Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘We should try and get on a little better, Molly Coddle. You’ve never understood me.’

  She thought, I understand you all too well.

  ‘I was fifty-three when I used to meet all those wonderful girls striding down the King’s Road, blonde hair flying, boots like little musketeers. Only fifty-three. I could feel quite young then. Now I’m seventy-seven and I’m hardly a day older.’

  What a pity you can’t feel your age, she thought. It would make life so much more pleasant.

  ‘Let’s all go into Mondano in search of adventure. Anyway I want to root out the priest. Chase up a few stories. You’ll have shopping to do, most likely?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll have shopping.’ And then she looked down again at the neatly typed list in the book, open on the floor in front of her.

  ASSETS

  1) La Felicità

  2) Being together

  3) The children

  CURRENT LIABILITY

  The existence of B.

  MEANS

  1) Lawyers (useless)

  2) Other means to be considered

  OBJECTIVE

  B. lost and gone forever

  Nancy L. Which side is she on?

  ‘What are you looking at, Molly Coddle?’

  ‘Really nothing.’

  ‘Isn’t that “The Flagellation”?’ Her father squinted down at the page but she banged the book shut and slid it back on the shelf.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’ And then, to her relief, Jacqueline appeared at the doorway and asked, accusingly, if anyone was going to get her breakfast.

  ‘Lardo. Bacon. Have you any lardo? And marmellata di arancia. And matches. Fiammiferi. The wooden ones. Fiammiferi di legno. Not the little wax jobs.’ Molly smiled and laughed nervously. ‘Niente fiammiferi di cera.’ She remembered trying to light the gas at the villa with a flaming wax Vesta, which twisted and burnt her thumb. ‘Lardo,’ she repeated, reading from her list with diminishing confidence. The woman behind the counter had been gazing at her through strong spectacles and now scratched doubtfully at her moustache with a thumbnail. The three old men seated on chairs in the dark shop were looking at her as though she were an amusing variation on their usual routine of watching the shopping.

  ‘Well, uova then.’ Eggs had not been one of the things left by her unknown benefactor and there had been complaints about the absence of toast soldiers. Now Jacqueline, trotting about the shop telling herself some endless and only vaguely comprehensible story, knocked down a pile of brightly coloured buckets. Being with young children, Molly thought desperately, is like having to take out a geriatric, or a drunk. Samantha wandered out through the plastic strips of a door-curtain to where death-dealing lorries thundered down Mondano’s main street. Only Henrietta stood in a silent spasm, her entire body controlled by the Walkman which gripped her head and blared into her ears the sound of her own personal disco, reminding her, to her quiet fury, of the parties she was missing by coming on holiday with her parents. The shopkeeper nodded with eventual understanding, cut off a huge bunch of bright green grapes and threw them on to the scales.

  ‘No, no. No uva, grapes. Uova, eggs.’ Molly tried to speak slowly and rationally but the calm which had sustained her in the villa seemed to have drained away. She could feel the sweat soaking her cotton dress and the red flush rising up her neck like an infection. As she struggled with Italian pronunciation, Jacqueline doubled away behind her and slid out of the shop.

  ‘Where’s she gone?’ She turned on Henrietta. ‘I told you, I told you to keep an eye!’ But her eldest daughter only smiled vaguely, deafened by her private music. It was at this moment that Signor Fixit appeared in the doorway with the plastic strips draped over his shoulders like variously coloured spaghetti. He was holding Jacqueline, who seemed to trust him, by the hand and Samantha was on his other side.

  ‘Just caught your nippers apparently setting out for Siena,’ Fosdyke said. ‘You want to watch out for the lorries. Accidents have been known.’

  ‘It’s too bad of you!’ Molly heard her voice rise miserably in a forced panic caused by guilt and love. ‘I told you not to wander off.’

  ‘But they will, won’t they? You can’t stop people wandering. Let me tell you, no one shops in here. Absolutely nobody. I’ll take you across to Lucca’s. He’s an old scoundrel but he’s got all the Oxford marmalade you want. Why don’t you give me la lista and relax?’

  Lucca’s, across the lorry-ridden road and down a small sour-smelling alley, was as small as the shop from which Fosdyke had led them. But lame Lucca skipped and dived into dark recesses at Signor Fixit’s commands barked out in Italian that was not much better than Molly’s.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for all you’ve done.’

  ‘Absolutely niente, Mrs Pargeter. Sorry I couldn’t get some basic staples up at the house for your arrival. Had to pop down to Rome on a spot of business.’

  ‘But there were all sorts of things there: salami, figs, even baked beans. I thought how thoughtful you’d been.’

  ‘Not me, I’m afraid. I can’t take the credit.’

  ‘Then who do you think?’

  ‘Someone, I suppose, used to the ways of offspring. By the way, Mrs Pargeter —-’ He moved closer to her and lowered his voice; she got a whiff of Imperial Leather and small cigars. ‘The bank here stays open until twelve. Would you like to get it over? Then you can enjoy your holiday without thinking of money!’

  ‘Of course. I was going to let you have the rent as soon as we met again.’ She hastened to reassure him that she would never be less than totally reliable in her dealings with S. Kettering. To show her continual readiness, she carried her traveller’s cheques and her passport in her handbag.

  They loaded the car and then Fosdyke offered to take the children for a coke in the café opposite the petrol pumps. They could all meet there and he wouldn’t embarrass her by coming into the bank while she did her little bit of business. The children seemed willing, indeed anxious, to go with their newfound friend. Even Henrietta took off her ear-phones as Fosdyke asked her how she liked the villa: and, to her surprise, her mother heard her answer, as she walked away, ‘It’s absolutely brilliant.’

  In the branch of the Banco dell’Annunziazione a girl, whose face was a mask of disappointment nobly borne and from whose carmined lips dangled a cigarette miraculously balancing a tube of ash, clattered calculations as she stood before an upright typewriter and, in less time than she had expected, Molly was in possession of a mound of hundred thousand lire notes. In the café she found Fosdyke nursing a malt whisky (‘Kept for me specially by Carlo because I was once able to do him a favour’) and the children occupied with a Space Invader machine for which he had advanced them hundred lire pieces. When she gave him the second half of S. Kettering’s rent, he put it in his pocket without counting it. ‘I trust you implicitly, Mrs Pargeter,’ he told her. ‘You won’t want a formal receipt?’

  ‘I suppose,’ she felt bound to say, ‘I ought to have one.’

  ‘Then I’ll knock something out for you. Kettering… Well, Kettering’s travelling.’

  Kettering travelling and Fosdyke in Rome? Then who, she began to wonder, had supplied last night’s dinner? ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you about the Ketterings.’

  ‘Relax, Mrs Pargeter. You’ll have a drink, I’m sure you will.’

  ‘Mrs Kettering, for instance…’ she asked after Fosdyke had called the pale and sullen-looking girl wearing glasses and a blue overall from behind the zinc-covered bar to bring vino bianco to the Signora, plus ancora malt whisky con acqua. ‘Is she travelling with her husband?’

  ‘Travelling, I think. Not necessarily with her husband.’ Fosdyke smiled, as though enjoying a joke.

  ‘But you told me that Mr Kettering was the apple of his wife’s eye.’ She remembered the curious expression he had used.

  ‘Well, yes, of course.’ He seemed to find her questions more and more comical. ‘But you can’t always tr
avel with the apple of your eye.’ And then, no longer smiling, ‘What’s this, Mrs Pargeter? Some sort of an interrogation?’

  She looked round the café, a bleak, concrete erection with plastic chairs and tables. At one of them sat the men who, she was sure, had jeered at her from the wall beside the petrol pumps and were now slapping down playing cards and shouting Ventidue! with much of their remaining strength. Behind the bar the wall was decorated with postcards of the Pope and the Madonna. On a shelf stood wilting plants and very small stuffed animals, squirrels and starlings which had fallen victim to the chase. Their table was close to the door of the toilette from which came the smell of urine mixed more faintly with disinfectant. ‘Naturally, I feel curious about the people who own such a splendid house.’

  ‘You’re happy there?’

  ‘I’m sure we’re going to be.’

  ‘Then what else do you need to know?’

  She thought for a moment and then said, ‘Well, do they live at ‘La Felicità’ all the winter? I mean, do they have somewhere in England?’

  ‘Oh, nowhere in England. People like me and the Ketterings have severed all connections. We’re the ex-pats.’ He said it as though they had settled in some remote outpost of the old British Empire and not in handy, holidaymaker’s Chiantishire. The Star Wars machine, eagerly watched by all her children, hummed and twittered.

  ‘And the Kettering children?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They seem very neat and tidy.’

  ‘Kettering, I believe, runs a fairly tight ship.’

  ‘And are they travelling too?’

  ‘I’ll tell you quite frankly, I wouldn’t know where to put my hands on them at the moment. Any other questions?’

  ‘Yes —-’ Drinking white wine, she felt bold enough to ask - ‘What’s the S. for?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The S, in “S. Kettering”.’

  ‘I think we’ll leave you to find that out.’ He was smiling at her again now. ‘It seems to me that you enjoy a bit of detection.’

  She didn’t deny the accusation, for they were interrupted by the children with hands outstretched for more lire to finance the Star Wars programme. Driving out of Mondano she thought that Fosdyke had, perhaps, understood her. She wanted to be more than an outsider in ‘La Felicità’, more than a vague summertime nuisance for whose sake the family had to go travelling, someone only to be communicated with by notes or as a new source of rent. She was also, in a way which she found surprising, beginning to feel the remote attraction of a powerful force called ‘S. Kettering’. Whatever you thought of Hugh, no one could accuse him of running a ‘tight ship’. Then she remembered that she had forgotten to get a receipt from Signor Fixit. She had also failed to pick up her father. Having been driven with the children into Mondano he had wandered off on his own unexplained concerns.

  Now she saw him, standing on the pavement outside the church, holding his thumb out to her and grinning beseechingly as though he were some hopeful teenager off on the hippy trail. And beside him, an elderly priest in a black soutane was also holding up a thumb and laughing as though he were taking part in a particularly outrageous joke.

  ‘Arriverderci, Don Marco. Arriverderci. Grazie mille. Grazie tanto,’ Haverford said to the priest, as he climbed into the car. ‘Terrific fellow,’ he told Molly as they drove away. ‘Red as a baboon’s bum. I mean, not just a Euro-Communist or of the pinkish persuasion. Hard-core Stalinism, with strong support from the Holy Ghost.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Molly wondered how far the language tapes borrowed from the Fulham Public Library had allowed her father to penetrate the political opinions of a Tuscan cleric.

  ‘Of course, the old God-botherer speaks pretty good English. Learnt it off an R.A.F. prisoner on the run during the war. And another thing. He’s suggested a way we might persuade Giovanna to do the washing. You won’t have to spend the entire holiday peering into that steamy little porthole, watching the children’s vests revolving in the suds. All we have to do is tell her that we know all about her parents.’

  ‘They were shot by the Germans.’

  ‘Not according to the highest authority. They were a couple of collaborators. The red resisters of Mondano shot them, by popular request. Oh, and the priest gave me a pot of wild boar pâté. It’ll be a treat for the children.’

  In the back of the car, Henrietta and Samantha made exaggerated vomiting sounds at the very thought of it, and Jacqueline joined enthusiastically in the pantomime. Molly drove skilfully back down the road, taking the short cut to what she had already grown to think of as home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The children lay round the pool and slowly lost the prison pallor of Notting Hill Gate. Sometimes they sent the pigeons fluttering up to the sky and played ping-pong on the white encrusted table. Haverford got up early, sat in the garden jotting away until, as often as not, Don Marco arrived in a small rattling car and took him off on an unknown errand. Hugh would get up purposefully and drive into Mondano, returning with a large number of bread rolls and a few croissants over which the children quarrelled. Later, exhausted by the morning’s expedition, he would retire to the poolside where he read yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, of which Signor Fixit had found him a source. After lunch he formed the Italian habit of taking a siesta and he went to bed early. When Molly joined him he would ask hopefully if she were feeling tired or, even perhaps more hopefully, as though it relieved him of all responsibility, if she had the curse. Almost always she answered ‘yes’ because she had come to prefer lying still, with his soft sleeping body behind her, breathing the night air scented with pine wood and wild thyme as it came to her through the open shutters, and listening to the faraway ululation of the Borzoi dog chained beneath the walls of the Castello Crocetto.

  She often wondered about the note left in the art book in the small sitting-room and typed, she was sure (and her interest in detection took her so far), on the same instrument that had typed the instructions sent to her. ‘La Felicità’ came first among S. Kettering’s assets, above The children and Being together. But who or what was B., the only liability? And why was her landlord’s object to have B. lost and gone forever? Something to do with his business, she thought, but she still had to discover what his business might be. It had been enough for her that he was a man who thought his house a good point of departure for the Piero della Francesca trail.

  One night she dreamed that she got up and went to the lavatory, where she found a new, neatly typed notice fixed over the bowl. The master bedroom at ‘La Felicità’ is intended for regular sexual intercourse. Visitors are asked to respect the traditions of the house. S. KETTERING. The note embarrassed her considerably, although she suspected, even while she read it, that it was a dream. When she awoke she was surprised at herself for dreaming so foolishly and resolved to think less about the mysterious Mr Kettering in the future.

  A remarkable change had taken place in Giovanna. She spoke and understood more English than had at first appeared but it seemed to be English she had got from the Kettering children, so she was easily understood by Jacqueline who would run to her, climb on to her lap, whenever the maid sat down for a moment and stay there silent and apparently overawed. Giovanna said she often sat in with the Kettering children if their parents were out and would be glad to do the same for the Signora Pargeter.

  Now she left with plastic bags full of washing and returned after lunch the next day with Hugh’s shirts, Molly’s dresses and the children’s T-shirts and jeans beautifully ironed. She arranged them on the big table on the terrace where they looked impeccable, like clothes set out for a wedding.

  Molly had a bad moment wondering if her father had somehow used the fate of Giovanna’s parents to blackmail the cleaning lady. She wouldn’t put it past him but in the brilliant afternoon heat she wasn’t inclined to pursue the matter. The next day she put her shirt and cotton trousers, even her knickers, out for Giovanna. She could spend more time by the
pool, thanks, perhaps, to a long-forgotten act of collaboration with the Nazis.

  ‘I wish I had red hair,’ Samantha said to her mother, inspecting herself as she so often did in the tarnished mirror surrounded with gilded laurel leaves and intertwined cherubs. ‘Gorgeous thick chestnut hair, considered artistic, like the girl in the Sherlock Holmes story.’

  ‘Which Sherlock Holmes story?’

  ‘The one Gamps was reading to us. He found the book here. “The Copper Beeches”.’

  ‘Which one is that?’ Molly, of course, knew perfectly well. She was thinking of the book that had been left open on the bedcover when she first visited ‘La Felicità’.

  ‘You know. The one where this governess is told to put on a special dress and sit with her back to the window. Just so she can be mistaken for someone else.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Molly caught sight of herself in the mirror, standing beside her daughter. Strangely enough, the idea which occurred to her, in that first moment of its discovery, didn’t make her feel at all afraid.

  She went over to the pool and found the book on a table, damp from having been left out all night among towels and goggles, sunglasses, an old Daily Telegraph and the girls’ bikini bottoms. The story was still marked with a dry leaf. She read it through and then sat for a long time on the white strips of the reclining chair in which she had first seen Signor Fixit. She was afraid then, rather as a skier might feel when he looks down the steep whiteness of a dangerous slope, or a high diver who seems far above the water, but the sensation was so unusual to her that she couldn’t be sure that it was entirely unpleasant still strongly mixed, as it was, with curiosity.

  ‘And how many children did you say Mr Kettering had?’

  ‘Well, three. At the last count.’