Avery's Mission, page 11
Receiving this as idle politeness, Luigi acknowledged it only with a stiff bow – or with that and with a faintly bewildered expression. But Avery filled the gap.
‘All the bambino’s photographs and things?’ he queried enthusiastically. ‘They’re absolutely smashing.’
‘He is as far from being a bambino as you are, young man – or perhaps a good deal farther.’
‘Oh, yes—of course.’ Avery was disconcerted. ‘It’s a silly joke of mine. Part of my having just about six words in Italian, so far. But I’m learning. And a lot faster now that Luigi’s teaching me.’
‘Don’t learn too much from him.’
‘Oh, I’m too slow for that,’ Avery said genially.
I glanced at Luigi and saw that, unlike his English friend, he hadn’t failed to catch something cryptic and almost menacing in Mrs Mountpatrick’s last remark. But for the fact that he had changed colour, I should have supposed that he was merely puzzled. And I recalled the story Avery had told me, not half an hour before, about Luigi’s affair with a married woman. I had classed it as vainglorious fairy-tale, spun by Luigi to keep his end up, perhaps in response to equally vainglorious stuff from Avery about the toughness of life in an English school. It now came to me that it was true; that Mrs Mountpatrick knew about it; and that her attitude to sexual licence – or at least to adultery – was not of the permissive sort. No more is mine. Yet I felt displeased with my friend, and resolved to tell her so. Married women are rarely seduced by boys scarcely out of school, and it was improbable that Luigi had borne the more flagitious part in the affair. Such an episode was certainly no occasion for public rebuke by a stranger. It might be, of course, that Luigi Fagandini was known by reputation to Mrs Mountpatrick as a positively and promiscuously loose-living person, and this would set a different complexion on the small incident. But here I appealed to my own general acquaintance with young men in their several types and varieties. And I decided that Luigi, although one wouldn’t in the least guarantee him as a stern young virgin, was at least equally remote from being the type of the precocious womaniser.
‘The garden is very well worth walking round,’ I said, by way of pacific remark for the moment. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Luigi?’
‘It is not the Gamberaia or the Petraia, but in its small way it is not bad. Particularly as there are so few old gardens round Florence. Old villas, yes; old gardens, no. Rich Americans are most to blame.’ Luigi turned to Mrs Mountpatrick. ‘But I beg your pardon. You are yourself American, I think?’
‘My late husband was American. I am English.’
‘Ah, yes. But the English, I fear, have been to blame too. They settled here in swarms. They bought the villas and preserved them, since it would have been expensive to knock them down. But the gardens – that was easy. So out went the old giardini tagliati, and in came deciduous trees, and lawns to play vigorous games on, and ever so many jolly little flowers.’
‘I have always understood’—Mrs Mountpatrick spoke with a snap—’that the Anglicisation of the Tuscan garden came from France in the age of the Petit Trianon, and was the work of a Francophile Italian nobility. For that matter, there is evidence that a strong naturalistic school of gardening was growing up in Italy itself as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.’
‘Ah, you are thinking of the Borghese gardens in Rome, and supposing them to have taken their present form under Giovanni Fontana at that time. But the documentation is not strong to my mind. Learned persons have destroyed our gardens too, we are sad to think.’ Luigi offered Mrs Mountpatrick his very rare smile. ‘Enthusiastic archaeologists have dug up gardens, and removed pots, and left mud.’
At this point I nudged Avery (who was merely gaping, I fear, before these learned exchanges and the tone he was acute enough to detect in them). And Avery, recalled to his duty as host, quite competently intervened and led his guest away. There was no reason to suppose that he knew one kind of garden from another. But as Mrs Mountpatrick’s object in making his acquaintance was to commend to him the profession of arms this did not greatly matter.
‘Oh, my!’ Luigi exclaimed.
‘One can say that?’ I asked humorously – perhaps out of some impulse to show the young man that I remained well disposed to him.
‘Oh, my hat! Oh, crumbs!’ It was with Avery’s cheerfulness that Luigi thus overreached himself with a plunge into the most archaic vocabulary of his distant school stories. But despite this artless reaction he was eyeing me warily. ‘Well?’
‘You were a little unfair about the English and their philistinism. You admire them, don’t you? Their vigorous games, even if not their jolly little flowers.’
‘All is fair, Mr Bannerman, in love and war. The lady was hostage to me.’
‘Hostile.’ I thought this odd slip suggested that Luigi was considerably upset.
‘Hostile. I prefer feelthy books – like the one Avery so foolishly gave to the dustman – to feelthy minds.’ Having produced this notable sentiment, Luigi pulled himself up. ‘While Avery shows your friend the garden,’ he said calmly, ‘might I have the pleasure of showing you a little of how we work? Mr Brenton, I know, would wish it.’
There followed what I need not detail: an interesting half hour. The top storey of the ancient tower which had become the nucleus of the Villa Buontalenti formed a single large chamber, now by some discreet adaptation excellently lit. Here the whole labour of the corpus (whether vain and outmoded or not) went on. It is popularly believed that art historians and experts generally work surrounded by elaborate scientific devices which alone enable them to tell a Picasso from an El Greco; and I have myself been led through laboratories in which this, to the innocent eye, would scarcely appear to be an exaggeration. But in fact science does much more to preserve than to categorise or classify, and I should have suspended judgement, if tackled, on whether Messrs Brenton and Fagandini – the one equipped, I supposed, with a flash-light and a pair of opera-glasses, and the other lugging round a camera – were too hopelessly an antiquated couple. Certainly what Luigi called the archive was – or was in process of becoming – impressive. On one side of the room was a thicket or jungle of receptacles ranging from cassoni of the seicento and eighteenth-century armoires to Victorian hat-boxes and contemporary plastic bread-bins from Upim. On the other side was a line of steel filing-cabinets. There could be no doubt as to what this betokened. Luigi Fagandini was getting Jethro Brenton straight.
Luigi was a very good cicerone to his own domain. He didn’t pester me with information, and on the other hand he didn’t treat me as an uncomprehending person to whom courtesy has made it obligatory to put on a mere pretence of showing things. He let his wares expose themselves.
Yet I felt there was something missing. And because I own a professional impulse – sometimes rashly indulged – to clarify the minds of young men, I resolved to tackle Luigi on this. I had a shot at it when the time came to go downstairs again.
‘I wonder,’ I asked, ‘how much you’ve realised that Avery’s no fool?’
‘Signore?’
‘I’m sorry. What I mean is this. Avery has a kind of simplicity which amuses and attracts you – and, I think, a background and associations which attract you as well. And you, correspondingly, have a kind of sophistication and (if you’ll forgive the word) a precocity which impress and attract him. When I say he’s no fool, I’m saying that he might be not merely impressed but quite perceptive too. Anything he ventured about you, I’d be myself inclined to listen to.’
‘Ventured about me?’ I saw Luigi’s wary look flit over his attractive features. ‘Avery has been good enough—’
‘Oh, he hasn’t been pronouncing upon you at large. He has simply recorded his impression that this’—and I made a gesture round the room—’just isn’t you.’ There was nothing like an elusive English meaning to concentrate Luigi’s attention.
‘Ah.’ Luigi’s gesture held a subtlety that made my own seem crude. ‘I must not be thought miserable.’
‘Restless?’
‘Forse, signore. Vi sono diverse possibilità.’
Upon this linguistic retreat on Luigi’s part I ought to have stopped off. But I chose to take up what he had said.
‘Well, one of them that I see is your going right to the top – whatever in Italy is the top – at this sort of thing. The Pope telling you to look after the Vatican Museums, or something of that kind.’
‘Which would be very splendid, distinguished, top-drawer.’ I was relieved to see Luigi respond to my smile. ‘Meanwhile’—he looked around him—’there is much work on hand.’
‘And you are determined to go through with it?’
Luigi’s gesture was this time his only reply. As so often, it was simply not to be read by a foreigner – which didn’t mean that I failed to find myself, as it were, poring over it there and then. It struck me as having been involuntary and unguarded; and it was this quality, paradoxically, which first put it into my head that Luigi Fagandini was a young man playing a part. Perhaps it was no more than the kind of part I already suspected: that of one more absorbed in the history of Florentine painting than was in fact the case. Perhaps it was something quite other than this. But my real perplexity arose from a sense that somewhere in Luigi there lay a centre not so much of restlessness (which I had suggested) as of more or less recently implanted bewilderment and resentment. And if these emotions were there, the youth certainly had no disposition to acknowledge them to the world. It was perhaps this that lent even a faint suggestion of the clandestine to his picture.
But now he was looking at me with an openness of regard which he might have studied from his English friend.
‘Mr Bannerman,’ he said, ‘do you know something of what I owe to Mr Brenton?’
‘I don’t know anything about you, Luigi. There’s really no reason why I should.’ I saw the young man flush, and realised how much I had got this wrong. It had been my intention to do no more than disclaim any intrusive curiosity, but my words could have been taken as expressing the general inconsiderableness of Jethro Brenton’s secretary. The necessity to straighten the record was so obvious that I did it in words as explicit as I could find. And Luigi’s manner of dismissing the incident was deft and unelaborate; he simply pointed us towards the staircase while giving me, once more, the same frank glance. It was as we took our last steps across the room, I believe, that I became aware of Luigi as not merely good-looking but also beautifully made. He might have been an athlete of the sparer sort: a sprinter, possibly, or a first-class bat. Perhaps it was a consciousness of this potentiality which had endowed him with that mild fixation upon the life of English public schools, or upon the romantic image of that life in books from Tom Brown’s Schooldays onwards.
IV
We found Jethro Brenton, together with his son and Mrs Mountpatrick, beneath the shade of the loggia – at one end of which a table had been laid for five. Brenton’s prompt insistence that neither the lady nor myself, if not positively engaged, should depart unrefreshed at so awkward an hour was by this small fait accompli rendered awkward to resist – the more so as he put a good deal of courteous formality into the proposition that life at the Buontalenti was a very informal affair. So an informal meal it had to be.
It seemed to me, rather strangely, that our impromptu festivity took its occasion from some obscure sense in our host that there might be safety in numbers. He could scarcely have been called ill at ease. He had his presence, and anything self-conscious in his manners went no farther than the cultivation of a somewhat old-world air. Nevertheless he did seem a little on his guard. It was a natural stance in an expatriate who had behind him a failed marriage and what sounded to have been, at the least, a near thing in point of a whole professional career. As for the numbers, they weren’t all that considerable, anyway. And it was part of my sense of him that what he would really have liked would have been a gathering: a dozen people or more dotted about the long deep loggia, with himself doing cercle in a semi-regal fashion. Perhaps this was the Berenson-complex. As it was, he did at least have a small power of manoeuvre if anything awkward turned up.
It was possible, in other words, to feel that Brenton was apprehensive. I knew nothing of the routine of his life here at the Buontalenti, except that its principal components seemed to be Luigi Fagandini, three or four peasants from the Abruzzi, and mountains of photographs. But such as it was, it had been disturbed. Avery had arrived, and had certainly not been wholly successful in dissimulating the fact that he portended something. I had arrived myself, and might – although most unjustly – have been equally unsuccessful in asserting that I wasn’t in some dark way an emissary of Avery’s mother. And Mrs Mountpatrick had arrived as well.
Mrs Mountpatrick, although not a stranger to Jethro, had been prompted to turn up simply on account of Avery. That this constituted the sole sphere of her concern was now so apparent in everything she said that I found myself wondering whether I wasn’t witnessing the overplaying of a hand. She had professed entire surprise when I told her that Avery was in Florence. But had this, I asked myself, been disingenuous? Was it conceivable that the deep Fernanda (everybody called Fernanda Brenton deep), having despatched her son to report on her former husband, had straightway commissioned the companion of her schooldays to report on the situation thus created? It was a possibility which was perhaps going through Jethro’s head now.
At least Jethro was puzzled by Mrs Mountpatrick. Or if it wasn’t that – if he wasn’t, as it were, trying to work her out – then he was trying to remember her more clearly than he found it easy to do. I tried a little remembering myself. But Alison Mountpatrick, although an acquaintance of long standing, had never been other than an acquaintance merely, and nothing I had ever known about her could connect her with the Brentons in any degree. There were, of course, things it might be interesting, even amusing, to discover: whether, for example, her friendship with Fernanda had been of the kind that women sometimes renew with school-companions after a total lapse of many years, or whether it had in fact been continuous, and operative at the time both of the Brenton marriage and of its dissolution a decade later. Had the two women been kindred spirits? Had they attracted each other as opposites (like Avery and Luigi), or were they basically the same sort of woman?
This last question for some reason remained with me. It even struck me, rather wildly, that it was just what Jethro was trying to recall the answer to. And I concluded, provisionally, that the answer ought to be a negative. Mrs Mountpatrick’s excavations, for instance, hadn’t been a random scrabbling, merely destructive of gardens, as Luigi had with urbane insolence suggested. She had made her mark in an intellectual world. Fernanda Brenton, as I recalled her, was not at all like that; you at once supposed she might be clever; you acknowledged that she had striking physical attractions; but it didn’t occur to you to suppose that, in the speculative sense, she had a single idea in her head. That this conclusion left considerable areas of feminine psychology aside and uncompared, I didn’t go on to reflect. I had become aware that Jethro, most surprisingly, was addressing Mrs Mountpatrick on the subject of his former wife.
‘You must give me any news you have of Fernanda. She and I don’t much correspond. I suppose that’s an uncivilised thing. But successful correspondence depends upon a fairly large area of common interests.’ Jethro paused to glance at his son. ‘Of course, Avery has told me something of his mother’s circumstances. But between Avery and myself there is still a little constraint, as is natural. But it will wear off. Avery – wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, sir, of course.’ Avery had given the effect of jumping to attention. Why he should have chosen to address his father as ‘sir’, I don’t know, since it is a habit that English boys of his sort have almost entirely given up. He had, indeed, an old-fashioned streak to him which he could almost have inherited from Jethro, and it might have been expected that Jethro would be pleased by this linguistic instance of it. Jethro didn’t, however, seem to be, for he turned back to Mrs Mountpatrick at once.
‘I think you knew Fernanda long before I did.’ He was speaking with an easy openness which it ought to have been impossible to fault – yet I found myself registering something uncomfortable in it, all the same. ‘For I seem to remember you were at school with her?’
‘Certainly I was. Charles has asked me’—and Mrs Mountpatrick gave me an ironic glance—’which of us was the Terror of the Remove.’
‘Ah, the Remove! Observe Luigi prick up his ears. He is an authority upon English schools. In imagination, Luigi has endured everything that the Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s has to inflict. Luigi, isn’t that so?’
This, like his question to Avery, appeared to be Jethro’s way of bringing our juniors into the talk – and with a hint of extra politeness in that the Italian boy, being an employed person, must be additionally deferred to or conversationally provided for. It might be called the cercle stuff again. Yet it didn’t come off. Jethro had accompanied his words by a movement which appeared at variance with their lightness of tone; he had proposed to touch Luigi – reassuringly, affectionately – on the hand or arm. And Luigi had drawn back. Between these two, also, there was constraint – and of a kind that I registered as not lucid to me. Of course, Jethro was unlikely to be aware of what I had myself discovered in a day: that there lurked in his young secretary an intellectual impatience which he wasn’t finding it easy to reconcile with his job. Perhaps that was it. Certainly what Luigi further produced now, by way of response to the teasing and its accompanying gesture, was itself only a gesture – a resolutely good-natured gesture, indeed, but joined to a marked indisposition to speak. So again Jethro turned back to Mrs Mountpatrick.
