Whos Julian? I asked absent-mindedly.
The boy-friend, of course. I told you. He painted the Coke bright yellow. Fauve[140], she added in a defiant way.
He paints, does he?
Thats why he thinks the Easts very important to him. You know, like Tahiti was for Gauguin. He wants to experience the East before he starts on his big project. Let me take the Coke.
There was less than an hours wait at Venice, but the dark was falling when we pulled out and I saw nothing at all I might have been leaving Clapham for Victoria. Tooley sat with me and drank one of her Cokes. I asked her what her boy-friends project was.
He wants to do a series of enormous pictures of Heinz soups in fabulous colours, so a rich man could have a different soup in each room in his apartment say fish soup in the bedroom, potato soup in the dining-room, leek soup in the drawing-room, like they used to have family portraits. There would be these fabulous colours, all fauve. And the cans would give a sort of unity do you see what I mean? It would be kind of intimate you wouldnt break the mood every time you changed rooms. Like you do now if you have de Stael[141] in one room and a Rouault[142] in another.
The memory of something I had seen in a Sunday supplement came back to me. I said, Surely somebody once did paint a Heinz soup tin?
Not Heinz, Campbells, Tooley said. That was Andy Warhol. I said the same thing to Julian when he first told me of the project. Of course, I said, Heinz and Campbell are not a bit the same shape. Heinz is sort of squat and Campbells are long like English pillar-boxes. I love your pillar-boxes. They are fabulous. But Julian said that wasnt the point. He said that there are certain subjects which belong to a certain period and culture. Like the Annunciation did. Botticelli wasnt put off because Piero della Francesca[143] had done the same thing. He wasnt an imitator. And think of all the Nativities. Well, Julian says, we sort of belong to the soup age only he didnt call it that. He said it was the Art of the Techno-Structure. In a way, you see, the more people who paint soups the better. It creates a culture. One Nativity wouldnt have been any use at all. It wouldnt have been noticed.
I was badly out of my depth with Tooley in terms of culture and of human experience. She was closer to my aunt: she would never, I felt sure, have criticized Mr. Visconti: she would have accepted him, as she accepted Julians project, a voyage to Istanbul, my company, her baby.
Where does your mother live?
I guess shes in Bonn at the moment. She married a man on Time-Life who covers West Germany and Eastern Europe, so they move around a lot. Like Father. Do you want a cigarette?
Not for me. And youd better wait till were past the next frontier.
It was nearly nine-thirty in the evening when we arrived at Sezana. A surly passport man looked at us as though we were Imperialist spies. Old women heavily laden with small parcels came down the unplatformed track, making for the third-class. They emerged from everywhere like a migration, even from between the goods trucks which stood uncoupled all along the line looking as though they would never be linked together. No one else joined the train: no one got off. There were no lights, no waiting-room in sight, it was cold and the heating had not been turned on. On the road beyond if there was a road no cars passed. No railway hotel offered a welcome.
Im cold, Tooley said. Im going to bed. She offered to leave me a cigarette, but I refused. I didnt want to be compromised on this cold frontier. Another uniformed man looked in and regarded my new suitcase on the rack with hatred.
At moments during the night I woke in Ljubljana, in Zagreb but there was nothing to be seen except the lines of stationary rolling-stock which looked abandoned, as though nothing was left anywhere to put in the trucks, no one had the energy any more to roll them, and it was only our train which steamed on impelled by a foolish driver who hadnt realized that the world had stopped and there was nowhere for us to go.
At Belgrade, Tooley and I had breakfast in the station hotel dry bread and jam and bad coffee, and we bought a bottle of sweet white wine for lunch, but they had no sandwiches. I let my aunt sleep on: it was not a meal worth waking her to share.
Why are you two going to Istanbul? Tooley asked, taking a spoonful of jam she had given up trying to crumble the bread.
She likes to travel, I said.
But why to Istanbul?
I havent asked her.
In the fields horses moved slowly along, dragging harrows. We were back in the pre-industrial age. Tooley and I were both depressed, yet it wasnt the lowest point of our journey; that came as evening fell in Sofia, and we tried to buy something to eat, but no one would take any money but Bulgarian except at an exorbitant rate[144], and even when I agreed to that, there were only tepid sausages on sale made of some coarse unrecognizable meat and chocolate cake made of a chocolate substitute and pink fizzy wine. I hadnt seen my aunt all day except once when she looked in on us and refused Tooleys last bar of chocolate and said sadly and unexpectedly, I loved chocolate once. I am growing old.
So this is the great Orient Express, Tooley said.
All thats left of it.
Istanbul cant be much worse, can it?
Ive never been there, but I dont imagine so.
I guess you are going to tell me that I mustnt smoke because therell soon be another frontier.
There will be three frontiers, I said, looking at the time-table, in less than four hours. The Bulgarian frontier, the Greek-Macedonian frontier, the Turkish frontier.
Maybe its real luxury travel, Tooley said, for people not in a hurry. Do you think they have an abortionist on the train? Its lucky Im not nine months gone, isnt it, or I wouldnt know whether my baby was going to be Bulgarian or Turkish or what was the other?
Greek-Macedonian.
That sounds a bit special. Id choose that. Not a Bulgar. If he was a boy thered be dirty jokes.
But you wouldnt have a choice.
Id hang on. When they said push I wouldnt push. Not till after the Greek-Macedonian frontier. How long are we in Greece-Macedonia?
Only forty minutes, I said.
My, its complicated. Id have to work quick. She added, Its not funny at all. Im scared. Whats Julian going to say when the curse hasnt come? I really thought the train would do it, sort of shake it out of me, I mean.
Its Julians fault as much as yours.
But it isnt any longer, not with the pill. Its all the girls fault now. I really did forget. When I take a sleeping pill I wake up muzzy and forget, and then when I take a methedrine to wake up properly I get so excited I dont remember all the dull things like the pill and washing the dishes. But I guess Julian wont believe all that. Hell feel trapped. He often feels trapped. He was trapped first by his family, he says, and then he was nearly trapped by Oxford so he went away fast without a degree. Then he very nearly got trapped by the Trotskyists, but he realized just in time. He sees traps a terribly long way ahead. But, Henry, I dont mean to be a trap. Really I dont. I cant call you Henry. It doesnt sound like a real name. Can I call you Smudge?
Why Smudge?
I had a dog once called Smudge. I used to talk to him a lot. When Father and Mother got divorced I told him all the horrid details. About the mental cruelty I mean.
She leant against me in the carriage. I liked the smell of her hair. I suppose if I had known more about women I could have identified the shampoo she must have had in Paris. Her hand was on my knee, and the enormous wrist-watch stared up at me with its great blank white face and its four figures in scarlet, 12 3 6 9, as if those were the only important ones to remember the hours when you had to take your medicine. I remembered Miss Keenes minute gold wrist-watch like a dolls which Sir Alfred had given her on her twenty-first birthday. In its tiny ring it contained all the figures of the hours as though none were unimportant or without its special duty. Most of the hours of my life had been eliminated from Tooleys watch. There were no hours marked there for sitting quietly and watching a woman tat. I felt as though one night in Southwood I had turned my back on any possibility of home, so that here I was shaken up and down between two segments of Bulgarian darkness.
What was the mental cruelty? I had to ask her questions: it was the only way in which I could find my way about in this new world, but questioning was not a habit I had ever formed. For years people had asked me questions: What unit trust would you recommend? Do you think I should sell my hundred Imperial Tobacco shares before the next cancer report? And when I retired most of the questions I might have wanted to ask were answered for me in Everyman His Own Gardener.
The only mental cruelty I ever saw personally, Tooley said, was when Father woke her up bringing her breakfast in bed. I dont think that awful Bulgarian sausage was good for my metabolism. Ive got a terrible stomach-ache. Ill go and lie down. You dont think it was horse, do you?
Ive always understood that horse has a sweetish taste.
Oh God, Smudge, she said, I didnt want a literal answer, not real information I mean. She dabbed her lips against my cheek and was off.
I went down the corridor rather nervously to find Aunt Augusta. Id hardly seen her all day and the problem of Tooley was one which I felt she ought to share. I found her with a Baedeker[145] opened and a map of Istanbul spread over her knee. She looked like a general planning a campaign.
Im sorry about yesterday afternoon, Aunt Augusta, I said. I really didnt mean to say anything against Mr. Visconti. After all I dont know the circumstances. Tell me more about him.
He was a quite impossible man, my aunt said, but I loved him and what he did with my money was the least of his faults. For example he was what they call a collaborator. During the German occupation he acted as adviser to the German authorities on questions of art, and he had to get out of Italy very quickly after the death of Mussolini. Goering[146] had been making a big collection of pictures, but even he couldnt easily steal pictures from places like the Ufizi where the collection was properly registered, but Mr. Visconti knew a lot about the unregistered all sorts of treasures hidden away in palazzos almost as crumbling as your Uncle Jos. Of course his part got to be known, and thered be quite a panic in a country place when Mr. Visconti appeared taking lunch in the local taverna. The trouble was he wouldnt play even a crooked game straight or the Germans might have helped him to escape. He began to take money from this marchese and that not to tip off the Germans this gave him liquid cash or sometimes a picture he fancied for himself, but it didnt make him friends and the Germans soon suspected what was going on. Poor old devil, she added, he hadnt a friend he could trust. Mario was still at school with the Jesuits and I had gone back to England when the war began.