Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

‘Italian drinking habits have changed,’ the Baronessa said sadly, now making use of a box of kitchen matches. ‘Men in cities no longer go home at lunchtime for a bottle of wine and a plate of pasta. They take a sandwich in a bar near the office and drink beer or’ — she whispered the detested word — ‘Coca-Cola! There are few men now working in the fields, keeping going on a litre of wine. It is sad. My husband is travelling abroad to find new possibilities for us. When he gets back you can speak to him about it, if money really interests you.’

  ‘Money interests me very much.’

  ‘Oh really?’ The Baronessa smiled. ‘Now I must get back and give some sort of instructions for dinner. We are expecting people but I’m afraid they can’t be of any help to you, Mrs Pargeter. They are not the Ketterings, or anyone who knew them. Come, Manrico, you appalling hound.’

  Then she was gone, leaving nothing but a trail of perfume and the cigarette, which she had only just lit after such difficulty, suddenly stubbed out in a small silver dish Giovanna used for the salt. Molly was left wondering about the exact purpose of her visit.

  Dearest Marcia, Hugh wrote to Mrs Tobias, on a postcard of Martini’s horseman he had bought in Siena. Wish you were here. Am missing you and the ‘Dolce Vita’ very much indeed. As you see from this p.c. I have been giving the children some basic art instruction. But I’ll be delighted to be away from the joys of family life! Roll on September. Fondest. Hugh. It was very early in the morning and he wrote on his knee sitting in the car, waiting to take the children on the breakfast run to Mondano. He had a stamp and meant to drop this message into the box outside the post office, and no one would be any the wiser. As Henrietta, Samantha and Jacqueline straggled out to join him, he slid the postcard into a hiding-place behind the map in the pocket of the driver’s door. From there he meant to remove it hastily whilst the children were consuming their doughnuts in front of the café — their reward for getting up early enough to fetch the bread.

  He had started the engine and was backing out of the shade when he heard his wife calling him to stop. It was something Hugh hadn’t bargained for. She wanted, it seemed, to be taken to the post office.

  ‘We can go there for you. Anyway, all post offices are hell.’ Hugh hadn’t been into a post office in England for a decade.

  ‘I’d like to come.’ Molly opened the car door and sank into her seat, and then turned to smile at the children. ‘I’ll buy you all doughnuts.’

  ‘I do that, anyway,’ Hugh grumbled as he drove too fast in his irritation and bumped up the track. He hoped that he would be able to palm the postcard and whisk it into the letter-box while his wife was engaged elsewhere. As for Molly, she was going to ask if there were any letters in ‘La Felicità’s cubby-hole at the post office. Nothing had been delivered to the villa. If there were letters for the Ketterings she meant to take possession of them and, though she hadn’t yet promised herself to take to the steaming kettle again, she might feel driven to such a step.

  They parked in Mondano’s central Piazza Cavour and all sat. The church and the deliciously smelling breadshop were visible from the car. Hugh said, ‘I thought you were going to the post office?’

  ‘And aren’t you going to buy the bread?’ Molly felt a wave of lethargy in the hot car and didn’t move.

  ‘Of course we are.’

  ‘Then why don’t we meet in front of the cafeé?’

  ‘Come along, Dad,’ Samantha sighed and opened the back door. Hugh was forced to join the children as they set out across the square. He would have to think what to do with his postcard later. Left alone in the car, still reluctant to make the effort to heave herself out of the passenger seat, Molly saw the edge of Martini’s horseman protruding from behind the map in the driver’s door. Because of her compulsion to investigate she took the postcard out and read it.

  “‘Dearest Marcia.” Who’s Marcia?’

  ‘I told you. Just a client.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Mrs Tobias.’

  ‘And who’s Mister Tobias?’

  ‘Long gone. She divorced him.’

  ‘It sounds to me as though he should have divorced her.’

  ‘I did her case. I won it.’

  ‘I’m sure she was enormously grateful!’ Molly astonished herself. She was eloquent and angry, as though the house had given her a new courage. She stood in the middle of the big bedroom, a commanding figure in her white nightdress, and Hugh sat on the edge of the bed, longing to escape in sleep from this attack. When he had got back to the car with the rolls and long loaves that morning he had found Molly gone and his postcard with her. He had looked forward to some sort of scene and a bad quarter of an hour, but he had been kept waiting all day, until the rest of the household was asleep, and then had been amazed at the intensity of his wife’s rage.

  ‘Anyway, what’s this sweet life you seem to enjoy with Mrs Tobias?’

  ‘What sweet life?’

  ‘This “Dolce Vita”.’ Molly spat out the words with full-blooded contempt.

  ‘Oh, the “Dolce Vita”.’ Hugh felt on firm ground and gave her a smile which she found patronizing. ‘You’ve got that entirely wrong. The “Dolce Vita” happens to be a restaurant.’

  ‘Oh, yes. And what goes on there?’

  ‘Mrs Tobias and I have lunch…’

  ‘Lunch.’ The word seemed to excite Molly to a new level of disgust. ‘How often do you have lunch?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘Oh. And how often is occasionally?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Do you go through lunch with Mrs Tobias in some sort of trance? The person you’re missing so dreadfully.’

  ‘Very much indeed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t say dreadfully. I said very much indeed.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you should know. You’re a lawyer. I asked you, what difference does it make?’

  Hugh shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t want to argue, but he found himself unable to leave the witness-box.

  ‘I’m sure you miss her. How many times have you had lunch with her?’

  ‘Not more than once a month.’

  ‘And when was her divorce case?’

  ‘Almost two years ago.’ Hugh had a memory for such things and hoped, now he had told the truth, she would let him sleep.

  Molly had no such intention. ‘And do you take all your clients out to lunch every month, for the rest of their lives, when you win their cases?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He did his best to smile again.

  ‘I don’t suppose you win so many cases.’

  ‘I do well enough’ — he looked hurt — ‘to bring you all on this holiday.’

  ‘You brought me on this holiday! You know I brought you. I paid for it. With my money. Does Mrs Tobias pay for your lunch?’

  ‘I did the car hire,’ Hugh said with justice, ‘and the air fares. I even paid for your father’s ticket.’

  ‘Of course you did. You’re two of a kind, you and my father. Two old womanizers. You should have lots to talk about.’

  Seated on the loo, with the door open and his pyjama trousers round his ankles, Haverford was listening to the quarrel with great pleasure. Upstairs Henrietta said to Samantha, ‘She’s shouting at him. That’s a thing that’s never happened before.’

  Samantha said, ‘Do you think they’ll get a divorce?’

  ‘So what did you do after lunch?’ Molly asked what she felt was the deadliest question.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean, nothing?’

  ‘I mean, nothing in particular.’

  ‘Oh yes. And where did you do nothing in particular? In a sleazy hotel bedroom? Or did someone at the office lend you his flat? Men do that, don’t they? Here’s the key, old boy, and don’t forget to replace the bottle in the fridge.’ Molly heard her voice rising but sh
e had no idea where these thoughts, these words, were coming from. The room with its high ceiling and the long curtains seemed to encourage such arias.

  ‘Or I suppose you can go back to her place now she’s divorced. I can just imagine it. Her little maisonette in St John’s Wood! Full of frilly pelmets and a cover for the lavatory seat.’ Mrs Tobias did, in fact, live in such a place but Hugh had never seen it.

  ‘We didn’t,’ Hugh said truthfully, ‘go to any of those places.’

  ‘Perhaps you crept back to our house, when I was at work, and Mrs O’Keefe had taken Jacky to the nursery. I wouldn’t put that past you.’

  ‘Of course we didn’t.’

  ‘Why, of course? You’re her fondest, aren’t you? Roll on September, so you can have a chance of doing it again.’

  ‘We didn’t do anything.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I tell you, we “did” nothing. We just had lunch.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ She stood in the middle of the room accusing him.

  ‘I swear,’ he said, and tried a faint smile. ‘The whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

  ‘Nothing? Just had lunch?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Absolutely nothing else?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  ‘I think’ — she was looking at him as though all her worst fears were confirmed — ‘that’s the most terrible thing I have ever heard.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, of course, it is.’

  ‘If we’d done something, that might have been terrible. If we’d been guilty as charged. But we haven’t. It’s entirely innocent.’

  ‘It’s the most appalling thing I ever heard.’ Again it was as though there were something, some presence in the room itself, voicing her derision. ‘You’ve brought me all this trouble. You’ve made me read how much you hate this family, how you can’t wait to be rid of us. You’ve slobbered over this Tobias woman all through lunch — twenty-four lunches to be exact — and you haven’t had the courage or the passion even to screw her.’ ‘Screw’, where had that come from? It was a word she never used. ‘Move over, will you, because I must say you disgust me.’

  He lay down gratefully on his side of the bed. She lay on hers, after she had turned out the light.

  ‘I didn’t slobber over her at lunch.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ Molly told him. ‘I don’t ever want to talk about it again.’

  He was relieved to hear it and found his usual refuge in sleep. But his wife lay awake for a long time, angry still but in some way triumphant. Oh, T. Buckland Kettering, a voice within her said before she fell asleep, I shall find out what’s happened to you.

  ‘She’s stopped shouting,’ Henrietta said to Samantha and sounded disappointed. ‘I suppose that means no divorce.’

  Haverford stretched his pyjama’d legs out comfortably in bed and chuckled to himself. The dirty old bugger, he thought, he’s been sending her postcards.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The row over Mrs Tobias’s postcard had the effect of elevating Molly, at any rate for the time being, to the undisputed leadership of the family. No longer was she an obscure power whose plans were laid in secret and operated without recognition. The children treated her with a new respect. Hugh was remarkably anxious to please her. Even her dissident father seemed muted. He appeared at breakfast in a clean shirt and his best grey flannel trousers and refrained from uttering dubious anecdotes in the presence of the children.

  ‘I wonder’ — Hugh looked anxiously round the table — ‘what we’d all like to do today?’

  ‘I want to see the Piero della Francescas,’ Molly told them. ‘I must make some plans for that.’

  ‘The place to be avoided,’ Haverford said, ‘is Siena. Because of the Palio.’

  ‘Whatever’s that?’ Henrietta suspected that it was some kind of an infectious disease.

  ‘A particularly brutal kind of horse race. It all goes on in the square with a parade of flag-wavers in medieval costume, knights in armour — all the delights of the Middle Ages without the stink and the fear of plague.’

  ‘Let’s go. Mum, can we?’

  ‘It’ll be packed out,’ Haverford said, and, making little of an experience he’d never had, ‘I never got to see it myself. Always had something better to do during my salad days in Siena.’

  ‘Perhaps it’ll be on the television in the bar in Mondano.’ Hugh suggested a compromise which he knew would be unacceptable. Molly had no desire to watch the race on a wide screen set among stuffed squirrels.

  ‘Can we go, Mum? Why can’t we?’ The children were appealing to the highest authority.

  Molly said, ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t try it. Just to see what we can see.’

  ‘Molly Coddle has spoken. Let no dog bark,’ said Haverford, and when she had gone he whispered to his unhappy son-in-law, ‘Got any postcards to send in Siena, dear boy? Why don’t you trust me with them?’

  The parishes they walked through were hung with silk flags of the Dragon, the Hedgehog, the Panther and the Giraffe. The horses had been prayed for in the parishes’ churches and those that left a steaming mound in the aisles were considered by their supporters to be particularly blessed by God. The long procession with its beating drums and twirling flags and pages in medieval uniform was winding its slow way to the Piazza del Campo. The Pargeter family, having discussed the matter all day, and, so far as the girls were concerned, perfected their wardrobe most of the afternoon, were surprised by the emptiness of the streets, not realizing that almost the entire population of the town was packed into the shell-shaped centre of the Piazza. From there, those that fainted away would be plucked by the ambulance men like chestnuts from a fire as they waited for the race to be run around them on a sanded track between the padded stone bollards and the bolstered buildings.

  As they got to the Via di Città Molly looked down the steep, dark alleyways between the houses and saw the sea of faces in the middle of the Piazza. She began to regret her decision to take her family to the Palio. Just possibly Jacqueline, on her father’s shoulders, might catch a glimpse of the three-minute race; perhaps the children, clinging to the shutters of a restaurant in a side street, might have a view of an occasional flag thrown up above the crowd or the heads of the riders as they flashed past. That would have to be the limit of their success. And then she heard her name called and saw Rosie Fortinbras, followed by the clearly exhausted figure of her Carlo, going into the cool entrance at the back of a tall palazzo on the square.

  ‘Not here with the family, Molly? Poor you.’

  ‘Rosie Fortinbras! By all that’s wonderful.’ Haverford greeted her effusively. ‘I had the pleasure and privilege of taking you out when you were at school with Molly Coddle. Toasted tea buns, as you may remember, in the Trusthouse Forte. I must say you don’t look a day older. Going to the races?’

  We’re going to watch from a window in Doctor Marocetti’s apartment. It’s the only way to see the Palio.’

  ‘Oh, I do so agree. The good doctor has invited us too.’ Her father said this with such confidence that for a moment Molly almost believed him.

  ‘Orlando has invited all of you?’ Rosie looked startled.

  ‘Well, he can afford it, can’t he? Best gynae man in Siena. This way, my group!’

  As Haverford set off with her old schoolfriend and her old schoolfriend’s lover across a plant-filled courtyard and up a marble staircase, Molly allowed her family to straggle after them. When Hugh said nervously, ‘Is this all right?’ she whispered back, ‘Of course it’s all right. Where’s your sense of adventure?’ The house she was living in, the investigation she was engaged on, had given her a new feeling of recklessness. She wanted, in this instance, to see how her father’s elderly daring would be rewarded and had also, when it seemed impossible, become determined to see the Palio.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Rosie Fortinbras said, when they arrived at the open door of a first-floor apartment,
‘Orlando Marocetti’s a dentist.’

  ‘Sorry, got hold of the wrong end of the stick.’ Haverford laughed and threw up his arms. ‘Ah, Dottore! How extremely good to meet you.’

  ‘Rosie, cara!’ Doctor Marocetti turned out to be a small man in a lemon-yellow silk suit with large sunglasses. He had to rise on his toes to kiss Miss Fortinbras; he squeezed Carlo’s forearm and looked at Haverford and his entourage in some doubt.

  ‘Haverford Downs, lo scrittore inglese,’ said the old man. ‘I’m delighted to discover that I am read in vostra bellissima città.’

  ‘You are a writer?’ The dentist’s English was not perfect but at least better than Haverford’s Italian.

  ‘I am charged with the task of writing about your Palio as seen from the windows of your superb apartment for the famous giornale inglese, La Spia, the Informer. Obtainable in Italy, as I have also discovered.’

  ‘You are to write about my apartment?’ Rosie’s host seemed improbably flattered.

  ‘Mainly. I will also describe the Palio, if you have no objection.’

  ‘You have brought your family’ — Dr Marocetti looked more doubtful — ‘in order to write about my apartment?’

  ‘A point in my article will be the great hospitality shown by the Italian people to children of all creeds and colours. As you see they are thin children, undernourished, as we are all poverty-stricken in England. They will take up little or no room at your windows.’

  ‘Si accomodi, prego.’

  Hugh and Molly were thanking the little man effusively as he stood aside and counted their family in. ‘Your father,’ Rosie Fortinbras whispered in her best Kensington accent, ‘hasn’t half got a nerve.’

  Inside the apartment tall windows looked out on to the finishing and starting point of the race. The room was full of Italians greeting each other, sipping white wine and peach juice, wearing the silk scarves of the parishes of which they were the aristocratic patrons. Vittoria Dulcibene swayed towards Molly and said, ‘You get everywhere, my dear, don’t you? Even to Orlando Marocetti’s. You know I don’t wish to sound snobbish but for most of the year we who move in society do not know dentists. On the day of the Palio one such person becomes our oldest friend.’ Molly smiled vaguely. She was thinking of something else. On the way through the streets she had seen a small Italian girl stumble and fall. The child’s mother tottered insecurely forward on high heels calling, ‘Sandra, Sandra!’ with mixed anger and concern. Sandra, to Molly, was an unexpected Italian name.