The Takeover (19 page)

‘Excellent,’ said Hubert. ‘The sentiments are accurate and the English is wrong just right. You must understand that with a woman like the Marchesa everything must be done in style. If your style wavers she takes immediate advantage of it and walks all over you. No doubt she believes the Gauguin is genuine. Certainly, she had it smuggled into the country along with many others, in the first place, so she can hardly make a public fuss. I myself have never doubted its authenticity or naturally I would never have accepted it in part settlement.’

‘Style, style,’ said Massimo de Vita grasping at the idea as if it were a crust, and he starving for it, as indeed he was. He was a brutally ugly man, which in itself could not be counted a disadvantage if he had not made it so by a continual unconscious betrayal of his thoughts which were low-pitched all the time and really quite base. He thought, in fact, that he exercised a quality which he called style, but was in reality an aggressive cynicism. Style, in the sense that he believed himself to possess it, needs a certain basic humility; and without it there can never be any distinction of manner or of anything whatsoever. ‘Style,’ he repeated, smiling at Hubert who, on occasion, did have a certain style.

‘Send her this letter,’ Hubert said, handing it back.

Some people could be heard coming up the stairs and presently Pauline entered the drawing-room with a lanky young man. Massimo de Vita got up and greeted her warmly while Hubert sat on in an expressionless way.

Pauline introduced the young man to the lawyer as Walter. He was her boy-friend from the Common Market Headquarters at Brussels, taking his vacation in Italy now that May was passing into June, and was staying in the house as Hubert’s guest. He had yellow hair and a moustache of a darker yellow. Hubert tolerated him even though, as he said to Pauline, ‘Walter is too occidental for my taste.’ At first she thought he had said ‘accidental’, and was puzzled. He had repeated ‘occidental’, whereupon she was still puzzled but rather less so.

Walter now plonked himself, tired from his walk, on the sofa, while Pauline busied herself with the letter which the lawyer offered her for a second opinion.

‘The English is all wrong. I’ll put it right,’ she said when she had read it through.

‘You will leave the English alone,’ Hubert said. ‘It expresses Massimo’s personality, and besides, if there’s any real unpleasantness one can always fall back on the plea that there was some linguistic misunderstanding.’

‘What misunderstanding could there be?’ Pauline said. ‘We thought all along the Gauguin was genuine. We could have counted on it for our bread and butter. Now it turns out to be a fake. I think that woman knew all along it was a fake.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Hubert said.

‘And we spent all that money on getting it cleaned,’ Pauline said.

‘You had it cleaned?’ the lawyer said.

‘Yes, I took it into Rome myself. I was terrified of a hold-up and being robbed or kidnapped on the way. I needn’t have been,’ Pauline said.

‘You needn’t say anything to anyone about the cleaning,’ Hubert said. ‘It would make people laugh. Spending good money on cleaning a fake. It could damage the work of the Brothers and Sisters of Diana and Apollo. The Movement comes first.’

‘If the picture went to be cleaned,’ said the lawyer, ‘this should not be mentioned. The Marchesa must not believe you have money to burn.’

‘It’s really a lovely picture,’ Pauline said. ‘It’s real to me, anyway.’

Walter said, ‘That’s all that matters,’ and he looked at Hubert with an expression a little more sour than befits a guest

Bulging Clara, the Bernardinis’ chronically victimized maid, stopped in the main street of Nemi, and put down her plastic shopping bags, bulging like herself they were. Agata, the pretty housemaid from the Radcliffes’ house, stopped too. She had approached from the end of the narrow street where the grey castle stood bulkily with its tall and ancient tower, looking like a crazed and bulging woman wearing an absurd top hat, ready to dive off over the cliff into the lake far away below her. Agata was decidedly swollen round the hips and belly, pregnant as a well-founded good hope. ‘Well,’ said Clara. ‘Well, Agata, any news?’ Agata stood into the wall to let the men who were unloading fruit cases from a truck go about their business. She looked back up the haphazard street of fertile Nemi which, by some long-ago access of euphoria or wishful thinking, when Italy was still a kingdom, had been named, doubtless to the peal of bells and the high notes of trumpets, the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. She already had her paper-tissue handkerchief to her eyes. Agata then named the private parts of numerous animals, including humans, and ended the litany by declaring that, to sum it up, the man was a ne’er-do-well.

‘And all his dead!’ responded Clara, meaning precisely that all the dead relations of the man in question should by rights endure damnation alike with him.

They stood talking in the sunny main street of Nemi while life bustled by them, the machines in the smithy went on grinding, the electrician skimmed by in his bright Opel, the fruit van backed up and then manoeuvred forward, backed up again and then was off while the fruit shop assistants noisily discussed where the fruit should go in the banked-up crates outside the tiny shop. Clara, with her sly eyes moving occasionally towards the fruit shop, to see how the prices were set on the newly graded qualities, listened to the young wronged Agata; she listened with her sly ears and puffed out her breath with sympathetic paranoia. Across the street outside the recreation centre stood a carabiniere in his brown uniform, the town clerk in his pressed suit and clean collar and tie, looking on at an exchange of banter between a schoolboy and a white-frocked friar. The two women were greeted occasionally by busy shoppers who passed and swept a glance, along with their smiles, at Agata’s hard-done-by belly of shame, while the whole of eternal life carried on regardless, invisible and implacable, this being what no skinny craving cat with its gleaming eyes by night had ever pounced upon, no tender mole of the earth in the hills above had ever discovered down there under the damp soil, no lucky spider had caught, nor the white flocks of little clouds could reveal when they separated continually, eternal life untraceable and persistent, that not even the excavators, long-dead, who had dug up the fields of Diana’s sanctuary had found; they had taken away the statues and the effigies, the votive offerings to the goddess of fertility, terracotta replicas of private parts and public parts, but eternal life had never been shipped off with the loot; and even the lizard on the cliff-rocks in its jerky fits had never been startled by the shadow or motion of that eternal life which remained, past all accounting, while Clara and Agata chattered on, tremendously blocking everyone’s path although no one cared in the slightest that they did so.

‘Could it be anyone else’s?’ Clara said.

‘No, it could only be Lauro’s,’ said Agata. ‘He wants me to put it on Mr Michael but Mr Michael wasn’t there at the time. It couldn’t have been Mr Michael, but Mr Michael offered to pay for an abortion and Lauro says the offer is a proof of responsibility, and he’s getting married to his fiancée right soon; anything to save himself the responsibility. I said, “Lauro, there will be a blood test and I can prove the paternity,” but Lauro said, “Well, Michael’s group O and I’m group O, so you can just go to
that country
and prove paternity.” It was terrible to hear him swearing at me like that after all those times I was good to him when he needed it.’

Clara looked judicious about this. ‘You shouldn’t have been good to him.’ And she added, ‘I’m never good to them,’ as if she had plenty of opportunities. Then she observed the obvious: ‘If Mr Michael wants to pay for an abortion he must have a reason.’

‘I never went with him,’ said Agata. ‘But I know about his woman in Rome. I know all about that. He even brought her to the house once.’

‘What did the Signora Mary say?’

‘She was away. Anyway, he wants to help me, and maybe he wants me to keep quiet, too. Maybe he just wanted to help me, to be kind; I don’t know. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had an abortion, not even—’

‘They never do anything just to be kind. Imagine it, just figure to yourself!’ Clara said.

‘Well, maybe Michael will give me something to help.’

‘He’ll have to. He’ll have to,’ Clara said. ‘He has no option. The master of the house.…Work it out for yourself and take my advice. Be advised by me.’

Lauro sat in the sitting-room of the new bungalow high on the terraced cliffs among the woods and caves of Nemi, one of a new group of small houses that looked as if they belonged to tidy Snow White. His relations-to-be sat around him, a good-looking, long-legged set, modern and, with the exception of his fiancée, slender. His future mother-in-law had a fine tanned face and streaked short hair, a woman who could pass, at sight, for any of the Radcliffes’ friends. The same was not quite true of his fiancée with her long dark hair and slightly over-ripe figure dressed in a shirt and blue jeans; Lauro considered that he could slim her down after they were married. The two uncles, however, brothers on the mother’s side, were also good-looking; one, in his late thirties, with lightish hair, well-tinted and cared for and of a length to cover his ears; and the other, about fifty years old, grey-haired, bespectacled and professorial of appearance. The latter’s wife was a fashionably skinny woman with a close-cropped silvered hair-style. They all looked as if they worked in the fashion business or the film industry or else ran a night club, and went to the hairdresser a great deal for tints and cuts and for manicures. Lauro, gloomily perceptive, was proud enough of his new family’s appearance, now that it had come to the point where he was goaded into actual marriage by the demands of the wretched servant-girl, Agata. It would have been unthinkable for him to marry Agata, a man of considerable pride like Lauro who had been accepted into the familiar confidences and the beds of the Radcliffes and the Tullio-Frioles, not to mention the distinguished and equally care-free company of the past. It was the lack of that very heart-easy quality in his new family, fine-looking as they were, that depressed Lauro. He flicked ash from his cigarette into a clean ceramic ashtray, and as he did so his impending mother-in-law, good woman that she was, rose and took the ash-tray and shook the frail ash out of the window, so that Lauro was left with a clean ash-tray again to finish his cigarette with. It was like eating from a plate where they gave you a clean one half-way through the dish. To the tips of her red varnished finger-nails, the mother-in-law was spick-and-span. It made Lauro unhappy although he could not precisely say why, since Maggie, too, and Mary and all the others were always neat and well-groomed enough. It bothered him too that his fiancée, Elisabetta by name, called herself Betty. It troubled him deeply that these people were talking about the wedding-feast in the best trattoria in Nemi with grade one French champagne, seven courses, and at least two hundred people, counting all cousins and friends on both sides, at the expense of the bride’s family, no matter how much per head, money no object on such an occasion and seven courses; seven, eight courses, light courses, Betty’s sleek, smart aunt was saying, just as if she was a fat country woman, seven courses so that you start with the antipasto, maybe ham and melon; then the soup, a cold consommé very chic for summer; and for pasta you want two, three kinds, say a fine cannelloni of game or with spinach and cream cheese inside and a lovely ravioli with tomato sauce and a good fettucine al burro with parmigiano over it, a choice; then you have to have the fish, scampi dipped in a batter; and then a salad, tomatoes and endives with condiments; you have to have the cold meat next, like for instance veal sliced thin and chicken breasts, or pheasant and for the next course something original, maybe a shish kebab which is to say beef on skewers surrounded by small carrots, green beans and rice; and then a green salad of lettuce and basil, very fresh, and so to a cream cake, for example St Honoré and then the fruit, fresh fruit or macedonia, you could give them a choice, which could be served with petits-fours and some nuts on the table, too; then of course the cheese and coffee; the chocolates you pass round with the liqueur, sambuca, cointreau, cognac, and the bride cuts the cake which goes round; Betty’s eldest relation should toast the
sposi
in champagne as the champagne glasses are always kept full throughout the meal, and the
sposo
replies to toast the relatives of the bride and Betty’s eldest uncle toasts the relatives of the groom; and you give cigars; the waiters should come from Rome so they would know what to do and serve with white gloves. The bride should give away flowers from her bouquet, then you must remember.…Lauro looked at his young bride-to-be with panic on his face but she failed to notice. He panicked all the more that she was listening, enthralled, to her aunt, after all the two years’ association with Lauro, and then becoming engaged to him, and all the times he had described the sort of life he led, with Michael and Mary, with Maggie and Berto, and their friends in Sardinia, at Ischia, in the Veneto, at Mary’s house at Nemi, with its well-served meals of which nobody ate very much so that it was all sent back to the kitchen for the servants to guzzle and drink, and the funny, quite outrageous, chatter and gossip with always little bits of laughter but never a real rowdy laugh. In the world Lauro knew, there was silence in between the talk, and afterwards music and space, and nobody talked of the food at all; they took the good food for granted and if the men discussed wines or the women certain dishes, it was all like a subject that you study in a university like art history or wildlife. For two years Lauro had distilled all this into Betty’s ear, but now, it seemed, to no avail, for she was chattering away about the wedding-feast, as loudly and eagerly and rapidly as everyone else, breaking into the half-finished sentences of the others as indeed they were all doing. It was a big food-babble, rising louder and louder and dinning around Lauro’s ears, he being only half able to isolate the source of his unhappiness since certainly the family looked very good and up-to-date and prosperous and distinguished. Lauro wanted to run, but he thought of Agata in the Radcliffes’ kitchen with one hand on her hip and the other pointing at him, and her screaming accusations and all those tears threatening the vengeance of her father and her brothers. He had nowhere to run to; once he was married to Betty it would be too late and Agata would become a muttering bundle of impotent umbrage, violated for life.