The Apprentice Lover (8 page)

“You make me sound like a heifer,” she said. “But the answer is yes. My parents met at Oxford. He's a psychologist, at All Souls—that's a research college in Oxford.” (As I learned from Vera, Sir Richard Hampton was the author of several important books on public policy and mental health.) “What about your parents?” she asked.

“My father runs a construction business. It was started by my grandfather, Alessandro.”

“A patriarchy,” she said.

“You should meet my mother before you make too many assumptions.”

She seemed, for the first time, interested in something I had said, and asked about my poetry.

“I'm serious about it,” I said carefully, “I want to write more poems, and better poems. For my own sake, really. I don't care if I ever publish them. I mean that.”

“That sounds reasonable,” she said.

“What about
your
novel?” I asked.

“I don't usually talk about it.”

“Talk anyway.”

She sighed. “You don't give up, do you?”

“It wouldn't be in character,” I said.

This provoked the tiniest smile. “It's set on Capri,” she said, “before the war. The Great War. That's one reason I came here.”

“So you're doing research for yourself?”

She concurred, but her response was curt. She regarded me as a hopeless case, I could tell. “I had better get back,” she said, shifting from the rock. “Rupert will miss me.”

I walked beside her, letting the crash of the surf fill in for conversation.
Getting to know Holly was going to be difficult, but I felt a primitive urge to overcome that obstacle. I would not be brushed aside.

We rounded the point to see a bonfire, its flames billowing skyward. A number of shadowy figures danced around it, one of them banging a tambourine. Another stood at the side, playing a small accordion. The steep hillside above the beach had fallen into shadow, as had Mount Solaro—a brooding, almost invisible presence—more felt than seen. I found the scene strangely thrilling: the bonfire, the beach, the dancing. I had dropped mysteriously into a world so unlike anything in my previous experience that my nerves bristled with pleasure, electric.

Rupert Grant had joined the circle of dancers. I watched with interest as he raised his arms in the air like some parodic version of Zorba the Greek as Vera, seeming lonely, stood to one side, a drink in hand.

“What's your impression of Rupert?” Holly asked, with surprising bluntness.

“I hardly know him,” I said. “But I've been reading him pretty intensely for the past month.”

“Reading what?”

“The novels, some of the poetry.” I felt defensive, as something in her tone suggested that she didn't believe me.

Holly persevered. “So what do you think?”

“He's good,” I said, unambiguously.

“How good?”

“Compared to what?”

Sensing my discomfort, she pressed no further. “He's a remarkable man,” she said, more to herself than to me. “One mustn't be too critical.”

“I believe that,” I said.

Impressionable at that age, when everything looked new and strange and freshly lit, I was ready to be convinced about any aspect of life, especially by Holly Hampton. Although many things suggested that life at the Villa Clio would not be easy, I intended to make my way in this particular world. As my brother put it: “You do what you got to do, Asshole. And you do it well.”

G
rant left the island for Rome in mid-May, taking Holly with him. He had some business there, and they would spend a few days at the Rafaele, a small, ivy-covered hotel hidden in a square behind the Piazza Navona. Marisa was left to lounge beside the pool, where she spent her time with a glass of wine in her hand, leafing through an Italian fashion magazine. She was supposedly writing a piece for a Roman newspaper on Capri—her first real assignment—but I had yet to see her doing much research. “I am thinking about it,” she said to me, when I inquired about its progress over lunch. “When the article emerges, I will write it down.”

I had seen her in tears more than once, and asked if anything was wrong. “My life is wrong,” she said, rather melodramatically. I decided there was little I could do that would comfort her, so stayed away, unlike Vera, who grew especially attentive to Marisa with Holly gone. “I worry about the poor thing,” she said. “Rupert doesn't take her seriously. I don't think he even likes her.”

It occurred to me that Grant really didn't like women at all, but I didn't dare say this to Vera.

Grant had left me without a specific assignment. “Just get on with it, Lorenzo,” he told me.
Get on with what?
I wanted to say, but didn't dare.

Vera told me that Grant had made few genuine friendships with other writers in Italy. He did admire Alberto Moravia—the uncrowned king of
Italian letters—and they would periodically exchange letters or phone calls. And when in Rome, he invariably called on Gore Vidal and his companion, Howard Austen, who lived grandly in a penthouse overlooking the Largo Argentina with their dog, Rat. “Gore is the only celebrity I can tolerate,” Grant told me. “He has no morals. Morals are for those who can't think for themselves.” Muriel Spark, an “English Tuscan,” as Vera put it, turned up periodically for a day or two on Capri, although she considered southern Italy a foreign country and, according to Vera, “whined incessantly about the heat.” Auden, once a close friend of her husband, rarely came to the island these days. “There is always a rivalry with Wystan, and Rupert dislikes competition,” Vera said. Even Graham Greene, a legendary figure on Capri (though he rarely occupied Il Rosaio, his villa in Anacapri), had remained a passing acquaintance. “He went to a minor public school,” Vera said. “And I find his books rather sour. There's nothing more depressing than an
English
Catholic.”

I could not get a fix on Vera's attitude toward “the girls,” though she referred in passing to her husband's “goatish little hobby.” She had presumably come to an arrangement with him about their sexual life. In any case, she treated Holly and Marisa with respect, even affection—like fellow sufferers of an obscure disease.

Was the Grant arrangement what Patrice called a
mariage blanc
, a union without sexual content, a cover for their mutually independent lives? Or was this just a tony form of modern decadence? I knew about the Bloomsbury crowd, and Vera considered herself an heir of sorts to that sensibility. Her father, a wealthy entrepreneur who had come with his parents from Riga in flight from the Bolsheviks, had known Keynes at Cambridge, and Vera blithely referred to “Uncle Maynard” quite often. Her mother, from a famous county family, had also gone to Cambridge, and (as Vera said on more than one occasion) “once met Virginia Woolf at a party at Garsington,” a manor house near Oxford where the Bloomsbury crowd often gathered under the supercilious gaze of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

I gradually pieced together Vera's personal history. After studying art history in England, she had spent a period in Florence at an expensive art school, where “the daughters of English gentlefolk apprenticed them
selves to attractive older men in the pursuit of wisdom.” It was in Florence, at the Villa Barbaresca, the neo-Palladian home of an English baroness, that she met Grant, then in his early forties. He was recently divorced, famous, and extremely eligible. The fact that he had barely enough money to support the children of his previous marriage didn't trouble her, as her parents had plenty and would be glad to supply her and a suitable husband with all the necessities, even a villa on Capri if that was their preference.

I hadn't, at first, been aware of Grant's social isolation, which was largely self-imposed. Because my arrival in April coincided with his birthday, my first impression was misleading. I was, in fact, dazzled by the company he and Vera managed to assemble on the beach that night. In a fell swoop, my address book filled with local phone numbers and addresses, and I had invitations to call at half a dozen villas. (“Who would have guessed you would be popular?” Vera remarked, calling on me in my cottage the next morning, bringing hot tea in a Thermos.) But I did not immediately attempt to widen my circle.

I sensed that Grant wished for the Villa Clio to remain aloof, a place where private fantasies were indulged, and where Art—his writing, Vera's cooking and gardening—occurred unobstructed by anything but their own demons. The dinner parties, plentiful in my first month on the island, disguised a lack of genuine desire to mingle; Rupert and Vera invited people to watch them, not to interact; the conviviality was, in part, a facade, a means of structuring and confirming their isolation. By late May, fewer and fewer guests crossed our threshold.

Holly and Marisa, in their different ways, had bought into Grant's vision of privacy and self-indulgence, and together with Vera and the servants they formed a solar system of sorts, with Grant himself the supernova at the center, supplying the necessary heat and light. Vera was the nearest planet, but a cold one, her atmosphere—layers of protective ice and fog—difficult for ordinary human beings to fathom, although she had sunlit clearings where great warmth and understanding could be found. Maria Pia was a little moon, circling Vera, as was Mimo, who glowered from the sidelines, a gardener who was more eyes than hands. Marisa and Holly were equidistant from the star, although they managed to sustain
enough distance—emotional and physical—from each other to avoid clashing in their orbit around him. I was trying, anxiously, to find my place in this system.

Often I lingered in the cottage by myself, scribbling in my journal, writing home, rereading my brother's letters from Vietnam. He would have been a marvelous reporter, with his eye for the luminous detail. He often placed himself in situations of danger, and enjoyed talking about them with casual detachment. I caught glimpses of a brothel in Saigon, an opium den in a village, a night patrol in a remote province, where the threat of ambush made every step, every cracked branch underfoot or wild animal in the brush, a cause for panic. “There are eyes in the jungle,” Nicky wrote, “eyes everywhere, and they're fucking malevolent. There are no kind eyes in Vietnam. It's all death here. Even the sex drips death like water in a dark cave.”

I told no one about Nicky, fearing their pity. That would have been unbearable. It came as some relief that they remained oblivious to the outside world, where wars raged, people starved, dictators dictated, and vast sums of money passed among a few controlling hands. The Grants read few newspapers and never watched television. The Villa Clio, indeed, had no television set. “You can acquire only one station,” Vera explained. “Nothing but bloody local stuff anyway. Telecapri is hardly a station at all. More like a peasant family feud.”

Politics rarely arose in conversation, though the Grants were essentially Tories. They despised Harold Wilson and the Labour government, who in their opinion appealed to “the lowest common denominator” in British society. The TUC, the national trades union organization, was ridiculed as “a gang of hooligans” by Vera. Oddly enough, I found myself nodding in agreement when Grant and Vera bemoaned the “bogus socialist notion of equality.” (Vera's Jewish grandfather had been dislodged from a position of prominence in Latvia by the Bolsheviks, although she was born in London and completely absorbed into the British upper-middle class.) At that time, I shared Grant's unequivocal belief in the superiority of the artist, in the privilege conferred by pure acts of imagination; I, too, disliked the “world of mass production” that was Grant's favorite bugaboo. His blithe assumptions about class unsettled me, though I dis
missed my reservations as American gaucherie. At least he and Vera never referred to the Vietnam War, which was probably of less interest to them than the Boer War.

Complicating my situation at the Villa Clio were my feelings for Holly. After our initial, botched, encounter on the beach, she remained wary of me, or so I thought. She barely acknowledged any gestures of friendship I put forward, as when I asked her to stop by the cottage one afternoon for tea. English girls could hardly object to invitations to tea, could they? “Yes, that would be nice,” she had replied, “but not today. Another time, perhaps.” She seemed to suggest—or so I imagined—that no day would be the right day.

Holly and Marisa, each driven by their own ambitions, got along surprisingly well under the circumstances. They often joined forces at the dinner table, with Vera, to tease Grant (who seemed to luxuriate in this teasing, which was a form of flattery). They shared a suite at the villa: two small bedrooms in a separate wing, at the opposite end of where Grant and Vera slept in a big yellow room with a view across the Marina Piccola to the Punta di Mulo, with its ragged angostine cliffs. I wondered how sharing such close quarters was possible, given their rivalrous connections to Grant. He seemed arbitrarily to pick one or the other to serve as his “research assistant” for the day, and this involved not only long sessions in his study but morning swims, walks, and “naps.” This was a form of what the behavioral psychologists called intermittent reinforcement: the most vicious and powerful type of reward, and one that turned laboratory mice into little neurotic fuzz balls willing to perform any species-demeaning task for a drop of sugar water.

In the early morning, I occasionally met Holly by the pool, where she sat with the manuscript of her Capri novel on her lap—it had recently topped a hundred pages, she said. When I asked to read some of it, she refused. “Only when it's finished,” she said. “I don't present work-in-progress.” The book was overly influenced, she claimed, by Evelyn Waugh, whose work I'd never read. “You must, absolutely must, read him,” she insisted. I was lent a copy of
A Handful of Dust
, and found it delicious as well as shocking. It also explained to me a good deal about
the world of upper class British society, which until my arrival at the Villa Clio had been largely unknown to me.

“You fancy Holly, don't you?” Vera asked, while her husband and Holly were still in Rome. We sat alone in the dining room, lingering over coffee one day after lunch.

“I suppose,” I said.

“Rupert won't like that.”

I feigned confusion, and this annoyed Vera.

“Rupert tells me that she's good at fellatio,” she said. “You're familiar with the term, I presume.”

Vera was disconcerting, without emotional boundaries, and willing to say anything that came into her head.

“I don't mind his girls,” she said. “I wish you could believe that.” Her intimate tone, the sense of trusting me with her private life, won me over. “You needn't worry about Rupert and Holly,” she said. “She's nothing special, not to him. One of many in a long string of amusements. Seize the day, darling. Isn't that what you poets advise?”

“She isn't interested in me,” I explained. “You see how she treats me.”

“Like a poor, dumb booby,” she said.

A poor, dumb booby.

“Poor baby!” Vera continued, “I've hurt your feelings.”

“A little,” I said.

“Have you made your sentiments clear to Holly?”

“Not really,” I said. “I should just give up.”

Vera sighed and put down her cup. “Are you queer, Alex?”

“What?”

“Queer. Patrice is queer, isn't he? I don't mind—the island is crawling with buggers.”

I did not respond, flummoxed.

She studied me carefully. “About you, I'm uncertain. But it's bloody obvious that Patrice is queer.”

“Not to me.”

“You are not as alert as you might be.”

That was understating the case. I began to wonder if I could possibly navigate the world of Capri, where every goal was obscured by the mes
merizing light, refracted in a zillion ways. Motives were hidden or difficult to parse.
Lo pazzo d'isola,
as the locals called it, permeated everything, but it was worse at the Villa Clio. The island madness heaped here, spoonful after spoonful like whipped cream, with nuts sprinkled on top.

“Seize the day, Alex,” Vera said, with false urgency. “Isn't that what poets do?”

“With Holly?”

“Why not?” she asked. “It would not, of course, delight Rupert. But who cares?”

 

The month of my arrival remained the peak of contact between myself and Rupert Grant, a period when he seemed determined to win me over. I had tried to impress him, too, roughing out the Tiberius chapter for him in four days by poring over a Latin dictionary well past midnight. Reading over my translation carefully, I decided it was not as rough as I'd first imagined. The prose was clear, even fluent, with graceful flourishes. I put the manuscript on his desk one afternoon with a barely feigned modesty.

“Come, sit beside me,” he said, lifting my typescript. There was a scold in his voice, a slight edge of disapproval. “Let's see what you've accomplished.”

Warily, I pulled up a chair; he had a schoolmaster's way of lowering his bushy eyebrows that made me highly self-conscious.

He donned his wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair like a waterfall in reverse. His manner bordered on interrogation, yet his presence thrilled me: he was an emotional and intellectual generator, and I wanted to clamp my cables onto him, to let his power flow into me. For at least twenty minutes he read to himself, occasionally mouthing a few words sotto voce, leaving me to gaze around the room.