‘My mother and Luigi have gone off to England. She left a note.’ He contrived a strained grin. ‘I expect it was stuck to a pin-cushion. They say that’s the drill.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. But I’m not wholly surprised.’

  ‘My father is. Or, rather, he’s bewildered. I didn’t know there was such bewilderment. It’s that that’s the problem really – for the moment. He just wanders around. He won’t listen to me, won’t attend to me. Perhaps he’ll attend to you. I’m sorry we’re such a damned nuisance.’

  ‘Where is he now? I’ll have a shot.’

  ‘He’s up in the tower. I think he’s turning over files of those confounded photographs. I wish I knew the first thing about them.’

  ‘I see.’ What I saw was the direction in which this unremarkable boy’s mind was moving. ‘Well, Luigi is the corpus to him, and the corpus is Luigi. We’d rather decided that already.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s more than that. It’s Luigi who’s my father’s son. We’d decided that too.’

  ‘If that’s a fact – and I think it is – it’s an important one, and to be held on to.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Avery looked at me askance. ‘I’ve always known – I think I’ve told you – that my mother is . . . is an amazing person. But I’d come to feel the bambino was—well, reliable. He has a terrific brain.’

  ‘Oh, he has his wits about him, all right.’

  ‘But I’d got him properly wrong, hadn’t I? You remember how I thought he and that Mountpatrick woman were making eyes at each other.’

  ‘You weren’t entirely wrong. Luigi was at least making eyes at her. Not that “making eyes” is quite right. He was eyeing her, which is a different thing.’

  ‘Taking her clothes off as she sat.’ Avery said this surprisingly; he felt himself, I believe, thrust into a region in which there is virtue in unvarnished speech. ‘Of course it’s natural. I’ve done it myself. But one couldn’t call it good manners.’

  ‘Decidedly not.’ I didn’t find the situation too tragic to be amused by this judgement. ‘It was a revealing moment, I’d say: Luigi’s indulging himself in that fashion at our lunch- party.’

  ‘If my mother had been there, it might have put ideas in her head.’

  ‘That’s true.’ I wondered why anybody had ever found Avery unintelligent. I also reflected that it is a faculty which, whether for good or ill, expedites any journey into disillusionment. I decided to support Avery’s sense of our having arrived at a point at which everything was better said. ‘She naturally wouldn’t like to see her school-friend – an old rival, in a way – making all the running.’

  ‘I wish I knew what she said in her note to my father. He won’t show it to me. I’ve tried suggesting she’s just taken Luigi away on a kind of freakish impulse – to show him England, because he’s such dead nuts on it. That’s a factor anyway, wouldn’t you say? In Luigi’s playing ball, that is. Two birds with one stone.’

  ‘Yes.’ The hardness of this a little daunted me. ‘Undoubtedly. But it’s not, incidentally, an explanation you entertain yourself?’

  ‘An innocent association?’ Avery produced a queer laugh. ‘No.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s just stupid. He might have been hit on the head. But I don’t think so. Please go and talk to him.’

  ‘I’m going – in a moment. But, you know, I’m not so interested in his future as I am in yours. And you have a future, Avery. An immediate one. When you get back to England, do you feel you can go home?’

  ‘Of course not. I couldn’t take—could I?—a half-brother and a step-father rolled into one. Luigi would be all too much the prefect, and I’d be all too much the fag.’

  ‘Yes.’ I found this a wholesome clarity. ‘But it raises practical issues. For instance, how is it likely to be about money?’

  ‘Money?’ Avery sounded surprised. ‘Well there’s a trust, and a lawyer, and I get nine hundred a year when I come of age. For ever, it seems. And I think I have come of age, because of some new law. Even if it doesn’t apply, the lawyer would see me through. We’re family friends, and I go and stay. He has a very decent daughter of my own age.’

  ‘Is that the girl at Somerville?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Avery flushed; he seemed astounded at my remembering this. ‘But I’m not thinking about all that.’

  ‘That income will be just about right for Oxford – if you have to keep yourself during vacations as well.’

  ‘I mean what I say. I’m not thinking about all that at all.’

  Avery left me at the foot of the tower, and I climbed its staircase alone. The treads seemed steep and numerous; I took them slowly; perhaps I hoped that, before I had to encounter Jethro, some aim or plan or policy would come into my head. No doubt I ought to have been thinking how to comfort the man, since a great evil had befallen him; and indeed I hope my mind was not innocent of some such intention. Avery, after all, had called me up to attempt just that; and with Avery I had to be (as Avery would have said) ‘square’. Nevertheless it was decidedly the problem of how to deal with Jethro that was engaging me. If the man was a victim, he was a menace as well.

  My first observation, as I entered the large work-room, was that some of the ranked filing-cabinets at its farther end had been pulled open, and that their contents lay in an untidy heap on a table, as if thrown there in the course of a muddled and impatient rummage. And for a moment I thought I had made my climb in vain, since Jethro was nowhere to be seen. Then I looked into the only shadowed area in the room. He was sitting there at a table, with his head buried in his arms. I halted awkwardly by the door.

  ‘Brenton,’ I said, ‘—may I come in?’

  He straightened himself and looked at me, seemingly without recognition; but when he spoke it was in Greek. I should have been a poor scholar had the line eluded me, since Aeschylus never penned one more quotable. Agamemnon, while being butchered by his wife, was crying out that he had been struck a mortal blow within his house. This piece of theatre seemed unpropitious. To any reasonable dignity in misfortune a man whose first notion is to posture has a long way to go. Nevertheless, Brenton had every excuse for being in a deep state of shock. And that, one has to suppose, takes one man one way, and another quite another.

  ‘I have only just heard this strange and sad news,’ I said. ‘Avery rang me up.’

  ‘Don’t speak of him. I will not have him mentioned to me. He came here as a spy.’

  ‘Brenton, you are quite wrong. He came with the most honest intentions.’

  ‘That vile woman sent him. He reported to her, and she came herself. Her ideas, her designs, were laughable and absurd – and she came to know that I judged them so. Who said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?’

  ‘I believe it was Congreve.’

  Jethro’s question must have been designed as rhetorical, since my supplying an answer disconcerted him. But in a moment he was off again.

  ‘Fernanda was the first great disaster of my life, and now she has been the last. She thought to avenge herself by an unspeakable slander. And when that was exposed, crushed, by my boldly speaking forth the truth, she saw, and grasped her chance to do me this supreme injury. She has seduced my son. She has abducted him. And he went, Bannerman! He went in the very moment in which I had made clear to him that he owed me all. That he was my son! Ought not that’—Jethro made a compulsive movement, as if clasping something to his breast—’ought not that to have bound him to me even more closely than the benefits he had enjoyed for so long?’

  ‘I’m afraid Luigi has felt your acknowledgement of him to have come a little late. But that was certainly no reason for running away with your wife—or former wife. Much less for running away with Avery’s mother. That’s what I can’t take. And it’s Avery who has to be thought of.’

  ‘Avery has to be thought of! I have forbidden you to mention him.’

  ‘Very well. And you won’t be bothered with him for long. He’s due in Oxford within a week.’

  ‘Oxford! The idiot has scrambled into some obscure college after all?’

  ‘He has scrambled into a very good college. And fortunately, as you must know, he is to have quite a useful private income. You can forget about him.’

  ‘I have forgotten about him – even although he comes into this room and importunes me.’

  ‘He won’t do that again, Brenton, if I can find any means of stopping him.’

  Jethro had now risen and was pacing about the place. Or rather he was wandering about it so indecisively that to follow his progress was like watching a slow-motion film of a ball on a pin-table. Avery had told me that his father might have been hit on the head. This was literally true. I have seen a boy concussed on the rugger field thus alarmingly meander before being led away. But now Jethro paused and looked around him. He raised his head as if to listen. I think the emptiness of the Buontalenti had come home to him.

  ‘What use would he be?’ He had turned upon me challengingly, querulously. ‘He’s ignorant and stupid, isn’t he – and every inch Fernanda’s booby son?’

  There was a moment’s silence – simply because I had made as if to speak, and then checked myself. These words revolted me; they seemed to approach the pathological. ‘Although I don’t think he’s without taste,’ Jethro went on. ‘He must have something from me, I suppose – unless his mother betrayed me right at the start.’ He paused on this Elizabethan pleasantry. ‘Do you know, Bannerman, he once said something rather perceptive to me about silence in Masaccio and—’

  ‘Don’t be misled. Avery had that from Luigi. I heard it myself. Avery has no promise as a Kunsthistoriker, or even as a simple aesthete. His is very much a practical intellect.’

  ‘Of course that’s true. He is practical. We’ve been rather in pieces over the last twenty-four hours, but I can see that he has taken things in hand. What they are to do in the kitchen, and things of that sort. Not, mark you, that I ever want to see him again.’

  ‘Do you want to see Luigi again?’

  This produced a longer silence – into which, as it were, Jethro presently spoke.

  ‘I could forgive Luigi,’ Jethro said.

  It was clearly true – and, in a strict judgement, would have to be accounted the first sincere thing the man had said. I didn’t feel too good at pouncing upon it. But I pounced.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that Luigi might come back. From time to time, I mean, and on a basis of no questions asked. He wouldn’t really be ashamed. Do you understand me, Brenton? Your marriage with Fernanda is past history – and perhaps you at least found it not much of a marriage anyway. But Fernanda is still attractive – honest-to-God sensually attractive – and has lots of money. She makes sense to Luigi – just on those scores. He’d see nothing out of the way in a joint household, really. Only he’d know that you and Fernanda are both too Saxon and irrational for that! Still, he’d turn up. He’d face it – what he felt was to be faced. But he wouldn’t face Avery. There, he has betrayed a brother. And that’s a real Italian crime.’

  ‘You keep on coming back to Avery.’ Jethro said this irritably. ‘I’ve told you I want to hear nothing about Avery.’ He hesitated. ‘How does Avery feel about Luigi?’

  ‘He’s been hurt by Luigi. Much more than by you.’

  ‘Why should I have hurt him? I’m not interested in him. Why should I be?’ Jethro looked at me in simple enquiry. ‘Until two or three weeks ago, I’d scarcely ever set eyes on him. Not that I don’t do him justice, as I’ve said. He could run a fellow’s household, and affairs, and so forth.’

  ‘You don’t quite get the point I’m making.’ I felt there had been enough of this blundering, monomaniac scheming. ‘Luigi knows how much he has hurt Avery. And he likes Avery. He even – if you can get this into your head, Brenton – admires Avery, who comes straight out of his myth of the English public school. And so he will never square up to him again. His spirit is rebuked by Avery: it’s as simple as that. If you continue to have Avery around, you will most assuredly never see your son Luigi until the day you die.’

  ‘My dear Bannerman’—Jethro took a long breath—’why, why do you keep on talking about Avery? He’s clearing out, praise the Lord – to whatever very good college it may be.’

  ‘Just that,’ I said. And after some further decent words – for I wasn’t so inhuman as not to pity the man – I got myself out of the room.

  But Avery was waiting for me in the garden. I took him round it twice, and spoke to him with more attempt at persuasiveness than I’d ever ventured to youth or boy before. Then we walked up the drive.

  ‘No,’ he said – and the barbed-wire entanglement was before us: almost, I felt, it was around him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m a bore to him, and all that. But he’s alone. It wouldn’t be a bit the thing.’

  III

  I spent three days having a bad time. I had no business, I had no business in the world, to interfere again. What I had come up against was a moral absolute. And that was that. But on the fourth day I walked up to the Villa Buontalenti, all the same.

  The garden was deserted and dusty, and it was still a summer warmth that steeped it. But in the air or in one’s bones there was something, hard to define, which spoke of a new season marshalling itself in the farther Apennines. Luca, visible from the loggia in a middle distance, had abandoned his rake in favour of a long wand or pole, and with this was conducting a preliminary skirmish with some olive trees. Beyond him, Florence had withdrawn, if almost imperceptibly, within an atmosphere in which there might have hung suspended innumerable particles of bronze. At any time the tramontana might arrive, and the scene be wholly transformed.

  Before a closed door I rang a bell. There was no reply, and I rang again. Nobody seemed to be around. I somehow fancied that the door would open at a turn of the handle, but this time I hesitated to make so free as to walk in. Instead, I took a turn up and down the loggia, and presently I saw that Luca had decided he had a duty to join me. He had put down his pole, and was advancing slowly through the olive grove. Perhaps he felt that an eye should be kept on me. He was a thoroughly autumnal figure – almost an allegory, I told myself, of the turning year. But as he drew nearer, his image changed. He was wearing a faded blue cap which, although crumpled and shapeless, retained a stiff peak which came far forward and down over his aquiline, wrinkled, and toothless face. I had seen him before – I think in some caricature by Leonardo of an aged warrior beneath a barbaric helmet.

  I asked for Signor Brenton, and received as answer the information that the young gentleman had gone down to Florence to take photographs. This news gave me pause, and I found I didn’t care for it. I made my first question clearer by asking for Jethro as il padrone. But from Luca this elicited only a vague gesture, which terminated in his stepping forward and courteously opening the front door. The young Signor Avery would be back at any moment, and I might care to wait for him in the tower. It was the tower that he had made his own.

  There seemed no reason to reject this proposal, so once more I climbed the steep staircase. The work-room was untenanted. It had been tidied up. The disordered files had been put away. The table at which I had come upon Jethro bowed in his misery had now become Avery’s. Lying in an ash-tray was an object I had seen only once before: the shiny new pipe which Avery had thought better of producing on our aeroplane. There was a tin of English tobacco beside it, and a packet of cerini. Nearby lay Luigi’s paperback copy of Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day. And beside this again, open at an early page, was a copy of Berenson’s Three Essays in Method.

  I studied these evidences soberly – and perhaps my eye lingered, in particular, upon the heroic absurdity of that treatise by the fabulous B.B. Of course Avery was methodical. He would decide at once that this was where to begin.

  Then I noticed something else. Placed squarely in the centre of the table was an envelope, addressed in what I recognised as Jethro’s hand. It said simply Avery Brenton Esq., and I reflected on the quite small ways in which Jethro could contrive impressions other than agreeable. Beneath the envelope lay a small pile of what appeared to be thousand-lire notes. I was eyeing these curiously when Avery spoke behind me.

  ‘Oh, hullo – how nice of you to come in!’ He was being so determinedly grown-up that he had forgotten his customary ‘sir’. ‘And I’m sorry you’ve had to wait. I’ve been trying to photograph some pictures, as a matter of fact. A high-up at that kind of thing has given me a permit. One has to begin somewhere, and it’s frightfully interesting. The technique, and so on.’

  ‘I suppose so. Avery, where is your father?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I gave him a shout when I got in’—Avery said this, I felt, by way of a bid to suggest a cheerful informality as now obtaining in the Buontalenti—’but he didn’t seem to be around. He’s better, by the way. That Mountpatrick woman was here yesterday, and I think she managed to chat him up a bit. A bad conscience, I expect. And quite right too. She owes my father something, I’d say. I think it was she who set that filthy yarn going.’

  ‘Avery, there’s a note for you on that table. From your father.’

  ‘How very odd!’ Avery crossed the room. ‘And he has shoved some money under it.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s your housekeeping money,’ I said drily. ‘I suppose you’re expected to see to all that.’

  ‘Well, yes. Only—’ Avery’s voice died away, and his glance sought mine. I realised that he was suddenly aware of what he was going to find. He had turned as pale as at the moment of Luigi’s handing him the telegram from Oxford. But as he picked up his father’s letter he gave me a resolute smile. ‘At least it’s not on a pin-cushion,’ he said.

  But it was, of course, a pin-cushion communication, all the same. Only two hours before, Jethro Brenton and Alison Mountpatrick had departed together for Rome. They would be back at the Buontalenti, married, within a week. As it would be inconvenient that Avery should still be there, his father would be grateful if his delightful visit might terminate in the interim. Paternally apprehensive that his son might be short of journey-money, he was leaving a substantial sum herewith. And he added the address of the bank to which, at Avery’s convenience, repayment should be made.

 

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