‘The key was in the lock of the front door, so we simply walked in. In view of the fact that we have paid half the rent into the Banco dell’Annunziazione.’ Molly spoke quietly and in English, only for the purpose of relieving her feelings and not in the expectation that this woman would understand. She had only caught the meaning of the outraged Italian aria in snatches. Then, remembering the tragic death of Giovanna’s parents, she spoke with exaggerated courtesy to the elderly orphan. ‘Molte, molte grazie, Giovanna. Capito. Domani a la nove e mezzo. Grazie tanto.’
In spite of Molly’s smiles and her anglicized Italian, the woman still stood, wrathful and unappeased. Then the door opened, and old Haverford, rosy from his sleep and the unaccustomed sun, stared at the avenging Gorgon.
‘Signora Giovanna? Bienvenuto. Que bellissima figura.’
And he went on in English and in the manner of his ‘Jottings’: ‘How many generations ago, when she was a young girl, might she have sat for Pietro and become his Madonna della Misericordia? It’s a face which only grows more beautiful with the years.’
Molly’s discomfiture at her father’s unstoppable awfulness was increased by the spectacle of the hard-faced Giovanna, who appeared to her to be simpering, her eyes modestly downcast. Then, instead of leaving them, the maid began to take plates and glasses off the dresser and carry them out on to the terrace.
‘And a few generations later,’ Haverford went jotting on, ‘she must have turned up as Susanna in Figaro. What, exactly, do you think she’s doing?’
‘Goodness knows.’ Molly felt she had lost all control of the situation and was only anxious to withdraw from it. ‘I’m going upstairs to see about the children.’
She could hear them as she climbed to the top of the tower. They had returned noisily to life after the journey, consoled by spreading the contents of their suitcases, which always looked to her like carefully collected rubbish, old dresses bought from barrows, ratty bits of fur, crumpled and disorderly history notes, about their new quarters. Jacqueline, naked as a fish, ran screaming with delight from room to room, slithering out of her sisters’ hands as they tried to catch her. The tasteful domain of the unknown Kettering children, with its bright bedspreads, art reproductions and posters from exhibitions in Florence, had been taken over by the Pargeters, who would soon reduce it to a tip. Her children felt, it seemed, as immediately at home as she had. Molly moved to a high window someone had left open, fearing that the baby, to escape its pursuing sisters, might leap out. She thought again what a point of defence the tower was, commanding the countryside, and then she saw that there was a back road leading away from the tower, narrower, bumpier even than the drive to the front door, which snaked quickly down the hill and out of sight. That way, whoever had brought the ham and cheese, and she could guess who it must have been, had vanished as they arrived, leaving a set of keys behind.
‘Why don’t you come down and have a swim? Then you can unpack and get ready for dinner.’
‘Dinner.’ Samantha laughed at this pretentious way of describing their last meal. ‘You mean supper, don’t you?’
‘No. I mean dinner. I know we’re not really settled in yet. But we’re all going to have a proper dinner by candlelight. On the terrace.’
‘Can I have it in my dressing-gown? I’m going to be terribly tired.’ Samantha sank on to her bed to show the helpless state she expected to be in by the evening.
‘No. You can put on dresses. We’re going to have dinner on the terrace with candles.’
‘Why on earth?’
‘Because that’s the way we do things, out here.’ Molly spoke with quiet confidence as though she had become in the few hours since their arrival the owner of ‘La Felicità’ and the organizer of life in the house.
‘When I was staying with your sainted mother in Siena, small hotel in Via dei Cappuccini, and we were just leaving, I handed a postcard to the hall porter to stamp and send to England. Well, your mother came rushing in from the car with a rare display of energy and snatched it from the fellow’s hands. Of course, it was written to some girlfriend or other in England. The message was how much I missed her, time dawdling on leaden feet until we could slide between the sheets together; picture on front of a Piero angel, undoubtedly her face. Hughie will be acquainted with the sort of thing.’
‘I don’t know why you should think that.’ Hugh in a white shirt, neatly consuming prosciutto and figs, was thinking of Mrs Tobias far away from ‘La Felicità’.
‘Anyway, the Queen of the Night, always called your mother that, you know, because of her amazing devotion to sleep, which she seemed to prefer to almost any other activity, in particular to that which I believe today’s lovers refer to so elegantly as “boffing” or “shafting”… Do you “shaft” nowadays, Hughie?’
‘Would you like another fig?’ Molly found herself strangely unaffected by her father’s appalling conversation. There had been half a dozen bottles of red wine left standing in a corner of the huge kitchen hearth. She drank a mouthful of unchemicated Chianti someone had brought from the Castello Crocetto. ‘Samantha, darling, do try not to fiddle with the candle. We don’t want to set the place alight.’
‘You mean pas avant les jeunes filles en fleur. Oh, I understand.’ Haverford laid a finger upon his bluish lips. He was wearing an elderly white linen jacket and a blue spotted bowtie, so that, given a boater hat set at a jaunty angle, he might indeed have looked like the late Max Beerbohm.
‘Well, then your outraged mother leapt into the car which was loaded with our luggage because we intended to be off to Urbino that morning, and apparently she decided on some kind of hara-kiri or felo de se, a consummation of our marriage devoutly to be wished but never performed. Anyway, she drove off at high speed, ignoring all senso unicos, and finally crashed into a bollard by the ospedale. And you, Molly Coddle’ — he smiled at his daughter as though it were all, in some comic way, entirely her fault — ‘you were in an awful pink plastic carry-cot in the back seat and you never even woke up!’
‘That’s not true, is it, Mummy? It can’t be true!’ Samantha’s common sense was outraged.
‘How should I know? Babies don’t remember that sort of thing.’ Molly smiled, thinking of Jacqueline, no longer a baby it was true, but so trusting, so unperturbed by being transported to the top of a Tuscan tower, that she had not stirred when her mother knelt beside the bed to kiss her. Molly felt similarly safe, brought to this strange place about which she would have clearly so much to learn. It was knowledge which could be postponed until they were days older and more experienced in the ways of ‘La Felicità’.
If she looked at her father with tolerance on that first night it was because his flattering of Giovanna had resulted in the table being elaborately laid on the terrace, fresh candles put in the brass candlesticks, and flowers in a big green and white pottery jug set in the centre of the table. She had even found the records to which S. Kettering had directed her. They were piled haphazardly, some put back in the wrong sleeves, and were mainly recordings of Italian opera. Now, a somewhat scratchy and hissing Turandot, playing from the small, lit sitting-room which opened on to the terrace, added a mixture of Italian and oriental excitement to the occasion.
‘Of course your marriage isn’t subject to these accidents, is it, Molly Coddle? You never caught old Hugh trying to smuggle out an illicit view of the backside of the Cathedral to some little angel in Pimlico. Modern wedlock is so terribly much more like the home life of our dear Queen.’
‘I’m not much of an expert,’ Hugh said, ‘but isn’t the wine rather good?’
‘The Classico of Chiantishire. Grown to suit the palates of N.W. as they turn up at their summer villas. I recall when Nancy Leadbetter and I stayed in a terrible fleapit of a room in Siena. What we drank then tasted like sulphur and ox blood; it set fire to your tonsils.’
‘There’s one thing we have got to remember —’ Molly wondered how she had forgotten to tell them.
‘But we were
drunk the whole time on the aphrodisiac of youth.’
‘— Shoes. No one can walk about in this garden without shoes on.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘It seems there are all sorts of stinging things. You just have to be careful.’
‘Not snakes?’ Molly was surprised to see her father looking at her, blue-eyed, smiling, as though they were alone in an entertaining conspiracy.
‘No. Not snakes in particular,’ Molly told the children. ‘Just everyone be careful.’
‘You have your instructions, girls,’ Haverford winked at them. ‘Keep your shoes on or you will get kicked out of the garden of Eden. I must leave you for a while. When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.’
‘What do you mean, not snakes in particular?’ Hugh asked after his father-in-law had wandered off into the shadows at the end of the terrace and they heard his stick tapping along the stone floors. But before Molly could answer they all looked out as a car breasted the top of the small hill and lit them as brightly as actors on a stage. Molly and her husband covered their eyes and peered out towards the lights. So whoever it was driving the silent car must have seen them before twisting the wheel, reversing against the dry grass and brambles, and driving away as quietly towards the castle and the village.
‘Whatever was that?’
‘Who knows? Somebody lost, I suppose. It must be quite easy to mix up all these tracks,’ Molly told them. They were no longer shading their eyes, and the terrace was now lit only by the candles and the open door into the small sitting-room.
‘But how did they know?’ Henrietta was puzzled.
‘How did they know what?’ Samantha looked at her sister with contempt.
‘How did they know they were lost? They didn’t even stop to ask.’
In the bedroom cupboard the man’s shirt and woman’s skirt were still swinging. Molly moved them carefully to one end of the bar before she hung up Hugh’s clothes and her summer dresses. She wanted the room to be tidy before they went to sleep as, after only some nine hours’ occupation, she felt a proprietorial interest in ‘La Felicità’ and wanted it to look its best always.
‘He’s worse.’ Hugh came out of the bathroom which was dimly lit and marbled as a side chapel. ‘Absolutely worse than he’s ever been.’
‘I know.’ He had a white trace of toothpaste at the corner of his mouth. Molly took a handkerchief and tidied him up as though he were the room.
‘Nothing but talk of “bum-boys” and “shafting” in front of the girls.’
‘They don’t really mind. I mean, they’re extremely knowledgeable.’
‘Well, I mind. And suggesting I’d creep out and send a postcard to some, well, some girlfriend or another!’ Hugh was deeply offended by the suggestion. ‘What’s he trying to do, split us up or something?’
‘Probably.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘It entertains him.’ She was surprised by her tolerance. ‘I suppose he hasn’t got much else to do, at his time of life.’
‘Can’t he grow old with dignity?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Does he think about sex the whole time?’ Hugh was already in bed, his wife still tidying.
‘So it seems.’
‘I can’t imagine being like that, when I’m old.’ He gazed towards his mid-seventies with an anxious expression. He hadn’t been, in his wife’s experience, very much like that when he was young.
‘It’s his generation,’ Molly reassured him, lifting an empty suitcase on to the top of a cupboard. ‘Apparently they hardly ever thought about anything else. You like it here, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he had to admit. ‘Of course, it’s very grand.’
‘Not really. It seems quite homely.’ It wasn’t what she meant. She would have liked to say that, in her opinion, it wasn’t in the least like home, but in every respect better.
‘Grand, and, my god, it’s expensive.’
‘Much cheaper than a hotel, for all of us.’
He shook his head, hardly able to bear the thought of what they were paying out to have his antique father-in-law insult him at mealtimes.
‘Anyway, I’m going to pay for it.’
‘I’m not sure I altogether approve of that.’
‘It’s all fixed. I’ve fixed it all with S. Kettering. So don’t worry.’ She resisted the temptation to add, ‘Your pretty head.’
But Hugh’s brown eyes were closed and his martyred Saint Sebastian head was flat on the pillow. He had had a long drive and, in the face of great provocation, behaved, on the whole, exceedingly well. Molly, now in her nightdress, got into bed beside him. As she stretched out an arm to switch off the light she saw, on the marble-topped bedside table, the book which had been open on the bedcover when she had first visited the house. It was closed now but a dry leaf marked a place. She was too tired to read and fell asleep.
First Week
CHAPTER FOUR
Molly’s sleep had been deep and dreamless but she woke up early, saw Hugh unconscious beside her and replaced the sheet he had kicked away as she might cover one of the children. Then she moved quietly into the kitchen and made herself a mug of tea. Framed in the narrow window she saw the landscape, lit and brilliant as the background of a painting. The terrace tiles were already warm under her bare feet; the sunlight, when she looked towards it, stung her eyes and made them water. When she moved, a bright green lizard sprinted up the wall and vanished. She sat and drank the tea and thought about S. Kettering. Then she got the photographs out of her handbag and looked at the view of the swimmingpool. The figure sitting on its far side was a man wearing sand-coloured trousers and a red shirt; he had reddish-brown hair brushed straight back and looked square-shouldered and sturdy. The focus in the distance was not sharp enough for her to be able to tell much more about him. She stood at the foot of the staircase which led up to the tower but even Jacqueline, so well known for her early rising that her grandfather called her the Dawn Patrol, was silent. She wandered back into the small sitting-room with her mug of tea, put it down on the polished surface of a table but removed it hastily in case it left a tell-tale ring which S. Kettering might complain about in the future. And yet, now she had taken possession of ‘La Felicità’, she no longer felt so much in awe of the absentee landlord as a half-amused curiosity about him. Finding out about Kettering was, she thought, a private game which she might set herself to play on this holiday. The room gave her no help. It was too appropriate, too suitable, to betray any particular personality. There were a couple of oriental rugs on the tiled floor, old maps, comfortable armchairs and sofas, flower vases which tactfully avoided the awfulness of Italian ceramics. Only a picture over the fireplace seemed out of place: an archly primitive painting of a large tabby cat and a Victorian child in a formal garden. It was so painted, Molly thought, that the cat looked considerably more human than the child, who had the embarrassing appearance of a performing animal dressed in frilly pantaloons and a bright blue sash. She avoided its eye and knelt in front of the bookcase.
The books were hardly more revealing, seeming to be less of a private collection than the sort of works which might help visiting tourists dedicated to culture. There was a shelf of art books, another of guides, Italian history and works on wine and Tuscan cooking. There were none of the battered paperbacks usually left abandoned after rainy afternoons in holiday houses, no near pornography and, she thought, no detective stories, until she remembered the Sherlock Holmes collection beside the bed. S. Kettering was either a particularly serious-minded chap or anxious to show off to his tenants. Having reached that judgement Molly felt, for the first time, one up.
So she smiled to herself and pulled out a tall book from the bottom shelf, Piero della Francesca by the fellow whom her father always called K. Clark. The plates flickered past, solemn and beautiful faces, sleeping soldiers, angels carrying flutes, and then a page fell open more easily because, slipped in
to it, she found a sheet of the villa’s notepaper on which was typed what she at first thought to be a shopping-list, but, as she began to read, discovered it was no such thing.
‘On the floor looking at artworks, crouched in front of forgotten masterpieces! That’s how I always remember you, Molly Coddle.’ Her father came into the room, looking like an unreformed convict in his striped pyjamas, his grey hair upright at the back of his head, a smouldering cigarette held in one cupped hand and his mug of tea in the other. ‘Forget art,’ he said. ‘Life’s the thing, isn’t it? My “Jottings” will describe Italy as a place where the drama in the streets is never ending. Not as a museum.’
‘Don’t put your mug on that table,’ she said. ‘It’s going to leave a ring.’
‘Life is for living and, for God’s sake, tables are for putting mugs down on.’ All the same he stood his on the rug as he sat down, inhaled smoke and coughed with pleasure. ‘When do you propose to begin life, Molly Coddle?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘A husband, three jolly girls and a holiday in Italy. Is that enough to satisfy your taste for living? At least there was a bit of drama in your mother’s life. She used to crash cars.’
‘Only because of the way you behaved,’ Molly was angry enough to answer.
‘The way I behaved, yes.’ He smiled complacently and gulped his tea. ‘The way I behaved certainly gave rise to a bit of drama, from time to time. Don’t you long for it, Molly Coddle? You must do, as your father’s daughter. Tell me honestly, are we as different as all that?’
What he had said was meant to be consoling. He thought, once again, how large she looked and yet how vulnerable, wearing nothing but her nightdress, kneeling on the floor in front of him so that he could see, although he tried not to, the tops of her ample breasts. He had never been much of a fellow for breasts. In a way she was imposing, and as statuesque as the pictures in front of her; it was just that she was not, and never could be, her father’s type. He held out his hand to her, feeling, unusually for him, guilty.
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