However blasé one is, however much one has been prepared for the aerial splendors of the little town, its freshness is perennial, it rises in one like sap, it beguiles and charms as the eye turns in its astonishment to take in crags and clouds and mountains and the blue coastline. Here one could sit in a deck chair gazing out into the night and thinking about Greek flair and Roman prescience — they married here in this place; but why was it a failure at last, why did it fall apart?
Because everything does I suppose. And now after so long, here come I with my valedictory admiration, inhabitant of yet another culture which is falling apart, which is doomed to the same decline and fall, perhaps even more suddenly.… How marvelous to read a book at dinner. I had chosen that fussy but touching civil servant Pliny; his pages tell one all one wants to know and admire about Rome.
And how pleasant, too, to dawdle the length of that main street — like walking the bridge of a Zeppelin. And how astonishingly still the air is at this great height. It is what constitutes the original feature of Taormina, I think; one’s thoughts naturally turn to places like Villefranche or Cassis (as they must have been a hundred years ago); and then, quite naturally, to Capri and Paleocastrizza. The difference is not only in variety and prolixity of classical views — the whole thing has been anchored in mid-heaven, at a thousand feet, and up here the air is still and calm. The white curtains in my hotel room breathed softly in and out, like the lungs of the universe itself. There were cafes of Roman and Venetian excellence, and there were the traditional hordes of tourists perambulating up and down the long main street. Its narrowness grew on one after the sixth or seventh turn upon it.
And in the little side streets there were unforgotten corners of the real Italy — by which I mean the peasant Italy with its firmly anchored values and purity of heart. At dusk next day I walked up to have a look at the villa Lawrence occupied for three years. It was modest and quite fitting to the poems he wrote here in this pure high tower of silence which is Taormina at night. But at the first corner of the road there stood a tattered trattoria with a dirty cloth across the door to keep the flies at bay. In the street, under a faded-looking tree, stood a rickety table and two chairs. Just that and nothing more. A tin table which had been racked with smallpox and perhaps some hunter’s small shot. A slip of broom was suspended from the lintel. And here I was served a harsh black wine by a matron with a walleye and hairy brown arms. She was like Demeter herself and she talked to me quietly and simply about the wines of the island. Hers was Etna, volcanic wine, and it tasted of iron; but it was not sugary and I bought a demijohn as a present for Loftus when I should decide to take up his invitation. If I hesitated, it was for a rather obscure reason; I wanted, so to speak, to let the Carousel experience evaporate before I changed the whole key. For I knew that encountering Loftus and his life here meant that I would find myself back in the Capri of the twenties; in the world of Norman Douglas — a world very dear to me precisely because it was a trifle precious. Martine had had one foot in this world, to be sure, but what I had personally shared with her had not belonged to this aspect of our islomania. Capri had long since sunk below the horizon when Cyprus became a reality. Yet she had loved Douglas as much as I, and Compton Mackenzie as well, while the silent empty villa of Lawrence up the hill also carried the echoes of that Nepenthean period where Twilight in Italy matched South Wind.
But Taormina is so small that it was inevitable that from time to time I would bump into other members of the Carousel. I saw the Microscopes in the distance once or twice, and the American dentist waved from the April cafe as I passed. I also saw the Bishop — he had taken up a stance in order to “appreciate” a piece of architecture, while his wife sat on a stone and fanned herself with her straw hat. But that was all. There was no sign of Deeds. After two days of this delicious privacy in my little pension where I knew nobody, I visited the bookshop and bought a guide to the island, intending to spend my last few days filling in the lacunae in my knowledge. I could not leave without bracing Etna for example, or standing on the great “belvedere of all Sicily,” Enna; then Tyndarus … and so on. I thought I would rent a small car to finish off the visit in a style more reminiscent of the past than by having any truck with trains and buses. It would be interesting to see what Loftus thought.
I rang him, and was amused and pleased to recognize his characteristic drawl, and the slight slurring of the r’s which had always characterized his speech. He had a little car he could lend me, which was promising, and so I agreed to dine at his villa the following evening. In a way it was reassuring that nothing much had changed for Loftus; he had ruined a promising diplomatic career by openly living with his chauffeur, an ex-jailbird, and then, as if that were not enough, winning notoriety by writing a novel called Le Baiser in French which had a succès de scandale. Someone in the Foreign Office must have known that the word “baiser” didn’t only mean “kiss” (though it is difficult to think who) and Loftus was invited to abstract himself from decent society. This he did with good grace — he had a large private income — and retired to Taormina where he grew roses and translated the classics. He had been one of the most brilliant scholars of his time, though an incurable dilettante. About Sicily he knew all that there was to be known. But of course now he was getting on, like the rest of us, and hardly ever moved from the Villa Ariadne — a delightful old house built on a little headland over the sea, and buried in roses. He too was a relic of the Capri epoch, a silver-age man.
I hardly recognized the chauffeur lover after such a long lapse of time — he had grown fat and hairy, and spindle shanked. But he panted with pleasure like a bull terrier at meeting me again and ushered me into the car with a good deal of friendly ceremony. I was glad that I had been fetched when he started to negotiate the steep descent from the mountain to the coast where the villa was. It was a labyrinth of crisscrossing roads, with snatches of motor road to be crossed. But at last we arrived in that cool garden full of olives and oleanders and the smell of rushing water in dusty fountains — the house had been designed by water-loving Romans. And there was Loftus frail and smart as always, though a little greyer, waiting for me.
Terraces led down to the sea; there were candles already burning on a white tablecloth; wide divans with stained cretonne covers were laid out under the olives. The parrot Victor had gone to bed; his cage was covered in a green baize cloth. Smell of Turkish tobacco. “Dear boy,” said Loftus, “I can’t rise to greet you as is fitting. I had a small ski mishap.” His crutches lay beside him. The tone and temper of his conversation was reassuringly the same as ever, and I was glad to feel that now it would never change. It belonged to an epoch, it marched with the language of the eighteenth century whose artists (like Stendhal?) discovered how to raise social gossip to the level of an art. The trivia of Loftus had the same fine merit — even though he had not much at present to recount. Various film nabobs from Beverley Hills had come and gone. Then Cramp the publisher from London. There were two amusing local scandals which might lead to a knife fight. “All this is simply to situate you, dear boy. You are in Taormina now which has its own ethos and manners. It is very degenerate in comparison to the rest of Sicily which is rather straitlaced.”