The Long Farewell Read Free Page A

design. And Appleby thought he could take a dim guess at it.
    This eminent literary detective wasn’t in Italy for his health. Even if his own gross corpulence made it medically probable that he should drop down dead at any moment, such a calculation wouldn’t make the slightest impact on Packford’s sanguine personality. No – this wasn’t a rest cure. Nor, for all his delight in his situation and his fluent chattering in Italian with his retainers, was it matter of a lover’s retreat into communion with the soil and culture of his passion. Packford’s wanderings, when they happened, were invariably strategic in conception. This villa was a cunningly chosen lurking place. And Packford, as he had virtually admitted, had been very far from advertising it. Mere chance had put Appleby in possession of his whereabouts. And perhaps – despite the cordiality of his welcome – he wasn’t too pleased at being found out.
    Not that Appleby felt in the least an intruder. If he now tumbled to some secret of Packford’s, that would be all in the game, and Packford would acknowledge it as such. And indeed Appleby was determined – quite idly, indeed, since the whole matter was without seriousness of any sort – to discover what he could. Detective work of his own wasn’t commonly his notion of a holiday. But detection that is all amid innocence and merely learned guile, that can’t end in anybody being hanged or imprisoned or disgraced: well that, after all, was about as complete a change as he could run to. So he decided to have a go.
    The little breeze had faded away, and when Giuseppina brought out candles they burned without a flicker in the warm, faintly lemon-scented air. It was an evening for dining al fresco – and, sure enough, the meal was presently brought out to them where they sat. It wasn’t, after all, in the least elaborate: only a mess of deadly-looking but delicious fungi , followed by a chicken displaying a higher proportion of flesh to bone than is at all common south of the Alps. They drank Chianti. And Appleby tapped the flask. ‘It’s like the vermouth,’ he said. ‘Sit down with it in a dark room, and it would be undistinguished stuff. But here – well, it’s another matter.’
    ‘My dear man, Portia knew that. Nothing is good, I see, without respect . You remember?’
    Appleby nodded. ‘ How many things by season season’d are – isn’t that it? – to their right praise and true perfection! I suppose it’s true everywhere. But what about Shakespeare’s having had it borne in upon him in Italy?’
    Packford set down his glass with caution. ‘Now just what,’ he asked with great casualness, ‘puts that in your head?’
    ‘I’m sure I don’t know. Would it be your Giuseppina’s candles? Certainly they reminded me of Portia coming home to Belmont. The light we see is burning in my hall; how far that little candle throws his beams . And look over there.’ Appleby pointed across the darkness of the lake. ‘Those tiny lights on the farther shore. You could reach out your hand to them. I’d say there really is Italian air in that last act of The Merchant of Venice .’
    ‘And therefore Shakespeare must actually have travelled across Europe and taken a sniff at it?’ Packford leant back and laughed with great decision. ‘Cobweb, my dear Appleby – mere cobweb! There’s a great deal of English poetry that is stuffing with Greek air, if it comes to that. But how many great English poets have ever set eyes on Greece? Two, precisely.’
    ‘So you think Shakespeare didn’t come to Italy?’
    ‘I didn’t say that.’
    ‘Ah.’
    Packford looked suspiciously at his guest. ‘I can see,’ he said genially, ‘that you’ve been reading some rubbish or other. There’s enough of it, the Lord knows.’
    Appleby shook his head. ‘I don’t read much in that sort of learned way. But didn’t somebody lately find an old map of Verona, and decide that it fitted Shakespeare’s Verona