It was the bag that determined my immediate proceeding (and also, by chance, a little that was to follow) when I got back to Florence. To lug it to San Marco, and later from the filobus stop to the Serena, would be feasible but a little burdensome. So at the railway station I sought out the hotel’s bus. This wanders the city in the interest of delivering travellers of the middling sort at their destinations, and the driver can be persuaded for a surprisingly small sum to finish off by running up to Fiesole. Boarding it without difficulty, I found that no chaffering was required. The Serena was already on the itinerary. So I sat down near the front, and prepared to inspect the exterior appearance of half a dozen pensioni and hotels. I should be at my destination with an hour to spare before dinner.
‘You are Mr Bannerman. The information was offered to my ear – and from directly behind it – in the moment that the bus jerked into motion. It might have been from a determination to waste no time as soon as it was no longer possible for Mr Bannerman (leaving baggage, impedimenta, accoutrements, and even weaponry on the field) to beat a precipitate retreat.
I recalled the voice at once – and wondered why I had not so recalled it, as I had vividly recalled the lady’s physical presence, upon the occasion at Heathrow when I first directed my thoughts towards Avery Brenton’s parents. I have spoken of his mother’s impact. I now realised that it was due in part to an almost alarming disparity between what must be called her manner (which was not remote from that of her school-friend Mrs Mountpatrick) and the sheerly physical timbre with which what she had to say was said. Her voice held, to put it briefly and broadly, a huskiness which did something to one’s spine. And now she had planted herself down beside me.
‘Avery,’ she said, ‘ought to have done better at Anglebury than he did.’
‘I don’t think that Avery did too badly with us at all.’ I noted with satisfaction that it was the insufficiency rather of his school than of the boy himself that Mrs Brenton had appeared to propose as a basis for our present talk. This, at least, was wholesome. ‘And if he gets to Oxford,’ I went on, ‘as I hope he will, it won’t in the least surprise me if he gains his Half-Blue at squash. He’d like that.’
‘So far, so good.’ Fernanda Brenton wasn’t disconcerted. ‘But we must consider his career, his settlement in life. We owe it to him to put our heads together and think about that: you, his father, and myself. A normal background. He has been deprived too long.’
It wasn’t for me to comment on this, although I found it interesting as indicating that Mrs Brenton had a line. So I said nothing, but instead took a look at the lady. She was quietly dressed, I suppose in whatever an Englishwoman nowadays thinks of as travelling clothes. Nevertheless the effect was all there. Delilah sailing into the prison at Gaza, bedecked, ornate, gay like a stately ship of Tarsus, and all intent upon mopping up Samson, was the only image upon which I’d have ventured if called upon to evoke her in a literary way. If I hadn’t been more sorry for Jethro Brenton on other accounts, I should have felt like commiserating with him on the score of what was advancing upon him now.
‘Do they know you’re coming?’ I asked baldly.
‘Of course they must. I had a telegram.’
‘From Alison Mountpatrick?’
‘Yes.’ My question had produced a quick stare. ‘We were at school together. We write to each other from time to time.’
‘Alison has told me as much.’ I paused, very aware of clarifications which must be achieved. ‘It was a summons?’
‘A summons? She simply suggested my coming out. She didn’t say much.’
‘One doesn’t in telegrams.’ I reflected that Mrs Mountpatrick, indeed, could scarcely have made a very explicit communication of her ideas in such a medium.
‘It must be dull for Avery in that outlandish villa of Jethro’s.’ Fernanda spoke as if the bringing of due entertainingness to her son had ranked high among the occasions of her present journey.
‘Well, there happens to be another lad of about his own age living there. A kind of secretary-companion.’
‘Jethro has always liked young men.’
‘So Avery has told me of your telling him. This young man’s name is Luigi Fagandini.’
‘I haven’t heard of him.’ Fernanda was uninterested. ‘Is he competent?’
‘As a secretary? Well, it’s really more than that. He might be called a research assistant. He works on the corpus, and Mr Brenton thinks very highly of him.’
‘I see.’ Fernanda’s tone didn’t suggest that she saw anything particularly agreeable. Beyond this, however, it was completely uncoloured. ‘To my mind Fiesole is an impossible place. A villa at Saltino, yes – with perhaps an apartment on the Lungarno. But Fiesole! Is there any good society there?’
‘Brunetto Latini certainly didn’t think so. He described the inhabitants as ill-savoured crabs, covetous, envious, and proud. But then he was talking to Dante in hell, and perhaps he had a jaundiced view.’ I scarcely knew what perverse impulse had prompted me to offer this nonsense to Mrs Brenton, particularly as the degree of our acquaintance was so slight as to render raillery not very mannerly. I remembered, moreover, that Dante’s former teacher had been not the sort of man whom one should mention, as things at present stood, in the Brenton circle. I suppose I was coming to a nervous awareness of the difficulties with which this abrupt rencontre was confronting me. I had been unprepared for Mrs Brenton, and even more unprepared for her state of innocence. Or was it a state of innocence? One had to remember that Fernanda Brenton was ‘deep’. And supposing her purposes to be simply as they appeared, and her knowledge to be just that too, what on earth should I be saying to her? It wasn’t as if I had knowledge, or anything more than what might be termed a view. Mrs Mountpatrick’s view Mrs Brenton was presumably at once to receive – and her manner of responding to it was anyone’s guess. At least there was nothing to be gained by my rushing in with that; endeavouring to ‘break’, as it were, to Fernanda the present drift of events at the Villa Buontalenti. For one thing, I might be out of date in any assessment of the situation I ventured. I had spent four nights in Rome, and what had been a breath of disaster when I went away might be a destructive gale of disaster by now. What I had inhaled from Mrs Mountpatrick while perched before the Badia was a mephitic vapour of a sort not easy to keep in a bag.
‘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.’