Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘Then perhaps we were just unlucky. Hetty says you’ve met in London,’ Molly went on with her questioning, although Henrietta was making eyes at her, beseeching her to go away please, to talk to the old grandparents or, better still, drive home and stop embarrassing her in front of her friends. ‘Do your parents have a place in London as well?’

  ‘Not now. My sister and I stay with our aunt in the school terms. Holland Park, actually. I think Mummy and Daddy like to spend all the time they can in Italy.’

  ‘And the baby. Violetta, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, she’s with Mummy, really all the time.’

  ‘I would like to ring your mother. Just to tell her how we’re getting on and to put her mind at rest about the water. She’s not in London?’

  ‘Oh no. Rome. Staying with friends. I’ve got the number.’ It all seemed far too easy, but then Chrissie, who had been searching in a huge woollen shoulder-bag, said, ‘Sorry. I left it at the house we’re staying in. Nancy Leadbetter’s.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just an idea. I suppose I could ring your father, actually.’

  ‘Well, that’s a bit harder. He’s gone off somewhere. Business, I suppose.’

  ‘He was going to take Chrissie on a trip.’ Henrietta spoke for the first time to point out the unreliability of parents in general.

  ‘What fun.’ Molly tried to sound not particularly interested. ‘Where was he going to take you?’

  ‘Oh, to see a lot of paintings. He said it was time I learnt about them. We were going to stay with him at “La Felicità” before you came too, but he couldn’t fit that in somehow.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right. I’ve been travelling. We’ve been to all sorts of places.’

  ‘She’s allowed to travel’ – Henrietta looked at her mother rebukingly – ‘without her parents.’

  ‘I go with my friends,’ Chrissie said. ‘It’s much better.’

  Then they discussed how Henrietta would get home and Chrissie said the Tapscotts would drive them, or one of the Italian boys who had a car. Before she went, Molly thanked Chrissie again for the loan of her house and, as she turned back into the unfortunately hung studio, said, ‘Those pictures your father was going to take you to see. I suppose they were the Piero della Francescas.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Chrissie told her. ‘He’s been promising to show me those for years.’

  The next morning Molly rang Nancy Leadbetter only to discover, after the usual confused series of questions and answers, that Chrissie and her friends had moved on. It might have been to Orvieto. She might be coming back that way, but then again she might not. No, Nancy had absolutely no idea of Sandra Kettering’s phone number in Rome. Molly put down the telephone in the kitchen as Giovanna came sweeping in from the terrace where Haverford, jotting in the shade, called out, ‘Ciao, bellissima!’ as she left him.

  ‘Giovanna, lei sa il numero di telefono della Signora Kettering a Roma?’

  ‘No.’ Giovanna pressed her lips together and brushed even more energetically at the clean kitchen floor. Then she got a dustpan on a long handle and introduced a minute quantity of dust into it.

  ‘Giovanna. Il vecchio signore fuori…’ Molly had worked on her Teach Yourself Italian from the time when she had first answered the advertisement; she could make herself ungrammatically understood in most shops and restaurants. But now, as when she quarrelled with Hugh, the house itself seemed to come to her aid, suggesting words and phrases for the complicated speech she was about to utter about the old gentleman on the terrace. ‘Il vecchio signore,’ she said, ‘is a great English writer. He is a historian. He is studying the history of Mondano-in-Chianti during the war. He will write which families worked with the Tedeschi and which fought for freedom. He would like to write down the story of Giovanna’s family.’ Meanwhile she wished to speak to Signora Kettering in Rome, so would Giovanna please give her the number. Tante grazie. Giovanna gave her a look of intense hatred from basilisk eyes and then yanked out a drawer of the dresser. She took out a tin which contained crumpled shopping-lists, old bills, notes of laundry done and slapped a small square of graph paper, decorated with a row of figures, on to the kitchen table. ‘Grazie, Giovanna.’ Molly was unsmiling. ‘Grazie mille.’

  She rang the number and it was answered with an immediate, gentle, ‘Pronto. Mrs Kettering? I will pass you to her.’ The voice was in no way deceived by Molly’s Italian. There was a silence, then footsteps and she imagined high heels crossing the marble tiles of a dark Roman piano nobile. Then a voice said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Molly Pargeter here, Mrs Kettering.’

  There was a moment’s pause, it seemed a small intake of breath, and then, ‘Oh yes, Mrs Pargeter. It’s good to hear from you. I hope all is well at “La Felicità”.’

  What could she say? All well, Mrs Kettering? Suppose you tell me. I have discovered a note written with the typewriter you used to write to me on. It seems that one of your objectives was to have your husband gone forever. He has disappeared, Mrs Kettering. Even his child seems to have no idea where he is. I have sleepless nights on this subject and at one moment I thought that the remains of Buck Kettering might have been seen by my daughter down a well. I have rejected that idea, but how do you explain your list and your objective: B. lost and gone forever? In fact she said none of these things, the time not being, she told herself, ripe for such a confrontation. ‘We had a bad moment when the water ran out.’

  ‘I heard about it. It was terrible.’

  ‘A terrible mistake?’

  ‘No. I mean a terrible thing to happen.’ Sandra Kettering had a rich, contralto voice and only a trace of an Italian accent. She sounded concerned.

  ‘It seems to be happening to a number of people.’

  ‘My concern is that it should happen to you.’

  ‘And it led to a tragedy at the house where Mr Fosdyke was staying.’

  There was a longer pause then, and the answer came, ‘It has been a maledetta summer.’

  ‘We’ve had to pay five hundred and thirty thousand lire for water they delivered. Mr Fosdyke was going to get it back from the second half of the rent I gave him.’

  ‘You shall have your money, Mrs Pargeter. After such a tragedy money is not always the first thing one thinks of.’

  Molly felt rebuked. But she couldn’t help saying, ‘Doesn’t it seem rather strange that so many people ran out of water?

  You can’t really blame it on the weather, can you?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mrs Pargeter. I can’t explain it.’

  ‘Can’t you? Then perhaps you should ask your friend Claudio.’

  There was silence, then a click and an angry buzzing. Molly put down the phone and dialled again but there was no reply, no friend picked up the phone and offered to pass her to Signora Kettering in a voice which she thought she had identified as that of Vittoria Dulcibene.

  ‘My God, what a crafty old manipulator you’ve become.’ Haverford, his straw hat on the side of his head and his papers under his arm, came in from the terrace. ‘Pure Italian Renaissance guile, mixed with some not very covert threats. Have you become Molly the Machiavelli?’

  She moved away from the phone and put on the kettle to make coffee, pretending to have no idea what her father meant. Two days later, when she called at the post office, she found a letter from the Banco dell’Annunziazione informing her that the sum of five hundred and thirty thousand lire awaited her collection at their branch in Mondano-in-Chianti. She couldn’t be entirely sure whether she was receiving hush money or the payment of a debt.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  JOTTINGS FROM TUSCANY

  by Haverford Downs

  ‘Marriage,’ wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, who may have some cause to know, ‘is a battlefield.’ Although this is undoubtedly true, hostilities are carried out in a very different way in Italy and England. At home we believe in the uneasy truce and the balance of terror. A pre-emptive strike may lead to the divorce
court, crippling alimony or a lonely old age without the comfort of a domestic quarrel. So the war remains cold with, at best, formal exchanges and, at worst, the severing of diplomatic relations.

  In Italy they order things differently. It was here, among these very hills, that in 1610 the highly aristocratic Lucia Baderini married her major-domo. For this offence the unfortunate husband was flung from the top of the campanile in Siena, during the Palio, by members of the family. It is said that in the excitement of the race this act of execution passed unnoticed.

  Up the road from the villa now inhabited by your man in Chiantishire, as I have already mentioned, is the Castello Crocetto, home of the Barone Dulcibene and some of the world’s best Chianti Classico. In the eighteenth century an old and crusty Dulcibene lived in Rome with his beautiful young wife. At a ball given by the British Ambassador to the Holy See she danced once too often with a cavalry officer. That night the Barone ordered his wife from the ballroom and took her in his carriage to this distant and isolated castle. She was never seen again in public and the Barone, whose life was given over to guarding his prisoner, devoted his leisure hours to blending black and white grapes to produce the pure wine we pour down our throats each night without the slightest fear of a hangover. Things didn’t end so happily for the young cavalry officer, who was found floating face downwards in the Tiber a few weeks after the fatal ball.

  To what extent does this extreme manner of regulating your domestic affairs persist in Italian culture? I put the problem to my old friend Don Marco over a glass of grappa in his stifling little study in Mondano (the good priest, who risked his life fighting the Nazi war machine, now lives in daily fear of draughts, an unreasonable terror with the temperature hovering in the eighties). I asked him how many of his flock might, at some time or another, have been guilty of a crime of passion, but I couldn’t get him to reveal the secrets of the confessional. However, my favourite cleric (who would have made the Red Dean of Canterbury look an uninteresting shade of watery pink) told me that Italian women take it as a huge compliment that murders might be committed on their account, even if they often become the victims. He also said that Englishwomen have become nervous and unhappy because their husbands no longer care enough to resort to assassination. The crime passionnel is, according to my religious adviser, the greatest compliment an Italian can pay to a marriage: at least it means that the husband has found something to feel passionel about.

  Haverford sat by the swimming-pool and read what he’d written so far. ‘Can I do work?’ Jacqueline asked and, climbing on to his knees without invitation, began to draw minute shapes, said by her to be fish, on his sheet of paper. Hugh had taken the two older girls into Siena, Henrietta being particularly depressed by a return to family life after a brilliant evening out with Chrissie Kettering, who had now moved on. It was a still day and very hot, a dragonfly dipped and skimmed the water of the pool, the child who unaccountably loved him frowned with concentration and wriggled on his lap. In spite of all he had written about marriage, Haverford wondered if he might not, perhaps, given the most favourable circumstances, try it again. ‘I’ll go no more a’roving,’ the old man thought, giving his past a romantic glow which it had hardly had at the time, ‘so late into the night’, round the Gargoyle in Soho just after the war, or the Arethusa in the King’s Road in the sixties, or even until closing time in the Nell Gwyn pub at the World’s End. ‘For the sword outwears its sheath’, but not yet, not quite yet. And Haverford thought that seventy-seven was no age at all nowadays: being old was still safely five years ahead of wherever he was. The sword still had a little life in it, particularly when he woke up in the mornings. It was only his legs that hurt him. ‘Get off now, darling,’ he said to Jacqueline as the child’s weight induced a stab of pain in one swollen ankle. Well, what did the legs matter? The best things in life, after all, can be better enjoyed lying down. The thing about you, Haverford, he confided in his more private and not as yet published ‘Jottings’, is that you have had the most prolonged and perhaps the most pleasurable adolescence in the history of mankind. But settling down, that was something he might make a go of now. His own marriage, of course, had clearly been impossible; his wife had lacked the essential talent of being able to turn a blind eye.

  ‘My God, Molly Coddle. Aren’t you putting old Hughie through the ordeal of fire and ice?’ His daughter came to sit by the pool to read Henry James’s Italian Hours, one of the books which the Ketterings kept on display.

  ‘Chaps do send the odd furtive p.c. when on a family holiday, you know. It’s a fact of human nature. Has been, I suppose, ever since the postcard was invented.’

  ‘You were listening to our quarrel.’

  ‘Of course. What do you expect? You can’t keep secrets in a family.’

  ‘Hugh hasn’t been unfaithful.’

  ‘No. I do see that’s very hard to excuse. Poor old Hughie, all froth and no Guinness. It makes you despair of the fellow.’

  ‘I really don’t think you know very much about it. Don’t go into the pool without your arm-bands, darling!’ Molly called across at Jacqueline who was wriggling in the white plastic reclining chair in which she had first seen the late Signor Fixit.

  ‘I know a good deal about it. As I told you, exactly the same thing happened to me when I was with your sainted mother. You call to mind when I postcarded a girlfriend from a hotel in Siena?’

  ‘I remember what you told us.’

  ‘Two differences in that case. One, your mother did crash the car into the ospedale, but two days later she’d forgotten the subject and we were rowing about something else. Two, I had more than an academic interest in the girl concerned. I mean, we’d got a bit further than consummating our relationship through the post.’

  ‘Do you call regular little lunches and not saying anything about them “academic”?’

  ‘Of course I do. And so is kissing a bit of crackling goodbye in the wide open spaces of Chancery Lane.’

  ‘Chancery Lane? Did you say Chancery Lane?’

  ‘Well, it was just’ – Haverford hadn’t really meant his son-in-law any further harm – ‘a figure of speech.’

  ‘How did you know he kissed her in Chancery Lane? Is that where the “Dolce Vita” is?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why I said it. I just imagined that might have been where he kissed her. If he’d ever dared to do anything quite so flagrant.’

  ‘Isn’t that near the Informer office?’

  ‘Near his office too.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say you actually saw them?’

  ‘Now, Molly Coddle. I told you. It was a pure guess. Just something I happened to say. That’s all.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  She turned her attention to her book. There was a long silence. Curled up and sucking her thumb, Jacqueline appeared to be asleep. Two dragonflies were now skimming the pool.

  ‘How does it come about,’ Haverford said, ‘that you and I are so entirely different?’

  ‘Please, I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

  ‘You see, I don’t think it matters whether you believe me or not. What matters is that you should understand me, even understand old Hughie too, comprehend our weakness. Not be forever ferreting out the truth like some merciless inspector of police. The truth is probably the least important thing about us.’

  She didn’t answer him and he knew that she felt no sympathy for what he had said.

  ‘I’d like you to understand me some time. Particularly as I’m thinking of making a bit of a change in my way of life. What would you feel, tell me honestly, Molly Coddle, if I decided to get married again?’

  She looked up at him unbelieving, and said, ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Well, it’d have to be an old girlfriend. We might not be able to put on much of a show now, but at least we’d have our memories. And someone, well, self-supporting or, even better, Haverford-supporting. Come on now, let’s have a bit of this truth-telling you’re so
famous for. Wouldn’t it be a relief not to have to take me on any more holidays?’

  ‘Who on earth’ – Molly looked at her father – ‘are you thinking of marrying?’

  ‘What do you think of Nancy Leadbetter?’

  ‘But’ – Molly was amazed – ‘she didn’t even remember you.’

  ‘Always one for a joke, old Nancy,’ her father smiled back at her. ‘We used to understand each other pretty well, and no doubt we shall again. We were once happy, you know. I’m sorry not to see you happy. Is that my fault, would you say?’

  ‘Please. I’m perfectly all right.’

  ‘Or is there something in what old Don Marco said? Do Englishwomen want a husband who’d care enough to kill for them?’

  ‘Is that the subject of your “Jottings”?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact. I’m writing a few extra so I’ll have a store to fall back on, if I go back to England.’

  ‘If you say that sort of thing, you’re going to get smothered in letters from outraged women in England.’

  Haverford knew she was right. Covens of women, he told himself, from Battersea to Birkenhead, would write furiously to the Informer demanding his head on a platter, and without a second wife with a spot of cash to her name he couldn’t afford to lose his job. He went back into the house to compose a more neutral final paragraph. But Molly closed her book and sat staring into the water, thinking of what her father had said. Then she picked up Jacqueline as the one sure thing in an uncertain world but the child struggled in her arms, as children will, anxious to be free.

  Hugh found it hard to believe that the effect of a single postcard, which never reached its destination, could be so long lasting. His acts of contrition appeared unavailing and the fact that his knowledge of Mrs Tobias stopped short at the edge of her designer wardrobe seemed not to mitigate his offence but to fuel his wife’s quiet outrage. As he and Molly now had little to say to each other, he spent more time with the older children and discovered an unexpected sympathizer in Henrietta, who was always prepared to widen the gap between her parents. Samantha, a middle child, who had the least of her father’s attention, now found him seeking her out and asking her questions about her school, which half-flattered, half-embarrassed her. In return she sat on his lap, even though she felt too old for it, disturbed his hair and told him how young he looked, cheering him up considerably and acting a role which Mrs Tobias might have filled had their relationship not terminated at lunchtimes. So, unexpectedly, the effect of the matrimonial quarrel was to turn Hugh to the company of his children, and they enjoyed their holiday more because of it.