The Cypress Garden

by Jane Arbor

  With his hand firmly beneath her elbow he gave her no choice, but all the way along the Via Lombardia to the Spanish Steps she continued to fume and protest.

  Michele argued, ‘Look, if you were an actress, engaged to play a certain part, you’d expect the management to provide your wardrobe for it. Well?’

  ‘It’s not at all the same thing. I’m not an actress and I never claimed to be.’

  ‘Well, Leone thinks you’ve accepted his contract and he means to kit you out accordingly. And all I ask is, one, that you don’t make a scene at Luigi’s and, two, that you don’t go back to Mama having bought nothing. For even with her lost interest in clothes, she’d think it absurd that you couldn’t find something pretty lush at Luigi’s.’

  Alix tried again. ‘I’m not in the habit of making scenes in shops,’ she said loftily. ‘I suppose it’s all because I refused to be paid for coming to the Villa, and this is Leone’s way round it?’

  ‘It could well be,’ Michele allowed. ‘He doesn’t take kindly to being flouted.’

  ‘Well then, I—!’ Alix halted, furious.

  ‘—But I don’t think it is,’ Michele went on. ‘As I said, he feels you have this image to keep up and he is determined that you should for as long as it matters. Besides, this way, Cenerentola mia, your obligation to him can end as soon as he decides your midnight hour is due to strike and he has no further use for having you around. Then you can skip, leaving the lot, from glass slippers to mink stoles, behind you, and you’ll be free.’

  ‘And if there’s one thing certain under the wandering moon, it is that there’ll be at least no mink stole to leave!’ But that was Alix’s last abortive defiance of the morning. They had reached the discreetly curtained double doors of the great Luigi’s salon.

  Michele introduced himself and her by name, describing her as la mia fidanzata to the ample goddess who greeted them.

  The latter beamed, ‘Your fiancée, Signor Parigi? Then we must find something very special both for her and for your approval. The first should not be difficult—the signorina is so lovely. The other—well, one must hope that our girls will be able to beguile you!’

  In any other circumstances and in a lighter mood Alix would have been amused by Michele’s command of the situation during the hour they spent at Luigi’s. Almost any Englishman as intrigued as Michele was with the texture and line and cut of feminine clothes would conceal it as his own dark secret, she reflected. But Michele suffered no such shame. It was equally clear that he was experienced at this sort of thing and that the model girls were out to impress him rather than herself.

  At last she was taken to a fitting room with a selection of the dresses he liked and she brought as good grace as she could to choosing one, a demure little Hansel and Gretel number in fondant yellow, smocked and gathered at wrists and waist and worn with a brief crystalline bolero. She was repeatedly assured that if even this was not exactly to her taste, she could be suited to measure in a matter of hours. But she settled on the little dress, having realized already that at Luigi’s no one ever mentioned price.

  While the models had paraded the dresses Michele had quickly got on first name terms with them, and when Alix returned to the salon he was deep in talk with one of them, their shrugs and gestures so expressive and their flirtation so uninhibited that Alix stood off a little in order to watch them.

  The girl, Bettina, was typically Italian, with a wide full-lipped mouth, dark secret eyes, a heavy chignon of black hair and a figure which curved generously in all the right places. It was she who noticed Alix first and, saying something quickly to Michele, she minced away with a provocative turn of her hips.

  ‘Your type, I take it?’ Alix could not resist the quip.

  Michele grinned. ‘Yum-yum—luscious! Not married either—However, what else shall we buy you? What about an evening bag to go with the little confection? And some perfume, of course. You can not, I insist, buy a Luigi model without one of his special perfume numbers to match.’

  When they left they took none of their purchases with them. They would be sent out to the Villa by messenger that afternoon, they were promised. For Alix, by that time, the whole episode had taken on a quality of fantasy which robbed it, somehow, of the guilt she was convinced she ought to feel. It would come back, but for the moment she was a little heady with a sense of feminine daydreams realized, and she would not have been human if she hadn’t known a Cinderella thrill of excitement at this glimpse of a luxury world which for Michele—for all these Parigis—was a commonplace.

  When they left Luigi’s the streets were emptying for the long noontime siesta. Shops were being closed, sunblinds furled, and urchins, let out from school, were stripping off for forbidden dips in the fountain of the Piazza di Spagna. The flower sellers at the foot of the Spanish Steps unwrapped wads of bread and ham and limp pizze; groups of hitchhikers lounged about the Steps and half-way up them, in a recess of the wall, a girl lay deeply asleep, her head pillowed on one slim outstretched arm.

  A covered flower basket stood a yard or so off from her, and in about the same moment as Alix noticed her a lout furtively darted across the Steps, snatched it up and was away with it without waking her.

  Alix exclaimed, ‘Oh no—!’ and Michele, ‘Why, the young—!’ before plunging down the Steps hot in pursuit of the thief.

  Hubbub followed. The girl waked bemusedly. The boy darted round the fountain. Michele, wet to the knees, dashed through the water and caught him in a rugby tackle on the far side. The basket changed hands; Michele afforded the lad a sound cuff to each side of the head, contemptuously flung him a coin, then brought the basket back to the girl.

  She was standing now, string-bean thin, a mere slip of adolescence whose age might be anything from fourteen to eighteen. Her hair was tied at her ears in childish wings and her black knee-length shift was as formless as a school overall. She had the appealing immaturity of a young colt, and yet there was dignity in the way she accepted Michele’s return of her property.

  ‘Grazie, signore.’’ No more than that. No servility. ‘You are very kind.’ She glanced at the tidemark on his trousers. ‘You are also very wet, signore.’

  He gave her his melting smile. ‘It is nothing. I shall dry in the sun. ‘Now, what flowers are you selling, little one? Let’s see them.’

  The girl kept her basket covered. ‘You do not have to buy anything from me, signore.’

  ‘Nonsense. Of course I must. Don’t you see that the signorina has no buttonhole?’ Michele flicked off the cover himself, selected a posy of tight pink rosebuds. ‘Quanto sono le rose?’

  ‘Nothing at all to you, signore. I should like the signorina to accept them.’

  Michele protested, ‘Oh, come—!’ But Alix intervened. ‘I think she means it.’ She smiled at the girl. ‘Thank you so much. They are lovely.’

  ‘Prego.’ Recovering the flowers, the girl walked away down the Steps to the Piazza. Michele stood looking after her.

  ‘We shouldn’t have let her get away with that. The whole stock she had wouldn’t have cost much more than a thousand lire. And she could certainly do with the money,’ he said.

  ‘I rather gather she valued her pride more.’ Alix added a shade tartly, ‘After all, everything isn’t to be bought for money, you know.’

  Michele gave her his now familiar glance from under his brows. ‘There’s no call to get waspish with me, just because Leone is going to get a fat bill from Luigi. Anyway, it’s a fine set-up if a chap can’t do the chivalrous thing without getting kicked in the teeth by a nothing of a girl like that.’ He turned to continue up the Steps. ‘How old do you suppose she was?’

  ‘I wondered too. But there was so little of her it’s hard to say.’

  ‘M’m, all skin and bones and grief. I wonder she even had a shadow!’

  Alix laughed. ‘She had. I noticed.’ Remembering the girl’s poise as she walked away, ‘She had dignity too. Which makes me think she couldn’t be quite as young as
she looked. But not, I take it, at all your type?’

  ‘My type?’ Michele’s jaw dropped. ‘A metre and a half of straight-up-and-down waifhood like that? You’re joking, of course.’

  ‘Well, I thought she was a lot more attractive than that full-blown model you were chatting up at Luigi’s,’ Alix claimed.

  ‘Which only goes to show you’ve about as much idea of how I spell sex-appeal as Leone has. Just because he despises it himself, he doesn’t want to know. Oh yes, there’s some legend about him and a woman who jilted him, way back in the Dark Ages. But he’d hardly bat an eyelid for one now. And for me, the only girl I’ve ever known him approve was you, and—’

  ‘And I don’t really count, do I? With either of you?’ Somehow, Alix found, it hurt less to say it herself than to hear it.

  Michele grinned. ‘You said it. I didn’t. But as things are with me and as they are with him—let’s face it, cara mia—you don’t really,’ he admitted.

  When they reached home in the afternoon their purchases had arrived and Alix had to run the gauntlet of Venetia’s comments.

  ‘All Luigi stuff—for you. And I asked you last night if you ever shopped there,’ she accused.

  ‘Yes, well, I think the dinner gong rang just then. Actually I hadn’t. It was Michele who persuaded me to go there today,’ said Alix.

  ‘What for? I mean, what did you buy?’

  ‘A little yellow dress. I think we’re all going to your Del Lago Club on Sunday night, aren’t we? And one or two oddments that Michele chose for me—perfume and a silk headsquare and some nylons.’

  Venetia widened her eyes. ‘Michele choosing your clothes for you already? You’re letting him come the heavy fiancé a bit early, aren’t you? Still, if you can go to Luigi’s for a dress, I shall go too and charge it to Leone. He’ll scold when he finds out, but that needn’t be yet. All of us dining at the Club, you say? Zia Dora too? Then in that case I shall certainly get something new. If Zia Dora is going to be there Leone will want me to do him proud, if only, I suspect, to distract people’s attention from all that tattiness of hers. I mean—her hair! I declare, she can turn a Balenciaga model into a sack, just by putting it on. And all her jewellery on at once! What is she afraid of for it—cat burglars?’

  With an effort Alix bit back the sharp reply which probably wouldn’t have carried much conviction. For how was it possible to rationalize or justify the empty fears of a neurotic to anyone who had never suffered them? She never had herself. She had only the outgiving sympathy which her experience with her father had taught her. Such fears weren’t to be explained away by any reasoned argument. They could only be overlaid or dispelled for the moment by the offer of something more constructive to do or think about, she had found. As she gathered up the zebra-striped Luigi boxes and went to her room her thoughts were all with Signora Parigi—of how, as subtly and gently as she knew, she might test her theories to ease the older woman’s troubled way. Anyway, she meant to try...

  It was not until she was trying on the yellow dress, liking it afresh and looking forward to wearing it, that she found she was wondering just what was the personal relationship between Leone and Venetia d’Anza.

  Michele and Venetia were easier. They were much of an age and from the comments of each and from the little Alix had seen of them together they appeared to be on brother-and-sister terms. But what was Leone’s view of Venetia and hers of him? On Leone’s part Alix sensed an indulgence towards the girl which he didn’t accord to Michele. He was alleged to be indifferent to women, but did he perhaps spoil Venetia a little? And how did she regard him? Not entirely as an older brother than Michele, Alix felt, though allowing that it was mere intuition which told her so.

  It was, she thought, Venetia’s claim to fear Leone’s wrath in almost the same breath as she boasted her freedom to exploit him. The little mouse, extracting a dangerous excitement from belling the cat, and rather confident of succeeding ... Also Venetia’s assumption that, even in a family party, it was she, paired with Leone, who must do him credit in front of their friends. And—yes, a kind of trading on the decade of years between them to use his maturity as a foil for her youth.

  The older man ... He was supposed to carry a fatal fascination. Had Leone that kind of attraction for Venetia? And why, Alix wondered, her thoughts going off at a tangent, had Michele found it necessary to warn her against falling victim to it too?

  That evening she was alone on the loggia before dinner when Leone joined her there. He poured himself a drink and sat down.

  ‘Well, did you go shopping and to luncheon in the city this morning?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She hesitated. ‘But it wasn’t at all necessary to give me that introduction to a salon like Luigi’s. Nor to make yourself responsible for paying for what I chose.’

  He dealt curtly with that. ‘Nonsense. I told you last night I intended to provide you with some stage properties for your job, and clothes bought in the right places are as good talking-points as any. I hope you were able to find something you like?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. But I wish you wouldn’t refer to—all this as a job. Originally you put it to me that it was something which might help your stepmother, and I’d rather think of it as an obligation I owe her for letting Michele deceive her about me.’

  Leone shrugged. ‘As you please. What’s in a name? I only thought you would prefer to regard it as a job between your last one and your next. And of one thing I can be very sure, can’t I? You didn’t agree to come from any sense of obligation to me?’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘I meant—because I asked it of you?’ He added drily, ‘You can take that as one of those Latin grammar questions which expect the answer No.’

  But instead Alix said slowly, ‘I don’t know.’

  He looked at her over the rim of his glass. ‘Meaning by that—?’

  ‘Well, I think, in a way, I did come because you asked me. Or rather because you seemed to be daring me to refuse. So I couldn’t.’

  His dark eyes held hers. ‘Really? So may I feel flattered? Or are you only paying tribute to the basilisk power of my tongue?’

  Alix felt snubbed. Without knowing what had impelled her to make her small confession to him, she knew she had hoped he might meet her motive half-way. Instead, this irony! In an effort to recoup ground for her pride, she said as lightly as she could,

  ‘Neither, I think. All I meant was that when you put the onus squarely on me, I knew I wouldn’t have you—or anyone—think I wasn’t big enough to take it.’

  When he laughed on a short breath she knew he had taken her emphasis as she had intended he should. He said, ‘I see. Nothing personal between us. How did I guess? Just your own self-esteem put on its mettle, bent on proving itself, and I just happened to be the “anyone” who applied the appropriate test! But tell me, how have you found Madrigna today? She did go out to lunch with you and Michele?’

  ‘Yes. She wouldn’t come shopping with us, but she was very patient about waiting for us. She was rather tired when we returned and said she might decide against coming down for dinner.’

  ‘Oh, I think she should make the effort,’ Leone ruled. ‘I’ll go and see her. She has put you to no embarrassments, I hope?’

  (Such as having to lie to her in so many words?) Aloud Alix said, ‘No. We talked together for quite a time this morning, and I am—That is, I could get very fond of her, I think.’

  ‘Good.’ As he emptied his glass and stood up, he dropped a card into her lap. ‘Your chit of membership at the Del Lago. You might have to show it the first time you go, but not afterwards.’

  She read the details on the card and looked up. ‘But I thought you only meant to enable me to swim there. This gives me full membership for a year!’

  ‘Well, what of it? Did you expect to be issued with a kind of summer season ticket to a swimming pool? What about riding? Would you care to take lessons from the stables Venetia and Michele use?’

  ‘No, thank
you very much. I do swim and I’d like to, but I’ve never ridden at all and—’

  ‘—And in the reluctant month or two you have pledged yourself to give me, you think you wouldn’t have time to show much skill in the saddle?’ He laughed suddenly and paused by her chair, looking down at her. ‘You know, signorina, at times I find you quite engagingly transparent,’ he said.

  She looked away. ‘Do you?’

  ‘And at others a press-ganged confederate whom I’ve a shrewd idea I may have to learn to respect! Ah, Michele—’ He turned as the latter came out on to the loggia. ‘Alix would like to swim at the Club tomorrow, I daresay. Will you escort her, please?’

  Michele made an elaborately courtly bow in Alix’s direction. ‘Delighted, I’m sure. Though you could, couldn’t you’—he addressed Leone’s departing back—‘have allowed me the privilege of inviting her myself?’

  But though he arranged to drive Alix to the Club the next morning he had not put in an appearance when she had waited for him for more than half an hour. A maid had told her that he was up and Venetia, off on some ploy of her own, suggested vaguely that he might be found tinkering with his ‘impossible’ car.

  Alix walked round to the big three-car garage and found it open. Michele, however, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was his little runabout. But though by now it was late morning the long open roadster Leone drove was still there and as she turned away she saw him coming over.

  ‘I thought Michele was supposed to take you swimming this morning?’

  Alix laughed, ‘So did I!’

  ‘You mean he has let you down?’

  ‘Well—’

  Leone frowned. ‘But this is absurd. He’ll have left some message at the house for you?’

  ‘I asked. He hadn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Perhaps he had to get his car serviced or something.’