Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  Whose was this voice which Molly found to be both bossy and patronizing? She turned to the end of the document and saw a signature S. KETTERING over the address of the villa, LA FELICITà, MONDANO-IN-CHIANTI, SIENA, ITALY. Probably a Sam and not a Selina Kettering, she thought, and the signs of an absentee male landlord’s domination became more pronounced in the final paragraph.

  In conclusion, ‘La Felicità’ has a certain atmosphere and is used to special treatment which we ask you to respect. The house is unaccustomed to the sound of transistor radios or record-players by the pool. There is adequate equipment to play music on the lowest shelf of the bookcase in the small sitting-room. We would also ask you to observe the tradition of dinner on the terrace taking place by candlelight. Those alarmed by insect life should consider holidaying in Skegness.

  S. Kettering had gone too far. Why should the children be consumed by mosquitoes and confined to three or four scratched L Ps? ‘Frank Sinatra Goes down Memory Lane’ she imagined or ‘The Magic Flute of James Galway’, tucked into their disintegrating sleeves on the bottom shelf. And then she read The villa will appeal in particular to devotees of Italian painting. It makes a perfect centre for the study of the Sienese school. More importantly, perhaps, the work of Piero della Francesca can be followed from the frescos in Arezzo to the pregnant Madonna in the small chapel at Monterchi. Enthusiasts can take the trail to Sansepolcro and on, across the Mountains of the Moon, to see the sublime ‘Flagellation’ in the Ducal Palace at Urbino, undoubtedly the greatest small picture in the world. Those making this journey should ensure that the stopcock is closed and all electrical appliances switched off before departure. The pleasures of art tend to be diminished by returning to a complete absence of hot bath water.

  Now, in spite of the unsympathetic tone of his letter, S. Kettering had won her. Molly could put up with the mysterious fallibility of the electric devices; she would overcome her husband’s reluctance at the prospect of any sort of adventure. She was going, at some time that summer, to follow the Piero della Francesca trail across the Mountains of the Moon to undoubtedly the world’s greatest small picture. And if the shadowy Mr Kettering’s requirements had some secret explanation, as she suspected, she was going to find it out.

  So she wrote to the box number and suggested a date for a preliminary viewing to avoid disappointment or misunderstandings. Everything was working out more easily than she could have hoped.

  Leave the Florence—Siena raccordo and follow signs to Conterchi. In Conterchi take the concealed right-turning between the church and the supermercato, then left under the bridge, following signs to S. Pietro in Crespi. In S. Pietro, turn right by the fountain and immediately left, just past the posto di polizia. After two kilometres you will cross a bridge and see a large ilex tree on your right. You are best advised to turn left down the dirt road which provides a short cut (known only to the Kettering family) to Mondano-in-Chianti. In Mondano, turn left again by Signora Fantoni’s alimentari (best mozzarella cheese in the district) and immediately double back to the right down a single-track road which will bring you out behind the Castello Crocetto (most reliable source of Chianti). From then on the unmade road (beware of pot-holes) will take you straight to ‘La Felicità’.

  Further orders, typed and duplicated, lay beside Molly on the empty passenger-seat. In front of her the motorway shimmered in the sun like the sands of a desert. She was in a mood of high excitement, flicking on her indicator light and passing thundering lorries and bucketing Fiats, overloaded with Italian families, with unexpected expertise. She was elated by a further message, not typed this time, but written, apparently in haste, on paper printed with the villa’s address. Will be at the house between two and three on the afternoon of the 12th, getting things ready for the children’s holidays. Look forward to meeting you then. The last document was signed, as always S. KETTERING.

  This almost welcoming message kept her going down the raccordo to Siena. After she’d turned off, she became tired and nervous. She drove slowly in Conterchi so as not to miss the turning and Italians hooted at her or raised their fingers in gestures she knew to be obscene. Once, knowing she couldn’t be heard, she shouted back and was conscious of looking like a pinkish, fair-haired and flustered fish with its mouth moving silently behind glass. Her hands sweated and soaked the steering-wheel. In San Pietro she drove fast to avoid abuse, missed the road by the police station and had to do a U-turn to obey her directions. As her anxiety grew the small towns and villages looked grey and inhospitable. Steel shutters barricaded most of the shops and those that were open displayed only a few boxes of tired vegetables and strings of plastic toys. In Mondano-in-Chianti three old men, busily engaged in sitting on a wall beside the petrol pumps, seemed to jeer at her and a child threw a small stone which rattled against her car bonnet.

  She had doubts about the road but then found herself driving along the grey fortress walls of what she hoped might be the Castello Crocetto. At its gates a tall woman leading a Borzoi dog viewed her passing with disdain. And then she dived and rattled down the dirt-track which seemed to go on for ever across an empty hillside. As the insects met a sticky death on her windscreen and brambles and gorse bushes clawed at the bright sides of her hired Fiat, she wondered if she should have stayed at home and if she would ever, in fact, see ‘La Felicità’.

  Suddenly she did. The track had climbed, twisted, rocked her in its pot-holes and then swept down in a flurry of loose stones and flying dust, to a house gradually lit, theatrically, as the sun returned from behind a stray afternoon cloud. Her first thought was that the photographs hadn’t lied. The place looked fortified, not as a grim walled castle but impregnable all the same, with thick walls and, in the centre of the square, unornamented two-storey building, a stocky tower from which arrows or muskets might have been shot or red-hot ploughshares hurled down on invaders. The iron-studded door in the central archway looked impervious to battering-rams, but above it, behind a line of similar arches, was the big open terrace on which S. Kettering expected the family to dine — an instruction, Molly thought, which it would be no particular hardship to follow. Three great stone pots contained geraniums which trailed down to the walls beneath them, softening the stern appearance of the house.

  In the centre of a pavement leading to the front door was a well head with an ornate ironwork structure over it. She had no idea of the age of ‘La Felicità’ but such houses had stood on the white furrowed hillsides in the pictures she knew by heart. She felt then that S. Kettering’s almost military orders were appropriate and added to the feeling of security about the place.

  She parked under a straw-covered shelter and got out slowly, still vibrating. The silence was underlined by the drumming of grasshoppers and she noticed that there was no other car which might have brought S. Kettering. The door she tried was unyielding; the bell she pulled echoed inside some shuttered hallway but nobody answered. Her confidence, which had returned on her first view of the house, once more ebbed. She wanted to pee and she walked round the house in search of a bush.

  It was there that she saw the man lying on the plastic strips of an off-white metal reclining chair beside the pool, which was undoubtedly smaller than it had looked in the photograph. His straw hat was balanced on his forehead, his jacket lay folded on the concrete beside him, and she noticed that he wore balding suede shoes and some form of club or regimental tie.

  ‘You’ve arrived.’ He opened one eye and said, ‘You must be a practical sort of person.’

  ‘The directions were brilliant, actually.’ She knew she sounded effusive but she remembered the lordliness of S. Kettering’s style and wished to propitiate him.

  ‘Some people,’ he told her, ‘get horribly lost in Conterchi.’

  ‘Poor them!’ She wanted to assure him that she wasn’t that kind of idiot.

  ‘So you drove here straight from Pisa?’

  ‘Yes.’ All the bushes she could see were small and scrubby and she couldn’t find an excuse
to leave S. Kettering and double back to the front of the house.

  ‘Then you’ll want to use the facilities.’ He stood up smartly and she followed him with gratitude as he took from his pocket a large bunch of keys, from each of which dangled a carefully written label.

  The chain requires one sharp downward pull. Don’t be tentative or give repeated tugs which achieve nothing. So read the notice in the particular facility to which he led her. She pulled sharply and was rewarded. She rejoined the man, embarrassed by the sound of the cascade behind her.

  ‘Managed it first go.’ He smiled at her. ‘Unusually masterful.’

  ‘This’ — she held the fluttering pages of description in her hand — ‘must be the small sitting-room.’ The room was lit by a shaft of sunlight from the single open shutter. The furniture seemed large and dark, pieces designed for a grander room. ‘What’s this used for?’

  ‘For anything, I imagine, that you have a mind to. The big sitting-room’s downstairs. Converted from the cowsheds. You could do anything in there. Get up a musical comedy.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’

  ‘Good heavens, no.’ He looked at her as though it was she who had made the unusual suggestion. ‘That’s not my style of thing at all.’

  ‘And the children’s bedrooms?’

  ‘Top floor, I should think. I haven’t much personal experience. Not of where children sleep.’

  ‘I should like to see them, please.’

  ‘I suppose, if you’re really keen on it.’

  ‘I’ve come all this way…’ she smiled.

  ‘And so you have. I’m here to help you. Absolutely all I can.’ He led her quickly up a staircase which began by being broad and stone and went on up to twist woodenly to the top of the tower. She followed the short-back-and-sides hair-cut of this curious S. Kettering, who, apparently, never said goodnight to his children.

  ‘How many have you got?’ The rooms he opened for her had few signs of childish occupation. There were some rows of books, bright bed-covers and cushions, some reproductions such as she had once had of Italian paintings. There were no photographs, posters, record-players, piles of clothing from Oxfam shops, drawings pinned to the wall — nothing much to indicate children at all.

  ‘Myself, absolutely none,’ the man told her. ‘It’s been the experience of my chums that offspring break up marriages. Mother gets wrapped up in the kids and the poor old husband gets left on his ownio.’

  ‘But you said you’d be here getting things ready for the children’s holidays…’

  ‘Checking up, yes. Seeing that nothing’s drowned in the pool recently.’ The man looked at her with sudden amusement as a penny dropped. ‘You hadn’t taken me for Kettering?’ He laughed at her confusion. ‘I’m not Kettering, or anywhere near it. The name’s Fosdyke. William Fosdyke. I’m cursed with living in Mondano all the year round, all through the rains of January and Feb. So I do things for chaps from the U.K. Keep an eye on their properties. And the like.’

  Of course, she told herself, she should have known at once that he wasn’t Kettering. Kettering would have been a less accessible and more commanding presence.

  ‘No, I’m certainly not him,’ Fosdyke went on, garrulous after her mistake had been discovered. ‘Wish I were sometimes. Lucky fellow, Kettering. He’s got ‘La Felicità’, of course. And his marriage; that’s something I miss. Mrs K. thinks the world of Kettering. One hundred per cent devotion. Kettering, not to put too fine a point on it, is the apple of her eye.’ They stood in the single child’s bedroom and Molly joined in a short, silent tribute to the Ketterings’ marriage, whilst some large, blundering insect bumped against a window that had been long closed.

  ‘I lost my wife,’ Fosdyke told her. ‘Many years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I mean literally lost her. We went shopping in Brighton. We arranged to meet at twelve-thirty under the clock. She never showed up. Missing, believed to have scarpered with the manager of Boots. Women are curious creatures. Nothing personal, Mrs Pargeter.’

  She did her best to become businesslike. ‘I think this will do splendidly for our three.’ She crossed to the window and looked down to where the pool sparkled in the early sunshine.

  ‘Got snaps of them, have you?’ Mr Fosdyke asked her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll bet you carry snaps of your young. I know Mrs Kettering does. I’d feel very privileged if you’d let me see them.’

  So she opened her handbag and produced for the man with the scarpered wife a selection, some faded a little and creased with age. Although mistrusting children, he showed an absorbed interest as he took the photographs and gazed at Henrietta (fourteen), Samantha (just ten) and the baby Jacqueline (now three and born after a long period during which Hugh had displayed a lack of interest in physical contact). As soon as Fosdyke had taken the pictures, she felt that she had shown him too much of her private life and put out her hand to receive them back.

  ‘Fine little family,’ he said, releasing them. ‘They look as though they’d fit in jolly well at “La Felicità”.’

  ‘I think,’ Molly said firmly, ‘I’d like to have one more look round. By myself this time.’

  ‘Of course. Be my guest. Or rather’ — he stood with one hand in his blazer pocket, squinting only a little — ‘the guest of Mr Kettering.’

  When she looked round the house on her own, it seemed more impressive. The big downstairs room might have been a converted cowshed, but when she opened the tall shutters and the sunlight poured in, it looked more like a state apartment. At one end there was a platform with a piano on it, so Fosdyke might, for all she knew, have been right about the musical comedies. The kitchen was a huge stone cavern with an open fireplace, the size of a small room, beside which logs were piled so that she could see herself (but certainly not Hugh) barbecueing thick steaks on an iron grill, turning them over with tongs the size of a medieval weapon. In the bedroom cupboard, scented with lavender, a man’s shirt and a woman’s white skirt swung among the empty coat-hangers. None of the drawers was locked; all of them were empty. Looking around the bedroom, she saw that it was almost exactly as it had been in the photograph, although now there was a book open and face downwards on the patchwork quilt. She wondered who had been reading so recently on the carefully made bed, or if this fat book, which she now saw to be a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, were a relic of the past summer, and the maid, or whoever cleared the house, was devotedly keeping her employer’s place. She also left the book undisturbed but felt, as soon as she saw the title, a further fellow feeling with S. Kettering.

  Her inspection of the bedroom finished, she walked down the staircase into the coolness of the stone-flagged hallway. A large collection of sun-hats hung on pegs in the entrance hall, bowls were filled with dried lavender and a huge pottery jar was crammed with walking-sticks, some of which had ornate silver handles. By the time she reached the front door the house, she knew, had to be hers for the summer. If it had a secret she would do her best to discover it and she was not going to miss the trail across the Mountains of the Moon to what was undoubtedly the greatest small picture in the world.

  Molly Pargeter, a woman of forty, whose hair was kept in place with difficulty, might have looked like one of the larger Graces in the paintings she admired had not her size caused her such embarrassment that she lowered her head and stooped a little as she walked. She was a woman of mixed awkwardness and determination. Now dressed in striped cotton with sensible shoes and a cardigan, she stepped into the sunshine and walked round the corner of the house. And there she caught a snake consuming a large Tuscan toad.

  As she drove William Fosdyke back to Mondano he assured her that he would be always at her disposal and could guarantee to make her family holiday a success. ‘You know what the Brits in this part of Tuscany call me?’ he asked her. ‘Signor Fixit. They know they can rely on me, you see. And I must say that gives me a great pleasure.’
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  She left him in front of a café and as she drove away to follow the complex instructions back to the raccordo she saw him in her mirror, standing with his hand still raised in the sort of military salute with which he’d taken his leave of her.

  ‘You really liked the place?’

  ‘Of course. I loved it.’

  ‘Can we afford it?’

  ‘I can afford it,’ she assured him. A legacy from a great-aunt had bought their house and provided her with a small income. She was free to dream of paintings and detective stories.

  ‘No drawbacks?’ Hugh’s voice betrayed his disappointment.

  ‘Absolutely no drawbacks whatever. Of course, we must be careful to see that the children wear shoes.’

  ‘Shoes?’ He sounded more hopeful. ‘Why shoes?’

  ‘Prickles in the grass. Things like that. It’s really all very wild. But beautiful.’

  She didn’t tell him about the snake. Had she done so, he might have had a reason to object to the holiday and a great deal of trouble would have been saved.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘I hear you’re going to take that house in Italy.’ The elderly voice, half a challenge and half a tease, came down the telephone to Molly as she was in the middle of giving Jacqueline her supper. She popped a toast soldier into her own mouth to give herself the strength to deal with her father.

  ‘I called you earlier. Sam answered, she seemed to be alone in the house…’

  ‘She wasn’t alone. Mrs O’Keefe was here.’

  “‘And Gamps,” Sam said. “You’ll never guess. We rented this unbelievable posh villa.” How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho! Of course, I could never have your patience and study the stock exchange prices, Molly Coddle. I’d far rather do something exciting, like sit here and watch my fingernails grow.’