by Morris West
MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.
After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.
Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.
West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.
Morris West died at his desk in 1999.
THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION
FICTION
Moon in My Pocket (1945, as Julian Morris)
Gallows on the Sand (1956)
Kundu (1957)
The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)
The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)
The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)
The Devil’s Advocate (1959)
The Naked Country (1960)
Daughter of Silence (1961)
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)
The Ambassador (1965)
The Tower of Babel (1968)
Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)
The Salamander (1973)
Harlequin (1974)
The Navigator (1976)
Proteus (1979)
The Clowns of God (1981)
The World is Made of Glass (1983)
Cassidy (1986)
Masterclass (1988)
Lazarus (1990)
The Ringmaster (1991)
The Lovers (1993)
Vanishing Point (1996)
Eminence (1998)
The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)
PLAYS
The Illusionists (1955)
The Devil’s Advocate (1961)
Daughter of Silence (1962)
The Heretic (1969)
The World is Made of Glass (1982)
NON-FICTION
Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)
Scandal in the Assembly
(1970, with Richard Frances)
A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)
Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.
This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017
First published in Great Britain in 1961 by William Heinemann Ltd
Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1961
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
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For Hilda
Alta vendetta d’alto silenzio è figlia.
Noble vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.
(Alfieri: La Congiura de’ Pazzi, Act I. Sc. I.)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS bright noon, high summer, in the upland valleys of Tuscany: a torpid time, a season of dust and languor, of stripped flax and larks in the wheat-stubble, and new wines coming to vintage in the country of the elder gods. It was an hour of bells, undulant in a dry air, tranquil over the tombs of dead saints and the feuds of forgotten mercenaries. It was a persuasion to darkness and drawn shutters; since who but dogs and Americans would expose their foolish foreheads to an August sun at midday?
In the village of San Stefano the first strokes of the angelus were sounding over the square. The bell-ringer was old and the music of his chimes was muted. The village was drowsy and replete with a good harvest, so the last passages of its morning life were muted too.
An old man stopped, crossed himself and stood with bowed head as the triple tones rang out from the white campanile. A tubby fellow in a white apron with a checker-board napkin over his arm stood at the door of the restaurant and picked his teeth with a match. A mule-faced policeman made a tentative step outside his door, squinted languidly round the square, spat, scratched himself and then wandered back to his wine and cheese.
Water welled sluggishly from the mouths of tired dolphins and spilled into the shallow basin of the fountain, while a skinny boy sailed a paper boat in the eddies. A charcoal-burner trundled his handcart over the cobbles. The cart was piled high with little bundles of twigs and brown bags filled with charcoal. A small girl was perched on top of them, tousle-haired, serious of mien, like a woodland elf. A barefoot woman, with a baby on her hip, came out of the wine-shop and headed for the alley at the far end of the piazza. Five miles away, the towers and tumbled roofs of Siena reared themselves, hazy and magical, against a copper sky.
It was a placid tableau, curiously antique, sparsely peopled, its animation geared to the low pulse-beat of country living. Here, time flowed sluggishly as the fountain, and the only change was the cyclic mutation of age and the seasons. This, one understood, was a tribal enclave, where tradition was more important than progress, where custom was nine points of the law, and old loves were cherished as sedulously as old hates and the tangled loyalties of blood and bondage.
There was a road in and a road out, the one leading to Arezzo, the other to Siena, but their traffic was small and seasonal. The trunk routes of tourism and commerce had always bypassed San Stefano. The valley farms were small and jealously reserved to their peasant owners, so there was no welcome for migrants. Those who went away were the restless or the footloose or the ambitious, and the village was hap
pily quit of them.
Before the last echo of the bell had died away, the square was empty. Shutters were closed, curtains were drawn. The dust settled back into the cracks of the cobbles, the paper boat swam rudderless round the fountain and the cry of the cicadas rose, strepitant and monotonous, from the circling fields. The first watch of the day was over. Peace – or what passed for peace – came down on the village.
It was, perhaps, ten minutes later when the bell-ringer came out of the church: an elderly friar in the dusty habit of St Francis, with a white tonsured head and a ruddy face lined and seamed like a winter apple. He stood a moment in the shadow of the portico, mopping his brow with a red handkerchief; then he twitched his cowl over his head and padded across the square, his sandals flapping tic-tac on the parched stones.
Before he had gone a dozen yards, an unfamiliar sight stopped him in his tracks. A taxi with a Siena number-plate pulled into the piazza and rolled to a halt outside the restaurant. A woman got out, paid off the driver, and watched him drive out of sight.
She was young, no more than twenty-five. Her dress marked her as a city-dweller: tailored costume, white blouse, fashionable shoes, a handbag slung by a leather strap over one shoulder. She wore no hat and her dark hair hung in waves to her shoulders. Her face was pale, calm and singularly beautiful, like that of a wax madonna. In the empty, sunlit square she looked uncertain and vaguely lonely.
For a while she stood, looking round the square, as if orienting herself in a once-familiar territory; then with a firm, confident step, she walked across to a house between the wine-shop and bakery and rang the bell. The door was opened by a stout matron dressed in black bombazine with a white apron tied round her middle. They talked for a few moments, and the stout one made a gesture inviting her to enter. She declined and the matron went away, leaving the door open. The girl waited, fumbling for something in her handbag, while the friar watched, curious as any countryman about any stranger.
It was perhaps thirty seconds later when the man appeared in the doorway – a tall, thick-set fellow in shirt-sleeves, with a grizzled head, a sallow, lined face, and a table-napkin stuck in his shirt-front. He was still chewing on a mouthful of food, and in the clear light the friar could see a small dribble of sauce at the corner of his mouth. He looked at the girl without any sign of recognition, and asked her a question.
Then she shot him in the chest.
The impact spun him around and flung him against the door-jamb, and in a horrible suspended moment the friar saw her pump four more shots into him and then turn away, walking unhurriedly towards the police-station. The echoes were still shouting around the piazza when the friar began to run, tottering and stumbling, to offer a final absolution to a man who was already beyond it.
Five miles away, in Siena, Doctor Alberto Ascolini was sitting for his portrait-an exercise in futility, an illusion of immortality to which he submitted himself with irony.
He was a tall man, sixty-five years of age, with a pink lively face and a mane of snow-white hair that flowed down in careful disarray over his collar. He wore a silk suit and a silk cravat fastened with a diamond pin. Both the suit and the cravat were immaculately tailored but deliberately old-fashioned as if age and incongruous animation were his stock-in-trade. He looked like an actor – a very successful actor – but he was in fact a lawyer, one of the most successful advocates in Rome.
The artist was a slim, dark girl in her late twenties with hazel eyes, a frank smile and expressive, elegant hands. Her name was Ninette Lachaise. Her apartment was a high attic chamber that looked over the roof-tops of the old city towards the campanile of the Vergine Assunta. One end of it was a studio, meticulous in its order and cleanliness. The other was her living quarters, furnished with the gleanings of provincial craft, waxed and gleaming with Gallic housewifery. Her pictures were an index to her character – full of light, spare in detail, stylized, yet ample in movement, a lineal development of the primitive Tuscan tradition to a twentieth-century idiom.
She was working in charcoal now, making a series of swift bravura sketches of her subject as he sat, half in sunlight, half in shadow, telling scandalous stories of the Roman courts. It was a virtuoso performance on both sides. The old man’s stories were full of extravagant wit, clever malice and sly bawdry. The girl’s sketches were avid and percipient, so that it seemed as if a dozen men lived inside the sleek pink skin of this very intelligent mountebank.
Ascolini watched her with shrewd, affectionate eyes, and when he had come to the end of his stories he grinned and said with mock pathos: ‘When I am with you, Ninette, I mourn my youth.’
‘If you have nothing else to mourn, dottore,’ she told him with gentle irony, ‘then you’re a fortunate man.’
‘What else is there to regret, my dear, but the follies one is incapable of committing?’
‘Perhaps the consequences of those one has already committed.’
‘Eh! Eh! Ninette!’ Ascolini fluttered his eloquent hands and laughed drily. ‘No lectures this morning, please! This is the beginning of my holiday; I come to you to be diverted.’
‘No, dottore.’ She smiled at him in her grave fashion and went on sketching with swift, firm strokes. ‘I’ve known you too long and too well. When you come to drink coffee or buy me lunch at the Sordello, then you are content with the world. When you offer me a commission like this or pay me too much for my landscapes, then you have problems on your mind. You offer me a fee to solve them. It’s a bad habit, you know – it does you small credit.’
His smooth, youthful face clouded a moment, then he grinned crookedly. ‘But you still accept the fee, Ninette. Why?’
‘I sell you my pictures, dottore, not my sympathy. That you get for nothing.’
‘You humble me, Ninette,’ said the old man tartly.
‘Nothing humbles you, dottore,’ she told him bluntly. ‘And this is where all your troubles begin with Valeria, with Carlo and with yourself. There now!’ She made a last brisk stroke on the canvas and turned to him, holding out her hand. ‘The words are said, the sitting is over. Come and look at yourself.’
She led him to the easel and stood, holding his hand while he surveyed the sketches. He was silent for a long time, then with no hint of raillery he asked her: ‘Are these all my faces, Ninette?’
‘Only the ones you show me.’
‘You think there are others?’
‘I know there must be. You are too various a man, dottore, too dazzling in each variety.’
‘And which of them is the real Ascolini?’
‘All of them – and none of them.’
‘Read them to me, child.’
‘This one? The great advocate, the noble pleader who dominates every court in Rome. He changes a little, as you see. Here he is the darling of the salons, the wit who makes the men blush and the women squirm when he whispers in their willing ears. That one? A moment from the Sordello: Ascolini drinking wine with the law students and wishing he had a son of his own. There he becomes the chess-player, moving people like pawns, despising himself more than he despises them. In the next one there is a memory – of youth perhaps, and an old love. And last of all, the great advocate as he might have been, had not a country priest pulled him out of a ditch and opened the world to him : a peasant with a load of sticks on his back and the monotony of a lifetime in his eyes….’
‘It is too much,’ said the old man flatly. ‘From one so young it is too much and too frightening. How do you know all this, Ninette? How do you see so many secrets?’
For a moment she looked at him with sombre, pitying eyes. Then she shook her head. ‘They are not secrets, dottore. We are what we do. It is written in our faces for the world to read. For myself? I am a foreigner here. I came from France like the old soldiers of fortune, to plunder the riches of the South. I live alone. I sell my pictures-and wait for someone to whom I can give myself with confidence. I know what it is to be solitary and afraid. I know what it is to reach out for love and grasp
an illusion. You have been kind to me and you have shown me more of yourself than you know. I’ve often wondered why.’
‘Simple enough!’ There was a harsh note in his rich actor’s voice. ‘If I were twenty years younger, Ninette, I should ask you to marry me.’
‘If I were twenty years older, dottore,’ she told him softly, ‘I should probably accept – and you would hate me for it ever afterwards.’
‘I could never hate you, my dear.’
‘You hate everything you possess, dottore. You love only what you cannot attain.’
‘You’re brutal today, Ninette.’
‘There are brutal things to be faced, are there not?’
‘I suppose there are.’
He released her hand and walked over to the window, where he stood watching the sun pour down over the towers and roof-tops of the old city. His tall frame seemed bowed and diminished, his noble face became pinched and shrunken, as if age had come upon him unaware. The girl watched him, caught in a rush of pity for his dilemmas. After a while she prompted him quietly: ‘It’s Valeria, isn’t it?’
‘And Carlo.’
‘Tell me about Valeria.’
‘We’re not two days arrived from Rome and she’s started an affair with Basilio Lazzaro.’
‘There have been other affairs, dottore. You encouraged them. Why should this one bother you?’
‘Because it’s late in the day for me, Ninette! Because I want grandchildren in my house and a promise of continuity, and because this Lazzaro is scum who will end by destroying her!’
‘I know,’ said Ninette Lachaise softly. ‘I know it only too well.’
‘It is news already in Siena?’
‘I doubt it. But I was once in love with Lazzaro myself; he was my grand illusion.’
‘I’m sorry, child.’
‘You must not be sorry for me – only for yourself and Valeria. Carlo too, for that matter. Does he know yet?’
‘I doubt it.’
