Chapter Nine

 

From Betti's, when lunch was finished, he strolled over to his bank.  Catching sight of him, as he stood waiting for the cashier to give him his money, the manager came running out to tell him enthusiastically that, next month, they hoped to do even better on the exchanges.  The bank had a new correspondent in Berne, a certain Dr Otto Loewe, who had a truly wonderful gift for this branch of speculation - a real genius, one might say, like Michelangelo or Marconi....

      Still carrying his Degas drawings and his Treatise of the Love of God, Eustace made his way to the Piazza and, hailing a taxi, gave the driver Laurina Acciaiuoli's address.  The cab started; he leaned back in his corner and signed with a weary resignation.  Laurina was one of his crosses.  It was bad enough that she should be sick and importunate and embittered.  But that was only the beginning.  This haggard, arthritic cripple had once been the woman he had loved with an intensity of passion such as he had never experienced before or since.  Another woman would have resigned herself to forget the fact.  Not so Laurina.  Twisting the dagger in her wound, she would spend whole afternoons talking to him about past beauty and present hideousness, past loves and present neglect, present loneliness and misery.  And when she had worked herself up sufficiently, she would turn against her visitor, pointing accusingly with her swollen fingers and, in that low voice (once so enchantingly husky, now hoarse with sickness and over-smoking and sheer hatred), telling him that he had only come to see her out of a sense of duty - worse, out of mere weakness; that he had cared for her only when her body was young and straight, and that now she was old and crippled and unhappy he could hardly bring himself even to feel pity.  Challenged to deny these all too painfully obvious truths, Eustace would find himself floundering in a quagmire of hypocritical platitudes; and what he said was generally so very unconvincing that Laurina would end by laughing outright - laughing with a ferocity of sarcasm much more wounding to herself, of course, than to him; for, after all, he was not the one who had the arthritis.  But, even so, it was painful enough.  Apprehensively, he wondered what the present afternoon would bring.  Another of those unutterably boring threats of suicide, perhaps.  Or else ...

      'Bebino!' a piercing voice shouted almost in his ear.  'Bebino!'

      He turned with a start.  Through the narrow, crowded street the cab was making its way at a foot pace, and trotting along beside it, her hand on the frame of the open window, was the inventor (for reasons which she and she alone could understand) of that grotesquely infantile nickname.

      'Mimi!' he exclaimed, and hoped to God there was nobody of his acquaintance within sight or earshot.

      In that extraordinary purple outfit she looked not merely like the pretty little tart she was, but like the caricature of a pretty little tart in a comic paper.  Which was what he liked about her, of course.  The simple and unaffected vulgarity of her style was absolutely consummate.

      Leaning forward, he called the driver; and when the cab had stopped, opened the door for her.  Mimi would look less conspicuous inside than out.

      'Bebino mio!'  She snuggled up against him on the seat, and he found himself enveloped by the reek of cheap perfume.  'Why haven't you been to see me, Bebino?'

      As the cab drove on, he began to explain that he had been in Paris for a couple of months, and after that in England.  But instead of listening, she continued to overwhelm him with reproaches and questions.  Such a long, long time!  But that was what men were like - porchi, real porchi.  Didn't he love her any more?  Was he making her horns with someone else?

      'I tell you, I was in Paris for a couple of months,' he repeated.

      'Sola, sola,' she broke in on a note of heartfelt grief.

      '... And then a few weeks in London,' he went on, raising his voice in an effort to get himself heard.

      'And I who did everything you ever asked!'  There were actually tears in her brown eyes.  'Everything,' she insisted plaintively.

      'But I tell you I was away!' Eustace shouted impatiently.

      Abruptly changing her expression, the girl gave him a look and smile of the frankest lasciviousness and, catching up his hand, pressed it against her plump young bosom.

      'Why don't you come with me now, Bebino?' she cajoled.  'I'll make you so happy.'  And leaning towards him she whispered in baby language, 'Hairbrush - naughty little Bebino needs the hairbrush.'

      Eustace looked at her for a moment in silence, then consulted his watch.  No, there wouldn't be time, before the train arrived, to fit in both.  It would have to be one or the other.  The past or the present; commiseration or enjoyment.  He made his choice.

      'Gather ye peaches while ye may,' he said in English, and tapping the glass he told the driver that he had changed his mind: he wanted to be taken someone else, and he gave the address of Mini's apartment near Santa Croce.  The man nodded and gave him an understanding wink.

      'I have to telephone,' said Eustace when they arrived.

      And while Mimi was changing her clothes, he rang up his house and left orders that the car was to be waiting at the main entrance of Santa Croce at a quarter to six.  Then it was Laurina's turn.  Could he speak to the Contessa?  Waiting for the connection, he elaborated his little fiction.

      'Eustace?' came the low husky voice that had once had power to command him anything.

      'Chère,' he began volubly, 'je suis horriblement ennuyé ...' Polite insincerity seemed to come more easily in French than in English or Italian.

      He broke it to her gradually, in a spate of foreign words - the bad, bad news that he had broken the little contraption which had to take the place of his vanished teeth.  Not yet a full-scale râtelier, thank goodness - plutôt un de ces bridges - ces petites ponts qui sont les Ponts des Soupirs qu'on traverse pour aller du palais de la journesse aux prisons lugubres de la sénilité.  He chuckled appreciatively at his own elegant joke.  Well, the long and the short of it was that he'd been compelled to go en hâte to the dentist's, and would have to stay there until the bridge was repaired.  And that, hélas, would prevent him from coming to tea.

      Laurina took it a great deal better than he had dared to hope.  Dr Rossi, she told him, had imported a new kind of lamp from Vienna, a marvellous new drug from Amsterdam.  For days at a time now she was almost free from pain.  But that wasn't the whole story.  Passing on from the subject of her health, she remarked with a casualness of tone that was meant to mask, but actually betrayed, her sense of triumph, that D'Annunzio had recently come to see her - several times, and had talked so poetically about the past.  And dear old Van Arpels had sent her his new book of poems, and with the most charming of letters.  And, talking of letters, she'd been going through her collection - and he had no idea what a lot there were and how interesting.

      'They must be,' said Eustace.  And he thought of the almost insane intensities of feeling she had evoked in the days of her fascination, the agonies of craving and jealousy.  And in such a variety of men - from pure mathematicians to company promoters, from Hungarian poets to English baronets and Estonian tennis champions.  And now ... He called up the image of Laurina as she was today, twenty years after: the gaunt cripple in her invalid-chair, and those brassy yellow curls above a face that might have been Dante's death-mask....

      'I'd got out some of your letters to read to you,' said the voice in the microphone at his ear.

      'They must sound pretty silly now.'

      'No, no, they're charming,' she insisted.  'So witty; et en même temps si tendres - cosi vibranti!'

      'Vibranti!' he repeated.  'Don't tell me I was ever vibrant!'

      A sound made him turn his head.  In the open doorway stood Mimi.  She smiled at him and blew him a kiss; her claret-coloured kimono fell open.

      At the other end of the wire paper sharply rustled.

      'Listen to this,' said Laurina's husky voice.  '"You have the power of arousing desires that are infinite and, being infinite, can never be assuaged by the possession of a merely finite body and personal mind."'

      'Golly!' said Eustace.  'Did I write that?  It sounds like Alfred de Musset.'

      Mimi was standing beside him now.  With his free hand he gave her a couple of friendly pats on the buttocks.  Gather ye peaches ...

      The husky voice went on reading.  '"So it looks, Laurina, as though the only cure for being in love with you were to become a Sufi or a John of the Cross.  God alone is commensurate with the cravings you inspire ...'"

      'Il faudrait d'abord l'inventer,' Eustace interjected with a little chuckle.  But at the time, he remembered, it had seemed quite sensible to say that sort of thing.  Which just showed to what a condition this damned love could reduce a reasonable being!  Well, thank goodness, now he was finished with that sort of thing!  He administered another gentle smack and looked up at Mimi with a smile.

      'Spicciati, Bebino,' she whispered.

      'And here's another adorable thing you wrote,' said Laurina's voice in the same instant: '"Loving you as I do ..."'

      Mimi tweaked his ear impatiently -

      '"... As though one had been born again into another and intenser kind of life,"' the voice at the telephone read on.

      'Sorry to have to interrupt my own raptures,' said Eustace, speaking into the receiver.  'But I've got to ring off.... No, no, not a moment more, my dear.  Here's the dentist.  Ecco il dentista,' he repeated for Mimi's benefit, accompanying the words with a playful little pinch.  'Adesso commincia la tortura.'

      He hung up, turned and pulled the girl down on to his knee, began with thick stubby fingers to tickle her well-covered ribs.

      'No, no, Bebino ... no!'

      'Adesso commincia la tortura,' he said again through the pearls of her hysterical laughter.