(1941) Up at the Villa (2 page)

`Yes, I called her up_ and told her that I was obliged to
leave Florence for a few days.’

`Did you tell her why? You know what an old tyrant she
is,' he smiled indulgently.

`She told me off good and proper for throwing her over at
the last moment and in the end I had to confess the truth.’

`Oh, well, she'll find someone to take your place,' Mary
replied casually.

`I trust you'll take Ciro with you as I shan't be able to
come and fetch you.’

`I can't. I told Ciro and Nina that they could go out.’

`I think it's terribly unsafe for you to drive along
these - deserted roads by yourself at all hours of the night But you'll keep
your promise to me, won't you?”

‘What promise? Oh, the revolver. I think it's perfectly
ridiculous, the roads of Tuscany are just as safe as the roads of England, but
if it'll set your mind at ease I’ll take it with me tonight' Knowing how fond
Mary was of driving about the country by herself, and having the Englishman's
man's belief that foreigners on the whole were very dangerous people, Edgar had
insisted on lending her a revolver and exacted a promise from her that unless
she were only going into Florence she would always take it with her.

`The country's full of starving workmen and penniless
refugees,' he said.

`I shan't have a moment's peace unless I know that if the
need arises you can take care of yourself.’

The manservant was at the taxi to open the door for him.
Edgar took a fifty lira note out of his pocket and gave it to him.

`Look here, Ciro, I'm going away for a few days. I shan't
be able to come for the Signora to-night. Be sure she takes the revolver when
she goes out in the car. She's promised me she would.’

`Very good, Signore,' said the man.

2

M A R Y was doing her face. Nina stood behind her,
watching with interest and offering now and then unsolicited advice. Nina had
been with the Leonards long enough to speak a certain amount of English and
Mary in the five months she had lived at the villa had learnt a good deal of
Italian, so they got on very well together.

`D'you
think
I've put on enough
rouge. Nina?' asked Mary.

`With the beautiful colour the Signora has naturally, I
don't know why she wants to put any rouge on at all.’

`The other women at the party will be plastered with it,
and if I don't put on a little I shall look like death.’

She slipped into her pretty frock, put on the various
bits and pieces of jewellery she had decided to wear, and then perched on her
head a tiny, quite ridiculous, but very smart hat. For it was to be that sort
of party. They were going to a new restaurant on one of the banks of the Arno where
the food was supposed to be very good and where, sitting in the open, they
could enjoy the balmy June night and when the moon rose the lovely view of the
old houses on the opposite side of the river. The old Princess had discovered a
singer there whose voice she thought unusual and whom she wanted her guests to
hear. Mary took up her bag.

`Now I'm ready.’

`The Signora has forgotten the revolver.’

It lay on the dressing-table. Mary laughed.

`You idiot, that's just what I was trying to do. What is
the use of it? I've never fired a revolver in my life and I'm scared to death
of it. I haven't got a licence and if I were found with it I would get into all
sorts of trouble.’

`
Me
Signora promised the Signore
she'd take it.’

`The Signore is an old silly.’

`Men are when they're in love,' said Nina sententiously.
Mary looked away. That wasn't a matter she wished to go into just then; Italian
servants were admirable, loyal and hard-working, but it was no good to delude
yourself with the belief that they didn't know all your business, and Mary was
well aware that Nina would be perfectly willing to discuss the whole matter
with her in the frankest possible way. She opened her bag.
All
right.
Put the beastly thing in.’

Ciro had brought the car round. It was a convertible
coupé that Mary had bought when she took the villa and which she was proposing
to sell for what it would fetch when she left. She stepped in. drove cautiously
along the narrow drive, out of the iron gates and down a winding country lane
till she got on to the highway that led into Florence. She turned the light on
to see what the time was and finding that she had plenty kept to a leisurely
speed. At the back of her mind was a faint disinclination to arrive, for really
she would have much preferred to dine by herself on the terrace of the villa.
To dine there on a June evening, when it was still day, and after dinner to sit
till the softness of the night gradually enveloped her, was a delight of which
Mary felt that she could never tire. It gave her a delicious feeling of peace,
but not of an empty peace in which there was something lethargic, of an active,
thrilling peace rather in which her brain was all alert and her senses quick to
respond. Perhaps it was something in that light Tuscan air that affected you so
that even physical sensation had in it something spiritual. It gave you just
the same emotion as listening to the music of Mozart, so.
melodious
and so gay, with its undercurrent of melancholy, which filled you with so great
a contentment that you felt as though the flesh had no longer any hold on you.
For a few blissful minutes you were purged of all grossness and the confusion
of life was dissolved in perfect loveliness.

`I was a fool to go,' Mary said out loud.

`I ought to have cried off when Edgar was called away.’

But of course that would have been silly. Still, she
would have given a good deal to have that evening to herself so that she could
think things over quietly. Though she had long guessed Edgar's intentions she
had not till that afternoon been quite sure that he would ever bring himself to
the point of speaking, and till he did she had felt it unnecessary to make up
her mind what she should answer. She would leave it then to the impulse of the
moment. Well, now he had, and she felt more hopelessly undecided than before.
But by this time she had reached the city, and the crowds of people walking in
the roadway, the string of cyclists, forced her to give all her attention to
her driving.

When Mary reached the restaurant, she found that she was
the last to arrive. The Princess San Ferdinando was American; an elderly woman
with iron-grey. tightly waved hair and an authoritative manner, who had lived
in Italy for forty years without ever going back to her native country; her
husband, a Roman prince, had been dead for a quarter of a century and she had
two sons in the Italian Army. She had little money, but a caustic tongue and
great good-nature. Though she could never have been beautiful and now, with her
upright carriage, fine eyes and determined features, was probably
better-looking than she had ever been in her youth, she was reported to have
been very unfaithful to the Prince; but this had not affected the great
position she had made for herself; she knew everybody she wished to know and
everybody was pleased to know her. The rest of the party consisted of a couple
of travelling English people, Colonel and Lady Grace Trail, a sprinkling of
Italians and a young Englishman called Rowley Flint. Mary during her stay in
Florence had got to know him pretty well. He had indeed been paying her a good
deal of attention.

`I must tell you that rm. only a stopgap; he said when
Mary shook hands with him.

`It was unusually nice of him,' the Princess put in.

`I asked him when Sir Edgar called up to say he had to go
to Cannes and he broke another engagement to come to `
You
know quite well rd break any engagement in the world to come and dine with you,
Princess,' he said. The Princess smiled dryly.

`I think I should tell you that he wanted to know exactly
who was going to be here before he accepted!’

`It's flattering that we met with his approval,' said
Mary. The Princess gave him another of those quiet smiling looks of hers in
which there was the indulgence of an old rip who had neither forgotten nor
repented of her naughty past and at the same time the shrewdness of a woman who
knows the world like the palm of her hand and has come to the conclusion that
no one is any better than he should be.

`You're an awful scamp, Rowley, and you're not even
good-looking enough to excuse it, but we like you.’ she said.

It was true that Rowley was not much to look at. He had a
tolerable figure, but he was of no more than average height, and in clothes he
looked thick-set. He had not a single feature that you could call good: he had
white teeth, but they were not very even; he had a fresh colour, but not a very
clear skin; he had a good head of hair, but it was of a vague brown between
dark and fair; his eyes were fairly large, but they were of that pallid blue
that is generally described as grey. He had an air of dissipation and people
who didn't like him said he looked shifty. It was freely admitted, even by his
greatest friends, that he couldn't be trusted. He had a bad record. When he was
only just over twenty he had run away and married a girl who was engaged to
somebody else, and three years afterwards he had been co-respondent in a
divorce case, whereupon his wife divorced him and he had married, not the woman
who had been divorced on his account, but another, only to leave her two or
three years later. He was now just over thirty. He was in short a young man
with a shocking reputation which he thoroughly deserved. You would have said
there was nothing to recommend him; and Colonel Trail, the travelling
Englishman, tall, thin, weather-beaten, with a lean red face, a grey toothbrush
moustache and an air of imbecility, wondered that the Princess had asked him
and his wife to meet a damned rotter like that.

`I mean he's not the sort of feller' - he would have said
if there'd been anyone to say it to - `that a decent woman ought to be asked to
sit in the same room with.’

He was glad to see, when they took their places at table,
that though his wife sat next to Rowley Flint, she was listening to the civil
remarks he was making to her with a cold look of disapproval. The worst of it
was
,
the Teller wasn't an adventurer or anything like
that; in fact, he was a cousin of his wife's; so far as family went he was as
good as anybody and he had quite a decent income. The mistake was that he'd
never had to earn his living. Oh.
well
, every family
had its black sheep, but what the Colonel couldn't understand was what the
women saw in him. He couldn't be expected to know, this simple, honest
Englishman, that
what Rowley Flint had which explained
everything was sex appeal, and the fact that in his relations with women he was
unreliable and unscrupulous seemed only to make him more irresistible. However
prejudiced she might be against him, he had only to be with a woman for half an
hour for her heart to melt, and soon she would be saying to herself that she
didn't believe half the things that were said against him. But if she had been
asked what it was she saw in him she would have found it hard to answer. He
certainly wasn't very good-looking, there was even no distinction in his
appearance, he looked like any mechanic in a garage; he wore his smart clothes
as if they were overalls, but as if he didn't care a hang what he looked like.
It was exasperating that he seemed to be serious about nothing, not even about
making love; he made it quite clear that there was only one thing that he
wanted from a woman, and his complete lack of sentimentality was intolerably
offensive. But there was something that swept you off your feet, a sort of gentleness
behind the roughness of his manner,
a thrilling
warmth
behind his mockery, some instinctive understanding of woman as a different
creature from man, which was strangely flattering; and the sensuality of his
mouth and the caress in his grey eyes. The old Princess had put the matter with
her usual crudity:

`Of course he's a bad lot, a thorough wrong 'un, but if I
were thirty years younger and he asked me to run away with him I wouldn't
hesitate for a moment even though I knew he'd chuck me in a week and I'd be
wretched for the rest of my life.’

But the Princess liked general conversation at her table
and when her guests were settled down she addressed Mary.

`I'm so sorry Sir Edgar was unable to come tonight’

`He was sorry, too. He had to go to Cannes! The Princess
took the rest of the party in.

`It's a great secret, so you mustn't any of you tell
anybody, but he's just been made Governor of Bengal.’

`Has he, by Jove!' cried the Colonel `A damned nice job
to get’

`Did it come as a surprise?”

‘He knew he was one of the people who were being
considered,' said Mary.

`He'll be the right man in the right place; there's no
doubt about that,' said the Colonel.

`If he pulls it off, I shouldn't be surprised if later on
they didn't make him Viceroy.’

`I can't imagine anything I'd like better than to be
Vicereine of India,' said the Princess.

`Why don't you marry him on the off-chance?' smiled Mary.

`Oh, isn't he married?' asked Lady Grace.

`No.’

The Princess gave Mary a shrewd, malicious look.

`I won't conceal from you that he's been flirting with me
outrageously during the six weeks he's been here.’

Rowley chuckled and from beneath his long eyelashes threw
a sidelong glance at Mary.

`Have you decided to marry him, Princess? Because if you
have, I don't think he's got much chance, poor blighter.’

`I think it would be a very suitable alliance,' said
Mary. She knew quite well that both the Princess and Rowley were chaffing her,
but she had no intention of giving anything away. Edgar Swift had made it
sufficiently plain to his friends and hers in Florence that he was in love with
her; and the Princess had more than once tried to find out from her whether
anything was going to come of it `I don't know whether you'd much like the
climate of Calcutta,' said Lady Grace, who took everything with complete
seriousness.