The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Dinner date…?’ said Hubert. Since Maggie’s marriage following on her son Michael’s marriage, and since the trouble with his money in Switzerland, he had been asked out less and less. He looked into his little drop of gin, while Father Cuthbert seized on the doubt about dinner. ‘You’re going to go out for dinner?’

  ‘We’ve already told you so,’ said Pauline.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know if you meant it,’ said the priest.

  Hubert, remembering, said ‘Oh, yes, I am. I have to go and change very soon, I’m afraid. They eat early, these people.’

  ‘What people?’ said Father Cuthbert. ‘Do I know them? Could we come along?’

  His companion the ecologist began to show embarrassment. He said, ‘No, no, Cuthbert. We can go back to Rome. Really, we mustn’t intrude like this. Unexpectedly. We have to.…’ He rose and looked nervously towards the car where it was parked half-way down the drive.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see Michael?’ Hubert said, meaning Maggie’s son, whose house was nearby.

  Father Cuthbert looked eager. ‘Do you know if he’s home?’

  ‘I’m sure he is,’ said Hubert. ‘They’re both in Nemi just now. He got married himself recently. Marriage does seem to be a luxury set apart for the rich. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to see you.’

  While Hubert explained to the excited priest how to get there by car, his friend, Father Gerard, looked around him and across the lake. ‘The environment,’ he said. ‘This is a wonderful environmental location.’

  ‘It’s your duty to visit Michael and Mary, really,’ Pauline egged them on. ‘They have sumptuous dinners. They had a shock when Maggie got divorced and married again, you know. It’s been an upset for the Radcliffes. Her new husband’s a pig.’

  ‘Don’t they see his father?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say,’ Hubert said. ‘Radcliffe was Maggie’s second husband, of course. The new one’s the third. But it was so sudden. The family’s all right financially of course. But I must say it’s left me in a mess, personally speaking.’

  When the priests had left, Hubert went with Pauline into the kitchen. He opened a tin of tuna fish while she made a potato salad. They then sat down to eat at the kitchen table, silently, reflectively.

  It seemed as if Hubert had forgotten the priests. Pauline, as if anxious that he should not forget a subject that had served to bring them closer, assiduously said, ‘Those priests.…’

  At first he didn’t respond to the tiny needle. He merely said dreamily, ‘It’s not too much to wonder if they’re not a bit too much,’ and took in a mouthful of food.

  ‘But so pressing, so insufferably pushy,’ Pauline said, at which Hubert was roused into agreement, chummily communicating it: ‘It’s an extraordinary fact,’ he said, ‘that just at the precise moment when you’re at your wit’s end it’s always the last people in the world you want to see who turn up, full of themselves, demanding total attention. It’s always the exceptionally tiresome who barge in at the exceptionally difficult moment. Would you believe there was a time when a Jesuit was a gentleman, if you’ll forgive the old-fashioned expression?’

  Pauline passed him the potato salad. It had onion, too, in it, and mayonnaise. ‘Forget them, Hubert,’ she said, plainly intending him not to do so.

  But Hubert smiled. ‘Miss Thin,’ he said as he took the salad bowl from her hand, ‘I have inside me a laughter demon without which I would die.’

  Chapter Three

  ‘DEMONS FREQUENTED THESE WOODS, protectors of the gods. Nymphs and dryads inhabited the place. Have you seen the remains of Diana’s temple down there? It’s terribly overgrown and the excavations are all filled in, but there’s a great deal more to see than you might think.’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen it,’ said Mary, curling her long legs as she sat, yoga-style, on a cushion on the pavement of the terrace. She was a young long-haired blonde girl from California, newly married to Michael Radcliffe. The priests were entertaining her enormously. She didn’t want them to leave and pressed them to stay on for a late dinner. Michael had gone to Rome and wouldn’t be back till nine. ‘He said nine, which most probably will be ten,’ she said.

  ‘Pius the Second,’ said Father Gerard, ‘said that Nemi was the home of nymphs and dryads, when he passed through this area.’

  ‘Really?’

  An Italian manservant, young and dark-skinned in a white coat with shining buttons and elaborate epaulettes, brought in a tray of canapé and nuts which he placed on the terrace table beside the bottles. He looked with recognition at Father Cuthbert who, without looking at the manservant, took a handful of nuts, as also did Father Gerard. The ice clinked in the glasses, and they helped themselves to the drinks when their glasses were empty, refilling Mary’s glass too. They were Americans together, abroad, with the unwatchful attitude of co-nationals who share some common experiences, however few.

  ‘I majored in social science,’ said Mary who had been to college in California.

  ‘Did you come to Italy before?’ said Father Gerard.

  ‘No, never. I met Michael in Paris. Then we settled here. I love it.’

  ‘How’s your Italian?’ said the other priest, beaming with idle pleasure as who would not after two months’ continuous residence in the priests’ bleak house in Rome, anonymous and detached in its laws of life?

  ‘Oh, my Italian’s coming along. I took a crash course. I guess I’ll get more fluent. How about yours?’

  ‘Gerard’s is pretty good,’ said Father Cuthbert. ‘He doesn’t get enough practice. There are Italians at the Residence of course, but we only talk to the Americans. You know the way it gets. Or maybe the French—’

  ‘Cuthbert speaks almost perfect Italian,’ said Father Gerard. ‘He’s a great help when I’m talking to the locals around the country about their legends and beliefs.’

  ‘Gerard,’ said Father Cuthbert, ‘is doing a study on pagan ecology.’

  ‘Really? I thought the Italians were mostly all Catholics.’

  ‘On the surface, yes, but underneath there’s a large area of pagan remainder to be explored. And absorbed into Christianity. A very rich seam.’

  ‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘I don’t know if you’ve talked to Hubert Mallindaine about that…’

  Hubert was a whole new subject, vibrating to be discussed. The priests began to speak in unison, questions and answers, then the girl broke in with laughing phrases and exclamation marks, until Father Cuthbert’s voice, being the highest and most excitable, attained the first hearing. The manservant hovered at the terrace door, his eyes upon them, waiting to serve. Mary stretched her fine long suntanned legs and listened. ‘We arrived this evening,’ said Cuthbert, ‘without letting him know in advance. Well, that’s nothing new. As a matter of fact the last time I saw him, about six weeks ago, in Rome, he said, “Come to dinner any time. Sure, bring a friend, you’re always welcome. There’s no need to call me. I never go out. Just get into that car and come.” That’s what he said. Well. We arrived this evening didn’t we, Gerard?’

  ‘We did,’ said Gerard.

  A person with a good ear might have questioned the accuracy of Cuthbert’s report on the grounds that Hubert, not being American, was not likely to have used a phrase like, ‘Sure, bring a friend…’ But it did seem that the priest had been in the habit of dropping in on Hubert from time to time, whether welcome or not. Clearly he regarded it as his right to do so, anywhere.

  ‘I was embarrassed for Gerard,’ Cuthbert was saying, ‘especially as this was his first visit, you know. He had an awful secretary, a girl who used to work for another friend of mine in Rome. A terribly—’

  Here Gerard broke in, and so did Mary. When they had finished exclaiming over Pauline, Cuthbert continued, ‘I think she’s got a problem. Then she kept telling Hubert he had to go out to dinner, which I’m sure wasn’t true because of the way it was said, you know.’ He finished his drink and the manservant came out of the shadows to replenish it. This tim
e Cuthbert recognized the man’s face but couldn’t at first place it.

  The servant lifted the glass with a well-paid and expert air and smiled.

  ‘I know you, don’t I?’ said Cuthbert to the man.

  ‘It’s Lauro,’ said Mary. ‘He was one of Hubert’s secretaries last summer.’

  ‘Why, Lauro, I didn’t recognize you in that uniform! Why, Lauro!’ The priest seemed confused, realizing the man had understood their conversation.

  Lauro answered in easy, accented English. ‘You surprised to see me here? I lost my job with Hubert and I went to a bar on the Via Veneto then I came back to Nemi to work for Mary and Michael.’

  ‘Lauro’s on first-name terms with us,’ Mary said. ‘The Embassy crowd are shocked. But we don’t care.’

  Lauro smiled and slipped back to his doorway.

  ‘Lauro could tell you everything you want to know about Hubert,’ Mary said. Lauro’s shadowed form stooped to adjust a rose in a vase. Cuthbert looked carefully at Mary as if to see quite what she had meant by her words, but she had evidently meant far less than she might have done.

  ‘Oh, I like Hubert. Don’t misunderstand me,’ said Cuthbert, and he looked towards Gerard who gave it as his opinion that Hubert had seemed very likeable. ‘Well, I used to like him too,’ said Mary. ‘And I still do. But when Maggie and her husband number three got kind of mad at him we had to take her part; after all, she’s Michael’s mother. What can you do? There’s been a bad feeling between the houses since Maggie got into this marriage. She wants Hubert to go. He says he won’t and he can’t pay rent. She’s going to put him out. The furniture belongs to Maggie as well. But my, she’s finding it difficult The laws in this country.…Hubert might get around them forever.’

  They sat down to dinner soon after Mary’s husband, Michael, arrived. They spoke of Hubert most of the time. Hubert was a subject sufficiently close to them to provide a day-to-day unfolding drama and yet it was sufficiently remote, by reason of their wealth, not to matter very much. Hubert himself, since the young couple had ceased to see him, had become someone else than the large-living and smart-spoken old friend they used to know when he was Maggie’s favourite. Now that Maggie had turned against him he was, in their mythology, a parasite on society. ‘He’s not like the old Hubert at all,’ Michael said. ‘Something’s changed him.’

  ‘I dread one day maybe bumping into him in the village,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t know what I’d say.’

  First one Jesuit and then the other offered advice as to the coping with this eventuality. So dark, rather short but so somehow splendid, Lauro served the meal, assisted by a good-looking maid. The spring evening air from the terrace stood around them like another ubiquitous servant, tendering occasional wafts of a musky creeper’s scent. The wine had been sent by Maggie’s new husband from his own vineyards in the north.

  ‘Hubert,’ said Michael, ‘of course considers he is a direct descendant of the goddess Diana of Nemi. He considers he’s mystically and spiritually, if not actually, entitled to the place.’

  ‘No kidding!’ said Gerard.

  ‘No kidding,’ Mary said. ‘That’s what Hubert believes. It’s a family tradition. All the Mallindaines have always believed it. Michael and I met an aunt of his in Paris. She was convinced of it. But I think her health had broken up.’

  ‘She was old,’ Michael said.

  ‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘I should look into this for my research.’

  The other Jesuit said, ‘I always thought, you know, the Diana mythology was just an interest of his. I didn’t know it was in the family. We’ll have to go see him again.’

  One of the stories to be read from the ancient historians of Imperial Rome is that the Emperor Caligula enjoyed sex with the goddess Diana of Nemi. And indeed, two luxurious Roman ships, submerged for centuries in the lake and brought to land in recent times, have been attributed variously to the purpose of Imperial orgies on the lake of Nemi, and to service in the worship of Diana. These ships were brought to land in reconstructable condition only to be destroyed by some German soldiers during the Second World War; however, their remaining contents and fittings testified to the impression that something highly ritualistic took place on board, well into Christian times, although the worship of Diana at Nemi reaches back into the mythological childhood of the race. Hubert’s ancestors.…

  But it is time, now, to take a closer look at Hubert on that spring evening, seeing that he had provided a full and wonderful stream of conversation for the party over there in the other house, where the frank spirits rose higher, Lauro glowed in the shadows and Mary, with her golden Californian colouring, her dark blue eyes and white teeth, was so far stimulated as to repeat for good measure a recent saying of Maggie’s: ‘The goddess Diana presents her compliments, and desires the company of her kinsman Mr. Hubert Mallindaine at the Hunt Ball to be held at Nemi.…’

  Meanwhile, then, Hubert watched Pauline Thin wash up the plates. He carried their coffee through the sitting-room and out to the terrace. ‘At my age,’ Hubert said, ‘I shouldn’t drink coffee at night. But, Miss Thin, it doesn’t always bear to think of what one should or shouldn’t drink. There’s a limit to everything.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Pauline, looking out over the marvellous lake.

  ‘Miss Thin,’ said Hubert, ‘I have decided. I will not leave this house.’ Hubert had shaved off his beard shortly after hearing of Maggie’s divorce last year in the December of 1972. Then, a week after he heard, in the following January, that she had married the northern Marquis, he had shaved off his moustache. Not that he felt these actions were in any way connected with Maggie’s. It does, however, obscurely seem that in these two shavings he was expressing some reaction to her divorce and marriage, or, more probably, preparing himself for something, maybe an ordeal, requiring a clean-cut appearance.

  He looked younger, now. Pauline Thin who had come to work for him this February, had never known him with his hairy maestro’s face. She described him to her best friend in Italy, another English girl who was working in Rome, as ‘dishy’.

  Hubert was now forty-five. His generally good looks varied from day to day. Sometimes, when she went into Rome for shopping and stopped to lunch with her girlfriend, Pauline described him as ‘a bit fagoty’. However that may be, Hubert undoubtedly had good looks, especially when anguished. By a system of panic-action whenever he started to be overweight, he had managed to keep his good line. The panic-system, which consisted of a total fast for a sufficient number of days, never more than twelve, to make him thoroughly skinny and underweight, allowed him then to put on weight comfortably with small indulgences in food and drink which otherwise he would never have enjoyed. Hubert had been told, much earlier in his life, that eventually this course would ruin his health but the event had never happened. Indeed, most of his active life was formed by panic-action and in the interludes he was content to dream or fret or for long periods simply enjoy sweet life. One such of these interludes was just coming to an end, which accounted for the especially good looks of his worried face. He was fairly dark-skinned with light blue eyes and sandy-grey hair. His features were separately nothing much, but his face and the way his head was set on his body were effective. Quite often, he was conscious of his physical assets, but more often he simply forgot them.

  This house, with the best view of all Maggie’s three houses in the neighbourhood, was furnished richly. After only a year’s occupancy this new house still had newness penetrating its bones. Even the antiques, the many of them, were new. Maggie had brought back across the water from an apartment high in the air, on the east-sixties of Manhattan, large lifts of itinerant European furniture and pictures. The drawing-room furniture was Louis XIV; there had been six fine chairs, at present only five; one was away in a clever little workshop on the Via di Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, being sedulously copied. Hubert was short of money and, almost certain that Maggie would at least succeed in removing the furniture from the house,
he was taking reasonable precautions for his future. The new chair was almost finished, and it only remained for the upholstery on the original to be tenderly removed and fitted on to the fake before Pauline should be ordered to go into Rome and fetch the chair. She had been told only that it was being mended. The original would remain in Rome for a while at Hubert’s disposal. Like money in the bank. Hubert thought of switching and rearranging, perhaps, a few more items, and maybe, if there was time, another chair. Maggie had put on the drawing-room floor a seventeenth-century rug; Isfahan. Hubert brooded upon it: not at all possible to copy with excellence. He didn’t use the drawing-room much these days; the heart had gone out of it.

  Maggie’s withdrawal from Hubert had taken place quite slowly. It was only to him that it seemed abrupt. To him it was the heedless by-product of a too-rich woman’s whim or the effect of her new husband’s influence, the new husband also being rich. But Hubert’s memory was careless. As we have seen, as far back as the previous summer he was privately lamenting Maggie’s lack of chivalry. His protectress had already started, even before that, to recede. She had let him occupy the new house, as one silently honouring a bad bargain; the house had been ordered to his taste more than three years before it was ready. But it was during those three years and more while the house was being made that she had gradually stopped confiding in him and even before that, perhaps, the disaffection and boredom of the relationship had set in for Maggie.

  Hubert had been uneasy about his position, really, for many years more than he now admitted when he thought or spoke of Maggie. ‘Like any other spoilt moneybags she used me when she needed me and then suddenly told me to go, to clear out of her house and her life. All my projects were based on her promises. We had an understanding’

  So he dramatized it in a nutshell, first to himself, then, later, to Pauline Thin.

  Pauline assumed there had been a love affair till one night, when he was confiding in her for the sheer lack of anyone else to talk to about himself, he remarked, ‘I never touched a woman. I love women but I never went near one. It would break the spell. There’s a magic…women are magic. I can’t live without women around me. Sex is far, far away out of the question in my mind where women are concerned.’