When in Rome

‘Really, it couldn’t matter less what I think.’

‘You needn’t be so snappish.’

They stared at each other in astonishment.

‘I can’t make this out,’ Grant said unexpectedly. ‘I don’t know you,’ and Sophy in a panic, stammered, ‘It’s nothing. It’s none of my business. I’m sorry I snapped.’

‘Not at all.’

‘And now,’ fluted Sebastian Mailer, ‘I hand over to my most distinguished colleague, Mr Grant.’

Grant made Sophy an extremely stuffy little bow and moved out to face his audience.

Once he was launched he too did his stuff well and with considerable charm, which was more than could be said for Mr Mailer. For one thing, Sophy conceded, Grant looked a lot nicer. His bony face was really rather beautifully shaped and actually had a carved, medieval appearance that went handsomely with its surroundings. He led them farther into the glowing church. There were two or three other groups of sightseers but, compared with the traffic in most celebrated monuments, these were few.

Grant explained that even in this, the most recent of the three levels of San Tommaso, there was a great richness of time sequences. When in the twelfth century the ancient church below it was filled in, its treasures, including pieces from the pagan household underneath it, were brought up into this new basilica so that now classical, medieval and renaissance works mingled. ‘They’ve kept company,’ Grant said, ‘for a long time and have grown together in the process. You can see how well they suit each other.’

‘It happens on the domestic level too,’ Alleyn said, ‘don’t you think? In houses that have belonged to the same family for many generations? There’s a sort of consonance of differences.’

‘Exactly so,’ Grant agreed with a quick look at him. ‘Shall we move on?’

A wave of scent announced the arrival of Lady Braceley at Alleyn’s elbow. ‘What a marvellous way of putting it,’ she murmured. ‘How clever you are.’

The doeskin glove with its skeletal enclosure touched his arm. She tipped her head on one side and was looking up at him. Sophy, watching, thought a shutter had come down over his face and indeed Alleyn suffered a wave of revulsion and pity and a recognition of despair. I’d give a hell of a lot, he thought, to be shot of this lady.

Sebastian Mailer had come up on the far side of Lady Braceley. He murmured something that Alleyn couldn’t catch. Grant was talking again. The hand was withdrawn from Alleyn’s arm and the pair turned away and moved out of sight behind the junction of two pilasters. Now, Alleyn speculated, was Mailer doing a rescue job or had he something particular and confidential to say to Lady Braceley?

Grant led his party into the centre of the nave and through the enclosed schola cantorum, saying, Sophy thought, neither too much nor too little but everything well. She herself was caught up in wonder at the great golden bowl-shaped mosaic of the apse. Acanthus and vine twined tenderly together to enclose little groups of everyday persons going about their medieval business. The Cross, dominant though it was, seemed to have grown out of some pre-Christian tree. ‘I shall say nothing about the apse,’ Grant said. ‘It speaks for itself.’

Mailer and Lady Braceley had re-appeared. She sat down on a choir bench and whether by some accident of lighting or because she was overtaken by one of those waves of exhaustion that unexpectedly fall upon the old, she looked as if she had shrunk within her own precarious façade. Only for a moment, however. She straightened her back and beckoned her nephew who fidgeted about on the edge of the group, half-attentive and half-impatient. He joined her and they whispered together, he yawning and fidgeting, she apparently in some agitation.

The party moved on round the basilica. The Van der Veghels took photographs and asked a great many questions. They were laboriously well-informed in Roman antiquities. Presently the Baron, with an arch look, began to inquire about the particular features that appeared so vividly in Grant’s novel. Were they not standing, at this very moment, in the place where his characters assembled? Might one not follow, precisely, in the steps they had taken during that wonderful climactic scene?

‘O-o-oah!’ cried the Baroness running her voice up and down a chromatic scale of enthusiasm. ‘It will be so farskinating. Yes?’

Grant reacted to this plea as he had to earlier conversations: with a kind of curbed distaste. He gave Sophy and Alleyn one each of his sharp glances, darted a look of something like pure hatred at Sebastian Mailer and suggested confusedly, that an author seldom reproduced in scrupulous detail, an actual mise-en-scène any more than he used unadulterated human material. ‘I don’t mean I didn’t start off with San Tommaso,’ he shot out at Sophy. ‘Of course I did. But I gave it another name and altered it to my purpose.’

‘As you had every right to do,’ Sophy said boldly and Alleyn thought the two of them were united for the moment in their common field of activity.

‘Yes, but do show us,’ Lady Braceley urged. ‘Don’t be beastly. Show us. You promised. You know you did.’

Kenneth Dorne said, ‘Isn’t that why we came? Or not? I thought you were to be the great attraction.’

He had approached Grant and stood in an attitude of some elegance, his left arm extended along one of the closure-slabs of the schola, his right hand on his hip. It was not a blatant pose but it was explicit nevertheless and at least one aspect of Kenneth was now revealed. He looked at Grant and widened his eyes. ‘Is it all a sellout?’ he asked. ‘Or have I made a muddle? Or am I merely being impertinent?’