The Takeover

by Muriel Spark

  Pietro said, ‘Because it sounds nicer.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it does,’ Maggie said and laid down her little spoon to drink some water. ‘And “Signora” would be better. “Mrs” and “Miss” make you close your mouth for the ms but for “Signora” and “Signorina” you don’t shut your mouth. “Mrs” and “Miss” form a sneer but “Signora” and “Signorina” are a hiss.’

  Marino the psychologist leaned forward to catch Maggie’s drift, puzzled. The others laughed while Letizia explained the point to Marino in rapid Italian undertones. He said, ‘Why is a hiss better than a sneer?’

  ‘It’s better,’ said the father as the glasses were filled with his good wine.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Maggie, ‘Signora is perfectly all right for me as I’m now married to an Italian and Italy’s a republic’

  ‘The Signora is of course the Marchesa di Tullio-Friole,’ said Dr Bernardini with his cool good manners, at the same time drawing the line at any excess of a tiresome subject arising from Maggie’s logic.

  ‘Oh, Marchesa is so formal. It suits me only when I’m with my husband.’

  ‘I was at school with his son, Pino,’ said Dr Bernardini. ‘I remember your husband very well. I stayed at the villa up in the Veneto, often. I’ve hunted there.’

  ‘Then you must come again,’ said Maggie. ‘He’s there now, seeing to the alterations to my bathroom.’

  The candles flickered. Came the spinach soufflé, the crumbed veal and salad, the lemon ice and the fruit, while Maggie talked on about the two other houses she owned in the neighbourhood, her son’s and Hubert Mallindaine’s.

  ‘Mr Mallindaine’s is new,’ said Letizia sharply, ‘but your son’s house is a sixteenth-century farm-house.’

  Pietro said he had always admired the old farm-house. He seemed uneasy about his sister.

  ‘It should be in Italian hands,’ Letizia said. ‘Our national patrimony.’

  ‘It cost a fortune to put right,’ Maggie said.

  The father intercepted Letizia’s foreseen reaction to say that he understood Maggie had restored the old house beautifully, and built the new house beautifully as well.

  Pietro, it seemed, knew the young Radcliffes and had been to their house.

  ‘Oh, those are the Americans you spoke of?’ This was Letizia again, so much so that her boy-friend laughed. ‘What’s funny?’ said Letizia, seeing that the others were laughing.

  ‘Something,’ said Maggie, ‘about the way you said “Americans”.’

  ‘Letizia, don’t be silly,’ said the father.

  Letizia said, ‘Shall we have coffee outside, Papa?’ Then, as she led the way through the french windows to the upper terrace, she said, ‘I believe in Italy for the Italians.’

  ‘Letizia!’ said Emilio.

  ‘You are so impolite,’ said her brother.

  ‘What about the English?’ said Nancy. ‘Are we unwanted here?’

  ‘The English the same,’ Letizia said as she waited for her guests to be seated.

  The father was explaining to Maggie. ‘It’s only a toy gun she’s playing with, or at least, a gun filled with blanks.’

  Letizia said ‘Oh!’ protestingly.

  Maggie said, ‘Oh, I agree with her, really I do. I think the Americans soon won’t be able to afford to stay in Italy. You know, since I married an Italian, I feel myself to be an Italian.’

  The young psychologist said to the father, ‘You talk of guns, Dr Bernardini. Playing with guns. That’s interesting.’

  ‘It’s a sexual image,’ Maggie said, and they all laughed except Letizia and her boy-friend.

  Letizia sat down and the coffee was brought to the terrace table. Letizia started pouring while Nancy took round the cups. ‘And the third house?’ Letizia said.

  ‘An Englishman,’ Maggie said. ‘As a matter of fact, Dr Bernardini, he’s my problem. He’s the problem I wanted to ask you about.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful house,’ said the father. ‘It must have a wonderful view.’

  ‘It has the best view of all three houses,’ Maggie said looking one by one at her rings. ‘And what’s more, the furniture is mine. Every piece. I’ve given him notice to quit.’

  ‘But he belongs to Nemi,’ said Letizia.

  ‘Who belongs to Nemi?’ said Pietro.

  ‘The occupant. The Englishman. He has an ancestral claim.’

  Emilio Bernardini called for the brandy and liqueurs.

  ‘He has to quit,’ Maggie said. ‘My husband insists.’ She turned to Emilio. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘what Italians are like, of the old school. Very conservative. And really, I admire it.’

  ‘In our country it’s difficult to get rid of tenants,’ Emilio said, not anxious to take the landlady’s part against a tenant so near at hand. ‘Very difficult indeed.’

  ‘He pays no rent,’ Maggie said. ‘He has been a guest for a year and now his welcome is outworn.’

  ‘I’m not sure we can help you,’ Emilio said, as if reinforced by the rest of the company.

  ‘I thought we might, perhaps, get up a neighbourhood petition,’ said Maggie, prompt, too, with her ‘we’. She added, ‘My son and daughter-in-law, of course, will—’

  ‘It would make a scandal,’ Pietro said.

  ‘But he himself is quite a scandalous person,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m sure you must have heard—’

  ‘There is a secretary but no scandal. Miss Cowan knows her, don’t you, Nancy?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I know her,’ Nancy said. ‘I believe I met her in Rome one time at the house of some English friends. She had a job in Rome.’

  ‘Well,’ said Maggie, ‘before this secretary there were boys.’

  ‘It’s a Mediterranean custom and in Italy not a crime,’ the host said. ‘I sympathize with you, Marchesa, but a petition…’ he spread his hands…a petition to get a man out of his house because of boys.…The scandal would fall on us, definitely, as Pietro says.’

  ‘What does your lawyer say?’ said the psychologist.

  ‘Oh, he’s working on it,’ said Maggie, somewhat vaguely and without conveying much enthusiasm for her lawyer.

  ‘But Mr Mallindaine has a claim to Nemi,’ said Letizia. ‘His ancestry goes back to ancient times. He can prove it.’

  ‘You know him well?’ Maggie said.

  ‘No, I don’t know him at all, but I heard—’

  ‘Well, I,’ said Maggie bending her head sorrowfully, ‘know him well.’ Since the subject of Hubert had been discussed, she seemed to have been unexpectedly put in the position of asking an unwelcome favour; her looks seemed to have lost their sensational quality.

  In bed that night Emilio Bernardini said to Nancy, ‘She’s an animal.’

  ‘She looked stunning when she came in.’

  ‘Animals can look stupendous. I wonder what she really wanted to see me about. She rang me in the office this afternoon and said she’d like to see me. I asked her to dinner. I wonder if she just wanted to see what we’d done to her house.’

  ‘I think she wanted you to help her to get the other tenant out.’

  ‘He was probably her lover.’

  ‘No. No, he wasn’t. He likes boys.’

  ‘He could take women too, I suppose.’

  ‘No, they had a long relationship but there wasn’t any sex in it,’ Nancy said, lying beside him in the cool of the summer night, under the thin white sheet.

  ‘I don’t believe it. Who would believe it?’

  Nancy cast aside her half of the sheet and stretched her body. Her underdeveloped skinniness and boniness was, if it was not regarded as a defect, her considerable speciality; so that without her clothes she was changed, in Emilio’s view, from a nobody into a somebody. ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked her lover.

  ‘I’m admiring your non-figure,’ said Emilio. ‘You look so much as if you need a good dinner.’

  ‘I had a good dinner,’ she said. ‘Maybe I don’t look very lovable but I don’t care.’

/>   ‘How seldom one falls in love with the lovable!’ he said. ‘How seldom.…Hardly ever.’

  ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’ she said.

  ‘The traffic in the city improves and the cost of living seems to be very low.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘A TYPICAL BUSINESS-MAN, ABOUT forty-three, I should imagine rather conceited,’ said Maggie, ‘with a son who looks like a gigolo, a daughter, a kind of Girl Guide, I couldn’t stand the girl; then there was a downtrodden English governess and the girl’s boy-friend, awful little fellow from under some stone. The only good thing about them was their house, which isn’t theirs, it’s mine.’

  ‘Oh, but I know Pietro and Michael likes him,’ her daughter-in-law said.

  ‘I admit the son was the best of the lot,’ Maggie said, ‘but it isn’t saying much. Very bourgeois; of course they were terrified of lifting a finger to help me to get Hubert out.’

  ‘I’ll do everything I can to help you,’ Mary said eagerly. She was terribly anxious to make a success of her marriage, as she would put it; her father was a success and her mother was a well-known success in advertising although she didn’t by any means need the job; moreover, Mary’s elder sister was busy making a success of her marriage. Mary had been successfully brought up, neither too much nor too little indulged. And so, still half under the general anaesthetic of her past years, Mary was not disposed to regard Maggie as critically as she would have done had Maggie not been her mother-in-law; it was part of making a success of her marriage. ‘So long as I’m here on the spot, Maggie,’ Mary said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘I know I was foolish to let things get this way,’ Maggie said. ‘I realize that. It was just that when I was married to Ralph Radcliffe I got just so bored, I just took on a number of artists and intellectuals in a number of cities, and I just.…Well, Hubert of course was really sort of someone, I really helped him to be what he was, but he’s not all that a somebody. He’s better known in Paris, of course, or rather was a few years back after Ce Soir Mon Frère, that play, you know—’

  ‘Oh yes! Did Hubert produce it?’ Mary said.

  ‘No, Hubert wrote it. Well, I took—’

  ‘Was it a success?’ Mary said.

  ‘Well, in Paris it was. So I took Hubert on more and more. He was doing this play. And after a couple of years he was doing another. I helped him a lot with funds and so on, the rent. Sometimes he’d give me a bit of advice about pictures, when we went to the galleries, New York and Paris. Then, well, there was advice and counsel about so much furniture and rugs. He has taste and knowledge, but of course that’s not everything. Then you know he kind of took over my life; even when I was away I felt dependent, I felt trapped, and I couldn’t rely on Michael’s father as a husband, not at all; no, Ralph Radcliffe couldn’t have cared less. Of course Hubert’s friendship with me was only platonic.’

  ‘So what were you getting out of it?’ Mary said.

  ‘Exactly. In the end, that’s what I asked. But who would believe it if there was a scandal? And you know these houses at Nemi, it was Hubert’s idea to invest this way; he found two houses for me, and of course he wanted one for himself on that piece of land. I don’t regret the houses, they’re all good properties and appreciating in value, only I want out, out, out, where Hubert is concerned. When I remarried I told Berto about Hubert still occupying one of my houses, and all the best furniture in it. Berto said, “You’re crazy, Maggie, crazy. He’s a hanger-on. Just get him out. Tell him to go.” But it’s difficult, you know.’

  ‘Hubert has the nerve!’ said Mary. ‘The nerve of him! I heard that he had a house full of queers last summer.’

  ‘Yes, but I stopped the money. When I married Berto he said, “Stop sending money. Stop the money order at the bank.” I didn’t really know what to do. It’s really hypnotic when you get in someone’s clutches. Berto said, “Why are you hesitating? What are you afraid of? Just write and tell him you’re stopping the money.” Berto said he would write himself, if I wanted. I said, “Well, Berto, he knows you don’t need the money and neither do I, and I don’t give him very much.” So—’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Mary said.

  ‘Right. That’s precisely what Berto said. It isn’t the point. But now Hubert’s being so stubborn, I don’t want a scandal, especially as you and Michael live here and like it so much. It’s a problem.’

  ‘It’s a very, very big problem,’ said Mary, eager to be entirely with Maggie. ‘It’s a tremendous problem.’

  ‘And there’s that lesbian secretary living with him,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Is she lesbian?’

  ‘I guess so. What else would she be?’

  ‘I guess that’s right,’ said Mary.

  ‘She couldn’t be normal, living there with him.’

  ‘Well, it could be platonic like when you were friends with him,’ Mary said, ‘but I guess it isn’t.’

  ‘A lesbian,’ Maggie said, adding, as if to make her real point, ‘a penniless lesbian.’ With that much off her chest, Maggie now started to praise Hubert by little bits, placing Mary, who also had a few pleasant memories of Hubert, in a state of assenting duplicity.

  ‘He has been careful of the furniture,’ Maggie said. ‘He appreciates fine furniture and understands it. In fact he helped me choose it. And now I hear he still sends the Louis XIV chairs to an antique expert in Rome to be checked regularly and put right if there’s any little thing loose or frayed, you know, and maybe the wood treated. I heard only the other day. In some ways, Hubert was very thoughtful for me.’

  ‘It’s expensive, the maintenance of antiques,’ Mary said. ‘My father’s—’

  ‘Oh, I know. He can’t be all that short of money, can he?’

  Mary said, ‘I’ll find out what I can.’

  ‘Not that it matters to me,’ Maggie said. ‘Only, I mean, he can’t be all that badly off if he’s looking after my furniture, can he?’

  ‘No, he can’t.’

  ‘He didn’t open the door to the official whom my lawyer sent with a notice to quit. Pretended he was out.’

  ‘But he’d have to let you in,’ Mary said. ‘Why don’t you go yourself and have it out with him? A confrontation is always the best.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Well, maybe. I don’t know. I mean, most of the time a confrontation is healthy when a relationship goes wrong.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the relationship,’ Maggie said. ‘On my side, everything’s the same. I just don’t want to go on keeping him, that’s all. No explanation necessary. I just don’t want to go on.’

  ‘I hear he changed the locks on all the doors.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Pietro, the Bernardini son. He told us their tutor learned it from Hubert’s secretary. They changed all the locks so your keys won’t fit.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream,’ Maggie said wildly, ‘of breaking into the house without his permission. What’s he think I am? He’s not all that bad.’

  ‘Sure, he’s got very good points. Very, very good points.’

  ‘It would be nice,’ Maggie said speaking softly now, ‘to think he wasn’t in need of actual food. I hope he has enough to eat.’

  ‘He couldn’t afford a secretary if he hasn’t enough to eat,’ Mary said in an equally low voice.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Maggie said, ‘and it makes me thoughtful. There are young secretaries foolish enough to work free for a man if they believe in him. And Hubert’s secretary, the little time I saw her passing in that station-wagon of his, it was only once, for a second, well, I don’t know.…She may have ideas for the future.’

  ‘But she’s a lesbian!’ Mary said.

  ‘Who knows? Lesbians like to hook a man too, you know. Sex isn’t everything. She might want a cover. And so might he.’

  ‘Well, if he hasn’t enough to eat he’ll be starved out,’ Mary said.

  ‘Then there’s the electri
city, the gas and the telephone. They’ll be cut off if the bills aren’t paid,’ Maggie said, and her voice had taken completely to a whisper, as if an utterance of such things could be unlucky.

  ‘That will solve your problem, then,’ Mary said. ‘He’ll have to leave.’

  ‘Do you believe in the evil eye?’ said Maggie still speaking very low.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Mary whispering back in concert, ‘I believe I don’t.’ She bent closer to Maggie.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Maggie breathed, ‘that if there is such a thing, Hubert has the evil eye. His name, Mallindaine, is supposed to be derived from an old French form, “malline” which means of course malign, and “Diane” with the “i” and the “a” reversed. He told me once, and as he explained it, the family reversed those syllables as a kind of code, because of course the Church would have liquidated the whole family if their descent from a pagan goddess was known. And they always worshipped Diana. It was a stubborn family tradition, apparently.’

  ‘It sounds very superstitious,’ Mary said in her hush.

  ‘I wouldn’t think Hubert was malign, would you?’ Maggie whispered.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t think that. I think he’s a bum, that’s all,’ Mary said, shifting in her garden chair, while the treetops on the slope below their house rustled in a sudden warm gust of air and the dark lake showed through the branches, calm, sheltered by the steep banks.

  ‘It makes me uneasy,’ Maggie said. ‘Could you keep a secret?’ She moved her chair a little nearer to the daughter-in-law.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Even from Michael?’

  ‘Well, if it wouldn’t make any difference to our marriage…,’ Mary said.

  ‘I don’t see how it could as it only concerns Hubert and me,’ Maggie whispered.

  ‘Oh, sure I can keep a secret,’ the girl whispered back eagerly, as if the confidence might otherwise be withdrawn altogether.

  ‘I want to send Hubert money from time to time. But he mustn’t know it comes from me,’ Maggie said. ‘I also have to think of my marriage. Berto insists that I throw Hubert out. Well, I have to keep trying, and in a way I want to.’