Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had a chameleon reputation. The austere brass plaque outside his chambers in the Rue St Honoré in Paris described him, inadequately, as Counsellor in International Law. His wife, Louise, who was a very witty lady, described him as ‘a floor-walker in the Tower of Babel’, because his life was spent in a series of displacements: Beijing, Buenos Aires, London, Sydney, New York, Moscow.
He defined himself with a certain irony: ‘My clients think I’m a magician. They pay me large sums of money to negotiate impossible bargains between incompatible characters under mutually contradictory systems of law. Of course there’s no magic! It’s a parlour trick I learned at my children’s birthday parties. Everyone has to get a slice of the cake. I make a big ceremony so they all feel uplifted by the sublimity of the occasion. I’ve got a good eye and a steady hand and I cut clean. For the rest, I’m an agreeable fellow who listens more than he talks and kisses ladies’ hands, never tells Irish jokes and sleeps with his own wife and not his client’s.’
He was born under the sign of Taurus and this was his sixty-fifth birthday. He had spent seven weary hours of it in a Wall Street boardroom trying to mediate an agreement between his own clients, a group of European bankers, and their counterparts in a US consortium. Both parties had lent heavily to an international corporation cobbled together out of a grab-bag of small but profitable enterprises which, the prospectus had promised, would merge into a single giant organism, spawning money as, a termite queen spawns offspring by the millions in her anthill.
In fact, the investors and the bankers were landed with a genetic freak, doomed to disaster from day one. Within three years, the shareholders’ funds were all gone, loan covenants were in massive breach and the monster was dying on its feet, bleeding money by the minute. Unfortunately, the demise was a slow and expensive event because the bankers could not agree whether to dispatch the animal at one stroke or dismember the living body limb by limb for an extra margin of salvage. The Europeans wanted a swift execution. The Americans favoured a slow butchery. At five in the afternoon, Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh decided he had had enough. He invoked the Chair:
‘By your leave, sir! I have a statement to make, a final statement on behalf of my clients. They consider this debate has gone on long enough. They want the matter put to the vote forthwith. Before the motion is tabled, I beg to remind our colleagues of two lessons they all learned at business school: lesson one, never send good money after bad; lesson two, never try to butcher your own beef. It’s a bloody business. Leave it to the professionals. My advice, which my clients accept, is that at opening of business tomorrow, you file all necessary documents in all jurisdictions for the appointment of liquidators to wind up the company. Now, my clients have given me permission to withdraw. Today is my birthday. I’m going to spend what’s left of it in a private memorial service for my vanished youth. No flowers by request. Cash donations or contributions of liquor may be sent to my hotel. God keep you from harm in this wicked city! I bid you good evening!’
The exit raised a laugh and a small round of applause. It also took the last heat out of the debate, so that before he reached his hotel the bankers had voted by a comfortable majority for the immediate dissolution of the corporation.
The concierge handed him his key with a bunch of faxes and mail, most of it from his office in Paris. All of it could wait until he had washed the dust of the city out of his pores and the sour taste of business jargon out of his mouth.
Finally, bathed, shaved and fortified with a drink, he began to work through the messages: birthday greetings from Louise and the family vacationing together in Ireland, sundry letters and a fax from an Italian company – Impresa Romagnola:
We wish to retain your services as special counsel in certain matters affecting Italian shareholders of this company and their relations with American interests.
Our need is urgent. It would be necessary that you arrive in Rome not later than Saturday the fourth of May and remain at least until the evening of Monday the sixth. You are kindly requested to confirm your acceptance and your arrival time by fax to this office. You will be met at the airport and lodged in comfortable accommodation just outside Rome. During your stay all our communication facilities will be at your disposal.
In respectful anticipation of your consent, we enclose a bank draft for fifteen thousand US dollars to cover an initial retainer and your travelling expenses. We hope most earnestly that you will accept our brief.
I have the honour to be, sir,
Pietro Lombardi
President.
The tone was impersonal and a touch peremptory, but fifteen thousand dollars was somewhat more than a courtesy deposit.
He checked his diary and the airline schedule which he always carried in his briefcase. Today was Thursday, the second of May. He could fly out of New York on Friday evening and arrive in Rome early on Saturday the fourth. He could be back in Paris on the Monday evening, a full week before Louise returned from her holiday. He was about to call her when he remembered that in Ireland it would now be after midnight. No matter. Tomorrow would be soon enough. She was used to his sudden moves and quite incurious about his business affairs. Their lives were conducted in a good-humoured shorthand perfected by thirty years of intimacy. Louise had defined it once and for all: ‘Bryan reserves his eloquence for paying customers. I’m happy with his table talk and his pillow talk and his silences, which are sometimes more interesting anyway.’
Immediately he began to organise. A call to Alitalia secured him a first-class seat to Rome on the Friday flight. A fax to Impresa Romagnola confirmed his acceptance of their brief and his arrival time at Fiumicino. It was the way he liked to run his life: Tac! Tac! Decide and do. And when the act was done, tip your hat over your face, drowse and dream in the sun.
He was going through the rest of the correspondence when a hotel messenger delivered a document package in the plastic container of a courier company. The envelope inside it was made of heavy hand-milled paper, embossed with a coat of arms, sealed with red wax and addressed in a bold, cursive hand.
For a long moment he sat, staring at the envelope, weighing it in his hands, running his fingertips over the embossed emblem on the paper and on the seal itself. He had not seen it for forty years, but he recognised it instantly, as he recognised the handwriting.
The coat of arms was a shield surmounted by a coronet and draped with tasselled cords. The charge on the shield was a pattern of fleurs-de-lis. The coronet itself was a female one and the knotted cords also were a female embellishment. They signified that the bearer belonged to an ancient princely house – the Farnese of Mongrifone.
There was a paper-knife on the desk. He slit the envelope with great care and took out the letter.
My dear Friend,
For the past forty years I have made it my business to know where you would be on your birthday. I have never written to you, though I have often wanted to do so. Instead, on each anniversary I have gone to the chapel at Mongrifone, made a prayer for you and, afterwards, sat in the villa garden listening to the small sound of the water and remembering the journeys we made together in that long-ago springtime.
This time, however, I find myself in great need of your presence and your support. So I am asking you to visit me at Mongrifone. We are both long past the age of indiscretion, so there can be no question of scandal. Nevertheless, I would not, for a moment, risk an embarrassment to your wife or your family. Therefore, I have arranged for you to be invited to act as Special Counsel to Impresa Romagnola, which is one of our family companies.
I still have the medallion you gave me. I have worn it like an amulet every day of every year. So, the gold is much rubbed; the Graces have aged somewhat; Mercury has lost some of his sparkle. However, the inscription is still legible: vocatus extemplo adsum!
‘That’s how I’ve remembered you always: as the lover with wings on his feet, who would come instantly to my call. I hope I haven’t left the call too late.
Ti voglio ben assai,
Giulia
Time was suddenly suspended; space was emptied about him. Every sense was quickened by a swift surge of memories: the drift of her perfume, the texture of her skin, the pulse and passion of her voice. Her urgent, imperious script invoked them all, like the score of a symphony, read in silence, yet heard in rich harmonies through all the caverns of the soul. Even after forty years of separation and silence, the music had power to tempt him back into the perilous uplands of the love-country.
Long practice in the law had made him a sceptic. Thirty years of stable marriage had taught him that love was a plant which needed patient nurture if it were to survive the stresses and erosions of time. In spite of his Celtic origins, he did not believe in ghosts; yet far back in his subconscious was a region haunted by unexorcised memories and dilemmas still unresolved.
This letter, for instance, was both pleasant and poignant to contemplate over a drink at the end of a long business day in New York. On the other hand, it would take a deal of explaining to Louise who, for all her good humour, would tolerate no trespass on her family turf. She had enough Italian to know that ‘Ti voglio ben assai’ did not mean ‘Have a nice day’ and the spectacle of Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh as a winged messenger hurrying to the call of an old lover would please her not at all!
Immediately he reminded himself that there was no way in the world Louise could possibly know about Giulia. That affair had ended years before Louise had come into his life – which made it only the harder to explain, even to himself, why he felt obliged to honour a promise made in the heat of passion forty years ago.
Why indeed? One of the rewards of age was that the truce between the present and the past was easier to maintain. Time dulled the pain of all grieving, took the edge off most guilts. Nonetheless, his encounter with Giulia had left him so wounded in his self-esteem that he had locked the memory away in the deepest recesses of his subconscious, determined never to contemplate it, never never to discuss it. He had held to his resolve. He was a natural and entertaining storyteller, but on this subject he had never indulged himself in anecdote or allusion, even of the most trivial kind.
Now, totally unprepared, he was beset with memories, besieged by phantoms: himself, a big, freckled red-head, with a Navy discharge, and a brand new law degree leaving his home place in Sydney, Australia for the Grand Tour of postwar Europe. The ship that carried him was a Greek rust-bucket called the Kyrenia, which came out loaded with migrants and went back half-filled with cut-price tourists, while she tramped the intervening ports for bodies to fill her vacant cabins.
In those days and in that shuddering hull the journey from Sydney to Athens and Genoa took six long weeks; but for Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, with two hundred sterling pounds in his pocket and five hundred more in a circular letter of credit on Coutts Bank, every hour of every day was a new adventure.
His pulse-beat had always been in rhythm with the swing of the sea. Even in his callow days as junior Watch Officer on a corvette, he had the reputation of a man who could smell the weather and find a sea for the helmsman in the most turbulent stormwater. This voyage was like a chaplet of recollections – the jewelled islands and cays of the Great Barrier Reef, the misty shorelines of the East India archipelagos, the slow enveloping smell of Asia as they came at midnight to drop anchor in the Singapore Roads, the bare cliffs of Aden giving off heat like an oven.
His early masters – the Brothers and the Jesuits – had packed him full of learning, Latin and Greek and Romance Languages and Ancient History and the geographies of the great voyagers. All of it had lain fallow during the war years and the postwar ones when he was running to catch up with learning and with life. Now, suddenly, it was blooming like a flower patch in spring.
He could sit on the bridge at midnight and make disjointed but comradely talk with the Second Mate, who came from Samos in the Dodecanese. He could curl up in one of the leaky lifeboats – God help all if they should ever be needed! – and make love with the young Portuguese widow wending her way homeward from Timor. He could huddle over an ouzo with the old bearded missionary from the uplands of New Guinea, who told him strange tales of the women who offered their first born to the pig-god and then took a piglet to the breast, of the man who could change himself into a cassowary and run faster than the wind along the mountain trails, of the sorcerers who were seen to be in two places at the same moment . . .
But all this was overture to what he knew in his flesh and bones would be the grandest opera of all – the Passionate Pilgrim. It would tell the tale of de Courcy Cavanagh the Boy Wonder from the Antipodes, going back to his roots in Europe then scrambling happily among the spreading branches of his family tree which, so his elders had told him, spread far and wide: to Halifax in Nova Scotia, and Boston, and Manhattan, and even to the vineyards of Bordeaux, where the de Courcys and the Cavanaghs had come with the first flight of the Wild Geese.
Well, maybe it hadn’t all been grand, but sure as hell there had been some high operatic moments, big passionate arias, moments of dark tragedy, muted in the end to safe, perennial operetta, in which the freckled-faced boy from down-under won himself a bride from the old quality and they bred themselves beautiful children and lived happily ever after, with himself a Docteur d’État in the European Community on which he had placed a bet while it was still a dream in the mind of Jean Monnet.
It had been a gamble – Mother of God, what a gamble! He could have accepted to dine in the Temple and thence been called to the Bar in London. He could have accepted Lou Molloy’s invitation and done postgraduate Law at Harvard, made himself an American citizen and been hoisted to a lucrative partnership in Manhattan. Instead, pigheaded bogtrotter that he was, he had opted for the long slog for his Master’s degree at the Sorbonne, the year in Moscow wrestling with the Marxist legal system, the time in Rome and Madrid preparing his doctoral thesis on the mutations of the Codex Justinianus into modern times.
It was Giulia who had urged him to walk this long way round to get the eggs. ‘You’re a hybrid,’ she told him. ‘You’re a native twig grafted on Celtic stock. In Britain, you’ll always be the outlander. No matter how high you rise, you’ll always be the upstart, the Wild Colonial Boy, patronised and damned with the same compliment. In America, you’ll be caught in the old trap, the immigrants at war with each other and the Brahmins against them all. Of course you’ll be among the winners, like the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds, with money running out of your ears; but you won’t like yourself any more. So it’s two choices only: go home and be king in your own cabbage-patch, or come to Europe, with all the other displaced tribes, and build it anew from the rubble upwards . . . Don’t you see, you were bred for this, because this is the country in which your mind lives. This is why you and I struck fire the moment we met . . .’
He had believed her. His whole career attested the wisdom of her advice. The irony was that a scant two weeks after she had offered it, she had thrust him out of her life and closed the door in his face.
She had done it calmly and lucidly. It was an act already understood and agreed between them. Their golden days were over; now she was summoned back to the world of business and statecraft to which the Farnese had been dedicated for centuries. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh could have no place in their convoluted lives. He had feared that and fought it from the beginning; but he was still unprepared for the bitterness of the end.
Now, forty years later, Giulia was telling him that for her the loving had never ended and that she still counted upon his promise to come instantly at her call.
In his hotel room in Manhattan, Cavanagh found a grace of laughter. God damn the woman! She hadn’t changed. She was still as arrogant and imperious as the long-dead princess for whom she was named – Giulia Farnese, called the Beautiful. He could still see the proud lift of her chin, the fire in her dark eyes, the toss of her lustrous hair as she demanded ‘Do this! Do that! Take me there!’ He could still hear the ripple of her laughter when he poured eloquent derision on her for a spoilt brat and a Roman snob and a chattel put up for auction in the marriage market by a down-at-heel prince. But she wouldn’t give him an inch of ground. She taunted him: ‘Giulia the Beautiful was sold by her brother to the Borgia Pope when she was fifteen, but the Romans fell in love with her and called her the Bride of Christ – or the Pope’s whore, according to their mood! And her gift to him on his deathbed was a third child, while her profligate brother finally became Pope himself! So, can you match that, my young vagabond? Can you?’
Of course he couldn’t and he had to confess it. So, after the fight was the lovemaking, wild and wonderful, and after that the peacemaking and the whispered hopes that dawn would never come and the moonlit enchantment would last forever.
It didn’t. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh was a fledgling attorney with the wanderlust still on him and all his hopes in his head and nothing but small wages in his pocket. How the hell could he compete with Lou Molloy and all his millions and his high connections in the Democratic machine, with Spellman and the Vatican and, through those, to Adenauer in Germany and Franco in Spain and the Farnese and their like in Italy and even to de Gaulle, walking on the water at Colombey des Deux Eglises?
Lou Molloy! Now there was a character for you, a Black Irish buccaneer if God ever made one, supple as silk, with a smile like a summer’s day, full of dignities when he chose to be and dangerous as a cocked pistol if you crossed him. He was what the old folk used to call ‘a fine figure of a man’, flat bellied, straight backed, not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. He had big, innocent brown eyes and behind them a brain like a fine Swiss watch.
His family was in the machine-tool business, essential reserved occupation, but he had served time as a volunteer coastguard using his own boat as an off-shore patrol vessel.
After the war, everything was easy. The family fortune devolved to him. In the period of postwar shortages he doubled then trebled it. The Democrats wanted to run him for the Senate. He waved them off. That was the Kennedy playground and he’d rather pay to watch than get his nose bloodied in their family game. Besides, politics under the spotlight was not his style. He preferred the chess matches played in boardrooms and clubs and châteaux in France and villas in the Tuscan hills. Half his interests were in Europe now and he was convinced that Western Europe could develop into a viable political and economic entity, a land-bridge one day, between the Soviet States and the American continent.
He had had a variety of lovers in his life and had treated them all – except one – with a tyrant’s disdain. Now it was time for him to take a wife and he would do it in the old dynastic style, with a union blessed by the Church and ornamented by tradition.
Wise in the ways of Irishry in America, he sought – and paid handsomely for – counsel from the man they called ‘the American Pope’, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York. By way of insurance he also talked with old Joe Kennedy and the McDonnells and the Cuddihys, who headed the Irish social set in Manhattan.
In due time, a smiling Spellman conveyed the news that the Pope himself was nodding towards a possible bride, a twenty-four-year-old Italian princess with an ancient name and a father eager to establish his own transatlantic connections. Molloy, in his careful fashion, took the suggestion under advisement and agreed that subject to pre-nuptial agreement and the provision of a papal decoration for himself – the Order of St Gregory would serve quite nicely, thank you – he would commit to the sacrament. It was typical of the man that he doubted neither his power to charm the lady nor his potency to match her in bed and endow her with beautiful children.
Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had been witness to the wooing and was safely gone before the wedding. Of the marriage itself he knew nothing, save that a son had been born to the happy couple and that Lou Molloy had died in New York a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. Cavanagh read the obituary in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune whilst he was holidaying with Louise in Amalfi. For a brief moment he was tempted to send a telegram of condolence to Giulia; then he thought better of it. The past was safely buried, why open the vault and set the ghosts walking?
Alone in his hotel room, looking over the long traverse of his past, Cavanagh was invaded by a winter chill. Not all this was pleasant reminiscence of young love and passionate encounters and lyric duets. There were guilts in it, too, betrayals and treacheries in which both he and Giulia had played their special roles. There were lies and shabby little stratagems, the games of spoilt children who cared not at all for the hurts they inflicted. He wondered how much Molloy had seen at the time or guessed over the years, how much he had chosen to ignore to maintain his honour and the stability of this most convenient marriage.
Suddenly his own company was intolerable to him. He tossed off the lees of his drink at a gulp, put on his street clothes and headed up Madison to a small bistro where the patron served drinks at an old-fashioned zinc bar and madame dispensed onion soup and coq au vin and a wraith-like girl played piano and sang Piaf songs. He was known. He was welcomed. He could sit quietly over his food and not feel too solitary while he remembered his first encounter with Lou Molloy, on a June day forty years ago.