Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  She remembered a tube of gum Samantha had bought to stick postcards and photographs into her project (‘My Italian Holiday’), and refixed the envelope, returning it to her handbag. Then she went back to the kitchen, poured herself another cup of tea, and crossed to the window. She looked out at the moonlight in the well-filled pool and her brain was racing. The business that had been done successfully was undoubtedly the business of seeing Buck lost and gone forever. Might he have been despatched by those means, other than useless lawyers, which were considered by Sandra when she wrote the list? So now Mrs Kettering could enjoy the future with her Claudio, whom she would meet again after a decent interval. That was the message Molly had received when she had come down the stairs and left her husband at the dinner table. And as she stood at the window she seemed to hear again, as clearly as she had heard it two days before, the sound of Henrietta screaming. The remembered sound had an extraordinary effect on Molly. She ran down the stairs, unbolted the heavy wooden door and was off, running in her nightdress, barefoot across the garden, holding the torch which she had snatched from the chest in the entrance hall.

  Through all this Hugh slept. Had he woken up and looked out of one of the bedroom windows he would have seen his wife in the moonlight pulling desperately at the handle on a manhole cover. When she had lifted it, she prostrated herself on the ground and peered into the blackness below with the help of the well-provided villa’s torch. She saw the water at a higher level than it had been when Henrietta had been lowered into it and the mouths of the two pipes were almost submerged. And then she saw that there was a narrow, open doorway in the wall opposite her, which opened on to another chamber. There was nothing the big, anxious woman could do to investigate the matter further and although she played the beam of the torch on every inch visible to her, she couldn’t see whatever it was that might have made her daughter scream other than the damp and secret darkness of the place.

  After a while she felt exhausted and walked slowly back to the house, shutting the front door carefully behind her. Hugh didn’t wake as she lay down on top of the sheet beside him and before dawn she fell into the heaviest sleep she had enjoyed that holiday. In the morning she wondered if her inspection of the villa’s water-works might not have been part of a dream and looked carefully to confirm that the letter to Signora Kettering was still in her handbag. Later she locked it away in her own empty suitcase, a place where she was sure even Giovanna would never find it.

  The house from which Haverford Downs intended to telephone his ‘Jottings’ belonged to the Harrisons, an elderly couple who had set off to visit their daughter in Toronto. They had arranged a tenant but been let down, and Signor Fixit had promised to go and sit in their villa, having let his own house. The arrangement suited him well. The Harrisons’ home was perfectly kept, equipped with all the latest devices, with its cream carpets and matching walls, with its rôtisserie and dishwashing machine and its large television set on which the Harrisons played videos of their favourite movies which they swapped with a group of friends who lived around Siena. So, in the winter evenings, they would draw the curtains and watch The Sound of Music or Bridge over the River Kwai and feel as though they had never moved out of Twickenham.

  Mrs Harrison had always been a keen gardener and they had built a rockery, down which a small stream flowed with the aid of an electric pump. Their pool was oval-shaped and illuminated at night by carriage-lamps, fixed to the posts of the pergola which surrounded it. Their poolside chairs had plastic covers patterned with bright flowers and their poolside barbecue was electric because Mrs Harrison didn’t like the mess made by charcoal. Everything the Harrisons had was well ordered and extremely neat. In the middle of all this tidiness Fosdyke created his own particular mess. His jackets were hung on the backs of chairs, his triumphantly acquired groceries were stacked in the sitting-room, his cigar butts filled the ashtrays and his glasses had made rings on the surface of the poolside table. He spent a great deal of time on the telephone and he was often out of the house on various missions, not returning until late at night.

  It was at the Harrisons’ villa, named by them ‘Sole Mio’, that Fosdyke had entertained his hero and admired writer, Haverford Downs, on the night before Nancy Leadbetter’s party. Having managed to come by a decent bit of steak and kidney, he stood over the young maid, who came in once a week, until she had managed to produce a pie, later warmed up for dinner in the microwave. There were potted shrimps to start (a collector’s piece anywhere past Calais) and apple crumble, Stilton cheese, charcoal biscuits, Bath Olivers and a bottle of Warre’s port.

  Bald and pink, with his face peering above the white folds of the napkin stuck into his collar, Haverford looked like a particularly contented baby at feeding-time. ‘The continentals have never understood the delights of nursery food.’ He tried out a possible ‘Jotting’ on Fosdyke. ‘Come to think of it, they’ve probably never had nurseries. They’ve never known the delights of being shut in a cupboard and smacked with a hairbrush by a Nanny whose starched apron crackled across her bosom like approaching thunder. That’s why Mrs Thatcher could never become Prime Minister of Italy.’

  ‘I thought it right to feed you, sir,’ said Fosdyke, ‘in the style of an English gentleman. They’re not particularly thick on the ground around Mondano-in-Chianti.’

  ‘Am I a gentleman?’ Haverford wondered as he dug into the steak and kidney. ‘I suppose I have some of the right characteristics. I have always owed money. I usually stand up when a lady enters the room (if the lady in question is one of those battling Berthas from Bermondsey who staff the Informer office, her subsequent confusion delights me), and I have always been anxious to place my education and superior talents at the service of the Radical Left. My grievance against our present masters is that, quite frankly, I find most of them rather common. I dress myself untidily, my family despair of me, and I have absolutely no sympathy with any technological advance since the invention of the shoehorn. I suppose you might call me a gent.’

  ‘Or a genius?’

  ‘Well, that,’ Haverford was forced to admit, ‘of a sort, yes. We may not be in the First Eleven, but we are a pretty strong team, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Beerbohm, Chesterton and Haverford Downs. We who do battle with the weekly deadline.’

  ‘I believe I’ve told you how much pleasure your writing gives me.’

  ‘I believe you have. I must say it gives me a certain amount of pleasure too.’

  ‘Beautiful prose style. Not that I’m an expert.’

  ‘Kind of you to say so. I believe I was born with a certain ear. The gift God gave to Mozart.’

  ‘Mozart?’ Fosdyke looked confused.

  ‘Of course he wrote music,’ Haverford explained patiently, ‘but it’s much the same thing. One has to hear one’s paragraph. One word cut and hark, what discord follows! It’s something I can’t make my Pictish editor understand. The fellow makes marks on my copy like the abominable snowman.’

  ‘Whatever you say, of course, I’m no judge of these things. You always seem pretty wise to me.’

  ‘One has lived a certain amount of life,’ Haverford admitted, swigging the Guinness Fosdyke served with the steak and kidney (‘no particular point in just opening another bottle of Chianti in Chiantishire’). ‘But tell me, dear boy, I don’t see you as a regular Informer reader?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t until I managed to put my hands on a source for old Lord Pottleton, the Labour peer who had the castle outside San Pietro. Hell of a fellow for crystallized fruits and waiters. Well, when Paddy Pottleton snuffed it, I still got the rag, entirely for your articles. I can’t say much for the rest of the paper.’

  ‘Quite honestly’ — Haverford was wiping his mouth with the napkin still festooned about his neck — ‘neither can I.’

  ‘I always thought, if I were in a hole, you’d be the sort of chap I might turn to. Much sooner than any of the politicians —’

  ‘Poets,’ said Haverford, who wasn’t one, ‘are the ac
knowledged legislators of mankind. And of course,’ he added hastily, ‘certain prose writers also.’

  ‘— Or sooner than, well, a priest for instance.’

  ‘Don Marco’s a remarkable fellow. Red as a watermelon. One of the old-fashioned sort.’

  ‘Well, there now! That’s exactly what I mean.’

  ‘Are you?’ Haverford looked curiously at Fosdyke, who was changing the plates, stacking the dirty ones for the moment on the Harrisons’ video recorder. ‘In a hole, I mean?’

  ‘Not so much a hole —’ Fosdyke poured cream on his visitor’s apple crumble. ‘Let’s say, more at a crossroads.’

  ‘Ah.’ Haverford ate his pudding tactfully and with some respect. People had rarely asked for his advice and he found the idea of playing the role of Signor Fixit’s confessor novel and strangely flattering. ‘A crossroads, did you say?’

  ‘It seems to me, do correct me if I’m wrong, but reading the weekly “Jottings” one would say you’ve had a certain amount of experience with women.’

  ‘Over the years’ — Haverford did his best to sound modest — ‘you might speak of me as one who has loved not wisely but too well.’

  ‘Love! Well, that was what I wanted to ask about. I don’t just mean the other stuff.’

  ‘What other stuff?’ Haverford got going again with the cream jug. ‘What are you referring to exactly?’

  ‘Well, you know. The below the belt. All that side of the business.’

  ‘My dear Fosdyke. You can’t be quite so English. You can’t live by the Queensberry rules, you know. Most of what’s most interesting in life goes on below the belt.’ He absorbed another spoonful of nursery food, thinking that he had said something rather good which could be used in next week’s article.

  ‘I’m not referring to what is available for fifty thousand lire in the back streets of Siena.’

  ‘Really?’ Haverford did his best not to look interested. ‘Which back streets are those exactly?’

  ‘This is a country,’ Fosdyke said, ‘where you can get most things if you know where to look for them.’

  ‘Can you really?’

  ‘Oh, yes. If I told you what you can lay your hands on, if you’re prepared to pay the price, you’d be astonished.’

  ‘In the words of Diaghilev to the young Jean Cocteau, astonish me, Fosdyke.’

  ‘Well, I mean, you can always find someone who’ll do it for money.’

  ‘And I imagine you always have been able to from the dawn of time.’

  ‘Not that anyone should avail themselves of it, of course.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Provided you take reasonable precautions.’ Haverford smiled tolerantly.

  ‘But if you have any particular quarrel with anybody. I mean if there’s anyone you find standing in your way.’

  ‘A quarrel?’ Haverford gave himself the credit for being reasonably quick-witted, but now the old ex-pat’s meaning had eluded him.

  ‘They usually do it, you know. With lorries.’

  ‘Lorries?’ Haverford’s mind began to boggle. Did you do it in the cabin or was there a bed made up in the back? And what about the driver? Was there a man at the wheel who would be present throughout? Or was Italy full of slender, available girls driving ten-ton trucks.

  ‘A fellow can’t live out here, winter and summer both, without getting to know the ropes,’ Fosdyke told him. ‘I’ve heard about a chap who’s in close touch with a fellow who can always manage it. It could happen crossing the street in Mondano, and you know what a menace those lorries can be. Well, it might be a big one with a misleading number-plate which simply doesn’t stop that gets your mortal enemy. Pure accident, that’s the name of the game.’ Having delivered himself of this, his longest speech, Fosdyke sat apparently shrouded in gloom.

  ‘I thought,’ Haverford said, puzzled by the turn the conversation was taking, ‘that we were talking about love.’

  ‘Love —’ Fosdyke adjusted himself to the change of subject. ‘I thought I’d got over it completely. My lady wife behaved exceptionally badly, as I think I may have told you. Scarpered, not to put too fine a point upon it.’

  ‘Love isn’t a thing you get over, Fosdyke. It’s not influenza.’

  ‘I realize that now.’

  ‘It’s not something I shall get over, I’m afraid, this side of the Styx.’

  ‘Even at your age?’

  ‘I don’t quite know what you mean by even at my age.’ Haverford looked miffed. ‘It’s always the same person of course, although over the years she has had different names and come in various shapes and sizes. Fundamentally she is a slightly delinquent page-boy with small buttocks and an upturned nose. She is the archetype of the imagination. The obsession that never dies’ — Haverford drank Guinness — ‘whilst there is a spark of life in this old carcass.’

  ‘Small buttocks…’ Fosdyke was thoughtful. ‘Well, I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.’

  ‘Unfortunately that’s true.’

  ‘But that’s not what’s brought me to the crossroads.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Not that at all. I suppose you might say it’s the real thing.’

  For an unusual moment Haverford was silent, looking, when it came to the real thing, a little out of his depth.

  ‘Quite honestly, it’s rather thrown me.’

  Fosdyke got up and cleared the pudding plates, stacking them also on top of the video. He put Stilton, biscuits and port at the disposal of his guest. As he did so he moved in the dreamy way of a man in a state of shock.

  ‘Is it the unrequited sort, this love?’ Haverford felt he should ask for more particulars. ‘Does the person concerned…’

  ‘Whom I will not name, if it’s all the same to you, Mr Downs.’

  ‘Or does, whoever the person in question is — of course, I’m not expecting a name — reciprocate the passion?’

  ‘Fully reciprocated,’ Fosdyke said with some gloom. ‘Mutual in every way. I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence of course.’

  ‘Oh, of course. But what, dare one ask, is the problem?’

  ‘I’m worried, quite frankly, about the responsibility I might be taking on.’

  ‘Oh, responsibility.’ Haverford was clear on the answer to that one; he had mentioned it in several of his ‘Jottings’. ‘Responsibility is like income tax, VAT, string vests, opentoed sandals worn with socks, tights and grubby bra straps — one of the great anti-aphrodisiacs. Breathe the word “responsibility” and the most dauntless cock-stand collapses. Responsibility detumesces.’

  ‘I do feel’ — Fosdyke didn’t seem to have been listening — ‘a strong sense of responsibility.’

  ‘Because you and this lady…’

  ‘Who shall be nameless.’

  ‘Of course. Because you and Miss Nameless happen to fancy each other?’

  ‘Coming into someone’s life is a bit like taking over their house,’ Fosdyke said. ‘It may land you in something you didn’t bargain for. I’m not boring you, am I?’

  ‘Not at all. No, my dear fellow, of course not.’ But whether it was because of the conversation or the nursery food, Haverford’s eyelids were beginning to droop.

  ‘So what would your advice be, speaking from experience?’

  ‘Taking over other people’s lives? Not on, if you want my opinion. I’ve always had quite enough to do taking over my own.’

  ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ Fosdyke said. ‘But I’m enormously grateful to you for your time. I say, I do hope I haven’t embarrassed you, talking like this?’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ Haverford told him. ‘I don’t get embarrassed easily.’

  Eventually, Haverford was driven back in the Metro the Harrisons had left at Fosdyke’s disposal. It was the night a driver had put a letter into Molly’s hands and called her Signora Kettering. Haverford had got home after the children had gone to bed, earning Molly’s frowns for slamming the car door, shouting good-night to Fosdyke and singing ‘L
ydia, the tattooed lady’ all the way upstairs.

  Second Week

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ken Corduroy drove round to the Harrisons’ with an ingenious pool-cleaning device, a mechanical object that swam round scrubbing at the walls, he had ordered for them from England. He walked up to the front door and pushed a button but the chimes went unanswered. So he went round to the pool and noticed, at first, how the neat tables were littered with old newspapers and the ashtrays loaded with cigar ends. A couple of chairs, plastic with the appearance of cast-iron painted white, had been knocked over, a glass had been broken and an empty whisky bottle lay on what he would call, with his expertise, ‘the pooldeck’. He saw that the little waterfall in the Harrisons’ rockery had run dry.

  Then he noticed that the level of water was low. Stepping nearer he saw that it was, in fact, non-existent and that the pool had only a few rapidly drying puddles. It was not until he was standing on the very edge that he saw Signor Fixit. He was lying face downwards in the shadow of the short diving-board, fully dressed in a blazer and white linen trousers. Blood from his head discoloured the blue tiling pattern of the plastic liner around him. The terrace door was open and when he went into the house Ken Corduroy found further disorder; another chair knocked over, dirty glasses and a smell of spilled whisky. He telephoned the police in Mondano.

  ∗

  ‘What dramas!’ Haverford came home in a state of nervous excitement. ‘Don Marco drove me over so I could telephone my “Jottings” and the house was crawling with carabinieri. There was a doctor there, the whole works. They’d fished poor old Fosdyke out and the ambulance was just leaving.’