Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘The Sienese Cardinal persuaded this surgeon to poison his patient, you see. Well, of course, the whole plot was found out and the unhappy doctor drawn and quartered or whatever. Can’t remember what happened to the Cardinal. Did he get beatified or secretly strangled? Can’t you tell me that, Henry? I suppose not. Schools never hand out any useful information.’

  ‘Who’s coming,’ said Molly, collecting her bits of shopping and standing up, ‘to the picture gallery?’

  ‘I’m dying for a swim,’ Henrietta panted. ‘When are we going back to “La Felicità”?’

  ‘We’ve seen pictures.’ Samantha returned with the youngest Pargeter, leaving a flurry of disappointed pigeons.

  ‘Oh, honestly, need we?’

  ‘Isn’t it rather a long walk?’

  ‘Anyway we haven’t had an ice-cream. You promised.’

  ‘I must confess I’d rather sit on and view the passing scene.’ Haverford, his head cocked on one side, was casting an eye over blonde girls from Sweden, Guildford or Saskatoon, quite undiscouraged when they didn’t return his smile but merely quickened their pace towards the souvenir stalls. ‘At my time of life there’s more pleasure to be had from the rear view of a pair of Levis than in all the Martinis the old rascal ever painted. Wouldn’t you agree with that, Hughie?’

  Hugh looked into his glass of white wine. It was hard to tell if he was more discomforted at being accused of being as lecherous or as old as his father-in-law.

  So Molly walked alone and ended up in front of another Martini painting in the Pinacoteca. The tall and helpful Saint Agostino stood surrounded by disasters, someone was attacked by a wolf, a child fell from a window, a horse fell into a ravine. As soon as a flying angel whispered news of these events into his ear, the Saint put down his book and flew, like Batman, to the rescue. So he swooped to catch the falling child, drive away the wolf or restore the horse — all these miracles being depicted in small panels round the central figure of the Saint.

  ‘Signor Fixit,’ a voice behind her spoke her thoughts. She turned to see Nicholas Tapscott the ex-consul and painter. Dressed in a white shirt and trousers, and with his white hair and a face apparently never submitted to the sunshine, he looked as though he had been rolled in flour preparatory to cooking. ‘Doesn’t that remind you of old Fosdyke?’

  ‘I was thinking that,’ Molly agreed. ‘He seems to be fixing everything.’

  ‘Wonderful painting.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Full of life, of course.’

  ‘It seems to be.’

  ‘Neither Connie nor I could touch it. That’s what we can’t seem to get into our pictures. Life…’

  ‘I suppose it’s hard.’

  ‘Not that we expect to be Martini. Nothing like it. But all the years we’ve been trying. Might have been able to capture “life”. Can’t think why not, in fact.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Molly hardly knew what to say.

  ‘Dedicated painters, both of us. A.I light out here. Old masters to study. Long winter days with nothing else to do. One problem. We’re so jolly rotten at it. Know what you’re going to say. Why not give it up?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’ Molly had, at least, thought it.

  ‘Dedicated, you see. All the great ones dedicated. Van Gogh, Raphael, even old Martini. Easy to be dedicated if you’re a blooming genius. But to go on being dedicated when you’re a rotten painter! I tell you. That calls for heroic devotion.’ He smiled at her, revealing strong, yellowish teeth. It didn’t seem to her as though he were joking.

  ‘Gift of ubiquity,’ he went on, looking at the picture. ‘All the saints had it. They could turn up wherever they liked. Several places at the same time. Only not everyone wants all that helping, do they? It’s a bit disconcerting to be minding your own business. Just getting on with things. Then having a blooming great saint swooping down. Interfering with everything. People resent that. Why didn’t Nancy ask old Fosdyke to that excellent party?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Not universally popular, Signor Fixit.’

  When they got back from Siena, the pool was three quarters empty. Deprived of a swim, Henrietta decided to wash her hair but the bathroom tap could only be persuaded to emit a trickle of dark brown water, after which it coughed, spluttered and ran dry. By six o’clock there was no water in the loos. Molly rang the blessed Saint Fixit for the fourth time but there was still no reply. Then she rang Nancy Leadbetter again.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. This is Molly Pargeter. I rang this morning…’

  ‘About your child. Of course, I remember quite clearly. You won’t have got a postcard yet.’

  ‘No. It’s about the water at “La Felicità”. We seem to have been cut off.’

  ‘You can’t keep them at home forever, you know. You’ve got to let go.’

  ‘I mean all the water’s gone. In the taps and everything. It’s terribly inconvenient. Do you know who I ought to ring? The plumbers?’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They must be new here.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Plummers. Where do they live?’

  ‘I just wondered if you knew…’

  ‘Anyway, if there’s no water in the Ketterings’ house I don’t think you should take it. Not if you’ve got children who’ll need a regular wash.’

  Molly gave it up and drove into Mondano. She now knew where Giovanna lived, in a surprisingly large house opposite the café. The windows were dark and she got no answer to her repeated knocking on the front door. She went into Lucca’s shop but he had no idea where Giovanna and her family had got to. And when she tried to interest him in niente acqua, he laughed as he limped round his shelves serving several customers at once and, shrugging his high shoulders, said, ‘Non c’è pioggia, non c’è acqua.’ It was all very well for him to talk, Molly thought, as she saw Signora Lucca washing a lettuce under a running tap in the kitchen. In the café the sullen girl in glasses merely muttered, ‘Fuori,’ when she asked where Giovanna and her family were. She wrote a note on a postcard she had bought in Siena about the acqua and slid it through Giovanna’s letter-box. She still felt, in some calm and detached part of her mind, that Buck Kettering was alive and wouldn’t want their holiday ruined.

  When she got home she had to boil spaghetti in acqua minerale. She was determined to appear unworried in front of her dispirited family.

  ‘There’s something wrong with this house,’ Hugh said when they sat at their muted dinner. ‘I always felt it.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong. It’s just been a dry summer. Lucca in the shop was saying that. Non c’è pioggia, non c’è acqua.’ She drank a quick second glass of wine and did her best to smile round the table.

  ‘If we bath in mineral water,’ Samantha said, ‘I’d like to try the fizzy sort.’

  Only Haverford encouraged his daughter. ‘A man can live without water,’ he said. ‘Hughie, you’ll join me in a bottle of duty-free gin, purely for shaving purposes?’

  ‘Giovanna’ll be here in the morning,’ Molly said with determined brightness. ‘I’m sure she’ll do something about it.’

  ‘ “And Noah said to his wife as they sat down to dine, ‘I don’t care where the water goes as long as it doesn’t get into the wine”’,’ Haverford quoted gleefully. ‘Splendid writer, old Chesterton, even if he wasn’t all that expert in the sex department.’

  Before they went to bed they had filled buckets with what was left of the pool to use in the lavatories. The children became excited, as though they were preparing to withstand a siege.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The next day the sun woke them early, beating down from a clear sky, baking those tiles it could reach on the terrace so that the children hopped over them, nimble as cats on hot bricks. The distant hills were burnt to the ashen colour of the landscape Martini’s horseman rode through, each crowned by its sweltering farmhouse, now turned into a holiday home. Jacqueline ran
naked, pulled at skirts and trousers, whining at the heat, but no one was prepared to take a hot and heavy child in their arms. Hugh wore a pair of neat white shorts which made him look ready for tennis. Haverford fanned himself with his panama hat and wheezed like a rusty concertina. Molly stood on the battlements of the terrace and kept a look-out. At last she was rewarded. A cloud of dust appeared on the horizon, the air was again torn by the sound of a high-pitched buzz and Giovanna rode, as Molly hoped, to the rescue.

  The powerful maid didn’t seem to take the situation seriously. She turned on taps that emitted nothing but a despairing sigh and she laughed. Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she heated up a kettle of pool water to do the washing up. At last a pick-up truck came bumping up the track, containing Giovanna’s fat and apparently unsatisfactory husband and a detachment of villagers, including the old men, Molly was sure, who had sat on the wall by the petrol pumps mocking her. Other villagers came straggling over by bicycle and motor bike as though the disappearance of ‘La Felicità’s water were a kind of annual festival at which prizes would be given and refreshments served. Finally Don Marco came rattling down the track in his battered Fiat and shook Haverford enthusiastically by the hand, ignoring the rest of the family.

  The pool was now empty; only a few rapidly drying puddles stained the bottom. The villagers looked down at it with the satisfaction of those who couldn’t swim and certainly wouldn’t want to try. In time they were joined by a certain Valentino, an elderly man with spectacles and a purple birthmark, who unlocked a shed beside the pool, turned taps and wheels, and announced, in his role as the Ketterings’ regular pool attendant, ‘Va bene adesso.’ He then went off to cut the nettles under the straggling roses, satisfied that water, should it ever reappear, would no longer escape from the pool.

  Meanwhile Giovanna’s immense husband had waddled off to a patch of rough grass in which he hunted until he found a small metal square. He began to pull at it, stooping, sweating and shouting, ‘Il pozzo!’

  ‘Pozzo’ Haverford translated for the benefit of the English present. ‘The stout party’s found the well!’

  It was at this juncture that Molly was distracted by Jacqueline, who had to be taken back to the house into one of the lavatories sluiced only by a bucket of old chlorinated pool water. Meanwhile the villagers crowded to peer down the open manhole as though it were an interesting accident. What they saw by the further light of a bicycle lamp was a chamber about six feet square and the opening of two pipes, half in and half out of the water-level on opposite walls. If the liquid was meant to flow into the chamber from some high point on the hillside and then out to the tank supplying the house, it had given up in the hot weather and was no longer doing so. Giovanna’s husband acquired a long garden cane, which had been supporting a tottering mallow, and with it established the depth. He poked the stick hopelessly towards the mouth of the pipe and grunted, ‘Bloccato.’

  ‘Blocked,’ Haverford explained. ‘He says it’s blocked.’

  ‘Qualcuno deve scendere.’ The huge man whose belly flowed over his belt and seemed to cascade down the front of his trousers pointed with the cane. They all looked at the dark square and saw that it was hardly a manhole, more of a childhole. Even Hugh, although able to look like a jeune premier from time to time, had filled out as a result of an under-demanding marriage and a sedentary occupation, and would have been a round peg for such a small square hole. The other villagers, eyeing each other speculatively, saw that they were all too full of pasta for the adventure. Henrietta, tall for her age and spectacularly thin, stood by them in the bikini she had put on for the sunshine and the wand, hovering round the crowd, finally pointed at her.

  ‘La ragazza.’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘Quite definitely no.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ Henrietta said. ‘It’d be something to do.’

  ‘It’d be a bit of fun!’ Haverford, too old and far too tubby to be lowered down any manholes, was enjoying a vicarious adventure.

  ‘Sì?’ Giovanna’s husband raised his eyebrows at Henrietta.

  ‘Why ever not sì?’

  So the voluminous man held her wrists and lowered the girl’s body, small-breasted with protruding hip bones and long legs which, when stretched out together, still showed light between them, into the dark square where she stood with water up to her thighs. He handed down the cane and the bicycle lamp and she waded away into the shadows as the curious faces of the villagers, the anxious face of her father, peered down at her.

  Molly had buttoned up the braces on Jacqueline’s trousers and found her youngest child a biscuit when she heard the screams. They were high-pitched, terrified and rent the silence of the house. Going to the kitchen window, the biscuit tin still in her hands, she saw an extraordinary sight. The crowd of villagers seemed to be standing round a patch of earth from which the thin, naked arms of a young girl were desperately waving as the screams continued. She picked up Jacqueline and ran out into the garden.

  Hugh was coming towards her carrying their tall eldest, whose arms and legs fell haphazardly like a doll’s while a long strip of green weed circled her ankle. The sobs still racked her.

  ‘She’s all right. Nothing’s broken.’

  ‘Hetty! What is it, Hetty? Darling…’

  ‘She just panicked, that’s all. She must have panicked in the dark.’

  ‘Darling. What did you see? Did you see anything?’

  The sobs were less frequent now. But there was still a terrified child’s face on a body almost a woman’s.

  ‘I thought she’d enjoy it.’ Haverford was trotting beside them.

  ‘It was perfectly safe.’ Hugh knew that his wife would blame him although he shouldn’t be blamed. ‘It was quite shallow. They only wanted her to clean out the drain with a stick.’

  ‘And she was the only one thin enough to get down the hole. You’d’ve stuck there, Molly Coddle. Wouldn’t she, Henry? Your mother would have been stuck just like Pooh Bear.’ In saying which old Haverford, as usual, brought no help or comfort to anyone.

  ‘What did you see?’ Molly asked the question again when she was alone with her daughter in her tower bedroom. Henrietta lay wrapped in a blanket, her teeth chattering, pale in spite of the tan she had been cultivating so carefully.

  ‘I told you. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Why were you frightened then?’

  ‘I… I don’t know.’

  Molly thought she must have seen something. ‘There was nothing there? Nothing peculiar at all?’

  ‘I suppose I was stupid, really.’

  ‘But you’re not stupid, darling. You know that.’

  ‘I suddenly thought they’d shut me in there. I thought I’d never get out. It was stupid.’

  ‘You know Daddy wouldn’t let them do that.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So wasn’t there anything else?’

  ‘Not really.’

  What did that mean, that ‘not really’? ‘They shouldn’t have put you down! They should never.’ Molly put her arms round the girl in an unusual demonstration. She had brought them to a place with snakes, although none had appeared to alarm the children, snakes or secrets. She felt guilty as she held her daughter until the shivering and the teeth chattering stopped. And yet she didn’t mean to leave ‘La Felicità’. She meant to find out more, as much as possible.

  In the hallway she found Giovanna telephoning. It sounded as though she were talking to someone she knew well, or at least had dealt with previously, because she called her interlocutor ‘Tonio’ and smiled continuously as though engaged in invisible wooing and sometimes she laughed.

  ‘Acqua.’ Molly used the word, unable to make a joke, or a tragedy or even, for the moment, a sentence of it. And Giovanna stood with her hand on the telephone which she had put down and spoke slowly, loudly, as though to an imbecile. Molly understood that water would come by lorry during the afternoon or at least by the evening. Tonio at the Water B
oard had given her his promise. That should have been arranged before. The ragazza should never have been put down the well, that was the fault of her husband who didn’t fully understand the house and was ignorant of its ways.

  … The purchase of water by the lorry load may strain the budget of even the best-heeled family. She remembered the warning in the letter written, it now seemed, by Mrs Kettering. Well, Mrs Kettering would have to pay, the woman who wished Buck Kettering lost and gone forever would eventually, Molly decided, be responsible for the intake of water.

  Giovanna left. Henrietta came down to lunch, still shivering slightly, in a sweater and jeans, and refused to discuss her experience, telling Jacqueline not to be bloody silly when she asked if she’d seen crocodiles.

  All that afternoon they waited for the water to come. Molly and Hugh sat on the terrace unable to concentrate on anything else. At the distant sound of a lorry on the Mondano road he would start up, shade his eyes, and then sink back in his chair, disappointed. ‘Bloody disaster,’ Hugh said, ‘this holiday’s turning out to be.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘If it’s your idea of fun to sit here… waiting for water. We might as well have gone on holiday to the Sahara Desert.’

  ‘It’s interesting when things go wrong. That’s the way you find out about a place.’

  ‘Find out how much they charge for water. Probably a fortune.’

  ‘We’ve never bought water by the lorry load before. It’s rather an adventure.’

  “Well, I don’t see why I should pay for it.’

  ‘You won’t have to.’ But Molly knew he would say when they got home, ‘For what I shelled out for the water we might as well have filled the loos up with Chianti.’

  He stood up again at what he thought was the sound of a lorry, which also might have been an aeroplane or a dry gust of wind in the trees behind the house. When he sat down he said, because he felt guilty, ‘I thought it’d be an adventure for Henrietta.’