‘And girls, of course?’
‘Well, yes. Now that you come to mention it.’
‘How old?’
‘Fifteen, the eldest, I think they told me. Jail-bait, actually. She looks well over the age of consent.’
‘And the next?’
‘Oh, I think a few years younger.’
‘And, finally…’
‘Little Violetta seems to have come as a bit of an afterthought. She was a surprise to most of us.’
‘Only a toddler, Violetta?’
‘She’s certainly not four, but bright as a button. Knows a few rude words in Italian, I’m reliably informed.’
‘And girls don’t, on the whole, need very different accommodation from boys,’ Molly said, thoughtfully. ‘If I’d had three boys I could have fitted them into the same bedrooms.’
‘You tell me, Mrs Pargeter. I’m afraid offspring are something of a closed book to me.’ She had expected to see Fosdyke the day before when she went shopping. He was so often in Lucca’s, tasting a slice of salami, cutting off a sliver of cheese to try or speculatively pinching the melons. He hadn’t been there that morning and now she had run him to earth in the café. She had sat down opposite him and immediately started on her inquisition.
‘So why did the advertisement say girls preferred?’
‘Females preferred, wasn’t it?’
‘Exactly. Females. I suppose that made it sound more businesslike. Why females… and three?’
‘I suppose because little girls are less likely to possess catapults, air-guns, or lob cricket balls through windows.’
It was no good, she thought, for Signor Fixit to pretend that he still lived in the age of Just William. She had another explanation of the matter entirely.
‘Or did he want a couple with the same number of children as he had? The same ages, the same sex?’
‘Giovanna may get on better with them. Boys tend to annoy the servants.’ He said it as though it were some deep truth, a secret he had been let into.
‘I have read “The Copper Beeches”.’
‘Have you, by Jove?’ He looked at her, smiling. ‘Super chap, Conan Doyle. One of my own favourites.’
‘The Complete Sherlock Holmes is one of the books in the house.’
‘I know Kettering reads, of course,’ Signor Fixit said, ‘but pictures are his great love.’
‘Oh, I know that.’ And then Molly plucked up her courage to say, as casually as she could, ‘I wonder why the advertisement didn’t tell me what dress to wear.’
‘Come again?’ Fosdyke cupped his ear in his hand, suddenly afflicted with deafness.
‘Mr Kettering might have told me how to dress. When I was sitting at dinner on the terrace. With the candles lit, according to his instructions.’
‘Well, I suppose he might. But why on earth, my dear lady, should he want to?’ He smiled at her tolerantly, as though there were no accounting for the ideas girls got in their heads. And when that smile, that patronizing masculine smile which she had endured so often, was beamed at her, she felt her confidence drain away and retreat with a scrabbling of small stones like a departing wave. The explanation which had been so clear to her when she shut the book by the pool now seemed only a thought, whimsical and without any solid foundation. And even if it were, as it just might be, true, why should she assume that this old ex-pat, mainly interested in the hunt for gentleman’s relish, knew anything about it? ‘I managed to get hold of this mag from a shop off the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.’ Delving into a plastic bag on the seat beside him Signor Fixit unearthed the Informer and managed to change the subject. ‘It keeps me sane.’
‘What keeps you sane?’
‘This wonderful fellow.’ He opened the familiar magazine. ‘Must be thirty years ago I started reading his “Jottings”. What’s his name? Haverford West?’
‘Downs,’ Molly corrected him. The bar was hot and the small, stuffed animals with beady eyes staring down at her seemed especially repulsive.
‘What wisdom. What true knowledge of life!’
‘You think so?’ Molly looked at him. Did he really know nothing or was he trying to stop her questions by this extravagant praise of her least favourite weekly column?
‘An artist in words.’ Fixit was rambling on. ‘And with a good deal more education than I’ve had hot dinners. Wouldn’t I be right in saying that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Molly looked at him, anxious to discover what he was trying to conceal. ‘I mean, I don’t know anything about your education.’
‘Kicked out of Oundle before I had a chance to get to grips with the first line of the Aeneid, if you want to know the truth. Anyway, you can tell this fellow’s educated. And women! From the way he writes, and there’s nothing offensive about it mind you, nothing that I shouldn’t be ashamed to show my aunt… Well, she’s quite a racy old girl herself, just between the two of us… But from the little things this Haverford Downs slips in about the ladies, would I be right in thinking he’s had a fair amount of experience with the sex?’
‘I don’t think’ – Molly was finishing her glass of wine, which seemed even warmer and oilier than usual, as quickly as she could - ‘that you should believe all you read in the papers.’
‘And the weird and wonderful thing is this week’s “Jottings”… Here, look.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘Of course, I’m really saving it up for when the hotpot comes out of the oven, but I just happened to cast my eye and yes, look…’ He found the page triumphantly. ‘It comes from here.’
‘From here? It can’t do.’
‘Can’t?’
‘We only got here three days ago.’ Only three days and they seemed to have travelled a great distance.
Fosdyke laughed, showing her an unexpected quantity of gold fillings. ‘Don’t tell me, Mrs Pargeter, that “Haverford Downs” is your nom de plume. I mean, why would when you got here have anything to do with it?’
‘He’s my father.’
‘That distinguished old gent I’ve noticed in your company is the author of “Jottings”?’
She admitted it. She had come to question him and, as had happened so often, her father had taken over the conversation.
‘You wait till I tell Kettering! He’ll be tremendously impressed.’
‘You mean he doesn’t know? I thought Mrs Kettering must have an old father who wrote somewhere about the place.’
‘If she has, dear Mrs Pargeter’ – Fosdyke was being almost intolerably gallant – ‘he can’t be anything like the great Haverford Downs.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Must go now. I’m sure we’ll meet again. It’s a small world in Chiantishire, a very small world indeed.’
He left her then, smiling and bowing, carrying the plastic bags full of the good things he knew how to put his hands on. The idea that the Pargeters had been specially chosen because of their similarity to the Ketterings had in no way been confirmed by Fosdyke but it grew in her mind steadily. If the Ketterings had wanted another family to stand in for them, it could only be for recognition by someone they wished to avoid or who might be a danger to them. No doubt she should have been alarmed at this thought but she remained excited by it. And this excitement, and the feeling of being involved in a half-guessed-at mystery, became her private obsession as she went about the house, visited the shops and looked after the children.
‘I’ve met a fan.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘He’s asked me to dine at the villa he’s looking after for a few months, just to oblige a couple of ex-pats. It seems he’s able to lay on steak and kidney pudding. Remarkable fellow and a devoted reader of the “Jottings”. Might be a source of useful information.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Well, then, you’ll be out tomorrow evening?’ Hugh asked his father-in-law from behind the Daily Telegraph.
‘You’ll just have to make your own entertainment.’ Haverford finished his cup of breakfast coffee and lit a cigarette. His fit of coughing echoe
d across the landscape, an early morning salute, as he often put it in his ‘Jottings’, to an old man still courageous enough to face death at the hands of a packet of filter-tips. Hugh, who had been reading about the dangers of having a smoker as a cohabitee, waved his handkerchief through the air and moved to the edge of the terrace.
‘Oh and we’re all going to a party. Good thing you brought me along with the baggage, you know. I’ve got you into Mondano society.’
‘A party?’
‘Nancy Leadbetter. There’ll be young people there.’
‘God, how awful,’ Henrietta sighed. ‘I don’t think I can stand young people.’ Since their arrival at ‘La Felicità’ she seemed to have forgotten all the social life she was missing in England and devoted her energies to the narcissistic process of going brown, measuring each day the contrast between her exposed wrist and the satisfying white band left beneath her watch-strap. ‘How’s your watch mark?’ her sister would ask her, to which she was able to answer ‘Brilliant’. ‘Anyway, what young people? Probably the most awful little squeakies.’
‘They may be quite grown up. Nancy’s unbelievably long in the tooth,’ Haverford told them. ‘Her mind’s going too. I met her walking up by the castle, great big straw hat, floating veils, general appearance of a female Friar Tuck out for a constitutional.’ Molly waited for an embarrassing reminiscence and got it. ‘I greeted her. “Nancy Leadbetter, my old girlfriend.” “Who are you?” she said. “Who am I? Well, only the chap who rogered you regularly in the sixties.” I told her. “I’m too old,” she said. “Far too old to remember that sort of nonsense. So don’t ask me anything about it.” Then I said I was here with the family and she announced she was having a party for the local English, “a rather disgusting barbecue” which she knew young people liked, and she supposed we’d better come along. Arnold Leadbetter made a fortune in property after the war. Luckily he was away from home a good deal, which was when we got rogering.’
Molly remembered the note still stuck, so far as she knew, opposite ‘The Flagellation’ in the Piero della Francesca book. Nancy L. Which side is she on? She said, ‘How do we find a babysitter?’
‘I’ll ask Giovanna,’ Haverford volunteered.
‘No. I’ll ask her.’ At least Molly could see there would be no more blackmail.
‘Do we really want to go to this bash?’ Hugh wondered.
‘What’s the matter, Hughie?’ Haverford ground his cigarette out into the remainder of the butter left on his croissant plate and gave what he described as one of his ‘nice loose coughs’ as he grinned at his son-in-law. ‘Haven’t you got a thing to wear, darling?’
The next evening they were deprived of Haverford’s company when he went to dine with Signor Fixit. Hugh became more cheerful than usual. He sat at the head of the table in his white shirt, beautifully washed by Giovanna, with a silk scarf knotted at the neck, looking handsome and quizzical as he drank Chianti and told the girls about his less lurid divorce cases and more eccentric clients. He wondered if they’d ever find husbands or boyfriends who would take them on such a holiday as this and rather doubted it. He was glad, at any rate, that he had been able to arrange these weeks at ‘La Felicità’, a summer which they would always remember. But such occasions, to be really memorable, had to be worked at. Tomorrow they would go into Siena. Molly, at least, wanted to see some pictures.
‘Oh, not Siena, please,’ Henrietta said. ‘I want to go brown.’
Molly wasn’t listening to them. She had seen, like a distant lighthouse, headlamps moving round the castle on the skyline. Then the light had crept forward, down the rutted track that led to nowhere but their house. It vanished for a while, but then shone brightly at them as the car reached the top of the small hill and again they shielded their eyes to look at it like actors on a stage. Only this time the car didn’t stop or turn but drove on, slithering a little on the loose gravel, until it stopped by their front door.
‘Whoever?’ Hugh began, but Molly was already up and almost running down the stone steps as if she were hurrying towards some long-planned assignation.
The car was long, low and extremely dusty. The man who got out of it left the headlights full on and the engine running. He was in his early forties with a receding hairline, a plump face and a small mouth. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and dark blue trousers; one hand patted his moist forehead with a white handkerchief and the other held out an envelope.
‘Signora Kettering?’
She stood facing him, a large fair woman in an embroidered jacket and white trousers for their formal dinner on the terrace. She said nothing but put out her hand and took the envelope.
‘Buona notte, Signora Kettering.’
He got back into the car and she heard the door slam, the engine accelerate and the tyres slide again on the gravel. She walked up the stone stairs to the sound of the scratchy long-playing record, highlights from Turandot, which she had put on as they had sat down for dinner. When she got to the terrace there were four faces looking at her.
‘Well?’ said Hugh. ‘What was it?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just something for the Ketterings.’ She took the envelope into the small sitting-room and put it on the mantelpiece under the painting of the Victorian child with its crafty cat-like eyes. It was for Signora Kettering and her English upbringing told her that it was unthinkable to open letters addressed to someone else; and yet as she came down the stairs and met the driver she had been taken, as she felt sure she was meant to be taken, for Signora Kettering. She had been Kettering’s wife, the letter was hers and sometime, perhaps, she would have to open it.
CHAPTER SIX
Nancy Leadbetter’s grandchildren and a generous selection of their best friends, teenage lovers and hangers-on arrived by taxi, bus and hitch-hike from the station in Siena to the grandeur of Villa Baderini, her house on the other side of Mondano. Some were dressed in old riding-breeches, boots and grubby lace shirts; many in jeans and flak-jackets; some inappropriately, when the afternoon sun made the paving stones almost too hot for naked feet, in long Oxfam overcoats and black Homburg hats. They looked like a collection of the pallid child revolutionaries who emerged on the streets of Moscow after the Revolution. Their military appearance was emphasized by the fact that some of the girls wore scout knives, compasses, even tin mugs, hanging from their belts, and they carried haversacks and sleeping-bags bought from Army Surplus shops. The boys, especially those with hats and overcoats, carried battered suitcases and rolled umbrellas. All these preparations for living off the land were unnecessary, for between them they knew of a network of wealthy houses, stretching from St Tropez to Mykonos, where bedrooms with a bath en suite, swimming-pools and occasional servants in white gloves would be put at their disposal by parents only too grateful to discover that their daughters had not, as yet, been violated by a lorry-driver or their sons arrested for the importation of stuff. Their stay at each of these billets was short and they left behind them minor breakages, burnt saucepans, cigarette holes in the sheets and, as often as not, their forgotten passports.
Nancy moved among them for a while, making them welcome, peering into their pale faces with the object of discovering which were her grandchildren. She had invited four, if she remembered rightly; the product of two families and none much over sixteen. Out by the pool she found a girl who greeted her warmly and, delving into the recesses of her knapsack, brought out a box of nougat and gave it to her. ‘Why are you giving me a present?’ Nancy Leadbetter asked. ‘You’re certainly no grandchild of mine.’ ‘No, but I take these for the people we stay with,’ the girl told her. ‘It seems more polite.’
Having decided that she was too old for nougat, Nancy stood for a moment admiring her pool flanked by statues painstakingly collected by her husband, two Henry Moores, a Giacometti and an Elizabeth Frink, all concreted to the ground and wired with electrical devices to a central burglar alarm in the Mondano police station. What gave her the greatest satisfaction was the water, now bl
oodstained by the final, flamboyant exhibition of the setting sun. It had been a dry summer but the pool was full and the young people, many of them travelstained after a long trek from Portofino, were lying in steaming baths, their toes poised to activate the gilded taps. She went upstairs to change, thinking how proud Arnold would have been of the way she had coped with the water shortage.
Arnold Leadbetter had left the Pay Corps at the end of the war with nothing but his demob suit and fifty pounds. Ten years later he had acquired, thanks to some daring mortgaging and a firm way with sitting tenants, a hold on Notting Hill Gate and a sizeable amount of the East End of London. He moved into Mayfair and bought his first Matisse. He was a shy, lonely man who married the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be Nancy, the entertaining redhead who looked after his fingernails in the barber’s shop at the Dorchester.
Once married, Arnold began to give parties, admirably hosted by the young and vivacious Nancy, for the artists before whom he became speechless with respect. His wife, who was never speechless in those days, entertained the painters, art critics and sculptors more successfully than her husband and found herself slipping into various love affairs which her Arnold, smiling quietly and getting on with his business and his collection, seemed to expect. Perhaps she felt it was up to her to enter the ‘artistic’ world to which Arnold remained a devoted but remote outsider. When she was in her fifties and had grown to a generous obesity, her husband would whisper proudly to his dinner guests as they stood in front of some glowing nude or abstract construction, ‘Wonderful artist, wasn’t he? And of course, you know, an old boyfriend of Nancy’s.’ The guests would smile politely at the work and the information, often not quite sure how to take either of them.
After Arnold died, Nancy, feeling more strongly than ever what she had always known, that he was the only man she had loved, came to live permanently in the house where he had always seemed happiest, a piece of property he had picked up for a song in the sixties from Barone Dulcibene’s father-in-law, old Count Umberto Baderini. The villa had been built in the days of Lorenzo the Magnificent by a Baderini banker. The Baderini Cardinal gave it its baroque fçLade and had its gardens laid out with descending terraces, fountains, a grassystaged theatre, grottoes and a lemon house guarded by statues of antique giants. Into this grandiose villa with its chapel and immense central staircase Arnold Leadbetter had moved his business interests and his collection of modern art. His widow continued to give parties, for that had always been her talent, inviting the owners of neighbouring villas, the local Chianti growers and the aristocratic keepers of boutiques in Siena. She also asked her two sons. They were always too busy to come but they sent their children. Nancy enjoyed seeing them and an occasional painter or writer who asked to renew acquaintance with Arnold’s collection. They found Nancy, now in her sixties, had become larger and much quieter. She missed the sight of Arnold padding around in the background filling up glasses and, because he was no longer there to enjoy the effect of her jokes, she had given up making them.
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