‘We can’t go back today,’ he said, ‘so you chaps don’t need to hurry over your beer.’
‘What’s up, then?’ asked Timmie, sniffing loudly.
‘A blizzard. Came down like a burst eiderdown in a wind tunnel after we left this morning. It’s raging all over the south and halfway across the channel, and snowing clear up to John o’ Groats. The bottom’s dropped out of the barometer and... well, anyway, my instructions are not to go back.’
‘All that pasta,’ said Conker philosophically. ‘It does my tripes no good.’
He and Timmie went off to the snack bar and Patrick showed me the telegraph office to send ‘no go’ messages to Yardman and the expectant studs. After that we went back to the aircraft, where he collected his overnight bag and I turned homewards the arriving convoy of Italian mares. He waited for me to finish and helped me shut the big double doors from inside at the top of the ramp, and we walked forward across the flattened dismantled boxes, through the galley, and down the staircase which had been wheeled up to the door just behind the cockpit.
‘Where will you stay?’ he said.
‘Hotel, I suppose,’ I said vaguely.
‘If you like, you could come with me. There’s a family in Milan I berth with when I’m stranded, and there’s room for two.’
I had a strong inclination, as usual, to be by myself, but principally because I couldn’t even ask for a hotel room in Italian let alone find entertainment except looking at architecture for the rest of the day, I accepted his offer, and thanked him.
‘You’ll like them,’ he said.
We went two hundred yards in silence.
‘Is it true,’ he said, ‘that you’re a viscount?’
‘No,’ I said casually. ‘A Boeing 707.’
He chuckled. ‘A bleeding viscount, that little Welshman said you were, to be precise.’
‘Would it make any difference to you if I were?’
‘None whatever.’
‘That’s all right, then.’
‘So you are?’
‘On and off.’
We went through the glass doors into the hall of the airport. It was spacious, airy, glass-walled, stone floored. Along one side stretched a long gift counter with souvenir presents crowded in a row of display cases and stacked on shelves at the back. There were silk ties on a stand, and dolls in local dress scattered on the counter, and trays of paper-backed books and local view postcards. In charge of this display stood a tall dark-haired girl in a smooth black dress. She saw us coming and her coolly solemn face lit into a delicious smile.
‘Patrick,’ she said. ‘Hullo, Patrick, come sta?’
He answered her in Italian, and as an afterthought waved his hand at me and said ‘Gabriella,...Henry.’ He asked her a question, and she looked at me carefully and nodded.
‘Si,’ she said. ‘Henry anche.’
‘That’s fixed, then,’ said Patrick cheerfully.
‘You mean,’ I said incredulously, ‘that we are going to stay with... er... Gabriella?’
He stiffened slightly. ‘Do you object?’
I looked at Gabriella, and she at me.
‘I think,’ I said slowly, ‘that it is too good to be true.’
It wasn’t for another ten minutes, during which time she talked to Patrick while looking at me, that I realised that I spoke no Italian and the only English word that she knew was ‘Hullo’.
Chapter Six
You couldn’t say it was reasonable, it was just electric. I found out between one heartbeat and the next what all the poets throughout the ages had been going on about. I understood at last why Roman Anthony threw away his honour for Egyptian Cleopatra, why Trojan Paris caused a ten years war abducting Greek Helen, why Leander drowned on one of his risky nightly swims across the Dardanelles to see Hero. The distance from home, the mystery, the unknownness, were a part of it: one couldn’t feel like that for the girl next door. But that didn’t explain why it hadn’t happened before: why it should be this girl, this one alone who fizzed in my blood.
I stood on the cool stone airport floor and felt as if I’d been struck by lightning: the world had tilted, the air was crackling, the grey February day blazed with light, and all because of a perfectly ordinary girl who sold souvenirs to tourists.
The same thing, fantastically, had happened to her as well. Perhaps it had to be mutual, to happen at all. I don’t know. But I watched the brightness grow in her eyes, the excitement and gaiety in her manner, and I knew that against all probability it was for me. Girls were seldom moved to any emotion by my brown haired tidy unobtrusive self, and since I rarely set out to make an impression on them, I even more rarely did so. Even the ones who wanted to marry my title were apt to yawn in my face. Which made Gabriella’s instant reaction doubly devastating.
‘For God’s sake,’ said Patrick in amusement, when she didn’t answer a twice repeated question, ‘will you two stop gawping at each other?’
‘Gabriella,’ I said.
‘Si?’
‘Gabriella...’
Patrick laughed. ‘You’re not going to get far like that.’
‘Parla francese?’ she said anxiously.
Patrick translated. ‘Do you speak French.’
‘Yes.’ I laughed with relief. ‘Yes, more or less.’
‘E bene,’ she sighed smiling. ‘E molto molto bene.’
Perhaps because we were unburdened by having to observe any French proprieties and because we both knew already that we would need it later on, we began right away using the intimate form tu instead of vous, for ‘you’. Patrick raised his eyebrows and laughed again and said in three languages that we were nuts.
I was nuts, there was no getting away from it. Patrick endured the whole afternoon sitting at a table in the snack bar drinking coffee and telling me about Gabriella and her family. We could see her from where we sat, moving quietly about behind her long counter, selling trinkets to departing travellers. She was made of curves, which after all the flat hips, flat stomachs, and more or less flat chests of the skinny debs at home, was as warming as a night-watchman’s fire on a snowy night. Her oval pale olive-skinned face reminded me of mediaeval Italian paintings, a type of bone structure which must have persisted through centuries, and her expression, except when she smiled, was so wholly calm as to be almost unfriendly.
It struck me after a while, when I had watched her make two or three self-conscious customers nervous by her detached manner, that selling wasn’t really suited to her character, and I said so, idly, to Patrick.
‘I agree,’ he said dryly. ‘But there are few places better for a smuggler to work than an airport.’
‘A... smuggler? I don’t believe it.’ I was aghast.
Patrick enjoyed his effect. ‘Smuggler,’ he nodded. ‘Definitely.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ he added smiling.
I looked down at my coffee, very disturbed. ‘Neither of you is the type.’
‘You’re wrong, Henry. I’m only one of many who brings... er... goods... in to Gabriella.’
‘What,’ I said slowly, fearing the answer, ‘are the goods?’
He put his hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a flat bottle about five inches high, and handed it to me. A printed chemist’s label on the front said ‘Two hundred aspirin tablets B.P.’, and the brown glass bottle was filled to the brim with them. I unscrewed the top, pulled out the twist of cotton wool, and shook a few out on to my hand.
‘Don’t take one,’ said Patrick, still smiling. ‘It wouldn’t do you any good at all.’
‘They’re not aspirins.’ I tipped them back into the bottle and screwed on the cap.