. . .’

‘But I won’t. Definitely.’ His tone was reassuring. ‘Meanwhile I must hear something about the mother.’

The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. ‘A woman who couldn’t live on top gear. You’ve really said the last word.’

‘But I want first words,’ he answered. ‘It’s not the verdict that’s interesting. It’s the whole case, it’s all the evidence. You’re subpoenaed, my dear. Speak up.’

‘Poor Clare!’

‘Oh, nil nisi bonum, of course, if that’s what disturbs you.’

‘She’d have so loved it to be not bonum, poor dear!’ said the marchesa, tempering her look of vague condolence with a little smile. ‘That was her great ambition—to be thought rather wicked. She’d have liked to have the reputation of a vampire. Not a spiritual one, mind you. The other sort. Lola Montes—that was her ideal.’

‘It’s an ideal,’ said Fanning, ‘that takes some realizing, I can tell you.’

Dodo nodded. ‘And that’s what she must have found out, pretty soon. She wasn’t born to be a fatal woman; she lacked the gifts. No staggering beauty, no mysterious fascination or intoxicating vitality. She was just very charming, that was all; and at the same time rather impossible and absurd. So that there weren’t any aspiring victims to be fatal to. And a vampire without victims is—well, what?’

‘Certainly not a vampire,’ he concluded.

‘Except, of course, in her own imagination, if she chooses to think so. In her own imagination Clare certainly was a vampire.’

‘Reduced, in fact, to being her own favourite character in fiction.’

‘Precisely. You always find the phrase.’

‘Only too fatally!’ He made a little grimace. ‘I often wish I didn’t. The luxury of being inarticulate! To be able to wallow indefinitely long in every feeling and sensation, instead of having to clamber out at once on to a hard, dry, definite phrase. But what about your Clare?’

‘Well, she started, of course, by being a riddle to me. Unanswerable, or rather answerable, answered, but so very strangely that I was still left wondering. I shall never forget the first time Filippo and I went to dine there. Poor Roger Tarn was still alive then. While the men were drinking their port, Clare and I were alone in the drawing-room. There was a little chit-chat, I remember, and then, with a kind of determined desperation, as though she’d that second screwed herself up to jumping off the Eiffel Tower, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me if I’d ever had one of those wonderful Sicilian peasants—I can’t possibly reproduce the tone, the expression—as a lover.

I was a bit taken aback, I must confess. “But we don’t live in Sicily,” was the only thing I could think of answering—too idiotically! “Our estates are all in Umbria and Tuscany.” “But the Tuscans are superb creatures too,” she insisted. Superb, I agreed. But, as it happens, I don’t have affairs with even the superbest peasants. Nor with anybody else, for that matter. Clare was dreadfully disappointed.

I think she’d expected the most romantic confidences—moonlight and mandolines and stretti, stretti, nell’ estasì d’amor. She was really very ingenuous. “Do you mean to say you’ve really never . . .?” she insisted. I ought to have got angry, I suppose; but it was all so ridiculous, that I never thought of it. I just said, “Never,” and felt as though I were refusing her a favour. But she made up for my churlishness by being lavish to herself.

But lavish! You can’t imagine what a tirade she let fly at me. How wonderful it was to get away from self-conscious, complicated, sentimental love! How profoundly satisfying to feel oneself at the mercy of the dumb, dark forces of physical passion! How intoxicating to humiliate one’s culture and one’s class feeling before some magnificent primitive, some earthily beautiful satyr, some divine animal! And so on, crescendo. And it ended with her telling me the story of her extraordinary affair with—was it a gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit-shooting in it, I know.’

‘It sounds like a chapter out of George Sand.’

‘It was.’

‘Or still more, I’m afraid,’ he said, making a wry face, ‘like a most deplorable parody of my Endymion and the Moon.’

‘Which I’ve never read, I’m ashamed to say.’

‘You should, if only to understand this Clare of yours.’

‘I will. Perhaps I’d have solved her more quickly, if I’d read it at the time. As it was I could only be amazed—and a little horrified. That rabbit-shooter!’ She shook her head. ‘He ought to have been so romantic. But I could only think of that awful yellow kitchen soap he’d be sure to wash himself with, or perhaps carbolic, so that he’d smell like washed dogs—dreadful! And the flannel shirts, not changed quite often enough. And the hands, so horny, with very short nails, perhaps broken. No, I simply couldn’t understand her.’

‘Which is to your discredit, Dodo, if I may say so.’

‘Perhaps. But you must admit, I never pretended to be anything but what I am—a perfectly frivolous and respectable member of the upper classes. With a taste, I must confess, for the scandalous. Which was one of the reasons, I suppose, why I became so intimate with poor Clare. I was really fascinated by her confidences.’

‘Going on the tiles vicariously, eh?’

‘Well, if you choose to put it grossly and vulgarly . . .’

‘Which I do choose,’ he interposed. ‘To be tactfully gross and appositely vulgar—that, my dear, is one of the ultimate artistic refinements. One day I shall write a monograph on the aesthetics of vulgarity. But meanwhile shall we say that you were inspired by an intense scientific curiosity to . . .’

Dodo laughed. ‘One of the tiresome things about you, Miles, is that one can never go on being angry with you.’

‘Yet another subject for a monograph!’ he answered, and his smile was at once confidential and ironical, affectionate and full of mockery. ‘But let’s hear what the scientific curiosity elicited?’

‘Well, to begin with, a lot of really rather embarrassingly intimate confidences and questions, which I needn’t repeat.’

‘No, don’t. I know what those feminine conversations are. I have a native modesty. . . .’

‘Oh, so have I. And, strangely enough, so had Clare. But somehow she wanted to outrage herself. You felt it all the time. She always had that desperate jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower manner, when she began to talk like that. It was a kind of martyrdom. But enjoyable. Perversely.’ Dodo shook her head. ‘Very puzzling. I used to have to make quite an effort to change the conversation from gynaecology to romance. Oh, those lovers of hers! Such stories! The most fantastic adventures in East End opium dens, in aeroplanes, and even, I remember (it was that very hot summer of ’twenty-two), even in a refrigerator!’

‘My dear!’ protested Fanning.

‘Honestly! I’m only repeating what she told me.’

‘But do you mean to say you believed her?’

‘Well, by that time, I must admit, I was beginning to be rather sceptical. You see, I could never elicit the names of these creatures. Nor any detail. It was as though they didn’t exist outside the refrigerator and the aeroplane.’

‘How many of them were there?’

‘Only two at that particular moment. One was a Grand Passion, and the other a Caprice. A Caprice,’ she repeated, rolling the r. ‘It was one of poor Clare’s favourite words. I used to try and pump her. But she was mum. “I want them to be mysterious,” she told me the last time I pressed her for details, “anonymous, without an état civil. Why should I show you their passports and identity cards?” “Perhaps they haven’t got any,” I suggested. Which was malicious. I could see she was annoyed. But a week later she showed me their photographs. There they were; the camera cannot lie; I had to be convinced. The Grand Passion, I must say, was a very striking-looking creature.

Thin-faced, worn, a bit Roman and sinister. The Caprice was more ordinarily the nice young Englishman. Rather childish and simple, Clare explained; and she gave me to understand that she was initiating him. It was the other, the Grand P., who thought of such refinements as the refrigerator. Also, she now confided to me for the first time, he was mildly a sadist. Having seen his face, I could believe it. “Am I ever likely to meet him?” I asked. She shook her head. He moved in a very different world from mine.’

‘A rabbit-shooter?’ Fanning asked.

‘No: an intellectual. That’s what I gathered.’

‘Golly!’

‘So there was not the slightest probability, as you can see, that I should ever meet him,’ Dodo laughed. ‘And yet almost the first face I saw on leaving Clare that afternoon was the Grand P.’s.’

‘Coming to pay his sadistic respects?’

‘Alas for poor Clare, no. He was behind glass in the show-case of a photographer in the Brompton Road, not a hundred yards from the Tarns’ house in Ovington Square. The identical portrait. I marched straight in. “Can you tell me who that is?” But it appears that photography is done under the seal of confession. They wouldn’t say. Could I order a copy? Well, yes, as a favour, they’d let me have one. Curiously enough, they told me, as they were taking down my name and address, another lady had come in only two or three days before and also ordered a copy. “Not by any chance a rather tall lady with light auburn hair and a rather amusing mole on the left cheek?” That did sound rather like the lady. “And with a very confidential manner,” I suggested, “as though you were her oldest friends?” Exactly, exactly; they were unanimous. That clinched it. Poor Clare, I thought,