The Takeover (15 page)

It was the autumn of 1974 and Maggie had not succeeded in turning Hubert out of her villa, partly because she had been distracted throughout that year by little thumps of suspicion within her mind at roughly six-week intervals concerning the manipulation of her fortune, with all its ramifications from Switzerland to the Dutch Antilles and the Bahamas, from the distilleries of Canada through New York to the chain-storedom of California, and from the military bases of Greenland’s icy mountains to the hotel business of India’s coral strand. Brilliant Monsieur de Renault was now the overlord of Maggie’s network. Mysterious and intangible, money of Maggie’s sort was able to take lightning trips round the world without ever packing its bags or booking its seat on a plane. Indeed, money of any sort is, in reality, unspendable and unwasteable; it can only pass hands wisely or unwisely, or else by means of violence, and, colourless, odourless and tasteless, it is a token for the exchange of colours, smells and savours, for food and shelter and clothing and for representations of beauty, however beauty may be defined by the person who buys it. Only in appearances does money multiply itself; in reality it multiplies the human race, so that even money lavished on funerals is not wasted, neither directly nor indirectly, since it nourishes the undertaker’s children’s children as the body fertilizes the earth.

Anyway, back to Maggie’s fortune: Coco de Renault had reorganized her financial network throughout the past year; he had made something of a masterpiece of it. Like so many others in that year he began using the new crisis-terminology introduced by the current famous American Secretary of State; Coco de Renault’s favourite word was ‘global’. He produced an appealing global plan for Maggie’s fortune, so intricate that it might have been devised primordially by the angels as a mathematical blueprint to guide God in the creation of the world. It was quite unfathomable, but Maggie, whose rich contemporaries were beginning to look at each other with wild alarm, at first felt a great satisfaction at having acted in time. She felt that brilliant Monsieur de Renault from the Argentine was a sort of perfected bomb-shelter. But as the months of 1974 passed from those of spring and summer into the autumn, she had experienced these intervals of anxiety, sudden little shocks. On one occasion she realized that her administration headquarters, which previously occupied an entire floor of offices in a New York block, with three full-time lawyers, twelve accountants and a noisy number of filing clerks and secretaries who fell silent on the few occasions that Maggie made a visitation thereupon, was now all disbanded. Pensions and parting gifts had been bestowed on the staff. The lately administering lawyers had lawsuits pending against Maggie for breach of contract, but Coco de Renault was dealing with such trivial nuisances out of court. Coco explained to Maggie, the first time she had one of her little shocks on realizing her estate had no business headquarters any more, that a headquarters was the very thing she had to avoid. He was her headquarters and she must realize he was dealing with her affairs globally. Maggie calmed down. Another time, she failed to find him on any of his telephone numbers on the globe. She went frantic, rattling the receiver for long hours over a period of three days and a half, in the course of which a strike of the international telephone service took place in the Veneto, from where she was calling. Vainly dialling the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs in Rome, Maggie looked out of the window of Berto’s Palladian villa and saw her husband talking to the groom as if the world were not coming to an end. It came to her that if she were to die there would be an enormous lachrymose funeral with the Italian nobility speeding up to the Veneto to attend it and lay her in Berto’s family tomb; then two days later Berto would be out in the garden as usual talking to the groom, while her son Michael would be busy on the question of her fortune. Maggie drove off to Venice and booked into a hotel from where she tried to telephone to Coco. The strike on the international exchange still prevailed. She looked out of the window and saw a placard which said ‘The Postal Strike of the Veneto Must Be Confronted Globally.’ She remained frantic after the strike was over, and still in the hotel room tried one number after another in search of Coco and her power of attorney. She tried San Diego, California, Port au Prince, Hong Kong, London, Zürich, Geneva and St Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Then she tried Madras. She had been in Venice two days when Berto called her to ask what she was doing. Had she been to the del Macchis’ masked ball? How was Peggy? She said she was trying to find Coco de Renault. He replied that he thought there had been a call from de Renault if he wasn’t mistaken. Maggie returned to the villa and located Coco within a few more agonizing days. The fear passed once more. ‘I’ve been at Nemi, at Emilio Bernardini’s,’ he said, and laughed at the news that she had looked for him everywhere.

These distractions took her mind off Hubert but every now and again she was brought back to her frustration over his stubborn occupancy of the house. At the beginning of the summer of 1974 unknown to Berto she had handed the whole story of Hubert, in her own revised version, to an obscure lawyer in Rome, with instructions to get Hubert out of the house and to do it without a scandal. The lawyer promptly agreed to do it, and not only did he point out that the new Italian laws made it difficult to turn anyone out of any habitation whatsoever, but he exaggerated the difficulties. Maggie duly paid the man the large deposit he demanded to match the exceptional difficulties of the job he had undertaken. As it happened, this lawyer, having sentimental sympathies towards the political left wing, although no longer the extreme leftist he had been in his poor student days, loathed what he conceived Maggie to stand for at the same time as he was put into an ambivalent state of excitement by her glowing and wealthy presence. The one time she presented herself with her case in his absolutely ordinary office became an obsessive memory; as the months passed and the unseen presence of Maggie lingered here and there, with her voice on the phone to remind him on the one hand of his undertaking and, on the other, of her vital self and her money, his office and his life seemed in his eyes to be even more sad and ordinary. So that he was more short-tempered now, with his wife and with his secretary, than before. The secretary, indeed, left and he had to make do with another, inferior one; meantime Maggie was living her life all unaware of the effect she had produced on the lawyer. As to getting Hubert out of the house, the lawyer had written him a letter in a somewhat vague manner. Hubert had sent it back scrawled at the bottom with the message, ‘Mr Hubert Mallindaine is at a loss to understand this missive and, assuming that it is misdirected, returns it to the sender.’

‘You see,’ explained the lawyer on the telephone to Maggie, ‘he knows well the Italian laws. If you take out a court order even, this makes two years before you can disencumber him. He will make the newspaper scandal that your husband fears and he might win the case if he proves that the house was built by his instructions for his own use. The laws are now on the side of the tenant, always. And if he loses the case everyone will assume he has been your
amante
and you are tired of him.’

‘Don’t you know,’ Maggie said, ‘there’s a big recession on? We can’t afford to give away houses and there is valuable furniture inside. My Louis XIV furniture.…’

‘You have said he had them restored?’

‘I believe he’s looking after my things. Yes. There’s a Gauguin painting, too. I want it.’

‘If he is spending money to care for the property he could argue that the property was his, else why should he spend the money?’

‘Are you my lawyer or his?’ Maggie said.

‘Marchesa, I see the case objectively and I will try. I have my heart’s sympathy with your side. Everyone knows what our laws are like in the world of today. I have landlords and proprietors at my office lamenting every day that they cannot remove their tenants and they cannot raise the rents—’

‘But he’s paying no rent, and it’s fully furnished, my house.’

‘That is all the more argument for him. Marchesa, you permitted him to stay too long. Now is probably too late, in effect. In effect, I will try and I can only promise to continue to try. If you are not satisfied with my efforts, Marchesa—’

‘Oh, please carry on. Please do. I quite understand the difficulties,’ Maggie said. ‘But I have many problems just at this terrible moment in the economical situation of the world and I do wish to have the house to be near my son.’

‘The law says that if you already have a habitation, Marchesa, you cannot evict a tenant on the grounds that you need the house. Only if you are homeless—’

‘I know, I know. Go ahead, please; I have complete faith in you—’

‘If you would care to lunch with me on your visit to Rome, I could better explain my plan of next procedure, or you could call in again at my office—’

‘No, it won’t be necessary—’

‘It would be a pleasure. Or could I come to visit you at the Veneto? It is a country I well know—’

‘What do you mean, “country”? It’s still in Italy.’

‘That is our manner of speaking. In Italy are many countries. I would be happy to visit—’

‘Just at the moment I can’t make plans,’ Maggie said. ‘Please go on trying and keep in touch with me.’

The lawyer wrote again to Hubert, a strong firm letter, cunningly phrased with many citations of the law, number this and section that, including the commas. It was the sort of letter that would send the civil courts of Italy into a frenzy of sympathy for the tenant, at the same time as it left the lawyer professionally irreproachable. To this bureaucratic communication Hubert replied from the local bar at Nemi, by telephone.

‘Look,’ he said to the lawyer, ‘this house is mine. The lady gave it to me. I’ve got nowhere else to go. Why don’t you just take me to court?’

‘What number are you calling from?’ said the wary lawyer, anxious about a possible telephone tap.

‘The bar,’ said Hubert, ‘here at Nemi. Can’t you hear the noise? I can’t afford a telephone at my house. The Marchesa had it cut off.’

‘Tell me the number and I’ll call you back,’ said the lawyer. He checked the number that Hubert gave him, and rang back to the bar.

‘Now,’ said the lawyer, ‘it’s like this. I have to do my duty, and I have sent you a letter. You have nothing to worry about.’

‘I have plenty of things to worry about,’ Hubert said, ‘but the house isn’t one of them. Why do you send me these absurd letters?’

‘I am at the Marchesa’s command,’ the lawyer said. ‘You want my advice? You write me a reply that you are not well and enclose a medical certificate. When you are recovered you will see your lawyer.’

‘I’m in the best of health,’ Hubert said. ‘No doctor would give me a certificate, and anyway, I don’t know any doctor in Italy.’

‘Write me the letter,’ said the lawyer, ‘and I will arrange for the certificate.’

‘This is unusually kind of you,’ Hubert said. ‘Why don’t you come here and have a chat? I should be delighted to show you my house and my wooded grounds. And then, after all, I don’t know how far involved you are with Maggie. I’d like to be reassured.’

The lawyer, who was fat, laughed with the full fruition of the fat. ‘Sunday,’ he said, ‘I could make a little escape and getaway. After lunch, Sunday. Good?’

‘Good,’ said Hubert.

By the autumn, all the Louis XIV chairs had been replaced by very beautiful fakes, the Gauguin had been replaced by a copy for which Hubert had paid a very high price, but not, of course, a price of such an altitude as that fetched by the Gauguin, now safely smuggled into Switzerland. He had also replaced a Constable with a fair enough copy, the original of which, in any case, had been kept in a dark corner, so that the many fine points of difference between this and the fake were obscured by the gloom. A Sickert painting still awaited treatment because the price of a good copy was by now reaching excessively blackmail proportions and Hubert was investigating another organization which provided a discreet art-copyist and export service. He had similar plans for an inoffensive Corot in the lavatory, with its little red blot in the right foreground, and also an umbrageous Turner which, although it was small, overpowered the wall of the upstairs landing, but this, one of the experts in clandestinity had informed Hubert, was already a fake; an expensive fake, but not marketable enough to have copied.

In this way, Hubert was very comfortably off by the time the collapse of money as a concept occurred. ‘I refuse,’ he said, ‘to eke out my existence or change my philosophy of life according to the cost of oil per barrel—’

All the same, he took care to continue changing the locks on the doors of the house frequently. He did not flaunt his newly acquired money. The telephone remained cut off, the garden was weeded to the minimum and the paint on the outside doors and windows was left to peel and flake with poverty.

The expert self-faker usually succeeds by means of a manifest self-confidence which is itself by no means a faked confidence. On the contrary, it is one of the few authentic elements in a character which is successfully fraudulent. To such an extent is this confidence exercised that it frequently over-rides with an orgulous scorn any small blatant contradictory facts which might lead a simple mind to feel a reasonable perplexity and a sharp mind to feel definite suspicion.

Pauline Thin’s mind was not particularly sharp. But in her second year as Hubert’s companion and secretary she had acquired enough experience of him, of his documents and his daily sayings, that she couldn’t fail to realize that something was amiss between Hubert’s claims and the facts. It was just when, with the aid of his new ally, Maggie’s plump lawyer, Hubert had founded his religious organization that Pauline had discovered among Hubert’s papers clear evidence that his aunts, infatuated by Sir James Frazer and his
Golden Bough
, had been in correspondence with the quack genealogist; they had instructed him in the plainest terms to establish their descent from the goddess Diana.