Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  When she thought of the day at the Palio, the Middle Ages seemed to be passing, often unwatched, outside the windows, and the more immediate and important drama was taking place in the apartment, beside the long table set with crostini and slices of pan forte and silver jugs of wine at which, from time to time, she exchanged words with Rosie Fortinbras. Outside, the drums continued to beat, the flags were whirled round and thrown as high as the apartment windows, the musicians played, knights in armour with their visors down to represent defunct parishes rode solemnly by, and the Palio itself, a white banner surmounted by a silver plate (the winner’s prize), arrived on a cart drawn by white oxen. Then came the long wait for the race to start.

  ‘Poor Carlo is exhausted,’ Rosie said. ‘I have been rather putting him through it. We’ve done the entire Piero della Francesca trail.’

  ‘Really? We’re going to do that too.’

  ‘I thought you might be. Well, you always were an art buff, weren’t you? The only pictures Carlo likes are in his comics.’

  ‘You haven’t seen Buck Kettering lately?’ Molly asked the question as casually as she could.

  ‘Not all that lately, I suppose. We are good friends though. Over the years. He sometimes says I’m the only one of the Brits he feels he can trust.’ Rosie looked pleased with herself, as though close friendship with Buck Kettering was considered a particular honour in Chiantishire. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I want to get in touch with him, that’s all. About the trouble we had with the water.’

  ‘Oh Buck’s terribly sorry that happened.’

  ‘He knows?’ Molly asked quickly.

  ‘Well, I mean I’m sure he would be sorry’ — Rosie backtracked — ‘if he knew. I’m sure he wants you to have a super holiday. Could you just pour me another dollop of that peachy stuff? That’s the trouble with the Italians, they’re not serious drinkers.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ Molly said, ‘about Sandra.’

  ‘Were you? I thought you did more of your thinking about Buck, for some reason.’

  ‘Well, “Sandra”’ — Molly remembered the thought that had occurred to her on the way to the Piazza — ‘that doesn’t sound at all an Italian name.’

  ‘Of course not. All the same, it is, you know. Buck and I both have this thing about the natives. I think he found her behind the counter in a chocolate shop in Siena. But she turned out pretty well. Good at business and all that sort of thing. Well, you could never accuse my Carlo of being any good at business. Keeps his brains strictly between his legs, don’t you, my darling?’ Carlo, licking his fingers after eating a crostino, wandered up and stared at Molly in a way she found disconcerting. All the same she felt that she had made a genuine discovery. Sandra was Italian. There was something, surely, about that fact which didn’t fit at all easily into the pattern of events as she thought she knew them. She couldn’t imagine the girl from the chocolate shop in Siena, who had turned out to have a good head for business and who had become the mother of three, writing the suggestions, which came, it seemed to her, in something like the voice of an English schoolmaster, about the Piero trail to Urbino.

  ‘You seem to be unusually interested in the Kettering family.’ Rosie smiled at her.

  And then, angry with herself, Molly knew that she was blushing. ‘We’re living in their house. Isn’t it natural to wonder what they’re like exactly?’

  ‘Is it? If I took a house I don’t think I’d wonder what the people who lived there were like. I don’t think I’d worry about that at all. But then, of course, I don’t live with such a gigantic family. Poor old you, Molly. You must have an awful lot of time on your hands to wonder about other people.’

  A roar from the crowd called them all back to the windows. The horses had emerged from the Palazzo Pubblico, with jockeys wearing hard hats and what looked like pyjama suits in the parish colours riding bareback. They were got with difficulty to the starting rope where they pranced, bucked and jostled each other, some race horses finding it strange, no doubt, to be under starter’s orders in a city square. All the faces of the crowd turned in one direction; the pigeons, deprived of anywhere to settle, flew round in increasing panic. At Molly’s side the Baronessa Dulcibene said, ‘In the Palio it is less important to win than to see your enemy lose.’

  ‘Winning is a disaster.’ The dentist had joined them and looked politely out over the children’s heads. ‘There are bribes to pay and such a lot of parties to give. The only thing to be said for winning is that it saves you the terrible humiliation of coming second. I’ — he showed Molly the scarf tied round the top of his silk trousers — ‘am a member of the Ostrich. I can only pray that the Ostrich will not come second.’

  The race started. The horses streaked past the line of restaurants, the jockeys slithering on their sweating backs. Two of the riders fell at the first corner and lay still.

  ‘Those men will need a police guard in the hospital tonight,’ Vittoria Dulcibene said. ‘Their supporters will know they were bribed to fall.’ Other horses and other riders crashed to the sand-strewn pavement before, after three laps which went almost too quickly for the crowds to turn their heads, the Hedgehog won. Then the crowd stormed on to the course, seizing the Hedgehog jockey, lifting him into the air and putting him, it seemed to Molly, in far greater danger than he had ever been during the race.

  ‘I am cock-a-hoop!’ said the dentist.

  ‘But I thought you belonged to the Ostrich?’ Molly was puzzled.

  ‘That is true. And the Ostrich got nowhere. But the Dragon was second and the Ostrich has hated the Dragon since the Middle Ages. All the Ostriches will be celebrating tonight and the Dragons will hide their heads in shame!’

  Hugh was letting Jacqueline down from his shoulders and the children, who had behaved surprisingly well, were coming away from the windows in search of cake. Molly could see her father in a corner with Rosie Fortinbras. An unlit Italian cigar wobbled between his lips and he was flirting with her as he had, to his daughter’s intense embarrassment, when she and Rosie had been in the sixth form together and he had taken them out to tea.

  And then he must have asked Rosie for a light because she felt in her bag and produced a book of matches. Haverford took them, lit his cigar, bowed his thanks and then slipped the book of matches into his pocket. Her father, Molly was confirmed in her view, was not even to be trusted with a book of matches.

  ‘Wasn’t that a splendid spectacle, Molly Coddle?’ Haverford was coming towards her now, puffing like a steam engine. ‘And doesn’t it come in useful sometimes having a father who can tell a thumping lie when the occasion demands it?’

  The day after the Palio the Pargeters were, as they say in the package-tour programmes, ‘at leisure’. The children returned to the pool; Hugh, after offering help which his wife rejected, sat reading in the sun; and Haverford snoozed over a blank piece of paper. Molly washed up and put away the plates after lunch and wondered if the house had any more secrets to offer. She swept the floor, scrubbed the kitchen table to the colour of the dry and chalky landscape, and was still reluctant to go outside. She wandered round the room when her work was finished, hanging up cups, straightening plates on the dresser, and then she took the bunch of keys off its hook. She read the labels, thinking of the rooms, salone grande, salone piccolo, cucina, porta d’entrata, and then the one on a smaller key granaio. What did that mean? Granary? She knew the outbuildings by heart, the swimming-pool shed with the filter, the stone outhouse where the wheelbarrow and the gardener’s tools were kept, the old pigsty now used to store firewood and dried lavender. What would the Ketterings be doing with a granary? With the bunch of keys still in her hand, she went into the small sitting-room and looked the word up in the dictionary. Then she toured the bedrooms, looking at the ceilings.

  She couldn’t think why she hadn’t noticed the trap-door in the larger of the children’s rooms long before. The ceiling was not high there, and standing on a chair she could fit the key into the lock.
The end of a folding ladder was then revealed to her and she was able to pull it down and climb into the loft. She saw a switch on a beam and illuminated what seemed to her to be a sort of Tutankhamun’s tomb, so full was it of relics of the earlier Kettering period. Drowsy flies buzzed, hot air was heavy with dust.

  All the mess, all the jumble of living had been swept out of the orderly house and pushed up into the attic. There were children’s toys, a pile of abandoned, grown-out-of clothes, odd shoes, an old croquet set in a wooden box, a torn badminton net, wounded cushions, a dressmaker’s dummy, a treadle sewing-machine, torn magazines with their covers eaten by mice, and a heap of what Molly took to be dressing-up clothes — bright squares of material, hats with feathers, toy swords, masks and paper crowns, an old opera hat and the dusty coat of a set of tails. There was a cardboard box full of maps and one packed with what looked like account books filled with columns of lire. There were also piles of paperback novels — best-sellers from airport bookstalls and Italian stories of passion with covers on which men with shiny black hair could be seen kissing girls in frilly underwear whilst, in the background, the moon shone on gondolas or knives dripped blood. Who was it, Molly wondered, so ashamed of these publications that they hid them in lofts, leaving only the art books, guides and collections of Tuscan recipes on display to the tenants?

  Then she found what she had hoped to discover — some boxes of photographs of the house, of the pool as it was being built, and of the progress of the woman she took to be Sandra Kettering from a delighted girl, already tending to plumpness, holding a baby, to a matronly figure, square-shouldered, frowning at the camera as though it were an intruder, with two spindly girls beside her in the garden and Violetta, the afterthought, stuck solidly on her lap. There were many other photographs of the female members of this family at various stages of their development, but either the husband and father was of a singularly retiring disposition or he was holding the camera.

  Molly sat in the dust on an empty trunk and went through them all. Then she noticed a portable typewriter in its case. Under it she found a folder full of papers. She took out one and read words which had long been familiar to her: Villa to let near small Tuscan town. Suit couple, early forties, with three children (females preferred). Recently installed swimming-pool may compensate for sometimes impassable road. Owner suggests preliminary viewing to prevent disappointment or future misunderstandings. She picked up another page and read words which were also familiar: General remarks. The villa ‘La Felicità’ can only be enjoyed by the observance of strict rules and a certain discipline…

  All of these documents — the letters she had received ending with the words ‘s. KETTERING’ (but composed by whom, she wondered) — had been photocopied, not once but many times. Some of them were discoloured with age, as though they had been prepared for previous years. So, if there was a mystery about the house it wasn’t, as she had at first suspected, that she had been specially chosen to be mistaken for the Ketterings and to cover their retreat. Such a tactic could scarcely have been repeated year after year. She understood, with some disappointment, that she hadn’t been singled out to play any role in the Ketterings’ lives. And how self-regarding her landlords must be to only want families that were an echo of their own to inhabit their house, and to instruct them to behave as they did, to eat in the same place and play the same music. No doubt they so worshipped ‘La Felicità’ that they thought it would suffer from any great change in the perfect life within it. She restored the duplicated papers to their folder. Never had the fascinating Mr Kettering seemed so far away.

  When she came downstairs, having washed away the dust of the loft, she found her family wrapped in damp towels, drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits. She told them she had found nothing much up there except a lot of old dressing-up clothes and when Samantha asked if they could borrow them she really didn’t see why not.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘They’re not splitting, are they?’ Samantha lay on her bed, still young enough to fear the break-up of a marriage, however fragile.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’ Henrietta was at her mirror making elaborate preparations for a day on which nothing in particular was going to happen. She sucked in her cheeks, put her hands on her hips, jutted her pelvis and became the cover of Honey magazine, wearing a pair of yellowing long johns bought from an Oxfam shop, a lacy blouse also bought to feed the starving, glossy lipstick, Doc Marten’s thick-soled shoes, and one of the straw hats she had found in the hall downstairs. ‘So many people do split nowadays. Practically all my friends…”

  ‘Why are they?’

  ‘Well, you heard them. That night. Rows and arguments.’

  ‘They don’t usually do it.’

  ‘Things have probably come to a head.’ Henrietta decided to add a wide leather belt and a pair of braces to her ensemble. ‘Holidays impose a particular strain on a marriage. It’s called the twenty-four-hour-a-day contact crisis.’ She was quoting now from the woman’s page of an outdated Guardian her father had bought in Siena and left out by the pool (the Daily Telegraph had disappeared with Signor Fixit). ‘They’re both missing the supportive job situation where attentive secretaries or glamorous bosses act as effective spouse substitutes and proxy partners. In the first week of a holiday watch out for diarrhoea and domestic rows.’

  ‘It’d be awful,’ Samantha said, lying on her back staring at the ceiling with itching eyes, ‘if they split.’

  ‘It might not be so awful. My friends all say it’s much easier to get out to the Muckrakers and all that if there’s only one of them to stop you.’

  ‘What friends say that?’

  ‘You know. My friends.’

  ‘Whose fault is it, anyway? Is it Dad’s?’

  ‘You mean, has he got a girlfriend?’

  ‘He couldn’t.’ Samantha shook her head in disbelief. ‘He’s much too old.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s that much interested. I don’t know about her.’

  ‘What don’t you know about her?’

  ‘She’s different, isn’t she? Haven’t you noticed that? Well, it’s as though she’s thinking about someone else all the time.’ Henrietta tried another pose: this time one hand flat on the crown of her hat, her body twisted towards the door, her head turned back to the mirror, wide eyes gazing into the imaginary camera. She had reached the age when she needed to challenge Molly and was ready to disapprove of her.

  ‘Someone else? Whoever…?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it might be…’ Henrietta tried a selection of poses as the camera whirred and the photographer called out ‘I like it!’ from beyond the glare of the lights. She was conscious of the lack of hard evidence to bring against her mother. ‘Someone she met at that party.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t see that, could I? It was much too dark.’

  ‘Not…’ Samantha worried, ‘not that man who came when the water ran out?’

  ‘Him?’ Henriettaremembered the grey-haired Ken Corduroy. ‘Well, I suppose he might be about the right age for her.’

  So the two sisters considered the possibilities whilst downstairs Jacqueline sat, unexpectedly quietly, on her grandfather’s lap. She knew nothing of Haverford’s defects of character and as he told her the plot of King Lear she gave him her undivided attention.

  Later the telephone rang in the hall and Henrietta, who was on her way to the pool, answered it. The call was for her and when she had finished speaking she went back upstairs to change all her clothes. She was singing and felt that her holiday had definitely taken a turn for the better.

  The discovery that she had made in the loft, that she was only another photostat copy of a long line of tenants or prospective tenants, had the effect of taking Molly’s speculation about the Ketterings off the boil. As she no longer felt that she had been in any way chosen to stand in for them, so her feeling of particular involvement in their lives receded. At the same time she had taken comple
te possession of ‘La Felicità’, and as their intangible personalities withdrew so she became, in her mind, the undisputed chatelaine of the villa. She knew its ways, she was prepared to keep quiet about its secrets and she supplied it, decorated it with jugs of wild flowers and roses from the garden, and saw to its tidiness in a way to which she thought the house responded.

  Since their original quarrel about the postcard, Hugh had been more than ever content to leave the running of the house and the holiday to his wife. Once or twice when, contrary to her wishes, they were left alone together he tried to apologize.

  ‘You’re angry?’

  ‘I’m not. Not angry at all.’

  ‘I do feel terribly guilty.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Well, of course I feel guilty.’

  ‘You’ve no need. It seems you’ve got nothing to feel guilty about. That’s really the worst part of it. All that deception just so you couldn’t do anything except have lunch.’

  ‘What did you want me to do?’

  They were in the kitchen, clearing up before they went to bed. It was a quiet quarrel and one the children had no chance of overhearing.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Feel something for a change. Perhaps that’s it. I wanted you to feel something.’

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ Hugh stood with a tea-towel in his hand, drying one of the Ketterings’ cups. ‘Something’s happened to you.’

  She said nothing because, at that moment, she felt nothing had.

  ‘You’ve changed. You never used to spy on me like this.’

  ‘Me spy on you? Really! I’ve got better things to do.’ Or better things to spy on, she might have told him. ‘I don’t spy at all. You just leave things out for me to find, that’s all.’