PENGUIN BOOKS
SUMMER’S LEASE
John Mortimer is a playwright (A Voyage Round My Father), novelist and former practising barrister. He has written four volumes of autobiography, including Clinging to the Wreckage and Where There’s a Will (2003). His novels include the Leslie Titmuss trilogy, about the rise of an ambitious Tory MP: Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained and The Sound of Trumpets; and most recently the acclaimed comic novel Quite Honestly (2005). He has also published numerous books featuring his best-loved creation Horace Rumpole, most recently Rumpole and the Primrose Path (2002), Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (2004) and Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (2006). All these books are available in Penguin Paperbacks.
John Mortimer lives in what was once his father’s house in the Chilterns. He received a knighthood for his services to the arts. His authorized biography, written by Valerie Grove, was published by Viking in 2007.
By the Same Author
Charade
Rumming Park
Answer Yes or No
Like Men Betrayed
Three Winters
The Narrowing Stream
Will Shakespeare (An Entertainment)
Paradise Postponed
Summer’s Lease
Titmuss Regained
Dunster
Felix in the Underworld
Quite Honestly
Rumpole of the Bailey
The Trials of Rumpole
Rumpole for the Defence
Rumpole’s Return
Rumpole and the Golden Thread
Rumpole’s Last Case
Rumpole and the Age of Miracles
Rumpole à la Carte
Rumpole on Trial
The Best of Rumpole
Rumpole and the Angel of Death
Rumpole Rests His Case
Rumpole and the Primrose Path
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow
Murders
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror
Under the Hammer
With Love and Lizards (with Penelope Mortimer)
Clinging to the Wreckage
Murderers and Other Friends
The Summer of a Dormouse
Where There’s a Will
In Character
Character Parts
Plays
A Voyage Round My Father
The Dock Brief
What Shall We Tell Caroline?
The Wrong Side of the Park
Two Stars for Comfort
The Judge
Collaborators
Edwin, Bermondsey, Marble
Arch, Fear of Heaven
The Prince of Darkness
Naked Justice
Hock and Soda Water
JOHN MORTIMER
Summer’s Lease
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Viking 1988
First published in Penguin Books 1988
This edition published 2007
2
Copyright © Advanpress Ltd, 1988
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-192079-5
For Judy Astor and Jim Wolfe
who came on the trail to Urbino
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII
Preparations
CHAPTER ONE
The woman walked round the corner of the house and saw a snake consuming a large Tuscan toad.
The victim was motionless, looking about it only slightly puzzled, blinking, whilst the snake attacked its leg. The toad had the appearance of a fat businessman being done some sexual service by a hard-faced girl on the make and doing his best not to notice. The snake, with its sleek, shiny head and curled body, was long and smartly patterned in grey and black.
The woman, wishing to put an end to this outrage and feeling involved on the side of the toad, picked up a stick. But as she straightened, armed, the nervous snake abandoned its prey and slithered away into the shadows under a fig tree. There it was lost among the wild flowers and in the spring grass. The toad sat on, unafraid, bleeding slightly and blinking into the sun. The woman dropped her stick and stood looking at it, bewildered.
‘Mrs Pargeter.’ A man came up behind her and she turned towards him. He was dressed in a blue blazer and white trousers as though for some pre-war cruise. The sunlight behind him penetrated the thinness of his ginger hair and polished his scalp. ‘Is there anything more I can show you?’
‘No, thanks. Nothing more.’
She looked back towards the fig tree and saw that the toad had lumbered off into the tangled garden, perhaps to rejoin its tormentor. ‘Do you honestly think,’ she asked, standing in front of the stone walls and cool archways of the villa, ‘that it’ll be suitable?’
‘Suitable for what?’
‘For children, of course.’
‘My dear Mrs Pargeter. You’ve read the advertisement?’
Read it? She had learnt it by heart. Villa to let near small Tuscan town. Suit couple, early forties, with three children (females preferred). Recently installed swimming-pool may compensate for sometimes impassable road. Owner suggests preliminary viewing to prevent disappointment or future misunderstandings.
‘Doesn’t it say, Suit couple… with three children?’
‘It says that.’ She had noticed it particularly.
‘I should’ve thought that was pretty plain.’ The man smiled as though that were quite enough on the subject of children. ‘I’ll be around in the summer to show you the ropes, depend upon it. You’ll want to know a source of Gordon’s gin, angostura bitters, streaky bacon. All life’s little essentials. I can even find potted shrimps when the wind’s in the right direction. The Financial Times may be a bit of a problem. Hard to come by in Mondano-in-Chianti. I happen to know of a supply in Siena but I’d rather you kept it dark. It’s not the sort of knowledge one likes to have spread around.’
‘Don’t bother.’ There was sunshine on her face, an unusual sensation in March, and she felt light-hearted now that the snake and its co-operative victim had withdrawn. ‘The Financial Times is probably the least of our worries.’ And then she added, as casually as possible, ‘Grey with sort of b
lack markings. Would that be a grass snake?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one.’
‘No grass snakes around here at all?’
‘No snakes of any kind,’ he said firmly. ‘Not as far as I’m concerned. And don’t worry, Mrs Pargeter. No scorpions getting into your slippers at night either. Seen all you want to see, have you?’
She looked for the last time. The doves gave up strutting and whitening the old ping-pong table and set off, flapping busily towards the purple hillside. However, their flight was soon aborted and they settled back on the table.
‘Yes.’ She had seen all she wanted to see.
‘Then perhaps you’ll run me into Mondano?’
The seat in the rented Fiat was warm under her skirt. The man sat beside her and, after asking her permission, lit one of the thin Havana cigars he happened to know where to come by. His features were regular but he had a distinct cast in one eye, so that he couldn’t stare straight at her without looking somewhere else. Apart from that he was rather a handsome man, she thought, if you happened to like that type of thing.
Molly Pargeter’s drive down the long, rutted track across the hills to Mondano was part of a journey that had started in her childhood and only reached its present stage when, in the middle of a freezing London January, she read the advertisement in the Daily Telegraph: Villa to let near small Tuscan town. She had always had, as she would say with that breathless half of a nervous laugh with which she met anyone’s emotions including her own, this sort of a ‘thing’ about Italy. Her father had wanted her to turn out to be something exotic, an actress perhaps, or even, in the camera-obsessed sixties, a model, and he couldn’t conceal his disappointment at the growth of a big-boned daughter who seemed without ambition. Her mother spent most of her afternoons resting and Molly’s was a lonely childhood. She would kneel on the floor behind the sofa and pull out the tall books of art reproductions. Avoiding those which formed part of her father’s collection of naked Indian or Japanese bodies locked together in unusually gymnastic postures, she had, throughout her childhood, stuck to the Italian schools of painting. So she gazed and her finger traced the outlines of nymphs — thinner, higher cheek-boned than she could ever hope to be, garlanded with flowers, stepping barefoot through the forest; and sometimes she saw an exhausted Venus, a hand below her belly, lying in a countryside where oxen were driven and ships set sail on uncharted seas. She had looked seriously at soft-eyed young men, pierced, as often as not, by arrows. At the chilly boarding-school to which her parents sent her in the mistaken belief that she would be less lonely among girls of her own age, the prizes for mathematics — a subject which she didn’t particularly care for but which came easily to her — were framed reproductions of the works of Italian painters. Duccios and Signorellis and Martinis hung by her bedside at a time when other girls pinned up Elvis and Cliff or even Paul Anka. Such pictures she always found calming to her nerves and she had no need of the large net which was hung at the top of the staircase, to catch those distracted adolescents who attempted suicide in the converted country house where she received her education.
Villa to let near small Tuscan town Suit couple, early forties, with three children (females preferred).
When she was sixteen, in the age of Gucci shoes and Lambrettas, and being taken by her father on birthday treats to his favourite trattoria in the King’s Road (white lavatory tiles and low-slung lights, waiters singing ‘O Sole Mio’ and her father embarrassingly ordering ‘due cannelloni, per favore, and molto formaggio for my daughter’), Molly was conscious of becoming attracted to men with a lot of black hair round the bracelets of their wrist-watches.
She went on a school trip to Tuscany and saw many of the pictures she had known for so long. At first they seemed brighter, smaller and cruder than she had been led to expect by the polite reproductions. Her friend, Rosie Fortinbras, always getting lost between the Pinacoteca and the Duomo in Siena, boasted of having kissed her way round all the waiters in the restaurant in the Piazza del Campo, saving for the last, like a favourite soft creamy centre, little Vittorio with the face of a page-boy in the corner of an Adoration of the Magi. ‘Kiss? You can call it kiss if you like. It’s a quite different word in Italian.’ Rosie whispered ‘scopare’ to her as they sat beside each other at a concert in a dark and chilly palace behind the square. ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘It means “he ground himself into me”, as it says in the book I bought at the airport.’ Rosie’s further explanation was lost in a burst of Vivaldi and Molly didn’t believe her. All the same, the holiday had excited and disturbed her. She never forgot the sound of Italy, brutal as the sunshine on the hard pavements, and the nightly passage of crowds in the Piazza. Sharing a single icecream, she and Rosie watched an ever-circulating stage army of lovers arm in arm, young and old, walking very fast as though to give the illusion of purpose. Among them, young men with shining, pointed shoes astride snarling Vespas shouted, ‘Ciao, bellissima,’ but usually to someone else. As the years passed, the sights and sounds became less alarming in her memory and she came to think of Italy as the place where she had been happy.
‘Three children. Why females preferred? It sounds a bit fishy.’
‘Perhaps they think girls do less damage.’
‘Damage?’
‘To the furniture.’
‘I’m not sure I like the sound of it.’ Molly’s husband frowned. He looked, as always at the prospect of a new departure, an undertaking likely to cost money, desperate for ways of escape. Although he had no dark hairs growing round his wrist-watch, Hugh Pargeter had, in his youth, the regular features and slightly curled hair of young men who model knitting patterns. He had gone into his father’s firm of solicitors where his looks endeared him to wives in divorce cases, although his extreme reluctance to take decisions prevented them obtaining the best results. As a rule he would wait for others — judges, opponents, even his wife — to decide matters of importance. If things turned out well he would quietly take the credit. If not, his brown eyes wore an expression as helpless and martyred as those of Saint Sebastian in the paintings Molly had always admired.
‘What do we know of these people? We know nothing of them.’ As a lawyer, he had learnt that the safest course was inactivity; if you don’t do things, you can’t usually be blamed for them. Now he hoped he had found a fatal flaw in his wife’s plans and they could, as usual, spend the summer holiday with his mother in Dorset.
‘Nothing, until I write to the box number. Of course, I shall get full details.’
Hugh sighed. Once she had written, another decision would have been taken, and he would tell them in the office that they were having a stab at Italy this year, he’d managed to track down a villa in Tuscany. So much of their lives, each of the three children, the house in Kensington Park Road and now, it seemed, their summer holiday, followed inexorably after Molly had made a decision.
It was not only the prospect of Tuscany that had captivated Molly, it was the strange provision about three children, females preferred. Her husband had found this fishy, and perhaps for that reason it filled her with intense curiosity. Her life had not been particularly adventurous and at school, where her friend Rosie Fortinbras courted adventure, she had been regarded as a dull girl and a plodding worker. At night, however, or during the long school holidays, she read detective stories, earning the contempt of her father who told her that his answer to the question ‘Who dunnit?’ was invariably ‘Who cares?’ But, indulging a passion more secret than her love for Italian painting, Molly had early gone off with Holmes and Watson in a cab through the pea-souper, or sat on the edge of her chair while Poirot summoned the guests to assemble in the library after tea. She read with great attention, few clues escaped her, and it was with a suppressed little scream of excitement and fear that this large, lonely girl would guess the murderer three or four chapters before the end. She disposed quickly of red herrings, usually sought out the least probable suspect and rarely failed.
S
o why should anyone advertise their house as being specially suitable for a couple in their early forties, with three children (females preferred)? The fact that she and Hugh happened to fit the bill seemed to give her every opportunity for finding out. Accumulating the evidence would be an occupation to keep her going whilst she organized her children’s lives with Mrs O’Keefe, who came in each day to look after them. Some of it arrived about two weeks after she had written to the box number, in the shape of three typewritten pages. There were also several coloured photographs of the villa ‘La Felicità’; all taken from a low angle, so that it seemed to tower against the sky; a place where the owners might appear on the battlements to a flourish of trumpets and a cry of heralds. The swimming-pool, also shot from ground-level, might have been a sizeable lake, only the distant, slightly blurred figure of a man betrayed the scale. There was a photograph of the bedroom in which the bed appeared gargantuan, with a great carved wooden headboard and foot, neatly made, although somebody’s sunglasses had been left on the patchwork quilt. There was a picture of the terrace on which meals were taken ‘except during thunderstorms’ and several of the garden, but none of the kitchen or of the children’s accommodation. Each photograph had stamped upon the back the words PRIVATE PROPERTY.
She turned next to the typewritten pages. The work was divided into various sections, the first being headed General remarks: The villa ‘La Felicità’ can only be enjoyed by the observance of strict rules and a certain discipline. Most of these rules will be obvious. The wasteful use of the bathrooms, for instance, can turn a summer holiday into a time of intense anxiety and the purchase of water by the lorry load may strain the budget of even the best-heeled family. None of the following devices should, on any account, be switched on at the same time: the immersion heater in the master bathroom, the swimming-pool filter or the dishwashing machine. If a hair-drier is in use, it’s generally wise to temporarily disconnect the refrigerator. More detailed instructions will be found taped on the walls over the appliances concerned. Above all, avoid flushing the lavatory next to the small sitting-room more than once in any given half hour or serious results may follow.
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