CHAPTER FIVE
Four days later Craine motored out alone from Arezzo. The car was powerful; its chauffeur had all an Italian’s pride in driving fast and well; nevertheless it seemed a long run to Castelarbia. Craine had forgotten – if he had ever known – that this part of Tuscany held such fastnesses, and eventually he felt that they would certainly get lost. But the chauffeur had no doubts – and finally, when a wide valley opened before them, broke into speech. He was, it seemed, a local man; it was for this reason that he had been assigned to the trip. The volume of the torrente – later in the year, indeed, it would shrink to no more than a muddy trickle among stones – was something by which his passenger must necessarily be impressed. The olives were admitted to be the finest in the province; even their kernels gave you twice as hot a fire as any gathered in Val d’Arno or Casentino; and never in all Italy had there been such alfalfa as he had used to harvest when a boy!
Craine, although he had distracting thoughts, listened with pleasure to as much of the vivid Tuscan as he understood. It was a perfect day, with the sky one clear vault of blue, and he found it hard to believe that, only a few weeks ago, this had been a bare and bitter land, whipped by the tramontana. From late spring to early autumn spans the Englishman’s Italy; he can’t believe his eyes when he sees a snow-plough; confronted by a whole olive grove that the frost has stricken, he forgets his Virgil and dimly supposes a forest fire.
“Cinquantuno.”
“Come?” Craine’s mind had slipped away.
“Cinquantuno poderi, signore.”
Craine looked about him. However good the alfalfa was or had been, these were miserable little farms. But by owning fifty-one of them you could presumably do quite well.
“Ecco la fattoria.” The chauffeur pointed ahead. “Molto, molto grande.”
They were certainly substantial, the barns and granaries into which Marchesa Forni garnered her due proportion of what the estate produced. It wouldn’t do in Berkshire, Craine reflected, and it mightn’t get you far with Gloucestershire Old Spots. But as a system of land tenure it was older than anything known in England. So there must be sense – good business and good human sense – in it. He’d like to learn about it. Only he wasn’t here on any enquiry of that sort. He was concerned with the future of a small boy. And very much more – he told himself – with the boy’s future than with his past. There must of course be explanations. Without a satisfactory modicum of these, the possibility of a mere deception couldn’t be ruled out. But after that the thing became a matter of plans, of foresight. What would be the best future for this lad, who had been brought up, with a status as yet unrevealed, in the heart of Italy? Perhaps he lived with one of the gardeners, or perhaps he considered himself as virtually a Forni. The Marchesa’s cable hadn’t given much clue. But that sort of thing didn’t greatly matter. What was crucial was the nature and strength of the affections involved. The Marchesa might be devoted to Nino Arnander, and her message have been wrung from her by some powerful start of conscience. Or she might be an indifferent woman, briskly addressing herself to one of a number of dispositions required by some change of circumstances. Craine realised that he didn’t commonly go into a piece of business equipped with so little in the way of bearings. Even his chauffeur, having been born in the valley, probably knew more than he did. And this was a good reason for questioning him now – rather late in the day, since the walls of the villa could already be glimpsed behind a screen of ilex.
The Marchese Guido Forni had been an old man, and now he was dead. The chauffeur announced this with confidence. It was known that the Marchesa was going away, but whether the new owner would live on his estate was quite uncertain. Very likely not. Very likely all would be in the hands of the fattore. The new Marchese – he was a young man – might well live in Rome. Most people of that sort did, and extraordinary things appeared about them in the picture papers. Did he know anything about the late Marchese? Certainly he did. Everybody did. The old man had always been strange, and during his last few years had been mad. Pazzo. The old lady had controlled everything. She was a woman of strong mind, who had possessed her own ideas about Castelarbia. So probably there would be great changes there now.
Craine listened to all this – both to the facts and to the tone in which they were delivered – with interest. He liked, as he went about, to feel the pulse of the Continent. The chauffeur, a man in early middle age, had broken free from the life of this valley. His companions must be artisans, Communists, for the most part – and his job was driving round Italy the sort of wealthy foreigners who put up in the biggest hotels. What did he think about the immemorial peasant world from which he had emerged, and which, today, he was revisiting? He had spoken with pride about the fertility of the soil, but was that simply a sentimental turn, whether for his own or Craine’s benefit? Questions like this were of high general interest . . . Once more Craine had to remind himself that it was a different kind of concern he had on hand.
But now the man was continuing to be communicative. Castelarbia was impossibly remote. Even the coming of the Vespas and the Lambrettas had scarcely altered that. Twelve kilometres from even a tolerable strada provinciala! In winter one came to it over ice, in spring through mud, in summer and autumn amid clouds of disagreeable dust. Conditions of that sort were intolerable. They lacked all modernity. If one had a good car, it was folly to live other than on the Via Emilia or the Via Aurelia. Or in the north there were the autostrade. He had a friend who, having the happiness to drive a new Alfa-Romeo, had made a quite remarkable time from Torino to Brescia only the week before.
Craine’s interest in the chauffeur lapsed. He was suddenly eager, as he had not been before, to see the child who was to be – if only loosely speaking – his stepson. Had he been away to school? That, at eleven, would not be in the Italian manner. The villa and its surrounding life – the stables, the oil-presses, the various offices of a small, self-contained community – would constitute his present world. And now that was going to break up on him. Whatever his condition, it must have seemed secure and unchanging. For the chauffeur was clearly right. The age of the motor-scooter had brought little of modernity to Castelarbia as yet. One would suspect here a manner of living almost as antique as the façade now presenting itself beyond a formal garden and a series of terraces – a façade of the cinquecento, not in very notable repair. Or there would be a mix-up of old and new. A Marchese Forni filled in, it might be, as many Government forms as any harassed landed proprietor in England. But in all sorts of ways he could hold up the clock as he pleased. He could be eccentric as an English aristocrat in the eighteenth century could be eccentric. Possibly the late Marchese had been pazzo after that fashion.
The car stopped and Craine got out. On his left there was the gloom of a massive loggia, and on his right sunshine on the long terrace. And suddenly his heart gave an unexpected jump. He had seen a child. But a moment later he realised that it was a girl – a peasant girl who, in a fashion entirely Italian and unaccountable, was driving a young pig down this august vista, where urns and statues cast alternate shadows on the flags, and beyond which, across the valley, one saw a hillside scored and scratched in an anxious cultivation that presently lost itself in the chestnut forest softly closing the horizon.
Craine turned towards the house. An old manservant, white-gloved and with a silver chain round his neck, already stood prepared to admit him. He took a last glance down the terrace. Through some trick of perspective, or of the light, the child and her pig appeared to have made no progress since he first glimpsed them. And he felt an obscure and absurd alarm. It was as if time really could stand still here – could arrest itself, and then spring.
The family might be in a poor way financially, but at least they hadn’t been reduced to eating their stuffs and furnishings. If they had parted with anything to the great predatory collectors at the beginning of the century, it had not been in a big way as far as square or cubic feet were concerned. He was t
o be received, it seemed, in some remote apartment. But as he was led through the long series of rooms – restlessly intercommunicating in the ancient fashion – he hadn’t the sense of anything missing. Massive or finely elegant, dull or gleaming, in marble, bronze, pigment, leather, wood, the superimpositions of centuries cluttered the cold floors and climbed the walls to mingle with obscurely sprawled mythologies on the ceilings. Basically it was domestic and familiar and muddled, as if many generations ago people had here ceased condescending to any planned effect. In this it actually had its resemblance to Pinn, so that even if he had never been in such places before he wouldn’t have felt largely out of it. But he smiled to himself – treading unobserved behind the old servant – as he thought of the Amico di Sandro, recently acquired from Weidle after so much careful thought. Here such things lurked dimly in a shadow, unvisited except by the perfunctory duster. Or so it was easy to feel.
But it was in a different sort of room that the Marchesa Forni awaited him, an office entirely bleak and functional, in which Groocock himself would have found little out of the way except perhaps the huge German stove. Although the day was so mild the Marchesa had been sitting close by this, and Craine saw at once, as she rose and held herself rigidly erect, that she was indeed a very old woman. Gaunt but not shrunken – so that one guessed her to come of some race that did not run to fleshy abundance in its prime – she had a face so pale and lips so drained of colour that there was violent and painful contrast in a single broken vein streaking her temple. Her eyes were black and piercing, yet heavy-lidded with her years; her clothing was an unrelieved black; her only ornament was an ebony cross. She might have walked straight on a stage, Craine thought, and there enjoyed perfect acceptance as a figure of conventional gloom, with a role confined to the harbouring of some secret highly discreditable to the illustrious name she bore. But with associations of this sort the office with its commonplace desk and filing cabinets didn’t at all cohere; the old lady would have her more appropriate décor elsewhere in the villa. The mouldering accoutrements of condottieri, St. Laurence on a canvas all keyed up to the brisk fire on which he was roasting, devotional objects giving robust prominence to scourges and nails; it would be with these that any active dramatic instinct would fit her up. But at the moment she was standing beside a typewriter, and the only picture in evidence was a large diagram showing how to dismember an ox. It didn’t escape Craine that this choice of meeting-ground was by way of defining what the Marchesa conceived to be the nature of their relationship. He therefore opened the exchanges with a bow the formality of which would have been distinctly comical across the Channel.
She barely acknowledged it. For a moment he even thought she proposed to conduct their interview standing. But she slightly moved a hand – it was a hand to paint or draw, he noticed, despite its chalk-stones and its tremor – and pointed to a chair. Then she sat down and spoke, rapidly, confidently, and in an English so bad as to be virtually unintelligible.
For a moment the effect was merely disconcerting – for it didn’t go with the dignity the old lady was evidently concerned to consult. But it also seemed clear that in this medium communication was just not going to be achieved – or not more of it than was represented by Craine’s distinct sense that he was being disapproved of. He was puzzled to know why, for it could hardly be because he didn’t display, in the manner of persons attending conferences or assemblies, some species of pedigree dangling from a lapel. Even the most antique Continental grandees hardly now went in for that sort of exclusiveness – or not in regard to presentable elderly Englishmen. But however that might be, it was assured that no progress was to be made this way. So Craine interrupted, in his careful Italian, with a plea that he might be allowed to practise himself in a language he greatly loved. The Marchesa acquiesced in this with perhaps greater relief than she showed, and went on to express – in Italian and with an effect more icy than Craine would have supposed readily compassable in that language – the hope that Mrs. Craine was not unwell. For it had certainly been Mrs. Craine whom she had invited to honour her with a call.
Craine replied – on his part as briskly as he could bring out the words – that his wife was happily in the best of health, and at that moment no farther off than Arezzo. He had judged, however, that, the business in hand being what it was, he had better in the first place come over himself. Perhaps he had been wrong in insisting on this. But a certain suddenness in the Marchesa’s summons – not to speak of a sparing quality – had persuaded him that the first approach had better be made by one thoroughly conversant with the conduct of affairs. Eccomi qui!
This was perhaps slightly heavy – it wasn’t the less so for striving to close on his notion of a colloquial note – and the Marchesa received it in silence. Then, abruptly, she asked a question. “Mr. Craine, have you ever been a faithful son of the Church?”
“No, Marchesa, I have not.” Craine was to reflect afterwards that he had missed something in the implication of this question. At the moment it came to him simply as a very obvious light on the way the old lady’s mind was working. “I was brought up as a Protestant. That, you know, in England, is the common thing.”
“No doubt.”
“And I attend – say, I have the habit of attending, certain of the services of the Church of England. But to a serious enquiry like yours, I must reply that I’m unable to make any formal religious profession.”
“Quite so. It is what I would have expected.” The Marchesa gave a sombre nod, which Craine found himself not taking very well. Perhaps unreasonably, he was annoyed that she should suppose there was a presumption that an Englishman of his sort would be agnostic. “And Mrs. Craine?” she asked.
“I’d say her position may fairly be called much the same.”
“And may I ask, Mr. Craine, what, in these circumstances, is to be the fate of your children?”
“Certainly. It’s a fair enough question, in view of what we have to discuss.”
The Marchesa looked at him stonily. She might have made nothing of this. “Yes?” she said.
“They will go to church, and so on. Roughly speaking, they will be brought up to attach a good deal of weight to the simple fact that people have been doing just that for quite a long time. Later, they will have to decide for themselves, find their own feet.”
The Marchesa was silent. Her mind might have been wandering. Certainly she didn’t give the impression of much taking in what he had said. Perhaps, he thought, he had been a little too ambitious in the way of Italian idiom. And now she stirred on her chair. The small movement was noticeable, because she had the art of sitting quite still. She might be said – if she wasn’t so stiff already – to be squaring her shoulders. And he had a sudden, almost alarmed, impression of immense fatigue.
“Mrs. Craine,” she said, “is doubtless the last person to whom I ought to appeal.”
“Dear me, no. I see no reason to say that.” Craine was surprised at what he interpreted as evidence of extreme consideration in one whom he had been regarding as thoroughly hard. “My wife is most anxious to do what she can. And so am I. There’s nothing, surely, that can’t fairly readily be sorted out.”
He was conscious that he spoke with what might appear a rather easy confidence. And perhaps it was too much the confidence of money. Tutors, prep, schools, a word here or there where he carried weight, Groocock, trusts, a ready entry to half a dozen professions; all that side of the thing belonged to a world he commanded. Perhaps he was rather grossly putting it in the forefront, while the old lady was facing deeper – or at least more personal – issues, where difficulties weren’t so effortlessly overcome. He thought he had better take up at once what she had begun with, and explain that the child would of course be brought up as a Roman Catholic if his young mind was already inclined that way. “For instance,” he went on, “the religious issue. There’s certainly nothing we can’t manage there.”
Again it wasn’t perhaps a felicitous manner of speech, but
he was downright astounded when the Marchesa rose as if she had been stung and walked the length of the room. When she turned, there were small spots of colour on the dead pallor of her cheeks. “I am distracted,” she said.
Distratto. She was only apologising for absence of mind. But in fact she did give the appearance of something like desperation. And she was looking at him as if he were a monster. He could think of nothing better to do than produce a sympathetic murmur. Its effect wasn’t happy. Conceivably from a monster it was a disconcerting move.
The Marchesa made a gesture round the bleak room. “My nephew inherits. I retire to Florence. The house there is large. But there are my late husband’s sisters, and other members of his family. There is thus a problem – a practical problem. It has seemed to me proper that Mrs. Craine and yourself, living as you do, should take some part in solving it.”
“My dear Marchesa, it is a point on which we perfectly agree.” He had a vision of a small forlorn private Hampton Court, standing secluded and decayed on a slope below Fiesole, and cut up into apartments for an army of aged Forni ladies. Certainly it would constitute a problem where a small boy was concerned. “We are absolutely,” he went on, “the natural people to take over. There can be no doubt of that.”
She was standing in front of him, so that rather awkwardly he had to rise. She made one of her rare movements, placing a hand on her ebony cross. The gesture didn’t register with him as idle. “You are to understand,” she said, “that this act of—of charity and asylum was the Marchese’s. There were difficulties, legal difficulties, which he had to exercise his influence to overcome. It was the influence, you must know, not of his personality – for he was too much of an eccentric to possess that – but of his rank and name. I acquiesced in it. I acquiesced in it, once certain assurances, the nature of which you may readily guess, had been given me. I have never been troubled by the legal aspect of our conduct. There have been a good many centuries during which my own family, equally with my husband’s, have not always taken kings and princes and policemen very seriously.”
A Use of Riches Page 6
