Part 25 (2/2)

Mr Riversmith said he had arranged to return to Pennsylvania with Aimee in four days' time. He wondered if he'd been hasty. He wondered if his niece should be taken back to the hospital for observation.

'The journey will not harm your niece, signore.'

'All day she seemed fine.'

'I can a.s.sure you, signore, she has recovered more of herself than we once had hopes of in the hospital. What remains must be left to pa.s.sing time. And perhaps a little to good fortune. Do not be melancholy, signore.'

Naturally, in all honesty, Dr Innocenti had had to say that the journey would not be harmful. It was not the journey we had to dwell upon but the destination. And this was not something Dr Innocenti could presume to mention. There were further rea.s.surances, but clearly Mr Riversmith remained far from relieved. No sooner had the conversation with Dr Innocenti come to an end than he made a call to his wife in Virginsville. I guessed he would, and again picked up the receiver in my room. She was not surprised, the woman said. In a case like this nothing could be expected to be straightforward. Her voice was hoa.r.s.e, deep as a man's, and because I'd heard it I at last pictured without difficulty the woman to whom it belonged: a skinny, weather-beaten face, myopic eyes beneath a lank fringe, eyebrows left unplucked.

'What you need's a good stiff drink,' I said a little later, when Mr Riversmith appeared in the salotto salotto. He looked shaken. For all I knew, she'd given him gip after I'd put the receiver down. For all I knew, this weather-beaten woman blamed him for the mess they'd got into having to give a home to a child who by the sound of things was as nutty as a fruitcake. Added to which, the heat in Siena might well have adversely affected the poor man's jet-lag. I poured him some whisky, since whisky's best for shock.

10.

After I'd had my bath that evening I happened to catch a glimpse of myself, as yet unclothed, in my long bedroom mirror. My skin was still mottled from the warm water, the wounds of 5 May healed into vivid scars. A dark splotch of stomach hair emphasized the fles.h.i.+ness that was everywhere repeated in cheeks and thighs, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, arms and shoulders. To tell you the truth, I think it suits me particularly well in my middle age. I'd feel uneasy scrawny.

I chose that evening a yellow and jade outfit, a pattern of ferns on a pale, cool ground. I added jewellery simple gold discs as earrings, necklace to match, rings and a bangle. Not hurrying, I made my face up, and applied fresh varnish to my fingernails. My shoes, high-heeled and strapped, matched the jade of my dress.

'You're putting us to shame tonight,' the General remarked as we sat to dinner on the terrace, and you could see that Otmar was impressed as well. But Mr Riversmith reacted in no way whatsoever. All during dinner you could tell that he was worried about the child.

'You mustn't be,' I said when we were alone. A local man who hired machines for ploughing had arrived, and the General and Otmar had gone to talk to him at the back of the house.

'She's suffering from a form of amnesia,' Mr Riversmith said. 'She draws the pictures and then forgets she's done them. She's forgotten a whole day.'

'We're lucky to have Dr Innocenti here.'

'Why did the German say he'd drawn the pictures?'

'I suppose because there must be an explanation for the pictures' existence. It would be worrying for Aimee otherwise.'

'It isn't true. It causes a confusion.'

Because of his distress he was as forthcoming as he'd been when he'd felt guilty about his sister. Distress brings talk with it. I've noticed that. In fairness you couldn't have called him ambitious now.

'Look at it this way, Mr Riversmith: an event such as we've shared draws people together. It could be that survivors understand one another.'

His dark brows came closer together, his lips pursed, then tightened and then relaxed. I watched him thinking about what I'd said. He neither nodded nor shook his head, and it was then that it occurred to me he bore a very faint resemblance to Joseph Cotten. I didn't remark on it, but made the point that all four of us would not, ordinarily, have discovered a common ground.

'D'you happen to know if they've given up on the case?' he asked, not responding to what I'd said.

I didn't know the answer to this question. Since the detectives had ceased to come to my house we'd been a little out of touch with that side of things. The last I'd heard was that they considered their best hope to be the establis.h.i.+ng of a connection between the events of 5 May and some other outrage, even one that hadn't yet occurred. I repeated all that, and Mr Riversmith drily observed: 'As detective-work goes, I guess that's hardly rea.s.suring.'

I sipped my drink, not saying anything. It was Joseph Cotten's style, rather than a resemblance. A pipe would not have seemed amiss, clenched between his strong-seeming teeth. You didn't often see those teeth because he so rarely smiled. Increasingly that seemed a pity.

'There are mysteries in this world,' I said as lightly as I could. 'There are mysteries that are beyond the realm of detectives.'

He didn't deny that, but he didn't agree either. If he'd had a pipe he would have relit it now. He would have pressed the tobacco into the cherrywood bowl and drawn on it to make it glow again. I was sorry he was troubled, even though it made it easier to converse with him. Around us the fireflies were beginning.

'I've been trying to get to know you, Mr Riversmith.'

Perhaps it was a trick of the twilight but for a moment I thought I saw his face crinkling, and the bright flash of his healthy teeth. I tapped out a cigarette from a packet of MS and held the packet toward him. He hadn't smoked so far and he didn't now. I asked him if he minded the smell of a cigarette.

'Go right ahead.'

'You brought up mysteries, Mr Riversmith.' I went on to tell him about the feeling I continued to experience of a story developing around us, of small, daily details apparently imbued with a significance that was as yet mysterious. I spoke of pieces of a jigsaw jumbled together on a table, hoping to make him see that higgledy-piggledy ma.s.s of jagged shapes.

'I don't entirely grasp this,' he said.

'Survival's a complicated business.'

From the back of the house the voice of the Italian with the motorized ploughs came to us, a halting line or two of broken English, and then the General's reply. As soon as possible, the old man urged. It would do no harm to turn the earth over several times, now and in the autumn and the spring. The Italian said there would have to be a water line, a trench dug for a pipe from the well. There would be enough stone in the ruined stables, no need to have more cut. Dates were mentioned, argued about, and then agreed.

'It's been a long day.'

As he spoke, Mr Riversmith stood up. I begged him, just for a moment longer, to remain. I poured a little wine into his gla.s.s, and a little into mine. Because of his American background, I told him how I'd found myself in Idaho. I mentioned my childhood fascination with the Old West, first encountered in the Gaiety Cinema. I even mentioned Claire Trevor and Marlene Dietrich.

'Idaho is hardly the Wild West.'

'I was misled. I was no more than a foolish child.'

I told him how Ernie Chubbs had been going to Idaho in search of orders for sanitary-ware and had taken me with him on expenses; I told him how he'd taken me with him to Africa and then had disappeared. In the Cafe Rose they said they expected I'd met Mrs Chubbs, and it was clear what they were hinting at. 'A healthy woman,' they used to say. 'Chubbs's wife was always healthy.' All I knew myself was that every time Ernie Chubbs referred to his wife he had to cough.

I described Ernie Chubbs because it was relevant, his gla.s.ses, and tidy black hair kept down with scented oil. I explained that he didn't travel with the sanitary-ware itself, just brochures full of photographs. In order to ill.u.s.trate a point, I was obliged to refer again to the Cafe Rose, explaining that he took an order there but when the thing arrived eight or so months later it had a crack in it. 'The place was unfortunate in that respect. ”I Speak Your Weight”, a weighing-machine said in the general toilet, but when you put your coin in nothing happened. Chubbs sold them that too. He used to be in weighing-machines.'

'I see.'

There was another line Chubbs had, what he called the 'joke flush'. When you pulled the chain, a voice called out, 'Ha! ha!' You kept pulling it and it kept saying, 'Ha! ha!' What was meant to happen was you'd give up in desperation; then you'd open the door to go out and the thing would flush on its own. But what actually happened was that when people installed the joke flush the voice said, 'Ha! ha!' and they couldn't make it stop, and the flush didn't work no matter what they did. Another thing was, when the light was turned on in the toilet, music was meant to play but it hardly ever did.

'In the end the defective goods people caught up with Ernie Chubbs.'

'I really think I must get along to bed now.'

Women were Ernie Chubbs's weakness: he was Aries on the cusp with Taurus, a very mixed-up region for a man of his sensual disposition. Before my time he took someone else round with him on expenses, but when she wanted to marry him he couldn't afford to because of the alimony. It was then that Mrs Chubbs conveniently turned up her toes, and after that the other lady wouldn't touch him with a pole. Maybe she got scared, I wouldn't know. I was eighteen years old when I first met Ernie Chubbs, green as a pea. 'All very different from your ants,' I said.

The engine of a motor-car started. 'Buonanotte!' the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.

Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my t.i.tles in the gla.s.s-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.

'You're an author, Mrs Delahunty?'

I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Cafe Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew 'The Lady of Shalott' by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' I said: 'You might like to call me Emily.'

There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he'd said he didn't grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was rea.s.surance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn't. Clever men probably always need drawing out.

'You're Capricorn,' I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. 'The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.'

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