by Jane Arbor
you won’t be going back with them when they go?’ ‘No, but Cesare hopes to arrange an escort for them in their car, and if he can they’ll be quite safe.’ ‘I’m sure of it. And you are still there with them at the Palazzo, yes? What do you think of our home?’
‘It’s lovely. Quite different from any other house I’ve ever lived
in.’
‘And my bad but attractive and brilliant son—how do you regard him?’
Dinah glanced across at Cesare. ‘He is here and listening, signora, so what can I say?’ she replied.
There was a gay laugh at the other end of the line. ‘Which means that you find him all these things and do not want him to know it? Very well. Understood. Though if he is overhearing you, your refusal to reply must already have told him that I had asked what you think of him.’
Feeling trapped by this shrewd reasoning, Dinah hadn’t decided on an answer to it when Cesare strode over, made a gesture at the receiver and took it from her.
‘Cesare again,’ he said. ‘And if you were as king friend Dinah for a report on me, I think I can tell you myself that she considers me opinionated, sometimes obstructive and opportunist to a degree.’ He listened. Then, ‘How well you know me! Yes, I’m afraid I did.’ The line crackled again with talk, to which, after listening to it, he said, ‘Ah, that, Mother dear, must remain my business. So goodnight to you and sweet dreams. Ciao,’ and he replaced the receiver.
Dinah could find nothing to say. Jason protested mildly,’ ‘Did you have to give Aunt Ursula quite such a brush-off? And you could have let Dinah finish.’ And Lesley, glancing from Cesare to Dinah, said, ‘Whatever all that was in aid of, it’s made Dinah blush. And
whatever it was, it sounded madly mysterious, I must say.’
‘Did it? Good. That happened to be the intention,’ said Cesare over his shoulder, already on his way somewhere else.
Left with the twins, Dinah was short with their curiosity. ‘Well, with the person in question present, how do you say what you think of them off the cuff, just li ke that?’ she countered. And how did she know what question Signora Vidal had asked Cesare, to which he had refused her an answer? And of course she hadn’t blushed. Or if she had, it had been with embarrassment at being discussed over the phone like that. Most of which may have sounded more annoyed than convincing, but it was the best she could do.
It was not until the day before the twins were due to travel that Cesare produced a plan which he outlined to them, characteristically assuming that it was acceptable to all concerned.
‘I shall escort you as far as Lausanne,’ he said.
‘Dinah will come too ----------- ’
‘Dinah can? For the ride? Good-ee!’
‘—where we shall stay the night with business colleagues of mine. We shall have broken the journey tomorrow night at Domodossola. After the Lausanne night, you will leave early the next morning in the company of Rupert Brissac, my friend’s son, who is travelling in his own car to England, and you should make it with one, or at most two, stops on the way. I have business in Lausanne which will keep me until about noon, but on the way back I plan to make the break at Milan instead of Domodossola, reaching Venice again on Sunday evening.’
Dinah hadn’t expected to be of the party and said so. Calculating dates, she also reminded Cesare that she had to begin work at Plenair on the Monday morning. To which he promised she would be back on Sunday without fail, adding, ‘I like company on a long trip,’ making that sufficient reason for his in -viting her.
‘And we can go over the top of the Simplon, as we did coming
out?’ Lesley begged.
‘On your way, if you like. Coming back, Dinah and I will use the Tunnel. It’s what it’s there for,’ Cesare said.
Giuseppe took them all in the launch to the car park and Cesare gave him directions as to the approximate time for meeting him and Dinah on Sunday night. Then the convoy, Cesare matching the speed of his car to that of the Mini, took to the autostrada and the long stretch of the Lombardy plain. Whenever they left the cars and joined company for a rest or a meal, the twins were in regretful and reminiscent mood.
‘Wish we were going the other way, instead of heading for home.’
‘D’you remember what happened on that bit of road?’
‘And where we met the bullock cart, and it was too narrow to get by, and the old man wouldn’t budge, and we had to back up for
miles?’
They were all glad of their beds in Domodossola, and they made the summit of the Simplon the next morning.
‘It’s not so far down now to that steep bit where we boiled, and you made us all feel like fools for lifting the bonnet,’ the twins reminded Cesare. ‘Bet if any one had told you then that we were all going to meet again, you would have said rubbish, or words to that effect?’
‘As I felt about you then, I’d more probably have said Heaven forbid,’ he replied drily.
‘But when we showed up on your doorstep, you didn’t turn us out, did you?’ Jason questioned.
‘Though he was quite brutal with Dinah about re fusing to keep us if she wouldn’t stay too,’ added Lesley.
Cesare looked at Dinah, eyebrows crooked up ward. ‘Brutal— was I?’ he asked.
This time she couldn’t deny she was blushing— with chagrin. She looked away. ‘I didn’t tell them so,’ she said.
‘What then?’
‘I don’t remember. Just that—you’d insisted on my staying.’
‘But you thought “brutal”?’ he taunted, seeming to enjoy her discomfiture. But she was saved from having to reply by Jason’s urging of him, ‘Anyway, you’ve taken to us now? You do think we’re all reasonably nice people to know?’
They had left the cars for a view of the far blue mountains on the horizon, but now Cesare returned to his and opened Dinah’s door for her. ‘Let’s say you improve on acquaintance, and none of you has the nuisance value I expected,’ he said.
Both twins seemed to regard this as an honourable amend.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE next morning Dinah was up early enough to see Jason and Lesley away at first light with their new escort. Previously she had wondered aloud to Cesare that, going to England on his father’s busi -ness, Rupert Brissac had not chosen to go by air, and she was struck by Cesare’s bland reply that the young man had ‘obliged’ him by escorting the twins. Evid ently Cesare’s influence ranged far!
The two had gone off reasonably cheerfully, consoled that they had yet more travel to look forward to, and by the prestige they were going to collect from their friends for their having crossed Europe both ways on their own (more or less) in a secondhand Mini far past its first youth.
Dinah had sent presents to her parents by them— fine Italian kid gloves for her mother and bedroom slippers for her father—and she had flowers sent to Madame Brissac from a florist’s before keeping her noon appointment with Cesare at the Lausanne Palace Hotel.
She was early for it; he was rather late and suggested they were on their way at once, stopping for luncheon somewhere on the way.
The road ran for some way by the lakeside, past Vevey and Montreux, where they lunched, and Chillon with its grim water-girt castle. Then it began to climb, almost imperceptibly at first, as it took to the foothills and then the heights. The big car did not labour as the Mini had done. It sped along the rare levels and swung smoothly round hairpin bends, Cesare calculating that in four hours they would reach Simplon, and once through the Tunnel by train, they should arrive in Milan by ten o’clock.
Dinah relaxed, content with the length of a journey for which, unlike her outward one with the twins, she had no responsibility. Instead she told herself she must enjoy every minute of what would probably be her last long hours in Cesare’s company, listening, talking, today not at odds with him over anything, and hoping she was proving the undemanding companion he claimed he needed on a long trip. In saying so, his tone had implied that anyone would serve his purpose
. But he had chosen her, and he needn't have done, and the beginnings of love could extract pleasure from that.
She remembered too late that she had resolved she
Between dealing with clients and inquiries and the
She remembered too late that she had resolved she mustn't admit to loving him—if by love she meant the quiet delight of speaking his name, seeing him come towards her, hearing his voice and of thrilling to the merest impersonal touch of hand or contact of body. But for these few hours with him she indulged herself a little. He had somehow made himself the most important person in her life. But on Monday, after her day's work, she would be packing and leaving the Palazzo d'Orio for good. End of an interlude. End of an empty dream.
After Monday the problem of Trevor would claim her again. And here her dilemma was really twin-homed. After deciding to leave Etta a free field with him, later she had claimed to Cesare that she and Trevor were close, and had thought that a way of defending herself from Cesare’s flirtatious overtures would be to appear to cultivate Trevor more, not less.
But she couldn’t have it both ways! Either to see less of Trevor for Etta’s sake, or to see more of him to show Cesare she wasn’t footloose and fair game — which? But at the moment of thinking the question she suddenly realised how little any of it was going to matter to Cesare. After Monday she could see as much or as little of Trevor as she pleased, and Cesare wouldn’t know, wouldn’t realise he was being ‘shown’ anything at all.
Once or twice, on the road up to the Simplon, he stopped the car to enable her to enjoy a particularly dramatic view. At one such point at a road bend, a single cottage was perched, and from it an old woman in black had taken her chair across the road the better to look down across the great V of the valley, while she knitted busily, her eyes not on her work, but in long, absent-gazed focus on the view.
They did not disturb her by speaking to her, and when they left she was still gazing and knitting, seemingly unaware that anyone had been there.
Dinah shivered slightly. ‘What a lonely pla ce to live! How do you suppose she does?’
Cesare said, ‘There’s probably a little hill-pasture behind the house where it’s possible to keep a goat and perhaps grow a few hardy vegetables and some maize for flour. Or she may have a grown son who
can fetch supplies on mule-back or by mule cart from Brigue, which would be their nearest township.’
‘But imagine the winters up here! What would she do, all the length of them?’
Cesare laughed shortly. ‘She lights her lamp, draws up her chair to the fire and goes on knitting, I daresay.’
‘No more of a life than that?’ Dinah said pityingly.
‘You don’t know that she hasn’t had more of a life than that. She may have sailed the seven seas with her sailor husband. Or danced the can-can in a go-go troupe. Or nursed soldiers in some wars. She was as young as you once, remember. And when she looked so absorbed just now, she may have been remembering. There’s a poem about old women like her by Ronsard, the French poet. It begins, “Quand tu seras bien vieille, le soir, a la chart delle. ”
Dinah nodded. ‘I know it. The Irish poet, Yeats,
made a fairly free translation of it ---------------
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep.
And nodding by the fire.............”’
‘And does he tell her to remember, as Ronsard did, that she was beautiful when she was young?’
‘Yes.’
‘And loved?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
Dinah thought. She said hesitantly, ‘Something like—“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you;
and loved the shadows ..is that it? ... “of your changing face.”’
There was a small silence. Then Cesare said, ‘W ell, there you are. It’ll come to all of you in time.’
‘Being old, you mean?’
‘And being able to remember having been loved by someone.’
Not looking at him, she said, ‘Is that going to help, if the loving hadn’t been a mutual thing?’
‘If the man in questio n had left you unmoved? In that case, you won’t waste daydreams on him years later, I imagine. You’re only going to be nostalgic about the one—or ones—who did turn you on, or whatever the jargon for it will be in those days.’
‘You make it sound as if we could all count our admirers by computer! For most of us it isn’t so, I assure you.’
‘Though most of you would have us believe it for discipline’s sake,’ he retorted. ‘Pay any one of you an unwelcome attention, or give her the idea she is being rejected, and she can usually call up a battalion of reserve suitors to her aid.’
‘And that’s your experience, is it—that we play one man against another in self-defence?’
He nodded. ‘In a general way, that’s my experience, yes,’ he agreed.
‘A very wide one, no doubt?’ Dinah couldn’t resist the barb.
He turned to look at her briefly. ‘Wide enough,’ he said. ‘Wide enough’—and because she guessed he was reminding her of how
she had quoted at him her
own commitment to Trevor Land, she found herself with no riposte to make.
He had said he liked to win, and he had won again.
Half an hour or so later they reached the terminus of the Tunnel, only to find they had missed a train and there was a long wait for the next. Cesare debated times and distances, and finally decided to drive on over the pass by the same route as they had travelled on the outward journey the previous day.
‘Once over the other side, I can reduce our time by taking a short cut to the north of Locarno, and it should make very little difference, if any, to our arrival in Milan,’ he claimed.
But there was delay waiting for them. Not far from the point where Cesare had come to the aid of the Mini, an elderly couple were having trouble with their car. They explained to Cesare, when he asked what was wrong, that they had stopped for a picnic meal and when they wanted to go on, the engine had failed to respond.
The driver, hot and harassed, agreed that the cause was probably a flat battery and gratefully accepted Cesare’s offer to connect leads and try to charge it from his own engine. But with little result from this move, Cesare decided at last that he must give the other car a tow to the summit where the driver could telephone for garage help and, if necessary, he and his wife could spent the night at the Hospice.
The journey, though not very long, was hazardous and slow, involving much skilled manoeuvring of both cars on the gradients and bends of the road, and Cesare and Dinah had been delayed by nearly two hours before Cesare had completed his Samaritan act and they were on their own way again.
By now it was dusk and there were still several hours’ travelling before them. But Cesare claimed he could cut a fair amount from their time by taking the by-road through the lower mountain slopes which he had mentioned t o Dinah earlier. ‘We shall strike the main road again at Como; from there it will be all autostrada, and we shall
have saved two sides of a triangle,’ he said.
The road was narrow, and Dinah was glad that she and the twins had not had to negotiate anything like it. Here and there along it were one or two hamlets and one slightly larger township which looked, from its deserted streets and shuttered houses, as if it had already folded itself down for the night. After that the road became no more than a shelf along the mountainside, bordered by towering rock on one side and deep ravines on the other. The night was overcast, fully dark before its time. Appearing like slanting steel rods in the light of the headlamps, rain began to fall, blurring the windscreen and making a morass of the pitted road surface.
The going became rougher; the car rocked and bumped from one pothole to the next; Cesare mut tered, ‘Sorry about this. I haven’t been this way since last summer, when it wasn’t so ’
He broke off sharply as something that was not rain hurtled into the range of the headlights and crashed, sp
lashing, into the puddles. It was a hail of stone; fragments ricocheted onto the car roof to spin away into the ravine; the hail became thicker, more continuous, and then, as Cesare reached for the handbrake too late, on the bonnet of the car there was a thunder from which Dinah instinctively covered her ears and shrank back, her eyes closed.
She opened them a second later; guessed at the boulder which must have followed the hail, and felt a stab of fear for Cesare, already out of the car, investigating. She slid across into his seat and he spoke to her through the open door, indicating the crumpled metal of the bonnet behind the radiator cap.
‘Rock-fall,’ he said. ‘There sh ould have been warnings out. The radiator may be cracked, but we’ve got to get away from here fast. And back. There may be worse to come further on, and we can’t risk it.’
Taking his seat again, his glance at Dinah and his hand on her shaking knees was so licitous. ‘You didn’t scream,’ he said, stating the fact. ‘Did you see the size of the thing which hit us?’
She smiled tremulously. ‘I only heard it. I’d shut my eyes,’ she
said.
‘We can count ourselves lucky we weren’t a metre or so forward.’ Leaving the consequences of that chance to her imagination, he went on, ‘Now you had better close your eyes again, for turning on this width of road is going to be tricky.’
But his skill managed it in a single three-point turn. As he drove back by the way they had come, Dinah knew he was watching the instrument panel closely.
She watched it too, and was prepared for his pro nouncement, ‘The engine is overheating badly. That means no Milan tonight. We can't afford to go any farther than that last place we came through. Frijon. Did you notice if it had a garage? ’
Dinah remembered there had been one. ‘But it wa s closed.’
‘Then we shall have to knock it up, and also find ourselves a couple of beds for the night.’
A little way short of the village he stopped the car, got out and went to the roadside to lift an object which the headlights had picked out. It was a signboard, fallen face downward, which read in French and Italian, ‘Caution. Danger. Rock-falls ahead. No through road.’ Cesare propped it up, secured its base with stones and returned to the car. ‘That should keep the next fellow from being too clever, as I was,’ he remarked.