The maharajah, accompanied by Ramesh, was gazing unhappily at what had once been a very fine motor car.
‘There is the Major now, I fancy, Pater,’ son murmured to father.
‘Ah,’ the Major said as he approached them, ‘Good morning, sir. Rather earlier than we anticipated. We didn’t expect you for a week or two yet. Nothing wrong, I trust?’
He was acutely aware that his royal master seemed to be paying altogether more attention than was surely necessary to the mangled coachwork of the Royale.
‘There was talk of cholera,’ the maharajah said distractedly, ‘so I thought it best to leave Rome. Apparently some idiotic fisherman brought it over from Capri and it has been spreading like wildfire on the mainland ever since. In any event, I was tiring of Rome’s – ah, attractions. But pray tell, Major, what have you done to the old jalopy here?’
‘Italian drivers,’ the Major said bluffly. ‘You know how it is, sir. Damned fools, the lot of them. Drive too fast – don’t give a chap a chance to get out the way, what?’
There was a silence.
‘And on the wrong side of the road,’ he added.
There was a further silence. The maharajah gazed, perhaps significantly, at his own gleaming car, which he had clearly just driven from Rome entirely without mishap. The Major began to feel uneasy.
‘French drivers too, of course,’ he proffered, finding fresh inspiration. ‘Worse than the Italians, some of them.’
Encountering only further silence, he fixed what he hoped was a convincingly expert eye on the Bugatti.
‘Bit of panel beating required, eh? That’s all. Right as rain after that, I dare say.’
Ramesh gazed inscrutably at his father and then at the Major.
‘Most unfortunate,’ the maharajah said finally. ‘Why, here comes your dear lady wife, I believe.’
‘Ah yes, the memsahib,’ Major Benjy commented gratefully as Elizabeth beetled across the gravel, wearing the widest smile her face could possibly accommodate without risking permanent muscle damage.
‘Why, this is a pleasant surprise, sir,’ she greeted him. ‘We were not expecting you for some weeks yet.’
She essayed a curtsey, but cautiously in view of the mixed results which earlier attempts had produced.
‘I was just telling the Major,’ the maharajah explained courteously, ‘that there was talk of cholera arriving in Rome, so I thought it prudent to cut short my stay.’
This was in fact being somewhat economical with the truth, since it was not only cholera that had been threatening to return to Rome unexpectedly, but also a certain lady’s husband.
‘What a pity you could not have been here a few days earlier, sir,’ Ramesh said innocently. ‘You missed a wonderful party.’
Lucia stood beside a Pullman carriage on Milan station as a porter stowed her luggage. He finished at length, for Lucia did not believe in travelling light, climbed down on to the platform, and tugged the peak of his cap expectantly. She handed him some money. Clearly it was at least adequate, for he opened the door for her and invited her to mount the steps.
‘No, grazie,’ she said, waving her hand, and gestured wanly to the magazine stand, as if to convey that she knew the Italian to explain that she needed to buy some reading matter, but was much too tired to trot it out just now. Smiling, he tugged his cap again and was gone.
She was unsettled, undecided and out of sorts, none of which were feelings with which she was either familiar or comfortable.
That wretched misunderstanding with the King had affected her badly, though she believed she had carried it off well. It would have been intolerable to remain at Bellagio under his gently reproachful gaze. Though the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that it was a misunderstanding which could hardly be laid at her door. Georgie was the true culprit. If only he had taken her into his confidence in the first place. Come to think of it, if only he had not lured her to Bellagio under false pretences in the first place ...
She found herself turning over magazines on the stand in a desultory sort of way, the aged female proprietor hovering toothlessly. There were almost all in Italian, apart from some dreadful American publication with photographs of film stars. A pity. She had been hoping for either the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal. As it was, there were no English newspapers at all. She toyed with taking an Italian newspaper home to leave nonchalantly in the living room the next time people came to tea, having first carefully looked up all the words in the dictionary, but even this amusing idea failed to rouse her from her melancholy.
She sighed and turned away. Clearly she was going to have to make a start on the second chapter of I promessi sposi after all.
Her relationship with Georgie had always been one of magnanimous sovereign and loyal, adoring subject. Not for nothing had she been known as Queen Lucia back in the old days in Riseholme when Pepino had still been alive, and Georgie was Riseholme’s dashing young man, Francis Drake to her Elizabeth. Yet it was based on both parties knowing their place, and there were undeniably times when Georgie exhibited a rebellious streak. It was also undeniable, she mused, that the likelihood of such unfortunate episodes tended to increase when Olga was in close proximity. There had been various regrettable occasions when Lucia’s authority had been challenged in Riseholme, and all of them after Olga had moved into New Place, just a stone’s throw from Georgie’s house.
Now her departure from Bellagio, necessary and entirely justified though it had been, had left them together, and she wondered just when Georgie would return. When he had been to stay with Olga in the past, for example at Le Touquet, he had stayed away so long that tongues had started to wag, not that much time was required to elapse in Tilling for such a phenomenon to be observed. The ritual greeting ‘Any news?’ more or less cried out for something to be extemporised, even if no solid factual basis for it in fact existed.
Though Lucia would never admit it, least of all to herself, she was afraid of loneliness. She needed to feel people around her, to feed off their esteem, to be at the centre of things. Most of all, she needed Georgie. Their relationship was one of being together every day, except when she was engaged on civic duties of course, of a hundred and one private jokes and asides during the course of the day, and of piano duets as the evening drew in, and after dinner of him sitting doing his needlepoint while she stuck her press clippings into their appropriate scrapbooks. She realised at once that she would miss him dreadfully until his return, was in fact missing him dreadfully already.
As she distractedly scanned the station surroundings, her eyes alighted on a telegraph office. Suddenly she realised something else: that Georgie, or at least Georgie while in the presence and under the influence of Olga, would never send that telegram. She checked her watch and, calculating that she still had over twenty minutes before her train was due to depart, set off across the platform with a determined tread, already feeling inside her handbag for a pencil.
The maharajah was used to people bowing, and discreetly handing him pieces of paper. Usually they were communications from the Viceroy, or invitations to the next Durbar. Occasionally, while travelling overseas, they could even be billets-doux from ladies whose eye he had caught at dinner the night before. On this occasion, however, the document which the duty manager was attempting, with quiet determination, to bring to his attention was the Mapp-Flints’ bill to date. Major Benjy realised this belatedly and tried to snatch at it himself, but by some legerdemain presumably passed on from one generation of hotel managers to the next, it still somehow ended up in royal, rather than military, hands.
Just for a moment the maharajah visibly flinched. Then he raised his eyebrows at the manager, who shrugged apologetically in reply. The Major had the bright idea of asking the little woman to proffer an explanation, but when he looked round it was only to find that she had slipped away into the gardens.
The maharajah sat down at a convenient marble-topped table with a crossing of legs which would have made Georgie weep with envy, and, with that natural elegance that characterised all his movements, gracefully extracted a cheque book and a fountain pen, both very splendid, from his inside jacket pocket. Expressionlessly, he wrote down a very large figure and appended the royal signature. The manager seized the Hoare & Co. cheque gratefully with a deep bow.
‘My dear Major,’ the maharajah said casually, ‘I will ask the hotel to pack your bags. There is no need for you or your dear wife to trouble yourself about any of the arrangements. The concierge will provide a taxi to take you to the station. If I am not mistaken you will be just in time for the midday train to Milan.’
‘But ...’ essayed the Major, his world crumbling about him.
The maharajah smiled thinly.
‘No thanks are necessary, old chap,’ he said blandly. ‘On the contrary, it is I who must thank you for looking after Ramesh so very expertly.’
Ramesh, who was hovering deferentially as befitted a royal son and heir, bowed to the Major and added his Etonian murmured thanks to those of his father.
‘Ah,’ said the Major, who had until a few seconds previously been looking forward to a chota peg or two before lunch.
‘Do give my very best regards to your wife, my dear fellow,’ the maharajah said urbanely. ‘It has been so very good to see you again.’
This last phrase was delivered slightly over the shoulder, as the royal pair were already in motion, on their way out of the hotel.
‘Ah,’ said the Major sadly.
Lucia’s lady’s maid was making a last sweep through her former mistress’s room to make quite sure that nothing had been overlooked during the somewhat hastily conducted packing exercise of the previous day, when suddenly she came across what was clearly intended as a telegram lying on the dressing table.
Dutifully, she took the paper downstairs to the office and directed its occupant rather haughtily, given the superior status which a lady’s maid enjoys over a mere clerk, to send the telegram and then leave the draft on the signor’s desk to signify that it had been despatched. This mission safely accomplished, she adjusted her hat in the mirror and headed for the steamer stage, feeling most virtuous. After all, the signora had not only paid her to the end of the summer, but had also left her a generous tip, so she was happy to have been able to render her this final service.
The royal pair were once more regarding the battered Royale.
‘What shall we do with it, Pater?’ Ramesh enquired at length.
‘Whatever you like,’ his father replied curtly. ‘It displeases me. Pray dispose of it, old man,’
‘Yes, sir,’ his son replied dutifully.
Como is not one of the more obviously attractive Italian towns, but, being Italian, it is inevitably possessed of a certain elegance, upon which Georgie and Olga were reflecting as they sat at a café close to the cathedral, looking for all the world as though they might be Italian themselves, with little cups of espresso set before them together with a bottle of naturale.
‘You’re going to have to do it, you know,’ Olga said abruptly. ‘After all, it is her money.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Georgie said miserably, ‘but suppose just for once she is wrong about this? Suppose that by deliberately not sending the telegram I can save her from losing all of it?’
‘Do you really believe that?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, of course not,’ he admitted. ‘The truth is I really don’t know one way or the other, but it all just feels horribly wrong, somehow.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Olga admitted, pouring herself some more naturale. ‘I feel a huge uneasiness about it all, and I’m used to trusting my instincts. Of course, part of it may just be that I don’t much like that Lodge character, which I freely admit.’
Georgie’s face brightened for a moment.
‘I say, you don’t think he might be some sort of international fraudster, do you, like that Horatio Bottomley? Perhaps he’s trying to steal Lucia’s money, and we’d really be doing her the most enormous service by thwarting his evil designs ...?’
He looked at her without much hope, which was just as well, for she promptly dashed whatever little might have remained.
‘No, I’m afraid that horse won’t run, my dear. If you must know, I’ve sent some discreet telegrams to check him out, and it seems he’s the genuine article all right. My pal Bruno at Rothschild’s says he’s OK.’
She gazed at him fondly.
‘So what it comes down to, then,’ Georgie said slowly, ‘is a straightforward question of judgement.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed simply. ‘Are you prepared to back your financial judgement over Lucia’s?’
‘Well, no, of course not,’ came the sharp rejoinder, ‘and even if I was, I wouldn’t, because it’s her money, not mine.’
He tossed some coins on to the table and stood up.
‘Come on,’ he said resignedly. ‘There’s a telegraph office over on the other side of the square. Let’s go and send the damn thing and be done with it.’
‘I thought you left it at the hotel,’ she observed, as she quickly checked her reflection in her powder compact.
‘Yes, I did,’ he concurred, ‘but I can remember exactly what it says.’
So saying, he put his panama on his head with a most determined air, quite forgetting in the stress of the moment to position it at its usual rakish angle, and offered Olga his arm.
Back at the hotel the maharajah leaned on his motor-car bonnet and watched with a certain morose detachment as a squad of hotel workers, under the languid direction of Ramesh, slowly rolled the Royale to the end of the steamer pier and pushed it into the water. There was hardly a splash as it disappeared from sight. Being an Eton man, Ramesh could have told anybody who cared to ask that Lake Como was one of the deepest lakes in the world, but nobody did, perhaps because they were all from Como anyway and thus already possessed of this tantalising titbit of information.
The maharajah pitched his cigarette away rather savagely but paused with his foot poised in mid-air to grind it out as Miss Flowers suddenly came out of the front door. She was wearing a tennis dress which if anything seemed to end further above the knee than the last one, and which positively gleamed in the bright Italian sunlight. Once again, she could only be described, if it were not already an over-used and absurdly mawkish phrase, as a vision of loveliness.
‘Hello there,’ she said to him as he raised his hat, gazing at her with frank admiration. ‘I say, what a gorgeous car! Is it another Bugatti?’
He sighed, and then remembered that women could not be expected to understand cars.
‘No, my dear,’ he replied, and then, enunciating the words with all the gravity they demanded, ‘it is a Hispano-Suiza.’
He was gratified to observe that Miss Flowers was clearly properly impressed by this news.
‘Gosh!’ she exclaimed. ‘It looks frightfully expensive. God knows what it must have cost. Oh, I forgot – I am a fool. Of course, if you’re a maharajah you’re simply frightfully rich, aren’t you?’
‘Fair to middling,’ he confessed. ‘I say, are you off to play tennis?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking around for a startled hotel employee to whom to hand off her racquet and, failing to find one, tossing it nonchalantly into the back of the Hispano-Suiza, ‘but I don’t particularly like tennis. Why don’t we go for a drive instead?’
Somehow this seemed to the maharajah the best idea anyone had ever had. He immediately opened the passenger door and she clambered in, displaying rather more leg than before and rather less fleetingly, for she was quite getting the hang now of how to display herself to advantage while climbing into a car. Her new-found companion felt a sudden flush of warmth coursing through his veins that had nothing at all to do with the Italian sun.
‘Where to?’ he asked, as he walked around the car and vaulted rather thrillingly into the driver’s seat, without bothering to undo the door. He breathed a silent sigh of relief. The last time he had attempted this manoeuvre he had ripped his trousers, gone sprawling on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, and been left feeling undeniably foolish. He pressed the self-starter and the engine, still warm, responded at once.
‘Lunch somewhere?’ she suggested.
‘Why not?’ he concurred, sliding into first gear.
Obligingly, she moved her knees closer to the gearstick.
Francesco passed quietly through the suite, his suitcase standing outside on the landing. To his chagrin, it was empty. He had been hoping to say his final goodbye to Georgie. He sat down at the desk and carefully wrote a short note of farewell. As he was sealing it inside one of the hotel’s envelopes, he suddenly spotted a piece of paper lying face down, picked it up, and turned it over. It was clearly intended as a telegram, and was both urgent and important. He tucked it into his inside pocket and went downstairs, carrying his briefcase.
On his way through the lobby he looked in on the office. It was empty. He pulled the piece of paper out of his pocket and frowned. Then his face cleared as he realised that he could easily send it from the station en route to Venice. Picking up his bag anew, incognito for only a few hours more now, His Majesty stepped out of the hotel and into the pages of history.
By this juncture the Mapp-Flints had already been waiting at Como station surrounded by their luggage for what seemed like a very long time. On arrival they had discovered that the maharajah’s grasp of the railway timetable had definitely been at fault. In fact the next train to Milan was not due for nearly seven hours. The Major had by now heard his wife bemoan this fact many times. Many, many times.