Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  So often before. With Lally and Elizabeth for holidays from as early as I could remember, sitting on deck eating lemons against seasickness, on Lally’s stern advice, repeating the phrases she thought we might need on the other side—“Bonjour”, “Merci”, “Le Doublevey Sey, s’il vous plait”—watching the gulls swoop and glide behind us on the wake, smoke stream away from the black and red funnel, the water all about us like foaming ginger beer. We hadn’t ever looked behind then; no last looks, no silly waving, “Full Steam Ahead!” Lally used to cry happily. Ahead to Abroad, to adventure, a return rather than a parting. And that’s how I would think of it today in the sullen light; not a severance, a beginning.

  * * *

  The London flight was on time when we got to the check-in at Fiumicino; Arnold was pretty silent all the way down in the car. No one felt much like speaking.

  “I wish you’d let me stay a bit longer; just to see you settled in somewhere.” He stared miserably out of the window.

  “No, don’t even think of it, we’ll manage … got three houses to see today.”

  “Just don’t like leaving like this. It doesn’t feel right.”

  He checked in his baggage, a small handgrip. I handed him the presents which he’d bought for June and his child. A bottle of Chianti, a long sausage in a net bag, a wind-up police car with flashing lights.

  “I’m going to miss you, Gov. Miss you bad.”

  “I am too. It’s the only thing I really feel guilty about; leaving you, Noldie.”

  He rallied swiftly. “Aw Hell! We had a good innings though, didn’t we? Fifteen years … a long time … couldn’t ask for much more, could we?”

  We walked together towards Immigration, no sense in hanging about.

  “Maybe when we’re all settled you could come out for a holiday … bring June and Aidan? In the summer—have a real relax …”

  “Sure. I’ll miss all those early morning calls though; the bacon sandwiches. Always had the coffee ready, didn’t I? In my little percolator.”

  “You’ll be doing it for someone else soon, you see.”

  We stopped at the barrier, he rummaged for his passport and boarding card.

  “No. Not me … I don’t want to stand-in for anyone else now. Try and get my ticket on the Floor somewhere. Assistant …

  “Give June my love.”

  “I will; and take care, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “It was a really great time,” he said and turned away abruptly.

  * * *

  Rome seemed, then, to be full of ladies who ran Estate Agencies, or at least worked in them, and I got to know a varied selection of both the ladies and the properties which they had on offer to rent. All pretty awful.

  An elderly Russian Princess, dressed as if for a tough shoot in the Highlands, and with an inaccurate, not to say completely erroneous knowledge of my station in life, implored me round a number of decaying palazzos in the hills and ornate villas on the Appia Antica, promising that the central heating would be mended, the pools made watertight, the furniture returned, and that the views, on clear days were incredible … all the way to Frascati or even further. That these sad villas lay in vast, unkempt gardens amidst mouldering columns and crumbling putti, that they were cold, damp and neglected and often furnished as if by a mad Maharaja left naked with a cheque book in Drages or Maples, never caused her a moment’s care or worry. Everything, she insisted, could be done by tomorrow—and quite clearly, from the neglect and disarray of most of them, never was. Although I continued to insist that my funds were very modest, and that I only wanted a very small house with a swimming pool if possible, not as a luxury but as a dire necessity in summer in Rome, and that it should be as easily run and compact as possible, I still had to make fruitless journeys into the smart areas of the city, or up into the hills, where wreathed in mists and scrofulous with damp, yet another rusting crested gate was thrown open and warrens of rooms and corridors explored.

  Signorina Dora was a little easier to convince, and far less grand; her agency was small and seemed to cater for a more modest client. The flats she offered were often small, foul, in dark streets, or high blocks, and had all been used for one kind of a business or another. Usually one kind. She didn’t do houses very often. She was a wan girl, bleached blonde hair with an angry black parting, plastic alligator boots and a fur coat which moulted in the rain. She chewed thoughtfully at her pencil and made copious notes, a telephone glued into the crick of her neck, Italian streaming from her lips like bullets from a Tommy gun. Eventually she hung up, ran her hand wearily through the harsh blonde hair and pushed an address towards me.

  “It is north of the city, not chic, very not chic. Via Flaminia; not a good address. The big cemetery is there, Prima Porta. Molto doloroso, eh, va bene. It has what you want, is empty, is cheap, has telephone, pool … and you must pay the gardener.”

  Villa Fratelli was twelve kilometres out of Rome on a small hill stuck all over with parasol pines, mimosa, magnolia. Below it lay a clutter of squatters’ houses, apparently built overnight, from blocks of porous tufa. Bilious yellow, tin roofs, an open sewer running through the dirt streets, dumped cars, a football pitch, television aerials, enormous refrigerators incongruously standing in the muddy yards linked to the main electricity cable by meters of tangled wire. There was one Bar with green walls, striplights and a pin-table; a butcher, a baker, and a shop which sold Kodak film and wedding enlargements or confirmation photographs in vivid colour. Otherwise there was nothing much there apart from a few scrawny chickens, starving dogs, and an old man who rode about in an invalid car with a musical box, a monkey and no legs.

  The villa, when you finally reached it through the unmade roads and dank tufa houses, was not so bad. Surrounded by a walled garden, with stout wooden gates, it was a modern reproduction of a casa colonica … and commanded the most marvellous views from the upper windows. It was cool, light and not depressing. A good swimming pool in the garden, reasonable kitchen, sparse furniture, most of it awful, but it was cheap and it was in the country; if you ignored the sprawl of suburban Rome below the hill. There was even an empty chicken run, and a small vineyard. I made arrangements to re-visit and finalise it the following day and hurried back to Rome to warn the Princess.

  “Where is this villa?” she said darkly, the commission slipping through her anxious fingers. “Near Prima Porta! Dio! Not possible … you can not live near Prima Porta! only dead people are there … no one goes to that part of the city except on the day of the dead. It is appalling, dangerous, and not chic … I have all arrangements made for you to see Palazzo Gondoli … is divine, is the house of our Ambassador to Uruguay … is ravishing. 2,000 dollars a month. You come now. Immediately.”

  “But I have seen the Palazzo, Princess, it is too big, too grand and too expensive for me …”

  “We can make an arrangement, maybe they take 1,800 …”

  “But it overlooks the city dump yard.”

  “No. No. Is not true!”

  “I’ve seen the trucks, big trucks dumping the rubbish. The fires … you can see it from the gardens clearly.”

  “Ha!” she cried cheerfully. “Only when you stand up!”

  Villa Fratelli belonged, as might seem reasonable, to Signora Fratelli, a newly widowed lady, of considerable charm, reduced circumstances, and lost hopes. She was about thirty, pretty, vivacious when she was not melancholy, which was all the time now, and smart in a last-year’s-model kind of way. Something had distressed her greatly in the past, and she was not about to relinquish her grief easily. Her husband, she told me the first day we met, had been a very handsome man, very brave and dashing; if not particularly bright about finance, he was extremely good about guns and hunting which had led to his tragic death, by falling from a low flying aircraft, a Piper Cub she thought, attempting to shoot his first zebra in Kenya. He had unhappily lost balance and had fallen into the galloping herd below. Without having fired a shot. She herself was told th
e dreadful news while sitting on a Nile steamer floating gently towards Luxor and unsuspected widowhood. It had destroyed her. The house which they had built together was now too full of memories, so she had ripped out the furnishings, save for a few odds and ends, and put it on the market. The last, and indeed they had been the first, tenants, were an American family, very friendly, with many children. They were employed at NATO and he had been posted away suddenly; so the house was free. Would I care to rent it, or buy it? It didn’t matter much one way or another.

  I rented it for a year, and paid the slightly astonished Signorina Dora her first deposit. Capucine and Julie Christie, both of whom happened to be working in Rome just then, lost no time in having a look at it and both pronounced it acceptable if bleak.

  “You need masses of flowers and cushions everywhere!” they said, and later sent both to prove it.

  Two days later Signora Fratelli came up and did the inventory, which took very little time, since there was really very little left to check. Some ash-trays from local Roman restaurants, beds with straw mattresses, some chairs, a large refectory table too heavy to cart away, and a dining-room suite of spartan simplicity and ugliness. There were no sheets, naturally, and no electric light bulbs. Little things had to be found; like knives and forks, and something to cook in.

  “Ah! Si … I forget. I will find at the casa de Mamma where now I live alone … you understand.”

  She showed me how to work the central heating, where the water main was turned off or on, how to empty and fill the pool, and that the gardener’s name was Peppino and that he had been in the service of her mother’s family for fifty years. He was now, she thought, about eighty and useless. “The gardens,” she indicated them with a sad shrug, “we had so many plans to make it pretty … but God was unkind,” implying that what was left was for me to get right.

  It was a wilderness of red earth, clumps of frosted oleanders, long-dead geraniums, and a scrappy piece of grass outside the drawing room which might, once, have been a lawn. The tall pines dropped their needles endlessly, the magnolias shed enormous rusty leaves, the raspberry canes were a thicket. Through an overgrown hedge lay Peppino’s province, the vegetable garden where he grew tomatoes, onions, asparagus and ragged rows of beans in a vague haphazard way. Down at the bottom, the empty chicken run. All about the mimosa, pines, twisted olives, and at their feet, a cobalt carpet of violets scenting the March air. There was plenty of time; as soon as the house was livable I’d start on the garden with Peppino, useless or not.

  Signora Fratelli drove off in her small red car, a list of promises in her hand which I hoped she would remember, but already expected her not to; I was, after all, quite used to Italy.

  Eventually, with a certain amount of pressure from Signorina Dora, bits and pieces of missing inventory returned to the villa, and by the time that Eduardo and Antonia arrived to join me from Valencia, where they had been waiting, the place was almost a going concern. At least one could eat, sleep and cook in it, and they were delighted by the views all around, by the simplicity of the house, and by the fact that they could go to Mass anywhere they liked within minutes of the slummy village below.

  Peppino proved to be willing, kind, and eager to help. Ignored for years by the Fratellis, hardly spoken to by the American family from NATO, he clumped after me through his domain, chattering in incomprehensible Italian, apparently explaining what he could do with a few packets of seed, some encouragement, and a new spade and fork. His smelly little shed, in which he spent his siesta, beside the chicken run, was the centre of his life and his domain. A sagging bed, a wooden chair and table, Gina Lollobrigida on one wall and a Milan football team on the other, the beams wreathed with drying chillis, pomodori and onions. We shared a glass of repellent house wine and I promised him the tools he needed, and Antonia willingly agreed to cook him a meal daily in return for baskets of fresh fruits and vegetables, providing that he stopped hurling bricks at the cringing little dog, rib cage showing, foreleg smashed and bloody, with bone sticking out, riddled with worms and heaving with ticks, which haunted us day and night. He explained that it had been the property of the Americans who had bought it the year before as a puppy for Christmas for the children; and that when they left, apparently in a great hurry, they abandoned it, with two cats, now gaunt and starving, to fend for themselves, leaving him a small amount of money to buy them food. Since he reckoned that he needed the food far more than the beasts, he had spent it (compassion for animals is not in the Pope’s recipe for Holy Salvation); and most of the day chucking stones and bricks at the bewildered animals which refused to leave. I determined to find a vet to come out and painlessly destroy the three of them. They would obviously be a problem when Candy eventually arrived from England. In the event the vet wormed and mended everybody, which cost a fortune I had not budgeted for (I was on a tight rein here), and the house now had three more occupants who took over the place as a right. Under Antonia’s loving eye and gentle care, they prospered well. The dog was called Labbo, the cats Prune and Putana. Villa Fratelli was complete.

  Elizabeth was our first staying guest in the ugly Blue Guest Bedroom.

  “I admit the wallpaper is a bit dizzy-making, my dear, but still …”

  Blue roses and sweet peas writhed across walls, ceiling, curtains, bedspread and the one upholstered chair which Prune had claimed as his; the floor was of blue shining tiles.

  “It’s a bit like sleeping in a knitting-bag or something.”

  “Signora Fratelli calls it her bower.’

  “Her what?”

  “Bower … I think it was their room.”

  “How peculiar. Hope he doesn’t come back haunting people in his safari hat, I’d really have a frightful turn if he did; perhaps I should have brought old Candy after all … oh dear.”

  It had been the original intention that she would accompany Candy from England; but she had come alone, finally deciding that a mastiff was, at nine, too old to make the trip in a small cage, and that it would be far better off in the cooler climate of Sussex with her own family. She arrived instead with a pile of much needed bed linen, custard powder, Bisto, and three pudding bowls which Antonia said she could not possibly manage without; and was much impressed with the villa and the gardens, which were already starting to show promise, since Peppino and I spent hours attacking weeds and thick red clay, pruning, planting and mowing, making large compost heaps and dribbling beans and peas into long carefully-measured trenches. As the spring wore on more and more people started to arrive, Rome was a very busy place, and all roads seemed to cross there, even if they did not always end there, as I had been told. Eventually Villa Fratelli became just like Bendrose, Beel and Nore, with much the same cast, all coming out for holidays or long week-ends. Xan and Daphne, Moura, Irene, Gareth, the Lerners, Bumble and so on. The Blue Room was hardly ever without occupants. With the pool at the edge of the terrace, the Frascati wine in barrels, the soft spring sun of Italy, and three excellent meals from Antonia it was a happy temptation; instead of feeling a lost, wistful immigrant I was once again in the bosom of my friends, or they were in mine, whichever way you put it, and all that seemed to have happened was that the set and background had changed, but little else.

  One of the things which I surprised myself discovering was the sheer delight of marketing. Something I had not been able to do for over twenty years. In England it had been impossible to walk about in shops or streets alone; I was always accompanied by Forwood or Theo Cowan to ward off the inevitable scatter of curious people who would constantly follow me about from place to place making life sadly uncomfortable. Eventually I resigned the business of shopping at all, hating the stir it always caused which irritated both me and the shopkeepers. People were never rude intentionally, merely unthinking, and it was just better to keep out of the way. I never carried money in my pockets, Forwood paid for everything, and for many years I never even signed a cheque; this was done at a much higher level by a group of black-pin-st
riped gentlemen who were my accountants and lawyers and so on. Life was totally unreal in this direction, even in the village where I lived, unless I was very careful and went about looking like a tramp. Now to be able to wander among the towering piles of fruits, fish and flowers in the market at Ponte Milvio every morning at eight o’clock, alone and unheeded, was a delight that I had almost completely forgotten. Daily I would return to Antonia’s kitchen with baskets of fresh green beans, artichokes, new potatoes the size of bantams’ eggs, loaves of still-warm bread, kilos of gleaming coral-pink prawns, bunches of amber grapes, arms full of carnations and heavy-scented stocks. No one asked for autographs, pulled my clothes or asked for signed photographs for relations. If I was recognised it was always politely, with a smile, a salute, or sometimes even an offered flower. And if, after the exertions of bargaining with Elsa at the fish-stall, I went into a bar for a coffee, no one asked me to come outside and put up my fists to impress the woman they were with, which had been a frequent hazard before in pubs from Chiddingfold to Bristol. I naturally found it all very refreshing and even exhilarating to feel so free. I inevitably came to grief in the supermarkets, which for the first time in my life I now entered bravely with my trolley and clattered up and down the aisles plundering like Attila the Hun arriving back at the villa with a varied assortment of goods ranging from tinned beans, toilet rolls and pot-scrubbers to a five-foot cactus in a plastic pot. Having money in my pocket was a serious problem for the accountant, Forwood, who, after a few hysterical weeks of my assaults on Super-Romano or Standa, managed to bring my polka down to a slow foxtrot, if not a complete halt. The first showing, in private, of “Götterdämmerung” now retitled “La Caduta degli Dei”, managed to do that quite well.

  I was deeply impressed with the tremendous scale and theatricality of the film, of the breadth of Visconti’s vision and work and of all the performances save for my own. Clearly I had done what I could with the role of “Friedrich”, but what I had done was not, perhaps, quite enough. He still remained wet; this was not, I hasten to add, entirely my fault. Visconti admitted that he was eventually the villain of the piece, because he had decided to favour the second plot-line rather than the first; and had hacked most of the big set-piece scenes between Ingrid Thulin and myself out of the picture in favour of those of the incestuous son and his mother—which was the line he wished to pursue in his story. The fact that so much that had been strong was now eliminated, and that what was left was mostly played on the back of my head, rather diminished the effects which I had tried, successfully, I thought at the time, to achieve. Milestone had said years ago that you could make a good script bad but that you could never make a bad one good. It applied also to the parts. Now I learned the hard way.