Those Who Walk Away

  The Smith-Peters appeared from the left, approaching the lounge, and Ray turned his back and walked on towards the bar. There were only two people there, the barman and a customer. Ray looked back down the corridor, just as Coleman came in the front door fifty feet away. Ray turned slowly, sideways to Coleman, and when he looked again, Coleman had vanished, no doubt into the lounge. They might all come into the bar, Ray thought, and he decided to leave at once. He walked out at a pace neither fast nor slow, tensed as he passed the glass-panelled doors of the lounge where they sat, the four, only a few feet away.

  Ray went out of the hotel. Sooner or later, he thought, if he continued doing this, one of them would look up, happen to look at him, and the game would be over. But just now, they had all been in animated conversation, Inez gesticulating, Mr Smith-Peters leaning forward and laughing. If Inez was going to tell them about having been to the Seguso, she was saving it for later.

  In a shop in the Calle Vallaresso, Ray bought a dark blue sweater, and put it on under his jacket. He was able to see, while buying the sweater, that Coleman and his party had not passed by. They were perhaps lunching at the Monaco with the Smith-Peters.

  Ray walked back slowly towards the Monaco, and now he was on guard for Antonio, who might be joining them.

  The group of four had left the lounge corner, but they were not in the dining-room. Harry’s Bar, perhaps. Or they could have boarded a vaporetto while he was buying the sweater. Or they could be in the bar of the hotel. It was not wise to stick his nose into the bar, but Ray felt compelled to do so. He advanced once more to the bar, where four or five people were now, none of them Coleman or of his group. Ray ordered a Scotch at the bar.

  Fifteen minutes later, Inez and Coleman and the Smith-Peters came into the hotel and went into the lounge. They had probably been at Harry’s Bar. Ray let another five minutes pass. Then, not permitting himself to debate, because there was too much against the idea, he went to the lounge and looked in. They were not there. Ray walked on to the dining-room, which was only half full, and was met by the head waiter. Ray saw Coleman’s table on the far right, and requested a table for one on the opposite side of the room. Ray followed the head waiter to the table. He did not look towards Coleman’s table for several minutes, not until he had chosen his meal and ordered a half-bottle of wine.

  Whatever they were talking about, they were quite merry. Not falling about with laughter, but there was a smile on all their faces. Had Inez brought up her Seguso visit in Harry’s, and had they finished discussing Garrett’s disappearance? Or was Inez not going to mention it in front of other people? Was she going to speak to Coleman about it later when they were alone?

  But it was the fact that Inez knew which fascinated Ray as he watched her laughing and talking, waving a hand gracefully. She might think him dead, murdered by Coleman, but it was not influencing her manner at luncheon. Ray found this fact absorbing. And at any minute she might look in his direction—he was perhaps fifty feet away—and look again and recognize him, provided she was not shortsighted.

  Again a curious anger stirred in Ray as he slowly ate his food. Coleman looked so pleased with himself, as if he had done the right thing, something commendable, something at any rate for which he would never have to apologize to anyone. In a way, it was as if the whole group, Antonio also if he knew, accepted his disappearance, maybe his murder, as no more than fitting.

  Ray suddenly could eat no more. A cheese tray arrived anyway, a basket of fruit to choose from, and Ray declined them. He finished his wine, paid the bill, and made an unobtrusive exit. No cry followed him. It was as if he were invisible, a ghost.

  A few flakes of snow were falling, but they disappeared near the pavement, or as soon as they touched the ground. The shops were mostly closed now, but Ray found a tobacconist open. He wanted something to read. The shop had some Penguin books. Ray chose one on drawings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It had a section of illustrations. His walk homeward took him past the bar-caffé where Elisabetta worked. Ray glanced in, not expecting to see her, but she was there, smiling her wide, healthy, blonde smile at a dumpy woman who stood at the counter, maybe one of Elisabetta’s neighbours or friends. Ray remembered now that Elisabetta had said she was going to work from nine until two today. Elisabetta and the woman were real, Ray thought; they were connected. But he felt that, if he had walked into the bar, he might not have been seen by Elisabetta or by anyone else.

  He began to trot against the cold and in order to get home sooner. There was no doubt, he still had some fever.

  Signora Calliuoli opened the door for him, smiling. “It’s a cold day. A little snow.”

  “Yes,” Ray said. The house smelled rather pleasantly of tomato sauce. “I was wondering if I could have a hot bath?

  “Ah, si! In fifteen minutes the water will be hot.”

  Ray went up to his room. He had thought, an hour ago, of writing his friend Mac in Xanuanx. Now he realized he could not write anyone as long as he was pretending to have vanished. Ray felt depressed and lonely. His anger against Coleman had mysteriously disappeared. He thought of Peggy as he lowered himself into the tub of hot water. In the corner of the bathroom, an electric stove radiated an orange heat. The linoleum had an ugly pattern of red and green on a cream ground, and was worn in spots, showing dark red weaving. Not beautiful, but in a Bonnard it might have been. Ray owned a Bonnard in St Louis, and as he recalled it, he immediately attached a present value to it—about fifty-five thousand dollars—since he was now a dealer. He could foresee a time when the sudden view, the contemplation of paintings, would lose their wonder. Well, he could lose it, he supposed, but he did not intend to let that happen. Do you ever feel that the world is not enough? Peggy had asked him that at least twice. Ray had wanted to find out from her how the world was not enough, and Peggy had finally said she meant that the stars and the atoms, the systems of religion which stretch the imagination and still remain unfinished, and all painting and music—all this was not enough, and the human mind (or maybe the soul for Peggy) desired more. It might have been her death cry, Ray thought, if she had had one. The world is not enough, therefore I leave it to find something bigger. It was certainly the way she had felt about sex, because time after time—

  Ray’s memory boggled and dodged. He had always, always had the feeling that no matter how good it was, how much Peggy had enjoyed it, she was thinking that she must have missed something, missed somehow the essence, and for Peggy the only help was, ‘Let’s do it again.’ Or ‘Let’s get away early and come home and go to bed.’ It had been delightful at first, a sexy girl, a dream-wife and all that. Then sameness, even fatigue had begun to set in, camouflaged for a very long time, eight months perhaps, by physical pleasure, the feeling that the sex organs had separate existences of their own, weren’t even connected with Peggy or him. Ray remembered thinking this many times when, not having wanted to make love, he had found his body quite willing. Then he remembered times, maybe three times, when they had gone to bed before going out to dinner, made love twice (or for Peggy six times), and Ray had become short-tempered, ready with a cutting remark to Peggy or to anyone, some of which he never made, some of which he had, afterwards feeling ashamed of himself. He had begun to be busy around five or six in the afternoons, going out to do errands, or busy with his painting. He had also been frank enough to put it in words to Peggy: ‘If we go to bed in the afternoon, I’m a little tired for the night.’ Mild enough. Peggy’s face had fallen, briefly, when he had said that, Ray remembered. And though she hadn’t again proposed any afternoons in bed, Ray had seen that she had wanted to a few times. But no one, no friend, if they’d known the situation, no doctor, no Coleman could have possibly said that he neglected Peggy in the bed department, or overstrained her as far as he could tell. (Ray wished now he’d had a friend to talk to. Would that have helped? Mac, for instance. He had thought of talking to Mac, but he had felt he hadn’t known Mac long enough, or didn’t know him well enou
gh. Prudishness.) And this was something he hadn’t yet said clearly to Coleman, who still thought he had made demands on Peggy, or shocked her. This was what he had wanted to say the night of the Lido. Ray knew he suffered the damnable torture of being misunderstood and maligned, combined with the inability to speak to defend himself or even to find an ear: a circumstance ludicrous rather than pitiable to anyone who was not in it. From a big jolt like this, one could go on to little jolts, he foresaw, bitter reactions to little slights, and thus a paranoid would be created.

  And, as another example of their never having quarrelled and of Peggy’s wanting something ‘better,’ she had never arrived at the right moment to have a child. Ray had very much wanted a child, conceived and gestated in Xanuanx, born, maybe, in Rome or Paris. It was always ‘Not yet—but soon’ with Peggy. Since she would have been bearing the brunt of it, Ray hadn’t insisted or argued. Should he have insisted? It seemed brutal and vulgar to insist, and he knew he never could have. But a child on the way might have prevented her suicide. Funny Coleman had never mentioned that. Perhaps it was too earthy for Coleman. Ray remembered, wincing, his father’s P.S. to one letter after they had been married for a year: ‘Any chance of a grandchild any ways soon? Tell me the news.’ There wasn’t any news.

  Ray turned on a trickle of hot water from the big scratched nickel tap, and dragged the hand towel, which he was using as wash-cloth, absently over his chest.

  It was too bad that Peggy’s painting hadn’t been ‘enough’ for her, that she hadn’t been sufficiently fascinated by that struggle towards mastery or perfection or whatever it was, which was endless and quite big and absorbing enough for artists like Michelangelo, da Vinci, Braque and Klee. But it was impossible for Ray to imagine Peggy working really hard, the way her father did. Coleman definitely worked. Whether Ray liked his painting or not, he had to admit Coleman threw himself into it. Whereas Peggy had for only short stretches, three weeks here and there. Ray had heard about and seen these stretches in Rome in the months before they were married, but there had been no such stretches in Mallorca. The year and more in Mallorca suddenly seemed to Ray a prolonged honeymoon—from Peggy’s point of view. One couldn’t build a life in that atmosphere. Ray got out of the tub, impatient with himself for thinking nothing but platitudes.

  He was still ill, he realized, and he thought he had better get rid of whatever he had before he tried to do anything else.

  8

  Coleman at that moment, ten minutes to three in the afternoon, was entering his and Inez’s two-room suite in the Bauer Gruenwald, having left Inez and the Smith-Peters at the San Marco boat stop, whence they were taking a boat for some sightseeing. Coleman had said he wanted to work on some ideas, which was true, but he also wanted to get away from Inez for the afternoon. She was being chilly, was on the brink of questioning him again about Ray, Coleman knew. He did not intend to let her think he was worried, because he wasn’t. Least of all did he worry or care what Inez thought.

  The quiet and solitude of the two primly tidied rooms were a pleasure to Coleman, and after he had taken off his jacket and tie and changed into floppy, moccasin-like house slippers, he rubbed his hands together and slowly walked, like a comfortable bear now, from his and Inez’s bedroom through the bathroom which separated the rooms and into what he thought of as his room. Here he was accustomed to drawing, and writing an occasional letter (he had not answered every single one concerning Peggy’s death, but had convinced himself he didn’t have to, as he was above, or maybe even below, this kind of bourgeois convention), but so far had not slept, though Inez made him rumple the bed every night for the benefit of the maid. Coleman got a Venus pencil from his writing-table drawer, and picked up a sixteen by-twelve-inch pad. He began to sketch an imaginary cathedral seen from above, its arms coming down to make an enclosure in the foreground of the picture. In the foreground, he drew seven figures, showing only the tops of their heads and some of their noses, a few gesticulating hands, a few knees and feet.

  This was his new tack: the human figure seen from directly overhead. He felt this view, showing little, still showed much. His sketch, as he had anticipated, gave a mischievousness and duplicity to his assembled conspirators. That was to be the title, “The Conspiracy.” One of the shoes on the standing man was the black business shoe, another a jester’s pointed shoe, another a tennis shoe. One of the men was bald, another wore a bowler. The shoulders of one bore the epaulets of a naval officer, American. Coleman worked for nearly an hour on his sketch, tore it out of the pad and propped it up against his paintbox on the writing table, and retreated into the bathroom to get a view of it.

  He thought of an improvement in the composition, and went back to his drawing pad and a new page. Before he had finished this, Inez returned, and entered by the other room. Coleman greeted her without turning round. By now one slipper was off, and he had pulled his shirt out of his trousers.

  “Well, how was the afternoon?” Coleman asked, still drawing, as Inez came in.

  “I couldn’t face the museum. Too cold. So we had another coffee, and I left them.” She turned away to hang up her coat.

  Coleman heard her close a door, he thought the bathroom door, but glancing round, he saw that it was her room door. Faintly, he heard her saying something on the telephone. He went on with his work. She was probably trying the Seguso again for Ray, he thought, and who knew? Ray might answer.

  A couple of minutes later, Inez came in, knocking perfunctorily on the bathroom door which stood open. “Listen, Edward—if you have a moment. I’m sorry to disturb you, but it is something important.”

  Coleman turned round on the bed and sat up straighter. “What, dear?”

  “I went to the Seguso this morning—to see if they had any news of Ray. They have not and he has left no message.”

  “Well, you knew that,” Coleman interrupted.

  “I know, but they were a little worried also, because all his things are there still. They had not packed up his things, but I think by now they have. And his passport was in his room.” Inez stood in her silk-stockinged feet, a small, straight, earnest figure framed in the open bathroom door.

  “Well?—I’ve told you, I think he ran off, just chucked everything.” Coleman shrugged. “How am I to know?”

  “I just rang the American Consulate,” Inez continued. “They know nothing about him, where he is, but the Pensione Seguso this morning telephoned them about the passport in his room. Not only passport but toothbrush. Traveller’s Cheques, every—little—thing.” She pumped with her arms for emphasis.

  “It’s not my business,” Coleman said, “and I don’t see that it’s yours.”

  Inez sighed. “You said you put him down at the Zattere quay.”

  “Yes, right at the hotel. The hotel door wasn’t fifty feet away.” Coleman gesticulated also. “He obviously decided not to go home that night—if that was the night he didn’t turn up. Seems to be.”

  “Yes. He wasn’t drunk, was he?”

  “No, he wasn’t drunk. But I told you he was in a hell of a state of mind. He feels guilty. He feels awful.” Coleman stared in front of him for a moment, and longed to get back to his drawing. “I’m sure he was carrying some money. He always does. He could’ve gone to the railroad station and got the next train out. Stayed at some other hotel and just beat it the next day.”

  “Beat it?”

  “Vanished.” Another shrug. “But as I say, it does support what I think, doesn’t it? What I believe, what I know is true. Ray could’ve prevented Peggy’s death, and he didn’t take the trouble.”

  Inez looked up at the ceiling, wrung her hands briefly. “You are obsessed by that. How can you know?”

  Coleman smiled gently and impatiently. “I’ve talked to him. I know guilt when I see it.”

  “The Consulate told me they are going to notify the parents in America. In—”

  “St Louis, Missouri,” Coleman said.

  “Yes.”

  “Very
good. So they should.” Coleman turned back to his drawing, then felt compelled to stand up, to give Inez his attention, because she expected it. She was upset. She had left the Smith-Peters to come back and talk to him. He went over and put his short, heavy hands lightly on her shoulders, kissed her cheek. She looked older, because she was worried, but she lifted her face to his expectantly, awaiting words of strength, even orders, and Coleman said, “Honey, I don’t see that it’s our business. Ray knows where we are. If he wants to go off by himself—vanish, even—isn’t that his business? Matter of fact, did you know the police have no right to interfere with a person who wants to disappear? I read that in an article somewhere the other day. Only if a man is deserting a family or has debts can they track him down and bring him back.” Coleman patted her shoulders and laughed, happily. “An individual’s got some rights still in this bureaucratic society,” he said, turning away back to the bed and his drawing.

  “I think I saw Ray today,” Inez said.

  “Oh? Where?” Coleman asked over his shoulder. He blinked to conceal a sudden annoyance.

  “It was—oh, I don’t know, somewhere between Accademia and San Marco. One of the streets. I could be wrong. It looked like his head and shoulders. From the back.” She looked at Coleman.

  Coleman shrugged. “Could be. Why not?” He knew she was thinking, asking herself again, or was about to ask him again, ‘Did you have a quarrel on the Lido that night? Did you fight on the boat?’ Inez knew—because Coleman had been wise enough to tell her outright before she found out from Corrado—that he had driven the boat back alone with Ray that night. And she had asked him two nights ago, after he had told her he had dropped Ray at the Zattere quay, if he had not had a fight with Ray on the boat, and Coleman had said no. A fight on the boat meant one thing, that he might have pushed Ray overboard, unconscious or dead. Coleman’s annoyance grew as he looked at Inez, and he wished he hadn’t thrown away the gun. He had bought the gun in Rome, had had it twelve hours only, and had thrown it away wrapped in a newspaper in a rubbish basket that night, after he thought he wouldn’t need it any longer, after he thought Ray was dead. Coleman tried to calm himself and asked, “I gather you didn’t go up and see if he was Ray?”