The Takeover (12 page)

‘You’re using me,’ she said.

‘Of course. You’ll be paid as soon as I have the money, Pauline.’

‘I don’t want to be paid.’

‘You want to use me?’ he said.

‘No, I want to leave. Your behaviour.…’

‘You want,’ said Hubert, ‘to use me to satisfy your dreams. Which is wicked. I only want to use you as a secretary, which is perfectly reasonable behaviour. Are you in love with your lover in Brussels?’

‘That’s my business. Why do you keep talking about love?’

‘My dear, it was you who started—’

‘No, it was you.’

‘Look,’ said Hubert, ‘one can’t have sex with one’s secretary. It doesn’t work.’

‘Now you’re talking about sex,’ she said.

‘Well, it was you who started talking about sex, Miss Thin,’ Hubert said, and refilled their glasses.

‘We have to get new locks put on the doors tomorrow. The man’s coming,’ Pauline said, sleepily.

‘Why are we getting new locks?’

‘You told me to have them changed every month in case Maggie got hold of a key or something. Tomorrow’s the sixteenth. I told the man to come tomorrow. Shall I put him off?’

‘It’s expensive, everything’s expensive,’ Hubert said, ‘but no, my dear, don’t put him off. You’re very efficient.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. She put down her glass and started to walk carefully to the door, weaving only a little from her surplus intake of wine.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’ Hubert said when she reached the door. He made no motion to get up.

She looked back and felt the start of a drunken haze. She decided to use what lucidity remained to her to climb the stairs, clutching the banisters. ‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘What do you think I am? A piece of blubber?’ She achieved an exit, leaving him to think over what she had said.

What he thought was that the worst was over for the time being. She had got out what was in her mind and might even regret having done so. However, the air was a little cleared and he could count on the
status quo
continuing until it was possible for him to develop a better and more stable
status quo.
Hubert finished the champagne, so musing, and enjoying the solitude of the night. He thought of Maggie in Ischia. She had not told him of her change of plans. He didn’t know her house in Ischia. ‘Maggie…,’ mused Hubert, ‘Maggie.…’ At about three in the morning he had a sudden desire to telephone Maggie and wake her up, hear her voice. The Marchese would probably be snoring by her side in one of those huge matrimonial beds so prized by Italian families. Hubert felt he didn’t care. He half rose from his chair to go into the study, get her number from the exchange and ring her up. Then he recalled with great sadness that the telephone of his house had long since been cut off.

‘N
O REPLY FROM
H
UBERT,’
Maggie said. ‘I should have had the phone bill paid if only to keep in touch with him. But I didn’t see why he should have the use of it free, calling San Francisco, Hong Kong, Cape Town, you name it. And that lesbian. I had the phone cut off. Anyway I sent him a telegram two days ago to ask if he’s ready to vacate the house, and he hasn’t replied.’

Her husband, Berto di Tullio-Friole, was intent on listening to a Beethoven symphony on the gramophone and frowned across the room at Maggie to keep her voice down; he made an irritable gesture with his hand to accompany the frown; he was not in the least disenthralled with Maggie; he only wanted very much to savour the mighty bang-crash and terror of sound which would soon be followed by the sweet ‘never mind’, so adorable to his ears, of the finale. He was a sentimental man. Maggie and Mary lowered their voices.

Berto closed his eyes till the record came to an end. Then he went to join the women at the other part of the long paved room with its windows opened to the sunlight of October and the sea beyond. Lauro appeared from nowhere and was ordered to fetch a whisky and soda for Berto. ‘Si, Signor Marchese,’ said Lauro. No first names with Berto, nor would Berto have tolerated his wife, her son and her daughter-in-law to be addressed by their first names by any servant in his presence. Lauro, understanding this perfectly, had not even tried. They were nearly ready for lunch, already missing the past summer’s days with their morning rhythm of laze and swim, laze and swim, on and off their private rocky beach. This beach, a small promontory, was not entirely private by law, only the elevated rock was private. The pebbly shore where the waves lapped was like all other beaches in Italy, public property, a fact well-known to the blithe visitors who ostentatiously intruded whenever the whim seized them to bring their little boats ashore. It had happened that, one day during the summer, Maggie’s swim had been disturbed by a girl in a rowing boat; she was washing her long hair over the side with a shampoo which bubbled Maggie’s way. Maggie, aware of her impotence in territorial rights, shouted at the girl, ‘You can’t wash your hair in sea-water.’ Whereupon the girl shouted back, ‘It’s a special sea-water shampoo.’

Maggie had been very upset and after a hard day’s work on the telephone to the mainland had procured five private coastguards who still lounged along the rim of the shore below and on the rock and in front of Maggie’s house, dressed up as ‘intruders’, thus to keep at a distance the real ones. ‘The time is coming,’ Maggie said severely, ‘when we’ll have to employ our own egg-throwers to throw eggs at us, and, my God, of course, miss their aim, when we go to the opera on a gala night.’ She had sighed; a deep sigh, from the heart.

Meanwhile they sat in the room with the blinds lowered against both the fairly bright sunlight and those hired intruders, who Maggie thought were making a noise beyond the call of realism, while Berto waited for his drink and the two women continued their discussion of Hubert.

Berto, who was less rich than Maggie, but rich enough to understand the excessive and rather mysterious concerns of rich women of Maggie’s generation, and did not object to them, listened with a touch of tolerance and another touch of jealousy. The war of 1973 in the Middle East was just coming to an end. Things would never be the same again, as Berto had been told by the owner of the only newspaper he read. Once when he had entertained at a shooting-party a journalist of considerable fame, descendant of a noble family from Verona, who had ordered the delivery of three newspapers of conflicting politics, Berto had been highly indignant; his roof had been insulted and his hearth befouled; how could anyone read a Communist or a slightly left-wing newspaper, how could any friend of his read anything but the established paper of the right wing with its news reported fairly and its list of important deaths? The mild and middle-aged gentleman of Verona had tried very hard to point out that his profession required him to read all slants of opinion, but had not succeeded in conveying this to Berto who was convinced that all the needs of objectivity were supplied by the one and only newspaper permitted within his walls and whose owner he had known all his life. The journalist gave in and cancelled his wild order, being a man of agreeable temperament, and a desire to shoot some animals being one of the purposes of his visit.

‘By law,’ Maggie was saying to Mary, ‘when you turn someone out of a furnished house in Italy, you send a certain number of warnings, then the authorities send a van for the stuff. By law they have to leave behind the bed, the washing machine and the contents of the files. I would love to take everything away and leave him with the bed, the washing machine and his ridiculous papers and let him share them with Miss Thin.’

‘What about the man himself?’ Mary said. ‘How do you get rid of the person?’

‘It’s a different process and it’s difficult because first of all the neighbours gang up to protect the guy, and then you have the Press and the photographers and the police. But before it comes to all that you have to—’

‘Maggie dear!’ Berto said. ‘Maggie, my love, you’ll just have to forget it, you know. Leave him alone; starve him out. He’ll leave of his own accord one day, you’ll see.’

‘Now, Berto, you know you advised me to turn him out!’ Maggie said.

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘Berto you did say to turn him out.’

‘But,’ said Berto slowly, exasperated by their lack of his local logic which he fully thought to be the universal logic, ‘if the lawyer has told you the law, and it’s going to make a scandal, then you can’t succeed. You have to face the fact that the man has tricked you and has stolen your property. And you have to put that man right out of your mind because you can’t put him out of your house and make a scandal for the Communists to make capital of in the papers.’

‘Italy is a strange place,’ Maggie said.

‘It’s the same everywhere,’ Berto said. ‘Times are changing rapidly and things will never be the same again.’

‘I hate Hubert Mallindaine!’ Maggie cried out. ‘I loathe Hubert Mallindaine!’ And as she exploded further about her feelings against Hubert, her husband was overcome by a tremendous jealousy; Maggie’s emotions against Hubert were stronger by far than any she displayed towards himself; and Berto, suspecting in his jealous anxiety that she did not love him with the intensity that she hated Hubert, was too agitated to care whether she expressed love or hate; he cared only lest Maggie felt something for Hubert and nothing for him.

‘Hubert,’ Maggie said, ‘is a man that I despise, loathe and hate, and absolutely detest.’

‘He is very contemptible,’ Mary said.

‘The servants will hear you, Maggie,’ Berto said aimlessly, while staring at her as one appalled at his own fate. Lauro, representing the servants, appeared to enquire if he should serve more drinks. Berto had cancelled his trip to Le Touquet to buy horses. He had thought well before doing so; he had thought well, all the time knowing that he would decide to cancel the trip. Maggie had watched this process of decision with the eye of one watching a horse race, knowing full well which horse ought to win, and seeing it win.

‘I’m thinking of getting married,’ Lauro said.

‘Really? To anyone in particular?’ said Maggie.

Lauro looked put out. ‘She’s a fine girl from a very fine family. She did a year at the University of Pisa studying sociology, and she’s only twenty.’

‘And what does she do now, then?’

‘She works in a boutique in Rome. Her mother also works in a boutique. Her father is dead; I don’t know where he is.’

‘What do you mean…?’

‘I don’t know anything of the father. Maybe there isn’t a father. The mother’s family has land at Nemi, two fields.’

‘Well, Lauro,’ said Maggie, ‘you’re a lucky man. Is she beautiful?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lauro as if it went without saying.

‘Well, why don’t you bring her here to see us?’ Maggie said.

‘The Marchese wouldn’t mix,’ Lauro said with a laugh.

The Marchese had gone out and Lauro was sitting on the arm of one of the blue cotton-covered armchairs in the long paved room. He had opened the blinds to let in the mild sunlight of the late October afternoon. Berto was upstairs asleep. Mary and Michael had also disappeared upstairs where their voices sounded faintly in a continuous everyday tone. The rest of the staff had dispersed, some to the cottages behind the villa where their quarters were, others to hang around with their local friends at the bars which stretched along the quayside and where the incoming ferries brought ever-new talkative life from Naples, and the outgoing ferries carried away those multilingual visitors who had done their day, or stayed their weeks, on the island of Ischia. Lauro perched at his ease, in a fresh shirt and blue jeans, sipping from a glass of cloudy grapefruit juice and talking to Maggie. She sat back in her immaculate bright-coloured house-pyjamas, against the blue cotton covers of her chair, and smiled through her bright eyes and even as it seemed through the deep bronze of her skin.

Maggie was wondering whether Lauro had decided to talk of the girl he wanted to marry from the sheer naturalness of his kind, or whether he wanted to assert his male pride and put her in her place in some way, since he made love to her often in Berto’s absence and when Berto returned was so very much the old-fashioned servant; or did he, thought Maggie, smiling still, want a sum of money on the excuse that he needed it for his wedding and in the knowledge that, so far, she had always been generous to him with money? Maggie pondered on these alternatives as Lauro spoke in his casual manner about his girl and the boutique where she worked, and how she was unaware that he was employed as a domestic. ‘I am Mary’s secretary,’ Lauro advised Maggie, who murmured gaily, ‘Quite right, Lauro.’ Meantime Maggie’s mind ran on the alternatives of Lauro’s motives, mistakenly assuming that they were in fact alternatives and that Lauro was capable of analysing his own motives, or bothered to do so, since it had never been in the least necessary for him to find one reason only for doing any one thing.

Then Lauro said, ‘I hope that Mary will not take it to heart.’

‘Oh,’ said Maggie, ‘she won’t object to calling you her secretary. She’ll play along. What’s the difference?’

‘I mean that I hope my marriage will not upset Mary.’

Maggie was about to ask, ‘Why should it?’ But, thinking quickly, she refrained. She gave a little laugh instead and said, ‘There’s no question of upsetting Mary.’ And she was gratified to see that Lauro was put out. He’s trying to upset me, she thought.

‘You know about Mary and me?’ Lauro said.

‘I know you’re a very active boy,’ said Maggie, laughing softly again and gazing openly in his face.

‘Well, you Americans…,’ Lauro said, gazing back.

‘What about us?’

‘Strange women,’ he said, and in Italian repeated, ‘donne strane.’

‘Look, Lauro, I’ll give you a wedding present, a handsome one. Mary, too, will give you a present; from her and Michael. Isn’t that what you’re talking about?’

‘No, it isn’t what I’m talking about,’ said Lauro. He was furious and began to shout, ‘You think you can buy everything, don’t you? I was a secretary to Hubert Mallindaine and now I’m only the butler.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t say “butler”,’ Maggie said. ‘A butler is a very special type of professional with a very special training. You wouldn’t fit in as a butler, really. I always thought of you as our friend who looked after us, as—’