The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  He began also to plant the new chrysanthemum roots he had brought, working his way around the grave and, tidying up the border, tastefully arranged the colours; there were already a few nasturtiums, some asters in pink and purple shades and some dark green shoots the nature of which would not be revealed till the autumn. While he was at it he dug up, examined, and replaced two well-wrapped little parcels, one containing a huge sapphire ring and the other a pair of monogrammed cuff-links, these being objects he had picked up somewhere along the line from two earlier periods and encounters of his young life.

  When the grave was ready, Lauro stood up and looked at the picture of his mother whom he remembered as deserving and energetic. Her huge voice had commanded until she died. She looked out unsmiling with her bold eyes and her short hair shining and fresh from the hairdresser’s. The costly angel who spread his wings above her little oval picture looked frightened by comparison, and the downcast eyes of that pale, church-going, feathered adherent of the New-fangled Testament seemed shiftily afraid to meet those of the living Lauro.

  Nobody except the family was permitted to touch the grave. Lauro had taken on this work exclusively to himself; the rest of the family, from whom, in any case, he had nothing to fear, were all too busy elsewhere to tend it. His father had married again and lived in Milan; his two sisters were married with children and lived in Turin. One brother was married in America, and the other, who lived with his father in Milan, was a student. Once a year at the beginning of November, on the Day of the Dead, those of the family and their spouses who were not in America or, as it might happen, confined in labour wards, came to visit Lauro’s mother at the cemetery, bearing with them large bunches of long-petalled white and yellow chrysanthemums. These would be piled on the grave. The family would hover and weep, some lustily, some merely wetly. They would say how nicely Lauro kept it, how good he was, sparing them the expense of the cemetery-attendant’s services. They kissed Mama’s picture but did not touch the grave and asked no questions, not even of themselves. They felt Lauro was getting on quite well and admired his clothes. After the visit to the cemetery on the Day of the Dead the family would troop out with the other thousands of ancestor-visitors, get into their cars and proceed to a trattoria where they had booked a long table for a five-course family meal. Once a year.

  Lauro looked around the cemetery, now, in early August, nearly deserted. Only one or two heads moved behind one or two tombstones. Lauro wrapped the leafy rubbish in a piece of his newspaper and the trowel in another. An attendant passed and wished him good-morning. Lauro looked around with pleasure. What secrets lay buried in these small oblong territorial properties of the family dead!

  Chapter Seven

  DEAR HUBERT,

  We are leaving for Sardinia next week out of this frightful heat! I expect you too will have plans to go to the sea. After Sardinia I plan to return with Mary to the U.S. to spend some time on our own beautiful Atlantic beaches. Berto (my husband he looks forward to the pleasure of meeting you one day!) plans to join me on the Emerald Coast for a few weeks and then goes on to Le Touquet to join his brother. They plan to look over some horses he plans to buy. I plan to join him in Rome, then Nemi for a week on October first after which our plans take us back to the Veneto.

  What I am writing about mainly is, if you can plan to vacate the house during the summer so that we can occupy it from October first, that would suit our plans. Will you let me know, please? Address your letter up till the end of August:

  La Marchese Adalberto di Tullio-Friole,

  Villa Stazzu,

  Liscia di Vacca,

  Costa Smeralda,

  Sardegna.

  After that my New York address (address me there Mrs Maggie Radcliffe as the apartment is still in my old name!) till the end of September. Please leave the key with Mary’s maid Agata, if you vacate in the month of August. Agata is coming in every day to feed the cat and dust. September, Lauro will be back so please leave the key with him if you have to vacate as late as the month of September. August would be preferable as this would enable me to plan for the decorators to come in from Rome in September so the house would be in shape for us.

  A little bird told me you have been looking after my precious chairs! It was thoughtful of you and very, very simpatico. Bill me with the cost, of course. Maintenance is so very, very important.

  One day when all the trivialities of life are settled I hope you will come and visit with me and Adalberto and tell us about your big project that you plan as I am sure you do. I hope it’s shaping up!

  Happy summer!

  As ever, love,

  Maggie.

  Hubert took a large whisky and two Mitigils. He reread the letter, paying less attention to what she actually said than to the tone and implication. A mass of ideas moved like nebulae in his mind. It was not until later in the day, after lunch, that he was able to isolate the germ: it was Maggie who, two days ago, had caused the gold coins to be placed in the teapot. The reason: plain guilt. But why buy him off in such an exotic manner?

  And why, if she really wanted to make it easy for him to leave the house, had she sent so comparatively little? For, after all, small fortune though they amounted to, they were hardly the value and dimension of what one would call a settlement.

  A settlement. In any case, for no money at all would he leave the house.

  Again he read the letter. Over lunch he had read it out to Pauline Thin. ‘Does she always go on like that about her plans?’ Pauline said.

  ‘Not in conversation so much as in her letters. She has an epistolary style which denotes an hysterical need for stability and order. In conversation she counts on her remarkable appearance to hypnotize the immediate environment into a kind of harmony. She learned about planning at college, I should think. It’s a useful word in American education. She never understands the rules of anything, however, and her emphatic use of the word “plan” when she writes a letter is nothing but self-reassurance. Naturally, she will not stick to her plans. If she goes to Sardinia at all, she’ll probably only stay one night. That’s Maggie.’

  Pauline said, ‘If you look at things in her light, you wonder why she doesn’t get her lawyer to press on with the eviction.’

  ‘She doesn’t want a scandal and it’s difficult to evict.’ Hubert, who was always impatient with others who failed to keep pace with his leaps of logic, conveyed impatience now.

  Pauline found herself regretting the appearance of the gold coins; Hubert had been sweeter during their recent weeks of meagre living.

  ‘Well, we should still go very carefully,’ Pauline said. ‘It may be a trick to lure us into carelessness. We mustn’t leave the house unguarded in case they suddenly swoop and stage a takeover.’

  Hubert considered this. ‘You’re a clever girl,’ he said.

  ‘And we should still be careful with the money. Are you going to sell the coins?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Hubert said, ‘I shall go into Rome and sell a few. You’ll have another present, too.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Pauline said.

  ‘Why not?’ said Hubert. His mind was on the money he was going to collect for the chairs. He would have to leave early for Rome to give him time to collect the money comfortably and, in the event they didn’t pay in cash, change the cheque before the banks closed. It was an exceptionally hot August. He didn’t like Rome in the heat. ‘I’ll leave early in the morning,’ Hubert said.

  ‘Then I’ll iron those shirts of yours,’ she said, the wifely girl.

  ‘Shirts? I’ve got plenty of shirts,’ Hubert said absently, for his head had lifted to hear the sound of a car coming up the drive. A green Volkswagen that he did not recognize presently drew up at the door.

  Pauline said, ‘It’s the Bernardini daughter.’ She stood beside Hubert behind the locked glass doors of the terrace.

  ‘Those people who live in one of Maggie’s other houses?’

  ‘Yes, she’s the daughter, Letizia.’
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  Letizia had evidently brought a friend. She got out of the car in front of the house and went round to the other door. Presently, partly by persuasion and partly by force she brought out of the front seat before the eyes of Hubert and Pauline a tall lanky young man with a mop of reddish hair very like a giant chrysanthemum out of which peered a peaked and greyish face. He was trembling and wobbling, and obviously was in a bad way.

  ‘That’s Kurt Hakens,’ Hubert said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of my secretaries from last summer.’ Hubert locked the terrace door. ‘He looks drugged, and my laughter demon, which resides somewhere inside me, has ceased to laugh.’ He stood back from the glass door of the terrace. ‘Let them in,’ he said. ‘See what they want. Tell them I’m busy and can’t be disturbed.’

  The secretaries from last summer were not, in themselves, of any particular account to Hubert. There had been other secretaries and other summers in plenty. And other winters.

  Once, at a New Year party, in those days when Maggie was discovering the wonders of Bohemian life through him, one of his secretaries deliberately burnt Maggie’s hand, that right hand with which she had signed the cheques, and such grand and frequent cheques. ‘Hold this’ had said the young man who, Hubert reflected as he recalled the scene, must now be thirty, maybe with a secretary of his own. ‘Hold this,’ he had said, out on the terrace of that other villa of those days. It was a firework. He put it in Maggie’s hand then lit it; it was the live end of the firecracker that she held in her hand. It flared in her palm before she dropped it. She looked at the young man’s smiling face and fuming eyes. ‘He burnt my hand!’ she screamed out to Hubert across the dark terrace. ‘He did it purposely. I’m in agony.’ She bent with pain. Hubert was dancing to the distant bells. He seemed to have lost his head to the New Year, and it was another secretary who took Maggie away to treat her hand with some type of cream. Helplessly, Maggie asked for her chauffeur. Another young man joined them. Both secretaries said the chauffeur was asleep in the servants’ quarters. They wouldn’t call the chauffeur. It was recounted thus later to Hubert first by Maggie and then by the two young men who had helped dress her burns.

  ‘Where were you, Hubert?’ Maggie had said. ‘Why didn’t you help me?’

  ‘I didn’t realize what had happened. I thought you were throwing a temperament,’ Hubert replied. And he asked her, ‘Why didn’t you go into the kitchen yourself and demand your chauffeur if you wanted to go home?’

  ‘I couldn’t. I felt paralysed. Something just prevented me.’

  Maggie had slept in Hubert’s bed. They had given her a strong pill. She slept till the party was over at five in the morning, then had got into the car with her bandaged hand, without having seen Hubert around anywhere. The rooms had been littered with used glasses and piled-up ash-trays. Hubert had gone to someone else’s bed long before.

  When he heard this story later, he saw it all swiftly from Maggie’s point of view; he weighed up her nightmare-like experience of being unable to move of her own will to call her chauffeur, and her retiring to a deep sleep on his bed, and decided she was fairly hypnotized by him. For about five years after that, apparently indispensable to Maggie in practical affairs, he had been able to do what he liked with her until that time when gradually, at first unnoticed by him, she began to withdraw. In the meantime there had been secretaries, waves upon waves, season upon season of them. Last summer Kurt Hakens was a secretary, but that was when Maggie had already begun to retreat and was vaguely nowhere to be found. It was plain, now, that last summer she had actually been plotting. She was already getting rid of her ineffectual and purely nominal husband, preparing to marry the new one, and was emerging as a society woman, well-groomed, fully using her enormous wealth which had been lurking there in her favour all the time.

  Pauline Thin was at the drawing-room door, apologetically. Hubert looked vexed but in reality he was relieved to see her, imprisoned as he had been, merely sitting it out on one of the still unfaked chairs, out of sight and earshot of his visitors. He had a paranoiac feeling that he was being discussed behind his back and, at the same time as he was very eager to know what was going on between the Bernardini girl, the very ill-looking Kurt Hakens and Pauline, he was afraid to know. Pauline came softly over to him, apologizing in low tones. She pointed to the floor and said, ‘They’re still down there. Letizia says couldn’t you please come down a minute. It’s very urgent.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘She says Kurt used to be your secretary and he’s an old friend of yours. He needs help.’

  ‘I can’t have him here,’ Hubert said.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Pauline said.

  ‘You mean you can’t cope with them yourself?’ Hubert said nastily, rising.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pauline humbly.

  Hubert took his reading glasses from his pocket and followed her downstairs, looking very much as if he had been torn from his desk.

  Letizia was on the terrace, drinking tea. Kurt was stretched out on the long canvas chair beside her, his eyes closed, his mouth quivering. ‘How do you do?’ Hubert said to the girl.

  Letizia stood up, affably showing her teeth and fixing her clear eyes steadily on his face. ‘I did not phone,’ she said, ‘because we haven’t met. It was less complicated to come. My father is your neighbour, Emilio Bernardini. I am Letizia.’

  Hubert said again, ‘How do you do?’

  They sat down, looking at the view which seemed always to ask to be looked at like a much-photographed actress. Kurt Hakens continued to lie with closed eyes and quivering lips.

  In a while Hubert said, ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘He’s taken an overdose of a drug. I occupy myself with these cases. Now I find me in a predicament because we leave tomorrow for our vacation. This man is a foreigner and he’s a friend of yours—’

  ‘Yes, in a way,’ Hubert said. ‘I gave him a job last summer. A few weeks, then he left. You shouldn’t abandon your patients, you know.’

  ‘Papa has made arrangements.’

  ‘Is he getting treatment?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How does he live?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then you want to leave him with me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pauline said, ‘We’ll have to call a doctor.’

  ‘Do you know what would happen?’ Letizia stood up, agitated. ‘They would take him to the Neuro.’ The ‘Neuro’ was the mental hospital in Rome where all cases of mental, nervous, psychopathic and psychotic sufferers who could not afford private clinics were indiscriminately housed in conditions, it was said, rather worse than the Rome prisons, which were reputedly infernal.

  ‘What can I do with him? My dear girl, it’s a year since I last saw him,’ Hubert said, looking down at Kurt. ‘He needs treatment and care. I have no money, my dear. Are the police looking for him? Nemi is in fact my ancestral home. It may be difficult for an Italian to realize, but it is so. My landlady is trying to put me out of the house. How can I take in this poor boy?—I can’t do it.’

  ‘Well, yes, as I say, we will do our best,’ Hubert said.

  Kurt had been helped, half-pushed, upstairs, crying, and without any resistance; he did not seem to know where he was but he knew his way instinctively to the bedroom he had occupied last summer. From time to time a small noise would come from his room to the three sitting downstairs on the terrace; he was faintly whining through his nose; he sounded like a young horse or a dog dreaming in its sleep. Hubert looked at the cheque Letizia had given him. He passed it to Pauline.

  ‘I really don’t like taking it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s from our fund,’ Letizia said. ‘Papa gave me it for our funds, because I had Kurt on my hands and I didn’t know what to do with him for the vacation. I would have had to send him to a clinic, then they would ask him questions and maybe he would be in trouble.’

  ‘It will go straig
ht from your fund into ours,’ Hubert said. ‘I assure you we have a fund, too, for our unfortunates. Pauline, please put it in the fund.’

  ‘All right,’ Pauline said. ‘Do you want a receipt, Letizia?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ She made a gesture of pushing away the offer with her open palms as if alarmed lest the exchange of any document should continue to bind her to the bought-off Kurt. She said, ‘Papa was only too happy to help him. We leave tomorrow on the boat for Greece and Turkey. Then we go to Ischia. Papa wants you to visit us when we come back.’

  ‘If I’m still here,’ Hubert said. ‘Our padrona is trying to put us out.’

  Pauline was upstairs trying to converse softly with Kurt and at the same time to persuade him to stay in bed. She sat near the door in a soft armchair, in a casual attitude, but ready to flee because Kurt, from time to time, demanded his clothes. Pauline had agreed with Hubert in family-type whispers to keep watch over him while Hubert continued his conversation with Letizia downstairs. Letizia had begun to interest him on the subject of Maggie and this, together with the good big cheque she had handed over, made up for the actual infliction of Kurt upon him; the actual problem of Kurt could be solved later.

  The intermittent sound of Kurt’s argumentative demands and Pauline’s soothing replies seeped down to them. Letizia had accepted a sherry. Her face was lightly tanned, her eyes clear blue.

  She paused in her account of the night that Maggie dined at her house, and Hubert, thinking she was troubled about Kurt, said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. We’ll calm him down. I know a couple of Jesuits who’ll give me advice. American Jesuits. They’ll know how to cope with him.’

  But Letizia was not, apparently, at all troubled by Kurt; he had become yesterday’s problem. She had paused to consider whether, after all, it was wise of her to repeat how Maggie had tried to get her father’s help to put Hubert out of the house. ‘Yes, Jesuits, that’s good,’ she said.