Three-Cornered Halo (3 page)

It was Innocenta's dream to see her saint's cause recognised in Rome: Beata juanita, Santa Juanita at last—to see her order flourish once again, to return the convenuto to its true purpose, to be once more the humblest of Juanita's Perliti, spending the long days of devotion and quietness within the enclosing walls. What happiness, said Innocenta, perched on the flowering bank, swinging her plumply bulging patent leather shoes, what happiness in one's last years, to renounce all the bustle and fret of the world and give oneself over—since work we all must—to working only for God.…!

Winsome's narrow hands clasped themselves together till the knuckles shone, in her folk-weave lap. What happiness, indeed! She looked down at the pink-sprawled house, at the winding wall, at the terraces that fell away and away in flower and fruit and vine to the plain below, at the sequined sea and the shimmering blue of the sky. What happiness! To spend all one's days in contemplation here: a little church embroidery, an hour of ecstasy in a tiny chapel, an hour again in the cool of the evening, tending a garden of flowers dedicated to God.… Abbess, at last, perhaps, bæloved of all, respected of all, walking with gentle dignity, rosary in hand, through her dovecote of merry-eyed, simple-hearted saints.…

But all this could be of no interest to the Senorita, Innocenta suggested, scything in upon this weedy uprush of spiritual pride along the Little Garden Path; one understood well that in Inghilterra there were no convenutos, no colombaias.…

“Oh, but nonsense,” said Winsome, rushing once again to defence of benighted England. “We have many colombaias, lots of them; of both religions, Roman Catholic and Anglican.”

Well, well, said Innocenta, much interested; she had always been informed quite otherwise. And of different religions, too, how very odd! Here, of course, everyone was Catholica, that was the end of it. But she was surprised. The Church in England, one had always heard, was very narrow, quite, quite opposed to …

“No, no, of course not,” said Winsome again. “We have lots of them; not so many as the Catholics perhaps, but several. I was in one myself, a very well-known one.”

Well, fancy, said Innocenta.

“From the age of sixteen onwards. I was ‘finished' there.”

“Finito?” said Innocenta. She sighed and shrugged: too bad, her plump shoulders seemed to say, but that was life.

Winsome struggled to explain. “I mean I went there to complete my education: many of our girls in England do, for a year or two.…”

“E vere?” said Innocenta.

“To teach us to—well, to become young ladies, to grow from childhood to womanhood.…”

Well, certainly, said Innocenta, doubtfully, there could be no surer way. And for girls of different religions, too: a most delicate distinction. “La Colombaia Catholica! La Colombaia Anglica! E singulare!”

“And so you see, I am
most
interested in your plans for turning this lovely building back into a convenuto. The trouble, I suppose …?”

The trouble, acknowledged Innocenta at once, was a very usual one—there was no money. The present Grand Duke was satisfied with the present state of affairs, he said the Colombaia was filling a need and, said Innocenta lowering her voice though there was no one within a mile of them, he was strangely opposed to many Observances, all the island knew it, though few dared mention it aloud. In the matter of the Canonisation, for example …

“Of El Margherita?”

Not even a mere ‘Beata,' said Innocenta: and was it not well known that the Arcivescovo had long, long been eager to apply to Rome; that the affair would have been settled to the happiness and profit of all, had not El Exaltida.… Well, well: it was not wise to speak of it. The very vines had ears in San Juan el Pirata. And meanwhile … She dived her fat brown hand into her fat red plastic handbag and produced a very fat little old, black book. Meanwhile she could get on with the Diary.

“The Diary?”

Juanita's Diary. The Senorita would have heard, must have heard of the Diaries of El Margherita?—they had been translated into Spanish, into Italian …

“But not into English?”

Not into English. And now there were many tourists, British and American, coming to the island, there would be a great demand for the books, a great sale for the books when money for the convenuto was so sorely needed; and here was she, Innocenta, one of the very few of the island who could speak both languages. She tenderly unfolded her treasure from its silken wrappings and for the first time Winsome held the little black book in her hands.

‘In my youth,' writes Juanita complacently, opening the first page of her diary with a bang, ‘I was very beautiful. My uncle, the Grand Duke, delighted to load me with jewels and beautiful clothes, I bathed in scented waters and spent all my days in dancing, which was my delight. But from the hour of my Vision, I cared no more for these distractions.' The first part has, as it happens, been crossed out and altered, but the sentiment remains the same: ‘In my youth I delighted in ornament and beautiful clothes …' or, as Innocenta's translation has it, ‘While a young fowl
^*
I was happy for adorning and fine cloths; but from the time of my Arrivalment
^†
I was no more thinking of these excitings.'

There is a good deal of deletion in these early pages of Juanita's diaries, executed before the gentle flow of fiction-writing came to her as readily as it did in later year. Innocenta had spent much time in trying to read behind the heavy scorings that blotted out the first, unconsidered outpourings of her saint: success, however, had revealed one or two contradictions so startling that she came at last to a habit of adding further scribblings of her own, lest anyone else should decipher what lay beneath. After all, Juanita knew best. She would undoubtedly have said so herself, reflected Innocenta, a tiny bit ruefully for one so habitually happy to accept and be pleased, thinking back to those old, austere days in the novice-ship of the convenuto, when, from her table, El Margherita had laid about her with implacable self-esteem: would it not be wisest to let her know best to the end? ‘My attachment to Santa Fina dates from the year of my Vision,' for example. Juanita had scored it out and written instead, ‘from my earliest childhood.' Very well, then: what business of Innocenta's if she chose to lay claim to an extra decade of devotion? “Her adhesion to Santa Fina was from first times of childcap,” she said stoutly to the Senorita, pointing it out.

“Or shall we say, rather, ‘from the days when I was a tiny child'?” suggested Winsome: and with the very words there rose in her mind's eye, an Arrivalment all of her own—a vision of a book, gilt-edged, in a binding, perhaps, of mother-of-pearl, palely iridescent: The Diary of Juanita, Pearl of San Juan. ‘Translation by …' There would have to be an Acknowledgement, of course, ‘with the assistance of' or ‘in collaboration with'; but, for the rest, ‘Translation by'—and, in letters of gold, a facsimile perhaps of her signature—her own name: Winsome S. Foley. The Diary, all the Diaries; the slim vols., the books of prayers, the pieties, the (execrable) verse.… Juanita, to be canonised one day, a new star rising in the firmament of the sanctified: and, she, Winsome S. Foley, sole link between the saint and the English-speaking world. The Collected Works of Juanita di Perli, translated by Winsome S. Foley, (with acknowledgements …) One would have to learn Juanese, of course; and there would be Forewords, trips to the British Museum to look up figures and facts, a subscription to the London Library to delve for details of island history. And a Life! Under the aegis of the Grand Duke (who, after all was a friend of her cousin, the Inspector). The Life of El Margherita: by Winsome S. Foley—this time without acknowledgements, unless a gracefully turned compliment to the kindness of Lorenzo, Hereditary Grand Duke of San Juan el Pirata, would look well.…?

Winsome S. Foley had found her Cause at last.

*
Tour de Force.

†
Author's Note:
This is not quite correct: the island has in fact an area of nearly thirty square miles, including the plain of Toscanita or ‘Little Tuscany' on its Western side.

*
Presumably from the Spanish/Italian,
pollo
—a hen, and Spanish (fam.),
pollo
—a youth.

†
Query from
vision
—
visitation
—
arrival:
the Vision is referred to throughout the translations as The Arrivalment.

CHAPTER THREE

‘T
HE
island of San Juan el Pirata seen from the deck of the gay little vaporetto which plies between Barrequitas and Piombino on the mainland, looks like an outsize cathedral, rising abruptly up out of the sea. Perched fantastically at the tip of its spire, is the fairy-tale palace of the Grand Duke. To the west, built up from the sheer rock face, is the prison—a dark, dank old fortress where, in the splendid old piratical days, a countless toll of prisoners mouldered into merciful death; balancing it to the east is the Duomo, which houses the illustrious bones of the founder, and to the north the cobbled streets thrust their way down to the quays of the fishing boats. But looking southward over the sunlit blue sea starred with a dozen tiny satellite islands, what would be the façade of the cathedral slopes down, crumbling and pine-clad, to an indentation of little bays; and here, above many-flowered terraces, stand the long lines of the Bellomare Hotel, whose boast it is that every room faces into the sunshine and over the sea.…'

Mr Cecil crossed by the vaporetto on the same day, as it happened, as Miss Cockrill and her cousin, late in the September after the dinner party at which he had met Cousin Hat. He saw them standing together at the rails—a small, thin—and yet oddly sturdy—little woman in a shapeless linen dress and a flat round hat which looked as if it had once been high and curvacious and generously wreathed, but had been painstakingly reduced, by some steam-roller method, to its present indeterminate amalgamation of flowers and straw: the typical ‘shady hat' in fact, of the elderly Englishwoman abroad; and a younger woman of the type, reflected Mr Cecil, that it was quite impossible to ‘dress'—the droopy type, long drooping back that looked not strong enough to support the height—a standard rose, as it were, without proper staking: long, yearning face, long nose, long narrow hands and feet—long skirt, alas! of madly unfashionable length, jutting out in ill-considered gores, like a cardboard bell. Winsome on her earlier visit had fallen in love with Juanese folk-weave and taken home yards of it to be made up by a clever little woman she had found in Sittingbourne, to her own designs. She, too, wore a straw hat, wreathed with (of course) wild flowers; and the mauve beads. But she wore on the ring-finger of her right hand, a very beautiful opal. He saw his friend Tomaso's eyes light up as they noticed it. Tomaso was the finest goldsmith in Barrequitas, he owned the Joyeria there, the jeweller's shop, now that his father, dear old Pedro di Goya, was dead. After a while, Mr Cecil saw that he was manœuvring to speak to the owner of the ring. Tomaso loved all lovely things.

On this occasion the rooms had been ordered well in advance and the ladies found themselves admirably accommodated, looking out, as promised, over the terraced gardens and down to the sea. Mr Cecil arrived unheralded; but Mr Cecil, of course, is a law unto himself on the island of San Juan. He said as much as he made his way that evening, passing easily among the hotel guests sitting sipping Juanellos on the pebble-patterned terrace under the twisted grey wistaria boughs; stopping for a word here, a word there, in his high, gay voice, a slightly battered, middle-ageing popinjay, with the ormolu forelock and fluttering hands carefully cultivated for the benefit of admiring ladies in the world of haute couture (for Mr Cecil's exaggerations are by no means without calculation, and conceal a good, hard, not un-cynical business head); and the dear little paunch,
not
part of the deliberate décor, but which slappings and pummellings and foam-bathings galore, alas! fail to keep down. He was at the moment rehearsing a new fashion in the impromptu mannerisms for which he is, and justly, famous: soon all London would be talking Restorationese and adding (so good for publicity!) ‘as Mr Cecil would say.' “Oh, la!” cried Mr Cecil, therefore, stepping lively and at ease among the hotel guests, “One is vastly more wise not to book.” Just turn up unannounced, he insisted, and they thought one
must
be a Vip, and two poor members of some wretched Grouppa were doubled up, to give one the best room. “But then, of course,” he would add, at the same time delicately poking fun at his hosts and advertising his own identity, “one
is
their ‘Meethter Thetheelah'—the Juanese Hipline, you know: ‘Creethtophe et Thee.'” Short of distributing hand-outs, it cannot be said that Mr Cecil ever misses a chance of promoting Christophe et Cie.