by Muriel Spark
There came a moment when they let Betty’s eldest uncle speak. It was a moment of gravity. Betty’s mother filled the liqueur glasses with a sweet syrupy drink and handed them round accompanied each by a lace-edged napkin with a little lacey circlet to rest the glass on. The uncle spoke.
‘Betty,’ he said, ‘is entitled to her share of the land. We have a bit of land.’ And he pulled the black, smart briefcase that rested on the arm of the sofa beside him on to his knee, opened it, and extracted a folder. From this he brought a much-folded large document and a map which he spread out on the marble-topped dining-table.
Lauro began to take some notice, and the thought of Agata and his fury against her subsided, together with the memory of her accusations and the slightly older memory of the occasion when, just at the magic moment he had wanted to withdraw, the calculating bitch had told him she was on the pill, it was all right. These rankling images, as at the cinema, changed into that of the actual scene before him, Betty’s uncle and her land.
Betty’s family comprised her mother’s side; the father was unknown and said to be dead. The grandparents, too, were dead and there remained only the uncles, co-proprietors of the fields represented in the big map open on the table.
Lauro bent over it with his arm affectionately round plump Betty’s shoulder. He played with her hair and touched her neck as he looked, for he was excited by the surprising idea that she had so much land of her own. They traced a line. Betty’s portion was about ten acres, on a plateau among the cliffs of Nemi. ‘But it can’t be there,’ Lauro said.
The uncle’s finger traced the boundaries. ‘Of course it’s there,’ he said, and patiently he took out of his brief-case the title deeds, tracing their history for five generations right into young Betty’s hands.
‘This is good land,’ said the younger uncle. ‘Better a few ettari of good land than a hundred kilometres of waste.’
‘But some of that land has been sold. There’s a house there. The Marchesa bought it and a Mr Mallindaine, an eccentric Englishman, lives there. I used to work for him.’
Betty’s mother started to laugh and so did the uncle. ‘She bought it, yes, but not from us,’ said Betty’s well-groomed mother. ‘Some lawyer came along and sold it to her. He said he represented the Church and it was Church property. She got false deeds. We didn’t protest, naturally, when she put up the house. It’s just as well to bide one’s time.’
‘It isn’t hers,’ Betty said, ‘and the house is illegal. It’s abusivo. We can make them take it down.’
‘Any time we like. If we like. We can denounce them.’
‘Send the police along to that house,’ said Betty’s skinny aunt.
‘Why should we? Better let them pay us than pay a fine to the State,’ the elder uncle said. ‘We can sue. But she won’t take it to court; she’ll pay.’
‘Once you leave the job, Lauro,’ Betty’s mother said, ‘you can give the Marchesa a piece of news: she’s got an illegal house and is trespassing on your land.’
Betty’s mother took Lauro’s ash-tray, almost empty as it was, into the kitchen and brought it back clean.
‘The title-deeds of the land,’ said Hubert, ‘were transferred to Maggie on 8 February 1968, a date I can never forget; and at the end of April this house was started on cleared land where no house previously had stood. The house took three years and two months to construct.’
‘The building permit?’ said Massimo de Vita. ‘Was that a fake, too, or didn’t you have one?’
‘Maggie had a building permit, of course,’ Hubert said. ‘I don’t know what she’s done with it. She probably has it in her company offices for safe keeping.’
‘A pity she didn’t come to me sooner,’ said Massimo. He was growing a beard, as yet not long enough to cover the extra chins which would not go away. He looked excited and hastily dressed, as one who had been, as in fact he had, working long hours for several days. In that time he had established beyond doubt that the lawyer who had arranged for Maggie to buy the property at Nemi was not to be found and his name nowhere on the legal records of Italy. He had further discovered that Lauro’s impudent claim that the land on which Hubert’s house was built belonged to his fiancée was not impudent at all, it was true. The whole of the transaction had been a fake, including the documents, and the land presumed to have been Church property belonged to Lauro’s prospective bride at this moment.
‘She should have had me for her lawyer in those days,’ said Massimo. ‘Now I have to write her a letter and see how I can get her out of this mess.’
‘She gave me this house,’ Hubert said sulkily. ‘It is mine. I supervised the building of it for three years and two months; it was agony; getting things done in Italy is agony; then I moved in and a few months later Maggie cut off the funds she had promised in order to maintain it. I can sue.’
‘It’s up to me,’ said the lawyer, ‘to say whether you can sue or not. Meantime, let us look at the facts. You occupy this house no?’
‘Yes,’ said Hubert, meekly.
The library door opened and Pauline Thin put her head round it. ‘Coffee?’ she said chirpily.
‘Get out!’ barked Hubert. Pauline withdrew.
‘But you had no building permit.’
‘There was indeed a building permit,’ Hubert said. ‘I remember obtaining photo-copies from the lawyer to satisfy the building contractors. Everything was regular.’
‘Well, it wasn’t regular,’ said Massimo, ‘and the lawyer least of all. Dante de Lafoucauld, what a name for an Italian lawyer.…You should have known.…You should have—’
‘What’s the matter?’ said an aggressive male voice from the door. It belonged to a skinny sun-bronzed chest, shoulders and pair of arms topped by a yellow-haired head: Walter, with his deep yellow moustache, having been called in from his sun-bath and, bored by Nemi and resentful of Hubert, being now only too keen to take up a quarrel on Pauline’s behalf. Some other voices, male and female, questioned and commented behind him; Pauline had brought some of the local young people to the house for the day. She did this many, many days now, gradually building up something like a commune under the protective wings of the Brotherhood of Diana and Apollo; so far, Hubert had felt it wise to refrain from expressing all the alarm that he felt, even although these young people had seemed to take over the house, left a mess behind them all over the place and never did any work.
Hubert shouted at Walter, ‘Get out! I’m discussing serious business with my lawyer.’ He rose and lumbered over to the door, gave the young man a hefty push, slammed the door shut and locked it. A clamour of protest arose from the other side of the door, subsiding after a few minutes as the footsteps of the lithe and sandalled young set flip-flopped down the staircase into the overgrown garden where these people were wont to be and watch the intertwining of the weeds and get their bodies ever browner by the good offices of Apollo.
‘Now,’ said Hubert when he had simmered down a bit, ‘one problem at a time, if you please. Una cosa alla volta.’
‘Precisely,’ said the lawyer, on the defensive. ‘It’s hardly my fault that—’
‘Down to business,’ said Hubert. ‘Presumably, when Lauro gets married, he will start putting me out of the house.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Massimo.
‘Or they will want some money. A lot of money,’ Hubert said, ‘to keep their mouths shut.’
‘There could be several legal opinions,’ said Massimo. ‘The law is very contradictory. Certainly they will want some money. Certainly. But can they claim it? The house does not exist.’
‘I mean this house,’ Hubert said.
‘It does not exist. How can it exist? It is not on the records. In Italy if a house is not on the records, it has been constructed illegally and we call it abusivo. An abusivo construction does not exist in legal terms. The family who own the land can make the Marchesa pull it down.’
‘But will they?’
‘It depends on
their frame of mind and if they can come to terms. It depends also on whether the land they own is only the top soil. In Italy, sometimes the sub-soil belongs to somebody else; it could belong to the Church or the State. At any rate the family can make trouble for the Marchesa.’
‘She will have to pay,’ Hubert said. ‘Maggie will have to pay them off.’
‘Even then,’ said the lawyer, ‘the police or the town council might discover that it is abusivo and cause the house to be destroyed, but it is unlikely they will know that the house is abusivo unless the family reports it.’
‘Well, it’s my house. Maggie gave it to me.’
‘She had no right to do so. It doesn’t exist.’
‘She will have to make reparation if the house is pulled down,’ Hubert said.
‘Oh, certainly she would have to do that if she gave it to you. The legal transfer of the house to your name fortunately did not take place. Technically the house is still hers. Although of course I believe you, it is obvious that verbally she gave you the house. But now it is certain, anyway, that she can’t put you out. There are many tenants in abusivo houses who cannot be put out and who need not pay rent, either. Because the house does not exist.’
‘And the contents of the house?’ Hubert said.
‘It would be difficult,’ said Massimo, moving his plump hands in the air as he spoke, ‘to say anything about the contents of a house that does not exist How can a nonexistent house contain contents? How can it have a tenant? You don’t exist when you inhabit a house that is abusivo.’
‘Under Italian law?’ said Hubert.
‘It could be argued,’ the lawyer said. ‘It could be argued for a very long time and the longer you stay in a house the more difficult it is to get you out.’
‘Italian law,’ said Hubert, ‘is very exciting. Positively mystical. I approve strongly of Italian law.’
Massimo laughed merrily and looked at his watch, very flat, very gold with its golden band encircling his plump wrist. He said something about lunch time, but Hubert was musing on a private dream of his own from which he presently emerged to say, ‘This house seems to me to be perfectly safe as the headquarters of the Brother-Sisterhood of Diana and Apollo. We can ignore Maggie’s protests about the use the house is being put to; that’s my opinion.’
‘And mine,’ said Maggie’s lawyer. ‘I tear up the letter now which the Marchesa sent me to that effect. I never received it.’
He took a letter from his brief-case and tore it in small pieces.
‘It doesn’t exist,’ Hubert observed.
‘I never received it,’ said Massimo. ‘She did not register it and so it is easy never to receive a letter with the postal situation in our country being what it is.’
The door opened and Pauline stood on the threshold of the library. ‘Why have you unplugged the telephone?’ she said. ‘Someone is wanting to use it.’
‘I don’t want to be disturbed,’ Hubert said. ‘Miss Thin, are you my secretary or are you not?’
‘I’m hungry. We’re all hungry’ she said, ‘and the lunch is ready and the cook is getting angry.’
‘How much pleasanter it was,’ said Hubert to the lawyer, ‘before we had our good fortune.’ He rose with the lawyer and swept past Pauline, declaring that the blessings deriving from his ancestor the goddess Diana were mixed ones indeed.
As he descended the stairs Massimo loitered to grasp Pauline and press her against the wall of the landing; then he kissed her heavily whether she liked it or not.
Chapter Thirteen
‘HAVE YOU READ THE PAPERS?’ Berto said, his eyes reposing on an abyss of horror.
Maggie was in Switzerland intently but vainly hunting Coco de Renault through the woods and thickets of the Zürich banks, of the Genevan financial advisory companies, the investment counselling services of Berne, and through the wildwoods of Zug where the computers whirred and winked unsleepingly in their walls, where the office furniture was cream leather in the tall buildings, and the dummy directors of elaborately-titled corporations entered the glass front-doors set into the marbled facades, walked up the staircases lined with the cedars of Lebanon, to take their places at their large desks at ten in the morning, after a massage and a swim in the pool.
Mary and Michael had gone to the Greek islands on a yacht, to get away from it all, to get to know each other again and for a number of other purposes described in similar phrases which Mary had written down on a list. They were gone and the house at Nemi was closed up, the pretty maid having left their service with her aunt who, in view of the girl’s condition, had carried the suitcases, refusing all help from Michael and Mary, but serving them with polite but pregnant assurances that justice would be done on the girl’s behalf and Michael would be hearing from their lawyer. Mary had stood beside Michael in a very positive way, cool and blonde, rich and loyal. She had said the right thing: ‘My husband is innocent.’ Then she had said the wrong thing: ‘We’re not afraid of your Communist lawyer.’ This had brought a duet of retorts from the niece and aunt, to the effect that Mary would pay for those words, the politics of their lawyer were not her business; she had committed an outrage against the Republic of Italy by speaking disrespectfully of their lawyer and his politics; she was a whore who slept with everybody including Lauro and she had also been seen in bed with her mother-in-law. Mary had stood on, her arm in Michael’s, cold-lipped, till the women got into the car and drove off. Lauro, too, was away. He was on his honeymoon, having first spent a morning with Maggie, at Michael’s house, breaking gently to her the news that none of her three houses at Nemi was really hers and that Hubert’s in particular was built on the dowry of Lauro’s bride. Maggie had assumed at first that Lauro was weaving a fantasy in some obscure desire to rouse her passions and end up with a love-making scene. She had been indulgent about his stories, assuring him sweetly that she held the title-deeds of all her properties everywhere, or at least Coco de Renault did; Maggie took her cheque book out of its charming little drawer and wrote out a very large cheque to Lauro for a wedding present, which he received graciously and lovingly. When they got up from the sofa, pulling their clothes straight, however, Lauro again came round to his incredible story. ‘Really, Maggie, that lawyer was a crook. He can’t be found in Italy. He’s sold you land and houses that didn’t belong to him. He chose a couple of abandoned houses and a piece of vacant land and falsified the papers, that’s all.’
‘The real owners would have come forward by now,’ Maggie said.
‘In the case of this house of Michael’s,’ Lauro said, ‘it belongs to a large family, twelve, fourteen, cousins, all of them in America. That crook was clever. But when one of those cousins comes home for a visit you’ll have trouble. In the case of the Bernardini house, it once belonged to a cousin of my fiancée who died, but his son is the heir; he has a job in England, a very important job in a chemical factory. He won’t like to see someone occupying his house if he returns to look for it in Italy.’
‘The Bernardini house was a total ruin,’ Maggie said, ‘a complete wreck, and I spent a fortune on the reconstruction; I put in the tennis court and the pool; I put in the lily-pond and I laid the lawns; then the Bernardinis started all over again making big changes. The same with this house here; Michael had it before he was married; we flew one of the best architects in Los Angeles over here to restore this house; it was a wreck when I bought it.’
‘You didn’t buy it, Maggie,’ said Lauro, quietly. ‘You only thought you did. Take Hubert’s house which you put on Betty’s land, for instance, well, it just doesn’t exist officially.’
He comforted Maggie greatly that morning as she telephoned one after the other office in Rome to try and trace that lawyer Dante de Lafoucauld whom it now appeared nobody had ever heard of, and whom Maggie herself had met only twice, in Rome, in the Grand Hotel in the winter of 1968. Nobody had heard of him at all. Maggie rang the office of Massimo de Vita, who was out. She left her name with an answering service, and
then went into hysterics, blaming Massimo for everything and saying how awfully suspicious it was that he didn’t have a secretary any more, only an answering service attached to his phone. ‘Only crook lawyers have answering services,’ Maggie moaned, while Lauro poured her out a brandy and said, ‘Maggie, Maggie, drink this, Maggie dear. I love you, Maggie. You didn’t have Massimo de Vita for a lawyer in 1968, did you? You only went to de Vita for the first time a year ago, didn’t you? How can he be to blame?’
‘They’re all in it together,’ Maggie screamed. ‘Why hasn’t he got a proper office with a secretary? It was the seediest office I ever saw. Now he hasn’t even got a secretary. I hate to deal with answering services.’ The telephone rang just then, from Massimo de Vita in response to her message on the answering service. He was just about to write to her, he said.
‘I have to talk to you,’ said Maggie. ‘Have you ever heard of an Italian lawyer called Dante de Lafoucauld?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard that name last week. He isn’t any sort of Italian lawyer. I don’t know who he is. He’s a crook. Apparently, you see, Marchesa, you were badly advised, and this man, whoever he is, forged some documents for some houses which don’t belong to you—’
‘You know him?’ Maggie said. ‘Then you know the man?’
‘I never heard of him till a week ago, when I was looking into the matter of the eviction of Mr Mallindaine. Then it all—’
‘He had a beard,’ wailed Maggie. ‘He had a dark beard.’
‘So have I,’ said Massimo. ‘Marchesa, since last we met, I have grown a beard. I will do what I can for you in this affair, although you realize, Marchesa, that when the houses are not yours—’
