Travels With My Aunt

An luk me wan minit

Befo yu slip.’

The train gathered momentum and with a final jerk and strain it had left him behind.

I squeezed down the corridor to my aunt’s couchette which was number 72. The bed was made up, but there was a strange girl in a mini-skirt sitting on it, while my aunt leant out of the window waving and blowing kisses. The girl and I looked at each other with embarrassment. We could hardly speak and interrupt this ceremony of separation. She was very young, perhaps eighteen, and she was elaborately made up with a chalk-white face, dark shadowed eyes and long auburn hair falling over her shoulders. With the strokes of a pencil she had continued her eyelashes below and above the lids, so that the real eyelashes, standing out, had a false effect like a stereoscopic photograph. Her shirt had two buttons missing at the top as though they had popped off with the tension of her puppy fat and her eyes bulged like a Pekinese dog’s, but they were pretty nonetheless. They had in them what used to be called by my generation a sexy look, but this might have been caused by short sight or constipation. Her smile, when she realized that I was not a stranger intruding into my aunt’s compartment, was oddly timid for someone who looked so flagrant. It was as though someone else had dolled her up to attract. She was like a kid tethered to a tree to draw a tiger out of the jungle.

My aunt pulled in her head; her face was smeared with smuts and tears.

‘Dear man,’ she said. ‘I had to take a last look. At my age one never knows.’ I said with disapproval, ‘I thought that chapter was closed,’ and added for the sake of the girl, ‘Aunt Augusta.’

‘One can never be quite sure,’ my aunt said. ‘This is 71,’ she added, indicating the girl.

‘71?’

‘The next-door couchette. What’s your name, dear?’

‘Tooley,’ the girl replied. It might have been a pet name or a family name-one couldn’t be sure.

‘Tooley is going to Istanbul too. Aren’t you, dear?’

‘En passant,’ she said with an American accent.

‘She’s going to Katmandu,’ my aunt explained.

‘I thought that was in Nepal.’

‘I guess that’s where it is,’ the girl said. ‘Something like that.’ ‘She and I got talking,’ my aunt told me, ‘because-what’s your name again, dear?’

‘Tooley,’ the girl said.

‘Tooley has brought a sack of provisions with her. Do you realize, Henry, that the Orient Express has no restaurant-car? How times have changed. No restaurant-car till after the Turkish frontier. We face two days of starvation.’ ‘I’ve got a lot of milk chocolate,’ the girl said, ‘and a little sliced ham.’

‘And thirst,’ Aunt Augusta said.

‘I’ve got a dozen bottles of coke, but it’s getting pretty warm now.’ ‘When I think of the party I once had on this very train,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘with Mr Visconti and General Abdul. Caviar and champagne. We practically lived in the dining-car. One meal ran into another and night into day.’ ‘You are very welcome to share my coke,’ Tooley said. ‘And the milk chocolate. The ham too, of course, but there’s not much of that.’ ‘At least the conductor has promised us coffee and croissants,’ I said, ‘in the morning.’

‘I shall sleep as late as I can,’ my aunt said, ‘and we shall be able to get a bite at Milan station. With Mario,’ she added.

‘Who’s Mario?’ I asked.

‘We stop at Lausanne and St Maurice,’ said the well-informed girl. ‘Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘like some people are only bearable under a sheet. Now I shall go to bed. You two young people are old enough to be left alone.’

Tooley looked at me askance as though after all I might be the tiger type. ‘Oh, I’ll sleep too,’ she said, ‘I love sleep.’ She looked at a huge wrist-watch on a strap an inch wide with only four numerals, coloured scarlet. ‘It’s not one yet,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I’d better take a pill.’

‘You’ll sleep,’ my aunt said in a tone not to be denied.

WE WERE just pulling out of Lausanne when I awoke. I could see the lake between two tall grey apartment buildings and there was a tasteful advertisement for chocolates and then another for watches. It was the conductor who had woken me, bringing me coffee and brioches (I had asked for croissants). ‘Is the lady in 72 awake?’ I asked.

‘She did not wish to be disturbed before Milan,’ he replied.

‘Is it true that there’s no restaurant-car?’

‘Yes, monsieur.’

‘At least you will give us breakfast tomorrow?’

‘No, monsieur. I leave the train at Milan. There is another conductor.’

‘Italian?’

‘Yugoslav, monsieur.’

‘Does he speak English or French?’

‘It is not likely.’

I felt hopelessly abroad.

I drank my coffee, and then from the corridor I watched the small Swiss towns roll smoothly by: the Montreux Palace in baroque Edwardian like the home of a Ruritanian king, and rising behind it, out of a bank of morning mist, pale mountains like an under-exposed negative: Aigle, Bex, Visp … We stopped at nearly every station, but it was seldom that anyone either got in or out. Like my aunt foreign passengers were not interested in Switzerland without snow, and yet it was here that I was seriously tempted to leave her. I had fifty pounds of travellers’ cheques and I had no interest at all in Turkey. I caught glimpses of meadows running down to water, of old castles on hills spiked with vines and of girls on bicycles; everything seemed clean and arranged and safe, as my life had been before my mother’s funeral. I thought of my garden. I missed my dahlias, and at some small station, where a postman was delivering letters from a bicycle, there was a bed of mauve and red flowers. I think I might really have got off if the girl called Tooley hadn’t at that moment touched my arm. Was there anything so wrong with the love of peace that I had to be forcibly drawn away from it by Aunt Augusta? ‘Did you sleep well?’ Tooley asked.

‘Oh yes, and you?’

‘I hardly slept a wink.’ Her Pekinese eyes stared up at me, as though she were waiting for something from my plate. I offered her a brioche, but she refused it.

‘Oh no, thanks a lot. I’ve had a chocolate bar.’

‘Why couldn’t you sleep?’

‘I’m sort of worried.’

I remembered, from my cashier days, faces just as timid as hers, peering through a hygienic barrier where a notice directed them to speak through a slot placed inconveniently low. I almost asked her whether she had an overdraft. ‘Anything I can do?’

‘I just want to talk,’ she said.

What could I do but invite her in? My bed had been made into a sofa while I stood in the corridor, and we sat down side by side. I offered her a cigarette. It was an ordinary Senior Service, but she turned it over as though it were something special she had never seen before.

‘English?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What does Senior Service mean?’

‘The Navy.’

‘You don’t mind, do you, if I smoke one of my own?’ She took a tin marked Eucalyptus-and-Menthol Lozenges out of her bag and picked from it an anonymous cigarette which looked as though it had been home-rolled. On second thoughts she offered me one, and I thought it would be a little unkind of me to refuse. It was a very small cigarette, and it looked rather grubby. It had an odd herbal flavour, not disagreeable.

‘I’ve never smoked an American cigarette before,’ I said.

‘I got these in Paris-from a friend.’

‘Or French ones.’

‘He was a terribly nice man. Groovy.’

‘Who was?’

‘This man I met in Paris. I told him my trouble too.’

‘What is your trouble?’

‘I had a quarrel-with my boy-friend, I mean. He wanted to go third-class to Istanbul. I said it’s crazy, we couldn’t sleep together in the third-class, and I’ve got the money, haven’t I? “Your stinking allowance,” he said. “Sell all you have and give it to the poor”-that’s a quotation, isn’t it, from somewhere? I said, “It wouldn’t be any use. Father would pay me back.” “He need never know,” he said. “He has sources of information,” I said, “he’s very high up, I mean, in the CIA.” He said, “You can stick your money up your arse”-that’s an English expression, isn’t it? He’s English. We met when we were sitting down in Trafalgar Square.’

‘Feeding the pigeons?’ I asked.

She gave a bubble of a laugh and choked on the smoke. ‘You are ironic,’ she said. ‘I like men who are ironic. My father’s ironic too. You are a bit like him when I come to think of it. Irony is a very valuable literary quality too, isn’t it, like passion?’

‘You mustn’t ask me about literature, Miss Tooley,’ I said. ‘I’m very ignorant.’

‘Don’t call me Miss Tooley. Tooley’s what my friends call me.’ At St Maurice a gang of schoolgirls passed down the platform. They were nice-looking schoolgirls; not one of them wore a mini-skirt or visible make-up and they carried neat little satchels.

‘How can such a beautiful country be so dull?’ Tooley thought aloud.

‘Why dull?’

‘They aren’t turned on here,’ she said. ‘None of them will ever be turned on. Would you like another cigarette?’

‘Thank you. They are very mild. Agreeable flavour too. They don’t rasp the throat.’

‘I do like the expressions you use. They really are groovy.’ I felt more awake than I usually do at that hour of the morning, and I found Tooley’s company something of a novelty. I was glad that my aunt was sleeping late and giving me an opportunity to get better acquainted. I felt protective. I would have liked a daughter, though I had never been able to imagine Miss Keene as a mother. A mother should not be in need of protection herself.

‘This friend of yours in Paris,’ I said, ‘was a very good judge of cigarettes.’

‘He was fabulous,’ she said. ‘I mean, he’s really together.”

‘French?’

‘Oh no, he came from darkest Africa.’

‘A negro?’

‘We don’t call them that,’ she said reprovingly. ‘We call them coloured or black-whichever they prefer.’

A sudden suspicion struck me. ‘Was he called Wordsworth?’

‘I only knew him as Zach.’

‘That’s the man. Was it you he came to see off at the station?’ ‘Sure. Who else? I never expected him, but there he was at the gate to say goodbye. I bought him a platform ticket, but I think he was scared. He wouldn’t come any further.’

‘He knows my aunt, too,’ I said. I didn’t tell her that he had used her ticket for another purpose.

‘Now isn’t that the wildest sort of coincidence? Like something in Thomas Hardy.’

‘You seem to know a lot about literature.’

‘I’m majoring in English Literature,’ she said. ‘My father wanted me to take Social Science because he wanted me to serve a while in the Peace Corps, but I guess our ideas didn’t coincide in that and other things.’ ‘What does your father do?’

‘I told you-he has a very secret job in the CIA.’

‘That must be interesting,’ I said.

‘He travels about a terrible lot. I haven’t seen him more than once since Mum divorced him last fall. I tell him he sees the world horizontally, I mean that’s superficial, isn’t it? I want to see the world vertically.’ ‘In depth,’ I said. I was rather proud of catching up with her ideas. ‘These help,’ she said, waving her cigarette. ‘I feel a bit turned on already. It’s your fabulous way of talking. I feel I sort of met you in the English Literature course. As a character. We did Dickens in depth.’ ‘Vertically,’ I said, and we laughed together.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Henry.’ She laughed again and I followed suit though I was not sure why.

‘They didn’t even call you Harry?’ she asked.

‘Harry is the diminutive. One cannot be baptized Harry. There was never a Saint Harry.’

‘Is that what they call Canon Law?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Because I knew a fabulous guy once who was baptized Knock-Me-Down.’

‘I doubt if he was really baptized that.’

‘Are you a Roman Catholic?’

‘No, but I believe that my aunt is one. I’m not quite sure though.’ ‘I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot-I mean I’m superstitious. Was Macbeth a Catholic?’ ‘It’s not a question that’s ever occurred to me … I suppose … well, I mean I don’t really know.’ It seemed to me that I was picking up her phrases. ‘Maybe we ought to lock the door and open the window,’ she said. ‘What country are we in now?’

‘I think we must be coming near to the Italian frontier.’ ‘Then open the window quick.’ I couldn’t follow her reasoning, but I obeyed. I had already finished my cigarette, and she tossed away her stump and then emptied the ash-tray on to the line. Then I remembered Wordsworth. ‘What have we been smoking?’ I said.

‘Pot, of course. Why?’

‘Do you realize we could be sent to prison? I don’t know the Swiss law or the Italian, but …’

‘I wouldn’t be. I’m under age.’

‘And me?’

‘You could plead innocence,’ she said and began to laugh: she was laughing when the door opened and the Italian police looked in. ‘Passports,’ they demanded, but they didn’t even open them; the draught of the open window blew off one man’s cap, and I could only hope the smell of cannabis had dispersed down the corridor. They were followed closely by the customs men who were equally considerate, except that one man wrinkled his nose. A few minutes later they were safely on the platform. The sign read Domodossola.

‘We’re in Italy,’ I said.

‘Then have another.’

‘I’ll do no such thing, Tooley. I had no idea … For goodness’ sake get rid of them before tonight. Yugoslavia’s a Communist country, and they won’t hesitate to imprison someone under age.’

‘I was always taught that Yugoslavs were good Communists. We sell them strategic material, don’t we?’

‘But not drugs,’ I said.

‘Now you’re being ironical again. I mean I wanted to tell you my great trouble, but how can I do it if you’re ironical?’

‘You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality.’ ‘But you aren’t a novel,’ she said and began to cry as Italy went by outside. The cannabis had caused the laughter and now I suppose it caused the tears. I felt a little unhappy myself watching her. My head swam. I shut the window and saw through the pane a hill-village all yellow and ochre, like something grown of itself out of rain and earth, and beside the line a factory and a red housing estate and an autostrada and an advertisement for Perugina and all the wires and grids of a smokeless age.

‘What’s your trouble, Tooley?’ I asked.

‘I forgot the damn pill and I haven’t had the curse for six weeks. I nearly talked to your mother last night …’

‘My aunt,’ I corrected her. ‘You ought to speak to her. I don’t really know about these things.’

‘But I want to talk to a man,’ Tooley said. ‘I mean I’m sort of shy of women. I don’t get on terms with them fast the way I do with men. The trouble is men are so ignorant now. In the old days a girl never knew what to do, and now it’s the men who don’t know. Julian said it was my fault-he trusted me.’ ‘Julian is the boy-friend?’ I asked.

‘He was angry because I forgot the pill. He wanted to hitchhike to Istanbul. He said it might do the trick.’

‘I thought he wanted to go third-class.’

‘That was before I told him. And before he met a man with a truck going to Vienna. Then he gave me an ultimatum. We were in this cafe in the Place St Michel and he said, “We’ve got to leave now or never,” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Find your own fucking way then.”’

‘Where is he now?’

‘Somewhere between here and Istanbul.’ ‘How will you find him?’ ‘They’ll know at the Gulhane.’ ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s near the Blue Mosque. Everyone knows where everyone is at the Gulhane.’ She began to remove carefully the traces of tears. Then she looked at her huge watch with the four numbers and said, ‘It’s nearly lunchtime. I’m as hungry as a dog. I hope I’m not feeding two. Want some chocolate?’ ‘I’ll wait until Milan,’ I said. ‘Have another cigarette?’ ‘No thank you.’ ‘I will. It might do the trick.’ She began to smile again. ‘It’s funny the ideas I get, I mean I think almost anything might do the trick. I drank brandy and ginger ale in Paris because at school they said ginger did the trick. And I had sauna baths too. It’s funny when all you really need is a curetage. Wordsworth said he’d find me a doctor, but he said he’d need a few days to find him, and then I’d have to lay up a little, and it wouldn’t be much good getting to the Gulhane and finding Julian gone. Gone where? I ask you. I met a boy in Paris who said they were turning us all out of Katmandu and Vientiane was the place now. Not for Americans of course because of the draft.’ There were moments when she gave the impression that all the world was travelling.

Tooley said, ‘I slept with a boy in Paris when Julian walked out because I thought, well, it might stir things up a bit. I mean the curse comes that way sometimes right on top of the orgasm, but I didn’t get any orgasm. I guess I was worrying about Julian because I don’t often have difficulty that way.’ ‘I think you ought to go straight back home and tell your parents.’ ‘In the singular,’ she said. ‘I don’t count Mum, and I don’t no exactly know where Father is. He travels an awful lot. Secret missions. He might be in Vientiane for all I know-they say it’s lousy with CIA.’ ‘Haven’t you anywhere you call home?’ I asked her.

‘Julian and me felt like home, but then he got angry about my forgetting the pill. He’s very quick-tempered. “If I have to remind you all the time,” he said, “it takes away my spontaneity, don’t you understand that?” He’s got a theory women want to castrate their men, and one way is to take away their spontaneity.’

‘And you felt at home with him?’

‘We could discuss just everything,’ she said with a happy and reminiscent smile as the pot began to work again. ‘Art and sex and James Joyce and psychology.’

‘You oughtn’t to smoke that stuff,’ I protested.

‘Pot? Why? There’s no harm in pot. Acid’s another thing. Julian wanted me to try acid, but I said no, I mean I don’t want to warp my chromosomes.’

There were moments when I didn’t understand a word she said, and yet it seemed to me that I could listen to her for a long while without wearying. There was something gentle and sweet about her which reminded me of Miss Keene. It was an absurd comparison to make, of course, and perhaps this was what she meant by being turned on.

WHEN A TRAIN pulls into a great city I am reminded of the closing moments of an overture. All the rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: a factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gas-works by a modern church: the houses began to tread on each other’s heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and Milano, flashed the signs, Milano. I said to Tooley, ‘we’ve arrived. We’d better get lunch. It’s our last chance to get a square meal …’

‘Your mother …’ Tooley began.

‘Aunt Augusta-she’s here.’

The conductor had preceded her down the corridor (I should have realized who the important passenger was) and now she stood in the doorway of our compartment wrinkling her nose. ‘What have you two been up to?’ she asked. ‘Smoking and talking,’ I said.

‘You seem extraordinarily cheerful, Henry. It’s not quite like you.’ She sniffed again. ‘I can almost believe that poor Wordsworth is with us still.’ ‘It’s fabulous,’ Tooley said, ‘that you know Wordsworth, I mean.’ ‘Il y a un monsieur qui vous demande, madame’ the conductor interrupted, and I saw beyond my aunt, between a trolley of newspapers and a trolley of refreshments, a very tall thin man with exquisite white hair gesticulating with an umbrella.

‘Oh, it’s Mario,’ my aunt said, without bothering to turn. ‘I wrote to him that we should need lunch. He will have ordered it. Come, my dear, come, Henry, there’s no time to be lost.’ She preceded us down the steps and dropped straight into the arms of the white-haired man, who with steely strength held her for a moment suspended, ‘Madre mia, madre mia,’ he said breathlessly and dropped his umbrella as he put her carefully down on to the platform as though she might break-the very idea connected with Aunt Augusta was ridiculous. ‘What on earth is he calling you that for?’ I whispered. Perhaps it was the effect of the cannabis, but I had taken an extreme dislike to the man who was now kissing Tooley’s hand.

‘I knew him since he was a baby,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘He is Mr Visconti’s son.’

He was very good-looking in a histrionic way; he had the appearance of an ageing actor and I didn’t like the way he was trying to dazzle Tooley with pieces of his repertoire. After his burst of theatrical emotion with my aunt he was conducting Tooley ahead of us down the platform to the restaurant, holding his umbrella by the ferrule and pointing the crook up like a crozier. With his white hair and his head bent towards Tooley he looked like a hypnotic bishop instructing a neophyte on purity.

‘What does he do, Aunt Augusta? Is he an actor?’

‘He writes verse dramas.’

‘Can he live on that?’

‘Mr Visconti settled a little money on him before the war. Luckily in Swiss francs. I suspect too that he gets money from women.’ ‘Rather disgusting at his age,’ I said.

‘He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It’s the best way, Henry, to win a woman. They are wiser than men. They think of the period that must elapse between one love-making and another.

In my youth not many women smoked cigarettes. Look out for that trolley.’ I could feel in my head the cunning of cannabis. ‘He must have been born when you knew Mr Visconti … Did you know his mother too?’ ‘Not very well.’

‘She must have been a beautiful woman.’

‘I am not a fair judge. I detested her and she detested me. Mario always thought of me as his real mother. Mr Visconti called her the blonde cow. She was German.’

Mario Visconti had ordered a saltimbocca Romana for each of us and a bottle of Frascati wine. My aunt began to speak to him in Italian. ‘You must forgive me,’ my aunt said, ‘but Mario speaks no English, and it is many many years since we have seen each other.’

‘Do you speak Italian?’ I asked Tooley.

‘Not a word.’

‘You seemed to be having quite a conversation.’

‘Oh, he was very expressive.’

‘What was he expressing?’

‘He sort of liked me. What does more mean?’ I looked at Mario Visconti with resentment and saw that he had begun to weep. He was talking a great deal and using his hands in explanation and once he picked up his umbrella and held it above his head. In the short intervals between paragraphs he put a lot of saltimbocca Romana into his mouth, leaning his handsome face forward over the plate, so that the fork only had a short distance to travel and the tears only a little way to fall. It was lucky that the dish was heavily salted already. My aunt lent him a wispy lace handkerchief which he applied to his eyes and afterwards adjusted becomingly in his breast pocket to show a frilly corner. Then he became dissatisfied with the wine, which seemed very good to me, and called to the waiter to change it. Only after he had tasted a new bottle did he resume his tears. I noticed the waiters were as indifferent to the scene as usherettes at a cinema are to a movie which has been running a week. ‘I don’t like a man who cries,’ I said to Tooley.

‘Have you never cried?’

‘No,’ I said and then added for the sake of accuracy, ‘not in public.’ The waiter brought us all ice-creams in three colours. They looked dangerous to me and I left mine untasted, but Mario’s disappeared quickly and I noticed how his tears were quenched as though the ice had frozen the ducts. He gave my aunt a shy boyish smile which went strangely with his white hair, and she lent him surreptitiously her purse to pay with.

On the steps of the train I was afraid he would begin to cry again when he embraced her, but instead he gave her a small brown-paper parcel and walked silently away holding up his crook to hide his emotion or perhaps his lack of it.

‘So that’s that,’ my aunt said with cool thoughtfulness. Tooley had disappeared-I suspected into the lavatory to smoke another cigarette-and I decided to tell Aunt Augusta about her trouble.

But I found when I sat down beside her that she wanted to do the talking herself. ‘Mario seems rather an old man,’ she said, ‘or has he dyed his hair, I wonder? He cannot be more than forty-five. Or six. I am bad about dates.’ ‘He certainly looks a good deal older than that. Perhaps it is the poetry.’ ‘I have never much cared,’ she said, ‘for men with umbrellas, but he was charming as a child.’ She looked out of the window and I looked too: a new housing estate in red brick straggled beside the line and on the hill beyond a medieval village crumbled away behind its ramparts. ‘Why was he crying?’ I asked.

‘He wasn’t crying. He was laughing,’ she said. ‘Something about Mr Visconti. I haven’t seen Mario for more than thirty years,’ she said. ‘He was a sweet boy then-too sweet perhaps to last. The war came. We were separated.’ ‘And his father?’

‘I never associated sweetness with Mr Visconti. Charm perhaps. He was a terrible twister. Very generous with cream buns, of course, but one can’t live on cream buns. Perhaps I am being unfair. One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal. And after all he was kind to me from the very start-he found me my situation in Italy.’

‘At the theatre?’

‘I can’t think why you persist in calling it a theatre. “All the world’s a stage,” of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.’

I was a little shocked by her unexpected attack on Shakespeare. Perhaps it was because he wrote verse dramas like Mario. ‘You were talking about Mr Visconti,’ I reminded her. ‘I must admit he was very kind to me in Paris. I was quite heart-broken when I left Curran. I couldn’t appeal to your father because I had promised Angelica to stay away, and when Curran left, after our final quarrel, he took everything except the cash in the church collecting-boxes and twelve tins of sardines. He had an unnatural passion for sardines. He said they calmed his nerves, that eating them was like pouring oil on troubled waters.

There was enough in the collecting-boxes to pay my passage across the Channel and I was lucky to get this job of mine in the Rue de Provence. But I wasn’t really happy there, and I was grateful to Mr Visconti when he took me to Italy. The work, of course, was the same, but I enjoyed the travel from one city to another. And every eight weeks when I came back to Milan I enjoyed seeing Mr Visconti. Cream buns were a great improvement on sardines. Sometimes too he would pop up unexpectedly in Venice. He was a twister, no doubt of it, but there are many worse people than twisters.’ She sighed, looking out at the dull scenery of the Po. ‘I grew to be very very fond of him. Fonder than any other man I have ever known. Except the first, but the first is always a special case.’

‘How did you come to retire?’ I asked. I was going to say ‘from the stage,’ but I remembered her inexplicable dislike of the term. I had not forgotten Tooley’s trouble, but I thought it only fair to let my aunt finish first with the memories stirred up by the sight of Visconti’s son. ‘Your uncle Jo left me all his money. It was quite a shock. The house, too, of course, but there was nothing to be done about that. It’s still crumbling away near the autostrada. I settled the house on Mario when I had to leave Italy because of the war and I think he sometimes takes a woman there to spend a weekend in the ancient family palazzo. He even calls it the Palazzo Visconti (he’s a bit of a snob; quite unlike his father). One day they’ll want to build a connecting road to the autostrada and then the state will have to pay him compensation if he can show that the house was inhabited.’ ‘Why didn’t you marry Mr Visconti, Aunt Augusta?’

‘There’s no divorce in Italy, and Mr Visconti was a Catholic, even though a non-practising one. He even insisted on my being received into the Church. It was his wife who had all the money and that hampered Mr Visconti badly until he managed to get his fingers on most of what Jo had left me. I was very careless in those days and Mr Visconti was very plausible. It was lucky that no one would buy the house-that at least was left me for a time. He had a scheme for selling fresh vegetables-tomatoes, particularly, of course-to Saudi Arabia. At the beginning I think he really believed he would make our fortune. Even his wife lent him money. I shall always remember the conferences at the Excelsior in Rome with Arab notables in long robes who arrived with a dozen wives and a food-taster. Mr Visconti would take a whole floor in the Excelsior-you can imagine that made quite a hole in Jo’s money. But it was very romantic while it lasted. I had my fun. Mr Visconti was never for a moment dull. He even persuaded the Vatican to put in money, so we had cardinals for cocktails at the Grand Hotel. The Grand had once been a convent, and I suppose they felt more at home there. They were greeted at the door by flunkeys with tall candles, and it was a wonderful sight when the Arabs and the cardinals met, the desert robes and the scarlet skull-caps and all the bowings and embracings and the genuflections of the management and the kissing of rings and the blessings. The Arabs, of course, only drank orange juice, and the tasters stood at the bar sampling each jug and occasionally snatching a whisky and soda on the side. Everybody enjoyed these parties, but only the Arabs could really afford their fun, as it turned out.’ ‘Was Mr Visconti ruined?’

‘He pulled out in time with what was left of my money and what was left of his wife’s and to do him justice he had settled some of mine on Mario. Of course he disappeared for a while, but he came back after things had quietened down. The Vatican made a very profitable deal, you remember, with Mussolini, so that what they lost to Mr Visconti seemed very small beer indeed. He had left me enough to live on in a modest way, but I have never been very keen on modesty.

Life was very monotonous after Mr Visconti disappeared. I even visited Havana, as I told you, and afterwards I went back to Paris for a while (Mario was with the Jesuits in Milan)-that was when I met Monsieur Dambreuse. But when the affair was over I came back to Rome. I always hoped that one day Mr Visconti would turn up again. I had a two-roomed apartment, and I did a little part-time work in an establishment behind the Messaggero. Life was very middle-class after all the Arabs and the cardinals. I had been spoilt by Curran and Mr Visconti. No men have ever given me more amusement than those two did. Poor Wordsworth!’ my aunt added. ‘He was not in the same league.’ She gave a very young laugh and laid her hand on my knee. ‘And then-Oh praise to the Holiest in the height, as Wordsworth is fond of saying-I was putting in a little part-time behind the Messaggero when who should walk into the reception room but Mr Visconti. A pure coincidence. He wasn’t looking for me. But how happy we were. How happy. Just to see each other again. The girls didn’t understand when we joined hands then and there and danced between the sofas. It was one o’clock in the morning. We didn’t go upstairs. We went straight out into the lane outside. There was a drinking fountain shaped like an animal’s head, and he splashed my face with water before he kissed me.’

‘What was that half-time employment?’ I suddenly broke out. ‘Who were the girls? What were the sofas there for?’

‘What does it matter now?’ my aunt said. ‘What did any of it matter? We were together again and he splashed me and splashed me and he kissed me and kissed me.’

‘But surely you must have despised the man after all he had done to you?’ We were crossing the long aqueduct through the lagoons which leads to Venice-Mestre, but there were no signs of the beautiful city, only tall chimneys with pale gas flames hardly visible in the late afternoon sunlight. I was not expecting my aunt’s outburst.

She turned on me with real fury as though I were a child who had carelessly broken some vase she had cherished over the years for its beauty and the memories it contained. ‘I despise no one,’ she said, ‘no one. Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality. What do you suppose I was doing in the house behind the Messaggero? I was cheating, wasn’t I? So why shouldn’t Mr Visconti cheat me? But you, I suppose, never cheated in all your little provincial banker’s life because there’s not anything you wanted enough, not even money, not even a woman. You looked after people’s money like a nanny who looks after other people’s children. Can’t I see you in your cage, stacking up the little fivers endlessly before you hand them over to their proper owner? Angelica certainly brought you up as she wanted you. Your poor father didn’t have a chance. He was a cheat too, and I only wish you were. Then perhaps we’d have something in common.’

I was astounded. I could find nothing to say in reply. I thought of leaving the train at Venice, but then there was Tooley and I felt responsible for Tooley. The squalid station wrapped us round with its dirt and its noise. I said, ‘I think I’d better find Tooley,’ and I went away, leaving the old lady glaring on her couchette. Only as I closed the door of the compartment I thought I heard her laugh.

I FELT GLAD that I had not lost my temper, but nonetheless I was shocked and needed a little time for reflection, so I climbed down on to the platform and began to look around me for food. It was the last chance before Belgrade next morning. I bought six ham rolls off a trolley and a bottle of Chianti and some sweet cakes-it was not so good a meal as chicken would have provided, I thought sadly, and what a dreary station it was. Travel could be a great waste of time. This was the hour of the early evening when the sun had lost its heat and the shadows fell across my small lawn, the hour when I would take my yellow watering-can and fill it from the garden tap …

Tooley’s voice said, ‘Would you mind getting me some more coke?’

‘There’s nowhere on the train to keep it cold.’

‘I don’t mind warm coke.’

Oh the absurdity of it all, I could have cried aloud, for now the man with the trolley wouldn’t take a pound note, and I had to give him two of the dollars which I was carrying in my pocket-book against emergencies, and he refused any change, though I knew the exact rate and told him the lire required. ‘Julian did a fabulous picture of a coke bottle once,’ Tooley said.

‘Who’s Julian?’ I asked absent-mindedly.

‘The boy-friend, of course. I told you. He painted the coke bright yellow.

Fauve,’ she added in a defiant way.

‘He paints, does he?’

‘That’s why he thinks the East’s very important to him. You know like Tahiti was for Gauguin. He wants to experience the East before he starts on his big project. Let me take the coke.’

There was less than an hour’s wait at Venice, but the dark was falling when we pulled out and I saw nothing at all-I might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria. Tooley sat with me and drank one of her cokes. I asked her what her boy-friend’s project was.

‘He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment-say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity-do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate-you wouldn’t break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Staël in one room and a Rouault in another.’

The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me.

I said, ‘Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?’ ‘Not Heinz, Campbell’s,’ Tooley said. ‘That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. “Of course,” I said, “Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbell’s are long like English pillar-boxes.” I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasn’t the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasn’t put off because Piero della Francesca had done the same thing. He wasn’t an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age-only he didn’t call it that. He said it was the Art of the Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldn’t have been any use at all. It wouldn’t have been noticed.’ I was badly out of my depth with Tooley in terms of culture and of human experience. She was closer to my aunt: she would never, I felt sure, have criticized Mr Visconti: she would have accepted him, as she accepted Julian’s project, a voyage to Istanbul, my company, her baby. ‘Where does your mother live?’

‘I guess she’s in Bonn at the moment. She married a man on Time-Life who covers West Germany and Eastern Europe, so they move around a lot. Like Father. Do you want a cigarette?’

‘Not for me. And you’d better wait till we’re past the next frontier.’ It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening when we arrived at Sezana. A surly passport man looked at us as though we were Imperialist spies. Old women heavily laden with small parcels came down the unplatformed track making for the third-class. They emerged from everywhere like a migration, even from between the goods trucks which stood uncoupled all along the line looking as though they would never be linked together. No one else joined the train: no one got off. There were no lights, no waiting-room in sight, it was cold and the heating had not been turned on. On the road beyond-if there was a road-no cars passed. No railway hotel offered a welcome.

‘I’m cold,’ Tooley said. ‘I’m going to bed.’ She offered to leave me a cigarette, but I refused. I didn’t want to be compromised on this cold frontier. Another uniformed man looked in and regarded my new suitcase on the rack with hatred.

At moments during the night I woke-in Ljubljana, in Zagreb-but there was nothing to be seen except the lines of stationary rolling-stock which looked abandoned as though nothing was left anywhere to put in the trucks, no one had the energy any more to roll them, and it was only our train which steamed on impelled by a foolish driver who hadn’t realized that the world had stopped and there was nowhere for us to go.

At Belgrade Tooley and I had breakfast in the station hotel-dry bread and jam and bad coffee, and we bought a bottle of sweet white wine for lunch, but they had no sandwiches. I let my aunt sleep on: it was not a meal worth waking her to share.

‘Why are you two going to Istanbul?’ Tooley asked, taking a spoonful of jam-she had given up trying to crumble the bread.

‘She likes to travel,’ I said.

‘But why to Istanbul?’

‘I haven’t asked her.’

In the fields horses moved slowly along, dragging harrows. We were back in the pre-industrial age. Tooley and I were both depressed, yet it wasn’t the lowest point of our journey; that came as evening fell in Sofia, and we tried to buy something to eat, but no one would take any money but Bulgarian except at an exorbitant rate, and even when I agreed to that, there were only tepid sausages on sale made of some coarse unrecognizable meat and chocolate cake made of a chocolate substitute and pink fizzy wine. I hadn’t seen my aunt all day except once when she looked in on us and refused Tooley’s last bar of chocolate and said sadly and unexpectedly, ‘I loved chocolate once. I am growing old.’ ‘So this is the great Orient Express,’ Tooley said.

‘All that’s left of it.’

‘Istanbul can’t be much worse, can it?’

‘I’ve never been there, but I don’t imagine so.’

‘I guess you are going to tell me that I mustn’t smoke because there’ll soon be another frontier.’

‘There will be three frontiers,’ I said, looking at the timetable, ‘in less than four hours. The Bulgarian frontier, the Greek-Macedonian frontier, the Turkish frontier.’

‘Maybe it’s real luxury travel,’ Tooley said, ‘for people not in a hurry. Do you think they have an abortionist on the train? It’s lucky I’m not nine months gone, isn’t it, or I wouldn’t know whether my baby was going to be Bulgarian or Turkish or-what was the other?’

‘Greek-Macedonian.’

‘That sounds a bit special. I’d choose that. Not a Bulgar. If he was a boy there’d be dirty jokes.’

‘But you wouldn’t have a choice.’

‘I’d hang on. When they said push I wouldn’t push. Not till after the Greek-Macedonian frontier. How long are we in Greece-Macedonia?’ ‘Only forty minutes,’ I said.

‘My, it’s complicated. I’d have to work quick.’ She added, ‘It’s not funny at all. I’m scared. What’s Julian going to say when the curse hasn’t come? I really thought the train would do it, sort of shake it out of me, I mean.’ ‘It’s Julian’s fault as much as yours.’

‘But it isn’t any longer, not with the pill. It’s all the girl’s fault now. I really did forget. When I take a sleeping pill I wake up muzzy and I forget, and then, when I take a methedrine to wake up properly, I get so excited I don’t remember all the dull things-like the pill and washing the dishes. But I guess Julian won’t believe all that. He’ll feel trapped. He often feels trapped. He was trapped first by his family, he says, and then he was nearly trapped by Oxford-so he went away fast without a degree. Then he very nearly got trapped by the Trotskyists, but he realized just in time. He sees traps a terribly long way ahead. But, Henry, I don’t mean to be a trap. Really I don’t. I can’t call you Henry. It doesn’t sound like a real name. Can I call you Smudge?’ ‘Why Smudge?’

‘I had a dog once called Smudge. I used to talk to him a lot. When Father and Mother got divorced I told him all the horrid details. About the mental cruelty I mean.’

She leant against me in the carriage. I liked the smell of her hair. I suppose if I had known more about women I could have identified the shampoo she must have had in Paris. Her hand was on my knee, and the enormous wrist-watch stared up at me with its great blank white face and its four figures in scarlet, 12 3 6 9, as if those were the only important ones to remember-the hours when you had to take your medicine. I remembered Miss Keene’s minute gold wrist-watch like a doll’s which Sir Alfred had given her on her twenty-first birthday. In its tiny ring it contained all the figures of the hours as though none were unimportant or without its special duty. Most of the hours of my life had been eliminated from Tooley’s watch. There were no hours marked there for sitting quietly and watching a woman tat. I felt as though one night in Southwood I had turned my back on any possibility of home, so that here I was shaken up and down between two segments of Bulgarian darkness.

‘What was the mental cruelty?’ I had to ask her questions: it was the only way in which I could find my way about in this new world, but questioning was not a habit I had ever formed. For years people had asked me questions: ‘What unit trust would you recommend? Do you think I should sell my hundred Imperial Tobacco shares before the next cancer report?’ And when I retired most of the questions I might have wanted to ask were answered for me in Everyman His Own Gardener.

‘The only mental cruelty I ever saw personally,’ Tooley said, ‘was when Father woke her up bringing her early morning tea in bed. I don’t think that awful Bulgarian sausage was good for my metabolism. I’ve got a terrible stomach-ache. I’ll go and lie down. You don’t think it was horse, do you?’ I’ve always understood that horse has a sweetish taste.’ ‘Oh God, Smudge,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want a literal answer, not real information I mean.’ She dabbed her lips against my cheek and was off. I went down the corridor rather nervously to find Aunt Augusta. I’d hardly seen her all day and the problem of Tooley was one which I felt she ought to share. I found her with a Baedeker opened and a map of Istanbul spread over her knee. She looked like a general planning a campaign. ‘I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon, Aunt Augusta,’ I said. ‘I really didn’t mean to say anything against Mr Visconti. After all I don’t know the circumstances. Tell me more about him.’

‘He was a quite impossible man,’ my aunt said, ‘but I loved him and what he did with my money was the least of his faults. For example he was what they call a collaborator. During the German occupation he acted as adviser to the German authorities on questions of art, and he had to get out of Italy very quickly after the death of Mussolini. Goering had been making a big collection of pictures, but even he couldn’t easily steal pictures from places like the Uffizi where the collection was properly registered, but Mr Visconti knew a lot about the unregistered-all sorts of treasures hidden away in palazzos almost as crumbling as your uncle Jo’s. Of course his part got to be known, and there’d be quite a panic in a country place when Mr Visconti appeared taking lunch in the local taverna. The trouble was he wouldn’t play even a crooked game straight or the Germans might have helped him to escape. He began to take money from this marchese and that not to tip off the Germans-this gave him liquid cash or sometimes a picture he fancied for himself, but it didn’t make him friends and the Germans soon suspected what was going on. Poor old devil,’ she added, ‘he hadn’t a friend he could trust. Mario was still at school with the Jesuits and I had gone back to England when the war began.’

‘What happened to him in the end?’

‘I thought for a long time he’d been liquidated by the partisans, for I never believed that story about the gondolier I suspect he got someone to spread it for him. Mr Visconti as I told you, was not a man for fighting with knives or fists.’

‘A man who fights never survives long, and Mr Visconti was great at survival. Why, the old sod,’ she said with tender delight, ‘he survives to this moment. He must be eighty-four if he’s a day. He wrote to Mario and Mario wrote to me, and that’s why you and I have taken the train to Istanbul. I couldn’t explain all that in London, it was too complicated, and anyway I hardly knew you. Thank goodness for the gold brick, that’s all I can say.’ “The gold brick?’

‘Never mind. That’s quite another thing.’

‘You told me about a gold brick at London Airport, Aunt Augusta, surely . .?’

‘Of course not. It’s not that one. That was quite a little one. Don’t interrupt. I’m telling you now about poor Mr Visconti. It seems he’s fallen on very lean times.’

‘Where is he? In Istanbul?’

‘It’s better you shouldn’t know, for there are people still after him. Oh dear, he certainly escaped the hard way. Mr Visconti was a good Catholic, but he was very very anticlerical, and yet in the end it was the priesthood which saved him. He went to a clerical store in Rome, when the Allies were coming close, and he paid a fortune to be fitted out like a monsignor even to the purple socks. He said that a friend of his had lost all his clothes in a bombing raid and they pretended to believe him. Then he went with a suitcase to the lavatory in the Excelsior Hotel, where we had given all those cocktail parties to the cardinals, and changed. He kept away from the reception-desk, but he was unwise enough to look in at the bar-the barman, he knew, was very old and shortsighted. Well, you know, in those days a lot of girls used to come to the bar to pick up German officers. One of these girls -I suppose it was the approach of the Allied troops that did it-was having a arise de conscience. She wouldn’t go to her friend’s bedroom, she regretted her lost purity, she would never sin again. The officer plied her with more and more cocktails, but with every drink she became more religious. Then she spied Mr Visconti, who was having a quick whisky in a shady corner. “Father,” she cried to him, “hear my confession.” You can imagine the tension in the bar, the noise outside as the evacuation got under way, the crying children, people drinking up what there was in the bar, the Allied planes overhead …’

‘How did you hear the story, Aunt Augusta?’

‘Mr Visconti told Mario the essentials when he got to Milan, and I can imagine the rest. Especially I can picture poor Mr Visconti in his purple socks. “My child,” he said, “this is no fit place for a confession.” ‘Never mind the place. What does the place matter? We are all about to die, and I am in mortal sin. Please, please, Monsignor.” (She had noticed his socks by this time.) What worried Mr Visconti most was the attention she was provoking.

‘My child,’ he told her, “in this state of emergency a simple act of contrition is enough,” but oh no, she wasn’t going to be fobbed off with something cheap like that-“Bargain sale owing to closing down of premises.” She came and knelt at his knees. “Your Grace,” she exclaimed. She was used to giving officers a superior rank-it nearly always pleased a captain to be called a major.

“I am not a bishop,” Mr Visconti said. “I am only a humble monsignor.” Mario questioned his father closely about this episode, and I have really invented nothing. If anyone has invented a detail it is Mario. You have to remember that he writes verse plays.

“Father,” the girl implored, taking the hint, “help me.” “The secrecy of the confessional,” Mr Visconti pleaded back-they were now, you see, pleading to each other, and she pawed Mr Visconti’s knee, while he pawed the top of her head in an ecclesiastical way. Perhaps it was the pawings which made the German officer interrupt with impatience. “For God’s sake,” he said, “if she wants to confess, Monsignor, let her.

Here’s the key of my room, just down the passage, past the lavatory.” ‘So off went Mr Visconti with the hysterical girl-he remembered just in time to put down his whisky. He had no choice, though he hadn’t been to confession himself for thirty years and he had never learnt the priest’s part. Luckily there was an air-conditioner in the room breathing heavily, and that obscured his whispers, and the girl was too much concerned with her role to pay much attention to his. She began right away; Mr Visconti had hardly time to sit on the bed, pushing aside a steel helmet and a bottle of schnapps, before she was getting down to details. He had wanted the whole thing finished as quickly as possible, but he told Mario that he couldn’t help becoming a little interested now she had got started and wanting to know a bit more. After all he was a novice-though not in the ecclesiastical sense. “How many times, my child?” That was a phrase he remembered very well from his adolescence.

“How can you ask that, Father? I’ve been at it all the time ever since the occupation. After all they were our allies, Father.”

“Yes, yes, my child.” I can just see him enjoying the chance he had of learning a thing or two, even though his life was in danger. Mr Visconti was a very lecherous man. He said, “Always the same thing, my child?” ‘She regarded him with astonishment. “Of course not, Father. Who on earth do you think I am?”

‘He looked at her kneeling in front of him and I am sure he longed to pinch her. Mr Visconti was always a great pincher. “Anything unnatural, my child?” “What do you mean unnatural, Father?”

Mr Visconti explained.

“Surely that’s not unnatural, Father?”

‘Then they had quite a discussion about what was natural and what wasn’t, with Mr Visconti almost forgetting his danger in the excitement, until someone knocked on the door and Mr Visconti, vaguely sketching a cross in a lop-sided way, muttered what sounded through the noise of the air-conditioner like an absolution. The German officer came in in the middle of it and said, “Hurry up, Monsignor. I’ve got a more important customer for you.” ‘It was the general’s wife who had come down to the bar for a last dry Martini before escaping north and heard what was going on. She drained her Martini in one gulp and commanded the officer to arrange her confession. So there was Mr Visconti caught again. There was an awful row now in the Via Veneto as the tanks drove out of Rome. The general’s wife had positively to shout at Mr Visconti. She had a rather masculine voice and Mr Visconti said it was like being on the parade ground. He nearly clicked his feet together in his purple socks when she bellowed at him, “Adultery. Three times.” “Are you married, my daughter?”

“Of course I’m married. What on earth do you suppose? I’m Frau General”-I’ve forgotten what ugly Teutonic name she had. “Does your husband know of this?”

“Of course he doesn’t know. He’s not a priest.”

“Then you have been guilty of lies, too?”

“Yes, yes, naturally, I suppose so, you must hurry, Father. Our car’s being loaded. We are leaving for Florence in a few minutes.” “Haven’t you anything else to tell me?”

“Nothing of importance.”

“You haven’t missed Mass?”

“Oh, occasionally, Father. This is war-time.”

“Meat on Fridays?”

“You forget. It is permitted now, Father. Those are Allied planes overhead.

We have to leave immediately.”

“God cannot be hurried, my child. Have you indulged in impure thoughts?” “Father, put down yes to anything you like, but give me absolution. I have to be off.”

“I cannot feel that you’ve properly examined your conscience.” “Unless you give me absolution at once, I shall have you arrested. For sabotage.”

Mr Visconti said, “It would be better if you gave me a seat in your car. We could finish your confession tonight.”

“There isn’t room in the car, Father. The driver, my husband, myself, my dog-there simply isn’t space for another passenger.” “A dog takes up no room. It can sit on your knee.”

“This is an Irish wolfhound, Father.”

“Then you must leave it behind,” Mr Visconti said firmly, and at that moment a car back-fired and the Frau General took it for an explosion. “I need Wolf for my protection, Father. War is very dangerous for women.” “You will be under the protection of our Holy Mother Church,” Mr Visconti said, “as well as your husband’s.”

“I cannot leave Wolf behind. He is all I have in the world to love.”

“I would have assumed that with three adulteries-and a husband …”

“They mean nothing to me.”

“Then I suggest,” Mr Visconti said, “that we leave the general behind.” And so it came about. The general was dressing down the hall porter because of a mislaid spectacle-case when the Frau General seated herself beside the driver and Mr Visconti sat beside Wolf at the back. “Drive off,” the general’s wife said.

‘The driver hesitated, but he was more afraid of the wife than the husband. The general came out into the street and shouted to them as they drove off-a tank had stopped to give precedence to the staff car. Nobody paid any attention to the general’s shouts except Wolf. He clambered all over Mr Visconti, thrusting his evil-smelling parts against Mr Visconti’s face, knocking off Mr Visconti’s clerical hat, barking furiously to get out. The Frau General may have loved Wolf, but it was the general whom Wolf loved. Probably the general concerned himself with his food and his exercise. Blindly Mr Visconti fumbled for the handle of the window. Before the window was properly open Wolf jumped right in the path of the following tank. It flattened him. Mr Visconti looking back thought that he resembled one of those biscuits they make for children in the shape of animals.

‘So Mr Visconti was rid of both dog and general and was able to ride in reasonable comfort to Florence. Mental comfort was another matter and the general’s wife was hysterical with grief. I think Curran would have dealt with the situation a great deal better than Mr Visconti. At Brighton Curran would offer the last sacrament in the form of a ritual bone, which the poor beast of course could not possibly chew, to a dying dog. A lot of dogs were killed by cars on Brighton front, and the police were quite annoyed by owners who refused to have the bodies shifted until Curran had been summoned to give the corpse absolution. But Mr Visconti, as I have told you, was not a religious man, and the consolations he offered, I can well imagine, were insufficient and unconvincing. Perhaps he spoke of punishment for the Frau General’s sins (for Mr Visconti had a sadistic streak), and of the purgatory which we suffer on earth. Poor Mr Visconti, he must have had a hard time of it all the way to Florence.’

‘What happened to the general?’

‘He was captured by the Allies, I believe, but I’m not sure whether or not he was hanged at Nuremberg.’

‘Mr Visconti must have a great deal on his conscience.’

‘Mr Visconti hasn’t got a conscience,’ my aunt said with pleasure.

FOR SOME REASON an old restaurant-car with a kind of faded elegance was attached to the express after the Turkish frontier, when it was already too late to be of much use. My aunt rose that day early, and the two of us sat down to excellent coffee, toast and jam: Aunt Augusta insisted on our drinking in addition a light red wine though I am not accustomed to wine so early in the morning. Outside the window an ocean of long undulating grass stretched to a pale green horizon. There was the talkative cheerfulness of journey’s end in the air, and the car filled with passengers whom we had never seen before: a Vietnamese in blue dungarees spoke to a rumpled girl in shorts, and two young Americans, the man with hair as long as the girl’s, joined them, holding hands. They refused a second cup of coffee after carefully counting their money.

‘Where’s Tooley?’ my aunt asked.

‘She wasn’t feeling well last night. I’m worried about her. Aunt Augusta. Her young man’s hitchhiking to Istanbul. He may not have arrived. He may even have gone on without her.’

‘Where to?’

‘She’s not sure. Katmandu or Vientiane.’

‘Istanbul is a rather unpredictable place,’ Aunt Augusta, said. ‘I’m not even sure what I expect to find there myself.’

‘What do you think you’ll find?’

‘I have a little business to do with an old friend, General Abdul. I was expecting a telegram at the St James and Albany, but none came. I can only hope that there’s a message waiting for us at the Pera Palace.’ ‘Who is the General?’

‘I knew him in the days of poor Mr Visconti,’ my aunt said. ‘He was very useful to us in the negotiations with Saudi Arabia. He was Turkish Ambassador then in Tunis. What parties we had in those days at the Excelsior. A little different from the Crown and Anchor and a drink with poor Wordsworth.’ The scenery changed as we approached Istanbul. The grassy sea was left behind and the express slowed down to the speed of a little local commuters’ train. When I leant from the window I could see over a wall into the yard of a cottage; I was in talking distance of a red-skirted girl who looked up at us as we crawled by; a man mounted a bicycle and for a while kept pace with us. Birds on a red tiled roof looked down their long beaks and spoke together like village gossips.

I said, ‘I’m awfully afraid that Tooley’s going to have a baby.’ ‘She ought to take precautions, Henry, but in any case it’s far too early for you to worry’.’

‘Good heavens, Aunt Augusta, I didn’t mean that … how can you possibly think . ?’

‘It’s a natural conclusion,’ my aunt said, ‘you have been much together.

And the girl has a certain puppy charm.’

‘I’m too old for that sort of thing.’

‘You are a young man in your fifties,’ Aunt Augusta replied. The door of the restaurant-car clanged, and there was Tooley, but a Tooley transformed. Perhaps it was only that she had put on less shadow, but her eyes seemed to be sparkling as I had never known them do before. ‘Hi,’ she called down the length of the car. The four young people turned and looked at her and called back ‘Hi,’ as though they had been long acquainted. ‘Hi,’ she greeted them in return, and I felt a small ache of jealousy, irrational as the irritations of early morning.

‘Good morning, good morning,’ she said to the two of us; she seemed to be speaking a different language to the old. ‘Oh, Mr Pulling, it’s happened.’ ‘What’s happened?’

‘The curse. I’ve got the curse. I was right, you see. The jolting of the train, I mean-it did do it. I’ve got a terrible belly-ache, but I feel fabulous. I can’t wait to tell Julian. Oh, I hope he’s at the Gulhane, when I get there.’

‘You going to the Gulhane?’ the American boy called across.

‘Yes, are you?’

‘Sure. We can all go together.’

‘That’s fabulous.’

‘Come and have a coffee if you’ve got the money.’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Tooley said to my aunt. ‘They’re going to the Gulhane, too.’

‘Of course we don’t mind, Tooley.’

‘You’ve been so kind, Mr Pulling,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you. I mean it was a bit like the dark night of the soul.’ I realized then that I preferred her to call me Smudge.

‘Go gently on the cigarettes, Tooley,’ I advised her.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t need to economize now. They’ll be easy to get, I mean at the Gulhane. You can get anything at the Gulhane. Even acid. I’ll be seeing you both again before we go, won’t I?’

But she didn’t. She had become one of the young now, and I could only wave to her back as she went ahead of us through the customs. The two Americans still walked hand in hand, and the Vietnamese boy carried Tooley’s sack and had his arm round her shoulder to protect her from the crowd which was squeezing to get through the barrier into the customs hall. My responsibility was over, but she stayed on in my memory like a small persistent pain which worries even in its insignificance; doesn’t a sickness as serious as cancer start in just such a way?

I wondered whether Julian was waiting for her. Would they go on to

Katmandu? Would she always remember to take her pill? When I shaved again more

closely at the Pera Palace I found I had missed in the obscurity of my coach a small dab of lipstick upon the cheek. Perhaps that was why my aunt had jumped to so wrong a conclusion. I wiped it off and found myself wondering at once where she was now. I scowled at my own face in the glass, but I was really scowling at her mother in Bonn and her father somewhere in the CIA, and Julian afraid of castration, and at all those who ought to have been looking after her and yet felt no responsibility at all.

Aunt Augusta and I had lunch in a restaurant called Abdullah’s and then she took me around the tourist sights-the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia-but I could tell all the time that she was worried. There had been no message waiting for her at the hotel.

‘Can’t you telephone to the General?’ I asked her.

‘Even at the Tunis Embassy,’ she said, ‘he never trusted his own line.’ We stood dutifully in the centre of Santa Sophia-the shape, which had been beautiful once perhaps, was obscured by ugly-Arabic signs painted in pale khaki, so that it looked like the huge drab waiting-hall of a railway station out of peak traffic hours. A few people stood about looking for the times of trains, and there was a man who carried a suitcase.

‘I’d forgotten how hideous it was,’ my aunt said. ‘Let’s go home.’ Home was an odd word to use for the Pera Palace which had the appearance of an eastern pavilion built for a world fair. My aunt ordered two rakis in the bar which was all fretwork and mirrors-there was still no message from General Abdul, and for the first time I saw my aunt nonplussed. ‘When did you last hear from him?’ I asked.

‘I told you I heard from him in London, the day after those policemen came. And I had a message from him in Milan through Mario. Everything was in order, he said. If there had been any change Mario would have known.’ ‘It’s nearly dinner-time.’

‘I don’t want any food. I’m sorry, Henry. I feel a little upset. Perhaps it is the result of the train’s vibration. I shall go to bed and wait for the telephone. I cannot believe that he will let me down. Mr Visconti had a great belief in General Abdul, and there were very few people whom he trusted.’ I had dinner by myself in the hotel in a vast restaurant which reminded me of Santa Sophia-not a very good dinner. I had drunk several rakis, to which I was unaccustomed, and perhaps the absence of my aunt made me a little light-headed. I was not ready for bed, and I wished I had Tooley with me as a companion. I went outside the hotel and found a taxi-driver there who spoke a little English. He told me he was Greek, but that he knew Istanbul as well as if it were his own city. ‘Safe,’ he kept on saying, ‘safe with me,’ waving his hand as though to indicate that there were wolves lurking by the walls and alleys. I told him to show me the city. He drove down narrow street after narrow street with no vista anywhere and very little light, and then drew up at a dark and forbidding door with a bearded night watchman asleep on the step. ‘Safe house,’ he said, ‘safe, clean. Very safe,’ and I was reminded uncomfortably of something I would have gladly forgotten, the house with the sofas behind the Messaggero. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘drive on. I didn’t mean that.’ I tried to explain. ‘Take me,’ I said, ‘somewhere quiet. Somewhere you would go yourself. With your friends. For a drink. With your friends.’

We drove several miles along the sea of Marmara and came to a stop outside a plain uninteresting building marked ‘West Berlin Hotel’. Nothing could have belonged less to the Istanbul of my imagination. It was three square stories high and might well have been built among the ruins of Berlin by a local contractor at low cost. The driver led the way into a hall which occupied the whole ground space of the hotel. A young woman stood by a small piano and sang what I supposed were sentimental songs to an audience of middle-aged men in their shirt-sleeves sitting at big tables drinking beer. Most of them, like my own driver, had big grey moustaches, and they applauded heavily and dutifully when the song was over. Glasses of beer were placed in front of us, and the driver and I drank to each other. It was good beer, I noticed, and when I poured it on top of all the raki and the wine I had already drunk, my spirits rose. In the young girl I saw a resemblance to Tooley, and in the heavy men around me I imagined-‘Do you know General Abdul?’ I asked the driver. He hushed me quickly.

I looked around again and realized that there was not a single woman in the big hall except the young singer, and at this moment the piano stopped and with a glance at the clock, which marked midnight, the girl seized her handbag and went out through a door at the back. Then, after the glasses had been refilled, the pianist struck up a more virile tune, and all the middle-aged men rose and put their arms around each other’s shoulders and began to dance, forming circles which they enlarged, broke and formed again. They charged, they retreated, they stamped the ground in unison. No one spoke to his neighbour, there was no drunken jollity, I was like an outsider at some religious ceremony of which he couldn’t interpret the symbols. Even my driver left me to put his arm round another man’s shoulder, and I drank more beer to drown my sense of being excluded. I was drunk, I knew that, for drunken tears stood in my eyes, and I wanted to throw my beer glass on the floor and join the dancing. But I was excluded, as I had always been excluded. Tooley had joined her young friends and Miss Keene had departed to cousins in Koffiefontein, leaving her tatting on a chair under the Van de Velde. I would always be protected, as I had been when a cashier, by a hygienic plastic screen. Even the breath of the dancers didn’t reach me as they circled my table. My aunt was probably talking about things which mattered to her with General Abdul. She had greeted her adopted son in Milan more freely than she had ever greeted me. She had said goodbye to Wordsworth in Paris with blown kisses and tears in her eyes. She had a world of her own to which I would never be admitted, and I would have done better, I told myself, if I had stayed with my dahlias and the ashes of my mother who was not-if my aunt were to be believed-my real one. So I sat in the West Berlin Hotel shedding beery tears of self-pity and envying the men who danced with their arms round strangers’ shoulders. ‘Take me away,’ I said to the driver when he returned, ‘finish your beer but take me away.’

‘You are not pleased?’ he asked as we drove uphill towards the Pera Palace. ‘I’m tired, that’s all. I want to go to bed.’ Two police cars blocked our way outside the Pera Palace. An elderly man who carried a walking stick crooked over his left arm was reaching with a stiff right leg towards the ground as we drew up. My driver told me in a tone of awe, ‘That is Colonel Hakim.’ The colonel wore a very English suit of grey flannel with chalk stripes, and he had a small grey moustache. He looked like any veteran member of the Army and Navy alighting at his club.

‘Very important man,’ my driver told me. ‘Very fair to Greeks.’ I went past the colonel into the hotel. The receptionist was standing in the entrance presumably to welcome him; I was of so little importance that he wouldn’t shift to let me by. I had to walk round him and he didn’t answer my goodnight. A lift took me up to the fifth floor. When I saw a light under my aunt’s door, I tapped and went in. She was sitting upright in bed wearing a bed-jacket and she was reading a paperback with a lurid cover. ‘I’ve been seeing Istanbul,’ I told her.

‘So have I.’ The curtains were drawn back and the lights of the city lay below us. She put her book down. The jacket showed a naked young woman lying in bed with a knife in her back, regarded by a man with a cruel face in a red fez. The title was Turkish Delight. ‘I have been absorbing local atmosphere,’ she said.

‘Is the man in the fez the murderer?’

‘No, he’s the policeman. A very unpleasant type called Colonel Hakim.’

‘How very odd because …’

‘The murder takes place in this very Pera Palace, but there are a good many details wrong, as you might expect from a novelist. The girl is loved by a British secret agent, a tough sentimental man called Amis, and they have dinner together on her last night at Abdullah’s-you remember we had lunch there ourselves. They have a love scene, too, in Santa Sophia, and there is an attempt on Amis’s life at the Blue Mosque. We might almost have been doing a literary pilgrimage.’

‘Hardly literary,’ I said.

‘Oh, you’re your father’s son. He tried to make me read Walter Scott, especially Rob Roy, but I much prefer this. It moves a great deal quicker and there are fewer descriptions.’

‘Did Amis murder her?’

‘Of course not, but he is suspected by Colonel Hakim who has very cruel methods of interrogation,’ my aunt said with relish.

The telephone rang. I answered it.

‘Perhaps it’s General Abdul at last,’ she said, ‘though it seems a little late for him to ring.’

‘This is the reception speaking. Is Miss Bertram there?’

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘I am sorry to disturb her, but Colonel Hakim wishes to see her.’

‘At this hour? Quite impossible. Why?’

‘He is on the way up now.’ He rang off.

‘Colonel Hakim is on the way to see you,’ I said.

‘Colonel Hakim?’

‘The real Colonel Hakim. He’s a police officer, too.’

‘A police officer?’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘Again? I begin to think I am back in the old days. With Mr Visconti. Henry, will you open my suitcase? The green one. You’ll find a light coat there. Fawn with a fur collar.’ ‘Yes, Aunt Augusta, I have it here.’

‘Under the coat in a cardboard box you will find a candle-a decorated candle.’

‘Yes, I see the box.’

‘Take out the candle, but be careful because it’s rather heavy. Put it on my bedside table and light it. Candlelight is better for my complexion.’ It was extraordinarily heavy, and I nearly dropped it. It probably had some kind of lead weight at the bottom, I thought, to hold it steady. A big brick of scarlet wax which stood a foot high, it was decorated on all four sides with scrolls and coats of arms. A great deal of artistry had gone into moulding the wax which would melt away only too quickly. I lit the wick. ‘Now turn out the light,’ my aunt said, adjusting her bed-jacket and puffing up her pillow. There was a knock on the door and Colonel Hakim came in. He stood in the doorway and bowed. ‘Miss Bertram?’ he asked.

‘Yes. You are Colonel Hakim?’

‘Yes. I am sorry to call on you so late without warning.’ He spoke English with only the faintest intonation. ‘I think we have a mutual acquaintance, General Abdul. May I sit down?’

‘Of course. You’ll find that chair by the dressing-table the most comfortable. This is my nephew, Henry Pulling.’

‘Good evening, Mr Pulling. I hope you enjoyed the dancing at the West Berlin Hotel. A convivial spot unknown to most tourists. May I turn on the light, Miss Bertram?’

‘I would rather not. I have weak eyes, and I always prefer to read by candlelight.’

‘A very beautiful candle.’

‘They make them in Venice. The coats of arms belong to their four greatest doges. Don’t ask me their names. How is General Abdul? I had been hoping to meet him again.’

‘I am afraid General Abdul is a very sick man.’ Colonel Hakim hooked his walking stick over the mirror before he sat down. He leant his head forward to my aunt at a slight angle, which gave him an air of deference, but I noticed that the real reason was a small hearing-aid that he carried in his right ear. ‘He was a great friend of you and Mr Visconti, was he not?’

‘The amount you know,’ my aunt said with an endearing smile. ‘Oh, it’s my disagreeable business,’ the colonel said, ‘to be a Nosey Harker.’

‘Parker.’

‘My English is rusty.’

‘You had me followed to the West Berlin Hotel?’ I asked. ‘Oh no, I suggested to the driver that he should take you there,’ Colonel Hakim said. ‘I thought it might interest you and hold your attention longer than it did. The fashionable night clubs here are very banal and international. You might just as well be in Paris or London except that in those cities you would see a better show. Of course I told the driver to take you somewhere else first. One never knows.’

‘Tell me about General Abdul,’ my aunt said impatiently. ‘What is wrong with him?’

Colonel Hakim leant forward a little more in his chair and lowered his voice as though he were confiding a secret. ‘He was shot,’ he said, ‘while trying to escape.’

‘Escape?’ my aunt exclaimed. ‘Escape from whom?’

‘From me,’ Colonel Hakim said with shy modesty and he fiddled at his hearing-aid. A long silence followed his words.

There seemed nothing to say. Even my aunt was at a loss. She sat back against the cushions with her mouth a little open. Colonel Hakim took a tin out of his pocket and opened it. “Excuse me,’ he said, ‘eucalyptus and menthol. I suffer from asthma.’ He put a lozenge into his mouth and sucked. There was silence again until my aunt spoke.

‘Those lozenges can’t do you much good,’ she said.

‘I think it is only the suggestion. Asthma is a nervous disease. The lozenges seem to alleviate it, but only perhaps because I believe they alleviate it.’ He panted a little when he spoke. ‘I am always apt to get an attack when I am at the climax of a case.’

‘Mr Visconti suffered from asthma, too,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘He was cured by hypnotism.’

‘I would not like to put myself so completely in someone else’s hands.’

‘Of course Mr Visconti had a hold on the hypnotist.’

‘Yes, that makes a difference,’ Colonel Hakim said with approval. ‘And where is Mr Visconti now?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Nor had General Abdul. We only want the information for the Interpol

files. The affair is more than thirty years old. I just ask you in passing. I have no personal interest. It is not the real subject of my interrogation.’ ‘Am I being interrogated, colonel?’

‘Yes. In a way. I hope an agreeable way. We have found a letter from you to General Abdul which speaks about an investment he had recommended. You wrote to him that you found it essential to make the investment while in Europe and anonymously, and this presented certain difficulties.’

‘Surely you are not working for the Bank of England, Colonel?’ ‘I am not so fortunate, but General Abdul was planning a little trouble here; he was very short of funds. Certain friends with whom he had speculated in the old days came back to his mind. So he got in touch with you (perhaps he hoped through you to contact Visconti again), with a German called Weissmann of whom you probably haven’t heard, and with a man called Harvey Crowder, who is a meat packer in Chicago. The CIA have had him under observation for a long while and they reported to us. Of course I mention these names only because all the men are under arrest and have talked.’

‘If you really have to know,’ my aunt said, ‘for the sake of your files, General Abdul recommended me to buy Deutsche Texaco Convertible Bonds-out of the question in England because of the dollar premium, and away from England, for an English resident, quite illegal. So I had to remain anonymous.’ ‘Yes,’ Colonel Hakim said, ‘that is not bad at all as a cover story.’ He began to pant again and took another lozenge. ‘I only mentioned those names to show you that General Abdul is now a little senile. One doesn’t finance an operation in Turkey with foreign money of that kind. A wise woman like yourself must have realized that if his operation had any chance of success, he could have found local support. He would not have had to offer a Chicago meat packer twenty-five per cent interest and a share of the profits.’ ‘Mr Visconti would certainly have seen through that,’ my aunt said. ‘But now you are a lady living alone. You haven’t the benefit of Visconti’s advice. You might be tempted a little by the quick profits …’ ‘Why? I have no children to leave them to, colonel.’

‘Or perhaps by the sense of adventure.’

‘At my age!’ My aunt beamed with pleasure.

There was a knock on the door and a policeman entered. He spoke to the colonel and the colonel translated for our benefit. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘has been found in Mr Pulling’s baggage, but if you wouldn’t mind … My man is very careful, he will wear clean gloves, and I assure you he will leave not the smallest wrinkle … Would you mind if I put on the electric light while he works?’

‘I would mind a great deal,’ my aunt said. ‘I left my dark glasses on the train. Unless you wish to give me a splitting headache …” ‘Of course not, Miss Bertram. He will do without. You will forgive us if the search takes a little longer.’

The policeman first went through my aunt’s handbag and handed certain papers to Colonel Hakim. ‘Forty pounds in travellers’ cheques,’ he noted. ‘I have cashed ten,” my aunt said.

‘I see from your air ticket you plan to leave tomorrow-I mean today. A very short visit. Why did you come by train, Miss Bertram?’ ‘I wanted to see my stepson in Milan.’

The colonel gave her a quizzical look. ‘May one ask? According to your passport you are unmarried.’

‘Mr Visconti’s son.’

‘Ah, always that Mr Visconti.’

The policeman was busy now with my aunt’s suitcase. He looked in the cardboard box which had contained the candie, shook it and smelt it. ‘That is the box for my candle,’ my aunt said. ‘As I told you, I think, they make these candles in Venice. One candle does for a whole journey-I believe it is guaranteed for twenty-four hours continuously. Perhaps forty-eight.’ ‘You are burning a real work of art,’ the colonel said.

‘Henry, hold the candle for the policeman to see better.’

Again I was astonished by the weight of the candle when I lifted it.

‘Don’t bother, Mr Pulling, he has finished.’

I was glad to put it down again.

‘Well,’ Colonel Hakim said with a smile, ‘we have found nothing compromising in your luggage.’ The policeman was repacking the case. ‘Now just as a formality we must go through the room. And the bed, Miss Bertram, if you will consent to sit in a chair.’

He took part in this search himself, limping from one piece of furniture to another, sometimes feeling with his stick, under the bed and at the back of a drawer. ‘And now Mr Pulling’s pockets,’ he said. I emptied them rather angrily on the dressing-table. He looked carefully through my notebook and drew out a cutting from the Daily Telegraph. He read it aloud with a puzzled frown: “Those that took my fancy were the ruby-red Maitre Roger, light red, white-tipped Cheerio, deep crimson Arabian Night and Black Flash, and scarlet Bacchus …” ‘Please explain, Mr Pulling.’

‘It is self-explanatory,’ I said stiffly.

‘Then you must forgive my ignorance.”

‘The report of a dahlia show. In Chelsea. I am very interested in dahlias.’

‘Flowers?’

“Of course they are flowers.’

‘The names sounded so oddly like those of horses. I was puzzled by the deep crimson.’ He put the cutting down and limped to my aunt’s side. ‘I will say goodnight now, Miss Bertram. You have made my duty tonight a most agreeable one. You cannot think how bored I get with exhibitions of injured innocence. I will send a police car to take you to your plane tomorrow.’ ‘Please don’t bother. We can take a taxi.’

‘We should be sorry to see you miss your plane.’

‘I think perhaps I ought to stop over one more day and see poor General Abdul.’

‘I am afraid he is not allowed visitors. What is this book you are reading?

What a very ugly fellow with a red fez. Has he stabbed the girl?’ ‘No. He is the policeman. He is called Colonel Hakim,’ my aunt said with a look of satisfaction.

After the door had closed I turned with some anger on my aunt. ‘Aunt Augusta,’ I said, ‘what did all that mean?’

‘Some little political trouble, I would imagine. Politics in Turkey are taken more seriously than they are at home. It was only quite recently that they executed a Prime Minister. We dream of it, but they act. I hadn’t realized, I admit, what General Abdul was up to. Foolish of him at his age. He must be eighty if a day, but I believe in Turkey there are more centenarians than in any other European country. Yet I doubt whether poor Abdul is likely to make his century.’

‘Do you realize that they’re deporting us? I think we should call the British Embassy.’

‘You exaggerate, dear. They are just lending us a police car.’

‘And if we refuse to take it?’

‘I have no intention of refusing. We were already booked on the plane. After making my investment here I had no intention of lingering around. I didn’t expect quick profits, and twenty-five per cent always involves a risk.’ ‘What investment, Aunt Augusta? Forty pounds in travellers’ cheques?’ ‘Oh no, dear. I bought quite a large gold ingot in Paris. You remember the man from the bank …’

‘So that was what they were looking for. Where on earth had you hidden it, Aunt Augusta?’

I looked at the candle, and I remembered its weight.

‘Yes, dear,’ my aunt said, ‘how clever of you to guess. Colonel Hakim didn’t. You can blow it out now.’ I lifted it up again-it must have weighed nearly twenty pounds.

‘What do you propose to do with this now?’

‘I shall have to take it back to England with me. It may be of use another time. It was most fortunate, when you come to think of it, that they shot poor General Abdul before I gave him the candle and not after. I wonder if he is really still alive. They would be likely to glide over any grisly detail like that with a woman. I shall have a Mass said for him in any case because a man of that age is unlikely to survive a bullet long. The shock alone, even if it were not in a vital part …’

I interrupted her speculations. ‘You’re not going to take that ingot back into England?’ Ingot-England. I was irritated by the absurd jangle which sounded like a comic song. ‘Have you no respect at all for the law?’ ‘It depends, dear, to which law you refer. Like the ten commandments. I can’t take very seriously the one about the ox and the ass.’ ‘The English customs are not so easily fooled as the Turkish police.’

‘A used candle is remarkably convincing. I’ve tried it before.’

‘Not if they lift it up.’

‘But they won’t, dear. Perhaps if the wick and the wax were intact they might think they could charge me purchase tax. Or some suspicious officer might think it a phoney candle containing drugs. But a used candle. Oh no, I think the danger is very small. And there’s always my age to protect me.’

‘I refuse to go back into England with that ingot.’ The jangle irritated me again.

‘But you have no choice, dear. The colonel will certainly see us on to the plane and there is no stop before London. The great advantage of being deported is that we shall not have to pass the Turkish customs again.’ ‘Why on earth did you do it, Aunt Augusta? Such a risk …’

‘Mr Visconti is in need of money.’

‘He stole yours.’

‘That was a long time ago. It will all be finished by now.’

IT SEEMED AT FIRST another and a happier world which I had re-entered: I was back home, in the late afternoon, as the long shadows were falling; a boy whistled a Beatle tune and a motor-bicycle revved far way up Norman Lane. With what relief I dialled Chicken and ordered myself cream of spinach soup, lamb cutlets and Cheddar cheese: a better meal than I had eaten in Istanbul. Then I went into the garden. Major Charge had neglected the dahlias; it was a pleasure to give them water, which the dry soil drank like a thirsty man, and I could almost imagine that the flowers were responding with a lift of the petals. The Deuil du Roy Albert was too far gone to benefit, but the colour of the Ben Hurs took on a new sheen, as though the long dry chariot race were now a memory only. Major Charge looked over the fence and asked, ‘Good journey?’ ‘Interesting, thank you,’ I said drily, pouring the water in a thick stream on to the roots. I had removed the absurd nozzle which serves no useful purpose. ‘I was very careful,’ Major Charge said, ‘not to give them too much water.’

‘The ground certainly seems very dry.’

‘I keep goldfish,’ Major Charge said. ‘If I go away, my damned daily always gives them too much food. When I return I find half the little buggers dead.’ ‘Flowers are not the same as goldfish, Major. In a dry autumn like this they can do with a great deal of water.’

‘I hate excess,’ Major Charge said. ‘It’s the same in politics. I’ve no use for Communist or Fascist.’

‘You are a Liberal?’

‘Good God, man,’ he said, ‘what makes you think that?’ and disappeared from sight.

The afternoon post arrived punctually at five: a circular from

Littlewood’s, although I never gamble, a bill from the garage, a pamphlet from the British Empire Loyalists which I threw at once into the waste-paper basket, and a letter with a South African stamp. The envelope was typewritten, so that I did not at once conclude that it had been sent by Miss Keene. I was distracted too by a package of Omo propped against the scraper. I had certainly not ordered any detergent. I looked closer and saw that it was a gift package. What a lot of money manufacturers waste by not employing the local stores to do their distribution. There they would have known that I am already a regular purchaser of Omo. I took the packet into the kitchen and noticed with pleasure that mine was almost exhausted, so I had been saved from buying another.

It was getting chilly by this time, and I turned on the electric fire before opening the letter. I saw at once that it came from Miss Keene. She had bought herself a typewriter, but it was obvious that as yet she had not had much practice. Lines were unevenly placed, and her fingers had often gone astray to the wrong keys or missed a letter altogether. She had driven in, she wrote, to Koffiefontein-three hours by road-to a matinee of Gone with the Wind which had been revived at a cinema there. She wrote that Clark Gable was not as good as she remembered him. How typical it was of her gentleness, and perhaps even of her sense of defeat, that she had not troubled to correct her errors. Perhaps it would have seemed to her like disguising a fault. ‘Once a week,’ she wrote, ‘my cousin drives into the bak. She’s on very good terms with the manger, but he is not a real friend as you always were to my father and me. I miss very much St John’s Church and the vicar’s sermons. The only church near here is Dutch Deformed, and I don’t like it at all.’ She had corrected Deformed. She may have thought that otherwise I might take it for an unkindness. I wondered how I was to reply. I knew that the letter she would like best would contain news of Southwood: the small details of every day, even to the condition of my dahlias. How was I to deal with my bizarre journey to Istanbul?

To mention it only in passing would seem both unnatural and pretentious, but to describe the affair of Colonel Hakim and the gold brick and General Abdul would cause her to feel that my mode of life had entirely changed, and this might increase her sense of separation and of loneliness near Koffiefontein. I asked myself whether it would not be better to refrain from writing at all, but then on the last page-her paper had slipped in the machine and the print ran diagonally up into the previous line-she had typed, ‘I look forward so to your letters because they bring Southwood close to me.’ I put her letter away with others of hers that I kept in a drawer of my desk.

It was quite dark now, and yet more than an hour would have to pass before Chicken arrived, so I went to choose a book from my shelves. Like my father I rarely buy new books though I don’t confine my reading, as he did, to almost a single author. Modern literature has never appealed to me; to my mind it was in the Victorian age that English poetry and fiction reached the highest level. If I had been able to write myself-and in my boyhood before my mother found me the position at the bank I sometimes had that dream-I would have modelled myself on one of the minor Victorians (for the giants are inimitable): perhaps R. L. Stevenson or even Charles Reade. I have quite a collection too of Wilkie Collins, though I prefer him when he is not writing a detective story, for I don’t share my aunt’s taste in that direction. If I could have been a poet I would have been happy in a quite humble station, to be recognized, if at all, as an English Mahony and to have celebrated Southwood as he celebrated Shandon (it is one of my favourite poems in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), Perhaps it was Miss Keene’s mention of St John’s Church, the bells of which I can hear on a Sunday morning while I am working in the garden, that made me think of him and take down the volume.

‘There’s a bell in Moscow,

While on tower and kiosk O