Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  ‘Sometimes,’ Henrietta said, ‘I just don’t understand her at all. You know what I found her doing the other morning? Packing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, taking her suitcase down ready to pack.’

  ‘She isn’t going anywhere, is she?’

  ‘It seems she was thinking of it, Dad.’

  ‘Thinking of what?’

  ‘Clearing off.’

  ‘You mean leaving us?’

  ‘It’s happened to all my friends’ parents. They’ve practically all split up.’

  Hugh’s feelings were mixed. A sudden sense of freedom alternated with the fear of an uncertain future. A new worry assailed him: would he feel bound, on the strength of all those lunches, to become the second husband of Mrs Tobias? Away from home, sitting in the sun outside the restaurant in the Piazza del Campo with two attentive daughters, watching the people go by and the pigeons wheeling through the air like a squadron of crack pilots, he was detached about the future.

  ‘But she didn’t pack up and go, did she?’

  ‘Not this time. She probably stayed for the sake of Jacky.’

  ‘Jacky!’ Samantha said with feeling. ‘That’s all she thinks about.’

  ‘And Gamps.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why should she stay with me because of Haverford?’

  ‘Oh, because he’s longing for you two to divorce.’ Henrietta had unusual worldly wisdom for a girl of fourteen. ‘And she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing it happen.’

  Hugh considered his situation and came to the conclusion that it was unsatisfactory. He wasn’t in a position to enjoy the company of either his wife or Mrs Tobias. Indeed he seemed to have enjoyed the company of very few women. Unusually, he felt envious of old Haverford who, approaching death, was able to look down a long line of mistresses; some of them he might have forgotten and some might have forgotten him, but at least they had been there and might, with luck, be remembered. And when Hugh could no longer put on his socks with ease what would he have to remember? A string of not entirely successful divorce cases and a long line of lunches.

  ‘It seems to us,’ Samantha said, ‘that Mum’s been different lately.’

  ‘Quite, quite different.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well. She’s not being very nice to you, for instance.’ Hugh had bought his daughters a number of small china objects and decorative pencils to take back to their schoolfriends. He had also bought them each a man’s shirt, to stop them pinching his, and stood Henrietta a white wine and Samantha an orange Fanta. He didn’t put their sympathetic attitude to him down to cupboard love, however. Henrietta’s wide eyes and serious expression seemed to show serious concern.

  ‘It’s crossed our minds,’ Henrietta said, ‘that she might have found someone else.’

  ‘Why ever should you think that?’

  ‘She never seems to want to be with us,’ Samantha reminded her father.

  ‘She actually goes off alone to Mondano,’ Henrietta whispered, as though it were the most serious crime on the indictment.

  ‘She makes a lot of phone calls, too.’

  ‘And she doesn’t care about me going out now.’ Henrietta said this with severe disapproval.

  ‘I thought you’d appreciate that.’ Hugh was puzzled.

  ‘It’s as if,’ Henrietta explained, ‘she just didn’t care about any of us any more.’

  ‘And why do you think that is?’ Samantha summed up triumphantly.

  ‘She must have found a boyfriend.’

  In all the years since he had met his wife Hugh had never felt jealous. Now, in spite of all that had occurred over his ill-advised postcard, he felt an entirely new sensation, a stab of anger at the idea that Molly might be deceiving him.

  ‘Hullo there! Long time no see.’ It was Ken Corduroy, with his handbag strapped to his wrist. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He sat down at their table and the girls looked at him with narrowed eyes; he was, after all, their number one suspect. ‘Everything’s going smoothly at ‘La Felicità’ now?’

  ‘No further trouble with the water, if that’s what you mean.’ And Hugh bought Ken a gin e Schweppes.

  ‘Now that’s over, it’s best forgotten.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You might let your wife know that.’

  In the sunshine, having got outside most of a bottle of white wine from San Gimignano (Michelangelo’s favourite tipple, his father-in-law had told him) Hugh seemed to hear and see with unusual sharpness. Ken Corduroy’s face was very near him; he could see the open pores in the man’s suntanned skin, the grey curls and the fleck of shaving soap which lingered behind his ear. He also saw a smile which seemed to suppress anger.

  ‘I expect she knows.’

  ‘Well, then. I think she’s making a mistake.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Taking people to deal with the Water Board. Getting mixed up in other people’s business. After all, you’ve only been here a couple of weeks, haven’t you?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘It takes years to get to know the ropes round here. Years of experience. There are ways and ways, let me tell you, of dealing with Italian burocrazia. You can’t just blunder into it. Spoils things for those of us chaps who’ve got to live here all the time, you know. She might have thought of that.’

  ‘I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.’

  The children looked at the two men who might be about to quarrel, they thought, over their mother.

  ‘I think she’ll understand,’ Mr Corduroy said, ‘if you give her the message.’

  They got back to the villa in a good mood and had been singing ‘Green Grow the Rushes’ in the car as they used to do when the children were much younger. Hugh spread out his propitiatory gifts of white wine, Dolcelatte cheese and Baci chocolates on the kitchen table. He had even bought Italian cigars for Haverford and a small police car with a wailing siren for Jacqueline. Henrietta produced a bunch of richly smelling carnations her father had bought for her to give her mother. Molly looked at all these things without smiling and, when she was alone with her husband, said, ‘Did you have to kiss that Tobias woman in Chancery Lane?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘And why on earth did you wait to do it until my father was coming along the street? Were you afraid I might not get to know?’

  Hugh could think of nothing to do but slam out of the room and sit by the pool with the two-day-old Telegraph he had found in Siena. Molly stayed in the kitchen and started to look through the packet of photographs he had brought home developed. There were a number of pictures of the children behind plates of spaghetti and Coke bottles on the terrace, one of Haverford in an armchair looking rakish and several, blurred and uninteresting, of the landscape. And then she saw the picture which the waiter had insisted on taking on their first visit to the Piazza del Campo. There was Jacqueline holding a child-sized silk banner and old Haverford staring at the passing girls; there was Hugh smiling quizzically into the camera and there she was, looking as though she wished no one was taking her photograph. Then she held the picture closer to her eyes to study a man who was sitting alone at a table behind them; he was wearing a red shirt and sat with a glass and a folded newspaper in front of him. It seemed that these were the colours of the clothes he often wore because she was as sure as she could have been of anything that it was the same man who had been sitting on the further side of the pool in the picture that had been sent to her before she ever saw the house. And then she made an even more daring assumption. As Giovanna came in with a basket full of clean laundry she held the photograph under her eyes.

  ‘é il Signor Kettering, Giovanna?’

  ‘Sì, Signora,’ the maid had to admit, ‘é il padrone.’

  So Buck Kettering had been alive and well and sitting in Siena on the day the water vanished. His subsequent movements were still a matter for speculation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


  ‘You’re curious about Buck?’ asked Nancy Leadbetter. ‘Well, I can tell you. I’ve known him, of course, since he was quite a lad.’

  It was half-way through their holiday and the weather had changed. In small, hardly noticeable ways there was a hint that it might be time to start thinking about autumn. The mornings were as hot as ever, but sometimes there were clouds in the afternoon and a wind rustled the trees and the long grass on the other side of the swimming-pool. It flapped at the shops and the cafès in Mondano and made them roll up their awnings. The sunflowers in the fields had faded, gone brown: their stalks collapsed and they were ready for harvesting. There were also new smells, like faraway bonfires. Jacqueline, following Giovanna round devotedly, had learned to say buon giorno and count to four in Italian. Haverford, sitting at the table in the garden, with the wind lifting his ‘Jottings’, looked out across the hills and dreamt of a winter with Nancy beside the log fires and among the art works in the Villa Baderini. He would ring for a man to bring him a glass of champagne before lunch, and avoid having to go out in the icy rain at the World’s End to flog an armful of review copies for the price of a dinner with some pick-up from the Nell Gwyn pub he didn’t even fancy. And then, as though in answer to his unspoken prayers, Nancy Leadbetter invited them all to dinner.

  The change in the weather had brought her, it seemed, a change of mind. When she telephoned she had not only grasped the fact that they were the Ketterings’ tenants who had had some sort of trouble with the house, but the figure of Haverford seemed to have cleared the mists of memory. ‘Your father and I were old chums, of course, more years ago than a girl cares to remember. Why don’t you bring him with you, if you could bear to? It won’t be a big party. I’ve done my duty by the British colony for this year. Probably just us and Tosti Castelnuovo. You know the Prince, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Molly admitted on the telephone. ‘I’m afraid we’ve never met.’

  ‘Then it’ll be fun for you’ – Nancy reverted to her old disconnected ways – ‘to get together again.’

  So they sat in the dining-room at the villa where the high chimney-piece, carved in stone with the Baderini escutcheon and a Cardinal’s hat, stretched up to the ceiling, and the fireplace seemed to Molly to be about the size of Hugh’s old bed-sit. Part of Arnold’s collection of modern art hung in little pools of light on the walls and, in the shadows at the distant end of the room, a huge Calder mobile creaked and clanked in the draught when a high door was opened. Prince Castelnuovo turned out to be over eighty; he had a cautious expression and a small, tortoise-like head jutting almost straight out from his collar-bone. He wore a dark blue cashmere scarf over his shoulders and spoke English almost without an accent.

  ‘There are no spiders in this house, are there?’ the Prince had asked Molly when they sat together for a drink before dinner. ‘Have you stayed here? Tell me quite honestly if you have ever seen spiders.’

  ‘I see you two are getting along,’ Nancy had said, ‘remembering old times.’

  ‘No. We’re the ones who’re remembering old times,’ Haverford had called from the sofa where he had been sitting with Nancy. The sight of a man so clearly much older than himself had cheered him up considerably, as had the fact that his hostess now seemed to remember him without difficulty. ‘Who is that old boy exactly?’ he whispered to her on their way into the dining-room and, ‘Do you expect him to live through dinner?’

  ‘Don’t be naughty,’ Nancy smiled at him. ‘Tosti was always a great help to Arnold.’

  It was when they were arranged round the dinner table, a little raft of people in the ocean of a room, and the sallow manservant in white gloves was handing round dishes of iced soup, that Nancy turned to Hugh on her left and offered to satisfy his curiosity on the subject of Buck.

  ‘Buck?’ Hugh looked, for a moment, blank.

  ‘Well, of course’ – Molly, on the other side of the table, had pricked up her ears – ‘you can’t help wondering about someone whose house you are in.’ Hugh drank his soup, conscious of the fact that, from the moment his father-in-law had mentioned a kiss in Chancery Lane, it was impossible for him to say the right thing.

  ‘You have a house here?’ the Prince said very slowly.

  ‘No. We’ve leased the Ketterings’.’ Molly wished to deal with him quickly so that she could listen to Nancy.

  ‘I sincerely hope your house’ – Prince Tosti’s voice was tremulous and had a note of fear in it – ‘is spider-free.’

  ‘Buck Kettering,’ Nancy told them, ‘came to work for my husband when he was about eighteen. I don’t know what he was: tea-boy, runner, general dogsbody. But very willing. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t ask him to do. Arnold took a liking to the boy, promoted him. He had an area of the property business to look after. Arnold gave all the young boys an area, a “Fiefdom” he used to call it. Well, Kettering’s area was around Buckland Terrace in the East End of London. Whitechapel, I think. He collected the rents. Managed the properties. My husband always said he managed them beautifully.’

  ‘Tremendously good fellow, your husband.’ Haverford had become bored with the turn the conversation was taking and wanted to guide it to some more interesting subject, such as himself. ‘I always thought, Nancy, that Arnold had a great deal in common with the late Lord Nelson. He knew when to turn a blind eye.’

  ‘So that’s how young Kettering got the name Buckland. After his area, you see. When he came to us we all knew him as Terence. I think of him as Terry still.’

  Molly was listening, astonished. It was as though all her ideas had been turned upside down once more. She had thought a lot about the name Buckland but never dreamt that Kettering might have been called after a street in London where he collected the rents. She looked at Nancy who sat huge and motionless in her high-backed, carved chair at the head of the table and seemed pleased by the effect that her story was having on at least one of her listeners. In her shapeless, filmy red dress and with her dyed, copper-coloured hair their hostess looked like an old fortune-teller on the end of Brighton Pier.

  ‘Well, he got promoted in the business and Terry became absolutely fascinated with Arnold’s collection. He went to night school and actually took some sort of a degree, I think, in the history of art. He must have worked hard at it because I imagine he left school when he was about fifteen. But he had a real feeling and better taste than I had, quite frankly. He got so good, Arnold used to send him abroad to buy stuff for him. He came back with some marvellous bargains.’

  ‘Clever old him.’ Haverford was still hoping for a change of subject. ‘The world is divided between those who can create art and those who can make money out of it. In my own small way, of course, I’ve always been one of the creators.’

  ‘But how’ – Molly felt that if only she could keep the old woman going she would hear the sentence which would allow her to understand everything about Buckland Kettering - ‘how did he come to get the house here and…’

  ‘Marry Sandra? Is that what you want to know?’ Nancy seemed only too ready to gratify her curiosity, but before she went on she leant forward and tinkled a silver bell, which summoned the man in white gloves to remove the soup plates and bring in the bollito misto. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. When Arnold bought this place we used to have Terry out to stay, part holiday and part to report on the business. And it was then he began to look at the old pictures. He’d spend days, weeks sometimes, in Florence and Siena. He was bowled over by them. He wouldn’t speak about it. I remember he used to say, it’s secret. They have to be enjoyed in secret. He never took anyone with him: always went to the churches and the galleries alone. Well, he had a bit of money by then, thanks to Arnold, and so he bought ‘La Felicità’ when it was pretty well a ruin with cows and horses living on the ground floor and chickens upstairs. And he did it up. So then he looked round for a wife.’

  ‘And found Sandra,’ Molly asked, ‘in a sweet shop in Siena?’ Hugh looked at his wife and wondered why she had both
ered to find out all these things.

  ‘You’ve got it. Have you met Sandra?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve spoken on the phone, of course. She sounded –’

  ‘Common?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say that.’

  ‘That’s what she is, though, dead common. Nothing particularly wrong with that. I’m common.’

  ‘Most uncommon, I’d’ve said, Nancy.’ Haverford rose gallantly to the occasion.

  ‘Nonsense. I’m common as dirt, always have been. It’s a funny thing, Arnold’s father was a little tailor in Whitechapel but he was never in the least bit common and Terry was the lad from Buckland Terrace and he wasn’t common either. You know, the way he’s done up ‘La Felicità’. Nothing common about that, is there? I mean, no cocktail cabinets or tanks of tropical fish like a successful East Ender would flaunt at you.’

  And so many art books on the shelves, Molly thought, and all the paperbacks stuck up in the loft. And yet T. Buckland Kettering felt deeply about the pictures in them, something she had always known.

  ‘I was staying with Andrew Spratling at Porto Ercole,’ the Prince piped up in a small, precise voice as though he were adding some useful information to what Nancy had told them, ‘and I awoke at about two in the morning. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I turned on the light to read and what should I see but a large spider hanging from the ceiling by means of a string produced from its own body! I did not hesitate. I got out of bed stealthily and dressed as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the insect. I packed all my clothes and shut my case; the spider was still hanging there as I tiptoed out of the room. It seemed to me that its awful little eyes were upon me. I went down the stairs and let myself out of the front door. Then I walked to the hotel where luckily there was a porter on duty and a vacant room. Early the next morning I returned to my own home in Milano. I shall not stay there again. I become nervous of spiders and of omosessuali, and at Andrew Spratling’s house one finds both.’