‘Anything the matter, lady?’ says the driver.
‘It’s getting late,’ she says, weeping. ‘It’s getting terribly late.’
‘Lady, I can’t go faster. See the traffic.’
‘I can’t find my boy-friend. I don’t know where he’s gone.
‘You think you’ll find him at the Metropole?’
‘There’s always a chance,’ she says. ‘I make a lot of mistakes.’
SIX
The chandeliers of the Metropole, dispensing a vivid glow upon the just and unjust alike, disclose Bill the macrobiotic seated gloomily by a table near the entrance. He jumps up when Lise enters and falls upon her with a delight that impresses the whole lobby, and in such haste that a plastic bag that he is clutching, insufficiently sealed, emits a small trail of wild rice in his progress towards her.
She follows him back to his seat and takes a chair beside him. ‘Look at my coat,’ she says. ‘I got mixed up in a student demonstration and I’m still crying from the effect of tear-gas. I had a date at the Hilton for dinner with a very important Sheikh but I was too late, as I went to buy him a pair of slippers for a present. He’d gone on safari. So he wasn’t my type, anyway. Shooting animals.’
‘I’d just about given you up,’ says Bill. ‘You were to be here at seven. I’ve been desperate.’ He takes her hand, smiling with glad flashes of teeth and eyes. ‘You wouldn’t have been so unkind as to have dinner with someone else, would you? I’m hungry.’
‘And my car got stolen,’ she says.
‘What car?’
‘Oh, just a car.
‘I didn’t know you had a car. Was it a hired car?’
‘You know nothing whatsoever about me,’ she says.
‘Well I’ve got a car,’ he says. ‘A friend has lent me it. I’m taking it to Naples as soon as possible to get started on the Yin-Yang Young Culture Centre. I’m opening with a lecture called “The World —Where is it Going?” That will be a general introduction to the macrobiotic way of life. It’ll bring in the kids, all right.’
‘It’s getting late,’ she says.
‘I was nearly giving you up,’ he says, squeezing her hand. ‘I was just about to go out and look for another girl. I’m queer for girls. It has to be a girl.’
‘I’ll have a drink,’ she says. ‘I need one.’
‘Oh no, .you won’t. Oh no, you won’t. Alcohol is off the diet. You’re coming to supper with me at a house I know.’
‘What kind of a house?’ she says.
‘A macrobiotic family I know,’ he says. ‘They’ll give us a good supper. Three sons, four daughters, the mother and father, all on macrobiotics. We’ll have rice with carrots followed by rice biscuits and goat’s cheese and a cooked apple. No sugar allowed. The family eat at six o’clock, which is the orthodox system, but the variation that I follow lets you eat late. That way, we’ll get through to the young. So we’ll go there and heat up a meal. Come on!’
She says, ‘That tear-gas is still affecting me.’ Tears brim in her eyes. She gets up with him and lets him, trailing rice, lead her past every eye of the Metropole lobby into the street, up the road, and into a small black utility model which is parked there.
‘It’s wonderful,’ says Bill as he starts up the car, ‘to think we’re together again at last.’
‘I must tell you,’ says Lise, sniffing, ‘that you’re not my type. I’m sure of it.’
‘Oh, you don’t know me! You don’t know me at all.’
‘But I know my type.’
‘You need love,’ he says with a hand on her knee.
She starts away from him. ‘Take care while you’re driving. Where do your friends live?’
‘The other side of the park. I must say, I feel hungry.’
‘Then hurry up,’ she says.
‘Don’t you feel hungry?’
‘No, I feel lonely.’
‘You won’t be lonely with me.’
They have turned into the park.
‘Turn right at the end of this road,’ she says. ‘There should be a road to the right, according to the map. I want to look at something.’
‘There are better places farther on.’
‘Turn right, I say.
‘Don’t be nervy,’ he says. ‘You need to relax. The reason why you’re so tense, you’ve been eating all the wrong things and drinking too much. You shouldn’t have more than three glasses of liquid a day.
You should pass water not more than twice a day. Twice for a woman, three times for a man. If you need to go more than that it means you’re taking in too much fluid.’
‘Here’s the road. Turn right.’
Bill turns right, going slowly and looking about him. He says, ‘I don’t know where this leads to. But there’s a very convenient spot farther up the main road.’
‘What spot?’ she says. ‘What spot are you talking about?’
‘I haven’t had my daily orgasm. It’s an essential part of this particular variation of the diet, didn’t I tell you? Many other macrobiotic variations have it as an essential part. This is one of the main things the young Neapolitans must learn.’
‘If you think you’re going to have sex with me,’ she says, ‘you’re very much mistaken. I have no time for sex.
‘Lise!’ says Bill.
‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘Sex is no use to me, I assure you.’ She gives out her deep laughter.
The road is dimly lit by lamps posted at far intervals. Bill is peering to right and left.
‘There’s a building over there,’ she says. ‘That must be the Pavilion. And the old villa behind — they say in the brochure that it’s to be restored and turned into a museum. But it’s the famous Pavilion that I want.’
At the site of the Pavilion several cars and motor bicycles are parked. Another road converges, and a band of teenaged boys and girls are languidly leaning against trees, cars and anything else that can prop them up, looking at each other.
‘There’s nothing doing here,’ says Bill.
‘Stop, I want to get out and look around.’
‘Too many people. What are you, thinking of?’
‘I want to see the Pavilion, that’s all.’
‘Why? You can come by daylight. Much better.’
Some iron tables are scattered on the ground in front of the Pavilion, a graceful three-storey building with a quaint gilded frieze above the first level of the façade.
Bill parks the car near the others, some of which are occupied by amorous couples. Lise jumps out as soon as the car stops. She takes with her the hand-bag leaving the zipper-bag and her book in the car. He runs after her, putting an arm round her shoulders, and says, ‘Come on, it’s getting late. What do you want to see?’
She says, ‘Will your rice be safe in the car? Have you locked it?’
He says, ‘Who’s going to steal a bag of rice?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Lise, making her way along the path which leads to the Pavilion. ‘Maybe those young people might feel very intensely about rice.
‘The movement hasn’t got started yet, Lise,’ says Bill. ‘And red beans are also allowed. And sesame-flour. But you can’t expect people to know about it till you tell them.’
The ground floor of the Pavilion is largely glass-fronted. She goes up to it and peers in. There are bare café tables and chairs piled high in the classic fashion of restaurants closed for the night. There is a long counter and a coffee machine at the far end, with an empty glass sandwich-bar. There is nothing else except an expanse of floor, which in the darkness can only be half-seen, patterned in black-and-white chequered pavements. Lise cranes and twists to see the ceiling which obscurely seems to be painted with some classical scene; the hind-leg of a horse and one side of a cupid are all that is visible.
Still she peers through the glass. Bill tries to draw her away, but again she starts to cry. ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a café, the last one left.’