Letters to a Sister (33 page)

Henry said to her ‘I shall be going to Amesbury early for the car,' and Emily replied, ‘I shall catch the 11.15 from Salisbury,' then went up to bed.

One cannot sleep in the midsummer dawn, the day coming inexorably on. Emily lay awake and restless and heard the noisy birds, slept awhile, and woke a little before eight. Henry's amiable mother had put a portable wireless in her room; she turned it on, and it spoke about the weather, of how a weak cold front was advancing from the east, and
would reach the western counties before evening, and how there would be scattered showers and bright intervals. Then it said, changing the subject, ‘Here is a police message. An accident occurred on the A 345 road two miles from Amesbury last night, between a motor cyclist and a pedal cyclist. The pedal cyclist was killed. Anyone who saw the accident or can give any information about it is asked to communicate with the Chief Constable, Salisbury 1212.'

Emily turned it off. She dressed and packed and went down to breakfast, where Henry's parents were eating away, but Henry had gone to Amesbury in the bus. Emily said she had to catch the 11.15 from Salisbury.

‘Why not wait for Henry to drive you up this afternoon?' said Henry's mother.

Emily said she had a luncheon engagement. Henry's mother said to herself, and later to Henry's father, ‘They've fallen out. Henry was as cross as a bear this morning.'

‘Oh I shouldn't think they had,' said Henry's father, who was reading
The Times.

‘I wonder what it was about,' said Henry's mother.

‘Well, if they have they'll soon make it up,' said Henry's father, ‘so it won't matter what it was about.' And he went on with
The Times,
while Henry's mother rather wished her sister Peggy was staying with them.

The coroner's jury at the inquest on the cyclist decided that he had been killed in a collision with the motor cycle of Peter Luckles somewhere between one and one-thirty on the night of June 20. They added a severe corollary about dangerous and intoxicated driving. Mr Luckles was committed for trial at the next Assizes, allowed bail, and taken to his parents' home to mend his broken ankle and consider his plight. A plight indeed it was. At first his father was almost too vexed with him to do anything about engaging counsel for his defence, for he felt that a spell in prison would be just what Peter needed and deserved. But his wife prevailed on him to get
their son defended, though Peter himself was too depressed to care much; he felt that he was certainly doomed, and rightly so, for he had killed a man. His friends tried to cheer him up in vain. They suggested that Henry Tarrant might be engaged in his defence. But Henry, though known to be brilliant, was also known to be drinking pretty heavily just now, and his defence of a drunken driver would make an unfavourable impression on the court, so Henry was ruled out. They got a sober, sensible barrister, who would do his best for this probably hopeless case. He asked Peter to tell him all he knew about the accident, but found that Peter did not know much. He had started from the house of his friends at Gussage All Saints at, he supposed, about half past one.

‘Surely before that,' said the lawyer. ‘According to medical evidence the cyclist had been dead for at least an hour when the doctor examined him at 2.30. The distance from Gussage All Saints is about twenty-three miles.'

‘Well, it may have been at one, I dare say. Does it matter?'

‘It might. Because, even if you started at one, you would have done the twenty-three miles in about twenty-five minutes, which is an incautious pace on a dark night along an unlit road for someone in the condition you were. It would add to the impression of reckless riding, which it's our job to lessen. I should certainly not tell the court that.'

‘But the Vespa always does a pretty good lick. It has a good headlight.'

‘I know. They dazzle everyone else on the road. Do you know the number of people—drivers, walkers and cyclists—who are killed by dazzling headlights each year? Of course they shouldn't be allowed. If they weren't, drivers would have to go slow and there'd be a damned sight fewer accidents. But anything for speed, these days.' Disgust with headlights and with speed tightened the lawyer's face. ‘So for heaven's sake don't go saying things about headlights and good licks. Good headlights are feared and hated; you'd get more sympathy if you'd only had sidelights on. All the
members of the jury who have been dazed and dazzled and endangered by headlamps are liable to see red at the thought of them. I am myself. And judges see redder than anyone. I'm afraid you may get old Arbuthnot.'

‘Afraid?'

‘Yes. His wife was crippled for life by a crash. He was driving, and the other car didn't dip its lights. He's never got over it. So the less we say about speed and headlamps the better. You must surely have left Gussage some time before one.'

‘I told you, I don't remember. My friends might.'

‘I shan't ask them. If they confirm your time, it would be bad, and one can't ask them to lie.'

‘Oh, they wouldn't mind. I'd do it for them.'

‘I dare say. But I think we'll leave them out of it, and not stress the time. You've more than enough counts against you without that. Unfortunately this man Jim Higgins was known as a very experienced cyclist. He seems to have been a nice chap, riding from Cranborne to meet his wife and children at Amesbury and take them to Stonehenge to see the Druids.'

Peter groaned. ‘Those damned bloody Druids. They still cause as many deaths as they used to five thousand years ago.'

‘Well, come, hardly five,' said the lawyer, who was rather a pedant.

‘Oh, what's it matter. The point is they've killed Jim Higgins, and they'll get me put in jug. All that ballyhoo in the middle of the night. I should never have gone near them; I might have known.'

The lawyer reflected that there were so many things that Peter might have known that they had better be getting on with them. He turned the conversation on to some of them. The case for the defence looked such stuff as dreams are made of.

Sir Barty Bun-Flanagan—a rich tycoon whose father had migrated from County Cork to Chicago as an enterprising youth, made a great deal of money from a chain of bakeries, and finally died in Surrey—had so much money that he was being progressively ruined by taxation, so he took to salting his wealth away on the Continent, buying palazzi in Venice (he would have liked a chain of them, but could only get two), a villa near Nice, a castello on Capri, and a fine hotel on the Costa Brava, so that his British income tax and sur-tax were considerably mitigated. When people asked him if he did not ever want to visit County Cork, the home of his ancestors and indeed of many of his living relatives, his answer was ‘No'. His father had instilled into him a profound contempt and distaste for the land of Eire and all its ways, and he had endeavoured to pass these on to his children, forbidding them, so long as they lived under his roof, to have anything to do with the distressful and backward country where their grandfather had as a lad made bread and buns in Skibbereen.

Sir Barty, on account of being so rich, was married to a Viscount's daughter, who was the life and soul of a women's paper, and often spoke on ‘Woman's Hour' about such matters as the problems of adolescence and how parents should treat their children. One thing she said was that they should give them a lot of liberty, as this saves trouble and friction and creates confidence. So she let Sukey go abroad with her friends whenever she liked, and Sir Barty provided her with financial contacts so that she did not lack, and the only country she might not go to was Ireland, where they might meet their relatives and pick up ideas. He did not know, though his wife
did, that Sukey and Tim had been to County Cork one summer, and visited Skibbereen and met a number of relations, some of whom were nuns and some priests and one the manager of a bakery.

So, when Sukey asked her parents if there would be any objection to her bringing Emily Hyde to the Palazzo del Vigno in July, they said that would be all right.

Sukey said to Emily, ‘When shall we go? Shall we wait till we hear what happens to poor Peter?' and Emily said, ‘All right, yes.' But when Peter was committed for trial at the Assizes, after the coroner's jury had said that he had killed the cyclist, Sukey and Emily did not wait any longer, for the Assizes which would try Peter might not sit till September....

Rose's consecutive narrative breaks off here. But the scribbled contents of a notebook marked ‘Novel Notes 1957' suggest the general direction she meant it to follow when the scene of action shifted to Venice; they also hint at the deeper themes which were in her mind.

‘Glimpses of a motiveless malignity.'

‘Stories of hauntings, of subtle spiritual influences, of the elemental powers that preceded man's coming to earth, of possession, of evil let loose in the form of a werewolf of sheer human malignity—in the conviction of mystery and horror, moving in a world only just beyond the apprehension of the physical senses.'
¹
Haunting from deserted lagoon islands, and from ruined parts of house. Continual ambush, pressing in of evil and barbarism. Sins, pushed out of consciences, relegated to the marginal darkness,
kept at bay, lay constant siege. Car accident, killed someone, never discovered. Frauds, cruelties, deceptions, malice, lies, selfishness. Purgatorial swamps.

‘We despise one another. We both know what the other is like. We couldn't live together. We should always be afraid the other was doing that kind of thing again. I couldn't live with someone who knows I did that.'

Lagoon islands. Wild primitive creatures there, swim to Venice, or come in fishing boats. People and animals besieging civilization. As in old house, partly ruined and discovered attics full of strange life.

‘Was that a footstep?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘I think it was a footstep.'

‘Just one footstep? Like Man Friday's on the sands?'

‘Oh, you can make fun. There are odd things in this house.'

‘Odd things in all houses.'

‘Some odd form of life.'

‘All forms of life are odd. Life is odd. Don't
fuss
.'

‘If it's coming closer. Laying siege. What then? Like a tide, will it reach us and drag us back with it?'

‘I shouldn't think so.'

‘If sirocco blows, you hear boom of waves breaking on Lido shore. If it gave way, sea would roll in on city, sweeping palaces and churches to destruction, as Tintoretto has pictured in Santa Maria dell' Orto.
²
Lido never more than ½ mile wide—near Pellestrina, only a hundred paces. They put up palisades, later stone walls…,'
³

On mainland stood [the cities of] Venetia: Aquileia, Altinum, Padua, and many more. Rich nobles lived there. Then came the Goths (406) and they all fled. Returned [to the mainland] after Alaric's death. But fifty years after Alaric came Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, and they fled again....
The first fugitives, blind with terror, stumbled ashore on a sand bank, crying ‘The Huns are upon us.' … Verlorensein
(sense of being lost and consequent blind panic) … The cities fell. Citizens from Altinum built on Torcello. Islands united in federation, against the common danger of the great families; some were Frankish and from the West, others Greek and from Constantinople.

The Franks in 9th century under Pépin
⁴
took the nearer islands one by one, till Venetians left Malamocco and fled to Rialto… where enemy could not reach them. Siege of Rialto. Pépin's ships grounded in sand; he had to give up attempt, and retire to Ravenna. Rialto was fortified, and became seat of Government. It, and islands round it, were beginning of modern Venice. Buildings, churches, houses, begun. St Mark taken for patron saint, as he had once been shipwrecked on shore of Rialto. Devotion to him grew. His body was in Alexandria. Two Venetian merchants stole it (about 828. See mosaic of C.13 on façade of Basilica). Taken to ducal palace till a church could be built for it.

Venice of C.9.
Currents and rivers not yet all controlled by stone-faced canals. Long stretches of mud, on which tide threw up seaweed. Piles had to be driven in, side by side, forming a surface. Buildings on them still stand. St Mark's was roofed with thatch.

… Ebb and flow of tides twice a day. At high tide lagoon surface is water, at low tide mudbank, cut by innumerable channels. Sea sweeps impetuously through Lido port, with Atlantic
[sic],
Mediterranean and Adriatic at its back. Spreads through channels in mudbanks, till they brim over and flood
whole lagoon. Tide flows on past Venice and Murano to Campalto, Mestre, Fusina, on mainland. Laguna Viva and Laguna Morta. Sea-lavender spreads shimmering veil of blue. Boats have to keep to channels, even at high tide. Five main waterways, defined by
pali
⁵
along their margins.
⁶

A few sand ridges above surface of lagoon….
Venice will disappear into sand and water….

Great tidal wave in Adriatic submerges islands; their wreckage swept into Venice—boats full of lunatics; wooden buildings, people, animals, trees, crops, flung onto Venice. Adriatic sweeps into the lagoon….

What animals swim in canals? Rats, cats, dogs, ducks, wolves, fishes, crabs, sea creatures during flood; pigeons, one with dry twig in beak, perched on Campanile. Lower storeys of houses, palazzi, shops submerged. Children drowned, some ride dolphins.
‘Simo, Simo.'
⁷
Monkeys…

Campanile sticks up, and the domes and houses. All the debris of the islands flung into Piazza. Piers, bridges, calles, campos, all submerged. Piles of wrecked gondolas in the Bacino. Fragments of Austrian cannons. Sea slowly sinks, inch by inch.