Mr. Mailer went on to describe briefly the enormous task of nineteenth-century excavation that had so gradually disclosed first, the earlier basilica and then, deep down beneath it, the pagan household. “Rome has risen, hereabouts, sixty feet since those times,” he ended. “Does that surprise you? It does me, every time I think of it.”
“It doesn’t me,” Major Sweet announced. “Nothing surprises me. Except human gullibility,” he added darkly. “However!”
Mr. Mailer shot him an uneasy glance. Sophy gave a little snort of suppressed amusement and caught Barnaby Grant looking at her with something like appreciation. Lady Braceley, paying no attention to what was said, let her ravaged eyes turn from one man’s face to another. The Van der Veghels, standing close together, listened intently. Kenneth Dorne, Sophy noticed, was restless and anxious-looking. He shuffled his feet and dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. And the tall man, what was his name — Allen? — stood a little apart, politely attentive and, Sophy thought, extremely observant.
“But, now,” Mr. Mailer said, “shall we begin our journey into the past?”
The woman with the postcards had sidled between the group and the entrance. She had kept her face down and it was still shadowed by her black headscarf. She muttered, almost inaudibly, “Cartoline? Posta-carda?” edging towards Sebastian Mailer. He said generally to his company: “There are better inside. Pay no attention,” and moved forward to pass the woman.
With extraordinary swiftness she pushed back her headscarf, thrust her face up at him and whispered: “Brutto! Farabutto! Traditore!” and added what seemed to be a stream of abuse. Her eyes burned. Her lips were retracted in a grin and then pursed together. “She’s going to spit in his face,” thought Sophy in alarm and so she was, but Mr. Mailer was too smart for her. He dodged and she spat after him and stood her ground with the air of a grand-opera virago. She even gave a hoarse screech of eldritch laughter. Mr. Mailer entered the basilica. His discomforted flock divided round the postcard seller and slunk after him.
“Kenneth, darling,” Lady Braceley muttered. “Honestly! Not one’s idea of a gay little trip!”
Sophy found herself between Barnaby Grant and Alleyn. “Was that lady,” Alleyn asked Grant, “put in as an extra touch of atmosphere? Does she recur, or was she a colourful accident?”
Grant said: “I don’t know anything about her. Mad, I should think. Ghastly old bag, wasn’t she?” and Sophy thought: “Yes, but he hasn’t answered the question.”
She said to Alleyn: “Would you suppose that all that carry-on, if translated into Anglo-Saxon terms, would amount to no more than a cool glance and an indrawn breath?”
Grant looked across Alleyn at her, and said with a kind of eagerness: “Oh, rather! You have to make allowances for their sense of drama.”
“Rather excessive in this instance,” she said coolly, giving, she said to herself, snub for snub. Grant moved round and said hurriedly: “I know who you are, now. I didn’t before. We met at Koster Press didn’t we?” Koster Press was the name of his publisher’s house in London.
“For a moment,” Sophy said and then: “Oh but how lovely!”
They were in the basilica.
It glowed sumptuously as if it generated its own light. It was alive with colour: “Mediterranean” red, clear pinks, blues and greens; ivory and crimson marble, tingling gold mosaic. And dominant in this concourse of colour the great vermillion that cries out in the backgrounds of Rome and Pompeii.
Sophy moved away from the group and stared with delight at this enchantment. Grant, who had been left with Alleyn, abruptly joined her.
“I’ve got to talk about this,” he muttered. “I wish to God I hadn’t.”
She looked briefly at him. “Then why do it?” said Sophy.
“You think that was an affectation. I’m sorry.”
“Really, it couldn’t matter less what I think.”
“You needn’t be so snappish.”
They stared at each other in astonishment.
“I can’t make this out,” Grant said unexpectedly. “I don’t know you,” and Sophy in a panic, stammered: “It’s nothing. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I snapped.”
“Not at all.”
“And now,” fluted Sebastian Mailer, “I hand over to my most distinguished colleague, Mr. Grant?”
Grant made Sophy an extremely stuffy little bow and moved out to face his audience.
Once he was launched he too did his stuff well and with considerable charm, which was more than could be said for Mr. Mailer. For one thing, Sophy conceded, Grant looked a lot nicer. His bony face was really rather beautifully shaped and actually had a carved, mediaeval appearance that went handsomely with its surroundings. He led them further into the glowing church. There were two or three other groups of sightseers but, compared with the traffic in most celebrated monuments, these were few.
Grant explained that even in this, the most recent of the three levels of San Tommaso, there was a great richness of time sequences. When in the twelfth century the ancient church below it was filled in, its treasures, including pieces from the pagan household underneath it, were brought up into this new basilica, so that now classical, mediaeval and Renaissance works mingled. “They’ve kept company,” Grant said, “for a long time and have grown together in the process. You can see how well they suit each other.”
“It happens on the domestic level too,” Alleyn said, “don’t you think? In houses that have belonged to the same family for many generations? There’s a sort of consonance of differences.”
“Exactly so,” Grant agreed with a quick’ look at him. “Shall we move on?”
A wave of scent announced the arrival of Lady Braceley at Alleyn’s elbow. “What a marvellous way of putting it,” she murmured. “How clever you are.”
The doeskin glove with its skeletal enclosure touched his arm. She had tipped her head on one side and was looking up at him. Sophy, watching, thought a shutter had come down over his face and indeed Alleyn suffered a wave of revulsion and pity and a recognition of despair. “I’d give a hell of a lot,” he thought, “to be shot of this lady.”
Sebastian Mailer had come up on the far side of Lady Braceley. He murmured something that Alleyn couldn’t catch. Grant was talking again. The hand was withdrawn from Alleyn’s arm and the pair turned away and moved out of sight behind the junction of two pilastres. Now, Alleyn speculated, was Mailer doing a rescue job or had he something particular and confidential to say to Lady Braceley?
Grant led his party into the centre of the nave and through the enclosed schola-cantorum, saying, Sophy thought, neither too much nor too little but everything well. She herself was caught up in wonder at the great golden bowl-shaped mosaic of the apse. Acanthus and vine twined tenderly together to enclose little groups of everyday persons going about their mediaeval business. The Cross, dominant though it was, seemed to have grown out of some pre-Christian tree. “I shall say nothing about the apse,” Grant said. “It speaks for itself.”
Mailer and Lady Braceley had reappeared. She sat down on a choir bench and whether by some accident of lighting or because she was overtaken by one of those waves of exhaustion that unexpectedly fall upon the old, she looked as if she had shrunk within her own precarious façade. Only for a moment, however.