When in Rome

3 Saturday, the Twenty-Sixth

It became fairly clear from the outset why Mr. Sebastian Mailer made extravagant charges for his expeditions.

At 3:30 in the afternoon two superb Lancias arrived at the rendezvous near the Church of the Trinity and therefore within a very short distance of the hotel where three of Mr. Mailer’s prospects were staying.

From here, as they assembled, his seven guests looked down at April azaleas flaring on the Spanish Steps and at Rome suddenly laid out before them in a wide gesture. There was a sense of opulence and of excitement in the air.

Alleyn got there before the appointed time and saw the cars draw up. They had small labels in their windows: Il Cicerone. Out of one of them stepped a dark man of romantic appearance whom he at once recognized as Barnaby Grant and out of the other the person he had come to see: Sebastian Mailer. He was smartened up since Barnaby Grant’s last encounter with him and was dressed in a black suit of some material that might have been alpaca. This, together with a pair of clumping black shoes, gave him a dubiously priestly look and made Alleyn think of Corvo and wonder if he might turn out to be such another. The white silk shirt was clean and the black bow tie looked new. He now wore a black beret on his cropped head and no longer had the appearance of an Englishman.

Alleyn kept his distance among a group of sightseers who milled about taking photographs. He saw that while Sebastian Mailer, half-smiling, talked vivaciously, Grant seemed to make little or no response. He had his back to Alleyn, who thought the nape of his neck looked indignant. “It looks,” Alleyn thought, “like the neck of a learner-driver seen from the rear. Rigid, cross and apprehensive.”

A young woman approached the cars, spotted Mailer and made towards him. She had a glowing air about her as if Rome had a little gone to her head. “Miss Sophy Jason,” Alleyn said to himself. He saw her look quickly at Barnaby Grant. Mailer pulled slightly at his beret, made a little bow and introduced her. The girl’s manner was shy, Alleyn thought, but not at all gauche: rather charming, in fact. Nevertheless, she said something to Grant that seemed to disconcert him. He glared at her, replied very shortly and turned away. The girl blushed painfully.

This brief tableau was broken by the arrival of two oversized persons hung about with canvas satchels and expensive cameras: a man and a woman. “The Van der Veghels,” Alleyn concluded and, like Barnaby Grant before him, was struck by their resemblance to each other and their strangely archaic faces. They were well dressed in a non-with-it sort of way: both of them in linen and both wearing outsize shoes with great rubber-studded soles and canvas tops. They wore sensible shady hats and identical sunglasses with pink frames. They were eager in their greetings and evidently had met Grant before. “What great hands and feet you have, Baron and Baroness,” thought Alleyn.

Lady Braceley and her nephew were still to come. No doubt it would be entirely in character for them to keep the party waiting. He decided it was time for him to present himself and did so, ticket in hand.

Mailer had the kind of voice Alleyn had expected: a rather fluting alto. He was a bad colour and his hands were slightly tremulous. But he filled his role very competently: there was the correct degree of suavity and assurance, the suggestion that everything was to be executed at the highest level.

“So glad you are joining us, Mr. Allen,” said Sebastian Mailer. “Do come and meet the others, won’t you? May I introduce—”

The Baron and Baroness were cordial. Grant looked hard at him, nodded, and with what seemed to be an uneasy blend of reluctance and good manners, asked him if he knew Rome well.

“Virtually, not at all,” Alleyn said. “I’ve never been here for more than three or four days at a time and I’m not a systematic sightseer.”

“No?”

“No. I want things to occur and I’m afraid spend far too much time sitting at a caffè table waiting for them to do so which of course they don’t. But who knows? One of these days the heavens may open and big drama descend upon me.”

Alleyn was afterwards to regard this as the major fluke-remark of his career. At the moment he was merely astonished to see what an odd response it drew from Barnaby Grant. He changed colour, threw an apprehensive glance at Alleyn, opened his mouth, shut it and finally said: “Oh,” without any expression at all.

“But today,” Alleyn said, “I hope to improve my condition. Do we, by any chance, visit one of your Simon’s haunts? That would be a wonderful idea.”

Again Grant seemed to be about to speak and again he boggled. After a sufficiently awkward pause he said: “There’s some idea of it. Mailer will explain. Excuse me, will you.”

He turned away. “All right,” Alleyn thought. “But if you hate it as much as all this, why the hell do you do it?”

He moved on to Sophy Jason, who was standing apart and seemed to be glad of his company. “We’re all too old for her,” Alleyn thought. “Perhaps the nephew of Lady Braceley will meet the case but one doubts it.” He engaged Sophy in conversation and thought her a nice intelligent girl with a generous allowance of charm. She looked splendid against the background of azaleas, Rome and a pontifical sky.

Before long Sophy found herself telling Alleyn about her suddenly-bereaved friend, about this being her first visit to Rome, about the fortunate accident of the cancellation and finally about her job. It really was extraordinary, she suddenly reflected, how much she was confiding to this quiet and attentive stranger. She felt herself blushing. “I can’t imagine why I’m gabbling away like this!” she exclaimed.

“It’s obliging of you to talk to me,” Alleyn said. “I’ve just been, not exactly slapped back but slightly edged off by the Guest of Honour.”

“Nothing to what I was!” Sophy ejaculated. “I’m still cringing.”

“But — isn’t he one of your publisher’s authors?”

“He’s our great double-barrel. I was dumb enough to remind him that I had been presented by my boss. He took the news like a dose of poison.”

“How very odd of him.”

“It really was a bit of a facer. He’d seemed so un-fierce and amiable on the earlier occasion and has the reputation in the firm of being a lamb. Aren’t we rather slow getting off our mark? Mr. Mailer is looking at his watch.”

“Major Sweet’s twenty minutes late and so are Lady Braceley and the Hon. Kenneth Dorne. They’re staying at the—” He broke off. “Here, I fancy, they come.”

And here, in fact, they came and there was Mr. Mailer, his beret completely off, advancing with a winning and proprietary air towards them.

Alleyn wondered what first impression they made on Sophy Jason. For all her poise and obvious intelligence he doubted if the like of Sonia Braceley had ever come her way. Alleyn knew quite a lot about Sonia Braceley. She began life as the Hon. Sonia Dorne and was the daughter of a beer-baron whose children, by and large, had turned out disastrously. Alleyn had actually met her, many years ago, when visiting his Ambassadorial elder brother George at one of his official Residences. Even then she had what his brother, whom Alleyn tolerantly regarded as a bit of an ass, alluded to as “a certain reputation.” With the passage of time, this reputation had consolidated. “She has experienced everything,” Sir George had weightily quipped, “except poverty.”

Seeing her now it was easy to believe it. “It’s the legs,” Alleyn thought. “More than the precariously maintained mask or the flabby underarm or the traitorous neck. It’s the legs. Although the stockings are tight as a skin they look as if they should hang loose about these brittle spindleshanks and how hazardously she’s balanced on her golden kid sandals. It’s the legs.”

But the face was not too good either. Even if one discounted the ruches under the eyes and the eyes themselves, there was still that dreadfully slack mouth. It was painted the fashionable livid colour but declared itself as unmistakably as if it had been scarlet: the mouth of an elderly maenad.

Her nephew bore some slight resemblance to her. Alleyn remembered that his father, the second Lord Dorne, had been rapidly divorced by two wives and that the third, Kenneth’s mother, had been, as George would have said, “put away.” Not much of a start, Alleyn thought, compassionately, and wondered if the old remedy of “live on a quid-a-day and earn it” would have done anything for Kenneth Dorne.

As they advanced, he noticed that the young man watched Mailer with an air that seemed to be made up of anxiety, furtiveness and perhaps subservience. He was restless, pallid, yellow and damp about the brow. When Mailer introduced him and he offered his hand it proved to be clammy as to the palm and tremulous. Rather unexpectedly, he had a camera slung from his shoulder.

His aunt also shook hands. Within the doeskin glove the fingers contracted, momentarily retained their clasp and slowly withdrew. Lady Braceley looked fixedly into Alleyn’s eyes. “So she still,” he thought, appalled, “gives it a go.”

She said: “Isn’t this fun?” Her voice was beautiful.

Mailer was at her elbow with Grant in tow: “Lady Braceley, may I present? Our guest of honour — Mr. Barnaby Grant.”

She said: “Do you know you’re the sole reason for my coming to this party? Kenneth, with a team of wild horses, wouldn’t have bullied me into sightseeing at this ghastly hour. You’re my ‘sight.’ ”

“I don’t know,” Grant said rapidly, “how I’m meant to answer that. Except that I’m sure you’ll find the church of San Tommaso in Pallaria much more rewarding.”

“Is that where we’re going? Is it a ruin?” she asked, opening her devastated eyes very wide and drawling out the word. “I can’t tell you how I hate roo-ins.”

There was perhaps one second’s silence and then Grant said: “It’s not exactly that. It’s — well, you’ll see when we get there.”

“Does it come in your book? I’ve read your book — the Simon one — which is a great compliment if you only knew it because you don’t write my sort of book at all. Don’t be huffy. I adored this one although I haven’t a clue, really, what it’s about. You shall explain it to me. Kenneth tried, didn’t you, darling, but he was even more muddling than the book. Mr. Allen, come over here and tell me — have you read the last Barnaby Grant and if you have, did you know what it was about?”

Alleyn was spared the task of finding an answer to this by the intervention of Sebastian Mailer, who rather feverishly provided the kind of raillery that seemed to be invited and got little reward for his pains. When he archly said: “Lady Braceley, you’re being very naughty. I’m quite sure you didn’t miss the last delicate nuance of Simon in Latium,” she merely said, “What?” and walked away before he could repeat his remark.

It was now the turn of the Baron and Baroness. Lady Braceley received the introduction vaguely. “Aren’t we going to start?” she asked Alleyn and Grant. “Don’t you rather hate hanging about? Such a bore, don’t you think? Who’s missing?”

Upon this cool enquiry, Sebastian Mailer explained that Major Sweet was joining them at the basilica, and proceeded to outline the programme for the afternoon. They would drive round the Colosseum and the Forum and would then visit the basilica of San Tommaso in Pallaria which, as they all knew, was the setting for the great central scene in Mr. Barnaby Grant’s immensely successful novel, Simon in Latium. He had prevailed upon the distinguished author, Mr. Mailer went on, to say a few words about the basilica in its relation to his book which, as they would hear from him, was largely inspired by it.

Throughout this exposition Barnaby Grant, Alleyn noticed, seemed to suffer the most exquisite embarrassment. He stared at the ground, hunched his shoulders, made as if to walk away and, catching perhaps a heightened note in Mr. Mailer’s voice, thought better of this and remained, wretchedly it appeared, where he was.

Mr. Mailer concluded by saying that as the afternoon was deliciously clement they would end it with a picnic tea on the Palatine Hill. The guests would then be driven to their hotels to relax and change for dinner and would be called for at nine o’clock.

He now distributed the guests. He, with Lady Braceley, Alleyn and Barnaby Grant would take one car; the Van der Veghels, Sophy Jason and Kenneth Dorne would take the other. The driver of the second car was introduced. “Giovanni is fluent in English,” said Mr. Mailer, “and learned in the antiquities. He will discourse upon matters of interest en route. Come, ladies and gentlemen,” said Mr. Mailer, “let us embark. Pronto!”

The four arches that lead into the porch of San Tommaso in Pallaria are of modest proportion and their pillars, which in classic times adorned some pagan temple, are slender and worn. The convolvulus tendrils that their carver twined about them have broken in many places, but the work is so delicate that the stone seems to tremble. In the most shadowed corner of the porch sat a woman with a tray of postcards. She wore a black headscarf pulled forward over her face and a black cotton dress. She shouted something, perhaps at Mr. Mailer. Her voice was strident, which may have caused her remark to sound like an insult. He paid no attention to it.

He collected his party about him and looked at his watch. “Major Sweet,” he said, “is late. We shall not wait for him but before we go in I should like to give you, very shortly, some idea of this extraordinary monument. In the fourth century before Christ—”

From the dark interior there erupted an angry gentleman who shouted as he came.

“Damned disgusting lot of hanky-panky,” shouted this gentleman. “What the hell—” He pulled up short on seeing the group and narrowed his blazing eyes in order to focus upon it.

He had a savage white moustache and looked like an improbable revival of an Edwardian warrior. “Are you Mailer?” he shouted. “Sweet,” he added, in explanation.

“Major Sweet, may I—”

“You’re forty-three minutes late. Forty-three minutes!”

“Unfortunately—”

“Spare me,” begged Major Sweet, “the specious excuses. There is no adequate explanation for unpunctuality.”

Lady Braceley moved in. “All my fault, Major,” she said. “I kept everybody waiting and I’ve no excuses: I never have and I always do. I daresay you’d call it ‘ladies’ privilege,’ wouldn’t you? Or would you?”

Major Sweet turned his blue glare upon her for two or three seconds. He then yapped: “How do you do,” and seemed to wait for further developments.

Mr. Mailer with perfect suavity performed the introductions. Major Sweet acknowledged them by making slight bows to the ladies and an ejaculation of sorts to the men. “Hyah,” he said.

“Well,” said Mr. Mailer. “To resume. When we are inside the basilica I shall hand over to our most distinguished guest of honour. But perhaps beforehand a very brief historical note may be of service.”

He was succinct and adequate, Sophy grudgingly admitted. The basilica of San Tommaso, he said, was one of a group of monuments in Rome where the visitor could walk downward through the centuries into Mithraic time. At the top level, here where they now stood, was the twelfth-century basilica which in a moment they would enter. Beneath it, was the excavated third-century church which it had replaced. “And below that — imagine it—” said Mr. Mailer, “there has lain sleeping for over eighteen hundred years a house of the Flavian period: a classic ‘gentleman’s residence’ with its own private chapel dedicated (and Mr. Grant will tell you more about this) dedicated to the god Mithras.” He paused and Sophy, though she regarded him with the most profound distaste, thought: “He’s interested in what he’s talking about. He knows his stuff. He’s enjoying himself.”

Mr. Mailer went on to describe briefly the enormous task of nineteenth-century excavation that had so gradually disclosed first, the earlier basilica and then, deep down beneath it, the pagan household. “Rome has risen, hereabouts, sixty feet since those times,” he ended. “Does that surprise you? It does me, every time I think of it.”

“It doesn’t me,” Major Sweet announced. “Nothing surprises me. Except human gullibility,” he added darkly. “However!”

Mr. Mailer shot him an uneasy glance. Sophy gave a little snort of suppressed amusement and caught Barnaby Grant looking at her with something like appreciation. Lady Braceley, paying no attention to what was said, let her ravaged eyes turn from one man’s face to another. The Van der Veghels, standing close together, listened intently. Kenneth Dorne, Sophy noticed, was restless and anxious-looking. He shuffled his feet and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. And the tall man, what was his name — Allen? — stood a little apart, politely attentive and, Sophy thought, extremely observant.

“But, now,” Mr. Mailer said, “shall we begin our journey into the past?”

The woman with the postcards had sidled between the group and the entrance. She had kept her face down and it was still shadowed by her black headscarf. She muttered, almost inaudibly, “Cartoline? Posta-carda?” edging towards Sebastian Mailer. He said generally to his company: “There are better inside. Pay no attention,” and moved forward to pass the woman.

With extraordinary swiftness she pushed back her headscarf, thrust her face up at him and whispered: “Brutto! Farabutto! Traditore!” and added what seemed to be a stream of abuse. Her eyes burned. Her lips were retracted in a grin and then pursed together. “She’s going to spit in his face,” thought Sophy in alarm and so she was, but Mr. Mailer was too smart for her. He dodged and she spat after him and stood her ground with the air of a grand-opera virago. She even gave a hoarse screech of eldritch laughter. Mr. Mailer entered the basilica. His discomforted flock divided round the postcard seller and slunk after him.

“Kenneth, darling,” Lady Braceley muttered. “Honestly! Not one’s idea of a gay little trip!”

Sophy found herself between Barnaby Grant and Alleyn. “Was that lady,” Alleyn asked Grant, “put in as an extra touch of atmosphere? Does she recur, or was she a colourful accident?”

Grant said: “I don’t know anything about her. Mad, I should think. Ghastly old bag, wasn’t she?” and Sophy thought: “Yes, but he hasn’t answered the question.”

She said to Alleyn: “Would you suppose that all that carry-on, if translated into Anglo-Saxon terms, would amount to no more than a cool glance and an indrawn breath?”

Grant looked across Alleyn at her, and said with a kind of eagerness: “Oh, rather! You have to make allowances for their sense of drama.”

“Rather excessive in this instance,” she said coolly, giving, she said to herself, snub for snub. Grant moved round and said hurriedly: “I know who you are, now. I didn’t before. We met at Koster Press didn’t we?” Koster Press was the name of his publisher’s house in London.

“For a moment,” Sophy said and then: “Oh but how lovely!”

They were in the basilica.

It glowed sumptuously as if it generated its own light. It was alive with colour: “Mediterranean” red, clear pinks, blues and greens; ivory and crimson marble, tingling gold mosaic. And dominant in this concourse of colour the great vermillion that cries out in the backgrounds of Rome and Pompeii.

Sophy moved away from the group and stared with delight at this enchantment. Grant, who had been left with Alleyn, abruptly joined her.

“I’ve got to talk about this,” he muttered. “I wish to God I hadn’t.”

She looked briefly at him. “Then why do it?” said Sophy.

“You think that was an affectation. I’m sorry.”

“Really, it couldn’t matter less what I think.”

“You needn’t be so snappish.”

They stared at each other in astonishment.

“I can’t make this out,” Grant said unexpectedly. “I don’t know you,” and Sophy in a panic, stammered: “It’s nothing. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I snapped.”

“Not at all.”

“And now,” fluted Sebastian Mailer, “I hand over to my most distinguished colleague, Mr. Grant?”

Grant made Sophy an extremely stuffy little bow and moved out to face his audience.

Once he was launched he too did his stuff well and with considerable charm, which was more than could be said for Mr. Mailer. For one thing, Sophy conceded, Grant looked a lot nicer. His bony face was really rather beautifully shaped and actually had a carved, mediaeval appearance that went handsomely with its surroundings. He led them further into the glowing church. There were two or three other groups of sightseers but, compared with the traffic in most celebrated monuments, these were few.

Grant explained that even in this, the most recent of the three levels of San Tommaso, there was a great richness of time sequences. When in the twelfth century the ancient church below it was filled in, its treasures, including pieces from the pagan household underneath it, were brought up into this new basilica, so that now classical, mediaeval and Renaissance works mingled. “They’ve kept company,” Grant said, “for a long time and have grown together in the process. You can see how well they suit each other.”

“It happens on the domestic level too,” Alleyn said, “don’t you think? In houses that have belonged to the same family for many generations? There’s a sort of consonance of differences.”

“Exactly so,” Grant agreed with a quick’ look at him. “Shall we move on?”

A wave of scent announced the arrival of Lady Braceley at Alleyn’s elbow. “What a marvellous way of putting it,” she murmured. “How clever you are.”

The doeskin glove with its skeletal enclosure touched his arm. She had tipped her head on one side and was looking up at him. Sophy, watching, thought a shutter had come down over his face and indeed Alleyn suffered a wave of revulsion and pity and a recognition of despair. “I’d give a hell of a lot,” he thought, “to be shot of this lady.”

Sebastian Mailer had come up on the far side of Lady Braceley. He murmured something that Alleyn couldn’t catch. Grant was talking again. The hand was withdrawn from Alleyn’s arm and the pair turned away and moved out of sight behind the junction of two pilastres. Now, Alleyn speculated, was Mailer doing a rescue job or had he something particular and confidential to say to Lady Braceley?

Grant led his party into the centre of the nave and through the enclosed schola-cantorum, saying, Sophy thought, neither too much nor too little but everything well. She herself was caught up in wonder at the great golden bowl-shaped mosaic of the apse. Acanthus and vine twined tenderly together to enclose little groups of everyday persons going about their mediaeval business. The Cross, dominant though it was, seemed to have grown out of some pre-Christian tree. “I shall say nothing about the apse,” Grant said. “It speaks for itself.”

Mailer and Lady Braceley had reappeared. She sat down on a choir bench and whether by some accident of lighting or because she was overtaken by one of those waves of exhaustion that unexpectedly fall upon the old, she looked as if she had shrunk within her own precarious façade. Only for a moment, however.

She straightened her back and beckoned her nephew, who fidgeted about on the edge of the group, half attentive and half impatient. He joined her and they whispered together, he yawning and fidgeting, she apparently in some agitation.

The party moved on round the basilica. The Van der Veghels took photographs and asked a great many questions. They were laboriously well informed in Roman antiquities. Presently the Baron, with an arch look, began to inquire about the particular features that appeared so vividly in Grant’s novel. Were they not standing, at this very moment, in the place where his characters assembled? Might one not follow, precisely, in the steps they had taken during that wonderful climactic scene?

“O-o-oah!” cried the Baroness running her voice up and down a chromatic scale of enthusiasm. “It will be so farskinating. Yes?”

Grant reacted to this plea as he had to earlier conversations: with a kind of curbed distaste. He gave Sophy and Alleyn one each of his sharp glances, darted a look of something like pure hatred at Sebastian Mailer and suggested, confusedly, that an author seldom reproduced in scrupulous detail an actual mise-en-scène any more than he used unadulterated human material. “I don’t mean I didn’t start off with San Tommaso,” he shot out at Sophy. “Of course I did. But I gave it another name and altered it to my purpose.”

“As you had every right to do,” Sophy said boldly, and Alleyn thought the two of them were united for the moment in their common field of activity.

“Yes, but do show us?” Lady Braceley urged. “Don’t be beastly. Show us. You promised. You know you did.”

Kenneth Dorne said: “Isn’t that why we came? Or not? I thought you were to be the great attraction.”

He had approached Grant and stood in an attitude of some elegance, his left arm extended along one of the closure slabs of the schola, his right hand on his hip. It was not a blatant pose but it was explicit nevertheless, and at least one aspect of Kenneth was now revealed. He looked at Grant and widened his eyes. “Is it all a sell-out?” he asked. “Or have I made a muddle? Or am I merely being impertinent?”

A rabid oath, instantly stifled, burst from Major Sweet. He shouted: “I beg your pardon,” and glared at a wall painting of the foolish virgins.

“Oh dear,” Kenneth said, still to Grant. “Now the Major’s cross? What have I said?” He yawned again and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief.

Grant gave him a comprehensive look. “Nothing to the purpose,” he said shortly and walked away. Mr. Mailer hurried into the breach.

“Naughty!” he tossed at Kenneth and then, vindicating Grant to his disconcerted customers, told them he was unbelievably modest.

Lady Braceley eagerly supported this view, as did the Van der Veghels. Grant cut short their plaudits by adopting, with a great effort, it seemed to Alleyn, a brisk and business-like air by resuming his exposition.

“Of course,” he said, “if you’d really like to see the equivalent places to those in the book I’ll be delighted to point them out, although I imagine if you’ve read it they declare themselves pretty obviously. There, in the right-hand aisle, for instance, is the picture so much admired by Simon and, I may add, by me. Doubting Saint Thomas, himself, by Masolino da Panicale. Look at those pinks and the ‘Pompeian’ red.”

“Fabulous!” Kenneth restlessly offered. “Psychedelic, aren’t they?”

Grant disregarded this. He said to Sophy: “He’s so very doubtful, isn’t he? Head on one side, lips pursed up and those gimlet fingers! How right that enormous hospital in London was to adopt him: he’s the very pith and marrow of the scientific man, don’t you think?”

Sebastian Mailer gave a shrill little cackle of appreciation, perhaps of surprise.

“While we are in this aisle of the basilica,” Grant said, leading them along it for a short distance, “you may like to see something that I’m afraid I did adopt holus-bolus.”

He showed them a railed enclosure, about six feet by three in size. They collected round it with little cries of recognition.

It encompassed an open rectangular hole like the mouth of a well. Fixed to the rails was a notice saying in five languages that climbing them was strictly forbidden.

“Listen,” Grant said. “Can you hear?”

They stood still. Into the silence came the desultory voices of other sightseers moving about the basilica, the voice of a guide out in the atrium, footfalls on marble and a distant rumour of the Roman streets. “Listen,” Grant repeated, and presently from under their feet, scarcely recognizable at first but soon declaring itself, rose the sound of running water, a steady, colloquial voice, complex and unbroken.

“The cloaca maxima?” Major Sweet demanded.

“A pure stream leading into it,” Grant rejoined. “More than sixty feet below us. If you lean over the rail you may be able to see that there is an equivalent opening immediately beneath this one, in the floor of the earlier church. Yet another thirty feet below, out of sight unless someone uses a torch, is a third opening, and far down that, if a torch is lowered, it’s possible to see the stream that we can hear. You may remember that Simon dropped a pebble from here and that it fell down through the centuries into the hidden waters.”

The Van der Veghels broke into excited comment.

Grant, they warmly informed him, had based the whole complex of imagery in his book upon this exciting phenomenon. “As the deeper reaches of Simon’s personality were explored—” on and on they went, explaining the work to its author. Alleyn, who admired the book, thought that they were probably right but laid far too much insistence on an essentially delicate process of thought.

Grant fairly successfully repressed whatever embarrassment he felt. Suddenly the Baron and Baroness burst out in simultaneous laughter and cries of apology. How ridiculous! How impertinent! Really, what could have possessed them!

Throughout this incident, Major Sweet had contemplated the Van der Veghels with raised eyebrows and a slight snarl. Sophy, stifling a dreadful urge to giggle, found herself observed by Alleyn and Grant, while Lady Braceley turned her huge, deadened lamps from one man to another, eager to respond to whatever mood she might fancy she detected.

Kenneth leant far over the rail and peered into the depths. “I’m looking down through the centuries?” he announced. His voice was distorted as if he spoke into an enormous megaphone. “Boom! Boom!” he shouted and was echoed far below. “Ghost beneath: Swear,” he boomed and then: “Oh God!” He straightened up and was seen to have turned a sickly white. “I’d forgotten,” he said. “I’m allergic to heights. What a revolting place.”

“Shall we move on?” said Grant.

Sebastian Mailer led the way to a vestibule where there was the usual shop for postcards, trinkets and colour slides. Here he produced tickets of admission into the lower regions of San Tommaso.

The first descent was by way of two flights of stone stairs with a landing between. The air was fresh and dry and smelt only of stone. On the landing was a map of the underground regions and Mailer drew their attention to it “There’s another one down below,” he said. “Later on, some of you may like to explore. You can’t really get lost: if you think you are, keep on going up any stairs you meet and sooner or later you’ll find yourself here. These are very beautiful, aren’t they?”

He drew their attention to two lovely pillars laced about with convolvulus tendrils. “Pagan,” Mr. Mailer crooned, “gloriously pagan. Uplifted from their harmonious resting place in the Flavian house below. By industrious servants of the Vatican. There are ways and ways of looking at the Church’s appropriations, are there not?”

Major Sweet astonished his companions by awarding this remark a snort of endorsement and approval.

Mr. Mailer smiled and continued. “Before we descend — look, ladies and gentlemen, behind you.”

They turned. In two niches of the opposite wall were terra-cotta sculptures: one a male, ringletted and smiling, the other a tall woman with a broken child in her arms. They were superbly lit from below and seemed to have, at that instant, sprung to life.

“Apollo, it is thought,” Mr. Mailer said, “and perhaps Athena. Etruscan of course. But the archaic smiles are Greek. The Greeks, you know, despised the Etruscans for their cruelty in battle and there are people who read cruelty into these smiles, transposed to Etruscan mouths.” He turned to Grant: “You, I believe—” he began and stopped. Grant was staring at the Van der Veghels with an intensity that communicated itself to the rest of the party.

They stood side-by-side admiring the sculptures. Their likeness, already noticed by Grant, to the Etruscan terra-cottas of the Villa Giulia startlingly declared itself here. It was as if their faces were glasses in which Apollo and Athena smiled at their own images. Sharp arrowhead smiles, full eyes and that almost uncanny liveliness — the lot, thought Alleyn.

It was obvious that all the company had been struck by this resemblance except, perhaps, Lady Braceley, who was uninterested in the Van der Veghels. But nobody ventured to remark on it apart from Sebastian Mailer, who with an extraordinary smirk murmured as if to himself: “How very remarkable. Both.”

The Van der Veghels, busy with flashlights, appeared not to hear him and Alleyn very much doubted if any of the others did. Barnaby Grant was already leading them down a further flight of steps into a church that for fifteen hundred years had lain buried.

In excavating it a number of walls, arches and pillars had been introduced to support the new basilica above it. The ancient church apart from the original apse was now a place of rather low, narrow passages, of deep shadows and of echoes. Clearly heard, whenever they all kept still, was the voice of the subterranean stream. At intervals these regions were most skillfully lit so that strange faces with large eyes floated out of the dark: wall paintings that had been preserved in their long sleep by close-packed earth.

“The air,” Barnaby Grant said, “has done them no good. They are slowly fading.”

“They enjoyed being stifled,” Sebastian Mailer said from somewhere in the rear. He gave out a little whinnying sound.

“More than I do,” Lady Braceley said. “It’s horribly stuffy down here, isn’t it?”

“There are plenty of vents,” Major Sweet said. “The air is noticeably fresh, Lady Braceley.”

“I don’t think so,” she complained. “I don’t think I’m enjoying this part, Major. I don’t think I want—” She screamed.

They had turned a corner and come face-to-face with a nude, white man wearing a crown of leaves in his curls. He had full, staring eyes and again the archaic smile. His right arm stretched towards them.

“Auntie darling, what are you on about!” Kenneth said. “He’s fabulous. Who is he, Seb?”

“Apollo again. Apollo shines bright in the Mithraic mystery. He was raised up from below by recent excavators to garnish the Galalian corridors.”

“Damn’ highfalutin’ poppycock,” Major Sweet remarked. It was impossible to make out in what camp he belonged. So Kenneth, Alleyn noted, calls Mailer “Seb.” Quick work!

“And they are still digging?” the Baron asked Grant as they moved on. “The Apollo had not risen when your Simon came to San Tommaso? He is then a contemporary resurrection?”

“A latter-day Lazarus,” fluted Mr. Mailer. “But how much more attractive!”

Somewhere in the dark Kenneth echoed his giggle.

Sophy, who was between Alleyn and Grant, said under her breath: “I wish they wouldn’t,” and Grant made a sound of agreement that seemed to be echoed by Major Sweet.

They continued along the cloister of the old church.

It was now that Baron Van der Veghel developed a playful streak. Holding his camera at the ready and humming a little air, he outstripped the party, turned a corner and disappeared into shadow.

Mr. Mailer, at this juncture, was in full spate. “We approach another Etruscan piece,” he said. “Thought to be Mercury. One comes upon it rather suddenly: on the left.”

It was indeed a sudden encounter. The Mercury was in a deep recess: an entrance, perhaps, to some lost passage. He was less strongly lit than the Apollo but the glinting smile was sharp enough. When they came up with him, a second head rose over his shoulders and smirked at them. A flashlight wiped it out and the echoes rang with Baron Van der Veghel’s uninhibited laughter. Lady Braceley gave another scream.

“It’s too much,” she cried. “No. It’s too much!”

But the elephantine Van der Veghels, in merry pin, had frisked ahead. Major Sweet let fly anathema upon all practical jokers and the party moved on.

The voice of the subterranean stream grew louder. They turned another corner and came upon another railed well. Grant invited them to look up and there, directly overhead, was the under-mouth of the one they had already examined in the basilica.

“But what were they for?” Major Sweet demanded. “What’s the idea? Grant?” he added quickly, apparently to forestall any comment from Mr. Mailer.

“Perhaps,” Grant said, “for drainage. There’s evidence that at some stage of the excavations seepage and even flooding occurred.”

“Hah,” said the Major.

The Baroness leant over the rail of the well and peered down.

“Gerrit!” she exclaimed. “L-oo-ook! There is the sarcophagus! Where Simon sat and meditated!” Her voice, which had something of the reedy quality of a schoolboy’s, ran up and down the scale. “See! Down there! Belo-oow!” Her husband’s flashlight briefly explored her vast stern as he gaily snapped her. Heedless she leant far over the railing.

“Be careful, my darlink!” urged her husband. “Mathilde! Not so far! Wait till we descend.”

He hauled her back. She was greatly excited and they laughed together.

Alleyn and Sophy approached the well railing and looked downwards. The area below was illuminated from some unseen source and the end of a stone sarcophagus was clearly visible. From their bird’s-eye position they could see that the stone lid was heavily carved.

As they looked, a shadow, much distorted, moved across the wall behind it, disappeared, and was there again, turning this way and that.

Sophy cried out: “Look! It’s — it’s that woman!” But it had gone.

“What woman?” Grant asked, behind her.

“The one with the shawl over her head. The postcard seller. Down there.”

“Did you see her?” Mr. Mailer said quickly.

“I saw her shadow.”

“My dear Miss Jason! Her shadow! There are a thousand Roman women with scarves over their heads who could cast the same shadow.”

“I’m sure not. I’m sure it was she. It looked as if — as if — she wanted to hide.”

“I agree,” Alleyn said.

“Violetta is not permitted to enter the basilica, I assure you. You saw the shadow of someone in another party, of course. Now — let us follow Mr. Grant down into the temple of Mithras. He has much to relate.”

They had completed their circuit of the cloisters and entered a passage leading to a spiral iron stairway. The ceiling was lower here and the passage narrow. Grant and Mailer led the way and the others trailed behind them. The head of the little procession had reached the stairhead when Lady Braceley suddenly announced that she couldn’t go on.

“I’m frightfully sorry,” she said, “but I want to go back. I’m afraid you’ll think it too dreary of me but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t stay in this awful place another moment. You must take me back, Kenneth. I didn’t know it’d be like this. I’ve never been able to endure shut-up places. At once. Kenneth! Where are you! Kenneth!”

But he wasn’t with them. Her voice flung distorted echoes about the hollows and passages. “Where’s he gone!” she cried out and the whole region replied, “—gone — on — on.”

Mailer had taken her by the arm. “It’s all right, Lady Braceley. I assure you. It’s perfectly all right. Kenneth went back to photograph the Apollo. In five minutes I will find him for you. Don’t distress yourself. No doubt I’ll meet him on his way here.”

“I won’t wait for him. Why’s he suddenly taking photographs? I give him a camera costing the earth and he never uses it. I won’t wait for him. I’ll go now. Now.”

The Baron and Baroness swarmed gigantically about her making consoling noises. She thrust them aside and made for Grant, Major Sweet and Alleyn, who were standing together. “Please! Please!” she implored and, after a quick look round, latched with great determination on the Major. “Please take me away!” she implored. “Please do.”

“My dear lady,” Major Sweet began in tones more consistent with “My good woman”—“My dear lady, there’s no occasion for hysteria. Yes — well, of course, if you insist. Be glad to. No doubt,” said the Major hopefully, “we’ll meet your nephew on our way.”

Clinging to him she appealed to Grant and Alleyn. “I know you think me too hopeless and silly,” she said. “Don’t you?”

“Not at all,” Alleyn said politely and Grant muttered something that might have been “claustrophobia.”

Mr. Mailer said to the Major: “There’s a continuation of this stairway that goes up into the basilica. If you’ll take Lady Braceley that way I’ll go back and find Mr. Dorne and send him to her.”

Lady Braceley said: “It’s maddening of him. Honestly!”

Sophy said: “Would you like me to come with you, Lady Braceley?”

“Oh no,” she said. “No. Thank you. Too kind but—” Her voice trailed away. She still gazed at Alleyn and Grant. “She wants an entourage,” Sophy thought.

“Well,” Major Sweet said crossly. “Shall we go?”

He piloted her towards the upper flight of the spiral stairway. “I’ll come back,” he shouted, “as soon as that young fellow presents himself. Hope he’s quick about it.”

“You’ll carry on, won’t you?” Mr. Mailer said to Grant.

“Very well.”

Grant, Alleyn and Sophy embarked on the downward flight. They could hear Lady Braceley’s heels receding up the iron treads together with the duller clank of Major Sweet’s studded brogues. Behind them the Van der Veghels shouted excitedly to each other.

“It is only,” roared the Baroness, “that I do not wish to miss a word, my darlink, that he may let fall upon us.”

“Then on! Go and I will join you. One more picture of the Mercury. Joost one!” cried the Baron.

She assented and immediately fell some distance down the iron stairs. A cry of dismay rose from her husband.

“Mathilde! You are fallen.”

“That is so.”

“You are hurt.”

“Not. I am uninjured. What a joke.”

“On, then.”

“So.”

The descending spiral made some two or three turns. The sound of running water grew louder. They arrived at a short passage. Grant led them along it into a sort of anteroom.

“This is the insula,” he said. “You might call it a group of flats. It was built for a Roman family or families somewhere about the middle of the first century. They were not, of course, Christians. You will see in a moment how they worshiped their god. Come into the triclinium. Which is also the Mithraeum.”

He motioned them into a cave-like chamber. The roof was vaulted and studded with small stones. Massive stone benches ran along the sides and in the centre was an altar.

Grant said: “You know about the Mithraic cult. There’s no need for me-”

“Please! But please,” Implored the Baroness, “We would like so much! Everythink! Please!”

Alleyn heard Grant say “Oh God!” under his breath and saw him look, almost as if he asked for her support, at Sophy Jason.

And, for her part, Sophy received this appeal, with a ripple of warmth that bewildered her,

“Only if he wants to,” she said,

But Grant, momentarily shutting his eyes, embarked on his task. The Baroness, all eyes and teeth, hung upon his every word. Presently she reached out an imploring hand and whispered; “Excuse! Forgive me. But for my husband to miss this is too much, I call for him.” She did so with a voice that would have done credit to Brunnehilde. He came downstairs punctually and nimbly and in response to her finger on her lips fell at once into a receptive attitude.

Grant caught Sophy’s eye, scowled at her, momentarily shut his own eyes, and in an uneven voice told them about the cult of the god Mithras. It was, he said, a singularly noble religion and persisted, literally underground, after other pagan forms of worship had been abolished in Christian Rome.

“The god Mithras,” he said, and although at first he used formal, guidebook phrases, he spoke so directly to Sophy that they might have been alone together- “the god Mithras was born of a rock. He was worshiped in many parts of the ancient world including England and was, above all, a god of light. Hence his association with Apollo, who commanded him to kill the Bull which is the symbol of fertility. In this task he was helped by a Dog and a Snake but a Scorpion double-crossed him and spilled the Bull’s blood from which all life was created. And in that way evil was let loose upon mankind.”

“Yet another expulsion from Eden?” Sophy said,

“Sort of. Strange, isn’t it? As if blind fingers groped about some impenetrable, basic design.”

“Curse of mankind!” Major Sweet proclaimed.

He had rejoined the party unnoticed and startled them by this eruption. “Religion,” he announced, “Bally-hoo! The lot of them! Scoundrels!”

“Do you think so?” Grant asked mildly. “Mithras doesn’t seem so bad, on the whole. His was a gentle cult for those days. His worship was a Mystery and the initiates passed through seven degrees, It was tough going. They underwent lustral purification, long abstinence and most severe deprivation. Women had no part of it. You wouldn’t have been allowed,” he told Sophy, “to enter this place, still less to touch the altar. Come and look at it.”

“You make me feel I shouldn’t.”

“Ah, no!” cried the Baroness. “We must not be superstitious, Miss Jason. Let us look, because it is very beautiful, see, and most interestink.”

The altar was halfway down the Mithraeum. The slaughter of the Bull was indeed very beautifully carved on one face and the apotheosis of Mithras assisted by Apollo on another.

To Grant’s evident dismay Baron Van der Veghel had produced out of his vast canvas satchel a copy of Simon.

“We must,” he announced, “hear again the wonderful passage. See, Mr. Grant, here is the book. Will the author not read it for us? How this English Simon finds in himself some equivalent to the Mithraic powers. Yes?”

“Ah, no!” Grant ejaculated. “Please!” He looked quickly about and beyond the group of listeners as if to assure himself that there were no more. “That’s not in the bargain,” he said. “Really.” And Alleyn saw him redden. “In any case,” said Grant, “I read abominably. Come and look at Mithras himself.”

And at the far end of the chamber, there was the god in a grotto, being born out of a stony matrix: a sturdy person with a Phrygian cap on his long curls and a plumpish body: neither child nor man.

Alleyn said: “They made sacrifices, didn’t they? In here.”

“Of course, on the altar,” Grant said quickly. “Can you imagine! A torch-lit scene, it would be, and the light would flicker across those stone benches and across the faces of initiates, attenuated and wan from their ordeal. The altar fire raises a quivering column of heat, the sacrificial bull is lugged in: perhaps they hear it bellowing in the passages. There is a passage, you know, running right round the chamber. Probably the bull appears from a doorway behind Mithras. Perhaps it’s garlanded. The acolytes drag it in and the priest receives it. Its head is pulled back, the neck exposed and the knife plunged in. The reek of fresh blood and the stench of the burnt offering fills the Mithraeum. I suppose there are chanted hymns.”

Sophy said drily: “You gave us to understand that the Mithraic cult was a thoroughly nice and, did you say, gentle religion.”

“It was highly moral and comparatively gentle. Loyalty and fidelity were the ultimate virtues. Sacrifice was a necessary ingredient.”

“Same idea,” Major Sweet predictably announced, “behind the whole boiling. Sacrifice. Blood. Flesh. Cannibalism. More refinement in one lot, more brutality in another. Essentially the same.”

“You don’t think,” Alleyn mildly suggested, “that this might indicate pot-shots at some fundamental truth?”

“Only fundamental truth it indicates — humans are carnivores,” shouted the Major in triumph. “Yak-yak-yak,” he added and was understood to be laughing.

“It is so unfortunate,” said Baron Van der Veghel, “that Lady Braceley and Mr. Dorne are missing all this. And where is Mr. Mailer?”

“Did you see them?” Alleyn asked Major Sweet.

“I did not. I put her in the — what d’you call it? Garden? Courtyard?”

“Atrium?”

“Whatever it is. On a bench. She didn’t much like it, but still. Silly woman.”

“What about young Dorne?” Alleyn said.

“Didn’t see ’im. Frightful specimen.”

“And Mailer?”

“No. Damn casual treatment, I call it. What do we do now?”

Grant said with that air of disengagement that clung about him so persistently: “I understand it was thought that you might like to look round here under your own steam for a few minutes. We can meet here, or if you prefer it, up above in the atrium. I’ll stay here for ten minutes in case there’s anything you want to ask and then I’ll go up and wait in the atrium. We’ll probably meet on the way and in any case you can’t get lost. There are “out” notices everywhere. I’m sure Mailer—”

He broke off. Somebody was approaching down the iron stairway.

“Here he is,” Grant said.

But it was only Kenneth Dorne.

He had sounded as if he were in a hurry and made a precipitate entry, but when he came out of the shadows and saw the others he halted and slouched towards them. His camera dangled from his hand. It struck Sophy that he was in some unsatisfactory way assuaged and comforted.

“Hullo,” he said. “Where’s my aunt?”

Grant informed him. He said: “Oh dear!” and giggled.

“Hadn’t you better take a look at her?” Major Sweet asked.

“What?”

“Your aunt. She’s up top. In the garden.”

“May she flourish,” Kenneth said, “like the Green Bay Tree. Dear Major.”

Major Sweet contemplated him for one or two seconds. “Words,” he said, “fail me.”

“Well,” Kenneth rejoined. “Thank God for that.”

This produced a kind of verbal stalemate.

It was broken by the Van der Veghels. They had, they excitedly explained, hoped so much (ah, so much, interpolated the Baroness) that Mr. Grant would be persuaded to read aloud the Mithraic passage from Simon in its inspirational environment. As everybody saw, they had brought their copy — was it too much, even, to ask for a signature? — to that end. They understood, none better, the celebrated Anglo-Saxon reticence. But after all, the terms of the brochure, not of course to be insisted upon au pied de la lettre, had encouraged them to believe…

They went on along these lines with a sort of antiphonal reproachfulness and Grant’s face, even in that dim light, could be seen to grow redder and redder. At last he turned helplessly to Sophy, who muttered: “Hadn’t you better?” and was strangely gratified when he said at once and at large: “If you really want it, of course. I didn’t mean to be disobliging. It’s only that I’ll feel such an ass.”

The Van der Veghels broke into delighted laughter and the Baron developed a more extravagant flight of fancy. They would take a photograph: a group at the centre of which would be Grant, reading aloud. In the background, the god Mithras himself would preside over the work he had inspired. This extraordinary variant on Victorian group photography was put into operation after a playful argument between the Van der Veghels about their active and passive roles. Finally they agreed that the Baroness would take the first picture and she went excitedly into action. The wretched Grant, with open book, was placed upon an obscure stone protrusion to the left of Mithras, Alleyn on his one hand and Sophy, who was beginning to get the giggles, on the other. Behind Sophy posed Major Sweet and behind Alleyn, Kenneth Dorne.

“And you, Gerrit, my darlink,” the Baroness instructed her husband—“because you are so big, yes? — at the rear.”

“Afterwards we exchange,” he urged.

“So.”

“And all to concentrate upon the open page.”

“Ach. So.”

Major Sweet, always unpredictable, took a serious view of this business. “How,” he objected, “are we to concentrate on something we can scarcely see?”

And indeed, it was well urged. The head of the little god, like the altar and all the other effigies in these regions, was cleverly lit from a concealed niche, but his surroundings were deep in shadow, none more so than the area in which the group was deployed. The Van der Veghels explained that all would be revealed by the flashlamp. Their great desire was that the god should be incorporated in the group and to this end a little make-believe was to be excused. Grant’s discomfort had become so evident that Alleyn and Sophy Jason, simultaneously but without consultation, decided upon a note of high comedy.

“Ah yes,” Alleyn suddenly offered. “Even if we can’t see it, we’re all to gaze upon the book? Fair enough. And I expect Mr. Grant knows the passage by heart. Perhaps he could recite it for us in the dark.”

“I can do nothing of the sort, damn you,” Grant said warmly. The Baroness explained. Afterwards they would move into a more luminous spot and Grant would then, without subterfuge, read the appropriate passage.

In the meantime, the Baroness reiterated, would they all concentrate upon the almost imperceptible page.

After a good deal of falling about in the dark the group assembled. “Would it be pretty,” Alleyn suggested, “if Miss Jason were to point out a passage in the book and I were to place my arm about the author’s shoulders, eagerly seeking to read it?”

“What a good suggestion,” Sophy cried. “And Major Sweet could perhaps bend over on the other side.”

“Delighted, I’m sure,” said the Major with alacrity and did bend very closely over Sophy. “Damn’ good idea, what,” he whistled into her ear.

“It recalls,” Alleyn said, “Tchékhov reading aloud to Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts players.”

This observation was received with loud applause from the Baroness. Sophy and Alleyn crowded up to Grant.

“You shall suffer for this,” Grant said between his teeth. “Both of you.”

“On the book, on the book, all on the book!” gaily chanted the Baroness. “Nobody to move. Gerrit, you must step a little back and Mr. Dorne, are you there, please?”

“Oh, God, yes, I’m here.”

“Good. Good. And so, all are ready? Freeze, please. I shoot.”

The camera clicked but the darkness was uninterrupted. The Baroness, who had uttered what was no doubt a strong expletive in her own language, now followed it up with a reproach to her husband. “What did I tell you, my darlink! They are useless these local bulps. No! Do not answer. Do not move. I have another in my pocket. Not to move anybody, please, or speak. I find it.”

Sophy giggled. Major Sweet immediately groped for her waist.

“Serve you bloody well right,” whispered Grant to Sophy. He had detected this manoeuvre. From somewhere not far away but beyond the Mithraeum there came the sound, distorted as all sounds were in that region, by echoes, as of a high-pitched voice.

There followed a seemingly interminable interval broken after a time by a distant thud as of a heavy door being shut. The Baroness fiddled and muttered. Kenneth detached himself from the group and took a flashlight shot of the god. He was urged back into position and at last the Baroness was ready.

“Please. Please. Attention. Freeze, please. Again, I shoot.”

This time the light flashed, they were all blinded and the Baroness gave out loud cries of satisfaction and insisted upon taking two more. Against mounting impatience the group was then re-formed with the Baroness replacing her husband and over-hanging Major Sweet like some primitive earthmother. The Baron had better luck with his flashlamp and all was accomplished.

“Although,” he said, “it would have been nicer to have included our cicerone, would it not?”

“Must say, he’s taking his time,” Major Sweet grumbled. “Damned odd sort of behaviour if you ask me.”

But Kenneth pointed out that Sebastian Mailer was probably keeping his aunt company in the atrium. “After all,” he said to Grant, “he handed over to you, didn’t he?”

Grant, under pressure from the Van der Veghels, now moved into the area of light and with every sign of extreme reluctance read the Mithraic passage from Simon to this most strangely assorted audience. He read rapidly and badly in an uninflected voice, but something of the character of his writing survived the treatment.

The reading continued in jerks to the end of the appropriate passage. Grant shut the book with a clap, passed it like a hot potato to the Baroness and hitched his shoulders against obligatory murmurs from his audience. These evaporated into an uneasy silence.

Sophy felt oppressed. For the first time claustrophobia threatened her. The roof seemed lower, the walls closer, the regions beyond them very much quieter as if the group had been deserted, imprisoned almost, so many fathoms deep in the ground. “For tuppence,” she thought, “I could do a bolt like Lady Braceley.”

Grant repeated his suggestion that the others might like to explore and that he himself would remain for ten minutes in the Mithraeum in case anyone preferred to rejoin him there before returning to the upper world. He reminded them that there were side openings and an end one, leading into surrounding passages, and the insula.

Kenneth Dorne said he would go up and take a look at his aunt. He seemed to be more relaxed and showed a tendency to laugh at nothing in particular. “Your reading was m-a-a-r-velous,” he said to Grant and smiled from ear to ear, “I adore your Simon.” He laughed immoderately and left by the main entrance. Major Sweet said he would take a look-see round and rejoin them above. “I have,” he threatened, “a bone to pick with Mailer. Extraordinary behavior.” He stared at Sophy. “Thinking of looking round at all?” he invited.

“I think I’ll stay put for a moment,” she said. She did not at all fancy roaming in a Mithraic gloaming with the Major.

Alleyn said he, too, would find his own way back and the Van der Veghels, who had been photographing each other against the Sacrificial altar, decided to join him, not, Sophy thought, entirely to his delight.

Major Sweet left by one of the side doors. Alleyn disappeared behind the god, enthusiastically followed by the Van der Veghels. They could be heard ejaculating in some distant region. Their voices died and there was no more sound except, Sophy fancied, the cold babble of that subterranean stream.

“Come and sit down,” Grant said.

She joined him on one of the stone benches.

“Are you feeling a bit oppressed?”

“Sort of. “

“Shall I take you up? There’s no need to stay. That lot are all right under their own steam. Say the word.”

“How kind,” Sophy primly rejoined, “but, thank you, no. I’m not all that put out. It’s only—”

“Well?”

“I’ve got a theory about walls.”

“Walls?”

“Surfaces. Any surfaces.”

“Do explain yourself.”

“You’ll be profoundly unimpressed.”

“One never knows. Try me.”

“Mightn’t surfaces — wood, stone, cloth, anything you like — have a kind of physical sensitivity we don’t know about? Something like the coating on photographic film? So that they retain impressions of happenings that have been exposed to them. And mightn’t some people have an element in their physical make-up — their chemical or electronic arrangements or whatever — that is responsive to this and aware of it.”

“As if other people were colour-blind and only they saw red?”

“That’s the idea.”

“That would dispose rather neatly of ghosts, wouldn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t be only the visual images the surfaces retained. It’d be emotions too.”

“Do you find your idea an alarming one?”

“Disturbing, rather.”

“Well — yes.”

“I wonder if it might fit in with your Simon.”

“Ah,” ejaculated Grant, “don’t remind me of that, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry,” Sophy said, taken aback by his violence.

He got up, walked away and with his back turned to her said rapidly: “All right, why don’t you say it! If I object so strongly to all this show-off why the hell do I do it? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Come on. Isn’t it!”

“If I am it’s no business of mine. And anyway I did say it. Up above.” She caught her breath. “It seems ages ago,” said Sophy. “Ages.”

“We’ve dropped through some twenty centuries, after all. And I’m sorry to have been so bloody rude.”

“Think nothing of it,” Sophy said. She looked up at the sharply lit head of Mithras. “He is not very formidable after all. Plump and placid, really, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t it odd, though, how those blank eyes seem to stare? You’d swear they had pupils. Do you suppose—”

She cried out. The god had gone. Absolute darkness had closed down upon them like a velvet shutter.

“It’s all right,” Grant said. “Don’t worry. They do it as a warning for closing time. It’ll go on again in a second.”

“Thank the Lord for that. It’s — it’s so completely black. One might be blind.”

“ ‘All dark and comfortless’?”

“That’s from Lear, isn’t it? Not exactly a reassuring quotation if I may say so.”

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

In a distant region there was a rumour of voices: distorted, flung about some remote passage. Grant’s hand closed on Sophy’s arm. The god came into being again, staring placidly at nothing.

“There you are,” Grant said. “Come on. We’ll climb back into contemporary Rome, shall we?”

“Please.”

He moved his hand up her arm and they embarked on the return journey.

Through the insula, a left turn and then straight towards the iron stairway passing a cloisteral passage out of which came the perpetual voice of water. Up the iron stairway. Through the second basilica, past Mercury, and Apollo, and then up the last flight of stone steps towards the light, and here was the little shop: quite normal and bright.

The people in charge of the postcard and holy trinket stalls, a monk and two youths, were shutting them up. They looked sharply at Grant and Sophy.

“No more,” Grant said to them. “We are the last.”

They bowed.

“There’s no hurry,” he told Sophy. “The upper basilica stays open until sunset.”

“Where will the others be?”

“Probably in the atrium.”

But the little garden was quite deserted and the basilica almost so. The last belated sightseers were hurrying away through the main entrance.

“He’s mustered them outside,” Grant said. “Look — there they are. Come on.”

And there, in the outer porch where they had originally assembled, were Mr. Mailer’s guests in a dissatisfied huddle: the Van der Veghels, the Major, Lady Braceley, Kenneth and, removed from them, Alleyn. The two sumptuous cars were drawn up in the roadway.

Grant and Alleyn simultaneously demanded of each other: “Where’s Mailer?” and then, with scarcely a pause: “Haven’t you seen him?”

But nobody, it transpired, had seen Mr. Mailer.