The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  ‘You don’t have to tell Berto everything, do you?’

  ‘He wants to know everything,’ Maggie said. ‘He’s the old-fashioned Italian, it’s part of the charm.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said the girl.

  ‘How can I get this money to Hubert without him guessing?’

  ‘Is it a lot of money?’

  ‘Well, if I decide on a sum…enough for him to live on here at Nemi while I’m trying to get him out of the house.’

  ‘I don’t think I follow, really,’ said Mary. ‘But I see what you mean in a way.’

  ‘It’s a paradox,’ Maggie said. ‘But Hubert mustn’t know how I feel.’

  ‘He’d think you were frightened of him.’

  They talked in hushes late into the afternoon.

  ‘We’re going a long way but we aren’t getting anywhere,’ Maggie said as the air grew cooler.

  ‘I wish I could talk it over with Michael.’

  ‘No! Michael would put a stop to it.’

  ‘So he would, I guess. I’ll try to think of a scheme.’

  ‘You have to help me.’

  ‘I’ll help you, Maggie.’

  They looked down on the incredible fertility beneath them. A head and small flash of face every now and again bobbed out of the trees as the country people came and went; one of these, approaching up a path through the dense woodland, presently emerged clearly as Lauro returning. He appeared and disappeared ever larger, seeming to spring from the trees a fuller person at every turn. A little to the north was a corner of Hubert’s roof, and under the cliff below him at a point where the banks of the lake spread less steeply into a small plain lay the cultivated, furrowed and planted small fields of flowers and the dark green density of woodland that covered what Frazer in The Golden Bough described as ‘the scene of the tragedy’.

  The scene of the tragedy lay directly but far below Hubert’s house, and meanwhile the stars contended with him. ‘Hoping to inherit the earth as I do,’ he said, ‘I declare myself meek.’

  This tragedy was only so in the classical and dramatic sense; its participants were in perfect collusion. In the historic sense it was a pathetic and greedy affair. The recurrent performance of the tragedy began before the dates of knowledge, in mythology, but repeating itself tenaciously well into known history.

  The temple of the goddess Diana was, from remote antiquity, a famous pilgrim resort. To guard her sanctuary, Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Wood, had a court of attendants ruled over by a powerful high priest Legends and ancient chronicles have described this figure and it was upon him that J. G. Frazer’s great curiosity was centred. Here is Frazer’s celebrated account of the priesthood of Diana and its ‘tragedy’:

  In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or craftier.

  The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill offence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant.…According to one story the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas, king of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis). According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat.

  Rigid and frigid as was the statue of Diana the huntress, still, after all, it became personified as a goddess of fertility. But how, Hubert would demand of his listeners, did the mad Emperor Caligula have sex with a statue? It was an orgy on a lake-ship: there must have been something more than a statue. Caligula took Diana aboard his ship under her guise as the full moon, according to Suetonius. Diana the goddess, Hubert explained, was adept at adding years to the life of a man—she had done so with her lover Hippolytus. She bore a child to the madly enamoured Emperor, added years to the infant’s life so that he became instantly adult, and it was this young man, and not a Roman hireling, whom Caligula sent to supplant the reigning King of the Wood, the priest of Diana.

  Hubert descended, then, from the Emperor, the goddess, and from her woodland priest; in reality this was nothing more than his synthesis of a persistent, yet far more vague, little story fostered by a couple of dotty aunts enamoured of the author-image of Sir James Frazer and misled by one of those quack genealogists who flourished in late Victorian times and around the turn of the century, and who still, when they take up the trade, never fail to flourish.

  Modern Nemi, at the end of the last century, as more recently when Hubert Mallindaine settled there, appeared to Frazer to be curiously an image of Italy in the olden times; ‘when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen’. Diana’s temple had been feared by the Church. The long wall of high arched niches, once part of the temple-life, have perfectly survived antiquity, and these, at a later time, had been named ‘the Devil’s Grottoes’. Hubert, beating his way through the undergrowth along the rows of remaining cliff-chapels, would come upon the relics of traditional disrespect and of outcast life. There was a rubbish dump, incredibly rubbishy with the backs of yellow plastic chairs, petrol tins, muddy boots and cast-off rags piled up in those enormous Roman votive alcoves which soared above their desecration with stony dignity. And from this view the plateau was beautiful; it contained the rectangular site of the sanctuary itself, now filled up with earth and cultivated with a chrysanthemum crop.

  Very few people now visited this spot as a temple. Hubert had seen reported in a recent article that it was ‘still lost as far as the ordinary tourist is concerned’. ‘No local folk,’ complained the author of the article, ‘seem to know where it is.’ Which, of course, was instinctively the way with local people. Chrysanthemums enjoyed a commercial popularity in Italy on one day of the year, the Day of the Dead; otherwise they were considered unlucky.

  The site of the rectangular sanctuary was marked unobtrusively by a withered tree in one corner. A rim of the
temple wall still protruded a few inches from the ground on three of its sides. The reason the peasants had cultivated the soil once more over the late dig was that ‘the money for the excavations had stopped’, as one of them explained to Hubert.

  One spring, when he was supervising the building of the house then destined by Maggie to be his, Hubert had walked down the cliff-path and talked to a man who was pruning a pear tree on the site of Diana’s temple. The man was about forty-two. He remembered the excavations, he said, when he was a boy. Very beautiful. Red brick paving. A fireplace. Yes, said Hubert, that was for the vestal virgins; it was an everlasting flame. The man went on with his pruning. My ancestress, Diana, was worshipped here, Hubert said. The man continued his work, no doubt thinking Hubert’s Italian was at fault.

  Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, ‘It’s mine! I am the King of Nemi! It is my divine right! I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods.…’ And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not?—at any rate, these words were what Hubert cried.

  Chapter Six

  MARY HAD NOT YET got used to the Italian afternoon repose. Her hours were the Anglo-Saxon eight in the morning till midnight with a two-hour break for lunch. That Maggie went to bed between three and five in the afternoon she attributed to Maggie’s middle-age. That nearly all Italians rested during that period of the day she attributed to Latin laziness. What her husband did with himself in Rome during these hours she had not begun to wonder; if she had done so she would have assumed that he regularly returned to his office after lunch, keeping American hours in lonely righteousness. In fact, Michael had a mistress in Rome in whose flat he spent the customary hours of repose; it was not unusual for Italian businessmen to spend the long free hours of lunch and after-lunch with their mistresses, but if Mary had suspected that Michael had acquired the habit, especially so early in their married life, she would have considered her marriage a failure beyond redemption.

  Maggie was sleeping successfully that afternoon. Mary had, with some scruple, for she was a girl of many scruples, plied her mother-in-law with white wine. They had lunched together on the terrace, talking of next week. Then Maggie had given Mary the smart jewel-case of black calf-skin, slightly wider than a shoe-box, which, when opened, was dramatically and really very beautifully packed with gold coins of various sizes, dates and nationalities. ‘There are no absolute collectors’ items,’ Maggie explained. Their two heads—Maggie’s shimmering silver and Mary’s long and fair—bent over the glittering and chinking hoard. ‘But,’ said Maggie, ‘the collection as a whole is of course worth more than its weight in gold. Coins always are. My real collection is worth a great deal.’ Mary’s long fingers shifted the coins about. She lifted one, examined it, put it down and took up another, then another. ‘Queen Victoria half-sovereign, King Edward sovereign, South African sovereign—whose head is that?’ ‘Kruger,’ said Maggie. ‘Kruger. Are these worth a lot of money, then?’ ‘Well,’ Maggie said, ‘it depends who you are, whether they are.’

  The coins tinkled through Mary’s hands, then hearing the coffee-cups being brought she shut the box, put it on her lap and looked over her shoulder. Lauro appeared, his eyes intent on the tray although he must have seen the black box on Mary’s lap.

  When he had left, Maggie said, ‘Hubert mustn’t have a clue who sent them.’

  Mary said, ‘I really don’t see why he should have all these.’

  ‘I have my own important collection,’ Maggie said, ‘and I can get more. Any time I want.’

  ‘I know. But it’s crazy…’

  ‘Yes, it’s crazy. But it’s a way of getting rid of him in my own mind.’

  ‘Oh, I do see that.’

  ‘A cheque would tie him to me even more. I could never get rid of him.’

  ‘No, I see that. He’d think he was in with you again. But gold is appreciating in value, isn’t it?’

  ‘Such a damn cheek,’ Maggie said. ‘I hate him.’

  Later, in Maggie’s room, they counted the coins and made a list. It was Mary’s idea to make a list. She made lists of everything. A good part of her mornings was spent on list-making. She had lists for entertaining and for shopping. She listed her clothes, her expenditure and her correspondence. She kept lists of her books and music and furniture. She wrote them by hand, then typed them later in alphabetical or chronological order according as might be called for. Sometimes she made a card index when the subject was complex, such as the winter season’s dinner parties, whom she had dined with and whom she had asked, what she had worn and when. Now she was making a list of the coins while Maggie took off her clothes, and got right into bed for her afternoon rest. Mary took her unfinished list and the coin-box quietly out of the room when Maggie fell asleep, and now she was in her own room sorting and writing seriously. She felt useful. Even though it was to be a secret from Michael, this help she was giving to Maggie was almost like helping Michael. Maggie, asleep in the next room, was much the same as if Michael were lying down there, having an afternoon sleep.

  ‘Q. Vict,’ she wrote, ‘½ SOV. 1842.’

  She grasped quickly that there were no numismatic rarities; the value of the coins was largely commercial. At that, they added up to a considerable amount. They were mostly English half-sovereigns, early and late “Victorian, bearing the Queen’s young head and her older head. Mary found a sovereign of the reign of George IV and, realizing its extra value, wondered if Maggie had put it in by mistake. She put the coin aside, then, on the thought that Maggie might think her critical or stingy, put it back in the box and marked it on her list. The main idea was to please Maggie and show she understood her position. Maggie, after all, was being very delicate in her treatment of Hubert. Mary began to consider various means of conveying this treasure to him without betraying its origin. When she realized how impossible it would be for her to simply drive or walk over to the house herself and hand it over to him, she felt a waif-like longing to do so; she saw herself for a brief moment as an outcast from what appeared to her as a world of humour and sophistication which Hubert had brought with him during those few months she had known him, when he was still in Maggie’s good favour. At the same time she disapproved of him as a proposition in Maggie’s life. He really had no right to this golden fortune. Her mood swivelled and she imagined with satisfaction a dramatic little scene of handsome Hubert being thrown out of Maggie’s house by the police.

  Her list was complete. She closed the box and stood up. From the window she caught sight of a shining black head in the greenery below. She recognized Lauro and at the same time the idea came to her that, obviously, Lauro would be the person to carry this box to Hubert. She was convinced of his discretion and, after all, he had worked for Hubert once.

  Mary went immediately to Maggie’s room clutching the box. Maggie was still asleep. Her mouth was open and she slept noisily. The girl felt guilty, watching this uncomely sleep. Maggie, if wakened, would know she had been watched. Mary retreated, deciding to act on her own and rightly perceiving how gratified Maggie would be to wake up and find her plan accomplished; she would feel free in her heart and mind to turn Hubert out and give him hell and know that at least he wasn’t starving. Mary was already on her way to meet Lauro, leaving the house by the back door. His white coat was hanging on the back of a kitchen chair. Mary swung down the hot winding path with her long brown legs and sandals and, seeing Lauro’s black head once more below her, called to him, ‘Lauro!’

  He stopped and waited. She found him sitting down in the shade of the woods just off the path. ‘Lauro,’ she said, ‘I’ve got something important to ask you. I want you to do so
mething.’

  She expected him to stand up immediately she approached but he let a moment pass before doing so. He was smiling as if he enjoyed the lonely scene, and as if the woods belonged to him. She felt strangely awkward as she had not been before when she had been alone with him in the house or in the car, or walking with him to the shops in the village street.

  She spoke rapidly, as if giving some domestic instructions while her free mind, as it might be, was on something weightier. ‘You have to keep a secret, Lauro,’ she said. ‘I have something here for Mr Mallindaine but he must not be told who sent it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Lauro.

  ‘I want you to take this box to Mr Mallindaine’s house. He mustn’t see you as he mustn’t know where the box has come from. Find some way of leaving it where he’s sure to find it. Do you know the lay-out of the house?’

  ‘Sure, I know the house well. I lived there all last summer. What’s in the box please, Mary?’

  Mary opened it, trembling at what she was doing. ‘They’re old coins,’ she was saying. I’ve made a list.’ She displayed the rich tumble of gold with an expression which conveyed both her naïvety and the pleasure of showing off to the boy.

  The sight of so much golden money in the rich, very rich, tall girl’s hands inflamed him instantly with sexual desire. He grabbed the box and pulled her into the thick green glade. He pulled her down to the ground and with the box spilling beside them he would have raped her had she not quite yielded after the first gasp, and really, in the end, although she protested in fierce whispers, her eyes all over the green shrubbery lest someone should see, she put up no sort of struggle. ‘That wasn’t no good because you didn’t relax,’ Lauro said, his face, satyr-like, closing in on hers, his eyes gleaming with automatic hypnotism as he had seen it done on the films and television from his tiniest years, and acquired as a habit.

  Mary, in a crisis of breath-shortage and an abundance of tears, pulled at her few clothes and managed to articulate, ‘My husband will kill you.’