The Takeover (17 page)

Now Guillaume had started to climb the beautiful sweeping staircase and Berto, to save him the fatigue, came out of the library door to meet him, leaning over the well of the circling banister.

Guillaume looked up. ‘People,’ he announced, without further elaboration— ‘
Gente
,’ by which he conveyed that the visitors were, as Berto plainly expected, people who wanted to see over the house. And the fact that he had invited them to wait inside and given them some hope that Berto would receive them demonstrated that he considered the newcomers not, so far, unworthy, without committing himself further to the road of positive approval.

‘A few moments,’ Berto said, giving himself time to put away the papers he had been studying and the visitors time, no doubt, to admire the care that had gone into the maintenance of the villa inside and out, starting with the hall and its superb outlook.

‘Go down and tell them to wait.’ His commands to the servants always struck Maggie and Mary as being on the abrupt and haughty side: they felt embarrassed and guilty when Berto gave orders to his old butler especially. But to Guillaume’s ears Berto’s tone was perfectly normal; the old man judged only what his master said, whether it was sensible or not sensible. Guillaume’s life had been considerably upset by the fraternization that went on between Lauro and the Americans. Now, he turned and shuffled to the hallway, deeming Berto’s orders to be sensible.

Berto descended in his own time and, courteously shaking hands with each of the men, inquired their names. At the same time he took in the well-silvered hair and the interesting light blue and white fine stripes of his trousers, the jacket of which he held over his arm. The younger man, who wore well-tailored fawn trousers of some uncrushable and impeccable material, was holding a shiny slim catalogue of an artistic nature. They gave their names, apologized for the intrusion, and asked if they might see over the exquisite villa. They bore no resemblance whatsoever to Caliban the beast, with intent to rape and destroy Prospero’s daughter who, some have it, represents the precious Muse of Shakespeare. ‘Come along,’ said Berto. ‘With pleasure, come along.’ The younger man left his catalogue on the hall table, while Guillaume came forward to take the older man’s jacket from his arm.

Meanwhile Maggie, on the sun-terrace, turned over her splendid body, winter-tanned from the Caribbean, and lay on her belly; she continued smoothing her arms with sun-tan oil. ‘I want my house at Nemi and my furniture and my pictures,’ she said. ‘It’s a simple thing to ask. That man makes me have bloody thoughts; they drip with blood.’

‘Do you think he’s practising some kind of magic?’ Mary said.

‘We ought to go to the police. But Berto’s so conservative,’ Maggie said. ‘Berto would prefer magic to a scandal.’

Lauro appeared once more, and sulkily ambled over to where he had thrown the transistor radio. He picked up the battered object, tried it, shook it, opened it and readjusted the batteries, but apparently it was dead from violence. He threw it back on the terrace floor and went to pour himself a drink.

‘Where is my husband?’ Maggie said, nervously.

‘Showing visitors over the house.’

‘What visitors?’

‘I don’t know. They just came and asked to see the house. Guillaume let them in. Two men, well-dressed.’

‘Berto will get us all killed one day,’ Maggie said. ‘They are all well-dressed. They could be armed. We could all be tied up and shot through the head while they loot the place.’

Mary dipped into her bag for her powder-compact and lipstick. She combed her long hair.

‘Your husband is too much a gentleman,’ Lauro told Maggie, ‘and old Guillaume is too much an old bastard in all the senses of the word. He never knew his parents. He was off the streets. No family.’

‘What recommendations do they have?’ Maggie said. ‘Who sent them?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps nobody. They are art historians.’

‘They are all art historians,’ Maggie said. ‘You read about them every day in the papers. And look what happened to me the summer before last at Ischia.’

‘Those were boys from Naples,’ Lauro said. ‘These men here are Americans.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Berto doesn’t ask them to stay to lunch,’ said Maggie.

Mary closed her powder-compact. ‘There are only six of us for lunch to-day. Two more won’t make any difference.’

‘They could tie us all up, shoot us, take everything,’ Maggie said.

‘I got a gun,’ Lauro said. ‘Don’t worry. I go now and get my gun.’

‘Oh, we don’t want any shooting!’ said Mary. ‘Please don’t start carrying revolvers in the house. It makes me jumpy.’

‘Lauro’s wonderful,’ said Maggie, standing up like a brown statue in her gleaming white two-piece bathing suit. She swung her orange striped towel wrap from the back of a chair and put it on, haughtily. Mary got up too, lean and long. ‘I’m going down to the pool for a swim’ she said as she too wrapped herself up neatly in a bath-robe.

‘I’m going to my room,’ Maggie said. ‘One thing they can’t do is see over my bedroom. I just won’t have it, even if it is one of the most interesting sections of the upper floor.’

‘I bring you a drink at the pool, Mary,’ Lauro said.

‘Lauro, you’re sweet.’

They descended from the sun-terrace together, listening for voices but hearing none.

‘In fact,’ Mary said, ‘I think I heard them outside. Berto must be showing them the grounds.’

‘Well, if you’re keen to see them try to get rid of them before lunch,’ said Maggie. ‘I don’t want them to stay.’ She swung into the little lift that descended to her room.

‘Maggie,’ said Berto, ‘these gentlemen are staying to lunch.’

Two middle-aged women, Berto’s cousins who were expected to lunch, had already arrived and Maggie saw the two unfamiliar men chatting easily with them in the hall. The younger man was saying ‘Byzantium was a state of mind.…’

Maggie came over regally to be introduced, on her way passing the console table where the young man had left his catalogue. Mary stood with her back to it and when she saw Maggie she murmured, ‘The damn pool water wasn’t heated the gardener forgot—’

‘How are you? Come on in,’ said Maggie to her husband’s cousins, and then she held out her hand to welcome the new visitors who stood with Berto. The little group at the console table parted and Maggie’s eye caught the picture on the cover of the catalogue just as she had her hand in the elder art historian’s. She let her hand drop and her smiling mouth formed a gasp. ‘What’s this?’ she said, grabbing the catalogue.

It bore on its lovely cover, in tasteful print, the name Neuilles-Pfortzheimer, a Swiss auction house famous among collectors of paintings and fine arts. Under this was a reproduction of an Impressionist painting. ‘What’s this?’ Maggie shrieked, and the circle of friends around her stood back a little as if in holy dread. ‘What’s
what
?’ said Berto looking over her shoulder.

‘My Gauguin!’ Maggie said. ‘It was in my house at Nemi. What is it doing in this catalogue? Is it up for sale?’

The younger of the visiting art historians said, ‘Why, that was sold last week. We were there. You must be mistaken, ma’am.’

‘How can I be mistaken?’ Maggie screamed. ‘Don’t I know my own Gauguin? There’s the garden seat and the shed.’

Everyone spoke at once with ideas pouring forth: ring the police; no, never the police, you don’t want
them
to know what you’ve got; get your lawyer; ring the gallery, yes, call Neuilles-Pfortzheimer, I know the director well; I know Alex Pfortzheimer; call your home at Nemi, who is the caretaker?… ‘Art-thieves!’ Maggie screamed, pointing at the two visitors who looked decidedly uncomfortable, having come predominantly to find the best means of entry to the little Chinese sitting-room with its rare collection of jade, to plan a future jewel-robbery at least, and certainly they were alert also to where Maggie’s room, with its wall-safe, was situated, since it was known she had taken her large ruby pendant, part of the diaspora of the Hungarian crown jewels, out of the bank to wear to one or two of the season’s balls, even though she ostentatiously insisted, as was the fashion, that it was a fake. The visitors had also noted, with an eye to its whereabouts, Berto’s sublime Veronese about which they had already heard, at the top of the staircase. They were innocent, however, of Maggie’s Gauguin and the more she cried out against them, there in the graceful hall among the astonished friends, the more it seemed how demonstrably wronged the strangers were; the only discomfort in the affair, for them, was the risk involved should the police be called in, for they were already in some embarrassment in France.

Berto looked at them and said, quietly, ‘I
am
sorry. I do apologize. My wife is distraught,’ at the same time as he put his arm round Maggie as if to protect her from the menaces of a malignant spirit.

Mary joined the group and, shortly, Michael too, seeming, as he more and more frequently did, that he had too much on his mind to take notice of a domestic emergency. He eyed his watch. Mary was looking rather enviously at Berto’s gesture of concern for Maggie, for in fact he looked very handsome at those moments of spontaneous charm belonging as it did to his own type and generation; it did not occur to Mary how silly Michael would have looked, how affected, bending his eyes upon herself as Berto bent his, so frankly with love, over Maggie. She only admired handsome Berto and envied Maggie who, pouring out her accusations, did not, in Mary’s view, really deserve so fine a solicitude. If Mary had suspected the theft of any of her property she would have gone about it silently and with a well-justifiable slyness. Maggie, in the meantime, shrieked on, and Berto murmured over her as if she greatly mattered in the first place, the guests in his house next, and the Gauguin not at all.

Lunch was delayed forty minutes, but the hubbub had been whisked away little by little by Berto’s tactics, and the guests had been waved into the green sitting-room, had been served drinks and their several troubled souls variously feather-dusted, while Maggie, refusing her room, lay on a sofa and allowed herself also to be somewhat becalmed. Berto was considerably aided in his efforts by the two cousins, women of authority and many wiles, who had pulled themselves together quickly for the purpose of family solidarity and the pressing need to avoid any threat of a lawsuit against themselves for defamation of character. Quite soon the embarrassed art historians were given new courage, full explanations, and were begged to stay; the elder remained slightly nervous, but both magnanimously overlooked Maggie’s accusations which, from her sofa, she blurted out from time to time, ever more feebly, for thirty-odd minutes. A short space, and they went into lunch.

Berto had refused to do anything whatsoever about the Gauguin mystery before lunch. ‘Later, later, it must wait,’ he said. ‘If the picture is stolen…well, first we have to make a plan of inquiry, and first we sit down and have a drink before lunch. Maggie, my dear.…Love, be tranquil. We have a drink, all. Only the worst can happen.

Only the worst…It is not so very terrible. The worst is always happening to many people everywhere. And only the worst can happen, Maggie, my dear.’

Now they sat in the perfect dining-room overlooking the artificial lake. Berto looked attentively towards his cousin Marisa; she was the newsbearer, grand as a Roman
statue and anxious to get these pettifogging hysterics of Maggie’s over and done with so that she could impart news of the world that mattered to the assembled company, whether they understood what she was talking about or not; for Marisa’s world concerned the heavily populated cousinship of their family, and only she could know which of their Colonna cousins was in love with which Lancelotti, and how much the dowry would be; only Marisa could know who was expected to inherit when the ancient Torlonia should die, probably within the next few days; she alone knew that the Baring nephews had been staying in Paris with the Milanese Pignatellis in an endeavour to find a settlement about the companies in Switzerland; all this Marisa only was able to know since only she had the mornings on the telephone with a family information service from all parts. Very often, when the family themselves failed to telephone or were not to be found at home, she would get the required information from an old housekeeper. All these facts she was waiting to impart to Berto and her other cousin, the thin religious widow Viola, at lunch, for she had a strong sense of what was right for lunch, what to eat, what to wear, what to say; she expected fully that these family concerns would enthral every listener; if not, what were the strangers doing at Berto’s table? She was as confident of the fascination of her subject to everyone as were the ancient dramatists who held their audiences with incessant variations on the activities of the gods and heroes of legend. And indeed, such was her confidence that she did manage to hold the attention of the outsider, for however unintelligible the substance of her talk she brought a sense of glamorous realism to the Italian mythology of the old families.

Maggie had brought her glass of strong rye whisky to the table, trembling still, but settling somewhat under the influence of Berto’s solicitude and induced into an effort of self-control by a determination not to be overborne by the tourist-attraction, Marisa. Maggie now sat gleaming in her shaken beauty at the top of the oval table. On her right was the elder of the intruders who had been pressed to stay for lunch, and who went by the name of Malcolm Stuyvesant. Next to him, Mary, with Berto on her other hand, and next to Berto at the other end of the table his other cousin, the black-dressed pale little Princess Viola Borgognona, very thin of neck among her strings of seed-pearls; Viola was agog to hear Marisa’s new serial in the family saga, for it always gave her an excuse to be morally scandalized and to recall the family scandals, misalliances and intrigues of the past. She, like Berto, was aware that this inter-family talk had little relevance to the world of foreign visitors or of newcomers to the family, but she felt that it should be common knowledge even if it wasn’t and, anyway, it was plain that people were not bored by it. Marisa had already started talking. ‘Dino is sure to get married again when the year is up. He goes every morning to the cemetery, and then rides with Clementine, but of course the parents think he’s too old. What can one say?’ She turned appealingly to her neighbours, Michael on her left and then, on her right, to the younger of the two intruders, George Falk by name. ‘What can one say?’ she asked first one and then the other.