The Takeover (13 page)

‘As a servant,’ Lauro shouted. ‘I have to wear that white coat, those black pants.’

‘Well, Lauro, that’s the custom and we pay you well. You do better with us than you ever did with Hubert, and besides you were only his houseman, really, among other things. The word “secretary”—’ She stopped and motioned towards the staircase where footsteps descended.

Lauro stood up and Berto appeared in the bend of the staircase. ‘What’s going on?’ he said to Maggie. ‘Who’s shouting?’

‘Lauro wants to be known as our secretary from now on,’ Maggie said. ‘I don’t see why he shouldn’t be a secretary. He’s going to get married.’

‘Secretary? What do you mean? I don’t understand,’ Berto said.

Lauro stood in a state of confusion. He was exasperated by Maggie’s coolness and quickness of mind and by the fact that he had put himself in the wrong by raising his voice. Maggie, smiling in her chair, was fully conscious that even if the younger man burst out at this moment with the wildest truths about his relations with Maggie and, possibly, Mary, he would be disbelieved on principle; and in fact he would be in deep trouble.

Lauro stood looking at Berto’s angry face. ‘I finish being a servant,’ is what he said.

‘All right, all right,’ said Berto. ‘You can go. Take your things and go. Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll give you your wages and your severance pay and your holiday pay and all your other damned communistic rights for domestics, but don’t stand there abusing the Marchesa. You don’t raise your voice in my house, understand.’

The thought flitted into Maggie’s mind that Berto was behaving out of character, but then the thought flitted away in the heat of things.

‘Now, you listen a minute,’ screamed Lauro, ready for a long hysteria-match such as he had been involved in several times before in his life, not only with Hubert but with the owner of a nightclub, with another Marchese, with a policeman known familiarly as Contessa, with his late mother and very many others. In torrential Italian he listed the indignities he had been subjected to in the service of the Radcliffes and threatened to denounce to the Ministry of Inland Revenue the family’s faulty tax returns, this being a safe guess; he said he would sue for being overworked and having to keep late hours with the result that he now suffered a nervous crisis. Tears came to his eyes as he bawled his accusations, convincing himself by his own voice, more and more, how humiliated he had been and how Berto had even done the unspeakable by addressing him with the familiar ‘tu’ instead of the third person ‘lei’ required by the law.

‘Go!’ screamed Berto and gave him the ‘tu’ again: ‘Vai!’

Maggie now stood up majestically, spreading her golden arms in a peace-appeal. From upstairs Mary called down, ‘Maggie!’

Maggie went to the foot of the staircase, leaving the two men glaring at each other, and called up, ‘It’s all right, Mary.’

Michael looked over the banisters. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Stay there, both of you,’ Maggie said. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Then she returned to the combatants. ‘I haven’t understood a word of all this Italian,’ she said, ‘but it sounds awful. Berto, I have to speak with you privately. Lauro’s only a young man and they’re all like that these days.’

Lauro spat on the floor between them and left the scene, mounting the main staircase to his room where he banged the door hard. Against the further banging of Lauro’s cupboard door and his suitcases, Maggie settled once again in her chair with her hand to her head.

‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ said Berto gently and quite surprisingly.

‘Oh, these things happen.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘Yes. Anything.’

He brought her a whisky and soda and she could hear the clink of ice in the glass as he brought it over. His hand was trembling.

Upstairs, Michael could now be heard in urgent conversation with Lauro, possibly trying to calm him down.

Berto brought over his own drink and perched where Lauro had lately perched. The ice in his glass pelted against the sides. He was agitated. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Well, Berto, it’s sweet of you to feel sorry for me, but really he wasn’t so bad before you appeared.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t want him to leave,’ Maggie said. ‘At least not yet. He might start saying things and cause a scandal.’

‘Did he say anything about me? What did he say about me?’

‘Nothing,’ Maggie said, smiling again, ‘except what he said to your face, and that was enough.’

‘Oh, I just wondered if the little swine had said anything about me, as you say he might go around talking—’

‘I mean Mary. He might talk about Mary.’

‘What can he say about Mary?’

‘I don’t know. Between ourselves, Berto, I don’t know if Mary hasn’t been foolish with Lauro. He seemed to hint something like that.’

‘Mary!’ he said.

‘Yes, Mary.’

‘I can’t believe that. These boys are capable of saying anything. They’re dangerous. What did he want? Money?’

‘I guess so. But you know he’s proud and he went a long way round to ask for it.’

‘He went the wrong way round.’

‘I guess so.’

‘He has to leave this house,’ Berto said, rather factually and with a melancholy tone which invited contradiction.

‘Maybe it will blow over,’ Maggie said. ‘I don’t mind calling him our secretary. I don’t see that it makes any difference what he’s called. He says he’s going to get married and the girl thinks he’s a secretary.’

‘I don’t believe there’s a girl.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘There are things you don’t understand, Maggie. You know, at least, that he was Mallindaine’s boy.’

‘I dare say he goes with boys and girls regardless.’

‘Amazing,’ said Berto, obviously not much amazed.

‘You should talk to him like a father, Berto.’

‘Me?’ he said. ‘Look, I don’t want any more to do with him. He’s a whore. Coming into my house and raising his voice to my wife.…Are you sure of what he said about Mary?’

‘Well, he hinted. I don’t remember the actual words.’

‘He’s a liar. I’m sorry.’

Maggie, suddenly unable to resist the impression that Berto had said ‘I’m sorry’ rather often, threw out a small bait. ‘If we let him go, what could he say against
you
, Berto?’

‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Anything. But it wouldn’t be true, naturally.’

‘Then we’ll throw him out,’ she said. ‘Servants are a boring subject. So that’s settled. Michael can drive him to the ferry.’

‘He’ll make a scandal of it,’ Berto said. ‘I think, in fact, he’ll calm down.’ He looked up to the ceiling. ‘Michael seems to be dealing with him.’ Berto was agitated, speaking softly and loudly by turns. Loudly now, he said, ‘And he’d better apologize.’

Maggie said, ‘I’m going to have a shower.’ She put down her glass and got up, looking back at her empty chair. Berto stood up politely beside her, hovering and anxious to please. What a lot one can learn, she thought, just by sitting still for one hour in a chair. She recalled the long gaze of anger that had passed between Lauro and her husband a short while ago. It had been a knowing anger. She said to herself that she had not seen Berto lose his temper with the other servants or with any of his business employees whatever their stupidity, or however much they lost theirs; Berto habitually subdued them by placing a thousand miles of ice between himself and them. On the other hand, she had seen him involved in brief shouting and glaring exchanges, like that with Lauro, when discussing a horse with his brother or politics with an acquaintance.

‘Michael seems to have done the trick,’ Maggie said, smiling as she went to the stairs. There was silence above. ‘I’m sorry, Maggie,’ said Berto as she left him.

Lauro came along the passage from the farther end, where his room was, and confronted her before she could reach her room. She put a finger to her lips. Michael threw open the door of his room, meanwhile. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘you upset Lauro.’

Mary appeared behind him. ‘We have to call Lauro our secretary, Maggie,’ she said. ‘It’s only fair.’

‘I quite agree,’ Maggie said. ‘After all, Lauro is our secretary in a very real sense. A secretary is one who keeps secrets. What is the Italian for “secretary” anyway?’

Nobody answered her. She went into her room, glancing swiftly at Michael. God knows, she thought, what next to expect; anything might have been going on under my nose, anything. She took off her clothes and went to turn on her shower. But of course, she thought, it hasn’t been under my nose. It’s been somewhere I wasn’t. Lauro with Mary. Lauro with Berto, of all people; Berto. Michael…God knows.

Berto, she mused to herself as she took her shower, is in love with me all the same. Mary and Michael I suppose love each other. Who loves Lauro? Who cares? And he knows he isn’t loved in this little family; that’s what the row was really about, I guess. She soaped her breasts and pummelled them between her fingers luxuriously. Lauro, she thought, knows a lot, and a man like that is useful to know.

By the evening their holiday guests, the Bernardinis, had returned with their English tutor from a three-day progress to various friends along the Amalfi coast. By the time Berto returned from the chemist’s with medicine for Lauro’s migraine, the visitors were sitting out on the terrace overlooking the sea. Berto handed the bottle of tablets to one of the maids and told her to take it to Lauro in his room: two with a glass of water; then he rubbed his hands, cheered up and kissed Letizia Bernardini and Nancy Cowan, once on each cheek, both girls. Then he went and fetched a shawl for Maggie.

At dinner they spoke of Hubert, and of Nemi to where they were all planning shortly to return. It was not in their minds at the time that this last quarter of the year they had entered, that of 1973, was in fact the beginning of something new in their world; a change in the meaning of property and money. They all understood these were changing in value, and they talked from time to time of recession and inflation, of losses on the stock-market, failures in business, bargains in real estate; they habitually bandied the phrases of the newspaper economists and un-questioningly used the newspaper writers’ figures of speech. They talked of hedges against inflation, as if mathematics could contain actual air and some row of hawthorn could stop an army of numbers from marching over it. They spoke of the mood of the stock-market, the health of the economy as if these were living creatures with moods and blood. And thus they personalized and demonologized the abstractions of their lives, believing them to be fundamentally real, indeed changeless. But it did not occur to one of those spirited and in various ways intelligent people round Berto’s table that a complete mutation of our means of nourishment had already come into being where the concept of money and property were concerned, a complete mutation not merely to be defined as a collapse of the capitalist system, or a global recession, but such a sea-change in the nature of reality as could not have been envisaged by Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud. Such a mutation that what were assets were to be liabilities and no armed guards could be found and fed sufficient to guard those armed guards who failed to protect the properties they guarded, whether hoarded in banks or built on confined territories, whether they were priceless works of art, or merely hieroglyphics registered in the computers. Innocent of all this future they sat round the table and, since all were attached to Nemi, talked of Hubert. Maggie had him very much on her mind and the wormwood of her attention focused on him as the battle in the Middle East hiccuped to a pause in the warm late October of 1973.

Letizia Bernardini, with her youth dedicated to an ideal plan of territorial nationalism, had she been able to envisage at that moment the reality to come would have considered it, wrongly, to be a life not worth living. At any rate, at Berto’s table in Ischia that evening, Letizia conversationally embarked once more on the leaky ship of Hubert.

‘There’s a certain magic about him,’ Letizia said, causing Maggie to glare at her and her father to smile. ‘There’s something of the high priest about him,’ Letizia went on. ‘I want to see more of him when we return to Nemi.’

Nancy Cowan said, ‘I think he’s pure fake.’

‘What!’ said Letizia.

‘Why?’ said Maggie at the same time as her husband said ‘Fake what?’

One way and another, Nancy’s quiet little words produced an uproar of argument, all about Hubert, so that they hardly noticed the good food they were eating or heard the very professional robbery of Maggie’s summer jewels going on upstairs in the meantime. Here are the details of the burglary:

Maggie’s summer collection of jewellery was worth a vast fortune, even although it was far less valuable than her winter jewels, and considerably less again than the jewellery she kept in the bank summer and winter, except for the rarest and most important occasions. Her jewellery was difficult to insure against theft in any way that meant business; the insurance companies’ requirements for so large a risk were not only so expensive as to defeat the purpose of insurance, but inconvenient as well. The companies insisted on the jewellery being housed in all types of safes and secured by innumerable safeguards, and even then were becoming more and more unwilling to insure jewellery of Maggie’s sort. Generally, she avoided hotels and when she did stay in one she took very little jewellery, which she lodged in the hotel safe when she was not wearing it. Maggie’s main problem was to prevent jewel-robberies at home. Burglar-alarms had become less and less effective as the burglars themselves became more and more adept at inventing, patenting, selling and subsequently exploiting them.

Two summers ago, Maggie had thought up a scheme to outwit the burglars, provoked as she had been at that time by a passing thief’s discovery that she kept some of her jewels in a hot-water bottle. Her new scheme was to have a tiny kitchen built on an upper landing of every house she owned and frequented. This kitchen, complete with stove, refrigerator and sink, was ostensibly for the use of house-guests who wanted to be independent and who might take it into their heads to cook bacon and eggs in the middle of the night, or mix a drink. These upper kitchens were never used but were always elaborately stocked with food and drinks. They were always approached by a little step about four inches in height. This step was in reality a drawer, and in this drawer went Maggie’s jewellery, unlocked and unnoticed.