The Takeover (21 page)

‘The real owners would have come forward by now,’ Maggie said.

‘In the case of this house of Michael’s,’ Lauro said, ‘it belongs to a large family, twelve, fourteen, cousins, all of them in America. That crook was clever. But when one of those cousins comes home for a visit you’ll have trouble. In the case of the Bernardini house, it once belonged to a cousin of my fiancée who died, but his son is the heir; he has a job in England, a very important job in a chemical factory. He won’t like to see someone occupying his house if he returns to look for it in Italy.’

‘The Bernardini house was a total ruin,’ Maggie said, ‘a complete wreck, and I spent a fortune on the reconstruction; I put in the tennis court and the pool; I put in the lily-pond and I laid the lawns; then the Bernardinis started all over again making big changes. The same with this house here; Michael had it before he was married; we flew one of the best architects in Los Angeles over here to restore this house; it was a wreck when I bought it.’

‘You didn’t buy it, Maggie,’ said Lauro, quietly. ‘You only thought you did. Take Hubert’s house which you put on Betty’s land, for instance, well, it just doesn’t exist officially.’

He comforted Maggie greatly that morning as she telephoned one after the other office in Rome to try and trace that lawyer Dante de Lafoucauld whom it now appeared nobody had ever heard of, and whom Maggie herself had met only twice, in Rome, in the Grand Hotel in the winter of 1968. Nobody had heard of him at all. Maggie rang the office of Massimo de Vita, who was out. She left her name with an answering service, and then went into hysterics, blaming Massimo for everything and saying how awfully suspicious it was that he didn’t have a secretary any more, only an answering service attached to his phone. ‘Only crook lawyers have answering services,’ Maggie moaned, while Lauro poured her out a brandy and said, ‘Maggie, Maggie, drink this, Maggie dear. I love you, Maggie. You didn’t have Massimo de Vita for a lawyer in 1968, did you? You only went to de Vita for the first time a year ago, didn’t you? How can he be to blame?’

‘They’re all in it together,’ Maggie screamed. ‘Why hasn’t he got a proper office with a secretary? It was the seediest office I ever saw. Now he hasn’t even got a secretary. I hate to deal with answering services.’ The telephone rang just then, from Massimo de Vita in response to her message on the answering service. He was just about to write to her, he said.

‘I have to talk to you,’ said Maggie. ‘Have you ever heard of an Italian lawyer called Dante de Lafoucauld?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard that name last week. He isn’t any sort of Italian lawyer. I don’t know who he is. He’s a crook. Apparently, you see, Marchesa, you were badly advised, and this man, whoever he is, forged some documents for some houses which don’t belong to you—’

‘You know him?’ Maggie said. ‘Then you know the man?’

‘I never heard of him till a week ago, when I was looking into the matter of the eviction of Mr Mallindaine. Then it all—’

‘He had a beard,’ wailed Maggie. ‘He had a dark beard.’

‘So have I,’ said Massimo. ‘Marchesa, since last we met, I have grown a beard. I will do what I can for you in this affair, although you realize, Marchesa, that when the houses are not yours—’

‘Crooks, all of you!’ Maggie yelled, whereupon her voice was immediately overlaid by that of Lauro who had taken the telephone from her hand. ‘Doctor de Vita,’ said Lauro, ‘you must excuse the Marchesa. She’s very upset. I will be in touch with you and arrange a meeting.’

The lawyer said a few words in Italian for Lauro’s ears only, partly legal in substance, partly sexual.

‘
Si, si, Dottore
,’ said Lauro, and hanging up the receiver continued his work of calming Maggie down. He was somewhat successful until she got it into her head to ring Coco de Renault. The lines were engaged for every number she tried where Coco might be: Nemi-Paris, Nemi-Geneva, Nemi-Zürich. ‘It’s lunch time; it’s one o’clock,’ said Lauro. ‘Everyone will be out. I’ll fix you some lunch, Maggie. Leave the telephone and I’ll tell you all you need to do in the case of Betty’s land. It’s simple and, after all, you can afford it.’

Maggie rang Berto and gave him the story, which he didn’t believe. He replied quietly, thinking her to be temporarily deranged, and said he would join her shortly at Nemi. He sounded reluctant to do so; he said he was occupied with problems to do with the safety from robbers of his house in the Veneto.

‘We can’t stay here. There are no servants,’ Maggie said. ‘Lauro’s getting married on Saturday and Agata’s left. I have all these houses and nowhere to stay.’

‘We can stay in Rome. Or we could stay with the Bernardinis,’ said Berto. Maggie hung up and rang the Bernardinis. Emilio would not be home till six. The young people were out. Maggie collapsed into tears and presently let Lauro bring her a delicate lunch-tray.

That stormy morning over, Maggie set off the next day with Berto’s car and driver for Rome where she had a full-scale massage treatment, then onwards, glowing and resolute, for Switzerland in pursuit of Coco de Renault. She was anxious to see him in any case about the lack of funds. Something was happening to her monthly cheques which were not arriving at the Rome bank as usual, so that she had been unable to pay her bodyguard. She said nothing to Berto. The bodyguard had left. That was embarrassing enough. And now it was imperative to get from Coco the title-deeds of her houses and so prove them hers.

Berto was staying with the Bernardinis meanwhile and had wearily realized the truth about the houses at Nemi. ‘If I had met Maggie earlier,’ Berto told Emilio, ‘she would never have done anything so foolish. There’s nothing for it but for Maggie to pay reparations or else surrender the properties; she can manage that all right. I wish she would try to see things in proportion.’

‘It would be hard on us,’ said Emilio Bernardini, ‘to have to leave here after all the work we’ve put into the house.’

‘I dare say something can be arranged,’ Berto said.

‘I dare say,’ said Emilio, smiling to reassure his friend.

‘Do you trust Coco de Renault?’ said Berto, gazing across the trees towards the tower of the castle and the rows of little houses built into the cliff below it, huddled in half-circular terraces round the castle like the keys of an antiquated typewriter. He looked away from the view and into Emilio’s face, suddenly realizing that the man was not quite his usual cool self. 

‘I did trust him, of course,’ said Emilio. ‘When I introduced him to Maggie of course I trusted him. He handled some affairs of mine, very badly as it has turned out. I can’t say, honestly, that I trust de Renault now. It’s very embarrassing, and I wish I’d never brought him together with you and Maggie. But I had no idea she would hand over so vast a part of her fortune to him to manage. In fact, I think she put everything in his hands, which was a foolish, an unheard of, thing to do. I would never have expected her to hand over
everything
.’

‘Has she done that?’ said Berto.

‘I think so, yes.’

‘And you have doubts about de Renault?’

‘I do, yes. I have had quite a shock in my own case. There is something shady about him, and I’m very sorry, very embarrassed.’

‘Poor Maggie,’ Berto said mildly, ‘I hope she won’t get any more shocks. I think only of Maggie herself, you know. A wonderful woman, a wonderful woman. She doesn’t need money to make her a wonderful woman. It’s only that she’s used to it.’ Berto added after a while, ‘It’s hardly your fault, Emilio. I should myself have taken more interest in Maggie’s affairs. Perhaps I could have persuaded her not to put her trust in de Renault. Perhaps. For my part, how could I hold you responsible? After all, I’ve known you since you were a schoolboy.’

Emilio said, ‘Thank you, but, you know very well, you can’t trust every man who was at school with your son. These days, whom can you trust?’

‘One’s friends,’ said Berto. ‘You know, Emilio, you’re too sad by nature. Why are you so sad?’ And this question, the asking of which would have seemed quite absurd in another society, was really quite normal at Nemi, on the outskirts of Rome in the middle of June 1975, for Berto and Emilio.

‘Why are you so sad by nature?’

‘Life is sad.’

It was the next morning, reading the newspaper, that Berto said to Emilio, ‘Have you read the papers?’ This was an unnecessary question since the news, on that morning and the next, was a national event: the regional elections throughout Italy had confirmed a popular swerve to the political Left. It could fairly be said that Italy had turned half-Communist overnight. Both halves were fairly stunned by the results.

Berto, keening at the wake in those days, detained Emilio from going about his morning’s business, with prophecies and lamentations. The Communists became ‘They’, the Italian ‘
Loro
’. Berto said, ‘
Loro, loro, loro.…
They, they.…’

‘It’s the will of the people,’ Emilio said, but he spoke into heedless morning air, and Berto continued, ‘Look how they write in the newspaper; they say one has the sensation that something is finished for always. And whatever they mean by that, it’s the truth. Something is finished. Loro, loro.…They, they.…They will come and take away everything from you. They took away everything from us in Dalmatia. They will take, will carry away.… Loro…ti prenderanno, ti porteranno via tutto.…They will come and take.…Everything you possess…’ The gardener’s son, passing by and catching these words, wondered how that could be, his possession being a motor-scooter. ‘They will kill…ti liquideranno…,’ said Berto. ‘They will take over, and they will—’

Emilio, who, although not himself a Communist adherent, had none the less voted Communist in these elections to express his exasperation with Italy’s government-in-residence, did not have the heart to say so to the older man. After all, he had been at school with Berto’s son, and Emilio would not shatter Berto’s kindly affection. Emilio kept his dark, young secret and merely observed, sadly, ‘After the capitalists have finished with us I doubt if there will be anything left for the Communists to take over. De Renault, for example—’

‘Better her money should go to a swindler than to the Communists,’ Berto said.

W
ITH THE ELECTIONS AND
the strawberry festival in the air, and Maggie, so far as Hubert had ascertained, on a trip to Switzerland, and with Lauro away on his honeymoon, Hubert felt it wise to call a rally of his followers and prepare for battle with any such apocalyptic events and trials as are bound to befall the leaders of light and enlightened movements, anywhere, in any age.

Maggie, he hoped, had gone to Switzerland to arrange for the surreptitious payment of his claim for the fake Gauguin, and maybe to raise funds to meet the demands of Lauro’s bride and the eventual claims of the other owners of the properties she had thought were hers; she would do this, he reckoned wrongly, without breathing a word to her pig of a husband. He was wrong not only in this reckoning, but also in the assumption that Maggie had received her lawyer’s letter about his demand to be compensated for the fake Gauguin. The letter had indeed been sent to her by registered post, but the mails from Rome were fairly disordered, and the letter had not in fact reached Maggie at the Veneto before she had left the villa. Guillaume had signed for it and put it aside, on the tray in the hall, where it innocently awaited the most peculiar circumstances of her return. Hubert did not know this, and in fact he had got into a habit of false assumptions by the imperceptible encroachment of his new cult; so ardently had he been preaching the efficacy of prayer that he now, without thinking, silently invoked the name of Diana for every desire that passed through his head, wildly believing that her will not only existed but would certainly come to pass. Thus, like ministers of any other religion, he was estranged from reality in proportion as he mistook the nature of prayer, offering up his words of praise, of gratitude, penitence, intercession and urgent petition in the satisfaction that his god would reply in kind, hear, smile, and wave a wand. So that, merely because he had known in the past that the unforeseen stroke of luck can happen, and that events which are nothing short of a miracle can take place, Hubert had come secretly to take it with a superstitious literalness that the miraculous may happen in front of your eyes; speak the word, Diana, and my wish will be fulfilled. Whereas, in reality, no farmer prays for rain unless the rain is long overdue; and if a miracle of good fortune occurs it is always at the moment of grace unthought-of and when everybody is looking the other way. However, Hubert, largely through his isolation at Nemi and from not having seen Maggie in person for a number of years, believed that Diana of the Woods could somehow enter Maggie’s mind, twist a kind of screw there, and force her to do something she would not otherwise have done.

Moreover, he had not allowed for a change in Maggie, a hardening. In the carefree past she had been more or less a docile pushover where money was concerned, and Hubert miscalculated the effect upon her of being married to steady-minded Berto, of having had her suspicions aroused to the point of almost-justified paranoia by various threats to her moneyed peace, and, most of all, by the new economic crisis which Hubert had mentally absorbed in those months from what he read and heard, but which had not closely touched him.

Maggie would come back from Switzerland, he felt sure, and make a settlement for the Gauguin. Indeed, he could hardly think of Maggie without the word settlement coming to his mind.

Lauro and his buxom horror-beauty of a wife would also return and, should it please the gods, Lauro might even join the Fellowship of Diana and Apollo, in the same way that the three other boys had returned to him, those secretaries of the first, beautiful summer at Nemi, when the house was newly built, in 1972, that year of joy and of outrage, when Hubert was free to leave his doors unlocked, could come and go as he pleased, but when Maggie began to desert him, searching as she did after strange gods and getting married to Tullio-Friole. As it happened, the return of the secretaries was a mixed blessing, but Hubert thanked Diana for them all the same.