After Hannibal (5 page)

They would have had to pay a tidy sum for that too. Blemish felt a pang at the thought of this wasted money. “You don’t need an architect at all,” he said. “All they know is how to draw up plans.”

The Greens talked on and Blemish listened carefully. These two old people were very confiding—he had no need really to ask many questions. They told him they had sold their house in Michigan. They told him what the architect’s original estimate had been, how alarmed they had felt when it had jumped up and jumped up again. They told him the point at which they had realized that they could not continue with the architect, as the estimate had reached a level beyond their resources. By the end of the recital Blemish knew within a few thousand dollars what the Greens were ready and able to spend on the conversion of their Italian house. In other words, and as he put it familiarly to himself, he knew what was in the kitty.

“No, a surveyor is enough,” he said. “What they call a
geometra
here. A
geometra
will know far more about the practical side of things than an architect. We employ a
geometra
who is quite outstanding. There was a case like yours only a couple of months ago. Their
geometra
kept on taking measurements and asking for more money. No building work was done. In despair they turned to us. We sent our
geometra
in. As simple as that. If you went to visit those people now you would find them happy and smiling in a tastefully refurbished dwelling.”

“What exactly would you do for us?” Mr. Green asked.

“Engage a good and experienced builder. Get him to cost everything and make a proper estimate. Oversee the work, make sure things were done properly and that your wishes were made known to the builder—we speak good Italian.” This at least was true. Blemish had understood very early the advantage of knowing more Italian than his clients. He had embarked on an intensive course while still under investigation at the Lambeth Public Works Department. “In short,” he said, “we would carry the project through to its conclusion.”

“And your charges?”

“Forty thousand lire an hour, plus expenses—things like phone calls and petrol.”

“Let’s see now,” Mr. Green said. “That is about twenty-four dollars, isn’t it? Well, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. How soon could your builder be ready to start if we decided to go ahead?”

“We are rather busy just at present.” It didn’t do to seem too eager, Blemish knew. In his way he was a student of business dealings. And when you come right down to it, he was fond of saying, what other dealings are there? The key to the whole thing was to let the others make the running. The Greens must be made to feel that he was doing them a favor, saving them from disaster. “The builders we work with and trust are all committed at this moment in time,” he said. “There is no way I would engage a builder I knew nothing about. We work to a very high standard of service.”

“Well, we want to get things moving.” Mr. Green glanced around the room. “Things aren’t too comfortable here at present.”

Blemish rose. “You will need to think it over,” he said. “It never does to take decisions too hastily.
Patti chiari, amicizia lunga
, as the
Italians say—clear agreements, long friendship. You have the phone number. Remember,” he called up as he inserted himself into the car, “
siamo sempre qua
, we are always here.”

Standing side by side at the top of the steps, the Greens watched him drive away. In the silence following the car’s departure they heard the faint drone of a lawn mower somewhere high up behind them. They remained there for some time looking at the curving line of the road and the steeply rising terraces beyond. There were remnants of mist in the air, fluffing the lines of the hills, softening the edges of everything. The fig trees below the house were naked still, their pointed shoots dark silver in the sunshine.

After some moments of silence the Greens turned and smiled at each other, sure of each other’s feelings, sure that their pleasure in the peace and the beauty of the place was shared. Throughout the forty years of their marriage they had always had this communion of feeling, always been completely happy in each other’s presence. Mrs. Green’s eyes were bright. “We are looking at the hills that Perugino and Piero della Francesca looked at,” she said.

Later they went out together and stood looking up at the house, the ancient broken tiles of the roof, through which the rain came in, the walls where the packing of clay between the stones had crumbled away, the darkness and dankness of the ground floor, where for most of the century farm animals had been kept. There was a lot that needed doing to the house but the form of it was beautiful. It sat there, long and low, dressed in the time-warmed colors of its stone, the outside staircase with its broad terra-cotta steps leading up to the colonnaded porch. It would be a beautiful
house when it was finished—this was something the Greens told each other often.

“This Blemish seems a smart young fellow,” Mr. Green said. “Doesn’t know a whole lot about painting.”

“Perhaps he can do something for us.” Mrs. Green took her husband’s arm and they began to walk back to the house. “Perhaps this is the turning point.”

“Twenty-four dollars is not so much and we can discontinue with him anytime we like—he is not asking for anything in writing.”

“He seemed straightforward enough,” Mrs. Green said.

“Funny way with his eyes sometimes,” Mr. Green said. “Kind of sleepy. Why do you think he kept referring to himself as ‘we’?”

Later that morning a wind sprang up and it began to feel colder. Harold and Cecilia Chapman walked the half mile or so to the Checchetti house and inspected the collapsed wall. No attempt had yet been made to clear away the rubble that lay along the edge of the road below the house. The width of the road was considerably reduced, Harold noticed; there was room enough for a car to pass and probably a van or medium-sized truck, but nothing any bigger. That faint whisper of alarm sounded again. This was the only way out to the village by car; the road did not proceed beyond the German’s place, petering out in vineyards and deeply rutted tracks unfit for motor vehicles of almost any sort. Anyone who wanted to get onto the road leading to the village and the greater world beyond had to go this way.

“Just as I thought,” he said. “This wall had no foundations whatever. It looks to me as if they laid the blocks down flat, with hardly any digging at all.”

At this point they were joined by the Checchetti, father and daughter, who converged on them from different directions. Of the husband there was nothing to be seen. The two approached rapidly and in complete silence. Then, while still some yards away, they came to a halt and fell to regarding the strewn debris of their wall. This muteness, which had seemed strange at first, Cecilia now recognized as a powerful dramatic device: the Checchetti were hoping that the sight of the wall with themselves standing by it as tragic witnesses would plead their case more powerfully than words.

“Tell them,” Harold said, “what they know full well already, that their precious wall had no foundation, they built it on the cheap and this heavy rain has brought it down.”

While Cecilia was still struggling to convey her husband’s meaning more gently and tactfully, the father retreated to a distance of some dozen yards and began shouting loudly.

“Is he uttering threats?” Harold said. “I won’t proceed on that basis and they had better know it.”

“No, no.” Cecilia paused, listening. “No, it is his way of discussing things. He is saying, as far as I can make out, that whether the wall had foundations or not is completely beside the point.”

“Discussing things? The man is a complete savage. What does he do when he feels like shouting? How can it be beside the point when—”

“He says the point at issue is not the foundation but what caused the wall to collapse.”

The woman now spoke directly to her father in what seemed an attempt to silence him or tone him down. Cecilia had again the impression that the two of them were acting, improvising from moment to moment, following some instinctive, archetypal pattern.

The father fell silent and the daughter drew nearer to the Chapmans and spoke more quietly, glancing upward from time to time as if to take the skies as witness.

“She is saying mainly what she said before, that the wall, which was a very good strong wall and cost them three million lire to have built only four years ago, and God is her witness to this, was loosened by the vibrations caused by the repeated passing of heavily loaded lorries.”

“It’s a wonder to me the wall stood for so long.” Harold pondered for a moment or two. Money was what they wanted, of course—that was as clear as daylight. It might be better to spend a little money than to get on the wrong side of these people. As neighbors they might conceivably be useful. If they felt wronged they would certainly be vindictive and might find ways of doing harm. One heard horror stories now and again: pets poisoned, fences torn down, wells polluted in the night … “I suppose we will have to accept some responsibility,” he said to Cecilia. “After all, the road is narrow and the lorries must have been heavy-laden.”

“Oh, Harold,” Cecilia said, “I am so glad you think that, because it is exactly what I think too.” She was swept by pride at his magnanimity. Harold might seem unfeeling at times but his underlying generosity would come to the fore, however much he might try to conceal it. Radiant-faced, she turned back to the Checchetti.

“Don’t tell them what I said,” Harold said quickly. “Never
admit liability, it’s always a great mistake. For heaven’s sake, Cecilia, think for a minute.”

He stared at his wife in reproof. She really had no idea of the world at all. One did not give ground to people free of charge, one did not render oneself vulnerable, one did not surrender an advantage. Now, as he looked at Cecilia, it seemed to him that this essential lack of grasp of hers found a parallel in the loosely flowing style of her attire, the full-skirted, unbelted blue dress, the pale hair escaping from the confines of her tortoiseshell combs. There came unbidden to his mind a sudden thought of his new secretary, Miss Phelps, blonded and permed, tight-skirted, high-heeled. A woman who was not afraid to look like a woman.

The Checchetti, sensing a turning point, had drawn closer together and maintained now a silence full of expectation. It was they, Cecilia thought, who had controlled the conversation from the very start, with their pattern of rage and appeasement, their calculated clamor and calculated hush. Avarice was written in the lines of their faces and a hostility that no requirement of tact or advantage could altogether mask. She looked over their heads at the hillside beyond, the strange sense of close order imposed by the rows of bare vines strung between pale concrete pillars. Rising steeply in rank upon rank, carefully terraced, they represented an enormous sum of labor; the yield in money, on such small holdings as these, could not be very great. Little wonder these people clawed for gain.

“Whatever is done will have to be done in legal form,” she heard Harold say. “I hope they don’t imagine we are just going to hand them a lump of money. Tell them we will see our lawyer this afternoon and try to work something out.”

Monti had no teaching until late afternoon. He had some student essays to look at but by eleven he was free for his own work. As usual he made himself coffee on a small hot plate in his room; he had avoided the common room as far as possible since Laura’s going. He was a stranger at the university, on a visiting fellowship. He had some acquaintances in the faculty but no friends, no one whose kindness he could take for granted; he shrank at the thought of having his humanity reduced, brought down to a single image of cuckoldry and loss.

His nature had always tended to the obsessive and in this period of loneliness the tendency became more pronounced, his studies were not so much a solace to him as a quest for encoded meanings. He was occupied with the relations between the Republic of Perugia and the Papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and more particularly with the rise of the Baglioni family of Perugia, a story marked throughout by the extremest forms of rapacity and violence.