When in Rome. Ngaio Marsh
were dingy and nondescript. His hat, a rusty black felt, was obviously Italian. It was pulled forward and cast a shadow down to the bridge of the nose, over a face of which the most noticeable feature was its extreme pallor. The mouth, however, was red and rather full-lipped. So dark had the noonday turned that without that brief flash, Barnaby could scarcely have seen the shadowed eyes. He felt an odd little shock within himself when he realized they were very light in colour and were fixed on him. A great crack of thunder banged out overhead. The black canopy burst and fell out of the sky in a deluge.
There was a stampede. Barnaby snatched up his raincoat, struggled into it and dragged the hood over his head. He had not paid his bill and groped for his pocket-book. The three countrymen blundered towards him and there was some sort of collision between them and the young couple. The young man broke into loud quarrelsome expostulation. Barnaby could find nothing smaller than a thousand-lire note. He turned away, looked round for a waiter and found that they had all retreated under the canvas awning. His own man saw him, made a grand-opera gesture of despair, and turned his back.
‘Aspetti,’ Barnaby shouted in phrase-book Italian waving his thousand-lire note. ‘Quanto devo pagare?’
The waiter placed his hands together as if in prayer and turned up his eyes.
‘Basta!’
‘—lasci passare—’
‘Se ne vada ora—’
‘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