Avery's Mission, page 9
‘Well, he would make a good soldier, as a matter of fact. So the round and the square is with him, you may say, that way on.’
‘If I meet him, I shall talk to him about the army as a career.’
‘I hope you will. Meet him, I mean, and harangue him if you care to. He’s finding Florence rather thinly populated.’
‘Of course I must meet him! Where is the child to be found?’
‘After today, at the Buontalenti. There has been a short delay, but now he is to join his father. For how long, I can’t guess, nor can he. I don’t know how his mission is supposed to conduct itself. He’s a nice boy – his mother seems to have made an accurate assessment of that – and in his society his father’s heart is to kindle towards the old domestic felicities. Perhaps the thing is calculated to run on those lines. Meanwhile, I can’t at all guess what sort of society Avery is going to encounter. Have you ever heard tell of the Comtesse de Criquetot? He – Jethro, that is – has named her as a friend.’
‘I never have. But people say he talks about rather nebulous French or German or Scandinavian friends – all well-born – in default of Italian ones.’
‘Nebulous? You mean, he makes them up – Mme de Criquetot and the rest?’
‘I think they exist in a come-and-go fashion. Old-style minor foreign notabilities. And he makes the most of them.’
‘Would you call the King of Sweden a minor foreign notability?’ I didn’t pause on this. ‘Do you mean that, so far as Florentine society is concerned, Brenton is for some reason ostracised?’
‘It couldn’t be called that. But for some years he must have been aware of a certain coolness. He blotted his copy-book, in fact.’ Mrs Mountpatrick glanced at me sharply; she might have been wondering whether I was in possession of information I hadn’t owned to. ‘It was a purely professional matter,’ she added quickly and strangely. ‘And quite long ago.’
‘Avery told me something which perhaps squares with that, and which, indeed, I had a vague sense of having been aware of. Brenton stopped being much of a man to appeal to for an expertise. Something like that.’
‘Yes. There was some sort of scandal. He’d had money from an Italian nobleman who was selling a picture, when he ought to have had it only from the American client who was proposing to buy it. And one can’t do that sort of thing here without being—well, thrown out of the club.’
‘I should hope not.’ This piece of information about Avery’s father had horrified me.
‘Only, he was only half thrown out. Or even a shade less than that. Not what you call ostracised. I never knew the details, but there appear to have been some influential people who judged that he’d been more sinned against than sinning. Having been got at by the Duca of Whatever-it-Was caught him on a vulnerable side.’
‘A snobbish side?’
‘Just that. And they so worked on him – the Duca’s wily agents – that he ended up, I suppose, on his familiar note of successful self-deception. For he has such a note.’
‘So I myself came to judge within twenty minutes.’
‘And of course the Duca wasn’t going to have any scandal reflecting on him. So it was all clamped down on. And now it wouldn’t prompt anyone to cut Mr Brenton in the street, or to refuse to talk civilly to him at a party. A good, strong push would rehabilitate him – art-wise.’ Mrs Mountpatrick paused on this odd addendum. ‘But still,’ she said.
‘I see. He has to put a good face on things. And it might be possible to view him as a figure of unwholesome pathos. But that can’t be Fernanda’s line? Of course, I possess no more than a speculative sense of your old school-friend. But I do keep on thinking of her as a soldier, whatever Avery’s going to be. And not as the sort of soldier—commander, really—who makes the mistake of re-enforcing failure rather than success. She wouldn’t think, surely, to rescue Jethro?’
‘I just don’t know. Fernanda plans things, I agree, and your military metaphor is entirely apt. Only it’s possible that she may be a woman first and a soldier afterwards.’
‘With whatever implication for the mystery that may be said to carry.’ I put down my empty cup with the knowledge that there would be no more tea in the pot. And Mrs Mountpatrick had already gathered up her handbag. ‘Thank you, my dear Alison, for being so communicative. You’ve provided me with the most abundant information on the whole affair.’
‘Have I?’ My friend gave me the glint of a queer look. ‘More may, of course, be available. But you will have to ferret it out for yourself.’
‘Does that mean’—I glanced at the little tab hanging from the pot between us—’that you still see yourself as having been given an expensive cup of Snake Tea by a wheedling character who has turned private enquiry agent?’
But Mrs Mountpatrick had risen to her feet – considerately, I saw, since the next filobus for Fiesole was just turning into the Piazza.
‘You’re at the Serena again?’ she asked. ‘Then you have any remaining mystery at your back door. Almost on your back stairs.’
‘Quite so.’ I was uncertain what to make of this. ‘And I’ll be the kinder to Brenton for knowing that he has a semi-murky past. He’s very conscious of it, no doubt.’
‘One can see it makes a burden,’ Mrs Mountpatrick said coolly, and shook hands.
Part Three
LUIGI
I
A week went by without my receiving from Jethro Brenton the summons he had promised as soon as Avery should be settled with him. At the end of it I went to spend a few days in Pisa, where one of my oldest Italian friends, a classical scholar, is a professor at the university. It is a city of which I am not particularly fond. The Arno, now within sniff of the sea, is more sluggish than ever, and the architecture is full of bizarre notes: there is a little church like a hedgehog; the Baptistry is full of tourists enchanted by its maniacal whisperings; the drunken campanile, as the guide-book tells one, is best viewed by moonlight. Galileo, I don’t doubt, derived his predilection for tiresome practical jokes from having been bred in the place.
When I got back to Fiesole it was to find that I had just missed a letter from Brenton, which had contained an invitation to lunch at the Villa Buontalenti on the day following its delivery. This had been short notice. But he was a formal person nevertheless, and it struck me that I ought to have let him know in advance about my absence. I decided to walk up the hill and present my apologies in person.
Although so near at hand, the Buontalenti proved not easy to locate. But the route to it at least paid appropriate tribute to the arts, since I had first to climb to the Piazza Mino da Fiesole and then wind my way along the Via Verdi. Presently on either hand sundry houses, large and small, were precariously perching themselves upon steeper and steeper acclivities which constituted the nearer slopes of Monte Céceri. But it remained true that I was winding round to a position from which a rude bellow could be conceived as disturbing my host Signor Galbiati at the Serena – if he was not already disturbed, indeed, by the intervening infant uproar from the Villa Montagnola.
But in fact, it was a singularly soundless place. The dogs had gone to sleep. The poultry were discouraged. The trees were devoid of songsters – doubtless because the songsters had been shot or netted and eaten. And the trees were very thick on the ground. When at length I glimpsed the pale walls of the Buontalenti it was amid a huddle of tall cypresses like a black-cowled Misericordia procession congregated round a corpse. Nor was this the only suggestion of change and decay before me. There was a drive in reasonably good order, and beyond the wrought-iron gates giving on this was a respectable lodge-like dwelling with the word portineria over its doorway. But as the gates were rusted and padlocked, and the porter demonstrably for many years a non-resident, I was obliged to move on. Fifty yards up the road there was a second entrance, with similar gates and a similar lodge – one announcing itself as sheltering the giardiniere. An ugly barbed-wire entanglement, however, suggested that this had become an independent concern, admitting no allegiance to the big house beyond. The impression was reinforced by a scrawled notice on the barricade. Chi entra furtivo – this pleasantly read – muore tosto.
I now appeared to have found, nevertheless, the current entrance to Jethro Brenton’s property. A letter-box (which, in the expansive Italian fashion, invited the delivery of telegrams) had been recently polished; the gates opened easily; the drive had received as much weeding as is necessary at the close of a hot summer. I walked past the lodge as little furtively as possible, and made my way down a steep incline towards the villa. On the left there appeared a group of outbuildings suggesting little more than a clutter of cowhouses randomly disposed, but which no doubt, sheltered in addition to any livestock the Buontalenti kept, those retainers from the Abruzzi whom Brenton had mentioned. I hoped that they were better affected than the gardener. As Abruzzese domestic architecture consists in the main in elevating caves, dens and grottoes to the condition of hovels, it was possible that they regarded themselves as transported amid amenities of the first order, and that they were in consequence indisposed to quarrel with their employment.
I came suddenly upon the house. It consisted of a square tower, massive and of evident antiquity, round two sides of which several centuries had more or less casually pitched their disparate notions of what may be appropriately added to a country dwelling. Nothing more than a place of villeggiatura had ever been envisaged, I imagine, but it had been by persons of means and taste, and the resulting composite was wholly harmonious. Moreover a real garden – by which, in an Italian context, one must mean a formal garden – had after a fashion survived, so that instead of banana-plants surrounded by cannas, or distant cousins of French parterres, or threadbare relations of English lawns, there ran the ordered lines of tall dark hedges squarely hewn, which carried the eye down through a fine perspective of small successive terraces, low balustrades, oblongs of shallow water trickling continently each into the next, fountains modest alike in volume and elevation, battered’ and discoloured statues, pedestalled noseless busts. As a background to this were the cypresses again, darkly fingering the sky. And beyond one sun-soaked gap between them lay the city of Florence.
Upon these last appearances I had arrived only by rounding the villa. This had been necessary in order to find any means of entering or alerting it. On its northern side there was indeed a curved staircase of the up-and-down-again sort, which had obviously been designed to lend consequence to the principal approach to the house. But this scalino I had climbed in vain, since the door to which it led had neither bell nor knocker, and suggested itself as having become one with the immobile main fabric of the building. The south side was another matter. Here again there was a staircase: otherwise one’s only entrance would have been, I imagine, into a honeycomb of dismal cellars. What this second ascent presented me with was a loggia and a wide open door: this, and the talk and laughter of two young voices, neither very distinguishable from the other.
I went straight in – I believe without a thought to how casual such behaviour was when venturing a first call upon the ceremoniously inclined Jethro Brenton. It was the mere quality of what I had heard that attracted me; I walked towards the sound as unthinkingly as I might have done at Anglebury towards some agreeable hubbub in the junior day-room of School House. There was a high square hall, its walls of dressed stone, its floor of marble, and its proportions fine enough to be set off by the sparseness of the furniture it contained. And then, unexpectedly, there was a billiard-room – or at least there was a large room with a billiard-table, distinguishably moth-eaten, at the end of it. Avery was perched on this, swinging his legs. Beside him, and in a similar attitude, was Luigi Fagandini. They were rolling the balls about the table – not quite idly, I judged, but in the pursuit of some loosely conceived game of their own invention.
Avery’s standard ‘Oh, hullo, sir!’ and Luigi’s more formal ‘Buon giorno’ were simultaneous, nor could I have determined which youth took the initiative in jumping politely to the floor. They exchanged a quick glance as they did so. It would have had to be described as discreetly at my expense, since its acknowledgement was of the fact that, here suddenly turned up on them, was somebody they had lately been discussing in a spirit of humorous indulgence. I was far from resenting this; I do, I know, render a certain ‘period’ effect; a youth would even appear a shade dull to me to whom the circumstance wasn’t available as a prompting to mild amusement. What more struck me at the moment was the observation that the two young men were as thick as thieves; there was even a curious air of co-proprietorship in whatever the Villa Buontalenti offered apparent in their manner of welcoming me.
‘Isn’t it amazing?’ Avery said. ‘Luigi has turned out to be my father’s secretary. His colleague, really. He manages the whole archive along with just one old man.’
‘Well, well!’ I hadn’t been particularly surprised that the youths had got together again; nor, somehow, was I amazed at the new information given me. At our earlier meeting I had been aware of Luigi as dissimulating an impulse to size Avery up. There seemed no reason not to refer to this. ‘Luigi kept mum about it,’ I said, ‘in the Brancacci.’
‘Avery might have been any Brenton.’ Luigi took up my challenge at once. ‘I was uncertain of my ground.’
‘Listen to the child’s English,’ Avery said joyously. ‘It’s quite idiotically idiomatic. Do you know, he can do riddles? We’ve been doing riddles on forfeit, and I come off worst.’
‘What’s the forfeit?’
‘One with a billiard-cue,’ Avery said cheerfully. ‘Look, I’ll do him one now. I’ll do him the one about the elephants. You remember?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ I saw that some conundrum once in vogue at Anglebury must be in question. ‘But go ahead.’
‘How would you stop a stampede of elephants, Luigi?’ As he asked this, Avery climbed on the table again, and once more fell to swinging his legs. ‘Come on, bambino,’ he said absurdly. ‘It’s as easy as stink.’
‘As stink?’ Luigi queried, momentarily diverted. He knitted his brows. ‘But, no – this one is too hard.’
‘I should damned well think it is.’ On this inconsequence, Avery’s hand moved hopefully towards a billiard-cue lying on the table – whereupon, being unminded to witness some scene of sadistic excess, I picked the object up and restored it to its rack.
‘Una telefonata intercomunale,’ Luigi said suddenly. ‘It is known as a trunk call. So that is the clue, the key, the crux. Avery! I should call trunks and . . . and reverse the charge.’
‘You see?’ There was triumph in Avery’s voice. ‘Isn’t it amazing? Luigi might be a free-born Englishman, and no Italian.’
‘Most amazing.’ It was clear that the two boys had taken to each other in a thoroughgoing fashion, and that the basis of this must be precisely the steep contrast between them in both character and ability. It was unlikely that at Anglebury Avery Brenton had gained any close friends among the really clever boys, and it was this that now made him so ready to goggle at Luigi in an admiring way. And Luigi, about whose acute intelligence there could be no question, was correspondingly fascinated by there having been suddenly tumbled out before him, as it were, a figure so representative as Avery of that fabulous world in which his own adolescent imagination had indulged itself. For Luigi, I decided, Avery was Stalky and Co. rolled into one.
I had now sat down – an action which the correctly mannered Luigi took as licensing him to rejoin Avery on the billiard-table. So there they were again as I had discovered them: of an age, but of disparate types; slightly turned towards each other in relaxed attitudes which yet seemed to draw them together into a single composition as unified as a painter could desire. I felt a curious persuasion that – no longer now, but in the single instant of my thus first coming upon them – I had glimpsed something about them which they were not themselves in possession of. Perhaps it was no more than the hidden but familiar mechanism which turns youths into what we call ‘inseparables’ for a time. I wondered how much they were in fact running around together, and this prompted me to ask a question.
‘And what about Avery’s artistic education, Luigi? Are you bringing it along?’
‘We have been several times to galleries. Avery is a serious pupil.’
‘I have to get to know the stuff,’ Avery said, with a sobriety which appeared directly elicited by this description of himself. ‘The trouble is that there’s such an awful lot of it. Still, it’s quite fun at times. The bambino is good at making it rather fun. Eh, bambino?’
‘Silly ass,’ Luigi said colloquially – and added, apparently on his system of synonyms, ‘Cheerful young idiot! Mr Bannerman, one can say that?’
‘Certainly. An excellent expression.’
‘For instance,’ Avery said, ‘there’s an Annunciation by Filippino Lippi in the Accademia. He’s the painter, you remember, who had a go long after Masaccio and Masolino in that Brancacci-place.’
‘Yes, I do remember,’ I said, and glanced at Luigi. He was looking a shade uneasy.
‘Well, this Annunciation has two angels, and each of them is carrying a lily. If one of them had a palm-leaf it would be all right. Because, you see, a palm-leaf’s for death. So you get life and death. It’s what’s called an iconographical convention. So I asked Luigi why two lilies?’ On this Avery paused, and I supposed that some notable instance of his friend’s erudition was to be brought forward. ‘And Luigi said,’ Avery concluded, ‘That God had perhaps been thinking of twins.’
Although I found this funny (but not so funny as Avery did) I took care to look at Luigi with gravity – an unkind imposture which increased his confusion. Then he recovered himself, and looked at me with sharp curiosity.
