The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  ‘I suppose she wants your father to gang up with her,’ Hubert said, coaxingly. The phrase ‘gang up’ was beyond her, and after it was explained she rattled on obligingly. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘we’ve no intention of making the gang with her. I mean, I have no intention and Papa will listen to me. At Casa Bernardini we’re on your side. Papa has to think this way: if she can get one tenant out then we’ll be the next.’

  ‘This has the best view of all three houses,’ Hubert said, wishing to establish a banal, greedy reason why Maggie should want to be rid of him.

  ‘Oh, is that why she wants it? Well, Papa has spent a fortune in reconstruction so our house is now more worth than it was when we rented it.’

  ‘Maggie,’ pressed Hubert, ‘covets the view.’

  ‘She says you must go because her husband insists.’

  ‘I dare say. He, too, appreciates the situation of the house. But I shan’t go. I have an ancestral claim, you know, my dear.’

  ‘I know! I know!’ The girl jumped up and sat down again. ‘Tell me more, please, about yourself, how you belong to Nemi and your—‘

  ‘Nemi…,’ said Hubert, leaning back in the chair with his legs stretched out wide in front of him. ‘Nemi is mine. It belongs to me, as a matter of fact. The offspring of Diana and Caligula became the high priest of Diana’s sanctuary and I am his descendant.’

  Kurt’s voice could be heard in some sharp protest from above, joined with Pauline’s impatient tones. It appeared, now, that Pauline had left the bedroom and was turning the key in the lock. Her footsteps could be heard coming down.

  ‘I’m interested, so interested, Mr Mallindaine. Our English tutor and your English secretary have talked of your family tradition. I love so much the traditions. You shouldn’t be sent away from your house.’ She made her hands into fists and thumped one on top of another in a way most alarming to see in a young girl. ‘My friends and I,’ she shouted coarsely, ‘will put the son of that American Marchesa out of his house. They will not send you away from your house. The farm-house of the son is Italian property. The Curia had no right to sell it to her. The land where she built this house for you is Italian property. We want things Italian kept in the hands of the Italian people, we must remember our origins!’

  Her oration finished, she breathed heavily with an overflow of indignation. Pauline had entered in the course of this speech and looked rather impatient of the rhetoric, in her English way. But Hubert, whatever he felt, looked impressed. He said, ‘More Italian in origin than me you could not be…a direct descendant of a union between the Roman Emperor Caligula and the goddess Diana, here at Nemi. She must, of course, have been more than an idea; she was flesh, miraculous flesh, be sure of that. Pauline, my dear, refill our glasses and help yourself. Letizia looks so like the very Diana of the Woods, she looks a true goddess of ancient Latium.’ He shoved his glass towards Pauline who had sulkily fetched the sherry bottle. ‘Diana, huntress, chaste and fair…,’ Hubert said. ‘It’s true. She remained chaste at heart even after she became the great goddess of fertility of all Italy.’

  ‘Do you have documents,’ said practical Letizia, ‘relating to the family?’ Pauline was holding out the refilled glass of sherry; her hand wobbled and a few drops fell on Letizia’s pink cotton skirt.

  ‘Documents!’ Hubert said, over and above the exchange of Pauline’s squeal of apologies, Letizia’s reassurances, and the sound of Kurt upstairs banging on his bedroom door. ‘Documents! I have an avalanche of family letters and documents. We are working on them now. We’re working against time. What do you think Pauline’s here for?’

  Pauline looked downcast, and indeed she felt so. Letizia, so very young and full of opinion, so very rich and so planted on her home ground, simply by her presence put Pauline in the position of an inferior. Upstairs, minding Kurt like the employee she was, while Letizia relaxed with Hubert on the terrace, Pauline had felt aggrieved. Letizia did not know quite how much au pair Pauline was; Pauline had been lending Hubert money to live on. She had paid his electricity bill. She had filled up the station-wagon with petrol to go back and forwards to Rome with those chairs.

  Pauline sat silent, not being at all helpful to Hubert on the subject of the documents, because in the first place the documents she was putting in order had so far failed to prove, really, Hubert’s ancestral claim, and secondly she did not feel in the mood to support him by so much as a misleading grunt. Hubert thought her obtuse. ‘Pauline’s been working on the documents,’ he said. ‘And I have sent for the important ones, which have been kept in England and in Malta. The Mallindaines lived for a long time in Malta.’

  ‘It sounds most interesting,’ said Letizia.

  ‘It is most interesting,’ said Hubert Mallindaine, and the words brought once more to mind his two aunts having passed the window on Lady Day. ‘It sounds most interesting,’ said the vicar who stood looking straight out from the bow-window with his hands in the pockets of his summer-grey clergyman’s suit, rocking to and fro from his heels to his toes, while his mother sat sewing in the window-seat. The aunts had passed, without hats, which was strange for ladies in Hubert’s childhood; their hair, moreover, was cut short, straight, grey and untidy. They were walking hand in hand, and his mother had finished explaining to the vicar that her sisters-in-law were convinced ‘Mallindaine’ was a corruption of ‘maligne Diane’. ‘Which is Old French,’ his mother said. The aunts had not cared to turn their heads towards them as they passed the window. ‘…on their way to Hampstead Heath; they do it every Lady Day,’ his mother said, still intent on her embroidery. ‘They light a bonfire and offer up prayers to the goddess Diana, and I expect there are other rites. They could be had up. Very eccentric. My poor husband could do nothing with them.’

  ‘It sounds most interesting,’ said the vicar.

  ‘I dare say it is most interesting,’ said his mother, ‘but it’s embarrassing for me, because of the boy.’

  ‘Have they means?’ said the vicar, gazing out on the sunny Hampstead pavement.

  Hubert had a few letters referring to these aunts and their special eccentricity. He had come across the letters some yean ago, in Paris, while sorting the first batch of his papers for his memoirs. From that moment he had cultivated the fact of these long-neglected aunts, one of whom had died in the meantime, allowing their fantasy to grow upon him. It may be that in those days he had felt a premonition, even before he had any outward sign, of Maggie’s ultimate defection. Those were the years when he still had full control of Maggie’s mind and it was he who convinced her to acquire the houses at Nemi ‘where Diana, my ancestress, got laid by my ancestor the Roman Emperor’. It wasn’t every woman whose escort and protector could make such claims. Submissively and carelessly Maggie had acquired two of the houses at Nemi and had the third built to Hubert’s special stipulations; in the meantime she started an affair with a fine-looking young man who was a plain-clothes policeman and part-time actor, the very scourge of those other young men preferred by Hubert. She handed over the fretful details of the purchase of land and buildings at Nemi and had telephoned to Hubert from Rome in that special jargon used by people who at that time woke and took breakfast, as it might be, in Monte Carlo, flew to Venice for a special dinner, Milan next evening for the opera, Portugal for a game of golf and Gstaad for the week-end. ‘J’ai compris—toute à Nemi—un avocat…called Dante de Lafoucauld, yes, really.—What do you mean, “my policeman lover”, Hubert? Il était gendarme, c’est vrai mais, mais.…Well, darling, he’s handsome. I have to sleep with someone, je dois—ma vie.…Va bene, va bene, Hubert, ma cosa vuoi, tu? I tuoi ragazzi.…I don’t say a word about your boys, do I? Hubert, after all these years pensando che siamo sempre d’accordo.…Look, I have to go.…My maid has the luggage.…’ Maggie always travelled with her maid and now, for a short while, until the affair of course ended, with her policeman.

  Hubert’s aunts, in the meantime, grew in the grace of his imagination. They sprouted ancestors before
them, springing from nowhere into the ever more present past, until Hubert had a genealogy behind him. He started corresponding with the surviving aunt who in her poverty and dotage was greatly consoled by Hubert’s complicity in her life-long belief. He had brought the aunt to meet Maggie in her flat in Paris. Maggie’s son, Michael, was there, and Mary whom he was shortly to marry. ‘Our forebear Diana,’ said Hubert’s aunt, ‘sets us rather apart. That was why I never married, nor my sister. Hubert will always be a bachelor, too.’

  He sat, now, on the terrace of the house at Nemi, secure in this lineage in which he could truly be said to have come to believe, seeing that his capacity for belief was in any case not much. He managed very well without sincerity and as little understood the lack of it as he missed his tonsils and his appendix which had been extracted long since.

  He sat half-facing Letizia.

  ‘Documents.…Yes,’ he said, ‘the documents exist, of course. Pauline is sorting out the documents. I’m writing my memoirs, you know.’

  Letizia turned her head to look uncomfortably inside the house where Kurt’s noise was coming from.

  ‘You know how to handle him?’ she said.

  ‘Of course. Don’t worry,’ said Hubert.

  Pauline helped herself to sherry and sat down.

  Hubert said, ‘I was good to him before. He wasn’t on drugs then.’

  Kurt sounded as if he would break down his door. Pauline did not move. She was watching Letizia who was ready to leave, and was standing, now, a little way off, gazing up at Hubert with her young face. They walked off to the car, talking. The girl obviously was extremely relieved to get rid of Kurt, and was gratefully attributing to Hubert a kind of broad-shouldered glamour which Pauline just for that moment realized he did not possess. That Hubert, walking Letizia to her car, was assiduously playing up to this role made Pauline impotently furious. She could not hear what Hubert was saying as he smiled down at Letizia, held her hand, kissed her hand, laid his hand reassuringly on the girl’s arm, and held open the door of the car for her. Letizia turned to wave to Pauline who, after a slight pause, waved back in the laziest way she could manage. Then Letizia was off, back to her sheltered privilege, her Papa and her holidays by the sea, while Hubert, really looking very handsome, strode back and up the steps to the verandah. Kurt was shouting and banging louder still. Hubert looked for help towards Pauline.

  ‘What’ll we do with him?’ Hubert said.

  ‘Get a doctor, I suppose,’ Pauline said, not moving. ‘It’s your job. You’ve been paid to look after him.’

  ‘Look, Pauline, we can’t get a doctor. You know he’ll be put straight into the loony-bin; my house will be searched; I’ll be questioned by the police, you’ll be questioned—’

  ‘Oh, no I won’t,’ Pauline said. ‘I’m leaving tonight. Going back to Rome tonight and tomorrow I’m going to the sea. If your bouncy admirer can get rid of her responsibilities and flip off to Greece tomorrow morning, why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Pauline, it would be very dishonourable of you to let me down at this moment. Listen to him, up there!’

  ‘How honest are you?’ Pauline said, the words coming out in an unpremeditated access of insight. She had never questioned his honesty before.

  Possibly suspecting that she already knew more about him than she actually did, he said, ‘Dishonest I may be when pushed to it; it’s a relative thing. But dishonourable, no.’

  Pauline was by now very much upset, and this verbiage confused her. She said, ‘We should go up and get him. Bring him down, and try to do something with him.’

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Hubert, loftily and pained. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’

  The boy’s panic subsided when they opened his door. He was laughing and crying as they brought him downstairs, Pauline holding him by the arm and Hubert following, exhorting him to keep calm, not to worry and to relax.

  There was a canvas chair on the terrace that converted into a full-length couch. Hubert arranged this and they got Kurt stretched out on it crowing through his tears. His voice had the effect of ventriloquism, sounding sometimes from a point above and behind him, sometimes from the ground beside him. No words were distinguishable among these doom-like cries and sob-like spasms of laughter. He bayed like an animal. He fell back exhausted. Hubert fetched him a glass of mineral water and two of his Mitigil tranquillizers which the boy took with upturned mad eyes.

  Pauline was trembling. ‘Either you call a doctor or I do,’ she said.

  ‘He can’t be seen by a doctor here in my house.’

  In the end Hubert agreed to take him to Rome to see a doctor he knew who might even get Kurt into a private clinic. ‘It will cost a fortune,’ Hubert said roughly.

  ‘Isn’t Letizia’s cheque enough for the clinic?’ Pauline was eager to know how much.

  ‘Barely,’ Hubert said. ‘We must hope for the best.’

  It was nearly eleven that night when Hubert arrived in Rome with Kurt, who was somewhat stunned by a further dose of tranquillizers and trembling at the wrists and knees, in the front seat beside him. Hubert drew up at the foot of the Spanish Steps in the Piazza di Spagna, pressed a golden Victorian half-sovereign into Kurt’s hand, told him it was exchangeable for a week’s lodgings, and put the young man out on the pavement. Kurt made his way without looking back to a crowd of young vagrants and hippies who were sitting or reclining on the steps in the warm young night.

  “That’s that,’ said Hubert when he returned. Pauline had waited up for him.

  ‘A clinic?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, a clinic.’

  ‘What clinic?’

  ‘It’s better you shouldn’t know what clinic. If there are any questions, you know nothing. Just mind your own business, my dear.’

  ‘It’s Letizia Bernardini’s problem. You should phone and let her know what’s happened before she leaves for Greece.’

  ‘Don’t be disagreeable, Pauline. Let the girl go in peace.’

  ‘She hates foreigners, actually. She’s that type of Italian. She’s only using you.’

  ‘She appeared to be very charming. She’s entitled to her bit of folk-schmaltz, it’s fashionable among the young.’

  ‘I don’t need to be told by you what it feels like to be young.’

  ‘But you can be taught by me, I see, what it feels like to be jealous.’

  ‘How could I be jealous,’ said Pauline, ‘when you don’t care for women, anyway? That’s what you told me.’

  ‘I do care for women. I don’t have sex with them.’

  Pauline started to cry. ‘There was something passed between you and Letizia. I could see it. All that tenderness. I don’t know what to believe.’

  Hubert put his arm patiently around her shoulders, meting out an almost equal balance of tenderness. ‘You can’t leave me,’ he said, ‘because we’re friends, and I need you.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘NOW YOU PRIESTS,’ HUBERT said, ‘give me my money’s worth. Ours is a friendship based on mutual advantage and so I expect some intellectual recompense for this materially superb dinner that we are about to receive.’

  Father Cuthbert Plaice said coyly, ‘Oh, Hubert!’ Father Gerard gave a jocular smile to Pauline and lifted his fork.

  ‘Pass the wine,’ said Hubert. Pauline was wearing a long lavender-blue dress of floating chiffon; Hubert wore a deep purple patterned shirt of transparent cotton with expensive-looking blue jeans; the smart dining-room had been opened and the silver and fine glasses brought out; a cold buffet of elegant rarities was laid on the sideboard.

  Cuthbert, having tasted his chilled salmon mousse, looked at Pauline across the candlelit table and said, ‘Everything looks very sumptuous this evening.’

  ‘He means opulent,’ Hubert said, for no other reason than to be difficult.

  ‘It’s only a semblance of opulence,’ said Pauline, warily; she was evidently thinking that their golden windfall must inevitably reach a point of exhaustion.

 
‘But what is opulence,’ said Hubert, ‘but a semblance of opulence?’

  ‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘I would say there is a very, very great difference.’

  ‘How ingenuous you are!’ said Hubert.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said the young priest. ‘How?—ingenuous.…’

  ‘If you imagine,’ Hubert said, ‘that appearance may belie the reality, then you are wrong. Appearances are reality.’

  ‘Oh, come, Hubert,’ said Father Cuthbert. ‘Pauline has just said that you have here a semblance of opulence. “Semblance” was her word wasn’t it, Pauline?’

  ‘Yes, it was,’ said Pauline, ‘and Hubert knows what I mean.’

  ‘A vulgar concept,’ Hubert said. ‘Tonight we have opulence.’

  ‘But it might not be everybody’s idea of opulence,’ ventured Gerard. ‘I mean of course you’re making reality out to be something very subjective, aren’t you? People differ in their perceptions.’

  ‘Reality is subjective,’ said Hubert. ‘In spite of what your religion claims, I say that even your religion is based on the individual perception of appearances only. Apart from these, there is no reality.’

  ‘Try having a scientist agree with you,’ said Cuthbert, making little excited movements in his chair.

  ‘The more advanced scientists do agree with me; in fact they’re almost mystics,’ Hubert said. ‘As am I.’

  ‘Can you come to the sideboard?’ said Pauline. ‘Take your own plates and help yourselves.’

  ‘It looks delicious,’ said Gerard, following her to the sideboard. ‘And you look very nice in that gown, Pauline.’

  ‘It’s new,’ she said.

  ‘Is Maggie back from her holidays?’ Cuthbert meanwhile enquired softly of Hubert, as if treading a mined field.

  But Hubert ignored the question, standing back and beckoning the guests towards the spread of cooked meats and the choiceworthy range of salads. When they were seated Hubert produced a different wine, recommending it with a grand and far-away voice.

  It was mid-September and still the heat of summer hovered far into the nights of Rome and its surroundings. Tonight at Nemi there was a faint hill breeze, hardly enough to flicker the candles through the open doors of the dining-room balcony.