Part One
…………………
1
With half an ear, Reg Griffin listened to the Institute’s clock. It chimed the four quarters, then after a portentous pause began to strike ten. What right had any clock to sound so goddam complacent?
His trainers resting half -way up the white -painted Victorian mantelpiece, he had been making an effort to listen to the undergraduate reading his essay. The fellow had some bee in his bonnet about sexual symbolism in El Greco’s Death of the Count of Orgaz. It was to be understood that the bishop’s crozier, penetrating the heavenly regions at the top of the picture, was highly suggestive and significant, as was the Count’s spirit mounting through ‘what is indisputably’ an ethereal vagina to salvation.
It was a perfectly sound idea, Reg had been conceding, though not for the reason this ponce was giving. Religious painting and sculpture, especially in the Renaissance and Post-Renaissance period, was of course stuffed with sex, a kind of holy mastur-bation, safe sex in the age of the new pox...
So what? He got up suddenly, and padded to the window. While the rather nasal voice behind him paused in surprise before continuing, he watched a middle-aged don approaching across the square below. The man walked with a mincing, self-important step.
All his recent doubts were back. Wasn’t that idiot down there what he would all too rapidly become if he stayed here at the Courtauld, a pathetic, effete academic, trapped into internecine intellectual warfare, attending committees, reading papers at inter-national conferences, listening to endless undergraduate crap and believing it was all of world -shaping importance? Did he really want to spend the rest of his life raking over the stubbled acres of art -history from which all the goodies had been long since cropped, and for which he would be paid a pittance, when now, within his grasp, was a way out?
The undergraduate was limbering up for a purple finale. In a minute he would sit back with the smug look of someone
delivered of a masterpiece. Pre-empting this, Reg went to the phone. It was ten o’clock, but the voice was half -dazed. As it was too early for even Razzy Licknowski to be drunk, he was obviously still in bed. ‘I’ll do it,’ Reg said crisply. ‘Do it? Do what?’ ‘I’ll meet you at midday. The same trough as last night.’ He put the phone down. ‘Right,’ he said to the frustrated and now anxious genius. ‘You’ve finished, have you? That’s all then.’
‘All?’
‘But - haven’t you any comments?’
‘None. Your essay is definitive. It leaves me speechless, probably permanently. Now if you don’t mind?’
The ass blushed, and began to burble about the time. Didn’t the tutorial finish at ten -thirty?
Reg opened the white -gloss door that gave on to the white-gloss corridor, and stood there until rid of this irrelevance in his life.
At midday Reg carried his pint to a corner seat. In deference to his old Etonian rules of throwaway nonchalance, Razzy would be late of course.
Reg had known from the moment Razzy made the laconic proposal here last night that it was the crossroads variety. North or south.
‘This one has a goodish echo, Griff,’ Razzy had said. ‘There’s more than is on the surface. Must be, or they’d have been on to the V. and A. or somewhere respectable, and there’d be a figure mentioned. The ethos seems to be: “Deliver and you’ll be rewarded. Be silent and you’ll live to enjoy the spoils.” Razzy’s final words had added unusual flattery. ‘And it’s made for you, goddam it. It’s as if the specification were written with you in mind. I wish I had your academic cargo aboard. I wouldn’t be offering, I can tell you, if I had. You’ll owe me big for this - I mean on top of the usual cut. I’m talking about favours, for life.’
Had his decision ever really been in doubt, Reg thought? Now it had been taken he was sure it hadn’t. Its breathtaking finality
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stirred a deep nerve of pleasure. Who but the bored, the incompetent, or the destitute believed in luck? One chose, didn’t one? And decision cleansed, inspired and, if you worked, got you what you wanted.
Needless to say, Reg’s beer was half -gone before Razzy’s unobtrusive entrance took place, The Independent tucked under his arm and folded at the crossword. Reg watched and admired the cool way Razzy dealt with the mob of competing males at the bar. You could not learn how to do that. There was no assertion, no pushing. Just, anonymously, in a matter of seconds, with no one objecting, he was somehow in front of them all and being handed his invariable Pernod and soda without a word being spoken by him or the barman. His quality of being totally unobtrusive would have made him a good spy, Reg thought, if he had not opted for his more remunerative profession.
Razzy settled himself comfortably at Reg’s side, and trawled the bar lazily for ears that might be tuned. ‘Now you know this isn’t part-time any more,’ he said, still trawling. There was an interesting note of resentment, Reg noticed. ‘It’s not like the Dusseldorf job, a week -end affair, a little on the side, for pin money. I’ve no details - I wouldn’t have. But if you’re taken on, I have the impression you’ll be fully employed for a considerable length of time.’
‘You said that last night.’
‘You won’t be able to take the fellowship, nor possibly any other afterwards.’
‘I realise.’
‘No more hunting and running at the same time.’
Repetition wasn’t Razzy’s style, and the agony column approach was tiresome. Reg asked for the nitty.
For some moments Razzy did not speak. He put the crossword on his knee, unhooked the silver pencil that was nestled in the V of his thick -knit, thought, and filled in one across, just the intersection letters. I’ve told you, there are no details,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘First, it seems you have to get yourself a job. That, and that alone. A sine qua non.’
‘You mean a job, not the job?’
‘Precisely. And before that you have to get yourself an interview.’
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‘With the party concerned?’
‘Not at all the party concerned as I read between rather brief lines. Step one is just to land the job. If you don’t get it, that’s the end. You get yourself the job if you can - against, I gather, other candidates, and without making a formal application, for which it’s now too late. Then one supposes, if you’re successful, there may or may not be developments. I have no doubt my imprint is big enough in the circles we’re talking about, but they’ll be bound to check on you themselves. If they don’t like your vibes, you’ll hear no more. If they do, they’ll no doubt contact you in their own way in their own time.’
An answer to another clue was hatching. ‘By the way,’ he added when it had gone in, ‘I have hinted about Dusseldorf. It should have an encouraging effect if I’m not mistaken. You’ll need a heavy credential.’
When he thought about it afterwards, Reg was conditionally encouraged, too. The second -cousin -three -times -removed aspect was worrying. Razzy supplied the name finally, and a photograph, of the guy he had to contrive to meet. Somehow the unexceptional face was not totally unfamiliar, though he was sure it was not one of any consequence. And there was a London address. But no more to speak of, except an injunction to get a move on. The man was ‘available’ in three days’ time, and it had, it seemed, to be ‘a chance encounter.’
What if he got this unknown job, lost the Courtauld in the process, and then failed to qualify for the goodies, whatever they were, at a later stage?
But Razzy’s sour tone, not to mention the lecturing, was not like him. Reg decided that Razzy was jealous. That had to be a good augury. Ya se arma el gordo,’ as the blind Spanish lottery - sellers say.
It had better be a fat one arming itself. He was burning a fleet of boats. And, to further mix the metaphor, he had not been playing with a straight bat all these years to hit singles. Dusseldorf had been to convince Razzy, not for ‘pin money’.
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2
Robert Caine said goodbye to the last applicant and closed the heavy mahogany door of the luxury flat. Like the Italian lot he had seen in Rome, they had been worthy but dull. Was it Fine Arts departments or the profession, he wondered, that attracted such uninspiring people these days?
He turned away to face an empty flat and an empty evening. Mortimer Ready’s ‘little pied-d-terre’ - Mortimer’s phrase - did not revive his spirits. Some pied, some terre, he thought with grim humour. In Ashley Gardens, among the dwellings of the rich and the titled, it was big enough to house a Victorian family. Rather ample, you would have thought, for a small -size expatriate Englishman and his tiny oriental wife who would have fitted, both of them, into one of the commodious tallboy drawers. It would have been more tolerable had there been any evidence of taste. There was none. Filled with a miscellany of valuable furniture, there was no idea of co-ordination. Victoriana cohabited with the age of elegance, baroque with chinoiserie, brass with copper, like an excuse -me dance in Noah’s Ark. It could be a very upmarket antique shop.
He wished now he had excused himself from Mortimer’s insistence, almost certainly inspired by the thought that it would reduce his expenses, and stayed in a hotel at his own cost. Occupying one of the five bedrooms reminded him too much of how in pawn he had allowed himself to become to this petty dictator of the art world. He felt the need to escape the place.
He gave the last applicant, a young woman, a minute or two to disappear. Then, taking up his raincoat in the hall, for a storm was forecast, he walked down the carpeted stairs into the still crisply bright April sunlight. He stood for a moment in the paved piazetta in front of Westminster Cathedral. He tried to imagine himself as he had been when he left Cambridge twenty years ago with his double first and Ph.D., with Mortimer’s amazing offer of a new directorship in his pocket and recently wed to Kate. Surely then there had been excitement, expectation, as sharply defined as this
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light? How was it he had allowed such priceless commodities to slide into the comfortable everydayness in which he was now jellied? An extravagant idea came to him. Why didn’t he go out on the town? He was alone in a capital city which provided every conceivable pleasure. A classy night-club, an attractive young girl? Who would know?
He had hardly finished the thought before he rejected it. He didn’t even know the name of a night-club, and even if by some effort of will he got himself to such a place, what next? He saw himself at a solitary table, the not -so -attractive girl making her professional approach, his conditioned liberal instincts dousing automatically, like activated fire -sprinklers, any feeble semblance of lust. On Victoria Street he bought an evening paper. He went into a shadowless café lit with yellow neon to read it and drink a cup of tea.
He glanced at a so-called ‘sensation’ on the front page which was meaningless to him, and found the cinema list. Scanning the unknown titles and actors’ names and the exaggerated phrases attached to each advertisement, his eye fixed on ‘Le Bonheur’ at the Baker Street Classic. He had seen it years before and remembered — yes, with a definite tingle — how it had affected him. Would, could, his feelings be the same now? It would at worst be an interesting experiment. There was only an hour until the next showing. He took the tube.
The careless joy of the young man, who thought he could suffer no consequences from loving two women at the same time, one of whom was his wife and the mother of his child, the visual beauty and poetry of the film, once again lightly tore apart the sexual morality his genes had programmed him to. For who could say the young man was ‘wrong’, and leave it at that? The only difference was that where those years ago the lack of guilt had excited, challenged and uplifted him, now, equally moved, he felt not only saddened by the human tragedy that destroyed the radiant happiness of both the marriage and the affair, but also faintly, in some undefined and paradoxical way, jealous. At least the characters had lived. However, there were still shameful and mawkish tears on his cheeks as he shuffled up the aisle at the end trying to be
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anonymous. In the grip of his emotion he forgot his raincoat stuffed under the seat.
‘You left this.’ A young man, a shade taller than himself, in jeans, an open -neck shirt and an odd grey hairy garment that most resembled a waistcoat, was grinning at him infectiously.
He felt foolish. The type didn’t appear to have been moved by the film at all. He looked humorous, with an interesting air of restlessness. Robert thanked him for the raincoat, and they shuffled together in silence through the doors and up the stairs.
The forecast had hit the spot all right. During the film, thunder had rumbled intermittently. It was now pelting in the darkness outside. The chap had no mac. In the crowded foyer Robert was wondering if he could offer to share a taxi perhaps, when the man suddenly turned to him. ‘You live in Italy, don’t you?’
It startled him. ‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘Italian name on the raincoat - the cut of your clothes. And now I guess I recognise you. You’re Dr Robert Caine, aren’t you, of Etruscan fame? Director of the Villa Aemelia.’
Robert blushed, though whether from pleasure or confusion he was not sure. He could hardly claim to be that well-known outside the narrow precincts of scholarship, and certainly not in England. ‘That’s very perspicacious of you,’ he muttered.
He was going to ask if the man’s name was Holmes - it was after all Baker Street. But he was too slow.
‘Home on leave?’ the man asked.
‘No, I’ve been interviewing as a matter of fact - a curatorship vacancy. We had a bit of a tragedy. That is to say, we’ve now to assume it was a tragedy.’
An interest seemed to kindle. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, one of our curators disappeared. He went off one weekend to walk in the Abruzzi, as he sometimes did, and we haven’t seen him since. This was two months ago, and as the police have found nothing, we must assume that he either fell into a ravine or did himself in. He was a depressive, I’m afraid...’
The young man’s interest, if such it was, died, or rather, switched. Impatient again, he was looking up dubiously at the weather. The lightning seemed to be over, but the heavy rain
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looked set in. Cars and taxis were sluicing up Baker Street. The cinema crowd jostled about them, donning raincoats, putting up umbrellas. Of course, Robert thought, a chap like him would hardly be interested in a deceased museum curator in another country.
‘I say, you’re going to get a bit wet, aren’t you, with no coat?’ There was a shrug. Robert hesitated. But he thought of Mortimer’s flat again, and the words were out of his mouth. ‘Why don’t we have a drink? There’s a pub just round the corner, if I remember.’
The fellow said he was hungry, and asked if Robert had eaten. There was a restaurant almost next door. Robert found himself offering dinner.
For a moment he wondered if he should have acted on impulse like this. What on earth would they talk about?
But if he had doubts, his companion did not apparently. As they sat down, he immediately seized the leather -covered menu from the red and black check tablecloth and began to run his eyes down the two pages like a scrolling computer. In a matter of seconds he passed the menu over, having made his choice. He began to search impatiently for a waiter. One was passing and would have ignored them. He leaned backwards on his chair and
seized his arm.
‘A carafe of white wine please, on your way back. You agree?’ Retaining the waiter’s arm, he gave a token glance at Robert for confirmation. ‘OK. And we’ll order as soon as you’re free.’
Direct, to say the least of it. Had his offer of paying for the dinner sunk in, Robert thought? But he immediately dismissed the scruple as one of those silly social correctitudes to which Kate had conditioned him. Instead, he felt an absurd rush of youthfulness.
The wine arrived promptly, dumped off a full tray the waiter was carrying to another table.
‘You haven’t told me your name,’ Robert said, pouring.
‘Reg.’
‘‘Reg...’
‘Griffin.’
‘What did you think of the film?’
Amazing pale blue eyes fixed him firmly, like those of a Burmese cat. ‘OK. But the guy was a bit naive, didn’t you think?’
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‘Imagining he could run two women simultaneously, you mean?’
‘He didn’t exactly take precautions to keep them apart.’
‘No, but... ‘
Wasn’t that the point, that he didn’t? ‘Le bonheur’ - the assumption that anything pleasurable and happy is right, that life is so easy and uncomplicated? Should he plunge further in? He thought not. He made his escape.
‘Well, I suppose nowadays all three of them would have hopped into the same bed, produced two families and lived happily ever after.’
‘I like them one at a time myself,’ Reg remarked without humour.
The implications of this remark spread like shot from a gun. But there was no chance to pursue any aspect of it. The waiter came into their catchment area again. Reg raised his eyebrows, and the palm of one hand. The waiter came and turned back a leaf of his notebook. Reg immediately ordered an expensive steak with three vegetables, Robert, after some dithering, a Dover sole with none.
This bothered Robert. ‘Look, I’m sorry about the wine. It should be red for your steak, shouldn’t it?’
Again, the shrug. ‘I ordered it. I prefer white plonk actually. Don’t they say there’s less they can tip into it?’
Conversation was in rushes like this. Robert let hares out of the trap. Reg coshed them. Was it nervousness or indifference?
The waiter brought the food and deployed it. Between them they had already made inroads into the rather mean carafe.
‘Would you bring another of these, please?’ Robert said to the waiter, tapping the depleted vessel. Perhaps the wine would help to ease things.
As they began eating, he enquired what Reg did for a living. A more adhesive interest showed. ‘Same racket as yours as a matter of fact.’
‘You mean you work in a museum?’
‘The culture business anyway. I’m a don, or almost one. Fine Arts. My corner’s sculpture. The later Renaissance.’
Robert stared. Was such a coincidence possible?
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‘But how extraordinary.’
‘What’s extraordinary?’
‘My ex -curator’s field — Carlo Pelucci’s — was that period. Not sculpture specifically, he was more of an expert on furniture. But he covered sculpture in the museum, too. You may know his name?’
‘It’s familiar, yes.’
There was a silence. A first segment of steak went into the rubbery, rather sensual lips and an investigatory chew began, his head on one side, fork rather unpardonably in the air. Robert felt a further ignition of amusement. Reg was droll, likeable. He laughed. ‘Well, I think you’d better apply for the job.’
‘You mean you haven’t found the person you’re looking for yet?’
‘Nobody I’ve seen makes up my mind for me. Carlo’s shoes are difficult to fill.’
‘Do you want to measure my feet?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean you have no job at present?’
Reg swallowed. Apparently the meat met his standards. He took his time replying. ‘The Courtauld want me back. I’m teaching there part-time at the moment. But I’m not sure I want university life. I’ve thought of museum work, and Italy certainly attracts me. I spent some time there not long ago, and speak the language. It’s a good place to be, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Well, yes.’
Robert had to rein back his excitement. He would never have suspected the man of being an academic. He had placed him in television somehow. On the technical side probably, all action, quick with the witty riposte, but without much thought. It might well turn out that his credentials would not withstand scrutiny, but there was something about him that was intriguing, not least, now he thought about it, the cool way he had accepted the coincidence, as if- yes - as if he expected life to be surprising. How refreshing that was. Reg could not be in greater contrast to the earnest people he had interviewed.
‘Why didn’t you apply for the job? You must have seen it advertised. There aren’t that number going.’
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‘I didn’t see it. I’ve been busy teaching.’
Robert convinced himself before they parted company that evening that Reg Griffin was no run of the mill art -historian. Age twenty-seven, first class bachelor degree, a good doctorate, wanted by the Courtauld, a couple of books published already, one on Bernini (hence the interest in Italy, and Rome in particular), one on some Malaysian stuff he had recently got interested in. And he was clearly no desiccated academic. Given the necessarily commercial aspect of a major private museum, and with Mortimer’s materialistic breath daily down their necks, that could not be a disadvantage.
Griffin repeated that he wanted to be considered for the job. The next morning Robert set about the checks on the telephone. He got through to the right man at the Courtauld, who said Reg Griffm was outstanding.
‘A voluptuary of Decameronian dimensions when he was an undergraduate here, and by all accounts nothing much has since changed in that direction. A bit of an oddball. It’s always been understood there’s some kind of tragic family background, though this has never been clear, and he’s as conceited as a peacock. But he is immensely energetic. Socially, he’s pleasingly unplaceable. And about his ability there’s no question. It’s top class.’
The professor confirmed Reg’s publications, also that the Institute had offered him a fellowship and would be sorry to lose him.
Robert had Reg come to Mortimer’s flat in the afternoon. He grilled him a lot more severely than he had the night before. He was impressed by his mind, and even more by the humorously nonchalant way in which he seemed to regard his own talents. Wasn’t this just what the museum needed, what he was looking for?
Towards the end of the interview indeed, he began to grow apprehensive that Reg might lose interest in the post when he heard how miserly the salary was. But this did not seem to worry him.
Afterwards, he thought it mildly odd that Reg had shown such little curiosity about the job from his own point of view. ‘I think I know the kind of thing to expect,’ he had interrupted, when he
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was trying, unbidden, to inform him. But on reflection Robert liked that, too. Griffin had obviously, for his own reasons, quickly decided he wanted the job. It was pleasing to find such decisiveness, and such an apparently unmercenary and professional attitude.
Robert would normally have taken time to reflect on all the candidates, and there were still two more due to be seen tomorrow. But in a sudden heat of certainty, he decided he could put off the remaining two and offered Reg the job there in Mortimer’s culturally schizophrenic dining -room. It was accepted at once.
Later, he wondered how Mortimer would react to his choice. Almost certainly badly. He would not be able to classify Griffin in the way he usually liked to vilify academics, and it was hardly likely he would appreciate Griffin’s laid-back attitude, which he would interpret as, a priori, insolence.
This added to Robert’s satisfaction. He had the same feeling of outrageous triumph a spur of the moment, expensive purchase can give.
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3
Reg was puzzled by aspects of his triumph. Given the luck of Caine’s not having found anyone before their meeting, it had been easy enough. A bit of hanging about outside that dismal Catholic pile and the café, a tube journey at rush hour, with admittedly the danger of a slip-up, then the cinch of the cinema and the meal. But why the super secrecy? They could have given him more than the name and address. They could have told him it was the Aemelia, couldn’t they, told him it was Rome? Could it be a practical joke? Razzy’s idea of fun and games — to lose him the Courtauld and get him walled up in a minor museum like one of its exhibits? The idea bore his stamp. Razzy had never liked universities, probably because he did not go to one.
Since Dusseldorf, he had afforded a mortgage on a terraced house in Clapham. On his new doormat a couple of days later was a hand -delivered, executive class air -ticket, single, London to Kuala Lumpur, Qantas, for the next day. This improved matters. He believed in the development. Mean bastard that he was, Razzy would not have gone to this expense for a laugh.
There was a baldness. No note accompanied the ticket. There was also an amputated element about the lack of the return leg, or, more accurately, an unspoken conditional clause. If he did not deliver in some way... But the arrangements so far had a certain style about them. That had to be encouraging, he decided.
Was this the big one then, churning in the lottery urn, Reg thought several times as the plane journeyed over the blinding white lands of Araby, then the brown ones of the Indian subcontinent? The next twenty-four hours were probably going to reveal.
It was after midnight when they landed. The equatorial heat and humidity snatched at him with clammy fingers as he emerged from the aircraft. You could hardly see the control tower, let alone the sky, for moisture -laden haze, and the place stank of a cellar -like mildew. He only hoped the accommodation would suit
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the class of air ticket, with five stars and air-conditioning. He felt raked with lag. It was like being luggage in advance. His body would follow on a later plane, due in about a week.
Not a sign of red carpets in immigration. He queued for twenty minutes and got an unwelcome stamp in his passport. He had an instinctive dislike of leaving his scent. But in the customs hall an ugly little sod with a fuzzy head like a coconut, wearing khaki shorts and a pineapple -motif shirt barged him aside and took over his trolley.
‘Follow me, plees.’
Apparently, customs were fixed. The officials didn’t even raise their eyes as they made for the exit. Outside, a little away from the flare of neon light, a Jaguar waited - the four -wheeled variety, he wouldn’t have been so surprised if it had had four legs and a snarl. In the front seat was a figure.
The man with khaki shorts was the driver, it seemed. He opened the back door for him, then set about stowing the suitcase in the boot. Reg got in. The head in front of him did not turn or speak. Reg also kept his mouth shut. The onus of greeting was surely on the host nation, and weren’t the Malaysians renowned for hospitality?
He knew a fair amount of Bahasa Malay, but there was a short exchange he didn’t catch between the driver and the chaperon. They set off. Soon they were gliding through jungle vegetation towards the reddish loom that was the city. Was it ominous? Reg decided to think he was simply in the presence of servile reticence.
At the modern skyscraper hotel, it was the same. The chaperon came in, but did not utter a word to him. He spoke briefly and unintelligibly with the male night receptionist. A registration pad was swivelled and a pen handed with lowered eyes. When he had finished signing, the man was on his way out, passing the incoming porter entering with his suitcase. The porter was handed his key and the two of them made their way to the lifts. In the lift he thought of questioning the porter, but the blank face raised dutifully to the floor indicator did not suggest inside knowledge. At least he was in a bona fide four star hotel.
The usual post -jet routine set in. For four or five hours he listened to the hissing breath of the air-conditioning. His body and
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mind felt wound up like clockwork. They would take their own time to unwind, and there was nothing he could do but wait. Just as it was beginning to get light something seemed to relax. He slept.
He woke after midday, feeling drained. He got up to have a shower, and only when he returned from the bathroom saw the note that had been pushed under the door, together with the Straits Times. His name, Mr Reginald Griffin’, was hand-written on the envelope. Inside was a stiff, thick card with bevelled, gilded edging. ‘His Royal Highness the Tunku Raschid will see you at his residence at 6 p.m. this evening. Please make yourself ready in the lobby at 5.30 p.m. A car will be sent for you. There was no signature.
By five -thirty, lunch, a swim in the hotel pool, and the thought of a live Tunku pending, had gone a long way to restoring Reg to something nearer normality. When he went down, the driver - a different one - rose from one of the armchairs as if he didn’t really belong to it and led him out to the car, this time a Mercedes.
Apparently the Tunku’s day staff were a bit more extrovert than the night shift. The man seemed to have a perpetual grin. He thought it a joke that Reg preferred to sit in the front seat, announced his name was Selim, and was quite prepared to chatter. Reg learnt that Tunku Raschid was the brother of one of the Sultans, of the State of Panjung, that the house they were approaching was only one of a dozen he owned in various parts of the world, that the family owned huge areas of rubber and palm-oil jungle as well as mines, that the Tunku had four wives, the
‘latest’ being a young Hawaiian girl. The ‘last one’, a beautiful English woman, had been pensioned off somewhere in Europe. Reg rather expected a palace, or perhaps part of the palace. In fact it was a sizeable but not vast two -storey modern building built round three sides of a swimming pool in an ordinary street in the more fashionable, residential part of the town. The only sign of security was that the villa, the pool, and a small garden were surrounded by a ten foot wall surmounted by spikes which looked like the front row of pikemen at Agincourt, and an aged guardian who sat in a hut beside the one modest, wrought -iron gate that
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breached it. The gate was for pedestrians only. Cars were apparently garaged elsewhere. Selim indicated that Reg should get out. He did so. He entered through the gate that was electrically operated by the guardian, and another man appeared from an outhouse. Apparently the latter was the butler. He bowed courteously from the waist and in Jeeves-perfect English asked Reg to follow. He led the way to a table and a group of chairs set in the shade of the house beside the pool, and asked if he could bring Reg anything to eat or drink.
Waiting for fruit juice to arrive, Reg looked about him. The house was motionless, and silent except for the single, rather insolent call of a tropical bird which should have been in a zoo, sitting out of sight in one of the short bushy trees. He then became aware that there was someone beyond the trees, running. Heavy footsteps pounded ponderously. An upright figure appeared in a blue track suit, running with his hands clenched in front of his chest and with knees exaggeratedly raised, like a soldier running at the double on parade. He turned at the wall and retraced his footsteps. He was running up and down in this absurd way, it seemed, in the fifty -yard space between the walls, letting out his breath in artificial expulsions between pursed lips.
In a moment a beautiful girl came out of the house in a pink cheong-sam. She was holding a large bath towel. She stood dutifully at a distance from the runner. The ‘latest’? The butler returned, and confirmed that the male figure was the Tunku. The Tunku took ‘a constitutional’ every day at this time, he explained, ‘as regular as clockwork’. Nothing had ever been permitted to interrupt it, he added impressively.
‘And the girl?’ Reg asked.
There was a pause of whose timing Jeeves would certainly have approved.
‘The Princess Irene has just joined us,’ said the butler faintly.
Reg began to enjoy himself. The iced mango juice had a flavour that went with the bird of paradise in the bush. There were no doubts left in his mind. This was no joke, and Razzy had been right, the client was big. You could smell it. Information about the state of Panjung was arriving in his mind. Sipping, he watched the ceremony of the bath towel. Her hero having fnished his
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exertions, the girl bestowed a token wiping of his face and neck, standing on tiptoe. What delighted Reg was the way they completely ignored him. They both went into the house without as much as an acknowledgement. This was the East all right. Not a bourgeois manner in sight.
It was half an hour and a whisky and soda later before the Tunku reappeared. He emerged suddenly into the deep shadow of the arched loggia that kept the downstairs windows from the full glare of the sun. Showered and spruced - had other therapy also been bestowed? - he had an equestrian look about him. He wore a spotless white shirt with a multicoloured neck -cloth, black strongly tapered trousers and black leather shoes with silver buckles and raised heels. One almost expected to see spurs. It was a good bet he was a product of an English public school and a good regiment, though - not quite the image - he had a plodding, rather laboured walk, as if he had some deformity, which had not been apparent when he was running. That would surely have
precluded the army.
‘Good evening, Mr Griffin. You will forgive me for keeping you waiting. Abdel has seen to your wants, I see.’ He barely raised his voice. ‘Abdel?’
The Tunku did not need to speak. Abdel had appeared a few discreet seconds behind his master. Raised eyebrows, and a manicured, ringed hand stretched forward, on which a large, surely priceless Burmese ruby was prominent, suggested the same again for Reg. Reg declined. The Tunku’s eyes did the rest of the ordering. Abdel withdrew to execute wishes apparently as standard as the evening jog.
Reg had a batch of small talk ready. But though there was a long silence, which it was tempting to think needed filling with western conversational expertise, Reg withheld it. The Tunku’s attention seemed riveted by something in the pool. From his seat he peered forward, both hands on the arms of the chair, frowning heavily. In a moment he leaned back in the chair and they sat in silence again.
Abdel reappeared with what looked like a glass of sparkling water. There were two pills beside it on the small, English, silver tray. The Tunku did not look at Abdel, and spoke in English.
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‘Abdel, the pool is filthy. Will you kindly attend to it at once.’
Startled and puzzled in equal proportions, Abdel gazed at the pristine expanse of blue. He and Reg spotted the offending item simultaneously — a white feather gently rocking against the overflow rim at the deep end. Reg and the Tunku watched while Abdel oversaw another male servant with what resembled a butterfly net, and a red plastic bucket.
‘I have an incompetent and idle bunch of people at present,’ the Tunku explained, as he took the glass and threw the first pill vigorously to the back of his mouth.
Reg felt a further silence was necessary to absorb the aberration and perhaps bestow sympathy. If this could be transmitted by a nod and blank features, he was not averse to doing so. Again, he waited.
The manner then changed abruptly. So radical was the shift of expression, Reg could not think in this moment how he could have imagined the man deformed. Suddenly the face was all action. The black eyes blazed, the high cheek bones suggested a fearsome medieval warrior.
‘You took a first and a doctorate at the Courtauld Institute, where you have been working recently as an auxiliary tutor. Your speciality is High and Post Renaissance sculpture. But I gather you know something of Malaysian art, which was a subsidiary subject in your first degree course, and that you have had some employment at Christie’s, both on the public relations side and as a valuer for important auctions.
‘I have in Panjung quite a collection, mostly of Malaysian artefacts. For various reasons I want it realistically valued. Naturally, I require total discretion. If your knowledge is what I think it is, and your valuations are convincing, you will be well paid. Any books you need can be supplied. I would like you to travel early tomorrow morning. Do you accept the assignment?’
Reg would have much preferred to fix the remuneration and be assured of a return air -ticket. He did not think he would get an answer if he asked about this. As the religious say, there are some matters that require faith.
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4
Sunshine, striking the rising wing, distracted Robert Caine’s concentration again. Almost imperceptibly they were altering course. For longer than one would have imagined, the pilot held the turn before lowering the wing gently on to the new bearing.
Reg Griffin’s appointment had certainly had one immediately good result. He was on his way back to Rome a day earlier than he had planned. But though he was trying to read a long article on a new Hittite discovery in the Italian Archaeology Society Journal, he found it hard to keep his mind focused.
Just then the intercom pong-ed and the line was live. There was a long stagey pause while the engines droned on dutifully.
‘This is your captain, Captain Waterman, speaking..
The languid, all -is -well voice began, as if its owner were basking in a deck -chair on a Caribbean cruise, idly contemplating the quirks of the rest of humanity.
Robert looked down quickly through the small porthole to the uniform layer of cloud below. The voice added to the disquiet he felt and, practised in stalking himself as he was, he immediately suspected why. He imagined the captain in shirtsleeves, relaxing up there on the flight deck. Several days a week he did this, endlessly traversing placid ponds of water or cloud. Every time, at this point in the journey, in that self-satisfied tone he gave his passengers their height and airspeed, and pointed out Mont Blanc on the port side.
It was the demon, he knew, that had got at him in London, up to his tricks again, for did not his own life similarly voyage, with a parallel predictability?
He quickly tried a catechism he had used before as an antidote. He could not be said, surely, to have done so badly in life? Without total immodesty, he could claim, could he not, to have created one of the few viable private museums of Europe? In the field of scholarship he had made his contribution, was continuing to make it. His name was known, even if only to a handful of specialists of a similar bent.
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As regards personality too, where ultimate judgements had to be made, need he be so despondent? Some people saw him, he was sure, as an amiable plodder, an academic distanced from reality, pushed around by Mortimer Ready, and married to a woman who thought she deserved better. But did his compliance spring from weakness? He could claim it didn’t. Weren’t understanding and forbearance worth something? He felt he exercised both.
It was no use. At a deeper level he did not believe himself. He had not done so for a long time. The animation his London appointment had temporarily aroused in him was already fading. What difference would a new young man on his staff make?
They were kept waiting in the aircraft after landing at Fiumicino, just off the runway. No other aircraft seemed to be landing or taking off. After ten minutes, the captain came on the intercom again, rather less languidly, and apologised for ‘a temporary administrative hold-up’. But when police cars started flashing about the tarmac in front of the reception building, a male American passenger in a tartan cap got more than curious.
‘Say, darlin’, you ain’t goin’ to tell me this is an admin snarl-up. It’s a goddam bomb scare,’ he said loudly to one of the beleaguered air -hostesses doing her best to reassure.
It was a bomb scare, in the terminal building. In the end the captain had to come on the blower again and tell them so. At once pandemonium broke out. Most of the Italian passengers, the majority, started talking at once, shouting and gesticulating.
Robert was amused. He loved Italy and the Italians, and his affection included an appreciation of the Italian excitability which burnt on a pilot flame and could flare up like this at any moment. For was not this the reverse side of their intense interest in life, their insistence on the moment, their immense capacity for emotion? He sat back in his seat, enjoying the drama around him as he idly watched through the porthole a yellow Agipgaz vehicle turning under the wing.
The bomb was apparently a hoax, but it was an hour before the place was cleared and they were allowed to enter the building.
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Robert’s more genial mood persisted. Broad, easy, knowled-geable, careless, disorganised, fitfully and spontaneously affectionate, Italy, his foster parent, took him back. The crowded airport was its usual mixture of private animation and official inefficiency. As they walked down the long corridor, the overhead television screens had a fit of the blinks. In Customs, in such preferable contrast to more officious behaviour in other airports, sullen officials with slouched, shallow -rimmed caps loitered and could scarcely raise the energy to place their yellow scribbles on the suitcases, as if to put in its place the whole idea of the tiresome controls they were forced to operate. And on all sides private intercourse raged. A small dog belonging to a woman had a coughing fit. She was surrounded by solicitous strangers offering advice. He was home, he thought amiably. ‘Oh, for a beakerful of the south.’ He was not the first Briton to need Italy to convince him he was alive.
He emerged with his one modest suitcase into the balmy spring evening which smelt of the nearby sea, and sought out his car in the huge open air park, a very old resprayed and indestructible Citroen D.S. with rather gaudy cerise upholstery he had bought second-hand years ago. It started almost at once, and he waited in pleasant anticipation for the hydraulic suspension to elevate him. He had thoughts of a cool gin and tonic on the balcony. It was just possible Kate had organised a little more than tin opening, their usual custom on Sunday evenings. And perhaps his absence would rekindle a little the surely still glowing embers of their relationship?
The Citroen lapped the grassy waste of the Pontine Marshes with lofty, unhurried speed, and he was soon negotiating the scruffy environs of the Eternal City. The serpentine route wound its way through a web of suburban streets, spun by an active and insular proletariat bent upon its own purposes and unmindful of the traveller trying to reach the centre of the city. He drove down endless avenues of battered plane trees with the torn election posters of umpteen political parties, unmade litter -strewn pavements where unattractive brown dogs foraged under café tables, ugly concrete blocks which were a maze of telephone wires and washing hung out of the windows. Only when past the
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Porta Ostiense and inside the great Aurelian walls did the ancient world and therefore some dignity take over.
Robert’s mood lifted further as he passed the long oval of the Circo Massimo, the ruined palaces of the Emperors on the Palatine that overlooked it, the massive Arch of Constantine, and finally, rounding the Coliseum, the Forum on his left. The classical symmetry, even in silent ruin, reprimanded like a respected elder the chaos of the Italian city that seethed and bickered about it. The study of ancient Rome could never be quite his love as it was Kate’s. He liked a lot more between the lines than Rome seemed to offer, and he could never quite rid his mind of the notion that the Romans had pinched so many of their central ideas from his Etruscans without acknowledgement. But he understood Kate’s absorption in the subject. It suited the lust for that Augustan definition and exactitude she had inherited from her determined, self-made, scientific father. And whatever his personal regrets, Rome, glorious, crumbling, decadent Rome, which had long departed from these classical certainties, was his city, an uplifting, daily pleasure.
Through the walls again, he broke free of the stranglehold of traffic as he entered the Borghese Gardens. The Villa Aemelia was in an ideal position for a museum, isolated, surrounded by pines, left alone in a fume of resin to brood upon its treasures from the past. Though he suspected that Kate, in her moods of social pretension, took private exception to the concept of living over the shop and often apologised for it to the well-connected friends she cultivated, when the public had disappeared in the evenings she had been known to say it was a lovely place to live. They inhabited the flat on the top floor, which had a superb
terrace. How many rich Roman families had this almost rural peace?
As he drove on to the tufa-paved area in front of the palazzo, he slowed for a moment to reconnect himself with the familiar sight. The Renaissance facade was particularly beautiful in the glow of sunset, when its ochre -painted rendering - together with terracotta, one of the two standard colours of old Rome - turned to a lavish gold. The three storeys of well-proportioned windows, handsomely grilled on the lower floors, rose majestically to the
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high wooden eaves jutting almost horizontally, like someone shielding their eyes contentedly from the sun. In the centre, at ground level, was the welcoming spread of half a dozen shallow steps leading to the front entrance.
The house was almost square and was built round a central court. The Caines’ flat was on the third floor at the rear. The approach to it was by a gravelled road that rounded the building on one side, and then through an archway that tunnelled through the ground floor on the far side and led into the inner court.
The archway was defended against unauthorised vehicles by a chain, slung between two stone bollards. As he drove round the building, Robert hooted lightly to warn Kate he was back. To his surprise the bulky, athletic figure of Pietro Buongusto, the concierge, sauntered from the door of his flat in the middle of the archway, followed by the inevitable Faro. Pietro was seldom separated from his mongrel.
‘Non si preoccupe, lo faccio io.’
Usually surly and ever -conscious that he might be being put upon, Pietro would never normally have considered undoing the chain as part of his duty. But he did so. Puzzled but grateful, Robert thanked him through the lowered window, and drove into the court.
There confronting him was the explanation. Mortimer Ready’s Rolls was parked next to Pietro’s absurdly huge and ancient Mercedes. Pietro was standing guard. Robert’s spirits took a nosedive. He kept his manner calm, however.
‘Mr Ready is upstairs?’ he asked, in Italian.
Pietro had followed him into the courtyard. The podgy, self-centred, boyish features betrayed, as they usually did, his predominant emotion. Obsessed with notions of tella figura’, Pietro sycophantically admired Mortimer, largely, as far as Robert could judge, because of the Rolls. Robert’s own standing, in view of the old Citroen, was correspondingly low.
Pietro used the most insolent weapon in his repertoire -English. ‘Mee-ster Ray-ar-dee telephone your wife,’ he pronounced with relish. ‘Your wife telephone me. He is here since one hour. I not go out. I make certain I expect for him.’ He raised his crafty brown eyes insolently to the third floor. ‘Meester Ray-ar-dee very angry, I think. He expect for you upstairs.’
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Robert took his suitcase out, locked the car, and left Pietro standing there. The man had been difficult ever since last summer when he had demanded a loan, undoubtedly to finance an affair he was carrying on with an English girl on holiday in Rome. Robert had refused, and Pietro had gone to Mortimer who swallowed the lies and gave him the money.
Access to their flat was through the museum’s rear door in the corner of the court. He gave their private bell the usual tinkle, opened the door with the electronic gadget he issued only to himself, Kate, and to one or two of the senior staff, and disconnected the alarm system while he went up to the third floor, where he would reconnect it. He mounted in the ancient lift, which was also used for shifting heavy museum objects to the upper floors. As he rose, he tried to get his pulse in line with the stately movement. The last thing he was going to do tonight was to be angry if Mortimer was indeed on the rampage.
They were out on the terrace with empty glasses. Kate, groomed and immaculate as usual in a white silk blouse, stylish green scarf and matching skirt, raised her hand to the level of her shoulder. He held it ritually for a second until she disengaged it. ‘Why the hell are you so late?’
Mortimer’s small, blue -suited, gingery figure was enthroned in the large basket chair, which was one of those with a wide, fanned back like a Tudor ruff. He looked lost in it, like the smaller Ronnie doing that old solo act of his.
‘Someone playing bomb scares at Fiumicino. They kept us in the aircraft.’
‘Well, I’ve been sitting here an hour waiting for you.’
What was implied — that he should have opened an emergency door and jumped, just in case Mortimer happened to be waiting for him at home? Kate, he noted, was already informed of whatever it was, and was as usual outwardly in cahoots with Mortimer. She refused to meet his eyes.
Mortimer realised his last remark had not been exactly gallant towards Kate. ‘It’s only fortunate,’ he mumbled as a postscript, ‘that I’ve had Kate to keep me company.’
The remark convinced Robert it was nothing catastrophic. If it had been that urgent, Mortimer would not have played about like
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this but gone straight to the point. He relaxed, and though mindful of his new thoughts, put an old routine into action. The first thing was to get the fuses out.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well, whatever the dread news is, I want a drink first if you don’t mind. Can I fill you up, either of you?’ Kate shook her head. Mortimer continued to look cross, but didn’t answer. Robert went inside.
He took his time pouring the whisky. They had demolished the soda, so he went to the kitchen to get another. He was aware of them sitting out there, waiting for him in silence. It seemed they had already run out of things to say to each other. He had never understood why Kate was so polite to Mortimer, even when speaking about him when he was not there. She had even less in common with the man than he did, and really despised him. Was it part of her unspoken punishment of himself? Probably. He was responsible in her eyes for landing them in the predicament of their relationship to Mortimer, so she was making the best of a bad job. Was that what she wished to imply?
‘That Bruneschi woman’s got to go,’ Mortimer said, as soon as he returned. ‘I wish to God she had disappeared and not Pelucci.’ Robert had rather expected Kate would melt away at this point, now she had handed on the baton. She usually did when museum talk developed. She sat her ground.
‘Gabriella? How has she transgressed?’
‘To begin with she’s quite obviously administratively incompetent. I cannot think why you leave her in charge. And apart from the fact that she’s a bungler, what you once chose to call her “frilly pinkness at the edges” is getting starker red every time I see her.’
Robert sipped. ‘What happened?’
‘Does it matter precisely what happened? It’s a general situation I’m talking about. This isn’t a university, Robert, it’s a commercial enterprise. Let her rabbit on about social injustice where it does no harm. A university would be the ideal place for her - if she could get into one, which I doubt.’
‘Gabriella hardly “rabbits” - but what has she been up to?’ Mortimer flushed. ‘“Up to.” That’s a typical phrase of yours, isn’t it? As if the whole thing’s a childish game. Well, I’ll tell you
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what Signora Bruneschi’s been up to. I happen to be meeting the Minister tomorrow in case you’ve forgotten. It’s your darned highbrow exhibition, which is going to lose me a packet of money again, that I’m seeing him about, isn’t it? Where would you be with it if I hadn’t used my influence in high quarters? I need the precise list of exhibits. If the Minister’s going to pressure the Spaniards, he will need to know what an important exhibition it is and what a gap the Escorial Crucifixion will leave if it isn’t there. When I phoned her yesterday morning, Bruneschi says airily “she’ll see what she can do”. An hour, two, goes by and not a
squeak. I phone again. She’s been “caught up”, she informs me. The lights had fused on the ground floor, or some triviality. When I pointed out the urgency of my request, she told me, “other people can have emergencies too,” or some such phrase. I tore a strip off her and told her to get the list immediately or there would be consequences for her. I still haven’t got that list.’
‘You mean she didn’t get back to you?’
‘Your secretary got back to me this afternoon to say the list must be in the safe and that you went away with the keys.’
‘That’s true.’
‘I’m not going to be treated like this by your curators, Robert. You have the right to hire and fire, but I expect a certain minimum of civility. She must go. As it turns out, she couldn’t have got the list. But that’s no longer the point. The point is, she isn’t the kind of person we want round here. With her ideology and attitude, and those of that red husband of hers, there’s a security risk, quite apart from other considerations.’
Robert was on the point of defending Gabriella on the last count. If security had anything to do with it, which it didn’t, Gabriella was hotter on it than he was, quite apart from being the straightest, most honest person he knew. It was also absurd to say she was red in the way Mortimer was suggesting. He stopped himself. Instead, he got up.
‘I’ll get you the list of exhibits and their donors,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea you were seeing Palomero so soon. You didn’t actually say, you know.’
When he returned from the office on the floor below, Mortimer was standing and Kate was handing him his brief -case. He snatched the sheet from Robert’s hand.
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‘At last. I really don’t expect to have to come into Rome for a piece of paper from you. Get rid of that woman, any way you can, or there will have to be consequences.’
Robert was going to accompany him down to his car. But at the lift he was dismissed.
‘I don’t need nursemaiding, thank you. Pietro will let me out - one of your smarter and more loyal employees, incidentally, a damn sight smarter than some of your so-called intellectuals. Next time, perhaps you can leave keys with Kate when you go away.’
Robert went back into the flat and alerted Pietro on their communicating phone, as if he needed to be. When he heard the door boom downstairs, on a reflex action he reconnected the alarm system. Kate was in the kitchen, putting the glasses into the dishwasher. He tried to revive his earlier feelings.
‘Well, a somewhat dramatic homecoming,’ he said lightly.
‘Indeed.’
‘Why didn’t he send someone in for the paper? He didn’t have to come himself. He could have phoned and I could have sent it out to him this evening for that matter.’
‘He was clearly angry on the matter of principle.’
‘What matter of principle?’
‘Gabriella Bruneschi’s behaviour.’
Robert turned away.
‘Then I have the feeling I haven’t heard quite all of the story. From what I have heard, I can’t discern any principles at large.’
‘You certainly haven’t heard all the story.’
‘You mean Gabbi really shot her mouth off?’
Kate was being unusually domestic. Fastidiously, at arm’s length, item by item, she began to rearrange two or three days’ crockery in the machine.
‘Among other things I gather she called Mortimer a fascist.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Mortimer is right, you know. She doesn’t control her tongue.’
He sat down at the table. ‘No. But neither of course does Mortimer.’
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‘Mortimer happens to own the place.’
‘Yes, and thinks he owns us as well.’
‘Well, in a way, I suppose he does, doesn’t he? You, and the staff anyway, apropos the museum. Anyway, his influence is useful, isn’t it, with Cellini? He is good at cultivating people in high places. I would have thought you’d all see that Paris, or Madrid in this case, is worth a mass.’
Robert again applied the brakes. What she said had some truth, though her tone had a personal edge which went beyond the situation. In spite of the implications of what she had said, paradoxically he had a spasm of that old affection for her. For what the Italians so graciously call ‘sulla quarantina’ - she was actually forty-four, four years older than he was - she was still pretty athletic and youthful. She was still, surely, beneath the irrelevant layers time had built, the girl he had fallen in love with on the Cambridge backs? They were regarded in those days as the
ideal pair, she the daughter of a distinguished and eminent scientist and in her own right one of the best undergraduates in the Archaeology Faculty, he with his own bunch of laurels.
‘All right, I agree,’ he said, with humour. ‘The Escorial Cruci-fixion is worth a mass.’ He paused. ‘And it’s nice to be home.’
‘Nice to have you back,’ she said perfunctorily.
She was shaking soap powder into the plastic compartment, amateurishly, at arm’s length, as if it were not her job. It amused him to watch her. Did he not really appreciate her refusal to be domestic, which was part of her immense integrity as an archaeologist?
He hoped the subject had gone away, but it had not.
‘What are you going to do about Gabriella Bruneschi?’ she said in a few moments.
‘Oh, it’ll blow over.’
‘I rather doubt it this time. You didn’t see Mortimer when he came in.’
‘Mortimer’s fury evaporates as fast as it bursts out.’
‘Do you think Bruneschi’s competent?’
‘Of course she is. She’s by far the ablest person here.’
‘Then it’s a pity she hasn’t got more tact. Can’t you ease her out somehow? If she’s as bright as you say she is, she should be able to find another post easily enough.’
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He turned to her, astounded. ‘But Kate, quite apart from common justice, I don’t think Gabbi wants to move. Her husband’s a Roman.’
‘You mean you’re going to take her side over this business?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Well, what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying we’ll see, and that I’m hungry.’ He looked around the room for evidence of food.
She had done nothing about a meal. She apologised. She had been going to, she said, but Mortimer had ‘shifted the agenda’. He suggested they went out somewhere, to Trastevere perhaps. They hadn’t been there for years. She said she really didn’t feel like it if he didn’t mind. She had a hard day ahead of her, out at Viterbo.
They had a tin of asparagus soup, and a tin of salmon, with a salad he made. At least, he thought, the subject of Gabriella and Mortimer had been buried. During the meal Kate chatted comprehensively about the new villa dig she had been invited to examine. The villa had belonged to a rich commercial family and some interesting graffiti had been unearthed which could be useful for her new book on first -century inscriptions.
As an afterthought, she asked him about his visit to London. He had looked forward to telling her at some length about the candidates, about his chance meeting with Reg Griffin and his feelings about him. In the moment he found he had no relish for the story, related it baldly, and made his method of choice sound even more casual than it had been.
‘A bit risky taking on someone like that, isn’t it?’ was her tangential comment.
‘He has as good academic credentials as the others. Better in fact.’
‘Well, let’s hope he isn’t another Bruneschi,’ she added more crisply, ‘and that his politics are a little more sophisticated.’
The evening died. They went to bed as on any other day. He might not have been away, he thought gloomily. He knew that he had not really expected it to be otherwise.
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