“You gave it to Anthea in the expectation that she would derive pleasure from it?”
“I did what I judged to be my duty.”
“Your duty, Chipchase?”
“Certainly. It is only right that these young people should face the facts.”
“Facts?”
“The possibilities, if you prefer the term. Rupert Poyle’s account of things is most amusing – and charitable.”
“Charitable?”
“That is certainly the word. For isn’t there a less fantastic – but by no means less discreditable – reason why the useful Mr Wendell Dauncey should suddenly find himself married to the girl Mark Lambert had been stalking?”
During a moment of expressive silence Miss Bave picked up her bag and made a sign to her attendant porter. “I am afraid my train is waiting. And indeed I must not detain you. No doubt you are going to the Brera, where you will find another Piero della Francesca. The saints and angels are rather wooden, and even the Madonna is not as striking as the one you missed at Monterchi. But it remains a work of exalted feeling to which you will certainly respond at once.”
Miss Bave picked up her stick – a tiresome object to which she had lately been obliged to reconcile herself – and with a nod to the Sub-Dean went on her way.
FIVE
On the northern outskirts of Fiesole there is a small restaurant with a large view. The giardino – which is in fact an arbour of mingled rose and vine – perches deliciously above a tumble of dark red roofs and innocently exposed domestic privacies; and these in turn overlook the boldly sculptured valley of the Mugnone, with wooded hills beyond, and in the farthest distance a stupendous cemetery just peeping into view. In Tuscany mere geology everywhere evinces a plastic intention, and man has only to add here and there the last touches of art. The cemetery is one of these. Sitting in the giardino with his wine before him, the wayfarer may set his imagination roaming through its acres of monumental atrocity, and so gain a memento mori sufficiently sharp to give savour to his feast.
Here, lightly screened from the warmth of the early afternoon, Anthea Lambert and Garth Dauncey sat at luncheon. Their companions were an enormous waiter, an enormous cat, and a little old man playing a guitar. For some minutes Anthea had been gazing far down the valley, and it was perhaps with simple distance that her eyes were swimming when she presently turned them gravely upon the young man. Then her lips parted – for the purpose, it would have been conjectured, of some utterance too intimate for chronicle. “Is it possible,” Anthea asked, “that we can have eaten that whole steak?”
“Every pound of it – barring a square inch that went to Sandro.” Garth stretched out a lazily luxurious arm to stroke the tawny creature as it slumbered on the stone balustrade beside them. “Every pound, honey – and a litre of chianti as well. And when we’ve had a peach and a cup of coffee we shall get straight to our feet and walk for miles and miles and miles. Middle-aged folk, too. It must be the air.”
“It must certainly be the air.” Anthea, conceivably because of her scientific training, took a deep breath. The test proved satisfactory, for it was with an effect of considerable contentment that she breathed it out again. “The air does a lot.”
“The whole job.” Garth uttered this with sober awe. “Or say the Florentine light and the Fiesolan air together. They’ve done us proud.”
“The whole job?” Anthea, skinning her peach, took up the phrase in challenge. “Isn’t that, in a sense, what, so far, we’ve rather notably failed of?”
Garth laughed. He was always delighted when she faintly mocked the cadences of Mark Lambert’s ladies. “I’ve a dim memory of what you mean. Indeed I’m still, I assure you, the literary pilgrim at heart.” He raised his arm and pointed past Sandro’s whiskers to the valley beneath them. “Do you know who once walked there – and met whom? Can you stand an examination on it?”
“Martin Alleyne – and he met the Principessa, driving down to call on some battered old noble family in the city. But there are no princesses in the lanes of Tuscany now.”
“None at all.” Garth was emphatic. They looked at each other in silent amusement. The little old man with the guitar judged the moment favourable, and advanced in dignified mendicancy. He received five hundred lire – Garth had all his countrymen’s incurable vagueness about foreign currencies – and at once struck up the Blue Danube. His discernment having failed him, he had concluded his patrons to be Tedesci. Indeed he had feared that they might prove Tedescume, and was delighted to find them so decidedly Tedescotti instead. But the young people, unaware of these accuracies of Latin discrimination before the nation of Goethe and Hitler, heard the music with satisfaction. Strauss must have composed it, after all, not without some thought to persons in their condition. Only when it had ended did Garth say, “It’s true that we haven’t dug up a lot.”
“I feel I’ve been feeble with my brother. There’s no doubt in my mind that he believes the missing novel to exist or to have existed, and that he even knows its title as well as we do. But Raymond is evasive – and of course one can’t establish with him the common ground of any serious interest or intention. I have an odd feeling, by the way, that he is conscious of having done something rather foolish – something he’s now uneasy about.”
“From what I’ve seen of him, I’d guess that’s likely enough.” Garth stirred his coffee. “But you don’t suppose he knows anything about my father’s whereabouts?”
“I think he’s uneasy about him too. But I’m almost sure he has no notion of where we might find him.”
“There’s nothing surprising in that – or in the failure of our own efforts to run him to earth. My father has the habit of vanishing. It may be into another part of Italy, or it may be inside Florence itself. He may of course be ill, but my guess is that one day soon I shall just walk into him. I wish you were in a position to recognise him if you saw him. It would increase the chances.”
Anthea shook her head. “I’m certainly not that. But, do you know, I believe I’ve discovered another memory of him? It has to do with a painting again. Somebody taking me by the hand into a small dim place, and a light being turned on – and there in front of me was an iceberg.”
“An iceberg?”
“Yes – but with palms and orange trees sprouting from it, and behind it a landscape of little Tuscan towns, and winding through it a train of camels and horses and all the most gorgeous people in the world.”
“Gozzoli’s Magi.”
“It must have been. And my guide – whom I can’t remotely see – told me a story. I don’t think it had anything to do with the story in the Bible. But it was long – as long as that wonderful procession itself – and I thought it more beautiful than anything I had ever heard. It’s a dim memory, but I’m surprised to have recovered the first trace of it only the other day.”
“It fits in with the little men in the Uffizi. My father must have made quite a thing of getting you around. He must certainly be at our wedding.”
“So he must.” Anthea looked out over the landscape again in what might have been momentary hesitation. “And that reminds me – you’ve never told me anything about your mother. I know she died when you were a baby. But what do you know about her?”
“I know her family name – quite a famous one in Italian history, although her branch of it was in a thoroughly ruined state. Her father – he was a prince, by the way, and would probably have gone well enough into a Mark Lambert novel – her father married a promising American lady, who turned out in some mysterious fashion not to have a nickel after all. He was so chagrined that he just lay down and died. And that’s about all I know.”
“Shall we do some research there too?”
Garth shook his head. “Haven’t we enough on our hands? And I guess my mother’s history wouldn’t help with Mark Lambert. On the other hand, if you’d like the noble families of Italy at that wedding, I dare say it might be a way of rustling them up. For I must be a sort of gr
eat nephew, oddly enough, to the whole lot of them.”
“I’m not sure that you don’t carry a lick of it about with you.”
“Is that a compliment?” Garth beckoned the enormous waiter. “I should add that I’m a lineal descendant of Charlemagne.”
“So am I, if it comes to that.”
“You?” Garth was largely scornful. “A mere barbarian? Stuff and nonsense.”
“I doubt whether there’s a soul in Western Europe who isn’t descended from Charlemagne – and from every single one of Charlemagne’s contemporaries as well. Mere arithmetic will tell you so.”
Garth laughed. “How many pounds to a turbo-prop? But I’ll allow you your arithmetic. It’s swell to feel that we’re kind of related.” He paused frowning. “Say! It looks to me you’d better check on the arithmetic of this bill.”
Anthea checked – and then, under some surveillance, let Garth pay. In the tumble of houses below them everybody and everything seemed to have gone to sleep, and in the valley beyond she could see nothing stirring. As they waited for change she leant forward and stroked Sandro, and the great tawny creature responded by purring like a powerful and smoothly-running machine. The sound brought home to her suddenly how far she had travelled from that lab which had seemed her only reliable refuge from Mark Lambert’s centenary. “Garth,” she asked, “don’t you possess anything of your mother’s? It seems strange.”
“Nothing at all – except a diary she kept as a girl, when on a visit to Spain. I’ve possessed that ever since I can remember. How it came to me, Won’t at all know. There’s decidedly nothing out of the way in it. But I’m glad to have it, all the same.”
They rose to go. Climbing the steps that led up from the giardino, Anthea became aware that her lover was no longer just behind her. She turned to look, and saw that he had paused to thank the guitarist for his music. The elder Dauncey, she reflected, might have done that, for artists can acknowledge each other over considerable gulfs. But she suspected that she was glimpsing something that came to Garth from his mother’s father’s side. She watched, fascinated. Garth’s manner was egalitarian, and spoke perhaps of Texas. His instinct was aristocratic, and surely stemmed from the nobleman who had so incompetently married the lady without a nickel. And then she realised that her own fascination had in it something hereditary too. It was just such scraps of observation that the author of The Cosmopolitans had so often found seminal long ago.
They walked as far as Santa Margherita a Saletta and then, turning back, took the path that curves round the ridge to Settignano. The air was dry, aromatic, very still; they looked down through cypress and ilex and oak upon the small scattered poderi, asleep in sun-soaked glades. Nothing moved. Even the olives, brown-skinned savages writhing helplessly each within a silver cloud of stinging insects, had been frozen as they pranced and flailed. Here and there a thin column of smoke rose like a pencil-stroke scored perpendicularly on the blue of the sky; bonfires of vine-shoots, Anthea said, that were suspected of some blight. These woods and terraced valleys had been her playground, and she moved confidently from minor landmark to minor landmark. Her ability to predict, round this or that corner, the small topographical facts of the place gave them both extraordinary pleasure.
They walked close together, murmuring. They parted on individual explorations, disputing paths and venturing small scrambles, so that the woods rang with their voices raised in summons or challenge or triumph. They passed an old man carrying a scythe and an umbrella, and the fact that this was a combination which neither of them had ever observed before or might ever observe again struck them as a circumstance both delightful in itself and of a profound philosophical significance. They found a point from which they looked sharply down upon a small green level littered with enormous pumpkins interspersed with gigantic wilted sunflowers. It was like a fantastic croquet green. They persuaded themselves that with concentration it was possible to conduct a game by a species of remote control, and for some time they argued over an imaginary whacking of pumpkins through sunflower-hoops.
Because they had found something inviolable, and knew it, their talk was interspersed with long silences. In one of these they were moving with all the soundlessness of a dream – for here there was a carpet of pine needles underfoot – when Garth pointed ahead. “What gates are those?” he asked. “And there’s a kind of barn.”
Anthea rapidly took her bearings. “It’s the drive going up to the Castello di Poggio. What you call a barn is a chapel. And it’s important.”
“Important?” Garth knew at once that it was not any matter of archaeological or artistic significance that was in question. “Can we look?”
“Yes – let’s go. For one thing—don’t you remember?—my father wanted to be buried here.”
“I remember. It’s the place he walked to that day – when he thought he was recovering from his illness.”
Anthea nodded. “No spot more inviolate, more likely to grant a peaceful sleeping.”
“Yes. And he wrote too that there could be no spot less susceptible of other than the gentlest touches from the hand of time.”
Anthea stopped to look at her lover. Suddenly she kissed him. “I like his having written that,” she said. “And I like your remembering.”
“You used to come too?”
“Yes – alone. When I was being religious – very privately religious – I used to come up here and say my prayers.” She paused. “I think I could do it again.”
They had left the path and were approaching the chapel. She had given him her hand. She was coming back to something full of significance and was taking him along. Mysteriously, he had a place now even in her childhood, and he felt the large simple wonder of it almost to a point of pain. He sought to safeguard the moment with a question deliberately prosaic. “Anything much inside?”
“Don’t you remember that too?”
He thought for a second. “An unremarkable Madonna.”
“There’s just that. For a time she was very remarkable to me.”
It was an undistinguished oblong building, still partly obscured from them by trees. The quiet of the place was such that they found themselves treading softly even on the soft carpet beneath them, and speaking in lowered voices. “Does it seem to have grown smaller?” Garth asked.
“Much smaller.” She looked at her lover as if he had achieved a profound perception, and then laughed at her own absurdity.
“It would do for a hermit – for one of the little hermits in the Uffizi. I believe one of them may come out at any moment, for a chat with a lion or a ride on a leopard or to teach a bear tricks.”
“Or to ring a bell for his dinner?” Garth halted suddenly. “He was wrong.”
“The hermit?”
“Your father, I’m afraid. He wouldn’t have had an undisturbed time of it at all. The roof’s gone. Bombed.”
It was true. They passed through doors that still swung on their hinges and found themselves in an empty and desecrated shell. For a moment Anthea looked about her unbelievingly. “Yes,” she said slowly. “There was fighting in the hills, I know. It must have been used as a strong-point, and a plane was sent in to wipe it out . . . I never hated an aeroplane before.”
Garth said nothing. They moved together across a broken floor littered with rubble and dead leaves. Anthea paused and pointed. “The unremarkable Madonna.”
Garth looked at the abandoned altar. The remains of some small dead creature lay on it. Perhaps it had perished there. More probably its carcass had been so disposed by an enlightened contemner of pretismo. Beyond, the wall showed a single vivid patch of blue, answering the sky that was now the only vault above them. The patch represented a robe – and this, used as a guide, presently made possible the tracing out of an almost obliterated fresco of the Virgin and St Anne. Across it had been scrawled in black paint a political exhortation: Donne! Per Vavvenire de vostrifigli votate Partito Comunista.
“Industrious folk,” Garth said – and
his tone was carefully neutral. “I can’t believe that many donne come in. And oughtn’t it to be Comunisto?”
For a moment Anthea was silent, so that he supposed she had not heard. Then she pointed to a wall near the door by which they had entered. “It’s the same there. Scuola Comunista.”
Garth studied this further scrawl with attention. “But that’s with a feminine noun.”
“Yes. But I know it’s right with partito too. Italian grammar’s queer.”
Unbelievably, they were uneasy and at a loss with each other. She glanced overhead. “The sky,” she said mechanically. “It’s a little darker, seen like this.”
“Let’s go.” Garth took Anthea by the arm and led her out through the door. “Of course it’s horrible – and a highly compressed sample of modern history.”
“It reminded me of another unexpected discovery we once made.”
He looked at her quickly and without speaking. They regained the path and walked on in silence. It was a rather different sort of silence now. Anthea, Garth saw, was more troubled than he had at first realised. “Yes,” he ventured presently. “It’s a nasty thing to have happened to a place one knew as a kid.”
She shook her head a shade impatiently. “It’s not that. Wouldn’t you have tipped my father as right?”
“About the undisturbed future of the chapel? I suppose I would. It’s sufficiently out of the way, surely, for the world to be likely to pass it by. But you never can tell.”
“That’s it. You can’t!” Anthea spoke with sudden odd vehemence. “A tremendous convulsion shakes the whole of Europe. Vast powers hurl themselves against each other, prompted by inordinate ambitions and enormous fears. We are all tiny components of the process, helplessly involved. People like myself, sitting over drawing-boards slicking it up with bigger and quicker turbo-props, as you like to say. And quite without wanting to. Yet one feels that there’s some single dynamic to it. Get right above the nationalities and policies and defeats and victories and one would see it as a single outpouring of force. There’s something majestic about it. But it takes time off for little insidious jobs. Sweeping its armies up and down Italy, it makes a dive into the Fiesolan hills and brings off a tiny deft irony. It levels kingdoms and decimates peoples – but it doesn’t forget to take a passing cock-shy at the Settignano Memorandum Book.”
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