Ngaio Marsh - When in Rome

This time the light flashed, they were all blinded and the Baroness gave out loud cries of satisfaction and insisted upon taking two more. Against mounting impatience the group was then re-formed with the Baroness replacing her husband and over-hanging Major Sweet like some primitive earthmother. The Baron had better luck with his flashlamp and all was accomplished.

“Although,” he said, “it would have been nicer to have included our cicerone, would it not?”

“Must say, he’s taking his time,” Major Sweet grumbled. “Damned odd sort of behaviour if you ask me.”

But Kenneth pointed out that Sebastian Mailer was probably keeping his aunt company in the atrium. “After all,” he said to Grant, “he handed over to you, didn’t he?”

Grant, under pressure from the Van der Veghels, now moved into the area of light and with every sign of extreme reluctance read the Mithraic passage from Simon to this most strangely assorted audience. He read rapidly and badly in an uninflected voice, but something of the character of his writing survived the treatment.

“—Nothing had changed. The dumpy god with Phrygian cap, icing-sugar ringlets, broken arms and phallus rose from his matrix of stony female breasts. A rather plebeian god one might have said, but in his presence fat little Simon’s ears heaved with the soundless roar of a sacrificial bull, his throat and the back of his nose were stung by blood that nineteen centuries ago had boiled over white-hot stone, and his eyes watered in the reek of burning entrails. He trembled and was immeasurably gratified.”

The reading continued in jerks to the end of the appropriate passage. Grant shut the book with a clap, passed it like a hot potato to the Baroness and hitched his shoulders against obligatory murmurs from his audience. These evaporated into an uneasy silence.

Sophy felt oppressed. For the first time claustrophobia threatened her. The roof seemed lower, the walls closer, the regions beyond them very much quieter as if the group had been deserted, imprisoned almost, so many fathoms deep in the ground. “For tuppence,” she thought, “I could do a bolt like Lady Braceley.”

Grant repeated his suggestion that the others might like to explore and that he himself would remain for ten minutes in the Mithraeum in case anyone preferred to rejoin him there before returning to the upper world. He reminded them that there were side openings and an end one, leading into surrounding passages, and the insula.

Kenneth Dorne said he would go up and take a look at his aunt. He seemed to be more relaxed and showed a tendency to laugh at nothing in particular. “Your reading was m-a-a-r-velous,” he said to Grant and smiled from ear to ear, “I adore your Simon.” He laughed immoderately and left by the main entrance. Major Sweet said he would take a look-see round and rejoin them above. “I have,” he threatened, “a bone to pick with Mailer. Extraordinary behavior.” He stared at Sophy. “Thinking of looking round at all?” he invited.

“I think I’ll stay put for a moment,” she said. She did not at all fancy roaming in a Mithraic gloaming with the Major.

Alleyn said he, too, would find his own way back and the Van der Veghels, who had been photographing each other against the Sacrificial altar, decided to join him, not, Sophy thought, entirely to his delight.

Major Sweet left by one of the side doors. Alleyn disappeared behind the god, enthusiastically followed by the Van der Veghels. They could be heard ejaculating in some distant region. Their voices died and there was no more sound except, Sophy fancied, the cold babble of that subterranean stream.

“Come and sit down,” Grant said.

She joined him on one of the stone benches.

“Are you feeling a bit oppressed?”

“Sort of. “

“Shall I take you up? There’s no need to stay. That lot are all right under their own steam. Say the word.”

“How kind,” Sophy primly rejoined, “but, thank you, no. I’m not all that put out. It’s only—”

“Well?”

“I’ve got a theory about walls.”

“ Walls ?”

“Surfaces. Any surfaces.”

“Do explain yourself.”

“You’ll be profoundly unimpressed.”

“One never knows. Try me.”

“Mightn’t surfaces — wood, stone, cloth, anything you like — have a kind of physical sensitivity we don’t know about? Something like the coating on photographic film? So that they retain impressions of happenings that have been exposed to them. And mightn’t some people have an element in their physical make-up — their chemical or electronic arrangements or whatever — that is responsive to this and aware of it.”

“As if other people were colour-blind and only they saw red?”

“That’s the idea.”

“That would dispose rather neatly of ghosts, wouldn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t be only the visual images the surfaces retained. It’d be emotions too.”

“Do you find your idea an alarming one?”

“Disturbing, rather.”

“Well — yes.”

“I wonder if it might fit in with your Simon.”

“Ah,” ejaculated Grant, “don’t remind me of that, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sorry,” Sophy said, taken aback by his violence.

He got up, walked away and with his back turned to her said rapidly: “All right, why don’t you say it! If I object so strongly to all this show-off why the hell do I do it? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Come on. Isn’t it !”

“If I am it’s no business of mine. And anyway I did say it. Up above.” She caught her breath. “It seems ages ago,” said Sophy. “Ages.”

“We’ve dropped through some twenty centuries, after all. And I’m sorry to have been so bloody rude.”

“Think nothing of it,” Sophy said. She looked up at the sharply lit head of Mithras. “He is not very formidable after all. Plump and placid, really, wouldn’t you say? Isn’t it odd, though, how those blank eyes seem to stare? You’d swear they had pupils. Do you suppose—”

She cried out. The god had gone. Absolute darkness had closed down upon them like a velvet shutter.

“It’s all right,” Grant said. “Don’t worry. They do it as a warning for closing time. It’ll go on again in a second.”

“Thank the Lord for that. It’s — it’s so completely black. One might be blind.”

“ ‘All dark and comfortless’?”

“That’s from Lear , isn’t it? Not exactly a reassuring quotation if I may say so.”

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

In a distant region there was a rumour of voices: distorted, flung about some remote passage. Grant’s hand closed on Sophy’s arm. The god came into being again, staring placidly at nothing.

“There you are,” Grant said. “Come on. We’ll climb back into contemporary Rome, shall we?”

“Please.”

He moved his hand up her arm and they embarked on the return journey.

Through the insula, a left turn and then straight towards the iron stairway passing a cloisteral passage out of which came the perpetual voice of water. Up the iron stairway. Through the second basilica, past Mercury, and Apollo, and then up the last flight of stone steps towards the light, and here was the little shop: quite normal and bright.

The people in charge of the postcard and holy trinket stalls, a monk and two youths, were shutting them up. They looked sharply at Grant and Sophy.

“No more,” Grant said to them. “We are the last.”

They bowed.

“There’s no hurry,” he told Sophy. “The upper basilica stays open until sunset.”

“Where will the others be?”

“Probably in the atrium.”

But the little garden was quite deserted and the basilica almost so. The last belated sightseers were hurrying away through the main entrance.