Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘Sorry. We’re going to Italy.’

  ‘You really enjoy that, don’t you?’ Henrietta gave her well-known hollow laugh. ‘You revel in disappointing somebody.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Henrietta. We’ll have fun.’

  ‘Can’t you all have fun while I stay here?’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Rachel Koo would come over.’

  ‘You’re not staying here without us.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why not.’

  ‘Because I’d shoot up drugs or have parties and get drunk and sleep with boys? Thank you very much. It’s nice to know you think your daughter’s a raving drug addict and a tart. That really cheers me up!’

  ‘Of course I don’t think that.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do. To you I’m just someone who can’t be left in your house alone.’

  It was the point at which her mother usually said, ‘You are only fourteen,’ — an undeniable truth which Molly decided to save for the endless discussions on the subject which would be bound to occur in the weeks to come. Of course she couldn’t leave Henrietta alone in the house, the tall building she had bought with great-aunt Dorothy’s money. And it was here, after the house-warming party which began with hours of few arrivals and long silences, that she and Hugh had finished what was left of the Carafino and found themselves in the narrow bed in the basement where this dramatically argumentative child had been conceived. She couldn’t leave her there alone; she would be safer with them in Italy.

  Her husband came home then and found them quarrelling, engaged in a power struggle in which he felt he had no place. Three-year-old Jacqueline ran at him and grasped his knees; he put down his briefcase and lifted her in his arms, flattered by her attention. Later he said, ‘Your father called me in the office.’

  ‘I wish he wouldn’t do things like that.’

  ‘It seems his paper’s asked him to write a series of articles from Italy. On social problems. Serious stuff, that’s what it sounded like.’

  ‘Hugh, you didn’t…’ Molly had the same feeling of doom she remembered when her father wrote to say he’d be coming down to see her at school and would take her out to tea, so she could meet a ‘new friend’.

  ‘Well, he said he’d lose his job if he couldn’t go. Poor old Haverford, it’s really all he’s got left.’

  ‘Is that what he said?’

  ‘Not all he said.’ In fact his father-in-law had congratulated him on the perfectly splendid bit of crackling Hugh had in his arms in Chancery Lane, and naturally mum was the word, and his lips were sealed as far as Molly Coddle was concerned. And, by the way, he did have this job in Italy, but if it was in the slightest degree inconvenient to join them in the villa, he’d book into a cheap little pensione by the railway station in Siena. Hugh was not an absolutely brilliant solicitor but he knew when he’d been out-manoeuvred by a ruthless opponent. ‘He said he knew the part of Tuscany we were going to extremely well and all the priests were Communists. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘It will be,’ Molly said with considerable feeling, ‘when he’s finished writing about them.’

  At the end of the month Molly received another communication from S. Kettering setting out the arrangements for paying the rent. Half the sum due should be converted into dollars and placed in the overseas account of Barone Bernardo Dulcibene in the Banco dell’Annunziazione in Siena. The other half can most conveniently be received in lire (cash please) by William Fosdyke, an Englishman who has long made his home in Mondano and who has certain bills to discharge in relation to the property. I intend to travel extensively during the summer and I may not have the pleasure of meeting you. It has, however, been pleasant to do business with you and I am sure you and your little family will be extremely happy at ‘La Felicità’.

  So she felt, with an unexpected disappointment, that she would never get to know her landlord. All she had learned was that he was a man whose wife thought him the apple of her eye and who had tastes in Italian painting that were remarkably similar to her own.

  Arrival

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Why can’t you sit up and look about you?’

  ‘Because we’re feeling sick.’

  ‘We paid out all this money to bring you here.’ Hugh, driving a large, family-sized Fiat, blamed his two elder daughters whom he knew to be slumped in varying attitudes of distress on the seat behind him. ‘At least you ought to show a bit of gratitude and look about you.’ Not only had he paid out money, some of it his own, but he had forgone almost a month of lunches with Mrs Tobias in the ‘Dolce Vita’.

  ‘My advice to you, if you want my advice, is never look about you.’ Haverford, exercising an old man’s privilege, was sitting next to the driver. In the back, squashed in beside two hot and complaining children, Molly tried her best to restrain the youngest on her lap from wrenching open the door and free-falling out towards the autostrada.

  ‘Never look about you as you go,’ was old Haverford’s advice, ‘and then arriving will come to you as a total surprise. Besides which, there’s nothing much to see except the motorway and a lot of Krautish industrialists hurrying south in their Mercedes towards the bum-boys of Naples.’

  Molly’s heart sank. Having her father with them on holiday was going to turn out as disastrously as she had expected. Why hadn’t Hugh hardened his heart and refused to accept his ridiculous story of having been commissioned to do his ‘Jottings’ from Tuscany? Haverford had jotted away from the furthest reaches of the King’s Road for the past forty years. His journey was, she now felt, quite unnecessary. ‘Why don’t you read Jacky a story?’ she asked Samantha. And to the desperately wriggling child, ‘You’d like a story, wouldn’t you, about Postman Pat?’

  ‘I can’t possibly read when I’m feeling sick,’ Samantha told her. ‘And, anyway, what’s a bum-boy, Gamps?’

  ‘Look about you, anyway,’ said Hugh quickly. ‘It’s Italy. That’s what we’ve paid to see.’

  ‘A gay tart,’ Henrietta explained with what sounded like her last breath. ‘Anyway, how many more kilometres is it now?’

  ‘Ask your mother.’ Hugh moved out to pass a lorry, disclaiming all responsibility for this endless and ruinous journey. ‘She knows all about it.’

  ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ Haverford intoned. ‘Three score miles and ten.’

  ‘When shall we be there?’ Samantha asked with her eyes closed. ‘Whenever shall we be there?’

  ‘The only decent journeys are the package tours of the imagination, trips to a wood near Athens or Ruritania. You don’t have to queue up at passport control. You don’t have to fight your way into a plastic-wrapped leg of hairy chicken, while you’re hurtled through space at the mercy of some suburban pilot with piles who thinks only of his duty frees and having it off with the stewardess. You don’t have to spend half a day in a moving microwave oven racing lorries down the autostrada. You can travel the world from your own armchair.’ Haverford was warming to a theme which he had expanded in some of his best-loved ‘Jottings’. Why on earth, Molly wondered, couldn’t he have followed his own advice and imagined their progress towards the raccordo to Siena.

  ‘We should be there in an hour,’ Molly said, ‘and Jacqueline says she wants to stop.’

  ‘Don’t you think she’s lying?’

  ‘It’s not worth risking. Anyway, we don’t want to get there too soon.’

  ‘Getting there’s absolutely all I want,’ Samantha moaned. Molly didn’t remind her that they mustn’t arrive too early because S. Kettering had told them not to.

  Suggested arrival time [his latest communiqué read] should be about 16.00 hours, after Giovanna has recovered from her siesta. In the normal course of events, she will be at your disposal for three hours in the morning between 9.30 and 12.30. Her cleaning is admirable, but she will not undertake washing (the machine will be available to you provided you take proper precautions) or cooking. Don’t be put off by Giovanna’
s somewhat harsh and peremptory manner. She is an orphan, both her parents having been shot by the Germans. She’s matched with a somewhat feckless husband and has the sole responsibility for a large family. She will present you with your personal bunch of keys and explain their uses. You will find each key clearly labelled. Signed, S. KETTERING.

  They stopped at a Motta bar. ‘Dov’è la toiletta?’ Haverford asked on the children’s behalf, but they had already found it, scampering away through the display of giant dolls, plastic picnic tables, local cheese and wine, and returned resentful at having been glowered at by the resident guardian because they hadn’t understood the purpose of her saucer of lire. Haverford ordered a coffee and a cognac italiano per favore. Hugh drank a beer; with his sleeves rolled up he looked masculine and masterful, in charge of his family on the journey his wife had planned for so long. He was all the more determined to appear in control because his father-in-law was giving him the half-amused, half-pitying look, which Hugh interpreted as ‘I know you’re sorry you’ve got to put up with me. It’s just because you’re the poor fish my daughter married; but then the unfortunate girl couldn’t get a better catch in her particular sea.’

  When they got outside, the early afternoon heat hit them like a blast of air from the Underground. The hot car seats stung the children’s bare legs and made them cry out in protest.

  Hugh remained calm at the wheel, driving with the window open. He accepted his wife’s instructions and negotiated Conterchi and San Pietro in Crespi without hesitation or mishap. Mondano was as deserted as a ghost town, wrapped in the silence of its siesta. As they passed the alimentari (shut, as it might be forever) and then plunged off the road into the shadows of the bramble-lined single track, Haverford quoted, as he had been waiting to do ever since they left Heathrow:

  ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

  Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura

  Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

  “In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself lost in a dark wood,”’ he began to translate for the benefit of the children, but they were all, including the baby, asleep now and Molly thought that for her father to pretend to be in the middle of his life was a bit of a cheek anyway.

  So she sat, with the sleeping Jacqueline on her lap and waited, it seemed forever, for the moment she both longed for and dreaded. The pot-holed drive seemed endless and dustier than before, with the fine show of spring flowers over. And then the car bumped and scrambled to the top of the little hill and there, once more and changeless, was ‘La Felicità’. No one spoke, no one congratulated her. Her family showed no sign of amazement. Hugh drove neatly into the straw-covered shelter as though he were coming to rest in a multi-storey car park; then he switched off the engine and opened his door. But the family sat on with the inertia of those who have travelled a long way and are reluctant to face the effort of arrival.

  Hugh said, ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone here.’

  ‘But what do you think?’

  ‘It’s a fort,’ Hugh said suspiciously.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Henrietta now grumbled as she awoke. ‘We’re not here, are we?’

  “‘This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air nimbly and sweetly recommends itself unto our gentle senses,”’ Haverford orated. The silence that followed was broken only by the buzzing and blundering of insects, the uninterrupted beating of cricket legs.

  ‘Where’s the pool?’ Samantha opened her eyes. ‘I can’t see any pool.’

  ‘It’s there,’ Molly told her. ‘Everything’s there.’ But she sat, afraid to get out and face some possible disappointment. The house looked cooler, clearer, its angles sharper and shadows blacker in the high summer sunshine. There was bougainvillaea in flower, clambering up the stone walls, small white roses on thin stalks among the weeds, and wild flowers in what could hardly be called a garden. And then, when she looked at the high terrace with its pots of trailing geraniums, she could see nothing for the shadow was so intense — not the pale blob of a face or the movement of a hand — but she was suddenly as sure as she could be of anything that someone was standing there, looking down, waiting for them to get out of the car and watching them.

  ‘I suppose the children could go and find the swimmingpool,’ Hugh suggested.

  ‘I think Giovanna’s got here early. We’re in luck.’ Molly swung open the car door. Jacqueline was awake and starting to complain. Molly carried her a little way towards the house and then set her down on the pavement by the front door. She no longer felt the presence of anyone on the terrace above her. She pulled the bell; there was no answer. Then she called ‘Giovanna!’ fruitlessly into the silence. She looked back at the shelter where theirs was the only car. If the maid had arrived and was waiting for them she would have to be driven back to Mondano. And now, as she watched, the car doors were swinging open and the two older girls were struggling out, clutching books, hats and plastic bags full of personal possessions. Her old father was extricating himself from the front seat slowly, painfully, gasping, as though he had to push open a heavy coffin lid in order to rise from the dead.

  It was only then she saw what she should have noticed immediately: a bunch of keys with one stuck in the lock, many of them hung with labels. It was a collection she had last seen in the hands of William Fosdyke, Signor Fixit, as he locked up the house after her first visit. She turned the key in the lock; the heavy door swung open and she and her family were admitted to the house.

  Ten minutes later she was in possession of the huge kitchen. The children had stood for a moment, awestruck in the hall, as she had hoped they might, amazed at the broad stone staircase, the hanging lantern and the dark portraits of who? Certainly not the Ketterings’ ancestors as they appeared to be mostly of sly Italian clerics. Then Henrietta and Samantha charged up to the tower, with Jacqueline stumbling after them, to quarrel about their bedrooms.

  So Molly stood in the kitchen, the centre of the house, with its door opening on to the terrace, where now, for certain, no one stood watching her. The big wooden table had been scrubbed as white as a bone on the seashore. The knives stood sharp and shining in their racks. Out of the window she could see her father sitting in the plastic chair by the pool. He had stayed awake long enough to remember Dante and Duncan and now he was asleep, the sun on his face and his hat on the grass beside him. She opened the tall refrigerator and found, to her surprise, that it was stocked with white wine, beer, mineral water and coke for the children. There was also butter, cheese, peaches and packets of milk. She opened a wooden chest and found pasta, jam, and, put there even more thoughtfully, packets of Rice Krispies and tins of baked beans. On a marble slab near to the cooker there was a joint of ham and a fat salami ready for slicing. Next to them was a huge watermelon and a bowl of green figs. On the shelves of a tall dresser, she saw tins of coffee and chocolate biscuits and a collection of Twinings teas ranging from Darjeeling, through English Breakfast to Lapsang and Rose Pouchong. Her tiredness seemed to soak away from her, as though she were lying in warm water; she felt not only welcome, but positively needed. She decided to treat herself to a fig from the bowl and found its skin still damp, as though it had been recently washed. Then she heard the sound of a car starting and tyres sliding on a dirt road. But when she pushed open the door and walked out on to the terrace the only car to be seen was their family-sized four-door saloon hired from Pisa airport. The boot was open and Hugh was manfully pulling the remaining suitcases out of it.

  ‘Was that a car?’ she called out to him.

  ‘Was what a car?’

  ‘I thought I heard something…’

  ‘I didn’t. Do these all have to go up to the tower?’

  ‘Not ours. We’re in the big bedroom.’

  And then the silence of the hillside was rent by a further sound, a high buzzing at first like a gigantic and enraged wasp, and then a roar and a rending of the air, so that Molly felt as though she were standing on the bridge of a warship and some huge Exocet mi
ssile was being hurled in her direction. And indeed it was, for over the brow of the little hill a bright-red motor-scooter erupted and upon it swayed the figure of a monumentally built woman, her classic features frozen into a mask of anger and her grey hair flying in the wind so that she had the appearance of a vengeful Medusa.

  This was no doubt Giovanna aroused from her siesta. She skidded to a halt, threw her leg over the saddle as though dismounting from a charger, and began to harangue Hugh in words he didn’t understand. Molly watched the scene feeling calm, even amused, and bit into her fig. Then she walked back into the kitchen and soon heard the hard clatter of shoes on the stone stairs and Giovanna was upon her.

  ‘Dov’è la chiave?’ The furious figure, stone-faced, and with magnificently controlled rage demanded of her new employer.

  ‘Ecco su la tavola. Ecco qui.’ Molly pointed to the bright bunch on the scrubbed table and Giovanna gathered them up and strode to a hook on the dresser where they dangled with all their labels. It wasn’t fair, just or right for the Signora to come before the hour appointed; she should have been admitted by Giovanna herself and the keys should have remained hanging on their appointed hook; the other set being in the pocket of Giovanna’s overall from which she now drew them and held them up making it clear that they would be relinquished only upon her death and then only into the hands of Signor Kettering. What had occurred was quite contrary to the wishes of the padrone who would be outraged if he ever got to hear of it. Despite this disastrous beginning, however, Giovanna would be there in the morning, her own family circumstances permitting, and she would be much obliged if the Signora would make sure that her children were up and dressed, and the breakfast eaten, so that she could see that the house was returned to something like the order which Signor Kettering expected of it.