The Bay of Noon Page 10

  Recounting my evening to Gianni and Gioconda in the piazza next day, I spotted the Colonel blearily reading his newspaper. (He could not know the whole cause of our laughter, but must have sensed the trend, for the following week he kept me late at work each evening for no purpose. He never came to Capri again, so far as I know, and often spoke of it as being full of degenerates.)

  I noticed too that Gianni, who had flung himself back in his chair with a roar of delight at my story, became quieter at the sight of Gioconda with her hand to her mouth and tears of laughter brimming over her eyelids. It made him uneasy, not only the revelation of female duplicity, but her pleasure in it. Weeks later, when the Colonel cropped up in some other connection, Gianni went so far as to say that he felt ‘sorry for that man, with all you women baiting him’.

  Gianni had hired a small boat in which he proposed to row us to an inlet, away from the holiday crowd. That morning on Capri we bought a picnic in the souks of the town, and I got a bathing suit, not having known it would be warm enough to swim. Straddling a chair in a white shop that hotly smelt of the next-door bakery, Gianni pointed out the costume that would suit me best and, to punish me for having got the better of the Colonel, made a scene when I almost chose another.

  As we came away he told me, ‘There you are. Stop sulking. You got the one that’ll look best on you.’

  ‘That’s beside the point,’ I said, enraged by the uproar he had made.

  Gianni stared. ‘It’s the only point,’ he said.

  Taking us to the beach to claim the boat, he imagined himself, so it seemed, in possession of every lovely woman we passed. ‘Legs like that – my God’, or ‘I’ve always fancied women with that curly, carroty hair’ – in each case his admiration was unrelated to, undiminished by, those that had gone before or would immediately come after. It was something of the same spontaneous and faithless pleasure with which Gioconda herself would remark of almost any flower that she saw – iris or freesias, roses or ranunculus, wild or growing in a pot or gathered in sheaves on a barrow – ‘That’s my favourite flower.’

  Gianni took credit for the island, as he had done with Herculaneum – for the Judas trees in bloom, the limestone peaks and dolomitic escarpments, the sea luridly streaked between slopes of oak and juniper. Foreign tourists were doing their best to ruin it – ‘When I knew it first there was one car on Capri, one only, and it belonged to Ferrari.’

  He told me that Capri had been taken by the English during the Napoleonic wars, though not for long, thank God – ‘Otherwise can you imagine? – another little Malta.’

  Gioconda and I floated in the boat while Gianni swam beneath us, monstrous in a rubber mask.

  ‘That great rock in the sea, the one all by itself. On that the Romans built a funeral pyre for a follower of Augustus Caesar.’ Gioconda pointed, and I shaded my eyes to look. ‘The Monacone, they call it, supposedly because a monk lived there in the time of Tiberius.’

  ‘A monk, in the time of Tiberius?’

  ‘I mean a priest, a sacerdote —whatever they had then. So they say, anyway. Gianni and I climbed to the top of it once – there’s a hole through the middle of it, like a chimney. You can squeeze up, planting your feet on the sides.’

  ‘It sounds awful.’

  ‘So it was. The whole thing was somewhat awful — there was no,place to land there from the boat, only a jagged shelf covered with sea-urchins. Then this vertical tunnel, wet, black, maggoty … On top, though, it was nice – like a big rough tabletop, covered with stunted bushes and flat, circular nests of sea birds. But going up was horrible. I thought I was going to fall back through the rock and be killed.’

  ‘Why ever did you do it?’ I asked her, knowing well enough.

  ‘Oh – to be companionable, you know. I’m unathletic, in general, for a person like Gianni.’

  I could imagine it all — the abuse, the remonstrances, Gianni shouting, ‘Su, su, idiota —not like that, don’t you know anything about climbing …’ At that moment Gianni surfaced alongside. Holding on to the boat with one hand he blew out his snorkel and shook the water from his goggles.

  ‘What a pair – lolling here while there’s all this to be seen below. It’s marvellous down there. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.’

  Gioconda leant over, took the goggles from him and dried them on a towel. Gianni floated on his back beside the boat.

  ‘See that rock, Jenny — I got Gioconda to the top of that one day. What a job. It’s marvellous up there. Beautiful, isn’t it, Gioconda?’

  She agreed.

  ‘All kinds of plants, flowers, coloured lizards. Like a desert island. If it hadn’t been for me she would never have been up there.’

  We had our lunch among the rocks, on an arrow of sand that, once the boat was beached there, scarcely allowed us to stretch ourselves in its shadow. Gianni sang and complained by turns as we unpacked paper cones of fruit and cheese. When we had eaten he lay down in the sun beside Gioconda; but, with his hand shading his eyes, watched me while I sat up recorking bottles and pushing garbage into a bag.

  ‘Jenny,’ he said. ‘You really do have a cat’s eyes. Amber, are they? Or topaz?’

  I told him, ‘My sister-in-law says they’re yellow.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s the sort of remark I get about my Maserati. Envy makes people desperate.’ He yawned. ‘These flies. That’s the trouble about being on holiday, you can never rest. You never really take your afternoon snap, as the English call it.’

  I looked at Gioconda, who lay with eyes closed, as wakeful as he. Sand had dried on her arms and legs, and salt was whitely grained into her brows and lashes. Years later at the Piraeus I saw an Athena, one of two great bronzes that had been lifted intact from the excavations of a drain, lying flat on a stone floor with clay-caked eyes, bringing to my mind Gioconda as she lay motionless near the Saracen Beach that afternoon.

  While I watched she opened her eyes. Turning on her side towards Gianni and raising herself on one elbow, she laid her other hand almost tentatively on his midriff. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you’re roasting. You’ll be developing the bronze disease.’

  He had been so petulant, so unpredictable, that day, with each of us, that I should not have been surprised to see him brush her hand away; and was almost embarrassed when instead he tenderly covered it with his own. ‘I’m told that goes away with handling,’ he said.

  Gioconda’s hair, which floated around her when she swam, falling like a stain over her shoulders or drifting about her like some fringed sea-plant, was bound now to one side in a single thick cable.

  ‘Quite a dish,’ a youth had remarked, passing us that morning in the street.

  ‘Which one?’ asked his friend.

  ‘The Long Plait,’ the boy replied.

  ‘La lunga treccia,’ I echoed now, as Gianni reached up and ran the heavy damp pigtail through his hand. ‘It’s what used to be called tresses.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gianni. ‘The sort of hair people could cherish locks of.’

  I told them how, on one of my sister-in-law’s excursions to the inner circle, I had gone to John Murray’s in London and been shown the locks of hair clipped by Byron from his loves. ‘There was one – identified by Byron as something like “Lisbon, 8-10 p.m., 17 October” – incredibly long, coarse, straight, almost like a horse’s tail.’

  ‘How Byronic,’ said Gioconda, ‘in the truest sense, if he had clipped a horse’s tail and had it reverently preserved by his publisher as a souvenir of the Romantic era.’

  Gianni said, ‘I can think of a still more Byronic explanation, but decency forbids.’ With his free hand he killed a sandfly that had settled on his stomach, and remarked, ‘Un salaud de moins. Byron,’ he went on, rubbing his palm in the sand to clean it, ‘now there’s a great man. You know, he wrote to his friend, “My mother-in-law has been dangerously ill, and now is dangerously well again.”’ He passed the heavy braid of Gioconda’s hair through his hand again, allowing her enoug
h rope.

  She leant away from him, laughing, letting him hold the taut pigtail by its tip. ‘I’m at the end of my tether,’ she said.

  One wet morning at the beginning of May, Germani, our driver, made known to the Colonel and me a Neapolitan saying – ‘Rain on the fourth of May, rain for four weeks.’ As this cheerless maxim, possibly invented on the spur of the moment to distract our attention from some near miss to a barrow or a bicycle, proceeded to fulfil itself to the letter, the Colonel’s daily greeting to me was transformed from his unintelligible rendering of ‘Buon Giorno’, into ‘Sunny Naples’. And there he would stand, day in, day out, in a dripping doorway on Via Posillipo, saying ‘Sunny Naples’ to himself and me and never tiring of it – so relieved was he to be confirmed in his suspicion that the fame of Naples was groundless and that he need not trouble himself over its origins. Through the words one could retrace his military past, picturing the successive theatres of service in which he had snorted ‘Sunny Spain’, or ‘Sunny Egypt’, or ‘Sunny Palestine’, as the spring rains poured down on him in absolution.

  In the third week of that month, as we stood, the Colonel and I, looking over a rucked and slatey sea to the blurred cone, rising on its buff-coloured pediment of habitation, I was opening my mouth to forestall this observation of his when Justin Tulloch’s car drew up beside me, followed by the Vehicle.

  ‘Just in time,’ I told him, climbing in.

  ‘That’s what they called me at school.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Justin Time.’

  ‘That man sends me up the wall.’

  ‘They called my brother Ethelred the Unready.’

  ‘Is his name Ethelred? Really?’

  ‘No. It was just to make a pair of us. Symmetry is not constructed out of logic. Come for a drive.’

  ‘You know I can’t. I’m late already.’

  ‘He’s later than you are,’ said Justin, swerving out and passing the Vehicle. Just as it had been easy to imagine him a Scottish Nationalist, so too, I could picture him with the hectic cheeks and plunging walk of the British schoolboy.

  ‘Now Jenny,’ Justin said to me, ‘know this. I grow to be quite fond of you.’

  ‘Listen.’ I touched his knee. ‘Don’t grow to be anything of the kind.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, copying the gesture but leaving his hand on my knee. ‘As yet I ask nothing.’ He went on at once, ‘On our left, the tomb of Virgil.’ The car slowed down to merge with the morning traffic of the tunnel that led out of Naples. ‘Fittingly placed at the gates of Bagnoli.’ He said, ‘Good old Virgil. I salute thee, Mantovano.’ Removing his hand from me he raised it before him, to the great interest of a young man who drew alongside us in a dented Topolino. ‘About my middle name, now – Jenny, why do you never show any curiosity about my middle name?’

  ‘Well, what is it for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘That P – for whose meaning affection would have prompted you to inquire long ere this – that P, my dear, stands for Pericles, a figure for whom my father’s admiration knew, as the saying goes, no bounds.’

  ‘It’s nice. I hope you’re not joking.’

  ‘I’m not joking. I like it myself.’

  ‘I knew someone at Cape Town whose middle name was Vercingétorix, for the same reason.’

  ‘I’m jealous of him already.’

  ‘Don’t be. He’s twelve.’

  This sort of talk could continue through the tunnel and out the other side, past blocks of fascist sport pavilions and dopoguerra housing, until Justin left me at my office. ‘Yabbling away,’ Justin himself used to call it. I suppose we both knew that something would come of it eventually – felt that it was up to circumstances, having brought us together in the first place, to draw conclusions from so much banter. My own detachment, so far as it was pleasantly conscious, continued to interest me; on Justin’s part, of course, it was merely exasperating.

  Some time before this I began to have week-ends to myself – that is, I could leave the office at lunchtime on Saturday and need not return to it until Monday morning. I made short, rainy trips – down to Paestum, over to the islands, up to Rome. In Rome that May the weather was better. Mostly I went up by train, but Gioconda several times drove to Rome to visit Gianni, and once or twice took me along in her car – a tearing, hooting journey among fields yellow with mustard, and trees damp with rising sap; among the little clouds of the olives and the lyre-shaped ranks of budding vines.

  They were a relief, those trips to Rome. In the south the rain had begun to dilute our spirits. Even my sister-in-law had read of it in The Times, and wrote, ‘What a shame you are having such frightful weather.’ In Naples we had given up looking for wedges of clear sky or diagnosing signs of change. At Bagnoli we dodged from building to building tenting our heads with raincoats, and on one of the cameo-hunting expeditions to town I bought a pair of gumboots in Via Roma, at a shop that called itself The Fountain of Rubber. At first merely a symptom of the sirocco, the rain was now being attributed to the atomic bomb, as if so maddening a phenomenon must of necessity be man-made. In the middle of May the British obligingly detonated a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific, and this – though coming after weeks of rain – was taken as proof by the faction that supported the theory of the bomba atomica.

  ‘For all I know,’ I said to Gianni, ‘they may be right.’

  Gianni looked pained, and raised his palm at me like a traffic policeman. ‘Figlia mia. At the end of the First World War, when I was a boy, there was a lot of bad weather in Europe. And why was that? It was the guns on the Western Front, they said; it was the disturbance in the atmosphere caused by poison gas; it was — I forget what other fantasies. Then there was the rain in Italy in ’44 — that was due to the bombardment too, as I recall. Now it’s the atomic bomb, is it? Let us congratulate ourselves, my dear. It may be that the least we have to fear from shelling, gas, or the atomic bomb is a shower of rain.’

  Rome was a relief, most of all, from poverty. Just as Gioconda had said, the collective indigenence of Naples bore down sometimes in a begrimed and desperate sadness that all the city’s compensations could not outweigh. Rome, poor as it was – poorer then than now – could never crush you with its poverty as Naples did; alleviated by well-groomed, floodlit monuments, by tourism, by a middle class, and by the opulence of church and state, it could never convey the same sense of unremitting daily hardship. I loved, then, these excursions into the comparative wellbeing of the Romans – the evidence of comfort or of luxury glimpsed through the windows of apartments and displayed in the velvet vitrines of dress shops or art dealers or jewellers. I enjoyed the multiplicity of restaurants and bookshops, the paucity of beggars; it was a pleasure to sit outdoors at a café without watching the envelope of sugar disappear from my saucer into the lightning grasp of a ragged infant. (The few outdoor cafés of Naples likely to provide such refinements as separate, sealed sugars were haunted by these swift children in the way that, at Rome, the restaurants were patrolled by cats.) After the impoverished provinciality with which, at Naples, individual sophistication was invariably countered, Rome – though with its own, less vital brand of provincialism – seemed grandly cosmopolitan to me.

  One Sunday morning I sat having coffee beside one of the kiosks in the Borghese Gardens and, in this mood of relief, watched – as if I could never get enough of it – husbands and wives and children, fresh from Mass, washed, starched, and ironed, in white shirts and pink dresses and hats heavy with flowers; accompanied by well-fed babies in high-sprung prams and little silky dogs on red leather leashes. So many of these comfortable, comforting, boring families that one might have imagined there was nothing else in Rome nothing more distressing, nothing more interesting.

  Gianni’s apartment was at the top of an old house near Piazza del Popolo, with a long, tawny view of Rome. It was a beautiful and, to me, disturbing place. The rooms were white, and plate glass had been let into some of the deep walls. There were teak tables in fron
t of long sofas, and leather chairs beside Swedish telephones; a high fidelity system was concealed in the bar. Along with this went a pair of eighteenth-century tables in scagliola and a French mirror almost as high as the high room where it hung. There were walls of books, and paintings by Morandi and Derain. In a recess between two windows there was an Attic vase on which Hector and Menelaus contended for the body of Patroclus. In Gianni’s bedroom there was a great picture: a landscape seen through tears of joy.

  I had never seen such things in a private house until then (for my expeditions with Norah had broken off just as she was entering her great collections phase), and was much moved by them. Gianni, curiously enough, took less credit for my pleasure than he had done at Capri or Herculaneum, quite modestly asking, ‘You really like it then?’ or saying, ‘You know he painted several versions of this.’

  There was a study, other bedroom — I don’t think I ever saw all the rooms in Gianni’s flat. When I said this to him he answered, ‘In Italy one should try to have some rooms one doesn’t have to enter. Like undeveloped aspects of one’s personality.’

  I never saw a sign of children, not even a photograph. But once on Gianni’s crowded desk I saw stamps, torn off and put aside in a pile, as if for a child.

  The beauty of this flat of Gianni’s was the most troubling of his inconsistencies. It reflected not only an unfeignable degree of intellect and feeling, but even – for its main impression was of clear surfaces, of space without ornament——a certain austerity of temperament: qualities that one must exclude from Gianni’s composition in order to make his daily self comprehensible. Unlike the abrupt suggestions of discord in Gioconda, Gianni’s incompatibilities were disturbing in an expansive, favourable sense – like the wide, modern light that came into his rooms from the window-surgery he had performed on that ancient building.