The Cypress Garden

by Jane Arbor

  ‘Meaning that then I’d know for sure, even if you don’t want to? But don’t worry, I’m not asking him yes or no outright. If I know my Leone, and I do, the thing isn’t to be proved that way, if he doesn’t mean it shall be. No, if you can stick it until I’m sure of my ground, I daresay I can. When I can’t—’ Michele left the phrase in the air and tucked his arm into hers as they came out from the wild garden at the foot of the water steps. ‘Meanwhile, to our act con brio!’ he grinned. ‘A lingering kiss or two in the shade of the cypresses, I think, don’t you? Another time we might stage a lover’s quarrel, and then make it up in public—eh?’

  Sick at heart as she was with the whole intrigue, Alix had to smile. ‘One minute you’re claiming you’ve been tricked; the next, you are co-operating like mad. Whose side exactly are you on?’ she asked.

  He frowned quickly and withdrew his hand. ‘Need you ask?’ he said. ‘You must have had a summary of my character from Leone? So I’m on my own side, of course. Yours too—but only so far as it goes along with mine. Sorry about that, but it’s the way I’m made. No high-minded principles at all.’

  Alix protested, ‘Nonsense. You’re not like that. I don’t believe it!’

  He shrugged. ‘Please yourself. But keep in mind, won’t you, that Leone and I both run Parigi blood, and in the matter of ruthlessness, I doubt if he has much of an edge on me. You Have Been Warned, cara mia.’

  From his dark tone, so alien to him, so much an echo of Leone’s, Alix knew he was serious. But it was not until later that she was to remember and understand what he had meant.

  The next day or two brought nearer the imposture of Sunday’s proposed dinner party at the Del Lago. Alix was dreading it. Leone meant to encourage his stepmother to introduce her to their friends. He had said so. Interest would be shown in her for someone she was not; there would probably be kindly, if casual, questions about herself; she might even be asked to meet the two gossips of the swimming-pool—they not guessing she had overheard them, and she not sure she would recognize them from her one backward glance after reaching the far side of the pool underwater.

  And yet, strangely, it was on that dreaded Sunday that she was first able to forget guilt and to see worthwhile purpose to being where she was, however illicitly; to being, in the immediate Parigi circle, the one person whose instinct and experience of a neurotic’s despairs enabled her to meet crisis and deal with it better than they. For that role, no more credit to her than there was to Leone who had thrust her into it without knowing how she would fill it. But that Sunday it did something for her self-esteem to show him she had taken up the gage...

  She recognized some warning signs when Signora Parigi appeared at luncheon in a drab housecoat, bedroom slippers and with her hair in even more of a birds’ nest tangle than usual. Her air of dejection was almost a visible cloud bearing down upon her and though she took a little anti-pasto when it was handed, she made no pretence of eating. There was some small talk round the table in which she did not join until suddenly, her voice edged and harsh, she said,

  ‘I shall not go out tonight, Leone. I am far too tired to attempt it.’

  He looked at her unmoved. ‘Not go, Madrigna? Wouldn’t that be a pity? I hoped you were looking forward to having Alix meet some of our friends at the Club, and I think you shouldn’t disappoint her. You will have several hours in which to rest and your maid will do everything for you. So you will try to make the effort and come?’

  It was not a request but a veiled order, and Alix’s head jerked his way in silent protest. How could he be so highhanded? Didn’t he realize that you had to lead, not drive? She saw with pity the Signora’s shaking hands on the table edge as she retorted in weak defiance,

  ‘I shall not go, and you cannot force me. You must not force me. There will be people ... too many people. I cannot meet them. I—’ Pushing silver, plate and wineglass from her, she stood up. ‘It is always the same. “Do this, Madrigna,” you say, and I do it. “Do that,” and I obey you. You ... leave me no will. You—’ Suddenly she was weeping hopeless, abandoned tears where she stood, and Leone abruptly pushed back his chair.

  As he went to her he was issuing more orders. ‘Venetia, go with your aunt to her room. See that she takes a sleeping pill and stay with her for as long as she needs you. Michele, call her doctor, please. Make it urgent—’ But there he was interrupted by a strangled, ‘No!’ from his stepmother which gave him pause.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Later, if you are not better. Venetia—?’

  The girl rose reluctantly. ‘I’ll go up with her, but I can’t stay long. I am going out this afternoon.’ She looked at Michele. ‘What’s wrong with you staying with Zia Dora for a change, my friend? Or you either?’ she challenged Leone.

  But there Alix took a hand. ‘May I?’ she looked at Leone and warmed to the quick glance of gratitude he threw her.

  He actually hesitated. ‘If you think you can—If you’d like to—?’

  ‘Please—’ she said firmly. And again. ‘And please—no one else until we say so.’ She smiled into her hostess’s drowned eyes. ‘Because that’s the way we want it for the moment, isn’t it? Just the two of us, taking it easy and going into an all-girls-together huddle?’

  As the Signora allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led away Alix was aware that they left three rather nonplussed people behind them.

  Upstairs, in the Signora’s little boudoir, there were continuing tears and more half-choked protests against Leone’s power complex. The latter Alix contrived to ignore or turn aside and the older woman’s bemused thought did not pursue them far. She did not want to sleep. She would not take a sedative. But she calmed. And as she began to chat as normally and coherently as on Alix’s first morning with her, Alix realized that, as much as anything, she needed the reassurance of her own voice asserting itself; talking women’s talk, making women’s small plans, asking and answering, and expressing hopes she wanted to share and fears she wanted dispelled; trivial comfort costing little but patience but which, Alix suspected, she was denied by Venetia.

  They talked about hair and about clothes. ‘Your hair is lovely, dear. Who is your man for it? I think Venetia goes to Rossi, but she does not say. Remind me to ask her to take you to him if you should want to make a change of parruchiere. Though why should you, when your hair looks so well. As for my own—’ Signora Parigi ran a hand through it with dire results—‘even a Rossi could do nothing for it. I should be ashamed now to ask him to try. Look for yourself! A disaster, is it not? And yet, do you know, Auguste, my husband, used to say that it was with my hair that he first fell in love? I could be proud of it then, so he may have been speaking the truth. But in love with a thicket-hedge, walled up with combs?—if my poor Auguste could only see it now!’

  Alix sensed the renewed threat of weak tears. ‘I wonder,’ she said gently, ‘whether you might ask your maid to try a simpler style? One that would need fewer pins.’

  ‘Ask Suela? No, she is so clumsy that I cannot bear her to touch my hair. I do it myself. But my hands are not always very steady, you understand?’

  ‘Then you do need something very simple,’ Alix advised. ‘Say a Paris pleat, or if it’s too long for that, a chignon low down on your neck. May I show you what I mean?’ They adjourned to the Signora’s bedroom, where Alix brushed and brushed, sleeked back the unruly hair into a ballerina style, and a quarter of an hour later some trial and error had produced a softly twisted chignon firmly speared by only a single large comb.

  ‘Ah yes.’ The client admired her reflection. ‘I remember, I used to wear it so when I was young. When Auguste—’ She used her hand-mirror this way and that and then looked up at Alix.

  ‘I shall wear it so when we go to the Club tonight,’ she said as if the outing had never been in question. ‘I should like to rest a little now, I think. But you will come back and do my hair again for the evening?’

  Alix promised, ‘I’ll come back, of course. But only to see
you do it yourself. I’m sure you can. It’s perfectly simple.’

  A vague flutter of hands. ‘Oh, no, I cannot! I don’t know how. I—I’

  ‘If you can’t, I’ll help you. But even if you don’t manage it the first time, you will before long. Shall I ring for Suela to come to you now?’

  ‘Please, dear. And I will try!’

  They smiled at each other’s reflection in the mirror and on a sudden impulse Alix bent to kiss the soft cheek, in tribute to a tiny effort of courage which she guessed had cost the older woman a lot.

  Downstairs again, the rooms were all shuttered against the afternoon heat and there was no one about. Alix thought gratefully of the wild garden and went down there in search of a shady place to sit. Just as she used to feel drained after coping with her father’s veering moodiness, so she felt now—as if her mental tanks needed to refill themselves. Glad to be alone, she found the ideal place, almost curtained off by trailing creepers, but still within earshot of the soothing ‘plash, plash’ of the fountain. Propped on an elbow, she lay there at peace, thinking about Signora Parigi, feeling she might have found and taken the first step towards helping her, thinking ... thinking ... Half an hour later she would have claimed she was still deep in thought if she had not roused with a start from unmistakable sleep to find herself watched by someone who had parted the creepers to look down at her—Leone in swimming trunks with beads of water still gleaming on the deep bronze of his torso. She supposed he must have come straight up from the lake.

  She shook back her hair and knuckled at her eyes. ‘I must have fallen asleep,’ she said bemusedly.

  ‘Stating the obvious. I’ve been spying on you for minutes!’

  He threw down the towel which he had slung on his shoulder and stretched his length on it just outside the creeper curtain. ‘I told Michele to stick around in case you needed him, or Madrigna did. Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him. I came straight down here after I left your stepmother.’

  ‘And how did you leave her? Was she calmer? Were you able to make her rest?’

  ‘She became a lot calmer, and she is resting now. And she’ll come out to dinner tonight.’

  Leone sat up. ‘She will, after all? How did you get her to agree to that?’

  Alix picked up a dry larch cone and gave it all her surface attention. ‘I didn’t “make” her rest, nor “get” her to change her mind about this evening,’ she said. ‘She chose to do both herself—when she was ready. Which I think proves something—that she needs to choose more and be persuaded or directed a lot less. For instance, at luncheon she told you you left her “no will”, and I believe she had a point there.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. She was overwrought.’ Leone spoke shortly. ‘In her present state I have to manage her and urge her to the simplest actions. Left to her own decisions, she would make none and become almost completely inept.’

  Alix said doggedly, ‘Well, she made two for herself without any persuasion from me. She had to talk her own way into them, and I’m wondering whether perhaps you’re impatient of giving her enough time for that. It must be so much more simple to give her orders. But she does need to chat, you know—quite badly.’

  ‘Are you telling me or am I telling you?’ Leone sat forward, clasping his knees. ‘I thought we were agreed on her need for more company? Michele’s for preference, with yours as a kind of overplus, a bonus. Which reminds me—I haven’t thanked you for the masterly way in which you took charge of the scene you judged I was handling badly. Tell me, where did you learn this armchair psychology of yours with which you seem determined to beat me?

  At the lightly sceptical tone Alix flinched but recovered herself. Of course he couldn’t know! She said quietly, ‘Well, that’s all it is, I’m afraid—“armchair”. But there were hours and hours of it, all told. I didn’t analyse it, but I suppose I was learning all the time and, faced with a situation very like it, I daresay I couldn’t resist airing some theories. I’m sorry.’

  For a moment there was silence. Then Leone parted the creepers, looping them aside in order to scrutinize her face.

  ‘My dear—’ he said intently, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand? Have I opened an old wound, perhaps? Is that it? Someone you love or loved—as perplexed and mixed-up as Madrigna? And you at the receiving end—yes?’

  She nodded. ‘My father. Ill and not ill for months before he died. They said his heart was worn out, but really it was broken for my mother—in a different sense. He couldn’t cope either, and no one could tell him how to.’

  ‘And you carried the burden of all this? And learned from bitter experience how to deal with it?’

  ‘I couldn’t always deal with it. Sympathy merely dissolved him in self-pity, and harshness did nothing to brace him. But I did learn I must steer between high-handedness and giving in to him completely. And I found I had to divert him—continually offer him new things to do and think about, and rarely expect the novelty or his interest to last—because it never did for long.’

  ‘And he suffered the kind of fears and withdrawals that Madrigna does?’

  ‘Of people, and of making an effort, and of going out, and of being alone—yes, all those. And I couldn’t dispel them, only bolster him against them as best I could.’ Alix sighed. ‘I know I failed him often. He said so. Without meaning to be cruel, of course. It was simply that I wasn’t Mama for him and could never be. He didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to live either and I think I—as myself—mattered to him less and less.’

  ‘Which hurt you?’

  ‘Afterwards, yes. At the time I couldn’t afford to let it. Without wanting me very much he still needed me. I was all he had—’ But there Alix broke off, surprised by the sound of her own voice uttering confidences that had gone unshared with anyone since her father’s death. Among the Parigis, Michele hadn’t been curious and she remembered deliberately withholding them from Venetia. Why then offer them to Leone of all people—the regrets, the guilts, the failures and the few lessons she had learned the hard way?

  Because, came the answer, he seemed to want to hear; to be willing, however briefly, to be told, instead of insisting on doing all the telling. His interest had stripped him of the arrogance which kept him at a distance and for the first time she felt strangely at ease with him, as with a friend to whom it had been quite natural to turn...

  He said quietly, ‘I think you shouldn’t blame yourself for being less than your father needed, for failing him sometimes. It sounds as if he was too sick-minded to count his blessings, but supposing he hadn’t had even you?’ He stood as he spoke, reaching for her hand to help her up.

  He looked her over and made a business of dusting her free of the tatter of dry leaves which clung to her frock. Then both his hands went to her shoulders. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I begin to think that, in the way of being the one person likely to help Madrigna, I could hardly have chosen better than if I’d picked you by computer!’

  His arrogance at work again, full blast, thought Alix. He hadn’t had the choosing of her—Michele had! And yet, without his imperious claim on her, his appeal to her compassion, she would not have been here now. And in this rare moment of his sympathy she was glad she had come.

  When they returned to the Villa in the small hours the evening behind them had proved to Alix that the worst of one’s bogeys frequently have no substance. She had enjoyed herself without reserve. Signora Parigi had been more at ease than Alix had yet seen her. The little yellow Luigi model and its accessories had been just right for the occasion. Venetia, conscious that her beauty could hold the attention of any company she entered, had been at her most charming. Leone had been suave, an excellent host and particularly gentle with his stepmother. The one threat of discord had been Michele’s absence until a few minutes before they were due to leave for the Club. But he had adroitly evaded Leone’s curt, ‘Where have you been?’; had made a parade of kissing Alix, ‘because you look so swe
et, carina,’ and in apology for keeping her waiting, had been groomed and ready to escort her well within the quarter of an hour’s grace grudged to him by Leone.

  After that everything had gone well. They had dined and had danced a few times before the floor-show came on, and had enjoyed that. Too many people for Alix to remember had been introduced to her and whenever interest in her had threatened dilemma for her, Leone as well as Michele always seemed able to cushion her from awkwardness. She found herself adding another ‘first time’ to her earlier experience of feeling needed at the Villa Fontana. Tonight for the first time she was not conscious of being outside the Parigi circle. Tonight, however briefly or falsely, some turn of fate had drawn her within it, and tonight she wasn’t looking at tomorrow.

  At one point in the evening Michele had mentioned to the others that her birthday was near, and it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to hear them making plans for feting her on the day.

  Michele had lifted his glass to her. ‘Here’s to our whooping it up in style!’ he grinned. Leone had said, ‘A birthday celebration dinner, I think. Say at the Hilton, perhaps?’ He had consulted Michele. But before the latter could reply Signora Parigi had said quietly, ‘Oh no, I think not a public restaurant, Leone. Not for anything as intimate to us as Alix’s birthday. Let’s make it a party at home, please. Not just for ourselves though. For some of our nicest friends, and for some of the Parigi and d’Anza relatives too, don’t you agree?’

  Excusably they had all stared or drawn breath in surprise. Leone had begun, ‘At home, Madrigna? But—’ then had quickly recovered himself. ‘But of course,’ he assured her evenly. ‘A party for Alix at home would be ideal if you feel you would like to give one. Though have you thought of all the trouble you might find it?’