The Battle of the Villa Fiorita

by Rumer Godden

‘Then it isn’t a child’s, thank God,’ and sensing her trouble he moved to look into her face. ‘What is the matter?’

  ‘Rob, shouldn’t we keep the wedding-ring until …’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘We really are married.’ She knew he would say what she would say herself in strict reasoning: ‘Can some words that a little man will say over us make us any more married than we are?’ They should not, but mysteriously they will, thought Fanny. Rob was laughing at her, because he refuses to be disturbed, thought Fanny, and she freed herself from his arm. He stood up, taking out a cigarette. ‘It’s a little late to be conventional, isn’t it?’ he said, but Fanny looked up at him in the mirror, still troubled.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be more honest?’

  ‘No.’ The laughter had gone, leaving his face and eyes purposely expressionless, a mask that she had seen him put on for other people. ‘Honest?’ he asked smoothly – and when Rob was smooth it meant he was angry. ‘If you are thinking on those lines, honesty has gone.’

  ‘How gone?’

  ‘If a public promise, before witnesses, to put it at its least, makes all that difference to you, I have to remind you you have already given that promise to Darrell.’

  ‘This, this is my Hugh,’ said Fanny, her face lit with happiness and triumph.

  She and Rob were on the veranda of the hotel at San Vigilio, finishing their dinner.

  The Nettuno was moored at the jetty, and in the dusk small fishing boats were moving out, each with its searchlight shining down into the water, to make a pool of luminous green through which the fishes moved. A man stood in each boat moving the oars, while another knelt to cast and draw in the nets. The veranda was dimly lit, its orange-red walls seemed to glow; they made Fanny’s skin, so much browner now, look warm, her hair a deeper bronze. She had a flush on her cheeks. Rob had never seen her look prettier.

  ‘What was Mother like?’ In the flat, Caddie, wrinkling up her forehead to try to remember, had asked that. None of them was sure, though Philippa began to embroider. ‘Her hair is nut brown,’ she had said.

  ‘Nuts can be all kinds of brown,’ said Hugh. He did not want to discuss Fanny.

  ‘I mean red brown. Her eyes are the colour of sherry.’

  ‘Sherry can be anything from dark brown to pale gold.’

  ‘Her eyes are not pale gold,’ said Caddie. Only Topaz’s eyes were gold.

  ‘She has dimples.’ Philippa was developing a new admiration for her mother.

  ‘She’s big and soft,’ said Caddie.

  ‘You make her sound like a sofa or a pillow,’ but Fanny was soft, soft to lean against, and Caddie’s eyes had stung so that she had to trace out the pattern of the chintz on the armchair, to stop tears spilling over. ‘Caddie is always brimming,’ said Hugh.

  Fanny had thought she knew what she was like – like any of the others who live in Whitcross, she would have said. It seemed to her now that they had been almost identical, ‘peas in a pod,’ she told Rob. ‘I, or Anthea, or Margot, or Molly Ferguson, Pam Winter, or Charmian. We dressed the same, in tweeds, a cardigan or jersey jacket, a string of pearls, cultured or very small – except Anthea’s; we wore good stockings, a little thick, and flat shoes. We talked the same,’ she said. ‘But you never had that high-pitched carrying voice,’ objected Rob. ‘We lived the same, in houses a little shabby but gracious, with Regency wallpapers or panelling, chintzes, bowls of flowers. Our children went to much the same boarding schools, the younger ones to the same small private day-school. We drove them there and back, and those of us who hadn’t two cars drove our husbands to and from the station; in fact we were perpetual chauffeurs. We all had dogs, most of our children had ponies. We had accounts at Harrods, Debenham and Freebody’s, a few of us at Fortnum’s. We gave the same parties, mostly children’s or for drinks, but Anthea’s and Margot’s were more ambitious; for instance I should never have thought of asking you to dinner,’ Fanny told Rob. ‘In the holidays we were so busy we scarcely had time to exchange a word and the driving was really hard work. Children are supposed to keep you young,’ said Fanny. ‘I know often at the end of the holidays I felt old, almost worn out. We were critical of each other, especially behind one another’s backs, but if any of us were ill or in trouble we all helped as a matter of course. We were almost sisters, which is why …’ and Fanny broke off. Then, ‘Anthea was the most important,’ she said. ‘You saw that when you were shooting in the Big House park.’ They always called Whitcross Park the Big House. ‘Anthea went to the Palace, did things the rest of us couldn’t. Margot was the clever one and the most sophisticated. She really knew about the theatre and films.’

  ‘God deliver me,’ said Rob.

  ‘Charmian had a tongue. Pam was a darling. Everybody loved her.’

  ‘Didn’t they you?’

  ‘I was separate, even then,’ said Fanny slowly. ‘Quieter. Perhaps it was that I had to do things by myself with Darrell so much away. I was usually odd woman out. Besides, I wasn’t interesting. Everyone knew everything about me and I suppose I didn’t think much about myself. That’s not being virtuous,’ she told Rob. ‘It’s just that there was nothing to think about until …’

  She had lost that unconsciousness. Nowadays she was always looking at herself in the mirror, but perhaps not as much with vanity as with questioning wonder. ‘I am forty-three. I have had three children, one almost grown up. My waist will never be truly slim again. I have wrinkles at the corner of my eyes’ – she could have called them crinkles, but ‘wrinkles’, said Fanny firmly, nipping off all illusions. ‘My eyes still look like Caddie’s and my nose is straight, and I have kept my skin, that’s from what Margot would call innocent living; but I am large, my mouth is too wide, and my forehead is wide too, rather than high which is supposed to be unintelligent – Lady Candida often said that – and I haven’t any presence,’ but, ‘I saw you in your village shop,’ said Rob, ‘and I thought you were sweet.’

  If Margot had said that it would have been derogatory, but Rob meant sweet as a good apple is sweet, sweet, and sound. ‘That’s the kind of wife I want,’ said Rob.

  ‘But you could have had someone exciting.’

  ‘My work is exciting,’ said Rob, ‘I need rest.’

  He loved to dine with her like this, to look at her across the table, but tonight there was a change. She was not alone with him, absorbed, content, as she had always been. There had always been other people in the room, of course, people round them, beside them – but not between us, thought Rob. I suppose it was too much to hope that this could last. They say a female animal changes completely when she has young; perhaps humans do as well. There was an air of quiet management about Fanny that irritated him. Silently he poured out her wine.

  ‘It hurts that they had to do it at all,’ but Fanny did not sound hurt, she sounded happy and gratified. ‘Darrell can never say again that Hugh hasn’t guts. For a boy just fourteen to plan and face all that.’

  ‘He had Caddie with him,’ Rob pointed out, but Fanny was intent on Hugh. ‘He always took my side,’ she said, triumphant again.

  ‘Did you take sides?’ asked Rob. ‘That strikes me as disloyal.’

  ‘Darrell didn’t understand Hugh,’ and Rob remembered how her eyes had shone with pride and love as she had turned Hugh towards him on the terrace. ‘Rob, this is Hugh.’ ‘I knew Hugh wouldn’t stay with him. I knew it,’ said Fanny.

  ‘He has to stay with him,’ said Rob. ‘It would be wrong to encourage Hugh to think anything else.’

  ‘Encourage him?’ There was a distinct bristling in Fanny’s voice. ‘How encourage him?’

  ‘Making them feel too welcome. I know it’s hard but …’

  ‘Is that why you rubbed it in about not being expected?’ The bristling was unmistakable now. ‘I thought that was unkind.’

  ‘Not unkind, it was sense.’

  ‘But of course I welcomed them,’ said Fanny. ‘Children are always welcome where their mother is. Always.’r />
  ‘At any time?’ asked Rob.

  ‘At any time.’ Fanny lifted her chin at him in a way he was beginning to know. ‘Does that sound wrong to you?’

  ‘It sounds false,’ said Rob. ‘No one, however near and dear, is welcome at any time,’ and he said roughly, ‘Be yourself, Fanny.’

  ‘I am myself. This is me.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s a kind of play-acting.’

  ‘Thank you,’ and there was pricking silence between them until she began to talk about San Vigilio, its famous old hotel-keeper, and the chapel that was open once a year in the Count’s villa. Rob knew by the lightness of her voice that he had hurt her and presently he leant over, took her hand and kissed it. The forced talk stopped at once, but with the coffee he had to go back to it. ‘You know, dear, no matter what our feelings are, they must go back. We must telegraph Darrell. It’s only fair.’

  ‘Yes, but not tonight.’

  ‘Tonight. We can call in at Malcesine. We have to, Fanny dear.’

  When the Nettuno turned into the small walled harbour, Fanny stayed in the boat watching the waterfront lights while Rob went to send the telegram from the little cafe that was the town’s public call office. When he came back he looked at her as if he thought she might hold this against him, even be sulking, but, as he sat down next to Salvatore, the young boatman who owned and drove the Nettuno, she moved closer and slid her hand inside Rob’s arm. The children are not to turn into an argument between us, they are not to, thought Fanny.

  The lake had never been more beautiful; it was still as a pool, its mountains dark against the sky; only their snow glimmered, as the foam glimmered in the wash behind the Nettuno. The lights in the villages and towns had been put out, only a few were strung out along the shore, or one shone here and there like a firefly on the mountain. The Nettuno’s prow, broke up the reflections of the stars in the water – because they are only reflections? asked Fanny and caught herself back. She would not think any more contentious thoughts tonight. Indeed, she felt blessed more than she deserved; to have Rob and this warm triumph in her heart: ‘They ran away. They ran away to me.’

  The Nettuno circled in a sweep to the jetty; the engine died and in the sudden lull Salvatore sent the rope flying; it fell neatly round the post and they came alongside. They were back at the sleeping villa.

  3

  It was not Rob’s villa, nor was the Nettuno his. ‘Great Jehoshaphat, I’m not as rich as that,’ he would have said, though for Hugh and Caddie he remained immensely rich for ever. The villa belonged to Madame Menghini, Renato Menghini’s aunt.

  The Menghinis were, it appeared, an even bigger clan than Celestina’s, whose relations peopled the village, let the camping sites, ran the kitchen of the Hotel Lydia, owned the trattoria and many of the farms up the mountain. Celestina’s cousins and uncles and aunts were in almost every shop in Malcesine, ‘Every shop with which we deal,’ said Rob, but ‘We are a cadet branch of the famous Menghini,’ Madame Menghini liked to say. ‘They have a palace in Riva.’

  Renato Menghini had been the producer of the last three pictures Rob had done. ‘Think of it, he came to Whitcross,’ said Fanny. One of Renato’s uncles and his grandmother had helped to finance Haysel to Harvest, and in this crisis Rob, between pictures, had asked Renato if he could find a house somewhere in Italy where he and Fanny could go. ‘We are better out of England for the next three months.’ Renato had immediately delved among his relations and come up with this aunt. ‘She is French-English,’ he said, which now she was a widow, was why she liked to be called Madame Menghini, not Signora Menghini.

  ‘But … turn her out of her house?’ Fanny had said.

  ‘She has three,’ said Renato gently. ‘One on Garda, one in Genoa, one in Milan.’ He had driven out from Milan to see that everything was in order and to greet Rob and Fanny. His bright brown eyes slid away from Fanny and looked at her again, in a way he could not help but which embarrassed them both. ‘She often lets one or other of her houses,’ he explained.

  The Villa Fiorita was her holiday home. All the villas on these north Italian lakes, Garda, Como, Maggiore, Iseo, had been built for holidays; for mountain air, sailing, sun-bathing, relaxation, peace. Renato told Fanny that Garda, because of its winds, was never as sizzlingly hot as most of Italy can be; every morning brought the tramontana, ‘the wind from the mountains’ that the people called, simply, the vento; in the afternoon it changed to the ora which blew from the south but in early spring could be so fierce that it was deadly to the orange and lemon blossom. Because the lake was so far north, Garda was not as popular – ‘Thank God,’ said Renato – as the more flowery and accessible Como and Maggiore, though tourists came to it all summer long, driving down to Riva over the Brenner Pass, coming in from Milan, Verona, Mantua, Venice. It had its riviera, too, stretching from Gardone to Salò on the western side, and famous Sirmione’s narrow peninsula under the ruins of Catullus’s villa. Here were the big hotels, the Excelsiors, Grands, Imperials, and Splendides with their Edwardian-sized rooms, marble pillars and marble floors.

  At the north end of the lake the villas and gardens were smaller, hotels more modest with more modest names: Hotel Alpina, Primula, Claudia, Lydia. Here were camping sites in the olive groves – campers were far more profitable than olives – with little pebbled beaches and wooden jetties; there were canteen bars, communal washrooms, trattorias. In the villages the stands of oranges and lemons were smaller, most were sold from the road wall, by children. The steamers, so busy down the southern end, and the fast aliscafo, that lifted out of the water on two red wings, did not call anywhere on the eastern shore after Malcesine, but went straight to Riva at the head of the lake or across to Limone. In the harbours there were only fishing boats and none of the fishermen wore yachting caps as they did in the tourist towns; none of them had clubbed together to buy a Nettuno. There were no gift shops until the road reached Torbole.

  The villa was on this quieter shore, two kilometres above Malcesine. Madame Menghini, Renato told them, had bought the land and built the house long ago when land on Garda was cheap. Now a small camping site in a lakeside olive grove sold at four thousand pounds. Then, the roads were not built, the occidentale and orientale roads that bordered the east and west sides of the lake cutting less lucky villa gardens in two, running behind the little fishing towns and tunnelling under the mountains where these came down sheer to the shore. ‘We have no railways here,’ said Renato. ‘Once the only way between most towns and villages was by boat. The people were primitive then, as they still are back in the hills. They lived off their fish and fruit and vines and olives; now they live off the tourists. They are cannibal,’ said Renato, his brown eyes twinkling.

  ‘We are not tourists, we are staying,’ said Fanny.

  ‘All the English like to say that,’ said Renato.

  Malcesine was one of the smaller towns, almost a fishing village, topped by an old red stone castle that went back to the thirteenth century. The castle was deserted now. Malcesine had grown but it had kept its small harbour and its steep cobbled streets. They were so narrow that the house roofs almost met overhead, with hardly room to hang a line of washing across, or a string of peppers or put out a bird-cage. Fire-wood and the wicker damigiana of wine, loads of vegetables and groceries, had to be taken up or down on wooden runnered sleighs, drawn by mules.

  All the streets ran down to the lake – its blue could be seen at every turn – and they teemed with life. Besides the grocers and wine shops, the bread shops, confectioners, and the greengrocers that at this time of year sold pots of azaleas and arum lilies with their potatoes and salads, there were gift shops hung with scarves and ties from the silk mills at Como; they had copper from Toscana, Venetian glass, Austrian embroideries, model galleons carved from horn, and everywhere, in every shop, postcards. Every ferry boat brought crowds; the café tables under the oleanders were always crowded. Every half-hour a speedboat backed out of the little harbour where the fishing
boats knocked against the old stone walls, and took a load of tourists out on to the lake. Though they paid several million lire for their boats Salvatore and his friends made a golden harvest.

  To the tourists, the great blue lake probably seemed a place to be looked at rather than lived in; the villa, if they passed it on the lake, seemed a façade with its yellow walls, painted eaves, and tumbling roses. If, in the evenings, they strolled as far as the gates, all they could see were the old olives in the grove, a glimpse of flowers beyond, cypresses, the painted garage, and the hedges of forbidding prickly whitethorn. ‘If they were not there,’ said Renato, ‘you would have Germans picnicking in the garden, or on the front step.’ The open back road only led to the boathouse. ‘Villa Fiorita’, they would read, in the gilt letters. Fiorita would have been a usual name on Como or Maggiore, where azalea and camellia bushes grew as large as trees, where every flower was lush; here, in the Garda winds, it was a struggle to grow flowers at all, but Madame Menghini, with her English strain, had been a gardener; she had sent down as far as Naples for rare bushes and flowering trees, to England and to Paris. In the old days when she could keep the villa up and had two gardeners, not Giacomino asleep under the olives or sunning himself on a wall, with only an occasional hand from Mario, who was boatman, handyman, chauffeur, fisherman, the garden had been famous up and down the lake. Now creepers and blossom trees were unpruned, roses had grown into tangles, bushes been choked, and Celestina’s chickens had scratched up the beds. ‘But it is still Fiorita,’ said Fanny. ‘Flowering peace and stillness.’

  It was strange that it should have felt so still, because the first few days were cold and stormy. Fanny had always thought of Italy as sun-drenched, warm, hot, lazy, but now rain and wind hurled themselves across the lake, the vento blowing all day long. ‘Two metres of snow on the Brenner,’ said Rob, ‘and it’s nearly Easter!’ The villa on its point caught the full force of the wind which shrieked down the chimney; every room was filled with the clattering of the shutters as they shook and rattled. Though there were double doors and windows – ‘Now we know why,’ said Rob – draughts whistled across the floor, lifting the rugs and turning feet to ice. Outside, in the garden, the flowers were dashed headlong, and lay in soaked masses; the olives threshed themselves to a sea of silver green, made more silver by the rain; rain dripped from the hedges, and the cypresses bent and twisted into such loops that Fanny thought they must snap. The mountains were hidden in cloud, and the lake, as far as they could see it, was white with breakers. Yet under the waves the water still kept its blue, as mysteriously intrinsic as if the lake were a jewel that held its own colour. How when the sky was grey? ‘That is Garda fame,’ Celestina told Fanny. Celestina had once spent a year in England. ‘When me young,’ said Celestina. ‘Come Giulietta. Very good England. Molto bella l’Inghilterra. Oxforrd Street. Peecadilly.’ She spoke a little English but often German words crept in and she did not know which was which. Celestina was, she said, shamed by the weather. ‘Aprile, Maggio, bestest munths. Schön Schön,’ she said regretfully, but, to Fanny, the tempest outside only shut the villa further into peace.