“Leave him alone, you gross bully,” shouted the Duke, between gasps for breath.
“Leave him alone, leave him alone, he’s not strong,” shrilled Marjorie, beating the flat of her hands futilely on her husband’s broad back.
“Darling, this is all your fault,” said Ursula, turning on me like a tigress. “You do something.”
Before I could protest at her perfidy, however, Reggie pulled Perry up close to him and glowered into his face.
“I’m shick of your bloody puke of a father and I’m shick of you,” he roared. “So your bloody father doesn’t think my wife’s good enough for you, eh? eh? eh? Well, I’ll show you! I’ll divorce and then you can bloody well marry her.”
The Piazza San Marco is always a place of interest to tourists visiting Venice and so, not unnaturally, we now had a crowd of some five thousand people, of different colours and creeds, gathered around us expectant and interested.
“What did you s-s-s-say . . . ?” asked Perry, white-faced, still being shaken to and fro in Reggie’s massive grasp.
“I’ll divorce my wife and then you can bloody well marry her,” Reggie roared.
“Bravo! Queue diplomatie, ” said a Frenchman in the crowd.
“You can rely on my son to do the proper thing,” declared the Duke, recovering from his shock at Reggie’s announcement. “After all, he had a public school education and so knows how to behave like a gentleman.”
“But I don’t want to marry her,” gasped Perry.
“What?” said Reggie.
“What?” exclaimed the Duke.
“What?” added Marjorie and Ursula, almost in unison.
“Ils sont trés drôles, les anglais, n’est-ce pas? ” said the Frenchman in the crowd.
“I’m too young to get married,” explained Perry, plaintively, “I’m only eighteen.”
“D’you mean to say you refuse to make an honest woman of my wife?” asked Reggie, trying to get the facts straight in his mind.
“Well, I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what you mean,” said Perry petulantly.
“I must say I agree with the boy. Most unsuitable liaison,” put in the Duke, unwisely.
Reggie looked closely into Perry’s face and then turned and stared at the Duke.
“Horse shit, both of you,” he said. Before anyone could do anything sensible, he had picked up Perry as if he were a child and tossed him into the Grand Canal, and then turned, seized the Duke, and sent him flying after his son. The sight of a real Duke and his only son and heir surfacing, spluttering, in the Grand Canal was, I must confess, such a rarity that I savoured it to the full. Two carabinieri, who until then had been standing in the crowd quietly enjoying the drama as any true Italian would, now, with the utmost reluctance, decided that, as representatives of law and order, they ought to make some sort of a gesture. Elegant as peacocks they drifted up to Reggie.
“Pardon, signor,” said one of them in excellent English, “but are you having any trouble?”
It was Reggie’s big moment and I was lost in admiration at the way that he rose to the occasion.
“It is kind of you to ask, but I do not require assistance,” he said regally, if unsteadily. “My wife has been seduced by the son of a Duke. I am here to take my wife back home shince I now believe her to be cured of her infatuation. The Duke and his son are that strange couple you see disporting themselves in the Canal there. I have no wish to prefer charges against them. Come, Marjorie, let us away.”
So saying he took the by then bewildered and submissive Marjorie by the hand and walked off through the crowd, leaving me with a very damp and angry Duke and his son and two courteous but interested members of the Italian police force. It took us two hours to explain what it was all about, who the Duke was, who Perry was, who I was, who Ursula was and who (if they could only have been found) Reggie and Marjorie were. In addition we had to vouchsafe all the extra information that the bureaucratic machine demands: date of birth, whether our grandmothers had in-growing toenails and so on. Eventually, limp with exhaustion, we left the Duke and his sulky son and heir, and Ursula and I repaired to a pleasant bar on the Piazza San Marco.
“Darling, I do think you handled that wonderfully,” she said, her big blue eyes melting as she gazed at me. “You handled those awful policemen with such aplumb.”
“Aplomb,” I corrected automatically.
“That as well,” she agreed. “I was so proud of you.”
“Thank you,” I said, “what’ll you have to drink?”
“I’ll have a Graffiti,” she said, “with ice.”
“Madam will have a Martini and ice and I’ll have a double brandy and soda,” I translated for the waiter.
“I’m so glad that I managed to sort out Reggie’s problem,” said Ursula, with satisfaction.
“I was under the impression that he solved his own problem.”
“Oh, no, darling,” explained Ursula. “If it hadn’t been for me and the Duke, and, of course, all your help, Reggie wouldn’t have known what to do.”
“Why don’t you stop trying to help your friends?” I asked. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”
“You can’t just leave them alone,” said Ursula. “You don’t know what they’re going to do when you leave them alone . . . Now, you must admit that if I hadn’t taken part in the whole affair Reggie and Marjorie wouldn’t be happily together again. In this instance I was a sort of catapult.”
“Catalyst?” I suggested.
“I do wish you would stop trying to correct me, darling,” said Ursula. “I think you’re ravishing but this constant correcting becomes very irritating.”
“You think I’m ravishing?” I asked, intrigued.
“I always thought you were ravishing, but I really don’t see what that’s got to do with Reggie and Marjorie,” said Ursula hurriedly.
“Frankly, at this precise moment, I am unmoved by anything that may, or may not, happen to Reggie and Marjorie in the future. I feel they deserve each other. I feel that the Duke and his son ought to get married and, to encapsulate the whole incredibly futile affair in a nutshell, I came to Venice to enjoy myself and you are a very beautiful woman. So why don’t we stop talking about the incredibly dull landed gentry of England, and you tell me what we are going to do tonight . . . and I warn you, it’s got to be sexy.”
Ursula went pink, partly with embarrassment and partly with pleasure.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, to my unmitigated delight. “I had thought of going to bed early.”
“Darling, you couldn’t have suggested anything better,” I exclaimed with enthusiasm.
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she went on, bridling.
“Now that you have solved the various problems of Reggie, Marjorie, Perry and the Duke,” I said, “why don’t you relax? Come and have a disgustingly sexy dinner with me and then decide whether or not you want to spend the next two days of your stay in Venice in that squalid pension of yours or whether you want to have a bedroom the size of a ballroom overlooking the Grand Canal .”
“Oooo!” she said. “You haven’t got a bedroom looking out over the Grand Canal . . . you perfect pig .”