Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  Long ago, it now seemed almost a life-time ago, she had stood in one of the children’s bedrooms and the dead man, she must get used to thinking of him as dead, had said, ‘I’m not Kettering, or anywhere near it. The name’s Fosdyke. William Fosdyke.’ So he was known to the family at ‘La Felicità’ as Bill — another ‘B.’ perhaps, even the ‘B.’ referred to in the cryptic note which had disappeared from Kenneth Clark’s book on Piero, the ‘B.’ who needed to be lost and gone forever. And Bill was certainly gone, more definitely, more irretrievably than Buck, who might be only awaiting his moment to return from any part of the world in which he might have been hiding himself.

  The list hadn’t been signed. It had been typed on the Ketterings’ machine but might have been composed by either Buck or Sandra. And would the woman who had started life in a chocolate shop in Siena write notes to herself in English? Molly, perhaps in her eagerness to convict Sandra, had avoided that consideration. And then she thought of her family’s arrival at ‘La Felicità’. Whom had they disturbed and had someone, perhaps two people, been staying in the house, keeping it supplied and leaving quietly by the back road when the Pargeters arrived much earlier than expected? She remembered the feeling of someone watching her from the shadows of the terrace and the key forgotten in the lock.

  She walked back into the house and climbed past the tidiers and furniture removers to the first floor. In the kitchen Haverford was acting the host, pouring out glasses of wine and Diet Coke. Hugh was feeding Jacqueline a biscuit. Molly went past them and into the big bedroom she shared with her husband.

  She locked the door and pulled the suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. The zip was undone, which didn’t surprise her as all the young people had been in there looking for dressing-up clothes, and the letter to Sandra from Claudio gone. The mystery of the vanishing water was no longer what concerned her.

  She stood looking at her clothes and Hugh’s and then she remembered something else. The first sight she had had of the wardrobe with two white garments, a man’s shirt and a woman’s skirt dangling from coat-hangers. And even when they all arrived at the house, she was sure the wardrobe hadn’t been entirely empty. She pushed her clothes along the rail and found what she had been looking for, squashed against the wood.

  The shirt was plain white, but had initials embroidered in blue on the breast-pocket. The letters were B.A.F. She couldn’t tell if the A. was the first letter of a name, or if it had merely been inserted to separate two letters which might otherwise have looked ridiculous.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The next morning the visitors packed up as efficiently as an army on the move and left. Chrissie said goodbye and thanked her hostess as politely as she might have been taught to do when she was a little girl leaving a party. ‘Thank you for having us, Mrs Pargeter. We had a smashing time.’

  ‘Goodbye, Chrissie. Oh, and please come and see us in London. I know the girls would love to see you.’ Molly looked at the brown-armed, self-confident girl who had unwittingly told her so much in the charades. What had happened, what might be about to happen, would be hard for Chrissie Kettering. She felt a curious longing to keep her with her and to look after her. ‘Do stay with us a little longer, if you’d like to.’

  ‘No, really. I must go with my friends. But it’s very kind of you.’ At which Molly put her hands on the girl’s shoulders and kissed her cheek, as though asking forgiveness for whatever she intended to do. Then Chrissie broke away and ran out to the old, overloaded car in which the front seat was being kept for her as the undoubted leader. ‘Thanks again,’ she shouted. ‘Send you a postcard,’ and slammed the car door shut.

  ‘They’re marching away, Molly Coddle. Off to lie by someone else’s pool and take the mickey out of someone else’s parents. They’re leaving us behind. Unless Henry and Sam have gone off as camp-followers. Did you search their baggage?’

  Haverford was sitting on the terrace finishing his breakfast. Molly sat opposite him and poured herself a cup of cool coffee. The house, in which her own children were still asleep, was empty and silent.

  ‘That girl Chrissie,’ Haverford said, ‘looks remarkably like her mother.’

  ‘Really?’ Molly tried not to sound over-interested. ‘Have you ever met her mother?’

  ‘Not been formally introduced but I have an idea she was the woman I saw with the Baronessa at old Fosdyke’s funeral. I mean she looked like the daughter, only spread out a bit, of course. I suppose it would be natural for her to go to the funeral.’

  ‘I suppose it would. Who else was there?’

  ‘Only me and the priest. A few undertaker’s men, of course.’

  ‘Poor old Bill Fosdyke…’ Molly used the name she had only just learned.

  ‘Oh, yes. I heard that. They called him “Bill”.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, no. I called him Fosdyke. But then I come from a vanished age.’

  ‘You had dinner with him?’

  ‘Steak and kidney pie and apple crumble. It was an extraordinary occasion.’

  ‘Why extraordinary?’

  ‘Can’t do it, Molly.’ Haverford shook his head.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A chap has got to respect the secrets of the confessional. Especially when I must have been one of the last people Fosdyke ever spoke to.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about? The confessional?’

  ‘Fosdyke, in a manner of speaking, unburdened his soul to me.’

  ‘But you’re hardly a priest, are you?’

  ‘I have not,’ Haverford admitted, ‘taken Holy Orders, although I think I might well have enjoyed the Papacy had it come to me some time in the fifteenth century. I think I could have managed the public appearances with dignity and the private parties would have been a joy. I can’t pretend that my dinner with Fosdyke had any great religious significance. But he told me something in the strictest confidence.’

  ‘Oh, well then, that’s that, isn’t it?’ Molly, who knew her father better than anyone, got up to go.

  ‘Hang on a minute. Why do you ask?’

  Molly sat down again. She knew that he couldn’t resist sharing a secret.

  ‘I was just thinking. No one’s really explained his death, have they?’

  ‘And of course you want to explain it. You want to explain everything.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not asking you to put it in one of your articles.’

  ‘I suppose he might not have minded you knowing, as one of my immediate family.’ Haverford took a swig of coffee and lit the last of the cigars Hugh had given him. He lay back in his chair, blowing smoke and twiddling the white book of matches in his fingers. He was enjoying the moment. ‘It was the usual sort of problem. Fosdyke told me he’d fallen for some woman. He came to me, I suppose, as an expert on the subject.’

  ‘A woman. Who was she?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Molly Coddle. Fosdyke didn’t seem to think her name should be mentioned in the Mess. I got the feeling, though, that the involvement was pretty serious. He asked me if he should take on some immense new responsibility.’

  ‘I can guess what you told him.’

  ‘Well, you know me, Molly. Always ready to take on anything except responsibility. Responsibility is a passion-killer like tights and dirty bra straps and…’

  ‘Where did you get those matches?’ Molly interrupted him. She had heard that particular speech many times before.

  ‘These?’ Haverford looked at the small white book between his fingers.

  ‘Urbino.’ Molly took them from him. She had recognized the picture of the Ducal Palace on the flap from one of the many guide-books in the house. It was the end and aim of the Piero della Francesca trail.

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. Didn’t tell you. I slipped away for a dirty weekend with Miss Hairy Armpits from the side of the pool.’

  ‘I just wondered…’ Molly lifted the flap and saw the name of the concern it had been printed for: MOTEL VALLOMBR
OSA, URBINO and a telephone number.

  ‘What a super ’tec you are. Shall I get you a magnifying glass and a little deerstalker hat for Christmas?’

  ‘I was only curious.’

  ‘And you get curiouser and curiouser.’

  ‘When you picked them up. I mean none of us has been there and…’

  ‘Lay off, Guvnor.’ Haverford lifted his hands in surrender. ‘You got me bang to rights. I half-inched them.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Pinched them. And I can even remember when.’

  ‘Really?’ Now Molly also remembered.

  ‘That party in the smart flat, where we saw the Palio. I got a light from that distinctly fanciable old school chum of yours, Rosie Fortinbras. I remember getting home and finding I’d slipped them into my pocket. Perhaps she’d been to Urbino.’

  ‘Oh yes’ — Molly remembered that also — ‘she’d been on the trail.’

  ‘Well, then, any more little mysteries you want solved, my dear Watson?’

  Molly said she’d better go and see if the children were showing any sign of life and she forgot to give her father back his matches.

  Haverford sat on alone until the sallow manservant from the Villa Baderini arrived on a motor bike to deliver a letter to the Signor Downs of ‘La Felicità’.

  My dear old friend, [it started]

  Memory plays odd tricks on us. I suppose me blot out things we may have enjoyed a darn sight too much as well as those too horrible to remember. Since I got yours and read it carefully (well, old dear, your handwriting does look like a spider who’s been on a binge for about forty years. I held it up to a mirror, tried it upside down, but at last I made sense of most of it)… Reading your three-volume scribble made it all come back to me. We had our moments undoubtedly, and someone ought to put one of those tablets on the floor in front of the fireplace: NANCY LEAD BETTER FELL HERE, AND DIDN’T GET UP FOR SOME TIME!

  Now I know writing comes as naturally to you as p∗∗∗∗∗g up a lamp-post does to a blind mongrel, but I do most heartily welcome your decision not to write about our local water problems in your paper. As a woman, and out of respect for my late husband’s wishes, I know very little about business matters, and I’d like to know less, but us ex-pats have to work our a∗∗∗s off to keep the Italian bureaucracy sweet, and I know full well that you wouldn’t want to make life difficult for us, would you, old dear? Arnold was always very careful to keep any mention of his business dealings out of the papers. ‘Once you let them know how you make your money,’ he always said, ‘they’ll start taking it off you.’ Little as I know, or indeed, care to know about business, that has always been my motto too. So far as your daughter is concerned, she seemed a sweet girl although I suppose she could do with losing a little weight. Well who’s talking? I can hear you say, you old devil. You know, I look on you and her as family. She wouldn’t want to hurt her family’s feelings, would she now?

  Well, that’s enough about business, which to be quite frank with you, I don’t understand anyway. It seems we’ve got a lot more than business to talk about. So why don’t you come over at your soonest, and then we can chat? I’ll keep something cool for you (and perhaps something warm too, for the sake of old times).

  Best as ever,

  Nancy L.

  Haverford read this letter twice over with great satisfaction. Give him a pen and a sheet of notepaper, he thought, and he could always work the oracle. Dear old Nancy, of course she remembered! What a sweet old thing she was, with her innocent habit of writing rude words with asterisks. He folded the letter carefully and put it into the breast-pocket of his shirt. When he went down to the table by the pool he was whistling a little tune. After all, it wasn’t too bad to have seen seventy-eight summers and still be absolutely irresistible to women.

  On her way back from shopping Molly stopped by the square tower of the thirteenth-century church near Mondano’s walls and parked the car. She walked across the road and into the gates of the cemetery. Although she had not been at the funeral she found the newest dug grave easily. She stood looking down on it and on the fresh roses which filled the gleaming brass vase, and heard an Italian voice calling her, ‘Signora Pargeter.’ It was the priest, his cassock flapping on a bright, windy morning, threading his way through the grass towards her far more nippily than Haverford would have managed it, although they must, she thought, have been of an age. ‘Signora Pargeter. It is I. Don Marco.’

  ‘Lei conosco bene. Lei in casa mia, “La Felicità.”’

  ‘Please, Signora. Your father likes to try to speak Italian to me. I try to speak English to him. Now shall we use that language together?’

  ‘That’ll be very nice.’ Molly felt suddenly foolish standing by Signor Fixit’s grave, as though she’d been caught out spying on someone. ‘Do you want to talk to me here?’

  ‘In my house perhaps. We can speak in privato.’

  So they left the remains of Fosdyke and walked across the road and through the old church, restored in the eighteenth century, which had barley-sugar pillars and theatrical red curtains backlit by the sun. God the Father was painted on the ceiling as a cross old man with a walking-stick. Don Marco led her past the altar and out across the smallest of courtyards to his house and into a dark, airless living-room that smelled of furniture polish and onions. She allowed the priest to pour her a minute glass of grappa and they sat together at a table with a green baize cloth like a couple about to enjoy a hand of whist.

  ‘Signora Pargeter, I am anxious about your father.’

  ‘I gave up being anxious about him years ago.’

  ‘He is known in your country, is he not, as a great writer?’

  ‘Well, hardly.’

  ‘Non ho capito.’

  ‘He is known as a writer. In a newspaper.’

  ‘Karl Marx has said that poets are different from the rest of us. There must be other rules for them.’

  ‘I’m sure my father would agree with that.’

  ‘I am anxious, you see, if Signor Downs is able to understand the sanctity of marriage.’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘He speaks of his life with your mother now dead and he speaks of it lightly. An unhappy marriage is a cross to bear. Did your father bear it patiently?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘That is my opinion. He has now asked me to celebrate his marriage to the Signora Leadbetter.’

  So now Molly understood why there would be no mention of the water scandal in the ‘Jottings’.

  ‘They are both old people. They must set an example of growing old with grace and resignation.’

  ‘I don’t think’ — Molly was doing her best to answer truthfully — ‘either of them will be much of an example of that.’

  ‘Surely they do not marry for’ — Don Marco drained his grappa as though to give himself strength and whispered in a low voice which Molly found unexpectedly thrilling — ‘sessualità?’

  ‘You mean sex?’ What she felt like saying was ‘You want to bet?’ She contented herself with ‘I don’t think you should exclude the possibility.’

  ‘On the other hand’ — the priest refilled their glasses with further minute quantities — ‘Signora Leadbetter is good to Mondano-in-Chianti. She finances our fiesta and provides the fireworks. She contributes generously to the Partito Comunista. I would not like to offend Signora Leadbetter.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘On the other hand, I am afraid Signor Downs doesn’t understand us completely.’

  ‘He doesn’t completely understand a lot of things.’

  ‘The people are Communists here you see. This means they are very old fashioned in their opinions. We are conservatives. We are not like Signor Downs, who is always talking of free love and other new ideas. We believe in family life and the sacrament of matrimonio. In your opinion, Signora Pargeter, is your father a fit person to take part in this ceremony? I speak as a priest, you understand.’

 
; ‘And I’ — Molly finished her grappa and looked at him equally earnestly — ‘speak as his daughter.’

  ‘That is why I ask.’

  ‘Don Marco, you have said marriage is a cross we have to bear.’

  ‘Sometimes’ — he nodded his grey and celibate old head — ‘a heavy, heavy cross. Pieno di sofferenza.’

  ‘My father,’ Molly said with feeling, ‘is my cross.’

  ‘Davvero?’ Don Marco raised his shaggy eyebrows.

  ‘Sometimes the weight of it is almost unbearable.’

  ‘Signora?’

  ‘If we were to return to England and leave him here, safely married to a lady who can afford to give the village fireworks, I must tell you, in all honesty, that it would be a great weight off my mind. I think we should encourage it.’

  There was a long silence between them and the slow dawn of a mutual understanding.

  ‘Signor Downs is a member of my church, he tells me, although he has lapsed a little. I think that he may understand the sacrament of marriage very well, after a short period of instruction.’

  ‘We’re only here for another week,’ Molly told him, ‘so perhaps it should be as short as possible.’

  The priest appeared friendly, so she decided to ask him another favour, a scrap of information. ‘I saw that there were fresh flowers on Bill Fosdyke’s grave. I wonder if you know who put them there.’

  Don Marco shook his head then and said, ‘Non capisco,’ although the sentence seemed no more difficult than others he had understood with ease.

  As she drove away from the church, Molly was smiling. She had, she thought, solved the mystery of the district water supply and she had no further plans for using her knowledge. The solution was, for her, an end in itself.

  Her inquiries, at any rate, seemed to have led to one desirable but quite unexpected result: her father kept in comfort in his last years far away from her and her family. Whatever else happened, that was, as Haverford wouldn’t have been able to resist saying, a consummation devoutly to be wished. Perhaps, now that he knew that she knew, the water would no longer be stolen and people like the Pargeters and the Greensleeves no longer robbed. She could only hope so. But she had other matters to attend to and another quest to go on. She was determined that the holiday shouldn’t end before all her questions had been answered. It had been cloudy that morning and there had been a pattering of rain on the windscreen of the car. It was hotter again now and the sun was shining, but autumn was near. Before it came she was determined that someone else should know all that she had found out.