We walked up the hill together. The haze of noon had vanished, and in an intense clarity the city seemed to lie almost beneath one’s hand; one might have thought to put finger and thumb to the stone ribs of Brunelleschi’s dome and set Florence spinning like a glittering roulette-wheel upon its green table. On the other side of the road the strip-tease girls still patiently postured within their blotched frames. I wondered whether the impulse that had put Avery in brief possession of Ossessione Erotica had led him to investigate the dismal spectator-sport on offer nightly within. Luigi, I felt, would have been in a position to make some superior recommendation.
This idle thought caused me to wonder just what it was that Avery supposed me to ‘understand’. I didn’t attribute much understanding to myself – or anything more, in relation to our present problem, than what might be called a working hypothesis. And this I hoped was now going to be put to a test and verified pretty well without word spoken by me. But, if necessary, I would act. I would march Jethro Brenton off to some secluded corner of his garden and endeavour at a single stroke to straighten things out. I was tired, I told myself, of the spectacle of these people wandering in a maze of their own devising.
It was upon Jethro that we first came. He was prowling – wandering, indeed – upon the perimeter of his domain, close by the small secessionist territory marked by the barbed-wire entanglement of the gardener. Chi entra furtivo muore tosto. He might have been described as a shade furtivo himself. Short of positive banishment, he had certainly retreated from the Villa Buontalenti as far as he could.
‘Have you seen anything of Alison?’ he asked at once.
‘No, sir. I don’t think she has turned up yet.’
I might have judged it notable that Mrs Mountpatrick had thus so spontaneously become ‘Alison’ again had I not been more struck by Jethro’s continuing to be ‘sir’. But I understood Avery’s difficulty. ‘My father’ is easy. But ‘Father’ as a vocative for some reason comes a shade awkwardly to an English boy’s tongue. On the other hand ‘Daddy’ or the like carries assumptions which Avery, so far, was unable honestly to get round to.
‘And I don’t know what has become of Luigi either. I thought he might show your mother things.’ Jethro turned to me. ‘My dear Bannerman, I’m exceedingly glad you’ve dropped in.’
It was ludicrously patent that the man was casting round among his resources; even grabbing at rail or rigging, one might say, under threat of the advancing squall. And yet it wasn’t at all likely that Fernanda had been raging or was going to rage. It was her technique to move in rapidly indeed, but with calm. Perhaps Jethro preserved an image of her in his mind as the still eye of the hurricane. And he impressed me now as rather like one of those bobbin-shaped structures – cooling-towers or whatever they may be – which go up round modern power-stations: shapely, almost noble in certain lights, but the vacuity of which renders them liable to crumple before a breeze – to the just indignation of ourselves who have been made to pay for them.
I didn’t think that Avery was now in much doubt about his father’s interior engineering. And similarly too with his mother; it was as if the vast dome of light that is an Italian sky hadn’t been good for her wrinkles. He wasn’t going to have much left after this business had clarified itself. Only – and suddenly I saw this as a whole new troubled vista – he might take it all more for responsibility than disillusionment. What if he were to immolate himself in some stupid way on the altar of this family mess? I thought suddenly and mournfully that I might be left blaming the ethos of Anglebury.
And now we were walking down to the house: Jethro between Anglebury’s late headmaster and late pupil, and thus to a slight effect of being under escort.
‘Fernanda hasn’t changed,’ Jethro said to me, and scarcely on a note of satisfaction. ‘But I have a feeling’—he almost brightened—’that she finds I have. I gather you had a talk with her last night. Did she say anything which might suggest that?’
‘My dear Brenton, she hadn’t seen you then.’
‘But of course not.’ Jethro passed a mannered hand over his eyes, but I judged his confusion to be genuine. ‘Things happen so quickly! Avery, has she said anything about me to you?’
‘No, nothing at all. She hasn’t said much to me about anything, so far.’ Avery hesitated. ‘Not even about why she has arrived in such a hurry. It wasn’t a bit her plan.’
‘Her plan?’ It scarcely seemed that Jethro could really find this word bewildering. ‘There must have been some sudden reason for her following you?’
‘Perhaps she thought I wasn’t doing too well.’
There was a silence – into which, surprisingly, I heard myself intrude.
‘Mrs Brenton,’ I said, ‘had a telegram from Mrs Mountpatrick.’
‘From Alison!’ There was agitation in Jethro’s voice, and I found myself not sorry to remark the fact. My unpremeditated interjection had told me I was myself all for the crunch. I’d keep mum if there was a risk of darkening council, but speak up if there was a chance of giving things an onward nudge. But now Jethro was recovering himself.
‘Women are really incomprehensible,’ he said. ‘And they do get in the way of one’s work. Even Mme de Criquetot, for example. She has Pacino di Bonaguida at her finger-tips – Bannerman, I remember telling you that – but nevertheless the dear Comtesse will spend half a day gossiping about nothing at all.’
‘I don’t think you’ll find my mother doing that.’ Avery came out with this with a grimness of tone which surprised me. He had allowed his father’s drift into a small fatuity to irk him – or rather, perhaps, to humiliate him. But he rejected this instantly and loyally. ‘Your work mustn’t be interrupted,’ he said. ‘I do see that as the important thing.’
‘It’s important to me, such as it is.’ Jethro put into this a humility I didn’t care for. At the same time he glanced at Avery wonderingly – almost as if at a stranger in whom some remote possibility might inhere. I cared for this even less. Jethro Brenton, I knew, would never see Avery Brenton in other than an instrumental light.
‘Here comes Luigi,’ Avery said suddenly.
Luigi had appeared at the end of the drive, framed between the reaching cypresses and with the faded pink façade of the Villa Buontalenti behind him. He held something in his hand, and seemed to be looking for us.
‘So it is.’ Jethro’s pace, which had been lagging, lagged further. ‘Avery, there is one important thing. To get clear, that is. Your mother has thoughts that do her honour. I greatly respect her. She’s a notable woman. But work – well, that she just doesn’t understand. A scholar’s dedication. It would always be an enemy to her. So her ideas are impracticable – absolutely.’
Across Jethro Brenton’s finely trimmed beard Avery’s glance met mine. We were both silent – awkwardly acknowledging, I fear, the simulacrum of strength and resolution that had been presented to us. And now Luigi had come up and halted, holding out what he was carrying.
‘It’s for you, Avery,’ he said curtly. ‘A telegram.’
‘Thank you.’ This time, Avery’s colour had really left him, and in his pallor, I glimpsed him, for the first and last time, as physically his father’s son. He took the telegram and thrust it into a pocket without a glance.
We rounded the villa while I was digesting the meaning of this, and I expected that we should proceed indoors by way of the loggia. Mrs Brenton, after all, was presumably unattended within, and she had scarcely been long enough an inmate to be left unceremoniously to her own devices. Jethro however put on a spurt – a spurt, it might have been called, disguised as a stroll – which had the consequence of committing us to a full turn round the garden. I supposed that the simplest impulse of procrastination was the occasion of this. However distressing in certain of its aspects the unfolding situation was, it had its one point of mere high absurdity in Jethro Brenton’s terror of his former wife. Whether anything that could be termed fascination went along with this there had been little chance to decide. Even a superficial observer, unconcerned to determine what might or might not be his sexual constitution, would soon have put him down as the kind of middle-aged man who is readily alarmed by women – the more so, perhaps, as himself carrying inescapably round with him something that didn’t at all alarm them. He hadn’t cared for Mrs Mountpatrick’s turning up (like Fernanda, more or less out of a past), and he had been keenly aware of her hostility to Luigi. But once Fernanda entered the ring – it was as simple as that – Mrs Mountpatrick had, potentially at least, assumed the character of one of those substantial barriers on the ring’s periphery which in a crisis may be dodged behind. Or so I read Jethro’s anxiety for Mrs Mountpatrick’s presence now.
The path we were following admitted of only two walking abreast, and it seemed natural that Jethro and I should make a pair. But for some moments we had nothing to say to each other; and I was aware that, behind us, Avery and Luigi had nothing to say to each other either. It had always seemed to me that Luigi might grow bored with Avery more rapidly than Avery with Luigi: this was a probability inherent in their several mental ranges and tempos. It didn’t mean that Romulus and Remus need positively fall out. But I began to feel that Luigi was indeed armouring himself within a very general reserve, and that Avery was right in declaring his Italian friend to have become not the bambino he was.
We had reached a point at the bottom of the garden where two high-backed stone benches were ranged formally on either side of a stone table. Jethro sat down, and perhaps it was because we were still speechless that I found myself remarking something stiff in his movements. The quality appeared too as he walked. It was partly a matter of comportment, no doubt; it simply went with his sense that he was somebody. But he could be no younger, after all, than I was; we were both approaching that phase of life in which a man who doesn’t begin to hint decrepitude is described as well-preserved. A certain stiffness was perhaps afflicting his joints.
I sat down beside him, possibly rather gingerly myself. Even in an Italian garden two slabs of stone set at right- angles are ungrateful to the human frame. The young men, not without a distinguishable reluctance, sat down opposite. It was like a board meeting. And I saw that we were here not merely because Jethro Brenton had baulked at entering his own house. He had something else in mind.
‘We must have a plan,’ Jethro said.
‘A plan?’ It was Avery who echoed the words, and with a blankness that his father found irritating.
‘If your mother has a plan, I suppose I may have a plan too. If you are part of her plan—and why else have you come here?—you’d better cut along to her.’ Jethro paused. ‘At least I can trust Luigi.’
This speech, in its sudden ugliness, brought Avery to his feet – so rapidly that if the table between us hadn’t weighed a tonne or thereabout I believe he would have sent it flying. Luigi was immobile. Only his eyes sought mine briefly, and I found myself resenting what I read in them as an invitation to join in a contemptuous view of the indecorum suddenly before us. I may have been wrong in this. Luigi Fagandini was becoming increasingly inscrutable. As for Avery, he had nearly walked away; and I am sure he was even more hurt than angry. But now he faced his father squarely.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘I know my mother has her idea, and I know now it could be of no use to you. But there’s been nothing wrong in it; it’s perfectly honourable; and I’m no more in a plot than Luigi or the Head is.’ (I had become, in Avery’s moment of perturbation, simply the Head again.) ‘If you can trust Luigi, you can trust me quite as much – that I promise you. There’s the difference that I’m your son. And her son. I have to be square by both of you.’
Long before this short (and satisfactory) speech was over, Jethro Brenton – there is only a painful word for it – was grovelling. Both hands were working in a nervous agitation before him, and in gestures which seemed to implore Avery to sit down.
‘My dear boy, you must forgive me. I am upset. My wretched routine, my small struggles to get on, have been cast in confusion. It has been like a sudden wind blowing at my poor guttering candle.’ Even in what was a genuinely pitiable state, Jethro’s sense of Jethro’s pathos – the devoted scholar against the world – had by no means deserted him. ‘Luigi knows,’ he said.
But Luigi gave no sign of knowing, and his silence and immobility increased the awkwardness of our situation. I had to tell myself not to give way to disliking scenes. ‘Heads’ dislike scenes, no doubt. They get out a cane and whack a clearing round themselves. Or so – as a matter of theory – I have always supposed. But I had better put up with scenes now. There were more coming. What came to us immediately, however, was the sound of a car approaching down the drive.
‘Mrs Mountpatrick,’ Luigi said.
Jethro may have taken in the words; he certainly took in their tone. He looked from Luigi, mysteriously alienated and in a cold fury, to Avery, who had spoken according to his lights and from his heart. And then – there was no doubt where his heart lay – his eyes went back to Luigi.
‘Luigi,’ he said, ‘—you are going to stand by me in spite of everything?’
It was intolerable – or at least it was absurd, and time for another nudge.
‘Brenton,’ I said, ‘Luigi doesn’t have a place in this. No more than I have. It’s a family affair.’
Avery looked at me as if I’d talked sense, and Luigi as if I’d produced a fatuous platitude. But Brenton’s eyes had turned to me with a sudden, swiftly masked, intensity. Then, once more, he turned back to Luigi.
‘I think I see,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept it—so monstrous a thing—from my mind. You know it’s nothing, don’t you – a vileness that the little people talk about us who are scholars, artists, not of their horrible and scrambling world? It will sink as it has risen, I tell you! Luigi, you wouldn’t let it take you away?’ He looked from one to another of us, and we were silent before this rhetoric – but only Avery, I think, in total incomprehension. ‘I will never submit to mockery,’ Jethro said. ‘I will not be laughed at!’
If I myself didn’t find this last utterance a total inconsequence it was only because I was, so to speak, a special case. Momentarily, it brought Avery and Luigi in contact again in a common bewilderment. They must have thought the man was raving.
‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘whether we ought not to join the ladies?’
As if these had been the words of a host, we were all on our feet – like men rising from dessert, straightening their ties, wondering about the lavatory, preparing small talk. We moved silently up the garden, up the steps. There was a brief moment, I believe, in which we all four came mysteriously together. It was simply as a sex – and as if ahead, in the cool shadowy house, something alien, implacable, female was awaiting us.
But what our senses first encountered was a faint perfume, as from a garment thrown carelessly aside; this, and the sound of a piano. Vaguely, I imagined it to be Chopin that was being discoursed, but Avery’s identification was more precise.
‘That’s my mother,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit she’s been getting up.’
The sound guided us into a room I had not entered before: a salotto grande it might have been called, for it was entirely in the Italian taste. At the piano at its farther end sat Fernanda Brenton, with Alison Mountpatrick standing beside her. Both looked up at us, and Fernanda finished a phrase before taking her hands from the keys.
‘You keep your piano well tuned, Jethro,’ she said approvingly.
She looked very much at home.