‘Dead. Did you say dead?’ Molly had been laying out the lunch on the terrace. The sun sparkled on the plates and, wet-haired from the pool, the children were being unusually helpful in the kitchen. Nothing that day had seemed threatening at ‘La Felicità’, until her father came panting up the stairs with his news. The old priest came steadily up after him; his car, small and dusty, parked under their thatched shade.
‘Not sure. Wouldn’t give much for his chances, though.’
‘Morto. Forse morto…’
‘I invited Don Marco to lunch. You won’t mind. He’s had a terrible shock.’
‘Of course not. Father, do please sit down here. We’re honoured.’ Hugh, who never went to church, adopted a tone of peculiar reverence when faced with the old man whose cassock showed traces of tomato sauce.
‘Grazie. Non ho fame. No hunger.’ But the priest allowed himself to be seated and to have a glass of wine poured for him. Haverford also sat, lifting his panama to mop his flushed forehead with a red and white spotted handkerchief. Molly went on laying the table, placing knives and forks neatly as though her sanity depended on it. It was true she hadn’t entirely trusted Fixit. Sometimes she’d found it difficult to believe a word he said, but he had been there to meet her when she’d arrived as a stranger. He had shown her round and helped with her shopping. Now he had vanished with no reasonable explanation whatever. She felt bewildered and suddenly lost.
‘It all seems quite obvious. Fosdyke was all alone, had been for a few days since I had dinner with him in fact.’
‘He drove you home on that night?’ Molly started to investigate.
‘You saw him?’
‘Yes. When you got out of the car.’
‘Ubriaco,’ said Don Marco sadly. He raised his glass with a dirty-nailed little finger cocked and drank disapprovingly. ‘Drunk.’
‘Ubriaco as a newt. I’m afraid so. He must have been staggering a bit out there by the pool. Just his luck it didn’t have any water in it.’
‘Had it?’ Molly asked her father.
‘Had it what?’
‘Water in it. When you went there to dinner?’
‘Oh yes, I’m sure it did. We had a drink out there before we got stuck into that amazing menu. Yes, I’m sure I remember I saw water lapping.’
‘Pools can empty pretty unexpectedly round here,’ Hugh said. ‘As we know to our cost.’
‘Old Fosdyke certainly didn’t expect it.’
The children had finished laying out prosciutto and cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Molly brought out a big bowl of salad and sat looking at it, eating nothing.
‘What’s wrong with Mr Fosdyke?’ Samantha said.
‘He had an accident. He dived into the pool with no water in it.’ Henrietta had heard more of the conversation.
‘Silly thing to do,’ said Jacqueline, her teeth stained yellow with hard-boiled egg.
‘He didn’t dive. He fell. So you must all be very careful.’ Hugh looked round at his family nervously. It had turned out to be a strange sort of holiday. Now they were all sitting round discussing a fatal accident in muted voices, with an old priest who smelled of garlic beside them, cutting a piece of cheese into wafer-thin slices. On top of it all, the remorseless heat was becoming too much for Hugh, his sunburn itched and he felt sick. At that moment his dearest wish was to be back at work and having lunch with Mrs Tobias.
‘We had a long talk when we had dinner together,’ Haverford said out of a silence in respect of the dead. ‘He confided in me. It was a sort of confessional.’
‘Confessionale,’ the priest smiled at Molly and took another genteel sip of wine and surprised her. ‘Your father is naturally religious.’
‘He seemed to be worried about taking over someone’s life. He said it was like taking over their house,’ Haverford remembered. ‘That’s what worried him.’
The next day Giovanna came to work and couldn’t stop herself weeping. Her small crushed handkerchief was quite inadequate to contain the huge tears that welled from her eyes after she had heard of the death of Signor Fixit.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JOTTINGS FROM TUSCANY
by Haverford Downs
The sack of Rome, when the brute and lascivious soldiery of the Emperor Charles V raped the women, robbed the churches, and broke open a long-dead Pope’s tomb to steal the ring from his finger, was only one of the invasions of this long-suffering land. It was followed by the deprivations of greedy Swiss, repressive Austrians, revolutionary French, barbaric Germans and the huge, unpaid army of tourists and expatriates who live off the land and commit their own atrocities. They’re not, it’s true, much given to murdering old men and children; they don’t force Cardinals to ride facing the tails of donkeys through the streets. They have not, as yet, imprisoned Pope John Paul II. However they do desecrate the holiest places with their flash-bulbs and hand-held video cameras; they invade peaceful monasteries and sleep on the outskirts of towns in their evil-smelling ‘campers’. They display their scarlet, sunburnt shoulders and huge backsides flaunting shiny ‘jogging shorts’ round the Piazza del Campo in Siena. They do their best to make even our delightful local trattoria in Mondano sound like a Berni Inn in Basingstoke as they call raucously for prawn cocktail and steak and chips, having to settle with obvious disgust for the pure poetry of Signora Sparanti’s risotto con funghi. Ever since the Marquis of Mantua failed to defeat the French at Fornovo in the 1490s (a period which must have been almost as barbaric and unpleasant as the 1980s), this sunsoaked land has had to endure invasion and rely on the assassin’s knife or the patriot’s bullet to even the score.
In the context of such a history, how are we to interpret our local sensation, the death of an obscure Englishman, who acted as house agent, courier, travel guide, purveyor of groceries in short supply, house-sitter and, it has been daringly suggested, pimp to the English army of occupation in Chiantishire? He was a man of considerable literary taste (I must report, in all modesty, that he subscribed to the Informer and never missed these ‘Jottings’) who died, so the authorities would have us believe, by falling into an empty swimming-pool when drunk on hard-to-come-by malt whisky.
I attended Fosdyke’s funeral. The English masters he served so well, and to whom he was universally known as ‘Signor Fixit’, were conspicuous by their absence. My own family stayed away. My son-in-law, being a solicitor, said it was too much like work, as he is constantly attending the funerals of clients in England. My daughter, although clearly distressed at the tragedy, preferred to stay at home with the children. In the local cimitero, opposite the old Mondano church, I was, at first, the only mourner. The graves around us on a stifling hot morning (funerals here are not long postponed for obvious reasons) were decorated with wilting flowers and photographs of deceased mamas and departed children. As my old friend, the Communist priest, performed the last rites, did I see a half smile on those weatherbeaten features? How many fascists did he bury with public grief and deep private satisfaction in the last year of the German Occupation?
Did Fosdyke die, I wondered as I stood by that hastily dug grave, to avenge the humiliation of Fornovo? Remember this is the country, as Signor Fixit himself told me, where a lorry can be hired not only to move your furniture but to run over an unpopular citizen. And if Fosdyke had been popular, it’s strange that his funeral was so poorly attended.
However, I was not alone at the graveside. A little later a car drove up and two women in veils got out and joined me. One I recognized, the local Baronessa, whose family has always been friendly with the occupying forces. The other was a middle-aged woman, also Italian, who seemed to be her friend. I intended to ask the Baronessa Dulcibene why she had come to pay her last respects to this mysterious Englishman but she gave me a glassy look of non-recognition and moved rapidly away with her companion. As my old girlfriend Nancy Leadbetter used to say, ‘There’s no snob like a foreign snob.’
A reader has suggested that the belated realization that you’re tal
king to an ex-lover is best expressed by the old Tallulah Bankhead crack: ‘I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.’ Well done, Mr A.B. of Bromley. A bottle of Chianti Classico will be winging its way in your direction with the Informer’s compliments.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In the second week of their holiday Molly felt that they had been living in ‘La Felicità’ for ever. Notting Hill Gate, Mrs O’Keefe and the children’s schools seemed part of a distant world she could barely remember. Her life centred round the villa, the sunlit early mornings with their promise of great heat, fulfilled during the long afternoons, and dinner on the terrace when the darkness fell suddenly. She still laid the table there, and lit the candles, and put on the scratchy and neglected golden moments from Turandot, although no unexpected car came again with any message.
What occupied her mind all day, as she shopped, tidied the children’s bedrooms in order not to further distress Giovanna, or swam up and down the pool with her deliberate, tireless breaststroke in search of weight loss and a youth she had not particularly enjoyed, was ‘her mystery’. She had come to think of it as hers because, apart from Fosdyke, now deceased, she had shared her thoughts on this ever-engrossing subject with no one. Molly had not had a religious upbringing. Early in her life, Haverford had told her that if God existed He would be an extremely unpleasant old gentleman with a taste for smiting Philistines and little sympathy for the delights of love as they were understood down the King’s Road in the fifties and sixties. Her mother, having been brought up in an icy vicarage on the outskirts of Birmingham, had no faith and said she suffered from a nervous skin condition whenever she was lured, for weddings or funerals, into churches. Molly’s longing for mysteries had found its satisfaction in Italian paintings and English detective stories; but never before had the mysterious circumstances of living people come so near her. As she cut up toast soldiers to dip in Jacqueline’s egg, or sat with a towel spread on her lap smiling vaguely whilst her youngest child swam and splashed her way through her bath, she speculated endlessly. Fosdyke? What was the real importance of the man with the squint, the potted shrimp provider, the house-sitter and general factotum of the Brits? Had he been able to answer her questions; was he about to explain the Ketterings’ strange requirements about three children and dinner on the terrace to her? Is that why Signor Fixit had ended his long and useful life in an empty swimming-pool? But then she steadied herself, reined in her galloping imagination and felt that she was behaving ludicrously, as she had when she had run out into the garden in her nightdress and dragged the manhole cover off the cistern by the swimming-pool.
But two pools, she thought, as she turned for the twentieth time and did her breaststroke towards the white hills under a dry and remorseless sky — their pool and the pool in the house where Fosdyke was staying — had been emptied without apparent explanation. Surely these two events must be connected? But that was reasoning falsely, and such accidents must happen to many people, mustn’t they? And why, she asked herself, as she swam towards the steps, why should an apparently full and cared-for pool (her father had told her that when he visited Fosdyke for dinner, the water was lapping) be suddenly emptied? An act of God or an act of man? Molly knew which explanation she preferred.
Looking up and shaking the water out of her hair she saw the willowy figure of the Baronessa wearing white silk trousers and heavy bracelets, shimmering against the sun and the sky.
‘Venus rising from the sea.’ The Baronessa was laughing, Molly thought unkindly.
‘Hardly!’ She felt more than ever awkward and overweight in her bright red bathing-dress and was conscious of the dimpling of her thighs. Manrico the dog, straining on the short leash Vittoria Dulcibene was holding him by, slapped his tongue round her wet ankles in friendly recognition.
‘You will forgive my calling, unannounced.’
Oh, no, Molly felt like saying, you should at least have sent on a couple of heralds with trumpets, followed by your butler, to check up on the state of the lavatories. Instead, she said, ‘Of course not. Won’t you come in? I mean I could get you a drink or a cup of tea?’
‘Tea, of course. I love a cup of Darjeeling at four o’clock in the afternoon. I am also absolutely mad for Harrods’ bangers but God knows where we’re going to find them since Mr Fosdyke left us. Shall I tie the wretched Manrico up somewhere?’
‘He can come in. Anyway, he looks in need of water.’
In the small sitting-room the children were sprawled on the sofa listening to their Beastie Boy tapes and re-reading the copies of Smash Hits and Seventeen they had brought with them from London. Jacqueline was colouring her Postman Pat book brilliantly but inaccurately. Molly didn’t want their father to see them indoors. Although he was busily engaged in a long siesta he thought that his family shouldn’t waste the expensive sunshine. She closed the door on her children and led the Baronessa to the kitchen where she put on the kettle and stood watching it with a towel tied round her waist.
‘I wanted to bring you my sympathy.’ The Baronessa sat at the table and produced a packet of Italian cigarettes and a gold lighter which seemed almost too heavy for her to lift. ‘After your unfortunate experience.’
‘Which unfortunate experience was that?’
‘The wretched trouble you had with your water. Our Idraulica workers are so stupid. Of course, they are all Communists.’
‘I thought you were a Communist once.’ Molly felt she had scored a point.
‘That was in the war when being a Communist was a pleasure. It is not so amusing now.’
‘Anyway, it seems rather common round here.’
‘What seems common?’ The Baronessa put a cigarette between her lips and failed to make her lighter work.
‘Trouble with the water supply.’
‘It’s these wretched Tuscan hills. Water is like gold here. One of my family, on the Baderini side that is, not the Dulcibenes — they were merely court jesters if you want my candid opinion. Well, anyway, Paolo Baderini led Mondano in a pitched battle against San Pietro in Crespi for the well on the Arezzo road. Six men were killed but Mondano got its water.’
‘When was that?’
‘I think 1398,’ the Baronessa said as though it were yesterday.
‘In spite of your heroic ancestor’ — Molly showed some spirit — ‘we still seem to be having trouble with the water.’
‘Oh, yes. There must have been some mistake. Something perfectly stupid must have gone wrong. Things like that don’t happen at ‘La Felicità’, of all places.’
‘You mean ‘La Felicità’ is different from everywhere else?’
‘Well, things usually run pretty smoothly here. On the whole, “La Felicità” doesn’t dry out entirely, any more than we do at the Castello or Nancy does at the Villa.’
‘The house where Mr Fosdyke was staying wasn’t so lucky.’ Molly felt that the Baronessa was at some disadvantage, that she was saying things she didn’t want to have too closely questioned. She pressed on however, as ruthless as Holmes or Poirot interviewing a suspect. And the fact that the woman, sipping Darjeeling tea and fiddling with a gold lighter, looked so cool and elegant, whereas Molly knew that her hair was in rats’-tails, her shoulders sunburnt and the damp towel in danger of coming undone at her waist, merely added to her determination.
‘That seems another mistake,’ her visitor conceded.
‘What sort of mistake is it, I wonder,’ Molly asked with a carefully assumed air of innocence, ‘which dries up somebody’s swimming-pool?’
‘I told you —’ The Baronessa spoke patiently, as though explaining to a child. ‘It’s a very dry place, Tuscany. We are not Manchester.’
‘Perhaps not.’ Molly’s answer came sharply as she felt she had been patronized. ‘But however dry the weather is, it wouldn’t make a whole swimming-pool full of water vanish overnight.’
‘No doubt, there are reasons for that.’ The Baronessa looked terminally bored. She clicked her lighter again uselessly
and then dropped it back into her handbag with a sigh of disgust at all mechanical objects.
‘What sort of reasons?’
‘Please don’t ask me that. When I was a schoolgirl in Siena I learnt Dante and a great deal of Virgil. I regret to say that I took no course in hydraulic engineering.’
Yet you know a good deal about resistance movements and possibly sabotage, Molly thought. At last she said, ‘I can’t understand why a swimming-pool should suddenly empty.’
‘No doubt there are devices, certain mechanisms, to control these things.’ The Baronessa waved a hand, dismissing the tedious subject. ‘If someone turns the wrong wheel or pushes the wrong button, then whoosh! It’s probably like pulling the plug out of your bath water.’ Anxious not to have it thought that she was ever to be found in a swimming-pool engine shed, dressed in a pair of oil-stained overalls and fiddling with the controls, she crossed the room and looked out over the hills towards her castle. ‘Buck was so clever to make this window tall and narrow like an altar panel.’ With a loud slurping Manrico finished his second bowl of water.
‘I had to pay out a huge sum of money to get the water back,’ Molly told her. ‘Mr Kettering will have to be responsible for that.’
‘Who knows what Mr Kettering will be responsible for?’ The Baronessa had been half joking during her tea-time chat and her answers were casual, almost flippant. Now her concentration increased. ‘You have told him this?’
‘No. But I will when I find him.’
‘And you haven’t found him yet?’
‘I shall have to have some of the rent back.’ Molly was determined. ‘I would have asked Mr Fosdyke, but…’
‘That was terrible.’ The Baronessa shuddered. ‘It was the act of a coward.’
‘You mean his suicide?’
The Baronessa didn’t answer and after a silence Molly said, ‘I paid half the rent into your husband’s account at the Banco dell’Annunziazione.’
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