ESTATE OF POMPEII
183
"God
damn it, yes, what?" Fairhaven sighed, smiling at Tansy.
"The time required for a conducted round is from one and a
half to two hours, but to view the place properly, four or five hours
are necessary. Visitors are not allowed to take food in with them.
Do you know, when I was a very little girl, my mother had a stere–
opticon," Tansy said, "with pictures of Pompeii. Really it was my
grandmother's."
"Hoot toot!"
"Oh, I wonder if it'll look like those pictures! I remember them
perfectly ... You haven't heard a word I said."
"Och yes ... they're going to rain ashes and boiling water on
us, and we can't take any food in," Roderick said. "But what about
wine?"
-"All kind of different bird here," said the guide, "snail, rabbit,
ibis, butterfly, zoology, botanic, snail, rabbit, lizard, eagle, snake,
mouse."
There was no one else in the city of Pompeii (which at first
sight had looked to him a bit like the ruins of Liverpool on a Sunday
afternoon: or supposing it to have suffered another, latter-day ca–
tastrophe since the Great Fire of 1886, Vancouver itself-a few stock
exchange pillars, factory chimneys, the remnants of the Bank of
Montreal) just the guide; and Roderick, while returning Tansy's
glance of mocking wide-eyed pleasure at this mysterious statement,
knew he'd done his best to avoid him.
It was not precisely because he, Roderick, was mean, Roderick
felt, nor was it precisely because there happened to be few things
more natively loathsome to him than the whole business of bargain–
ing and tipping, no, he'd avoided the guide out of a kind of ridicu–
lous fear. For he'd so signally failed to make himself understood on
this trip, often, as just now at the Restaurant Vesuvius, in the most
elementary commerce, that the failure was beginning to strike .at his
amour propre.
And so, rather than spoil matters at the outset by
making a fool of himself, he liked rather to wander, to drift alone
with Tansy, letting this sense of the strange and utter meaninglessness,
to him, of his surroundings, be absorbed in that of their happiness
just of being together, which certainly was real, in
her
happiness at
being in Europe-just as he would have liked to have let it be ab–
sorbed wandering with her now around Pompeii. Moreover at such
times he had some opportunity for imagining that he (as he damned
