his view. She was coming right towards him with the wine on the tray, and she chewed a little wad of taffy right in rhythm with the swing of her hips, and smiled at the same time with a natural good humor. As she set down the cups, she bent over so far that under the soft ruffle of her low-cut blouse he saw both her pink nipples! A little riot of passion broke out in him. At any other moment, at any other time…but it was as if this were not even happening; her hips, the exquisite nakedness of her arms, and those pretty, pretty eyes. She was no older than he was, he reasoned, and there was about her something that suggested she might suddenly, for all her seductiveness, start giggling.
“And why would he concoct such foolishness!” Angelo was going on.
“Oh, we should leave it, don’t you think?” said Alessandro softly. And he opened the English papers and asked Angelo whether the opera had ever held any attraction for him.
“Wickedness,” Angelo murmured. “Tonio,” he said, forgetting the proper address as he often did when they were alone, “you didn’t know that man, did you?”
Tonio stared at the wine. He wanted to drink it, but it seemed quite impossible to move.
And for the first time, he looked up to Alessandro. His voice was small and cold when it came out:
“Do I have a brother in Istanbul?”
9
IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT. Tonio was standing in the vast damp hollow of the Grand Salon, and having closed the door by which he had entered, he could see nothing. Far off, a score of church bells tolled the hour. And he held in his hand a large sulphur match and a candle.
Yet he was waiting. For what? For the bells to stop? He wasn’t certain.
The evening up until this moment had been an agony for him.
He couldn’t even remember much of what had happened. Two things imprinted themselves on his mind, having nothing to do with each other:
The first, that the little girl in the café, brushing up against him as he rose to go, whispered on tiptoe: “Remember me, Excellency, my name is Bettina.” Piercing laughter; pretty laughter. Girlish, embarrassed, and utterly honest. He wanted to pinch her and kiss her.
The second was that Alessandro hadn’t answered his question. Alessandro had not said it wasn’t true! Alessandro had merely looked away from him.
And as for the man whom Angelo discounted a dozen times as a dangerous young lunatic, he was Tonio’s cousin. Tonio did remember. And for such a person to make a mistake like this was virtually impossible!
But what was it that disturbed him above all else? Was it the fact that in him there was some elusive and dim sense of recognition? Carlo. He’d heard that name before. Carlo! Someone saying those very words, “just like Carlo.” But whose voice, and where did it come from, and how could he have grown to the age of fourteen years without ever knowing he had a brother! Why had no one told him this? Why didn’t even his tutors know it?
But Alessandro knew.
Alessandro knew and others knew. People in the bookseller’s knew!
And maybe even Lena knew. That was what lay behind her sudden crossness when he had asked her.
He’d meant to be sly. He had come in merely to see to his mother, he said, and his mother looked like death itself to him. The tender flesh under her eyes was blue, and her face had a hideous pallor. And then Lena said for him to go, that she would try to get the mistress up for a while later. What had he said? How had he put it? He’d felt such a rush of humiliation, such a scalding misery. “One of us…ever heard…the name Carlo.”
“There were a hundred Treschi before my time, now go on.” That would have been simple enough if she hadn’t come after him, “And don’t you go bothering your mother about those others,” she’d said, meaning the dead ones, of course. His mother never looked at their pictures. “And don’t you go asking foolish questions of anyone else either!”
That was her worst mistake. She knew. Of course she did.
Now everyone was in bed. The house belonged to him and him alone, as it always did at this hour. And he felt invisible and light in this darkness. He didn’t want to light the candle. He could hardly endure the echo of his slightest footfall.