Pack of Cards

  I doubt that, thought the judge. He put the newspaper down. ‘Mrs Lukes …’

  ‘Oh, Moira … please.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Conveyancing, as it happens, is not my field. Anything I said might quite possibly be misleading. The only sensible advice I can give is to change your solicitor if you feel lack of confidence in him.’

  Her eyes flickered; that look of honest appeal dimmed suddenly. ‘Oh … I see. Well, I daresay you're right. I must do that, then. I shouldn't have asked. But of course the invitation stands, whenever you're free.’

  ‘How kind,’ said the judge coolly. He picked up his paper again and looked at her over the top of it; their eyes met in understanding. And he flinched a little at her expression; it was the look of hatred he had seen from time to time, over the years, across a courtroom, on the face in the dock.

  ‘Have a lovely day,’ said Moira Lukes. Composure had returned; she gleamed, and wrinkled her eyes, and was gone. Well, thought the judge, there's no love lost there, now. But it had to be done, once and for all. He folded the paper and went in search of Marjorie.

  She was packing a beach-bag with costumes and towels. The judge, unlocking the suitcase, took out a stack of the pornographic magazines and pushed them into the bottom of the bag. ‘Oh, lor,’ said Marjorie, ‘I'd forgotten about them. Must you?’

  ‘‘Fraid so. The case resumes tomorrow. It's the usual business of going through them for degrees of obscenity. There are some books too.’

  ‘I'll help you,’ said Marjorie. ‘There – greater love hath no woman …’

  The beach was agreeably uncrowded. Family parties were dotted in clumps about the sand; children and dogs skittered in and out of the surf; gulls floated above the water and a party of small wading birds scurried back and forth before the advancing waves like blown leaves. The judge, who enjoyed a bit of unstrenuous bird-watching, sat observing them with affection. The weather, this particularly delectable manifestation of the physical world and the uncomplicated relish of the people and animals around him had induced a state of general benignity. Marjorie, organising the rug and wind-screen, said, ‘All right?’ ‘All right,’ he replied. They smiled at each other, appreciating the understatement.

  Marjorie, after a while, resolutely swam. The judge, more craven, followed her to the water's edge and observed. As they walked back up the beach together he saw suddenly that Moira Lukes and her sister were encamped not far off. She glanced at him and then immediately away. Now, at midday, the beach was becoming more occupied, though not disturbingly so. A family had established itself close to the Braines' pitch: young parents with a baby in a pram and a couple of older children now deeply engaged in the initial stages of sandcastle construction. The judge, who had also made a sandcastle or two in his time, felt an absurd urge to lend a hand; the basic design, he could see, was awry and would give trouble before long. The mother, a fresh-faced young woman, came padding across the sand to ask Marjorie for the loan of a tin-opener. They chatted for a moment; the young woman carried the baby on her hip. ‘That sort of thing,’ said Marjorie, sitting down again, ‘can still make me broody, even at my time of life.’ She too watched the sandcastle-building; presently she rummaged in the picnic basket and withdrew a plastic beaker. ‘Turrets,’ she explained to the judge, a little guiltily. ‘You can never do a good job with a bucket …’ The children received her offering with rewarding glee; the parents gratefully smiling; the sandcastle rose, more stylish.

  The judge sighed, and delved in the beach-bag. ‘To work, I suppose,’ he said. Around them, the life of the beach had settled into a frieze, as though the day were eternal: little sprawled groups of people, the great arc of the horizon against which stood the grey shapes of two far-away ships, like cut-outs, the surface animation of running dogs and children and someone's straw hat, tossed hither and thither by the breeze that had sprung up.

  The judge and his wife sat with a pile of magazines each. Marjorie said, ‘This is a pretty gruesome collection. Can I borrow your hankie, my glasses keep getting salted over.’

  The judge turned over pages, and occasionally made some notes. Nothing he saw surprised him; from time to time he found himself examining the faces that belonged to the bodies displayed, as though in search of explanations. But they seemed much like any other faces; so presumably were the bodies.

  Marjorie said, ‘Cup of tea? Tell me, why are words capable of so much greater obscenity than pictures?’ She was glancing through a book, or something that passed as such.

  ‘That, I imagine, is why people have always gone in for burning them, though usually for quite other reasons.’

  It was as the judge was reaching out to take the mug of tea from her that the wind came. It came in a great wholesome gust, flinging itself along the beach with a cloud of blown sand and flying plastic bags. It sent newspapers into the air like great flapping birds and spun a spotted football along the water's edge as though it were a top. It lifted rugs and pushed over deckchairs. It snatched the magazines from the judge's lap and from Marjorie's and bore them away across the sand in a helter-skelter whirl of colourful pages, dropping them down only to grab them again and fling them here and there: at the feet of a stout lady snoozing in a deckchair, into the pram of the neighbouring family's baby, on to people's towels and Sunday papers.

  Marjorie said, ‘Oh, lor …’

  They got up. They began, separately, to tour the beach in pursuit of what the wind had taken. The judge found himself, absurdly, feeling foolish because he had left his jacket on his chair and was plodding along the sand in shirt-sleeves (no tie, either) and tweed trousers. The lady in the deckchair woke and put out a hand to quell the magazine that was wrapping itself around her leg. ‘Yours?’ she said amiably, looking up at the judge, and as she handed him the thing it fell open and for a moment her eyes rested on the central spread, the pièce de resistance; her expression changed, rubbed out as it were by amazement, and she looked again at the judge for an instant, and became busy with the knitting on her lap.

  Marjorie, stumping methodically along, picked up one magazine and then another, tucking them under her arm. She turned and saw that the children had observed the crisis, abandoned their sandcastle and were scurrying here and there, collecting as though involved in a treasure hunt. The mother, too, had risen and was shaking the sand from a magazine that had come to rest against the wheels of the pram. As Marjorie reached her the little girl ran up with an armful. ‘Good girl, Sharon,’ said the mother, and the child – six, perhaps, or seven – virtuously beamed and held out to Marjorie the opened pages of the magazine she held. She looked at it and the mother looked at it and Marjorie looked and the child said, ‘Are those flowers?’ ‘No, my dear,’ said Marjorie sadly. ‘They aren't flowers,’ and she turned away before she could meet the eyes of the young mother.

  The judge collected a couple from a man who handed them over with a wink, and another from a boy who stared at him expressionless, and then he could not find any more. He walked back to their pitch. Marjorie was shoving things into the beach-bag. ‘Shall we go?’ she said, and the judge nodded.

  It was as they were folding the rug that Moira Lukes came up. She wore neatly creased cotton trousers and walked with a spring. ‘Yours, apparently,’ she said; she held the magazine out between a finger and thumb, as though with tongs, and dropped it on to the sand. She looked straight at the judge. ‘How awfully true,’ she said, ‘that people are not what they seem to be.’ Satisfaction flowed from her; she glanced for an instant at Marjorie, as though checking that she had heard, and walked away.

  The Braines, in silence, completed the assembly of their possessions. Marjorie carried the rug and the picnic basket and the judge bore the beach-bag and the wind-screen. They trudged the long expanse of the beach, watched, now, with furtive interest by various eyes.

  Venice, Now and Then

  ‘VENICE!’ SHE said, getting up, crossing the room. ‘Of course! The Doge's Palace and the Campanile.
It's nice. Where did you get it?’

  ‘I saw it in a junk shop.’

  London traffic rumbled beyond the window. ‘Yes,’ she went on. ‘Doesn't it take you back! We went over to that church once, the picture must have been done from that side. San – San …’

  ‘Santa Maria della Salute.’

  ‘That's it.’ She stabbed a finger on the glass. ‘That's where I bought the fluorescent necklace. There – under that arch.’

  He peered, as though the past should be made manifest. ‘Really? I thought it was in the square. How things get distorted. What I remember is the heat at night. Like being in warm soup.’

  There are long quivering ribbons of light on the water. A tanker passes, huge black bulk eclipsing churches and palaces, bigger than any of this, sending ridge after ridge of waves to slosh against the quay, against the tethered boats. To and fro the people go, hundreds of them, to and fro, walking and talking, us with them: Liz and I and Belinda and Alan. Here today, gone tomorrow – well, next week. Has everyone in the world passed this way, at some time or another? A place is a receptacle; perhaps only places exist, not people.

  I should like to eat. I catch the others up. Liz is buying something from a man with a tray of postcards, scarves, ties. Alan holds Belinda's hand. Liz says, ‘Look, I couldn't resist it! Fix it for me, fames.’

  They curl round people's necks like glow-worms. I say, ‘I must have one!’ Alan and Belinda watch, smiling; Alan wears a blue shirt, his hair is crimped by sea and salt. James fastens the necklace, he fastens it to the hairs at the back of my neck and 1 complain. ‘Il faut souffrir,’ says Alan, ‘pour être belle.’ We sit down at a pavement restaurant, laughing. There are live fish in a tank, and shafts of light furry with insects.

  ‘How much?’ she said. ‘Twenty-five – that's not bad, I suppose, for nowadays. Actually I'd have hung it over the desk. If I was consulted. By the way you haven't said what you think of the new hair-do.’ She turned her head from side to side, displaying.

  ‘There's less of it,’ he observed at last, cautiously.

  ‘Of course there's less of it, you nit, that's the idea.’

  ‘Where was it,’ he said, ‘that those Carpaccios were?’

  ‘O Carpaccios, where art thou?’ sings Belinda. ‘Wherever art thee – thou – they?’ She leans over a parapet. ‘Two plastic bottles, seventeen lettuce leaves, something horrible I don't want to know about, someone's T-shirt, yesterday's paper …’

  James stands with the map in his hand, scowling. He turns the map this way and that; he aligns map and street; he squints to right and left; he tries to marry print and the real world. We hang about.

  ‘Perhaps,’ suggests Alan, ‘we should give them a miss. We're back where we were ten minutes ago, I rather think, James.’

  And James fusses that no, no, we can't possibly miss them, they are one of the things, the book says, and just a sec he's got it now, if we go up there and then right …

  We follow him. ‘Carpaccio, Carpaccio,’ sings Belinda. ‘Wherefore art thou, Carpaccio?’

  We wander through a trompe-l'œil landscape in which streets run slap into buildings and canals, in which people vanish into walls, in which a square has no visible exit. We pick our way from here to there, from there to here. I shunt my dark glasses off and on, on and off; we plunge from heat to cool murky interiors. We stand in attentive observation; we switch back over bridges. I shell out money into the hands of a grumpy custodian; we file into the hot dim room. Outside, men are drilling the street. The man closes the door and the noise is quenched. ‘Aren't they small?’ says Liz. ‘I imagined enormous, somehow.’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ she said. ‘San something or other. Do I get a drink, James dear, I'm whacked.’

  He stood beside her, fiddling with bottles. ‘Do you ever, in fact, see anything of Alan?’

  ‘I work in the same organisation as Alan. Now, as then. Of course I see Alan. From time to time. Alan has got a bit stout. Alan has moved to Fulham.’

  ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I like Alan, still. Ah well.’

  Alan, who has nice manners, hands me into the boat. He holds my elbow, steadying. He says, ‘Here, give me the bag. O. K.?’ We have been dropped out of the sky into an apricot evening. The sky is apricot and the amazing horizon and the quivering molten air. Belinda says, ‘Oh dear, I should have been to the ladies' at the airport, I wonder how long it takes?’ Alan sits beside her. ‘Control yourself, my girl,’ he says, and he smiles across at me. ‘Well, far cry from Whitehall now, eh?’ I look round for James, but James has gone to sit at the end, the prow, the whatever it is. He stares all round; he is trying to get his bearings; James likes to know where he is, always.

  We dash through a world that is manifestly circular, leaving a carven white wake; we fly across this disc of water rimmed with land, an indeterminate ring of substance that resolves itself here and there into a scribble of cranes and chimneys, a sequence of domes and towers. Pewter clouds lie all around the horizon, with bellies of lemon and gold and silver. Liz shouts into the throbbing air; I cannot hear a word. 1 lean forward. She bawls, ‘Isn't it fun! I'm so glad we didn't take the bus.’ I nod.

  ‘Hmn …’ he said, ‘I don't know about time clarifying things. What it does do is add something.’

  ‘Years?’ she suggested. ‘Grey hairs?’

  ‘I can't see any. Or did they cut them all off?’

  ‘Beast. Belinda, now, is just the same.’

  ‘I can't,’ he said, ‘remember Belinda any more. Belinda then. Odd, that.’

  ‘Oh, I can. That bag she was always leaving behind in cafes. Some special sunburn stuff. Graham Greene.’

  Belinda is reading Brighton Rock. ‘It's ages since I read that,’ I say. ‘He dies in the end, doesn't he? The boy. Pinky. He has this bottle of acid and …’

  ‘You wretch!’ cries Belinda. ‘Now you've told me what happens. Now you've spoilt it.’ ‘Not spoilt it,’ corrects Alan. ‘You can still enjoy it, it's the same book.’ ‘No it isn't,’ says Belinda. ‘I know how it ends now. Everything is changed when you know what's coming.’ ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Tiresome girl,’ complains Belinda. She puts her glasses back on; she reads.

  I pick my way past tables to where Belinda sits, reading. She looks up. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘James. Alan's just checking on those ferry times. Wretched Liz has told me how my book ends so she's gone to buy the Sunday papers, as a penance. Tea or coffee?’ And she gazes at me, eyes screwed up against the brightness in a face I can no longer see, because it no longer exists, the face of Belinda then, the face of Alan's wife Belinda. I sit opposite her on an uncomfortable metal chair with patterned seat; I can feel metal and absence of metal through the cotton of my trousers; I sit there wondering how it is possible to feel a pattern. Belinda talks about a film at the Notting Hill Classic.

  ‘It could do,’ she said, ‘with a nicer frame.’

  ‘Ah. Possibly.’

  ‘And a bit of a clean-up. Shall I do the glass? Or would that be considered forward?’

  He reflected. ‘I should wait, maybe.’

  ‘Scuola di something. Where the Carpaccios were. Scuola di … di …’

  The ceiling is all red and gold. My sandal hurts where the strap has rubbed. There is this fearful drilling noise and then snap! it is cut off, turned down to a mumble, and instead there is a voice in German, level, instructive, impassive. We move, James and Belinda and Alan and I, around the room keeping as far as we can from the guided German party, superior in our unconducted independence. We are absorbed; we forget, perhaps, about each other.

  I look up and see James stand beside Belinda. I can see them still: my tall stooping brother James and Belinda in a flowered cotton skirt and a pink top, people who do not know each other very well, staring at a painting.

  I stand beside Belinda, who is the friend of my sister, whose husband Alan is also the friend of my sister, and I look at the picture. I can see it now; the man'
s face turned to the light, the little white dog, the book fallen to the floor. Belinda says, ‘St Augustine in his study.’ And then, ‘The dog is just like our neighbour's dog.’ I smile politely at Belinda; I look down at her: I see a pleasant woman, plumpish. As though through a glass, darkly.

  ‘I can't stay long, but I'll have a top up if you're pressing me. Is it for something special – the picture?’

  ‘Something special?’

  ‘Birthday?’

  ‘Oh no.’ He looked again at it, in surprise, as though it were unexpectedly there. ‘Nothing special, no. Just that it caught my eye. You know … Struck one as pleasant. Familiar. Did I pay too much?’

  ‘Familial? Well, yes, I suppose. Familiar, I mean – not paying too much. And yet you know I could have sworn that was there.’ She tapped, again, the glass. ‘Remember the thunderstorm?’

  Lightning flares. Wild, operatic lightning. The buildings are projected against sculptural cloudshapes from which surely must ride forth Valkyrie or seraphim or a trio singing Mozart. It is quite unreal, as unreal as the cathedral, the palace, the campanile, all of which must have been erected yesterday in mockery of what is claimed. All is a stage-set, as are the people extras, a great Hollywood army of extras that ebbs and flows around the square, up and down, to and fro, this way and that. Should one applaud? Or is the climax yet to come?

  James suddenly claps his hands. He stands there in shirt-sleeves clapping his hands. ‘Your brother,’ says Alan, ‘is determined to be the original eccentric Englishman.’ He smiles, benignly; he is older than we are, sometimes there creeps in a licensed avuncular note. And now there is fork lightning against sheet lightning, a stunning effect, a metallic sizzle against the great white flare, and far away the landscape growls, off-stage. ‘It isn't,’ says Alan, ‘happening here at all. Over the Dolomites, I reckon. Miles away.’ And Belinda is uneasy; it's going to pour, she claims, any minute now, it's going to come chucking down and anyway lightning always makes me queasy, suppose it hit one of those pinnacles, we'd all be … She scuttles round us, like a sheepdog, chivvying. She chivvies James, who stands now with arms folded, intently appreciative, and James gives one last clap or two and smiles, amiable, detached, and we all move away, back to the hotel.