Crook's Tour

Part II of a new suspense comedy

Synopsis: Dahlia-growing Henry Pulling had been retired as manager of a London bank for only two years when his mother died. At the crematorium, he was surprised to bump into her sister, whom he hadn't seen in over half a century. Aunt Augusta looked like a slightly updated version of the late Queen Mary, but when she invited Henry to her flat to share some sherry, he soon discovered there was much more to the old girl than met the eye. The first in what proved to be a continuing series of surprises was Wordsworth, her very large black "valet." Henry was nagged by the suspicion that Wordsworth supplied services beyond the normal household chores but refused to let his mind dwell on the odious possibilities. On leaving his aunt's flat, Henry realized he had left behind a parcel containing an urn filled with his mother's ashes. When Wordsworth returned it to him and Henry noticed the package had been tampered with, he felt even less kindly disposed toward the valet. The feeling was compounded the next day, after the police paid Henry a visit and it was revealed that Wordsworth had replaced over half the contents of the urn with pot; the humor of that combination was lost on Henry. Events moved quickly after that. Wordsworth disappeared and Aunt Augusta suddenly commandeered Henry to accompany her on a journey to Istanbul, the first leg of which involved a flight to Paris, In the lounge at London's Heathrow Airport, Aunt Augusta regaled Henry with descriptions of various forms of thievery and, on the flight, imparted a knowledge of sex practices around the world that astonished him. It also became apparent that his aunt was very anxious that a red suitcase of hers should get through customs undisturbed, a task that, as the plane landed at Le Bourget, she assigned to Henry, saying, "I think it better if we pass through customs and immigration separately. My red case is rather a heavy one and I would be glad if you would take that with you. Employ a porter.... And show in your manner that the tip will be a good one before you arrive at the customs. There is often an understanding between a porter and a douanier. I will meet you outside."

The man who came to see my aunt Augusta was not my idea of a banker at all. After I took her the red suitcase, I left them alone, but not before I saw that the case seemed to be stacked with ten-pound notes.

I had no clear Idea what my aunt intended by her elaborate precautions. There was obviously little danger from the douanier, who waved me through with the careless courtesy that I find so lacking in the supercilious young men in England. My aunt had booked rooms in the St. James and Albany, an old-fashioned double hotel, of which one half, the Albany, faces the Rue de Rivoli and the other, the St. James, the Rue Saint-Honoré. Between the two hotels lies the shared territory of a small garden, and on the garden front of the St. James I noticed a plaque that tells a visitor that here Lafayette signed some treaty or celebrated his return from the American Revolution, I forget which.

Our rooms in the Albany looked out on the Tuileries gardens and my aunt had taken a whole suite, which seemed rather unnecessary, as we were spending only one night before we caught the Orient Express. When I mentioned this, however, she rebuked me quite sharply. "This is the second time today," she said, "that you have mentioned the subject of economy. You retain the spirit of a bank manager, even in retirement. Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless, because the young do not particularly care for luxury. They have interests other than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink that is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: Even their lovemaking is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily, in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flage a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth (the other Wordsworth, I mean, of course) if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Lovemaking, too, provides, as a rule, a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino is not a writer for the young."

"Perhaps it's not too late for me to begin," I said facetiously, in an effort to close that page of her conversation, which I found a little embarrassing.

"You must surrender yourself first to extravagance," my aunt replied. "Poverty is apt to strike suddenly, like influenza; it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times. In any case, this suite is not wasted. I have to receive some visitors in private, and I don't suppose you would want me to receive them in my bedroom. One of them, by the way, is a bank manager. Did you visit lady clients in their bedrooms?"

"Of course not. Nor in their drawing rooms, either. I did all business at the bank."

"Perhaps in Southwood you didn't have any very distinguished clients."

"You are quite wrong," I said, and I told her about the unbearable rear admiral and my friend Sir Alfred Keene.

"Or any really confidential business."

"Nothing, certainly, that could not be discussed in my office at the bank."

"You were not bugged, I suppose, in the suburbs."

The man who came to see her was not my idea of a banker at all. He was tall and elegant, with black sideburns, and he would have fitted very well into a matador's uniform. My aunt asked me to bring her the red suitcase, and I then left them alone; but looking back from the doorway, I saw that the lid was already open and the case seemed to be stacked with ten-pound notes.

I sat down in my bedroom and read a copy of Punch to reassure myself. The sight of all the smuggled money had been a shock, and the suitcase was one of those fiber ones that are as vulnerable as cardboard. It is true that no experienced loader at Heathrow would have expected it to contain a small fortune, but surely it was the height of rashness to trust in a bluff that depended for its success on the experience of a thief. She might easily have tumbled on a novice.

My aunt had obviously spent many years abroad and this had affected her character as well as her morality. I couldn't really judge her as I would an ordinary Englishwoman, and I comforted myself, as I read Punch, that the English character was unchangeable. True, Punch once passed through a distressing period, when even Winston Churchill was a subject of mockery, but the good sense of the proprietors and of the advertisers drew it safely back into the old paths. Even the admiral had begun to subscribe again, and the editor had, quite correctly in my opinion, been relegated to television, which is, at its best, a vulgar medium. If the ten-pound notes, I thought, were tied in bundles of 20, there could easily be as much as £3000 in the suitcase, or even £6000, for surely, bundles of 40 would not be too thick.... Then I remembered the case was a Revelation. Twelve thousand was not an impossible total. I felt a little comforted by that idea. Smuggling on such a large scale seemed more like a business coup than a crime.

The telephone rang. It was my aunt. "Which would you advise?" she asked. "Union Carbide, Genesco, Deutsche Texaco? Or even General Electric?"

"I wouldn't like to advise you at all," I said. "I am not competent. My clients never went in for American bonds. The dollar premium is too high."

"There's no question of a dollar premium in France," Aunt Augusta said with impatience. "Your customers seem to have been singularly unimaginative." The line went dead. Did she expect the admiral to smuggle notes?

I went restlessly out and crossed the little garden, where an American couple (from the St. James or the Albany) were having tea. One of them was raising a little bag at the end of a cord, like a drowned animal, from his cup. At that distressing sight, I felt very far away from England, and it was with a pang that I realized how much I was likely to miss Southwood and the dahlias in the company of Aunt Augusta. I walked up to the Place Vendôme and then by the Rue Daunou to the Boulevard des Capucines. Outside a bar on the corner, two women spoke to me, and suddenly I saw, bearing down on me with a happy grin of welcome, a man whom I recognized with apprehension.

"Mr. Pullen!" he exclaimed. "Praise to the Holiest in the height."

"Wordsworth!"

"In all His works most wonderful. You wan those two gels?"

"I was just taking a stroll," I said.

"Women lak that they humbug you," Wordsworth said. "They jus short-timers. They do jig-jig, one two three, out you go. If you wan a gel, you come along with Wordsworth."

"But I don't want a girl, Wordsworth. I am here with my aunt. I am taking a little walk by myself because she has business to transact."

"Your auntie here?"

"Yes."

"Where you live?"

I didn't want to give our address without my aunt's permission. I had a vision of Wordsworth moving in, to the room next door. Suppose Wordsworth began to smoke marijuana in the St. James and Albany.... I was uncertain of French laws on the subject.

"We are staying with friends," I said vaguely.

"With a man?" Wordsworth asked with instant savagery. It seemed incredible that anyone could be jealous of a woman of 75, but jealous Wordsworth undoubtedly was, and now I saw the banker with sideburns in a different light.

"My dear Wordsworth," I said, "you are imagining things," and I allowed myself a white lie. "We are staying with an elderly married couple." I felt it was hardly suitable to discuss my aunt like this at a street corner, and I began to move down the boulevard, but Wordsworth kept pace with me.

"You got C. T. C. for Wordsworth?" he asked. "Ar find you lovely gel, schoolteacher."

"I don't want a girl, Wordsworth," I repeated, but I gave him a ten-franc note to keep him quiet.

"Then you have one drink with old Wordsworth. Ar know A-one first-class joint right here."

I agreed to a drink, and he led the way into the entrance of what seemed to be a theater, the Comédie des Capucines. A gramophone was howling below, as we descended under the theater.

"I'd rather go somewhere more quiet," I said.

"You jus wait. This A-one racket." It was very hot in the cellar. A number of unaccompanied young women were sitting at the bar, and turning toward the music, I saw an almost naked woman passing between the tables where a number of men, wearing shabby mackintoshes like uniforms, sat before untasted drinks.

"Wordsworth," I said crossly, "if this is what you call jig-jig, I don't want it."

"No jig-jig here," Wordsworth said. "If you wan jig-jig, you take her to hotel."

"Take who?"

"These gels--you wan one?"

Two of the girls at the bar came and sat down, one on either side of me. I felt imprisoned. Wordsworth, I noticed, had already ordered four whiskies, which he obviously couldn't pay for with the ten francs I had given him.

"Zak, chéri," one of the girls said, "present your friend, please."

"Mr. Pullen, you meet Rita. Lovely gel. Schoolteacher."

"Where does she teach?"

Wordsworth laughed. I realized I had made a fool of myself, and I watched Wordsworth with dismay as he entered into what seemed a long business negotiation with the girls.

"Wordsworth," I said, "what are you doing?"

"They wan two hundred francs. Ar say no. Ar tell 'em we got British passports."

"What on earth has that got to do with it?"

"They know British people very poor, can't afford good dash." He began to talk to them again in a kind of French that I couldn't follow at all, though they seemed to understand him well enough.

"What are you talking, Wordsworth?"

"French."

"I don't understand a word."

"Good Coast French. This lady she know Dakar well. Ar tell her ar work in Conakry one time. They say hundred and fifty francs."

"You can thank them very much. Wordsworth, but say that I'm not interested. I have to return to my aunt."

One of the women laughed. I suppose she recognized the word aunt, though I couldn't for the life of me see why a rendezvous with an aunt should be funnier than a rendezvous with a cousin, an uncle or even one's mother. The girl repeated tante and both laughed.

"Tomorrow?" Wordsworth asked.

"I am going with my aunt to Versailles and in the evening, we take the Orient Express to Istanbul."

"Istanbul!" Wordsworth exclaimed. "What she do there? Who she go for see?"

"I imagine we shall see the Blue Mosque, Santa Sophia, the Golden Horn, the Topkapi Museum."

"You be careful, Mr. Pullen."

"Please call me by my right name, Pulling." I tried to temper my rebuke with humor. "You would not like it if I continually called you Coleridge."

"Coleridge?"

"Coleridge was a poet and a friend of Wordsworth."

"Ar never met that man. If he say ar did, he humbug you."

I said firmly, "Now I really must be off, Wordsworth. Get the bill or I shall leave you to pay."

"You waste good White Horse?"

"You can drink it yourself or share it with these ladies." I paid the bill--it seemed an exorbitant one, but I suppose the floorshow was thrown in. A naked black girl was dancing with a white feather boa. I wondered what all the men here did for a living. It seemed extraordinary that one could watch such a scene during banking hours.

Wordsworth said, "You give three hundred francs to these ladies for private show."

"The price seems to be going up."

"Maybe ar make them say two hundred francs. You lef it to Wordsworth. OK?"

It was no use appealing to Wordsworth's sense of morality. I said, "As you have a British passport, you should know that an Englishman is allowed to take only fifteen pounds in currency out of the country. Two hundred francs would exhaust the whole amount."

This was a reason Wordsworth could understand. He looked down at me from his great height with melancholy and commiseration. "Governments all the same, no good." he said.

(continued on page 150)crook's tour(continued from page 146)

"One must make sacrifices. The cost of defense and the social services is very high."

"Traveler's checks," Wordsworth suggested quickly.

"They can be exchanged only at a bank, an official exchange or a registered hotel. In any case, I shall need them in Istanbul."

"Your auntie got plenty."

"She has only a travel allowance, too," I said.

I felt the weakness of this last argument, for Wordsworth cannot have lived for very long with my aunt before learning that she resorted to ways and means. I changed the subject by attacking him. "What on earth did you mean, Wordsworth, by sending me away with Cannabis in my mother's urn?"

His mind was elsewhere, brooding, perhaps, on the travel allowance.

"No cannibals," he said, "in England. No cannibals in Sierra Leone."

"I'm talking about the ashes."

"Cannibals in Liberia, not Sierra Leone."

"I didn't say cannibals."

"Leopard Society in Sierra Leone. They kill plenty people but not chop them."

"Pot, Wordsworth, pot." I hated the vulgar word that reminded me of childhood. "You mixed pot with my mother's ashes."

At last I had embarrassed him. He drank the whisky quickly. "You come away," he said, "ar show you much better damned place. Rue de Douai."

I harried him all the way up the stairs. "You had no business to do such a thing, Wordsworth. The police came and took the urn."

"They give it you back?" he asked.

"Only the urn. The ashes were inextricably mixed with the pot."

"Old Wordsworth meant no harm, man," he said, halting on the pavement. "Those bloody police."

I was glad to see there was a taxi rank close by. I was afraid he might try to follow me and discover the whereabouts of Aunt Augusta.

"In Mendeland," he said, "you bury food with your ma. You bury pot. All the same thing."

"My mother didn't even smoke cigarettes."

"With your pa, you bury best hatchet."

"Why not food with him, too?"

"He go hunt food with hatchet. He kill bush chicken."

I got into the taxi and drove away. Looking through the rear window, I could see Wordsworth standing bewildered on the pavement edge, like a man on a riverbank waiting for a ferry. He raised his hand tentatively, as though he were uncertain of my response, whether I had left him in friendship or in anger, as the traffic swept between us. I wished then that I had given him a bigger C. T. C. After all, he meant no harm. Even in his size he exhibited a clumsy innocence.

• • •

The Orient Express left the Gare de Lyon just after midnight. The two of us had spent an exhausting day--first at Versailles, which my aunt, curiously enough, was seeing for the first time (she found the palace a little vulgar). "I didn't get very far afield," she told me, "and in earlier times, when I lived in Paris, I was much too occupied."

I had become very curious about my aunt's history, and I was interested to arrange her various periods in some kind of chronological sequence. "Would that earlier time have been before or after you went on the stage?" I asked her. We were standing on the terrace, looking down toward the lake, and I had been thinking how much more pretty and homely Hampton Court was than Versailles. But then, Henry VIII was a more homely man than Louis XIV; an Englishman could identify more easily with a man of his married respectability than with the luxurious lover of Madame de Montespan. I remembered the old music-hall song, 'Enery the Eighth I Am.

I married the widder next door, She 'ad 'ad seven 'Eneries before.'Enery the Eighth I am.

Nobody could have written a music-hall song about the Sun King.

"On the stage, did you say?" my aunt asked rather absent-mindedly.

"Yes. In Italy."

She seemed to be trying hard to recollect, and I was aware as never before of her great age. "Oh," she said, "yes, yes, now I remember. You mean the touring company. That came after my Paris days. It was in Paris that I was spotted by Mr. Visconti."

"Was Mr. Visconti a theatrical manager?"

"No, but he was a great amateur of what you insist on calling the stage. We met one afternoon in the Rue de Provence and he said I had a fine talent, and he persuaded me to leave the company I was with. And so we traveled together to Milan, where my career really started. It was fortunate for me; if I had stayed in France, I would never have been able to help your uncle Jo, and Jo, having quarreled with your father, left me most of his money. Poor dear man, I can see him still, crawling, crawling, down the corridor toward the lavatory. Let us go back to Paris and visit the Musée Grévin. I need to be cheered up." And cheered up she certainly was by the waxworks. I remembered how she had told me that her idea of fame was to be represented at Tussaud's, dressed in one of her own costumes, and I really believe she would have opted for the Chamber of Horrors rather than have had no image made of her at all. A bizarre thought, for my aunt was not of a criminal temperament, even though some of her activities were not strictly legal. I think that the childish saying "Finding's keeping" was one of her ten commandments.

I would myself have preferred to visit the Louvre and see the Venus of Melos and the Winged Victory, but my aunt would have none of it. "All those naked women with bits missing," she said. "It's morbid. I once knew a girl who was chopped up that way between the Gare du Nord and Calais Maritime. She had met a man in the place where I worked who traveled in ladies' underwear--or so he said, and he certainly had an attaché case with him full of rather fanciful brassieres, which he persuaded her to try on. There was one shaped like two clutching black hands that greatly amused her. He invited her to go to England with him, and she broke her contract with our patronne and decamped. It was quite a cause célèbre. He was called the Monster of the Chemins de Fer by the newspapers, and he was guillotined, after making his confession and receiving the sacrament, in an odor of sanctity. It was said by his counsel that he had a misplaced devotion to virginity, owing to his education by the Jesuits, and he therefore tried to remove all girls who led loose lives, like poor Anne-Marie Callot. The brassieres were a kind of test. You were condemned if you chose the wrong one, like those poor men in The Merchant of Venice. He was certainly not an ordinary criminal, and a young woman who was praying for him in a chapel in the Rue du Bac had a vision of the Virgin, who said to her, 'The crooked ways shall be made straight,' which she took as proclaiming his salvation. There was a popular Dominican preacher, on the other hand, who believed it to be a critical reference to his Jesuit education. Anyway, quite a cult started for what they called 'the good murderer.' Go and see your Venus, if you want, but let me go to the waxworks. Our manager had to identify the body and he said it was just a torso, and that gave me a turn against all old statues."

In the evening, we had a quiet dinner at Maxim's, in the smaller room, where Aunt Augusta thought to escape the tourists. There was one, however, whom we could not escape; she wore a suit and a tie, and she had a voice like a man's. She not only dominated her companion, a little mousy blonde woman of uncertain age, she dominated the whole room. Like so many English abroad, she seemed to ignore the presence of foreigners around her and spoke in a loud voice, as though she were alone with her companion. Her voice had a peculiar ventriloquial (continued on page 339)crook's tour(continued from page 150) quality, and when I first became aware of it, I thought it came from the mouth of an old gentleman with a rosette of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, who sat at the table opposite ours and who had obviously been taught to chew every morsel of his meat 32 times. "Four-legged animals, my dear, always remind me of tables. So much more solid and sensible than two legs. One could sleep standing up." Everyone who could understand English turned to look at him. His mouth closed with a startled snap when he saw himself the center of attention. "One could even serve dinner on a man with a broad enough back," the voice said, and the mousy woman giggled and said, "Oh, Edith," and so identified the speaker. I am sure the woman had no idea of what she was doing--she was an unconscious ventriloquist and, surrounded as she believed by ignorant foreigners and perhaps excited a little by unaccustomed wine, she really let herself go.

It was a deep cultured professorial voice. I could imagine it lecturing on English literature at one of the older universities; and for the first time, my attention strayed from Aunt Augusta. "Darwin--the other Darwin--wrote a poem on the Loves of the Plants. I can well imagine a poem on the Loves of the Tables. Cramping it might be, but how deliciously so. when you think of a nest of tables, each fitting so blissfully, my dear, into one another."

"Why is everyone staring at you?" Aunt Augusta asked. It was an embarrassing moment, all the more so as the woman had suddenly stopped speaking and had plunged into her carré d'agneau. The trouble is that I have an unconscious habit of moving my lips when I am thinking, so that to all except my immediate neighbors. I seemed to be the author of her ambiguous remark.

"I have no idea, Aunt Augusta," I said.

"You must have been doing something very odd, Henry."

"I was only thinking."

How I wish I could conquer the habit. It must have been established first when I was a cashier and silently counted bundles of notes. The habit betrayed me very badly once with a woman called Mrs. Blennerhasset, who was stone-deaf and a lip reader. She was a very beautiful woman who was married to the mayor of Southwood. She came to my private office once about some question of investments, and while I turned over her file, my thoughts couldn't help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness. One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up, I saw that she was blushing. She finished her business very quickly and left. Later, to my surprise, she dropped in to see me again. She made some small alteration to the decision we had reached about her War Loan and then said, "Did you really mean what you told me?" I thought she was referring to my advice about National Savings Certificates.

"Of course," I said. "That is my honest opinion."

"Thank you," she said. "You mustn't think I am at all offended. No woman could be when you put it so poetically, but, Mr. Pulling, I must tell you that I truly love my husband." The awful thing, of course, was that she couldn't in her deafness distinguish between the lip movements made by spoken words and the lip movements that expressed my unspoken thoughts. She was always kind to me after that day, but she never came to my private office again.

That night at the Gare de Lyon, I saw my aunt into her couchette and ordered her petit déjeuner from the conductor for eight A.M. Then I waited on the platform for the train from London to come in from the Gare du Nord. It was five minutes late, but the Orient Express had to wait for it.

As the train moved slowly in, drowning the platform with steam, I saw Wordsworth come striding through the smoke. He recognized me at the same moment and cried, "Hi, fellah." He must have learned the Americanism during the War, when the convoys for the Middle East gathered in Freetown Harbor. I went reluctantly toward him. "What are you doing here?" I asked. I have always disliked the unexpected, whether an event or an encounter, but I was growing accustomed to it in my aunt's company.

"Mr. Pullen, Mr. Pullen," Wordsworth said, "you an honest man, Mr. Pullen." He reached my side and grasped my hand. "Ar allays was your friend, Mr. Pullen." He spoke as if he had known me for years and I had been a long time in his debt. "You no humbug me, Mr. Pullen?" He gazed wildly up and down the train. "Where's that gel?"

"My aunt." I said, "if that's whom you mean, is fast asleep by now in her couchette."

"Then please go double-quick tell her Wordsworth here."

"I have no intention of waking her up. She's an old lady and has a long journey ahead of her. If it's money you want, you can take this." I held out to him a 50-franc note.

"Ar no wan C. T. C.," Wordsworth said, waving one hand hard for emphasis, while at the same time he took the note with the other. "Ar wan my bebi gel."

Such an expression used in connection with Aunt Augusta offended me and I turned away to climb the steep steps into the coach, but he put his hand on my arm and held me back on the platform. He was a very strong man. "You jig-jig with my bebi gel," he accused me.

"You're preposterous, Wordsworth. She is my aunt. My mother's sister."

"No humbug?"

"No humbug," I said, though I hated the expression. "Even if she were not my aunt, can't you understand that she is a very old lady?"

"No one too old for jig-jig," Wordsworth said. "You tell her she come back here to Paris. Wordsworth wait long, long time for her. You speak her sweet. You tell her she still my bebi gel. Wordsworth no slip good when she gone."

The conductor asked me to get onto the train, for we were about to leave, and Wordsworth unwillingly released me. I stood on the top of the steps as the train began to move out from the Gare de Lyon in short jerks, and Wordsworth followed it down the platform, wading through the steam. He was crying, and I was reminded of a suicide walking out fully dressed into the surf. Suddenly, staring at a window beyond me, he began to sing:

"Slip gud-o, bebi gel:, An Ink me wan minit, Befo yu slip."

The train gathered momentum and with a final jerk and strain, it had left him behind.

I squeezed down the corridor to my aunt's couchette, which was number 72. The bed was made up, but there was a strange girl in a miniskirt sitting on it, while my aunt leaned out of the window, waving and blowing kisses. The girl and I looked at each other with embarrassment. We could hardly speak and interrupt this ceremony of separation. She was very young, perhaps 18, and she was elaborately made up with a chalk-white face, dark shadowed eyes and long auburn hair falling over her shoulders. With the strokes of a pencil, she had continued her eyelashes below and above the lids, so that the real eyelashes, standing out, had a false effect, like a stereoscopic photograph. Her shirt had two buttons missing at the top, as though they had popped off with the tension of her puppy fat and her eyes bulged like a Pekingese dog's, but they were pretty, nonetheless. They had in them what used to be called by my generation a sexy look, but this might have been caused by shortsightedness or constipation. Her smile, when she realized that I was not a stranger intruding into my aunt's compartment, was oddly timid for someone who looked so flagrant. It was as though someone else had dolled her up to attract. She was like a kid tethered to a tree to draw a tiger out of the jungle.

My aunt pulled in her head; her face was smeared with smuts and tears. "Dear man," she said, "I had to take a last look. At my age, one never knows."

I said with disapproval, "I thought that chapter was closed," and added for the sake of the girl, "Aunt Augusta."

"One can never be quite sure," my aunt said. "This is seventy-one," she added, indicating the girl.

"Seventy-one?"

"The next-door couchette. What's your name, dear?"

"Tooley," the girl replied. It might have been a pet name or a family name--one couldn't be sure.

"Tooley is going to Istanbul, too. Aren't you, dear?"

"En passant," she said with an American accent.

"She's going to Katmandu," my aunt explained.

"I thought that was in Nepal."

"I guess that's where it is," the girl said. "Something like that."

"She and I got talking," my aunt told me, "because--what's your name again, dear?"

"Tooley," the girl said.

"Tooley has brought a sack of provisions with her. Do you realize, Henry, that the Orient Express has no restaurant car? How times have changed. No restaurant car till after the Turkish frontier. We face two days of starvation."

"I've got a lot of milk chocolate," the girl said, "and a little sliced ham."

"And thirst." Aunt Augusta said.

"I've got a dozen bottles of Coke, but it's getting pretty warm now."

"When I think of the party I once had on this very train." Aunt Augusta said, "with Mr. Visconti and General Abdul. Caviar and champagne. We practically lived in the dining car. One meal ran into another and night into day."

"You are very welcome to share my Coke," Tooley said. "And the milk chocolate. The ham, too, of course, but there's not much of that."

"At least the conductor has promised us coffee and croissants," I said, "in the morning."

"I shall sleep as late as I can," my aunt said, "and we shall be able to get a bite at Milan station. With Mario," she added.

"Who's Mario?" I asked.

"We stop at Lausanne and Mürren and St.-Moritz," said the well-informed girl.

"Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet. Now I shall go to bed. You two young people are old enough to be left alone."

Tooley looked at me askance, as though, after all, I might be the tiger type. "Oh. I'll sleep, too," she said, "I love sleep." She looked at a huge wrist watch with only four numerals on a strap an inch wide, colored scarlet. "It's not one yet," she said doubtfully, "I'd better take a pill."

"You'll sleep," my aunt said in a tone not to be denied.

• • •

We were just pulling out of Lausanne when I awoke. I could see the lake between two tall gray apartment buildings and there was a tasteful advertisement for chocolates and then another for watches. It was the conductor who had woken me, bringing me coffee and brioches (I had asked for croissants). "Is the lady in seventy-two awake?" I asked.

"She did not wish to be disturbed before Milan," he replied.

"Is it true that there's no restaurant car?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"At least you will give us breakfast tomorrow?"

"No, monsieur. I leave the train at Milan. There is another conductor."

"Italian?"

"Yugoslav, monsieur."

"Does he speak English or French?"

"It is not likely." I felt hopelessly abroad.

I drank my coffee, and then from the corridor I watched the small Swiss towns roll smoothly by: the Montreux Palace in baroque Edwardian, like the home of a Ruritanian king, and rising behind it, out of a bank of morning mist, pale mountains like an underexposed negative: Aigle. Bex, Visp.... We stopped at nearly every station, but it was seldom that anyone either got in or out. Like my aunt, foreign passengers were not interested in Switzerland without snow, and yet it was here that I was seriously tempted to leave her. I had £50 of traveler's checks and I had no interest at all in Turkey. I caught glimpses of meadows running down to water, of old castles on hills spiked with vines and of girls on bicycles: everything seemed clean and arranged and safe, as my life had been before my mother's funeral. I thought of my garden. I missed my dahlias, and at some small station beyond Mürren, where a postman was delivering letters from a bicycle, there was a bed of mauve and red flowers. I think I might really have got off if the girl called Tooley hadn't at that moment touched my arm. Was there anything so wrong with the love of peace that I had to be forcibly drawn away from it by Aunt Augusta?

"Did you sleep well?" Tooley asked.

"Oh, yes, and you?"

"I hardly slept a wink." Her Pekingese eyes stared up at me, as though she were waiting for something from my plate. I offered her a brioche, but she refused it.

"Oh, no, thanks a lot. I've had a chocolate bar."

"Why couldn't you sleep?"

"I'm sort of worried."

I remembered, from my cashier days, faces just as timid as hers, peering through a hygienic barrier where a notice directed them to speak through a slot placed inconveniently low. I almost asked her whether she had an overdraft.

"Anything I can do?"

"I just want to talk," she said.

What could I do but invite her in? My bed had been made into a sofa while I stood in the corridor, and we sat down side by side. I offered her a cigarette. It was an ordinary Senior Service, but she turned it over as though it were something special she had never seen before.

"English?" she asked.

"Yes."

"What does Senior Service mean?"

"The Navy."

"You don't mind, do you, if I smoke one of my own?" She took a tin marked Eucalyptus-and-Menthol Lozenges out of her bag and picked from it an anonymous cigarette that looked as though it had been home-rolled. On second thoughts, she offered me one, and I thought it would be a little unkind of me to refuse. It was a very small cigarette and it looked rather grubby. It had an odd herbal flavor, not disagreeable.

"I've never smoked an American cigarette before," I said.

"I got these in Paris--from a friend."

"Or French ones."

"He was a terribly nice man. Groovy."

"Who was?"

"This man I met in Paris. I told him my trouble, too."

"What is your trouble?"

"I had a quarrel--with my boyfriend, I mean. He wanted to go third-class to Istanbul. I said it's crazy, we couldn't sleep together in the third-class, and I've got the money, haven't I? 'Your stinking allowance,' he said. 'Sell all you have and give it to the poor'--that's a quotation, isn't it, from somewhere? I said, 'It wouldn't be any use. Father would pay me back.' 'He need never know,' he said. 'He has sources of information,' I said, 'he's very high up, I mean, in the CIA.' He said, 'You can stick your money up your arse'--that's an English expression, isn't it? He's English. We met when we were sitting down in Trafalgar Square."

"Feeding the pigeons?" I asked.

She gave a bubble of a laugh and choked on the smoke. "You are ironic," she said. "I like men who are ironic. My father's ironic, too. You are a bit like him, when I come to think of it. Irony is a very valuable literary quality, too, isn't it, like passion?"

"You mustn't ask me about literature, Miss Tooley," I said. "I'm very ignorant."

"Don't call me Miss Tooley. Tooley's what my friends call me."

At St.-Moritz, a gang of schoolgirls passed down the platform. They were nice-looking schoolgirls: not one of them wore a miniskirt or visible make-up and they carried neat little satchels.

"How can such a beautiful country be so dull?" Tooley thought aloud.

"Why dull?"

"They aren't turned on here," she said. "None of them will ever be turned on. Would you like another cigarette?"

"Thank you. They are very mild. Agreeable flavor, too. They don't rasp the throat."

"I do like the expressions you use. They really are groovy."

I felt more awake than I usually do at that hour of the morning, and I found Tooley's company something of a novelty. I was glad that my aunt was sleeping late and giving me an opportunity to get better acquainted. I felt protective.

"This friend of yours in Paris," I said, "was a very good judge of cigarettes."

"He was fabulous." she said. "I mean, he's really together."

"French?"

"Oh, no. he came from darkest Africa."

"A Negro?"

"We don't call them that," she said reprovingly. "We call them colored or black--whichever they prefer."

A sudden suspicion struck me. "Was he called Wordsworth?"

"I knew him only as Zak."

"That's the man. Was it you he came to see off at the station?"

"Sure. Who else? I never expected him, but there he was at the gate to say goodbye. I bought him a platform ticket, but I think he was scared. He wouldn't come any farther."

"He knows my aunt, too," I said. I didn't tell her that he had used her ticket for another purpose.

"Now, isn't that the wildest sort of coincidence? Like something in Thomas Hardy."

"You seem to know a lot about literature."

"I'm majoring in English literature," she said. "My father wanted me to take social science, because he wanted me to serve awhile in the Peace Corps, but I guess our ideas didn't coincide in that and other things."

"What does your father do?"

"I told you--he has a very secret job in the CIA."

"That must be interesting," I said.

"He travels about a terrible lot. I haven't seen him more than once since Mum divorced him last fall. I tell him he sees the world horizontally, I mean that's superficial, isn't it? I want to see the world vertically."

"In depth." I said. I was rather proud of catching up with her ideas.

"These help." she said, waving her cigarette. "I feel a bit turned on already. It's your fabulous way of talking. I feel I sort of met you in the English-literature course. As a character. We did Dickens in depth."

"Vertically," I said, and we laughed together.

"What's your name?"

"Henry." She laughed again and I followed suit, though I was not sure why.

"They didn't even call you Harry?" she asked.

"Harry is the diminutive. One cannot be baptized Harry. There was never a Saint Harry."

"Is that what they call canon law?"

"I believe so."

"Because I knew a fabulous guy once who was baptized Knock-Me-Down."

"I doubt if he was really baptized that."

"Are you a Roman Catholic?"

"No, but I believe my aunt is one. I'm not quite sure, though."

"I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot--I mean I'm superstitious. Was Macbeth a Catholic?"

"It's not a question that's ever occurred to me.... I suppose ... well, I mean, I don't really know." It seemed to me that I was picking up her phrases.

"Maybe we ought to lock the door and open the window." she said. "What country are we in now?"

"I think we must be coming near to the Italian frontier."

"Then open the window quick." I couldn't follow her reasoning, but I obeyed. I had already finished my cigarette and she tossed away her stump and then emptied the ashtray onto the line. Then I remembered Wordsworth.

"What have we been smoking?" I said.

"Pot, of course. Why?"

"Do you realize we could be sent to prison? I don't know the Swiss law or the Italian, but--"

"I wouldn't be. I'm underage."

"And me?"

"You could plead innocence," she said and began to laugh: She was laughing when the door opened and the Italian police looked in.

"Passports." they demanded, but they didn't even open them; the draft of the open window blew off one man's cap, and I could only hope the smell of Cannabis had dispersed down the corridor. They were followed closely by the customs men, who were equally considerate, except that one man wrinkled his nose. A few minutes later, they were safely on the platform. The sign read Domodossola.

"We're in Italy," I said.

"Then have another."

"I'll do no such thing, Tooley. I had no idea.... For goodness' sake, get rid of them before night. Yugoslavia's a Communist country, and they won't hesitate to imprison someone underage."

"I was always taught that Yugoslavs were good Communists. We sell them strategic material, don't we?"

"But not drugs," I said.

"Now you're being ironical again. I mean, I wanted to tell you my great trouble, but how can I do it if you're ironical?"

"You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality."

"But you aren't a novel," she said and began to cry as Italy went by outside. The Cannabis had caused the laughter and now I suppose it caused the tears. I felt a little unhappy myself, watching her. My head swam. I shut the window and saw through the pane a hill village all yellow and ocher, like something grown of itself out of rain and earth, and beside the line a factory and a red housing estate and an autostrada and an advertisement for Perugina and all the wires and grids of a smokeless age.

"What's your trouble, Tooley?" I asked.

"I forgot the damn pill and I haven't had the curse for six weeks. I nearly talked to your mother last night--"

"My aunt," I corrected her. "You ought to speak to her. I don't really know about these things."

"But I want to talk to a man," Tooley said. "I mean, I'm sort of shy of women. I don't get on terms with them fast, the way I do with men. The trouble is, men are so ignorant now. In the old days, a girl never knew what to do, and now it's the men who don't know. Julian said it was my fault--he trusted me."

"Julian is the boyfriend?" I asked.

"He was angry because I forgot the pill. He wanted to hitchhike to Istanbul. He said it might do the trick."

"I thought he wanted to go third-class."

"That was before I told him. And before he met a man with a truck going to Vienna. Then he gave me an ultimatum. We were in this café in the Place St. Michel and he said, 'We've got to leave now or never,' and I said, 'No,' and he said, 'Find your own fucking way, then.' "

"Where is he now?"

"Somewhere between here and Istanbul."

"How will you find him?"

"They'll know at the Gülhane."

"What's that?"

"It's near the Blue Mosque. Everyone knows where everyone is at the Gülhane." She began to remove carefully the traces of tears. Then she looked at her huge watch with the four numbers and said, "It's nearly lunchtime. I'm as hungry as a dog. I hope I'm not feeding two. Want some chocolate?"

"I'll wait until Milan," I said.

"Have another cigarette?"

"No thank you."

"I will. It might do the trick." She began to smile again. "It's funny the ideas I get; I mean, I think almost anything might do the trick. I drank brandy and ginger ale in Paris, because at school they said ginger did the trick. And I had sauna baths, too. It's funny when all you really need is a curettage. Zak said he'd find me a doctor, but he said he'd need a few days to find him, and then I'd have to lay up a little, and it wouldn't be much good getting to the Gülhane and finding Julian gone. Gone where? I ask you. I met a boy in Paris who said they were turning us all out of Katmandu and Vientiane was the place now. Not for Americans, of course, because of the draft."

There were moments when she gave the impression that all the world was traveling.

Tooley said, "I slept with a boy in Paris when Julian walked out, because I thought, well, it might stir things up a bit. I mean, the curse comes that way sometimes, right on top of the orgasm, but I didn't get any orgasm. I guess I was worrying about Julian, because I don't often have difficulty that way."

"I think you ought to go straight back home and tell your parents."

"In the singular." she said. "I don't count Mum and I don't exactly know where Father is. He travels an awful lot. Secret missions. He might be in Vientiane, for all I know--they say it's lousy with CIA."

"Haven't you anywhere you call home?" I asked her.

"Julian and me felt like home, but then he got angry about my forgetting the pill. He's very quick-tempered. 'If I have to remind you all the time,' he said, 'it takes away my spontaneity, don't you understand that?' He's got a theory women want to castrate their men, and one way is to take away their spontaneity."

"And you felt at home with him?"

"We could discuss just everything," she said with a happy and reminiscent smile as the pot began to work again. "Art and sex and James Joyce and psychology."

"You oughtn't to smoke that stuff." I protested.

"Pot? Why? There's no harm in pot. Acid's another thing. Julian wanted me to try acid, but I said no: I mean, I don't want to warp my chromosomes."

There were moments when I didn't understand a word she said, and yet it seemed to me that I could listen to her for a long while without wearying. There was something gentle and sweet about her.

• • •

When a train pulls into a great city, I am reminded of the closing moments of an overture. All the rural and urban themes of our long journey were picked up again: A factory was followed by a meadow, a patch of autostrada by a country road, a gasworks by a modern church; the houses began to tread on each other's heels, advertisements for Fiat cars swarmed closer together, the conductor who had brought breakfast passed, working intensely down the corridor to rouse some important passenger, the last fields were squeezed out and at last there were only houses, houses, houses, and Milano, flashed the signs, Milano.

I said to Tooley, "We've arrived. We'd better get lunch. It's our last chance to get a square meal...."

"Your mother--" Tooley began.

"Aunt Augusta--she's here."

The conductor had preceded her down the corridor (I should have realized who the important passenger was) and now she stood in the doorway of our compartment, wrinkling her nose. "What have you two been up to?" she asked.

"Smoking and talking." I said.

"You seem extraordinarily cheerful, Henry. It's not quite like you." She sniffed again. "I can almost believe that poor Wordsworth is with us still."

"It's fabulous," Tooley said, "that you know Zak, I mean."

"It y a un monsieur qui vous demande, madame," the conductor interrupted, and I saw beyond my, aunt, between a trolley of newspapers and a trolley of refreshments, a very tall thin man with exquisite white hair, gesticulating with an umbrella.

"Oh, it's Mario," my aunt said, without bothering to turn. "I wrote to him that we should need lunch. He will have ordered it. Come, my dear, come, Henry, there's no time to be lost." She preceded us down the steps and dropped straight into the arms of the white-haired man, who with steely strength held her for a moment suspended.

"Madre mia, madre mia," he said breathlessly and dropped his umbrella as he put her carefully down onto the platform as though she might break--the very idea connected with Aunt Augusta was ridiculous.

"What on earth is he calling you that for?" I whispered. Perhaps it was the effect of the Cannabis, but I had taken an extreme dislike to the man who was now kissing Tooley's hand.

"I knew him since he was a baby," Aunt Augusta said. "He is Mr. Visconti's son."

He was very good-looking, in a histrionic way: he had the appearance of an aging actor and I didn't like the way he was trying to dazzle Tooley with pieces of his repertoire. After his burst of theatrical emotion with my aunt, he was conducting Tooley ahead of us down the platform to the restaurant, holding his umbrella by the ferrule and pointing the crook up like a crosier. With his white hair and his head bent toward Tooley, he looked like a hypnotic bishop instructing a neophyte on purity.

"What does he do, Aunt Augusta? Is he an actor?"

"He writes verse dramas."

"Can he live on that?"

"Mr. Visconti settled a little money on him before the War. Luckily, in Swiss francs. I suspect, too, that he gets money from women."

"Rather disgusting at his age," I said.

"He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It's the best way, Henry, to win a woman. They are wiser than men. They think of the period that must elapse between one lovemaking and another. In my youth, not many women smoked cigarettes. Look out for that trolley."

I could feel in my head the cunning of Cannabis. "He must have been born when you knew Mr. Visconti.... Did you know his mother, too?"

"Not very well."

"She must have been a beautiful woman."

"I am not a fair judge. I detested her and she detested me. Mario always thought of me as his real mother. Mr. Visconti called her the blonde cow. She was German."

Mario Visconti had ordered a saltimbocca alla Romana for each of us and a bottle of Frascati wine. My aunt began to speak to him in Italian. "You must forgive me," my aunt said, "but Mario speaks no English, and it is many, many years since we have seen each other."

"Do you speak Italian?" I asked Tooley.

"Not a word."

"You seemed to be having quite a conversation."

"Oh, he was very expressive."

"What was he expressing?"

"He sort of liked me. What does cuore mean?"

I looked at Mario Visconti with resentment and saw that he had begun to weep. He was talking a great deal and using his hands in explanation and once he picked up his umbrella and held it above his head. In the short intervals between paragraphs, he put a lot of saltimbocca alla Romana into his mouth, leaning his handsome face forward over the plate, so that the fork had only a short distance to travel and the tears only a little way to fall. It was lucky that the dish was heavily salted already. My aunt lent him a wispy lace handkerchief, which he applied to his eyes and afterward adjusted becomingly in his breast pocket to show a frilly corner. Then he became dissatisfied with the wine, which seemed very good to me, and called to the waiter to change it. Only after he had tasted a new bottle did he resume his tears. I noticed the waiters were as indifferent to the scene as usherettes at a cinema are to a movie that has been running a week.

"I don't like a man who cries," I said to Tooley.

"Have you never cried?"

"No," I said and then added for the sake of accuracy, "not in public." The waiter brought us all ice creams in three colors. They looked dangerous to me and I left mine untasted, but Mario's disappeared quickly and I noticed how his tears were quenched, as though the ice had frozen the ducts. He gave my aunt a shy boyish smile, which went strangely with his white hair, and she lent him surreptitiously her purse to pay with.

On the steps of the train, I was afraid he would begin to cry again when he embraced her, but instead he gave her a small brown-paper parcel and walked silently away, holding up his crook to hide his emotion or, perhaps, his lack of it. "So that's that," my aunt said with cool thoughtfulness. Tooley had disappeared--I suspected into the lavatory to smoke another cigarette--and I decided to tell Aunt Augusta about her trouble.

But I found when I sat down beside her that she wanted to do the talking herself. "Mario seems rather an old man," she said, "or has he dyed his hair, I wonder? He cannot be more than forty-five. Or six. I am bad about dates."

"He certainly looks a good deal older than that. Perhaps it is the poetry."

"I have never much cared," she said, "for men with umbrellas, but he was charming as a child." She looked out of the window and I looked, too: A new housing estate in red brick straggled beside the line and on the hill beyond, a medieval village crumbled away behind its ramparts.

"Why was he crying?" I asked.

"He wasn't crying. He was laughing," she said. "Something about Mr. Visconti. I haven't seen Mario for more than thirty years," she said. "He was a sweet boy then--too sweet, perhaps, to last. The War came. We were separated."

"And his father?"

"I never associated sweetness with Mr. Visconti. Charm, perhaps. He was a terrible twister. Very generous with cream buns, of course, but one can't live on cream buns. Perhaps I am being unfair. One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal. And after all, he was kind to me from the very start--he found me my situation in Italy."

"At the theater?"

"I can't think why you persist in calling it a theater. 'All the world's a stage,' of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer, indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations."

I was a little shocked by her unexpected attack on Shakespeare. Perhaps it was because he wrote verse dramas like Mario. "You were talking about Mr. Visconti," I reminded her.

"I must admit he was very kind to me in Paris. I was lucky to get this job of mine in the Rue de Provence. But I wasn't really happy there, and I was grateful to Mr. Visconti when he took me to Italy. The work, of course, was the same, but I enjoyed the travel from one city to another. And every eight weeks, when I came back to Milan, I enjoyed seeing Mr. Visconti. Cream buns were a great improvement on sardines. Sometimes, too, he would pop up unexpectedly in Venice. He was a twister, no doubt of it, but there are many worse people than twisters." She sighed, looking out at the dull scenery of the Po. "I grew to be very, very fond of him. Fonder than any other man I have ever known. Except the first, but the first is always a special case."

"How did you come to retire?" I asked. I was going to say "from the stage," but I remembered her inexplicable dislike of the term. I had not forgotten Tooley's trouble, but I thought it only fair to let my aunt finish first with the memories stirred up by the sight of Visconti's son.

"Your uncle Jo left me all his money. It was quite a shock. The house, too, of course, but there was nothing to be done about that. It's still crumbling away near the autostrada. I settled the house on Mario when I had to leave Italy because of the War and I think he sometimes takes a woman there to spend a weekend in the ancient family palazzo. He even calls it the Palazzo Visconti (he's a bit of a snob: quite unlike his father). One day they'll want to build a connecting road to the autostrada and then the state will have to pay him compensation if he can show that the house was inhabited."

"Why didn't you marry Mr. Visconti, Aunt Augusta?"

"There's no divorce in Italy, and Mr. Visconti was a Catholic, even though a nonpracticing one. He even insisted on my being received into the Church. It was his wife who had all the money and that hampered Mr. Visconti badly, until he managed to get his fingers on most of what Jo had left me. I was very careless in those days and Mr. Visconti was very plausible. It was lucky that no one would buy the house--that, at least, was left me for a time. He had a scheme for selling fresh vegetables--tomatoes, particularly, of course--to Saudi Arabia. At the beginning, I think he really believed he would make our fortune. Even his wife lent him money. I shall always remember the conferences at the Excelsior in Rome with Arab notables in long robes, who arrived with a dozen wives and a food taster. Mr. Visconti would take a whole floor in the Excelsior--you can imagine that made quite a hole in Jo's money. But it was very romantic while it lasted. I had my fun. Mr. Visconti was never for a moment dull. He even persuaded the Vatican to put in money, so we had cardinals for cocktails at the Grand Hotel. The Grand had once been a convent, and I suppose they felt more at home there. They were greeted at the door by flunkies with tall candles, and it was a wonderful sight when the Arabs and the cardinals met, the desert robes and the scarlet skullcaps and all the bowings and embracings and the genuflections of the management and the kissing of rings and the blessings. The Arabs, of course, drank only orange juice, and the tasters stood at the bar sampling each jug and occasionally snatching a whisky and soda on the side. Everybody enjoyed these parties, but only the Arabs could really afford their fun, as it turned out."

"Was Mr. Visconti ruined?"

"He pulled out in time with what was left of my money and what was left of his wife's and, to do him justice, he had settled some of mine on Mario. Of course, he disappeared for a while, but he came back after things had quieted down. The Vatican made a very profitable deal, you remember, with Mussolini, so that what they lost to Mr. Visconti seemed very small beer, indeed. He had left me enough to live on in a modest way, but I have never been very keen on modesty. Life was very monotonous after Mr. Visconti disappeared. I went back to Paris for a while (Mario was with the Jesuits in Milan). But when that was over, I came back to Rome. I always hoped that one day Mr. Visconti would turn up again. I had a two-room apartment, and I did a little part-time work in an establishment behind the Messaggero. Life was very middle class after all the Arabs and the cardinals." She gave a very young laugh and laid her hand on my knee. "And then--Oh, praise to the Holiest in the height, as Wordsworth is fond of saying--I was putting in a little part time behind the Messaggero when who should walk into the reception room but Mr. Visconti. A pure coincidence. He wasn't looking for me. But how happy we were. How happy. Just to see each other again. The girls didn't understand when we joined hands then and there and danced between the sofas. It was one o'clock in the morning. We didn't go upstairs. We went straight out into the lane outside. There was a drinking fountain shaped like an animal's head, and he splashed my face with water before he kissed me."

"What was that half-time employment?" I suddenly broke out. "Who were the girls? What were the sofas there for?"

"What does it matter now?" my aunt said. "What did any of it matter? We were together again and he splashed me and splashed me and he kissed me and kissed me."

"But surely you must have despised the man, after all he had done to you?"

We were crossing the long aqueduct through the lagoons that leads to Venice-Mestre, but there were no signs of the beautiful city, only tall chimneys with pale gas flames hardly visible in the late-afternoon sunlight. I was not expecting my aunt's outburst.

She turned on me with real fury, as though I were a child who had carelessly broken some vase she had cherished over the years for its beauty and the memories it contained. "I despise no one," she said, "no one. Regret your own actions, if you like that kind of wallowing in self-pity, but never, never despise. Never presume yours is a better morality. What do you suppose I was doing in the house behind the Messaggero? I was cheating, wasn't I? So why shouldn't Mr. Visconti cheat me? But you, I suppose, never cheated in all your little provincial banker's life, because there's not anything you wanted enough, not even money, not even a woman. You looked after people's money like a nanny who looks after other people's children. Can't I see you in your cage, stacking up the little livers endlessly before you hand them over to their proper owner? I only wish you were a cheat. Then, perhaps, we'd have something in common."

I was astounded. I could find nothing to say in reply. I thought of leaving the train at Venice, but then there was Tooley and I felt responsible for Tooley. The squalid station wrapped us round with its dirt and its noise. I said, "I think I'd better find Tooley," and I went away, leaving the old lady glaring in her couchette. Only, as I closed the door of the compartment, I thought I heard her laugh.

This is Part II of "Crook's Tour." a selection from a new novel by Graham Greene. The third and concluding part will appear next month.