I sit in the Piazza San Marco on the day when I discovered a sea of corruption among the local Communists. The music plays, visitors remark upon the pigeons.
Scenes coalesce: Miss Batchelor passes along the promenade, Major Trubstall lies, the blue dress flutters and is still. In Rotterdam I have a nameless woman. ‘
I must try, they tell me; it will help to write it down. I do not argue, I do precisely as they say. Carefully, I remember. Carefully, I write it down.
It was Bath, not Corniglia, not Rotterdam or Venice, not Vezelay: it was in Bath where Dorothea and I first met, by chance in the Pump Room. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, actually bumping into her.
She shook her head, saying that of course I hadn’t hurt her. She blamed the crowds, tourists pushing like mad things, always in a hurry. But nothing could keep her out of the Pump Room because of its Jane Austen associations.
‘I’ve never been here before.’
‘Goodness! You poor thing!’
‘I was on the way to have some coffee. Would you like some?’
‘I always have coffee when I come.’
She was small and very young – twenty-one or -two, I guessed – in a plain white dress without sleeves. She carried a basket, and had very fair hair, quite straight and cut quite short. Her oval face was perfect, her eyes intense, the blue of a washed-out sky. She smiled when she told me about herself, as though she found the subject a little absurd. She was studying the history of art but when she finished that she didn’t know what on earth she was going to do next. I said I was in Bath because my ex-wife’s mother, who’d only come to live there six months ago, had died. The funeral had taken place that morning and my ex-wife, Felicity, had been furious that I’d attended it. But I’d always been fond of her mother, fonder in fact than Felicity had ever been. I’d known of course that I would have to meet her at the funeral. She’d married again, a man who ran a wine business: he had been there too.
‘Is it horrible, a divorce?’ the girl asked me while we drank our weak, cool coffee. ‘I can never think of my parents divorcing.’
‘It’s nice you can’t. Yes, it’s horrible.’
‘Did you have children?’
‘No.’
‘There’s that at least. But isn’t it odd, to make such a very rudimentary mistake?’
‘Extraordinary.’
I don’t know what it was about her manner that first morning, but something seemed to tell me that this beautiful creature would not be outraged if I said – which I did – that we might go somewhere else in search of a better cup of coffee. And when I said, ‘Let’s have a drink,’ I said it confidently. She telephoned her parents’ house. We had lunch together in the Francis Hotel.
‘I went to a boarding-school I didn’t like,’ she told me. ‘Called after St Catherine but without her charity. I was bad at maths and French and geography. I didn’t like a girl called Angela Tate and I didn’t like the breakfasts. I missed my brothers. What about you? What was your wife like?’
‘Fond of clothes. Very fine tweed, a certain shade of scarlet, scarves of every possible variation. She hated being abroad, trailing after me.’ I didn’t add that Felicity had been unfaithful with anyone she had a fancy for; I didn’t even want to think about that.
The waiter brought Dorothea veal escalope and steak
‘They say I am compulsively naughty,’ Dorothea said, as if guessing that I wondered what she had said to her parents on the telephone. I suspected she had not confessed the truth. There’d been some excuse to account for her delay, and already that fitted in with what I knew of her. Certainly she would not have said that she’d been picked up by a middle-aged journalist who had come to Bath to attend a funeral. She spoke again of Jane Austen, of Elizabeth Bennet, and Emma and Elinor. She spoke as though these fictional characters were real. She almost loved them, she said, but that of course could not have been quite true.
‘Who were encumbered with low connections and gave themselves airs? Who bestowed their consent with a most joyful alacrity?’
I laughed, and waited for her to tell me. I walked with her to a parked car, a white Mini that had collected a traffic warden’s ticket. Formally we shook hands and all the way to London on the train I thought of her. I sat in the bar drinking one after another of those miniature bottles of whisky that trains go in for, while her face jumped about in my imagination, unnerving me. Again and again her white, even teeth smiled at me.
Within a day or two I was in Belfast, sending reports to a Washington newspaper and to a syndicate in Australia. As always, I posted photocopies of everything I wrote to Stoyckov, who operates a news bureau in Prague., Stoyckov used to pay me when he saw me, quite handsomely in a sense, but it was never the money that mattered: it was simply that I saw no reason why the truth about Northern Ireland should not be told behind the Iron Curtain as well as in Washington and Adelaide.
I had agreed to do a two-months stint – no longer, because from experience I knew that Belfast becomes depressing. Immediately afterwards I was to spend three days in Madrid, trying to discover if there was truth in the persistent rumour that the Pope was to visit Spain next year. ‘Great Christ alive,’ Felicity used to scream at me, ‘call this a marriage?’
In Belfast the army was doing its best to hush up a rape case. I interviewed a man called Ruairi O Baoill, whom I’d last seen drilling a gang of terrorists in the Syrian desert. ‘My dear fellow, you can hardly call this rape,’ a Major Trubstall insisted. ‘The girl was yelling her head off for it.’ But the girl had been doing no such thing; the girl was whey-faced, unable to stop crying; the girl was still in pain, she’d been rushed to hospital to have stitches.
