The Battle of the Villa Fiorita Read online

  At the end of the landing a small door led into a room that was … ‘queer,’ said Caddie. She meant it was a mixture. Cupboards filled all one wall so that it, too, looked like a dressing-room, but the other three walls were hung with tapestry. There was a large painting of the Madonna in deep blues and pinks, a vividly rosy Madonna. Inlaid chairs were pushed back against the wall and in the middle was a wooden kitchen table, heavy, rough, with a wooden kitchen chair. The window-sills were heaped with books, there were more books on the floor with a big waste-paper basket, while the table itself was covered in papers, more books, blotting-paper, clips, a typewriter. A red crystal goblet held pencils and pens, and on top of it all was a notice printed on a piece of cardboard in English and Italian, ‘NON TOCCARE. Don’t touch!’ For the first time Hugh smiled. ‘I bet Mother tries to make him clear up his table.’

  Next door was the bathroom, big and white-tiled. ‘Look!’ whispered Caddie. ‘Big towels and little towels and a bathmat all to match.’ Someone had just had a bath; the air was heavy with steam, ‘and scent,’ said Caddie, wrinkling up her nose, ‘but Mother doesn’t use scent.’

  ‘She does now,’ said Hugh.

  Fanny, if it were she who had had the bath, seemed to have caught the untidiness; underclothes were thrown down on a stool; the bathmat, still damp from wet feet, was wrinkled on the floor, powder was spilled; it might have been their seventeen-year-old sister Philippa, not a responsible woman, a mother. Caddie picked up the box of powder with its large puff. ‘Jicky Guerlain,’ she read.

  ‘Put it down,’ said Hugh. ‘Come out.’ He looked even paler than he had on the road and his forehead was clammy. It seemed too intimate, there in the empty villa. The swallows flew round it, making a rush of wings in the height; a shutter, loose on its catch, clacked gently; the singing sounded from below. These were the only sounds, but the house was filled with two people, Fanny and – ‘Mr Quillet,’ whispered Caddie and, caught unawares, spied on like this, they seemed not enemies but vulnerable. It was like putting one’s hand into a nest and finding it still warm.

  If the last door had not been open they would not have looked in. As it was, Hugh stopped short on the threshold and Caddie had to reach up and look over his shoulder. ‘Mother’s bedroom,’ breathed Caddie. She felt Hugh’s arm quiver against her. She quivered herself. This was even worse than seeing the furniture from Stebbings in the new London flat. Mother’s room. At Stebbings it had not only been where she slept – and their father when he was home – it had been where anything serious, or private, in the family had happened or was discussed. Talks took place there and what Fanny called reasoning; punishments were given, temperatures taken. Doctor Railton did his examinations in it and ill children were allowed to spend the day there in bed. Hugh and Caddie had both been born in that room. It had been the core of Stebbings, though they had not known it. Now, this pink and cream enamelled furniture, the wide bed that had a bedhead of brocade in a gilded frame, the tiled floor, and shutters, were Italian, foreign, but still there on the dressing-table were their photographs, as they had always been: Philippa, Hugh, Caddie; under the glass of Hugh’s was a brown curl of baby hair. There, too, was the apple pin-cushion Philippa had made and painted at school, the wooden pin-box Hugh had made in carpentry with Fanny’s initials burned in its top: F.C. They won’t do now, thought Hugh. There were a great many more bottles and jars than there used to be and the brushes were new; perhaps the old silver ones with cherubs’ heads on them were too battered to bring to this villa. These matched the blue and gold of the clock on the bedside table. ‘Is he fearfully rich?’ asked Caddie.

  ‘Shut up.’

  As if holding to a thread of Fanny, Caddie was glad to see by the clock a shopping list, written in Fanny’s sprawling writing, and beside it was the little green leather book, the Imitation of Christ, that had been by Fanny’s bed since they could remember. Its corner had been chewed by Danny as a puppy and it had a ring on the binding where Philippa had once put down a cup on it.

  This room too was untidy; someone had dressed and thrown things down. Caddie gave a ‘tchk’ and picked up a petticoat; it was fine, gauzy with net and embroidery. ‘Is it Mother’s? It doesn’t look like hers.’

  ‘Shut up. Put it down,’ said Hugh even more fiercely.

  They looked through to the dressing-room they had seen before; the door was open as if he and she came in and out and talked while they were dressing. The bedside table on the other side of the bed was heaped with books, there were cigarettes on it, an ashtray and, ‘She lets him smoke in bed,’ whispered Caddie. ‘She wouldn’t let Father.’

  The Times had had only a paragraph.

  Colonel Darrell Charles Clavering was granted a decree nisi in the Divorce Courts yesterday because of the adultery of his wife Frances Clavering with Robert Paston Quillet (the film director) on the 12th of October and subsequently at Mr Quillet’s flat in Lowndes Square, S.W.1. The suit was undefended. Colonel and Mrs Clavering were married at St Michael’s, Chester Gate, in 1945. There are three children of the marriage. Custody of the two younger was awarded to Colonel Clavering who was also awarded costs.

  The other papers had been less reticent. A few had headlines: ‘Queen’s Messenger brings suit.’ ‘Well-known film director named as co-respondent,’ ‘Rob Quillet (of Diamond Pipe and Haysel to Harvest fame) named in case.’ ‘Colonel Clavering awarded costs against film director.’

  Philippa and Hugh had been told at half-term – ‘But Darrell should have let me tell Hugh,’ Fanny had cried – Caddie had not known until the end of the Easter holidays. ‘When the case is all over, and it’s all settled,’ Darrell had told the others. ‘It will be less painful for her like that.’

  ‘Was it less painful?’ Caddie might have asked.

  She had been bundled off out of the way to Devonshire for the Easter holidays. ‘Not bundled, you wanted to go,’ said Philippa.

  ‘It was a riding course,’ said Caddie as if that settled it. Even now, in the midst of this shock, her face had shone when she thought of it. ‘I learned an immense lot,’ she said, ‘and so did Topaz.’

  ‘But didn’t you suspect?’ asked Hugh. ‘Didn’t you think Father was being extraordinarily kind? Paying those fees and boxing Topaz all the way to Dartmoor after the fuss he kicked up when you won him?’

  ‘I thought he was beginning to believe in him,’ said Caddie.

  ‘Oh, Caddie!’ They could not help laughing. ‘It was just to distract you, my poor infant,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Only too easy,’ said Philippa.

  ‘You must have had some inkling, heard gossip?’

  ‘How could I?’ asked Caddie. ‘I never listen.’

  ‘We know that,’ said Philippa. ‘But all the same … Mother being away all that time up in Scotland at Great Aunt Isabel’s?’

  ‘But Aunt Isabel was dying. She died.’

  ‘Then us going so suddenly with Mother to Switzerland for Christmas?’

  ‘I hated that,’ said Caddie.

  Those had been Darrell’s terms. ‘Terms?’ Fanny had asked when Rob came back from that one interview.

  ‘He can make terms,’ said Rob. ‘It’s only just.’

  Fanny had waited that late November morning in the sitting-room of Rob’s bachelor flat. Because of the block’s central heating it had been over-hot, the air stuffy and stale after the English coldness of unheated Stebbings, and she had pushed up the window and sat by it. Outside in the Square, traffic came and went; there was a perpetual roar of it from Knightsbridge; cars pulled out from the parking spaces round the Square gardens, voices floated up; Christmas shopping was already in full spate; throngs of women were going into Woolland’s, Harvey Nichols, as a year ago she would have been going. Everything was busy, crowded, rushed, but here in this room was stillness, silence: only the ticking of the clock, the beating of her heart. Beside her had been a bowl of chrysanthemums, small, curled, bronze, that Rob had bought for her that morning; in his distress for
her he had gone in and out buying her things. The glow of their colour and their pungency filled the room, but, as Fanny waited, she had fiddled with them cruelly, jerking them, uncurling the petals until her fingers had smelled pungent too. When Rob had come in, quietly closing the door, coming to her and sitting down beside her, she had known by his gentle protectiveness that his news was harsh – but what could I have expected? thought Fanny.

  Only a few of Rob’s sentences reached her. He said them as if he had learned them by heart. ‘Darrell is thinking of the children, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally’ – that came stiffly through Fanny’s lips.

  ‘He was quite fair.’

  ‘He always was,’ said Fanny.

  ‘… not time now before their Christmas holiday to make arrangements. He asks that you go back to Stebbings to meet them. He will guarantee to keep away. He wants no one to know until they need. I think he is still hoping you will change your mind.’ Fanny bent her head over the mutilated chrysanthemum, jerking it, pulling it, and after a moment Rob went on, ‘To save gossip when he doesn’t come home for Christmas, you will take the children to Switzerland.’

  ‘We can’t afford it,’ she had said automatically.

  ‘He says his mother will help,’ said Rob.

  ‘Lady Candida!’ said Fanny. ‘Must she? Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘He will start proceedings at once. After the holidays you can come out to me in Africa, or have this flat until I can get back. The case should come on in the spring. By that time he will have found somewhere to put the children.’

  ‘Put the children!’

  Darrell had been awarded the children as he had been awarded costs. ‘It makes them seem like chattels,’ said Fanny, and, ‘One must hand it to them,’ Hugh had said that day of Caddie’s return, ‘they are clever arrangers. Everything went most smoothly and all behind our backs.’ His hands were in his pockets when he said it and then he tried to whistle, the clear blackbird whistle that always filled Caddie with envy – she could never make more than a breathy squeak – but the whistle jarred and was jerky, just as Philippa’s talk was offhand. Caddie could tell they were both quiveringly hurt and she ached for them. ‘The worst of Caddie,’ Gwyneth often said, ‘is that when she does think of other people, she thinks too hard.’ Gwyneth had been the Claverings’ daily woman since Philippa was a year old and she knew them, ‘inside out,’ said Gwyneth.

  She had come to London to housekeep and look after them, closing her own cottage, but the life seemed to have gone out of Gwyneth; she no longer sang the chapel hymns the children had loved and her step was heavy. ‘Well, she worshipped Mother,’ said Philippa.

  ‘More fool she,’ said Hugh.

  To the whole of Whitcross it had come as a shock.

  ‘Fanny? Fanny Clavering?’

  ‘The Claverings? Darrell and Fanny? Impossible.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s there – in print.’

  ‘But Fanny!’

  ‘With all those children!’

  ‘She never said a word,’ and, ‘I thought we were friends.’ That was Margot and Anthea, Fanny’s best friends – ‘Well, my oldest friends,’ said Fanny.

  There were other, humbler voices about whom Fanny cared even more: people like Prentice, their old gardener, and Mrs Derrick at the shop; George Glossop at the garage, post-office Emily; the travelling fishmonger who had always let the children ring up the cash register on his van when they were small, and Patrick Aloysius, the milkman.

  ‘Mrs Clavering? Up at Stebbings? Never!’

  ‘But she wasn’t that kind.’

  ‘Well, you could knock me down!’

  ‘Mrs Clavering!’

  No one could believe it, yet it was true. All her life Caddie was to remember Darrell telling her in the taxi on the way from Paddington: in the flat Philippa and Hugh had confirmed every dread thing he had said.

  Lady Candida had found the flat, on the fourth floor of a great modern block of ‘cement shoe-boxes’ as Hugh called them, and it was true that the rooms were all the same though fitted in differently. It depressed Caddie and Hugh to think of the hundreds of other rooms round them; it made them feel like rabbits in hutches instead of people. On the ground floor were shops. ‘Very convenient,’ said Lady Candida but, ‘Wickedly expensive,’ said Gwyneth; she always went to the shops in the poor streets round the corner. There was a swimming-pool and a restaurant. ‘Your father can go there when Gwyneth is away. You and Hugh can go to the snackbar. You will like that,’ said Lady Candida, but Hugh and Caddie did not like it; the snackbar soup came out of tins, as did its meat, while the bread of its sandwiches looked and tasted like thick white flannel: it was, too, always crowded with people, ‘Who look at us,’ said Caddie, quailing; she and Hugh might have been a pair of new and peculiar rabbits. ‘Oh, Gwyneth, don’t go away,’ prayed Caddie.

  The flat had, too, a nightmare quality because it was furnished with bits of Stebbings so that one came across the nursery armchair in the kitchen, dining-room chairs in the hall, the oak chest from Stebbings hall in the new sitting-room, the grandfather clock telling London time. Stebbings itself was empty, left with only Prentice to keep an eye on it. Presently it would be sold. ‘Sold!’ Caddie had cried.

  ‘Naturally. Father can’t run it without Mother. She worked like ten men.’ For a moment a quiver came even into the airy Philippa’s voice. Fanny herself had gone to Italy … ‘For the present,’ Darrell had said.

  ‘How long is the present?’ Caddie asked Hugh.

  ‘We don’t know. Perhaps the summer.’

  ‘But she can’t,’ said Caddie, aghast. ‘The second of August is Risborough Show. Topaz is entered.’

  ‘Caddie, haven’t you taken anything in?’

  ‘And don’t you ever think of anything but that blasted horse?’ asked Hugh.

  ‘Pony,’ said Caddie mechanically. ‘He’s under fifteen hands,’ but she did not dare at this moment to think about Topaz, boxed trustfully back from Dartmoor to Stebbings. Darrell said Prentice had met him and taken him to Mr Ringells’ farm and stables, where they kept ponies at grass. Caddie’s mind took refuge as it so often did with her dream Topaz. ‘Miss Candida Clavering’s Topaz made a perfect round, in the Juvenile Jumping.’ ‘The Fitzherbert Cup was won by Miss Candida Clavering’s Topaz for the third year in succession, a record for this show.’ ‘Miss Candida Clavering’s Topaz won the fourteen-two showing, then this grand little pony went on to win the Supreme Championship.’

  ‘Not ambitious, are you?’ Philippa would have said if Caddie had said this aloud and, ‘Yes, I am,’ Caddie would have answered, but she did not say it aloud. She was used to the fact that no one saw Topaz as she did. ‘Dog meat. Knacker,’ Hugh called him, which was near the bone because everyone said that no pony would have been given as a prize by a girl’s magazine unless he had been bought cheaply. Caddie had won him with an essay called ‘My Pegasus’. That had amazed her family. That Caddie had cut out the coupon, filled it in, bought the five-shilling postal order for the entry fee, was almost as incredible as that she had written the essay. ‘I wanted a pony,’ she had said as if that explained it. There was one fact that she and Hugh had kept to themselves: he had helped her with ‘My Pegasus.’

  Once upon a time, long long ago – ‘Well, six years,’ said Caddie, which after all was more than half her lifetime – she and Hugh had been companions, inseparable. They had gone to school together, the little day-school where most of the Whitcross children went. They played together though not equally – Hugh of course was the master, Caddie the slave – but played, shared. They had had a house in the big apple tree, Hugh had hauled Caddie up it, a secret harbour by the stream. They had slept together in the night nursery. Caddie could remember it quite well; after all, she had been nearly six when Hugh went away to his first boarding school. She could still see him in his new grey flannel suit, shorts with pockets, jacket with more pockets, a striped school tie, a new
blue cap with crossed keys embroidered on it. Hugh had had a wooden playbox with iron hinges and clamps, a trunk of his own, both lettered: ‘H. D. Clavering’. Hugh went to school and Caddie was left behind for ever.

  For years she had been still attached, still tagging on, as Hugh said; and there was always a hope far ahead of an enchanted time when they would both be grown up; then the two and a half years that made such a difference would not be the chasm it was now, nor the fact that she was female. ‘There are too many women,’ Hugh had often cried of Stebbings and certainly there were many of them: Fanny, Lady Candida, Gwyneth, Philippa, and Caddie herself, if she could be counted as a woman: five of them to balance, if Darrell were away, one boy. No wonder he was spoilt as Darrell always said he was, but Hugh could still be kind, still share with Caddie, and sometimes he lent her a little of his slipperiness. ‘It says you must write the essay yourself,’ she had said.

  ‘You will write it,’ said Hugh. ‘I shall only tell you what to say.’ Yet mysteriously, when Topaz came, Caddie was freed of Hugh.

  ‘But why call him Topaz,’ Philippa had asked, ‘when he’s the colour of a mole? Topazes are yellow.’

  To Caddie it was because of his eyes, though she did not tell anyone that. His eyes were a pony’s, dark, lustrous, lashed, but Caddie had a private idea that they were gold. Now, ‘It’s his first show,’ she said. ‘I have been training him. He … he …’

  ‘Why cry?’ asked Hugh. ‘It’s perfectly normal. Thousands of couples get divorced every year.’

  ‘Think of parents at school,’ said Philippa.

  ‘Yes, but not ours,’ said Caddie.

  ‘It was all because of that film,’ said Philippa.

  ‘What film?’ asked Caddie.

  ‘You know perfectly well. Haysel to Harvest. The film Rob Quillet was making. It was nearly all shot in the village. It has just come on in London.’ Sometimes Philippa forgot and talked as if they still lived in Whitcross. ‘It’s at the Empire, with Gail Starling and Mark Bennett.’