Territorial Rights Read Online Free PDF Page B

waiter had put in his hand. The couple at the next table started to prod what had been set before them with their forks.
    A carafe of white wine was placed on Curran’s table. He gave his order quietly to the waiter who poured some wine, meantime, in Curran’s glass. Curran sipped his wine but the couple at the next table were not disposed to leave him alone.
    ‘You know Robert well?’ said Arnold, between mouthfuls of his stabbed pasta.
    ‘Quite well. I live in Paris.’
    ‘Are you an art historian?’ Arnold said.
    ‘You could put it that way,’ said Curran with a modest smile that conveyed a certain understatement on Arnold’s part. Curran lowered his lids while the waiter bent over him to place a plate of smoked ham in front of him. His self-effacing interest in the ham suggested strongly that Arnold should have known, if he had been sufficiently well informed, that Curran was something more than a simple art historian, that he dealt in art collections on a grand scale, was a name.
    ‘You’re an artist?’ said Mary, quickly.
    ‘I paint,’ Curran said, with an air to the effect that there was more to it than that.
    Arnold looked as if he had made a gaffe, and Mary did not help the moment to an easy transition to better moments when she said, ‘These farfarlone al burro con erbe are not made al denti, which means hard, and by Anglo-Saxon standards, undercooked. They should be hard. The pasta is overcooked for the tourist trade I imagine. It’s too soft. I expect they think it’s what we want.’
    ‘Of course,’ Curran said, eating his ham. ‘I quite agree.’ He buttered a thin piece of toast which lay cuddling its fellows in the folds of a napkin.
    ‘I’m glad to hear that Robert is—’ Arnold said; but again Mary butted in. She said, with her openly impudent smile which could be on some occasions so charming, ‘Do you know, Mr Curran, when we met you this morning with Robert I was convinced you were a private detective. And now we meet you again here. You wouldn’t be a private detective by any chance? I mean, sent to watch us?’
    ‘Mary dear!’ said her friend.
    Curran smiled across the table to her with friendly indulgence.
    ‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘What an exciting idea, though. One wouldn’t feel guilty about snooping if one were sent to snoop.’
    ‘Do you feel guilty, Mr Curran?’
    ‘Not a bit,’ Curran said.
    ‘Mary!’ said Arnold. But he smiled; and to Curran he looked, then, every inch a headmaster.
    Curran said, ‘I never feel guilty. Even when I should.’
    ‘I always feel guilty,’ Mary said. ‘I love it. I don’t really feel alive without a feeling of guilt.’
    Arnold apparently wanted to concentrate on eating. Mary looked at her companion; she seemed to adore him, although from an objective point of view he didn’t seem particularly adorable, that was all.
    While waiting for his second course Arnold Leaver gave his childish laugh and said to Curran, ‘Any idea what Robert is doing here in Venice?’
    ‘How like Robert you look just now!’ Curran said.
    Arnold looked perplexed. Curran said: ‘Your son is doing research, so far as I understand.’
    ‘You came here with him?’ Arnold said.
    ‘No, he’d already transferred to Venice when I bumped into him,’ Curran said.
    ‘What brings him to Venice? He didn’t write home that he was going to Venice.’
    ‘Young men seldom tell their parents of their plans.’
    ‘Venice,’ said Robert’s father, while a fleck of the Venetian sunlight caught his small yellow moustache. ‘What is he studying in Venice? In Paris, he—’
    ‘There might be a girl behind it, who knows?’ said Curran.
    Mary said, chirpily, ‘That’s what I’ve been thinking.’
    Arnold said, ‘A what?’
    ‘A girl,’ said Curran, coolly.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Arnold said, looking hard at the salad that had been placed at the side of his main dish. He was embarrassed, now, at having revealed surprise. Mary was tasting a piece of veal