The Takeover (6 page)

‘That will solve your problem, then,’ Mary said. ‘He’ll have to leave.’

‘Do you believe in the evil eye?’ said Maggie still speaking very low.

‘Well, no,’ said Mary whispering back in concert, ‘I believe I don’t.’ She bent closer to Maggie.

‘It’s possible,’ Maggie breathed, ‘that if there is such a thing, Hubert has the evil eye. His name, Mallindaine, is supposed to be derived from an old French form, “malline” which means of course malign, and “Diane” with the “i” and the “a” reversed. He told me once, and as he explained it, the family reversed those syllables as a kind of code, because of course the Church would have liquidated the whole family if their descent from a pagan goddess was known. And they always worshipped Diana. It was a stubborn family tradition, apparently.’

‘It sounds very superstitious,’ Mary said in her hush.

‘I wouldn’t think Hubert was malign, would you?’ Maggie whispered.

‘No, I wouldn’t think that. I think he’s a bum, that’s all,’ Mary said, shifting in her garden chair, while the treetops on the slope below their house rustled in a sudden warm gust of air and the dark lake showed through the branches, calm, sheltered by the steep banks.

‘It makes me uneasy,’ Maggie said. ‘Could you keep a secret?’ She moved her chair a little nearer to the daughter-in-law.

‘Sure.’

‘Even from Michael?’

‘Well, if it wouldn’t make any difference to our marriage…,’ Mary said.

‘I don’t see how it could as it only concerns Hubert and me,’ Maggie whispered.

‘Oh, sure I can keep a secret,’ the girl whispered back eagerly, as if the confidence might otherwise be withdrawn altogether.

‘I want to send Hubert money from time to time. But he mustn’t know it comes from me,’ Maggie said. ‘I also have to think of my marriage. Berto insists that I throw Hubert out. Well, I have to keep trying, and in a way I want to.’

‘You don’t have to tell Berto everything, do you?’

‘He wants to know everything,’ Maggie said. ‘He’s the old-fashioned Italian, it’s part of the charm.’

‘I can see that,’ said the girl.

‘How can I get this money to Hubert without him guessing?’

‘Is it a lot of money?’

‘Well, if I decide on a sum…enough for him to live on here at Nemi while I’m trying to get him out of the house.’

‘I don’t think I follow, really,’ said Mary. ‘But I see what you mean in a way.’

‘It’s a paradox,’ Maggie said. ‘But Hubert mustn’t know how I feel.’

‘He’d think you were frightened of him.’

They talked in hushes late into the afternoon.

‘We’re going a long way but we aren’t getting anywhere,’ Maggie said as the air grew cooler.

‘I wish I could talk it over with Michael.’

‘No! Michael would put a stop to it.’

‘So he would, I guess. I’ll try to think of a scheme.’

‘You have to help me.’

‘I’ll help you, Maggie.’

They looked down on the incredible fertility beneath them. A head and small flash of face every now and again bobbed out of the trees as the country people came and went; one of these, approaching up a path through the dense woodland, presently emerged clearly as Lauro returning. He appeared and disappeared ever larger, seeming to spring from the trees a fuller person at every turn. A little to the north was a corner of Hubert’s roof, and under the cliff below him at a point where the banks of the lake spread less steeply into a small plain lay the cultivated, furrowed and planted small fields of flowers and the dark green density of woodland that covered what Frazer in
The Golden Bough
described as ‘the scene of the tragedy’.

The scene of the tragedy lay directly but far below Hubert’s house, and meanwhile the stars contended with him. ‘Hoping to inherit the earth as I do,’ he said, ‘I declare myself meek.’

This tragedy was only so in the classical and dramatic sense; its participants were in perfect collusion. In the historic sense it was a pathetic and greedy affair. The recurrent performance of the tragedy began before the dates of knowledge, in mythology, but repeating itself tenaciously well into known history.

The temple of the goddess Diana was, from remote antiquity, a famous pilgrim resort. To guard her sanctuary, Diana Nemorensis, Diana of the Wood, had a court of attendants ruled over by a powerful high priest Legends and ancient chronicles have described this figure and it was upon him that J. G. Frazer’s great curiosity was centred. Here is Frazer’s celebrated account of the priesthood of Diana and its ‘tragedy’:

In the sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or craftier.

The post which he held by this precarious tenure carried with it the title of king; but surely no crowned head ever lay uneasier, or was visited by more evil dreams, than his. For year in year out, in summer and winter, in fair weather and in foul, he had to keep his lonely watch, and whenever he snatched a troubled slumber it was at the peril of his life. The least relaxation of his vigilance, the smallest abatement of his strength of limb or skill offence, put him in jeopardy; grey hairs might seal his death-warrant.…According to one story the worship of Diana at Nemi was instituted by Orestes, who, after killing Thoas, king of the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimea), fled with his sister to Italy, bringing with him the image of the Tauric Diana hidden in a faggot of sticks. After his death his bones were transported from Aricia to Rome and buried in front of the temple of Saturn, on the Capitoline slope, beside the temple of Concord. The bloody ritual which legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; it is said that every stranger who landed on the shore was sacrificed on her altar. But transported to Italy, the rite assumed a milder form. Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title of King of the Wood (Rex Nemorensis). According to the public opinion of the ancients the fateful branch was that Golden Bough which, at the Sibyl’s bidding, Aeneas plucked before he essayed the perilous journey to the world of the dead. The flight of the slave represented, it was said, the flight of Orestes; his combat with the priest was a reminiscence of the human sacrifices once offered to the Tauric Diana. This rule of succession by the sword was observed down to imperial times; for amongst his other freaks Caligula, thinking that the priest of Nemi had held office too long, hired a more stalwart ruffian to slay him; and a Greek traveller, who visited Italy in the age of the Antonines, remarks that down to his time the priesthood was still the prize of victory in a single combat.

Rigid and frigid as was the statue of Diana the huntress, still, after all, it became personified as a goddess of fertility. But how, Hubert would demand of his listeners, did the mad Emperor Caligula have sex with a statue? It was an orgy on a lake-ship: there must have been something more than a statue. Caligula took Diana aboard his ship under her guise as the full moon, according to Suetonius. Diana the goddess, Hubert explained, was adept at adding years to the life of a man—she had done so with her lover Hippolytus. She bore a child to the madly enamoured Emperor, added years to the infant’s life so that he became instantly adult, and it was this young man, and not a Roman hireling, whom Caligula sent to supplant the reigning King of the Wood, the priest of Diana.

Hubert descended, then, from the Emperor, the goddess, and from her woodland priest; in reality this was nothing more than his synthesis of a persistent, yet far more vague, little story fostered by a couple of dotty aunts enamoured of the author-image of Sir James Frazer and misled by one of those quack genealogists who flourished in late Victorian times and around the turn of the century, and who still, when they take up the trade, never fail to flourish.

Modern Nemi, at the end of the last century, as more recently when Hubert Mallindaine settled there, appeared to Frazer to be curiously an image of Italy in the olden times; ‘when the land was still sparsely peopled with tribes of savage hunters or wandering herdsmen’. Diana’s temple had been feared by the Church. The long wall of high arched niches, once part of the temple-life, have perfectly survived antiquity, and these, at a later time, had been named ‘the Devil’s Grottoes’. Hubert, beating his way through the undergrowth along the rows of remaining cliff-chapels, would come upon the relics of traditional disrespect and of outcast life. There was a rubbish dump, incredibly rubbishy with the backs of yellow plastic chairs, petrol tins, muddy boots and cast-off rags piled up in those enormous Roman votive alcoves which soared above their desecration with stony dignity. And from this view the plateau was beautiful; it contained the rectangular site of the sanctuary itself, now filled up with earth and cultivated with a chrysanthemum crop.

Very few people now visited this spot as a temple. Hubert had seen reported in a recent article that it was ‘still lost as far as the ordinary tourist is concerned’. ‘No local folk,’ complained the author of the article, ‘seem to know where it is.’ Which, of course, was instinctively the way with local people. Chrysanthemums enjoyed a commercial popularity in Italy on one day of the year, the Day of the Dead; otherwise they were considered unlucky.

The site of the rectangular sanctuary was marked unobtrusively by a withered tree in one corner. A rim of the temple wall still protruded a few inches from the ground on three of its sides. The reason the peasants had cultivated the soil once more over the late dig was that ‘the money for the excavations had stopped’, as one of them explained to Hubert.

One spring, when he was supervising the building of the house then destined by Maggie to be his, Hubert had walked down the cliff-path and talked to a man who was pruning a pear tree on the site of Diana’s temple. The man was about forty-two. He remembered the excavations, he said, when he was a boy. Very beautiful. Red brick paving. A fireplace. Yes, said Hubert, that was for the vestal virgins; it was an everlasting flame. The man went on with his pruning. My ancestress, Diana, was worshipped here, Hubert said. The man continued his work, no doubt thinking Hubert’s Italian was at fault.

Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, ‘It’s mine! I am the King of Nemi! It is my divine right! I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods.…’ And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not?—at any rate, these words were what Hubert cried.

M
ARY HAD NOT YET
got used to the Italian afternoon repose. Her hours were the Anglo-Saxon eight in the morning till midnight with a two-hour break for lunch. That Maggie went to bed between three and five in the afternoon she attributed to Maggie’s middle-age. That nearly all Italians rested during that period of the day she attributed to Latin laziness. What her husband did with himself in Rome during these hours she had not begun to wonder; if she had done so she would have assumed that he regularly returned to his office after lunch, keeping American hours in lonely righteousness. In fact, Michael had a mistress in Rome in whose flat he spent the customary hours of repose; it was not unusual for Italian businessmen to spend the long free hours of lunch and after-lunch with their mistresses, but if Mary had suspected that Michael had acquired the habit, especially so early in their married life, she would have considered her marriage a failure beyond redemption.

Maggie was sleeping successfully that afternoon. Mary had, with some scruple, for she was a girl of many scruples, plied her mother-in-law with white wine. They had lunched together on the terrace, talking of next week. Then Maggie had given Mary the smart jewel-case of black calf-skin, slightly wider than a shoe-box, which, when opened, was dramatically and really very beautifully packed with gold coins of various sizes, dates and nationalities. ‘There are no absolute collectors’ items,’ Maggie explained. Their two heads—Maggie’s shimmering silver and Mary’s long and fair—bent over the glittering and chinking hoard. ‘But,’ said Maggie, ‘the collection as a whole is of course worth more than its weight in gold. Coins always are. My real collection is worth a great deal.’ Mary’s long fingers shifted the coins about. She lifted one, examined it, put it down and took up another, then another. ‘Queen Victoria half-sovereign, King Edward sovereign, South African sovereign—whose head is that?’ ‘Kruger,’ said Maggie. ‘Kruger. Are these worth a lot of money, then?’ ‘Well,’ Maggie said, ‘it depends who you are, whether they are.’

The coins tinkled through Mary’s hands, then hearing the coffee-cups being brought she shut the box, put it on her lap and looked over her shoulder. Lauro appeared, his eyes intent on the tray although he must have seen the black box on Mary’s lap.

When he had left, Maggie said, ‘Hubert mustn’t have a clue who sent them.’

Mary said, ‘I really don’t see why he should have all these.’

‘I have my own important collection,’ Maggie said, ‘and I can get more. Any time I want.’

‘I know. But it’s crazy…’

‘Yes, it’s crazy. But it’s a way of getting rid of him in my own mind.’