by Muriel Spark
‘My Gauguin!’ Maggie said. ‘It was in my house at Nemi. What is it doing in this catalogue? Is it up for sale?’
The younger of the visiting art historians said, ‘Why, that was sold last week. We were there. You must be mistaken, ma’am.’
‘How can I be mistaken?’ Maggie screamed. ‘Don’t I know my own Gauguin? There’s the garden seat and the shed.’
Everyone spoke at once with ideas pouring forth: ring the police; no, never the police, you don’t want them to know what you’ve got; get your lawyer; ring the gallery, yes, call Neuilles-Pfortzheimer, I know the director well; I know Alex Pfortzheimer; call your home at Nemi, who is the caretaker?… ‘Art-thieves!’ Maggie screamed, pointing at the two visitors who looked decidedly uncomfortable, having come predominantly to find the best means of entry to the little Chinese sitting-room with its rare collection of jade, to plan a future jewel-robbery at least, and certainly they were alert also to where Maggie’s room, with its wall-safe, was situated, since it was known she had taken her large ruby pendant, part of the diaspora of the Hungarian crown jewels, out of the bank to wear to one or two of the season’s balls, even though she ostentatiously insisted, as was the fashion, that it was a fake. The visitors had also noted, with an eye to its whereabouts, Berto’s sublime Veronese about which they had already heard, at the top of the staircase. They were innocent, however, of Maggie’s Gauguin and the more she cried out against them, there in the graceful hall among the astonished friends, the more it seemed how demonstrably wronged the strangers were; the only discomfort in the affair, for them, was the risk involved should the police be called in, for they were already in some embarrassment in France.
Berto looked at them and said, quietly, ‘I am sorry. I do apologize. My wife is distraught,’ at the same time as he put his arm round Maggie as if to protect her from the menaces of a malignant spirit.
Mary joined the group and, shortly, Michael too, seeming, as he more and more frequently did, that he had too much on his mind to take notice of a domestic emergency. He eyed his watch. Mary was looking rather enviously at Berto’s gesture of concern for Maggie, for in fact he looked very handsome at those moments of spontaneous charm belonging as it did to his own type and generation; it did not occur to Mary how silly Michael would have looked, how affected, bending his eyes upon herself as Berto bent his, so frankly with love, over Maggie. She only admired handsome Berto and envied Maggie who, pouring out her accusations, did not, in Mary’s view, really deserve so fine a solicitude. If Mary had suspected the theft of any of her property she would have gone about it silently and with a well-justifiable slyness. Maggie, in the meantime, shrieked on, and Berto murmured over her as if she greatly mattered in the first place, the guests in his house next, and the Gauguin not at all.
Lunch was delayed forty minutes, but the hubbub had been whisked away little by little by Berto’s tactics, and the guests had been waved into the green sitting-room, had been served drinks and their several troubled souls variously feather-dusted, while Maggie, refusing her room, lay on a sofa and allowed herself also to be somewhat becalmed. Berto was considerably aided in his efforts by the two cousins, women of authority and many wiles, who had pulled themselves together quickly for the purpose of family solidarity and the pressing need to avoid any threat of a lawsuit against themselves for defamation of character. Quite soon the embarrassed art historians were given new courage, full explanations, and were begged to stay; the elder remained slightly nervous, but both magnanimously overlooked Maggie’s accusations which, from her sofa, she blurted out from time to time, ever more feebly, for thirty-odd minutes. A short space, and they went into lunch.
Berto had refused to do anything whatsoever about the Gauguin mystery before lunch. ‘Later, later, it must wait,’ he said. ‘If the picture is stolen…well, first we have to make a plan of inquiry, and first we sit down and have a drink before lunch. Maggie, my dear.…Love, be tranquil. We have a drink, all. Only the worst can happen.
Only the worst…It is not so very terrible. The worst is always happening to many people everywhere. And only the worst can happen, Maggie, my dear.’
Now they sat in the perfect dining-room overlooking the artificial lake. Berto looked attentively towards his cousin Marisa; she was the newsbearer, grand as a Roman statue and anxious to get these pettifogging hysterics of Maggie’s over and done with so that she could impart news of the world that mattered to the assembled company, whether they understood what she was talking about or not; for Marisa’s world concerned the heavily populated cousinship of their family, and only she could know which of their Colonna cousins was in love with which Lancelotti, and how much the dowry would be; only Marisa could know who was expected to inherit when the ancient Torlonia should die, probably within the next few days; she alone knew that the Baring nephews had been staying in Paris with the Milanese Pignatellis in an endeavour to find a settlement about the companies in Switzerland; all this Marisa only was able to know since only she had the mornings on the telephone with a family information service from all parts. Very often, when the family themselves failed to telephone or were not to be found at home, she would get the required information from an old housekeeper. All these facts she was waiting to impart to Berto and her other cousin, the thin religious widow Viola, at lunch, for she had a strong sense of what was right for lunch, what to eat, what to wear, what to say; she expected fully that these family concerns would enthral every listener; if not, what were the strangers doing at Berto’s table? She was as confident of the fascination of her subject to everyone as were the ancient dramatists who held their audiences with incessant variations on the activities of the gods and heroes of legend. And indeed, such was her confidence that she did manage to hold the attention of the outsider, for however unintelligible the substance of her talk she brought a sense of glamorous realism to the Italian mythology of the old families.
Maggie had brought her glass of strong rye whisky to the table, trembling still, but settling somewhat under the influence of Berto’s solicitude and induced into an effort of self-control by a determination not to be overborne by the tourist-attraction, Marisa. Maggie now sat gleaming in her shaken beauty at the top of the oval table. On her right was the elder of the intruders who had been pressed to stay for lunch, and who went by the name of Malcolm Stuyvesant. Next to him, Mary, with Berto on her other hand, and next to Berto at the other end of the table his other cousin, the black-dressed pale little Princess Viola Borgognona, very thin of neck among her strings of seed-pearls; Viola was agog to hear Marisa’s new serial in the family saga, for it always gave her an excuse to be morally scandalized and to recall the family scandals, misalliances and intrigues of the past. She, like Berto, was aware that this inter-family talk had little relevance to the world of foreign visitors or of newcomers to the family, but she felt that it should be common knowledge even if it wasn’t and, anyway, it was plain that people were not bored by it. Marisa had already started talking. ‘Dino is sure to get married again when the year is up. He goes every morning to the cemetery, and then rides with Clementine, but of course the parents think he’s too old. What can one say?’ She turned appealingly to her neighbours, Michael on her left and then, on her right, to the younger of the two intruders, George Falk by name. ‘What can one say?’ she asked first one and then the other.
Berto, however, was still concerned for Maggie, and now started on a course that was distinctively his own and which he reserved for occasions when the atmosphere required to be soothed. It consisted of the introduction of certain words into the conversation which formed a magic circle of sweet suggestiveness, and, such was his instinct and skill, that he managed to do this without definitely changing the subject. ‘When I was young,’ Berto now said, ‘I was very much in love with a Spanish girl who had been married to a man much older than herself; he was killed in the war. But although I was very much in love I didn’t marry her because I felt that she would always desire an older man, and I,
of course, was not much older.’
‘Well, in the case of Dino,’ Marisa went on, ‘let me tell you that he does ride with her every morning after visiting poor Lidia’s tomb.’
‘It is so fragrant and cool in that cemetery,’ Berto said. ‘You know, it’s quite romantic. I went once to visit our German aunts who are buried in that little cemetery, tucked away in the Vatican, and I heard the nightingale, suddenly, as if paradise were there among the treetops. I also would have liked, afterwards, to have gone riding with a beautiful lady and kiss her.’
So he went on with his groupings of ‘I was in love’ and his ‘fragrants’, his ‘heaven’ and his ‘beautiful lady’ and all the pleasant numbers of romantic poetry trite in themselves but accumulatively evocative of a better life than the actual and present one; so he went on, and presently he could see Maggie’s wrists relaxing on the table and her shoulders responding as a cat which has been upset responds to the soft stroking hand.
He could see that the danger was past that she should again open her mouth and let forth her accusations like the dead pouring out of their tombs, crazed, on All Souls’ Night. If she had been a cat she would by now have started, against her better judgment, to purr, and if an analytical critic had been taking a careful note of all that was said, Berto’s magic technique would have been a feast more special than the very good lunch they were eating. Mary looked at Michael who alone among the company was brooding over whatever it was he had on his mind, and then she looked at Berto and once more thought how attractive he was in spite of his age; she hadn’t noticed before how good-looking was Berto, what marvellous eyes he had.
‘And before they went to Baden they were getting that new pool in the garden,’ Marisa was saying. ‘They had to dig much deeper, and do you know they found a marble head of the first century? Dino says they are now digging deeper to find the rest of it.’
‘The Belle Arti will stop everything,’ said Cousin Viola. ‘They’ll take it for the nation and someone will steal it and smuggle it abroad.’
‘Well, they had to leave for Baden,’ said Marisa. ‘But I’m sure, I’m sure, that they haven’t breathed a word to the Belle Arti.’ Again she appealed to her neighbours. ‘The Belle Arti,’ she said to Michael on her left and to the young criminal who went by the name of George Falk on her right, ‘is our cultural protection agency, but they stop work on anything the moment you report a find. In Italy you only have to dig a few metres and you have a find. If one reported every find to the Belle Arti nobody would get a house built or a swimming pool.’
‘Can they trust the servants?’ said Cousin Viola.
‘It happened once to me,’ Berto said, ‘that I was helping Guillaume to put up a rabbit hutch as he was sure the rabbits we bought to eat were poisonous and he wanted to breed our own rabbits. We were digging a trench out there behind the orchard and I felt my spade touch on a stone, but not a stone. It felt not like the stones of the garden. So I put aside the spade and went down on my knees. Guillaume was amazed and he said, “But what are you doing, Marchese!” I scratched at the earth with my hands and I saw a colour, blue, then another, red. It was a moment I could never forget, such a moment of all my dreams you remember, Viola, the Byzantine vase. It was in fragments, of course.’
‘It’s in the museum in Verona,’ said Viola, calmly eating.
‘Oh, yes, it went to the museum.’
‘You could have kept it,’ Marisa said.
‘How could I have kept it? But the moment of discovery, it’s a moment that no one can take away from me, not even the Communists. I went back that night to look at the pieces in the moonlight. We left them where we found them, afraid to break them, and Guillaume constructed a little wire fence around them. I looked up at the clouds passing over the moon thinking of Guillaume’s tenderness as he made the fence. It was una cosa molto bella, molto bella—’
‘You have many fine things in this house’ said the younger criminal.
‘Exquisite,’ said Mr Stuyvesant, the older one, for whom under another name Interpol were looking to help them with their inquiries. ‘It must have been wonderful to grow up with them.’
‘I was not here very much as a child,’ Berto said. ‘I was a great deal in Switzerland, and then at school. But when I was a very young man just before the outbreak of the war I remember we had a masked ball here. It was considered a small house for a masked ball, but it was a summer night, you can imagine for young people in those days how exciting.…’
The troubadour host turned inquiringly to Lauro who stood quietly by his chair waiting for him to finish speaking. Lauro had appeared unexpectedly, for he did not serve at table here in Berto’s villa, clashing so much as he did with Guillaume and the cook. Berto looked up at the brown face with a little questioning smile. Lauro spoke in rapid Italian, very excited and happy and Berto listened with his eyes on Maggie till Lauro had finished, and had turned and left the dining-room.
‘The masked ball,’ said Marisa across the table to her cousin Viola, ‘was where Mimi de Bourbon met Aunt Clothilde. She had just broken off from the Thurn and Taxis—’
‘Maggie!’ said Berto, ‘do you know what Lauro has just told me? Your Gauguin is perfectly safe at Nemi; it’s there in your house and hasn’t been moved.’
‘Oh, darling!’ said Maggie, who was by now sweetly mellowed by the fragrant distillations of Berto’s talk.
Viola, more mesmerized by her cousin Marisa than by her cousin Berto, set her pale head at a saintly angle, and said, ‘Aunt Clothilde is still President of the Orphans of St Joachim. She does good work. She has not changed since the old days.’
‘Well, she should have,’ said Marisa, ‘but that’s a different topic. I remember—’ Meanwhile, Berto recounted how Lauro had telephoned to his girl-friend at Nemi, and she had gone on a pretext to Hubert’s house, and there had seen the leafy Gauguin in its usual place.
‘How did she know,’ said Mary, ‘where to look for that picture?’
‘Apparently Lauro’s fiancée goes to Mallindaine’s dreadful meetings regularly. Moon-worshippers. You can imagine—’
Maggie turned to Mr Stuyvesant, ‘Your Gauguin must be a fake,’ she said, happily.
‘It isn’t my Gauguin,’ said the art-thief. ‘It belonged to Neuilles-Pfortzheimer’s client, and it has been sold as an authentic. One should inform them.’
‘Could it possibly be,’ said George Falk, the younger crook, ‘that the Gauguin at your home is a fake?’
‘It is authentic,’ said Maggie, and rose to lead her guests into the garden-room for coffee.
Michael woke from his self-absorbed dream and said, ‘Mallindaine could have had a copy made. He could have sold the original.’
‘Oh, come,’ said Berto, as he stood aside to let his guests move out of the dining-room.
‘We should get the experts,’ Michael said, ‘and, anyway, get the picture out of Hubert Mallindaine’s hands.’
‘That I do agree,’ said Maggie.
Berto was about to catch Maggie’s arm, to waylay her before she left, and whisper in her ear that she really might, now that she knew her picture was safe, and her initial shock had blown over, apologize to Mr Stuyvesant and Mr Falk. He was about to say she really should, when he was himself waylaid by Guillaume, Maggie in the meantime sailing ahead. Guillaume, alone with Berto in the dining-room, now confided his change of mind about the two visitors of whom he had earlier approved. ‘I think they’re up to no good,’ said Guillaume.
‘But why, Guillaume? What makes you say so?’
Guillaume seemed uncertain what precisely to reply. ‘The senior visitor spilled ragoût on his trousers,’ he ventured somewhat wildly. ‘It’s embarrassing him a great red stain, and he’s trying to cover it up. Right in the front.’
Berto, stifling all reasonable thoughts, and only recalling that it is the easiest thing in the world to splash on one’s clothes some of that tomato sauce swimming in which Italian cooks love to present their pasta, was
immediately troubled. Plainly, Guillaume had merely only offered an outward symbol for an inward insight, and it was the insight that Berto trusted.
‘See if you can do anything for his trousers,’ Berto said. ‘Offer him some talcum powder. Ragoût is always a messy dish. I don’t see what it has remotely to do with trusting the unfortunate man, anyway. An accident can happen to the best of us. No reflection whatsoever on his character.’
In the garden-room Berto found Mr Stuyvesant sitting in a crouched position, leaning well forward, with his legs crossed, holding his coffee. But one could still see, on the pale thin-striped trousers that Berto had so much admired, numerous red blotches and smears. He was glad he had not asked Maggie to apologize to these men. It struck him, now, that it was strange how neither of them had seemed to expect an apology, even after news had arrived that Maggie’s picture was still in her house. They had not been offended, only embarrassed, by Maggie’s outburst. That could be a sign of guilt. One had to be careful who one let into one’s house. He looked out of the french windows to where the young Mr Falk was walking on the lawn between Maggie and Cousin Viola, and he looked again at Mr Stuyvesant crouched over his coffee. Guillaume had come in to hover. ‘Why don’t you go with Guillaume to the pantry,’ said Berto, ‘and let him do something to your trousers?’
Mr Stuyvesant looked helplessly at his splashed suit and gave a short laugh. ‘Not the pantry,’ Guillaume said. ‘If the gentleman will go to the guest cloakroom I will bring some materials to clean.’
Ah, yes, yes, thought Berto. Guillaume is thinking of the silver depository. Not the pantry, not the pantry. Stuyvesant rose to follow Guillaume while Berto, Knight of the Round Table, courteously remarked, ‘Beastly stuff, ragout.’
He hung around the window watching his guests and his wife wandering around the garden in the May sunlight. Lauro and Michael stood under the lovely portico which gave off to the back of the house. Lauro was talking quietly but urgently, Michael listening sullenly. Lauro glanced towards the french window, caught Berto’s eye where he stood watching, grinned, and resumed his talk. Berto watched Lauro with tolerant resignation; he had little doubt that Lauro was raising a moderate sum of money every so often from Michael; not much, but a moderate amount, just to keep quiet about the mistress in Rome. Berto looked at Lauro’s shining head with its expensive hair-cut. It was difficult to think of him keeping a secret or doing anything free of charge. ‘Once a whore,’ Berto mused to himself, ‘always a whore. That’s my philosophy.’
