The Takeover (4 page)

The brother and sister sat reading Byron with Nancy in the shady garden a few yards from the house. It was six in the afternoon. To humour Letizia, Nancy had bent her English lessons in the direction of local lore. A poor rescued drug-addict in the wreckage of his twenties was cleaning out the swimming-pool under the direction of a gardener and fat Clara. This simple operation made a terrific background noise since Clara’s only tone for all occasions was one of lament, and the gardener, in trying to make a simple instruction penetrate the saved youth’s brain, treated him as if he were hard of hearing. The youth, who had been brought in by Letizia from Rome that morning, would be given a meal and an old pair of Pietro’s trousers for his services before he was taken back to the welfare centre. A few such garden chores got done in this way; only garden chores, since Letizia did not bring these strange people into the house for fear of what they might see and be tempted either to take away or send their friends to procure. To her father, Letizia’s protégés were more or less what in the old days were gypsies. To the eyes of Nancy Cowan they were young drug-addicts just like the London variety. Letizia referred to them as ‘our new social phenomena’ and this, oddly enough, was the title they liked best; they seemed to respond to Letizia, to her statistics and her sociological language which apparently gave them a status in life, and it was rarely that any one of them attempted to take undue advantage of her or ask her for money. Mostly they demonstrated an allergy to Pietro with his Bulgari steel watch, his Gucci shoes and belt, his expensive haircut, and with his Porsche being endlessly cleaned by the house’s young lodge-keeper in overalls.

Big Clara lumbered up from the pool to the house, clutching her heart. She was not yet fifty but she looked much older and yet behaved like a child of twelve which evidently she still felt herself to be. ‘A headache,’ she said in her babyish whine. ‘It’s too hot. You need a professional to clean out the pool. He’ll never understand the chlorine. I’ve got a headache. He has no capacity. You need a man, a real man. He’ll never learn.’

Letizia sprang up from her seat beside Nancy Cowan, full of what it took to cope with Clara in their native tongue. Letizia’s young skin glowed in the late afternoon, her pale blue eyes had a fishy bulge. She swung around in her folklore skirt, her red platform clogs and smocked blouse, gesticulating with her healthy arms. As a specimen, Letizia at eighteen was rounded-off and complete; the finishing touches were already put, there was no room for further contention between character and contours, there was scope only, now, for wear and tear. She was much as she would be, she thought much as she would think, and looked not much different from what she would look, at forty-eight.

The grumbling servant having been coped with, Letizia returned to her garden chair beside her brother and Nancy, with a grin full of healthy teeth.

Nancy Cowan held out her hand for the copy of Byron which Pietro had taken to look at.

‘He must have come here in winter,’ Pietro said, ‘since he wrote about the wind tearing up the oak tree.’

Letizia leaned over Nancy Cowan to examine the lines. ‘He says the wind spares the lake, which is true. Nemi is a very secluded spot. Was Byron at Nemi in winter, then?’

‘Look, you’ll have to get a Life of Byron.…’

‘I think Papa has a biography of Byron. Pietro, do you know?’

‘…something you ought to know about, though. Byron’s always—’

‘He was a lame lord…’ Pietro had taken the book from Nancy and was reading aloud from the biographical foreword to the poems: ‘…a spendthrift and a rake.…’

‘What is that spendthrift…?’ Pietro reached for the dictionary. Nancy Cowan began explaining Byron while the air grew cooler, the light faded over the lawn and Letizia suddenly recollected a bit of Byron’s history from her earlier schooldays.

Just then Letizia was called to the telephone and cursing in Italian went indoors to answer it.

Nancy caught Pietro looking closely at her, and turned her head to look back into his face.

‘Would it embarrass you if I asked you a question?’ he said.

‘You’ve just asked me an embarrassing one,’ she said, to gain ground, and was never to know what Pietro’s other embarrassing question might be, for Letizia returned by way of the kitchen door to say, ‘Papa has asked our landlady to dinner. She phoned Papa at the office. Her name was Mrs. Radcliffe but she got married again to an Italian. La Radcliffe wants to see us.’

‘What’s she like?’ Nancy said.

‘We’ve never seen her. She rents the house through an agent. She’s a rich American, Madame Radcliffe, and now she’s a Marchesa married to a nobleman from the north. I hate Papa for renting a house from an American in our own country. It should be round the other way. Why doesn’t Papa buy a villa?’

‘Italians own property in England,’ said Nancy.

‘That is different. They settled there for two, three generations. They was poor.’ Letizia looked angry, unable to clarify her thoughts, if indeed her feelings existed in thought-form. She slightly lost her grip on correct English. ‘There is many reasons,’ she said. ‘Here in Italy the foreigners takes everything.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Nancy. ‘I really hadn’t thought of it before.’ She thought of it now, looking with purely formal anxiety into the distance.

‘This was an old Italian villa, the foundations are ancient Roman,’ said the girl calming down a little, ‘then along came an American woman with the money. She restores the house. She’s got other houses, all over Nemi, full of foreigners. We’re the only Italians and we pay her rent. Papa pays a huge rent. We had to put in a downstairs sitting-room. Before there was no sitting-room downstairs. We had to make over one of the garages at Papa’s expense. Papa likes the house so he pays and pays.’

The large maid came out with a tray of drinks and ice, wearing a baleful expression. Nancy smiled at her but this made Clara close her eyes as if in pain.

‘You shouldn’t criticize foreigners in Nancy’s presence,’ said Pietro. He was hoping to get a part in a foreign film just at that time and although it was unlikely that their English tutor had many friends among the thousands of foreigners in Italy, far less the Americans who were making the film, he felt there was nothing to lose by shutting his sister up a bit.

‘But Papa pays her to help us with our English and we’re talking English,’ Letizia said. ‘And tonight we have to talk English at dinner for our landlady.’

Their father’s car could be heard coming up the drive, whereupon Nancy Cowan smiled.

A sixteenth-century refectory table with some antique chairs from Tuscany waited for the party in a green damask dining-room. Some special-looking green and gold china was arranged on shelves in four flood-lit alcoves. The candles were ready to be lit in the silver candlesticks, the table was set for six, which meant that the seats were twice as far apart as they need have been. Letizia looked sulkily over the table, said nothing one way or another to the waiting manservant, then left the room through folding doors which led to the drawing-room. The manservant slipped out of another door to report, apparently, no complaints.

In the drawing-room Letizia’s father sat back on a sofa with his contented drink. Nancy Cowan sat by his side, tentatively and upright, near the edge of the seat Letizia, coming in from the dining-room, said, ‘We should have dined in the north room. The green dining-room is far too formal for six.’

The father, Dr Emilio Bernardini, elegantly thin with a pale skin and rather beautiful, very dark eyes behind a pair of scholarly spectacles, black-glossy hair and sharply defined eyebrows, had a look of the portraits of the Stuart monarchs. He was a business lawyer occupied between Rome, Milan and Zürich; in fact, a good part of his business was real estate, and the reason he had yet to sell his own family villa and had chosen to rent from Maggie Radcliffe the one in which he now sat was presumably known only to himself. Although it annoyed his daughter she was too well-fabricated within the business world of Italy to believe she could persuade the father to buy rather than rent. Whatever his reason, it was definitely in his own interest.

He replied in Italian, carelessly, that the dining-room was best for their landlady’s visit. Pietro, in the meantime, was telling Nancy he admired her dress.

Nancy answered, in correct Italian, that it was a new one. She added, ‘After my first long stay in Italy when I saw how Italians dressed, I felt I was underdressed in my London things, so I always get some clothes for the evening when I come to stay here.’

‘Do you mean we’re overdressed?’ said the charming father of the family.

‘In England, at this moment, for this occasion, we would be quite overdressed.’

The father contemplated his children and then herself with some happiness. ‘I think we all look very elegant,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we overdo it. Not long ago we overdid it far more.’

A new young man was shown in, whom Letizia had hastily summoned to dinner to make a respectable number. He, at least, had not overdone it, but was wearing a dingy, grey cotton round-necked shirt and dark trousers, both very much too tight. He was small and plump, bulging with little rolls of flesh under the arms, above the belly, all over; it seemed he had never even started to care what he looked like; Letizia introduced him as Marino Vesperelli, adding, for her father’s sake, that he was a Professor of Psychology. Dr Bernardini took him in good part, cast a hand to indicate a seat, rose to ask him what he would drink. At which Letizia took over, and the young man followed her to the wagon of bottles and ice at the far end of the room. Emilio Bernardini then murmured to Nancy, ‘I hate to think of
him
breathing all over my daughter.’

‘Maybe he’s just a friend.’

‘Where does she pick them up?’

‘I expect this one works with her in her welfare work.’

‘He needs a bit of welfare himself,’ said the father.

However, as soon as the young psychologist had sat down with his drink Dr Bernardini tried to engage him in conversation as to his profession. The young man answered briefly and asked no return questions; plainly he felt that his odd-looking presence was sufficient social contribution to the evening; which, in its decided oddity, it rather was.

‘There’s a car arriving; it must be
her
,’ said Pietro.

Maggie Radcliffe was so much in the long, long habit of making heads swim when she came into view that she still did so. She looked somewhere in her late forties but the precise age was irrelevant to the effect which was absolutely imperious in its demands for attention; and what was more, Maggie achieved it carelessly. She cared only, and closely, about what was going on around her. And so, as soon as she had given her hand to everyone in the room, she started to admire the Bernardinis’ pictures whose authors she recognized, one by one. Still administering her entrance like drops of heart-medicine, she turned to the owner and reminded him how the Klimt over the mantelpiece had very nearly remained in the Austrian collection, thus establishing with him the higher market-place communion that exists between rich and rich.

Nancy Cowan stood waiting for the special guest to sit down. She pulled, through her dress, at the top of her panty-hose, setting herself to rights like a schoolgirl. She then moved her finger under her hair at the nape of her neck. Maggie sat down. The men sat down. Maggie, on being asked what she would drink, turned to the uncomely young psychologist and asked what he was drinking.

‘Sherry on the rocks,’ he said.

Maggie gave a soundless laugh, looking towards her host in merry collusion, and said she would have a vodka-tonic. She had overdressed very tastefully, with a mainly-white patterned dress brilliant against her shiny sun-tan. Her hair was silver-tipped, her eyes large and bright. She had a flood-lit look up to the teeth.

The air-conditioner was turned off before dinner seeing that the evening was cool. The windows of the dining-room were opened to the breeze of the Alban hills. They sat at the long refectory table, spaced-out, murmuring pleasantly one to the other, waiting to be served. Emilio Bernardini at the top of the table had Maggie on his right, Nancy on his left. Letizia sat facing him with Pietro on her left and her boy-friend bundled in his chair on her right. Wine, water, avocado, sauce. ‘What do you think of your villa, Marchesa, now that we’re in it?’

‘You’ve made it charming, more delightful than I remembered having seen it before,’ Maggie said.

‘We made some alterations,’ Letizia said. ‘We had to get workmen. One of the garages is now a downstairs sitting-room. Otherwise, there wasn’t—’

‘I know,’ said Maggie. ‘My agent mentioned it.’

‘The Marchesa must see it later,’ said the father.

‘Yes, I must,’ said Maggie.

‘If we’re speaking English why do you say “Marchesa”,’ said Letizia. ‘ “Marchioness” is English.’

Pietro said, ‘Because it sounds nicer.’

‘Oh, yes, it does,’ Maggie said and laid down her little spoon to drink some water. ‘And “Signora” would be better. “Mrs” and “Miss” make you close your mouth for the ms but for “Signora” and “Signorina” you don’t shut your mouth. “Mrs” and “Miss” form a sneer but “Signora” and “Signorina” are a hiss.’

Marino the psychologist leaned forward to catch Maggie’s drift, puzzled. The others laughed while Letizia explained the point to Marino in rapid Italian undertones. He said, ‘Why is a hiss better than a sneer?’

‘It’s better,’ said the father as the glasses were filled with his good wine.

‘Anyway,’ said Maggie, ‘Signora is perfectly all right for me as I’m now married to an Italian and Italy’s a republic’

‘The Signora is of course the Marchesa di Tullio-Friole,’ said Dr Bernardini with his cool good manners, at the same time drawing the line at any excess of a tiresome subject arising from Maggie’s logic.

‘Oh, Marchesa is so formal. It suits me only when I’m with my husband.’

‘I was at school with his son, Pino,’ said Dr Bernardini. ‘I remember your husband very well. I stayed at the villa up in the Veneto, often. I’ve hunted there.’