The dinner, altogether, was a great success. The food was excellent, the wine acceptable, the proprietor attentive and the mise-en-scène congenial. Down the narrowest of alleyways they looked into the Piazza Navona, and saw the water-god Il Moro in combat with his Fish, superbly lit. They could almost hear the splash of his fountains above the multiple voice of Rome at night. Groups of youths moved elegantly about Navona and arrogant girls thrust bosoms like those of figureheads at the eddying crowds. The midsummer night pulsed with its own beauty. Barnaby felt within himself an excitement that rose from a more potent ferment than their gentle wine could induce. He was exalted.

He leant back in his chair, fetched a deep breath, caught Mr Mailer’s eye and laughed. ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘as if I had only just arrived in Rome.’

‘And perhaps as if the night had only just begun?’

‘Something of the sort.’

‘Adventure?’ Mailer hinted.

Perhaps, after all, the wine had not been so gentle. There was an uncertainty about what he saw when he looked at Mailer, as if a new personality emerged. He really had got very rum eyes, thought Barnaby, tolerantly.

‘An adventure?’ the voice insisted. ‘May I help you, I wonder? A cicerone?’

May I help you? Barnaby thought. He might be a shop-assistant. But he stretched himself a little and heard himself say lightly: ‘Well—in what way?’

‘In any way,’ Mailer murmured. ‘Really, in any way at all. I’m versatile.’

‘Oh,’ Barnaby said. ‘I’m very orthodox, you know. The largest Square,’ he added and thought the addition brilliantly funny, ‘in Rome.’

‘Then, if you will allow me—

The proprietor was there with his bill. Barnaby thought that the little trattoria had become very quiet but when he looked round he saw that all the patrons were still there and behaving quite normally. He had some difficulty in finding the right notes but Mr Mailer helped him and Barnaby begged him to give a generous tip.

‘Very good indeed,’ Barnaby said to the proprietor, ‘I shall return.’ They shook hands warmly.

And then Barnaby, with Mr Mailer at his elbow, walked into narrow streets past glowing windows and pitch-dark entries, through groups of people who shouted and by-ways that were silent into what was, for him, an entirely different Rome.

CHAPTER 2
An Expedition is Arranged

Barnaby had no further encounter with Sebastian Mailer until the following spring when he returned to Rome after seeing his book launched with much éclat in London. His Pensione Gallico could not take him for the first days so he stayed at a small hotel not far from it in Old Rome.

On his second morning he went down to the foyer to ask about his mail but finding a crowd of incoming tourists milling round the desk, sat down to wait on a chair just inside the entrance.