by Jane Arbor
‘I’ve been in love with him since I don’t know when.’ Had Cicely meant that to be taken at its face value? Or was that mere teenage extravagance? Ruth hoped so. There was no future in laying your all at the feet of a man who claimed that the adventure of marriage was not for him...
The guests did not know their dinner partners until they found their own place-cards at the tables for six in the restaurant. Ruth’s partner removed his card and tucked it into a pocket as he announced his name as Cesare Fonte, adding, when Ruth told him hers, ‘I do not speak English very well, signora. You must forgive me my mistakes.’
Ruth smiled, ‘On the contrary, if we speak Italian instead, you must forgive me my mistakes!’ and saw his dark, grave face light up with relief.
The other people at their table were two strangers and Stella Parioli and her partner, whom she addressed as ‘Luigi’—possibly the Luigi Bernanos whom she had claimed to have turned down in favour of lunching with Erle, Ruth remembered.
The conversation was all in Italian, with Ruth taking less part in it than anyone, though her own partner was attentive enough. At one point Stella Parioli glanced across to Erle’s table, where he sat with Cicely and four other young people, and said, ‘So eccentric of Erle, to put himself out to see that mere children enjoy themselves.’ Then, narrowing her glance on Cicely in particular, ‘The young blonde—I don’t recognise her. Does anyone know who she is?’
Ruth said, ‘Yes, I do. She is English—a protégée of Signore Nash. Her name is Cicely Mordaunt, and I am her chaperon for the summer she is in Rome.’
Stella Parioli turned her exquisitely dressed head, looking beneath her lids at Ruth, with an air of using a lorgnette in order to bring her into focus.
‘Indeed? Her chaperon?’
‘Her hostess too,’ Ruth supplied.
The other woman’s face cleared. ‘Ah, yes, I remember you now. A week or two ago, wasn’t Signore Nash interviewing you for the post of hostess—paid hostess —to that child?’
The intended slight did not escape Ruth. ‘Yes, I am being paid,’ she said.
‘As I thought.’ The reply seemed to give Stella Parioli some satisfaction. She turned to Ruth’s partner. ‘Is your sister here this evening, Count Fonte? I have not seen her yet, if she is.’
At Ruth’s sharp-drawn breath and glance his way, Cesare Fonte turned a dull red, as if in embarrassment.
‘Agnese? She has not come. She does not enjoy such affairs very much,’ he replied.
‘But you enjoy being invited to dine out on occasion?’ Somehow the implication was that he was grateful for a bowl of free soup and a charity crust. What a subtly poisonous person the woman was, thought Ruth as Cesare Fonte said quietly, ‘More than Agnese does, yes.’
After dinner there was a concerted move to a nightclub for a floor show and dancing. Cars were shared and Ruth went with her dinner partner. Erle signed in his big party; the youngsters took at once to the crowded dance-floor, while other people found tables, watching and chatting over their drinks.
At their table for two Cesare Fonte said suddenly, ‘You must forgive me, signora, for failing to give you my whole name.’ He took out the place-card he had put in his pocket and showed its wording—‘Count Cesare Fonte’. ‘The truth is that my circumstances are such that I prefer not to use my title in my everyday affairs, and my friends, if not my acquaintances, understand this.’
Not knowing quite what to reply, Ruth made a noncommittal murmur, and he went on, ‘You see, our hereditary titles are more common than are yours in England, and for a working man to bear one is no help to him. And so, for most purposes, I have dropped it. If I were to marry and my wife should wish to be known as Contessa, that would be different. I should agree, to please her. As it is, my sister and I live in a Casa to the east of the city, on the road to Tivoli. It is too big for us, but we need the grounds and the stables for my riding- school. That’s my work, you understand?’
‘I see,’ said Ruth. ‘Is your sister not married either?’
‘No. She keeps house for us both. She has some help in the house, and we both work in the gardens.’ He paused. ‘I should be very happy, signora, if you and your young guest would visit us one day?’
Liking him for his frankness, Ruth said, ‘We’ll do that, if we may. I want my charge to see the Roman countryside as well as the city. I have the use of a little car, and we could drive out.’
‘Or if you know our host well enough, he might bring you when he comes himself. He keeps his own mount at my stables. That is how I know him. Do you ride yourself, signora?’
But before Ruth could tell him she didn’t, Erle was at their table, doing a host’s tour of his guests. ‘Neither of you is dancing?’ he asked, sharing the question between them.
Cesare Fonte shook his head. ‘I am so bad that I haven’t dared to ask the signora,’ he said.
‘Then may I borrow her?’ Erle turned to Ruth. ‘I’ve asked the band to play something that my generation understands, a waltz for preference. So will you join me?’
To the strains of a waltz medley they went out on to the floor. Ruth, who hadn’t danced for a long time, moved hesitantly at first. But Erle’s hand, hard upon her back, guided her expertly and he was patient with her until her feet and body took the rhythm confidently.
She looked about her at the other dancers. ‘Where is Cicely?’ she asked.
‘Probably star-gazing on the terrace thoughtfully provided by the management. With scarcely a word or two of Italian to her name, she has made some conquests, notably with one Zeppe Sforza, to whom I’ve given permission to see her home.’
‘Oh. Was that wise?’
‘Don’t worry. Zeppe’s father is a Royal Opera artiste, under contract to me, and I know the lad. I’ve given them a curfew of one a.m. which, with your permission, I’ll see that they keep. How do you like Cesare Fonte?’ Erle asked.
“Very much.’
‘You found his lack of English no handicap?’
‘He understood my Italian. He tells me you ride, out at his riding-school, and suggested you might take Cicely and me over there one day.’
‘Good idea. I’ve been snowed under lately, and I’m in need of a work-out. We’ll make a date for, say, next week. You’ll be impressed with his place, the Casa Rienzi. It’s genuine Palladian, come down in the world. But as with a classically beautiful woman, with the bone-structure still there, who’ll be lovely at eighty, it keeps its grace.’
Ruth thought of the perfection of Stella Parioli’s features and understood the comparison. No doubt he was remembering it too. Aloud she said, ‘Does the Casa Rienzi belong to Signore Fonte?’
‘To Cesare? No. He rents it for the sake of the stable accommodation. Their own place—he has an older sister, Agnese—is deep in the South, in Calabria, where they have a small vineyard property, growing grapes and maize, but where people and tourists are too thin on the ground to merit a riding-school. So they let that in turn to a local farmer, and came north to Rome, though they’re both still homesick for their “ain folk”, I think.’
As Erle stopped speaking the music slowed to its end, and he halted, holding Ruth off from him. ‘Thank you. Why don’t we do this more often?’ he said, his tone making the kind of question to which she knew he didn’t expect her either to reply or to take literally at all. Probably his favourite closing gambit to everyone he partnered.
He delivered her back to Cesare Fonte, but after the floor-show when people were leaving, he came for her again to drive her back to the flat. He parked the car on the empty street and came with her to the door, at which she understood what he had meant by asking her permission to see the young people’s curfew kept. He expected to be asked in.
Using her door key she fumbled, and he took it from her. Using it himself, opening the door and following her in, ‘You boasted that your reputation would stand up,’ he reminded her. ‘But I can wait in the car, if you’d rather?’
‘No, come up, please.
’ What else could she say? Besides, it was a quarter to one already and, like him, she didn’t think the other two would be late.
Nor were they. At a few minutes after one a car came noisily up the stone-paved street and stopped outside. After that there was silence—‘Saying their goodnights,’ Erle suggested. Then there was the sound of Cicely’s key in the street door; the car drove away and the other two went down to meet Cicely in the tiny hall.
She was a little breathless and prettily flushed. ‘You see, Erle,’ she panted, ‘one o’clock to the minute—right on time. But gosh—’ she brushed back a strand of hair which had escaped from the elaborately piled curls—‘I’m tired! A lovely evening, Erle—thanks so much.’ She blew him a kiss and turned for the stairs, her long skirt lifted. ‘All I want now is my bed. I can hardly prop my eyelids open. Goodnight, dears—’
She went up.
Erle laughed shortly. ‘Evidently she has been roundly kissed,’ he said.
Ruth glanced up to the turn in the stairs where Cicely had disappeared. ‘What makes you think so? How do you know?’ she asked.
His gesture was impatient. ‘My dear girl, you’ve only to use your eyes! In a woman it always shows. They wear a sort of—well, a glow. A smug glow, granted, but still a glow.’ He paused, then with that characteristic lift of the eyebrow, ‘If I knew you better, and the hour being the romantic one it is, I might be tempted to prove it to you, Q.E.D. But as things are, you won’t need to trouble your mirror to prove it to yourself. Because this’—he took her hand and kissed the back of it lightly—‘doesn’t count. It’s just something I’ve learnt from the locals—’
And like ‘Why don’t we do this more often?’, another piece of his practised gallantry, thought Ruth when he had gone. She should have had ready some smart repartee, in order to make her ability to fence with words the equal of his. But that was the worst of wanting to believe people always meant what they said. Matter-of-fact yourself to a fault, you couldn’t hope to match up with them—ever.
Cicely must have made several friends at the party, for the telephone rang frequently for her. There were some English twins, a boy and a girl, who, like Cicely, were spending the summer in Rome and with whom she went swimming at the Lido; a French girl who took her on a shopping-spree to the notorious ‘flea-market’ in the Trastevere district, and most often the caller was the boy Zeppe Sforza who, having travelled with his father on singing tours, had enough careful English for Cicely to be able to talk to him. He was a day student at the University, and though Ruth thought he regarded her as Cicely’s guardian-dragon whom he had to placate, she felt his awe of her might be a surety of his good faith towards Cicely.
But it was Erle on the telephone or in person whom Cicely most welcomed, and when he rang up suggesting a day for visiting the Casa Rienzi, which Ruth accepted, Cicely promptly ditched a date with Zeppe, so that she could go too.
Ruth protested, ‘Erle would understand if you explained why you couldn’t come. Or you should ask him to take us another day, why not?’
‘No, why should I?’ Cicely wanted to know.
‘Because you promised Zeppe and you oughtn’t to let him down.’
‘Pff! I can go out with him any time. A date with Erle is quite something, and I’m not risking his saying he can’t make it another day instead.’
Ruth shrugged. ‘I still think you’re behaving very shabbily to Zeppe, and I won’t have any part in it.’
‘Who’s asking you to?’ Cicely snapped rudely. ‘I’m quite equal to turning Zeppe down for once without help. And anyone would think’—slanting a glance at Ruth—‘that you didn’t want me along. That you’d rather have Erle to yourself for the day!’
Ruth flushed with annoyance. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she snapped back. ‘There’s no question of a day with Erle for me. I’m going at Signore Fonte’s invitation to meet his sister and to see the Casa. Erle is only giving me a lift because he’s going riding. And I can’t ride with him. You can.’
It was their first sharp difference, and though it wasn’t pursued after Cicely’s grudging, ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that,’ it disturbed Ruth. Years ago she had known what it was to be grateful for a nod or a word thrown to her from Erle’s Olympian heights, and she knew she was reluctant for Cicely to suffer the same growing pains. And that, at the cruel distance between a teenager’s dreams and the man of the world that Erle had become.
Cicely, who had done some riding in England, went in some scratch gear—knee-high boots under slacks, and a polo-necked jumper, but Erle criticised her lack of a hat and stopped at an outfitters’ to buy her a velvet peaked cap.
‘You’d be brutta figura without something for your head,’ he told her.
Cicely wrinkled her nose. ‘What’s brutta figura?’ she asked.
‘In bad taste.’
‘Oh.’ Trying on the cap at a rakish angle, ‘What’s the opposite of brutta figura?’
‘Bella figura.’
‘And I am that now?’
He pinched her cheek. ‘You’re adorably fetching in any language,’ he said. Neither of them saw Ruth’s instinctive flinch.
The Casa was about ten kilometres out, standing in parkland, built of brick and stucco with a pillared frontage and flanking wings at either end. There were stables and outbuildings behind the house, opening on to a courtyard. All had an air of having seen better days, though as Erle had remarked, no shabbiness could quite hide the essential dignity of the place.
A short distance away from the house, behind a tamarisk hedge, was a miniature building of similar architecture with a portico on each of its four sides. ‘What’s that?’ asked Cicely, pointing.
‘That’s a belvedere—a kind of summer-house,’ said Cesare, who had joined them. ‘They were usual features of country-house building in Palladio’s day, put to romantic use for the keeping of assignations which couldn’t be discreetly conducted in the house, under the eye of an army of servants.’
Ruth translated this for Cicely. Then a boy groom brought out Erle’s mount, a magnificent grey, and Cesare took Cicely away to select a suitable one for her. Erle was already in the saddle when she reappeared on a small bay mare. She looked alight with happy anticipation as they wheeled and rode off, side by side.
Cesare stood looking after them. ‘She is a little in love, the youngster, I think,’ he said.
Ruth drew a sharp breath. ‘Does it show?’ she asked unguardedly.
‘You think so too, then?’
‘I’m rather afraid so,’ Ruth admitted.
Cesare nodded. ‘Yes, it would be a pity, that. Erle is a fine man—a man’s man who is a woman’s man too. There are too many of them in love with him for their comfort. For he has charm without heart, and marriage is not in his programme, he claims. But come and meet my sister now. She is expecting you.’
Before they left the courtyard he stopped to caress the white-starred nose of a horse looking out from its box. ‘This one belongs to La Parioli. She rides here with Erle sometimes. She was at our table at his party where you and I met, if you remember?’
‘Signora Parioli, yes,’ said Ruth. Then, needing to know, ‘Is she married?’ she asked.
‘No, though she has been linked with various names in the musical world—not excepting that of Erle. No, she uses the handle “signora” for professional reasons. Our women of standing like hers, addressed as “signorina”, would take it as a slight.’
Ruth knew it. Knew too that a small hope had died. She had wanted to believe there was a husband in Stella Parioli’s background; some man who had rights over her regard and her company; some man other than Erle ...
Agnese Fonte awaited them in a high-ceilinged room that was too graceful to be entirely comfortless. But its furnishing was sparse and forbidding, and Agnese herself, ramrod upright on a hard chair, was as austere as her surroundings.
She was even darker than her brother. She wore her black hair plaited in a coronet round her head, which she
held with a dignity that didn’t match with her weather-beaten skin and her thick peasant’s ankles and wrists. She was a woman of the South—Ruth recognised the type—somewhat out of her element, lacking the pitiless sun and harsh aridity of her homeland in the ‘toe’ of Italy’s ‘boot’. Ruth guessed she must be several years older than Cesare.
He made the introductions, suggesting that when he had shown Ruth the house, she might like some tea, and with a nod of her head Agnese agreed.
For a Palladian country house the villa was small, but even so, many of the rooms, including a long gallery on the first floor, were bare of furniture, curtainless, and in need of fresh paint.
‘We have a landlord who drives a hard bargain,’ Cesare explained. ‘He says we do not pay enough rent to justify his keeping the place in full repair. So, as there are only the two of us, we furnish and decorate the four or five rooms we need and keep the others shut up.’ He paused in the act of closing the door of the gallery. ‘It’s a pity, really, for it is a house that should have people and children and laughter and comings-and-goings. But there—’ he spread a hand. ‘It has only Agnese and me.’
Over the tea which Agnese served Ruth explained Cicely’s circumstances and her own, though evidently the information had gone before her via Cesare, for his sister knew she was a widow and what she did for a living.
It was Cesare who suggested she would like to see the belvedere, and they went down there together. It was a dolls’ house of a place, all its four tiny rooms connecting. It was designed for the sun, which shone on one of its porticos at any hour of the day. Cesare went to a wall cupboard and brought out a bottle of wine and some glasses and they sat out while waiting for Erle and Cicely to come back.