The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  ‘Crooks, all of you!’ Maggie yelled, whereupon her voice was immediately overlaid by that of Lauro who had taken the telephone from her hand. ‘Doctor de Vita,’ said Lauro, ‘you must excuse the Marchesa. She’s very upset. I will be in touch with you and arrange a meeting.’

  The lawyer said a few words in Italian for Lauro’s ears only, partly legal in substance, partly sexual.

  ‘Si, si, Dottore,’ said Lauro, and hanging up the receiver continued his work of calming Maggie down. He was somewhat successful until she got it into her head to ring Coco de Renault. The lines were engaged for every number she tried where Coco might be: Nemi-Paris, Nemi-Geneva, Nemi-Zürich. ‘It’s lunch time; it’s one o’clock,’ said Lauro. ‘Everyone will be out. I’ll fix you some lunch, Maggie. Leave the telephone and I’ll tell you all you need to do in the case of Betty’s land. It’s simple and, after all, you can afford it.’

  Maggie rang Berto and gave him the story, which he didn’t believe. He replied quietly, thinking her to be temporarily deranged, and said he would join her shortly at Nemi. He sounded reluctant to do so; he said he was occupied with problems to do with the safety from robbers of his house in the Veneto.

  ‘We can’t stay here. There are no servants,’ Maggie said. ‘Lauro’s getting married on Saturday and Agata’s left. I have all these houses and nowhere to stay.’

  ‘We can stay in Rome. Or we could stay with the Bernardinis,’ said Berto. Maggie hung up and rang the Bernardinis. Emilio would not be home till six. The young people were out. Maggie collapsed into tears and presently let Lauro bring her a delicate lunch-tray.

  That stormy morning over, Maggie set off the next day with Berto’s car and driver for Rome where she had a full-scale massage treatment, then onwards, glowing and resolute, for Switzerland in pursuit of Coco de Renault. She was anxious to see him in any case about the lack of funds. Something was happening to her monthly cheques which were not arriving at the Rome bank as usual, so that she had been unable to pay her bodyguard. She said nothing to Berto. The bodyguard had left. That was embarrassing enough. And now it was imperative to get from Coco the title-deeds of her houses and so prove them hers.

  Berto was staying with the Bernardinis meanwhile and had wearily realized the truth about the houses at Nemi. ‘If I had met Maggie earlier,’ Berto told Emilio, ‘she would never have done anything so foolish. There’s nothing for it but for Maggie to pay reparations or else surrender the properties; she can manage that all right. I wish she would try to see things in proportion.’

  ‘It would be hard on us,’ said Emilio Bernardini, ‘to have to leave here after all the work we’ve put into the house.’

  ‘I dare say something can be arranged,’ Berto said.

  ‘I dare say,’ said Emilio, smiling to reassure his friend.

  ‘Do you trust Coco de Renault?’ said Berto, gazing across the trees towards the tower of the castle and the rows of little houses built into the cliff below it, huddled in half-circular terraces round the castle like the keys of an antiquated typewriter. He looked away from the view and into Emilio’s face, suddenly realizing that the man was not quite his usual cool self.

  ‘I did trust him, of course,’ said Emilio. ‘When I introduced him to Maggie of course I trusted him. He handled some affairs of mine, very badly as it has turned out. I can’t say, honestly, that I trust de Renault now. It’s very embarrassing, and I wish I’d never brought him together with you and Maggie. But I had no idea she would hand over so vast a part of her fortune to him to manage. In fact, I think she put everything in his hands, which was a foolish, an unheard of, thing to do. I would never have expected her to hand over everything.’

  ‘Has she done that?’ said Berto.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘And you have doubts about de Renault?’

  ‘I do, yes. I have had quite a shock in my own case. There is something shady about him, and I’m very sorry, very embarrassed.’

  ‘Poor Maggie,’ Berto said mildly, ‘I hope she won’t get any more shocks. I think only of Maggie herself, you know. A wonderful woman, a wonderful woman. She doesn’t need money to make her a wonderful woman. It’s only that she’s used to it.’ Berto added after a while, ‘It’s hardly your fault, Emilio. I should myself have taken more interest in Maggie’s affairs. Perhaps I could have persuaded her not to put her trust in de Renault. Perhaps. For my part, how could I hold you responsible? After all, I’ve known you since you were a schoolboy.’

  Emilio said, ‘Thank you, but, you know very well, you can’t trust every man who was at school with your son. These days, whom can you trust?’

  ‘One’s friends,’ said Berto. ‘You know, Emilio, you’re too sad by nature. Why are you so sad?’ And this question, the asking of which would have seemed quite absurd in another society, was really quite normal at Nemi, on the outskirts of Rome in the middle of June 1975, for Berto and Emilio.

  ‘Why are you so sad by nature?’

  ‘Life is sad.’

  It was the next morning, reading the newspaper, that Berto said to Emilio, ‘Have you read the papers?’ This was an unnecessary question since the news, on that morning and the next, was a national event: the regional elections throughout Italy had confirmed a popular swerve to the political Left. It could fairly be said that Italy had turned half-Communist overnight. Both halves were fairly stunned by the results.

  Berto, keening at the wake in those days, detained Emilio from going about his morning’s business, with prophecies and lamentations. The Communists became ‘They’, the Italian ‘Loro’. Berto said, ‘Loro, loro, loro.…They, they.…’

  ‘It’s the will of the people,’ Emilio said, but he spoke into heedless morning air, and Berto continued, ‘Look how they write in the newspaper; they say one has the sensation that something is finished for always. And whatever they mean by that, it’s the truth. Something is finished. Loro, loro.…They, they.…They will come and take away everything from you. They took away everything from us in Dalmatia. They will take, will carry away.… Loro…ti prenderanno, ti porteranno via tutto.…They will come and take.…Everything you possess…’ The gardener’s son, passing by and catching these words, wondered how that could be, his possession being a motor-scooter. ‘They will kill…ti liquideranno…,’ said Berto. ‘They will take over, and they will—’

  Emilio, who, although not himself a Communist adherent, had none the less voted Communist in these elections to express his exasperation with Italy’s government-in-residence, did not have the heart to say so to the older man. After all, he had been at school with Berto’s son, and Emilio would not shatter Berto’s kindly affection. Emilio kept his dark, young secret and merely observed, sadly, ‘After the capitalists have finished with us I doubt if there will be anything left for the Communists to take over. De Renault, for example—’

  ‘Better her money should go to a swindler than to the Communists,’ Berto said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WITH THE ELECTIONS AND the strawberry festival in the air, and Maggie, so far as Hubert had ascertained, on a trip to Switzerland, and with Lauro away on his honeymoon, Hubert felt it wise to call a rally of his followers and prepare for battle with any such apocalyptic events and trials as are bound to befall the leaders of light and enlightened movements, anywhere, in any age.

  Maggie, he hoped, had gone to Switzerland to arrange for the surreptitious payment of his claim for the fake Gauguin, and maybe to raise funds to meet the demands of Lauro’s bride and the eventual claims of the other owners of the properties she had thought were hers; she would do this, he reckoned wrongly, without breathing a word to her pig of a husband. He was wrong not only in this reckoning, but also in the assumption that Maggie had received her lawyer’s letter about his demand to be compensated for the fake Gauguin. The letter had indeed been sent to her by registered post, but the mails from Rome were fairly disordered, and the letter had not in fact reached Maggie at the Veneto before she had left the villa. Gu
illaume had signed for it and put it aside, on the tray in the hall, where it innocently awaited the most peculiar circumstances of her return. Hubert did not know this, and in fact he had got into a habit of false assumptions by the imperceptible encroachment of his new cult; so ardently had he been preaching the efficacy of prayer that he now, without thinking, silently invoked the name of Diana for every desire that passed through his head, wildly believing that her will not only existed but would certainly come to pass. Thus, like ministers of any other religion, he was estranged from reality in proportion as he mistook the nature of prayer, offering up his words of praise, of gratitude, penitence, intercession and urgent petition in the satisfaction that his god would reply in kind, hear, smile, and wave a wand. So that, merely because he had known in the past that the unforeseen stroke of luck can happen, and that events which are nothing short of a miracle can take place, Hubert had come secretly to take it with a superstitious literalness that the miraculous may happen in front of your eyes; speak the word, Diana, and my wish will be fulfilled. Whereas, in reality, no farmer prays for rain unless the rain is long overdue; and if a miracle of good fortune occurs it is always at the moment of grace unthought-of and when everybody is looking the other way. However, Hubert, largely through his isolation at Nemi and from not having seen Maggie in person for a number of years, believed that Diana of the Woods could somehow enter Maggie’s mind, twist a kind of screw there, and force her to do something she would not otherwise have done.

  Moreover, he had not allowed for a change in Maggie, a hardening. In the carefree past she had been more or less a docile pushover where money was concerned, and Hubert miscalculated the effect upon her of being married to steady-minded Berto, of having had her suspicions aroused to the point of almost-justified paranoia by various threats to her moneyed peace, and, most of all, by the new economic crisis which Hubert had mentally absorbed in those months from what he read and heard, but which had not closely touched him.

  Maggie would come back from Switzerland, he felt sure, and make a settlement for the Gauguin. Indeed, he could hardly think of Maggie without the word settlement coming to his mind.

  Lauro and his buxom horror-beauty of a wife would also return and, should it please the gods, Lauro might even join the Fellowship of Diana and Apollo, in the same way that the three other boys had returned to him, those secretaries of the first, beautiful summer at Nemi, when the house was newly built, in 1972, that year of joy and of outrage, when Hubert was free to leave his doors unlocked, could come and go as he pleased, but when Maggie began to desert him, searching as she did after strange gods and getting married to Tullio-Friole. As it happened, the return of the secretaries was a mixed blessing, but Hubert thanked Diana for them all the same.

  In the meantime he thought it well to declare a special congress of his flock. Pauline Thin, who in kindly moments Hubert called ‘Our Mercury’, sent messages by telephone and by grape-vine word of mouth to numerous fellow-worshippers who lived within easy travelling distance of Nemi; she also sent out a number of telegrams, cautiously worded in each case, in order to get together a preliminary meeting of kindred souls, the elect Friends of Diana and Apollo, and so prepare for an even grander gathering which Hubert projected for the following autumn and which he spoke of variously as an ‘international synod’, a ‘world congress’ and a ‘global convergence’. Hubert was aware that the ecclesiastical authorities as well as the carabinieri already viewed his house with suspicion and that his activities were regarded with a certain amount of local disfavour. ‘They can’t pin anything on me,’ Hubert said, ‘not drugs nor orgies nor fraud. We are an honest religious cult. All the same, we have to be careful.’ Mostly he feared Lauro and the Radcliffe family, feeling sure they would, if they could, use any eventual excuse to bring trouble on his Fellowship, which was covering expenses by now, very nicely. What Hubert had in mind for his final project was to try and syphon off, in the interests of his ancestors Diana and her twin brother Apollo, some of the great crowds that had converged on Rome as pilgrims for the Holy Year, amongst whom were vast numbers of new adherents to the Charismatic Renewal movement of the Roman Catholic Church. News had also come to Hubert of other Christian movements which described themselves as charismatic, from all parts of Europe and America; a Church of England movement, for instance, and another called the Children of God. Studying their ecstatic forms of worship and their brotherly claims it seemed to him quite plain that the leaders of these multitudes were encroaching on his territory. He felt a burning urge to bring to the notice of these revivalist enthusiasts who proliferated in Italy during the Holy Year that they were nothing but schismatics from the true and original pagan cult of Diana. It infuriated him to think of the crowds of charismatics in St Peter’s Square, thumbing their guitars, swinging and singing their frightful hymns while waiting for the Pope to come out on the balcony. Not far from Nemi was the Pope’s summer residence in Castelgandolfo. Next month, he fumed, they will crowd into Castelgandolfo, and they should be here with me.

  Pauline, meanwhile, was having the time of her life. Men pressed her against the wall and kissed her whether she liked it or not. She found herself at the centre of Hubert’s young following, surrounded by attentive people and to spare. She was determined to keep her privileged position of having been in with Hubert from the start, holding on to it partly by a habit she had of reminding Hubert by little hints, privately from time to time, that some of those records she had been obliged to put in order over the past three years still puzzled her. Pauline’s allusions to the records inevitably subdued any attempt by Hubert to get rid of her, as he could now afford to do. He, meanwhile, on these occasions, finding himself stuck with her in this uneasy relationship, got himself quickly out of his troubled state of mind by telling himself he was fond of Pauline, very, very fond. When he told himself this for a few minutes continuously, he believed it, and did not appear in the least aware of having capitulated to a piece of blackmail, except that on such occasions he called her Miss Thin for the rest of the day. Perhaps it was his age; at all events he associated his pagan cult with his own very survival and was ready at least to endure Pauline for it; he was prepared to love her as far as he could and to let her fill the house and garden with anyone whomsoever, so long as they didn’t bring in forbidden drugs, use up the hot water in the house, and provided they subscribed to the Fellowship. On these conditions he was content with the arrangements that Pauline made and especially with her rule that nobody could approach him except through her; that suited him very well.

  Pauline herself had put a number of young people to work for the cult. She had roped in Letizia Bernardini as press officer and Pietro Bernardini as public relations officer. There was an older man, Pino Tullio-Friole, Berto’s son, who also made regular pilgrimages to the home of Hubert, descendant of Diana, bringing contributions of money and precious objects and some of his wealthy friends who liked to attend the religious services and afterwards sleep with whoever was available. Pino, who was in his early forties, despised Maggie and resented her marriage to his father.

  Hubert brooded especially over one of the many press cuttings Letizia had produced for him. It was dated 18 May, and was taken from the English-speaking paper of Italy, The Daily American.

  ‘Cardinals, bishops meet, dance in Rome,’ was the headline. It said:

  ROME, 17 May (AP)—Bishops, archbishops and cardinals, struggling to keep their hats in place, sang and danced in ecstasy, embracing one another and raising their arms to heaven.

  The Most Rev. Joseph McKinney, auxiliary bishop of Grand Rapids, Mich., joined hands with the Most Rev. James Hayes, archbishop of Halifax, who in turn linked arms with Leo, Cardinal Suenens of Belgium.

  The unlikely chorus yesterday opened the Ninth International conference on charismatic Renewal in the Roman Catholic Church.

  The conference theme of ‘renewal and reconciliation’—the theme of Holy Year—underlines the movement’s search for wholeheart
ed approval in the official Church.

  A crowd of about 8,000, most of them Americans, gathered at the catacombs of St Callixtus, burial place of the early Christian martyrs, for the opening ceremony. A young band led the congress in song, and delegates from Quebec to Bombay testified to the growth of the movement in all continents.

  Cardinal Suenens, archbishop of Malines, urged participants to use the four-day reunion ‘to renew your faith, to renew your hope in the future, to love each other like you never did before’.

  The Charismatic Movement, a predominantly lay movement claiming more than half a million followers, emerged in main line Protestant churches in the early 1960s and in Roman Catholicism in 1967, among students and professors at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

  It is characterized by fervent prayer meetings, gifts of the spirit such as ‘speaking in tongues’ and efforts to breathe new life into personal religion.

  In a recent report, American Catholic bishops credited the movement with ‘many positive signs…a new sense of spiritual values, a heightened consciousness of the action of the Holy Spirit, the praise of God and a deepening personal commitment to God.’

  But they warned of dangers inherent in the revival—divergence from the official Church, fundamentalism, exaggeration of the importance of the gifts of prophecy and speaking in tongues.

  ‘Tongues is not the important thing; the important thing is the change in your life,’ said Bob Cavnar, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who came here for the meeting from Dallas, Tex.

  Cavnar, introduced to the movement by his son Jim, was one of 70 congress elite renowned for speaking in tongues and selected to receive messages to the conference from the Holy Spirit.

  Hubert kept many such cuttings, read and re-read them, with a sense of having been cheated of his birthright. He had sent Pauline at the beginning of June to one of these meetings and afterwards had locked himself with Pauline into the drawing-room, or rather, locked out the rest of the drifting acolytes and lovers who at present made up his household, to hear her story.