The Battle of the Villa Fiorita

by Rumer Godden

  ‘Where’s Rob?’

  ‘Rob’s gone.’

  ‘Gone!’

  Caddie was right. It had been a cry.

  Fanny put out a hand, groping as if she were blind.

  ‘Caddie. Help me. Help me.’

  18

  In the old days, when a battle was won, the conquerors brought their defeated enemy home, a prisoner. That was how it felt to Hugh and Caddie.

  ‘Will we go back to the flat?’ asked Caddie.

  ‘I suppose so. I had better send a telegram to Father.’ Hugh was as slow as he had been quick before. Every thought seemed an effort.

  ‘Will Mother come to the flat?’

  ‘I don’t know. I should think it depends on Father.’

  ‘Where else could she go?’

  ‘We can take her to a hotel,’ but Hugh sounded as helpless as Caddie felt. They neither of them knew what was to be done with this shell of Fanny.

  They had had to wait twenty-four hours. It was only towards the afternoon that Hugh had opened his eyes.

  He opened them wide as if he had not seen the room or the villa before, but, as a matter of fact, he had been awake a long time. He had woken first about ten o’clock and lain listening to the silence in the house, silence that was echoed in himself. There was no struggle in him now, no torment. When Fanny, brought in by Doctor Isella, bent over him, it meant nothing at all. When Giulietta came, closing the shutters against the sun, bringing a fresh glass of water, he did not even have to turn over on his other side. They were only Fanny and Giulietta. Why? Why suddenly? thought Hugh. Was it, as some people said such things were, from having been so close to death? For the rest of his life, in Hugh, would be the remembrance of the death drag of that water; its coldness was in his bones – but no, it was not that that had changed him. It was mysteriously something to do with Pia. He kept seeing a nightmare glimpse of her unconscious face as she lay on the rocks. ‘I thought I had killed her.’

  He had been brave, they told him, and he had said brusquely, ‘It wasn’t brave. It was instinct, and training,’ but he lied. It was this odd way that Pia had of making him do things better, be stronger than he was, and he knew he could never have let her go, even if he had drowned with her. ‘I would rather have drowned with her,’ he said in surprise, surprise because he did not remember anyone before who had been more important to him than himself, Hugh. Fanny, Caddie, he loved them, of course, but, little old Pia! Funny, I didn’t know I really liked her, thought Hugh. The liking, indeed, seemed to have let him into this curious freedom from Fanny and Giulietta – and from Raymond? he could have asked. Then he knew that was not true; he would never be free of Raymond, but mysteriously Raymond was in his proper place, in perspective. It was all puzzling, perhaps because his head hurt so much, and, ‘I don’t understand anything,’ said Hugh.

  There was, he felt, one person who could have explained – this was towards evening when his head was more clear – one person who would have talked, not preached, and when Caddie next came in – she was acting as liaison between upstairs and downstairs, between the bedroom and dressing-room – Hugh croaked, ‘Caddie.’

  ‘Yes, Hugh?’

  ‘I want to see Rob.’

  ‘You can’t. He has gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ With Hugh’s cut lips and swollen face it was difficult to talk. ‘Why has he gone?’

  ‘Because we have won after all,’ said Caddie, and burst into tears.

  If Rob had gone, that meant Pia had gone too, taken out of their lives just when … Hugh lay very still. Would he ever see Pia again? Perhaps not. Perhaps when they were grown up. He toyed with that a minute and saw himself a young man, Pia a foreign elegant girl; he could guess how elegant she would be; but that time was far away, years, thought Hugh; though Italian girls were said to grow up quickly, look at Juliet, Pia was only ten, and now he saw her and himself, and Caddie of course, and Rob and Fanny, as little figures looked at through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling, getting smaller, and panic set in. This was the juggernaut power of adults, crushing what they did not even see, and for the first time Hugh was close to tears; not bitterness, ordinary tears. ‘I won’t let them,’ he vowed. ‘I will go to Rome and find her’ – he who had detested Italy – ‘there can’t be two Pia Quillets.’ Then he remembered she would be living with her grandmother, the Nonna she talked about, and he did not know even Nonna’s name. Write to Rob? Rob could be found through his pictures, but he could not write to Rob. Ask Fanny if she knew Nonna’s address? Hugh knew he could never ask her now.

  Renato sent a car to take them to Milan. It brought their air tickets and a note which Caddie read. ‘Everything is paid. If the boy’ – ‘that’s you, Hugh’ – ‘is not well enough to travel tell the chauffeur to telephone me and I will book you on another day. Keep the car,’ but Hugh, though stiff and sore, covered with bruises and still shocked, insisted on going.

  The villa, too, was already clearing them out. It seemed Madame Menghini had dismissed them. During the morning Celestina was sent for from the Hotel Lydia to telephone Milan. The villa was let, or lent again.

  ‘So soon?’ asked Caddie.

  It seemed callous even to Celestina, but Madame Menghini’s husband’s niece was coming on holiday, ‘And why should she go into a hotel when the villa will be empty,’ said Celestina.

  The niece was coming tomorrow with her husband and five children. ‘All rooms! All beds!’ Fünf kinder!’ said Celestina. ‘Everything be put away.’

  The villa began to be as it had been; the little curtains went up again on every window, mats were put back under every vase and ashtray. The chairs were arranged round the centre table, the plant pots set in rows. Rob’s study was a bedroom again. As soon as Fanny came out of her bedroom the necklace and cross would be put back over the bed. The only thing altered in the villa would be that Celestina had two kitchen tables.

  Yet there were traces: Celestina found Caddie’s panama behind the chest of drawers. It was squashed so out of shape that Caddie said she did not want it. Celestina gave it to Gianna who wore it to Mass; its St Anne’s crest looked incongruous but it made Gianna very proud. Celestina found too the picture of Saint Sebastian where Pia had left it on the windowsill; as Pia and Rob had gone, Celestina gave it to Beppino for his First Communion. In the bathroom Fanny had forgotten her soap, bathsalts, and Jicky powder. Giulietta asked her if she wanted them, but Fanny only turned her head away and Giulietta gathered them up to keep for her wedding.

  When Hugh and Caddie brought Fanny through the sunk garden on the way to the car, she stopped by an old olive tree. It seemed she wanted to touch it. ‘Well, she always does that when she’s in trouble,’ Caddie whispered. Fanny’s hand came down its trunk, feeling the dry wood, and she looked at Hugh and Caddie with eyes that were suddenly awake.

  Hugh had not been there that early morning when Caddie had had to stand by, inadequately trying to pat away that terrible grief, but now, tinged with it himself, he could not bear those eyes. ‘Come, Mother. Mother, come,’ but even Hugh could not reach Fanny now.

  Just before that dawn, ‘when the stocks smelled so strongly in the garden,’ whispered Fanny, ‘and it was so wet and chill,’ she had been sitting by Hugh’s bed, as Rob, she thought, was sitting by Pia’s in the hospital – each of us alone, with our own child, utterly separated. Separated, not only by this division of children but because she too, in those hours, had echoed Caddie’s cry ‘I want Father’. ‘I want Darrell.’ Hugh was Darrell’s child. ‘We should telephone him,’ Rob had said.

  They could not do that, not while this agony was going on. ‘Not until we know,’ and then ‘Wait until the morning,’ Rob had said.

  The morning.

  Perhaps Fanny had dozed in her chair because she had seemed to be woken suddenly by a sound, a feeling, she did not know which. Light was in the room, the first light, dawn light, colourless and with it a coolness that touched her cheeks and eyes. She was conscious of her clothes,
the tightness of her girdle, an ache in her back, her feet aching too from wearing shoes all night, and I had a feeling of stifling, thought Fanny, of terror. The terror of the night had not happened – miraculously, as Celestina said – but this terror was a terror to come. It was as if we had traded, Rob and I.

  ‘If that hope had really been the beginning of our baby, Rob’s and mine …’ That brought such a wave of longing that she had almost cried out. We should have been safe, thought Fanny, bound, as children do bind you, but now all the old teachings of Aunt Isabel had woken in her mind. If you do wrong, you will be punished, terribly punished.

  Hugh was asleep. Fanny got up and when she came out on the landing, Rob’s study door was open and he was at the table with the light still on; he had not noticed the daylight and he was writing.

  For one moment Fanny had thought it was Saladin; Saladin, after that night! Writers are like locusts, she thought. They feed on the moment and pass on – then she saw it was a letter.

  ‘Rob, what are you doing?’

  He looked up. ‘Writing to Darrell.’

  ‘That’s unpardonable.’ She seemed to be struggling for breath.

  ‘I know, but you don’t want to have to explain.’

  ‘Explain? I … I … I must go out into the garden,’ cried Fanny. It felt as if she screamed.

  ‘Fan,’ Rob had got up.

  ‘Don’t, Rob. Don’t call me that.’ And she cried, ‘I can’t breathe.’

  The ground floor of the villa had been shuttered as Celestina thought it should be, even on that night. Rob opened the door from the dining-room to the terrace; by mutual consent they had avoided seeing the lake, and walked round the house, down the steps, past the geraniums colourless in the half-light, and through the sunk garden to the olive grove where the grass was grey still, and the twisted stems of the old trees loomed and retreated into shadow as they passed. The olive leaves glimmered, the wistaria arch was grey. It is filled with ghosts already, thought Fanny. The flowers were still half hidden in darkness, still wet from the storm; only the stocks smelled strong and powerful, making wreaths of darkness or white round the olives. Fanny’s shoes and stockings were wet but her face had cooled and she could breathe.

  ‘We have given in,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Given in,’ said Rob.

  ‘I am calm now,’ said Fanny and she lifted her face to Rob. ‘I won’t make you a fuss.’

  The bell began to ring from Malcesine.

  ‘It must be twelve o’clock,’ whispered Caddie. The arciprete will be pleased when he hears, she thought; at least one person could be whole-heartedly pleased.

  Twelve o’clock.

  ‘Mother, you must come,’ said Hugh. ‘The car is waiting.’

  No answer.

  ‘Mother, we have to get to Milan,’ but Fanny still stayed, pressed against the olive tree.

  Caddie looked at Hugh, Hugh at Caddie. Then Caddie went to Fanny and took her by the hand.

  ‘Come, Mother.’

  She came obediently and walked with them to the car, one of them each side of her.

  Celestina and Giulietta had broken off their work to see them off. Giacomino had come to the steps, Beppino and Gianna were there. ‘Arrivederci,’ they called, ‘Arrivederci,’ but they were so busy they could not linger. Celestina shut the car doors briskly and stood back to wave.

  As the car drove out of the gates, Caddie noticed what she had not seen before: that the whitethorn flowers had dropped, their petals were scattered in the road. The hedges now did not disguise their pricks and, almost before the car turned up the road, Giulietta ran and shut the gates. The last thing Hugh and Caddie saw were the gilt letters, ‘Villa Fiorita’, as, with Fanny sitting between them, they drove away.

  A Biography of Rumer Godden

  Rumer Godden was the prolific author of over sixty works of fiction and nonfiction for both adults and children, including international bestsellers Black Narcissus and In This House of Brede.

  Margaret Rumer Godden, also known as Peggy, was born on December 10, 1907, in Sussex, England. Six months after her birth, her family moved to India, where her father worked for the Brahmaputra Steam Navigation Company. Godden spent most of her childhood in a large house along the river in Narayanganj, a trading town in Bengal with her sisters Rose, Nancy, and Winsome, also known as Jon. She fell in love with India, and went on to use it as a colorful backdrop for many of her successful novels, including The Peacock Spring and The River. In 1966, she and her sister Jon, cowrote a memoir about their childhood, Two Under the Indian Sun.

  In 1920, at the age of thirteen, her parents sent her and Jon to boarding school in England. The girls struggled to leave their home in India behind, changing schools five times in two years. Godden eventually parted ways with Jon and attended school in Eastbourne, England, where she studied literature and dance. Due to a chronic spinal injury, she could not pursue a career as a professional ballerina and instead trained in London as a dance teacher. When she was eighteen, she opened a dance studio in Calcutta, the Peggie Godden School of Dance, and there she taught both Indian and Eurasian students, a practice that was considered controversial at the time. At twenty-seven, she married Laurence Sinclair Foster, with whom she had two daughters, Jane and Paula. Upon the birth of her children, she briefly returned to Britain, where she published Black Narcissus, a commercial and critical success.

  At the start of World War II, Godden took her daughters to Kashmir and parted from her husband, who left her with many debts. She rented a small house by the Dal Lake with no electricity or running water, wrote endlessly, and cultivated an herb farm. At this home, one of her servant’s tried to poison her and her children by putting ground glass, opium, and marijuana in their food, inspiring a scene in her book Kingfishers Catch Fire. At forty, she returned to England again, and truly emerged on the British and American literary scenes. She remarried and lived in England for the rest of her life with the exception of a few visits to India. Godden felt at home in both Britain and India, and wrote, “When I am in one country I am homesick for the other.”

  Godden studied many religions of the world and she struck up a friendship with a scholarly Benedictine nun, Dame Felicitas Corrigan. Her studies inspired one of her best-known novels, In This House of Brede, a story about an Englishwoman who leaves her life in London behind to join an order of Benedictine nuns. Godden lived near Stanbrook Abbey for three years, researching the book. She officially converted to Catholicism in the early 1960s.

  Many of her books were made into classic films, including Black Narcissus, The River, The Greengage Summer, and The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. She collaborated with filmmaker Jean Renoir on The River, and they traveled to Calcutta while working on the movie. In addition to her novels written for adult audiences, she also wrote several children’s books—the most famous being The Doll’s House—and nonfiction books, including a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. In 1972, she won the Whitbread Award for children’s literature, and in 1993 she was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. At the age of eighty-six, she visited India—for the final time—with her daughter to shoot a BBC documentary.

  She published her last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, in 1997, just a year before she passed away.

  The Godden family house at Narayanganj in Bengal in the early 1900s.

  Godden in Bengal in 1915 with her parents, Norah and Arthur; her sisters, Rose, Nancy, and Jon; and their dogs, Cherub and Chinky.

  Godden at her desk in Dove House in Dal Lake, Kashmir, 1943.

  Godden in her garden at Dove House in the 1940s.

  Godden on the set of Black Narcissus at Pinewood Studios with Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Deborah Kerr.

  Godden in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden with her daughter Jane in the woods in Buckinghamshire in the 1950s.

  Godden at a book launch in New York with Jean Primrose in the 1960s.

  Godden with her
grandchildren Mark and Elizabeth in Rye, 1962.

  Godden’s home, Lamb House, in Rye.

  Godden and her cat, Simkin, in Scotland in the 1990s.

  Godden in India in 1995 while filming BBC’s Bookmark.

  Godden while filming Bookmark in 1995.

  (All photographs courtesy of the Rumer Godden Literary Trust.)

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1979 by Rumer Godden

  All photos copyright © The Rumer Godden Literary Trust

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4036-5

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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