Three-Cornered Halo

by Christianna Brand

  Perhaps it was some prerecognition, however, that prompted her to continue with Innocenta when they left the Cathedral. Miss Cockrill, worn out with sightseeing, took her aching feet and stiff neck back to the Bellomare; but Winsome walked up with Innocenta in the soft evening air to the top of the ridge that marks the last outskirts of San Juan’s one little town: and there, on a bank, they rested, looking down on to the lovely Toscanita plain with its drift of silvery olives, and to a pink-washed building enclosed by a winding wall. Innocenta pointed it out with loving pride. “E casa mea.”

  Winsome was astonished. The place had been shown to her before, but as the convent where Juanita had spent the last—or table—years of her life: La Colombaia, it was called, apparently, ‘the dovecote,’ she thought that was so charming! There was another ‘dovecote’ down in the town itself, she had seen the name up over the door, ‘Colombaia’ and a pretty girl, not yet attained to religious habit, looking out of an upper window: a pious people—all Catholics of course, and every family, no doubt, had one daughter a nun. “I understood this was the convent? Is it not La Colombaia?”

  Si, si, agreed Innocenta. A Colombaia. No more a convenuto, she said sadly, now that El Margherita was gone.

  “El Margherita is another name for Juanita?”

  Ah, the good one, the blessèd one, said Innocenta, fondly.

  “Why was she called El Margherita?”

  “The name of her, Senorita, was di Perli, Juanita di Perli. Perli are pearls; and margherita also is a pearl—you know, Senorita, our language is much mixing with Spanish and Italian, the two. So she is called El Margherita, the Pearl of San Juan; and her nuns they were called by the people here Le Perliti, the Little Pearls of Santa Fina. This is pretty, Senorita, si?”

  Very pretty, quite, quite charming. “And here,” said Winsome, catching the infection, throwing out a long, white knuckley hand, “was their oyster shell?”

  This flight of fancy, however, was too much for Innocenta’s English. “E Colombaia. No more now el convenuto, no more Perliti. It is I, Senorita, who have the Colombaia.” She lived there, as far as Winsome could make out with half a dozen lovely daughters; no mention of a Mr Innocenta, but still—these foreigners! thought Winsome with a liberal sigh.…

  “The house was given to me, Senorita, in el testamento.”

  “The will?”

  “El testamento d’el Margherita.”

  “In the will of …? Do you mean,” said Winsome, quite excited, “that you actually knew her?”

  Knew her? Knew Juanita? But of course—who had not known Juanita?—who, after all, was but twenty years dead, who for thirty years before that, had (with unflagging spiritual complacency) guided the lives of all the good people of San Juan. As for Innocenta, her heir—no, she had been no relation. The Senorita did not know, perhaps, the meaning of her name?—did not know that in San Juan, as in Italy, an ‘innocento’ meant an orphan?

  For Innocenta was what her name proclaimed her to be—fatherless, nameless, orphaned by the death of a single parent; one of the countless ‘innocenti’ of an island where youth is universally beautiful—where love is happy and easy and not really very severely frowned upon. Juanita, finding the number of applications to enter her sisterhood, after the first flush, somewhat disappointing, had in her later years conceived the simple plan of recruiting their number from the flourishing Barrequitas orphanage; and Innocenta had, almost in childcap, she explained, been taken into the convent with several others so chosen, and there brought up to an almost inevitable acceptance of the religious habit when the time should come. But the time, alas! had never come: not for Innocenta. Juanita had died; and somehow—somehow, said Innocenta wistfully, somehow all the young ones had slipped away and soon, as the old nuns died off, there was no one left. So that now there were no Perliti: only the Colombaia. “E triste?”

  “Molto triste,” agreed Winsome. Curiosity, however, struggled with sensibility. There was, for example, the matter of the lovely daughters. “And you too—er—relaxed your vows?”

  Innocenta was shocked. Her vows!—no, no, indeed, had she not explained to the Senorita that by the time Juanita died, one had not yet even left the noviceship.…? She had taken no vows; she had been a young girl serving her apprenticeship, that was all.

  “You didn’t go on and take them?”

  “Senorita, I was very young. The Badessa sent for me, she said that I would have a long religious life before me, but soon they would all be gone and I should be alone. This was the Badessa who was made after Juanita died. She was old and very wise.”

  “There is another Colombaia in the town? Could you not have gone there?”

  Innocenta looked oddly offended; it was one thing, she said, to be mistress of … The Senorita would not imagine …? She broke off, troubled and even a little haughty for one so plump and sweetly smiling. Evidently, pride of possession had somewhat gone to Innocenta’s charming head. Winsome hastened to revert to it. “Of course you would remain! The whole convenuto was bequeathed to you?”

  Innocenta, placated, explained. It was the custom in many religious houses in those days, in all parts of the world, to leave property to the youngest member of the novitiate, thus avoiding death duties and other like taxes. When the last of the old nuns had died, it had been found that Juanita’s possessions were still in Innocenta’s name. She had applied to El Exaltida—the father of the present Hereditary Grand Duke—and he had said that she could make good use of the house and had better keep it.… (Evidently, thought Winsome, the daughters had already been in existence and housing them a necessity.)

  But what she could not understand, she said, was why the convenuto had ever closed?

  The convenuto had closed, in fact, because its original purpose no longer existed. Juanita, arriving back from San Gimignano, a skeleton of her former robust young self, carrying a large, round tea-table and already self-proclaimed mystic and visionary, had had to be accommodated somewhere. The apartments in the Palatio had seemed to the Grand Duke, her uncle, no longer practicable—the widowed mother most heartily agreeing, for embryo saints are uncomfortable bedfellows and La Contessa di Perli, though devout, had no exaggerated taste for asceticism. What to do then? The old nurse had died, it seemed, inconsiderately but perhaps not very astonishingly, on the way home: worn out, murmured the cynical, but in very low tones, for it is dangerous work on the island to criticise the relatives of the Grand Duke, by an over-generous share in the honour of carrying the table. It had ended in his purchasing for his niece the freehold of the pink-washed farmhouse, the owner having received a pressing invitation from the Palace to find himself suddenly obliged to part with it; and in an invitation, also in terms exceedingly hard to refuse, to certain widows and unmarried ladies, to enclose themselves with his niece behind its walls. Since the almost entire function of the order had been to run errands for a dominating female who refused to budge from a table, it is hardly surprising that the community remained small in numbers, however ardent it may have been in spirit; and Juanita’s own press-gang methods in co-operating exploitable innocenti, occurred to her too late to save the order when, too soon, she died. Within ten years of that day, the last of the Grand Duke’s conscripts had gone to join their belovéd foundress in heaven: the flourishing novice-ship of the last year or two had all dribbled away; and there remained only one loving and simple heart to remember and to dream.…

  It was Innocenta’s dream to see her saint’s cause recognised in Rome: Beata juanita, Santa Juanita at last—to see her order flourish once again, to return the convenuto to its true purpose, to be once more the humblest of Juanita’s Perliti, spending the long days of devotion and quietness within the enclosing walls. What happiness, said Innocenta, perched on the flowering bank, swinging her plumply bulging patent leather shoes, what happiness in one’s last years, to renounce all the bustle and fret of the world and give oneself over—since work we all must—to working only for God.…!

  Winsom
e’s narrow hands clasped themselves together till the knuckles shone, in her folk-weave lap. What happiness, indeed! She looked down at the pink-sprawled house, at the winding wall, at the terraces that fell away and away in flower and fruit and vine to the plain below, at the sequined sea and the shimmering blue of the sky. What happiness! To spend all one’s days in contemplation here: a little church embroidery, an hour of ecstasy in a tiny chapel, an hour again in the cool of the evening, tending a garden of flowers dedicated to God.… Abbess, at last, perhaps, bæloved of all, respected of all, walking with gentle dignity, rosary in hand, through her dovecote of merry-eyed, simple-hearted saints.…

  But all this could be of no interest to the Senorita, Innocenta suggested, scything in upon this weedy uprush of spiritual pride along the Little Garden Path; one understood well that in Inghilterra there were no convenutos, no colombaias.…

  “Oh, but nonsense,” said Winsome, rushing once again to defence of benighted England. “We have many colombaias, lots of them; of both religions, Roman Catholic and Anglican.”

  Well, well, said Innocenta, much interested; she had always been informed quite otherwise. And of different religions, too, how very odd! Here, of course, everyone was Catholica, that was the end of it. But she was surprised. The Church in England, one had always heard, was very narrow, quite, quite opposed to …

  “No, no, of course not,” said Winsome again. “We have lots of them; not so many as the Catholics perhaps, but several. I was in one myself, a very well-known one.”

  Well, fancy, said Innocenta.

  “From the age of sixteen onwards. I was ‘finished’ there.”

  “Finito?” said Innocenta. She sighed and shrugged: too bad, her plump shoulders seemed to say, but that was life.

  Winsome struggled to explain. “I mean I went there to complete my education: many of our girls in England do, for a year or two.…”

  “E vere?” said Innocenta.

  “To teach us to—well, to become young ladies, to grow from childhood to womanhood.…”

  Well, certainly, said Innocenta, doubtfully, there could be no surer way. And for girls of different religions, too: a most delicate distinction. “La Colombaia Catholica! La Colombaia Anglica! E singulare!”

  “And so you see, I am most interested in your plans for turning this lovely building back into a convenuto. The trouble, I suppose …?”

  The trouble, acknowledged Innocenta at once, was a very usual one—there was no money. The present Grand Duke was satisfied with the present state of affairs, he said the Colombaia was filling a need and, said Innocenta lowering her voice though there was no one within a mile of them, he was strangely opposed to many Observances, all the island knew it, though few dared mention it aloud. In the matter of the Canonisation, for example …

  “Of El Margherita?”

  Not even a mere ‘Beata,’ said Innocenta: and was it not well known that the Arcivescovo had long, long been eager to apply to Rome; that the affair would have been settled to the happiness and profit of all, had not El Exaltida.… Well, well: it was not wise to speak of it. The very vines had ears in San Juan el Pirata. And meanwhile … She dived her fat brown hand into her fat red plastic handbag and produced a very fat little old, black book. Meanwhile she could get on with the Diary.

  “The Diary?”

  Juanita’s Diary. The Senorita would have heard, must have heard of the Diaries of El Margherita?—they had been translated into Spanish, into Italian …

  “But not into English?”

  Not into English. And now there were many tourists, British and American, coming to the island, there would be a great demand for the books, a great sale for the books when money for the convenuto was so sorely needed; and here was she, Innocenta, one of the very few of the island who could speak both languages. She tenderly unfolded her treasure from its silken wrappings and for the first time Winsome held the little black book in her hands.

  ‘In my youth,’ writes Juanita complacently, opening the first page of her diary with a bang, ‘I was very beautiful. My uncle, the Grand Duke, delighted to load me with jewels and beautiful clothes, I bathed in scented waters and spent all my days in dancing, which was my delight. But from the hour of my Vision, I cared no more for these distractions.’ The first part has, as it happens, been crossed out and altered, but the sentiment remains the same: ‘In my youth I delighted in ornament and beautiful clothes …’ or, as Innocenta’s translation has it, ‘While a young fowl* I was happy for adorning and fine cloths; but from the time of my Arrivalment† I was no more thinking of these excitings.’

  There is a good deal of deletion in these early pages of Juanita’s diaries, executed before the gentle flow of fiction-writing came to her as readily as it did in later year. Innocenta had spent much time in trying to read behind the heavy scorings that blotted out the first, unconsidered outpourings of her saint: success, however, had revealed one or two contradictions so startling that she came at last to a habit of adding further scribblings of her own, lest anyone else should decipher what lay beneath. After all, Juanita knew best. She would undoubtedly have said so herself, reflected Innocenta, a tiny bit ruefully for one so habitually happy to accept and be pleased, thinking back to those old, austere days in the novice-ship of the convenuto, when, from her table, El Margherita had laid about her with implacable self-esteem: would it not be wisest to let her know best to the end? ‘My attachment to Santa Fina dates from the year of my Vision,’ for example. Juanita had scored it out and written instead, ‘from my earliest childhood.’ Very well, then: what business of Innocenta’s if she chose to lay claim to an extra decade of devotion? “Her adhesion to Santa Fina was from first times of childcap,” she said stoutly to the Senorita, pointing it out.

  “Or shall we say, rather, ‘from the days when I was a tiny child’?” suggested Winsome: and with the very words there rose in her mind’s eye, an Arrivalment all of her own—a vision of a book, gilt-edged, in a binding, perhaps, of mother-of-pearl, palely iridescent: The Diary of Juanita, Pearl of San Juan. ‘Translation by …’ There would have to be an Acknowledgement, of course, ‘with the assistance of’ or ‘in collaboration with’; but, for the rest, ‘Translation by’—and, in letters of gold, a facsimile perhaps of her signature—her own name: Winsome S. Foley. The Diary, all the Diaries; the slim vols., the books of prayers, the pieties, the (execrable) verse.… Juanita, to be canonised one day, a new star rising in the firmament of the sanctified: and, she, Winsome S. Foley, sole link between the saint and the English-speaking world. The Collected Works of Juanita di Perli, translated by Winsome S. Foley, (with acknowledgements …) One would have to learn Juanese, of course; and there would be Forewords, trips to the British Museum to look up figures and facts, a subscription to the London Library to delve for details of island history. And a Life! Under the aegis of the Grand Duke (who, after all was a friend of her cousin, the Inspector). The Life of El Margherita: by Winsome S. Foley—this time without acknowledgements, unless a gracefully turned compliment to the kindness of Lorenzo, Hereditary Grand Duke of San Juan el Pirata, would look well.…?

  Winsome S. Foley had found her Cause at last.

  * Tour de Force.

  † Author’s Note: This is not quite correct: the island has in fact an area of nearly thirty square miles, including the plain of Toscanita or ‘Little Tuscany’ on its Western side.

  * Presumably from the Spanish/Italian, pollo—a hen, and Spanish (fam.), pollo—a youth.

  † Query from vision—visitation—arrival: the Vision is referred to throughout the translations as The Arrivalment.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘THE island of San Juan el Pirata seen from the deck of the gay little vaporetto which plies between Barrequitas and Piombino on the mainland, looks like an outsize cathedral, rising abruptly up out of the sea. Perched fantastically at the tip of its spire, is the fairy-tale palace of the Grand Duke. To the west, built up from the sheer rock face, is the prison—a dark, dank o
ld fortress where, in the splendid old piratical days, a countless toll of prisoners mouldered into merciful death; balancing it to the east is the Duomo, which houses the illustrious bones of the founder, and to the north the cobbled streets thrust their way down to the quays of the fishing boats. But looking southward over the sunlit blue sea starred with a dozen tiny satellite islands, what would be the façade of the cathedral slopes down, crumbling and pine-clad, to an indentation of little bays; and here, above many-flowered terraces, stand the long lines of the Bellomare Hotel, whose boast it is that every room faces into the sunshine and over the sea.…’

  Mr Cecil crossed by the vaporetto on the same day, as it happened, as Miss Cockrill and her cousin, late in the September after the dinner party at which he had met Cousin Hat. He saw them standing together at the rails—a small, thin—and yet oddly sturdy—little woman in a shapeless linen dress and a flat round hat which looked as if it had once been high and curvacious and generously wreathed, but had been painstakingly reduced, by some steam-roller method, to its present indeterminate amalgamation of flowers and straw: the typical ‘shady hat’ in fact, of the elderly Englishwoman abroad; and a younger woman of the type, reflected Mr Cecil, that it was quite impossible to ‘dress’—the droopy type, long drooping back that looked not strong enough to support the height—a standard rose, as it were, without proper staking: long, yearning face, long nose, long narrow hands and feet—long skirt, alas! of madly unfashionable length, jutting out in ill-considered gores, like a cardboard bell. Winsome on her earlier visit had fallen in love with Juanese folk-weave and taken home yards of it to be made up by a clever little woman she had found in Sittingbourne, to her own designs. She, too, wore a straw hat, wreathed with (of course) wild flowers; and the mauve beads. But she wore on the ring-finger of her right hand, a very beautiful opal. He saw his friend Tomaso’s eyes light up as they noticed it. Tomaso was the finest goldsmith in Barrequitas, he owned the Joyeria there, the jeweller’s shop, now that his father, dear old Pedro di Goya, was dead. After a while, Mr Cecil saw that he was manœuvring to speak to the owner of the ring. Tomaso loved all lovely things.