Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

Alleyn kept his distance among a group of sightseers who milled about taking photographs. He saw that while Sebastian Mailer, half-smiling, talked vivaciously, Grant seemed to make little or no response. He had his back to Alleyn, who thought the nape of his neck looked indignant. “It looks,” Alleyn thought, “like the neck of a learner-driver seen from the rear. Rigid, cross and apprehensive.”

A young woman approached the cars, spotted Mailer and made towards him. She had a glowing air about her as if Rome had a little gone to her head. “Miss Sophy Jason,” Alleyn said to himself. He saw her look quickly at Barnaby Grant. Mailer pulled slightly at his beret, made a little bow and introduced her. The girl’s manner was shy, Alleyn thought, but not at all gauche: rather charming, in fact. Nevertheless, she said something to Grant that seemed to disconcert him. He glared at her, replied very shortly and turned away. The girl blushed painfully.

This brief tableau was broken by the arrival of two oversized persons hung about with canvas satchels and expensive cameras: a man and a woman. “The Van der Veghels,” Alleyn concluded and, like Barnaby Grant before him, was struck by their resemblance to each other and their strangely archaic faces. They were well dressed in a non-with-it sort of way: both of them in linen and both wearing outsize shoes with great rubber-studded soles and canvas tops. They wore sensible shady hats and identical sunglasses with pink frames. They were eager in their greetings and evidently had met Grant before. “What great hands and feet you have, Baron and Baroness,” thought Alleyn.

Lady Braceley and her nephew were still to come. No doubt it would be entirely in character for them to keep the party waiting. He decided it was time for him to present himself and did so, ticket in hand.

Mailer had the kind of voice Alleyn had expected: a rather fluting alto. He was a bad colour and his hands were slightly tremulous. But he filled his role very competently: there was the correct degree of suavity and assurance, the suggestion that everything was to be executed at the highest level.

“So glad you are joining us, Mr. Allen,” said Sebastian Mailer. “Do come and meet the others, won’t you? May I introduce—”

The Baron and Baroness were cordial. Grant looked hard at him, nodded, and with what seemed to be an uneasy blend of reluctance and good manners, asked him if he knew Rome well.

“Virtually, not at all,” Alleyn said. “I’ve never been here for more than three or four days at a time and I’m not a systematic sightseer.”

“No?”

“No. I want things to occur and I’m afraid spend far too much time sitting at a caffè table waiting for them to do so which of course they don’t. But who knows? One of these days the heavens may open and big drama descend upon me.”

Alleyn was afterwards to regard this as the major fluke-remark of his career. At the moment he was merely astonished to see what an odd response it drew from Barnaby Grant. He changed colour, threw an apprehensive glance at Alleyn, opened his mouth, shut it and finally said: “Oh,” without any expression at all.

“But today,” Alleyn said, “I hope to improve my condition. Do we, by any chance, visit one of your Simon’s haunts? That would be a wonderful idea.”

Again Grant seemed to be about to speak and again he boggled. After a sufficiently awkward pause he said: “There’s some idea of it. Mailer will explain. Excuse me, will you.”

He turned away. “All right,” Alleyn thought. “But if you hate it as much as all this, why the hell do you do it?”

He moved on to Sophy Jason, who was standing apart and seemed to be glad of his company. “We’re all too old for her,” Alleyn thought. “Perhaps the nephew of Lady Braceley will meet the case but one doubts it.” He engaged Sophy in conversation and thought her a nice intelligent girl with a generous allowance of charm. She looked splendid against the background of azaleas, Rome and a pontifical sky.

Before long Sophy found herself telling Alleyn about her suddenly-bereaved friend, about this being her first visit to Rome, about the fortunate accident of the cancellation and finally about her job. It really was extraordinary, she suddenly reflected, how much she was confiding to this quiet and attentive stranger. She felt herself blushing. “I can’t imagine why I’m gabbling away like this!” she exclaimed.

“It’s obliging of you to talk to me,” Alleyn said. “I’ve just been, not exactly slapped back but slightly edged off by the Guest of Honour.”

“Nothing to what I was!” Sophy ejaculated. “I’m still cringing.”

“But — isn’t he one of your publisher’s authors?”

“He’s our great double-barrel. I was dumb enough to remind him that I had been presented by my boss. He took the news like a dose of poison.”

“How very odd of him.”

“It really was a bit of a facer. He’d seemed so un-fierce and amiable on the earlier occasion and has the reputation in the firm of being a lamb. Aren’t we rather slow getting off our mark? Mr. Mailer is looking at his watch.”

“Major Sweet’s twenty minutes late and so are Lady Braceley and the Hon. Kenneth Dorne. They’re staying at the—” He broke off. “Here, I fancy, they come.”

And here, in fact, they came and there was Mr. Mailer, his beret completely off, advancing with a winning and proprietary air towards them.

Alleyn wondered what first impression they made on Sophy Jason. For all her poise and obvious intelligence he doubted if the like of Sonia Braceley had ever come her way. Alleyn knew quite a lot about Sonia Braceley. She began life as the Hon. Sonia Dorne and was the daughter of a beer-baron whose children, by and large, had turned out disastrously. Alleyn had actually met her, many years ago, when visiting his Ambassadorial elder brother George at one of his official Residences. Even then she had what his brother, whom Alleyn tolerantly regarded as a bit of an ass, alluded to as “a certain reputation.” With the passage of time, this reputation had consolidated. “She has experienced everything,” Sir George had weightily quipped, “except poverty.”

Seeing her now it was easy to believe it. “It’s the legs,” Alleyn thought. “More than the precariously maintained mask or the flabby underarm or the traitorous neck. It’s the legs. Although the stockings are tight as a skin they look as if they should hang loose about these brittle spindleshanks and how hazardously she’s balanced on her golden kid sandals. It’s the legs.”

But the face was not too good either. Even if one discounted the ruches under the eyes and the eyes themselves, there was still that dreadfully slack mouth. It was painted the fashionable livid colour but declared itself as unmistakably as if it had been scarlet: the mouth of an elderly maenad.

Her nephew bore some slight resemblance to her. Alleyn remembered that his father, the second Lord Dorne, had been rapidly divorced by two wives and that the third, Kenneth’s mother, had been, as George would have said, “put away.” Not much of a start, Alleyn thought, compassionately, and wondered if the old remedy of “live on a quid-a-day and earn it” would have done anything for Kenneth Dorne.

As they advanced, he noticed that the young man watched Mailer with an air that seemed to be made up of anxiety, furtiveness and perhaps subservience. He was restless, pallid, yellow and damp about the brow. When Mailer introduced him and he offered his hand it proved to be clammy as to the palm and tremulous. Rather unexpectedly, he had a camera slung from his shoulder.

His aunt also shook hands. Within the doeskin glove the fingers contracted, momentarily retained their clasp and slowly withdrew. Lady Braceley looked fixedly into Alleyn’s eyes. “So she still,” he thought, appalled, “gives it a go.”