Eustace and Hilda (79 page)

He was to meet Jasper in the Wideawake Bar of the Splendide and Royal Hotel at twelve o'clock. Jasper was giving luncheon to some people there. He'd invited Eustace too, but Eustace had regretfully declined, for he was to lunch with Lady Nelly at the Excelsior on the Lido. She went there every morning now, with the Morecambes, and bathed and sun-bathed. She seemed to have given the sea a lesson in deportment; it crept to her feet, bowed, and altogether behaved as if it was indoors. She didn't seem to mind if Eustace stayed until the afternoon or didn't go at all. “You must get on with your book,” she said.

Lord Morecambe, running down the staircase with a sheaf of tennis racquets under his arm, used to say the same. And, oddly enough, Eustace had got on with his book, and much faster since the night of the Redentore. The ritual bath had reconciled him to those aspects of the story which conflicted with his wishes for his characters and their wishes for themselves. This objectivity of view visited him when he took up his pen, and deserted him as soon as he put it down; in the moment of creation, his creatures lived in a world more real than his.

There lay the exercise book, pegged down (though in so little danger of running away) by the present from Anchorstone, which Dick had thrown to him with such a careless gesture. A font! By association of ideas, the warmth of his feeling for Barbara and his pride in her achievement sent him hot-foot to the grey-green writing-table. Grey-green: so much more attractive on wood than on the human countenance. His heroine was now safely married to her lord, and of course, in the course of nature, they must have a baby. Several babies, in fact, for one of the ideas of the book was to show the younger generation growing up to a life that fulfilled their natures. He had meant to skip the part about them coming into the world; but why should he? Only his heroine didn't seem to want to have a child, certainly not at the big house in Little Athens. The more his thoughts tried to surround her with the comforts required by her condition and made possible by her estate the more she eluded him, and he saw instead his aunt's bedroom at Cambo, and Barbara, monstrously swollen, cracking jokes with Dr. Speedwell, while Jimmy, outside the door, walked up and down with strides as long as the little landing allowed, and in another room Minney and an unknown woman in white were boiling kettles and rolling up bandages. Only Barbara's trills and screams, and Jimmy's agitated footfalls, broke the expectant silence.

Baffled, Eustace replaced the paper-weight and went to have his bath. The other two letters lay tantalisingly unopened, ripening, maturing, awaiting the moment of their birth-pangs. He would put them in his pocket for later in the day.

“Well,” said Jasper Bentwich, “I'd about given you up; but as you're here, you'd better have a drink, I suppose.” From its bosky setting his eye-glass flashed at Eustace. “You look rather hot; what have you been doing?”

In the corner the electric fan, with a stealthy motion, wove its arc from side to side.

“Running,” said Eustace, whom breathlessness made brief.

“You needn't tell me that; but what were you doing before you started running?”

“I was buying some watches.”

“Some watches! How many?”

“Well, two.”

Jasper's tongue clicked.

“My dear fellow, you can't buy watches in Venice. You must be mad. And why two? Yes, Tonino, a dry Martini for Signor Cherrington, and I'll have some orangeade. Why two watches?”

“They were presents,” Eustace explained.

“For two twenty-first birthdays?”

“Oh no, just ordinary presents.”

“I never heard of such a thing. You know where Dante put spendthrifts on the slopes of the hill of Purgatory? I won't trouble you with the Italian, but you remember the reference, of course—'You have spread too wide the wings of spending'?”

“No,” faltered Eustace. Unversed in Dante, ignorant of Italian, detected in extravagance, trebly condemned, he could not look Jasper in the eye.

“Do you distribute watches like collar-studs? And are you sure they go?”

“They were going when I left the shop,” said Eustace.

“Not very well, if they told you it was twelve o'clock.”

Eustace blushed and took up his glass.

“Here's to the book,” said Jasper. “How's it going?”

“Oh, it's getting on.”

Jasper heaved an impatient sigh.

“You needn't keep that up with me.”

“But it
is
getting on,” cried Eustace.

“My dear Eustace, we all appreciate your loyalty to Nelly, but nobody believes you are writing a book. Why, only yesterday Laura Loredan said to me, ‘Quelle sottise de notre chère Nelly d'essayer de nous faire croire que le petit Cherrington écrit un livre.'”

“Oh!” said Eustace, the ground slipping under his feet. He
was
sailing under false colours, then; but how different from those he had imagined. “Do they think I'm an impostor?”

“No, but neither do they think that Laura's friend, Nino Buoncampagno, is a champion hurdler, or whatever she says he is. I don't suppose he's ever seen a hurdle.”

“You wouldn't come to Venice to practise hurdling,” Eustace said.

“And you might to write a book? I agree yours is a more plausible profession. But you needn't expect us to take it seriously. I'm sure Nelly doesn't.”

“She keeps on asking me about the book,” muttered Eustace.

“Laura often asks Nino his latest time for the hundred metres.”

Eustace was silent. Then he said, “I was going to show her what I'd written.”

“Then you really are writing something?”

Eustace no longer expected to be believed whatever he said.

“Yes.”

Jasper's eye-glass fell out. He stretched himself irritably in the round-backed wooden chair, twitched his shoulders and gave an angry sigh.

“You don't keep to the rules.
What
are you writing, may I ask?”

“Well, a long short story.”

Jasper's face brightened.

“Hopeless, my dear fellow. No publisher and no magazine editor will look at it.” His brow darkened again. “However, for Heaven's sake let me see it before you go any further.”

“I only started it because of what Lady Nelly said,” moaned Eustace.

“Yes, yes, I appreciate that. She has much to answer for, that woman; but I don't think she's ever made anyone write a book before. A book,” he repeated under his breath, as if a book was the final outrage. “And I suppose you've been neglecting your real work?”

“Well, I have, just lately.”

There was a silence.

“Tonino,” Jasper said, “give Signor Cherrington another Martini.”

“Oh, ought I?” said Eustace.

“Yes, you don't look very well. I hear you bathed on the night of the Redentore. What possessed you to do that?”

“I thought everyone did,” Eustace said. “I thought it was a kind of ritual.”

Jasper Bentwich laughed.

“No wonder English visitors to Venice get such a queer reputation. Have you felt seedy ever since?”

“Not really,” said Eustace. “In some ways I think I feel better.”

“In what ways? You don't look better.”

The second Martini increased Eustace's sense of well-being and loosened his tongue.

“Well, I don't mind the thought of dying so much as I did.”

Jasper looked at Eustace as though he had mentioned something improper.

“Do you attribute that to the bathe?”

“In a way I do,” said Eustace. “You see, I dreaded it, quite unreasonably, but when I came to the point it wasn't so very unpleasant. You see, there were so many other people doing it, and they didn't seem to mind.”

“But what people, my dear Eustace! I grant you they wouldn't be missed. But I can't understand this new craze for bathing at the Lido. It's bad enough by day, when the people are more or less clean, even if the sea isn't; but in the middle of the night, and among sewers and sewer rats—no, no. If you want reconciling to the idea of death, the ceiling here is much more helpful.”

Eustace turned his eyes from the bookcases of bright bottles behind the semicircle of the bar and looked up. The ceiling was painted a pale clear grey; and stuccoed on it in white in very low relief was an Assumption—possibly of the Virgin—but the feeling was of a social not a religious occasion. Between the fat clouds that billowed and (to Eustace's dyspeptic eye) seemed to sway, cherubic faces, some with bodies attached, peeped in respectful ecstasy; while nearer the middle a bearded saint in the meanest and scantiest apparel, and, facing him, a clean-shaven gentleman soberly but richly dressed, turned their rapt gaze upon the central figure. With eyelids drooping, but less it seemed in modesty than in pride, she floated upwards; above her head, extended in horizontal flight, a naked cherub held a crown. Crowded in each top corner multitudes of the heavenly host, some blowing trumpets, some with hands outstretched, waited to receive her; and at the very zenith a head and shoulders, forming a shallow triangle of little height but imposing lateral spread, suggested that her welcome was to be even more august.

Dizzy, Eustace dropped his head and found himself facing the two windows. They gave on the Grand Canal, and through one he could see the sparse Gothic windows and long low lines of the Abbazia, through the other the tremendous upward surge of the baroque Salute; and himself and Jasper in the mirror between them.

“I daren't look again,” he said; “but I saw what you meant.”

Noticing in his reflection some flaw in his appearance, imperceptible to Eustace, Jasper corrected it.

“One needs a looking-glass for these Italian ceilings,” he said. “Perhaps one needs one for everything. I don't care for a direct view.” His features mantled with irritation, and his eye seemed to be avoiding Eustace. “I don't think much about death myself; but if I did, it would be in terms of this ceiling, not of a tipsy bathing-party. But I'm afraid I shall have to hurry you off. What do all your new watches say?”

Shy of producing his team of time-keepers, Eustace consulted Miss Fothergill's.

“Oh, dear, it's twenty to one.”

“What time are you lunching?”

“Well, at one o'clock.”

“You'll only be half an hour late.”

They rose, and were going out when the barman said to Jasper:

“Shall I put these down to the Countess of Staveley?”

Jasper hesitated a moment. “Of course not. I'll pay.” Rejoining Eustace at the top of the little staircase, he said, “You knew that Nelly kept an account here for her guests?”

“I remember now, she did tell me,” said Eustace.

“But you haven't availed yourself of her hospitality?”

“I quite forgot to.”

Jasper made a sound of impatience.

Looped with arches, walled with crimson damask, glittering with vitrines exposing bottles of perfume and examples of highly gilt Murano glass, the interior of the Splendide and Royal Hotel dazzled Eustace, and would have dazzled him more had he not come to think of such magnificence as his proper environment.

As they were passing the concierge's desk Jasper said, “It won't make you really any later if we glance at his book to see if anyone's turned up in Venice.”

The concierge was a fat man with a greasy, sallow face, who looked like Iago in later life. Without asking his leave, without acknowledging his conspirator's smirk, Jasper pulled the heavy book towards him. Flicking back the pages, he scanned the arrivals of the past few days.

“Not a cat,” he said disgustedly. “All Levantines and Jews.”

But Eustace had seen a name out of the corner of his eye, and asked for the book, which Jasper relinquished with a shrug. The entry merely told him that Mrs. E.N. Alberic had arrived yesterday from India.

“Found someone you know?” inquired Jasper.

Eustace explained that he remembered the name—it was such an odd one—but could not fit it to anyone he knew. All the way to the Lido his memory struggled to give up its burden, until at last his fear of a scolding for lateness drove the problem from his mind.

Lady Nelly never had scolded him, nor did she now. Beyond giving him an absent smile, she hardly noticed his arrival, so deeply engaged was she with a young Italian, a stranger to Eustace, who had joined her party. He was very handsome, in a dark, aquiline way; his eyes could melt as well as burn, and he had a beautiful figure—one of the few Eustace had seen which justified the management's little-observed decree that the Grotto Restaurant was only open to people in bathing-suits. Count Andrea di Monfalcone was his name. “But you can call him Andy,” said Lady Nelly, and the young man bowed his permission.

Eustace took his coat off to appease the pagan spirit of the Grotto, and asked Lady Morecambe how she had spent the morning.

She was wearing a kind of dressing-gown over her bathing-suit, and like all her clothes, it not only fitted the occasion, but made one feel the occasion had been created to fit it.

“Well,” she said, “first we played tennis and then we bathed and then we sun-bathed, and after luncheon I guess we're going to sleep. What did you do?”

Eustace explained what his morning had been, without, however, making any reference to the watches, which were ticking all over him like tell-tale hearts.

“I do look forward to reading that book, Harry,” Lady Morecambe said. “Do you know,” she went on, turning to Eustace, “you are the very first author I've ever met—well, not that I've ever met, but that I've ever been a house-guest with.”

“Don't say that, he'll wonder where you have been brought up,” said Lord Morecambe. Sitting opposite the Count, and in flannels, not a bathing-suit, he looked very English. “How do you know he is an author, anyway? We've only his word for it.”