His roving, loving eye at last looked downwards. Moored to the blue pali, which looked curiously foreshortened from above, was a gondola. The gondoliers, in their white ducks and blue sashes, were asleep: one curled up on the poop, the other stretched out in the hold: each was using his curved arm as a pillow. Whose gondola could it be? Why, it was his—his gondola, with Luigi and Emilio in it. But why were they there, why hadn’t they gone home to bed?
A solution occurred to rum. If they had taken Annette to the hotel, as they must have, probably accompanied by some cavalier—Annette’s young men always accepted a lift—she might have sent them back to fetch her father. She would have looked for him, no doubt, before she left. But would she? Assuming she had remembered him at all, would she not have concluded that he had left the party earlier, with her mother, and dismissed the gondola when she reached the hotel? Or could it be that the party wasn’t really over and she was still somewhere about?
He stole downstairs into the lower sala. All was in darkness there, but he sensed its disarray—the debris of the party without the party spirit. His flesh creeping as if from contact with something dirty, he returned to the upper sala, and on an impulse shouted down the palace wall, as loudly as any Venetian could have:
‘Luigi!’
When he had repeated it a few times there was a movement in the boat, and with sighs of escaping sleep, almost as loud as steam, the gondoliers rose to their feet and looked incredulously upwards.
‘Have you seen the signorina?’ he shouted in Italian.
‘Nossignore.’
‘Didn’t you take her home?’
‘Nossignore.’
‘How did she go home then?’
‘She must have gone on foot.’
She might have done, but was it likely? Telling the gondoliers to wait—for waiting, even more than rowing, was their métier—he tried to work it out. She might have thought it fun to walk, but would she have forgotten the gondola? Except where her boy-friends were concerned, Annette wasn’t inconsiderate. It would have been very inconsiderate to leave Emilio and Luigi out all night.
His musing steps had brought him back to the encampment. Unwillingly he re-entered its precincts. How alien it was. Like something conjured up by an enchanter—purposeless, yet with a potent personality of its own, and not a pleasant one: a personality that recalled the lawless deeds of desert warfare. He was careful not to brush against the muslin fabrics. Each tent had its flap ajar—all the birds had flown. But no, one tent was shut. As though by compulsion he approached it. It was shut, and there were two other odd things about it. The tent was laced as tightly as a shoe, but the scarlet bows were tied on the outside, not the inside; and its pennon had been torn off, torn roughly off, for where the join had been a dark rent showed, and if he peeped through it——
He didn’t peep but stood at gaze obsessed more deeply every moment, by a sense of momentousness that was totally devoid of meaning. If, as he felt it might, the secret, the solution, lay inside the tent——
It did lie inside, sprawled over the two chairs, but he would not let himself believe, and here the darkness helped him; for it wasn’t growing lighter with the opening day, it was going back to night. Needing air and a moment to confirm his unbelief he staggered to the window, the one that overlooked the garden, and there he saw the massy thundercloud piled high against the light and heard without heeding it the rumble of the storm that was to end the heat-wave. The lightning flashed and flashed again; the mirrors on the walls reflected it; a sudden gust blew in—a solid wall of wind that struck the tents and bent them all one way, like spectres fleeing. A flash lit up the whole length of the sala. He could not shirk his duty any longer, his duty as a man and as a father. Something might still be done to help, to reanimate, to bring back—— But nothing could be done; around the darkening neck the scarlet fork-tailed pennon had been tied too tight. Another flash told him no more than he knew already: but the next lit up the legend on the noose. Two words were missing, hidden by the strangler’s knot, but the operative word was there, the last one, and his memory supplied the rest: Per far l’amore, to make love.
INTERFERENCE
After his tenants had left, Cyril didn’t try to replace them: let their rooms stand empty for a while, he thought.
They had never been unoccupied before, or not for long, since Cyril bought the house twelve years ago. Then the Gooches had them, the couple who kept house for him; it was only when they left to better themselves that the rooms fell vacant. Cyril couldn’t afford another couple; the ministrations of the daily woman, helped out occasionally by the gardener, Mr. Snow, who had his own flat at the top of the house, must suffice his needs. But the housing shortage pricked Cyril’s conscience; the empty rooms, that echoed to his tread, were to his spirit like a cold hot-water bottle on his flesh; they chilled it. Hence the tenants, who had no service obligations and who paid Cyril instead of being paid by him.
Five rooms they had, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a sitting-room and a kitchen. Awkwardly placed, they didn’t constitute a flat or a maisonette or any sort of dwelling you could give a name to. The kitchen and the sitting-room were self-contained and had their own entrance, a green door giving on the garden, invisible from Cyril’s part of the house. One went downstairs to them, as if to a basement, but it wasn’t really a basement: their windows looked out on the garden, not on an area wall, for the house, being perched on a steep slope, had an extra storey on the garden side, making four in all.
What a strange house it was. Built on to at different times, it had no plan or method. Few of the eighteen rooms were on the same floor-level as the others; a step up or a step down led to them. The architects, it must be admitted, hadn’t wasted any space on passages or landings; door followed door with a suddenness that confused strangers. In the days when Cyril had visitors to stay they often lost their way—indeed it was some time before Cyril could find his. Some of the rooms were roughly pentagonal in shape, with the doorway in the short fifth walclass="underline" should the door happen to be open, you got an oblique view of the room—you took it by surprise—walls meeting, pieces of furniture sidling up to each other—all most irregular.
The tenants’ bedrooms and bathrooms were also self-contained, behind a door that shut them off from Cyril’s domain. But between them and the sitting-room was a tract of common ground—a section of the staircase that, winding its way up from below, made a brief halt outside the tenants’ door. Only eight steps impaired their privacy, but sometimes Cyril met the Trimbles on them. ‘Unlucky to cross on the stairs,’ he would say gaily, and it always seemed to amuse them.
Mr. Snow hadn’t been in favour of letting the rooms off. He could look after the house perfectly well, he said, when Cyril was away. Tenants—well, you never knew who they were, or what they might be up to.
As far as the Trimbles were concerned, Mr. Snow turned out to be right. Cyril did know something about them, of course. They were Midlanders who had come south from Birmingham and bought a tobacconists’ and newsagents’ business in the large town near which Cyril lived: they had been in lodgings till they answered his advertisement. Others had answered it too, there had been quite a number of applicants for Cyril’s five rooms. But they all had something against them—children, dogs, unreasonable requirements—whereas the Trimbles had nothing against them. They were a sober, serious couple who minded their own business and gave no trouble: Mr. Snow admitted that. He even made friends with them, came down from his eyrie to sit with them, and accompanied them to the village local, where, so report said, they were making headway in the (for a foreigner) never easy task of making friends.