‘Prego, signore.’
The arrival of Mallory’s Caesar salad shattered this interference with the truth, more properly claiming his attention and causing him to abandon his pretence of an interest in something that wasn’t there. It was a younger waiter who brought the salad, who might even be the boy – grown up a bit – whom Julia had called the
primo piatto
boy and had tried her Italian on. While Mallory heard himself wished
buon appetito
, while the oil and vinegar were placed more conveniently on the table, he considered that yes, there was a likeness, certainly of manner. It hadn’t been understood by the boy at first when Julia asked him in Italian how long he’d been a waiter, but then he’d said he had begun at Harry’s Bar only a few days ago and had been nowhere before. ‘
Subito, signore
,’ he promised now when Mallory asked for pepper, and poured more wine before he went away.
‘I didn’t know Geoffrey got up early.’ At the table that was out of sight her voice was soft, the quietness of its tone registering more clearly than what it conveyed. Her husband said he hadn’t caught this. ‘I didn’t know he got up early,’ she repeated.
‘It’s not important that he does. It doesn’t matter what time the man gets up. I only said it to explain that he and I aren’t in any way alike.’
‘I know you’re not like Geoffrey.’
‘Why were you crying?’
Again there was no answer, no indistinct murmur, no lilt in which words were lost.
‘You’re tired.’
‘Not really.’
‘I keep not hearing what you’re saying.’
‘I said I wasn’t tired.’
Mallory didn’t believe she hadn’t been heard: her husband was closer to her than he was and he’d heard the ‘Not really’ himself. The scratchy irritation nurtured malevolence unpredictably in both of them, making her not say why she had cried and causing him to lie. My God, Mallory thought, what they are wasting!
‘No one’s blaming you for being tired. No one can help being tired.’
She didn’t take that up and there was silence while, again, the surface held and Mallory finished his Caesar salad. He was the only diner on his own in the upstairs restaurant, where for a moment on his arrival he had been faintly disappointed not to be recognized. He had recognized, himself, the features of the waiter who had led him to his table; there had later been that familiarity about the younger one; nor could he help remembering, from four years ago, the easy warmth of the welcome that had suggested stirrings of recognition then. But he hadn’t been a man on his own four years ago, and naturally it was difficult for restaurant waiters when they were presented with only part of what there’d been before. And perhaps he was a little more crumpled than before; and four years was a longer lapse of time than there ever was in the past.
‘My sister married Geoffrey,’ the girl at the table behind him was saying.
‘Yes, she did. And all I’m trying to say –’
‘I know what you’re saying.’
‘It’s just I wonder if you do.’
‘You’re saying I thought it would be like Geoffrey and Ellen. That I was looking forward to what isn’t there.’
‘It’s hard to understand why anyone married Geoffrey.’
Tonight it didn’t matter what they said. Dreary Geoffrey, who rose early to read his emails or scrutinize his bank statements, who liked to lead an ordered life, was enough tonight to nourish their need to punish one another. That her sister’s marriage wasn’t much was something to throw into their exchanges, to comment on tonight because it hadn’t, perhaps, been touched upon before. ‘Now, we don’t know one single bit of that,’ Julia in her occasionally stern way might have said, and seemed to say it now. ‘Talk to me instead.’
He smiled. And across the restaurant a woman in the jolly birthday party waved at him – as if she thought he’d smiled at her, or imagined she must know him and couldn’t place him, or just felt sorry for him, alone like that in such convivial surroundings. He nodded, not letting his smile go, then looked away. For all her moments of sternness, how often on their travels had Julia speculated as wildly as he ever had himself about people they didn’t know! Lovers embracing in the Fauchon tea-rooms, the Japanese at the Uffizi, Germans in the Lido sun, or café-table chatterers anywhere. And they’d been listened to themselves, that stood to reason – he taken for a country doctor, Julia had maintained, and she an almoner or something like it. English both of them, of course, for anyone could tell, their voices confirmed as upper class when there’d been curiosity as to that.
‘
Va bene
?’ the waiter who’d been the
primo piatto
boy enquired, lifting away the Caesar-salad plate. ‘Was fine?’
‘Va bene. Va bene.’
‘Grazie, signore.’
San Giovanni in Bragora was where the Cima
Baptism
they liked was: elusive on the train that morning and ever since, the name of the church came back. Sometimes when you looked it seemed that Christ was still in the shallow water, but looking again it wasn’t so: the almost naked figure stood on dry land at the water’s edge. The church of the Frari had Bellini’s triptych; the saints he’d painted when he was over eighty were in San Giovanni Crisostomo. How could it make a difference, not going again, alone, to admire them? Or standing or not standing before the Vivarini
Annunciation
in San Giobbe and whatever there was in Madonna dell’Orto? She’d be asleep now. As early as five o’clock they were put to bed sometimes.
‘I’m not,’ the girl was saying. ‘If we’re telling the truth, I’m not.’
‘No one can expect to be happy all the time.’
‘You asked me. I’m telling you because you asked me.’
Their waiter brought them raspberries, with meringue and ice-cream. Mallory watched the confections going by and heard the murmurs of the husband.
‘Why have we ordered this?’ the girl complained when the waiter had gone.
‘You wanted it.’
‘Why did you say I should have married Geoffrey?’
‘I didn’t say –’
‘Well, whatever.’
‘Darling, you’re tired.’
‘Why did we come here?’
‘Someone told us it was good.’
‘Why did we come to Venice?’
It was his turn not to reply. Marriage was an uncalculated risk, Mallory remembered saying once. The trickiest of all undertakings, he might have called it, might even have suggested that knowing this was an insurance against the worst, a necessary awareness of what unwelcome surprises there might be. ‘At least that’s something,’ Julia had agreed, and said she hoped it was enough. ‘Love’s cruel angels at play,’ she called it when they upset one another.
The quiet at the other table went on. ‘
Grazie mille, signore
,’ Mallory heard when eventually it was broken, the bill paid then. He heard the chairs pulled back and then the couple who had quarrelled passed close to where he sat and on an impulse he looked up and spoke to them. He wondered as he did so if he had already had too much to drink, for it wasn’t like him to importune strangers. He raised a hand in a gesture of farewell, hoping they would go on. But they hesitated, and he sensed their realization that he, who so clearly was not American, was English. There was a moment of disbelief, and then acceptance. This registered in their features, and shame crept in before the stylishness that had dissipated in the course of their quarrel returned to come to their rescue. His polite goodwill in wishing them good evening as they went by was politely acknowledged, smiles and pleasantness the harmless lies in their denial of all he’d heard. ‘Its reputation’s not exaggerated,’ the husband commented with easy charm. ‘It’s good, this place.’ Her chops had been delicious, she said.
Falling in with this, Mallory asked them if it was their first time in Venice. Embarrassment was still there, but they somehow managed to make it seem like their reproval of themselves for inflicting their bickering on him.
‘Oh, very much so,’ they said together, each seeming instinctively to know how their answer should be given.
‘Not yours, I guess?’ the husband added, and Mallory shook his head. He’d been coming to Venice since first he’d been able to afford it, he said. And then he told them why he was here alone.
While he did so Mallory sensed in his voice an echo of his regret that foolishness had brought him here. He did not say it. He did not say that he was here to honour a whim that would have been forgotten as soon as it was expressed. He did not deplore a tiresome, futile journey. But he’d come close to doing so and felt ashamed in turn. His manner had dismissed the scratchiness he’d eavesdropped on as the unseemly stuff of marriage. It was more difficult to dismiss his own sly aberration, and shame still nagged.
‘I’m sorry about your wife.’ The girl’s smile was gentle. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Ah, well.’ Belittling melancholy, he shook his head.
Again the playing cards fall. Again he picks them up. She wins and then is happy, not knowing why.
The party at the corner table came to an end, its chatter louder, then subdued. A handbag left behind was rescued by a waiter. Other people came.
Tomorrow what has been lost in recollection’s collapse will be restored as she has known it: the pink and gold of Sant Giobbe’s
Annunciation
, its dove, its Virgin’s features, its little trees, its God. Tomorrow the silenced music will play in the piazza of San Marco, and tourists shuffle in the
calles
, and the boats go out to the islands. Tomorrow the cats of Venice will be fed by ladies in the dried-out parks, and there’ll be coffee on the Zattere.
‘No, no,’ he murmured when the husband said he was sorry too. ‘No, no.’
He watched the couple go, and smiled across the crowded restaurant when they reached the door. Shame isn’t bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.
Mini Modern Classics
RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
Hell Screen
KINGSLEY AMIS
Dear Illusion
DONALD BARTHELME
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
SAMUEL BECKETT
The Expelled
SAUL BELLOW
Him With His Foot in His Mouth
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Widow Ching – Pirate
PAUL BOWLES
The Delicate Prey
ITALO CALVINO
The Queen’s Necklace
ALBERT CAMUS
The Adulterous Woman
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Children on Their Birthdays
ANGELA CARTER
Bluebeard
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Killer in the Rain
EILEEN CHANG
Red Rose, White Rose
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Strange Crime of John Boulnois
JOSEPH CONRAD
Youth
ROBERT COOVER
Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady
ISAK DINESEN [KAREN BLIXEN]
Babette’s Feast
MARGARET DRABBLE
The Gifts of War
HANS FALLADA
Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Babylon Revisited
IAN FLEMING
The Living Daylights
E. M. FORSTER
The Machine Stops
SHIRLEY JACKSON
The Tooth
HENRY JAMES
The Beast in the Jungle
M. R. JAMES
Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book
JAMES JOYCE
Two Gallants
FRANZ KAFKA
In the Penal Colony
RUDYARD KIPLING
‘They’
D. H. LAWRENCE
Odour of Chrysanthemums
PRIMO LEVI
The Magic Paint
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The Colour Out of Space
MALCOLM LOWRY
Lunar Caustic
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
Bliss
CARSON MCCULLERS
Wunderkind
ROBERT MUSIL
Flypaper
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Terra Incognita
R. K. NARAYAN
A Breath of Lucifer
FRANK O’CONNOR
The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland
DOROTHY PARKER
The Sexes
LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA
Through the Wall
JEAN RHYS
La Grosse Fifi