When in Rome

‘Non desidero parlarle.’

‘Non l’ho fatto io—’

‘Vattene!’

‘Sciocchezze!’

The row between the lover and the countrymen was heating up. They now screamed into each other’s faces behind Barnaby’s back. The waiter indicated, with a multiple gesture, the heavens, the rain, his own defencelessness.

Barnaby thought: After all, I’m the one with a raincoat. Somebody crashed into his back and sent him spread-eagled across his table.

A scene of the utmost confusion followed accompanied by flashes of lightning, immediate thunder-claps and torrents of rain. Barnaby was winded and bruised. A piece of glass had cut the palm of his hand and his nose also bled. The combatants had disappeared but his waiter, now equipped with an enormous orange-and-red umbrella, babbled over him and made ineffectual dabs at his hand. The other waiters, clustered beneath the awning, rendered a chorus to the action. ‘Poverino!’ they exclaimed. ‘What a misfortune!’

Barnaby recovered an upright posture. With one hand he dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of his raincoat and clapped it to his face. In the other he extended to the waiter his bloodied and rain-sopped thousand-lire note.

‘Here,’ he said in his basic Italian. ‘Keep the change. I require a taxi.’

The waiter ejaculated with evident pleasure. Barnaby sat down abruptly on a chair that had become a bird-bath. The waiter ludicrously inserted his umbrella into a socket in the middle of the table, said something incomprehensible, turned up the collar of his white jacket and bolted into the interior. To telephone, Barnaby hoped, for a taxi.

The Piazza Colonna was rain-possessed. A huge weight of water flooded the street and pavements and spurted off the roofs of cars as if another multiple Roman fountain had been born. Motorists stared through blurred glass and past jigging windscreen-wipers at the world outside. Except for isolated, scurrying wayfarers, the pavements were emptied. Barnaby Grant, huddled, alone and ridiculous under his orange-and-red umbrella, staunched his bloody nose. He attracted a certain incredulous attention. The waiter had disappeared and his comrades had got up among themselves one of those inscrutable Italian conversations that appear to be quarrels but very often end in backslaps and roars of laughter. Barnaby never could form the slightest notion of how long he had sat under the umbrella before he made his hideous discovery, before his left arm dangled from his shoulder and his left hand encountered—nothing.

As if it had a separate entity the hand explored, discovered only the leg of his chair, widened its search and found—nothing.

He remembered afterwards that he had been afraid to get into touch with his hand, to duck his head and look down and find a puddle of water, the iron foot of his chair-leg and again—nothing.

The experience that followed could, he afterwards supposed, be compared to the popular belief about drowning. In that an impossible flood of thoughts crowded his brain. He thought, for instance, of how long it had taken him to write his book, of his knowledge that undoubtedly it was the best thing he had done, perhaps would ever do. He remembered his agent had once suggested that it was dangerous to write in longhand with no duplication. He remembered how isolated he was in Rome with virtually no Italian, and how he hadn’t bothered to use his introductions. He thought inaccurately of—who? Was it Sir Isaac Newton? ‘O, Diamond, Diamond, you little know what you have done!’ Above all he thought of the ineffable, the unthinkable, the atrocious boredom of what must now ensue: the awful prospect of taking steps as opposed to the numb desolation of his loss: the rock-bottom horror of the event itself which had caused a thing like a water-ram to pound in his thorax. A classic phrase stood up in his thoughts: ‘I am undone.’ And he almost cried it aloud.

Here, now, was the waiter, smirking and triumphant, and here at the kerbside, a horse-carriage with a great umbrella protecting the seats and a wary-looking driver with some sort of tarpaulin over his head.

Grant attempted to indicate his loss. He pointed to where his attaché case had been, he grimaced, he gesticulated. He groped for his phrase-book and thumbed through it. ‘Ho perduto,’ he said. ‘Ho perduto mia valigia. Have you got it? My case? Non trovo. Valigia.’

The waiter exclaimed and idiotically looked under the table and round about the flooded surroundings. He then bolted into cover and stood there gazing at Barnaby and shrugging with every inch of his person.

Barnaby thought: This is it. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

The driver of the horse-carriage hailed him mellifluously and seemed to implore him to make up his mind. He looked at the desolation around him and got into the carriage.

‘Consolato Britannico,’ Grant shouted. ‘O God! Consolato Britannico.’

III

‘Now look here,’ the Consul had said, as if Barnaby Grant required the information, ‘this is a bad business, you know. It’s a bad business.’

‘You, my dear Consul, are telling me.’

‘Quite so. Quite so. Now, we’ll have to see what we can do, won’t we? My wife,’ he added, ‘is a great fan of yours. She’ll be quite concerned when she hears of this. She’s a bit of an egg-head,’ he had jokingly confided.

Barnaby had not replied. He contemplated his fellow-Briton over a handful of lint kindly provided by the consular staff and rested his bandaged left hand upon his knee.

‘Well, of course,’ the Consul continued argumentatively, ‘properly speaking it’s a matter for the police. Though I must say—however, if you’ll wait a moment I’ll just put a call through. I’ve got a personal contact—nothing like approaching at the right level, is there? Now, then.’

After a number of delays there had been a long and virtually incomprehensible conversation during which Barnaby fancied he was being described as Great Britain’s most celebrated novelist. With many pauses to refer to Barnaby himself, the Consul related at dictation speed the details of the affair and when that was over showered a number of grateful compliments into the telephone—‘E stato molto gentile—Grazie, Molto grazie, Signore,’ which even poor Barnaby could understand.

The Consul replaced the receiver and pulled a grimace. ‘Not much joy from that quarter,’ he said. Barnaby swallowed and felt sick.

He was assured that everything that could be done, would be done, but, the Consul pointed out, they hadn’t much to go on, had they? Still, he added more brightly, there was always the chance that Barnaby might be blackmailed.

‘Blackmailed?’

‘Well, you see, whoever took the case probably expected, if not a haul of valuables, or cash, something in the nature of documents for the recovery of which a reward would be offered and a haggling basis thus set up. Blackmail,’ said the Consul, ‘was not, of course, the right word. Ransom would be more appropriate. Although…’ He was a man of broken sentences and he left this one suspended in an atmosphere of extreme discomfort.

‘Then I should advertise and offer a reward?’

‘Certainly. Certainly. We’ll get something worked out. We’ll just give my secretary the details in English and she’ll translate and see to the insertions.’

‘I’m being a trouble,’ said the wretched Barnaby.

‘We’re used to it,’ the Consul sighed. ‘Your name and London address were on the manuscript, you said, but the case was locked. Not, of course, that that amounts to anything.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘You are staying at—?’

‘The Pensione Gallico.’

‘Ah yes. Have you the telephone number?’

‘Yes—I think so—somewhere about me.’

Barnaby fished distractedly in his breast pocket, pulled out his note-case, passport and two envelopes which fell on the desk, face downwards. He had scribbled the Pensione Gallico address and telephone number on the back of one of them.

‘That’s it,’ he said and slid the envelope across to the Consul, who was already observant of its august crest.

‘Ah—yes. Thank you.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Done your duty and signed the book, I see,’ he said.

‘What? Oh—that. Well, no, actually,’ Barnaby mumbled. ‘It’s—er—some sort of luncheon. Tomorrow. I mustn’t take up any more of your time. I’m enormously grateful.’

The Consul, beaming and expanding, stretched his arm across the desk and made a fin of his hand. ‘No, no, no. Very glad you came to us. I feel pretty confident, all things considered. Nil desperandum, you know, nil desperandum. Rise above!’

But it wasn’t possible to rise very far above his loss as two days trickled by and there was no response to advertisements and nothing came of a long language-haltered interview with a beautiful representative of the Questura. He attended his Embassy luncheon and tried to react appropriately to ambassadorial commiseration and concern. But for most of the time he sat on the roof-garden of the Pensione Gallico among potted geraniums and flights of swallows. His bedroom had a french window opening on to a neglected corner of this garden and there he waited and listened in agony for every telephone call within. From time to time he half-faced the awful notion of re-writing the hundred thousand words of his novel but the prospect made him physically as well as emotionally sick as he turned away from it.

Every so often he experienced the sensation of an abrupt descent in an infernal lift. He started out of fits of sleep into a waking nightmare. He told himself he should write to his agent and to his publisher but the mere thought of doing so tasted as acrid as bile and he sat and listened for the telephone instead.

On the third morning a heat wave came upon Rome. The roof-garden was like a furnace. He was alone in his corner with an uneaten brioche, a pot of honey and three wasps. He was given over to a sort of fretful lassitude and finally to a condition that he supposed must be that of Despair itself. ‘What I need,’ he told himself on a wave of nausea, ‘is a bloody good cry on somebody’s bloody bosom.’

One of the two waiters came out.

‘Finito?’ he sang, as usual. And then, when Barnaby gave his punctual assent, seemed to indicate that he should come indoors. At first he thought the waiter was suggesting that it was too hot where he was and then that for some reason the manageress wanted to see him.