Michael Pearce - A Dead Man In Trieste

Koskash was hesitating.

‘Will you, yourself, be here this evening?’

‘No, probably not. I may go to a lecture at the People’s University.’

‘Ah, really?’

‘Given by Mr Juice.’

‘I have been to some of his lectures before. He is usually very good. Odd, but good. Different from the other lecturers, anyway. Yes, you should go. You will find it entertaining,’

Seymour was less sure about that but felt a certain degree of curiosity. He might well go.

He went back into the inner room. The heavy and mostly empty appointments book was on top of the desk. He began to go systematically through the pages. What he was looking for was any reference to the Casa Revoltella. There was one, for the day of the reception, and it was underlined. It was one of the few entries that Lomax had made for himself. The entries at the beginning of the book had been made, dutifully, by Koskash, but after a while he had given up, switching instead to the bits-of-paper prompting that Koskash had told Seymour about. The reception had evidently become important to Lomax for some reason: perhaps the reason that Maddalena had suggested, that something in connection with it had disrupted what appeared to be the even flow of his existence.

Some person. In his investigation so far Seymour was very short of individual names. He had been looking for them all the time. This seemed to be a chance of getting one. At least there was an individual here, if Maddalena was to be believed, and he saw no reason why she shouldn’t be.

But the name. That was what Maddalena had come looking for and what he, Seymour, was looking for now. He went through the pages without success and then asked Koskash, who couldn’t help him. If Lomax had made any appointment with whoever it was, that hadn’t been registered in Koskash’s system.

Had Lomax mentioned a name? Koskash couldn’t recall any of particular significance at that time. He showed Seymour his notes, which were, as Seymour had come to expect, detailed and meticulous. The only names were those of officials. Seymour asked about them. It was possible, wasn’t it, that an official might wish to go to the reception, either through vanity or in the hope of an informal way of doing business? But no, the officials Koskash mentioned would all have had more promising means of getting invited to the reception than going through Lomax.

Seymour realized he would have to go back to his starting point: Maddalena.

It suddenly struck him that he didn’t know where to look for her. He could go to the artists’ table, of course, but he wanted to talk to her away from all the others. He was still leaving open the possibility of an Italian dimension to Lomax’s sympathies. Where else could she be? How did she spend her days? She modelled, of course, and might be with some artist or other, but if she was, he wouldn’t have a hope of finding her. Almost on the off-chance, he went back to her apartment, where, slightly to his surprise, he found her.

She seemed pleased to see him; more than pleased, delighted. He felt a twinge of contrition. He really ought to have gone back to her before this, carried things on somehow from where they had been left off. But then, he reminded himself, he had resolved to keep his distance from her. What was all that, he said to himself sternly, about focusing on his work? Why was he here? But this was work, a voice within him said. ‘Oh, yes?’ said another voice, which Seymour firmly suppressed.

He said that he had wondered if she would be out modelling.

‘If only,’ said Maddalena, with a sigh.

‘Not much demand?’

‘Not much money.’

He asked her how she spent her days and had a sudden pang at the thought that she might spend them like this. Here. Perhaps that was why she went down to the artists’ table. What was it that she had said when she was talking about Lomax? That a woman on her own could feel very alone in Trieste.

‘In the library,’ said Maddalena.

‘In the —?’

Maddalena looked embarrassed.

‘Well, I do,’ she said defensively. ‘I go there most days. It’s a very good library,’

‘What do you read?’

She looked self-conscious again.

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to catch up.’

‘Catch up?’

‘I come from Puglia,’ she said. ‘If you knew Puglia, you’d know what I’m talking about. It’s one of the poorest parts of Italy. With everything that goes with that. There’s nothing there for anyone and least of all for a woman who — who doesn’t want to get caught in the trap. You know, five children before you’re twenty, old before your time, your husband loses interest in you. I had to get away. I wanted to get away. I wanted all the things I had missed, education, ideas, art, all the things that I thought other people had. Well, of course, they don’t, but I thought they had. So I came up north. But you can’t go to a college or a university if you’ve had an education like I had. As I found out. I bummed around for a while and drifted into modelling.

‘What I do mostly is read. And listen. Not just to the artists, although they have helped a lot. They are always talking, about ideas and art, things that matter. I talk to students, too. There are a lot of them in Trieste. Usually they go out of town, to places like Bologna, but the cafes are always full of them. And sometimes in the evening I go to lectures myself, at the People’s University. It’s not really a university, not like theirs, it’s for people who can’t go to university, workers, women. People like me. But mostly I read.

‘Sometimes there are things I don’t understand and then I go to the students and they explain them to me. They are very good and usually know more than they pretend.

Sometimes they’re silly, of course. And sometimes they draw me in. That business with the statue, for instance. It wasn’t really an attempt at art. I just said that because I was annoyed with Marinetti. It was just a student prank. I dared them and they dared me.

‘A lot of their jokes are like that. Anti-authority, or against the Hapsburg Government. Especially in Trieste, where there’s a lot of feeling about Trieste becoming part of Italy. Well, I don’t mind that. It seems so obviously right to me. Of course, there are other students too, who don’t feel like that. There are all sorts of students here, from all over the Empire. But that makes it more interesting.

‘Lomax found them interesting, too. He liked to talk to them. He was like me. He had never been to university himself and envied them. “If I had my time again. .” he would say, “I think I would have gone to university.” But he came from a poor family, did you know that? They couldn’t afford it. And, anyway, he said, they’d never heard of it. Wasn’t that funny? Just like me. And yet a consul! He used to like to ask the students questions, about their courses and what they were reading and so on.’

‘About their political beliefs?’

‘Well, you can’t get away from that in Trieste,’ said Maddalena drily. That’s what they were talking about most of the time.’

‘And what position did he take?’

‘Oh, like an uncle. He would listen and laugh, but not nastily. Sympathetically, so that they would go on. But sympathetically only up to a point. “Now, now!” he would say sometimes. “You mustn’t blow the world up, or there’ll be nothing left for me to stand on.”‘

‘Maddalena,’ said Seymour. ‘I’ve come for your help. You said you wanted to help me and I think you can. I have been trying to find, as I think you were trying to find the other day, names. The names of individuals. Or at least an individual. So far I have found nothing. I have a feel for his general sympathies, yes; but what about people? Who did he know, talk to? And especially I have been thinking about what you told me about that reception at the Casa Revoltella. I think that could be important and I’d like to know who the person was,’