Roman Summer

by Jane Arbor

  At the house Agnese told Ruth where to find cognac and blankets, and then there arose the question of leaving her for the night. Erle drew Ruth aside.

  ‘I’ll drive you back straight away if you’ll give her a bed at the flat,’ he suggested.

  ‘Of course I will—if she’ll come,’ Ruth said doubtfully.

  ‘Why shouldn’t she? I shall make it an order and fetch the car. I’ll tell the assembled company as little as I can and come back to the party myself, after seeing you both safe. A pity about the anti-climax for you, but we’ll make up for it—some time,’ he added.

  While he was away Agnese grudgingly allowed Ruth to find her night things and a change of clothes, and when he came back he brought Ruth’s cloak with him. From the flat, when they reached it, he telephoned Cesare at Quindereggio, telling him what had happened and promising that Ruth would keep Agnese as her guest as long as necessary. Which could be about as short a time as she can bring herself to accept my hospitality, thought Ruth, overhearing. But she didn’t say so to Erle.

  She made up a bed for Agnese in the room Cicely had had and went to shed her grimy peasant dress and to take a bath. She meant to see Agnese comfortably settled before she went to bed herself, but Agnese forestalled her by coming to the door of her room as Ruth emerged from the bathroom.

  ‘May I speak to you before you go to bed?’ said Agnese, her gruff tone making it a demand rather than a request.

  ‘Of course. I was coming in to see you anyway. Won’t you get into bed?’ said Ruth.

  Agnese did so, sitting bolt upright against the pillows, staring at her big hands outspread on the quilt.

  ‘You saved my life,’ she announced.

  Ruth shook her head in deprecation. ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. I was afraid. I lost my nerve. If I had got to my feet I should have run in panic and that would have fanned the fire. Instead—’

  ‘Instead, I knocked you flat and sat on you,’ said Ruth, smiling. ‘Forget it, please.’

  ‘No. This is not all I have to say.’ Agnese rubbed a hand anxiously across her brow. ‘How was it that you were there?’

  ‘I had left the party a little while earlier. I had seen your light in the Casa and I had gone there to see you. But you weren’t there, and I was on my way back, using the stable yard as a short cut.’

  ‘To see me? What for?’

  Ruth looked down at her own hands in her lap. ‘Well, in case we didn’t meet again, to say goodbye to you without ill-feeling,’ she admitted.

  ‘And if I had repulsed you, what then?’

  ‘I’d have been sorry, but at least I should have tried.’

  ‘As I must try now. I am proud, and it is difficult. But I have to tell you, signora, that I have deliberately slandered you, blackened your name in public for my own ends. Because you had encouraged and then scorned my brother, I twisted what I knew to be the truth. I told those false stories to the gutter Press—’

  Ruth nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said.

  ‘You knew, and—?’

  ‘That’s not quite true. I didn’t know for certain, though I thought it must be so.’

  ‘Because I had warned you I would stop at nothing to revenge myself on you?’

  ‘Yes. But I think I realised how hurt you were, and when I went to the Casa tonight I did mean to try to convince you that I had never knowingly encouraged Cesare, and that he knows and accepts the reason why I couldn’t marry him.’

  Agnese nodded. ‘Yes, he has always been more generous than I. Or perhaps more easily deceived. For he says you have told him you are entirely happy in your engagement to Signore Nash. Yet, as I have taunted you myself, with such a man, how can you be sure he means as well by you as you by him?’

  Ruth coloured. ‘How can one ever be entirely sure of another person’s affection? One can only hope,’ she parried.

  ‘Only, sometimes, to be cruelly mistaken.’ Agnese looked away across the small room, as if at a scene beyond its confines.

  Ruth ventured, ‘You know, perhaps, what it is to be so misled, signora?’

  Agnese brought her gaze back to the present. ‘Once, yes. But it is a long time ago now; an old story not worth the telling. I have forgotten the effect of it. Now I have Cesare to care for, and I am well content.’

  ‘And if he should marry for love, as I hope he may?’ Ruth asked.

  Agnese drew herself up. ‘That is his right as a man, and I shall not stand in his way,’ she declared stoutly. ‘But I will not have him scorned because he is poor or wanting in the courage to prove his worth, or see him encouraged and then rejected for a lesser man.’ She paused. ‘All this I believed of you, and it made you my enemy in consequence. You understand?’

  ‘I think so. I’m glad you told me,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Even though you say you knew some of it already?’

  Ruth smiled. ‘The results. Not the full cause, and that I do now understand. Cesare is fortunate to have you for a sister.’ She stood up and laid a hand over one of Agnese’s. ‘You have forgiven me now, signora?’

  ‘And you me?’ Agnese added diffidently, ‘All happiness in your coming marriage, signora. I must wish you that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ruth, almost tempted, as she had been with Cesare, to confess that there was no happiness in store for her in marriage to Erle. But she said nothing. Cesare, Agnese, everyone would all know soon enough that there was to be no future to their engagement, and until then she must keep her promise to Erle.

  The next morning Erle telephoned to say that a doctor would be coming to see Agnese, and asking Ruth to keep her until he had been. ‘As I remember,’ he added, ‘you haven’t explained what had taken you down to the stables last night?’

  ‘I hadn’t much liked the thought of her alone, and I’d been over to the house to see her,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Against orders?’

  ‘As part-hostess, I felt I was privileged to break them. But I missed her, and I was making my way back to the party across the stable yard.’ Wondering what he would say if she enquired how he had managed to be so promptly on the scene, she asked instead, ‘Have you found out how the sack of fireworks happened to be where it was?’

  ‘Nobody wants to take responsibility for it. But from my sifting of the evidence I deduce that it may have been delivered at some time when the caterers weren’t on the site, so it had been dumped there instead of being added to the main stock they had in hand.’

  ‘I’m sorry I missed the display. Was it a good one?’

  ‘As spectacular as most, with the awed “Oohs” and “Ahs” tending to run out of superlatives before the grand finale.’

  ‘What time did the party break up?’

  ‘In the small hours, with its objective achieved. Stella pronounced herself enchanted with its success as a last appearance of the season for her, and made me her proxy for thanking you for giving it.’

  ‘It was your party for her,’ Ruth reminded him.

  ‘But in the circumstances, generous of you to cooperate.’

  Did he mean generous in view of her false role as his fiancée, or generous to a more favoured rival? she was wondering as he went on, ‘Either the doctor or Cesare Fonte may beat the other in descending on you and Agnese. When I spoke to him—he rang me again last night—Fonte said he was coming back to Rome, leaving Quindereggio at dawn. He should have news for you. I think.’

  ‘News for me?’

  ‘And for his sister. But news I imagine he’ll want to give you. I instructed my agents to make him an offer for the goodwill and the stable stock of the Casa, and he has accepted my figure.’

  Completely surprised, Ruth asked, ‘But what do you want with a riding-school business?’

  She heard Erle laugh. ‘I don’t,’ he said.

  ‘Then why buy one?’

  ‘Say that when I have a major project in mind, I believe in clearing my decks first.’ He laughed again as he rang off.

  In fact, the doct
or had pronounced Agnese only in need of rest and quiet some hours before Cesare arrived. He was anxious to hear all the details which Erle had not given him, and when Ruth protested that she had ‘done nothing’, said he preferred to take Agnese’s version of the affair. Before he arrived, Agnese had said, ‘I think we should not tell him that we already know of his settlement with Signore Nash’— a suggestion which told Ruth much of a brother-and-sister relationship which would not wantonly spoil the other’s fun.

  So they showed admirable surprise, and there was no doubt of the pleasure it gave Cesare to make scoop news of the transaction. ‘The papers making the offer were sent to me at Quindereggio,’ he said. Turning to Ruth, ‘You have a phrase in English—“beyond the dreams of avarice”—and Erle’s figure goes beyond my furthest hopes of anything I could ask or get elsewhere. It means everything—’ He checked, frowning. ‘No, not everything. But ease, freedom from worry for a very long time to come; until Quindereggio is on a footing which will serve Agnese and me very well.’

  ‘Though one questions why he should pay such an inflated price,’ demurred Agnese, looking at Ruth. ‘Do you not know why? As his fidanzata, you should,’ she ruled.

  But Ruth, remembering that they had agreed to know nothing of Erle’s plans until they heard them from Cesare, was able to say with truth that Erle had confided none of his motives to her. It was not until Agnese had gone to collect her things, preparatory to returning to the Casa with Cesare, that he showed he had come to his own conclusions on the matter. He said wistfully to Ruth,

  ‘Obviously, having bought the Casa to make it your home with him, Erle wouldn’t want a riding-school to be run from the grounds. Nor even for me to continue there for as long as I might need to bargain with other purchasers. He is rich. He could afford to buy me out and sell the goodwill to no one else. The stables he will keep up privately and you, Ruth, will have to learn to ride!’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps—’ she said non-committally, agreeing privately with Cesare’s reasoning, though not with his conclusion that it was she whom Erle meant to install as mistress of the Casa. He intended it should become a private home again. What otherwise could he have meant by ‘clearing his decks’? But when all was done, though he might live there himself, it would not be with her as his wife. Not with her.

  Cesare said goodbye to her then, while they were alone. He took both her hands in his and, humble and self-effacing as ever, he said, ‘The one thing I wanted of you, you couldn’t give me, but I still have a lot to remember and to treasure. And though I am jealous and envious of Erle now, I wouldn’t choose not to have known you—and loved you. You understand?’

  Ruth nodded. ‘Nor I—not to have known you,’ she said.

  ‘And you will be here, as my friend, when I come back to Rome—as I shall?’

  But she had to find an evasive answer to that. Where, when he returned to Rome after a time, might she be herself? She didn’t know, and after he and Agnese had gone, she questioned why he should be grateful to her. For the only service she was able to do him was a negative one, of which he must never know. In his eyes, Agnese might have failings, but she had no feet of clay. He did not guess at the lengths she would go in pursuit of an enemy, and Ruth was determined that, if she could help it, he never should.

  However subtly offensive Stella Parioli could be when she chose, she did not lack the veneer of social good manners, in that she telephoned Ruth to repeat her thanks for the Casa party before she left for New York.

  ‘Such a success you and Erle made of it for me,’ she crooned. ‘A thousand pities that you weren’t able to enjoy the end of it with us, but I told Erle he mustn’t fail to let you know how appreciative I am for your having given it for me.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ruth, and with too vivid a memory of the belvedere rendezvous, couldn’t resist adding, ‘Certainly the papers gave a great deal of space to it the next day.’

  ‘Oh, them.’ Stella’s tone dismissed the whole Italian Press. ‘Of course they are always rather avid for anything about me, though I assure you I told any reporters I spoke to that they should give full credit to Erle and you too.’

  ‘Which they did,’ said Ruth drily.

  Stella agreed, ‘Yes, and I was so glad. Because though it was Erle’s idea to give me a farewell party, it was mine that it should be at Rienzi. A nice touch, I thought, that you should give it as your first party in the grounds of your future home.’

  At Ruth’s ambiguous murmur in answer to that, Stella went on blandly, ‘Which reminds me, I do have a small quarrel with you, you know. Because it was so very soon after Erle asked me to look over the Casa that you were denying to me that there was any romance between you at all. Do you think that was quite fair?’

  Ruth said stiffly, ‘At that time there was nothing between us, and I think you must have known that, signora.’

  ‘Ah, I thought I did, but with Erle one never can tell. He has such universal charm. Rather too universal, I’m afraid, for a young wife to tolerate easily ... You won’t have to mind too much if, after marriage, he appears to—and even does on occasion—neglect you for other women. Not really the marrying kind, Erle, and later he could feel trapped. And if you are thinking it morbid of me to warn you, do remember, won’t you, how well I know him myself, and have done for years?’

  ‘I’ll remember it,’ promised Ruth. As if she would ever need warning against entrapping Erle in marriage! Opportunity, they said, was a fine thing ...

  Stella murmured, ‘So wise of you not to resent advice. And I speak from experience; never, for all our closeness, letting Erle fear that he wasn’t free as air—even to indulge an urge to marry, which isn’t him, you understand? Though of course one can only hope for you—’

  ‘Which I am sure you will be charitable enough to do,’ put in Ruth.

  ‘Of course! Though—forgive me—just an instance of how, for your own sake, you shouldn’t claim Erle too much, too early. Naturally he will be coming over for my debut at the Met. But unless it is so soon after your honeymoon that he can scarcely refuse you, do wait, won’t you, for him to suggest you accompany him? And if he does not, try to make an unimportance of whether you are to come to New York with him or not?’

  To which Ruth said, ‘I see what you mean. And though of course Erle will want to see your debut in America, I think you may take it—safely—that I shan’t be there.’

  Stella drew a sharp breath that could be heard on the line. ‘“Safely”?’ she echoed, catching at the deliberately chosen word. ‘Ah, that means you are offended, jealous! Though I assure you—’

  But Ruth had had enough. She hung up.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Stella duly departed, after being feted in the airport V.I.P. lounge, laden down by bouquets, and pursued to the departure gate by reporters.

  Erle held auditions, put out feelers towards new contracts, and consolidated existing ones in a tight schedule of flights to Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin.

  The everyday of Ruth’s life continued while she looked ahead at time—at such interval of it as she supposed Erle would consider ‘decent’ before the breaking of their false engagement.

  Then, one evening when she was to dine with Erle at a restaurant, he postponed ordering aperitifs, saying he was expecting two other guests, people on a visit to Rome.

  ‘Then I haven’t met them before?’ queried Ruth.

  ‘You know one of them—’ As Erle spoke he rose, offering both hands to the two women who were approaching his table. Ruth looked and gasped, her first swift thought one of reproach that he should have inflicted this upon her; her second, that he probably couldn’t help himself. For coming ahead of a beautifully groomed older woman was Cicely—all smiles and open arms, first for Erle and then for Ruth herself.

  ‘Surprise, surprise! Isn’t it? I made Erle swear he wouldn’t tell you!’ Cicely carolled. ‘Mother, meet Ruth and congratulate Erle on getting her. Fancy! They must have been growing a yen for each other
all the time they were coping with me. But not so much as a whisper out of either of them. Why not? You may well ask. Search me, though there was a time when I admit I shouldn’t have been amused—Ruth, meet Mother. Isn’t she marvellous? Only convalescent a week, and suggesting we come out here to thank you for all you did for me! We’re staying at the Salvatore—fabulous! How’s Cesare Fonte? And that grim Agnese? Erle, what are you giving us for dinner? I’m starving!’

  From such eager twitterings Ruth and Mrs. Mordaunt, smiling at each other, took it as read that they were introduced. Erle ordered drinks and they chose their meal, and presently, to all appearances, they were as happily normal a group as any in the room. Even Ruth forced herself to behave as if it were all true; wanting to believe it was; trying not to look at the inevitable aftermath of continuing lies and evasions until Cicely and her mother went back to England and the lengthening ‘decent interval’ which this re-meeting with Cicely must entail. After this, she and Erle couldn’t break with each other yet. He might carry it off. But she knew she could not, if she were ever to look the girl in the face again.

  Cicely’s gaiety was infectious, the people at nearby tables watching and laughing with her, indulging her youth. Mrs. Mordaunt was a much-travelled American, urbane and drily amusing, and Erle was, as always, a perfect host. The evening was hilarious, but not a late one, the price of Mrs. Mordaunt’s surgeon’s having allowed her to make the trip being her promise that she would always be in bed by midnight, and Cicely jealously saw that she kept it.

  They parted, arranging to meet for shopping, for sightseeing, for a return dinner party before the fortnight of the Mordaunts’ holiday ran out. Erle first took them back to their hotel, then came back for Ruth. As she joined him and he started the car he said, ‘You’re thinking that was an unlooked-for complication, but I assure you I couldn’t avoid it. Didn’t see why I should—particularly,’ he added, as if by afterthought.