Throughout the following morning there was no sign of Mrs Brenton. Like most people at the Serena, she had presumably breakfasted in her room; and if she had sallied out thereafter I had been unaware of it. I had my own breakfast on the terrace – even although the Laurentian, or at least the cupola of the Cappella dei Principi of San Lorenzo, was beckoning to me reproachfully from the plain below. I had decided against walking up to the Buontalenti uninvited, but I was reluctant to go off duty (as I expressed it to myself) altogether. So I sat watching Luca raking up a meagre hay beneath the olive trees, and from time to time I dipped, not very pertinaciously, into Mommsen’s Romisches Staatsrecht. At one o’clock Gino brought me out an omelette and some fruit and wine. At two o’clock, Avery appeared.
He had come round the corner of the villa in a hurry, and I was aware of him abruptly reducing speed when I came in view. At the Buontalenti, I knew at once, the morning had not been eventless. It was abruptly, too, that he flung himself into a chair and declined my offer of coffee.
‘My mother’s here,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes – I know. She’s staying at the Serena, and I’ve met her. So has Luigi. Hasn’t he told you?’
‘Luigi has gone funny, rather. He has turned close. He’s not’—Avery produced a slightly wry smile—’quite the bambino he was. We’ve just finished lunch. I thought I’d come down.’ Avery glanced at the remains of my own lunch, which included half a dozen olive stones on a plate. Oddly, he tipped these on to the stone table, and with the flick of a finger sent one of them across the terrace and surprisingly far into the garden. ‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that the whole thing is proving a good idea, at all.’
‘The family reunion?’
‘Yes – the idea of that. Do you?’
‘No, not really, Avery.’ I uttered this surprisingly promptly, considering that what I ought perhaps to have said was, ‘It’s not for me to say.’
‘You see, I don’t think my father has the necessary feelings.’ Avery produced this equally promptly, and with his intermittent and always slightly surprising command of precise speech. And then, instantly and staggeringly, he went far beyond this – and by means of his second incursion during my whole experience of him into figurative language. ‘It would be like dragging a man screaming to the scaffold, if you ask me.’ A second olive stone was sent viciously in the direction of the industrious Luca. ‘The question is, whether it’s just my mother, or if there’s really something else.’
‘What do you mean by that: whether it’s just your mother?’ My heart had sunk, but there was nothing for it except to go on.
‘Whether she has simply got a wrong idea. Whether it’s just that: their being, I mean, two completely incompatible persons. Or whether there’s something else.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, there being another woman – really very much another woman – after all. Anyway, it’s undignified.’
I was silent. This last remark had been a kind of judgement upon Avery’s mother, and it had cost him something to bring it out. Within a space of two or three hours, I supposed, he had been constrained to admit a vision of her in a new light. What had to be called, decently, her appetitive aspect had been more fully revealed to him. This was not, I felt, to the credit of Fernanda’s finesse. She had tripped up, conceivably, upon a sudden discovery that she had under-estimated the situation. But now another thought came to me.
‘Is Mrs Mountpatrick up there?’ I asked.
‘Not at the moment, but she’s coming this afternoon. I’ve been told to keep a look out for her, as a matter of fact. But I don’t think I need bother – not all that. You won’t know, since you’ve been in Rome. But she has been making pretty free with the place. Do you know, I think she may be rather struck on somebody?’
‘On your father?’ There was folly in my coming out with this. But it didn’t hold Avery up – and for the first time at this interview he produced what was almost a merry smile.
‘Lord, no! Hasn’t the poor man enough on his plate?’ Avery paused on this, as if aware of how much it testified to his enlarged sense of the matter. ‘Luigi,’ he said.
‘My dear Avery, they detest each other.’
‘Well, I know they scrap. But I think it’s something I’ve read about. Bernard Shaw – I think it’s Bernard Shaw – calls it the duel of sex.’
‘If you want that, you’d better read Racine, not Shaw.’ I was unable to repress in myself this melancholy pedagogic irrelevance. ‘And it seems to me that the antagonism between Luigi and Mrs Mountpatrick has quite a different basis.’ It had occurred to me that I could perhaps safely explore Avery’s mind a little. ‘Mrs Mountpatrick feels that your father’s relationship with Luigi has become an unfortunate one.’
‘Oh, yes – I know. That damned corpus. My father knows he relies enormously on Luigi to shove it ahead. But he conceals from himself just how enormously. I expect Mrs Mountpatrick feels there might be a disaster if Luigi walked out.’ Avery paused upon this definitive revelation of present innocence. ‘Perhaps she even feels a bit guilty about it. Because if he did, mightn’t it be in order to walk out with her?’
‘Avery, you’re indulging an idée fixe. Why should Luigi find anything attractive in a middle-aged—’
‘Well, there was that married woman, wasn’t there? The one Luigi seduced. So it may be his sort of thing. And he did stare at her, rather, at that lunch. I know I’m not much of an authority on sex.’ Avery interjected this apologetically. ‘Still, it seems quite likely to me. And there’s another thing. She may have money. Her husband was an American, and all Americans have pots of it.’
‘She hasn’t.’ I was much struck, and not a little appalled, by this further revelation. If Avery’s mind remained naive in one direction, it had made a rapid advance towards cynicism in another.
‘He may still think she has. Of course I know this seems a pretty rotten way to think about the bambino. But Italians are so different. I’ve come to see that. And, sir, it’s all so damned bewildering. Oh, hell!’
I knew this to be (except perhaps among his contemporaries and intimates) Avery’s strongest imprecation. It was almost like a cry for help.
‘Avery, you don’t think, do you, that anything of this is in your father’s head?’
‘Oh, probably not. But he does seem to cling to Luigi. I don’t think I’d be any substitute at all. And yet he’s drawing back from him too. There’s come to be something frightfully awkward between them. And I feel it’s because of something Luigi knows about and my father doesn’t – or doesn’t allow himself to. Or not quite.’
‘It might conceivably be the other way round.’ I was reflecting, perhaps irrelevantly, on the puzzling nature of what we call intelligence. It was not the first occasion upon which I had felt Avery Brenton’s simple mind to hover on the verge of high lucidity. ‘Your father may know something Luigi doesn’t – and it may be in the nature of an embarrassment, a barrier. Perversely so. What if Luigi—’ I came to a dead stop. I might have been hearing (like Matthew Arnold in the poem) a God’s tremendous voice telling me to be counselled and retire. In fact it was simply my returning sense that they must – the Brentons, Luigi, even the Mountpatrick woman – resolve their own confusions. ‘But we’re beating the air,’ I ended feebly.
‘Sir, come and have a look.’
Even as I stared at him, Avery had jumped impulsively to his feet.
‘A look, Avery?’
‘It’s the crunch. This afternoon. I know it is. And you understand these things. Come back with me.’