The Takeover (2 page)

‘How are you?’ said Hubert politely. ‘I’m afraid I’m going to be a bit pressed for time. If you’d have phoned me I could have made a date for you to come to dinner.’

‘Oh, oh, are you going out…?’

‘About sevenish,’ said Hubert putting on a weak smile. It was then sixish. ‘I have to go and change soon’—Hubert indicated his old clothes—‘out of these things. Have you met Pauline Thin? Pauline, this is Father Cuthbert Plaice.’

‘Why, I think I know you, Pauline,’ said the priest, shaking her hand and, it seemed, trying to locate her in his social register.

‘I worked for Bobby Lester in Rome,’ Pauline said.

‘Why, of course! Yes. Well, now you’re here?’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Hubert, I’ve got a Jesuit friend down there in the car,’ said the priest, ‘that I want you to meet. I thought you would like to meet him, he’s been studying the ancient ecological cults and in fact he’s taken some tape recordings of modern nature-cultists which you have to hear. There are the conscious and the unconscious. It’s fascinating. I thought we could have dinner together but anyway I’ll just go call him and we can have a drink. I just wanted to tell you before you meet him, you see, that he’s on your wave-length.’ The priest made away towards the car stretching one arm behind him as if Hubert were straining away from him at the end of an invisible cord.

‘Bloody pest,’ said Hubert to Pauline. ‘Why should I give them my drinks? He knows I’ve told him that I can’t afford those lavish entertainments any more. And dinner—he wanted to stay with his friend for dinner.—He marches in, and one’s house isn’t one’s own. Priests can be very rough people, you know. Such a bore.’

‘This one’s an awful bore,’ said Pauline. ‘Bobby Lester couldn’t stand him.’

Father Cuthbert was returning with a younger Jesuit of the same size to whom he was talking eagerly.

‘Hubert,’ he said, when he had reached the verandah, ‘I want you to meet Father Gerard Harvey. Gerard has been doing studies of ecological paganism and I’ve told him all about you. Oh, this is Pauline Thin. She’s working for Hubert. I knew Pauline before. She—’

‘Come in and have a drink,’ said Hubert.

‘We can sit right here on the terrace. I want Gerard to see the view. What marvellous weather! That’s the thing about Italy. You can sit outside in March, and—’

Hubert left them sitting on the terrace and went inside to fetch the drinks. Pauline followed him. ‘Do you want me to stay with them?’ she said.

‘Yes, make a nuisance of yourself. Hang around looking silly so that they can’t speak freely. Remember I’m supposed to get ready for dinner in about half an hour’s time. These people need to be house-trained.’

Pauline went out on the terrace and sat down with the two men.

‘Have you been in Italy long?’ she said to the younger man.

‘I’ve been here six months.’

She looked at her watch. ‘Hubert has to go and change very soon,’ she said. ‘He’s got a long drive ahead to arrive for eight. He has some letters to sign first.’

‘Oh, where’s he going?’ said Father Cuthbert.

‘You shouldn’t ask,’ she said.

‘Well, now, that’s not the way to talk,’ said Cuthbert, looking very amazed.

‘I guess she isn’t a Catholic,’ said Gerard soothingly.

‘I’m a Catholic,’ said Pauline. ‘But that’s got nothing to do with it. One doesn’t tell people all one’s business and all one’s employer’s business.’

Hubert appeared with a tray of drinks. The whisky bottle was one third full and the gin was slightly less. There was a box of ice and a bottle of mineral water.

‘It’s terrorism,’ said Pauline.

‘What’s this?’ Hubert said, setting down the tray.

‘Priests,’ said Pauline. ‘They’re terrorists. They hold you to ransom.’

The Jesuits looked at each other with delight. This was the sort of thing they felt at home with, priests being their favourite subject.

‘Times have changed,’ Hubert said to Pauline, ‘since you were at school at the Sacred Heart, I’m afraid.’

‘It isn’t so long ago,’ Pauline said, ‘since I was at school. My last year, I went to Cheltenham.’

Father Gerard said, ‘What goes on at Cheltenham?’

‘Ladies’ College,’ said Hubert. ‘If you look closely, it’s written all over her face.’

‘What do you have against us?’ Father Cuthbert said, shifting about with excitement in his chair as if he were sexually as much as pastorally roused.

‘It seems to me,’ Hubert said, turning with gentle treachery towards Pauline, ‘a bit inhospitable to carry on this conversation.’ His Mitigil had started to work. He had put ice in the glasses. ‘What will you drink?’ he said to the guests.

‘Whisky,’ said both priests at once. Hubert looked sadly at his whisky bottle, lifted it and poured.

‘Hubert,’ said Pauline, ‘that’s all the whisky we have.’

‘Yes,’ said Hubert. ‘I’m having gin. What about you, Miss Thin?’

‘Plain tonic,’ said Pauline.

The younger priest sipped his drink and looked out over the still lake in its deep crater and the thick wildwood of Nemi’s fertile soil. ‘Terrific ecology!’ he said.

‘You mean the view?’ Pauline said.

Hubert sat in a chair with his back to the grand panorama and he sighed. ‘I have to give it up,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing for it. The house isn’t mine and Maggie’s changed so much since her new marriage. They’re insisting on charging me rent. A high rent. I have to go.’

‘Remember your dinner date,’ Pauline said, ‘and Hubert, would you sign some letters, please?’

‘Dinner date…?’ said Hubert. Since Maggie’s marriage following on her son Michael’s marriage, and since the trouble with his money in Switzerland, he had been asked out less and less. He looked into his little drop of gin, while Father Cuthbert seized on the doubt about dinner. ‘You’re going to go out for dinner?’

‘We’ve already told you so,’ said Pauline.

‘Oh, I didn’t know if you meant it,’ said the priest.

Hubert, remembering, said ‘Oh, yes, I am. I have to go and change very soon, I’m afraid. They eat early, these people.’

‘What people?’ said Father Cuthbert. ‘Do I know them? Could we come along?’

His companion the ecologist began to show embarrassment. He said, ‘No, no, Cuthbert. We can go back to Rome. Really, we mustn’t intrude like this. Unexpectedly. We have to.…’ He rose and looked nervously towards the car where it was parked half-way down the drive.

‘Why don’t you go and see Michael?’ Hubert said, meaning Maggie’s son, whose house was nearby.

Father Cuthbert looked eager. ‘Do you know if he’s home?’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Hubert. ‘They’re both in Nemi just now. He got married himself recently. Marriage does seem to be a luxury set apart for the rich. I’m sure they’ll be delighted to see you.’

While Hubert explained to the excited priest how to get there by car, his friend, Father Gerard, looked around him and across the lake. ‘The environment,’ he said. ‘This is a wonderful environmental location.’

‘It’s your duty to visit Michael and Mary, really,’ Pauline egged them on. ‘They have sumptuous dinners. They had a shock when Maggie got divorced and married again, you know. It’s been an upset for the Radcliffes. Her new husband’s a pig.’

‘Don’t they see his father?’

‘Oh, I dare say,’ Hubert said. ‘Radcliffe was Maggie’s second husband, of course. The new one’s the third. But it was so sudden. The family’s all right financially of course. But I must say it’s left me in a mess, personally speaking.’

When the priests had left, Hubert went with Pauline into the kitchen. He opened a tin of tuna fish while she made a potato salad. They then sat down to eat at the kitchen table, silently, reflectively.

It seemed as if Hubert had forgotten the priests. Pauline, as if anxious that he should not forget a subject that had served to bring them closer, assiduously said, ‘Those priests.…’

At first he didn’t respond to the tiny needle. He merely said dreamily, ‘It’s not too much to wonder if they’re not a bit too much,’ and took in a mouthful of food.

‘But so pressing, so insufferably pushy,’ Pauline said, at which Hubert was roused into agreement, chummily communicating it: ‘It’s an extraordinary fact,’ he said, ‘that just at the precise moment when you’re at your wit’s end it’s always the last people in the world you want to see who turn up, full of themselves, demanding total attention. It’s always the exceptionally tiresome who barge in at the exceptionally difficult moment. Would you believe there was a time when a Jesuit was a gentleman, if you’ll forgive the old-fashioned expression?’

Pauline passed him the potato salad. It had onion, too, in it, and mayonnaise. ‘Forget them, Hubert,’ she said, plainly intending him not to do so.

But Hubert smiled. ‘Miss Thin,’ he said as he took the salad bowl from her hand, ‘I have inside me a laughter demon without which I would die.’

‘D
EMONS FREQUENTED THESE WOODS
, protectors of the gods. Nymphs and dryads inhabited the place. Have you seen the remains of Diana’s temple down there? It’s terribly overgrown and the excavations are all filled in, but there’s a great deal more to see than you might think.’

‘No, I haven’t seen it,’ said Mary, curling her long legs as she sat, yoga-style, on a cushion on the pavement of the terrace. She was a young long-haired blonde girl from California, newly married to Michael Radcliffe. The priests were entertaining her enormously. She didn’t want them to leave and pressed them to stay on for a late dinner. Michael had gone to Rome and wouldn’t be back till nine. ‘He said nine, which most probably will be ten,’ she said.

‘Pius the Second,’ said Father Gerard, ‘said that Nemi was the home of nymphs and dryads, when he passed through this area.’

‘Really?’

An Italian manservant, young and dark-skinned in a white coat with shining buttons and elaborate epaulettes, brought in a tray of canapé and nuts which he placed on the terrace table beside the bottles. He looked with recognition at Father Cuthbert who, without looking at the manservant, took a handful of nuts, as also did Father Gerard. The ice clinked in the glasses, and they helped themselves to the drinks when their glasses were empty, refilling Mary’s glass too. They were Americans together, abroad, with the unwatchful attitude of co-nationals who share some common experiences, however few.

‘I majored in social science,’ said Mary who had been to college in California.

‘Did you come to Italy before?’ said Father Gerard.

‘No, never. I met Michael in Paris. Then we settled here. I love it.’

‘How’s your Italian?’ said the other priest, beaming with idle pleasure as who would not after two months’ continuous residence in the priests’ bleak house in Rome, anonymous and detached in its laws of life?

‘Oh, my Italian’s coming along. I took a crash course. I guess I’ll get more fluent. How about yours?’

‘Gerard’s is pretty good,’ said Father Cuthbert. ‘He doesn’t get enough practice. There are Italians at the Residence of course, but we only talk to the Americans. You know the way it gets. Or maybe the French—’

‘Cuthbert speaks almost perfect Italian,’ said Father Gerard. ‘He’s a great help when I’m talking to the locals around the country about their legends and beliefs.’

‘Gerard,’ said Father Cuthbert, ‘is doing a study on pagan ecology.’

‘Really? I thought the Italians were mostly all Catholics.’

‘On the surface, yes, but underneath there’s a large area of pagan remainder to be explored. And absorbed into Christianity. A very rich seam.’

‘Well,’ said the girl, ‘I don’t know if you’ve talked to Hubert Mallindaine about that…’

Hubert was a whole new subject, vibrating to be discussed. The priests began to speak in unison, questions and answers, then the girl broke in with laughing phrases and exclamation marks, until Father Cuthbert’s voice, being the highest and most excitable, attained the first hearing. The manservant hovered at the terrace door, his eyes upon them, waiting to serve. Mary stretched her fine long suntanned legs and listened. ‘We arrived this evening,’ said Cuthbert, ‘without letting him know in advance. Well, that’s nothing new. As a matter of fact the last time I saw him, about six weeks ago, in Rome, he said, “Come to dinner any time. Sure, bring a friend, you’re always welcome. There’s no need to call me. I never go out. Just get into that car and come.” That’s what he said. Well. We arrived this evening didn’t we, Gerard?’

‘We did,’ said Gerard.

A person with a good ear might have questioned the accuracy of Cuthbert’s report on the grounds that Hubert, not being American, was not likely to have used a phrase like, ‘Sure, bring a friend…’ But it did seem that the priest had been in the habit of dropping in on Hubert from time to time, whether welcome or not. Clearly he regarded it as his right to do so, anywhere.

‘I was embarrassed for Gerard,’ Cuthbert was saying, ‘especially as this was his first visit, you know. He had an awful secretary, a girl who used to work for another friend of mine in Rome. A terribly—’

Here Gerard broke in, and so did Mary. When they had finished exclaiming over Pauline, Cuthbert continued, ‘I think she’s got a problem. Then she kept telling Hubert he had to go out to dinner, which I’m sure wasn’t true because of the way it was said, you know.’ He finished his drink and the manservant came out of the shadows to replenish it. This time Cuthbert recognized the man’s face but couldn’t at first place it.

The servant lifted the glass with a well-paid and expert air and smiled.

‘I know you, don’t I?’ said Cuthbert to the man.

‘It’s Lauro,’ said Mary. ‘He was one of Hubert’s secretaries last summer.’

‘Why, Lauro, I didn’t recognize you in that uniform! Why, Lauro!’ The priest seemed confused, realizing the man had understood their conversation.

Lauro answered in easy, accented English. ‘You surprised to see me here? I lost my job with Hubert and I went to a bar on the Via Veneto then I came back to Nemi to work for Mary and Michael.’

‘Lauro’s on first-name terms with us,’ Mary said. ‘The Embassy crowd are shocked. But we don’t care.’

Lauro smiled and slipped back to his doorway.

‘Lauro could tell you everything you want to know about Hubert,’ Mary said. Lauro’s shadowed form stooped to adjust a rose in a vase. Cuthbert looked carefully at Mary as if to see quite what she had meant by her words, but she had evidently meant far less than she might have done.