by Jane Arbor
Following him, wary of exposed tree roots which he pointed out and stooping under the trailers he lifted for her, Alix knew this place to be one after her own heart. It was a secret place. A hide-and-seek place. Dark now, she could picture it dappled with sunlight by day; here and there the stumps of long-felled trees formed natural armchair nooks, and it was possible to scuff one’s feet nearly ankle-deep in the carpet of dry pine needles and dead leaves. A place to escape to. Sanctuary...
Leone turned, a lifted bramble in his hand. ‘Careful of this. It bites,’ he warned. But she halted and took it from him.
‘It’s still only May and it’s already in blossom,’ she marvelled. ‘In England it would hardly be daring to show a bud. But of course it would need to bloom by now. I remember gathering ripe blackberries in the ruins of Pompeii last year in early August.’
‘You could gather them here too. They riot everywhere. But you probably regard that prospect more as a threat than a promise, I daresay? “Still here when his blackberries are ripe? Still playing quail-in-the-net to Michele by his orders in August? Not if I know it!” Come now, wasn’t that your thought as I spoke?’ Leone accused her lightly.
She was grateful for the darkness which must have hidden her swift rise of colour. ‘I don’t understand “quail-in-the net”. What does it mean?’ she evaded his question with her own.
‘I meant your function of keeping Michele at home and squiring you in full view of his mother with the consequent peace of mind one hopes it may mean for her. As for that netted quail, I’m afraid it has a rather cruel context. As you know, quails have gourmet value, and when they are migrating south from across the Alps the mountain peasants have the ugly custom of snaring a few females with the object of their cries attracting the mass of the males towards a prepared trap. But you probably have a parallel byword in English?’
‘I think we have. We say “decoy duck”. It’s not a role anyone would exactly fight to get,’ she said drily. As she spoke Alix made to lay aside the long bramble. But its weaving tip caught at her dress, causing its prickled length to hoop up and over and, catching her cheek, to score it from nostrils to jaw.
Momentarily the pain was as vicious as a whiplash, and at her involuntary gasp of dismay Leone was at her side.
‘What—?’ he asked, standing over her.
‘Just the bramble. It’s nothing.’
‘Let me see.’ With surprising gentleness he drew down her hand which was defending the long scratch and flicked his cigarette-lighter to peer at it. ‘Yes. Quite nasty. I warned you it could bite,’ he commented. Still tilting her chin, he dabbed at the scratch with the folded handkerchief from his breast-pocket and was showing her the long beading of blood spots which stained it when they both alerted to the sound of someone else making a way through the undergrowth.
Following the path they had taken, Michele came up with them, greeting the tableau they made with, ‘So? I leave my director and my leading lady being edified by television, and what do I find when I come back? That he has taken her out on location, leaving me, her leading man, to surprise them in what I trust was only a demonstration clinch—!’
He got no further. ‘Thank you. You can cut the fooling.’ Leone’s tone held splinters of ice. ‘I wanted to show Alix the garden—’
‘D’you know, I’ve heard that for “garden” the English read “etchings”?’ Michele murmured, unabashed. ‘No connection, of course.’
Leone ignored him. ‘—but a bramble has just caught us unawares and scratched her across the face.’
‘Let me see.’ Michele came closer and peered. ‘So it has, la povera ragazza! Still, there’s a well-known nursery cure for things like that—’ Stooping, he pecked a series of butterfly kisses along the length of the scratch, then tucked Alix’s hand beneath his arm.
‘Better already. You should leave it to the principals!’ he taunted Leone. ‘However, now what? The night is still young. Where shall we go from here?’
Leone said shortly, ‘You’ll go nowhere from here, until Alix has bathed that graze with disinfectant.’ As he turned, leaving them to follow him he added, ‘How did you leave Madrigna? Was she asleep?’
‘No. She had taken a tablet, but she hadn’t gone off. She sent me down to be with Alix.’
‘I’ll look in on her, then,’ said Leone.
When they reached the house he showed Alix to a cloakroom off the hall, poured disinfectant into steaming water and handed her a pad of linen from a cupboard. ‘Don’t skimp it,’ he ordered her. ‘In this climate you can’t afford to give germs a chance.’
He left her and went upstairs. While she dabbed at her cheek Michele stayed to lounge against the open cloakroom door.
‘You know,’ he commented, ‘if Leone weren’t a mastermind with no human feelings to speak of, and if I really had designs on you, I’d suspect him of poaching on my preserves. All that stopping for chit-chat in the bosky woodland, and all that tender tilting of chins that I was spying on before you heard me—! As I say, if it really mattered, you could hardly have blamed me if I’d called for pistols for two at dawn!’
Wincing from the sting of the disinfectant, Alix reached for a towel. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said sharply. ‘When we stopped we were discussing blackberries, if you must know. And I shouldn’t have thought much of Leone if he hadn’t wanted to see what that fiend of a bramble did to my face.’
Michele grinned. ‘Blackberries! Ah well, if you say so, even though, from my distance, it did look as if you were poised and waiting to be kissed. Which leads me to a word of warning in season—Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Get hypnotized by all that smooth arrogance of Leone’s. I know some women ask to be bullied and mastered by their men, and since you make it clear an uncomplicated chap like me isn’t your type, by contrast you might imagine that he is. But you’d be wrong to think there’d be any future in it. Mind, I’m not saying he’d snub you for melting. He might even encourage you in it. But he could eat a lovely green girl like you for breakfast and still find he had an appetite for dinner.’
Alix discarded the towel. ‘Don’t worry. I think I can claim to be quite as proof against Leone as I am against you. You’re both a lot too sure of yourselves—in different ways,’ she said.
‘You wound me, woman—here!’ Michele’s open palm thumped his chest. ‘Still, I’m glad to hear it—about Leone. Strictly a business deal—hm? Which reminds me, how much is he prepared to pay you for—all this?’
‘Pay me? He isn’t paying me anything,’ said Alix.
Michele’s eyes widened. ‘He didn’t offer to? You mean you let him simply demand that you come?’
‘No. He offered me money, but I refused.’
‘But you were going to have to get yourself a job! You—’
‘Look, leave it, will you?’ Alix cut in tautly. ‘I agreed to play your girl-friend and to come here as your guests for long as Leone thought it might help your mother. But I made it quite clear to him that I refused to be paid. And that goes for you too. Understood?’
Michele grudged his agreement with a small left-and-right head movement which was typically Italian. ‘If that’s the way you want it,’ he said, ‘though I’d say it’s about the first time ever that Leone has accepted a favour from a woman without seeing it in terms of hard cash. You’ve probably made history, young Alix—do you know that?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, now, believe it or not, the night is still young. What shall we do with the rest of it?’
Alix looked at her own watch. ‘It’s nearly eleven. I’m going to bed.’
‘Bed? At this hour? You can’t! Why, we could—’
‘Bed,’ she repeated firmly. ‘As Leone said at dinner, I’ve had quite a day. Good night.’
Michele hunched his shoulders and thrust out his lower lip in a childish pout. ‘If it’s all going to be like this, I shall wish I’d never started the thing at all,’ he groused.
‘And at that, you wouldn
’t be the only one,’ Alix agreed fervidly. Though not for his reasons nor, she was aware, meaning quite the same.
Probably from sheer weariness after the day’s long conflicts, she slept better than she hoped she would and had not long waked when a maid brought coffee and rolls to her room. She would have preferred to dress and go downstairs for breakfast, but if, as the girl said, it was everyone’s habit to take prima colazione in their rooms, she supposed she must conform.
While she was dressing afterwards she thought she heard a car drive away. Leone leaving for business? Or Michele making his first escape from ‘all this’? Neither of them was in evidence when she went down; nor were either Venetia or her aunt, and Alix was alone on the loggia for a long time before Signora Parigi joined her there, drifting through the french doors as if she were a little fearful of what lay beyond them.
At the sight of Alix who rose to greet her she smiled wanly. ‘So there you are, dear. All alone? That’s not good manners of Michele, but whenever he is at home, I’m afraid he sleeps late.’ She took a chair, but sat gracelessly, her thin hands weaving together in her lap.
Alix smiled. ‘I don’t mind being alone. It’s been so lovely here, enjoying the garden and just basking in the sun. Idling, in fact.’
‘Yes. One hears that in England you are all starved of warmth. I, too, idle a great deal. I have, you see—’ a vague look round ‘nothing else to do. I also have to be very much alone. My—young people aren’t willing to bear with me for long at a time. Leone has his work and Michele isn’t often here and Venetia—well, of course, she has her own friends. To them I am old and a burden and they are impatient of me. So it is good to think that sometimes you may be willing to sit with me and talk a little and—and be content.’
The drab tone and the betraying quiver of the chin spelled for Alix a self-pity which she recognized only too well. With months of just such bolstering of her father’s spirit for experience, she said vigorously, ‘I’ll ask for nothing better. I’m an incorrigible sitter-and-chatter. Let’s begin now, shall we? What shall we talk about?’
Dora Parigi’s chin steadied and she contrived to smile at this frontal attack. ‘I don’t know, dear. Perhaps about ourselves—no? About you first. About you and Michele. You do find him charming? You could grow—very fond of him, you think?’
This was the nettle that had to be grasped. Alix said, not without truth, ‘I liked him quite a lot the very first time we met and now I think our feeling is mutual. But on my side, it’s without knowing him very well yet. He—he rather took me by storm. There was one day when we hadn’t met and the next when we had, and on the next he wouldn’t take my No to going out with him, and then—’
She was surprised by her hostess’s quite natural, warm little laugh. ‘And then he was taking you out again and again? And sending you flowers, one hopes, and wooing you? And then demanding that you meet us all before, perhaps, you were ready to commit yourself so far? Ah, that is so much like my Michele! Whatever he wants, he wants—and means to get. Which is true of Leone too in a different way. He ... masters people; Michele cajoles them. His old Neapolitan nurse used to say of him that he had only to put his mind to it and he could sell pumice stone to Vesuvius. But if only he were a little more discreet! He has such odd friends and has had so many girls whom he hasn’t cared to bring home—Oh dear, though, I shouldn’t be telling you about them, should I?’
Alix smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ve heard about some of them from Michele. That’s one of the things I like about him—he’s so frank about himself.’
‘You find that endearing in him? So do I,’ his mother agreed eagerly. ‘But it offends Leone, who thinks Michele brash. And when I plead for Michele that he is still very young, Leone reminds me that when he was only a very little older than Michele, he was carrying the whole weight of responsibility of Parigi Cameos alone.’
‘And was he?’
‘After my husband, Auguste, died, yes. At the time the firm was in very low water, and the worry helped to kill him. Always, you understand, Parigi jewels have been famous, with both Royal and Papal appointments. But for many years after the war our aristocrats were almost as poor as the peasants, and the tourists hadn’t yet come back to us and the film makers hadn’t discovered us at all. But Leone was ready for the tourists when they did come. He still made precious jewellery for the few who could afford it, but he also saw a big future for the lesser trinketry—modern cameos and filigree silver and enamels and semiprecious stones. And he has repaired our fortunes with them, though at a price, I sometimes think, which few men of his age would be prepared to pay.’
‘You mean he gives all of himself to his work?’ Alix asked.
‘All his—charity, at least. He is hard now. With Michele. Sometimes with me. He does not play and he does not love any more. He gives commands and people obey, but he rarely laughs or forgets himself or wastes an hour with anyone to no purpose.’
Alix suggested gently, ‘But if he has been as dedicated as that since he was Michele's age, mightn't that be his character, and he chooses to have it so? I mean, perhaps he isn’t aware that any “price” has been asked of him?’
Signora Parigi shook her head. ‘Ah, he does choose it now. He enjoys—power. But at that time there was a price and he paid it. He loved then ... was able to ... hadn’t yet forgotten how. But when he had little money his love—a Contessa, one of our new-poor aristocrats—would neither marry him nor wait for him. She married instead a rich American and he—married no one.’
‘And there has been no one for him since?’
Signora Parigi looked away across the garden. ‘He is a man—of thirty-two. I am not so blind as to suppose there have not been’—a shrug—‘women for him from time to time. But none he has asked me to meet, and he has created no scandal. Now, I am sure, he sees to it that he is always the one who says goodbye, and when he does marry, I think it will be for reasons other than love.’
She brought her glance back to Alix in time to surprise the latter’s involuntary little shiver. ‘But you must forgive my realism, dear. You find it offensive. You are young and romantic, and you want everyone’s story to be as fairytale as you hope your own will be. It is my fault. I wanted to hear all about you and Michele, and yet here we are, talking about Leone instead!’
It being unthinkable to reply to that, But it was I who led you away from Michele and on to Leone. And not only because the subject of Michele has pitfalls for me, Alix only smiled and was relieved when her hostess changed the subject by noticing the scratch across her cheek.
As she was describing how she had come by it Michele appeared. He kissed the top of his mother’s head and blew a kiss to Alix.
‘Gossiping away here, and not so much as a martini between you to loosen your tongues!’ he chided them. ‘What are you going to have, Mama? And what for you, Alix?’ His mother fluttered. ‘Oh, Michele, my tablets! You know I’m not supposed to drink with them!’
‘Do I? Sorry. Anyway, Alix—?’
‘Not for me. I’m quite happy, just sitting.’
‘Well, I’m not drinking alone, so you can both stop just sitting. Time we were on our way.’ He turned to Signora Parigi. ‘Alix wants to do some shopping.’
Alix started. ‘I—?’ But his meaning frown silenced her and he went on, ‘So Leone suggested the three of us make a luncheon party of it. Say at Grignano’s or somewhere.’
‘Oh dear. And shopping tires me so. Couldn’t you and Alix go, and I’ll have just a—a salad on a tray. But did Leone really say I was to go?’ In a matter of minutes Dora Parigi seemed not the same woman who had compared her two menfolk with some perception and understanding, thought Alix, perplexed. Now she was all hesitancy and a-quiver with indecision.
Michele nodded. ‘Orders,’ he said. ‘But you needn’t come shopping if you’d rather not. We’ll park you wherever we decide to lunch.’
‘I—Oh, very well.’ As they both rose she asked Alix, ‘What is it you want t
o buy, dear?’
Michele answered quickly, ‘A party dress, for one thing. She says she hasn’t a thing to wear, if we’re all going to the Club for dinner on Sunday night. Leone’s idea, that. Now come along, Mama. I’m coming up with you, and take more than fifteen minutes to collect a handbag and a hat if you dare!’
Clearly he meant to separate them until he could get Alix alone, and when she went down after going to her own room, he had the car at the door and was waiting beside it.
She attacked him crossly. ‘What’s all this? I haven’t told you I’ve nothing to wear, and I’ve no intention of buying a party dress—’
‘Easy, easy!’ He grinned and his flattened palm made a calming motion. ‘It’s all part of your image as my intended, don’t you see?’
‘Why should I? Anyway, I can’t afford a—’
Michele was opening the car door for his mother who was just coming out from the shadowed doorway. Before she was within earshot—
‘Who’s talking about affording? Never heard of a charge-account?’ he asked.
CHAPTER FOUR
Alix was forced to contain herself until they had left the Signora at one of the cosmopolitan restaurants on the Via Veneto and she was again alone with Michele.
‘Luigi’s now,’ he announced. ‘Shall we walk? It’ll probably be impossible to park on Condotti at this hour of the morning.’
Alix did not move. ‘I’m not shopping at Luigi’s for a dress or anything else,’ she declared.
‘Somewhere else, then? But Leone said he would alert Luigi that we were coming.’
‘It’s all quite absurd! I’ve never yet stepped inside a salon like Luigi’s, and I do not shop on charge-accounts—anywhere.’
‘And who is asking you to, pretty one? I’m supposed to do the choosing for you, and Leone is paying. He has you lined up for cosmetics and stockings and any other bits of nonsense you fancy as well. But we can do the lot at Luigi’s, so for goodness’ sake cut the dramatics and come along,’ urged Michele.
