Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  If that old fool were to pass away in the night, Haverford thought, it’d be a merciful release. He’s had his four score years. How much more can he expect?

  ‘Well,’ Nancy Leadbetter turned to Molly and asked, in the silence that followed, ‘have I satisfied your curiosity about the Ketterings?’

  ‘Except for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, and what’s that?’

  ‘What sort of connection Sandra Kettering has with the Water Board.’

  Nancy said nothing but looked at her guests’ empty plates, stretched out a plump arm and rang her silver bell. Then she looked at the old Prince and said, ‘We mustn’t bore you with local gossip, Tosti. Tell us all you know about Jack Gerontius and the Arnaldo woman. Is she liable to get all his money?’

  ‘Who’d’ve thought it?’

  ‘Who’d have thought what?’

  ‘All those years ago. When Arnold was buying this place and he sent you out to look at it. I’d taken off for Siena, do you remember, allegedly to do my book Oscar Wilde and the Soul of Socialism, but really so we could meet.’

  ‘And did we?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Meet.’

  ‘You don’t remember that room I had behind the hospital, and the wine that tasted of sulphur and ox blood?’

  ‘I remember coming here,’ Nancy said, ‘when there was no furniture and the mess old Baderini had left it in. I remember the cold and the stone floors…’

  Sitting beside her on a sofa after dinner, Haverford was enormously encouraged. He remembered the bright chilly day in December when they had bought a picnic, lit pine branches in the fireplace and made a bed of their overcoats on the floor of the room they were now in, and Nancy had been perfectly willing to oblige him. He remembered her long, white legs, her red hair and easily provoked laughter. On the sofa opposite them, Prince Tosti Castelnuovo was asking Hugh if he were, by any chance, related to some Pargeters who lived outside Tunbridge Wells and were obscurely connected with the Greek Royal Family and thus to Tosti’s deceased wife. ‘We must be sort of cousins,’ he told Hugh sadly. ‘Everyone I meet is related. My poor wife once spent a weekend with your Tunbridge Wells relations. She said it was an appalling experience. They took no precautions whatever against insects.’

  Molly stirred her coffee and thought over all that Nancy Leadbetter had told her. She watched her father blow out the blue flame which was singeing the coffee beans floating on his large glass of Sambuca. She couldn’t hear what he was saying to their hostess.

  ‘You obliged me just over there, before you had a single carpet down.’

  ‘This place is too big for me now,’ Nancy told him. ‘I rattle around in it like a pea in a drum.’

  ‘Too big’ — Haverford took a swig of his hot, sticky drink — ‘for a person alone.’

  ‘You could certainly say that.’

  ‘But for two people…’

  ‘It never seemed too big when Arnold was here.’

  ‘I think Arnold would have liked it.’

  ‘What would Arnold have liked?’

  ‘Us being together. He always liked you being with artists. Artists need you, Nancy. Arnold knew that. You cheered us up considerably. I believe you even did something for my prose.’

  ‘There’s one thing I wish you’d make clear to your daughter…’

  ‘I was born with a perfect ear, of course. But during my marriage to the mother of my child… Well, hardly a child any more. You see her sitting over there? Looks as though she’s got all the cares of the world on her shoulders.’

  ‘I told her about Buck Kettering. I really can’t tell her any more.’

  ‘During my marriage to her mother my prose style became somewhat doleful. Long sentences. Marriage to Molly’s mother was a pretty long sentence in itself!’ Haverford laughed. After drinking his way through dinner, his mind staggered from one subject to another.

  ‘Arnold brought Buck up in the business. Then Buck carried some things on as Arnold would have liked. That was all it amounted to. I don’t think women should take too much of an interest in a business. Arnold didn’t think so either. He would have turned in his grave at some of the things Sandra’s been doing. Arnold believed in the family, but he thought the man should run the business.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect me to do that, I hope.’ Haverford was tired of this incessant talk of the Ketterings. He wandered, a little unsteadily, to the drinks tray under a grey and yellow still life, lemons on a plate. He sloshed out more sticky Sambuca. ‘You wouldn’t expect me to run any business?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Nancy called out to him. ‘From what I remember you could never add up a bill.’

  ‘Order what you like, that’s my motto, but never add up the bill!’ Haverford tried to light his drink but the match went out between his shaking fingers. The hell with it; he drank and refilled his glass, conscious of his daughter watching him as her mother would have been watching him, with disapproval. He closed his eyes and remembered the young Nancy, her sweater pulled up under her armpits, her clothes scattered, her white body lined up on the overcoats with bigger breasts than he had actually bargained for, but a comfort, he had told himself, in the cold weather. It was a picture he would have to keep continually in his mind during his future encounters with the greatly increased Nancy Leadbetter. There were still years, perhaps many years, for them to enjoy. She had told him she was lonely, that she was tired of rattling about alone in this huge villa where the gardens had been planned by a Cardinal. No time like the present, he thought, for popping the fatal question. He refilled his glass and returned to sit by Nancy on the sofa.

  ‘So there’s no reason for any of you to concern yourself,’ Nancy said, ‘with Buck’s business.’

  ‘Of course not. I’ll be happy to leave that entirely to him, when the time comes.’

  ‘When the time comes?’ She looked at him, he thought, nervously. Well, it was a bit late for Nancy Leadbetter to start acting like a virgin.

  ‘Hasn’t the time come for us to go on where we left off?’

  ‘Where we did what?’

  “‘How sad and bad and mad it was”’ — Haverford fell back on a quotation. “‘But then, how it was sweet!”’

  ‘I do seem to remember,’ Nancy said carefully, ‘coming here with you when the house was empty.’

  ‘You said you were all alone now,’ Haverford began in a heartfelt whisper, anxious that Molly shouldn’t overhear him. ‘Of course I’m lonely too, although I hardly “rattle round” my little flat at the World’s End. What I so much want to do with my life is…’ But what he wanted to do immediately was to answer a sudden, peremptory call of nature. His proposal speech was to be succinct but the answer might be long and hesitant. This was no moment to risk incontinence, an ever-present threat to Haverford. He thrust one hand deep into his trouser pocket, crossed the room with a curious half-running, half-limping gait and crashed out of the door.

  Once in the marble-paved passage he was uncertain as to which way to bolt and dared not waste time by returning to the sitting-room to ask. He saw a pair of glass doors which opened on to the terraced garden, ran and wrenched them open. There was moonlight by now, with black shadows cast by clipped yew hedges with niches in them for sculptures. In front of him was a balustrade with an opening on to a broad, pebbled staircase which led to other terraces and the pool. Haverford ran across the grass, steadied himself by leaning with one hand against a statue, unzipped himself, stood looking up at the moon, and experienced an enormous relief. He remembered a story about Sibelius, whom some admirer had seen standing in a darkened garden and approached with reverence, thinking that the master was evolving another Finlandia, only to find him contentedly watering the lawn. Haverford felt he had at least this in common with the composer Sibelius, they both loved peeing in the open air. However he was probably more drunk than Sibelius and he leant heavily against his supporting statue. It was a Giacometti figure, a lanky and desiccated pin woman, a pride of Arnold’s
collection but not carrying the weight to support an intoxicated Haverford Downs. Furthermore its concrete base had become cracked and somewhat powdery over the years. The result was the collapse of Haverford in the anorexic arms of a spindly statue, a sensation as far removed from sinking into the welcoming vastness of Nancy Leadbetter as could well be imagined.

  When he had picked himself up, Haverford also did his best to pick up the statue. This was not an easy task; although it was a great deal thinner than he was, it was also considerably taller. For some while in that moonlit garden Haverford Downs gave the appearance of a man dancing with a skeleton. At last he had it upright and although it tottered a little on its broken foot he was able to withdraw cautiously without it toppling to the ground.

  He didn’t immediately return to the house. The night air had made him dizzy and he wanted to recover. His trousers were a little splashed and he wanted to give them time to dry. He also reconsidered his approach to Nancy. Perhaps it was a mistake to pop the question so suddenly after dinner with his daughter sitting almost within earshot. He would do it on paper, where he was always at his best. He would write her a letter, funny, charming, self-deprecating, but offering Nancy a few more years of laughter such as they had known when the world was a better place and no one took life so ridiculously seriously. ‘We are old enough now, surely,’ he sketched out a few sentences, ‘to be quite irresponsible. Shall we do our best to be problem grandparents, senile delinquents? Shall we concentrate on shocking our children; they are, after all, so delightfully shockable?’ As he walked up and down the grass terrace, designed by that Baderini who was described as Cardinal for the Office of Corruption at the court of Pope Urban VIII, Haverford heard the wail of a police siren and thought that the place was really getting more like New York every day. So he decided merely to say to Nancy that he had something of the greatest importance to tell her and that she would hear from him soon. He lit one of the Italian cigars that Hugh had bought him, took another turn up and down the terrace, made sure the Giacometti was still precariously upright, and went back into the house.

  As he did so, he heard a car arriving with a screech of tyres in the drive on the other side of the villa, a bell rang and, as he went through the tall, glass doors, he heard distant and excited Italian voices. He appeared in the drawing-room and all its occupants rose to their feet.

  Molly saw her father come in with a cigar in his hand and his zip still half undone. ‘I have something of the greatest importance to tell you…’ he said, but was interrupted by four frowning carabinieri pushing through the door behind him, followed by the protesting manservant in white gloves. Molly looked at Nancy Leadbetter as the law arrived and saw, on her face, an expression of terror.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  There were so many parties in that week. Even the grey and usually dour town of Mondano-in-Chianti had a party. Jacqueline had a sleep in the afternoon so that they could all go to it.

  ‘What’s this party for?’ Samantha asked as they struggled down a seemingly endless line of cars parked on both sides of the narrow road, among a moving stream of tourists and local inhabitants, lit by the headlights of cursing drivers trying to get in or the tail-lights of cursing drivers trying to get out, where a fragment of a twelfth-century wall, the crumbling remains of a fourteenth-century castle, were floodlit. From the square came the hugely amplified sound of a group from Florence pounding electric guitars and intoning ‘Bimini, Rimini, Bim, Bim, Bim’, a number which had won nulles pointes for Italy in the Eurovision Song Contest.

  ‘For?’ Haverford was panting as he struggled to keep up with them. ‘I have no doubt it’s some religious festival. Probably the feast of the blessed Santa Margherita of Mondano.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘A person’ — Haverford looked at his daughter who was walking beside him — ‘who died of curiosity. Like the cat.’

  Their group was separated for a moment, and lit by the red brake-lights of another backing car. Police whistles shrilled in the darkness. ‘Bimini, Rimini, Bim, Bim, Bim,’ they could hear the group baying. When they were walking together again, Molly warned the children, ‘You shouldn’t believe everything your grandfather says.’

  ‘A married woman who lived in perfect obscurity in Roman times. She happened to be a Christian. No one would have worried unduly about that but she couldn’t resist asking questions. At great personal inconvenience she sought out the governor of the province and asked him what he thought would happen to his immortal soul. She intruded on a minor sort of general in his tent to ask him if he had considered the text “Blessed are the peacemakers”. Then she travelled to Rome; she threw a letter at the feet of the Emperor asking him if he had considered his position with regard to the doctrine of original sin. In the end they arranged for her to meet a lion and a wolf in the public arena. She might even have been let off that if she hadn’t asked her judges whether they thought the conception of Jupiter was in any way immaculate. She was canonized by Pope John Paul I, so there’s hope for you yet, Saint Molly Coddle…’

  ‘I like wolves,’ said Jacqueline from her father’s shoulders. And then a firework zipped into the purple sky, exploded with a crack that silenced the guitar players and fell in a shower of silver balls and sharp detonations. In spite of all Haverford said the town festival appeared to have no religious significance. The Virgin remained imprisoned in the stuffy church and wasn’t taken out for an airing. Don Marco was preceded by no procession of candle-carrying choir-boys, nor did he wear lace. He was in his usual soup-stained cassock, standing beside what seemed to be a Bring and Buy stall in aid of the Partito Comunista d’Italia. Strings of brightly coloured sweets hung like jewels beneath naked electric light bulbs. After the fireworks Samantha, Henrietta and Hugh tried their hands at shooting the pips out of alien playing-cards. Molly led Jacqueline to a long table under the walls where her father sat drinking Chianti Crocetto out of a paper cup and viewing the passing scene through watery blue eyes.

  ‘What was the point of all those lies about Saint Margherita?’ She accepted a cup of mineral water and gave Jacqueline a sip.

  ‘Not lies. A myth of my own devising.’

  ‘I’ve got a subject,’ Molly told him, ‘for one of your precious “Jottings”. And there’s nothing mythical about it.’

  ‘Is it something unbelievably sexy about homemade cannelloni?’

  ‘I can give you a scoop. Wouldn’t you like to expose the water racket in the Tuscan hills, the unacceptable face of free enterprise among the well-heeled ex-pats? That sort of thing’d be meat and drink to the readers of the Informer.’

  ‘Investigate the water? I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I think I can tell you all you need to know.’ A final firework, which had been hard to light, went off with a cannonade which echoed round the walls and died away along the road to Siena.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Haverford said, ‘I don’t need to know anything.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you do. It’s much better to know things, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a proposition, Molly Coddle, on which you and I might agree to differ.’ Jacqueline had slid off her mother’s knees to embrace a swarthy Italian four-year-old in satin shorts and a bow-tie. This scene, which brought sighs of ecstasy and delighted laughter from the extended family seated around them, seemed to Haverford only fit for the most revolting type of postcard.

  ‘Water’s like gold in these here hills. Everyone tells you that.’ Molly went on relentlessly, ‘Don’t you think Arnold Leadbetter tried to cash in on it?’

  ‘Old Arnold, who was always careful to turn a blind eye?’

  ‘Not when he saw a chance of making money. All he needed were friends in the Water Board who could turn off the supply on request. Then the desperate holidaymakers could be expected to pay through the nose to get their water back again. I’m not sure how far the business extended. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went all through Tuscany.’

  ‘Ar
nold may have cut a few corners in his life.’ Haverford called for a refill of his paper cup. ‘But you seem to forget; he’s been called by the Great Property Developer in the Skies.’

  ‘And Nancy’s taken over the racket.’

  ‘You heard her, didn’t you? She doesn’t think women should be concerned with business.’

  ‘I’m sure she doesn’t. So she left it all in the capable hands of Arnold’s right-hand man, T. Buckland Kettering. But, I’m sure’ — Molly seemed anxious to absolve Buck from as much guilt as possible — ‘Sandra Kettering had a great deal to do with running the affair. She’s got no old-fashioned ideas about a woman’s place being in the bedroom. She’s the operator who gets a letter from someone called Claudio, with a list of profits from the Idraulica.’ She had once thought it was a love letter but nothing in Sandra Kettering’s story as she now told it had much to do with love. ‘Sandra and this Claudio seem to have planned to get Buck Kettering out of the business.’

  ‘How on earth do you know all this?’

  ‘I guessed some of it; most of it seems pretty obvious. You saw Nancy’s face when the police arrived.’

  ‘Anyone foolish enough to keep a spindly tin statue wired to the police station in just the place a chap has to lean when he wants to pump ship’ — Haverford had taken to this nautical way of putting it in recent years, perhaps when he saw himself as a grizzled ship’s Captain, weathered by the storms of life — ‘Anyone foolish enough to do that is in for a very nasty surprise.’