‘No, thanks,’ I said. Another advertisement had caught my eye. It said, fall fair, 7th Nov., 2.00 to 5.00, and underneath:
Museo Nazionale, Palazzo Barberini, Tuesday Nov. 7th. Bring the kids. Home-baked Goodies; Ready-wear Rack; Games; Tombola; Genuine Auction.
A chorus of loud cries, rending the scarlet plush baroque ambience of the Greco and causing the antico oil paintings to tremble on the silk damask walls heralded the arrival of Di’s current party on a wave of Patou and Madame Rochas. I gave Di her
Daily American
and lit out.
Gladioli and carnations and roses were massed at the foot of the Spanish Steps. I walked there behind two soldiers with black tricorn hats and broad red stripes on their trousers; their tailcoats beat in rhythm like blackbirds all the way past the fountain and up the first flight of steps. A group of Indians with a guitar was sitting on the steps just above, strumming and talking with a man in a brown woollen pullover who was accompanying on comb and tissue.
It was Johnson Johnson. He got up as I stepped around the pendants and said, ‘Well, Christ, at last. I take it you’ve left Di behind you?’
He was jacketless and his trousers were bagged. The bifocal glasses glittered under a lot of black hair. I said, ‘She’s at the Caffe Greco,’ and moved my skirt away from the guitarist’s expert fingering. I added, ‘Waiting for you.’
‘Hardly,’ said Johnson. He jerked his head towards the big yellow hotel at the top of the steps. ‘I’m at the Hassler. I saw you both pass from the roof terrace. If you don’t believe me, come and have lunch with me.’
‘Instead of Di?’ I looked at him. ‘Hardly,’ I added.
‘Instead of Charles,’ said Johnson politely.
That is the great thing about Rome. Everyone knows everyone else’s business.
I am not in want, but I don’t lunch every day at the Hassler, either. Among the other reasons why I accepted Johnson’s invitation was the conviction that anyone who could stand up to Maurice’s twin-urn burials of his friends’ reputations could stand up to a mad portrait painter with an eye to the main chance like Johnson. Ah, well. Ah bleeding well, Russell.
The Hassler is built on the Pincio Hill. Through the plate-glass walls of the roof restaurant you can see all of Rome and her hills and monuments and bits of the Tiber. You can also see, as Johnson reported, the Piazza di Spagna and the steps. I sat at a window table with Johnson and had an amber antiseptic negroni with lemon and ice balls, and watched the corner into the Via Condotti to see if Di would come out and where she was lunching. Johnson said, ‘You don’t think he’s in Naples?’
I said, ‘Do you live here? Or are you living with Maurice?’ Monogrammed napkins had appeared: iced water, rolls and butter in ice. The headwaiter drifted around us in his grey jacket like a shadow, smiling when the bifocals glittered.
‘I stay with Maurice for the gossip.’ Johnson said. ‘I come to Rome for the action. If you want to know where he is, I can find out for you. I have a boat at Naples, with radio telephone.’
‘The
Dolly,’
I said. The lenses, dazzling into my eyes, reflected the yellow-fringed swags of the pavilion. I said, ‘Did Maurice send him to Naples?’
‘Maurice,’ said Johnson, ‘is a legal escape clause to himself, as you will recognize. All I have said is that if you want to speak to Charles, I can arrange it.’
I said, ‘I’m not interested in where he is now. I only want to know where he wants to be.’
There was a pause. ‘Married to you, I imagine,’ said Johnson.
The dining-room filled. Roman matrons sat facing each other, bouffant head to perfect bouffant head, the straight cashmere backs rippled with corseting. The businessmen. American, German, Italian, drank and discussed slipped discs and smoking and hotels they had stayed in at Frankfurt. Johnson said, ‘People with good taste don’t change overnight.’
‘You think not?’ I said. I thought of Maurice and all his awestruck encomium of Johnson and his cosmopolitan living. I said prosaically, ‘Then why should Charles suddenly want to marry me?’
I waited for him to flunk it, or bish it, or paper it over. Instead he thought, and then said, ‘To protect you?’
I stared at him. They were serving us with brochettes of lamb, slipped off the charcuterie wire, with tossed salad glistening beside them. A flagon of Antinori, Chianti classico 1966, had arrived instead of champagne. It was all quite different from what I had expected. I said, ‘It was you who said there was no need to go to the police. We’ve done nothing wrong, except hide the fact that we were in the zoo. We didn’t see the man die.’
‘But,’ said Johnson, ‘you know two things the police haven’t discovered. You know who was with the dead man. And you know why he died. You know what was in Lord Digham’s camera.’
‘So do you,’ I said. ‘So do Jacko and Innes and Diana and the couture house and Maurice, for all I know, as well as poor Charles himself. If I need protection, then so do we all. How shall we pair off?’ I added.
‘Morally, genetically or aesthetically?’ Johnson inquired. The sweet trolley stood to one side, awaiting us: I could see fresh strawberries and a deep bowl of cream; gooseberry tart, pears in brandy and gâteau. The waiter replenished my wine. Johnson said, ‘Who do you imagine killed that man in the loo? Mila Schön or Carlo Palazzi in person? The pirating of a season’s fashions can make the fortune of a wholesale house and bankrupt a couturier. Where big money is involved, big operators are hired. The two men you saw together in the Villa Borghese might even have been rivals. There was a struggle for the film in the toletta, and the first man had his head blown off.’ He broke off. ‘I’m sure he had an obituary.’
He had several. I recited the most recent one, rapidly:
‘Just as you were, you will always be
Treasured forever in memory
Death came and gently kissed your brow
God has another angel now.’
‘Mr Johnson—’
‘Johnson,’ he corrected me. ‘It’s confusing, I know, but my Christian name and surname are the same.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m Ruth. And it would be nice if you didn’t keep calling Charles Lord Digham. But if they were rivals, and not meeting each other, why did the first man have to go into the loo. I mean—’
‘There is a time for everything, and that wasn’t it,’ said Johnson. ‘Yes. Well, my guess is that he knew someone else had his eye on the camera, and he was looking for a quiet place to wind up and take out the film. He could hardly do that while you were spraying him with hoses in the rhinoceros compound or whatever. Then if he was attacked, all he stood to lose was the empty camera.’ He finished partitioning his brochettes through the lower half of his bifocals and inspected me through the upper. ‘You still don’t want to go to the police?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘They might ask how your camera and Charles’s got mixed up in the first place.’
I went on spearing cucumber because I prefer not to show when I have been shocked. I said, ‘Charles is around the Dome all the time. He was there before his Villa Borghese session. I suppose he picked up the wrong camera.’
‘The police,’ said Johnson prosaically, ‘might think you gave him the wrong camera. It certainly left his lying where anyone could get at it.’
‘Yes . . .’ I said slowly. ‘But that would argue that
three
people were after Charles’s film. Do three lots of people really want to know whether backless dresses are going to be in again this year?’
‘Or your two men from the Villa Borghese were really together, and one of them was killed and the film stolen by a different party?’ said Johnson. ‘Or no. That won’t wash. Unless he developed the film from your camera, the Villa Borghese survivor wouldn’t have known it was the wrong one. Assuming your Zeiss had no identifying mark on it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It hadn’t.’ I gazed at the sweet tray. ‘You know, you have a lot in common with Maurice.’
‘Charm?’ said Johnson.
‘Gâteau, I think. Charm, of course. And a wholly misdirected talent for mischief. If I wanted to pinch all Charles’s pictures, I should only have to take prints from his negatives. He develops half of them in the Dome while I’m working, and I could always take a contact print while he’s having a coffee. The same applies to Jacko and Innes. They come in and out. They’ve seen his stuff lying around. If any of us had pinched his pictures, we shouldn’t want Charles’s camera lying around in the Dome. We’d want Charles to take it, and pray that someone pinches it from him. So you see,’ I said over the gâteau, ‘we may be rather out of favour among the criminal classes, but there isn’t a police case against us.’
Johnson had chosen gooseberries. ‘But you don’t want Charles or the Trust on the front page of the
News of the World,’
he said thoughtfully, and arranged a passable sneer on his features. ‘I am a well-known sexual deviationist. Pander to my aberrations or I shall tell all the media.’
‘Well, naturally,’ I said. ‘We all thought of that.’
‘And?’ said Johnson. He seemed to be enjoying the gooseberries.
‘And we decided all you wanted was an introduction to Maurice,’ I said.
‘Money isn’t everything,’ Johnson said. ‘And Charles is in Naples.’
I felt very cool, and very spiteful and extremely self-possessed. Or it may have been the Chianti. ‘And where were
you,’
I said, ‘when all the fun and games were going on in the toletta?’
‘Waiting in the restaurant piazza,’ Johnson said, ‘for Charles to come back for your basket. I followed you both to the zoo. But I didn’t buy a balloon. You’ve spilled your cream . . . Ruth?’
I had. But the spot on my hand wasn’t cream: it was a tear. I put my fork down and sat looking at it and daring another to fall. Johnson made a little movement, and I felt the plates being taken away and a tray of coffee and colourless liqueurs arriving in their place.
‘I shall pour,’ Johnson said, and pushed a cup under my nose. ‘Black coffee and Sambucca and good intentions. I do some things for money, but I do other things from love. For example: You have never asked me what it feels like to paint the Supreme Pontiff, and indeed in one way it is like painting any other portrait. Except that I am summoned to each sitting by a phone call from the Maestro di Camera and admitted at eight in the morning through the Bronze Doors of the Vatican, inside which is my room, with easel and table and Pontifical chair. And once there, I am alone with my sitter, who talks a great deal, but not in English.’
He smiled suddenly. ‘Does it sound alarming? But then, the element of risk is what gives savour to dull professions like painting and astronomy. Are you frightened, when you go into the Dome at night, and put off all the lights, and shut the door at the top of the stairs?’
‘No,’ I said. And it was true. You shut the door, and you put up the bench bar across it and then touch the dimmer so that all the lights sink low. If you work in the autumn it is cold, because hot air distorts, and heating is never allowed in the cupola. Above you is the high aluminium dome in silvery orange-leaf sections, and you pull down the long spring switch which hangs from the rim of it and press the button and allow the spring to fly up as the loud drone of the retracting section begins. It opens ladderlike and very slowly from the outer rim inward, and reveals bit by bit the night sky, and the cold. You put the lights off and climb the pair of gliding steel steps and look at your sky and find your constellations and climb down again and then press and hold the switch by the door. Above your head the Dome begins to revolve, slowly and groaningly, and the open sector sweeps the night sky until there is your star cluster. You stop the cupola. And then you uncap your lenses and begin to set the declination and advancement of your telescope, and it is quiet.
‘You observe alone,’ Johnson said.
I drank my coffee. The Sambucca had three coffee beans floating in it. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Some find it boring and like to work in pairs, one observing and one taking notes. Here we do from six to ten exposures in a night, depending on when our stars set. Then the negatives are sent to the Trust and the findings computed. That is how you evaluate what you are doing. Back at the Trust, they’ll be reducing material from all their protégés, and comparing the results with other researchers. It’s what gives our work here its significance.’
‘According to Innes,’ Johnson said, ‘you and Jacko don’t believe your work
has
any significance.’
He was looking at me over the top of his glasses. I said, ‘That’s because Innes doesn’t know much about people. I don’t suppose you run on much about the significance of art, for God’s sake, either. You take it as read, and run about making up . . . obituary notices.’
‘You’ve known Charles a long time?’ Johnson said.
I said, ‘Yes. He was engaged to someone else. She was furious.’ I paused, and then said, ‘His parents want us to marry.’
‘I should have guessed that,’ Johnson said.
There was another pause. No one moved or spoke around us. It was only when I turned my head that I realized we were alone in the restaurant. All the tables but ours had been cleared. But no one hovered and no one even looked near us. Such is the power of money. I said, ‘Thank you for the lunch,’ and there was another silence.
Then Johnson said, ‘Whatever you may think, I am not motivated by mischief. I think you know something you haven’t told Charles, and I think this could be dangerous for both Charles and you. Will you trust me?’
‘If I do nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing will happen.’
The glasses watched me. ‘Is that a scientist speaking?’ said Johnson.
I said, ‘There was a goldfish inside the balloon.’
He said quickly, ‘Which balloon? The one you had?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It burst. There was something inside. I thought it was the maker and price. It said,
Fall Fair: five zero, zero.’
‘And?’ said Johnson. He was sitting very still.
‘You’ll need a
Daily American,’
I said. ‘But I saw it in Greco’s. An advertisement for a Fall Fair. And the hours are from two p.m. to five, zero, zero. Today.’