The Cleverness Of Ladies [Quick Reads]

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The running of a hotel inevitably brings requests from the guests. Nothing is ever quite right for everybody: one guest will want a larger towel; another will wonder why there is no fridge in the room; and so on. The usual hotel owners will listen to these complaints and make an effort to deal with the problem. Larger towels may be found, or at least promised. Fridges can be held out as a possibility, even if realistically they are not. The important thing, as any hotelier will tell you, is that the guest should feel that their request is a reasonable one and that something will be done to attend to it.

  But at Marlin House it was different. ‘What do you need a fridge for?’ was Georgina’s response to a guest who liked the idea of keeping a supply of cold milk in the room.

  ‘Because the milk curdles so quickly in this heat. It would be nice to make tea in the room.’

  ‘Plenty of milk in the kitchen. Go ask for it there.’

  ‘Well, could we at least have some biscuits in the room? To snack on?’

  ‘Food in the rooms brings cockroaches.’

  Georgina’s fierce reputation grew. ‘A delightful setting,’ wrote one travel writer, ‘which is well worth a visit if you are in that part of the Caribbean. The rooms are comfortable and the Caribbean-style cuisine delicious. But do not engage with the management on any issue.’

  Such comments served only to fuel curiosity, and people started to choose the hotel in order to experience at first hand Georgina’s highly individual style. Usually they were not disappointed. In fact, they delighted in the disgrace into which an inappropriate request or suggestion cast them. The hotel was becoming legendary.

  Georgina’s famous look of disapproval could be imitated over the dinner table but never equalled. Her thunderous expression when a female guest was unwise enough to ask Marcus, in the middle of a party, to dance with her was talked about for months.

  At the end of their first five years in the hotel, Marcus and Georgina decided to hold a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the success of the hotel and the new year itself. Word got out, and it was not long before all the rooms were taken for the new year holiday. Reviewing their bookings, Marcus smiled with pleasure at the thought of what this would do for the hotel’s finances, but Georgina frowned. Although she never admitted it to Marcus, guests annoyed her. They were so needy, so helpless. They made stupidly fussy requests. They never seemed pleased with what you gave them. Their conversation was so dull, their questions so childish.

  ‘If I’m asked again about those humming birds, I shall scream,’ she said one day. To the next guest who asked her, ‘What are those lovely little birds with their long tails? The ones that hover in front of the flowers? Look, there’s one now!’, she replied, ‘Small vultures,’ and turned on her heel.

  ‘That was rather unkind,’ said Marcus, who had witnessed the incident.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ said Georgina, with her discouraging face which was so much part of her character. ‘Just don’t.’

  The New Year’s Eve party was attended not only by the resident guests, but by people from the area. Some guests remembered the retired doctor, his parties, and the American writer who came to them. ‘He would have loved this,’ they said. ‘He loved a party.’

  ‘Frightful man,’ said Georgina.

  ‘Oh, did you ever meet him?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  They had brought in a three-piece band from the town, and the musicians played on the terrace while people stood at the parapet and looked down at the lights of the town and, beyond the town, to the sea. It was a windy night, but the air was warm and scented with the flowers that grew in the windward section of the garden. Down in the darkness below, from time to time somebody would send up a firework rocket that would break into a cone of falling stars, and the people on the terrace would clap or whistle in admiration.

  As the old year faded into the new, champagne was opened and the guests broke into a rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, linking hands and stepping backwards and forwards on the creaky planks of the terrace. Georgina sat to one side. She looked disapproving for some reason, as if the ending of the old year was a personal affront or a private loss.

  Then she went out, by herself, glass in hand, and stood on the lawn under one of the swaying coconut trees. Marcus saw her from the terrace and called out, but his voice was swallowed by a strong gust of wind. It was the same gust of wind that dislodged a large coconut, which fell directly on Georgina’s head.

  There was a shout from the terrace. ‘Georgina’s down …’ Then a rush as the guests made their way to the lawn. Georgina lay there, unconscious. A nurse among the guests reached down and took her pulse. ‘She’s been knocked out,’ she said. ‘Get her inside.’

  They put her to bed while they telephoned for an ambulance. Nobody answered at the other end, and so they tried the number of a local doctor. He said, ‘I’ve been at a party. I’m not sure if I can drive …’ But he agreed to come, and when he arrived two hours later, with a small cut on his face that nobody asked about, Georgina had already come round.

  ‘I hope everyone enjoyed themselves,’ she said. ‘I would not like to think that I had spoiled the party.’

  Marcus looked at her in surprise. His surprise continued the next morning when Georgina, back on her feet, went round the hotel wishing everybody a happy new year and asking them whether there was anything she could do for them.

  ‘Somebody’s made a new year’s resolution,’ muttered one of the guests. ‘It won’t last.’

  Marcus was astonished at the change in Georgina’s character. ‘She’s not the same any more,’ he said. ‘Georgina used to be so forceful, so … well, so firm. Now she’s … well, a bit … well, you know what I mean.’

  It continued like that for at least a month. Then one morning Georgina came back from a short walk in the neighbouring coconut grove. She snapped at the chef and immediately after that was very sharp with one of the guests, who had told her that his coffee was cold.

  Overhearing this, Marcus felt his heart leap with pleasure. She’s back, he thought. My ever-so-slightly irritable Georgina is back!

  He looked out of the window. The wind, that warm wind from the west, had started again, making the coconut palms sway backwards and forwards against the sky, gently, but enough to dislodge the fruit, sending it earthwards.

  Fabrizia

  Fabrizia could not remember her mother very well. In fact, she was worried that such memories as she had, vague and ill-defined ones, were of the wrong person, and that the woman she was thinking of was actually an aunt who had left Italy to live in the United States and never returned.

  ‘Four is not too early to remember,’ said her father, Alessio. ‘Many people remember being four quite well. I do, for one. I remember travelling on the train all the way from Reggio Emilia to Milan and seeing a man with one leg standing near the entrance, begging. I remember that, you know. I think that you’ll be able to remember your mother if you try.’

  She had tried, and had told her father that she remembered something – a beautiful woman with a smell of flowery soap, and he had said, ‘Yes! Yes! That’s her, my darling, that’s your mother.’

  But she had seen a picture of the aunt, and the face in the picture and the face in the memory seemed to her to be one and the same person. She did not mention this to her father, though, because he was desperate that she should have a memory of her mother, his wife, who had died so unexpectedly and left him to raise their daughter. They had been a small family, just the two of them, but it did not matter. He lived for her, and told his friends that he would have died for her, willingly, several times over if necessary, to protect her from the dangers of the world.

  ‘Look what’s happened to Italy,’ he said. ‘All this lawlessness. I remember when this was the safest place in the world to be. Nothing ever happened in those days. Nothing.’

  He was well off by the standards of Reggio Emilia, the town in which they lived. There was great wealth
in Milan and Bologna, of course, and Parma too, with all its elegance. Reggio Emilia was much simpler than its well-known neighbours, but there was money to be made there too, and he had done well with the two shops that he owned in the centre of the town, in a street that led off the Piazza Cavour. One of these shops sold furniture and carpets, and the other was a dress shop that specialised in clothing for short, fat ladies.

  ‘Now that we have so many Southerners up here,’ Alessio said to a friend, ‘there will be a big demand for dresses to fit squat ladies. That is the shape they are, these women from Naples and Sicily. Look at them.’

  His friend thought about this. He was probably right; people from the south of Italy tended to be shorter than those from the north, but that was due to diet, was it not? Once they moved to the north, to take up jobs in prosperous towns like Reggio or Modena, their children would grow to be much taller. A good diet could make all the difference. It was diet, not genes.

  Alessio did not believe this. He had a deep prejudice against people from the south, whom he believed to be responsible for all of Italy’s woes.

  ‘Look at Naples,’ he said. ‘Look at the proportion of the population down there who are involved in criminal activities. Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you: thirty per cent.’

  ‘Surely not?’ said his friend. ‘Surely not one in three people.’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ said Alessio. ‘Just think of it. Every third person in Naples makes his living from crime.’

  Whatever his prejudices against Southerners might have been, Alessio got on well with the customers who came into his clothes shop. The squat ladies who came to buy outfits for weddings and christenings were also cheerful and polite, and he even found himself enjoying the company of the Southern assistants whom he had taken on. These girls were all involved with young men, whom they spoke about endlessly. The young men had names like Salvatore or Pasquale – ‘Typical names from Naples,’ muttered Alessio. ‘Look at the names in the newspaper reports of the trials in the criminal courts. Salvatore this, Salvatore that. They’re the ones who commit all the crimes in this country. Typical!’

  Fabrizia was used to these views from her father. She had heard them all her life – but did not agree with them. She rather liked Southerners; she liked the way they talked, and she liked Southern cuisine. She had heard about corruption and the Mafia and the ongoing economic problems of the Mezzogiorno, as Italians called the south, but these did not interest her very much. ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ she said to her father. ‘There’s been corruption even in the Vatican, hasn’t there? No, don’t shake your head like that. What about your precious Christian Democrats? When they were in power what did you have? Honesty? Hah!’ 40

  Alessio did not mind hearing these views expressed by his daughter. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t care what your political views turn out to be, just as long as you don’t marry one of those people. That’s all. Don’t end up marrying a man from Naples, a Neapolitan. I couldn’t bear that. I really couldn’t.’

  At the age of twenty-three, when Fabrizia had finished her course at the University of Parma, she came home to help Alessio with his shops. She proved to have a good head for business, and within two years they had acquired a further three shops. These shops also sold clothes: one specialised in teenage clothing, and played loud music at its entrance; one stocked children’s outfits and the third sold clothing for work – waiters’ outfits, maids’ skirts and the like. All of these businesses thrived, and Alessio and Fabrizia became more and more wealthy.

  Then one evening Alessio happened to see his daughter in a restaurant. It was not a restaurant that he was used to visiting, and both he and Fabrizia were surprised to see one another there. He, in particular, was taken aback by the fact that she had a young man with her. 41

  The young man stood up politely when Alessio approached the table, and the older man knew immediately. The young man was a Southerner, a Neapolitan, no doubt. He could tell. He had never been wrong about things like that.

  Alessio stared at the gold chain around the young man’s neck, and the small charm it bore that was supposed to ward off the evil eye, a tiny gold cornicello, or horn. This would never be worn by anybody from the north, where belief in such things was looked down upon; Northerners, in his view, had no time for such superstitions – and quite rightly too.

  There was a tense exchange of words between the two men, about nothing in particular. The young man was called Salvatore, and he had intense green eyes, which he focused on Alessio. The older man, however, could not bring himself to return this frank stare. He looked at his daughter instead, almost begging, as if to say to her, ‘Please tell me that this young man is nothing to you, a casual friend.’ But of course the look that she gave her father implied the opposite, and he knew then, with complete certainty, that this young man was to be his son-in-law.

  He was not surprised, therefore, when Fabrizia came to him three weeks later and announced that she wished to marry Salvatore.

  ‘I know what your views are about people like him,’ she said. ‘No, don’t try to deny it, Father. You don’t like Southerners. You just don’t. It’s so unfair on people like Salvatore.’

  Alessio looked down at the ground. He could hardly deny the truth of her words; after all, he had never hesitated to express his views to her, even when she was a child. He had impressed upon her, time and again, the need to distrust those from the south. In fact, he had tried without shame to shape her views – and now she had reacted by choosing to marry a Southerner. It had been a bad mistake on his part. One cannot tell one’s children what to think, he had read; try to do that, and you’ll lose them. They’ll do the opposite – the exact opposite – of what you want them to do. Be careful. He had paid no attention to this advice, and this was the result.

  He looked up at his daughter. You are so dear to me, he thought; you are my world. You and my shops – our little world.

  She looked back at him. I didn’t choose him just because he’s a Southerner, she thought. You imagine that I did, but it’s not that. I love this man. Where he’s from is nothing to do with it. Nothing. 43

  They did not say a word. After a few minutes, she sighed and rose to her feet. Leaving the room, she glanced back at her father briefly and shook her head, as if in judgement. For a moment his heart stopped from fear at the thought of losing her, but then he said to himself, I shall fight back, because if you don’t fight for what you have, for what you’ve worked for, then some Southerner is going to come along and take it away from you. The thought gave him comfort, and he stared at her defiantly as she left the room. All right! Marry him, and see what it’s like.

  Both father and daughter made an effort at the wedding. Alessio hired a hotel in the hills and paid for a lavish meal. He sat through the ceremony with a fixed smile, and kept this smile in place at the reception. He was seated between two of Salvatore’s aunts, both of whom conformed to his vision of Southern middle-aged women. They were widows who had been married to men who had no doubt worn ill-fitting dark suits and old-fashioned black felt hats. There were many of these widows in the south, he reflected, because the men died young. Why did they die? It was because of violence and bad driving and impatience. 44

  At the end of the reception, when the couple was due to go away, he stood awkwardly by the door of the hotel while the aunts fussed round and friends said goodbye to Fabrizia, girls he had known as his daughter’s childhood friends, adults now, themselves married or destined for marriage. He looked at these young women with a fond eye and remembered them as girls all those years ago, when they came to the house to see Fabrizia. Childhood was so brief, so fleeting: we have our children for so short a time. He felt the tears in his eyes and he fought them back. His fixed smile returned.

  Then, just before they left, Alessio’s new sonin-law Salvatore came up to him and stood before him, holding out his hand. Alessio took the younger man’s hand, but avoided his gaze.

  ‘I know
you don’t approve of me,’ Salvatore said to him, his voice lowered. ‘I can tell that. But I promise you I’ll look after your daughter. I give you my word as …’ He stopped, and although Alessio waited for him to finish the sentence, he did not.

  He looked at the young man. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You can tell how a father feels, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Salvatore. ‘That is why I’m asking you to trust me.’ 45

  Alessio closed his eyes. ‘I shall try,’ he said. Salvatore pressed his hand, and then dropped it. There was laughter from a group of Fabrizia’s friends – a final joke before the couple moved through the door, beneath the flashing of cameras, and into the car which had been brought up to the front of the hotel and which Salvatore’s brothers were now showering with confetti.

  They had never formally discussed Salvatore’s entry into the business, but Fabrizia brought him in anyway, and Alessio did not challenge her. After a while Alessio would have agreed, had his daughter ever asked him, that his new son-in-law was a remarkable salesman. The takings of the shop which he supervised went up noticeably, and Alessio himself asked Salvatore to come and apply these skills in the other shops, which went on to see an improvement too.

  The warmth that had grown in their working relationship now came into their personal lives. Alessio went for dinner with Fabrizia and Salvatore and bought them expensive gifts for the house. Salvatore returned these favours, inviting his father-in-law to join them at a restaurant he liked, where he introduced him to the proprietor – a Southerner from Naples – with pride. He bought Alessio a new briefcase, made of supple leather from Florence, and had his initials engraved on the flap in handsome gold lettering.