Summer's Lease

by John Mortimer

  Then she moved towards the battle in which the Emperor of the East savagely punished the King of Persia for setting a cock at his left hand and calling it the Holy Ghost, a painting which Vasari had described as an ‘almost incredible scene of wounded and fallen dead’. Molly was staring at a man on his knees. Over him stood an assailant with a white helmet the shape of a coolie’s hat and of a peculiarly Mongolian cast of countenance. The kneeling man, sturdy with hooded eyes, resigned but holding his defenceless hand out against the sword, made her think, as she did always now, of Buck Kettering. It was a face she was to find often in the pictures she saw that day.

  ‘Things they are always on the look-out for in the Consular Service are chaps who go “bush”. Got to like the country where they’re posted better than their own. Can be a ghastly embarrassment in spots like Tahiti or Fiji. Get a whole intake of perfectly straightforward chaps from the U.K. and they start going round wearing long cotton skirts or sticking hibiscus flowers behind their ears. Fellow I know went bush in Riyadh and beheaded his wife. It’s so darn easy to do. I have to admit I went bush in Florence.’

  ‘Not ten o’clock yet, and we’ve done Arezzo.’ They were drinking cappuccinos under an umbrella outside the San Francesca church and Connie Tapscott looked at her watch with deep satisfaction. ‘It won’t take us long to knock off the pregnant Madonna.’

  ‘It all got to me. Pictures. Churches. Driving down the Arno in the early morning. Well, they called me back to the U.K. and they said, “Look here, Tapscott. We hear you’re going bush in Florence. Only one thing for it. We’re going to transfer you to Toronto.” “Bugger that for a lark!” I said. So I took early retirement.’

  ‘We both decided,’ Connie Tapscott told Molly, ‘to devote our lives to Art.’

  ‘I’ve got to respect old Piero,’ Nicholas said, ‘because he could do it, and I can’t. Although I very much doubt if he could hold down a job in the Consular Service.’

  ‘He went blind,’ Molly said.

  ‘Well, there you are then. Whoever heard of a blind Consul? Come on, girls. Let’s get our skates on.’

  In the minute chapel at Monterchi, in a field off the main road, there is only one painting on the wall behind the altar. Two angels hold back curtains to reveal a young woman with heavy eyelids, unsmiling, solid and beautiful. She is so far gone in pregnancy that her dress, of the same blue as the sky, will not fasten. One hand is on her hip and with the other she touches her swollen stomach with delicate fingers. The picture is brown, pale pink, blue and green — the colours of the earth, the sky and the olive trees. Molly stood in front of it, elated by the excitement of her mission. The memory of her last pregnancy, when she was carrying Jacqueline, flooded back to her; the feeling of strength and purpose which she hadn’t known again until she set out on the trail to find Buck Kettering.

  ‘I think Nicholas is keen to hit the road,’ Connie Tapscott sidled up to her and whispered. ‘I know he wants to get to Sansepolcro before there’s any risk of them closing “The Resurrection”.’

  ‘All right, girls. Had enough of the preggy lady? And shall we be pushing on?’

  They pushed on at a great rate, past tobacco fields, through an industrial zone, and roared through narrow streets to come to a halt with a screaming of brakes in front of the Palazzo Comunale in Sansepolcro. Nicholas Tapscott bought the entrance tickets and took them at a brisk walk that seemed about to break into a loping trot, past lesser paintings and straight to ‘The Resurrection’. There, he said with the complacency of a conjuror producing the flags of all the nations from a wine glass: ‘Now you can see what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘What fuss, Nicholas?’ Connie gave him the feedline.

  ‘All the trouble that girl had, back in the chapel at Monterchi.’

  It was the trouble, which Molly had never had, of producing a man. And the man in question, with eyes that could never be forgotten, had one heavy, naked foot planted firmly on the edge of the grave from which he emerged strongly, solemnly, holding a banner. And behind him, of course, were the hills of Tuscany, pale and waterless with white trees, a castle and few clouds, pink with the dawn in the sky.

  ‘That geezer,’ Nicholas Tapscott said, pointing to one of the sleeping soldiers in front of the tomb, ‘has got no blooming legs! I mean, look at him. He’s anatomically impossible. Piero got away with it. But if I’d made a similar sort of nonsense in my job, I’d’ve been drummed out of the Consular Service. Rum do, isn’t it, Art?’

  ‘That’s what Nicholas and I feel about Art,’ his wife said.

  ‘We never seem to quite get the hang of the rules.’

  ‘Do pay your whack, Mrs Pargeter. If that would make you feel better?’

  ‘Nicholas and I discussed it last night,’ Connie said, ‘and we thought you’d rather we went Dutch on this spree.’

  ‘Spoils the party, doesn’t it, if you feel under any sort of obligation?’

  Molly quite agreed and said that was exactly what she had expected. They were having lunch in a somewhat dark hotel, decorated with pictures of pale, bloodstained saints and the sullen heads of wild boars. Nicholas ordered large plates of pasta, slowly followed by unidentifiable chops disguised in thick tomato sauce. ‘Always stoke up well,’ he advised Molly, ‘when you’re out. Grey Tart calls for stamina.’ She thought he was describing some particularly lugubrious pudding but then he said, ‘Great visual Art calls for stamina,’ and she knew that she had misheard him. ‘Once knew a chap who tried to do the Uffizi on a ham sandwich. Fainted dead away in front of the Botticellis. That’s not the way to do Grey Tart. Now we’ve got to get you to “The Flagellation” before the Ducal Palace shuts.’

  ‘The point is’ — Connie tucked into the large ice-cream she and her husband later ordered ‘come dolce’ and Molly wondered why with such an intake of Art and sustaining lunches, the Tapscotts remained so stringy — ‘what sort of place would you like for dinner in Urbino?’

  ‘I know where you can get fish. And boiled potatoes. Get a lot of stamina out of a boiled potato,’ Nicholas told her.

  ‘I’d rather like to wander round a little by myself this evening.’ Molly was firm.

  ‘Well, yes, of course. We’d respect your privacy.’

  ‘I’ll write down the name of this fish place. If you’d like to go there on your own?’

  ‘I hope you don’t think I’m being rude.’

  ‘Course not. That was one lesson you had to learn in the Consular Service. If people come to you, you do your level best to help them. But if they don’t come, for heaven’s sake don’t pry. People can get very funny, you know, if you start prying into their business. They seem to resent it much more here than they do in the U.K. It must be the hot weather.’

  ‘It’s sometimes irresistible, isn’t it, Mrs Pargeter, to pry just a little? Other people’s lives do seem so terribly interesting.’ Connie smiled at her in a way Molly found suggestive.

  ‘My wife is of a more prying disposition’ — the ex-consul dug his spoon into his ice-cream — ‘because her mother was a continental. On the whole, U.K. citizens don’t pry.’

  After Sansepolcro they drove out of Tuscany and into Umbria. The road snaked to a dizzy height and Molly saw, marked on the map she was holding, ALPEDELLALUNA — the Mountains of the Moon, as Buck Kettering called it. Her guide drove the heavy car with considerable élan and, no doubt strengthened by his ample lunch, he hurled it into the hairpin bends and wrenched it away from the ever-approaching precipice. ‘Nicholas got his training in tanks,’ Connie shouted back at their passenger. So they drove through the high pass between Umbria and the Marche and down the valley towards Sant’Angelo in Vado, through a new sort of country whose signposts pointed up towards ski-lifts and the scattered houses looked like Swiss chalets. It all seemed far from the gentle hills around ‘La Felicità’. Then they were out of the mountains and driving towards the sea, across a plain that seemed endless. Molly’s faith in her mission began to drain away. Buck may hav
e met Rosie Fortinbras in Urbino but why should he have stayed to await her arrival? And if she ever reached him what, after all, could she say except, ‘I have come from your house to tell you that I now know what happened.’ Had she, Molly began to wonder, entirely exaggerated the importance of the truth? Now she had it, what, after all, was she to do with it?

  With one hand on his hip, almost in the same attitude as the pregnant Madonna, the young Lord of Urbino stands, barefoot and serene, between two evil counsellors. What are they plotting, discussing, arguing about? What terrible and irrevocable decisions they may have come to, no one can tell. What is certain is that they are far too involved in their own concerns to notice the act of cruelty which is casually, almost elegantly, taking place at the remote end of the building. Christ is standing, an impassive, white figure against a white column. The arms of the flagellators are raised gracefully. Pontius Pilate in a hat with a long peak is watching with detachment. It was the picture Molly had in her mind all the holiday and the one that she had come so far to see. All the books she had read told her that its importance lay in its effect on what the architecture of the Ducal Palace was going to be, on the perfect balance of its forms and its special harmony. Molly was interested, far more interested, in the mysterious involvement of groups of people in their own awful concerns. They can be together, she thought, by the same walls, on the same floor and know nothing of each other’s lives. They can commit terrible acts quietly, casually, at the other end of a room and nobody seems to notice. Of the things she felt she had to do that day, looking at the picture was the most exciting and the most alarming. She shivered a little as she stood before it, and the Tapscotts hurried away to ‘knock off the Raphaels, before the place closes’. She stood on alone, in front of the picture, half expecting Buck Kettering to step out of the shadows and explain it to her. She stood for a long time but nobody came and she decided to go on to the final stage of her journey.

  The Palace built by Federico di Montefeltro at Urbino — a house the size of a city which shines like marble — made Molly, as she walked down its wide, shallow staircase and round the peaceful courtyard, feel almost regal. Something of the ham actor in her father came out in her and she felt well qualified to command servants and detect conspirators. She came out into the hard afternoon sunset and her servants, the Tapscotts, were standing by their car, the long day’s Art done and already thinking of dinner.

  ‘Stunning pictures,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘Are they? I only saw one.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Pargeter. That’s your privilege. On this trip, we want you to do absolutely your own thing.’

  They had chosen a characterless hotel by the station. Their rooms adjoined and Molly could hear the indistinguishable bark and murmur of Tapscott conversation as she dialled ‘La Felicità’.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ Henrietta said. ‘Having a good time?’

  ‘Oh yes. We’ve seen most of the Pieros.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Henrietta said, without envy.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Absolutely. Gamps has been invited to dinner and to stay the night tomorrow with Mrs Leadbetter. We think it’s absolutely disgusting. And we’ve got a surprise for you when you get back.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a surprise if we told you that. Do you want to speak to Dad?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, goodbye, Mum.’

  ‘I love you.’ Molly didn’t say that sort of thing often. She put down the telephone. Then she left the hotel and didn’t let the Tapscotts know where she was going.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  After such a long time of waiting and speculation, Molly was in no great hurry to end her mission in failure or success. She had looked up the Motel Vallombrosa in the phone book in her hotel bedroom and, picking up a plan of the city from the concierge, decided to walk through the streets to her destination on the road out to Rimini. So she entered the walls under a grey sky, with a wind shaking the dry tops of the cypress trees, and the sound of thunder trundling around the countryside. She walked, climbed steps and made her way, her plan in her hand to guide her, down narrow passages, between dark buildings from which came the sounds of blaring television sets, dogs barking and family quarrels.

  She emerged into a square blazing with lights, with cars hooting their slow way through thick crowds of wandering sightseers. Café tables under tall arches were filled, policemen were blowing whistles, and standing in front of a tobacconist’s she saw the Tapscotts choosing postcards. She turned down a narrow side street and walked for a while past dustbins and the backs of restaurants. Then she climbed more steps, and walked down more dark streets, in one of which she surprised a girl who seemed to be younger than Henrietta kissing passionately and hurried on. She walked in bravely through the bead curtain of a bar and ordered a glass of white wine.

  The uncertainties she had felt, the fear of failure, the illogical disappointment at not finding Buck Kettering in the Ducal Palace, had given way now to a quiet confidence in her mission. She stood at the zinc bar and drank the wine as though she had always been used to travelling alone. Then she paid, said buona sera, and went on her way.

  She was half way across the town when she emerged into the Piazza Duca Federico, in front of the palace built by a man who would fight for whoever paid him, who took many prisoners for the sake of ransom and killed comparatively few. On one side of the square there was a café, where a crowd who looked like English and American students doing holiday courses on the history of art sat, and she saw the Tapscotts again, looking for an empty table. She retreated into the dark streets once more.

  Leaving the walls again she walked through a dusty belt of trees and out on to the Via Giuseppe di Vittorio. Cars behind flashed their lights and accelerated past. She walked on undeterred. In about half a mile she was rewarded. A headlight momentarily illuminated a board on which a busty woman and a muscular man were depicted sitting beside a swimmingpool in front of an apparently palatial building, MOTEL VALLOMBROSA… she read; the other letters had unaccountably faded: a 500 METRI. In due course she found a gap in a scrawny hedge and was walking down an unweeded gravel drive towards the address on her book of matches. Then she came to a brackish pool in which floated a Coca-Cola bottle and a sheet of newspaper blown there by the wind. Beside it were a couple of rusty chairs and behind it a desolate erection in cracked concrete. Half a dozen cars with foreign numberplates were parked on the gravel.

  The reception area of the Motel Vallombrosa was no more cheerful. There was a bar with three stools covered in torn plastic leopard-skin lined up in front of the espresso machine, and a few bottles and some dolls dressed as Italian peasants. A couple of plants wilted, the dry earth in their pots fertilized with cigarette ends; there was a bench covered in black plastic, also torn, and a coffee table on which the copies of Oggi and Cronaca Vera were yellowing with age. Molly went up to the reception desk which was attended, at that moment, by no one at all.

  Behind the counter hung a calendar, not torn off for two months, showing a discontented girl wearing a black suspender belt and sitting on a motor car tyre. There were two rows of hooks, most of which had keys hanging from them, and a framed picture of the Virgin Mary on a cloud. On the counter against which Molly leant was the top of a tin of sweets filled with cigarette ends and an announcement that the establishment took American Express. What it didn’t seem particularly keen to take were customers. She stood and heard nothing but the wind stirring the branches outside and the distant sound of traffic. The storm had moved away, it seemed, to water other and more fortunate areas.

  Then Molly looked down at the desk behind the counter. There was an old cash-book, a couple of biro pens, a German passport and a pocket calculator. Then she saw a list, she supposed of room numbers, some of which had names beside them. With no one to observe her she picked it up and started to read the names, KOENIG was the only K, and there was no sign of Kettering. Then she
went through it again and saw, opposite 31 and written in faded biro, perhaps long before the other entries, T.B. ARNOLD. Her reaction was immediate. She moved behind the desk, took key 31 off the hook and went quickly through a glass door and up a concrete staircase. She was no longer speculating but felt certain that Buck Kettering was using, for whatever reason in this unlikely retreat, his first initials, and the name of his benefactor, Arnold Leadbetter. She went down an uncarpeted corridor and, without bothering to see if she had been noticed, unlocked the flimsy, plywood door of room number 31.

  The place, she saw when she switched on the single, unshaded overhead light, was as unwelcoming as a prison cell and as austere as quarters in a monastery. The three-quarter-sized bed had no pillow. The shower behind a torn curtain ran directly into a hole in the ground. In the cupboard she found three shirts and a pair of linen trousers hanging on wire hangers, and a locked suitcase, the most expensive-looking article in the room. Beside the bed was a book fit to take its place on the shelves in ‘La Felicità’: an illustrated copy of the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini. And leaning up against the mirror on the dressing-table, beside a half-empty bottle of Italian brandy, was a picture postcard which relieved Molly of further doubts. It was ‘La Flagellazione’ from the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. She looked in the drawers of this rickety piece of furniture and found nothing but underwear, socks, some neatly folded handkerchiefs and an insect spray. She sat on an upright chair facing the door and waited.