There again,’ they said in Spratpool Street. ‘She’s there again,’ and they looked at each other and plodded on round the shops.
The horse lifted and dropped a hoof. The groom sat above on the polished seat of the trap. The trap was smarter than a carriage, quite chic and, like the County, expensive and correct but not yet a motor. It stood outside the studio of the new photographer and the groom stared ahead, knees stalwart under the rug, the Ironside groom, just about the last in Shipley.
Mrs. Ironside was attending the photographer. All of sixty, squat as the old Queen, she was again attending the photographer, she was never away.
The first visit had been only a sighting from the road when the new studio was still an amazement in the town and she had directed the trap to pause there as she passed by, to allow her to examine the window.
A low, artistic signboard of bright wood was painted with gold lettering: ‘Settimo. Portraiture’, and behind it stood a huge, near life-size photograph of a newly married couple, the she in a mile of heavy lace, the he in half a bale of black, ill-fitting, foreign-looking suiting. The she had her veil pulled down low over the brow with a little tight band of flowers, rather like a swimming cap. It gave her a glamorous ferocity. The sheaf of lilies across her lap lay like swords. The he stared hot-eyed, plump-cheeked, a broad silken moustache and tie, round-ended stiff collar, hair plastered flat on his head, gleaming; and on his ankles spats, grey spats above patent leathers. They were a serious, confident pair, not yet rich but determined. You could see the black ink of ledgers, the shouting and the passions, little leisure, and the children not having it easy. Mrs. Ironside felt a liking for the two of them, almost recognition, though they clearly hadn’t had much to do with Shipley.
Nothing at all to do with Shipley, for over their shoulders spread a crumbling hillside tremulous with laburnum, dark with chestnut trees, and roses showered over the tops of secret garden walls. A little donkey with panniers filled with grasses was being watched on its way by a peasant woman shading her eyes in a dusty, flowery lane. And all beneath a cloudless sky.
And this couple was seated upon an ornamental terrace before a marble balustrade and on the balustrade a slippery fringed shawl and on the shawl a flagon with an inviting lip and beside the flagon a great glass jar with a carved glass stopper. The jar seemed stuffed with spiral layers of orchard fruits, strange, syrupy, glowing things catching the light.
The photograph had already created a stir in Shipley. Often little groups had gathered on the pavement in the cold spring winds and steady northern English rain saying, ‘Look at them pears and plums, you could sink your teeth in them, queer aren’t they, you can see right through to the gowks. You can just feel the silk in that shawl. He’ll be expensive I dare say. It’ll be for carriage folk I dare say.’
Florrie Ironside was carriage folk nowadays all right and had been for a long time. Expense meant nothing to her in her jet necklaces and black ruched satin and first-quality Shipley woollen pelisse, her beaded hat from Harrogate, her chunks of ugly jewellery and the vast brass-framed cameo attached to her bosom. The cameo held a tinted representation of her dead husband and a twist of his sandy hair. Florence Ironside sat under a black umbrella in the rain and examined the new shop-front painted coffee-cream with lighter cream blinds each with a golden tassel. It stood between Bogey’s Grocers full of cheeses stuck with gluey linen, and Batty’s Drapers (founded 1812) stacked up with bales of wool and tweeds and calicos, and fans of cards of button hooks and linen-covered singlet-buttons. Outside the new shop a young man in thin shoes was locking the door behind him as he went off to his lunch. His coat didn’t look the cloth for a Shipley spring.
‘A newcomer,’ she said to the groom, who said he’d heard tell a Hitalian.
A while later Florrie Ironside saw the young man again changing the window, and she stopped the trap to watch. He was lifting away the happy Italian couple and replacing them with a bride alone, startlingly dark, her hair falling in polished ripples, a great Nottingham veil dragging down behind her and swinging round into a pool at her feet. The dress had a straining satin bodice with no shame. The mouth was soft and sulky, swollen with desire; and, good gracious heaven, was the mouth of Hilda Staples’ sullen Nellie! Who could have made a beauty of that slow lump? And sitting before that transfer screen with all the moral messages on it and the improving pictures—there was Mr. Gladstone with his rose—the sort of thing decent children used to stick together with flour paste to fill up a winter. If it was Nellie, no wonder the bodice was tight, and just as well that bouquet was the size of a haystack. She looked sultry, though. She’d be admired.
Two sets of fingertips set Nellie gently on the easel and, over the top of her, Signor Settimo’s sad eyes met the eyes of Mrs. Ironside in the trap. As the photographer moved sideways and forwards for a moment, to look Nellie over, she saw that he seemed now rather better dressed. He was a delicate-looking young man with a pale face and dark hair pomaded down, the body slight as if it had taken no account of itself since it belonged to a stripling—shoulders birdlike, sloped hips and waist like a dancer’s. All this—as he turned and looked at Mrs. Ironside again—with a sense of yearning, of honey for sale. He vanished behind the bead curtain.
‘I might get the dog done,’ thought Mrs. Ironside, and then aloud, ‘I might get the dog done. I’ve never had the dog done,’ and the groom cocked an ear to see if he was to turn and go to the veterinarian’s in the High Street. But no command came.
A few days later the trap was again outside the studio and Mrs. Ironside handing the dog down to the groom, who carried it in. Mrs. Ironside sat stately and waiting, and time passed. Mrs. Ironside even had to haul on the reins now and then to keep the pony steady, something she was perfectly able to do even in her black stiff costume, having been a farmer’s daughter and well known, before she married Ironside who had made her so rich, for bumping down into Shipley in a shabby old habit on a shabby old cob every Thursday market day.
The groom emerged nervous. There had to be appointments. Yes, he’d said that. Yes, he’d tried—that’s why he had been all this time—and, yes, even for dogs. And dogs was altogether dubious anyway. This Settims didn’t care for dogs. This Settims stood his distance and got out his handkerchief, sneezing, having some nose trouble. He often drew the line at dogs.
Florrie Ironside then flung the reins away and crashed into the studio with the dog hanging down front and back under her arm. The groom stood waiting, and soon watching the arrival and angry departure of a mother with her swansdowned child. The woman recognised the Ironside conveyance and told the groom that her appointment had been cancelled for a dog, and she might even say for a bitch. The groom, who knew when he was well off (for jobs were scarce), looked steadily ahead and did not reply.
Mrs. Ironside was with Signor Settimo a good three-quarters of an hour and emerged flushed with success, and the dog hanging limp even for a dachshund. Over luncheon with her daughter, Molly, she described the triumphant morning. It had been a struggle to get the better of this Italian even though he was so quiet. He had just stood there at first, watching her and smiling and apologising in a slimy sort of way. He hadn’t given an inch until she had told him where she stood in the town, and Mr. Ironside’s position there, though dead. And that her address was The Mount. Then he’d been decisive and sensibly got on with the job. Not very talkative, though. Well, he’d certainly learned that foreigners in Shipley have to stand back.
Molly said she’d heard that he was a very good photographer and Mrs. Ironside had said, Well, we shall see; and that he was taking a very long time to produce any proofs of his photographs. Three weeks, if you please, three weeks! ‘Pressure of work’—and not able to get away to deliver even in the lunch-hours now, if you please. If you asked her it was all show and lies.
On the day promised for the delivery of the proofs of the portrait of the dog, Mrs. Ironside arranged herself and Molly around the silver tea service in the drawing room at four o’clock as usual and as usual proceeded to eat up all the tea. Signor Settimo was to call at a quarter to five, and an upright chair had been placed for him at an appropriate distance. Mrs. Ironside was for the first time since her widowhood wearing colour—a bunch of cloth violets against the black foulard of her dress above poor old Willy’s good-natured face and wisp of dead hair. Molly across on the humpty was also looking neither one thing nor the other, for her mother in a fit of boredom had said Yes, she might bob her hair, and then in a fit of pique, No, she might not shorten her skirts.
So, ridiculous in flounces below her neat modern little head, Molly sat sideways reading a motoring monthly in which lean girls with flying scarves and cigarette holders clasped in their teeth lay back at the wheels of long chassis and sped across the pages like the wind. Their proud, painted, selfish faces stirred Molly. They rattled her. She said, ‘I’m glad about the violets, Ma. It’s well over the year. Well over. Black, black—it doesn’t suit me and Pa wouldn’t care.’
Her mother stared as if the fireguard had spoken. She said, ‘Your father liked me in black. Black gives authority.’
‘Well, I’d like a sea-green now. I’d like one of those motoring duster-coats and actually a car.’ (And a man, she thought, to get me away. Any man. I wonder what the Eyetie’s like? She’s not used to men. She’ll shred him. Poor old Pa with his belly and his sandy hair.)
A bell rang faintly far away and Mrs. Ironside instructed Molly to eat the last piece of bread and butter. Molly asked if she should order fresh tea but her mother said no, and a maid came in with a package.
‘Where is Mr. Settimo?’
‘He said, mum, he couldn’t wait, mum.’
‘Couldn’t?’
‘Said he couldn’t, mum, pressure of work, mum. Sends his compliments and the bill for the proofs is in the separate envelope.’
Mrs. Ironside thrust up her chin and turned a little blue about the lips and breathed slowly. She slapped down her crumby plate and said, ‘Take the tea things. Give me the package. Why isn’t it on a salver? What! Account! This isn’t an account, it is a ransom. It’s more than a doctor!’
But inside the package was a sleek and knowing hound, each hair gleaming, jokey frown-lines wrinkling between the eyes as if he were the most intelligent animal of the ark, as if he were perhaps even trying to understand Italian. His paddle feet hung down showing his beautifully manicured nails and his ears were lifted charmingly and alertly at the root.
‘Oh, Ma! It’s wonderful! He’s the most wonderful photographer!’
Mrs. Ironside sat all evening in her chair lifting the proofs of the dog one by one, holding them close to her eyes and then at arm’s length. She returned them next day via the groom marked up for enlargement and a note in her wild green ink saying that the account would be settled in full the following week when her considerable order was completed. She gave instructions to the maids that when Mr. Settimo called he was to be shown round to the back door.
But he did not come. Not to either door. Not the next week, nor the one after, nor the one after that. And at last when the groom was sent down to the studio he found a notice in the window saying, Temporarily closed owing to family bereavement in Cremona, and Nellie Staples displaced for a swathe of crepe.
‘Unprofessional,’ said Florrie Ironside. ‘Unnecessary. And what has Cremona got to do with it? I thought it was toffee. He’ll get nowhere if he can’t stick to his last. I’m sure we could never afford to go running about overseas when your father was making his way.’
Molly (eighteen) said, ‘But he’s young, Ma, you know, and he hasn’t any ties. He’s only about twenty.’
‘Forty-five if a day,’ said Florrie, fuming. ‘Foreigners are deceptive. All talk and guile. You should remember what your father used to say about them after we’d been to Dusseldorf for our silver wedding. No—he’ll go bankrupt.’
But later the next day the photographs of the dog were delivered directly to the back door by Signor Settimo’s personal messenger dressed in coffee-coloured uniform and pill-box hat and white gloves under the epaulette. Mind you, May, the maid, said ask her and she’d say it was George Bickerstaffe’s Henry with his face washed and the suit come from that overgrown page at the Regal cinema.
Mrs. Ironside said only, ‘Messenger, my eye,’ and sent for the trap and directed it to Spratpool Street.
In they swept.
‘Mr. Settimo,’ demanded Florence of the girl at the desk, who was in coffee-coloured sateen and jewelled bandeau, writing slowly in an order book with her tongue out.
‘He’s engaged.’
‘Engaged!’
‘He’s with a sitter. I can’t get at him. Not when he’s under the cloth.’
‘Produce him at once. I am Mrs. Ironside.’
The girl knew this. She was Netta Cricklewood of Bogey’s Grocers before being a Shipley solicitor’s tea-girl and she had known Mrs. Ironside from childhood. She sidled off (‘Half an inch of paint and silk stockings’) and returned looking sulky with fear.
‘He says to sit down and take a browse through the albums.’
There was one spindly gold chair, which Florrie regarded with venom while Mollie, who had been brought along, stood at the glass door looking out, hoping for motors.
‘Come away from there,’ said Florrie, ‘D’you want all Shipley to know we’re being kept waiting by a tradesman?’ and she glared at Netta Cricklewood and asked if she wasn’t missing her earlier professional career.
Netta—could it be her portrait above the desk, a sea nymph all bare skin and lip-gloss like a concubine?—Netta, recovering, said, ‘Thank you very much, I’m not missing anything at all these days.’
At last came Settimo, clashing through the bead curtain and bowing out the sitter—an excited shadow—and turning to Mrs. Ironside his gentle and impervious face.
He bowed.
‘I have brought my account.’
‘How very prompt. I am greatly obliged.’
‘The photographs were very late.’
‘I was called away to Cremona.’ He let his eyes drift over her black, and old Willy smiling away on her chest. ‘In Italy we also pay attention to mourning.’
Molly waited for her mother to embark on the sermon about the necessity for the bereaved to allow hard work to deal with grief and how she herself had immediately taken up the reins, winding up a great business with no assistance from anyone, except an only child who knew nothing, not even how to deal with the letters of condolence.
Instead she heard her mother ask if he would photograph her daughter. She, Molly.
Signor Settimo, not wavering by a flicker in Molly’s direction, brushed Netta aside and negotiated the appointment himself in the leather-bound book.
Going home, Molly said, ‘But I don’t want my photograph taken, Ma. Why should I be photographed? I’m not a baby or a bride. They’ll think you’re trying to get me off.’
‘Nonsense. I want a photograph of you for the drawing room. It’s always wise to have a likeness. You never know what’s going to happen. Look at the Duke of Clarence.’
Molly then wondered if she was going to die and her mother knew something she didn’t. She went up and peered in the glass and decided she looked tubercular and became so taken with the idea that she considered making her will until she remembered that she had no money. She sat looking at her mother that evening, trying to see her sitting there soon alone, and maybe weeping. But Molly had a poor imagination.
When the photographs came, Mrs. Ironside put them aside with scarcely a glance. ‘I’m afraid you haven’t your mother’s presence, Molly.’ Molly, flat-chested, taut, anonymous, sat bemused.
For there had been something very queer about Signor Settimo at the sitting, tip-tapping about the studio floor as if he was in church, arranging the folds of the cloth on a trellis behind her—nearer and nearer, circling nearer, touching her cheekbone at last; directing her head to look now at the Pantheon, now at the Bridge of Sighs and now—just here over his head—at the Campanile at Cremona. His neat little shanks made a pair of back legs for the angular dragonfly that fixed its great eye on her.
Molly was unnerved. Again and yet again she waited tensely for him to slide beneath the pall that was the creature’s back, to crash the great brass plates together, then to plunge under again and call out his muffled directions. Out would dangle an arm holding in its fingers a soft grey rubber bulb on the end of a tube—there’d been something terrible and exactly like it the nurse used to bring when her father was dying—and the fingers would give a sudden expert squeeze and the flash of deadly lightning would strike.
‘These will be very excellent photographs,’ said Signor Settimo.
‘Will they be as good as the dog’s?’
He came dancing across to her then, and lifted dovelike hands on either side of her face as if to cup it. Then he stopped and let the hands and his head tip together first one way then the other as he smiled with the whitest of teeth and the most affectionate lips. He then appeared to recollect himself, and Molly unexpectedly thought of the groom who muttered, ‘Jobs is scarce.’
‘Miss Ironside,’ said Signor Settimo, ‘Signorina Ironside—I should very much like to photograph your mother.’
‘He said he wanted to photograph you,’ said Molly. They were riding lugubriously up and down Shipley leaving cards on people on a dank and sunless afternoon.
‘Insolence,’ said Florrie, and then, ‘Well, I dare say he does. I’m not surprised. The prices he charges he’ll need a good bit of advertisement.’
‘He’s put me in the window.’
‘What? He hasn’t dared! Without permission? For everyone to see? We have been good enough to give him trade and he hasn’t asked permission? How dare he! We’re going there at once.’ And she gave the groom a prod in the back and they turned about.
In the window of Spratpool Street, there sat straight-eyed Molly with her frozen shoulders awaiting the lightning, and beside her, Lily, daughter of Alderman Bellinger, the late Mr. Ironside’s most vulgar and thrusting competitor in the building trade, who had posthumously absorbed him though at an exorbitant price. Lily’s portrait was bigger than Molly’s.
‘This must be stopped. Wait here.’ And Florrie was into the shop in three strides. And very quickly out of it again.
Signor Settimo was now on holiday. ‘At The Grand at Scarborough,’ said Netta with awe. There was only her there, and the messenger. The messenger was sitting looking rather ill on the ornamental chair, picking his teeth. He was without his pill-box and didn’t get up.
‘I shall complain in writing. Take my daughter from the window.’
‘I’d never dare.’
‘Then you—’ She pointed. She grabbed the messenger by the neck.
‘I’ve not got to touch things,’ he said. ‘I’ve got unnatural damp hands.’
‘Then I shall.’
And Molly (and Shipley) saw the black arm of Mrs. Ironside appear like King Arthur’s in reverse and pluck her from the window.
Mrs. Ironside was considerably upset and didn’t speak all the way home or during tea. She sat in heavy thunder all the evening and the next day when Molly, frightened, at last said, ‘There’s no need to mind, you know, Ma. He can’t hurt you. I mean, you’re an old woman and he’s only a boy.’
Then Mrs. Ironside leaned across the breakfast table and slapped Molly across the face.
‘She did,’ said May, who’d been at the sideboard replenishing one of the big steel domes with bacon. ‘She did. She slapped her face! And there’s Molly runs out and up the stairs crying. That’s the front door. Run and get it. I’m hot and cold all over.’
The bell had been rung by Signor Settimo hastening early from the studio in his new motor to apologise for the bish about Molly and Lily Bellinger. The breakfast room door was still open and Mrs. Ironside was shaking at the table, shocked and prior to weeping, but the weeping she set aside. She found her heart was beating fast. She ordered the maid to show the photographer into the morning room. Breathing slowly now, she sat on for a little, wondering at the wonderful sense of lightness in her, the triumph within. She went out to him.
Settimo stood in the window of the morning room beside the metal storks. He stood upon a rich Turkey rug admiring the polish on all the mahogany, the shine on the Dutch tiled grate, the bloom on the escritoire. His fingers stroked a Chinese pot on a plinth of inlaid walnut. Above his head hung the very latest thing—a metal drum with a pink silk frill that contained bulbs of electricity. It was like looking up skirts.
‘Cremona,’ he was saying, ‘Oh, Cremona!’
‘Mrs. Ironside,’ he said, ‘how I should like to make a commemorative album of this house! How nearly it is like my home.’
‘Cremona?’ Florrie was feeling lighter and lighter; a victor, yet joyously damned. ‘Cremona?’
He told her about Northern Italy, the watery flatness of the plains, the reedy River Po (which he pronounced as in pot or tot or clot, in the best possible taste), the dark canyons of the old streets of its cities and how, in Cremona, his own city, the narrow toppling alleys flung black flags of shade. He told how you burst out from under them into the bright sunlight of the piazzas, light that softly bathed the street-long baroque palaces, the gold and pale-pink churches, the tightly bound but generously bulging, beckoning cathedral. He described the boom of the bells, the jingle of the little carriages all ribbons and plumes, the café tables shining with thick linen cloths under the pillars round the cathedral square. There you could sit talking, talking long into the summer night, and nobody to hurry you away.
‘Cremona is the essence of dignity and culture and civilisation. Keep Firenze. Keep Roma.’
‘I wonder that you could bear to leave it, Mr. Settimo.’
‘I wonder, too, but in Cremona there are many photographers. All is weddings—weddings and weddings. Weddings and babies. I was so seldom called upon to photograph a face of experience, of knowledge of the world.’
Florence Ironside was booked in for a sitting at 2:30 P.M. the following Tuesday.
But it was not a success.
Signor Settimo was desolate. It was not a success. Florence (prophetic name) was not herself—hush! He meant it. ‘This is not yourself, not your real self sitting there. You pretend to be so bold, so, if you will forgive me, so tight drawn-up. But I cannot see you. I cannot feel your essence. All I see and feel are your—certainly magnificent—strength and your ferocity. Hush, yes, your ferocity. Your enmity. Oh, relax please, Signora Ironside, you electrify the air.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Florence, lifting her chin, confronting the dragonfly optic and the black hump of Settimo laid along behind. She felt excited. He thought he’d catch her, did he, with all that about sunshine and piazzas? Little Signor Settimo and she, the widow of Willy Ironside of Shipley. She curled her rather pretty, scornful little lips. There came the squeeze and the flash and the crash of thunderbolts and he took the photograph that a long time later went the rounds.
It is always the wrong photograph that goes the rounds.
He came over and stood looking down into her face and said, ‘Signora—why are you belligerent?’
‘Your English is very good,’ she said.
‘Of course. I am from Cremona. Do you think I am a Sardinian? Or educated in Shipley?’
He made her sit in the hard spotlight and slid back under the cloth. The silence returned. The bulb was held high, but was not pressed.
Mrs. Ironside’s face changed, the small eyes widened, the chin sank down. The lips seemed to soften. He came over and directed the cheekbone towards the Bridge of Sighs. He touched the shoulder of the armoured dress. He lifted one of the hands across the breast, screening poor old Willy.
‘I’ll take this off,’ said Florence, unpinning the brooch, wondering if she had been told to do so or if it was her own idea.
Under the pall he cried, ‘Oh—that is so much better. But still—no, I still do not see you. You are unpractised. You cannot give. There is something withheld, something secret about you. Am I looking at a woman or a cold machine? A frightened—forgive me—old maid?’
He squeezed the bulb listlessly and the lightning seemed scarcely to flicker.
‘There will be no charge,’ he said. ‘You have not trusted me. You cannot give. You shall return next week.’ He walked with her only as far as the door of the darkroom and dismissed her inattentively.
‘He said he wouldn’t charge me,’ she said to Molly, who had asked no questions and now said nothing. ‘And I should think not. He was entirely at fault. He was out of sorts. Very temperamental.’ She thought of the horrible slapping of Molly’s face. ‘Well, who isn’t, from time to time. Especially after bereavement. I’m afraid I am sometimes temperamental myself. I do thoughtless things sometimes. I’m sorry, Molly.’
Molly, amazed, said, ‘I don’t think I am temperamental.’
‘Oh, but you see all Italians are, and you have your father’s colouring, Scottish colouring. I wonder if I have a little drop of Italian blood.’
‘They say he’s overspending,’ said Molly. ‘May says there are bills as long as your arm everywhere. And that car isn’t paid for, May says. He’s in trouble.’
‘Oh, but I think he’s been used to wealth. He tells me that in Cremona there are streets of nothing but palaces. He only travels for his Art.’
‘Are you going back to him then? I know I wouldn’t. Ma—I was a bit afraid of him.’
‘Oh, of course I’m going back. I’m not a churlish woman, I hope.’
For the next sitting she left off the mourning brooch, laying it down on her dressing table, and turned back into her bedroom at the last minute to change her hat for a great Leghorn straw swooning with flat roses—cream roses—and a veil that tied under the chin, this time with a white velvet ribbon.
‘Ah—’ said Settimo. ‘There! Exactly. Yes. Just like that. Lift the chin a fraction—do not pretend to be demure. It hasn’t come to that. Smile at me. Mrs. Ironside, I have never seen you openly smile. But that is beautiful. Oh, how beautiful—your lovely smile. You have the lips of a young madonna, Mrs. Ironside. Delicious under the veil.’
His pointed fingers were on her shoulder as she left. ‘But, I want more.’ He was like a sympathetic doctor. They were alone. Netta and the messenger were nowhere to be seen. She suddenly remembered for some reason that little Henry Bickerstaffe had measles and that Wednesday anyway was Shipley’s early-closing day.
He moved his fingers across the back of her neck to the knot of ribbon that held the veil. ‘I should like to undo this veil. I should like to see—perhaps unpin—your hair. Had I the money—any money, I am over-spent. I am in deep, deep water owing to circumstances in Cremona—had I any money, I would dress you as a Princess of Piedmont. I would drop your awful English jewels in the river and I would adorn you with moonstones.’
He sent for her again the following Wednesday and she went to him on foot and (‘I’m not imagining this, I saw it from the end of Blenheim Terrace and Mrs. Cricklewood saw it, too’) she went hatless. Perhaps gloveless. He held back the bead curtain, first drawing down the blind that said ‘Half Day Wednesday’ over the glass front door. She passed before him into the darkroom.
‘All right then. Tek me to Scarborough. I’ll say nothing if you’ll tek me to Scarborough. Mind you, half Shipley knows. They’re all asking me.’
‘Netta, I can’t take anyone anywhere. This is the reason about the abeyance of the wages. I am in trouble. I am an artist—you know that—not a businessman. I need a business partner of character, if possible with great capital. That is all there is to say. I take you into my confidence. I never have trouble in finding business partners. Never. I have every hope of money—even for Scarborough—quite soon.’
‘You mean my Auntie Florrie?’
‘Auntie?’
‘It’s not a real auntie. “Auntie”’s what you call your mother’s best friends in England. You may not have it in Cremona. Auntie Florrie was at school with my mam. Auntie Florrie had to walk in to Shipley school five miles. Her Molly and me, we went to different schools, Molly’s being private, but she was always my Auntie Florrie. She married rich and you see what’s become of her, sitting up at that great place and Molly like a cold drink of water and neither of them with a thing to do. Tek me to The Grand. You’re on the wrong tack up there, Ferdinando.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Half Shipley does then. It’s the wonder of the world. And those that knows laughs their heads off and thinks you’re a daftie.’
‘A—what?’
‘I don’t know it in Italian. Will you tek me to Scarborough?’
‘I can not.’
‘Then I’ll tell yer. I know where you went to the so-called funeral. It was your engagement party—I opened the photos. And I’ll tell you you’re up the wrong tree with Auntie Florrie. She hasn’t a penny after Molly’s thirty-five. It’s all going to be Molly’s. I saw it in the will when I was being a solicitor.’
Signor Settimo looked steadily at Netta with his clever eyes angry and little like those of the Piedmontese bridegroom. He then left her and stepped into his car.
He roared out of Spratpool Street and hurtled out of the town, way past Ilkley and on to the purple moors. Hours went by and in the end the car seemed to drift and sway, to turn back and to take itself home via the dachas on the green slopes surrounding Shipley.
Molly, the girl so mad about cars, Molly, so innocent, so eager for life. Oh, the mistake he had made. He cursed himself. He had an insane desire to proceed at once to The Mount, to sweep up the deep trenched gravel of its drive, to ask to see Molly. But, impossible now.
Yet as he drew near, at the end of The Mount’s driveway he let the car dawdle and stop and after a time he heard footsteps crunching in the gravel and he got out of the car and took off his tight little driving helmet and waited.
But it was only the groom in a muffler and an old coat, trailing the dog along behind him; and the groom gave him a look of pity as he passed.
Then the groom called back over his shoulder as he went off down the hill, ‘Whichever you’re after you’re out of luck, Maestro. They’re gone, the pair of them. They’re gone touring off foreign and both of them miserable, thanks to you. You’ve ruined them with your magic lanterns.’