The Battle of the Villa Fiorita

by Rumer Godden

  ‘I can’t even speak to him.’

  ‘I can.’ Under her calmness, Rob could feel the tension and remorse. ‘Hugh will be all right, dear.’ It was odd that it was his comforting that brought an edge of hysteria into her competence. ‘It will be my fault, my fault if he isn’t.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Rob. ‘It was his fault for eating that piece of pie. Caddie didn’t.’

  ‘Italian food, I suppose,’ Darrell had said on the telephone.

  ‘It was English actually,’ Rob had said smoothly. ‘An English woman on the bus gave him a piece of pork pie. At least we think it must have been that. It was the only thing he ate that Caddie didn’t.’

  Fanny had been icily furious over Darrell’s remarks. ‘Malingering! How dare he say that. He has never been fair to Hugh, never. How could he put on sickness like this, a high temperature.’

  ‘Not high, darling. Only a hundred and two.’

  ‘Only! That is high for food poisoning. Doctor Isella …’ and she accused Rob. ‘You take Darrell’s part because he’s a man.’

  ‘I don’t. Hugh’s a sick boy.’

  ‘Then how could he put it on?’

  Rob did not know, nor did Caddie, yet she, like her father, was not sure. It was Hugh’s luck, of course, but how did he attract the luck? Caddie privately thought he could do anything. As Gwyneth said, ‘Hugh always has the last word.’

  By lunchtime Doctor Isella had stopped the sickness; his injections, charcoal pills, potions of weak tea were beginning to wash away the effects of the pie. ‘Short and sharp,’ said Doctor Isella who did speak English. Hugh was weak, still fevered, full of headache, hollow-eyed, tender-skinned, and filthy-tongued, but it was over. When Caddie tiptoed into the room – he had been moved into the big bedroom – she had seen his eye peeping out from under the compress on his forehead and the eye had a glint, authentically Hugh.

  ‘Hullo, Hugh.’

  ‘Hullo.’ It was a croak.

  ‘You’re better?’

  ‘Not dead yet,’ and he whispered, ‘At least it’s put paid to them pushing us off back.’

  ‘You are very, very clever,’ said Caddie earnestly.

  ‘Clever!’ Fanny’s voice came from behind her. ‘What is clever about an attack of poisoning? What is all this? You make Hugh sound diabolical.’

  ‘What is diab …’

  ‘Devilish,’ said Hugh and winked. The wink heartened Caddie who was very much dismayed. She could not know the chaos in Fanny; the contrition and guilt over their journey, over the selling of Topaz, Hugh’s illness, the feeling that Rob was criticizing her, and a subtle dislike of herself for feeling an echo of what Rob had said to her: ‘Children are always welcome.’ ‘At any time?’ Rob had said, and, though Fanny would not admit it, Hugh and Caddie were an interruption. Caddie could not know this, it only seemed to her that Fanny was too angry, ‘Too angry for what I said,’ and she mumbled, ‘I only meant …’

  ‘Yes, what did you mean?’

  ‘I meant, Rob – Mr Quillet – said we had to go and now we can stay here.’

  ‘Not you,’ said Fanny. ‘You are going back to London.’

  ‘Caddie can come back,’ Darrell had said.

  ‘Alone?’ Rob had asked. ‘Wouldn’t that be rather dismal?’

  ‘Dismal?’ The word was barked down the telephone.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rob. ‘She’s unhappy as it is.’ After a hesitation he added, ‘You know she sold her pony, Topaz, to get here.’

  That produced a pause; then, ‘I wondered how they got the money.’ The implication seemed to sink in. ‘The devil they did! What business …’ which made Rob ask, out of sheer mischief, ‘Wasn’t it her pony? I thought she won it,’ and Darrell had said, more curtly than ever, ‘She must come back. She’s missing school.’

  Fanny’s anger could not last when she saw Caddie’s stricken face. ‘I’m sorry, darling, but Father insists on it – he can, you know. Rob is taking you to Milan in half an hour.’

  In the car Caddie sat as far away from Rob as she could get and kept her face turned away to the window.

  Fanny had mistaken her frozen silence for fright. ‘You will be quite all right. Rob will speak to the air-hostess and, Father will be waiting for you at London Airport.’ Rob seemed to understand the silence, and respect it; he did not try and beguile her with talk as most adults would have done, but drove in a silence as deep as her own.

  For Caddie the silence was partly shock. Until Rob had issued his edict on the terrace, it had not occurred to her that they could be returned. Indeed, and childishly as she saw now, she had expected Fanny to decide straight away to come back to England with them. Expected? Took it for granted was nearer, as if the sight of them, or at any rate of Hugh, would have been enough. Now she was beginning to see that it could not happen without a fight and one in which they might not win, even if I could have started fighting, thought Caddie in despair.

  ‘I’m here,’ Hugh would have said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ but Caddie, unwilling, did not; if Hugh grew to like Rob, and she had to concede that would be easy, he might go over, thought Caddie.

  She stole a glance at Rob as he drove, looking ahead. His eyes were hidden by dark glasses so that he looked masked and he was all alien to Caddie: the darkness of his sallow skin, his head with the hair growing so far back that he was almost bald in front – I never knew someone bald could be attractive. People’s faces, Philippa said, were divided into horses, birds, and puddings. Rob’s with its leanness and curved nostrils, was unmistakably a horse, which perhaps was why, in spite of herself, he appealed to Caddie. She looked at his wrists coming out from the silk shirt cuff, strong brown wrists with a down of black hair; at his hands on the wheel. They did not have the big knuckles, the thick skin she, Darrell’s daughter, had always associated with a man, yet they were a man’s hands for all their fineness, big, strong-looking, with, on the left one, a little finger ring with a dull green carved stone. She would have liked to ask what the carving was, but she would not speak to Rob. There was no doubt that he was a stronger enemy than they had dreamed and it seemed she had really sold Topaz for nothing. A tear rolled out of Caddie’s eye and slid down her nose, but, with her face turned away to the window, she thought Rob did not see.

  He did not need to see. Disquiet had been growing in him ever since the bravado of that first hour when he had taken Fanny away to San Vigilio, disquiet, and a misery against which he had to tighten his mind; and he thought firmly, even if I am guilty I will not be made to feel guilty by a little girl. There was, though, nothing he could do to make either of them feel better and he drove on in silence.

  All round them the brightness of the Venetian spring unrolled; neither of them saw it. Rob did not comment when they swung on to the autostrada and he paid at the gate, and Caddie said nothing when the speedometer needle moved up to eighty-five, ninety, a hundred kilometres. They by-passed towns and suburbs, came through a large factory town and then to the suburbs of Milan itself. Rob said then, ‘We’re nearly at the airport. Just think! Two hours from the take-off you will be in London.’ To Caddie this was only another proof of the way adults could blot one’s efforts out. Two hours! To reduce that aeon of uncomfortable, dirty, hungry, and frightening travel to that! ‘Then it will be all over,’ said Rob. He meant it to be comforting, but Caddie said nothing at all.

  ‘And you will come back and stay with us, perhaps in the summer holidays.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Caddie, ‘but that will be too late.’

  ‘Too late?’

  ‘Mother will have married you by then.’

  After that, at the airport too, they sat far away from one another.

  The little temporary airport was crowded and Rob was suddenly resentful. The crowds, the stark white light, the rasping loudspeaker voices, the ashtray stands with their stale whiffs of smoke, the bins of dirtied cardboard cups, the scattered Cellophane wrappings and newspapers on the floor, were hideous. Tired children staggered
and cried, mothers scolded in voices like amplified hens, thought Rob; men argued, older children played and shouted. It seemed a day-nightmare and, I should have been at the Fiorita, he thought, with the peace of a day’s work done: Fanny waiting for me alone on the terrace: a look at our star, a walk perhaps in the garden, a drink, dinner, and here, because of this plain little lump of a girl … His voice was terse as he tried to be kind to Caddie. She knew he was trying to be kind and she was ever terser.

  ‘Would you like some coffee? Lemonade, before your flight?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘A sandwich? An ice would be better – it’s fearsomely hot. An ice?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘A magazine? Or wouldn’t you like a book?’ There was a small kiosk and he said, ‘Look. That little silver model is Milan Cathedral. You could take that home to show where you have been? An Italian peasant doll? One of those souvenirs?’

  Caddie did not even answer. The brown eyes flicked a glance at his tactlessness and went back to their fixed look. Rob had seen that look before, on a famine child in India, doomed hopelessness; but that’s exaggerated, he thought angrily. Caddie is neither hopeless nor doomed. She is going back to a father who wants her, and to an excellent school, but Caddie still did not take that look off her face.

  ‘Listen,’ he wanted to say. ‘This all seems dreadful now but it will be all right,’ or ‘When you are older you will understand.’ Even, ‘Forgive me. You see, I love your mother,’ but in the face of that look they were easy phrases, empty comfort. And why shouldn’t she hate me, poor little toad? thought Rob. He ended by saying nothing but sat looking at his hands, turning them over, examining the fingers while Caddie, at the other end of the bench, looked at her feet in her brown walking shoes that were nearly as flat and large as her sandals.

  ‘British European Airways announce the departure of Flight 507 for London. Will passengers please …’ ‘This is for you,’ said Rob. ‘Come along,’ and picking up the grip Fanny had packed, he led the way to the customs barrier. ‘This is Candida Clavering, travelling to London,’ she heard him begin to the girl in her pale-blue suit and cocked cap. ‘She has her passport, tickets, and five pounds in English money,’ and to Caddie, ‘You just follow the blue lights. Here’s your grip. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ and, ‘I should have left then,’ said Rob to Fanny later. ‘Not stayed to watch her out of sight.’

  The corridor from the barrier to the customs and waiting-rooms was long. Other passengers walked with Caddie, around her and past her, almost brushing over her: Italian businessmen in heavy suits, black hats, with opulent pigskin briefcases: women in high heels that tapped briskly, their arms laden with coats, handbags, bucket-bags, magazines. Two walked each side of Caddie as if she were not there, one bumping her with a bandbox.

  Carrying her raincoat, the grip swinging, she looked small and unprotected in the skimpy green-checked frock, green blazer, extinguishing hat. Why can’t they send her to a school where the uniform isn’t so ugly? thought Rob irritably. The irritation was no good, already his heart was betraying him; the back of her arms looked so young, and unexpectedly thin, ‘like a lamb’s bones,’ he told Fanny.

  One of the women, turning to speak to a man, brushed Caddie in the face with the coat she carried – and didn’t apologize, thought Rob, which made him unreasonably hot with indignation. Can’t they see she’s only a child, and travelling alone? But Caddie was too old, and too young, to arouse any interest and she only turned her head away and went on, though Rob saw that even her buttocks shrank from the women, and once again Rob was reminded of a small bullock, but this time driven down the ramp. He seemed to have a whole menagerie of animals for Caddie. It was her helplessness, he thought irritably.

  At the far end of the corridor, passengers had to show their passports and tickets. That seemed to startle Caddie. She put the grip down between her feet – in case it should be stolen? thought Rob – and began to search through her wallet. The ticket and passport were not there. ‘In your blazer pocket,’ Rob wanted to shout but he was too far away. The air-hostess was standing, not looking at Caddie but over her head to where two other passengers were fumbling with their papers, her hand held, out; it was automatic, Rob knew, but it looked relentless and he could see Caddie was getting in a panic. She began to search through the raincoat pockets, holding it out. The other passengers began to chafe, a man pushed past her, ‘And suddenly,’ Rob told Fanny afterwards, ‘I couldn’t stand it any longer. I ran back to the desk. I had signed for her there as her stepfather.’

  ‘Stepfather!’ Fanny sounded as if that were a shock. ‘But … you are not really that.’

  ‘I suppose that’s what we have to call me. They thought I was mad, of course, but they spoke over the loudspeaker and Caddie was fished out and given back to me.’

  She had been stunned by being made to go, now she was shocked. ‘But … they will be very angry with you,’ she said.

  ‘I expect they will,’ said Rob. ‘I’m a fool.’

  Fanny later was to probe. ‘But why?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘Why?’

  ‘God knows,’ said Rob.

  That answer would have satisfied Caddie. This sudden intervention was in Greek god style. The face she turned to Rob when he announced they were going back to the Villa Fiorita was still white but transformed, luminous, eyes shining. Rob did not flatter himself it was happiness; it was only relief. He hoped that the sudden hollow feeling in himself was only hunger and, walking away from the airport to the car park, he said, ‘Caddie, shall we sink our differences, just for an hour, and have dinner together?’

  ‘You took her to the Continental? Caddie!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘In those dreadful clothes?’

  ‘The clothes didn’t matter and the dining-room there is good.’

  ‘But what a waste.’

  ‘I was there too,’ said Rob, ‘and it wasn’t a waste. She enjoyed it.’ He corrected himself. ‘We enjoyed it.’

  Caddie had not been in such an hotel before. Coming from the foyer, with its rows of desk clerks – they bowed to Rob as if they knew him – and into the immense marble-pillared lounge, she had felt as if she had walked into a palace and, shaken out of herself, she was still as transformed as in that miracle moment at the airport; like the princess in the fairytale who shook off the frog, thought Rob. He liked the way she sat upright on the banquette in their corner, while the brown eyes that were so like Fanny’s took in the room with its white arches, pale walls, great baskets of flowers. The next table had been made ready for a party with small vases of pale-pink tulips – ‘One for every person!’ said Caddie – and in its centre a miniature fountain bubbled pale-pink water. ‘A fountain on a table!’ she said. She looked a little askance at the knives, forks, and glasses arranged in front of her, the size and starchiness of the napkin the waiter unfurled and laid across her knees, but her manners were so naturally polite and modest – ‘Like yours,’ Rob told Fanny. ‘You did very well with her there’ – that there was none of the gaucheness of every day. ‘Yes, Caddie can rise to an occasion,’ said Fanny. Looking across the table, Rob had seen, for the first time, some promise of beauty in this ugly duckling; it was in the shape of her face, a peach bloom that had come up under the freckles, and those will fade, he thought. Her hair, under the shaded lights, had points of gold in its ginger which looked a deep red brown, and her eyes, tonight, were astonishing; but Rob was too hungry to look for long at Caddie and they ate, ‘Extraordinary things,’ as she told Hugh afterwards. ‘There were artichoke hearts with brains’ – ‘Ugh!’ said Hugh – ‘a mixed grill of fish with squids, tiny octopus and prawns and mussels, veal cooked in wine.’

  ‘At ten o’clock at night!’ said Fanny.

  ‘It was ten o’clock,’ said Rob. ‘Remember I had to arrange a message to Darrell at London Airport. I tried to telephone him but couldn’t. That took two hours. Caddie wanted to go to the ladies’ room, that
seemed perpetual,’ said Rob unfairly. ‘Then we had to drive in to Milan.’

  ‘But still, a full-scale dinner at ten.’

  ‘This is Italy,’ said Rob patiently. ‘In Rome we never dine before half-past ten.’

  Dinner had just ended when something happened to Caddie that she, child of Fanny and Darrell, had not experienced before – she was forgotten. A man came into the restaurant, an Italian, she thought, looking at his small, thickset body, his hair that was cut in a crew cut, thick and brown, his eyes black as berries in a sunburned face. They searched the room as he stood for a moment in the entrance, then lit up as he caught sight of Rob. ‘Rob! They told me you were here.’

  ‘Aldo!’ Rob had jumped up.

  ‘This is wonderful! Wonderful!’ Then they sat down. ‘I have been sending you telegrams all afternoon. Renato says there is no telephone at that tiresome villa.’

  ‘None, thank God,’ said Rob.

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  Rob smiled. ‘I don’t want even you, Aldo, ringing up.’ As Aldo looked at Rob the bright eyes were very friendly. ‘You are happy, Rob?’

  ‘Happier than I could have imagined,’ and Aldo stretched out a hand and squeezed Rob’s arm. Then, for a brief moment, Rob did remember Caddie.

  ‘Caddie, this is Prince Brancati.’ Did Rob say prince? As a well-trained child, she had stood up; now she wondered if she ought to curtsy, but the prince shook hands with her and that was the last time they remembered her – ‘for hours’, said Caddie.

  Prince Brancati was, Fanny told her afterwards, one of the many strange and floating people attached to Rob’s work. She had already learned that every picture seemed to have them. What were they? Producers? Associate producers? ‘I don’t know, but it’s something to do with the money part,’ said Fanny vaguely, ‘which is probably why they seem to have a say on the casting and scripts.’

  ‘But Prince Aldo’ – Caddie could not remember Brancati – ‘said he hadn’t any money. It was one of the things he said. “I have no money, Rob,” and he spread his hands out like that.’