Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  Now she stood looking out of her bedroom window, feeling lonely in spite of the car headlights crawling up the avenue of tall cypresses towards the villa’s ornate fçLade and the first arrivals climbing the twin stone staircases to the central entrance. She saw the old man who had accosted her on her walk that afternoon proceeding at the head of a little posse consisting of a neatly dressed man, a woman with untidy hair and a couple of children. He was waving his stick in a proprietorial fashion, as though he were showing them round his estate.

  ‘A couple of good Picassos. Four or five Braques, a Léger.’ Haverford waved his stick in the vague direction of the front door. ‘In Chiantishire! Where they’d steal your children if you didn’t bolt them to the ground!’

  ‘Oh, do shut up!’ said Molly, thinking of Jacqueline left in the sole care of Giovanna. What on earth was she doing, she wondered, climbing the steps of a palazzo, as behind her what seemed like the entire English colony of ex-pats in the province of Siena came straggling. Of course she knew why she had been so anxious to come; there must be some, perhaps many, people here who could tell her about S. Kettering.

  ‘Come along in. I’m Nancy Leadbetter.’ The huge woman came billowing down to the entrance hall, dressed in bright orange, which went uncomfortably with her recently revivified red hair.

  ‘I do know you, Nancy.’ Haverford reached up to kiss her unoffered cheek. ‘In every sense, of course, including the biblical,’ he added in a penetrating whisper clearly audible to his embarrassed family. ‘And I’ve brought along the fruit of my loins, my small claim on posterity. This is my Molly.’

  ‘I haven’t met you, have I?’ Nancy looked at Molly, puzzled.

  ‘Of course not.’ Haverford told her. ‘When we were together we were far too happy to worry about issue. Molly’s old man, Hugh Pargeter, and the young people. Henry and Sam.’

  ‘Young people,’ Nancy said firmly, ‘are all in the kitchen getting to know each other.’ She opened a door into a cavernous room where the young army were grouped round a huge table on which their boots and packs rested, smoking, rolling cigarettes or making each other up. ‘Need we?’ Samantha whispered in desperation. ‘Go along,’ said Hugh. ‘You know you’ve been wanting to meet someone of your own age.’

  ‘I’ve never understood that.’ Haverford stood in the middle of the entrance hall, wondering. ‘I don’t go to parties to meet septuagenarians. We rather hope to be asked to dance by a couple of twenty-year-olds, don’t we, old thing?’ He started to put his arm round Nancy’s waist and reached some of the way towards her mouth before she moved away from him.

  ‘All the men seem to be in the garden helping with the barbecue. That’s what men like doing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it’s not the only thing that men like doing, is it, Hughie?’

  ‘Of course’ — Hugh seemed deeply impressed with his surroundings — ‘we’ll help with the barbecue. Be pleased to.’

  ‘Why don’t you come into the drawing-room? You might meet someone.’ Nancy, ever vague, led Molly towards a pair of high double doors and then left her to talk to an English couple coming up behind them. ‘It’s the Corduroys,’ said the man helpfully. ‘Ken and Louise.’ ‘Go into the garden, Corduroys.’ Nancy raised a large arm with the authority of a policeman directing traffic. ‘Help with the barbecue. That’s where you’re needed.’ Then she sent Molly into a shadowy room which seemed at first to be empty. She paused at a picture on the wall, a grey and beige cubist arrangement of lines and broken planes around a torn fragment of newspaper.

  ‘A bad moment, wasn’t it,’ a voice behind her said, ‘when art surrendered to geometry? By the way, I am Vittoria Dulcibene. We live, you might say, in the next castle.’

  The woman who came towards Molly from the shadows by the bookcase was very tall and swaying like a poplar in a high wind. A long arm, seeming likely to snap at the wrist from the excessive weight of a diamond bracelet, was raised in what she thought might be a greeting, but ended in a gesture to brush a wisp of free-flowing grey hair from in front of the Baronessa’s eyes.

  ‘I’m Molly Pargeter,’ was all she could think of to say. ‘I’ve seen you with your dog. He’s very beautiful.’ Being English, she thought that a sure way of bestowing pleasure on strangers was to compliment them on their dogs.

  ‘You find him so? To me it is a most hideous brute. Our walks together are painfully boring. Anyway, he is not mine, this Manrico.’ She pronounced the dog’s name with special contempt. ‘He was dumped on me by your friend when he vanished, promising, of course, to be back in a day or two.’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘Your landlord. I assume you know Signor Kettering?’

  ‘We haven’t met.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We have corresponded, of course.’

  ‘But correspondence, that doesn’t give you, does it, the full flavour of a person? Kettering, I assure you, is nothing like his letters. So cold, so impersonal, so businesslike. Come, shall we sit down? Nancy has not arranged for us to be brought a drink. Her mind is on the young people.’ And as they sat together in the darkening room, as flares were lit in the garden and there was a blast of distant pop music through a crackling loudspeaker system, Molly confessed, ‘I must say I’m curious about Mr Kettering.’

  ‘It’s natural,’ the Baronessa smiled at her. ‘I would wish to know about anyone whose house I inhabit.’

  ‘The house seems a bit anonymous.’

  ‘There’s safety in that, no doubt.’ She was still smiling. ‘Our Kettering doesn’t give things away. But you want to know what he’s like, in the flesh? Is that the expression?’

  ‘I’m beginning to find a few clues.’

  ‘How clever of you! But whatever impression you have, it will be wrong, unless you allow for his charm. Believe me, he is a bloody bewitcher. Who else would persuade me to care for his revolting Manrico, a creature who consumes at least two sheep hearts a day. Believe me, that monster is costing me a fortune!’ Vittoria Dulcibene suddenly clutched her forehead, like a woman facing ruin. ‘Would not your children like a nice pet to take back to England?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. The quarantine laws.’

  ‘Of course, in England, you have laws against everything. And I believe you take them seriously!’ She was cheered up again and amused. ‘So are you happy in “La Felicità”?’

  ‘The children love it. The house is very beautiful.’

  ‘That is Kettering’s doing. He has an eye for beauty, I would say. And of course, you have the wonderful Giovanna.’

  ‘She’s babysitting tonight.’

  ‘Then your baby is indeed fortunate. This is a totally loyal servant.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ Molly, anxious again to show that she was not a stranger to the life of Mondano said, ‘Is it true, do you think, about her parents?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  The word sounded melodramatic but she said it. ‘Collaborators.’

  ‘You are English, Mrs Pargeter.’ The Baronessa was looking straight at her, speaking seriously. ‘I suggest you shouldn’t use words you don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have ever killed a person in your life.’

  ‘Well. No…’

  ‘Don’t apologize.’ The Baronessa raised a long white finger, weighted at the base by a sapphire ring, and wagged it as though to a child. ‘Living in England you would have no call to do so.’

  ‘Well, have you?’ Molly smiled back, by no means certain if this was a conversation meant to be taken seriously.

  ‘Oh, yes. I had to when I was a child, you know. It was for me like the young people out there doing their Licenza Classica. What do you call it? “A-levels”.’

  ‘A-levels. Yes.’

  ‘I was sixteen, I think, at the time. My friends and I were of the resistance. With the Communists, of course.’

  ‘The Communists?’ Molly looked away to the crackling logs in the huge firepla
ce, the only light in the dark room. The idea of this elderly, bejewelled woman as a young revolutionary seemed particularly absurd.

  ‘Oh yes. And to join the group you had to have killed a German soldier. You see, if you had killed one you were not so likely to betray the others. It was a sensible precaution.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Molly did her best to look at the matter in a practical manner.

  ‘Well, I bicycled round Siena with a gun in the basket on my handlebars, underneath my exercise books and Petrarch’s sonnets. It was November, cold and wet and the streets were empty. I rode up the Via Pendo and I saw one. He was a private; he was waiting by a big car, probably for his officer to come out of his mistress’s apartment. Well, I cycled up quite slowly behind him and then I stopped with my feet on the ground and felt for the gun. But he took his cap off and he had grey hair. He was an old man with a wife and children, I thought. Grandchildren possibly. Well, I couldn’t shoot a grandfather. So I pedalled up the Via San Pietro. And then I saw another Tedesco. An officer, this time. He came out of a restaurant and stood waiting. I said to myself, “All right, this will be it, now I will be a member of the group.” And you know what he did, the bastard?’

  ‘Ran away?’ Molly suggested.

  ‘He took out a beautiful silk handkerchief. It was a big square, with a green and golden pattern. And he blew his nose on just one corner of it, very carefully. He brought it out rather shyly, as though he didn’t want anyone else to see it. And I thought, if a man has a handkerchief like that his heart can’t be in the war. So I pedalled on up the Via Capitano. And on the corner by the Duomo a lieutenant in the uniform of the S.S. whistled at me. He had neither grey hair nor a silk handkerchief. I shot him between the eyes and then I was off, down the smallest streets, and I didn’t stop pedalling until I was back in this Villa Baderini, which, as a matter of fact, used to be my father’s. I slept almost all the next day. My family thought I had been studying too hard. It was the sleep of innocence, or experience, perhaps. All I wanted to say was when you speak of “collaborators”, you English don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Never having shot anyone, Molly was doing her best to look apologetic.

  ‘And I don’t think you can ever understand Italians. The English are always so complacent. You always appear to be perfectly contented.’

  Molly removed the smile from her face, now afraid that she was looking contented.

  ‘We are usually in a mood of black despair. That’s why you get all this singing and shouting. All this meaningless laughter in the streets. “Funiculì, funiculà”, all that sort of balderdash. That is to hide our deep pessimism. Kettering understood that. In many ways Kettering was typically Italian.’

  Was? They sat together in the darkness, in front of the log fire which was welcome on a summer night suddenly grown cool, and Molly wondered why S. Kettering should be referred to in the past tense. She wanted to ask, ‘Have you any idea where he is?’ But the room was suddenly bathed in light and Nancy Leadbetter, who had pressed all the switches by the door, was among them and telling them to go out to the barbecue because that was where the fun was about to begin.

  ‘Not for me, cara.’ The Baronessa looked more solemn than she had when she described shooting her German officer. ‘Squatting on the ground trying to balance a singed beefburger and a paper-cup load of Chianti, that is an occupation entirely for the English. If you don’t mind, I will go and make myself an omelette. I do remember where our old kitchen used to be.’

  As Nancy led Molly into the garden she said, ‘There are a whole lot of English people here, the local inhabitants. I expect you’ll know some of them already.’

  ‘Only a man called Fosdyke,’ Molly confessed the extent of her ignorance. ‘He seems a very helpful sort of person.’

  ‘If you’re being helped by Fosdyke,’ Nancy smiled, dimpling several of her chins, ‘then you really are in trouble.’

  ‘Oh, not as bad as that, surely?’

  ‘Arnold wouldn’t put up with the man, not at any price. He tried to sell him a picture. Can you imagine? A religious subject. Anyway, Arnold couldn’t ever stick religion. It made him think of death.’

  ‘I was wondering’ — single-minded, Molly pursued her investigations — ‘you must know my landlord quite well…?’ Nancy L. Which side is she on? She had the words by heart of the note pressed in the page opposite Piero’s ‘Flagellation’.

  ‘Kettering? Oh yes, of course. We all love Kettering. Now I must try to get the young people dancing.’

  She moved purposefully away to the group who lay in the darkness under the cypress trees, or sat on the walls and steps of the garden, and began to activate them so that a light dress, or white pair of jeans could be seen jigging about in the night that had suddenly fallen. There was no wind so that the flares stuck in the earth burnt straight upwards. The dancers avoided the illuminated area, which was left to the middle-aged, balancing plates and only occasionally laughing. Peering into the shadows Molly saw her two daughters, otherwise unpartnered, dancing together. Then she was pleased to see a girl, slightly older than Henrietta and Samantha, talking to them and offering them sweets.

  ‘Quite a party, isn’t it? Nancy’s an exceedingly generous person.’ The couple she had met as the Corduroys, Ken and Louise, were holding plates and looking round for somewhere to sit.

  ‘Absolutely no side about Nancy,’ Louise told her. ‘Arnold left her all the money in the world and she gives us the sort of barbecue we threw for our friends in Haywards Heath.’

  ‘Of course she does have staff to hand around the nosh,’ Ken told her.

  ‘Nancy has staff to a large extent’ — Louise seemed proud of their hostess’s wealth — ‘but there’s absolutely no side about her.’ She was looking at the maids carrying plates of singed meat to the young people and a servant who was bringing a tray full of raw steaks and sausages out from the house.

  ‘I was in landscape gardening, pools and patios,’ said Ken Corduroy, who had heavy hornrimmed glasses and the soft, urgent voice of a salesman. ‘But my tummy was playing up and I said to myself, “Ken. This isn’t a bit of good for you. Get out of the rat race.” We bought our property here in seventy-three.’

  ‘Ken misses the rat race. If you want to know the truth. Settled in, have you now, up at “La Felicità”?’

  ‘Of course I don’t miss the rat race. I’d be a fool to miss it.’ Ken looked at his wife with sudden hatred.

  ‘In the winter months,’ Mrs Corduroy said with smiling determination, ‘he misses the rat race. You know you do, Kenneth!’

  ‘Well, I do keep up an entrepreneurial connection with the local pool interests,’ Ken admitted. ‘Not enough to play up my ulcer, of course, but I do just tick over. I act in a consultative capacity to the Brits, when it comes to pools and patio windows. Yours all right at “La Felicità”, is it?’

  ‘Of course, it’s all right,’ Louise Corduroy answered on Molly’s behalf. ‘Sandra Kettering wouldn’t allow it to be anything but all right. That woman has a genius for organization.’

  ‘And paperwork.’ Ken smiled at Molly, retracting his top lip so that his teeth seemed to be aimed directly at her. ‘Sandra apparently bombards her tenants with paperwork.’

  ‘Written instructions. That’s what we heard.’ Louise was laughing. ‘Quite frankly, Ken and I couldn’t be bothered to let our place and give out all those orders.’

  ‘Be careful not to use the toilet and the hair-drier at the same time,’ Ken joined in the laughter. ‘Sandra Kettering is an Iron Lady when it comes to issuing commands.’

  ‘Sandra?’ Molly looked from one Corduroy to another. The words, spoken casually, had given another shake to the kaleidoscope, entirely altering the pattern her mind had grown used to. Whoever was manoeuvring her, it had now occurred to her that it might be a wife. She felt angry and disappointed at being robbed of her remote contact with her landlord through the letters. She heard herself say, ‘
So she’s S. Kettering?’

  ‘Is that how she signs her letters? How very formal.’ Louise looked as though it was typical and Ken said, ‘That’d be Sandra. Here’s your old man.’

  Hugh approached and they sat down together, the Corduroys and the Pargeters, and Molly felt that her husband’s almost invisible disposal of his food was a criticism of her lack of delicacy and the extent to which she had to open her mouth to accommodate her bun. The tomato ketchup stained her fingers and fell as uncompromisingly on her dress as blood, but her brain was racing. Mrs Kettering had composed the notes. Mrs Kettering wanted three girls and a fortyish couple so that they could sit by candlelight on their terrace, so that she could be taken for Sandra and Hugh for… but what was Mr Kettering’s Christian name? If he were to be an ‘S.’ also, a Stephen or a Sam, then how was she to know which of them had given her orders?

  ‘Then what’s his name?’ Molly asked Louise when the men were talking, so far as she could hear, about the rat race.

  ‘What’s whose name?’