Black Beech and Honeydew (36 page)

Since the days when I wrote the preceding chapters until now I have concocted eleven more Alleyn stories, sandwiching them between five Shakespeare productions and have made trips to England and to Italy, Copenhagen, Yugoslavia and Vigo and those groups of West
Indian islands which I shall never cease to confuse – the three Bs: Bermudas, Bahamas and Barbados.

The five weeks in Rome may be described as pampered. I was lucky enough to stay with the Alister McIntoshes at the Residence of the New Zealand Embassy where Alister was established as our first New Zealand Ambassador in Italy. The Residence has since been moved to a no doubt posher but certainly less enchanting site than that house in ‘old’ Rome.

In a narrow side street off the exquisite Piazza Navona, it was reached by means of a lift and Primo, an eccentric porter who inspected all in-comers from some kind of invisible eyrie, where he could be heard indecipherably shouting. He admitted callers at once or, regardless of rank or distinction, caused them to wait, sometimes for an unconscionable time, in a rather dreary, dark little office. It was impossible to guess what line of reasoning prompted Primo to behave in this disconcerting manner. He roared a great deal and understood no English but he ‘went with’ the Residence and might not be discarded.

He was the cause of extreme mortification to Marcello who was a sort of unofficial master-of-ceremonies-cum-controller of the household. But before invoking Marcello, who is unique, I must pause for a moment in this impressive interior. It was an apartment occupying a whole floor and a half of a very large building and was leased to our government by a rich American lady. The rooms were enormous and nobly proportioned. There were some huge, dark, dimly classical and vaguely belligerent pictures. The drawing room opened on to a roof garden from which one looked out upon an operatic backdrop of windows, walls and Roman streets that might have been ordered by Franco Zeffirelli. I arrived in spring and the air was alive with swallows. They darted across the vision so fast that a single bird looked like a flight of little arrows.

When one left the Residence it was to walk into the noise of Rome, which is formidable: a conglomerate of excited voices, motor horns, church bells and millions of feet. Almost everywhere, it seemed, it was presided over by stone saints high up against a brilliant sky, making beneficent frozen gestures upon the teeming streets. I never tired of watching Romans in conversation. Two men, for instance, would greet each other soberly enough, sometimes
gloomily: there would follow what might seem to be commiseration on the one hand and on the other tragic acceptance. Hands and eyes would be cast up. Shoulders would be clapped or stroked. Then, for no discernible reason, eyes would flash, teeth would be bared, voices would rise. Romantic profiles were advanced to within inches of each other. They were not yelling. A fight would seem to be imminent. ‘Well, come
on,
then,’ one would think, by this time oneself demoralized and, I’m afraid, longing for a scrap, ‘get on with it.’

And then, without warning, these unpredictable gentlemen would burst into peals of laughter, shake hands extensively, clap each other on the back and part, refreshed, it was obvious, by their baffling encounter.

Marcello, then. Marcello is a handsome, exquisitely mannered Roman, a chartered accountant, I believe, by profession and a motion picture creator who with a partner won the prize for a documentary at a film festival. Unhappily this success persuaded him to venture further with disastrous results. At the time when the New Zealand Embassy offices, which were some distance away from the Residence itself, were being set up, he had secured an extremely humble job in them. From this embarrassment, after confirmation of his story, he was rescued and promoted to chief driver for the Ambassador and thence to the indefinable but immensely important role in which he is now cast.
Éminence grise
one might be tempted to call Marcello except that there is no suggestion of high-flown, offstage manipulations or devious on-goings at any level, and not a hint of advancing himself above the role which he performs with such tact, adroitness and mastery.

It is the role itself which is elusive and impossible to define. He is still head driver and he drives beautifully, although you may not quite fancy certain tendencies. For instance when, in the hurly-burly of the terrifying Roman street traffic, another driver tries to put one across him, Marcello removes both hands from the wheel, puts them together and raises them in ostentatious and sarcastic prayer as if to say ‘The Mother of God protect us from such as you.’ He is of course too grand to lean out of his window and scream abuse.

When formal dinner parties were given Marcello was in the room throughout, presiding over the butler and footman who were
engaged for these occasions and who did not seem to resent his presence. After a large reception when all the guests were gone, Marcello and Vera, his wife who assists offstage with the housework, would come in to say good night. Ceremonial, almost feudal, kisses were exchanged and compliments bestowed.

When sightseeing trips were taken Marcello achieved wonders. At Paestum, a magical place of temples and ancient marvels in the south, beyond Amalfi, he required a closed museum to be opened for us and at Pompeii again caused those notorious rooms with extremely explicit frescoes to be unlocked for our slightly embarrassed inspection. At the exquisite Villa Giulia where visitors’ cameras are confiscated at the bureau, he excused himself for a moment and returned with the curator’s compliments and our cameras which, to the scarcely concealed and understandable anger of tourist groups, we were allowed to use. Nobody knew how Marcello achieved these miracles, but if it was by graceful bribery it was at his own expense. Probably it was by an appeal to snobbery.

For, it must be confessed, Marcello is a great snob and was much gratified when visits were made to grand restaurants or smart shops. But he is also extremely thrifty and his gratification was tempered by considerations of expense. He admired the Ambassador and went completely but respectfully overboard for the Ambassador’s lady. On one occasion when he was driving her to her dentist, she remarked that she was not looking forward to her appointment.

‘If he hurt you I kill him,’ Marcello alarmingly remarked.

Vitalia, the cook at the Embassy, was elderly, cunning and very,
very
devout. She did the marketing, but under the despotic supervision of Marcello to whom she had to account for every last centesimo that she spent. Every Friday evening if you passed the open door into the kitchen, there would be the wretched Vitalia seated with her account book at a table while Marcello with jabbing forefinger stood over her.

While I was staying at the Embassy, Vitalia came into her own. It seemed that in her native village there had lived a holy person now defunct and undergoing the long-drawn-out process of being made a saint. Vitalia as one, possibly the only one, still alive, who could bear first-hand witness to the alleged miracles, was constantly required by the Devil’s advocate to do so. She gained enormous
prestige by this circumstance and became unbearably smug: almost, one might have thought, as if she herself was in the running for beatitude. Marcello, maddened by her airs, teased her unmercifully, pretending he saw a halo coming and going over her head.

He has a sense of fun. A political election was in progress and one of the high-ranking candidates was a pompous, excitable but tiny minister who paced about the bedroom all night in a state of tension. His wife, Marcello said, had remarked that she would be glad when the election was over as she was getting no sleep with him walking to and fro under their bed.

Marcello speaks the sort of English that one had assumed to be made up by variety artistes impersonating Italians. When a pipe burst in the Embassy he really did say: ‘I getta da plum.’

Perhaps I should have first tried to set down some of the wonders of Rome instead of remarking on the idiosyncracies of the staff at one of its smaller embassies. The truth is I have already tried to suggest them in a book that I wrote after leaving it.
When in Rome
is yet another detective novel but it is based on, and for the most part takes place at, a recognizable basilica – San Clemente in Via di S. Giovanni in Laterano. I called it San Tommaso but that was the only difference.

Doris McIntosh and I, driven and escorted as always by Marcello, first visited San Clemente one spring morning. To explore it is to walk downwards and again downwards through nineteen centuries into the age of Mithras. The present Basilica – one of the loveliest in Rome – is, as it were, the top layer of a superb historical cake. It was built over an early Christian church which was filled in with earth to support it but has now been excavated and restored by Irish Dominicans who have been in charge there since 1677 and began excavating in 1877. And still further down under this place of worship is a first-century
insula
or block of Roman flats. And there, in a grotto, at the far end of his sacrificial chamber and rising out of a bed of breast-like stones, stood the god who was born out of a stony matrix, a strange, smooth, plump figure, not child, not man, with a Phrygian cap on his long curls: Mithras. There he had stood, fixed and heavy, for nineteen hundred years and there we stood in his temple which was forbidden to all women.

I knew at once that I wanted to write about him and when we got home began to read about his cult and what is known of the rites
that were practised in his honour. It was easy to fill the triculum with the bellowing of a garlanded bull and the reek of blood on hot stone.

We returned to San Clemente and on this second visit noticed how all the subterranean region where Mithras was fixed in his stones was filled with the sound of running water, because down there behind one of the walls runs an underground stream of pure water. It flows into the Cloaca Maxima about seven hundred yards away, close by the Colosseum.

Some six months later
When in Rome
was published.

But in the meantime Doris, knowing I was writing this book, thought she would like to visit San Clemente for the third time. Down she went through the now familiar corridors, nave and apse, past exquisite garlanded columns and frescoes whose colours are as bright as when they were painted, having been preserved by long burial in protective earth. And again down to the lowest level and the temple of Mithras. And to his grotto at the far end. It had been roped off.

Mithras was gone.

At first she could not, as one says, believe her eyes. After almost twenty centuries there was now only a litter of the breast-like stones into which he had been so firmly sunk and sealed! She returned up all the stairs to the bureau where the good brothers sell their cards and pamphlets and innocent little holy knick-knacks. By this time she was on friendly terms with them and was greeted, as usual, in the richest of Irish brogues. But the answers she was given were evasive and she came away none the wiser except that it seemed clear that the Dominican brothers had had nothing to do with the removal of the god Mithras, born of a rock, who was said to have banqueted with Apollo.

When I was in Rome there was a riot. At that time riots were of frequent occurrence. Beyond knowing that as usual it was political in character, and that students were heavily involved, I never really understood what this one was all about. It came to a head one
evening. The belligerents assembled in thousands in the Piazza Navona, hard by the Embassy, and overflowed into our little side street. We watched from our windows.

It all seemed, in an odd sort of way, lackadaisical, more like a first ‘take’ for a film than the real thing. There were all the ingredients: a vast crowd of extras, students, shouting, a bit of singing here, operatically dressed police there, doing nothing in particular except lounge about and smoke.

As far as we could see, there was a great deal of noise but no fighting or making arrests. But there was naughty behaviour of an exasperating, idiotic sort. A group of young men who had been lounging near a motorcycle parked under our windows, half-heartedly turned it over on its side and, after several, unsuccessful attempts, set fire to it and walked away. This was followed by a group of about a hundred young men erupting out of Navona and running down the side street, followed, though not very fast, by some of the police. They were not the highly picturesque
carabinieri
but the work-a-day
corpo di polizia.
They did not attempt to arrest anybody and as soon as their non-quarry got to the far end of the street and stopped, the police, very sensibly I thought, also stopped and lit cigarettes. I don’t remember any exchange of insults or threats or shaken fists, still less any baton charges. It was as if the director had shouted ‘Cut’ and everybody stopped acting. Meanwhile the background noise in Navona continued terrifically.

I am sure these rather limp demonstrations were by no means typical of Italian street demonstrations and riots as a whole but they did seem to me to be in paradoxical contrast to the ordinary street conversations that so often suggest belligerence and a violent approach to the most harmless of commonplace remarks.

While I was still in Rome I had a letter from Pammy, my former student-secretary, now a terrific passer of examinations and going great guns in Social Welfare. She suggested that I hire a car and that she come and drive it, being acquainted with Italy and the hazards of Italian motoring. When we had had our fill of this exercise we could return the car, no matter where we were, and take to the railroad. We planned to go to Perugia and thence to Florence for a week and on to Lucca to stay with friends who had a rural
palazzo
thereabouts. To Genoa then, by train. And so, by Paris and the English Channel, home.

Pammy, intrepid girl, arrived in the afternoon, collected the car and launched herself into the streets of Rome where she soon got lost. She asked her way of a driver with whom she found herself cheek-by-jowl in a traffic jam. He spoke English and offered to pilot her to her destination. So she followed him. The course he took was not direct. Presently she found herself high up in the world. He signalled for her to drive up beside him and stop.