Avery's Mission, page 4
I took this question, although it appeared laboriously whimsical, not as a piece of showing off on my former pupil’s part. It was meant as a signal of gratitude for the benefits of a classical education. Avery was intimating himself as well-affected to me.
‘They’d look like enormous grey boulders in the snow,’ I said, ‘or a convoy of lorries smothered in tarpaulins. I’m not sure whether Hannibal actually came this way. Some people say it was by the Mont Cenis, which is to the south-west of us. The question’s disputed.’
‘As with the discovering of America,’ Avery said retentively. ‘I say, think of Hannibal’s lines of communication! He must have been a tremendous general.’
‘The greatest in history.’ It was a slight somnolence that induced this reckless statement. The final stage of a journey by air has the same effect on me as one by rail.
‘Greater than Napoleon or Rommel or Montgomery?’
I adjudicated appropriately, and for a few minutes our conversation proceeded on this new and learned note. Then Avery abruptly changed the subject.
‘Air and road and rail,’ he said, ‘—it seems a pretty crumby way to do a day’s journey.’
‘It’s not very convenient, I agree.’ Avery had appeared to me to speak with the intolerance of a technological age. ‘But such matters are relative. It took months and months for those elephants to amble into Italy – if they ever did. And, less than two hundred years ago, a traveller had to spend eight days in getting from Edinburgh to London.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Avery was not impressed. ‘But the point is that we don’t arrive in Florence any too early. I think I’d better find a pub.’
‘If you’re turning up on your father out of the blue, perhaps you better had. But the place is still full of tourists at this time of year.’
‘I shan’t be stuck. I can shop around.’
‘I suppose so.’ It recurred to me that the length of Avery’s proposed stay in Florence had not been determined. ‘Have you plenty of money?’
‘I’ve got some lire, and quite a lot in travellers cheques.’ Avery named a sum which struck me as surprisingly ample. ‘But, of course, I don’t mean to be extravagant.’
‘There’s an affair in the railway station that tells you about hotels. You choose your district and your category, and press buttons, and information appears about vacant rooms, and lights go on and off, and telephones bob out of the wall, and your rucksack disappears down a chute—’
‘I expect it’s worked with coins.’ Avery ignored my embroidering upon this useful device. ‘I’ve got a pocketful. And more or less sorted them out.’
Before this independence, I refrained from a suggestion which had been hovering in my head to the effect that we should find temporary quarters for Avery in my own pensione near San Domenico. I acknowledged to myself that I didn’t want to lose sight of him during his mission, but I had a feeling that neither did he now intend to lose sight of me.
In fact he had docketed me as a resource, or at least as a fixed point of reference in a fluid situation. He had me in his head as at least predictable. And he didn’t have his father in his head that way.
These exchanges were followed by a period of silence. It may have occurred to Avery that the old gentleman (as he doubtless thought of me) needed a nap. But if this was his thought, what it educed from him decidedly woke me up.
‘I wonder,’ Avery asked, ‘if I might look at your Times?’
I reached for the newspaper, and handed it to him. There was nothing else to be done. I couldn’t have said, ‘Certainly not,’ or even, ‘I haven’t yet read it myself.’ And if I had pretended to have fallen fast asleep in the instant of his speaking to me there would have been nothing improper in his leaning over and simply possessing himself of the thing without fuss. What I was chiefly apprehensive of, I fear, was not the possibility of Avery’s coming upon a piece of surprising information about his mother’s recent matrimonial intentions. There is everything to be said for members of a family being well informed about one another’s affairs. What selfishly bothered me was the prospect of suffering detection in a false position. If Avery read the announcement, he would ask me if I had. In which case, I couldn’t with any honour or decency declare that I hadn’t and affect surprise. However, I didn’t see him as ploughing through this particular paper column by column and page by page. In The Times nowadays, one comes on a couple of pages of sports news well before meeting the royal arms and the words ‘Court Circular’. With any luck, we should have touched down at Malpensa before Avery had exhausted the interest of all this athletic intelligence.
I was soon wondering whether this prediction might not prove wrong. From over the top of my book (which I had picked up out of sheer nervousness) I saw that Avery owned a quite elderly expertness as a newspaper-reader. He began with the front page; ran his eye over its headlines, whether large or small; and then perused with care what he was thus able to judge significant. He then turned over the page, smoothed it deftly, and applied himself in the same spirit of judicious selection to the Home News. I became aware that I was listening to the drone of the engines of our aircraft; that I had been doing so for hours; and that this journey, like all journeys, was generating in its final stages a faint miasma of tension and melancholy. I told myself that, despite a conscientious application which might have been predicted of him, Avery was unlikely to make any pause over the Court page. He doubtless entertained respectful feelings about the royal family, but it seemed hardly probable that their daily doings would interest him. He was too young to have contemporaries getting engaged or married, and much too young to find any charm in obituaries. The chances were still that all would be well.
But this, after all, remained a shallow and short-term view of the matter. If he actually did pause on the Court page, but seem not to notice the strange announcement, I felt that this sharpened confrontation might constrain me to bring it to his attention, after all.
Avery read steadily on. Suddenly I found the situation intolerable, and did a cowardly thing. I rose, put down my book, and made my way to one of the lavatories at the tail of the plane.
When I got back it was to find that Avery had folded The Times neatly, preparatory to returning it to me. But I could see at once what had happened. He was almost pale.
‘Sir’—and he tapped the paper as he spoke—’did you see that bit?’
‘About your mother? Yes. And I’ve been in some doubt—’
‘I’m awfully sorry. It must have been awkward for you, after what I said about her having no thought of a second marriage. But, you know, it’s perfectly all right.’ Avery paused, and his abundant colour was returning. ‘I can’t think how to put it, but—well, the fact is she’s most awfully deep.’
‘Deep?’ It was stupidly that I echoed the word. ‘And you knew about this?’
‘Oh, no—nothing at all. That’s why I say she’s deep.’
‘There must have been a formal announcement of an engagement earlier.’ The only useful course was to talk the matter out. ‘But perhaps you were abroad, and your mother didn’t happen to let you know.’
‘That was it. And she wouldn’t feel she had to, would she’—and Avery tapped The Times again—’if there was to be this?’
I felt baffled – and chiefly by Avery’s attitude. It was as if, deep down in his head, there had stirred a desperation he didn’t consciously know about. But within a moment this impression was lost to me. Loyalty was so much his note that only the stiffest test of it would be effortful. In this persuasion I pressed on.
‘But, Avery, your mother can scarcely have known from the start that the marriage would not take place?’
‘It’s surprising, I agree.’ Avery was frowning, but seemingly in intellectual rather than moral perplexity. ‘And I’m trying to work it out now. After all, it turned up only five minutes ago.’
‘Perhaps we’d better drop it.’ I had felt a compunction. ‘I mean, perhaps I had. I’ve been rather intrusive about your affairs.’
‘Oh, no, not that a bit!’ Avery was emphatic. ‘And it isn’t that I’ve told you too much. It’s rather that I’ve told you too little. I see it now. The explanation of this’—he didn’t trouble again to tap The Times—’is in something I haven’t got round to with you. There are some things that are so embarrassing.’
‘Yes, of course.’ I felt that here was a moment virtually of commitment, and that I’d be glad to draw back from it. I had perhaps no business to allow some sense of trust I had built up in Avery to have the consequence of introducing me to his parents’ intimate affairs. But at the same time I acknowledged a suspicion that Avery was being used; even projected into situations in which the fact of his being so honest would not in itself afford him any special invulnerability. Weighing this, I decided it wouldn’t do simply, as it were, to shake hands with him and wish him well. ‘But,’ I said, ‘we can take a bit of embarrassment in our stride, if you ask me.’
‘Well, then, we think – my mother thinks – that my father hasn’t been doing so well in Florence. His talents are going to waste.’ Avery was looking steadily in front of him and at nothing in particular. ‘She has felt the time to have come when, at all costs, he must be brought home.’ The concentration which Avery was bringing to this statement struck me as reflected in the almost literary precision he had given to his tenses. ‘That’s what we start from.’
‘Brought home,’ I echoed. ‘And at all costs?’
‘Yes.’ Avery didn’t appear struck by my emphasis. ‘But he’s a difficult person, it seems.’
‘Are you working it out that this abortive relationship with Colonel Greville-Gregory has been some sort of manoeuvre? Is that what you mean by saying that your mother is deep?’
‘Richard Greville-Gregory is a very old family friend.’
‘On your mother’s side?’
‘I suppose so. But he knows my father. I’ve heard him say he understands my father’s character very well. But to get the hang of all this’—Avery hesitated—’we have to think just how my father hasn’t been doing too well. And why.’
‘And can we? Have we an idea?’
‘My mother hasn’t said very much. Although she’s so clever, she’s terribly sensitive as well. And she still thinks of me as a child, to whom some things can’t be said.’
‘But they can be hinted?’ Having yet to be convinced of the beautiful nature of Mrs Fernanda Brenton (apparently determined to become Mrs Jethro Brenton again), I found it necessary to avoid lending this any ironic inflection.
‘Well, I’ve formed an idea. You see, in a sense he’s been alone, my father, all those years. Exposed to things.’
‘Yes. But what things?’
‘I think it might be low women.’
If I was startled it must have been in part by the almost antique resonance of the term Avery had chosen. I certainly wasn’t amused. Conceivably one could view the thing in an edifying light: that of the kind of romance in which estranged parents are brought together, and their sins assoiled, by the innocent good offices of a younger generation. It is an idea which, after all, interested Shakespeare himself. During my own youth it had percolated down into the movies, which often ended with errant couples clasped to one another’s bosoms under the auspices of an angel child. No doubt it happened in the actual and contemporary world often enough. But the image didn’t knit for me with the circumstances of the present case. It was possible that Jethro Brenton had a mistress, and one so glamorously reported on by Fernanda Brenton’s kind female correspondents that the long-since-parted-with wife was acting under some recrudescence of jealous frenzy. There were further possibilities, but I couldn’t glimpse them as belonging other than in the same general category of phenomena – which made the galley not in the least an agreeable one for Avery to be stepping on board. It wouldn’t do, however, for me to express myself strongly – or indeed at all – on the strength of mere conjecture. And at least there was another question I could put to Avery.
‘You say Greville-Gregory is a very old friend of your mother’s. So let me come back to what I was trying to determine. Is it in your mind that he may have consented to enter into the appearance of an engagement of marriage with her simply in order to incline your father—’
‘I say, sir! That’s to put it a bit crudely, isn’t it?’
‘Nothing of the kind.’ I was coming to have a good deal of confidence in Avery’s stuffing, and had decided that there was no need to mumble. ‘It’s either so, or it isn’t. And I think it’s what had come to you, at least as a first notion of the thing, when you said that your mother is most awfully deep.’
‘She is. She’s astounding.’
This had some title to be called a gallant reply. Whether Colonel Greville-Gregory was to be credited with the same quality (proper to a soldier) I had no means of deciding. If Mrs Brenton had really believed that the news of her engagement to another man would bring her former husband back to her she might imaginably have put a plan for the making of such an engagement to a ‘very old friend’ with the understanding that it was later to be cancelled out. But would any mature man have done other than tell her – whether kindly or in so many words – that such a scheme was a dead duck? Greville-Gregory might, indeed, be a very stupid person, and at the same time a very devoted one. But I found myself turning down the notion that the plot, if plot there had been, was as Avery was viewing it. It was more probable that the engagement had been genuine, that the colonel had for some reason failed the lady or been dismissed by her, and that she had been left in a state prompting her at once to form a design upon her former husband. In which case, a volatile nature must be attributed to her. Unless, indeed, one read an edifying recrudescence of conjugal fidelity into the affair.
‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘that your mother has been thinking and acting along the lines you suggest – pretty deep lines, as you say. It hasn’t worked, has it?’ And I myself tapped The Times. ‘Your father hasn’t been drawn, and this winds the project up.’
‘I see that.’
‘Then do you see yourself, Avery, as a rapidly fired second shot?’
‘Sir, that is crude.’
‘Yes, this time I agree that it is.’
‘You’re asking me if I’ve got involved in something in which the end doesn’t justify the means.’ Avery produced this crisply and surprisingly – surprisingly because I had not been crediting him with so clear a head.
‘So what do you say?’
‘That I’m ready to be the last shot in the locker.’ Just for a moment, there was a gleam of amusement on what had become the anxious young face beside me. Then Avery was grave again. ‘Which makes it a responsibility,’ he said.
Part Two
JETHRO
I
Jethro Brenton’s house, the Villa Buontalenti, proved to be only a bow-shot from my pensione, but to reach it one would have had to aim one’s arrow high in air. The balcony of my usual room at the Serena – a room facing uphill, and so less expensive than the rooms with a view of Florence – was much commanded by the upper loggias and windows of the Villa Montagnola. This, now a day-nursery for the children of residents and visitors in the city below, had been a military hospital during the war, and the large red crosses, still faintly distinguishable like perished frescos on its walls, had attracted a good deal of gun-fire. Beyond and above this again, and surely having served to define the target against a contrasting background, towered a close palisade of cypresses. And invisible behind these except for a single nondescript tower, the Villa Buontalenti might be either an arbitrarily named modern dwelling or an authentic late-cinquecento structure which there was reason to associate with the architect of the Villa Medicea della Petraia and the completed Uffizi Palace.
Although I had never set eyes on this well-screened house – and could probably not do so now without an act of trespass – I must (it occurred to me) have glimpsed its proprietor on some previous occasion or another. Fiesole is not a populous place, and it would be odd if I hadn’t at some time marked, and even speculated upon, the figure I didn’t at all know as Avery Brenton’s father. I imagined him, I think, in a well-laundered but by no means new linen suit, and with a Panama hat of conservative circular shape. He was carrying a silver-headed cane, and an eyeglass on a black ribbon depended from his neck. Having constructed this figure in my inner vision I proceeded to search my recollection for any actual encounter with such a one. I had no success. But when Brenton’s letter came – it was sent down to the Serena on my second day – my imaginary impression of the man was powerfully if not very logically reinforced. What I read (written in brown ink on an ‘antique’ paper, so that the first effect was of something filched from an archive) was as follows:
Dear Mr Bannerman,
Your kindness to my son Avery on his recent and by me unapprehended journey, together with my sense of insufficiency, even discourtesy, in never having given myself the pleasure of calling upon you during the lad’s pupillage at Anglebury, render it essential that I should make you a sign. If I do not hear of its inconvenience to yourself, I shall venture to wait upon you at the Villa Serena on Thursday evening at six o’clock.
Yours sincerely,
Jethro Brenton
It will not be supposed that this letter enchanted me. I thought it intolerably affected. My grandmother had conceivably talked of making a person a sign – but not to the person involved. And the opening phrase about Avery’s journey was as uncordial as it was mannered; it had to be read as a kind of brush-off that I didn’t at all like. But I told myself that the letter was not to be fairly judged except as indicating something uneasy in the writer. Brenton had been for many years an exile, and this had bred uncertainties which troubled his prose style. I sent back a note saying that I should be expecting him.
