A Pigeon Among the Cats Read online

  When Mrs. Lawler made no answer to this Gwen went on, “What’s the matter with his face, anyhow?”

  At this Mrs. Lawler could not help saying, “Burns, I think. He may have been in the Air Force in the war. I’ve seen a lot of that sort of thing.”

  Mrs. Chilton thought, Burns, my foot! Car crash, more likely. She’s got the Air Force on the brain, poor old cow. Pathetic. Teaching all her life except that one break!

  Neither of them gave any more thought to the strange friendly man as they wandered down the steps to the square, sat in the shade at one side to eat a delicious ice-cream and wandered back to the hotel, where Mrs. Lawler unpacked a few things for the night, undressed, showered and dressed again in a thinner summer frock. She went down to the bar in good time to meet some more of her group before dinner. It was time to get to know a few more of them. A diet of Gwen Chilton, however sorry she felt for the girl, was not to be taken without relief.

  She drank an apéritif with the Woodruffs. Conversation was simple; it consisted of a long account from Mr. Woodruff of his growing success in electronics. He spoke a type of Midlands cockney that mirrored this process exactly, so mat when she asked Mrs. Woodruff where they lived in England the answer was Harrogate and she congratulated herself for a good guess.

  At the meal she was joined by the woman and niece of breakfast that morning; the one too stout and the other too thin, as in a cartoon, but dressed alike, though not actually “twin” in flowered nylon, knee length, sleeveless. Mrs. Franks was a midwife, attached to a rare private maternity home in a London suburb. Miss Hurry was a state-registered nurse, taking a holiday abroad with her aunt before going to a new post in a provincial hospital. They had visited Spain twice, they explained, and wanted a change. Sunbathing was all very well in its way, but …

  “I’m here to see Florence and Venice,” Mrs. Lawler said gently.

  “Not Rome?” Miss Hurry was surprised.

  “I spent a week in Rome some years ago,” Mrs. Lawler explained. “But Florence and Venice never yet. Time slips away so.”

  She sighed for all the plans made and never brought off, for one reason or another.

  Gwen Chilton waylaid her on the way from the dining room.

  “Going to have coffee?” she asked.

  “Yes, that would be nice.” Mrs. Lawler turned to invite her eating companions to join them but they had already disappeared.

  “They make it at the bar,” Gwen said, leading off in that direction.

  But Mrs. Lawler had stopped at the middle of the hall. Their chance acquaintance, their guide, their odd pick-up, was standing there with his back to them, lighting a cigarette.

  Gwen had stopped too. She came back to say in a low voice. “He’s stopping in the hotel. He was at a table near the door. Very fluent in Italian.” She moved away again and the man turned slowly.

  “So you’re staying here, too?” Mrs. Lawler said, calmly. “Can we give you some coffee as a reward for your help in the town?”

  She implied, without exactly meaning it, that she and Mrs. Chilton were together.

  “Thank you, but they brought me some at my table,” he answered. “I’ll watch you drinking yours, though.”

  And he walked off to where Gwen Chilton was waiting at the bar and presently came back with the girl, carrying both their cups to the small table in the lounge where Mrs. Lawler had established herself.

  He was quite ready now to explain his own movements. A short stay on the French Riviera with some English friends, a long drive round the Corniche road to Genoa. Another long drive that day to Siena. Wonderful new roads, they all agreed.

  “And where do you go now?” Mrs. Lawler asked. Mrs. Chilton did not seem particularly interested, but rather to have retired from the conversation into her usual self-pitying privacy.

  “South,” he answered. “Rome tomorrow and straight through to Naples.”

  “Not in one day?”

  “Possibly. The autostradas are wonderful. I can rest when I get there: I’m going to friends. I’d rather not dawdle on the way.”

  “You must have a super car,” Gwen said. She spoke suddenly, forcefully. Mrs. Lawler was startled, spilling her coffee spoon from the saucer to the floor. She noticed, as their unknown acquaintance dived politely after it that his hands, too, were shaking. Why? Or did they always shake? What did it matter, anyway?

  The little, pointless episode did break up the party, though, Mrs. Chilton leaving first, as if disturbed by it. The man, who had only just regained his seat, rose once more when the girl got up and remained standing to take his own leave.

  “You will be off before us in the morning,” Mrs. Lawler said, looking up at him. “Though we are again due to start most uncomfortably early. So thank you again for your help over our sight-seeing, Mr. — er — ”

  “Owen Strong,” he answered at once. “Thank you, Mrs.…”

  “Rose Lawler.”

  “Mrs. Lawler.”

  They shook hands and as she was clearly about to leave herself, he helped her to her feet. Surprisingly strong in the wrist, she decided and no longer shaking. Not that it mattered, she told herself.

  They exchanged a final good night and parted, Mrs. Lawler making for the lifts, Mr. Strong for the front door.

  Again she told herself, a little more regretfully than before, she had now seen the last of him.

  Again she was wrong. Having undressed and turned out her top light, she pulled back her curtains and opened her window, deciding to risk the mosquitoes rather than suffocate. The lights of the town were still brilliant, stars shone in the sky, though there was no moon. Her window was three floors up at the back of the hotel. Directly below she looked down on a terrace with small tables and one or two figures seated at them with glasses or cups.

  Owen Strong and Gwen Chilton were most noticeable. Also the courier, Billie and Mario, the coach driver. They sat at a table on the opposite side of the terrace to that of the other two.

  “Well, well, well,” Mrs. Lawler told herself, fastening up the window and pulling across half the curtain.

  To shut out the mosquitoes? Certainly. And an unwelcome sight? A sad reminder? What nonsense!

  Mrs. Lawler read a book for five minutes until the print began to swim, then put out her table lamp and slept.

  Chapter Two

  The coach ‘Roseanna’ drew up outside the Siena hotel just after eight o’clock the next morning and three-quarters of an hour later the tour climbed sleepily on board, Billie counted them, Mario prepared to drive them away.

  Mrs. Lawler, one of the first to leave the hotel, took her former place near the window, behind the driver: the Banks family did the same on the other side of the central aisle.

  For a little while Mrs. Lawler hoped to see Mrs. Chilton arrive and take a seat farther back in the coach, but there was no sign of her.

  “Did you see Mrs. Chilton at breakfast?” Billie asked her, tapping her biro against her front teeth.

  No one had seen Mrs. Chilton at breakfast that morning, but Mario on being consulted, agreed that all the luggage belonging to this tour was on board. Every piece was there.

  “Mrs. Chilton had no breakfast yesterday, so she told me,” Mrs. Lawler said. “Perhaps she never does.”

  “She wouldn’t be the first,” Mrs. Franks said comfortably.

  “They won’t be told, neither,” added Miss Hurry.

  This seemed to close the question of Mrs. Chilton’s, food habits. Billie left the coach to look for her. The men lit cigarettes and pipes. After a further glance round her Miss Banks also lit a cigarette, opening the window beside her to tip the ash out of it.

  In five minutes Gwen Chilton appeared at the corner of the street, making for the hotel entrance, but not hurrying and not apparently recognising the coach ‘Roseanna’. The other tourists stared but made no attempt to attract her attention. All except Mrs. Lawler, who called her name, but with no success.

  However, Billie came out of the hotel j
ust as Mrs. Chilton reached it, so with repeated apologies but no explanation the truant hurried up the steps of the coach and dropped into the seat beside Mrs. Lawler as Mario swung the coach away from the kerb.

  “Late getting up again?” asked Mrs. Lawler, smiling.

  “No. Early really.”

  “We didn’t see you at breakfast.”

  “That! No, I went out. But the place didn’t open till nine. Hopeless.”

  Guessing wildly but accurately, Mrs. Lawler said, “You wanted a bank?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I guessed, because I wanted one myself yesterday and then realised we were leaving too early. But I was in time at San Gimignano. You should have gone there.”

  Mrs. Chilton said nothing.

  “The trouble is,” Mrs. Lawler went on, “we probably shan’t get to Rome before they shut at twelve and you’ll have to wait till they open again in the afternoon.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Gwen Chilton softly.

  Mrs. Lawler raised a disapproving eyebrow at her but said nothing. An unattractive, disagreeable girl; no wonder her husband had run out on her. No, that was wrong: she had left him.

  The countryside flowed smoothly past, wide fields planted with rows of vines that climbed about, and were carried by short sturdy trees. The vineyards alternated with crops of maize; corn for animals, not humans.

  ‘Roseanna’ swept on across the wide landscape. The hills were behind them now and after the excitement of the drives on the two previous days Mrs. Lawler found the view very restful, especially that part of it they saw from the autostrada where Mario displayed his driving talent to the full, giving way to strings of fast cars before pulling out to pass a group of slow lorries. She admired the road, with its strong central barrier decorated with a seemingly endless hedge of oleander bushes in many-coloured flower.

  Her mind went back to the start of the tour. The easy flight, Billie’s efficient care in getting them all together, the tunnels, the bridges, Pisa, San Gimignano …

  She sat up suddenly, for she had remembered some details of that fascinating mediaeval stone town that had escaped her when she reminded Mrs. Chilton of their stop there on their way to Siena.

  She had visited the small bank to cash a traveller’s cheque. Later she had gone back to the square before the cathedral to look about her for a suitable scene for a photograph. This was not easy because the tall stone towers that gave the little place both its distinction and its history, were too near and too high to make a complete picture. In the end she had taken the sunlit angle of the top of a steep side street and then re-crossing the square had gone back down the uneven cobbles towards the bank in that second square where there was a closed well much frequented by pigeons.

  She had seen Mrs. Chilton leaving the bank. More than this she had seen Mrs. Chilton in the viewer of her camera. So she had a photograph of Mrs. Chilton on the current spool, leaving the bank in San Gimignano.

  Mrs. Lawler glanced sideways at her companion. The girl was slumped in her seat, her head lolling against the back of it, eyes closed.

  Looking about her as far as she was able Mrs. Lawler discovered that most of the travellers were dozing, the rest were occupied with maps, books, or in the case of Mrs. Banks, knitting. We left too early, she thought, we’re all half asleep, with that small continental breakfast providing less than the right amount of energy. Why does Gwen want another bank today? Another bank … another breakfast … another coffee … She returned her gaze to the passing landscape but felt her eyelids droop. I’m as bad as the rest, she decided and smiled to herself because she knew there was no guilt attached to any one of them.

  Billie roused her charges for a short coffee break at Ferrara. They stumbled sleepily out of the coach but revived quickly after hot drinks and sweet biscuits and in some cases slabs of the local cake called ‘penforte’ that they had bought in Siena the afternoon before.

  Mrs. Lawler, who had secured some of this solid refreshment herself, pressed a slice upon Mrs. Chilton, but found the girl had managed to snatch a quick breakfast before they left Siena.

  “Not at the hotel, surely?” Mrs. Lawler asked, astonished.

  “No. Near the bank that wasn’t open. That’s why I was late back.”

  Mrs. Lawler thought this was most unlikely, but she could hardly refuse to believe it, though her memory of San Gimignano still nagged at her for explanation.

  It nagged too at Mr. Banks, who in the privacy of his hotel room in Rome discussed it with his wife.

  “Did you happen to hear that Mrs. Chilton, as she calls herself, on the coach?”

  “I thought she was asleep most of the time.”

  “When she arrived late. To Billie as she came up the steps? And to Mrs. Lawler when she sat down?”

  “No. We started with such a jerk I dropped my stitch and had quite a business picking it up again.”

  “You and your knitting! We shall be a laughing stock as usual!”

  “What did the Chilton girl say, then?”

  “That she’d tried to find a bank open to cash a traveller’s cheque but hadn’t found one.”

  “She might have known she wouldn’t. It tells you about all that in the brochure.”

  “The point is,” Mr. Banks went on impatiently, “she cashed one or got some money anyway, in that place we stopped at in the morning. Place with those bloody great towers.”

  “San Gimignano.”

  “That’s right. I slipped in myself to be on the safe side and there she was, just finished making her signature. Didn’t see me. Moved along towards the cashier with her handbag. First chap wanted to give her back her passport, waved it over the counter. I saw it.”

  He paused, looking at his wife. As usual she was knitting. She was always knitting, damn her. No point, really, taking her abroad, except they expected it at the office. Even more now he was managing director.

  “I saw that passport,” he said, so forcefully that Mrs. Banks looked up with a start. Reg always had to make a drama of every little thing he told you.

  “I saw that passport,” he repeated more gently, having secured her attention, “and it wasn’t British and the name wasn’t Chilton.”

  “He’d got hold of the wrong one, I suppose,” said Mrs. Banks, returning to her work. She wished Reg would go down to the bar with his fairy tales, so she could do their unpacking. It would be worth hanging up her dresses and his suits because they would be in Rome for four nights.

  “It wasn’t the wrong one at all,” said Mr, Banks. “Because she took it when the cashier gave it to her with the money. She was talking the lingo to him, too.”

  “Well, you talk Italian enough to get along,” Mrs. Banks assured him. She added, thoughtfully, “She got on the plane at Gatwick. I do remember that.”

  “Whoever said she didn’t?” her husband snapped, sorry he had begun his strange story of their fellow-traveller. But he decided he had better keep it to himself if this was all the reception it got from Mildred.

  So though he had a pleasant chat with Mrs. Lawler that evening over an apéritif before dinner he did not mention Mrs. Chilton’s odd appearance in the bank at San Gimignano. When Gwen herself appeared and joined them he got to his feet but did not sit down again. He bought her a drink, then saying with very artificial heartiness that he must find his womenfolk, went away and did not appear again until all three of the Banks family took their places at the dinner table.

  Mrs. Chilton had endured a very boring afternoon. They had reached Rome in time for lunch. After a short siesta Mrs. Lawler had come knocking at her door and without apology for disturbing her welcome rest had swept her out into the blistering sunshine. On foot they had tramped what seemed like miles to the Spanish Steps, where the schoolmistress had sat down and pointed out a bank on the other side of the road.

  “We’ll have a little rest here and men go on to the Piazza Venetia and see Capitol Square and laugh at the ‘wedding cake’ as I call it, the
Victor Emmanuel white atrocity. Then we can find an ice or a coffee or something and get back here when the banks open at four.”

  All this they had done. The finish up at the bank had been the tricky part. But she had persuaded Mrs. Lawler to walk on slowly towards the hotel, saying she would catch her up and had then dashed into the bank before the nosy old bore could refuse. Inside the porch, out of sight, she had watched Mrs. Lawler hesitate, then walk away, while she made a play of searching in her bag, not finding what she sought, at last taking out a compact and lipstick, restoring her makeup and when she thought she had been there long enough, moving back into the street and timing her movement so well that she caught up the schoolmistress at the entrance to the hotel.

  The following day was spent in very heavy sight-seeing, a renewal of delights for Mrs. Lawler at St. Peter’s and the Vatican in the morning and in the afternoon a tour of well-known parts of ancient Rome and a drive through the Borghese Gardens, only spoiled by a sudden thunderstorm.

  Mrs. Chilton endured it all, being quite uninterested in ancient Rome and quite untouched by works of genius in paint or marble or any other material. Her total indifference was matched by the stunned appreciation of the majority of the coach party and the open delight of a few, including Mrs. Lawler. The hired Italian guide who took Billie’s place for the whole of this day and half the next found his customers very heavy on the hand, but dismissed them to himself as typical Britishers.

  On the second full day in Rome the coach ‘Roseanna’ took its cargo of visitors outside the ancient city, travelling first of all past the Baths of Caracalla and along the Appian Way over the Roman pavement that in places seemed as good as when it was first laid.

  On this drive, which took them to the hills again and past the Pope’s summer palace of Castel Gandolfo, the tourists recovered to some extent from their prolonged immersion in Culture on the day before. They compared views on the trip so far, chiefly in respect of the food and comforts at the three hotels in Pisa, Siena and now Rome. They laughed about their difficulties with the language; they laughed even louder over the quaint appearance and habits of some of the natives, though they all agreed that the girls in the streets might have come from anywhere in England if you went by the clothes they wore.