Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘My landlord’s.’

  ‘Buck Kettering.’

  ‘Is that his Christian name?’

  ‘I suppose so. Everyone here calls him Buck.’ To Molly the name seemed ridiculous, a cowboy actor’s or the name of an American millionaire.

  ‘A nickname?’ Something invented perhaps, to hide the ‘S.’?

  ‘No, it’s real.’ Ken turned to her and knew all about it. ‘He gave me a cheque once, after we’d done some work on the pool at “La Felicità”. I remember how he signed it because it sounded so impressive: “T. Buckland Kettering”.’

  Molly looked round at the party. Leaning against a recumbent Henry Moore, a group of English Sloanes, lanky people, all wearing old men’s panama hats regardless of sex, shared out the single bottle of champagne they had bought at the Duty Free and laughed loudly. The Baronessa was out in the garden now, a white cardigan slung over her shoulders, talking to a line of young Italians who were sitting on a wall in varying postures of exhaustion. A man with a bald head, brown as a walnut, with a sweater knotted round his neck, was dancing with a fair-haired woman whose face Molly couldn’t see, but whose sunburnt arms moved mechanically, like a doll’s arms, in time with the music. And then, as she sat watching the dancers, Molly thought of something which made her shiver, so that Ken Corduroy, noticing it, thought she felt cold in the dark garden and offered her the sweater which, like so many of the older guests, he wore knotted about his neck. B. is for Buck, she thought. So who had written the note in, opposite ‘The Flagellation’? Was that another of Sandra’s productions, and did she want her husband B. lost and gone forever, and was his existence her Current Liability? Did Mrs Kettering want Buck to leave her or was she considering a more extreme solution? Because of the story the Baronessa had just told her, Molly thought immediately of death.

  ‘Molly!’ Her husband was calling to her, as it seemed, from a long way off. ‘Mr Corduroy was asking you something.’

  She turned to Ken, feeling it very unlikely that she’d know the answer.

  ‘We were wondering about that charming old gentleman we’ve seen you with in Mondano.’

  ‘My father,’ Molly had to admit.

  ‘We’ve seen him around with the Padre too. Is he a very religious type of person?’

  ‘I think he’d like to be Pope,’ she told them with a sort of weary insight. ‘Only he doesn’t at all believe in God.’

  Molly spent more time with the Corduroys and was introduced to the Tapscotts, a white-haired couple: Nicholas, who had been the British Consul in Florence, and his wife Connie. They had settled in ‘Toscana’, they told her, finishing each other’s sentences, ‘to take a pot-shot at painting and… jeepers, isn’t painting difficult! Honest injun, it’s a dashed sight harder than the consular service. Nicholas bashes away at the landscape and I did… Yes, the missus did the child you may have noticed in the sitting-room at ‘La Felicità’… Pretty terrible really… Nonsense, old girl. You knock my landscapes for six.’ Molly remembered the child in pantaloons and decided that it must have been bought by Sandra and not Buck Kettering. They also met two elderly men, introduced as Tim and Gavin from San Pietro, who ignored Molly and proposed a ‘boys’ night out in our local “trat” if Hughie wanted a rest from the little ones’. It was to avoid this last couple that Hugh unexpectedly asked her to dance, which they did unsuccessfully, their bodies unused to performing together, and Molly keeping to the shadows in case the children should spot them and never be able to forgive the embarrassment they had been caused.

  Towards midnight she went to tell Henrietta and Samantha that it was far past their bedtime. For some time she looked round the garden for them and then went into the house. The lights were off in the big drawing-room but someone had lit the logs which had been piled in the fireplace. The young people were draped about the furniture or lay in couples on the floor in utter silence whilst the firelight flickered. Sitting on a carved stool on the hearthrug, holding forth like the Ancient Mariner, Haverford was bringing some long anecdote to a conclusion. From the expressions on the faces of his audience, which included the two Pargeter girls, it was impossible to tell whether they were listening to him or not.

  ‘There was this Andrea, lived somewhere down Oakley Street, danced for a time with the Ballet Rambert. Anyway, I used to call on her, quite unexpectedly, once in every month or two perhaps, and she used to entertain me most hospitably. Well, I dropped in one evening, a summer evening it was, as I recall it, after I’d been to dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club and I felt in urgent need of a little female company. Well, it was only a bedsitter and Andrea and I sat on the one divan having a smoke and a glass of the fizzy stuff I always brought her, and I said, “What about slipping between the sheets”?’

  ‘Henrietta! Samantha!’ Molly called from the doorway, and then, ‘We’re going now.’ Her voice had no effect on the audience or on her father’s story.

  ‘But she put me off! Unusually, she prevaricated. Not tonight, she said. Tonight wouldn’t be very convenient. And do you know what? I felt a sort of stirring beneath me, the faintest possible movement. And then, damn me, it was clear that I was sitting on someone! Do you know who it was? It was a little husband who’d been sleeping under the covers.’

  Haverford was laughing and some of his audience nodded solemnly, as though they understood. ‘Come on,’ said Molly to the children. ‘You really must come on. We’re going now.’

  ‘Going? And we’ve never had a chance to get together all the evening.’

  Mollie turned. It was the woman with sun-browned arms and the white dress who had been dancing. Now she was smiling, accompanied by a very young Italian who might have been one of the waiters her old school-friend saved for the last.

  ‘Don’t say you don’t remember me! Rosie Fortinbras.’ Of course she remembered when they first saw Siena together. Before she could think of an appropriate greeting, Rosie said, ‘Welcome back to Italy. Better luck this time.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure what you mean.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t do all that well on our grizzly school trip, did you? Not if you were on the look-out for adventure.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the sixth day of their holiday, the water ran out.

  Nancy Leadbetter’s party had ended late on Wednesday night. Rosie Fortinbras had proved to be of minimal use as a source of information. She had known Nancy for years, of course. She and Carlo were staying a night, possibly two nights, because Carlo hadn’t felt up to snuff all the summer (here young Carlo groaned wearily and leant against a wall in confirmation of his feeling considerably below snuff). Had she met Mr Kettering? Well, of course, absolutely everyone knew Buck. Charming? What a question to ask! I suppose it depended on whether you went for the older man, which, speaking for herself, Rosie didn’t and never had done and was, anyway, leaving to stay with the Spratlings at Porto Ercole and then, perhaps, driving down to Rome to see poor old Jack Gerontius, who hadn’t long to go, and after that, who knew? Positano, perhaps, or Capri? She, Rosie, was game for anything, but poor Carlo hadn’t been feeling exactly chipper.

  In the car Henrietta said sleepily, ‘That girl was frightfully snooty and superior.’

  ‘Which girl?’

  ‘The girl talking to us.’

  ‘She gave us nougat,’ Samantha said. ‘It was disgusting.’

  ‘Why was she so snooty and superior?’

  ‘Because she said we were in her house.’

  In the dark front of the car Molly felt another tingle of excitement, as though, in her childhood fantasies of detection she had found, at the scene of a crime, a clue which was going to unlock the whole mystery. ‘Her house? Whatever did she mean by that?’

  ‘Her parents’ house.’

  ‘Parents? Who is she?’

  ‘Chrissie Kettering.’

  Molly had gone round the party trying to pick up information, listening for hints dropped during casual conversations and there, talking to her own children
and eating nougat, was the girl who might have told her almost everything.

  ‘Do you know’ — she did her best to sound unconcerned — ‘this Chrissie Kettering at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’s always in the Muckrakers Club.’ Henrietta’s tone was accusing. The Muckrakers, a teenage disco which occupied, on Friday nights only, premises in the Charing Cross Road, was the Mecca of that young teenage set which those who had reached seventeen called ‘the squeakies’ and who were prepared, according to their older critics, to take over the world. On the two or three occasions when Henrietta had been allowed to go there, Molly had insisted on collecting her. She had waited long after midnight in the empty street until the Muckrakers doors were thrown open and ‘the squeakies’ filled the street with shouts of resentment at being fetched from their pleasures so early and the sound of long, passionate, gossiping farewells until school on Monday morning. And among that crowd, while she waited, might well have been Chrissie.

  ‘So she lives in London?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Well, she must do if she’s always in the Muckrakers.’

  ‘Nowhere in England. We’ve severed all connections. People like me and the Ketterings, we’re the ex-pats.’ Molly remembered what Fosdyke had told her. Once again she would have to review her ideas.

  ‘She lives in England, with her mother and father?’

  ‘Honestly, Mum. Well, I mean it’s not the sort of thing you ask people.’

  ‘She did say her father hated letting his house to strangers during the summer.’

  ‘He said that, did he?’ Molly was wounded.

  ‘Oh, apparently he doesn’t mind letting it to you.’ Samantha, a tired but considerate voice, comforted her mother from the back of the car.

  ‘Why me in particular?’

  ‘He said you sounded as if you were really fond of pictures.’

  ‘He thought you’d appreciate it, that’s why.’

  ‘We would?’ Hugh was driving fast along the bumpy, stoneskittering road, longing for sleep.

  ‘No. Mummy in particular,’ Henrietta told him. At which moment their car headlights lit the stone walls of ‘La Felicità’ so that they appeared golden against the black velvet of the sky. Forgetting all her questions, Molly could only feel a secret satisfaction.

  Inside the domestic fortress all was well. Giovanna, smiling as she left, said that the bambina had never stirred and she had taken the opportunity to do a pile of ironing.

  ‘Plays funny tricks on you, does the mind,’ Haverford said as he poured out a final nightcap of Chianti. ‘I never thought old Nancy Leadbetter would forget that I rogered her. Over a longish period, too.’

  That was all the talk of ‘rogering’ Molly heard that night. Hugh lay on his separate pillow; it was strange, she often thought, how he managed to sleep without getting his hair untidy and his inert body showed no interest in her. She lay awake for a long time, looking at a pattern of moonlight on the stone floor of the bedroom and listening to the distant complaints of the chained dog she now knew to belong to Buck Kettering. Buck, the man who was possibly in danger, the man whose wife wanted him lost and gone forever, the man who might perhaps already… ‘But you don’t know that,’ she told herself, ‘you don’t really know anything.’ At last she fell asleep, but it seemed to her that she woke up some time in the night. She was lying on her side and Hugh was on his side also, clinging to her back, as though for protection. And then, somewhere in the house, she heard a sound which gave her a dry, tingling sensation in the mouth like a small, electric shock. It was the feeling she had had as a child when she frightened herself with a detective story. It now hardly entered her life except for the time when, in the dark patch of garden below the bedroom window, she had seen the snake. Somewhere in the house she was sure a handle was turned quietly, a door was opened and then closed again with care. She would not, of course, have been surprised to hear her father making one of his many nocturnal pilgrimages, but he would have taken his stick, banged doors, bumped against furniture, turned on lights, even sung an old pop song from the sixties if he could have been sure of waking the children. This door was closed too carefully, perhaps too stealthily, for it to have been any of Haverford’s doing. The bedroom was on the same level as the terrace, the small sitting-room and the kitchen, and so she waited for the sound of another door or footsteps on the stone staircase down to the entrance hall. But, hearing nothing more, she decided that she must have been mistaken and went back to sleep.

  The next morning, alone in the small sitting-room, Molly took out the Piero della Francesca book, as a scholar might take a work from the shelves to check a reference. Molly’s special subject was the Ketterings; but when she turned to the reproduction of ‘The Flagellation’ the book was empty, the list gone. Puzzled at first, she turned every page, then she held up the book by its spine and let the pages flutter; no sheet of paper fell out. And yet she knew it had been there when she closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Someone had taken it, someone, presumably, who knew where to find it.

  ‘You should have come with us. The pool’s wonderful.’ Hugh with his hair wet, carrying Jacqueline and leading his two other daughters, all of them making wet footmarks on the stone floor, came in from the terrace. He looked very young and, she was surprised how irritated it made her feel, innocent. She thought of telling him that a note from their landlady, contemplating the disappearance of her husband forever, had gone, vanished, and just who, did he think, was likely to have taken it? But she could imagine his tolerant lawyer’s smile as he demolished her fears and speculations. He would cast doubt on the words of the note for which there was now only ‘secondary evidence, as we lawyers would say’. What fears she had, and even cherished, she decided to keep to herself.

  ‘Only one thing about that pool,’ Hugh said, depositing Jacqueline wrapped in a damp towel like a warm parcel in his wife’s arms, ‘the tide’s gone down a bit. Perhaps it’s leaking.’

  ‘I’ll see about it.’

  ‘All right. Call on me if you have any trouble. I thought we might have a treat and drive into Siena.’ Hugh went away to get dressed. Molly rang the house which Signor Fixit was guarding but there was no reply. The house-sitter was sitting somewhere else and the phone echoed in an empty hallway.

  Then she rang Nancy Leadbetter who was fetched by a servant and, after a long interval, answered sleepily.

  ‘Whoever is it?’

  ‘It’s Molly Pargeter.’

  ‘Molly who?’

  ‘Pargeter. We came to your party. It was so kind of you…’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘I thought I should drive over and thank you personally.’

  ‘No need for that.’

  ‘And my children would love to meet all those young people again. Apparently Chrissie Kettering was there…’

  ‘Chrissie who?’

  ‘Kettering. You know’ — she almost had to force herself to use the strange name — ‘Buck Kettering’s daughter.’

  ‘No. He’s away. Travelling.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Buck. He’s not here. He’s let his house to some English people.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s us.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Molly. Molly Pargeter.’

  ‘And you say your children were here last night?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’ She tried to sound as bright as possible. ‘Two young girls.’

  ‘Well, they’re not here now. They’ve all cleared off. Vamoosed. Moved on at dawn to Athens or Antibes or somewhere or other. I’m sorry I can’t help. They left no phone numbers. Your two girls will probably be sending you a postcard.’

  ‘My two girls are here.’

  ‘Where’s here?’

  ‘The Ketterings’ house.’

  ‘You know the people he’s let it to? Do tell me, what’re they like? More boring English?’

  ‘Is Chrissie Kettering still with you?’ Molly raised her voice slightly as thoug
h speaking to a foreigner and tried to get to the heart of the matter.

  ‘No. I told you. They’ve all gone. All the young people. And they’ve left the most terrible mess in their bedrooms. Do let’s chat again some time and you can tell me all the gossip about Buck’s new tenants.’ And Nancy Leadbetter rang off.

  ‘The thing about the Sienese,’ Haverford said, voicing a thought he intended to use in one of his ‘Jottings’, ‘is that they always want somebody else to do their dirty work for them. I mean, take the time when Cardinal Alfonso of Siena wanted to murder Pope Leo the Tenth. Niente fotografie per favore.’

  However, the waiter in the Piazza del Campo had taken Hugh’s camera off their table and was waving to them to sit closer. ‘Oh God,’ said Henrietta and pulled her hat over her eyes. Hugh moved his profile a little towards his family, conscious of the fact that he always looked his best in a snap whereas the sight of a lens made his wife flustered.

  ‘I mean, he didn’t go and strangle Leo himself. He corrupted the surgeon Battista da Vercelli, who was to treat a fistula just below the Pontiff’s left buttock…’

  They had arrived in Siena when the recently washed streets smelled fresh and metallic. They had parked by the stadium and walked down towards the Campo. On the way the children straggled behind them or dived down lanes where archways blocked out the steadily mounting sun. They inquired the price of medieval patterned paper diaries and portfolios for the girls, and bought them small address books as a concession to their shrill demands. They gave Jacqueline a bright parish flag to flap and trail along the ground. In the Palazzo Pubblico they saw Martini’s cavalier, dressed in the same golden, diamond-patterned cloak as his horse. The landscape he rode through was as white as a desert.

  ‘Bloody dry, the hills around here,’ Hugh had said. ‘No wonder the pool looked empty.’

  And then they had sat in the line of cafés and restaurants on the northern side of the cockle-shaped square, behind the fountain carved with women and wolves and dragons, opposite the tall, pink bell-tower. Samantha led Jacqueline out to buy a paper bag of corn to feed the portly, over-privileged pigeons and Haverford Downs gave them a taste of his ‘Jottings’.