Avery's Mission, page 13
‘If it’s anything like that, Avery is certainly ignorant of it.’ For the first time, I was shocked as well as startled by something that Jethro had said. ‘And couldn’t the thing be taken at a little nearer its face value? Many people get divorced, whose principles nevertheless forbid their then marrying somebody else. Does Mrs Brenton, for instance, have strong religious views?’
‘My dear fellow!’ Jethro was genuinely staggered. ‘You mean that I might be the only—’
‘It has occurred to me as one explanation of the affair of the disappointed colonel. She turned him down when she found that, after – you’ll forgive me – it was you—’
‘Mightn’t it be the affair of the disappointed Fernanda? Perhaps he turned her down. She may have frightened him.’
‘Well, yes. But you see my point. And I don’t know that religious principles are essential to it. Such behaviour is often purely impulsive, I believe. Say that Mrs Brenton has reached an age when a woman may rather strongly—’
‘Feel that her chances are running out?’ Jethro stared at me. ‘We’re for it now, Bannerman. These things are best expressed broadly if they’re to be expressed at all.’ He seemed to take a deep breath. ‘Fernanda needs to get into bed with somebody, and her colonel has been a false cast, so that, in fact, it has to be me again?’
‘Something of the kind is psychologically comprehensible.’
‘I can’t believe it. I don’t pretend not to have—well, groped my way past the notion you express – I mean when I’ve been trying to understand the thing. But—dash it all!—if she and I weren’t right then, how could we be right now? Has she changed—all that? Or have I? I might find her a different woman, I suppose. But equally,’—Jethro was looking at me in something like terror—’she might find me a very different man.’
We had come to a dead-end in our walk, and were gazing through a high wire mesh at a derelict tennis-court beyond which, to a sufficient effect of incongruity, an immemorial olive-field tumbled steeply downhill towards Maiano. And if we had not come similarly to a dead-end in our conversation, we had at least arrived at a point at which some movement of withdrawal had become instinctive with me. I wasn’t quite sure what Jethro Brenton was talking about – or was barely not talking about – and I didn’t feel that there existed between us such an established relationship as would render appropriate any further anatomy of his intimate history. The time had come to take my leave.
‘I have to go down to the city,’ I said, ‘and Mrs Mountpatrick has promised to give me a lift. I think I had better seek her out.’
‘Then we must retrace our steps.’ Jethro had turned round at once. ‘You know her well? I haven’t myself seen much of her in the last two or three years. Her turning up this morning was a surprise. As you’ve gathered, she was Fernanda’s friend in the first place. They were so thick for a time, those two, that it was I myself who felt like the terzo incomodo. At the time, that is, that we were all three pretty intimate together.’
‘Then weren’t you, during our very pleasant lunch, rather playing down the extent of your former acquaintance with her?’
‘Was I?’ Jethro looked perplexed. ‘Perhaps I was. My memory is bad. Her name is Alison, and I almost called her Audrey. It wouldn’t have done. And I was afraid of putting my foot in it in other ways.’
‘I see.’ We had quickened our pace, perhaps on my initiative. Jethro’s last remarks seemed a shade idle or foolish to me. ‘I’ve known her myself for a good many years,’ I added, ‘but not awfully well.’
‘And what was she up to?’ As if unable to prevent himself, Jethro had again come to a halt as this question burst from him. ‘She appeared quite out of the blue.’
‘I hardly think you can say that, since you were intimate at one time, and seeing each other regularly until a few years ago. I had told her, remember, about Avery. It was natural that she should want to make his acquaintance.’
‘There was more to it than that.’ Jethro looked at me suspiciously, so that I found myself pondering the extent to which he might really be viewing himself as the victim of comprehensive conspiracy. ‘Don’t you think Fernanda may have put her up to some devilry?’
‘Something of the sort did just cross my mind, I admit.’ Honesty constrained me to offer this reply. ‘But I don’t now think that anything of the kind makes sense. That Mrs Brenton and Mrs Mountpatrick are in any sort of confederacy seemed to me completely ruled out by more than one thing that Mrs Mountpatrick said.’
‘Such as?’
‘Brenton, I don’t really think that I ought to be airing my views. But I will say that what I heard suggested not so much collusion as challenge.’
‘But Alison Mountpatrick doesn’t like me one bit!’ The bizarre manner in which Jethro uttered this as if it represented a last straw to which he might cling showed that he had grasped the implication of my remark. ‘She doesn’t like my way of life. She thinks my work is outmoded and futile. The fact is she has a talent for disapproving of things. She disapproved of my marriage.’
‘Which is a good reason, surely, for not supposing she’s concerned with the re-establishing of it now.’
‘And she disapproved of Luigi. I could see that at once.’ Jethro walked on again. ‘Didn’t you notice?’
‘Yes, I did.’ I think I was surprised at Luigi’s name thus turning up. But Jethro held to this new tack.
‘I’m coming to think a number of people do. Of course he’s uncommonly able, and perhaps inclined to be a little supercilious at times. But it’s something that worries me. Quite selfishly, really. The boy is invaluable to me. As things now are, I almost believe the corpus would grind to a halt without him. So I don’t care to see him snubbed. Did you notice how badly the woman took his casting something of an appraising eye on her? What could be more pardonable in a lad of his age? She ought to have been flattered – at her age. And I’m already uneasy you see. He’s restless. He might suddenly want some quite different life.’
‘Whether suddenly or not, he’s one day almost bound to.’ If there was an inconsiderateness in my manner of saying this it must have arisen from a sense that Jethro Brenton was a singularly selfish man. ‘It will simply be a matter of ability, really,’ I went on – by way, I suppose, of softening what I had said. ‘You have just remarked on it, after all. He’s ambitious, and he’ll want to go far.’
‘Yes, yes—he ought to do that.’ Jethro was suddenly emphatic. ‘I see it—absolutely. But he won’t perhaps have told you much about himself?’
‘Almost nothing at all.’ The subject of the ladies having reached a point of embarrassment, I was quite willing to pursue this less intimate topic. ‘Except that I rather gathered he’d been working for you for about a couple of years.’
‘Ah! Well, he’s a reticent boy. I’m bound to say I like him, on the whole. Do you?’
‘Yes, I do.’ It was almost pathetically, I felt, that Jethro’s dependence upon the young man had stared through his last casually offered remark.
‘I’m very glad. You see – indeed, I hope it has already appeared – that Luigi is rather more to me than an employee of a couple of years’ standing. For one thing, I was a little concerned with his education. His father, who was a friend of mine, died in tragic circumstances when Luigi was an infant, and his mother died not many years later. There was very little money, and I felt that I had to take certain matters in hand. I think I can fairly say I didn’t obtrude myself. One is a little chary of appearing in the role of a benefactor.’ Jethro produced this with such an air of sensitive feeling that I almost expected him to add: ‘—or anything vulgar of that kind.’ What he did add was: ‘You can guess, I suppose?’
‘Guess?’
‘That I have sometimes thought of him as a son. Circumstances had deprived me of my own.’
‘Of Avery, you mean?’
‘Of course.’
I was silent before this, because I felt something not honest about it. Jethro Brenton’s divorce had not deprived him of the right to see quite a lot of his child, had he owned a mind to it. As I have recorded, I had known so much from the time of Avery’s entering Anglebury. And had Jethro been in the least by way of regarding himself as a frustrated parent, excluded from his son’s society through the harsh operation either of law or of some family tyranny, his attitude to Avery’s arrival in Florence would surely not have been quite as, initially at least, it was. He just could not, for instance, have written me that dreadfully artificial letter. Yet here he was, playing up the long period of years during which his lack of interest in the boy had been the next thing to absolute as having left an empty place which Luigi Fagandini, as a befriended orphan, had a little filled. I am uncertain why my mind should have moved so strongly towards these circumstances now – except perhaps that I did have a scarcely owned sense of things being not as they appeared to be. That Jethro felt this in me was presently to appear.
‘But here my true son is. And, as I’ve told you, I like him very much. It would never do if he got wrong ideas into his head; into—shall we say?—that delightfully thick head of his.’
‘If you suppose Avery to be thick, Brenton, I can only tell you that you are mistaken. He can be remarkably acute.’
‘Acute?’ There was something like grotesque alarm in Jethro’s voice. ‘Well, acute or not, who knows what Fernanda – and now this woman who came to lunch – may have stuffed him with?’
‘She didn’t come to lunch. She called, and you invited her to stay.’ I was becoming irritated. ‘Try to keep your own head clear, for heaven’s sake.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Jethro’s tone was now conciliatory. ‘But you must understand me. Luigi is not just a young secretary, who has come and will go. I don’t want to make it all sound too deep, but he has come a little to mean something to me. More than I mean to him, God knows.’ There was a fleeting note of something wholly theatrical in this. ‘I’d hate them to get against each other.’
‘Luigi and Avery? They’ve become good friends, it seems to me.’
‘You don’t think they might become jealous of each other?’
‘You make too much of a loadstone of yourself, Brenton.’ My sense of the man’s egocentricity must have become tolerably sharp to draw from me this stiff retort. Having offered it, however, I was temerariously impelled to say something more. ‘I’ve formed the impression, you know, that you are attractive to women – to women, say, of a certain age. But it isn’t necessary to suppose that young men with their way to make, and with the interests proper to their age, are going to tumble over themselves about you. Take it all more easily, and things will go well enough.’
‘You don’t understand me. And you don’t believe me, either!’ Jethro had produced these words with a sudden flare of feeling upon which I simply didn’t know what was going to succeed. But what he next said was: ‘Ah! Here they are.’
And this was true. We had turned a corner, and the companions from whom we had been separated were before us.
VI
‘I don’t know what to make of the man.’ I was in Mrs Mountpatrick’s car, driving down to Florence. ‘I’ve been rude to him; I’ve spoken out of turn; but I feel much more bewildered—alarmed, really—than repentant.’
‘Alarmed? Alarm’s infectious. He’s alarmed.’ Mrs Mountpatrick slowed as we turned into the small vehicular confusion of Fiesole’s Piazza Mino. ‘I suppose, Charles, you’re at least aware of that.’
‘Certainly he’s bothered. He’s in two minds about his son, for a start. He hates the idea of the boy’s having been sent by his mother as a consequence of some flare-up of predatory feeling on the woman’s part.’
‘As a springe to catch a woodcock? The poor lad is undoubtedly that. He tries to see it as part of a sensible plan for restored family life. But he’s far from a fool, so he’s not finding it easy.’
‘He’s far from a fool – although I surprised Brenton by saying so. Brenton’s tiresome sense of Avery as lacking distinction and cultivation is another thing that counts against the boy with him.’
‘Jethro Brenton is, among other things, a snob. He could be fatally a snob; be carried a long way on some disastrous road by it.’
‘Possibly so.’ In face of Mrs Mountpatrick’s revived animus, I sought for some balance in my own judgement of Jethro. ‘But it does, all the same, please him to have a son in the house. And there’s another thing – and it strikes me as rather pitiable, in a way. He relies a great deal on that Italian boy, but knows that he is restless and may perhaps leave him—’
‘Which he almost certainly will do. That kind of thing doesn’t last.’
‘And he dimly sees Avery as a conceivable replacement. He thinks Avery has no brains, but mutters things about latent aesthetic feeling. I shouldn’t be surprised if he has a vague vision of his son up in that tower, working away on the photographs.’
‘Well, it won’t happen. Avery will finish his visit, and go.’
‘Back to Mrs Brenton?’
‘To Oxford, Charles, if you haven’t been guessing wrong. If that means back to Fernanda as well, one can only say that’s bad luck.’
‘You seem, my dear Alison, thoroughly anti-Fernanda. Do you realise that Jethro regards you as a second emissary, as retained or instructed to back Avery up?’
‘Is that how you regard me?’ At some hazard – for the car was taking a sharp bend – Mrs Mountpatrick gave me a quick cool stare.
‘No, it is not.’ I hesitated, and then reflected that, after all, I was having a thoroughly reckless day. ‘But let’s grant what Fernanda’s up to. Will you explain her determination to me? Is it a very different Jethro she has in her memory from the man I’ve become acquainted with lately? If she turned up in Florence now, would she be likely to persist in her design?’
‘Plenty of women are fools.’
‘Would you say you’re in a special position, Alison, to tell me in just what Jethro’s attractiveness consists?’
‘He might prompt to some sort of salvage work, I suppose.’ Mrs Mountpatrick braked abruptly as we approached the hairpin turn by the road to Maiano. ‘Where did you say you wanted to be put down?’
This – no doubt very properly – shut me up for a time, and it was on Mrs Mountpatrick’s initiative that we resumed our conversation.
‘You think I’m all against Jethro, but it isn’t so. The squalor, after all, is of Fernanda’s making. And it might conceivably be cleaned up. Only I’d like Avery out of the way first.’
‘The squalor?’ Getting nothing by this prompting, I was again silent for several minutes. And in the silence something that Mrs Mountpatrick had said returned to me. ‘What did you mean,’ I demanded, ‘when you said that that kind of thing doesn’t last?’
‘Charles, how can you be so guileless? Don’t you see?’
‘I believe I see what you suppose you see. It has just come to me.’
‘And as for not lasting – well, it’s surely true that middle-aged men who set up in secluded situations with youthful and handsome male secretaries are seldom on to a very permanent thing. The minion finds a more attractive patron, and departs. Isn’t that right?’
‘I suppose it is.’ As I stared at my friend in horror there came back to me, as a shocking ambiguity, the first words she had spoken in the presence of the two young men: Which is Jethro Brenton’s boy? And now my feelings found only the most inadequate utterance in what I went on to say. ‘But aren’t you bringing forward a pretty staggering idea on no evidence at all?’
‘No evidence! Haven’t you, for a start, felt how equivocal the relationship between Jethro and young Fagandini is?’
‘Alison, one can’t rush around suspecting the most sinister things simply because people are a little awkward with each other. It’s true there’s a curious constraint between them. But—’
‘In public there’s that.’
‘My dear woman, you don’t claim to have had their behaviour under your observation, I suppose, in any other way?’
‘Jethro dissembles very badly. He can’t say a word about the young man – or to the young man – that isn’t at least faintly spurious.’
‘You are exaggerating an effect that I admit one does get. And Luigi’s work certainly isn’t spurious; isn’t simply a cover for this thing you suppose. In fact, Luigi now is the enterprise to an extent that could well make the straight professional relationship an uneasy one. Need there be more to it than that?’
‘Wait.’ We were approaching San Domenico, and Mrs Mountpatrick, as if aware that the traffic of Florence would not much assist a suddenly lurid conversation of this sort, had swung her car to the right, so that we were on the narrow road running steeply down to the valley of the Mugnone. But at the Badia Fiesolana she slowed, and we came to a halt on the little terrace before the church. That beautiful Romanesque façade, preserved through the wise obstinacy of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was to confront us as we pursued our disturbing theme. It was I who resumed it.
‘Alison, is this that you’re talking of supposed to be common knowledge?’
‘Not all that many people would be interested, I suppose. But, on a small scale, the answer is yes. Up here too.’
‘Up here too! What do you mean by that?’
‘Servants in the villas, say, and their relations in the little shops. Nothing much. A wink, a breath of scandal – that sort of thing.’
‘I see.’ I was silent for a moment, for a disconcerting recollection had come to me. It was of the two young Fiesolan conscripts who, at the moment of my first meeting with Luigi, had so exactly evinced the kind of behaviour Mrs Mountpatrick had described. ‘Look!’ I said. ‘The currency of this story, no matter whether it be true or false, must be something they are aware of at the Buontalenti?’
‘I feel the young man must be aware of it. If he is, it may induce him to decamp.’
