He told Janet about the séance and Fanning and Palladino. She only half listened, he thought, although she perked up when he got to Palladino and la fessa and the demon. Most of it, however, rather bored her. He said, ‘I hate myself for doing crap like that.’
‘It’s for your book.’
He hesitated. ‘When she was in her trance, the masculine voice said, “L’amore non c’è.”’
She frowned, translating it silently. ‘“There is no love”?’
‘Is that it? More like “Love isn’t in it”, I think.’
‘In what?’
He looked at her unhappily. He didn’t remind her of what Fanning had said about the mediums’ trading information: was it common knowledge that he and Janet were not equally in love? ‘It also said something about the police.’
‘They have police on the other side? Dear me.’
‘Something like “The policeman is playing”. DiNapoli wouldn’t talk about it. He thought it was meant for him because he’s had trouble with the police.’
‘Ah, but the other one about love, you thought that was for you.’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t, Denton.’
He sighed. ‘I don’t seem to be able to help it.’
She took a cigarette from a little box he’d given her, a product of his prowls through the antiquities shops. ‘It’s all fakery, you know. If the dead wanted to communicate with us, why in the name of God would they speak in mysteries? Surely if Fra Geraldo wanted to tell you that there wasn’t enough love in the world or some copper was on the take, he’d come right out and say so.’
‘Fanning says getting through “the veil” is a monumental task. He has an answer for everything.’
‘I’m sure it would be, if there were a veil and something that wanted to get through it.’ She struck a Crown Vesta and held up the flame as if to demand his attention. ‘On the other hand, the living put themselves fairly clearly: Assunta has asked me how she can stop having babies.’ She shook her head. ‘It was laughable, the two of us trying to talk about the body and reproduction. In Italian. But it’s tragic, too. Apparently that ratty little husband of hers jumps her every night. She already has two kids.’ She looked bereft. ‘She can’t afford a Dutch cap, of course. I told her about la douche, but she’ll have to hide everything from him. Christ, men are awful!’
He fidgeted. He said, ‘The medium’s messages could be significant, even though they’re fake.’
‘For God’s sake! I’m talking about somebody’s life and you’re talking about music-hall tricks!’ She threw the cigarette into the fireplace. ‘That’s the way they do it! They invent “messages” that could mean anything. And why in the world would you suppose the dead know things that the living don’t?’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I meant somebody could have put her up to it. Fanning says the mediums trade information all the time.’
‘Fanning sounds a complete fool.’ She got another cigarette. ‘So do you, as a matter of fact. Why would anybody put gibberish in a medium’s mouth?’
He muttered something about the book and left her. He went to a shop in the Galleria and bought a folding Kodak and a contraption that focused gas light with a parabolic mirror—he still wanted a record of Fra Geraldo’s ‘chapel’. The shop clerk tried to sell him magnesium flash powder and a thing that looked like a push-broom to fire it in, but Denton had seen one of those in use and had thought it was only one short step removed from setting off black-powder explosives. He didn’t want to blow Fra Geraldo’s chapel to smithereens; he simply wanted to take some pictures of it.
When he got back, she was dressing to go out. She said, ‘I listened to you about your séance and the old man and the chapel full of tortures. The least you could do is listen to me about problems like Lucy and Assunta.’
‘I do listen to you. You never said anything about Lucy.’
‘Yes, but you don’t—! I wish you were a woman sometimes; you’d understand.’
‘Janet, I can’t say things I don’t believe. Or don’t understand! I’m sorry about Assunta, but there are thousands of Assuntas here, old before their time, dead too soon from childbearing, slaves to their husbands. I know about it. But I can’t do anything about it!’
‘I see that.’ She pulled a strap over a bare shoulder, looked at him. ‘It isn’t your fault. But that doesn’t help.’ She turned her back. ‘As for Lucy, you’ve made it perfectly clear you don’t like her.’
A maid brought in the mail. There was a stiff note from Fanning, saying that he’d decided to return to England and he regretted Denton’s ‘ignorant scepticism’. All in all, Denton thought it was the best news he’d get that day. Still, not wanting Janet to leave without his having done something to explain himself, he said, ‘I’ve never had a chance to like Lucy. She seems a kid to me. But if I can help somehow, of course I will.’
She was putting on a hat. She eyed him with a hat-pin in her mouth. She said around it, ‘I may hold you to that.’ She took the pin out and put it through the hat and her hair without being able to see what she was doing. ‘Promise?’
‘Of course.’
She kissed him. ‘She is a child, there’s no getting around it. But—that mother of hers!’
He got DiNapoli to take him to a locksmith—‘somebody, you know, local, and not too inquisitive’—who worked in a basso a half-dozen streets away. The white-haired, bent man looked at the wax impression of the key to Fra Geraldo’s chapel and asked a few questions (Were the two sides of the key the same? Was it a new lock? Not an American one, he hoped, by which Denton thought he meant a Yale). Of course he could make such a key. Today? Two lire. Tomorrow? One lira.
He went to the Palazzo Minerva next day, the folding camera and the key in his overcoat pocket and the lighting contraption under his arm. The portiere produced the keys when a lira was waved at him. He stared at the equipment and Denton said, ‘La luce.’ When nothing dawned on the man’s face, Denton said, ‘Per l’evidenza.’
‘Ah! L’evidenza!’
Denton wondered if he was guilty of impersonating a policeman, remembered Palladino’s murky statement about a policeman playing a comedy. Or had she—he, King John—meant somebody playing at being a policeman? Anyway, it was all nonsense; there was no King John.
He crossed to the big door and slipped inside. It was as if he were entering a just-opened tomb; the closed doors might have led to chambers where papyri lay.
In the chapel, he used his flash-light to fit rubber tubing over the gas nozzle of a lamp and dragged the little work table and then the stool into position in front of the first of the paintings. The camera went on the work table, the ball of softened wax helping to hold it in place; the contraption went on the stool, below and in front of it. He lit all the lamps, hoping that even their feeble glow would help.
He took five rolls of film, four of them of the paintings at different exposures up to as long as thirty seconds, as the shop assistant had advised, one each of some of the sculptures. He wished that he had brought more film: some urge made him want to photograph everything, as if it might vanish soon. He thought of this even while he saw the flaking paint and the mildew and, behind the sculptures, the dark brown stains left in the winters by cluster flies. Time’s messages.
The photographic prints of Fra Geraldo’s chapel came back and were examined and put into a drawer. The carving of Michele ’l ubriacon’ sat on his mantel. He studied both the carving and the photographs with a magnifier as if he expected them to speak, but they did not, or if they did, he didn’t understand the language.
He worked. He went to other mediums, not for enlightenment but for usable stories. Walking back along the seafront from visiting one of them (one of Fanning’s charlatans, as it turned out), he overtook Maltby, who was barely strolling, his hands joined behind him and his hat pushed low over his eyes. When Denton passed, he looked over and then said, ‘Oh, Denton!’
‘Mm, Maltby. I didn’t recognise you from the back.’
Maltby looked at something off to the side and said, ‘I wanted to talk to you about that peculiar room in the Palazzo Minerva, but they sent me away.’
‘Where? Who sent you?’
‘The consulate sent me away. Bari, to observe the naval manoeuvres. I know as much about naval manoeuvres as I do about playing the bagpipes. I explained that to them and they said it wouldn’t matter, I was just an extra man because the Italians expected a lot of show from us. The naval attaché was the real observer; I was just there to fill up an empty dinner suit and chat up the admirals’ wives, which was fine if they spoke English, but they didn’t. I was two days at sea. Desperately sick. Never even saw the Italian navy—rained the whole time, couldn’t see the other end of the boat. I’ve just got back.’ Maltby scowled. ‘Desk was piled a foot deep, on the top a memorandum from my immediate superior saying the new Lord Easleigh’s sending out a private detective and what was I doing about it? As if I’d been here the whole time! And he knows I was away! Most unfair.’
‘A detective? What the hell for?’ Denton felt personally offended, didn’t understand why.
‘It’s all supposed to be my fault. Something I said in my report—simply was honest—you recommended it, straightforward, factual—something I’d said about you having doubts about the police report. It wasn’t my fault!’ He put his head down again and put his hands behind his back as if he were about to resume walking. ‘I’m thinking of giving it all up.’
Denton realised again how very young Maltby was. He said, ‘The first days in a job are always the toughest.’ He was thinking, however, about a detective and the new Lord Easleigh and why his doubts had been taken so seriously. ‘I don’t get the detective.’
It was as if Maltby hadn’t heard him. ‘It was my mother had her heart set on me being a diplomat. My father’d as soon I was a policeman, which was what I rather fancied. Too late for that now, of course. She saw herself visiting me in Delhi. At the durbar with the Viceroy—that sort of thing. Not very realistic.’ He pursed his mouth and stared at the pavement. ‘Truth is, I’m no good at it. Might as well have drowned at sea, for all the use I was in Bari.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose I’d better introduce this detective to you.’
‘Not on my account.’
‘Oh, well, if you take that line—’
‘No, no—’
Denton felt obscurely guilty, as if it were he who had sent Maltby off to the naval manoeuvres. No, it was because he’d disliked Maltby at first and been offhand with him, and then he had rather liked him, and now he found himself feeling sorry for him. Denton said, ‘By all means introduce him. I suppose you mean he should quiz me about my doubts.’
Maltby shook his head. ‘That room! I couldn’t get it out of my head, all the time on that infernal navy boat.’ And then he said one of those things that made Denton like him for his odd sensitivity. ‘I don’t want to have to show it to the detective. Isn’t that peculiar?’
The palm trees were blowing in the wind from the sea, their fronds rattling. The sky was a uniform, neutral grey, as if sun, stars, moon, even the blue, had been taken away. Close in, three fishing boats were bobbing in the chop, bow and then stern and bow again, as if they were hinged in the middle. Farther out, the bay merged with the sky. The palms rattled; the sea came in with a slap-slap-slap on the stones; the birds wheeled and made noises like squeaky carts. Maltby said. ‘He’ll be here next week.’
‘I’ll go with you when you show him the chapel, if you like.’
Maltby shook his hand. ‘You go ahead now,’ he said, as if he were the older man. ‘You walk faster than I do. Lot to think about. Don’t mind me. In the dumps. Bad company, I know. You trot along.’
Denton did. He walked quickly towards the Pizzofalcone, the Falcon’s Beak, that cliff down which the Monte di Dio declines into the sea, and that resembled his own nose in profile. The air smelled of the water and of fish. The sky seemed to have turned everything grey, the buildings, the gulls, the palms. Denton paused where the Via Partenope begins and looked back; well behind him, Maltby’s heavy figure was trudging along, beyond his right shoulder the pale shape of the island of Ischia, floating like a lump of rotting ice on the grey water. Denton thought of the terrible, to them at least, suffering of the young, most of it self-created: of his own at that age—married too young, in deep debt too young, trying to break the virgin crust of Iowa with an old plough and one horse—which he had survived, but with his youth pared away as if by a knife. So it would be with Maltby and Janet’s Lucy, he thought, who would outgrow their sufferings but sacrifice the sensitivity that made them possible.
Janet was wearing one of her Pre-Raphaelite gowns; she was seated partly sideways on a Recamier couch that had come from the upstairs, her left arm over the high end, her long body and legs slanting down it, one foot on the floor, the other crossed over. The dress showed off her body. They had recovered from their argument about… What had it been about? Lucy and Assunta and his account of the visit to Palladino. He said, ‘Let’s go to bed.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve the guest in the house.’
‘Oh, well… There are all sorts of things other people do.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Frank Harris told me about somebody who had himself tied up and was then told dirty stories by his mistress. It’s all they ever did together.’
‘A little hard on her. Well, that’s the usual way, isn’t it? You hear about most such stuff in a whorehouse. A lot of Englishmen have desires about the nursery—well-to-do ones, I mean—being spanked and having the girl dress up as Nurse, and so on. It suggests a real lack of a sense of humour.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘Unlike you. You have a healthy sexual appetite and enjoy it all even when you know it looks ridiculous. Plus you know how to give pleasure as well as take it.’ She kissed him again. ‘Thank God.’ She leaned back. ‘I shall give you a promissory note. Tell me about your day.’
‘Today’s medium was rubbish. Told me all sorts of things about myself he could have dug out of any newspaper. They must think I’m a complete idiot. Maybe I am.’ He threw himself into a chair. ‘I met Maltby on the way back. He’s still brooding on Fra Geraldo’s chapel.’
‘Like you.’
‘Well, it’s a weird place.’
She said, ‘Children as torturers, yes.’
‘I think it has to be sexual.’
‘That’s new! Did you tell Maltby?’
‘What else would it be? All that stuff about suffering martyrs, saints having their teeth pulled and their breasts cut off, it’s all sexual, isn’t it?’
‘So Fra Geraldo was sexually fixed on children, was he? And they become torturers and he whips himself? And he talks to you about atoning? Not too difficult to see what he was about if you buy that, I suppose. A bit Yellow Book for your Mr Maltby, however. You make him seem a straightforward meat-and-potatoes man—lie down and spread your legs, dear.’
‘You think he molested boys or he only thought about it?’
‘Maltby? Oh, Fra Geraldo. Whipping himself could suggest either one. Or was he simply ashamed of dirty thoughts from long ago? That would be very English.’
‘But it was children’s ghosts he told me about. He’d killed children?’
‘Rather a reach.’
‘Well, you don’t get ghosts without deaths.’
‘But an adult is a dead child—no? Or a child who’s gone away years ago is dead to you, isn’t it? “Ghost” may be poetic licence. Or if you destroy a child’s innocence, I suppose you could say that you’ve killed the child. And it becomes a ghost?’
He grunted. She lit a cigarette. She said, ‘To spend forty years painting yourself as the victim of torture isn’t entirely sane. And he did paint himself as the victim, isn’t that it? Not pictures of himself buggering little boys behind the church organ.’
‘The victim of a temptation that was also a torture? So it was all in his head?’
‘Or in his paintbrush. It’s like you when you’re writing—you haven’t done the awful things you write about, but they come out anyway; they’re in there in some form, but they don’t have to have really happened to cause you to spend a year or two writing a book. Maybe the poor man simply lusted for some child and has been punishing himself for it with his brush ever since.’
‘Or he murdered two of them and buried them in the walls of the Palazzo Minerva. He was a damned good plasterer. And carpenter. And he liked to hide things. Even his paintings are sort of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t—proportions a little off, the far distance not quite right because it’s so sharp. The angel on the ceiling may be sympathetic or it may be completely blasé.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve seen my photographs.’ He inhaled heavily. ‘Fra Geraldo’s successor’s sending out a private detective, Maltby says.’
‘Apparently to make sure the death was an accident. Sounds as if he’s a little unsteady on his pins—maybe thinks his title’s shaky. “Uneasy lies the head.” God knows what the dick will tell him when he’s seen that chapel. “Your predecessor was crazy as a loon.”’
‘And you, my dear, take the private detective as a personal insult. Am I right?’
They were silent. She smoked; he got up and took one of her cigarettes and lit it, standing at the window of the red room and looking down into the sere gardens. He said, ‘Maybe an English private detective will find something I didn’t. Maybe it needs fresh eyes.’
‘You’ll show him the chapel?’
He made a face. He got up and prowled the room. He said, ‘I’m sick of the dead and spooks and mediums. They’re all rubbish, no matter what DiNapoli says. Fra Geraldo was real. So is that chapel. Yes, I’ll show it to the detective, or Maltby will. I can’t pretend it’s mine simply because I found it. Although I guess that’s the way I feel.’ When she didn’t respond, he kissed her; she turned her cheek; he went out. His mind growled and grumbled like a sick stomach. Everything was in turmoil.
L’amore non c’è. Il poliziotto fa la commedia. Temptation as torture…