The Takeover (3 page)

‘Oh, I like Hubert. Don’t misunderstand me,’ said Cuthbert, and he looked towards Gerard who gave it as his opinion that Hubert had seemed very likeable. ‘Well, I used to like him too,’ said Mary. ‘And I still do. But when Maggie and her husband number three got kind of mad at him we had to take her part; after all, she’s Michael’s mother. What can you do? There’s been a bad feeling between the houses since Maggie got into this marriage. She wants Hubert to go. He says he won’t and he can’t pay rent. She’s going to put him out. The furniture belongs to Maggie as well. But my, she’s finding it difficult The laws in this country.…Hubert might get around them forever.’

They sat down to dinner soon after Mary’s husband, Michael, arrived. They spoke of Hubert most of the time. Hubert was a subject sufficiently close to them to provide a day-to-day unfolding drama and yet it was sufficiently remote, by reason of their wealth, not to matter very much. Hubert himself, since the young couple had ceased to see him, had become someone else than the large-living and smart-spoken old friend they used to know when he was Maggie’s favourite. Now that Maggie had turned against him he was, in their mythology, a parasite on society. ‘He’s not like the old Hubert at all,’ Michael said. ‘Something’s changed him.’

‘I dread one day maybe bumping into him in the village,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t know what I’d say.’

First one Jesuit and then the other offered advice as to the coping with this eventuality. So dark, rather short but so somehow splendid, Lauro served the meal, assisted by a good-looking maid. The spring evening air from the terrace stood around them like another ubiquitous servant, tendering occasional wafts of a musky creeper’s scent. The wine had been sent by Maggie’s new husband from his own vineyards in the north.

‘Hubert,’ said Michael, ‘of course considers he is a direct descendant of the goddess Diana of Nemi. He considers he’s mystically and spiritually, if not actually, entitled to the place.’

‘No kidding!’ said Gerard.

‘No kidding,’ Mary said. ‘That’s what Hubert believes. It’s a family tradition. All the Mallindaines have always believed it. Michael and I met an aunt of his in Paris. She was convinced of it. But I think her health had broken up.’

‘She was old,’ Michael said.

‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘I should look into this for my research.’

The other Jesuit said, ‘I always thought, you know, the Diana mythology was just an interest of his. I didn’t know it was in the family. We’ll have to go see him again.’

One of the stories to be read from the ancient historians of Imperial Rome is that the Emperor Caligula enjoyed sex with the goddess Diana of Nemi. And indeed, two luxurious Roman ships, submerged for centuries in the lake and brought to land in recent times, have been attributed variously to the purpose of Imperial orgies on the lake of Nemi, and to service in the worship of Diana. These ships were brought to land in reconstructable condition only to be destroyed by some German soldiers during the Second World War; however, their remaining contents and fittings testified to the impression that something highly ritualistic took place on board, well into Christian times, although the worship of Diana at Nemi reaches back into the mythological childhood of the race. Hubert’s ancestors.…

But it is time, now, to take a closer look at Hubert on that spring evening, seeing that he had provided a full and wonderful stream of conversation for the party over there in the other house, where the frank spirits rose higher, Lauro glowed in the shadows and Mary, with her golden Californian colouring, her dark blue eyes and white teeth, was so far stimulated as to repeat for good measure a recent saying of Maggie’s: ‘The goddess Diana presents her compliments, and desires the company of her kinsman Mr. Hubert Mallindaine at the Hunt Ball to be held at Nemi.…’

Meanwhile, then, Hubert watched Pauline Thin wash up the plates. He carried their coffee through the sitting-room and out to the terrace. ‘At my age,’ Hubert said, ‘I shouldn’t drink coffee at night. But, Miss Thin, it doesn’t always bear to think of what one should or shouldn’t drink. There’s a limit to everything.’

‘I can see that,’ said Pauline, looking out over the marvellous lake.

‘Miss Thin,’ said Hubert, ‘I have decided. I will not leave this house.’ Hubert had shaved off his beard shortly after hearing of Maggie’s divorce last year in the December of 1972. Then, a week after he heard, in the following January, that she had married the northern Marquis, he had shaved off his moustache. Not that he felt these actions were in any way connected with Maggie’s. It does, however, obscurely seem that in these two shavings he was expressing some reaction to her divorce and marriage, or, more probably, preparing himself for something, maybe an ordeal, requiring a clean-cut appearance.

He looked younger, now. Pauline Thin who had come to work for him this February, had never known him with his hairy maestro’s face. She described him to her best friend in Italy, another English girl who was working in Rome, as ‘dishy’.

Hubert was now forty-five. His generally good looks varied from day to day. Sometimes, when she went into Rome for shopping and stopped to lunch with her girlfriend, Pauline described him as ‘a bit fagoty’. However that may be, Hubert undoubtedly had good looks, especially when anguished. By a system of panic-action whenever he started to be overweight, he had managed to keep his good line. The panic-system, which consisted of a total fast for a sufficient number of days, never more than twelve, to make him thoroughly skinny and underweight, allowed him then to put on weight comfortably with small indulgences in food and drink which otherwise he would never have enjoyed. Hubert had been told, much earlier in his life, that eventually this course would ruin his health but the event had never happened. Indeed, most of his active life was formed by panic-action and in the interludes he was content to dream or fret or for long periods simply enjoy sweet life. One such of these interludes was just coming to an end, which accounted for the especially good looks of his worried face. He was fairly dark-skinned with light blue eyes and sandy-grey hair. His features were separately nothing much, but his face and the way his head was set on his body were effective. Quite often, he was conscious of his physical assets, but more often he simply forgot them.

This house, with the best view of all Maggie’s three houses in the neighbourhood, was furnished richly. After only a year’s occupancy this new house still had newness penetrating its bones. Even the antiques, the many of them, were new. Maggie had brought back across the water from an apartment high in the air, on the east-sixties of Manhattan, large lifts of itinerant European furniture and pictures. The drawing-room furniture was Louis XIV; there had been six fine chairs, at present only five; one was away in a clever little workshop on the Via di Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, being sedulously copied. Hubert was short of money and, almost certain that Maggie would at least succeed in removing the furniture from the house, he was taking reasonable precautions for his future. The new chair was almost finished, and it only remained for the upholstery on the original to be tenderly removed and fitted on to the fake before Pauline should be ordered to go into Rome and fetch the chair. She had been told only that it was being mended. The original would remain in Rome for a while at Hubert’s disposal. Like money in the bank. Hubert thought of switching and rearranging, perhaps, a few more items, and maybe, if there was time, another chair. Maggie had put on the drawing-room floor a seventeenth-century rug; Isfahan. Hubert brooded upon it: not at all possible to copy with excellence. He didn’t use the drawing-room much these days; the heart had gone out of it.

Maggie’s withdrawal from Hubert had taken place quite slowly. It was only to him that it seemed abrupt. To him it was the heedless by-product of a too-rich woman’s whim or the effect of her new husband’s influence, the new husband also being rich. But Hubert’s memory was careless. As we have seen, as far back as the previous summer he was privately lamenting Maggie’s lack of chivalry. His protectress had already started, even before that, to recede. She had let him occupy the new house, as one silently honouring a bad bargain; the house had been ordered to his taste more than three years before it was ready. But it was during those three years and more while the house was being made that she had gradually stopped confiding in him and even before that, perhaps, the disaffection and boredom of the relationship had set in for Maggie.

Hubert had been uneasy about his position, really, for many years more than he now admitted when he thought or spoke of Maggie. ‘Like any other spoilt moneybags she used me when she needed me and then suddenly told me to go, to clear out of her house and her life. All my projects were based on her promises. We had an understanding’

So he dramatized it in a nutshell, first to himself, then, later, to Pauline Thin.

Pauline assumed there had been a love affair till one night, when he was confiding in her for the sheer lack of anyone else to talk to about himself, he remarked, ‘I never touched a woman. I love women but I never went near one. It would break the spell. There’s a magic…women are magic. I can’t live without women around me. Sex is far, far away out of the question in my mind where women are concerned.’

Which bewildered Pauline. Quickly rearranging her ideas, and in the spirit of the missionaries of old who held that conversion was only a matter of revealing the true doctrine, she ended with the conviction that he had not yet met a truly appetizing, faithful woman and decided more than ever to stick by Hubert in these reduced days of his.

‘L
O,
N
EMI!
N
AVELL’D IN
the woody hills

So far, that the uprooting wind which tears

The oak from his foundation, and which spills

The ocean o’er its boundary, and bears

Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares The oval mirror of thy glassy lake;

And calm as cherish’d hate, its surface wears

A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake,

All coil’d into itself and round, as sleeps the snake.’

‘It’s a perfect description,’ said Nancy Cowan, the English tutor. ‘Can you imagine what Byron meant by “calm as cherished hate”? It’s mysterious, isn’t it? Yet perfectly applicable. One can see that in the past, the historic long-ago, there was some evil hidden under the surface of the lake. Many evils, probably. Pagan customs were cruel. “Cherished hate” is a great evil, anyway.’

Her pupils pondered, perhaps being nice enough to feel they had missed the point. Letizia, a girl of eighteen, was not quite sure what the phrase meant. ‘Hatred,’ explained the tutor, ‘which has been kept hidden, secret, never expressing itself behind its impassive face. That’s why the poet wrote “calm as cherished hate”.’

‘It’s very good,’ said Pietro. He was twenty. Both Letizia and Pietro were cramming for extrance exams to American colleges.

The villa at Nemi where they sat in early summer with the English teacher had no view at all of the lake. One could only glimpse the castle tower from one of the windows. It was the third of Maggie Radcliffe’s houses, the newly restored one, recently let to the family. Letizia, a passionate Italian nationalist with an ardour for folklore and the voluntary helping of youthful drug-addicts, resented very much the fact that her father rented the house from an American. She was against the foreign ownership of Italian property, held that the youth of Italy was being corrupted by foreigners, especially in the line of drugs, and asserted herself, with her light skin and hair, large-boned athletic shapelessness, and religious unbelief, to be a representative of the new young Italy. The father, who was divorced from the mother, was extremely rich. She was in no accepting frame of mind to study for an American university entrance, and had already almost converted Miss Cowan, the tutor, to her view. Her brother Pietro, dark-eyed, long-lashed, with a pale oval face, wanted very much to be in a film and then to direct a film, and whenever he was free he spent his time among the courtiers of famous film directors, skimming the speed-routes by day and by night in his Porsche, his St. Christopher medal dangling on his chest, speeding the length of the boot of Italy and back to be with some group of young men who clustered round the film director wherever the film should be in the making. Italy is a place much given to holding court. Pietro, when he was not at one or another court, was happier at home now than he had been in recent years because of the presence of Nancy Cowan.

She was thirty-six, well-informed, rather thin, long-nosed, tender-hearted towards anyone within her immediate radius at any one time. She had come in answer to an advertisement in
The Times
, bringing her Englishness, her pale summer dresses, her sense of fair play, and many other foreign things with her. Letizia had been at first delighted to find that the English tutor was so easy to walk all over in intellectual matters; it was as if Miss Cowan had anything you like instead of views of society or political stands. But at times she suspected that Nancy Cowan really didn’t feel it worth while to give her own opinions; sometimes it almost seemed, in fact, as if Nancy was making herself agreeable to either the brother or the sister simply because they mattered very little to her. Letizia, when this feeling struck her, would force her own views the more strongly, and would sometimes speak her mind to the point of insult. Pietro thought Nancy’s malleability to be very feminine, and with an intuitive artistic sense of economy, he set out to get his father’s money’s worth out of her in his studies. It seemed likely that their father was already sleeping with her. It would have been possible to find out for sure, but Pietro felt too young and sex-free to make the effort; it would have been unhealthy, indelicate, but Pietro one night when they were taking their coffee after dinner in the garden, from the way Nancy Cowan responded to the night-beauty, decided that his father had wooed and won her there. She was also better-looking in the moonlight, quite handsome as in a film; and then, again, the manner towards Nancy of the big fat whiney parlour maid, Clara, told Pietro something. He supposed it also told Letizia something, but he didn’t expect Letizia to acknowledge any such unsevere facts about their father or their English tutor. It was thoroughly in keeping, though, that Papa was getting all full value out of Nancy Cowan, as was she from the job.