Avery's Mission, page 14
‘You want him to decamp? Supposing, that is, that the situation is as you say, you positively feel it to be your business? If it all became a thing of the past – an episode, an aberration which was over and done with – would you yourself come to feel differently about Jethro Brenton?’
‘That’s a good question.’ Turning in her seat, Mrs Mountpatrick looked straight at me. She had entirely taken my point. ‘But absolutely not. Never! A thing like that is—well, irreversible, indelible.’
‘And Fernanda? Supposing, I mean she were to come to know.’
‘That’s another matter, isn’t it? She owes him restitution. She won him—’
‘Against stiff competition?’
‘Perhaps so, but that’s irrelevant. She ought to have stuck to him, even if he did run after women.’
‘Women?’
‘Yes, of course. You must surely know, Charles, that with some men it’s at quite a mature age that what you call aberration can take over. And being ditched by a wife, and living in exile, and perhaps pretending to a flight of scholarship one doesn’t really command—’
‘I see that a picture can be built up. But what I was asking about is your interest. Is it the unconscious Avery’s having been pitched into a situation of which even his mother has no notion, or only the dimmest and vaguest it’s possible to have, that sets you—’
‘Of course it is. Avery’s being there is an outrage. But there isn’t a great deal I can set myself to do. Except to scare them, perhaps. And particularly that little Italian. If he were really scared, he might ask for his cards and bolt.’
‘You had a shot, if I’m not mistaken, within the first minute of meeting him. Incidentally, you can’t maintain, can you, that Luigi doesn’t take a certain interest in women? At lunch—’
‘That was a most revolting piece of impertinence – put on, I suppose, to amuse Jethro. A lewd mime.’
‘Alison, I think you may be wrong. I mean, for a start, just about that incident and its implication. Luigi Fagandini likes women. To put it crudely, he’s been after them, and has met with what may be called an encouraging initial success. A conquest.’
‘My dear Charles, you know nothing about him.’
‘Alison, my dear, I at least know as much about young men in general as you do. Such knowledge is never more than fragmentary. One admits that. And I don’t at all know that Luigi mightn’t seek fresh pastures with another patron, as you express it. But I do know that he might make off with a woman.’
‘A woman! What woman?’
‘Oh, any woman. But probably one rather like yourself. Only it would be better if you were an heiress. Of course, he may mistakenly regard you as one. So beware!’
For a moment I thought that I had seriously offended Mrs Mountpatrick. She had flushed in the manner I remembered upon the occasion of Luigi’s so indicatively eyeing her at luncheon; and now, as if on an impulse to remove herself from the close proximity of any male, she climbed from the car, walked to the edge of the terrace, and sat down on the low parapet in which it terminated. I followed discreetly. Before the door of the convent a lay brother with a broom was conscientiously stirring up the dust, but the place was deserted except for this.
‘At least you don’t think highly of the young tart,’ Mrs Mountpatrick said.
‘Because he might admire you? Oh, come!’ I paused on this further venture. ‘At least he’s very clever. It quite often is very clever young men, you know, who are attracted by women not absolutely of the youngest, but full of poise and character and brains. As for your question, I think I do rather like him – although I’m bound to say I now feel any such fondness to be something it’s positively rash to express. Seriously, he is rather a brilliant creature, and one always feels an attraction in that. But I don’t see him as a particularly staunch or even trustworthy person. He could be ruthless at a pinch. And what could bring him to the pinch would be ambition.’
‘There’s something rather grand about being ruthless, I suppose. I think I’d call him simply venal. And if he is really sexually straightforward by nature, that merely makes the present spectacle of perversion more squalid still. He’ll take any means to claw his way up. And it’s from nowhere, you know. He was no more than a brat abandoned on a doorstep. Or, at least, nameless.’
‘But that is absolute nonsense!’ I was looking at Mrs Mountpatrick in astonishment. ‘Jethro—’
‘Oh, I know Jethro has a yarn. But Jethro’s yarn is a lie.’
I glanced up at the sky, expecting that some wholly improbable cloud had swept over the sun. For I had felt, quite simply, a physical chill. It told me that I had not really been crediting Mrs Mountpatrick’s disagreeable vision of things, and that her final harsh word, so confidently uttered, had brought home how very much I was going to dislike any compulsion upon me to conclude otherwise. I was conscious, at the same time, of being puzzled by the strength of this reaction in myself. I have no strong views on sexual inversion. It seems to come with the genetic packet, like being a blonde or a brunette; whole cultures may have their preference, but are not thereby entitled to hang people for the colour of their hair. I was to be able, a little later, to take a fairly effective retrospective glance into my own mind at this moment. For the present, I simply felt that something bad was coming.
‘I expect Jethro has told you about a dear friend who died prematurely, and whose wife died prematurely, leaving a young child whom we now call Luigi Fagandini?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jethro looked after the orphan’s interests in an unobtrusive way, put up money when it was required, and when the boy’s schooling was over took him into his household and trained him to help with his work?’
‘Just that. And you say I am to disbelieve it?’
‘I’m afraid so – and for the most unnecessary reason.’
‘What on earth do you mean by that?’
‘There was no occasion whatever why the story ever should be disbelieved. Who, after all, was particularly interested?’ Mrs Mountpatrick stood up, and turned to survey the little valley and the hills beyond. ‘You can actually see the pine,’ she said. ‘The one the church is named from: Santa Croce al Pino.’
‘Never mind about the pine. Go on.’
‘Very well. When Luigi Fagandini first turned up at the Villa Buontalenti there was this perfectly convincing tale. But then, a little later, Jethro took to embroidering on it. It’s a trap that liars are said to be apt to fall into. They have a nervous feeling that it helps to pile on—’
‘Yes, yes. I don’t doubt the general psychological proposition. You mean this embroidery didn’t fit?’
‘Just that. I was told about it by a surprised but not particularly interested elderly colleague. Jethro was too specific, you may say, and insufficiently inventive.’
‘But you’ve just said he embroidered the thing.’
‘Yes, but about real Fagandinis, a Roman family whom my friend by the merest chance had happened to know. And the particulars made nonsense. Which settles the matter, you must admit. This story of nurturing a dead friend’s son from near-infancy is entirely bogus. He picked up Luigi, if you ask me, as a personable adolescent in an orphanage.’
‘With the positive intention—’
‘Of what is called corruption.’
‘Luigi doesn’t strike me as straight from whatever is the Italian equivalent of a Dr Barnardo’s Home.’
‘Did Julien Sorel strike people as straight out of a sawmill?’
‘It’s a comparison which I suppose Luigi would be flattered by. He has told me, by the way, that he has a sense of obligation to Jethro.’
‘Then he has gone a shade too far in fulfilling it. Let’s drive on.’ Mrs Mountpatrick turned back to her car, and I obediently followed her. ‘I’ll take you as far as the Repubblica, Charles. It’s handy for the post office.’
‘The post office?’
‘Fernanda has got her son into this nastiness, and Fernanda can get him out of it. I’m sending her a telegram.’
Part Four
FERNANDA
I
Fernanda Brenton received her telegram, but not before I had received one myself. It came from London and from the secretary of a learned society, and it invited me, as a matter of urgency, to fill the place, at some formal and commemorative occasion in Rome, of a representative who had suddenly fallen ill. I have no fondness for Latin speeches and academic banquets, but having been run to earth in Florence I had no decent choice but to agree. I may have done so the more readily from a feeling that the Villa Buontalenti was a spot from which a three hours’ journey would constitute a grateful remove. Yet I was conscious of not just running away. I did dimly sense that the imbroglio there – what Mrs Mountpatrick had called the mess – presented confusions which might best be sorted out at a distance.
Yet, for a time at least, it was quite striking that nothing of the kind happened. The train to Rome saw me without an idea in my head, and in Rome itself the whole affair dropped out of my mind in a perfectly pathological way. Of course what one means by one’s mind is philosophy’s obscurest problem. Sigmund Freud, puzzling over how to convey his own emerging sense of it, compared it precisely to the city of Rome – as that city would be if every stage of its development were preserved in strata, the Rome of each succeeding age superincumbent upon the Rome of the last. Conceivably I was simply letting Avery Brenton’s predicament (which alone very much bothered me) drop down a stratum or two in my own mind. I did, it is curious to recall, dream of him, but in a fantastic setting which it would be idle and unbeautiful to record. This was after I had sat up half a night composing – lest the worst should come to the foreboded worst – an éloge (or whatever the Italians call an éloge) of my own. But the august occasion passed off without any need of this, and on my third day, which was my last in the city, I had a free afternoon. This I spent wandering those interminable Vatican galleries which I had blithely suggested might at some future time be presided over by Luigi Fagandini.
They are desperate expanses, full (as Henry James once said) of padding; one is conscious of a finite number of things one must see again; and for the rest one hurries on, oppressed by a mounting sense of the maniacal, the millennial acquisitiveness of the papacy. And occasionally one pauses in front of something new, without knowing why. It was thus that I halted before an antique sarcophagus, perhaps that of Junius Bassus or such another, which presents in lively relief two pudgy small boys. These putti, I have since discovered, are not uncelebrated, since both Luca della Robbia and Donatello copied them. They are Romulus and Remus. Behind them is the she-wolf, agreeably of the stuffed nursery order. The brothers themselves perch, more or less face to face, upon a rectangular object which no doubt represents the trough in which they floated down the mustard-coloured Tiber. They are thoroughly pleased with one another, and with knuckle-bones or the like are playing some game together. But Romulus will one day slay Remus, having fallen out with him over not much more than another game – one of hop, skip and jump.
I found myself looking at this sarcophagus for longer than its merit or intrinsic interest seemed to justify. And when its significance for me ceased to be enigmatic, when I had in fact made my association, I was unburdened (I hasten to say) by any sense of the ominous which might have come to me from the tragedy in which the ancient Roman legend ends. Rather I felt a considerable confusion of mind and an urgent need of fresh air. I made my way to the exit – which, upon such a sudden impulse, is not at all easy to find – with a precipitation which might well have aroused the suspicion of the guardians of the galleries. And from there, as if from a compulsion to clear some large space around myself, I took the devious route, which the intricacy of all that monumental magnificence compels, into the Piazza di San Pietro. Piccadilly Circus used to be called the hub of Empire – but here, much more overwhelmingly, is the hub of Europe. It was a large place to bring a small problem to. Nevertheless I made a full round of the incredible colonnade. When I had done so, it was to ask myself whether I was not, all unexpectedly, in possession of a very simple fact. It might almost be called an amusing fact, at least when set over against a proposition for which I hadn’t cared at all.
I returned to my hotel and packed my bag.
II
It was the bag that determined my immediate proceeding (and also, by chance, a little that was to follow) when I got back to Florence. To lug it to San Marco, and later from the filobus stop to the Serena, would be feasible but a little burdensome. So at the railway station I sought out the hotel’s bus. This wanders the city in the interest of delivering travellers of the middling sort at their destinations, and the driver can be persuaded for a surprisingly small sum to finish off by running up to Fiesole. Boarding it without difficulty, I found that no chaffering was required. The Serena was already on the itinerary. So I sat down near the front, and prepared to inspect the exterior appearance of half a dozen pensioni and hotels. I should be at my destination with an hour to spare before dinner.
‘You are Mr Bannerman. The information was offered to my ear – and from directly behind it – in the moment that the bus jerked into motion. It might have been from a determination to waste no time as soon as it was no longer possible for Mr Bannerman (leaving baggage, impedimenta, accoutrements, and even weaponry on the field) to beat a precipitate retreat.
I recalled the voice at once – and wondered why I had not so recalled it, as I had vividly recalled the lady’s physical presence, upon the occasion at Heathrow when I first directed my thoughts towards Avery Brenton’s parents. I have spoken of his mother’s impact. I now realised that it was due in part to an almost alarming disparity between what must be called her manner (which was not remote from that of her school-friend Mrs Mountpatrick) and the sheerly physical timbre with which what she had to say was said. Her voice held, to put it briefly and broadly, a huskiness which did something to one’s spine. And now she had planted herself down beside me.
‘Avery,’ she said, ‘ought to have done better at Anglebury than he did.’
‘I don’t think that Avery did too badly with us at all.’ I noted with satisfaction that it was the insufficiency rather of his school than of the boy himself that Mrs Brenton had appeared to propose as a basis for our present talk. This, at least, was wholesome. ‘And if he gets to Oxford,’ I went on, ‘as I hope he will, it won’t in the least surprise me if he gains his Half-Blue at squash. He’d like that.’
‘So far, so good.’ Fernanda Brenton wasn’t disconcerted. ‘But we must consider his career, his settlement in life. We owe it to him to put our heads together and think about that: you, his father, and myself. A normal background. He has been deprived too long.’
It wasn’t for me to comment on this, although I found it interesting as indicating that Mrs Brenton had a line. So I said nothing, but instead took a look at the lady. She was quietly dressed, I suppose in whatever an Englishwoman nowadays thinks of as travelling clothes. Nevertheless the effect was all there. Delilah sailing into the prison at Gaza, bedecked, ornate, gay like a stately ship of Tarsus, and all intent upon mopping up Samson, was the only image upon which I’d have ventured if called upon to evoke her in a literary way. If I hadn’t been more sorry for Jethro Brenton on other accounts, I should have felt like commiserating with him on the score of what was advancing upon him now.
‘Do they know you’re coming?’ I asked baldly.
‘Of course they must. I had a telegram.’
‘From Alison Mountpatrick?’
‘Yes.’ My question had produced a quick stare. ‘We were at school together. We write to each other from time to time.’
‘Alison has told me as much.’ I paused, very aware of clarifications which must be achieved. ‘It was a summons?’
‘A summons? She simply suggested my coming out. She didn’t say much.’
‘One doesn’t in telegrams.’ I reflected that Mrs Mountpatrick, indeed, could scarcely have made a very explicit communication of her ideas in such a medium.
‘It must be dull for Avery in that outlandish villa of Jethro’s.’ Fernanda spoke as if the bringing of due entertainingness to her son had ranked high among the occasions of her present journey.
‘Well, there happens to be another lad of about his own age living there. A kind of secretary-companion.’
‘Jethro has always liked young men.’
‘So Avery has told me of your telling him. This young man’s name is Luigi Fagandini.’
‘I haven’t heard of him.’ Fernanda was uninterested. ‘Is he competent?’
‘As a secretary? Well, it’s really more than that. He might be called a research assistant. He works on the corpus, and Mr Brenton thinks very highly of him.’
‘I see.’ Fernanda’s tone didn’t suggest that she saw anything particularly agreeable. Beyond this, however, it was completely uncoloured. ‘To my mind Fiesole is an impossible place. A villa at Saltino, yes – with perhaps an apartment on the Lungarno. But Fiesole! Is there any good society there?’
‘Brunetto Latini certainly didn’t think so. He described the inhabitants as ill-savoured crabs, covetous, envious, and proud. But then he was talking to Dante in hell, and perhaps he had a jaundiced view.’ I scarcely knew what perverse impulse had prompted me to offer this nonsense to Mrs Brenton, particularly as the degree of our acquaintance was so slight as to render raillery not very mannerly. I remembered, moreover, that Dante’s former teacher had been not the sort of man whom one should mention, as things at present stood, in the Brenton circle. I suppose I was coming to a nervous awareness of the difficulties with which this abrupt rencontre was confronting me. I had been unprepared for Mrs Brenton, and even more unprepared for her state of innocence. Or was it a state of innocence? One had to remember that Fernanda Brenton was ‘deep’. And supposing her purposes to be simply as they appeared, and her knowledge to be just that too, what on earth should I be saying to her? It wasn’t as if I had knowledge, or anything more than what might be termed a view. Mrs Mountpatrick’s view Mrs Brenton was presumably at once to receive – and her manner of responding to it was anyone’s guess. At least there was nothing to be gained by my rushing in with that; endeavouring to ‘break’, as it were, to Fernanda the present drift of events at the Villa Buontalenti. For one thing, I might be out of date in any assessment of the situation I ventured. I had spent four nights in Rome, and what had been a breath of disaster when I went away might be a destructive gale of disaster by now. What I had inhaled from Mrs Mountpatrick while perched before the Badia was a mephitic vapour of a sort not easy to keep in a bag.
