The Last Match (32 page)

“She.”

“He.”

And so on.

I got the plane tickets for Olbia that afternoon. The routing went by way of Milan, where we had to lie over for a night and a morning before making the connection. She’d never been to Milan before. I took her to look at the wedding-cake cathedral and
The Last Supper,
in the evening to hear a performance of
Madame Butterfly
at La Scala in which the soprano sang the part of Cio Cio San in German, Lieutenant Pinkerton his part in Italian, his pal the other American, what’s his name, in French. It was a pleasant little outing, all in all. Each time I showed her something new she would say, “Is this the surprise?” I’d say, “No, not yet, this is nothing, just an hors d’oeuvre to the
piece de resistance.”

We were in Olbia the following midday, that same afternoon in a motor launch puttering through the blue, blue water of the Tyrrhenian Sea. By then she was curious enough to be biting her nails, except that a properly brought up British girl doesn’t bite her nails. She kept begging me to tell her where we were going, please, please, please. I told her she’d see when we got there. It was a beautiful day to spring it on her; warm, sunny and clear, with a sea breeze that brought the heady fragrance of the sun-warmed
maquis
across the water to us while we were still half a mile from the island. The Villa Parfumée was a bad memory that would fade like a dying flower scent before the wild aroma of that strong growth.

When I beached the launch at last in the little cove where I had set up the sign, the sign had fallen down. I set it up again, whanging it firmly into the sand with a rock.

“There,” I said. “Welcome to your new home. I’d carry you across the threshold except that the threshold hasn’t been built. I haven’t had time to get around to it yet.”

She looked at me, she looked at the sign that read
ISOLA
REGINA
, she looked at me again, she looked back at the sign, she looked around; at the blue, sun-bright sea across which we had come, the beach, the
maquis
full of bees hurrying about gathering honey, the trees where birds sang, the hill where rabbits lived and quail called, the rocks under which lobsters crawled, oysters fattened, fish lurked waiting for the hook. She said not a word, just took it all in, looking stunned. Finally she looked back at me again. Still stunned.

I said, “I was going to give it to you in payment of the five thousand pounds. With interest. It’s worth more than that now, and will be worth a lot more later. I’ve changed my mind since finding out I’m going to become the head of the family. You’ll get your loan back in cash, although you’ll have to wait awhile yet because I’ve got other things to do with my cash at the moment. The island is a wedding present from me to you, or will be after I’ve built a house, put in a garden, a few beehives and an acre or two of wine-grapes and bought the boat we’re going to have. You may call it Curlilocks if you like. The boat, I mean.”

She still didn’t say anything. Her mouth was open just enough to make her look stupid, quite an accomplishment for Reggie.

I said, “I came by it honestly, or anyway semi-honestly. The title is mine; free, clear and legal. I’ve made good money in my real estate dealings, with the start you gave me. I stand to go on making it for a while. When the gravy runs out there, I know plenty of other ways to bring it in. I may not be able to support you in the style to which you have been accustomed, but I’ll have a damned good stab at it one way or another. For God’s sake,
say
something, will you? Don’t just stand there with your mouth open.”

She looked at me for another moment; still with the stunned look, still with her mouth open. Then, without a word, she turned her back and walked away down the beach. Leaving me with the lines of that silly verse running through my head:

She didn’t ask the reason why,

She didn’t stop to say goodbye,

She walked right in

And she turned around

And she walked right out again.

Well, women. What the hell. They’re incalculable. I think it must have something to do with their body chemistry. Particularly when they’re pregnant or otherwise running out of phase. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing except sit on a rock to smoke a cigarette and wait. She was still walking down the beach; not hurrying, not running away or anything like that, just walking, stopping now and then to examine something, a shell or a stone or a bit of driftwood, that caught her eye.

I smoked and waited. The sea-breeze blew, the sun shone, the
maquis
radiated its heady perfume, birds sang, bees buzzed, rabbits rabbited, quail quailed, lobsters crawled, oysters fattened, fish lurked, I waited. Two cigarettes worth of wait, which means at least an hour even when I’m nervous because I don’t know what the hell is happening or about to happen.

She came back; barefoot, carrying her shoes and stockings. No comment. She sat down on the rock beside me and wiggled her toes to get the sand out from between them. No comment. Sun, breeze,
maquis,
birds, bees, rabbits, quail and the other island livestock went about their business as before. No comment.

She sighed. Not too happily, I thought.

“Curly, love,” she said. “I am no longer accustomed to the style of living to which I have been accustomed. It’s about time you knew the truth, I think. In case you want to change your plans.”

No comment.

“Do you know the meaning of the word ‘entail’?” “I am not entirely illiterate.”

“Don’t be stiff and proud with me, love. I’m trying to explain something extremely important to both of us. I meant the special meaning of entail under British law. My father’s estate was in entail to his male heirs. I was his only child. The property passed, under the entail, to his brother, my uncle, along with my father’s title. I inherited his personal possessions and his debts.”

“Your uncle—”

“My uncle is a good man. Don’t misunderstand his position. The title means little to him, and the estate is a burden more than anything else. Nobody in England today has the money to maintain huge seigniorial halls and their grounds, much less occupy them. Or pay the taxes on them. Even when the entail can be broken, as is sometimes possible by legal action, nobody will buy such a white elephant. You can only get rid of it by giving it to the government trust or some private foundation. If they will accept it. If they won’t, and you live long enough before death takes the burden off your back to put it on the back of the next heir in line, it can ruin you.”

“It ruined your father?”

She nodded, looking off across the sun-bright blue sea.

“I like to believe it was the estate. Something not his fault, something beyond him. I always believed he was a wealthy man. We always lived well, rather conspicuously well. When I was born he settled a trust on me, adding to it over the years until it was enough to keep me—in the style to which I’ve been accustomed, as you put it—for as long as I lived.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “You can buy yourself fresh diamonds or a new Mercedes-Benz when you need one. I may not be up to managing those things for a while.”

Still looking at the sea, she smiled. A somber smile.

“No more will I,” she said. “Ever again. The money is finished. Every shilling except the five thousand pounds I lent you. I gave my father a creditable funeral, paid off those debts I could manage—he was horribly in arrears, poor dear—salvaged what I wanted of his books and pictures, things like that, and came away. Back to you. Because I love you. Not because I’m carrying your child. I don’t care a groat about its legitimacy, Ed rather have it as a bastard than feel you married me because of it. You are free to marry me or not, as you choose, and forever after hold your peace in either event. I will not have you telling my children that their mother diddled or tried to diddle their father into marrying her by pretending to be a wealthy heiress when she is not.”

We looked at each other for a while, sitting on a rock in the sun on an island in the blue Tyrrhenian sea. Sun, breeze,
maquis,
birds, bees, quail, rabbits, etc., etc., etc., as before. Situation delicate, no humor in it, chips down, serious values only, proper choice of words necessary. She was as solemn as all hell about everything she had said, right down to the finish wire. If it turned out to be the finish wire.

I said, “What about the note, the receipt, I was to take to London to exchange for a hundred thousand pounds?”

“There were no hundred thousand pounds. There weren’t ten pounds left. But I knew I could never make him believe it, and the promise of it was what I had to bargain with to keep from being knocked about. I didn’t believe you would leave me alone with him, whatever else happened.”

“What makes you believe I might want to leave you now?”

“What I believe doesn’t count. It’s what you believe. I want to hear what it is, now that you know.”

I said, “I believe I’m going to look up that horrid old American harridan I used to lay back in Cannes and start all over again where we were before you led me astray from the paths of spivvery. That’s what I believe.”

“Bloody likely,” Reggie said, sliding off the rock to pull me down to the warm sand with her to demonstrate how bloody likely it was. “Not after I’ve had my way with you, my lad. Nevah feeyah.”

Birds, bees, rabbits, quail, lobsters, oysters, the fish and us. You could set it to music.

We were wed at the
mairie
in Nice a few days later, as soon as we could get the
paperasse
out of the way.
Paperasse,
red tape, is so burdensome and so unnecessarily complicated in France, mainly to keep a large corps of government
fonctionnaires
in jobs they would otherwise not have, that the saying is: Anything illegal is far easier to accomplish than anything legal, because if it’s crooked you fill out fewer forms. But our marriage was just as legal as I could make it,
paperasse
and all. There weren’t going to be any little bastards in
my
family, by God.

Reggie beat me for five hundred thousand million pounds on the first baby, again for another half-million million on the second. Two boys in a row. We put the whole million million on the third get, double or nothing, and I won. She wanted a girl as much as I did by then, but she took the other side of the bet to be sporting and give me a chance to break even. When number four came along in the course of human events, we didn’t bet. We both wanted another girl to balance the family budget (we both won, that time) and neither one of us wanted to jinx the odds on what we meant to be our final
coup.
Four, we had decided, was the house limit.

“I think four will be nice,” she said, while she was gestating number three. “Actually I’d like dozens, swarming like bunnies all over the place, but we have to think about the population explosion, proper schools, things like that, don’t we? You don’t think four are too many, love? I mean, all I do is produce them. You have to get up the lolly for all of us.”

I said, “Don’t worry about me getting up the lolly as long as you don’t drop another boy the next time out. A debt of two million million and five thousand pounds hanging over my head just might discourage me.”

“Oh,” she said generously. “I’ll let you work it back.”

I worked. Brother, how I worked; not only in the way she had in mind but at earning a living, getting a home built on Isola Regina and a small farm started on the best land, digging out the springs to feed a reservoir for piped water and a few bass I stocked, seeding lobster spawn to fill the demands of the luxury resorts already sprouting on the Sardinian coast across the channel, finding the boat we had to have at a price I could afford, all the other things. Nine to five? I kept going fourteen or fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, and thrived on it. Once a week, if nothing special came up to change the program, I’d go back to the Cote d’Azur to look into land options, which were still paying off. I’d worked out a schedule by which I would get up early, putt-putt over to Olbia, grab an early plane to Rome, make a fast connection and be in Nice by midday. It gave me all the rest of the day and most of the following day to do business before going back the way I’d come, usually pulling into the island landing-cove before midnight. If I got involved with business and had to stay over, we had a radio transceiver on the island that hooked into the Italian phone system by way of Olbia, so that Reggie and I could always keep in touch.

I tried not to get held over. After the house was built I had four good Sardinians on the island and three
ragazze
in the house: a girl to take care of the kids, a cook-housekeeper and a maid. Reggie was never alone or unprotected or out of touch. Still, the island was my kingdom, and when I wasn’t there to reign over it I felt as if I had abdicated. It’s funny how a family and a home and property of your own can grab you by the short hairs like that. During my Nice trips and business dealings I met easy marks on the average of once a trip; suckers I could have trimmed as easily as plucking a ripe peach. They made my fingers itch just to see the eager innocence with which they held out money for somebody to take it from them. But when you’re on the con you have to be always ready to blow along fast ahead of trouble, and Isola Regina had me trapped. No complaints, you understand. It’s the way I wanted it, every bit of it, every minute of it, everything about it. I wouldn’t have exchanged what I’d got for myself, including the fourteen or fifteen hour working day, seven days a week, for anything else in the world. Until I discovered the serpent that was slithering around my island Eden. It kind of put a different color on things.

To discover that the woman you are married to, the mother of your children, is an unregenerate, barefaced, shameless liar can be something of a shock. I couldn’t believe it, at first. But the evidence was overwhelming, beyond refutation. How it came about, I was returning from one of my business trips to France, as usual late at night; tired, in need of a bath and a drink but feeling good. I’d made a respectable score on a deal, money I needed to put in my vineyard and make a few other improvements I had in mind, also to pay for Reggie’s third
accouchement.
Anyway, the launch wasn’t waiting for me in Olbia harbor as it should have been when I got there. The Sardinians knew my schedule, and that one or the other of them was to bring the boat to pick me up unless he was told otherwise by the
patrona.
I phoned the island right away to find out what was up. Worried, naturally.