The Battle of the Villa Fiorita Read online

  She had made capital out of the film at school. ‘Gail Starling, walking down our village street, Mark Bennett going into the post office. Both of them staying at the Red Lion,’ she had told the other girls.

  ‘Did you meet them? Actually meet them?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Philippa.

  ‘We saw them,’ muttered Caddie.

  ‘They were shooting in our park,’ Philippa explained.

  ‘It’s not our park. It belongs to the Big House.’ Caddie had not been particularly interested in the film until the Big House children’s ponies were used in it. ‘They are not a quarter as good-looking as Topaz,’ she had said.

  ‘They were there all summer,’ said Philippa now. ‘That’s how Mother met Rob Quillet. I must say I don’t blame her. He’s attractive. Dark, thin, rather melancholy.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Hugh.

  ‘I cut his photograph out of the papers.’

  ‘You did,’ said Hugh with distaste.

  ‘Yes, and I kept all the clippings,’ said Philippa.

  ‘You …’ Hugh began, but Caddie interrupted.

  ‘What was Father doing! Why did he let her go?’

  ‘You wouldn’t want him to make her stay, if she wanted to go,’ said Philippa, but Caddie certainly would.

  ‘In a gypsy marriage,’ said Philippa, ‘the husband and wife only stay as long as love is in their hearts. I think that’s beautiful.’

  ‘This isn’t a gypsy marriage,’ said Caddie.

  ‘To think it all happened when we were at school and we hadn’t a glimmer,’ said Philippa. There had been no doubt that she was excited. Her eyes seemed to flower into a brighter blue and she kept tossing her hair back, in its fan of fairness.

  It was all very well for Philippa. At seventeen she did not rank as a child and was going to Paris to the Sorbonne, ‘Only for the course, La Civilisation Française, that all the foreign girls take,’ said Hugh, and then to a secretarial college. ‘But I may stay in Paris and train as a model,’ said Philippa loftily.

  ‘With those legs?’ said Hugh. Philippa, though exceedingly pretty, had inherited Darrell’s stocky legs. ‘Which is better than being stocky all over,’ said Caddie. Now not even her legs could stop Philippa and she swept on, ‘English girls are tops for models in Paris.’ Philippa could escape, but, ‘I work it out I have twenty-three months in custody,’ said Hugh. ‘As for you,’ he said to Caddie, ‘you have years.’

  ‘Custody? That’s what they say when they take you to prison,’ said Caddie, her eyes alarmed. ‘Will Father keep us in custody from Mother? Won’t we ever see her?’

  ‘Don’t be such a goose, Caddie,’ said Philippa. ‘Mother has access.’

  ‘Access?’ Caddie could only repeat these terrifying new words. ‘What’s access?’

  ‘It means that we can be posted about like parcels,’ said Hugh, ‘to Italy or wherever Mother happens to be, when Father says we can visit her.’

  ‘Visit her?’ The full meaning of this extraordinary conversation had at last reached Caddie and she sat appalled until Gwyneth came in to call them to tea. ‘I have put it in the kitchen. I thought it would be more cosy.’

  The kitchen was the homeliest room in the flat, if any of it could be called homely; in it, and the slit of a bedroom next door, were Gwyneth’s things, though they too were jerked out of their right context, the cottage where Caddie had seen them all her life; here, transported to London, were the chalet musical box Fanny had once brought Gwyneth from Austria, the framed photograph of Mr Morgan, her husband, killed in the first world war, the red table-cloth worked with Welcome in each corner, the crocheted antimacassar on the armchair. They gave Caddie a wrench each time she saw them, but not such a wrench as the things from Stebbings, and Gwyneth had brought Thomas. ‘Cats don’t mind London,’ she said, and indeed his tabby paws had not had to be buttered; he was there as usual, stretched out, making a hearthrug on the hearthrug, as Gwyneth said, but, ‘Where’s Danny?’ Caddie had asked at once.

  ‘In kennels,’ said Gwyneth.

  ‘Mother has taken him,’ explained Philippa.

  ‘Taken Danny?’

  ‘Dearie, he was her dog,’ but two tears had squeezed then from Caddie’s eyes and trickled down her cheeks on to her chin.

  The days on Dartmoor, in wind, sun and rain – ‘Lots of rain,’ said Caddie – had given her more freckles than ever; her hair needed washing and hung limp in its ‘ginger’, as Hugh called it. ‘And it has probably got hay in it,’ said Philippa. Caddie’s face was lumpy with distress, and she looked so plain that her brother and sister found it difficult to be patient with her.

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ said Hugh.

  ‘Can’t you stop?’ said Philippa.

  ‘It’s no use, Caddie dear,’ said Gwyneth. ‘We all know what we think and feel but we have to face it. It has happened, and in two months, now, Mrs Clavering will be Mrs Quillet.’

  ‘We have to accept it,’ said Philippa.

  ‘Put it in our pipes and smoke it,’ said Hugh. ‘On our needles and knit it,’ but Caddie still sat at the table, and it was then that she had spoken.

  ‘What if we won’t?’ asked Caddie.

  At first it had been Hugh who had hung back. ‘What, crash in on their honeymoon?’ he had said.

  ‘They shouldn’t be having a honeymoon,’ said Caddie, unconsciously as moral as any elder of the church.

  ‘But they are, and they won’t want us.’

  ‘If we go, they will have to have us.’

  ‘We shall spoil it.’

  ‘All the better,’ said Caddie, and for the first time Hugh had looked at his small sister with respect; but now, in the villa, far from the flat in London, she was not as certain and, ‘Perhaps we oughtn’t to have come,’ she said.

  Shaded by the shutters so that the evening light was mellowed and made rich, this villa bedroom with its feminine colours seemed small and close, again too intimate. The same delicate scent was in the air and Hugh felt a tingling in his stomach that he had come to know. It was like a shiver, but can a shiver be hot? he thought. This was always strangely hot. Raymond, a boy at school, older than Hugh but in the same class, had some secret photographs. Like everyone else Hugh had looked at them and, having looked, had this same tremor. Nor could he forget them; indeed, he seemed to be attached to them by an invisible cord that kept jerking him into remembrance. They ‘visited’ him, he might have said. They were shown only to a chosen few. ‘This is Mirabelle,’ Raymond would say, watching for his effect. ‘That’s Coral. This is Darleen,’ and even Hugh had been startled into saying, ‘Do you know girls like that?’ which had sounded like Caddie, but he could not help it. ‘Do you mean to say you know girls who …’ and, ‘Aha!’ said Raymond. ‘I don’t believe you,’ Hugh had said, but he would not have put it past Raymond and, though Hugh had treated him in a lordly fashion, if the truth had been told, his whole being shrank away – until this curiosity had begun and disclosed another Hugh. Now he looked at his own curl of baby hair. Every boy hair of him felt erect and he was irritated as a young stag is irritated by the velvet on his antlers, combative – but there was only Caddie to combat. ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ she went on saying.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘We didn’t know it would be like this.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!’

  Suddenly he turned and ran lightly down the stairs and out of the front door to the forecourt. Caddie ran after him but she kept her eyes away from the bird-cages.

  To the right, a path led from this high forecourt, down behind the villa and back to the olive grove. Noiselessly they followed it and, on the level again, came to a little walled orchard of peach-blossom and figs, then to a vegetable patch, neat in plots of carrots, onions, lettuce, celery. It was sheltered by the rock ridge on which the villa was built, a ridge that ran in a long spine across a peninsula jutting out into the lake. Peering through the olive trees, the
y could see another entrance from the road, open, not barred, and leading to what seemed to be a boathouse, coloured terracotta like the garage. Smoke coiled upwards from its chimney – so somebody lived there – and its back veranda was hung with fishing nets; oars were propped against its wall and beyond it they could see a small harbour, the mast of the boat, and they could hear someone hammering. They had turned to go back when Caddie froze, her hand clutching Hugh’s arm. ‘Look.’ In the grove a man was stretched under one of the olives, his back against its trunk, a beret half over his face. He seemed all brown: brown overalls, patched brown shoes, brown face and hands, dusty brown hair, straggles of brown beard; only the beret was dark blue. He was asleep.

  ‘Now? It must be six o’clock. A funny time for a grown-up to sleep,’ said Caddie.

  ‘You don’t know Giacomino,’ Rob was to tell them. ‘He sleeps at any time. And drinks at any time.’ Beside the man was a straw-covered wine bottle. He looked so peaceful, so comfortable and happy, almost at their feet in the olive grove, that Caddie felt reassured and she asked an idiotic but hopeful question. ‘He couldn’t be … Mr Quillet?’ After all, Rob Quillet is a sort of artist, she argued to herself, and artists can look like that but, ‘Don’t be a super clot,’ said Hugh and led the way up, back to the villa. Round it on its other side, another paved path led to the lake front of the house, passing the French doors of the drawing-room, outside which was a table, again of pink stone. ‘A stone table?’ asked Caddie. There was a stone bench too, both sheltered from the lake by another clipped cypress hedge too tall to see over. Then, in front of the house, Hugh and Caddie stepped out on a terrace with a balustrade over which more of the yellow roses cascaded and, ‘Oh!’ said Caddie, ‘Oh!’ not in a cry as when she had seen the birds, but in a deep breath. This was the first time they had seen the whole width of the lake.

  They had glimpsed it already from the bus, sometimes close beside the road when it ran along the shore, but they had been too shaken – literally – and too anxious to look; they had trudged along beside it, but now, from the height of the villa on its ridge, the command of its peninsula, they looked at a blue that stretched as far as they could see, disappearing to the north into far folds of mountains, and to the south widening into a pale haze. Directly opposite them it was bordered by high mountains.

  The mountains reared along the lake on both sides; some were capped with snow; the biggest was behind the villa itself. Their flanks were scattered up and down with villages, hairlines of roads criss-crossed them and, as Caddie and Hugh stood there, the sound of bells floated down to the terrace, some so faint they hardly seemed like bells, only a half-heard quivering in the air. Then, from somewhere nearer, a single deep-toned bell rang out. It was just six o’clock and, though Caddie and Hugh did not know it, they were listening to the ringing of the angelus.

  ‘But it’s beautiful! Beautiful!’ Caddie was saying.

  ‘It’s only a lake,’ said Hugh, but Caddie could not say that. She had not his and Philippa’s ability to shut their eyes to, or gloss over, what they did not want to see. ‘Like a postcard,’ said Hugh scornfully, but even with a pigmy steamer crossing it, a little white steamer on that painted-looking blue, it was not like a postcard. Waves lapped the rocks; their reflections threw waves of light across the villa walls, round which the swallows swooped and flew. With the mountains, the dark cypresses, the sun, it took Caddie’s breath away and she could not pretend that it did not. ‘It’s a giant of a lake, and beautiful,’ she said.

  Below them a grassed walk was bounded by a low wall; steps went down to the water and a jetty ran out into the lake; it had painted pale-green railings that matched the house shutters. This was the villa front jetty; there was another, humbler, by the boathouse; at this one’s head a boat was moored and, ‘What a boat!’ said Hugh. Even he could not cry this down; its brown polished hull was half-decked, it gleamed with chromium and glass and its seats were covered in blue and yellow and an Italian flag floated from the stern. They could even see its name, Nettuno.

  ‘He must be fearfully rich,’ said Caddie.

  All at once they heard voices. Voices? A voice. Fanny’s! Caddie gave a sound like a little yelp. She would have rushed headlong but Hugh caught her by the back of her dress. Through the trellis he had seen a glimpse of dark blue, a dark blue shirt, twin to the one they had seen drying on the balcony. Fanny was not alone; this Rob Quillet was walking up under the wistaria with her and, ‘Wait. Hush,’ hissed Hugh. ‘Wait.’

  The two came into view. He was carrying a jacket, lightly over his shoulder; Fanny was wearing a white dress – ‘She never had a white dress,’ said Caddie – and held an unfamiliar pale-pink jersey, a bag and scarf. ‘They are going out,’ Hugh said warningly.

  ‘Out!’ Caddie said that as if it were treachery.

  At the top of the walk Fanny and Rob stopped, dazzled by the sun after the shade. Because of the brilliant light, and because his eyes were so tired, Hugh could not see them clearly; the whole garden and the lake had become a blur, but, standing in that flood of evening light, framed against the green leaves and the spirals of mauve flowers, they looked illuminated, glorified. ‘A couple,’ Hugh thought before he could stifle the thought, not his mother and Rob Quillet but a man and woman close together.

  As Hugh and Caddie watched she looked up at him and laughed; his arm was round her shoulders, now his hand touched her neck, caressing it.

  Hugh and Caddie had seen their father kiss Fanny’s cheek or forehead often enough, pat her head or shoulder, but this was the first time they had surprised a grown person in a moment of real tenderness. And a tenderness of ownership, Hugh could have said. He and Caddie seemed to swell to giant size. ‘Crash in on their honeymoon.’ ‘They oughtn’t to be having a honeymoon.’ But what could anyone do against this? and Hugh had a wild desire to punish them, wipe that look of private bliss off their faces; holding Caddie as if she were a prisoner, he stepped boldly out on to the path.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said with icy politeness.

  2

  As Hugh spoke, Caddie burst into a loud wail and tore herself from him to go to Fanny. Fanny’s jersey, bag and scarf dropped to the ground and in a moment she was crying too, Caddie gathered close in her arms. ‘But … how?’ Fanny kept saying, incoherently, because she was laughing and crying together. ‘How?’ Then, as Hugh still stood by the stone table, she freed one hand, holding it out to him. ‘Hugh? Hugh?’ At the pleading in her voice Rob abruptly bent and picked up her things, dropped them on the table and went to the balustrade where he lighted a cigarette. Only the way he flicked the ash continually showed he was in any way concerned. ‘Hugh, darling.’ He watched Fanny, her arm round Caddie, come across to the table.

  Before she reached Hugh there was an eruption from the back of the house, shrill cries, voices, a babel of Italian, and round the corner came a big woman in a flowered apron, a woman of a big bust, big forearms, small snapping eyes, with, behind her, a pretty girl, big too, with red cheeks and a mane of curly black hair; she was wearing a black dress, a short white apron, and carried the grips and raincoats. They must have found them on the terrace, thought Hugh – and found your disgraceful bag, he said silently to Caddie – and indeed the big woman was panting out, ‘Signore! Signora! Schurten! Schurten! Dei Turisti. Dei gitanti sono entrati. They get in. Malgrado tutti gli avvisi! So many notice. Ecco quanto Giacomino ha cura di voi!’ Behind them, still lazy but with his beret now on the back of his head, came the man who had been asleep under the olive tree, and she turned on him, ‘Fanullone, buono a nulla! Good-for-nothing.’ When she saw Fanny’s arm round Caddie, Hugh by the table, the cries and scoldings stopped. ‘Children, this is Celestina,’ said Fanny. ‘Celestina and Giulietta, and Giacomino, Celestina’s husband,’ and she whispered, ‘Shake hands,’ but Caddie was too broken with tears and Hugh only gave a curt nod. ‘Mio figlio, mia figlia,’ said Fanny and from the balustrade Rob spoke in quick Italian. Celestina, when she understood, br
oke into cries of admiration. ‘From England. England!’ She translated for Giulietta and her husband. ‘From England.’ Then, taking in their dirt and tiredness, ‘Poveri bambini! Poor childs! Devono aver viaggiato tutta la notte.’

  Fanny detached herself from Caddie and went to Hugh, turning him towards Rob. ‘Rob, this is Hugh.’ The pride in her voice made Hugh scowl.

  Rob was a man, Hugh only a boy, and Rob with kindness held out his hand, but Hugh kept his in his pockets. ‘How do you do?’ he said, and Fanny could guess that his hands were clenched; for all his whiteness, tiredness, and tenseness, there was all Hugh’s old insolence in the way he looked at Rob.

  Hugh was not tall for fourteen but he looked tall – until he stood beside a man; it was the way he held his head, the smallness of his thighs, waist, and shoulders. ‘His shoulders are too slim,’ Darrell had said lately. ‘It’s time he broadened out,’ but Hugh refused to broaden out. His head looked big because of his mop of hair; Darrell must have been at him to get it cut, which is why he wouldn’t, thought Fanny. Caddie could have told her this was true.

  ‘Quanto è bello il giovanottino inglese!’ Giulietta murmured to Celestina. ‘Che carnagione! Cosi chiara è rosea!’ and it was true that Hugh’s skin was pink and white, disgracefully pretty for a boy, almost like apple blossom. ‘How unfair that it shouldn’t be the boy in the family to have the freckles,’ Caddie often said. Hugh’s eyes were a darker blue than Darrell’s or Philippa’s, and his had none of the blandness of hers; Philippa could tell lies so that everyone believed them – except her nearest and dearest. Hugh only told them to be difficult or quip people. Caddie never lied. ‘I’m not clever enough,’ she would have said. To her it was an inconvenient defect.

  Now, in this scene with Rob and Fanny, she knew she had little importance, it was Hugh who mattered. ‘Bello, proprio bello il signorino,’ Giulietta murmured to Celestina. ‘Beautiful.’ Standing on this alien sunlit terrace, Caddie looked small, stocky, and very English, a little English bullock, thought Rob. He alone had looked beyond Hugh to her, until Fanny, quick to him, looked too. She saw the crumpled school dress and blazer, Caddie’s dirty knees, wrinkled socks, and brown walking shoes white with dust; the locks of ginger hair, the panama askew, face blotted out with tears. Not very attractive for Rob, Fanny thought, wincing, but here she was wrong; Rob knew real grief when he saw it, and watching Caddie, he began to sense what this journey had been and what lay behind it. Caddie had not a glance to spare for him, or for Celestina or Giulietta, and in that torrent of feeling there was no anger or jealousy, only grief. What was more, he saw Fanny in Caddie; in the brown eyes, the hair whose ginger held a promise of Fanny’s bronze, and just so had Fanny often wept. The boy doesn’t feel like this, thought Rob.