Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘Things. What sort of things?’

  ‘Postcards.’

  Molly’s expertise in running the house was now extended to shopping and going round Mondano she felt that she had acquired much of Fosdyke’s knowledge. She had found the freshest vegetables in the shop behind the church and discovered that the best olive oil was not to be had at Lucca’s but bought with the Chianti in the courtyard at the Castello Crocetto, where it was fetched from some cavern by an old man who was still in his pyjamas at midday and who could only be summoned by pulling a bell rope. She had found a cache of Ribena in the farmacia for Jacqueline and in a small supermercato on the road to Arezzo she had tracked down Shredded Wheat.

  Although she had done her best to banish the Ketterings, and whatever their doings might have been, from her mind, she still called at the post office to see if there were letters for ‘La Felicità’. On one such visit, her inquiries, as usual, met with no result and she was wondering if her landlords had given other instructions for their mail when she heard a young English voice, half frustrated and half amused, say ‘Water Board! What the hell’s the Italian for “Water Board”?’

  Turning from the nest of little boxes she saw a young couple, tall and thin with fair hair, interchangeable faded blue jeans and sweaters. They were struggling with the local telephone directory, entertained by their inability to make any sense of it.

  ‘Acqua. It must be acqua something. Go for the “A”s.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Why not necessarily?’

  ‘Well, it probably starts with something like “T” for Toscano…’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Molly moved in on them. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing. You’re not having trouble with your water?’

  ‘You’re English!’ The young woman looked at Molly in wide-eyed astonishment, as though she’d just met her next-door neighbour in the depths of some South American jungle or on an Arctic ice-floe.

  ‘Well, yes.’ Molly gave the impression that she might, at some unspecified time in her past, have had some vague connection with what Signor Fixit would have called the U.K. Indeed she was sufficiently self-aware to hear in herself something of the late, lamented Fosdyke’s tone of knowing helpfulness as she explained, ‘Water’s always a terrible problem in these hills. That’s why they tell you that watermelons are wonderful to eat and wash your face with.’

  ‘Yes. But can you bath in watermelons?’

  ‘Tim can’t exist without his bath in the morning and the house quite suddenly dried up.’ The couple introduced themselves as Tim and Hermia Greensleeve and they’d taken their villa through Paradise Palaces of Fulham. When they first saw it they were overcome by the bougainvillaea, the cool stone floors and the little pool, quite big enough really. ‘It seemed to have everything, but what’s everything without water?’ The maid only came in twice a week and spoke no English and when they rang Fulham the idiot in the Paradise office actually told them to pray for rain.

  ‘You don’t know what the Italian for “Water Board” is, do you?’

  Molly didn’t, so she could no longer carry on the Fosdyke tradition of swooping down to help those in trouble. But then, no doubt on the intervention of Saint Agostino, she saw through the open door of the post office a grey-haired man getting out of a Volvo Estate and setting off towards the butcher’s on the corner of the Via Garibaldi.

  ‘Wait there,’ she told the Greensleeves, ‘I think I can find a way to help.’

  ‘Water Board.’ Molly took the message to Ken Corduroy, who had by that time reached the safety of the butcher’s. ‘Someone else is in trouble.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ The pool expert smiled at her. ‘It’s this damned high stuck over Europe. If they want rain they should stop in the U.K. Hailstorms back home, apparently.’

  Mr Corduroy stood smiling at her. They were surrounded by the macelleria’s excellent supplies of roasts, meatballs and Tuscan shishkebabs prepared with fresh herbs, juniper berries and red peppers. Sausages flavoured with fennel dangled from the ceiling, long-boned pork chops and chickens tied in parcels of herbs decorated the steel trays on the marble counter. Somewhere behind Ken Corduroy a pale pig’s head wore a carnation behind its ear like a Spanish dancer and a crucifix hung among the hams. Old women sat on chairs, as silent as though they were in church, whilst the butcher went through his painfully slow rituals. A fan buzzed and fluttered plastic streamers; they breathed in the sweet smell of dead meat.

  ‘They want to get in touch with the Water Board, but they can’t find it in the book.’

  ‘Sound idea. Somebody may not have paid a bill.’

  ‘They’re renting through something called Paradise Palaces. Surely they should have paid it.’

  ‘Never can tell with these villa companies. You’re inclined to run into a load of cowboys. Quickest way would be to go up to the Idraulica.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Bloody great concrete building about fifteen kilometres out on the road to Siena. You can’t miss it. By the way, you haven’t heard anything of Buck Kettering, have you?’

  ‘No.’ At the mention of the name Molly’s interest in the Ketterings came flooding back and she could feel that Corduroy, although much occupied in putting his wallet back in the small leather handbag strapped to his wrist, was waiting for her answer in some suspense.

  ‘No, I haven’t. Not a word since we got here. Should I have done?’

  ‘Not really, I suppose. Odd sort of fellow, Buck. He seems to have vanished without trace.’

  When she returned to the Greensleeves, who were now standing outside the post office waiting for her obediently, Molly was in control of the situation and able to give them the full benefit of her experience.

  ‘The likely thing,’ she told them, ‘is that your wretched Paradise Palaces never paid the water bill, but it might take weeks to get the money out of them. So why don’t I run you over to the Idraulica, which is actually what we call the Water Board round here…’

  ‘And we were trying to find acqua.’ Tim smiled at their stupidity.

  ‘It takes a bit of time to get to know the ropes. Anyway, it’s only about fifteen kilometres on the Siena road. We’d better call in at the bank and change a traveller’s cheque or two. I can show you where that is.’

  ‘How much?’ Hermia wondered.

  ‘Could be… well. Might be up to five hundred and fifty thousand lire if they haven’t paid it for half a year. There have been cases like that,’ Molly quoted Ken Corduroy. ‘That’s not quite as bad as it sounds,’ she tried to comfort the young couple who looked stricken. ‘About two hundred and fifty quid. And Paradise whatever’s bound to pay you back in the end. I mean, you can’t live without water, can you?’

  Molly took them in her car. On the way they recovered their spirits; after all they could wire for more money from their bank in England. It might make a bit of a dent in what Tim had cleared on his TSB shares but after all you couldn’t bath in TSB shares or even swim in them. The pool water, didn’t they tell her, had also somehow evaporated overnight? They had just got married and this was the first proper holiday they had taken together since their honeymoon, which had been a bit of a disaster. St Lucia. Hermia had been laid low by some highly dubious prawns which was unfortunate to say the least. But they’d been looking forward to Italy and of course they were going to enjoy every minute when the water was fixed. What ought they to see?

  ‘The Piero della Francescas are the best thing. Start with the murals in Arezzo. Then you can do Monterchi and Sansepolcro. If you’re feeling very adventurous, I’d advise you to take the trail over the Mountains of the Moon to Urbino. See what’s probably the greatest small painting in the world.’

  They were in the bank by then, waiting for the girl with tragic eyes and a cigarette adhering to her lower lip to count out an enormous amount of lire.

  ‘What’s the greatest painting?’

  ‘Another Piero. “The Flagellation”.’

 
‘Sounds a bit kinky.’

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ Molly told them. ‘No one can quite explain it. That’s why it’s so marvellous.’

  The Greensleeves looked suitably impressed and Tim pushed the wad of notes into the back pocket of his jeans, where it would have only temporary accommodation.

  So they drove by the Siena road and Molly composed sentences of shopping Italian in her head. ‘Per favore, vogliamo pagare il conto dell’acqua per la casa “Perdita”, Mondano-in-Chianti,’ which she hoped might be sufficient to meet the situation. Hermia Greensleeve sat in the front seat but twisted round to hold her husband’s hand and point out the miracles on the way: the fields of sunflowers past their prime, the terraces of vines and the grandeur of the Villa Baderini high up on a hillside. Molly wondered if her first year with Hugh had been anything like that and decided that, on the whole, it hadn’t. In what seemed no time at all they found a grim building, perforated with small square windows like a prison, up a short driveway. Over the gates Molly read the words AZIENDAIDRAULICA COMUNALE. ‘There you are,’ she said, ‘the Idraulica,’ as though it were a secret known only to her. They parked in a yard beside a row of big tankers of the sort that had dumped water into her swimming-pool and found a door marked UFFICIO.

  ‘Per favore, vogliamo pagare il conto dell’…’ she started off to a man with a haggard, distinguished face who might have been an overworked priest or a university professor suffering from insomnia. ‘Yes,’ he nodded at her, saving her the trouble of further Italian, ‘you want to pay the bill?’ There were no papers on the desk in front of him, nothing in fact but a small tin lid piled with a mountain of cigarette ends, and yet he seemed to have expected her coming. When she had explained the Greensleeves’ problem, he retired into a back room from which he later emerged with a handful of carbon copies on flimsy paper and confirmed that the villa’s owners had ignored their bills for water.

  ‘Do you know Croydon?’ he asked as he wrote out the receipt.

  Molly had heard of it.

  ‘No shortage of water in Croydon. I was there as a student. My subject was philosophy. Now I am working for the Idraulica. Teachers of philosophy are poorly paid in Italy.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Molly felt embarrassed at this confidence, as though the man, who looked extraordinarily thin, had confessed that he was suffering from a fatal disease.

  ‘I don’t mind.’ He coughed and lit another cigarette. ‘One can still read philosophy without having to teach it. I hope very much that I will see Croydon again before I die.’

  They emerged from the office with the back pocket of Tim Greensleeve’s jeans emptied and a promise that an official would have reconnected the water by the time they got home. In the courtyard a man was getting into a long and dusty motor car. As he did so, he raised his hand to Molly as though in recognition. He had a receding hairline, a plump face and a small mouth, and she had no doubt that he was the man who, it seemed half a life-time ago, had called her ‘Signora Kettering’ and handed her a letter. She returned his salute and then, as he drove away, wondered why the words AZIENDA IDRAULICA COMUNALE written over the gate were somehow familiar.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘What’re you doing, Mum?’

  Molly was pulling down one of the empty suitcases from the top of the bedroom cupboard. Her purpose was to take another look at the letter addressed to Sandra Kettering which she had put there for safe keeping. ‘I’m just’ — Molly offered an unsatisfactory explanation — ‘well, seeing that everything’s unpacked.’

  ‘I know you’re going to say no to this.’ Henrietta sat on the edge of the huge matrimonial bed in which her parents were now unfriendly and looked resigned to disappointment.

  ‘How do you know?’ Molly looked at her daughter, envying her thinness and the possibilities her life had to offer.

  ‘Because you say no to everything, don’t you?’

  It was an unjust attack and Molly was stung by it. She had said yes to an adventure, an investigation which she had decided to undertake with no help from her family, in secret and entirely alone.

  ‘Of course I don’t, darling. That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh, you say yes to some things, like us tidying the bedroom or looking after Jacky for the afternoon. But no when it comes to going out to meet my friends.’

  ‘What friends exactly? Have you got many friends here in Mondano-in-Chianti?’ She smiled: she was doing her best to understand her daughter. ‘I don’t suppose they’ve got a Muckrakers Club here, have they?’

  ‘Actually you’re wrong. I don’t mean about the Muckrakers Club. I mean about me not having friends here. It just happens that one of them phoned me up. Don’t you want to know who it is?’

  ‘If you want to tell me…’

  ‘I thought you wanted to know the names and addresses of everyone I went out with, just so you could phone their parents to make quite sure we’re not sniffing glue or anything. As a matter of fact, it’s Chrissie Kettering. She’s back. And she doesn’t have to ask her mother every time she goes anywhere. If she did, she says, her street cred. would suffer.’

  ‘Oh, really.’ Molly did her best to sound calm, but she was consumed by a kind of envy. She had been inquiring, probing, consulting the most unreliable sources and making the most dangerous deductions, working, so it seemed to her, in the dark. And her daughter was entering the Ketterings’ lives without any effort and no doubt had access to the best information. ‘So what’s the plan?’

  It turned out that Helena Tapscott, the Tapscotts’ granddaughter, had also been at Nancy Leadbetter’s party and was a great friend of Chrissie’s. So they were all going to meet at the Tapscotts’ around six and then they might go and eat at the ‘trat’ in Mondano with some Italian boys Chrissie knew and who had promised to come out from Siena. And why on earth wouldn’t that be all right and need Samantha come too because she’d only feel left out with everyone older than her? ‘Now tell me I can’t go.’

  ‘Of course you can go. I’ll drive you over.’

  When Henrietta had left to start the long process of deciding what to wear, Molly opened the empty suitcase and rediscovered, zipped into the pocket in its lining, the letter to Signora Kettering. She considered boiling another kettle but she couldn’t be sure of being alone in the kitchen. She decided to renew the cheap brown envelope and might even go so far as to forge the writing of her landlady’s name on it. So she tore it open and found the message from Claudio; this she turned over and saw the three letters at the top of the column of figures: A.I.C. She was sure, now, why the words on top of the gates had seemed familiar to her: AZIENDA IDRAULICA COMUNALE.

  The Tapscotts lived in a small, ochre-coloured farmhouse outside San Pietro in Crespi. They took Molly into a barn converted into a studio and sent Henrietta out to join the young people in the garden.

  ‘All right,’ the tall, sadly smiling Nicholas Tapscott, who looked more than ever as though he’d been rolled in flour, said, ‘honest injun, now. I haven’t caught it, have I? Whatever it is, I haven’t caught it.’

  One wall was covered with his landscapes. These were views of Tuscany painted in oils in which the soft colours of the countryside had become hard and metallic; they were the sort of pictures which, had the artist more talent, might have gone on sale in Boots together with Eurasian ladies and tearful clowns. On another wall Connie Tapscott’s foxy-faced Victorian children had more originality but caused greater embarrassment.

  ‘Ought to be so blooming easy. Wonderful views round here. Spectacular light. Nice little studio. No expense spared on Reeves colours. Why can’t I catch it, Mrs Pargeter?’

  Through the open door Molly could see the young people on the sun-baked grass. The boys stood silent and aloof as the English girls chattered to each other and occasionally, like daring children who ring doorbells, tried a challenging word to the Italian visitors and then retreated. She saw a fair-haired girl she took to be Chrissie Kettering put her hand on Henrietta’s shoulder,
tell her something and then double up with laughter. Molly envied her daughter such confidences and wondered how she too might earn them.

  ‘Do you think I ought to get drunk?’ Nicholas was asking, his pale face very close to hers. “‘Smoke pot”? Go “on the needle”? Or do I have to “sleep around” a bit?’ He raised his eyebrows as he mockingly placed inverted commas round each of these activities. ‘I mean, when I was in the Consular Service, we weren’t meant to do any of that. Otherwise you’d take early retirement. Or get posted to New Zealand. But to be an artist! Must say, I’d be prepared to take on anything. Not a word to Connie.’ Nicholas said this with a heavy wink and his wife standing two feet away from him.

  ‘Nicholas is far too modest about his oils,’ Connie Tapscott said diplomatically. ‘I really do think he’s seen something in these Tuscan hills.’

  ‘But not the right thing, my dear. Oh, I do love it. Jeepers, yes. Art’s the greatest thing in the world. Even if you do make a bit of a pig’s breakfast of it.’

  ‘Will you excuse me for a moment? There’s someone I ought to talk to.’ Molly escaped out of the barn door with Nicholas’s voice following her, ‘Have a drink before you go, and look at Connie’s stuff,’ and Mrs Tapscott’s cheerful, ‘Don’t bother. I’m no good either.’

  ‘You must be Chrissie Kettering.’ The girl was shorter than Henrietta, although perhaps a year older, and had darker, golden skin, no doubt inherited from her mother. ‘We’re so much enjoying your house. It’s kind of your parents to let us have it.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it, Mrs Pargeter. Hetty told me about the water. I hope it’s all right now.’

  ‘Oh yes. I don’t know how that happened,’ she lied, as by now she had a very clear idea about the water. ‘I think it must have been some sort of a mistake. I mean, it shouldn’t have dried up in your house, should it?’

  ‘It never has.’