Читать книгу The Squire Quartet - Brian Aldiss - Страница 23

Ermalpa, September 1978

It was midnight; Thursday, 14 September, was passing into history.

The lights in the corridors had dimmed or had been switched off. Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, their nudity and guilty love shrouded in decent shadow, stood like sentinels over the dark foyer of the hotel, staring towards the Via Milano. Down that thoroughfare, last Fiats were fleeing, travelling all the faster in their comparative solitude, like the remnants of a school of fish escaping from a vast maw.

In the bar of the Grand Hotel Marittimo, lights still burned, the skilled waiters still waited, smiling and polite, pocketing their small tips. The tables were still encircled by conference delegates, most of them drinking and smoking, all of them talking.

Herman Fittich, buoyed by the success of his talk that evening, was laughing as he compared teaching experiences with members of the French delegation. Rugorsky was at another table, arguing with Morabito and some Italians, though turning every now and again to pat the arm of Maria Frenza, who sat next to him, smoking and smiling exclusively into the night air.

Dwight Dobell sat with Frenza at another table, discussing the vagaries of the American academic system. Squire was at the same table, half-listening; he had sat through many similar discussions in his time, yet the American academic system remained incomprehensible to him. Each conversation added a mite more incomprehensibility. He got up as if to go to the toilets, but turned instead to the lift, and travelled to the second floor. It might as well be bedtime.

The long melancholy corridors with their high arched ceilings were dim; every other light was off. A few trays lay uncollected outside doors. The silence was as thick as a blanket on a hot night. A vacuum cleaner, entangled in metres of its own cable, stood awaiting morning; its heavy fake streamlining suggested that it was a survivor from the regime of Mussolini; with its jutting black rubber prow, it even looked like Mussolini.

Before he reached the corner of the passage, Squire heard voices. A woman’s first, sharp, protesting. Then a man’s.

He turned the corner. The first door on the left was open. Light poured into the corridor from a bedside lamp.

A man bent over a woman. He was in trousers and shirt-sleeves. His jacket had been flung down on the bed. He was holding the woman fairly gently and speaking persuasively, not in English. She had reached the door, and was leaning backwards, to get as far away as possible. She saw Squire.

At the same moment, he recognized d’Exiteuil and Ajdini. D’Exiteuil turned, poking his little beard over his shoulder, looking extremely displeased by the interruption. Ajdini waved enthusiastically.

‘Ah, Tom Squire! I must simply have a word with you. There is rather an abstract question needing to be resolved.’

She moved fast, eluding d’Exiteuil, turning deftly to wish him good-night, smiling, linking her arm with Squire’s, adjusting her coiffure, thanking d’Exiteuil for his kindness.

D’Exiteuil stood at his door, his brows gathered darkly, pulling at his cheek as he folded his arms across his chest.

‘Good-night, Jacques,’ Squire said.

Squire walked briskly along to his room, unlocked it, ushered Ajdini in, followed her, and locked the door behind them. He was laughing more openly than she, as he stood beside her. She was a tall lady. Colour had mounted into the normal pallor of her cheeks.

‘I see that look in your eye,’ she said, pushing him with extended arm, ‘I hope I just didn’t step from the frying pan into the fire.’

‘What a gorgeous voice you have, Selina, and how lovely you look when a little ruffled. Was Jacques going to rape you?’

‘Of course not. Jacques? He is harmless. I simply changed my mind, that’s all. I simply changed my mind. Now I’m going to bed and I hope that you will be an English gentleman and not present me with any difficulty.’

‘Don’t insult me with the English gentleman bit. Regard me as Serbian, just for tonight. I’ve got you here and I won’t let you go till morning.’

‘I’m not insulting you, I’m praising you, for heaven’s sake. You’re not another little Enrico Pelli, I know that. Now, I’ll have a drink with you while you calm down a bit, for friendship, then I will go to my room.’

‘Your room’s not lonely. I am. You promised me that you would sleep with me tonight. You must keep your promises. You’ve whetted my appetite, Selina.’

The fine bone features became finer, turning almost to porcelain. She commenced to prowl about the room looking about her, as if bored by the conversation. He stood and watched her slender buttocks moving under her dress.

‘My belief in the miraculous doesn’t extend to quite that extent.’ She sighed. ‘Let me go, Tom. I don’t like to be your captive. This is boring. How’d you like to be a woman and go through this same scene so often? I was going through it only just now with Jacques, except that as yet you have not laid a finger on me. But that will come, eh?’ She looked at him with contempt, yet with a half-smile; there was a coquetry she seemingly could not suppress.

‘You must continually plant yourself in the same scene, mustn’t you, Selina? The role must give you a little titillation and pleasure, isn’t that so?’ He heard anger and banter and lust, spiced with a mite of sympathy, in his own voice.

She stopped pacing and faced him. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

‘Don’t smoke.’

‘It’s so late.’

‘You look fresh.’

‘I will not have any of your phoney psychiatry such as you gave me this morning. That was an insult, I consider. That Freudian stuff … That’s why I avoided you and would not eat dinner with you this evening, in case you wondered.’

‘I didn’t wonder. I guessed. But my remarks weren’t meant to irritate. I simply had a moment of perception regarding some of your troubles, or thought I did. I don’t want to pry, why should I? But if I can help I’d be glad to.’

‘Because you think you can get me into bed that way.’

He laughed. ‘Does it hold such fears for you that you dread it? It’s pleasant. Precious, if done for its own sweet sake, not as some sort of – bargain. Often exciting, sometimes consoling, occasionally – miraculous.’

She flushed. ‘Okay. That’s enough. I’m not a kid, you know. I can’t be talked into what I don’t wish to do. I’m not just a bloody body, you know.’

‘True.’ He pulled the door key out of his trouser pocket by its plastic label, walked over to the door, and opened it.

‘You’re free to go if you wish.’

She gathered herself up, breasts, stomach, handbag, between her arms, then suddenly changed posture, raising a finger.

‘Wait! Maybe I have a cigarette left after all, let me just look.’

She opened her handbag and produced a packet, which she flipped open and proffered, letting Squire see the label. ‘Drina’.

‘You can buy them in Germany now. So many poor Yugoslav Gastarbeiter are in the Bundesrepublik, working away to keep democracy going.’

‘And maybe to prop the tottering communist economy back home?’

As he accepted a cigarette, they both laughed. After they had lit up, she closed the door gently with her back and smiled at him.

‘Wicked Jacques may still be lingering in the corridor with intent. I am afraid to go from your room.’

‘If not sex, I’ve only got vodka to offer.’

‘Fine.’

She consented to sit down on the bed. After a drink, she allowed him to kiss her. Then she drew away her lips and smoked in silence. He watched her, admiring the line of her neck, its feather of dark hairs, her lobeless ear.

‘How could there be any possible connection between the death of my father, so long ago in Kragujevac, in a country I no longer visit, and my political sympathies?’

‘It’s just an intuition, and my intuitions aren’t reliable. But I also lost my father at an early age, and am aware of the stresses such bereavements bring with them. Otherwise, I had only your extraordinary reading of Aldous Huxley to go by. In his most enduring book, Brave New World – which I suppose Herman would classify as science fiction – Huxley dramatizes the battle between the state and the individual or, to define it more narrowly, between a bureaucracy and sexuality. Do you hate Huxley because he was on the side of sexuality? Doesn’t sexuality and all that goes with it challenge the Perfect State – or any state that claims perfection and therefore classifies all who criticize it as criminals? Remember the words of the Savage in Brave New World. He claims the right to be unhappy, to grow old and ugly and impotent, to catch syphilis, to be tortured, because then he can get a glimpse of freedom and poetry. I’d say on the basis of our very slight acquaintance, that you might be alarmed by the Savage in all of us, including the Savage in yourself. By opting for a repressive system, you repress the Savage.’

‘More phoney psychiatry! You insult me. You treat me as if I were a child.’ She puffed smoke at him.

He put an arm lightly round her waist.

‘You just see it that way. I only offered you an intuition. Marxism sounds bad in your pretty mouth, but I’ve no business speaking to you like this.’

‘That’s true!’ she said with spirit. ‘It’s immoral – interfering. Someone described you as a self-appointed critic, that I know. They were right!’

‘Would you rather critics were appointed by the state? The self-appointed ones are best, kindest, most disinterested … Were you happy as a child – I mean, before the massacre at Kragujevac? Can you remember so far back?’

She turned the fine bone china of her face towards him and regarded him searchingly with a pure glance which came close to making him quail.

‘No – yes. One always remembers.’ She looked at him, playfully, slid her spectacles down on her nose to regard him better. ‘Let me tell you this – since it’s late – my secret. My father was a desperate man, desperately poor, desperately everything, like a character from Gorki. There were trees behind our house where he would go to rage… He often beat me when he was drunk, with his hand or with poles. Yet after he was shot, I knew I loved him dearly, needed him, and I longed in despair to see him once more and even be beaten by him. I would be utterly degraded, as long as he came back. There, that’s the truth.’

She exhaled blue smoke and waved it away.

‘Your mother? You don’t mention her.’

‘She died giving birth to me. Another woman looked after us then.’

They sat without speaking, smoking together companionably, occasionally sipping vodka. She said, ‘Of course there’s more to it than that. There always is. The world changed, that day he and my brother were shot by the Germans. It wasn’t only them I lost, but a less tangible thing … A.E. Housman’s land of lost content. You can never get back there.’

She quoted,

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

‘You will think I’m very self-pitying, when you get to know me.’

‘We all need pity.’ He stroked her dark hair, and she rested her head against his shoulder. He remembered her anecdote about Dorothy, the woman with the brain injury.

‘One day, I’ll tell you about the death of my father.’

A simple exchange of stories … The promise appeared to please her. She rested a hand with its bright nails on his shoulder, whilst continuing to gaze into the shadowy recesses of the room.

‘It’s the night, Tom. When we’re changed, somehow …’

‘I don’t really know you at all. It’s a cheek to pretend to … Why don’t you go back to Serbia?’

‘Oh … The pain, or something. Let’s not talk about it. Kiss me again, if you’ll kindly go no further than that. In a way you’re right – I hate sexuality.’

‘Your beautiful lips, Selina …’ He poured kisses on them, removed her spectacles, held her tightly, relished the taste of her mouth, the warmth of her breath, began pressing his body with its erection against her thighs. She pushed away, gasping.

‘Look, Tom, be kind, promise, promise – I know how you feel, but promise you will just do no more than kiss me. Will you? Just kiss …’

‘No more? Come on, no one knows we’re here together.’

‘Tom …’ She wrapped an arm around his neck, whispering, ‘Then I’ll feel safe … Promise …’

He began to kiss her, pressing closer, forgetting himself, becoming just a warmth, sensing her delight. Her arms tightened as she sank back on the bed, their lips still together. Then her body began to heave under him, her leg hooked round his. Her tongue darted into his mouth, low gasps escaped her. He lay on top of her, eyes closed, ‘Drina’ burning his fingers. She ceased to move.

Rather than disturb her, he pinched out the cigarette stub with his fingers.

Gradually she stirred. She sighed. Judging his moment, he sat up, breathing so deeply he almost trembled. He took a small sip of the vodka. It was warm.

‘I must go, Tom, dear. I won’t stay.’ It was a faun’s glance she gave, there and away.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

She stood up. Her mood had changed; she was gentle and not exactly downcast, although her eyes perpetually sought the floor.

‘Yes … Oh dear … It is tomorrow … That’s serious.’

He kissed her on the cheek, with care in case she did not wish it. She appeared not to notice. As she moved to the door, she said, ‘Perhaps we’ll have more time together.’

When she slipped into the dark corridor, she said, ‘Tom, the miraculous does sometimes happen.’

Squire stood listlessly at the door until she had disappeared, before moving back into the room. An envelope lay at his feet. As he stooped to pick it up, he thought that Selina must have dropped it, and instantly his mind conjured up a scene where he went to her bedroom to return it and found her undressing. But the note had his name on, written in a foreign hand; it had been slipped under the door. He immediately lost interest, and flipped it onto the table.

Locking the door, he went and lay on the bed, hands behind his head, his meditations possessed by Selina Ajdini.

In a moment of vision, succoured by the silence of the hour, he saw no mystery in personality. He perceived her with clarity, and the circumstances which surrounded her. The clarity neither magnified nor belittled her; it was cleansed even of compassion, for one condition of the vision was that his own personality, with all its limitations and potentials for growth, was also clear to him – a distortion in one would have implied a distortion in the other.

Within those linked visions burned his understanding of human nature, of its ramshackle structure, its transience, its quality of light.

There was nothing inscrutable about personality or relationships between people. These matters could be perceived, divined; in a sense he knew Selina fully. There was no puzzle. The puzzle came when such things had to be translated into words. Words belonged only to the cerebrum, the part of the brain that made man specifically human; but the mysterious world inhabited by whole understanding occupied all of the brain, and the nervous system beyond it, and the blood cells and body beyond that. It could not be reduced into words. Any system of understanding built purely on words – such as an ideology – was an impoverishment of the human being. Selina tried to live in her words, her ideology, because, for specific reasons, she was afraid of the whole world of her personality. Pain lurked there.

With patience and love, it would be possible to make that proscribed area accessible to her again. But not by words alone. Words alone could not defeat pain.

He climbed off the bed, assumed tadasana, and performed some steady hora breathing in order to clear his mind still further. Moments of meditation and vision could be encouraged, developed. They enlarged life. They created stillness.

The stillness was in some miraculous way eternal within the frames of a human life. Squire had experienced the first such perception at the age of four. He still recalled it: it had remained with him. The nursery with a coal fire burning, firelight reflecting on all the shining brown surfaces of the room. The child at the window, face half-turned to the outdoors, realizing the lure – the wilderness – of the world, as dusk filtered in. Realizing the unknown was limitless. It had been the first of his escapes beyond time, and in a way the most vivid. He had felt his own containedness and greatness. He had reached to an oceanic content within his own being.

There had been other similar moments before his father died; they continued after the watershed of that event.

The death had killed his tentative reaching towards the orthodoxies of the Christian religion, though not towards an unspoken mysticism. He saw only now that the unspokenness had preserved its freshness. He hated the very word ‘mysticism’; but of its flesh he was not in doubt, for he felt it inside him.

Even these reflections visited his mind without a cloud of words, as he slowed his breathing and set aside the hotel room.

With placid amusement, he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought. That stillness, that balance, was a triumph, achieved within – the image always charged him with excitement – within the violent explosion that was the universe. He visualized the curdling galaxies, the stellar bodies, whirling away from each other, still fleeing from that primal explosion, that ejaculation of matter which began everything. The cosmos was still inexpressibly new.

All human experience was a brief dawn affair; more comprehensive experiences would be possible later in the cosmic day. Meanwhile, it was possible to develop towards greater understanding.

The sparks flew forever up the chimney. Turmoil was all that could be expected. There was evil in man, in men and women; only a fool would doubt it when he had the privilege of living in the twentieth century – as a being confined to a lunatic asylum would be the maddest of all inmates if he refused to believe in lunacy – but that evil was a flaw wrought by the holocaust of the physical world. That was where religion falsified the situation. Flames had no morality. If evil was a human creation, so was the concept of perfection. Wasn’t perfection always visualized as somehow static? And stasis was an impossibility in the exploding universe. It was a good idea to recognize the instability of all things, and to breathe deep and slow.

He threw off his clothes, brushed his teeth, and climbed between the sheets.

His mind would not let him sleep. He lay there for some while before realizing that sleep was not going to visit him yet. Some factor just beyond his grasp was worrying him.

He sat up with sudden impatience, saying into the wall of dark before his face, ‘But anyone who could speak so ill of Huxley cannot be a good person.’

Impatiently, he let his head thump back on the pillow.

Again, he tried to make himself sleep, concentrating on slow breathing. But the moment of rapture had curdled into a mood of self-distrust, sucking him back into the past with its regrets.

Images of disquiet flooded him. His father’s savage death. His mother’s dead countenance, patched with hitherto unknown browns and greys. The long estrangement from Teresa. Even the savagery with which the English critics, unlike those abroad, had attacked ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’.

From serenity, he fell into despair.

Near at hand lay his doubts about the conference in Ermalpa, and his quarrel with d’Exiteuil. One of his beliefs was that, as the nineteenth century cultivated optimism, often of a rootless kind, so that century’s impoverished heirs and assigns of the twentieth cultivated a pessimism possibly as rootless. The art of enjoyment was lacking. He had always hoped to contribute to the general enjoyment; not as an entertainer – he had no gift for that – but as an appreciater, one who could enhance other people’s lives, as his father had enhanced his. That had been the driving force behind his great television series and the book related to it.

(‘Tottering between playing the common man and the intellectual, hopelessly fumbling both roles, Thomas Squire – even now no doubt expecting a knighthood for his services to a TV-zapped nation – tries to camouflage a lack of content beneath a middlebrow concern with the surface of trivia; his compulsive dashes about the globe, which reduce all space and time to a corner of the studio, are physical analogues of his efforts to cover dozens of subjects in order to conceal the fact that he has no subject. As he points in astonishment at things with which we are all too familiar, it is impossible not to feel that the new Renaissance on which he lavishes his laboured epigrams is our Untergang in thirteen episodes.’ Leslie Lippard-Milne, ‘Frankensquire Among the Parts’, New Statesman)

There were no Lippard-Milnes in Ermalpa. The conference paid him homage – although one accepted that homage never meant what it professed. But the delegates were also busy destroying the things he held dear, the things they held dear. Could poor Krawstadt ever enjoy a game of pinball now he had written so villainously on the subject? Well, perhaps one hoped not.

These unembarrassed arts, why should they wilt so easily beneath scrutiny? Another law was emerging. Pick a flower and it dies.

What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour, ready to slip away to sea. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself, no doubt of that. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes.

He had no complaints. Things were as they were. If the conference was a failure, he was not responsible; he would never be one to admit it failed. If ideology killed it, there again he had no complaint. In his time – it was curious to look back on it now – he had killed for the sake of ideology. He could remember the savage triumph he felt when, in a farmhouse in Istra, he looked down at the broken body of Slatko, the Russian colonel. That had been no timeless moment of vision; whenever the episode rose to mind, he pushed it from him, not wishing to recognize any more that part of himself.

Now Slatko’s brutal face pursued him. Squire sat up and put the light on, feeling ill.

He padded over to the bathroom to get himself a sip of water – he had been warned that Ermalpa water was contaminated, but he had heard similar tales wherever he went. He caught sight of the unopened envelope lying on the table. After drinking, he took the envelope back to bed and ripped it open.

Inside was one sheet of paper with the hotel’s crest. The letter read,

Dear Tom,

For reasons you know well, I can bear no more of the talk round the conference table. Let me get away just in the morning. You must come with me and pay. We can take a No 9 bus to the little town called Nontreale. It is a cheap fare but you know our government keeps us poor as saints – which we otherwise are not – when we are out of our country. Besides, you are rich.

Tell nobody our plan. I must not tell my ‘comrade’ Kchevov. We will play truant, and talk like men, and view Nontreale cathedral to educate you and make me thirsty.

The bus leaves at 9.05 in the morning. Meet me just outside the hotel at ten minutes to nine tomorrow and I will take you to the bus stop. Nobody shall know where we go, so please be safe and flush this sheet in your toilet bowl (we Russians have a passionate admiration for secrets, you know that). I trust you.

Yours

Vasili Rugorsky

Squire laughed. He laid the letter by his bed, switched off the light, and in a moment was sound asleep, worries forgotten.

The No 9 bus was crowded, but they managed to sit together. Rugorsky’s mood was somewhat withdrawn. He had missed his breakfast in order to get away from the hotel without questioning.

‘I am a man who likes much to eat. But more I like to see foreign countries. When shall I again be allowed outside the sacred frontiers of my own country? It is naturally cosy in there, because it is so well guarded. But I feel a necessity to store up some images of Sicily, other than that room of mirrors and electronic equipment in which we sit.’

He lapsed into silence. Both men sat staring out of the windows as the bus wound through the suburbs of Ermalpa with many a stop, a pachyderm surrounded by flocks of Fiats.

On the outskirts of town, the buildings became drab and decrepit. Squire was reminded of the older parts of Cairo. Coppersmiths and saddlers and vulcanizers worked in tiny open-fronted shops beneath the room in which they and their families lived. The bus had transported its passengers from a twentieth-century city to some outlying byway of history. People, animals, and scruffy fowls were everywhere. Piles of refuse filled yards and gardens, spilling into the street. Here and there an elderly tree defied its destiny by sending forth bright blossom, carmine on purple.

Squire made an idle remark about the filth.

‘No, you see, you are a man of the world,’ said Rugorsky, looking at him askance in his teasing way. ‘But your world is limited. Here it is no real filth. It is merely untidy. That’s all. Merely a little untidy.’

He sank into silence again.

Outside the city, the bus turned onto a good dusty road and began forging steadily west. The way wound upwards, yielding increasingly fine views of the Mediterranean. At every broken-walled village en route, the bus stopped, and women and goats ceased their activities to stare at it.

Half-an-hour later, they arrived in Nontreale. The bus nosed along narrow streets hardly wider than the vehicle, entered the main square, and stopped with a protracted sigh. All the passengers climbed out.

The air was cooler than it had been in Ermalpa. Squire and Rugorsky stood together while the latter wiped his brow thoroughly with a brown handkerchief.

Nontreale held two points of historical and aesthetic interest, a ruinous castle and a cathedral. The cathedral filled one side of the small square. As they stood looking across at it, the crowd generated by the arrival of the bus slowly disappeared. Most of the people appeared to be locals; it was early as yet for tourists. In front of the cathedral, shopkeepers were setting up stalls loaded with bright tourist goods.

Rugorsky nodded and grunted. ‘Byzantium. A common heritage of East and West, you see. It looks promising, Tom. Perhaps we shall enjoy it more for having an ice cream first.’

‘There’s a bar over there. Would you prefer a drink?’

‘I don’t wish for a bad reputation. Let us proceed first to an ice cream.’

They sat down at open-air tables to one side of the square, and the sun shone on them. Rugorsky asked, ‘You don’t mind to pay for me?’

‘I’m pleased to do so.’

‘It does not make you feel too superior to me?’

Squire laughed. ‘You are not the sort of man one easily feels superior to, Vasili.’

‘That’s good – but be careful. I am aware of the terrible sinful power of money. Well aware. Money is very corrupting.’

‘So people say. The lack of it corrupts, too.’

They ordered cassati from the waiter.

Rugorsky reopened the subject. ‘You perhaps assume that as a good socialist I naturally preach about the evils of money. But that is not all my meaning. You see, I also feel on the personal level, and not just as a theory, that money corrupts. It has corrupted me. I am a corrupt man, Tom. Very corrupt, unfortunately. It’s not my wish.’

‘I don’t see you like that.’

An impatient gesture, made slowly to remove any offence. ‘You do not know me. You see, Tom, I do not wish to argue about how corrupt I am. That a man must decide for himself. The scale in such judgements is merely internal. You agree?’

Squire was silent. Howard Parker-Smith had phoned him from the Consulate earlier in the morning, catching him just before he left his hotel room. Rugorsky certainly had money problems. Squire wondered with some apprehension what exactly Rugorsky was planning to do.

He ate the ice cream slowly. It had a delicious flavour and texture. As they ate, they watched the life of the square. An old woman had brought two donkeys down from the hills, and was tying them to a railing a short distance away, talking to them loudly as she did so. ‘I was speaking with the Italian Morabito last night,’ Rugorsky said. ‘He has been once to your house in England. It is in the country.’

‘Yes. Norfolk. Only six or seven miles from the sea.’

The Russian sighed. ‘Perhaps I may myself come there one day and stay with you, as I have stayed with Lippard-Milne and his wife. They live in Sloane Street, in London.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve been there.’ Squire had caught sight of Howard Parker-Smith. At least he was certain he recognized those well-knit shoulders, clad in an English blazer, and the sleek well-groomed head, before the figure disappeared down a side-alley off the square. He glanced at his watch; it was before ten-thirty. He and Parker-Smith had been talking over the phone less than two hours earlier. What was the man doing here, if not keeping an eye on the two of them? Perhaps he was expecting a sudden move by Rugorsky.

Squire paid the waiter. He and Rugorsky rose, and they strolled across the square to the cathedral, soon entering into its grand shadow.

The main part of the building was twelfth century, with a grandiose porch built on four centuries later in a Gothic style. They stood for a while before moving into the great shell of the interior. Here, all was shadowy, the slanting bars of light from the high windows creating a sense of space and mystery. The shell was full of dusty scents, as if the departed still breathed. Squire stood gazing into that majestic space, seeing it as a convincing rendering of the true reality in which all things had their being, as well as an unwitting representation of that luminous hole in the rear of the skull, the lantern hidden in bone in which alone he believed – and in which, he reflected, he probably believed alone.

Rugorsky was much more interested in the famous mosaics, which he regarded fiercely, striding about in his shirt-sleeves, his arms folded. His white hair streamed as he gazed upwards at saints, both meek and warlike, who floated upwards to the roof in a haze of gold. He moved gradually towards the great commanding figure of Christ Pantocrat, eyes staring, forehead creased in an all-too-just frown, which dominated the apse behind the high altar.

Neither man paid attention to the faithful just leaving the cathedral after mass. A man and his wife still knelt in their places, elbows touching, staring up at the great silver cross, their dark faces seeming to glow with worship; like Christ Pantocrat, both frowned, perhaps aware of the injustice of their lot, against which their lips moved in prayer. Old ladies beyond anger, clad in Mediterranean widows’ black, went away bow-legged to light their sweet-smelling candles before returning to the workaday world outside.

Rugorsky walked back to Squire’s side. ‘A remarkable expression of medieval Italian art. These people had to be on guard against God. The relationship was understood on both sides to be formal. By reputation these mosaics are the equal of Ravenna. Those I have never seen and may never see.’

‘They are splendid,’ Squire murmured, vaguely. The two men walked apart again, Rugorsky to resume his staring at the stones above his head. Squire went and sat in a chair, slowing his breathing, experiencing the extent of the cathedral.

‘Shall we go?’ he asked, when Rugorsky eased his bulk into the next chair.

‘No. Wait, you see. Waiting is important. Keep the minute while you can, in order to remember. It’s a long bus ride. Just be still. That’s important.’

They sat where they were, both men immobile.

Finally, Rugorsky stood up. ‘Now we can leave. Perhaps something has sunk in.’ He tapped his head. ‘You do not have religious feeling?’

‘No, not really. Frankly, I was glad when I got rid of God.’

‘I see. I have not outgrown a religious impulse, despite all examples I see of godlessness all round. I mean, at home. Without God, I can see no meaning in anything.’

‘The meaning lies within us.’

Once they moved outside the cathedral, Rugorsky appeared nervous again. He used the sticky brown handkerchief to mop his brow, and looked pale.

‘Are you feeling well, Vasili? You surely won’t be in trouble just because you took a morning away from the conference? A lot of the other delegates have been taking, or plan to take, days off. Herman told me he was going down to a beach for a swim.’

He stood gazing back at the stonework rising above them. ‘It’s Friday, yes. I forget which day it is. In just three days, you see, I must return to Russia. To be frank, I don’t much relish the prospect. Tomorrow night, the conference is finished.’ He shot Squire one of his telling glances as they strolled across the square, from shadow into sunlight. ‘Do you ever experience the feeling that you have come to a dead halt in your life? Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Yes.’

Rugorsky ran a hand through his white hair. He stood still, gazing about him as he spoke.

‘Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. You see, I am a man with a weight upon his mind. It would be impossible for me to explain everything, and without explaining everything, then I can’t explain anything.’ He was silent. He clutched his shirt sleeves, looking up at the cathedral for a while.

He laughed shortly. ‘You see, I tell you nothing what I mean. Even so, I tell to you more than I tell to anyone I know in Russia. It must be the mark of a generous man, don’t you think? I don’t know what to do.’

Squire said, ‘That feeling of a dead end. Perhaps it’s characteristic of the age of fifty. One does run into difficulties then.’

‘Of course. Circumstances accumulate at the age of fifty; possibilities are fewer than they once were … It’s really a beautiful cathedral, mainly because it can still be used for the purposes for which it was designed many centuries ago, in confidence. There would be worse fates for a man than to have one room to live in across the square there – and watch the cathedral and see the people – wicked people no doubt, be sure of that – going in and out all the time.’

He regarded with longing the crumbling buildings across the square, where children played in doorways, and a woman languorously arranged a garment on a balcony railing. At that moment, another grey bus lumbered up from the plain in a cloud of exhaust fumes, and expired with a sigh under the central palm trees.

‘Are you having trouble with Kchevov?’

‘It’s a mistake to throw out God.’ He patted his white forelock into place, turning as he did so to scrutinize Squire. ‘I speak as a member of a country or nation, so to say, which has experience in that area. It’s a mistake to throw out God.’

‘Difficult, painful – not necessarily mistaken. Maybe the evolution of the human race demands it … Although God is in many ways the greatest human idea so far.’

Perhaps Rugorsky did not care for the remark. Turning to walk on, he said, flatly, ‘Georgi Kchevov can make trouble for me. I don’t wish him to know more than he must do. Did you destroy the note I put under your door last night?’

Squire patted a pocket of the jacket he was carrying over his arm. ‘I must admit I didn’t. I’ve got it here with me.’

Another heavy silence. Then Rugorsky said, ‘Now we must look at the Castle.’

They walked past the tourist stalls. Out of habit, Squire stopped and bought some postcards. He would send a card to Teresa, damn her, and to Deirdre, and possibly one to Willie and Madge in their new home. Rugorsky stood solidly by his shoulder, breathing hard, bored by the transaction. Squire also bought some little toy Sicilian carts for souvenirs, and tucked them in his jacket pocket.

Surrounding the cathedral was a maze of mean streets, through which Rugorsky led confidently. The alleyways were full of people, some selling vegetables, sentimental religious baubles, or toys. Sunshine blazed through an archway; they went towards it, emerging in a small square behind the cathedral. Ahead was the Castle of Nontreale.

The great stone walls of the Castle, tufted with fern here and there, were fringed by white Fiats, nestling together round the ramparts like fleas round a cat’s ear. The Castle had withstood many attacks throughout the ages, before eventually succumbing to the internal combustion engine. Although it lay more or less in ruins, and the lizards flickering over its hot stonework were its chief occupants, its two great towers remained intact, looking towards the distant sea.

The towers faced northwards, the direction from which all invaders had come. Nontreale was poised on the brink of a great basalt core of rock which loomed above the plain as it had done ever since prehistoric times. Its Castle stood on the very edge of the precipice, with the road far below, then – below the labouring road – plain, studded with vines and villas, across which the shadow of the eminence was flung.

A narrow and crumbling path, fringed with wild flowers at which butterflies sipped before fluttering away into the abyss, led round the base of the northern wall and the two towers. ‘Let’s go that way,’ Rugorsky said, pointing.

‘It’s only a goat track,’ Squire said.

‘We get a good view. Come on.’ He gripped Squire’s arm and led him forward.

It seemed to Squire that they would have enjoyed a better view from the top of one of the towers, but he followed the Russian. It felt cold as they entered the shadow of the fortress.

The chill entered Squire. As they moved forward with their right hands steadying themselves against the rough wall, he found himself dwelling uneasily on Howard Parker-Smith’s early morning call. Parker-Smith had more information concerning Vasili Rugorsky. Rugorsky was in trouble back in Leningrad.

‘He’s been embezzling public funds,’ Parker-Smith said. ‘All these Russians involve themselves in graft as they rise in the hierarchy – it’s a disease. The authorities probably allowed him a visa to Sicily so that they could turn everything over while he’s away. I guess there’s not a shred of paper left in his office by now. They’ll bag him when he gets home again.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Same way Rugorsky now knows it,’ Parker-Smith said. ‘A friendly colleague of his at Leningrad University got the word to him yesterday via the grapevine. We tapped the grapevine.’

‘What happens next?’

‘Depends. The friendly colleague may stand to gain if Rugorsky does a bunk. His friendly message may not be so friendly. Keep your eye on Rugorsky. One thing’s for sure – he’s in a spot. We must see which way the cat will jump.’ He rang off.

The path became narrower. Rugorsky went forward more slowly. A little roll of fat at the back of his neck glistened, and the ends of his white hair were dark with sweat. Far below them, a bus laboured up the road they had come, the sound of its engine frail in the still air. Below the road were tiny trees, shrubs, fields, roofs, stretching all the way to the distant sea, where a peninsula of rock pointed its finger towards Italy.

Squire thought, ‘All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’

Rugorsky turned round, steadying himself against the wall of the Castle. His eyes were narrowed; he was a man in the grip of a strong emotion. He reached forward and grasped Squire’s arm.

‘You were in Yugoslavia in 1948…’

Immediately, a blaze of images was released in Squire’s mind. Once again Slatko died on the floor of an Istran farmhouse, even as he himself plunged into the precipice. Rugorsky was sent in belated vengeance for that ancient killing; by killing Squire he would acquire enough virtue to cancel out the embezzlement charges awaiting him in the USSR. Sometimes the figure falling was not he, but Rugorsky, or some more mythical figure, falling into a plumbless gulf.

He slipped and regained his balance, leaning with his back against the ancient stonework. The alarming images faded. He and Rugorsky stared at each other, ringed by wall and blue sky.

‘Come,’ Rugorsky said. ‘We’re safe here.’

‘Safe …?’

‘No person in the world can hear what we speak. As I wrote in my letter, we talk together like men.’ He shuffled nearer.

‘Keep your distance, Vasili. You were going to push me off the cliff. What’s this you say about Yugoslavia?’

‘So in your heart you really believe we are all murderers and criminals after all? You think I’d be so naughty? It’s not so. Maybe I can convince you of it, you see. For you and I have met once before. More than once. Twice. When we first spoke at the conference, I reminded you that we had met previously, with Leslie Lippard-Milne and his pretty wife, in front of Richard Hamilton’s picture at the Tate Gallery, yes? You had forgotten the occasion, because you are slightly an egotist, I believe, and so do not easily recollect other people. It’s just a slight punishment. But – I knew I had set eyes on you previously.’ He paused, adding with distinct emotion, ‘Many many years ago, Thomas, when you and I were young men, and much more inclined to push people off cliffs than we are now – then I saw you. I had a good look at you. It was in a region of Yugoslavia called Istra.’

Hearing the thickness of his own voice, Squire asked, ‘What were you doing in Istra?’

With a gleam of his self-mocking humour, Rugorsky said, ‘What do Russians do anywhere abroad except foment trouble? My government had something against me, and so I was sent abroad to work on their behalf. I was being punished for writing a silly satirical poem about our beloved late leader, Comrade Stalin.’

‘“Winter Celebration”.’

‘You are properly informed in our literature. My poem circulated in samizdat. When the authorities caught up with it, they were not amused. They are never amused. So after some training I was sent to Belgrade, where I became – I suppose you would say a gundog for a very important KGB high official who had the codename Slatko. The word is Serbian for “sweetness”. You remember that name, I am sure.’

‘I remember,’ Squire said. ‘Slatko …’

‘You see, it was important to our Comrade Leader that all socialist countries should appear in agreement before the outside world. Just to have this one little country, Yugoslavia, disagreeing was bad for his sleep every night. Yugoslavia must be crushed. Therefore this evil man Slatko was sent in, with orders direct from Stalin. It was easy to send him in secretly, and many others like him.’

‘And you?’

‘Slatko was not sweet. He had many murders to his credit. He had especially the ambition to kill Tito, so he proceeded very cautiously. But he was also a drunken sot and, one spring morning in Istra, when he had hit the bottle and his actions were slow … well, Thomas, you drove up at the place where he was hiding, and by good fortune you managed to shoot him. It was the luck of the beginner, as we say.’

Squire imitated the Russian in giving his face a mop. ‘That’s thirty years ago.’

‘Do we ever forget such moments of our youth? Time’s nothing.’

He gestured out towards the sea. ‘Here we are, almost in a similar situation, you might say. Here I stand, speaking with the man who assassinated the evil Slatko. I am proud.’

He sat down on the narrow path, gazing across the panorama before them.

‘I wanted to speak these things to you, because I doubt that we will ever meet again. All my possibilities are closing.’

After a moment’s hesitation, Squire came and sat beside him, his shoes pointing out over the drop.

‘Where were you that day? You were at the farmhouse?’

‘Before dawn on that day, I had driven an old German truck containing crates of British machine-guns from the coast. I was resting in the sun. Writing another poem, to be exact. When I saw your car approach the farmhouse, I jumped over a wall at the back to hide. So did two others with me. There were explosions of grenades and shooting for some while. I kept my head down.

‘When I dared to peep up, there I saw you standing by an upper window of the house, only a few metres above me. I studied your English face. I could have shot you easily. Instead, I sneaked away, keeping behind the wall. There was a little car we had stolen, a Fiat. I ran to that and drove off in it. As a matter of fact, I believe you unkindly threw a grenade after me, but I kept going. What I felt then I’ll never forget.’

‘Nor I.’

‘Well, it’s impossible to forget. I was so scared, but also glad, because that cruel ogre was finished. At great danger to my life, I made my way back to my native country, aided by Soviet contacts I knew in Belgrade. What foolish loyalty to Stalin and my country! When I reported back, I was rewarded by ten years in the Gulag. That term was miraculously reduced after Stalin’s death.’

He sighed heavily.

‘Now you are in trouble again,’ Squire said.

Rugorsky smiled. ‘But I don’t do anything so serious as pushing my friends from cliffs.’

‘The world’s a dangerous place.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that. I brought you here because I wished to speak of those distant times in Yugoslavia. I longed to tell you of the extraordinary bond between us over many years, across the East–West struggle. To be frank, I thought if I told you that you would remember me in future times.’

‘I expect I shall.’

‘When we met before the Hamilton picture in the Tate Gallery, I had to work through my memory for many hours before I recalled you. This charming English critic was Slatko’s executioner. He had shot the evil man who had been chilled by the breath of Stalin. Then I believed in the miraculous.’

‘Of course you checked up on me through the KGB.’

‘I don’t deny. You also checked up on me – you know I am in trouble again now. That’s how the world situation is – we must check up on each other. We didn’t make that situation, you and I.’

‘The charges in Leningrad – they’re serious?’

The Russian pulled a stalk of grass and bit it. ‘All things are serious, you see. Unfortunately, such is the state of morals that we all get involved with some form of graft as we progress upwards. There is no other way. Perhaps you will remember the case of Madame Furtseva, Minister of Culture and the late Khrushchev’s lady-friend. I knew her slightly – she was disgraced for such things. But that’s another tale … When I arrive at Moscow, I shall probably be tried, sentenced, and returned to the camps. My poor wife … I will never survive. I’m old, my kidney is weak. It will not be like living in a civilized English prison. Even if I could survive – even if the miracle happens and I am cleared at my trial – but that is not how they conduct trials in Moscow – I shall never again see the pleasant places of the West.’

‘Let’s get back to the square. I’ll buy you a drink.’ He got cautiously to his feet. This time, he extended a hand to Rugorsky, who took it and struggled up. They edged their way back along the narrow path.

Addressing Squire’s back, Rugorsky said, laughing slightly, ‘You see, Thomas, we two are not such bad fellows, after all. We have managed some communication. There is always division between East and West, and always has been. So much mistrust. But just this afternoon we spoke like men.’

As they rounded the base of one of the towers, Nontreale again materialized; the shadowy abyss lay behind them. Squire found his legs trembling as he stood on firm ground, staring up the narrow side street, where life was lived among overhead balconies, drooping telephone wires, eaves that almost met overhead, and stalls selling portraits of Christ and the Virgin with luminous eyeballs which glowed at night.

They pushed their way into a bar in the main square, opposite the ice-cream parlour where they had sat earlier. Men in rough clothes were crowding the counter. Squire almost spilt the beers as he carried them to a small table.

‘Quite a scrum,’ he said.

‘No. It’s not so at all, you see. Here, nobody pushes at all. Everyone is decent and polite.’

As they sat down, Squire said, ‘Whatever you have been up to in Leningrad, you are short of money when you come abroad.’

Rugorsky looked searchingly over his glass at Squire. ‘It’s a privilege for you to buy me this beer. We shall think of it many years ahead. What little money I have, I keep. It’s possible a little bribe may help me at Moscow airport, because if I can fly on to Leningrad, then there’s a chance for me. In Moscow, none.’

‘I’m sorry. I am glad to buy you a beer. Is Kchevov keeping an eye on you?’

‘Of course. I’m sure you know it. But we will speak of such things no more. Instead, tell me about your Pop Expo. We are being watched by a friend of yours.’

Turning, Squire saw that Parker-Smith was toying with a glass of wine and reading an Italian newspaper behind them.

They caught the bus back to Ermalpa. Neither Squire nor Rugorsky spoke much on the way. Squire watched the Russian drinking in the outside world, storing away what he saw, possibly reflecting that even the dirtiest vulcanizers, carrying on their trade and their private life in two rooms, enjoyed a freedom they had no way of evaluating. And he thought, ‘The impulse to push me over the cliff in order to gain some small political advantage in Russia was in his heart. I’m sure of it, even if he denies it. Otherwise, why should I have felt threatened as I did?’

They climbed out of the bus at last, only two blocks from the Grand Hotel Marittimo. The vehicle disappeared in a snort of grey exhaust fumes. Outside the swing doors, they paused.

‘I thought I might get to England from here,’ Rugorsky said abruptly. ‘But something tells me that I would not be welcome at Pippet Hall. You have a mistrust. Perhaps you still think in your mind that I had an intention to do something a little serious on the cliff at Nontreale … Well, really we are stuck with the nation we are born into, you see, and must play out its game of consequences.’

‘I’m sorry I can’t help, Vasili. And I didn’t lob that grenade at you in Istra.’

‘That’s a small cause for celebration. If you’re not feeling too unfriendly, perhaps you would like to buy us a bottle of champagne, or at least a beer.’

He smoothed down his white lock of hair and smiled ingratiatingly, showing broken teeth. Scratch a Russian …

‘I’m going to my room to have a shower, Vasili. I’m sure you’ll find friends in the bar.’ They stood scrutinizing each other.

Rugorsky shrugged. ‘Well, I understand your meaning.’ As they pushed through the swing doors into the cool of the foyer, he gave Squire one of his sly looks. ‘You do still think partly that I would be wicked enough to push you over the cliff, don’t you?’

Looking him in the eye, Squire said, ‘If you were once one of Slatko’s men – yes.’

Rugorsky nodded and rubbed his chin. ‘I see, Thomas. It’s because you’re not sentimental enough.’