Avery's Mission, page 15
‘Avery has written to me,’ Avery’s mother was saying, ‘about how you travelled out together. You were always so interested in his affairs that I am sure he had a lot to tell you.’
This had been a fair sample of Fernanda’s art, since she must have known very well that at Anglebury my awareness of her son had been not substantial. But there was nothing ironical in her tone; on the contrary, its disturbingly Sirenlike note had been intensified. Just at the moment, she was not luring any Ulysses to a doom. But it was plain that she would have a fair shot at it, if occasion prompted.
‘Oh, yes – we had a good deal of talk. He told me about his last interview at Oxford. I’ve said I hope he’ll get in, and it’s only honest to tell you I’m pretty sure he will. Which must be an admirable thing for him.’
‘I’m not confident of that. Of course Avery is clever – much cleverer than one might suppose – but there’s nothing dry-as-dust about him.’
‘Nor is there about at least ninety-five per cent of Oxford undergraduates. You needn’t be afraid he’ll be out of his element.’
‘Perhaps not – yet something else might suit him better. And, I feel, if he has been deprived of his father his father has been deprived of him.’
‘So time lost is to be redeemed? They’re to become—father and son—inseparables?’
‘We are all to become inseparables,’ Fernanda Brenton said.
Through my head at this there passed the spectral form of Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Greville-Gregory. As a good soldier, he must have been taught that it is by audacity that battles are won – but it had perhaps been the audacity of Mrs Brenton that had been a little too much for him. She had exhibited the quality in this exchange. And I should have been alarmed for Avery – fated to be the young squire not even of the Buontalenti but of an apartment on the Lungarno – had I not been more impressed by the dimensions of the unapprehended and ironic cloud impending over Fernanda’s fond vision. I still intended, even at the cost of much disingenuousness, to avoid the region now. But the woman herself led me fatally towards it.
‘Would you say that, so far, Jethro has really taken to Avery?’
‘Well, yes – to a degree.’
‘To a degree?’
‘Mr Brenton is fond of young men, as you said. And Avery is a very likeable one. I judge that Mr Brenton is genuinely touched by having his son arrive on him. He even a little sees what you see – or, at least, one part of that.’
‘Which part, Mr Bannerman?’
‘Avery perhaps fitting into his present way of life – and even into sustaining something of the labour on the corpus. He sees that only very dimly, I think. Even so, I’m bound to say that that’s a good deal more clearly than I see it.’
‘You seem very confident that you understand us all.’
‘I understand Avery a little. He’s a very sensible boy, Mrs Brenton. He appreciates his own bent, and his own limitations. But there’s another thing.’ I paused on this, conscious of how far I was venturing, after all. ‘His father’s thoughts in that direction – companionship, the corpus, and so on – are something in the nature of an insurance policy. You must remember the other boy.’
‘The other boy?’ As she repeated this, Fernanda turned to stare at me. ‘Fagiolini?’
‘Fagandini. He has qualities which Avery – well, doesn’t much bother with: sophisticated intelligence, wit, brilliant technical expertness. But he’s restless, and Mr Brenton is apprehensive that he – Luigi, that is: Luigi Fagandini – may seek to leave his employment. Then there would be Avery.’
‘As a second best? To some little Italian handy man?’ Mrs Brenton had taken my words stoutly, but there was something in her eyes that conveyed a different message. ‘Are you telling me,’ she asked in a changed voice, ‘the full truth?’
‘I just can’t answer that question. On my honour I can’t. I’m only an outside observer who has had his few glimpses of an obscure situation. You will have to find out for yourself. But you did receive an urgent telegram.’
The bus had by this time made its several halts around the city; we were alone with the driver; and our course was along the Via Alessandro Volta and towards the gentle ascent to what Dante (again) had called the rough mountain- flint of Fiesole. And suddenly I felt that I had done right. If the woman were only a little prepared there might be the less chance of an éclaircissement – or supposed éclaircissement – of a gross and brutal character.
‘And there’s still a shot in the locker,’ I said impulsively – and certainly with a reminiscence of something that Avery had once said to me. ‘So don’t play it rough.’
III
They had to work it out for themselves. And they would work it out. Even if they didn’t, it would work itself out – right under their noses. Unless I was wildly wrong, it was in the nature of the case that this should happen. The process might be uncomfortable, but at least they wouldn’t be left severally deluding themselves. As for myself, I ought perhaps to be around – it might be useful to Avery if I were – but not for the purpose of making speeches.
These were the thoughts in my head as I sat down in the Serena’s lofty sala da pranzo and addressed myself to the not very imaginative taglierini in brodo which was to be the beginning of our evening meal. Mrs Brenton, I was relieved to see, had been given a table some way off. Immediately upon our arrival, she had shut herself up in the little glass cubicle in which the Serena keeps its telephone, but whether to announce herself to her former husband at the Buontalenti or to Mrs Mountpatrick in the city, I had no means of telling. She emerged looking a little pale. But this appeared to me not conclusive evidence either way.
She was not pale now, nor was she any longer unobtrusively dressed. Even the Serena’s two aged waiters appeared to be aware of her as a phenomenon. And the boy Gino, an impressionable although undemonstrative lad, could be detected as having to suppress an inclination to stare at her round-eyed. Gino’s function was to dispense the wine, a duty which he commonly held accomplished when he had planted a flask of appropriate size on one’s table. But as soon as Fernanda’s glass admitted of the slightest replenishment he advanced and performed this further service with alacrity.
Fernanda drank quite a lot. She had missed, I fancied, the solace of a stiff gin before the start of the meal. I had missed, for that matter, something of the same sort myself.
Since I have mentioned the brodo disparagingly, I must do Signor Galbiani the justice of adding that the little concoction following it was ingenious, and the vitello following that both abundant and superb. Before the end of the meal I felt more than adequately recruited – yet not to a degree of robustness that would have disposed me to a further immediate colloquy with the lady. Not even a Lucullian banquet would quite have done that. In Rome, an expansive Dutch professor had presented me with several cigars. I withdrew unobtrusively to the terrace to smoke one of these in the brief Tuscan dusk.
Over the city the last violet veils were fading, and the lights had been coming out. Florence was like a woman (I informed myself poetically) who draws from some capacious casket string upon string of many-coloured jewels. Only one great splash of cold and functional illumination over the stadio communale violated this fancy. Perhaps the Atletico Fiorentino F.C. were disporting themselves under the acid arcs. They might be a resource for Avery in place of the spectacle that had failed him at the Sferisterio. I went down into the garden, and it was suddenly almost dark.
‘Buona sera, signore.’
For a moment I supposed myself to have been addressed by one of Galbiani’s randomly disposed chunks of statuary – so immobile had the figure of Luigi Fagandini been.
‘Good evening, Luigi. Do you often come down here?’ I remembered that I was smoking. ‘Would you care for a cigar?’
There was a moment’s silence, and I could just distinguish that Luigi was looking almost bewildered. It was as if he had found something unexpected in this commonplace courtesy.
‘Thank you, I shall be very glad. Although I don’t often indulge.’ What was no more than the ghost of one of Luigi’s linguistic pauses followed this. ‘I didn’t venture to call, to enquire. Only I thought we might meet by chance. I almost came up and peeped through the dining-room window. I might have learnt how to do it.’
‘To do what, Luigi?’ I handed the young man my matches.
‘How to be a waiter. I think I shall go away and be a waiter in a London hotel. It would improve my English, would it not?’
‘It certainly wouldn’t do that.’ I watched Luigi, not very expertly, light his Dutch cigar. ‘I’m glad I happened to come out.’
‘We might walk, Mr Bannerman?’
‘Yes, indeed. But up on the terrace. We’ll break our shins down here.’
From the higher level the lights of the city were again visible. Luigi halted at the sight of them, and what he muttered in Italian I caught as one of Dante’s more sombre reflections on the place.
‘But your poet,’ I said, ‘isn’t encouraging about exile. Tu proverai si come sa di sale Lo pane altrui.’
‘E com’ e duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’’ In Luigi’s manner of concluding the quotation there had sounded a faint irony, as if to mark his consciousness that he was indulging a cultivated foreigner. Then he laughed harshly. ‘But mine is already another’s bread, and I go up and down another man’s stair. I owe much to the charity of Mr Brenton. Yet I am a protetto, a client, a hireling, after all. And it seems that I am other things as well. Surely it is time to call it a day.’
‘I want you to know I don’t believe a word of it.’
‘You are an old-fashioned and honourable person, Mr Bannerman, are you not?’
I became conscious, upon this exchange, of an odd quality in our interview. I had said something I was bound to say, and saw no possibility of saying anything more – or not except at the hazard of disastrous error. I had said something which possessed, at least, the authority of all my experience; what I might further say would be based on nothing more than a single strange start of mind. This being the situation, I might have been expected to feel most sympathetically disposed towards Luigi Fagandini: a young man, and a dependant, who had become aware of himself as the centre and occasion of spreading calumny. Yet this feeling I did not securely possess. Luigi, quite as much as his employer, was an egotistical person. He wanted – I was certain of this – above everything else a position of independence or dominance. And he had a quick pride – which was what had emerged in that last mocking ascription of sentimentality to an expression of faith which I had hoped he might be grateful for. Not that perhaps he hadn’t been. Luigi wasn’t, as Avery was, a simple person. And now the thought of Avery made me ask a question.
‘Have you talked to Avery about this?’
‘Of course not. He would make a row – with Mr Brenton, with Mrs Mountpatrick, or with the servants and the campagnuoli and everybody else. It wouldn’t help.’
‘I see you understand Avery very well. Are you coming to like him, Luigi? Even to feel a certain affection for him?’
‘To like him? Affection?’ It was as if I had plunged into the recess of the English language for unintelligible words. ‘Avery is amusing. It is with him as he says of me. He is fun. I think I have a kind of flirtation with Avery.’
‘A flirtation?’ I stared at Luigi stupidly.
‘Or with his myth. Yes, it is that. Avery is from a dream country.’
‘Luigi, you should remember that you are no longer a small boy – and that you are much too intellectual a person to have any proper traffic with dream countries.’
‘Perhaps it is so.’ Just detectably, Luigi offered the darkness a gesture which told he had been offended – perhaps by no more than the words ‘small boy’. He had as much vanity as pride. It was certainly as a wound to his vanity that this successful lover of a married woman felt the character now being ascribed to him. And again I was conscious of the difficulty of a sympathetic response to Luigi.
During these exchanges we had been pacing up and down the terrace, with little more than its vague masses visible to us. And now – although we might have been warned by the glowing tip of a cigarette – we almost bumped into somebody. All three of us came abruptly to a halt. It was Fernanda. Apparently correspondingly conscious of my own identity, she held her ground, so that a moment of awkwardness succeeded. It had not occurred to me – or I had scarcely had the opportunity – to tell Luigi that Avery’s mother had arrived in Fiesole. So here was a sudden encounter. I felt uncertain what to do. But I was quite certain of what I would not do, which was to fade with Luigi into the night. So that settled it.
‘Mrs Brenton,’ I said, ‘this is Mr Brenton’s secretary, Signor Luigi Fagandini. Luigi, Mrs Fernanda Brenton.’
‘Come sta, signora?’
It had been without a second’s hesitation that Luigi spoke. And in the same instant, as if his words had been a direction written into the stage-manager’s copy of a play, somebody within the Serena happened to fling open a French window. Fernanda, and Fernanda alone, stood framed in a brilliant shaft of light.
‘How do you do, Signor Fagandini?’ As she spoke, Mrs Brenton extended her hand into the darkness. Both the gesture and her tone told me that it had been quite unnecessary for me to advise her not to play it rough. To do so wouldn’t have occurred to her – or not until some final phase of the battle. Her plan (and I was now sure of its having being formed in the light of a full report from Mrs Mountpatrick) would be to ease Luigi out with no questions asked. What she had heard was no more to her than, as it were, one unexpected and further entrenchment to carry. I don’t know whether I ought to describe myself as lost in admiration before this, but I certainly found it necessary to reflect that she was an over-confident woman. Luigi’s talk of withdrawing upon menial employment in London had been rhetorical or ironical or whatever of that nature one pleased; if he went it would be on his own terms; and I suspected that the values of Italian opera would have a place in them.
And now that earlier hint of theatre repeated itself, although this time the stage-manager was Mrs Brenton herself. Having shaken hands with Luigi, she took a pace backwards into darkness, with the almost automatic consequence that the young man took a pace forward into light. There was no means of telling what she made of what she saw, and I felt that clarity might be served by a little stage-managing of my own. So I crossed the terrace and opened a second French window – an action which the mildness of the evening could make vexatious to nobody. We were now all three in a tolerably diffused glow.
‘Of course Avery has written to me about you,’ Mrs Brenton said – thus flatly contradicting her earlier statement to me that she had never heard of Luigi Fagandini. ‘And I know how much you have been helping Mr Brenton with his work. It will be quite sad when that is over, and you take your departure. But, I don’t doubt, you are destined for higher things than simply assisting an older scholar. Mr Bannerman, that must be your impression too?’
‘Signor Fagandini knows something of my impression.’
‘Exactly. I knew you would agree with me. I think, signor, your people belong to Rome?’
‘I have been told they did so.’ Luigi was looking at Mrs Brenton steadily. He might have been measuring, as it were, the length of the foils. ‘I know little of them.’
‘Everything happens in Rome. I have many friends there, and some of them are people of influence. One of them is the Minister who, I believe, looks after artistic affairs.’
‘You are to be felicitated, Mrs Brenton.’ Luigi paused (as he well might on such a triumph of bookish English). ‘Perhaps you will take Signor Avery there, and show him the sights. He will soon have exhausted our provincial Florence, I fear.’
‘Avery is not a prodigy of learning and expertness. But he is a resourceful boy, and will make his own interests. His natural place is with his father, after all – as Mr Bannerman, who has his interest at heart, has remarked to me.’
The sheer impertinence of this bare-faced lie so staggered me that I was speechless – a condition, indeed, to which the bright speed of Mrs Brenton’s methods might already have reduced me. Yet what I was next aware of was a pause. It was much as if Fernanda had been distracted by some new appearance on the scene. Yet all she was looking at was Luigi, and that unwaveringly enough.
‘It isn’t cold,’ she said, ‘but I think I should like my cloak. Signor Fagandini, I wonder whether you would be so kind? You can’t mistake it. I put it on a chair immediately inside the door.’
‘Con piacere,’ Luigi said coldly, and walked away in the direction indicated. I had concluded that this manoeuvre was designed to give Mrs Brenton an opportunity to say something to me privately. But nothing of the sort occurred. She merely followed Luigi with her glance as he departed – and similarly in silence watched him return. Her first words were again addressed to him.
‘How very good of you!’ Fernanda’s astounding voice was in play as she slipped on the cloak. ‘I think you have recently
met one of my friends – Alison Mountpatrick?’ She paused, but her question elicited nothing from Luigi except a formal bow. ‘Alison has very good qualities, but she is not discreet. She sometimes imports an unnecessary note of drama into things. And she can even be rude. But we were at school together, and I have always been able to keep her in order. I look forward to seeing her again. Perhaps she, too, will come up to the Villa Buontalenti tomorrow.’ As she thus announced her own intention, Mrs Brenton further arranged her cloak, much with the air of preparing for a journey. ‘And now, by way of recalling old times here, I am going to take a little stroll by myself. As you see, the moon is coming up.’
