The Cypress Garden

by Jane Arbor

  She had regarded him calmly. ‘And so—?’

  He had shrugged and smiled. ‘You feel equal to it, Madrigna?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Then we’ll lay it on.’ He had spoken to the Signora, but his swift, cryptic glance had slanted at Alix, acknowledging her as an ally, rewarding her.

  So four of them had come home, leaving Venetia to be escorted later by her faithful Giraldo. Signora Parigi went straight to bed after kissing Alix goodnight; Michele suggested a nightcap to which Leone agreed, but which Alix declined.

  ‘I’ve had enough.’ Mellowed and relaxed, she smiled at them both. ‘It’s been a lovely evening. Thank you so much,’ she said.

  Michele’s reply was an over-elaborate bow. ‘Thank you, signorina!’ But on her way past his chair he caught at her wrist. ‘What about a goodnight kiss?’ he asked, his voice a little thick.

  She hesitated, unwilling, and tried to turn her wrist out of his grasp. But his finger and thumb pinned it, and his narrowed eyes were a warning of his truculent mood.

  Involuntarily she glanced at Leone for help, saw his quick frown as a couple of strides brought him to Michele’s side.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said tautly. ‘Enough is enough. You don’t have to keep up the play-acting in front of me.’

  Michele looked up at him in bland, deliberate provocation. ‘Who’s talking of play-acting?’ he drawled. ‘This is for real. Alix says I’ve given her a lovely evening, and I’m putting in for my reward. What can be fairer than that?’

  For answer Leone took his glass from him, went back for his own and flung the contents of both out of the open french door. ‘Alix is right,’ he said. ‘We’ve all had enough, and if you take my advice, my friend, you’ll go to your bed. Alix—?’

  Behind them, as he went with her to the door and opened it for her, was the defiance of the clink of glass as Michele poured himself a fresh drink. Leone ignored it as he bent over her hand, then seemed to change his mind to brush each of her cheeks in turn with his lips in the typically Latin token of greeting or parting which he would accord his stepmother or Venetia.

  ‘Goodnight,’ he said. ‘And thank you—for more than the evening.’ The look he gave her meant her to understand.

  ‘Goodnight.’ Glowing a little, she turned away. Much less than a kiss, little more than a handshake, in itself the gesture had meant nothing. But with it, somehow, he had made her even more one of them. And the thanks which had gone along with it made it a kind of—of accolade. Laurels to honour ... to deserve.

  Later she was to wonder whether she had really expected the heartening success of that Sunday to be maintained. For it was not. During the fortnight before her birthday there were times when Dora Parigi was quite eager with plans for the party; wrote invitations to it and even discussed menus with Alix and her cook. But equally there were others when she would claim it was all too much trouble, a mistake. And when her self-pity wanted to know why anyone should wish to come to a party at which she was hostess. Alix and Michele should have planned to have the day and the evening to themselves. Why should they want an old woman like her to share them? People were just indulging her, that was all!

  For two reasons, most of all this was argued out with only Alix for audience. The first being that Leone had gone north to Milan on business, taking Venetia with him to spend time with friends in Bologna. The second—that Michele, making the most of Leone’s absence, contrived to play truant from the Villa almost every day, coming and going erratically and managing to sidestep questions he did not wish to answer.

  So much for her role as decoy duck to keep him at home! reflected Alix wryly, torn between a certain sympathy for his restiveness and pity for his mother, who was never critical of his neglect, only wistful. When Alix took him to task he taunted her playfully with going over to the enemy; quoted the Italian version of ‘When the cat’s away...’ and that night did not even sleep at home but, too late to get back, had spent it at his place in the Trastevere, he explained the next morning.

  When Leone and Venetia returned on the day before Alix’s birthday the Signora was once again on an upward wave of optimism, as Leone could see for himself when they met. But alone with him later, Alix was blunt with him about the ups and downs of the older woman’s mood while he was away.

  She played down Michele’s defections by making much of the few times he had escorted them anywhere.

  ‘He has taken us out to lunch, and we’ve been shopping. And your stepmother insisted on buying me a birthday present—a dress for the party which I’d admired in a window and which she got Michele to go in and buy for me. I was so touched that I simply couldn’t refuse to take it,’ she told Leone.

  ‘Why should you think of refusing? You must have known it would give her pleasure,’ he retorted. ‘What else have you persuaded her to take some interest in?’

  ‘Well, we’ve both been to Rossi’s salon to have our hair done. Her suggestion, that.’ Deciding that this was enough sugar on the pill, Alix added, ‘But it hasn’t all been an easy passage. I haven’t always been able to reach her. But I’ve learned at least two things about her. She craves to feel needed, preferably by someone in worse trouble than herself. And she is bored.’

  ‘Bored?’

  ‘Bored,’ Alix insisted firmly. ‘For far too long, in my opinion, she hasn’t had enough to do.’

  ‘Nothing to do?’ Leone reacted sharply. ‘For far too long she has been equal to nothing; wanted to do nothing whatsoever!’

  Alix held her ground. ‘On the contrary, she has told me of a lot of things she would like to do, if she could see the need.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well, we’ve talked dressmaking, and she says she loves to sew and always used to, once. But now she is expected to dress at the model houses, she can only yearn over the materials she sees in the shops and would delight in making up for herself. Then cooking—She can, she says. But she hasn’t prepared or cooked anything in her own kitchen for years. Nor even, lately, given the cook her orders. Nor marketed, even by telephone. You have taken over. Paying wages, engaging staff, dismissing it, budgeting—the lot. Even gardening! Why, she says your men would be affronted if she so much as took up a handfork or pulled out a weed! I tell you,’ Alix concluded, carried away, ‘your stepmother is starved of the necessity to lift a finger—for herself or for any of you or for the house. She is hungry to do. Women always are, you know. They’re made that way.’

  There was a small silence. Then Leone said, ‘Well, well! I’ve left Madrigna no will power of her own and now I’ve robbed her of her birthright of busyness! What do you suggest I do to remedy that? Order her the latest in sewing-machines and metre upon metre of, say, flannel for petticoats? Or shall I get rid of a couple of the garden boys?’

  Obtusely practical, Alix said, ‘She already has a sewing-machine, as you should know. And the cue word is “order”. Don't. If she wants to sew, let her finger and choose and compare stuffs for herself. And make over just one bit of the garden to her, to mess about in and—and create. You were surprised when she wanted to hold my party here, but you were wise enough not to thwart her. I was glad you didn’t. You ought to forget more often that you are both so rich and so dominant that you can arrange everything for her. Or for—anyone. People need to make their own mistakes. To be free to make them—and have to stand by them. And if you think that’s “armchair” of me, I’m sorry. But, I believe I’m right.’

  ‘You could be,’ he allowed, ‘about Madrigna. The rest you are far too young to be didactic about from your own experience. So I’m too rich and too autocratic, and you resent me for both?’

  ‘Only when you use both in order to manage people,’ she murmured.

  He laughed shortly. ‘If I were as poor and weak-kneed and as complaisant as the patient Grizelda, I’ve an idea I still couldn’t win! Being a woman, you’d have to see it as your duty to trounce me and try to make me over into something I’m not.’

&nbs
p; Stung, Alix retorted, ‘You do generalize, don’t you? That’s the second time you’ve disparaged me for being a woman, which I can’t help. You must have a pretty low opinion of us as a sex.’

  He shrugged. ‘To coin a phrase—“One speaks as one finds”.’

  She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘What a pity,’ she said.

  ‘A pity?’ His chin jerked up in query. ‘How so?’

  ‘I meant—a pity about your lack of faith in people ... in women.’ She hesitated. ‘About—sounding like the cynic I’d hate to believe you are.’

  He laughed again. ‘And reading for “cynic”—disgracefully wealthy dictator who appears to need no woman enough to become either husband-fodder or yes-man to her—by what saving grace do I escape the label? If I do?’

  Alix stirred uncomfortably. ‘Well, I hardly know you well enough to say. But if you were really as jaundiced as all that, you wouldn’t care as deeply about your stepmother as I’m sure you do, nor be as gentle and considerate of Venetia as you are.’

  ‘So I get some marks for being good to my stepmother and normally chivalrous with my cousin? What about our relationship, yours and mine? Nothing to my favour there?’

  She looked away. ‘That’s different. Ours is only a kind of business arrangement.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t care to see it as a job? But for you it’s a mere clinical pact, still without any—for want of a better word—heart?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by heart.’

  ‘Well, as with a fire. Kindled by now to a bit of a glow; on the tinder of our various frictions, if you like. But kindled ... gaining warmth. However, you prefer it to remain an assignment? You’ll stand by it. You’ll honour it. But you resent the moral piracy I worked to force it on you, and you don’t mean to get involved, do you?’

  Alix said slowly, ‘That’s hardly fair. I am involved, whether I wanted to be or not.’

  ‘With Madrigna, yes,’ he agreed. ‘You’ve got rapport and sympathy and pity there. But you find it safer to stand off a little from me, from the rest of us; keeping your distance and seeing to it that we keep ours.’

  ‘Safer?’

  ‘Self-preserving. The “Rhode” side of you overriding the “Alessandra” side. The warm Latin in you intrigued and a bit excited and willing to let a bizarre situation have its way with you; the frigid English bit warning you not to make an emotional thing of it—and winning, hands down. For instance, do you realize how a born Italian girl would probably have reacted if I’d demanded of her what I asked of you?’

  Because he expected her to, Alix asked, ‘No. How would she?’

  ‘She would have called me a brute. She would have wept. She might have thrown things. If she had agreed to come she wouldn’t have talked about obligations or sympathy for Madrigna or being driven to it by pride. She’d have made it a personal, woman-to-man favour to me, and all the time she was here I’d have had to keep her primed, like a reluctant water-pump, with one intense, sex-aware scene after another.’

  ‘And that would have been “heart”? You’d have preferred it?’

  He spread a hand. ‘Heaven forbid! The chances are we should have ended up either bitter enemies or lovers, which is hardly the object of the operation. No risk of that with you. The English bit is fully in control—There’s the gong for dinner. Shall we go in?’ he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next morning the family took breakfast in their rooms as usual. But they all gathered in the salon before luncheon to drink to Alix’s birthday and to give her their presents.

  These were all exquisitely gift-packed and they made an exciting pile. But before she opened them she knew a moment of panic. She remembered her last birthday, which she had spent alone with her father and when her only presents had been a cheque from him and a parcel from England from her aunt. Then—and now! She looked over the rim of her wineglass at the strangers who were wishing her well with expensive gifts today.

  Dora Parigi. Leone. Michele. Venetia d’Anza. Less than a month ago she had known none of them, and though she might delude herself now that she belonged; that some of them wanted her to, what, a few months or even weeks from now, would she be to any of them or they to her?

  The moment passed. It had to. They were waiting for her to open the parcels.

  From the Signora there was the dress which she had not allowed Alix to see after Michele had been dispatched to buy it. And to this she had added other things in separate packages—a dozen Italian silk handkerchiefs, ‘A’-embroidered, a diamante hair bandeau and a pair of arm-length evening gloves in finest white kid.

  Venetia’s present was a flask of Luigi perfume—an offering which she rather spoiled for Alix by her smirk at Leone—‘It’s all right, darling! That hasn’t gone on to your account. I saved up my own poor little lire and paid for it myself!’ Not knowing quite what she meant by the quip, Alix still felt it was in rather poor taste.

  Next she opened Leone’s parcel, labelled cryptically, ‘Even the English sang-froid may find an occasional use for this.’ It was an antique ivory fan, the fabric of sheerest gossamer silk and each of the eighteen sticks filigree-carved to a different design. Though she felt it was almost too delicate to handle, she unfurled it and closed it and unfurled it again in utter delight.

  ‘It’s one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen,’ she breathed.

  The Signora said, ‘It’s not new, you know. It belonged to Leone’s great-great-grandmother. He consulted me as to whether you would like it. He thought it might help you to begin to feel one of us.’

  Venetia said, ‘Well, well! You are privileged. An heirloom, no less!’—a taunt which, however lightly meant, drained Alix of pleasure and put guilt in its place.

  She looked across at Leone, watching for her reaction. ‘It’s quite, quite lovely. But you shouldn’t have! I’m not—’ she began, then checked, warned by his swift small frown against denying in public that she had any right or expectation to become one of them.

  Purposely, thinking she ought to give it importance, she had left Michele’s present till last. She opened it to find a beauty-case in cream tooled Florentine leather, its surface as soft and warm to the touch as a baby’s complexion. Excitedly she used its key to admire its satin interior and silver-topped fittings. She smiled up at Michele, ‘It’s fabulous! I’ve never owned one before. But it’s almost too luxurious to use!’—only to find that she hadn’t his attention.

  At his mother’s sharp-drawn breath of dismay he had turned to her, as the other two had. Wide-eyed and wistful, she said, ‘I should have known, from the size, that it wasn’t—But, Michele son, I had been hoping so much that your gift to Alix today would be—your ring!’

  To Alix the silence which followed seemed to go on and on. But in fact Michele recovered himself almost instantly. Going over to his mother, he bent to kiss her lightly.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Mama, a ring at this stage would be a bit premature. Alix hasn’t said Yes to me in so many words yet. But I’m living in hope—Meanwhile, I’m buttering her up with expensive beauty-cases and the like. And another thing—when I do buy her a ring, she must choose it for herself on Condotti. I can’t let her suspect that I got it wholesale on the cheap from Parigi Cameos, now can I?’

  ‘Oh, Michele!’ Signora Parigi laughed tremulously and patted his hand. ‘You make a joke of everything! And I—I’m just an over-eager old woman, aren’t I? Alix—?’ She put out a hand and Alix went to her. ‘I haven’t embarrassed you, dear? You’ll forgive me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Embarrassed? Shamed would be more apt, thought Alix. With the Signora so pathetically trusting, where was it all going to end? Alix glanced at Leone, who wasn’t looking her way. Did he know? Of course he didn’t. Whatever his motives, he was manipulating an artificial situation, trying to juggle with people, and how could it ever work?

  At luncheon the talk was of the party, with Venetia contributing slick thumbnail sketches of the ex
pected guests. She gave Alix one bad moment when she suddenly questioned, ‘Come to think of it, you’ve let us invite all our friends. Wasn’t there anyone from your circle that you wanted to ask?’

  Alix shook her head. (Be careful!) ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘You see, with my father being ill for so long, I couldn’t accept many invitations or give any, so I hardly got to know anybody in Rome.’

  ‘But he must have known plenty of people,’ Venetia insisted.

  ‘Who would hardly be of an age to fit in to Alix’s birthday party, surely?’ Leone interposed.

  Venetia wrinkled her nose at him. ‘They could have children, couldn’t they? I’d have thought—But I suppose Alix is right. She didn’t get to know anyone much. For instance, you don’t seem to have heard of any of the people I know, do you?’ she appealed across the table just as her aunt rose from it and the meal was at an end.

  Michele tucked a hand into Alix’s arm. ‘With people running hither and yon, getting ready for tonight, this place is going to be pure poison for the next few hours. Let’s go out,’ he invited.

  Alix hesitated. ‘Isn’t there anything I can do to help?’ she asked the Signora.

  ‘Nothing at all, dear. The maids will do it all. Go with Michele, but make him bring you back in time for you to rest before you have to dress, won’t you?’

  ‘To make sure of that, you’d better take the Alfa,’ Leone told Michele. But when Alix joined him ten minutes later Michele was at the wheel of his own runabout.

  She had thought he meant to take her for a drive in the Alban country or for a swim at the Del Lago. But he took the road to Rome and when she questioned where they were going he said, ‘Anywhere. It doesn’t matter. I want to talk to you. What about Carlo’s for old times’ sake?’