Prodigies

by Francis King

  The two dogs now safely on their leashes but still snarling at each other, the man examined his fragile wrist. A bead of blood appeared and then another.

  ‘Did one of them bite you? Is it bad?’

  ‘Niente. Nothing.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘The dogs should apologize, not you,’ He drew a silk handkerchief out of the sleeve of his jacket and delicately dabbed at the wound.

  ‘Oughtn’t you to see a doctor?’

  He laughed.‘No, no!’

  ‘You speak English. But you must be Italian.’

  ‘I had an English nanny.’

  ‘I also had an English nanny. I sometimes wish I still had her.’

  ‘I don’t wish I still had mine. She was horribly strict with me.’

  ‘But taught you excellent English.’

  He looked at her and smiled. His teeth were small and white, like his hands. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You’re the one they call La Principessa.’ He also knew that they called her La Pazza. ‘You’re famous. With your yacht out there’ – he pointed with his cane – ‘and all those African servants.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Well, if you’re a Principessa, then I’m a Principe.’ He swept off his hat and gave her an elaborate mock bow. ‘ Il Principe Massimo di Montebianco.’

  ‘I’ve also heard of you.’

  On her rare forays into Neapolitan society, she had heard people speak of this young prince, the last of a once famous house, with either mockery or disapproval. For most of the time, she had gathered, he lived with his hypochondriac and rarely seen mother on the diminishing ancestral estates between Naples and Salerno; but he also had an apartment on the piano nobile of the family palazzo in the city. The rest of the palazzo was let to some rich Americans in search of an aristocratic husband for their only child. Later Alexine was to recollect a snatch of conversation, overheard over a dinner table, about this girl and the Prince. A heavily bejewelled and jowly dowager was talking: ‘Well, if those poor, ignorant creatures think that Massimo is going to take the girl off their hands, they have a surprise coming to them.’ The red-faced old man next to her – a retired diplomat, Alexine was later to learn laughed: ‘If they’re really prepared to part with a fortune to buy her an aristocratic stallion, then they should make sure that the man is not merely the first of those things but also the second.’

  ‘What have you heard of me?’ Massimo now asked. ‘Nothing good, I’m sure.’

  ‘Interesting things. I’m glad I’ve met you at last.’

  Together, they began to walk through the park. The dogs, once so ferociously determined to do battle, now each behaved as though the other did not exist.

  ‘What brought you to Naples?’

  ‘Chance, nothing more than chance. We were making for Patras, when a storm was imminent. I wanted to press on, but the captain insisted that we must put in here until it had blown over. I decided to stay for a few days, and the few days became a few weeks. As things are going, the few weeks might well become a few months.’

  Their conversation became increasingly animated, until he asked whether she would take a coffee with him in a nearby café. The place – though he did not tell her this – was much frequented by younger members of the aristocracy, who regarded it almost as their club.

  ‘But what about the dogs?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t usually admit them. But they’ll admit them if they’re with me,’ he told her grandly.

  Everyone at La Girasole seemed to know him. ‘Ciao, Massimo,’ people looked up to greet him as he and Alexine made their way through the crowded salon to a small room, containing only three tables, at the back. But the waiters were much less enthusiastic about his presence. Although he repeatedly clicked his fingers and shouted to summon them, they continued either to feign a total unawareness or to respond ‘Momento, principe’ or’Vengo, vengo subito’ and then vanish never to return.

  Eventually, he jumped in fury to his feet. ‘This is impossible!’ He strode out towards the door leading from the little room to the salon and shouted down it: ‘ Signor Bartelli! Vieni qua, per piacere! Vieni!’

  The porcine manager arose from behind his cash-desk with a look of annoyance and strutted over in highly polished boots the exaggerated heels of which gave his dumpy body an illusion of height. He bowed ironically and asked if something were the matter. Massimo, his voice edging upwards in pitch and intensifying in volume, replied that, yes, something was the matter, a lot was the matter. The manager expressed his ironic regrets. In a scathing voice he added: ‘But you must know, Principe, that if customers are prompt in settling their debts, then waiters are more likely to be prompt.’ Peering into the little room, the manager suddenly glimpsed Alexine. She had never been a customer of the café, but a friend of his, the head waiter at the Hotel Splendido, had pointed her out to him in the street as the eccentric millionairess who not merely owned the yacht out in the bay but also rented the most expensive suite at the hotel. At once his whole attitude changed. ‘Let’s not quarrel, Principe. I’m truly sorry if my staff have been remiss. As you can see, the café is full and they’re exceptionally busy. You are need I say? – a highly valued customer, as your father was before you. Please!’ He indicated the table, with a smile. ‘I will myself come to take your orders.’

  On leaving the café, Massimo said, ‘I hope that we may meet again?’

  ‘Why not? Do you always exercise your dog at the same time?’

  ‘Yes.’ In fact, he usually left it to his one elderly servant to exercise the dog.

  ‘Then we could exercise our dogs together tomorrow.’

  He was both startled and delighted by her bold seizing of the initiative.

  On the second of their subsequent walks in the park, a group of grubby, barefoot boys first scurried along beside them and then, surrounding them, pointed and began to shout derisive abuse. Massimo shouted back, but so ineffectually, in his high-pitched voice, that that merely intensified the mockery. Then he lunged out with his cane. The boys scampered off only to return. When this had happened twice, Alexine put a restraining hand on his arm: ‘Don’t worry. Ignore them. This is what these wretched people do all the time to me. In the Arab world no one behaves like that. Forget it.’ Dismally conscious that he lacked the authority to get the better of the urchins, he felt both ashamed and relieved.

  When they next met in the park, he dreaded another such incident. But fortunately it did not occur.

  Massimo was sitting with his closest friend, Paolo, an impoverished aristocrat like himself, with a long, narrow face and sloping shoulders, in the Girasole. Paolo lowered a spoon into the bombe surprise before him and sucked on it. ‘You know that she’s extremely rich?’

  Massimo nodded, embarrassed, as he fiddled with the gold fob of his watch. ‘So they say.’ He had, from time to time, guiltily thrilled to the evidence of Alexine’s huge wealth – the suite and the yacht, both of which he had by now visited, the retinue of fourteen people whose chief task seemed to be no more than to trail around in her wake, the constant throwing of money, as though to do so were no more than a nervous tic, not merely at waiters and coachmen but at any beggar, however implausible, who approached her in the street. But at the same time he kept insisting to himself that, even if she were as impoverished as he was, he would still value her friendship.

  ‘Aunt Rosa told me that she was the richest woman in the Netherlands. Perhaps the richest woman in the world.’

  ‘Oh, you know how people exaggerate!’

  ‘I wish you could teach her how to dress better.’

  ‘She doesn’t care about clothes. At that dance at the Austrian legation she looked wonderful. She only has to make the effort.’

  Again Paolo sucked on the spoon. He was envious of his friend’s good fortune.

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’

  ‘That would solv
e all your problems.’

  ‘And it would create a lot more.’

  Massimo had already had this discussion with himself. A vestige of family pride, and a dread of gossip even more unfavourable than was already going round about him, made him shrink from becoming too blatant a fortune-hunter. At least the American heiress was both beautiful and younger than he was.

  ‘She has a certain je ne sais guoi. A modern Amazon. It’s pity she’s so tall and you’re so short.’

  When walking in the streets with Alexine, Massimo was embarrassingly conscious of that disparity between their heights. Even Sunny was now taller.

  Massimo sighed. ‘I don’t know what went wrong. When I was eleven, twelve – do you remember? – I was much taller than you. And then – then I just stopped growing.’

  That evening, Massimo accompanied Alexine to The Barber of Seville. It had been her idea, and it was she who, by dint of some bribery conducted by the Neapolitan who now served as her general factotum, had procured the box next to the royal one. ‘Would you like to bring someone?’ she had asked Massimo. He had thought for a second or two, wondering whether to invite Paolo. But then, possessive of this woman with whom he had struck up this totally unexpected and thrilling friendship, he had shaken his head. ‘I prefer to be with you alone. Unless, of course’, he added playfully, ‘you’re plarming to bring a duenna.’

  ‘Oh, no, I’ve grown out of that. Long ago.’

  When he arrived to collect her from the hotel in a carriage borrowed from a cousin, who had been grudging in his agreement to lend it, he was delighted by the elegance of her dress and stunned by the magnificence of her jewellery. In the carriage he put a hesitant hand to the bracelet on her wrist. ‘Is that a family heirloom?’ His mother had long since sold all but two or three of the family pieces. ‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’ She was vague. ‘It belonged to an aunt of mine.’ To her guilty consternation, she had been the sole beneficiary, apart from a few small legacies to servants and a generous one to Lucy, of the will that Addy had secretly made, writing it out herself and then getting Monsieur Thibault and Lola to witness it, only a few days before the return of the expedition to Khartoum.

  ‘Magnificent!’

  She turned her wrist from side to side, examining the bracelet: ‘I had to have it altered here in Naples. My wrists are so much thicker than my aunt’s. Hers were so slender.’

  During the opera, each time that the Rosina sang, Alexine found herself thinking about Sophie. It was so long since she had done so. It was even longer since she had written to her. Three letters from The Hague lay in the folding desk, now rarely opened, in the cabin. In them Sophie had written of her two small children, a boy and a girl, of her ‘darling’ husband and of papa and mama, now once again resident in France after papa’s retirement. She had also written – suddenly abandoning all her previous stiltedness of expression – of her longing to see the dearest of all her friends once again after so long a separation. Were it not for the children, still far too young to leave, she would travel to Naples – or to anywhere in the whole wide world – to be with her. Poor little Sophie! Guilt now once again gnawed at Alexine: like Harriet with Lola, she had unintentionally filled the girl with so many aspirations and hopes, all unrealizable.

  After the opera, Massimo announced that there was a cold supper awaiting them at the palazzo. He linked his arm in hers as he conducted her to the carriage, at the same time pulling out his watch to consult it. Accidente! The carriage was supposed to fetch his cousin and his wife back from a dinner-party by eleven at the latest and now it was five past that hour. Should he send the carriage on its way and hire one to replace it? Recklessly, he dismissed the idea, even though the cousin was one of the few of his relatives still prepared to lend him money. He supported Alexine into the carriage and then clambered in beside her.

  ‘That’s a wonderful scent.’

  ‘You like it? From Paris. My half-brother brought it as a present for me on his last visit.’

  He inhaled. ‘Intoxicating.’

  ‘And you’re wearing an interesting scent.’ During the opera, as he had repeatedly leaned towards her to hand her the opera-glasses, she had thought that his scent was totally different from the kind used by her father or Adolphe or indeed any other man she had ever encountered.

  ‘Do you like it? From Parma. Violets.’ He omitted to add that he had asked Paulo, returning from a business visit, to bring it back for him. He had not been able to settle the debt immediately and, though the sum was small, Paolo kept nagging him about it.

  Over the supper, which was served to them by the only servant at the palazzo apartment – an elderly man with a long, lugubrious face, wearing a pair of gloves so old that his thumb, the nail seamed with dirt, poked through a hole – they talked animatedly of the opera. Massimo knew far more about opera than Alexine did. Eagerly he spoke about Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi, about his favourite singers, and about an extraordinary performance – ‘all through I was in heaven, heaven!’ – of Tristan und Isolde that he had attended in Bayreuth, when taken there by an elderly friend of his long dead father.

  Breaking off from talking derisively about the stout, visibly sweating mezzo-soprano who had been the Rosina that evening, he put down his knife and fork and rushed over to the piano standing in the far corner of the high-ceilinged, beautifully proportioned but bare salone. He plonked himself down on the piano stool, adjusted the tails of his jacket, and then began to accompany himself as he sang Una voce poco fa in a mockery of the woman’s frayed, effortful voice. The words were not those of the opera but ingeniously improvised as he went along. There were hen-like cluckings and owl-like hootings, so ludicrous that for the first time for months Alexine found herself laughing uncontrollably. The cruel accuracy of the parody was matched by the outrageous doubles entendres of the words – delivered in Italian, so that some of the more scabrous lines were lost on Alexine, despite her growing mastery of the language.

  When he returned to the table, she grabbed his hand. ‘Oh, that was fun! Such fun!’ What appealed to her more than anything else in him was this sense of fun. It was a quality she knew she lacked. ‘Oh, I do so enjoy being with you. I’m beginning to feel happy again.’

  He raised his glass in a hand on which the rings glittered in the candle-light. ‘To happiness.’

  ‘To happiness.’

  The glasses clinked together and clinked again.

  The next day, without the dogs, Alexine and Massimo were wandering through the Galleria. She was now dressed not in one of her loose, billowy robes, but in a frock which, like that of the previous evening, one of the two Egyptian maids had meticulously ironed. People now stared at her not, as in the past, because she looked so wild and odd, but because she looked so elegant.

  She put out a hand to the frayed cuff that emerged below the sleeve of his tight-waisted jacket. ‘That’s getting old.’

  From the expression on his face she realized at once the tactlessness of the comment.

  ‘All my clothes are getting old. That causes Luigi some dissatisfaction.’ Luigi was the old manservant. ‘Firstly, he doesn’t like to see his master go around looking so shabby. But secondly – and more importantly – I can no longer pass on clothes to him, because I have to go on wearing them until they’re in rags.’

  She felt a pang of pity, not merely for his impoverishment but for the humiliation that he must inevitably have suffered in speaking about it.

  When, a short time later, they passed a well-known shirtmaker, she decisively took his arm and propelled him into the shop.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You’re going to choose some shirts.’

  ‘No, no! I can’t afford them.’

  ‘Ican afford them.’

  ‘But I couldn’t possibly –’

  ‘Nonsense. Do what I tell you! Choose the cloth, have yourself measured. That’s all you have to do.’

  ‘I think they already have my measurements.’ They also, though
he did not reveal this, had his promissory notes for shirts for which he had never paid.

  Alexine found an extraordinary pleasure in poring over the patterns with him. In the past, her father had derived the same pleasure from buying clothes for Sammy, and she from buying clothes for Sunny. ‘This would be perfect.’ She held the strip of cloth up to his shoulder.

  He pulled a face. ‘The stripes are too wide.’

  ‘Then what about this plain grey?’

  ‘Better.’ He felt it between his fingers.

  ‘Egyptian cotton,’ the shirtmaker said.

  ‘Egyptian! I think I’ll have a blouse made of that.’ Suddenly she was filled with a longing for Egypt.

  Massimo felt the cloth again. ‘ Yes, I think that’s my choice.’

  ‘But that’s only the beginning.’ Alexine pointed imperiously at a bale of cloth high above their heads. ‘Please get that down for us. Yes, the second one!’

  ‘You’re too generous,’ he said as they left the shop. He felt both excited and demeaned by that generosity.

  After that, she repeatedly bought him clothes. At first his protests were genuine – it was humiliating to have her pull out a wad of money, with the implication to everyone present that she was keeping him – but then, such was his love of finery, the protests became merely token ones.

  On one occasion he even said to her: ‘I wonder if I might ask a great favour of you?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve run out of cash. And I badly need a new pair of boots. I wonder if you could possibly lend –’

  ‘Lend! Certainly not. Let me buy them for you.’

  As a child, she had shown little interest in dolls. But now he was like that poupée modèle that her father had once brought back to her from his travels. She had rejected that doll. But her pleasure in dressing this one was inexhaustible.

  Two days later, he took her out to the palazzo in the country. ‘Unfortunately the carriage is being repaired,’ he told her, never having admitted that the carriage that had taken them to and from the opera had been not his but his cousin’s. ‘We’ll have to hire one.’