North from Rome (15 page)

“We’d have done better using the staircase,” Bill Lammiter said.

“I’m on the top floor,” she said warningly.

That was all they said during the whole journey to her apartment. He wished he had never agreed to come: conversation was going to be difficult, now that the first surprise was over. She was calmer, too. It looked as if perhaps she didn’t really need him around, after all.

The apartment was rambling, with large rooms leading off a dark central hall. She led him through double glass doors screened with lace into a dimmed and elaborately furnished room, everything exactly arranged in patterns of tables and ornate chairs. There was a good deal of glass and marble and gold-tipped wood, of silk brocade and net curtains carefully draped and puckered and folded.

“We share this room for everything except sleeping,” she explained. “Hideous, isn’t it? And I can’t move a thing—there’s a maid who goes with the apartment, and she won’t let us alter the position of one ashtray. The awful thing is, there’s a lot of good stuff in this room, and it could look beautiful.” She moved over to the two huge square-shaped windows, which began at high waist level and stretched almost to the carved and painted ceiling. She pulled them wide open, after a brief battle with yards of lace, and flung apart the outside shutters. “It’s cool enough now,” she said, in her peculiar way of half-explanation. Eleanor had always talked to people as if she expected them to be thinking along with her, keeping a kind of silent conversation going, so that her mental jumps needed no explanation. What she was telling him was that the fact that she had adopted, along with the Italian furniture, the Italian habit
of shutting windows as well as shutters while the sun was up.

She glanced at him. He had barely entered the room. He stood quite still, watching her. “Am I talking too much?” She tried to laugh. “Someone
has
to say something. The silence in the elevator nearly smashed my eardrums. Don’t look at me like that! I’m all right, Bill.”

“Are you?” he asked quietly, listening to the nervous edge in her voice, watching the anxiety in her wide-open eyes. Why had she brought him here? The reason had been real enough, he felt now, but she was backing away from telling it to him. “Then perhaps you don’t need anyone.” He turned towards the glass doors.

“But I do. I need
you.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never felt so—so lost in all my life. Honestly, Bill—” She gestured helplessly. “I tried to call you twice this evening.”

“So you said.” His voice was quite neutral. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the several mirrors strung around the walls. He didn’t look neutral, though. He looked like a man who had been strung out on a rack.

“Don’t hate me, Bill. Please don’t hate me—”

“I don’t hate. I don’t—” he took a breath and finished lamely, “—anything.” He must put on a better show than this. He looked around him, thinking he would stay for five, polite, agonising minutes; and then get the hell out. And stay out of Eleanor’s life forever. He chose a chair that would be the least comfortable. “Where’s everyone? All out to dinner?”

“Dorothy and Maymie are in Amalfi on their vacation. I sent the maid home this morning. I thought I had an engagement for tonight. With Luigi.”

He reached in his pocket for a cigarette. “This allowed?”

She nodded, saying “sorry” as she found a cigarette box to open in front of him, and then searched for matches. Suddenly she remembered the drink she had offered him. She must indeed have been upset to have forgotten all these politenesses. Eleanor was the kind of girl who always remembered a man’s little comforts: a good geisha, he used to joke. She brought him a well-mixed Scotch and soda with ice, and a large saucer to replace the Venetian glass thimble of an ashtray which he was balancing on his knee.

“And I thought,” she said wryly, still following the pattern of thought that he had interrupted with the smoking ceremony, “that I was going to visit some friends of Luigi’s this week-end. In Umbria. Luigi was going to join me there when he could.”

He said nothing, nothing at all. Did she really enjoy hurting him like this? He even managed to look at her quite candidly. And then he saw she was not thinking of hurting him; she was too engrossed in hurting herself.

“But it’s all off,” she said. “All off.”

“Well, you can see Umbria some other time, when you get back from America. The hill towns won’t run away. They’ve been there for a couple of hundred years, at least.”

“It’s
all
off, Bill!”

“Off?” He rose.

“Luigi—I—we aren’t getting married.”

“What?”

“I’m going home for good.” The words rushed out, ending her attempt at self-control. She turned her back on him. “I handed—I handed in my—”

He took a step towards her. But she was fighting off this attack of emotion by herself. She said, in a tight, strained voice, “I handed in my resignation at the Embassy this afternoon. They took it, too. Without one question. As if—as if they were glad I was going back to America, Suggested I leave as soon as possible.”

“Thank God for that.”

She swung around. “Why do you say that?” she asked sharply. “Why?”

He temporised. “What else would you expect me to say, Ellie?” he asked gently.

“You’re just like the Embassy. Too quick—” Angrily, she brushed the tears from her cheeks. “They were too obliging about letting me go; no questions asked. Nothing. Bill—what’s wrong? What are they trying to protect me from? What—”

“I suppose they saw your mind was made up.” Not a brilliant remark, but the best he could muster at this moment.

“But it
wasn’t
—not really. I could have been persuaded to stay.”

“Why?” he asked. “To plead with dear Luigi?”

“Bill!”

He didn’t apologise. But at least he had driven the tears away. “The sooner you leave, the better,” he said curtly.

She faced him, angry, a little frightened, but determined. She quieted her voice. “You’re like the Embassy,” she repeated, “pushing me off on the first plane—” She hesitated. “I think you know something,” she said slowly, “something I should know. What is it? Have you heard some rumour? Some—”

“Ellie,” he said very quietly, “what are you going to imagine next? I’m a stranger here. Where would I hear rumours?” He
walked over to the window. The evening sky had changed from gold to apricot and orange, and now—even as he watched—the flaming colours were streaked with violet-grey. Soon it would be dark.

“You heard the princess today...” She sounded worried, puzzled.

“I just don’t get this.” He swung round to face her. “You and Pirotta looked pretty damn well pleased with yourselves at Doney’s, this lunchtime.” He could have been more tactful. She flinched.

And then she said, the lines at the side of her lips suddenly drawing down so that her mouth seemed frail and miserable, “That was a pretence.”

He looked at her sharply.

“Luigi didn’t want his aunt to see that something was wrong— she would have been delighted: she never did think I was the right girl for Luigi; and we were hoping we could get everything straightened out. That’s why I met Luigi for lunch.” She took a long, deep breath. “But everything got worse instead of better.”

“Look—” he began, and stopped. If ever he had seen a man in love, it had been Pirotta. “I just
can’t
believe it. That guy just doesn’t give up so easily.”

Eleanor said, shaking her head, still hardly believing it herself, “We had some trouble two nights ago. Last night we had another quarrel—no, that isn’t the right word—it wasn’t a quarrel exactly. It was worse than a quarrel. Just—” She dropped her hands helplessly to her sides. “Just trouble. Which I can’t understand. I just don’t know what is wrong, Bill.”

“Then why break off the engagement? Or is this getting to be a habit?”

She flinched again. She said quietly, “I didn’t break it off. It was Luigi who—” She stopped, facing him. Abruptly, she turned away and sat down. She lit a cigarette very carefully. “He broke the engagement this afternoon,” she said at last.

Involuntarily he said, “That was the only solution. I mean— it was the right thing—for your sake. But I’m sorry. It’s a hard blow. Even if you sensed trouble coming, it is always hard to—”

She was staring at him. “What do you mean— ‘right thing’? Or ‘for my sake’?” She was angry. “Look, Bill—I wanted to tell you all this just because I—well, I felt you were the only person I could trust.”

“Trust with what?”

“With what?” she echoed blankly. She looked at him, utterly bewildered now. She shook her head. “Bill, what
did
you expect from me? I just wanted to tell
someone
, to have them listen, to have them understand. Someone I—I like very much. Someone who likes me, so that any advice I get will be honest.”

“But why choose me?” he asked angrily. Why cut open healed wounds?

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, and her voice slid into tears like that of a child who is frightened, “I just wanted—I just wanted to see you.”

Or perhaps, he thought savagely, the wounds had never healed. His, at least, were as raw as on the day they had been inflicted.

“Please stop teaching yourself to hate me,” she said sharply, her tears changing to anger. “I watched you at Doney’s today. You really had cast me for the role of villainess, hadn’t you? Nothing I could have done or said would have been right. Nothing.” There was a long silence. Her voice became calm, sad. “Don’t, Bill! One can always sneer at people—one can always find something to laugh at. But, you don’t
have
to do that with me. I know how wrong I was. And how I hurt you. I’m sorry. I’ve said that before. And I meant it. I didn’t need to lose Luigi to know how you felt when I treated you so—so badly. You don’t love me any more, but you don’t have to hate me.”

He watched her as she spoke. It was all as painful for her to say as it was for him to listen to. But she was right about some things. He might as well admit it honestly, as she had. Today, at Doney’s, he had been twisting every memory of her into a caricature, every thought about her into a bitter criticism. He had been trying to teach himself to hate her. Why? To stop loving her? Damn those big grey eyes, soft and shadowed, watching him so unhappily across the darker shadows of this room.

“I always told you I was a mean son of a bitch,” he said gruffly. He finished his drink quickly, and rose.

She rose, too. “And I never believed it. Or I wouldn’t have telephoned you this evening. I wouldn’t have asked you to come up here.” She held out her hand for his empty glass. “Let me mix you another.”

“I hate Pirotta’s guts,” he admitted. “I’m glad you are leaving him. Glad. But I’m sorry, too. Sorry this had to be...” He put out a hand and touched hers. They were two shadows, facing each other in a darkened room. The deep dusk blotted out all expressions, all memories. She didn’t move. He tightened his hand round hers, and took a step nearer. “Ellie—”

She came to life. Her arm and her voice were taut. “No, Bill! No—I’m selfish and vain and stupid, but I didn’t ask you to come up to—oh, Bill, I’m not as cruel as that! Have you got all your memories of me so twisted?”

He dropped her hand. She didn’t step away, though, not at once. She touched his arm, gently, as if to soften the sharpness of her refusal. And then she moved quietly, without haste, over to the wall and switched on the light.

“You know,” he said, making his voice as natural and easy as possible, “I think we both need some dinner.”

She smiled suddenly, with relief. “Do you mind if it’s simple? The larder didn’t expect company. Eggs, cheese—that kind of thing? And there’s Valpolicella.”

“Good,” he said. “Hemingway characters always drink Valpolicella. Lets them get things straight.” He managed a laugh. “I’ll help with the omelette. Where’s the kitchen?”

“As far down the hall as possible,” she said, almost laughing, too. “Who wants an old kitchen near any old dining-room?” She led the way into the hall, switching on lights.

He noticed a telephone. “By the way, why did you have to phone me twice? Didn’t the hotel mention I had checked out, the first time?”

“Yes. But they expected you back.”

“They did?”

“You had left your raincoat.”

“My Burberry?” And as he stared at her incredulously, he suddenly could see it, hiding on a hook behind the opened inner door to his bedroom. His much prized, overpriced Burberry. “Darn! So that’s how I found room for my camera in my suitcase.”

“You should use a Minox,” she said, “and carry it in your pocket. That would solve a lot of problems.”

It was the old argument between two camera addicts, each trying to convert the other to his own particular love. Lammiter
had always preferred the full-sized print he could get with his Rolleiflex.

He halted at a doorway, and looked at suitcases on the bed, evening dresses over the top of a trunk, clothes pulled out of a wardrobe, jars and bottles and lipsticks all pushed into a group beside a large handbag on the dressing-table. “Now I begin to see why you always depended on a Minox. But have you room even for it?”

“I can always ditch my cigarette lighter. Most of this stuff will be sent after me. I’m taking just one bag.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow, early.” She bit her lip, looking at him uncertainly. “Bill, am I doing the right thing?—Running away like this?”

“I think it’s the right thing.”

“But I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Why should I run?” Her grey eyes, blue when she wore blue, green when she wore green, looked obliquely at him from under the fringe of dark lashes. “Luigi is, of course, going to say that it was all my decision. Noble of him. He’s telling that to his relatives, right now, at that dinner party we were going to attend tonight. Can’t you see them? Horrified and angry. Shaking their heads. Saying ‘I told you so, my dear boy. These Americans—’” She broke off.

“Now, Ellie,” he said, and searched for a handkerchief. “Look—” he spoke sharply, to switch her mind away from the dinner party, “you didn’t leave your name, did you?”

“Where?” She stopped wiping her eyes, and stared at him.