Territorial Rights (8 page)

This had been a year before she met Robert Leaver in Paris. At first, she had caused a public stir; her name was in all the newspapers of Western Europe ‘Red Girl Painter Defects’ and ‘Balkan Woman Artist Makes Getaway’: ‘Lina Pancev a top Bulgarian artist was today reported to be in hiding under the protection of wellwishers after her defection Tuesday. Pancev, who also teaches art, left her group of Bulgar educationists, requesting asylum from the French government and pleading that she had been followed for over one year by the secret police and she “couldn’t stand it any more”. She made her bid for freedom at 11 a.m. yesterday and is being held in a secret location while her position is being clarified. Miss Pancev had declared herself fearful of reprisals by Balkan agents in Paris.’

She made friends with a girl ballet-dancer who had defected from Romania and a young man who had positively fled from Czechoslovakia; she was taken up and put down again by several hostesses of the art world; she was taken on a trip to London. She lamented the lack of her own former paintings which she despaired of getting out of Bulgaria: ‘I have nothing to show. I can’t get my work out.’ She painted some men fishing in the Seine, but nobody bought her pictures.

Lina could never understand the illogic of the West. ‘What have we defected for?’ she used to say, along with some of the more obscure refugees from communist countries who used to gather together in certain cafes or sometimes in the Orthodox churches on a Sunday. In London, Lina thought that the charwomen, going to work in Hampstead where she insisted on staying, were far too well dressed, not nearly shabby enough in comparison to the housewives who employed them.

She was at first less followed by secret agents than she thought she was. Very hard, she tried to trace the address of ‘Deborah’, the girl-friend whom Serge had described with semi-ridicule. The glamour of that woman and all her circumstances which had so gripped Lina, grew as she looked from face to face; long hair, long skirts, no make-up, not very pretty, rich and with alimony, very careless, very untidy. There were plenty of Deborahs, no matter which was the real one. Lina was unable to make her own good hair untidy, but she went into long dresses. She had boy-friends and slept with them, always preaching at them, whether they cared or not, the evils of East-West détente—‘What have we defected for?’ Sometimes she remembered Serge’s white teeth biting into the peach on that summer evening far away.

A
T THE INVITATION OF
the voice over the loudspeaker, Grace Gregory, the former matron of Ambrose College, looked out of the plane window at the Alps below and, having found no apparent fault with them, returned her attention to her companion.

‘Leo,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we’re doing the right thing. I can’t wait to get there. Poor Anthea, she’s the injured party all along the line and I’m going to sort out those two debauchees there in Venice.’

‘Well,’ said young Leo. ‘We’ll have a good time, Grace, depend on that. I don’t myself see that there’s much to choose between the injured party and the other parties. It’s all one and the same, isn’t it?’

‘Adultery,’ mused Grace. ‘Rather than fornication. Anyway, I’m a definite friend to Anthea and injury or no injury I’m going to add insult to it. Fancy her going to a private detectives’ and giving them the story. She never had reason to go to a private detective when I was Matron at Ambrose. I used to keep Arnold temperate myself in the sick-bay when there were no boys sick. Otherwise he would have been a libertine. I remember so clearly the smell of hyacinths on the window-sill and the sparkling medicine-trolley. If Anthea didn’t suspect it she should have, and been grateful. Well, all that’s past, Leo, and I appreciate the reduction on the ticket and this opportunity to sort them out. Mary Tiller’s a cook, Leo, a whole cook and nothing but a cook. I’m a Matron. That’s the difference.’

‘Oh, never mind them,’ said Leo. ‘It’s Venice we’re going to see.’

‘Oh, the gondoliers!’ Grace said.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Leo, ‘compared to the people in the rest of Italy the Venetians are very austere.’

Violet de Winter, chief agent of Global-Equip Security Services Ltd for Northern Italy and adjacent territories, had been feeling the pinch of modern immorality, as she put it. Over the past ten years her business, on the GESS side, had deteriorated by seventy-five percent largely because unmarried lovers no longer chose Venice as the most desirable place to be together and, moreover, the lovers’ husbands and wives no longer seemed to care if they did. The bottom has fallen out of the love-bird business,’ she frequently told her old friend Curran, who, in his turn, had always found her useful in many ways.

The point about GESS was that they operated on a commercial basis, and Violet got ten percent. She had a strict range of territory in which to operate. Everything about GESS was strict, especially her instructions within the territory. Violet’s job was to:

1. locate the subjects (two or more, as may be);

2. find out as quickly as possible their financial status;

3. exercise persuasion on any rich or susceptible party;

4. if none of the subjects was really rich, drop the enquiry and report back to GESS.

For ‘persuasion’ read blackmail. In this way, GESS was able to pursue its policy of dealing only on a strictly commercial basis. For the most part, they regretfully told their clients that ‘after prolonged investigations nothing of importance has emerged relating to your esteemed enquiry. Yours sincerely, [squiggle for signature] Global-Equip Security Services.’

Ca’ Winter, the large palace on the Grand Canal where Violet still lived, was in a fair state of preservation. She owned part of it and gathered in the rents from several of the apartments. The other parts were owned by other people, and by the relatives of the dead Count de Winter whom Violet, an Englishwoman, had married in 1935 after meeting him in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Now, occupying a quite splendid flat in the palace, she considered herself to be one of the stones, if not the pillars, of Venice. At the same time she practised several small money-making activities, never letting any opportunity pass, such as the publicising of an American art exhibition or a German film show. She worked hard at these jobs of public relations lest some evil should befall her; a cosy study in her apartment was dedicated to files and card indexes. Maybe it was the memory of a hard-up youth that made her feel for ever in need of picking up a small fee here and there. Certainly, the Countess de Winter had been left quite well-off by her husband, and although feeling the pinch compared to the old days, she still managed to keep her private motor-boat.

While Grace Gregory with her young friend Leo was high over the Alps on her way to foreign Venice, its waterways and its bridges, to sort things out, Violet’s thoughts were on the discreet letter she had received from GESS which, being decoded, offered her the exciting prospect of a small job.

Curran was in no way objective about Violet de Winter. To him, who had known her as a young woman, she had improved over the years; to him, she was a late-blooming person. What to him was the result of a long hard haul to improve herself from the sallow and sullen English girl he had known before the war, would be to a newcomer in her life a remnant of some braver and more glittering social personality. That she had been of service to Curran throughout the long years of their friendship made her features beautiful to him, now that she was sixty-four, beyond what they actually were. And she had attained, little by little, the power to infuriate him, whereas thirty years ago it had been the other way round.

The day after Violet got her missive from GESS came a telephone call from Curran.

‘I heard you were in Venice,’ she said.

‘Naturally,’ he said.

‘Well, I just heard you were in Venice, that’s all. Did you read about Carla’s cocktail-party in Verona?’

‘No, why should I?’

‘It was in all the papers. Connie threw a vase at Ruffolo the sculptor and said he should have been a bricklayer.’

‘Oh, yes, I heard about that, I—’

‘Well, I was there.’

‘Why are you boasting about it? I’d hush that up if I were you.’

‘Well, Curran, it was something to see, I can tell you. I arranged the publicity. It was quite something. When are you coming over? Are you at the Lord Byron?’

‘Yes. May I come now?’

‘Not now. No, please don’t come just now. Come at five this afternoon. I’ve got a job on; I’m busy. I’ll send my boat over for you at five.’

‘I can walk across the bridge at five.’

‘But it’s a filthy day. You—’

‘See you at five,’ he said.

At five in the afternoon it was still raining and a gale blew up making the dark grey sea send the ships anchored in the lagoon into a static gallop. The canals were at low tide, chopping up their smells.

Violet had her central heating well regulated; she had switched on the rosy lamps, and shut out the very watery view by drawing the silvery satin curtains an hour before the reasonable time. Curran thought how like Violet to do that. She always made her own environment. She seemed to rule Nature, more and more as she got older. More and more he felt her to be his equal.

‘Well, how is Robert?’ she said when he had settled himself with a drink. The last time she had seen Curran had been a few months ago in his house in Paris, where Robert was still installed.

‘Oh, he’s left Paris. He’s in Venice.’

‘Then he’s with you.’

‘No, he’s not with me. He’s staying at the Sofia.’

‘Oh, there! Why?’

‘He found a room there,’ Curran said, ‘that’s why.’

‘Oh, he found a room there. Am I stupid,’ said Violet, ‘or am I right in thinking he left you and came to Venice on his own?’

‘Well, you’re right,’ Curran said. ‘He’s interested in a girl he met in Paris. She came to Venice.’

‘Is he interested in girls?’ Violet said, rather coldly, and as if the whole idea of a young man of Curran’s being interested in girls was too much to ask her intelligence to take.

Curran said quietly, ‘Girl or rather a young woman. Over thirty. I should say ten years older than Robert. But still a girl, you know.’

‘And what about her?’ said Violet next.

‘Her name is Lina Pancev,’ said Curran. ‘A refugee from Bulgaria.’

‘Pancev, Pancev. …’ Violet’s eyes consulted the carpet and the window-curtains in apparent search for enlightenment. ‘Pancev,’ she said. That rings a bell. Pancev. …’ She stared in front of her. ‘The name rings a bell,’ she said. And so saying, she actually reached to the wall behind her shoulder and pressed the button-bell, so that her manservant came in with a dish of canapés and a ‘Good evening’ for Curran.

‘We need some ice,’ Violet said, and when he had gone she said, ‘Pancev, Pancev. …’

‘Stop it, Violet,’ Curran said.

‘If I recall—’

‘You do recall,’ Curran said. ‘And, what’s more, this Lina Pancev is the same Pancev, same family; she’s the infant daughter that was. She’s looking for her father’s grave and that’s why she’s in Venice. Robert has come to help her.’

‘Oh God!’ said Violet. ‘Oh God!’ Then she started to laugh, in little bursts, looking all the time at Curran as if to force him by her laughter to acknowledge the cause of it. But Curran did not respond. He looked at the drink he held in his hand, embarrassed and shocked. Violet said, ‘Looking for her father’s grave …’ and laughed again. Curran smiled towards her. ‘That’s enough, Violet’ he said.

‘She must be sentimental,’ Violet said.

‘I dare say,’ said Curran. ‘It’s very probable.’

‘You haven’t met her?’

‘No. But I want to get her a job. I expect you need a secretary-help, someone capable, to look after your files, let’s say, for your fashion shows and so on, or to do a bit of shopping. Keep you company.’

‘No, thank you,’ Violet said as the manservant came in with the ice, and when he had left Violet said of him, ‘He’s leaving. Somebody’s offered him better pay. It’s always the same. You train them, then they get ideas.’

Curran said, ‘If you want to keep servants there’s only one way. Pay them double what anyone else will pay.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t do that,’ Violet said. ‘I’d think it immoral. Besides, I couldn’t afford it.’

‘Lina Pancev might help you out,’ Curran said. ‘She might make a good
au pair
girl.’

‘No, thank you,’ Violet said.

‘I just thought you might do me a favour by taking her on,’ Curran said.

‘Oh, well, if it’s a favour. But I don’t think I’d like her. I don’t like her already.’

‘I can see that,’ Curran said. ‘And I haven’t met her myself. But it would be doing her a good turn. You see she’s pretty thick with Robert—’

‘Oh, you want to get her away from Robert, or Robert away from her? How could I do that?’ The doorbell rang downstairs and Violet went to the window where she parted the curtains to peer down at the landing-stage. The gale shook the panes and the water lapped greedily. She let the curtain fall, changing the climate back again.

‘That was the wine arriving,’ she said. ‘It’s Tuscan wine. It doesn’t do it much good tossing around in this rough weather.’

‘Robert,’ said Curran, as if anxious not to lose the drawing-room climate again, ‘is a not very nice young man. Rather nasty, in fact.’

‘Well, drop him, Curran,’ Violet said. She took away Curran’s glass and refilled it with ice and whisky.

‘I intend to set him on his way. I don’t drop people, as you know. But I want to make it easy for him to go on his own way independent of me. I’ve rather monopolised him the last two years. A mistake. One does make mistakes, you know, and—’ He stopped to allow Violet the opportunity of denying that he made many mistakes. She said nothing, so he went on, ‘Robert. He’s a nasty young man in his way, is Robert Leaver.’

‘Leaver?’ Violet said.

‘That’s his name,’ Curran said.

Violet took cognizance of the lampshade, the drinks-tray and the carpet. ‘Leaver … Leaver …’ she repeated.

‘Don’t tell me that rings a bell, too,’ Curran said. ‘It’s quite an ordinary name. His father’s at the Lord Byron just now—’