Michele had opened the piano and sat down in front of it, and slowly and gently the first notes of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata stole on to the atmosphere. The Sonata was followed by a Chopin waltz, and then a nocturne ... Candy sat listening with the keenest, most acute pleasure, and not only that, but a very real feeling of being temporarily anaesthetized against every hurt that life could offer. He finished with the plaintive beauty of Brahms’ Cradle Song, and when he stopped she wanted to ask him to go on—to go on and on, and keep the soothing flow of melody running for ever.
But she didn’t, and he closed the piano and turned round. “You feel better?” He was smiling.
“Much better.” She stood up. “Thank you. And now I’ll have to go.” Her eyes, very green in the lamplight, smiled into his with sudden warmth. “You’re kind,” she said, almost without thinking.
He shook his head slowly. “No. Not kind.”
The Conte insisted on driving her back to Miss Marchetti’s flat, and as soon as she had said good-bye to her hostess—who enveloped her in a haze of expensive French perfume as she kissed her rather theatrically on both cheeks—they walked out to his car, still waiting on the gravel sweep before the imposing front door. When he had closed the door on Candy and climbed into the driving seat he lit a cigarette, and Candy felt mildly surprised, for she had never seen him smoke before. As if he felt the surprise he glanced round at her in the faint light from the newly switched on headlamps, and she sensed something oddly rueful in his face.
“I don’t smoke often,” he said suddenly. “But sometimes ... It is a bad habit—very bad.” He ground the cigarette out in the ash-tray in front of him, and turned the key in the ignition. The car swung almost silently back through the gates and under the old stone archway, and soon they were speeding back along the Appian Way. Michele said nothing for several minutes, and then he spoke abruptly.
“I am very sorry... about this evening!”
Under cover of the darkness Candy flushed. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said awkwardly. “I—I had a wonderful evening. Your mother is—”
“My mother is a notorious man-hunter. And her latest victim is—happens to be someone who is important to you, no?”
“Was important to me,” Candy said quickly, feeling the colour still burning in her cheeks, the tears threatening again behind her eyelids.
“No, One day,” gently, “you will say that. But not yet.”
For some time they were both silent, and then, as they paused at a busy crossroads near the centre of Rome, he spoke again. “You saw Mrs. Endacombe?” he asked.
“Mrs. Endacombe?”
“She is Japanese, although married to an American diplomat. “I think,” rather drily, “you certainly saw her to-night.”
“Oh ... Yes, of course.”
“James Endacombe has been a—close friend of my mother’s. You will have guessed that.”
Embarrassed, Candy said nothing.
“Their relationship is now over. I don’t know why he takes his wife to the house. It could be that he wishes to torture her, but I think it is more a form of stupidity. They are to pretend—she is to pretend—that nothing has happened. But what I wanted to make clear is that with my mother things do end. One day your friend John Ryland will go his own way, and she will go hers.”
When they got back to the flat Caterina Marchetti was waiting for them, but although he greeted her with what looked to Candy like indulgent affection Michele firmly refused her offer of a cup of coffee, and said good-night to both of them at the ground-floor entrance to the flats. He had gone back to his car, and was just about to climb into the driving-seat when he suddenly turned and came hurrying back to speak to Candy. She was just about to enter the lift with Caterina when he caught up with them, and the Italian woman looked rather amused.
“There is something I forgot to say to Candida,” he explained. “It is about her work.”
“Very well.” With a surprising absence of rancour Caterina patted the English girl’s arm and stepped back into the lift. “I will go ahead, cara, and prepare the coffee.”
When they were alone Candy noticed that in the rather harsh light of the lobby the Conte seemed to look more drawn than ever, and with a sudden uprush of sympathy for him Candy wished she knew what it was that made him look like that. She wished she knew whether it would be possible to help him.
“I came back,” he told her, “to say something that I meant to say to you earlier.” He paused. “You were distressed to-night.”
She looked away from him, and he apologized swiftly. “Forgive me. I didn’t wish to hurt you—to constantly remind you. It was only that I wondered if you realized—if you understood how much your music could help you.”
“Yes,” she said rather wearily. “Signor Galleo said a lot about that.”
“Did he? I think you will find it is true.”
“I expect I shall.” This time she definitely sounded tired and withdrawn.
“What I wanted to say to you is that I think you should absorb yourself in your singing as much as possible.” He hesitated. “I know something of music. In between your lessons with Galleo I could perhaps help you...”
She looked up at him quickly, and there was a glow of real gratitude in her eyes as she thanked him.
“Would you really? I do need someone to—to just sort of listen to me...” And then she broke off. “Oh, but I couldn’t expect you to bother—”
“I suggested it,” he reminded her coolly. “So you can certainly expect me to bother. Caterina has a piano here. I will not disturb her to-night, but in the morning I will telephone her, and we will arrange everything.” He smiled at her with the sudden brilliance that she had seen in his face only once or twice before. “Does it please you?”
“It’s wonderful. I’m so grateful.”
For several seconds he looked into her face. “There is no need,” he said gently, “to talk of being grateful. Good-night, Candida.”
And then he was gone, and she hurried upstairs in the lift to join Caterina Marchetti.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN the morning Michele telephoned as he had promised, and as it happened Lorenzo Galleo telephoned too. Between them they worked out a programme for Candy that looked like leaving her with very little time for anything but music in the weeks immediately ahead, and she was grateful to them both. She was very grateful, too, to Miss Marchetti, who entered into the spirit of the thing with warm enthusiasm, and placed her own drawing-room with its beautiful Bechstein piano at Candy’s disposal almost whenever she wanted it. Candy realized, of course, that the Italian woman was probably glad of the opportunity to see such a lot of Michele, and she supposed too that Michele was equally happy about this aspect of the situation, although she was quite prepared to believe he felt a genuine wish to help her, Candy. There was, she decided, something very attractive about the Conte’s personality. She hoped he and Caterina would make up their minds about one another soon.
November passed, and the first two weeks of December, and all at once Christmas was almost upon them, and Candy realized that for the first time in her life she would be spending the festive season outside England. She was half prepared for a sharp bout of homesickness, but as the days went by everyone around her seemed to conspire to see to it that she hardly had time for lingering thoughts of snow and holly and mince pies. With Caterina she went Christmas shopping in the smart shops of modern Rome, buying presents for Sue and her brother-in-law and the children, and—because they were so beautiful and she couldn’t resist them—far more Christmas cards than she could possibly find a use for.
Caterina seemed to buy mountains of expensive gifts, from enormous bottles of perfume to an enchanting velvet-covered teddy bear intended for a very small cousin, and Christmas was obviously a time of the year that delighted her. Her pleasure in every sort of preparation was almost childlike, and Candy, who had grown genuinely fond of her in the course of the last few weeks, felt
glad that they would be spending most of the holiday together. Caterina was not going away— her parents were dead and her only brother was in America—and when Candy had at one time tried to insist upon removing herself from the Italian woman’s flat for the second half of December she had been genuinely horrified. She had, of course, been invited to an enormous number of parties, and to Candy’s amazement she, too, had been anything but overlooked. Lorenzo Galleo and his wife had urged her if she had nothing else to do to spend at least part of Christmas Day with them at their flat near the Via Veneto, and numerous Italian women whom she had met over the past few weeks had sent her invitations to social gatherings, while for Christmas Eve itself there was rather a special invitation. Both she and Caterina had been asked to have dinner on that evening at the Casa Lucca, Michele’s reputedly splendid Renaissance palazzo in the heart of the old city.
Just under a week before Christmas, Caterina unexpectedly asked her English guest if she would like to go with her to the Convent of the Holy Angels. “Today,” she explained, “the Sisters have a party for all the poor children of their district. Every year I go—just to help a little, and to watch.” Her dark eyes smiled. “With so many children there is a lot to watch.”
When they got to the old, stone-walled convent, it seemed to Candy that for this one afternoon at least the whole building had been thrown open to all the children in Rome. The nuns’ long dining-hall had been transformed into a fairyland, with tinsel and paper-chains and huge boughs of evergreen in all directions, and along the walls trestle tables laden with cakes, jellies, sandwiches and big bowls of pasta were obviously exercising such a fascination for hundreds of pairs of small dark eyes that there seemed every possibility of a stampede if supervision should not be adequate. Supervision, however, was adequate, and in fact it seemed to Candy that the Sisters’ skill with such a fantastic assortment of urchins was positively miraculous. Some of the children, it was explained to her, came from the poorest and roughest homes in that part of the city, and under normal circumstances their manners probably matched their backgrounds. But the mere fact that they were under the Convent roof seemed to have a powerful effect upon them, and although they were obviously enjoying themselves very few of them gave any trouble.
Candy was enchanted by them—by their small, olive-tinted faces and their silky black curls, their long, sweeping eyelashes and the delicate features that in so many cases bore the unmistakable stamp of old Rome, and in her broken Italian she tried to talk to some of them. They were certainly quite willing to talk to her, and here and there she managed to understand a lot. They nearly all belonged to big families—one little boy claimed proudly that he had eight brothers and six sisters—and most of them went to school. The Holy Virgin and the good Sisters played an important part in their conversation and, apparently, in their lives, and some of the saints seemed as familiar to them as members of their own families. They weren’t curious about Candy—they had seen foreign signorine before—but they were curious about the small presents hanging in clusters on the tall Christmas tree by the door.
Eventually, when practically all the pasta and the cakes and the jellies had been consumed, but everybody’s eyes were still fastened on the tree, two of the nuns set upon it and solemnly divested it of its colourful burdens. Then the interesting packages were carefully distributed so that not a single child was left out, and for ten minutes there really was a kind of controlled pandemonium. Each child had one box of sweets and one package containing a toy, and there were shrieks of delight in all directions as Cuddly stuffed animals, small vehicles of every description and diminutive sets of dolls’ furniture cascaded over the floor like something out of a child’s Christmas dream.
“Everybody gives, so that there is enough for them all,” Caterina Marchetti said softly. “Once,” she added, “it was the custom to give them things to wear—shoes and gloves, and jumpers of wool. But the Reverend Mother decided it was more important that they should be given something which would make them truly happy ... just once in the year.” Her face softened. “They have so few toys.”
The distribution of presents, however, was not the ultimate climax of the afternoon, and after a reasonable interval had been allowed for gloating over new acquisitions the nuns called for silence. One of them started speaking in Italian, and Caterina turned to her English companion with a slightly guilty expression on her face.
“Candy, I did not tell you before, but—at the end of the Christmas party it is the custom to sing. Hymns, you know, and one or two songs of the kind children like. Some of the nuns have good voices, but this is not quite the sort of thing they are used to. So...” she smiled apologetically, “I told them you would lead them!”
After the first shock of discovering what was expected of her, and of realizing that she couldn’t possibly get out of it, Candy began to enjoy herself more than she would have believed possible. She had never done anything of the sort in her life before, and for a few moments, as she went over to stand beside the small bespectacled nun who was seated in front of the piano, she felt decidedly shy, for the suddenly solemn eyes of what looked like several hundred Italian children were fixed exclusively on her, and every one of the Sisters seemed to be regarding her with exactly the same smile of gentle expectation. But the little nun at the piano began to play immediately, and she discovered to her relief that the hymns to be sung were all more or less familiar to her. And although she sang in English while the nuns and children sang in Italian, somehow the mixing of the languages didn’t seem to matter. They sang Away in a Manger and Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, and she was amazed to discover how many of the hymns she had always thought of as belonging to the Church of England were apparently well known to Roman Catholics. Then there were the songs that had been selected for her. These she was expected to sing more or less solo, but the nuns joined in here and there, and in any case she knew all the songs well, and her confidence increased by leaps and bounds. The children didn’t understand English, but they were none the less appreciative for that, and as she progressed from Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Little Donkey and Mary’s Boy Child they became raptly attentive.
Although Candy’s whole training was tending towards the preservation of her voice for opera and fairly serious music she was not at all the sort of singer who finds it impossible to cope with an ordinary, catchy melody, and as she stood between the piano and the Christmas tree, in the stone-flagged dining-hall of the convent, singing the songs of Christmas for the entertainment of poor Roman children she felt her spirit lightening, and a new warmth and energy pervading her voice.
As the last notes of Mary’s Boy Child died away on the piano the little plump Sister leant towards Candy, her eyes sparkling behind her rimless spectacles, and whispered that it would be nice if they could now have Silent Night. Candy agreed enthusiastically, and as if at a pre-arranged signal two of the novices went round the room turning practically all the lights out. The children were beckoned closer, and Candy began. By now she had lost every trace of self-consciousness, and her voice, clear and pure and incredibly soft, had a breathtaking quality about it.
“Silent night, holy night ... all is calm, all is bright.” The nuns folded their arms about their white-robed figures, and their tranquil faces beamed.
Carried away by her singing, Candy didn’t notice that one of the main doors to the passage way had opened, and at first she didn’t see the new arrival who had slipped unobtrusively into the room and taken up his position behind a cluster of novices. She had reached the second verse, and was beginning to be conscious of a faint prickling behind the eyelids at the thought, suddenly conjured up, of half-forgotten childhood Christmases when her attention was attracted by a movement, and she saw Michele di Lucca. He was standing in the shadows watching her, and in an odd way the sight of him was a shock. Her voice wavered, throwing the pianist into temporary confusion, and although she recovered quickly and went on more or less as before she knew that all the adults pr
esent were looking at her in mild surprise. All, that is, except the Conte, whose dimly seen face looked unreadable.
“Christ the Saviour is born....” Softly and sweetly, her voice died away on the familiar last words of the carol, and as the hushed piano also faded into silence she was startled and embarrassed by an eager, spontaneous burst of applause.
“That was bellissima, signorina.” It was Reverend Mother, coming towards her with hands outstretched.
“And now we will have Adeste Fideles, and you will lead us.”
The little nun struck a resounding chord on the piano, and everybody stood. Slowly, and with as much feeling as she could infuse into it, Candy sang O Come, All Ye Faithful as she knew it, and all around her Italian voices, young and old, joined in. The surge of sound was melodious and heart-warming, the sound of Christmas itself, pure and simple and unchanging, and this time, as she sang the last note she knew that her cheeks were wet.
Again the piano fell silent, and in the stillness that followed Candy felt all the exhilaration she had been feeling seep out of her, to be succeeded by a wave of dejection so overpowering that it seemed to her she was physically crushed by it. All her energy drained away from her, and all at once felt bitterly lonely ... utterly isolated. The childhood memories mocked her for a moment, and then receded. She looked around for Caterina, but somehow she couldn’t see her. Instead she saw the Conte di Lucca, and he was coming towards her.
Song Above the Clouds Page 9
