by Rumer Godden
‘I try and make it up to him, in love and attention.’
‘Far too much attention,’ said Rob wearily. ‘I think that’s a mistake. Children are children and they should learn to keep their places.’
Even when they kept their places they made themselves felt.
Meals were an agony. ‘Pia watches everything I do, Caddie watches everything you do,’ said Fanny. ‘Hugh looks at his plate and says nothing.’
‘Can’t they eat alone?’
‘It makes twice as much work for Giulietta and Celestina who have a lot of us to cope with as it is. Besides, it looks as if we were running away from them,’ said Fanny.
Rob tried to enliven one dinner by talking about the script he was struggling with – which is difficult enough for him, without this, thought Fanny in remorse. Almost every day, telegrams came from Renato, the prince, or the mysterious Herz, and they usually summoned Rob to the telephone; half-hour marathons, Rob named these calls. ‘It would be simpler to move to Malcesine or Milan,’ said Fanny.
‘I won’t be bullied,’ said Rob. He was amazingly patient, and though he sometimes swore, more often he laughed. ‘They want Saladin to fall in love with Berengaria,’ he told them at dinner.
‘But he didn’t,’ said Caddie, who had just read Ivanhoe and The Talisman.
‘I know he didn’t, but Renato and Mr Herz and Prince Brancati want him to, and they say it’s their film. They think it would be much more interesting, for Bianca Letti – if we can get her.’
Then Hugh did speak. ‘Italians have no business to monkey about with English history,’ he said into his plate.
‘Anyway,’ Rob went on, ignoring Hugh, ‘I’m trying to build Richard up so that it will be as much his story, but I’m afraid, unless we can find someone very strong, he hasn’t a chance against Saladin.’
‘But Richard was Coeur de Lion,’ said Fanny. ‘Surely, that’s romantic enough.’
‘It’s always the enemy who steals the thunder,’ said Rob. ‘The villain. Not that Saladin was a villain, just the enemy.’
‘I always liked Satan much the best in Paradise Lost,’ said Fanny.
‘You could play Saladin,’ said Caddie suddenly to Rob.
‘Or Satan?’ He was laughing, but Pia slid her hand into his and looked at Caddie and Hugh as if she could have stabbed them.
When Pia came, Caddie saw a father as she had not imagined a father could be. ‘You upset all our ideas,’ Fanny told him. It was clear that Rob and Pia loved one another, deeply, almost jealously, but with her he was completely natural. He was patient when he felt patient; one day he would let her climb all over him, drag him about the garden, steer the Mercedes or the motor-boat, interrupt; but the next, if he were feeling impatient, he would shout at her, order her out of the room and not allow her to put her nose into the study.
‘But Pia never knows where she is,’ Fanny protested.
‘She does,’ said Rob. ‘She knows she has to study me and find out what mood I’m in. That will teach her to deal with other people.’
‘You must hurt her feelings,’ but Rob shrugged.
‘Children are people,’ Fanny insisted.
‘Not yet,’ said Rob. ‘One day we hope they will be.’ He was the same with servants. ‘You must be considerate,’ Fanny had always taught, but if Rob wanted coffee at midnight he would ring for it. ‘But poor Celestina,’ Fanny would say.
‘Why poor? She’s perfectly happy,’ and, oddly, Celestina was. ‘But I couldn’t do it,’ said Fanny. ‘She would object. Why?’
‘You are a nice woman, darling, so every servant and child who comes near you takes advantage of you. You spoil them, and when I say “spoil”, I mean it.’ He was serious.
‘How spoil them?’ asked Fanny.’
‘You make them less than they are. Children should be free to grow up,’ said Rob.
Pia, thought Caddie, was left remarkably free, almost as if she were grown-up. ‘What time do you go to bed?’ Caddie had asked her the first day. Pia seemed surprised.
‘What time?’
‘I have to go at nine.’
‘But suppose you are not tired?’
‘I still have to go.’ That plainly seemed, to Pia, idiotic. ‘I wish Rob were my father,’ Caddie almost said.
It was hard to resist him. At four o’clock, stale with work or if he had to make one of those calls, he came down and yodelled, ‘I want a child.’ Pia came running, all her dignity forgotten, and Caddie, almost against her will, followed. Rob took them up the mountain road, ‘Though it’s wicked for the Mercedes,’ up behind Monte Baldo to pick wild flowers: cowslips, narcissi, lilies of the valley, ‘Fields of them,’ said Caddie.
She had not imagined they grew wild. He took them, too, into Malcesine, right down the lake to Sirmione, up to Torbole, and Riva. Fanny was strict about eating between meals, but Rob took Pia and Caddie to see Rita in the water-front café and gave them cassata, ice-cream cake filled with nuts and crystallized fruit, or else chocolate cake and cream ‘like the Germans’. They were all amazed at Pia’s capacity; a slice of cake in Italy seemed to mean a whole quarter of the cake, rich with icing, heavy with cream; even Caddie was defeated after half a piece, but Pia finished it in a few minutes and licked the last crumb from her elegant fingers.
Rob let them taste everything, even when Fanny came. ‘What’s that?’ Caddie had asked of the pale pink slices of mortadella and Rob put some into a roll with butter and gave it to her. ‘You won’t like that. It’s garlic,’ said Fanny.
‘She might, if you don’t tell her she won’t.’ This edge seemed to come into their voices whenever they spoke of the children. ‘They seem to set us at one another,’ said Fanny, when she and Rob were alone.
‘Isn’t that because we are tender? These are just pin-pricks, Fan. Don’t take any notice of them,’ but she could not help it and sometimes it flared into a real quarrel. On the evening of the shopping expedition, for instance, Fanny was in the drawing-room with the children, waiting for Rob who was working late. With Pia in mind, she had put on one of her new dresses, of heavy silk, honey-coloured. Pia stole up and felt its stuff between her fingers: ‘Seta pura,’ she said and, ‘That colour is good for you,’ but, ‘Another new dress?’ said Caddie, and Hugh gave it a cold stare.
When Rob came down he was tired, but satisfied and exultant. ‘Got it. Got it at last,’ he said. ‘Got the scene with Saladin and Richard. It’s right. Balanced, thank God,’ and on his way to the drinks tray, ‘That’s a lovely dress,’ he said to Fanny, bent down, put his cheek against hers and kissed her. It was only a light kiss but three pairs of eyes noted it, Caddie and Pia openly, but Fanny saw Hugh curl down in his chair, bend over his book too close to see it, while a deep blush spread up his neck to his ears.
‘Rob.’ Fanny, brushing her hair that night, stopped to look uncertainly at him in the mirror, as he lay on the bed, smoking. ‘Rob, do you mind if I ask you something?’
He answered, as she had answered once to Anthea and Margot. ‘It depends what it is.’
‘I think it might be wiser …’
‘Wiser to do what?’ Rob stretched. He was tired.
‘Wiser not to kiss me – or touch me,’ said Fanny with a rush, ‘in front of the children.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘It … embarrasses them.’
‘Does it now?’ said Rob, and Fanny knew there would be trouble.
‘Yes.’ She had to go on, ‘Especially Hugh. When you kissed me this evening …’
‘So that was it!’ For a moment Rob had to compel himself to be silent. He had come down to find them all waiting for him, as a family should wait for the father, he thought. All the faces had been turned to him, the little girls’ silken heads, Fanny in the midst of them in her honey-coloured dress. The firelight, the beautiful room, the … the welcome, thought Rob now – and he had thought it was a welcome – had filled him with content and a possessive pride. Caddie and Hugh were not his, of cou
rse, but through Fanny he had almost a lien on them, and Pia was taken out of that rarefied atmosphere of her Nonna’s that had worried him for so long. She has a real mother now, thought Rob, and in that kiss for Fanny was a kiss for them all, if they had only known it. For Rob the disappointment was curiously bitter and his voice was curt as he said, ‘So I’m to condition my feelings to Hugh?’
‘It doesn’t alter our feelings.’
‘This kind of thing may alter them considerably.’
‘Oh, Rob. Don’t be hurt.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be hurt? Has it ever occurred to you, Fanny, for one minute, that in all this business someone else than these precious children has feelings?’
‘Occurred to me! I feel as if I’m being pulled in half.’
‘You will be, if you play the children’s game. I warn you, Fanny …’ He had got up and was walking about. ‘As for Hugh. Has it also ever occurred to you, that he is trespassing?’
‘Trespassing?’
‘Yes, trespassing. Children are secondary, Fanny. They are meant to be that. The man and the woman are first. First. Get that into your head. You are out of focus.’
‘I am?’
‘Yes. The mother-and-child relationship isn’t as important as you, and dozens of other women, I expect, make it. Hugh will grow out of you, beyond you, and you will lose him; should lose him. What Hugh needs is to fall in love himself.’
‘At fourteen?’
‘Age doesn’t matter, and nothing else will distract him. Don’t you see?’ said Rob. ‘This has forced him physically without the balance of loving. That’s what makes boys, and men too, turn into – not monsters – gluttons. Something goes wrong in them. If Hugh could only love someone tenderly. Tenderness is the cure. Let’s hope it will come sometime. Meanwhile he will probably have two or three bad years. Don’t make them worse by turning life into a hothouse for him.’
‘It’s you who do that, when you kiss me.’
‘I do, do I?’ and they were back where they had started, quarrelling.
10
‘Fishing’s no good,’ said Caddie.
As a matter of fact, it was the only thing that was any good, that and sailing.
The Fortuna belonged to Renato, a little sailing boat of the international twelve-foot class. ‘The cream of dinghy racing,’ said Hugh. Renato had said Hugh could use her. ‘She’s not a beginner’s boat,’ Rob warned him. ‘You would have been better with a ten-foot-six,’ but Hugh loved the Fortuna.
Almost every afternoon, when the south wind sprang up, Mario and Hugh would take her out, and it was infinitely soothing. The lake, it seemed, was a world of men; the campers’ small inflatable boats chugged out from the shore, but almost always there were only men in them, browning their naked chests and backs; perhaps they wanted to get away from women too, thought Hugh. If they took a woman with them, or children, it was as appendages. The speedboats were driven by men, real men, fishermen from the harbour. If they wore yachting caps trimmed with gold, the caps were refreshingly dirty, and they dealt with their cargoes of tourists as they would have dealt with a catch of fry or trout. All along the shore in the evenings men fished to catch the evening rise, never a woman among them. Mario, now and again with Giacomino, or more often with a man from the village, would put out in his old boat, which was really a rowing-boat; its motor was broken more often than not. They came along the shallows, one man standing at the oars, the other paying out the narrow wide nets, fine and weighted with corks, to catch the fry of small fish near the shore. Later, they would go far out on the lake, using this same small silver catch as bait, setting large nets to catch the deep-water trout. It was a man’s world. Mario, taciturn bachelor, even resisted Celestina and no woman trespassed in the boathouse, ‘Thank God,’ said Hugh.
‘Take me sailing,’ Caddie would beg.
‘No bloody fear,’ Hugh could have said, but he only told Caddie, ‘It’s not for girls.’
‘Piffle paffle. Lots of girls sail.’
‘Yes, but I’m not good yet and you don’t swim very well.’
‘Mario’s there.’
‘He doesn’t like women,’ but Caddie was like a limpet. ‘Look,’ said Hugh, driven. ‘I promise you, if I ever take anyone, you will be the first,’ and Caddie had to be content with that.
Hugh fished every morning, borrowing Mario’s bicycle to go into Riva to buy bait. ‘What is it?’ Fanny asked, looking at the gruesome mess. ‘Meat maggots?’ she recoiled and went away. Even the bait frightens them off, thought Hugh, contented. Fishing all morning, helping Mario to deal with the temperamental outboard motor or sailing the beautiful little Fortuna in the afternoon, made the villa possible for Hugh, even likeable. This and, he had to confess, sometimes Pia; but the feeling for Pia was only budding and he liked best to be on the jetty, in the boathouse, out on the lake where no human antics disturbed him – there they dwindled to antics, but, ‘We came here to fight,’ said Caddie. ‘Six whole days have gone and we have done nothing. You do nothing,’ she said accusingly.
‘What can I do?’
‘Something.’ Caddie’s face was desperate. ‘Can’t you worry them, Hugh?’
‘No,’ said Hugh.
‘You used to worry Father, beautifully. And we must …’ but Hugh only dropped his hook in again with a plop that spread ripples and absorbed his whole attention. ‘You won’t even think,’ said Caddie.
‘How do you know what I’m thinking, you silly little clot? Leave me alone!’ said Hugh like a savage. Caddie’s sigh came from her depths. Hugh was more difficult in Italy than he had been even in London.
She tried to enlist Pia. ‘Pia, do you want your father to marry Mother?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Pia.
‘Why not? You have to live with your grandmother.’ Caddie could not imagine a worse fate. ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a father and a mother?’
‘Not your mother,’ said Pia, with unflattering promptness.
‘Why not?’ asked Caddie, bristling.
‘She is not elegante.’
‘What’s not elegante?’
‘Not chic.’
‘What is chic?’ Caddie pronounced it ‘chick’.
‘Don’t you know anything?’ asked Pia again.
‘I think Mother is chic,’ said Caddie loyally.
‘You can’t tell because you are not chic yourself,’ said Pia, which was true.
The more she saw of Pia, the more hopelessly clumsy and childish Caddie felt. Pia was so well arranged. Her side of the room was always neat. On her bedside table was the current detective novel with her missal, that she read every night, the photograph of the friend whose name Caddie was not permitted to know, and a vase of flowers put there by Pia. Her habits were orderly too; she would get up while Caddie was still half asleep, banded like a mummy in the bedclothes, though Pia dressed under her nightgown, which Fanny would have said was a flaw. Another was that Pia did not wash very much; she did none of the stripping Darrell insisted on, the rub-down with a towel, face plunge into cold water – Hugh skimped it but Caddie still faithfully carried it out – but even Pia’s socks were put on exactly; she had discarded the long tights. Her skirt and jerseys were taken down from their hangers; Caddie had seen her bestow a pitying glance on the way she, Caddie, slung her dress or skirt over a chair when she took it off, often leaving her jersey with the sleeves inside out. Pia had even hung them up for Caddie. Her own clothes were always without the smallest crease.
She brushed her short hair for a long time, standing at the window, her small face inscrutable. The window was another of their differences; Pia liked to sleep with her windows closed, the shutters down. Caddie wanted them wide open. Fanny supported her. ‘In this balmy air, and the lapping of the waves makes a lovely sleepy sound,’ she said, trying to beguile Pia, but Pia only looked at her with those lozenge eyes. ‘In the night, the wind blows off the mountains. The tramontana gets up.’
‘I still think you must have the wind
ow open.’ Pia retaliated by winding a small white shawl round her head and writing a long letter to her grandmother.
When Pia was dressed and brushed, she would kneel down and say her prayers. From delicacy or shyness, Caddie always pretended she was asleep, but from under her lids she would look at Pia’s hands, placed together like one of the angels in a holy picture, and wonder what it felt like to be so certain God would listen. ‘Pia,’ she asked one day, ‘do you pray it won’t happen?’
Pia did not need to ask what ‘it’ was.
‘I pray for my father.’
‘Not for my mother?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t there,’ asked Caddie, ‘anything we can do?’
Pia shrugged, yet it was she who found the weapon. It was the day Caddie had failed to stir Hugh. ‘I have noticed,’ said Pia thoughtfully, ‘that grown-ups are upset if children will not eat. Suppose we try and eat very, very little? Though that,’ she said with a darting look at Caddie, ‘will be difficult for you,’ but Caddie had already gone a large step further. ‘Suppose we eat nothing at all. Let’s go on hunger strike,’ said Caddie.
‘Children do go on strike,’ she argued with Hugh who thought it a stupid idea. Soon after, she brought him a newspaper. ‘Choirboys on strike against Vicar.’ ‘They wouldn’t sing because they weren’t allowed to bring books in to read in church,’ said Caddie, ‘and it says some school-children went on strike too. They sat down and wouldn’t get up because a boy was expelled.’
‘Yes, but going without food,’ said Hugh. ‘It would be futile. You could never keep it up.’
‘I can if Pia can.’
‘You know how greedy you are.’
Caddie was not only greedy, she was hungry. All of them were except Hugh in this lake and mountain air. Celestina, too, was a superb cook. Caddie gave a great sigh. Certainly, when you actually came to it, a hunger strike was a daunting thought but it was also dramatic. ‘A real sacrifice,’ said Pia as if that were extremely commendable. ‘We can start now with lunch.’
Lunch, that day, was to be gnocchi alla Romana. Caddie had seen it being got ready the night before; she could also smell it cooking. No one, here in Italy, had comfortable elevenses, so that they had had nothing since breakfast, and that had been only coffee and rolls. ‘Four rolls, two apples, and a banana,’ said Hugh of Caddie.