The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Delicious,’ said Cuthbert. ‘Delicious wine.’

  ‘Delicious,’ said Gerard.

  ‘And Maggie,’ Cuthbert plodded on, ‘…have you heard from her?’

  ‘Not a word,’ Pauline said, warming up to communicability which, with a little more wine, would presently become volubility. ‘We had a letter from her before she left Nemi. She told us all her movements up to the end of this month. She should have been in America at the moment but I believe she didn’t go. She’s still in Italy. She wants us to get out of this house by the end of September, but—’

  ‘Pauline!’ said Hubert. ‘Don’t you think you might be boring these learned Fathers with this trivial gossip?’

  ‘No, it isn’t boring at all,’ Cuthbert said.

  ‘Isn’t your chair comfortable, Cuthbert?’ Hubert said.

  ‘My chair? Oh, yes, thank you kindly, it’s quite comfortable, Hubert.’

  ‘Cuthbert very often motionizes,’ Gerard explained with well-wined pleasantness, ‘while verbalizing, depending upon the emotive force of the topic in its relation to the scope and limitations inherent in the process of verbalization.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hubert, inclining himself very slightly in aristocratic acknowledgement of this exposition and with the same movement lifting his glass of deep red wine. He sipped and looked at a point above Pauline’s head, as one who savours.

  “Well, I wasn’t being boring,’ Pauline said. ‘I was only saying that Maggie and I’ve never seen her, mind you, I haven’t met her at all is simply impossibly spoilt. Too much money. She had a gentleman’s agreement with Hubert and—’

  ‘Maggie is not a gentleman,’ Hubert said, ‘and I find personalities a boring subject of conversation, Pauline, if you please.’

  “What else is there to talk about?’ Pauline said. ‘Everyone reads the papers and we hear the news; I think it’s boring to discuss what everyone’s heard already. The point about Maggie is that she’s holding this threat over our heads while she’s sunning herself on some beach. We only have two weeks to go, and—’

  ‘Pauline, enough!’ Hubert said, loudly.

  ‘Maybe we could be of help?’ Cuthbert said. ‘We found Mary, her daughter-in-law, a very charming, human person. Could I have a word with her? Gerard was in Ischia with them the beginning of August, you know. He—’

  ‘Ischia—I thought they were going to Sardinia,’ Pauline said.

  ‘Maggie changed her plans,’ said Gerard. ‘I had an invitation from Mary to go study the surviving ecological legends of Ischia,’ Father Gerard said. ‘I stayed with them, it was very comfortable. And I must say that area is rich in legends of nature-worship. Mary listed for me many cases of surviving nature-practices and superstitions in that area. They’re devout Catholics, of course. I’m not saying anything against their faith; those peasants are great Catholics.’

  ‘But they worship the tree-spirits and the water-spirits,’ said Hubert.

  ‘No, no, I wouldn’t say worship. You’ve got it wrong. The Church continues to absorb many pagan nature-rituals because the Church is ecology-conscious.’

  Pauline, who had been engaged in conversation with Cuthbert while the other priest was expounding all this to Hubert, suddenly broke in and, hurling the words across the table, said, ‘Hubert listen to this! Lauro, that Italian boy who was your secretary and works for the Radcliffes—well, he went to join them in Ischia and he’s sleeping with Mary and Maggie. What d’you think of that?’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ said Cuthbert, bouncing in his chair, ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. But, well, maybe don’t you think, Gerard? it’s something that Hubert and Pauline ought to know.’

  Gerard, somewhat shaken, said hastily, ‘Why, yes, in confidence, of course. As I told Cuthbert on my return from Ischia, this state of affairs arises from an impression, as it was indicated to me by primary coadjunctive factors, that formed in that location with the Radcliffes. But still, as I said, I found Mary very intelligent to be with and very, very helpful. I think, in her case, it’s only a passing phase and that young Lauro should never have been allowed the freedom that he has. Mary was very helpful with her documentational listings.’ When he had finished this speech he looked at Pauline reproachfully, as if by her outburst she had been a confessor who had burst out of the confessional proclaiming the outrage of a penitent’s sins.

  Pauline was not apparently concerned with his feelings. She was looking intently at Hubert. He looked back in aloof silence.

  ‘Gerard,’ said Father Cuthbert, ‘is really very perceptive; since he told me about it, I thought about it and I decided this is something that you ought to know, Hubert, because both Lauro and Maggie have been friends of yours.’

  ‘Personalities bore me,’ said Hubert. ‘I’ve spent too much of my life on perishable gossip. Cuthbert, let me change chairs with you; I can see that there’s really something wrong with yours.’ He got up and started moving his chair. Cuthbert looked bewildered.

  ‘It’s only a reflex of Cuthbert’s,’ said Father Gerard.

  Hubert replaced his chair and before he sat down refilled their glasses. He said, ‘Gossip and temporal trivialities. Whereas the intellectual principle endures. Cuthbert, be intellectual, for God’s sake.’

  Pauline took up her plate, holding it at arm’s length from her new dress, and moved to the sideboard for a second helping.

  ‘I thought you’d be interested, Hubert,’ said Cuthbert, getting up to follow Pauline.

  Pauline said, ‘We’ve been hard at work all day. It’s nice to relax at night.’

  ‘Do you find it relaxing to think of Lauro busying himself with Maggie and Mary by turns?’ Hubert said.

  The priests giggled coyly.

  Pauline said, ‘I do.’

  ‘Then you have a sexual problem, my dear,’ Hubert said.

  ‘Whose fault is that?’ said Pauline.

  ‘Maybe we’d better keep off personalities, as Hubert suggests,’ Gerard said. ‘There was a lot of that going on in Ischia, I’m afraid.’

  ‘There always has been,’ Hubert said. ‘That’s where your studies in pagan ecology should begin. Copulation has always been part of the worship and propitiation of nature.’

  ‘Well, Christianity has given all that a very, very, new meaning,’ said Cuthbert.

  ‘To us,’ said Hubert, ‘who are descended from the ancient gods, your Christianity is simply a passing phase. To us, even the God of the Old Testament is a complete upstart and his Son was merely a popular divergence. Diana the huntress, the goddess of nature, and ultimately of fertility, lives on. If you poison her rivers and her trees she takes her revenge in a perfectly logical way. The God of the Christians and the Jews where’s the logic in him?’

  ‘Hubert,’ said Pauline, ‘you know I’m a Catholic. I don’t mind helping you but I won’t have my religion insulted.’

  Father Cuthbert said, ‘Good, Pauline!’

  ‘My dear, I knew you would take it personally,’ Hubert said, ‘and you look adorable tonight in your new dress. Go and get the sherbet ice out of the refrigerator and mind your frock.’

  When the visitors had left, greatly cheered by the wine and liqueurs, the pleasant food, the physical prettiness of the evening and Hubert’s exciting insults, Pauline went to change out of her new dress into a cotton nightdress in which she descended to join Hubert at the kitchen sink where he was stacking the dishes into the dish-washer. They started the machine buzzing, then Hubert poured whisky for both, and they sat at the kitchen table, sipping and sizing each other up for a silent while. Eventually Hubert said, ‘Lauro and Maggie. Lauro and Mary. When will it be Lauro and Michael?’

  ‘Just what I was wondering myself,’ Pauline said. ‘Only a few months ago I wouldn’t have thought of it. But now since being here alone with you, Hubert, and sharing the trouble, we seem to think the same thoughts. I feel there’s a real bond between us. An everlasting bond.’

  ‘Everlasting!’ said Hubert. ‘A bond, my de
ar Miss Thin, is not very far from bondage. Don’t frighten me, please.’

  ‘Well, Hubert, you don’t have to go back to calling me Miss Thin, suddenly, just at this moment. It’s not very nice of you after all we’ve been through.’

  ‘When I feel the bonds tightening, Miss Thin,’ said Hubert, ‘I break loose from them.’

  ‘All right, I’ll go away,’ said Pauline.

  ‘What have I done?’ said Hubert. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Pauline. ‘That’s the trouble. You’ve done nothing at all because you’re a confirmed queer. Proximity to a man who does nothing gets on one’s nerves after a time. I’m at the end of my tether and I’m leaving.’

  ‘Before one speaks of sex I should have thought one considered the aspect of love,’ Hubert said.

  ‘I’ve got a boy-friend in Brussels working for the Common Market,’ Pauline said. ‘I can go to Brussels and consider the aspect of love with him.’

  ‘Pauline, Pauline, how heartless you are! Love takes time,’ Hubert said. ‘And if you think you have a right to describe me as a queer when you don’t know the first thing about my physical inclinations, then you’ve got a stupid and a common mind. If I were to impart to you the erotic details of what goes on in my mind they would excite you but per se would consequently cease to excite me.’

  Pauline, successfully perplexed by this collage of clues, replied sulkily, ‘Well, you once told me that you’d never slept with a woman; you said so yourself—’

  ‘Which is not to say I can’t.’

  ‘Well, if you haven’t, how do you know if you can?’

  ‘Have you ever eaten blubber?’

  ‘No,’ said Pauline, ready to be very annoyed.

  ‘Whale-blubber. I ate some once in a little fisherman’s cafe in Normandy. It was on the menu so I thought I’d try it,’ Hubert said. ‘It tasted all right—fat and fishy—but I suppose there might be ways in which one could prepare it to make an absolutely delicious dish. However, you say you can’t eat it—’

  ‘I said I’d never eaten it. What’s whale-blubber got to do with sex?’

  ‘Practically everything, if you’re an Eskimo. Survival first, sex second.’ As he spoke Hubert, noticing a two-inch quantity of champagne at the bottom of the bottle, poured it into his own glass. He now drank it and waited for Pauline to snap back some reply to him, which she failed to do.

  Hubert repeated dreamily, ‘Blubber!’

  ‘Do you mean to insult women by saying they’re like blubber to sleep with?’ Pauline said.

  ‘I don’t know what they’re like to sleep with. But just because you haven’t done a thing doesn’t imply you can’t.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never eaten blubber and I’m damn sure I couldn’t,’ Pauline said. ‘What has all this got to do with sex?’

  ‘I thought we were talking about love,’ Hubert said, persuasively. He considered it was time to go to bed but on the whole he decided another bottle of champagne between them would be a good investment and a good idea. It was appalling, he thought as he undid the cork, how much she wanted a lover and how much he needed a secretary-accomplice.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Pauline, sitting winefully and sulkily in the corner of the big sofa.

  ‘Opening another bottle of expensive champagne. With you in this mood, Miss Thin, I can’t afford not to.’

  ‘May I bring my lover in Brussels to stay with us for a while? He gets leave soon,’ Pauline said.

  ‘No,’ he said, crossly. If she can try to be clever, he thought, I can be really clever. He filled their glasses, sank into his chair and raised his glass slightly to her before he sipped.

  ‘You’re using me,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. You’ll be paid as soon as I have the money, Pauline.’

  ‘I don’t want to be paid.’

  ‘You want to use me?’ he said.

  ‘No, I want to leave. Your behaviour.…’

  ‘You want,’ said Hubert, ‘to use me to satisfy your dreams. Which is wicked. I only want to use you as a secretary, which is perfectly reasonable behaviour. Are you in love with your lover in Brussels?’

  ‘That’s my business. Why do you keep talking about love?’

  ‘My dear, it was you who started—’

  ‘No, it was you.’

  ‘Look,’ said Hubert, ‘one can’t have sex with one’s secretary. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘Now you’re talking about sex,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it was you who started talking about sex, Miss Thin,’ Hubert said, and refilled their glasses.

  ‘We have to get new locks put on the doors tomorrow. The man’s coming,’ Pauline said, sleepily.

  ‘Why are we getting new locks?’

  ‘You told me to have them changed every month in case Maggie got hold of a key or something. Tomorrow’s the sixteenth. I told the man to come tomorrow. Shall I put him off?’

  ‘It’s expensive, everything’s expensive,’ Hubert said, ‘but no, my dear, don’t put him off. You’re very efficient.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. She put down her glass and started to walk carefully to the door, weaving only a little from her surplus intake of wine.

  ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’ Hubert said when she reached the door. He made no motion to get up.

  She looked back and felt the start of a drunken haze. She decided to use what lucidity remained to her to climb the stairs, clutching the banisters. ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘What do you think I am? A piece of blubber?’ She achieved an exit, leaving him to think over what she had said.

  What he thought was that the worst was over for the time being. She had got out what was in her mind and might even regret having done so. However, the air was a little cleared and he could count on the status quo continuing until it was possible for him to develop a better and more stable status quo. Hubert finished the champagne, so musing, and enjoying the solitude of the night. He thought of Maggie in Ischia. She had not told him of her change of plans. He didn’t know her house in Ischia. ‘Maggie…,’ mused Hubert, ‘Maggie.…’ At about three in the morning he had a sudden desire to telephone Maggie and wake her up, hear her voice. The Marchese would probably be snoring by her side in one of those huge matrimonial beds so prized by Italian families. Hubert felt he didn’t care. He half rose from his chair to go into the study, get her number from the exchange and ring her up. Then he recalled with great sadness that the telephone of his house had long since been cut off.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘NO REPLY FROM HUBERT,’ Maggie said. ‘I should have had the phone bill paid if only to keep in touch with him. But I didn’t see why he should have the use of it free, calling San Francisco, Hong Kong, Cape Town, you name it. And that lesbian. I had the phone cut off. Anyway I sent him a telegram two days ago to ask if he’s ready to vacate the house, and he hasn’t replied.’

  Her husband, Berto di Tullio-Friole, was intent on listening to a Beethoven symphony on the gramophone and frowned across the room at Maggie to keep her voice down; he made an irritable gesture with his hand to accompany the frown; he was not in the least disenthralled with Maggie; he only wanted very much to savour the mighty bang-crash and terror of sound which would soon be followed by the sweet ‘never mind’, so adorable to his ears, of the finale. He was a sentimental man. Maggie and Mary lowered their voices.

  Berto closed his eyes till the record came to an end. Then he went to join the women at the other part of the long paved room with its windows opened to the sunlight of October and the sea beyond. Lauro appeared from nowhere and was ordered to fetch a whisky and soda for Berto. ‘Si, Signor Marchese,’ said Lauro. No first names with Berto, nor would Berto have tolerated his wife, her son and her daughter-in-law to be addressed by their first names by any servant in his presence. Lauro, understanding this perfectly, had not even tried. They were nearly ready for lunch, already missing the past summer’s days with their morning rhythm of laze a
nd swim, laze and swim, on and off their private rocky beach. This beach, a small promontory, was not entirely private by law, only the elevated rock was private. The pebbly shore where the waves lapped was like all other beaches in Italy, public property, a fact well-known to the blithe visitors who ostentatiously intruded whenever the whim seized them to bring their little boats ashore. It had happened that, one day during the summer, Maggie’s swim had been disturbed by a girl in a rowing boat; she was washing her long hair over the side with a shampoo which bubbled Maggie’s way. Maggie, aware of her impotence in territorial rights, shouted at the girl, ‘You can’t wash your hair in sea-water.’ Whereupon the girl shouted back, ‘It’s a special sea-water shampoo.’

  Maggie had been very upset and after a hard day’s work on the telephone to the mainland had procured five private coastguards who still lounged along the rim of the shore below and on the rock and in front of Maggie’s house, dressed up as ‘intruders’, thus to keep at a distance the real ones. ‘The time is coming,’ Maggie said severely, ‘when we’ll have to employ our own egg-throwers to throw eggs at us, and, my God, of course, miss their aim, when we go to the opera on a gala night.’ She had sighed; a deep sigh, from the heart.

  Meanwhile they sat in the room with the blinds lowered against both the fairly bright sunlight and those hired intruders, who Maggie thought were making a noise beyond the call of realism, while Berto waited for his drink and the two women continued their discussion of Hubert.

  Berto, who was less rich than Maggie, but rich enough to understand the excessive and rather mysterious concerns of rich women of Maggie’s generation, and did not object to them, listened with a touch of tolerance and another touch of jealousy. The war of 1973 in the Middle East was just coming to an end. Things would never be the same again, as Berto had been told by the owner of the only newspaper he read. Once when he had entertained at a shooting-party a journalist of considerable fame, descendant of a noble family from Verona, who had ordered the delivery of three newspapers of conflicting politics, Berto had been highly indignant; his roof had been insulted and his hearth befouled; how could anyone read a Communist or a slightly left-wing newspaper, how could any friend of his read anything but the established paper of the right wing with its news reported fairly and its list of important deaths? The mild and middle-aged gentleman of Verona had tried very hard to point out that his profession required him to read all slants of opinion, but had not succeeded in conveying this to Berto who was convinced that all the needs of objectivity were supplied by the one and only newspaper permitted within his walls and whose owner he had known all his life. The journalist gave in and cancelled his wild order, being a man of agreeable temperament, and a desire to shoot some animals being one of the purposes of his visit.