‘My dear boy,’ he said, squeezing one of mine. ‘My condolences on your sad loss, my sincere condolences.’
‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You are very kind. Do you... er... know where Simon Searle is?’
‘Mr. Searle?’ he raised his eyebrows so that they showed above the black spectacle frames.
‘He hasn’t been in for a week, the girl says.’
‘No...’ he frowned. ‘Mr. Searle, for reasons best known to himself, chose not to return to this country. Apparently he decided to stay in Italy, the day he went to Milan in your place.’
‘But why?’ I said.
‘I really have no idea. It is very inconvenient. Very. I am having to do his work until we hear from him.’
He shook his head. ‘Well, my dear boy, I suppose our troubles no longer concern you. You’d better have your cards, though I don’t expect you’ll be needing them.’ He smiled the twisted ironic smile and stretched out his hand to the inter-office phone.
‘You’re giving me the sack, then?’ I said bluntly.
He paused, his hand in mid-air. ‘My dear boy,’ he protested. ‘My dear boy. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that you would want to stay on.’
‘I do.’
He hesitated, and then sighed. ‘It’s against my better judgment, it is indeed. But with Searle and you both away, the agency has had to refuse business, and we can’t afford much of that. No, we certainly can’t. No, we certainly can’t. Very well then, if you’ll see us through at least until I hear from Searle, or find someone to replace him, I shall be very grateful, very grateful indeed.’
If that was how he felt, I thought I might as well take advantage of it. ‘Can I have three days off for Cheltenham races in a fortnight? I’ve got a ride in the Gold Cup.’
He nodded calmly. ‘Let me have the exact dates, and I’ll avoid them.’
I gave them to him then and there, and went back to Simon’s room thinking that Yardman was an exceptionally easy employer, for all that I basically understood him as little as on our first meeting. The list of trips on Simon’s wall showed that the next one scheduled was for the following Tuesday, to New York. Three during the past and present week had been crossed out, which as Yardman had said, was very bad for business. The firm was too small to stand much loss of its regular customers.
Yardman confirmed on the intercom that the Tuesday trip was still on, and he sounded so pleased that I guessed that he had been on the point of cancelling it when I turned up. I confirmed that I would fetch the relevant papers from the office on Monday afternoon, and be at Gatwick on the dot on Tuesday morning. This gave me a long week-end free and unbeatable ideas on how to fill it. With some relief the next day I drove determinedly away from the gloomy gathering of relations at home, sent a cable, picked up a stand-by afternoon seat with Alitalia, and flew to Milan to see Gabriella.
Three weeks and three days apart had changed nothing. I had forgotten the details of her face, shortened her nose in my imagination and lessened the natural solemnity of her expression, but the sight of her again and instantly did its levitation act. She looked momentarily anxious that I wouldn’t feel the same, and then smiled with breathtaking brilliance when she saw that I did.
‘I got your cable,’ she said. ‘One of the girls has changed her free day with me, and now I don’t have to keep the shop tomorrow or Sunday.’
‘That’s marvellous.’
She hesitated, almost blushing. ‘And I went home at lunch time to pack some clothes, and I have told my sister I am going to stay for two days with a girl friend near Genoa.’
‘Gabriella!’
‘Is that all right?’ she asked anxiously.
‘It’s a miracle,’ I said fervently, having expected only snatched unsatisfactory moments by day, and nights spent each side of a wall. ‘It’s unbelievable.’
When she had finished for the day we went to the station and caught a train, and on the principle of not telling more lies than could be helped, we did in fact go to Genoa. We booked separately into a large impersonal hotel full of incurious business men, and found our rooms were only four doors apart.
Over dinner in a warm obscure little restaurant she said, ‘I’m sorry about your father, Henry.’
‘Yes...’ Her sympathy made me feel a fraud. I had tried to grieve for him, and had recognised that my only strong emotion was an aversion to being called by his name. I wished to remain myself. Relations and family solicitors clearly took it for granted, however, that having sown a few wild oats I would now settle down into his pattern of life. His death, if I wasn’t careful, would be my destruction.
‘I was pleased to get your letter,’ Gabriella said, ‘because it was awful when you didn’t come with the horses. I thought you had changed your mind about me.’
‘But surely Simon explained?’
‘Who is Simon?’
‘The big fat bald man who went instead of me. He promised to tell you why I couldn’t come, and to give you a bottle...’ I grinned, ‘a bottle of pills.’
‘So they were from you!’
‘Simon gave them to you. I suppose he couldn’t explain why I hadn’t come, because he doesn’t know Italian. I forgot to tell him to speak French.’
She shook her head.
‘One of the crew gave them to me. He said he’d found them in the toilet compartment just after they had landed, and he brought them across to see if I had lost them. He is a tall man, in uniform. I’ve seen him often. It was not your bald, fat Simon.’
‘And Simon didn’t try to talk to you at all?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I see hundreds of bald fat travellers, but no one tried to speak to me about you.’
‘A friendly big man, with kind eyes,’ I said. ‘He was wearing a frightful old green corduroy jacket, with a row of pins in one lapel. He has a habit of picking them up.’
She shook her head again. ‘I didn’t see him.’
Simon had promised to give her my message and the bottle. He had done neither, and he had disappeared. I hadn’t liked to press Yardman too hard to find out where Simon had got to because there was always the chance that too energetic spadework would turn up the export bonus fraud: and I had vaguely assumed that it was because of the fraud that Simon had chosen not to come back. But even if he had decided on the spur of the moment to duck out, he would certainly have kept his promise to see Gabriella. Or didn’t a resuscitated friendship stretch that far?
‘What’s the matter?’ Gabriella asked.
I explained.
‘You are worried about him?’
‘He’s old enough to decide for himself...’ But I was remembering like a cold douche that my predecessor Peters hadn’t come back from Milan, and before him the liaison man Ballard.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said firmly, ‘you will go back to Milan and find him.’
‘I can’t speak Italian.’
‘Undoubtedly you will need an interpreter,’ she nodded. ‘Me.’
‘The best,’ I agreed, smiling.
We walked companionably back to the hotel.
‘Were the pills all right?’ I asked.
‘Perfect, thank you very much. I gave them to the wife of our baker... She works in the bakery normally, but when she gets pregnant she’s always sick for months, and can’t stand the sight of dough, and he gets bad-tempered because he has to pay a man to help him instead. He is not a good Catholic.’ She laughed. ‘He makes me an enormous cake oozing with cream when I take the pills.’