‘TOMORROW,’ said Ninette firmly, ‘tomorrow we pack and go. We’ll get ourselves married in Rome and find ourselves a villa out near Frascati, a place with a garden and a view where you can study and I can paint. We need it, chéri! We’ve spent too much of ourselves in this place. It’s time to go!’
They were walking in the garden of Ascolini’s villa, watching the light spread westward over the valley, while the cicadas made their crepitant chorus and a languid bird chirped in the shrubbery. Carlo was asleep. Ascolini was drowsing in his library, and Valeria was playing the diligent chatelaine, arranging flowers, bustling the servants about the kitchen in preparation for the evening’s entertainment.
In spite of protests from Landon and Ninette, Ascolini had insisted that they come directly from the court to the villa. Valeria, too, had pleaded urgently for their presence. It was as if they were afraid of being alone with one another, as if they needed a catalyst to start the slow process of restoration and reunion. Landon and Ninette were tired and resentful, but they comforted themselves with the thought that on the morrow they should be quit of courtesies and free to address themselves to their private affairs.
After the drama of the court and the confusion of the aftermath, the countryside imposed a welcome calm on them all. Valeria drove, Carlo sat beside her, spent and taciturn, while Ascolini sat in the back seat rehearsing the morning’s triumph. Then he, too, lapsed into silence while the vineyards and the cornfields swept past and the olive leaves drooped, dusty and listless, on the hillside.
They lunched on the terrace, chatted vaguely for a little while and then dispersed. Carlo was in the grip of a fierce reaction. Valeria was conducting herself with self-conscious discretion and Ascolini was simply watching the gambits like a wary old campaigner. Landon’s own position was summed up in Ninette’s verdict: ‘Finita la commedia! Time to be quit of all others but ourselves. Let them play out their own epilogue. We mustn’t wait for the curtain call.’
So, in the long decline of the afternoon, they strolled in the pleasances of the villa and talked in the happy, inconsequent fashion of new lovers. They talked of Frascati and how they should live there: not penned in the town, not among the princely villas of the Conti and the Borghese and the Lancellotti, but in some small estate in the folds of the Alban hills, with a vineyard, perhaps and a tenant form with a green garden to walk in and watch the sun go down on the distant sprawl of imperial Rome. They talked of an exhibition for Ninette, of friends who would come to share their pastoral, of how their children might be born citizens of the Old World and of the New.
Then, as the shadows lengthened, Ascolini came out to join them, chirpy as a cricket after his siesta. ‘A great day, my friends! A great day! And we owe you a debt for your part in it. You know what we need now.’ He jerked an emphatic thumb in the direction of the house. ‘A love-philtre for those two. Don’t laugh. The grandmothers in these parts still make them for peasant lovers. We, of course, are too civilized for such nonsense, but…it has its uses.’
Ninette laughed and patted the old man’s arm. ‘Patience, dottore! No matter how much you prod him, that little donkey will trot at his own pace!’
Ascolini grinned and tossed a pebble at a scuttling lizard. ‘It is not I who am impatient, but Valeria. She is eager now for reunion. She demands proofs of forgiveness. But I tell the same thing: “Piano, piano! Soft words, soft hands, when a man is tired like this one.”’ He chuckled happily. ‘With me, it was different. After every big case, I was wild and roaring for a woman! Maybe Carlo will come to it, too – when he gets Anna out of his blood.’
‘Where will they put her, do you know?’
‘It’s not fixed yet. They’ve taken her back to San Gimignano, but I understand Galuzzi has hopes of transferring her to the Samaritan Sisters at Castel Gandolfo. They have a big hospice there for mental cases. It’s very beautiful, I believe. Very efficient, too.’ He shrugged off the subject and asked: ‘What will you two do now?’
‘We’re going to Rome,’ Landon told him, ‘just as soon as we can pack and close Ninette’s studio.’
‘I hope we may see you there. We, too, will be leaving in a few days. I want Carlo to begin taking over my practice.’
‘How does he like the idea?’
‘It appeals to him, I think, now that we can meet on equal terms. For my part, I need leisure to set my life in order. If these two can content themselves together, then I, too, can begin to be happy.’ He plucked a twig from an overhanging bush, sat down on a stone bench and began drawing slow cursive patterns in the gravel. ‘Life is a twisted comedy, my friends. Had you told me six weeks ago that I should come to this – that I should be playing cupid and dreaming of grandchildren and even thinking of going to confession – I should have spat in your eye! But this is what has happened. I wonder, sometimes, whether it is not too easy, and whether there is not a fellow waiting round the corner with a bill of reckoning in his hand.’
‘Why should there be, dottore?’ asked Ninette warmly. ‘Life is not all debit and credit. Sometimes there are gifts for which the only price is gratitude.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Ascolini, drily, ‘Perhaps I’m a suspicious fellow who doesn’t deserve his good fortune.’
‘Then let me tell you ours,’ said Ninette with a smile. ‘We’re going to be married.’
Ascolini stared at her for an instant. Then his shrewd old face lit up with genuine delight. He threw his arm around her and waltzed her up and down the path. ‘Maraviglioso! Wonderful! And you will have a sack of children, all beautiful. And you will be the most beautiful mother in the world! All this and talent, tool Landon, you are a fortunate fellow! Fortunatissimo! And you owe it all to us. If we hadn’t sent you back to Siena with a flea in your ear, you’d still be playing kiss-me-quick with the models and the telephone girls. But what an omen! There is double reason for a festa tonight.’ Breathless and excited, he grasped their arms and trotted them both up the gravelled path towards the house. ‘You must tell Valeria, child. And you, Landon, will read Carlo a little sermon on marriage and the joys of fatherhood and all the fun you have arriving there. When the first baby comes, we’ll have a great christening and I’ll guarantee a cardinal in a red hat to do the job for you. Then you must make me godfather so that I can look after his faith and morals!’
‘We’ll have to reform you first, dottore!’
‘By that time, child, I shall probably be wearing a hair shirt and beating my chest with a brick, like San Gerohimo!’
It was a comic picture and it made them laugh. They were still laughing when they reached the terrace and Ascolini shouted for a servant to bring wine and glasses. Valeria came out to join them, and when Ascolini told her the news her eyes filled up with tears and she embraced Ninette ardently.
Her friendliness surprised Landon. Ascolini’s conversion was easier to accept. He was getting old and, faced with the great ‘perhaps’, he was clinging to the simple certainties of life: pride and irony were too thin a diet for the winter years. Passion was being disciplined by the sheer diminution of age; native shrewdness and perverse experience were maturing into wisdom. But Valeria was a different case. She was still young, still wayward, initiated too early to the taste of truffles for breakfast, and Landon could see no good reason for so swift a reform.
Then, slowly, understanding began to dawn. This was the whole nature of these people. This was the essential paradox of their character and history. Old Cardinal du Bellay had called them ‘peuple de grands enfants… C’est une terrible beste, que cette ville-là, et sont estranges cerveaux’ a terrible beast of a city…great children…strange brains… Their own San Bernardino, a very modem psychologist in the fifteenth century, had characterized them even better: ‘I understand the weakness of your character. You leave a thing and then return to the same thing; and seeing you now in so many divisions with so many hatreds, I believe that, had it not been that you are very, very human, you would have ended in doing yourselves some great harm. However, I say that your condition and you yourselves are very changeable. And how very changeable you are, also with evil, for you soon return to good.’
They were very human people: too human for colder spirits to live with in comfort. They were violent by nature, incapable of compromise. The same mould produced the mystic and the murderer, the political assassin and the ascetic who took the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.
The valley below was filling with shadow, but the place where they stood was still bathed in sunlight, a symbol, Landon thought, of the gentler feelings which seemed to pervade the Ascolini household. He asked himself whether he had discovered, at last, the root of Carlo’s problem: that he understood Valeria and her father too little and demanded too much – a Roman constancy, an urban rectitude – when all they had to offer was courage, a fluent passion, and the high, visionary folly of an older day.
The wine was brought and they drank a toast to mutual happiness. They talked a while of simple things. Then Valeria took Ninette inside to find her a dress while Landon went in search of Carlo to borrow a clean shirt for dinner.
He found him rubbing the sleep out of his eyes in a small room that must have been his retreat when the marital chamber was too cold for comfort. Rienzi greeted him cheerfully, lit a cigarette and then said, laughing: ‘There’s a commentary for you, Peter! I stage a great triumph. My name will be in every newspaper and I end like this – sleeping in my underpants in the spare room!’
‘Just as well, laddy. You have a big night ahead of you.’
‘I know.’ He frowned in distaste. ‘I’m not sure I want to face it.’
‘Nonsense, man! It’ll do you good. And besides it’s a graceful gesture and you’ve got to accept it gracefully.’
‘It was the old man’s idea, of course.’
‘No, it wasn’t. It was Valeria’s.’
He gave Landon a sharp look. ‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Of course I’m sure. She and Ninette cooked it up between them. Ascolini simply telephoned the invitations. I was there. I should know.’
‘She means it then,’ he muttered, moodily.
‘Means what?’
‘A new start. An attempt to patch up our marriage.’
‘Yes, she does mean it. I hold no brief for her, as you know, but I’m convinced that she’s sincere in this. How do you feel about it?’
Rienzi chewed on the question a moment, then lay back on the bed and blew smoke-rings towards the ceiling. He said, slowly: ‘That’s a big question, Peter – and I don’t know how to answer it. Something’s happened to me and I don’t know how to explain it, even to myself.’
‘It’s simple enough, for God’s sake! You’re tired, played out. You’ve fought a big case at a critical time of your life. Now you need rest and a little readjustment.’
‘No, Peter. It’s more than that. Look!’ He heaved himself up on his elbow and talked eagerly. ‘You know the way I used to imagine this day – the day of my first success? I’ll tell you: just as it happened in the court. The decision, the acclamation, the congratulations of my colleagues, Ascolini’s surrender. Then? Then I would come to Valeria and take her in my arms and say: “There it is I I’ve tumbled the stars in your lap. Now stop being a child and come to bed and let’s make love and start a baby!”’ And she would come happily and there would be no more fighting – except lovers’ quarrels that would still end in bed.’
‘That’s exactly as she wants it at this moment. If you don’t believe me, try it!’
‘I know,’ said Rienzi, flatly. ‘I don’t need you to tell me. But don’t you see? I don’t want it any more! I don’t have the feeling. You know what it’s like.’
Landon knew, but he could not find words to tell Rienzi, who hurried on, explaining himself in an urgent tumble of words: ‘When I was a student in the first year of law, we had a great party. It was the night when the results were posted and I had passed. We got drunk and sang songs and felt twice as large as life. Then we all decided to finish the evening at a house of appointment, the biggest and most luxurious in Rome. Wonderful! We were young, full of sap, puffed with success. Then, when we got there, eh! It was nothing. I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t innocent, but the thing was a cold transaction. Too many feet had walked over the doorstep. Too many fools had walked up the same stairs.’
‘Did you go to bed?’
He laughed wryly. ‘No. I walked home and held hands with the landlady’s daughter, who was so innocent she thought a kiss would make her pregnant.’ His face clouded again. ‘But seriously, Peter, that’s how I feel now with Valeria. I just don’t care. I have no interest. What do I do?’
‘Lie a little. Give it time. Blow on the coals long enough and you have fire again.’
‘But if there are no coals, Peter – only charcoal and ashes?’
‘Then you’re in a bad way, brother! There’s no divorce in the Church or in this country, and you’ve got no talent for a double life. So give it a try, man, for pity’s sake I You’re not a baby. You know the words. And women are happy to believe what they want to hear.’
‘You’re right, of course.’ He jerked himself off the bed and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Except that I’m a bad liar and Valeria knows the words backwards. Still…vesti la giubba! On with the motley and see what son of a play we make! Now, let’s see if we can find you a shirt.’ He burrowed in a drawer and came up with a beautiful creation in cream silk which he tossed to Landon with a grin. ‘Wear it to the wedding, amico, and drink a toast to the reluctant groom!’
It was a bad joke, but Landon let it pass. This was no time to read Rienzi a lecture on marriage and the joys of fatherhood, so he let that pass, too. He thanked Rienzi for the shirt and walked back towards the guest-room to get ready for dinner. He wondered why Rienzi had said no word of Anna Albertini, and he asked himself, cynically, whether the boyhood history were not repeating itself in fantasy: the shamed man and the little white virgin holding hands at the top of the stairs while the big lusty world rolled on about its business.
The first act of Ascolini’s dinner party was a formal success. More than twenty people sat down in the big dining-room: local pundits and their wives, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, a brace of legal eminences, the doyen of the Siena press, Professor Galuzzi, and an astonishing marchesa, fragile as a Dresden doll, who scolded Ascolini with the frankness of an old lover.
Ascolini gave one of his bravura performances. Valeria smiled and directed the whole affair with a deft hand. Carlo walked through his part with a vague charm that disarmed the men and left the women crooning with satisfaction. Ninette was radiant and besieged by elderly gentlemen who had discovered all too late an interest in art. Landon had small talent for this kind of social charade and he was rescued from complete boredom only by Professor Galuzzi, who proved himself an urbane and witty talker and a satirist of formidable dimension.
When the meal was over, they took their brandies out on to the terrace and watched the moon climb slowly over the distant ridges of Amiata. Valeria’s nightingales were not singing yet, but Galuzzi was a diverting story-teller and Landon did not miss them at all. Inevitably, Galuzzi worked his way round to the Albertini affair and, after a cautious glance to assure himself that they were still alone, he delivered himself of some disturbing reflections.
‘One day, Landon, this young Rienzi will be a very great jurist. But there’s a flaw in him somewhere and I cannot put my finger on it.’
‘What kind of flaw?’
‘How shall I define it? A confusion, a conflict still unresolved.’
‘The conflict’s clear enough, I think. It’s not a very happy marriage.’
‘I’ve heard this before. It’s common talk. One observes the incompatibility, but this is not what I mean. I’ve watched him closely with this client of his, a curious relationship, to say the least.’
‘How-curious?’
‘On the girl’s part,’ said Galuzzi carefully, ‘it is, shall we say, normally abnormal. The mind in disorder seeks a focus for its dissociated faculties, a relief from the burden of its fears and frustrations and infirmities. It demands a scapegoat for its guilts, a protector for its weakness, an object for its ailing love. This is what Rienzi has become for the girl. You know as well as I how this kind of transference works.’
Landon said uneasily: ‘Carlo’s quite aware of that part, I think.’
‘I know he’s aware of it,’ said Galuzzi tartly. ‘I warned him.’
‘How did he take the warning?’
‘Very well. And I must say that his conduct has been professionally impeccable. But it is precisely at this point that the flaw begins to show: an arrogance, an attitude of possession, a subtle conviction that he exercises a benign influence over this girl, a too great readiness to assume responsibilities beyond his function.’
Everything that Galuzzi said Landon was prepared to echo and affirm. But the nagging sense of guilt made him attempt at least a token defence of Rienzi. ‘Isn’t this a fairly normal reaction – the first client, the first big case?’
‘On the face of it, yes. But there is another element which I find it hard to define.’ Galuzzi sipped his brandy in meditative fashion, and then lit a cigarette. He went on, slowly: ‘You know what I think it is, Landon? A tale of innocence and the lost paradise…I see you smile – and well you may! We are cynics, you and I. In our profession we have to be. We lose innocence early and seldom regret it until we are old. It’s a wasteful way to live, because we spend a whole lifetime getting back to the first point of departure. But it’s a very human way – and for most of us it’s the only way we learn to tolerate ourselves and tolerate others. We come in the end to forgive because we cannot endure without forgiveness for ourselves. We learn to be glad of half a loaf and not too proud when we achieve half a virtue.’ He laughed and threw out his arms in a spacious gesture. ‘Why should I read you a lecture on innocence, Landon? You have as much experience as I have. Fellows like you and me can pick a virgin at twenty paces and an honest man blindfolded. There aren’t too many of either! The world is full of half-virgins and near-liars.’ His face clouded again and he went on: ‘Rienzi is no more innocent than most, but he has never been able to forgive the lack in himself or in the world. He wants the moon and the sixpence too. He wants to be loved by a virgin and solaced by a whore, because each in her own way gives him the illusion of virtue. His ambition is nourished, his whole career is built on other men’s sins. But this is not enough. He must play the little priest and read sweet lectures to his client in prison. A fellow like this is impregnable! Nothing can touch him because everything is food for his delusions!’
‘By the same token,’ said Landon sombrely, ‘nothing can make him happy.’
‘I agree. Nothing can make him happy because he judges everything in the light of the lost paradise.’
Abruptly, Landon faced him with a new question: ‘Do you propose to let Rienzi keep in touch with the girl?’
Galuzzi smoked for a moment in silence and then answered slowly: ‘I’ve thought about that a great deal. I doubt whether I could prevent what is a reasonable contact between lawyer and client. I doubt also whether I would want to. To this point, Rienzi has been good for the girl. He may continue to help her for a long time. So I have decided to compromise.’
‘How will you do that?’
‘I’m trying to have Anna Albertini transferred to an institution at Castel Gandolfo, just near Rome. That may take a little time. For the present, she will be placed in the care of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd who run a similar, but smaller, mental home near Siena. I’ve told Rienzi he can visit her there immediately after she has been admitted. Then I want her left alone for a while so that I can keep her under my control and devise a regimen of analysis and treatment.’
‘How did Rienzi take the idea?’
‘He had to take it, but he didn’t like it.’ Galuzzi shrugged, flipped away his cigarette, and stood, a dark, imposing figure against the rising moon. ‘How does one draw pictures for the blind? How does one fight the potent magic of self-deception?’
Bluntly, Landon faced him with the last question: ‘Do you think Rienzi’s in love with the girl?’
‘Love is a chameleon word,’ said Galuzzi, absently. ‘Its colour matches a gamut of diverse experiences. Who can say that, even when we protest it most nobly, we are not loving ourselves?’
On that comfortless thought they left it and walked inside to join the other guests.
The party was tapering off now, fragmenting itself into little groups which, having exhausted their stock of civilities, were busy with local gossip and provincial reminiscence. Landon rescued Ninette from a too talkative politician and suggested that they arrange a ride back to Siena with the first party to leave. Carlo wandered up at the same moment with a glass in his hand and waved away the suggestion: ‘Nonsense! You can’t leave yet! Let’s get rid of this stuffy bunch and we’ll finish the evening together. Then I’ll drive you back myself.’
His eyes were glazed, his voice slurred, and Landon had no intention of letting him get within fifty feet of a car, so he grinned and said: ‘Not tonight, Carlo! You’re tired and you’re tipsy and it’s time you went to bed!’
‘To bed?’ He gave a drunken chuckle and gagged on another mouthful of liquor. ‘Everybody wants me to go to bed! Valeria, the old man, and now you! Nobody asks me what I want. I’m just a stallion, that’s all! A noble sire led out to service. You know what they want me to do?’ His voice rose higher and the liquor slopped from the glass on to the polished floor. ‘People the place with advocates – great advocates, like Ascolini and me!’
It was time to do something. Landon took his arm firmly and steered him towards the door, humouring him as best he could. ‘That’s fine, Carlo! Nobody wants you to do any thing that doesn’t suit you. Ninette and I will stay around, but you’ve got to sober up a little.’
‘Who wants to be sober? This is a great day. I’m a success! And I’m going to be married again!’ Landon had him out of the salone now and was working him up the stairs, out of earshot, when Valeria appeared on the landing above them. Rienzi raised his hand in a maudlin salute: ‘There she is! The little bride who wants to be the mother of the Gracchi. How many children do you want, darling? Shall we have them all at once or in easy stages?’
‘Get him to bed, for God’s sake!’ said Valeria bitterly, and tried to hurry past them down the stairs.
Rienzi reached for her, but Landon fended him away and wrestled him back against the banisters. He surrendered with a drunken laugh.
‘You see, my friend, she despises me! You don’t despise me, do you, Peter? You know I’m a great man! Little Anna doesn’t despise me either. I saved her, you know that! Nobody believed I could do it, but I saved her. Poor little Anna! Nobody’s giving her a party tonight.’
He leaned against the banisters and began to cry. Half-pushing, half-carrying, Landon got him up the stairs and into the small bedroom, laid him on the bed and took off his jacket, shoes and tie. He was still moaning and mumbling when Landon closed the door and went downstairs. Ninette signalled to him from the door of the library and he went in to join her while Ascolini and his daughter farewelled the last of their guests. She kissed him and said: ‘Thanks, chèri. You did that very neatly. I don’t think anybody saw too much. Valeria’s going to drive us back to town. Poor girl, I feel very sorry for her.’
‘It’s a bloody mess, sweetheart. But this one they’ll have to clean up for themselves.’
‘What’s the matter with Carlo?’
‘He’s tired. He drank too much. And he’s all mixed up, like a country omelette.’
He told her of his talk with Carlo and of Galuzzi’s uneasy diagnosis. She sighed and made a shrugging Gallic gesture of despair. ‘What more can one do, Peter? What is there to say? Is there any hope for these people?’
‘None at all!’ said Ascolini from the doorway. He was leaning against the door-jamb – a white-haired, grey-faced old man in a dinner-jacket that seemed suddenly too large for him. ‘We never forget anything and we never forgive anything. There’s a blight on us. Worms in the fruit and weevils in the wheat I Go home, my friends, and forget us.’
He crossed the room with a slow, tottering step and slumped into a chair. Landon poured him a glass of brandy and he drank it at a gulp, then sat, slack and listless, staring at the floor. Valeria came hurrying in with a coat thrown over her dinner-frock and a small suitcase in her hand. She was white with anger.
‘We’re going now, Father. Don’t wait up for me. If Carlo wants to know where I am, tell him I’ve gone to ask Lazzaro to have me back. He’s no great prize – God knows – but at least he’s a man!’
‘Please, child, don’t do it!’ A last flush of anger and animation galvanized the old man. ‘Let our friends take the car. You stay here and wait out one more day with me.’
‘With you, Father?’ Her voice was high, harsh and bitter. ‘You told me last night I must stand alone now; you had your own life, you said, and I must live mine and take the consequences! Well, I’m doing just that! Carlo doesn’t want me. You’re tired of re-living the dead years through me! So I’m free. Goodnight, Father! I’ll see you two in the car.’
Without a backward look, she hurried out. Landon shook the old man’s limp hand and muttered a phrase or two, but he did not seem to hear. Only, when Ninette bent to kiss him, he stirred himself and patted her cheek and said softly: ‘Bless you, child! Look after your man – and be gentle to each other!’
‘You’ll come to see us in Rome, dottore?’
‘In Rome …? Oh yes – yes, of course.’
They left him then, shrunken and defeated, in the big chair, and walked out into the cold moonlight where Valeria was waiting for them at the wheel of the car. Her face was wet with tears, but she said nothing and slammed the car fast and dangerously down the drive and out on to the moonlit ribbon of the Siena road. For the first mile or so, she was silent, wrestling the car savagely round the curves of the hill, while the tyres screamed and the offside wheels spun dangerously in the gravel of the verge. Then she began to talk – a low, passionate monologue that brooked neither comment nor interruption.
‘Dear Carlo! Dear sweet Carlo! The noble boy with the great talent and the great future and the wife who didn’t love him! You didn’t believe me, did you? You thought I was just a cold bitch who was warm to everyone but her husband! The music was the trick, you know! Soft music for bleeding hearts. Nocturnes for unrequited lovers. God, if you only knew how much I hoped from that man! I was my father’s girl. He gave me everything and I was grateful, but the one thing he couldn’t give was myself. He couldn’t surrender that, you see, and I didn’t know how to take it from him. He made himself a partner, even in my foolishness. That’s what I wanted from Carlo: what you two have and what I hated you for – partnership. I wanted him to stand with me, match me with love and anger, tame me and make me free at the same time! But he didn’t want that. Not Carlo! He wanted possession, surrender – to grind me small and boil me down and swallow me up so that there was nothing left. He wasn’t strong enough to do it one way so he tried another! The wilting smile, the melancholy mood, tantrums and tenderness. Take me back to the womb and let me eat your soul out like a grub in a walnut! …’ The car lurched and skidded as she wrenched it round a hairpin bend, but she talked on, heedless of Ninette’s cry and Landon’s protest…. ‘I thought today his pride – or whatever it is that drives him – would be satisfied and I could go to him as a woman. But he doesn’t want a woman! He wants a doll to play with, to croon over and spill the sawdust out of when he feels strong and cruel. That’s why he’s fallen for this Anna, a poor, empty, pretty child, with nothing inside but what he’s put there. Well, he’s welcome to her. I’m free of him now – free of my father, too! I’m my own woman and I don’t care what …’
She screamed and hit the brakes as a shadowy mass scrambled out of the ditch and ambled across the road in front. Ninette screamed, too, and threw herself against Landon. The wheels locked and they skidded in a sickening circle while the bumpers ripped open against the trunk of a roadside poplar. They ended, bruised and shaken, facing in the direction from which they had come. Ninette was breathless and trembling and Valeria sat slumped and sobbing over the steering-wheel. Landon was the first to recover. He said harshly: ‘That’s enough for tonight! We’re going back to the villa!’
Valeria made no protest when he thrust her roughly out of the driver’s seat and took over the wheel. They were all silent through the rattling, grinding drive up the hill, and when they reached the house Landon gave Ninette a curt order: ‘Get her up to bed. Stay with her until I come. I’m going to talk to the old man!’
Ninette opened her mouth to protest, but, seeing his white, angry face and his tight trap mouth, she thought better of it and, taking Valeria’s arm, she led her, submissive as a hospital patient, up the stairs to the bedroom.
Ascolini was still sitting in the library, slumped in his chair, staring into emptiness with a glass of brandy half-drunk at his elbow. Landon gave him no greeting but launched at once into a bitter tirade: ‘This has got to stop, Doctor – all of it – now! If it doesn’t there will be death in your house before the week is out. All three of us were damn near killed on the road ten minutes ago. Valeria’s desperate. Carlo’s a drunken mess. And you’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself because the bill collectors are in at last and you don’t want to pay the score. If you want to destroy yourselves this is the way to do it!’
The old man lifted his white, lion mane and fixed Landon with a vague but hostile eye. ‘And why should you care, Landon, what happens to us? Death, dishonour, damnation, what the hell does it matter to you?’
Landon’s anger drove him on. He thrust an accusing finger in the old man’s face and blazed at him: ‘Because I’ve got debts to pay, that’s why! To you, to Carlo, to Valeria. This is the only way I can pay them, and it’s the last chance I’ve got. It’s your last chance, too – and you know it! This is where it began – with you. If there’s any hope at all it’s in your hands. The bailiffs are in, my dear Doctor, and if you don’t pay they’ll tumble the house down about your ears!’
He broke off, splashed brandy into a glass and drank it at one swallow while the old man stared at him with cold, resentful eyes. Finally, with a hint of the old sardonic humour, Ascolini asked: ‘And what’s the payment, eh, my friend? What’s the penance from our confessor? I’m too old to scourge myself in the market place and crawl to mass on my knees!’
‘You’re old, Doctor,’ said Landon with soft malice, ‘and you’ll soon be dead. You’ll die hated and leave nothing behind but an unhappy memory. Your daughter will make herself a whore to spite you. And the man who could breed children for your house will die barren because there’s no love to teach him better.’ Swiftly as it had come, the anger died in him and he turned away with a gesture of despair. ‘Damn it all! What more’s to be said? Nothing is good enough for your gratitude, nothing can humble you enough to beg what the rest of us would give our eyes for!’
There was a long silence while the mantel clock ticked off the seconds like a death-watch beetle in the woodwork. Then, slowly, Ascolini heaved himself out of his chair and took a pace towards Landon. In a shaky, old man’s voice that still had in it a note of dignity, he said: ‘All right, Landon! You win. The old bull surrenders. Where does he go from here?’
Slowly, Landon turned to face him and saw in his aged face so much of ravaged pride, so much of pain long hidden, that he felt himself stifled by the sudden rush of pity. He gave the old man a pale, crooked smile. ‘The first step is the hardest. After that it gets simpler all the time. A little loving, Doctor: a little tenderness, a little pity, and the grace to say one is sorry.’
‘You think it’s as easy as that?’ A ghost of a grin twitched the lips of the old cynic. ‘You overrate me, Landon. Now go to bed like a good fellow. A man has a right to be private before the last surrender!’
When he left the old man, Landon walked out on to the terrace and lit a cigarette. The moon was riding high and magical over the mountains and from the recesses of the garden he heard, for the first time, the sweet lament of the nightingales. He stood stock-still, one hand resting on the cold stone of the balustrade, while the plangent song rose and fell in the still air. It was a ghostly music, echoing the plaint of dead lovers and the ardour of passions long cold. It was a lament for lost hopes and vanished illusions and words unsaid but now never to be spoken. And yet there was a peace in it and the cool absolution of time. The moon would wane and the song would lapse into the sad silence of the cypresses, but in the morning the sun would rise and the scent of the garden would waken again, and so long as one was alive there was the hope of morning and maturity.
Not so long ago, he had come to this place, obsessed by the conviction of futility, convinced that the jargon of his trade was like a shaman’s incantation – a passport to eminence in the tribe, but a fruitless remedy for the manifold ills of the soul. Now, for the first time, he began to see a virtue in their use, a virtue in the experience he had gathered, and perhaps a small promise of virtue in himself.
With Ascolini he had won a battle and paid one debt. But there were others still to be fought and he was grateful for the restoration of this hour of moonlight and nightingales. He finished the cigarette and then walked slowly upstairs to Valeria’s room.
She was in bed, propped against the pillows, her face pale, her eyes absorbed in the painful self-contemplation of the sick. Ninette was sitting on the edge of the bed, brushing Valeria’s hair. Landon stood at the foot of the bed, looking from one to the other, and groping for the words he needed. To Ninette he said affectionately: ‘I want you to go to bed, sweetheart, Valeria and I have things to talk about. I’ll come in to see you before I go to sleep.’
Ninette Lachaise nodded agreement, but he caught a swift flash of resentment in her eyes. She bent and kissed Valeria and then kissed Landon too. ‘Don’t be too late, chéri!’ There was a note of caution which belied the lightness of her tone. ‘I’ll be waiting up for you.’
She left him then and Landon sat down on the side of the bed. Valeria Rienzi watched him, half curious, half afraid. Landon said, with professional casualness: ‘It’s been a rough day, hasn’t it?’
Her eyes filled up with weak distressful tears, but she did not answer. Landon talked on, skirmishing round his theme, lest any injudicious word might destroy the relationship between them.
‘I know how you’re feeling, girl, because I feel with you. I know the danger you’re in, because I’ve been dealing a long time with hurt minds. You had a look at death tonight, but at the last minute you drew back. If you get reckless and take another look, you may wait a second too long. After that – kaput! There’s a cure for most things, but not for the kiss of the Dark Angel. You’re asking yourself why I care what you do. I’ll tell you. There was a night we had – and there was good in it, because there was some love. Not enough for a lifetime, perhaps, but enough for that little while. So I care! And there’s more. I’m a physician. People come to me with soul-sickness and heart-sickness, but most of them come too late when the sickness has a hold and won’t let go. You’re not sick, yet. You’re hurt and tired and lonely in a dark country. I’m offering you a hand to hold while you walk out of it.’
He could see the war in her: need and defiance struggling for the first utterance. She closed her eyes and lay back, dumb on the piled pillows. Landon laid a firm hand on her wrist.
‘There are two ways you can have it. You can fill yourself with sleeping pills and wake in the morning with the ghosts still sitting on the bed. Or you can talk the troubles out and let someone else cut them down to size for you. Me, for instance. I know all the words – even the dirty ones.’ He laughed softly. ‘There’s no fee. And if you want to cry, I can lend you a clean handkerchief.’
She opened her eyes and looked at him in doleful wonderment. ‘You really mean that?’
‘I mean it.’
‘But what happens then? Do you gather me up and put me together again? Do you fill up all the empty places where there’s no me at all?’
‘No.’
‘Do you pat me on the head and tell me I’m forgiven, provided I’m a good girl in future?’
‘Not that either.’
‘Do you teach my father to love me and Carlo to want me for a wife?’
‘No.’
‘Then what do you give, Peter? For God’s sake, what do you give me?’
‘Courage and a strong back! For the rest you need God Almighty. But without courage you won’t find Him either. Well…it’s the best offer I can make. Do you want to talk or do you want a sedative capsule?’
She broke then, and began to pour herself out, in tears first and then in a flood of talk, sometimes wild and incoherent, sometimes tragically lucid. Landon listened, prompted, probed and wondered, as he always did, at the miscellany of faces one human being could wear. Bitch, lover, liar, mother, mistress and lady in a mirror, small girl sitting on a father’s knee and selling him the world for a kiss. In one night, or in a month of nights, there was no time to read even a single one of them. What he was attempting now was not a clinical analysis but the dispensation of a simple mercy: to conjure away grief for a few hours, to plant a hope that he knew might not survive the first dawn.
Finally the torrent of talk spent itself, and Valeria lay back, exhausted but calm and ready for sleep. Landon bent and kissed her lightly on the lips and she responded with a sleepy murmur. Then, bone-weary, he went to his own room.
Ninette Lachaise was sleeping fully dressed on his bed. He slipped off coat and shoes and tie and lay down beside her. She stirred and muttered and threw her arm across his breast, then he too lapsed into sleep with her lips brushing his cheek. When he woke, she was no longer there and it was, once again, high noon in Tuscany.
When Landon came downstairs he found the villa bathed in a glow of triumph and familial unity. The maid-servant sang as she polished the furniture, the old gate-keeper whistled as he raked the gravelled drive, Ninette and Valeria were picking flowers in the garden, while Ascolini and Carlo Rienzi sat at coffee on the terrace working through a stack of newspapers and a pile of congratulatory telegrams.
They greeted him smiling. Ascolini rang for fresh coffee and then launched himself into an enthusiastic tally of Rienzi’s successes. ‘It is magnificent, Landon – like a great night at the opera. Read for yourself what they say. “A forensic victory …”…“a vindication of the noblest principles of justice”…“a new star in the legal firmament”. I haven’t seen anything like it for twenty years. And these.’ He waved expansively at the pile of telegrams. ‘Our colleagues in Rome are delighted. From this moment Carlo can have his choice of a dozen major cases. I’m proud of him. He has made me eat my words but I’m proud of him.’
Rienzi himself was flushed with pleasure. His face had lost its pinched and anxious look and he too launched into voluble compliments. ‘It’s your success, too, Peter. Without your counsel I should not have done half so well. I’m fortunate in my teachers, and, believe me, I know it.’ Then, with boyish awkwardness, he made his apology. ‘I’m sorry about last night. I hadn’t eaten all day and I was very drunk.’
Ascolini laughed indulgently. ‘A bagatelle, my boy! Forget it. I’ve seen better men than you carried to bed after smaller occasions. Besides, it’s the future we have to think of. Before you came, Landon, we were discussing a partnership for Carlo. I’m not quite ready to pack up yet, but I will be soon. And then he can have the whole practice. But I still have a few lessons to give him, eh, my boy?’
There was so much patent good will between them that Landon wondered for a moment whether he had not read too much drama into the events of the night. Then Carlo said, casually enough: ‘I had a call from Galuzzi this morning. They’re transferring Anna today to the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. He says I can visit her this afternoon. I was wondering, Peter, if you’d like to come with me.’ He gave a deprecating smile and added: ‘I know how much I’ve asked of you, Peter, believe me. Valeria told me you and Ninette were getting married, and I know you want to be gone as soon as possible. But I would appreciate it if you’d take a last professional look at Anna.’
‘If you like, of course, though I think there’s nothing I can add to Galuzzi’s knowledge. He’s a good man. I would have great confidence in him.’
‘I know. But he is, after all, a government official. I’d appreciate a little private guidance.’
‘How would Galuzzi feel about my visit?’
‘He’s already approved it. Please come, Peter. We can leave about three o’clock and we’ll be back here by five.’
‘Valeria and I will look after Ninette,’ said Ascolini. ‘We shall all dine together tonight and then we shall send you away with our love.’
It was all so simple and bland that Landon almost missed the point. Carlo needed a privacy with the girl. Ascolini needed Ninette as his ally with Valeria. Galuzzi was shrewd enough to want a monitor for this first crucial meeting between the advocate and the client whom he had started on the dubious road to freedom. They were still using him and there would be no freedom until Ninette and himself had left this home of troubled souls and made their own retreat in the green hills of Frascati.
The first touch of autumn was in the air as Landon and Rienzi drove out along the Arezzo road to the Hospice of the Good Shepherd. Carlo’s good humour seemed to have deserted him and he was fretful and preoccupied. When they reached the first high ridges he swung the car off the road into a craggy indentation from which the land fell steeply away into a wild and sombre valley. When they stopped, he produced cigarettes, lit one for Landon and one for himself, and then began to talk in the nervous, staccato fashion of a man too long deprived of intimacy.
‘We have time to talk, Peter. There are things I want to discuss with you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Valeria first. I’m sorry and ashamed for what happened last night, but in fact what I said was all true. I have no feeling for her any more. More than ever, at this time, I need a good marriage. I know what’s going to happen. My career’s going up like a balloon. You know what that means as well as I do. Pressure, demands, labour – from which there is no retreat. Without some kind of love in my life I shall be spending without renewal – a bankrupt’s course. An understanding mistress would help, but I have not that either. I’m lonely, Peter. I feel old and empty beyond my years.’
His self-pity irritated Landon, but, remembering his debt, he tried still to be gentle. ‘Look, Carlo. This kind of reaction is the most natural thing in the world. You’ve just fought a tremendous case. The pendulum is bound to swing back from triumph to depression. Don’t be too hasty. Why don’t you and Valeria give it another try?’
Rienzi’s face hardened and he shook his head. ‘We’ve forgotten the words, Peter. For me, too many nights in a cold bed. For her, too many other beds. Where do you start after that?’
Landon gave him Ninette’s answer first. ‘Someone has to make the first step and say “Sorry”. I suggest it should be you.’
‘And after that? How do you wipe out the waste and the hurt and all the memories?’
Landon gave him another answer to that, blunt and bawdy as anger could make it. ‘You live with them, brother! You live with them and learn to be grateful for what you’ve salvaged. Damn it, Carlo! You’re a big boy now! What do you want? A new book every night with the pages uncut and nothing written on them anyway? A new maidenhead every bedtime and people cheering when you hang out the sheets in the morning? Where’s the comfort in that, for God’s sake? It’s a twelve-hour wonder-and a tedious business at best!’
To his surprise, Rienzi laughed. ‘At least you haven’t forgotten the words, Peter!’
‘Neither have you. Neither has Valeria.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll never understand.’ Rienzi smoked in silence for a few moments and then said, more calmly: ‘You give me small credit, Peter. I’m not going to toss my cap over the windmill. I’m not going to go chasing the little models on the Via Veneto. I’m not built that way. I wish I were. Believe it or not, I’ve almost resigned myself to the situation. Convenient marriage is a very old institution in this country. Valeria can do what she wants so long as she’s discreet about it. For myself, I can begin to see a kind of purpose in my life. Not wholly satisfactory, perhaps, but in part, yes.’
‘You mean Anna Albertini?’
‘Yes. In three years she’ll be free. During that time she has to be prepared for an entry into the common world. When she does enter it she will need some kind of framework of interests and affection to step into.
‘And you think you can provide it?’
‘I do.’
‘At what price?’
‘Less than I’ve paid for the little I have now.’
‘Do you want to know what I think?’ Landon’s voice was chilly.
‘That’s why I’m talking to you, Peter. More than ever now I need your friendship.’
‘Then for God’s sake listen in friendship to what I’m going to tell you!’ He broke off and gathered himself for a moment, then began to talk, warmly and persuasively, knowing that now or never the last debt must be paid. ‘First, let me explain to you, Carlo, that I don’t agree with many of my colleagues who claim that every human aberration is a symptom of mental illness. I believe, as I think you do, that man is a responsible being, endowed with free-will. But this is no reason to confuse the issue. There is a moral infirmity as well as a mental one. There is evil in the world. There are calculated depravity and indulgence. And there is also a special sickness that follows from these things: a state of fugue, a flight from the knowledge of guilt, man pulling the blankets over his head to escape the beaks of the Furies.
‘This is why modern psychiatry splits itself into two schools. The determinists say that man is not responsible for his actions. Therefore, when we’ve revealed to him the source of his disorder, he will cure himself by forgiving himself. You’re a lawyer. You see where this ends – in the destructive absurdity that evil is its own absolution. The other school says, more reasonably, that when the source of the disorder is revealed, man must be given a hope of forgiveness, but he must also be led to the motions of self-reform….’ He broke off and laughed a little self-consciously. ‘You wonder why I’m reading you this little lecture, Carlo? I’m no plaster saint, God knows. I know when I’m doing wrong and so do you. You’re doing it now because you refuse any sort of forgiveness to Valeria and demand all of it for yourself. You know that you’re preparing the way for a greater wrong. So you’re creating a fiction that you can absolve yourself by the very act which will damn you – a cultivation of Anna Albertini.’
‘You’re lying to me, Peter,’ said Rienzi coldly.
‘Not this time, believe me.’ He was pleading now and the knowledge of his own guilt lent him an urgent humility. ‘Listen to me, Carlo, and think for a moment about Anna. You won your case on the plea you and I set up for her – that at the time of the murder she was mentally infirm, robbed of moral sense and legal responsibility by the shock of her mother’s death. Now this could be true. On the other hand, it could be equally true that she was a responsible person, that she was conscious of guilt, and that, after the act – after it, remember – she projected herself into the state of fugue in which she has remained virtually ever since. Think about that for a moment. And if there’s half a chance of its being true, see where it leads. She clings to you because you are the only one who continues to absolve her as you did in the legal sense in court. This could be why she has no regret for her husband, because he rejected and did not forgive her!’
‘That’s a monstrous thought!’
‘Monstrous indeed,’ said Landon quietly, ‘and the consequences are more monstrous still. You could be the one who robs her totally and completely of any hope of cure.’
‘I don’t understand that.’
‘Then let me explain it to you, Carlo.’ He laid a tentative, friendly hand on Rienzi’s shoulder, but Rienzi withdrew resentfully from the contact. ‘Believe me, man, I’m being as honest as I know how. I’m not raising bogies to frighten you. This is my profession, as the law is yours. All successful psychiatry depends upon the patient’s willingness to seek a cure because of his knowledge that he is sick. He will resist treatment, of course, but if the distress is acute enough he will come to co-operate – except for instance in cases of paranoia where the mind closes itself utterly against reason. In Anna Albertini’s case there is no distress, no sense of need. So long as she has you she is not sick, but cured, so her mind closes itself to further inquisition. You have forgiven her. Therefore she is totally forgiven. So the long flight continues and you, Carlo – you, my friend! – are her partner in the flight.’
‘But only,’ said Rienzi in the ironic fashion of the law, ‘only if your guess is true, and in court you proved to the satisfaction of the judges that it was not. Where do you stand now, Peter?’
‘On the same ground,’ said Landon flatly, ‘but for a different reason. You have made yourself a necessary prop to her infirmity. She will continue to cling to you. She will accept any condition, any relationship you impose on her, but you’ll never be able to get rid of her. And if you fail her …’
He broke off and let the thought hang, a discordant note between them. Rienzi prompted him caustically: ‘And if I fail her, Peter?’
‘Death is familiar to her now,’ said Landon sombrely. ‘It holds no terrors and solves all problems. She will either kill herself or try to kill you.’ It was out now, the untimely thought: death in the Tarot cards, death written on the palm of a man’s hand, and he too blind to see it. Landon let him sweat over it for a few moments and then asked: ‘Do you believe me, Carlo?’
‘No,’ said Carlo Rienzi, ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
He started the engine, turned the car back on to the highway, and headed once more into the uplands towards the Hospice of the Good Shepherd.
In the late afternoon, Alberto Ascolini made his final capitulation to his daughter and to Ninette Lachaise. He sat with them on a low stone bench facing a small fountain where a dancing faun played his pipes and disported himself among the water jets. For once in his life, he gave no thought to stage management nor to the rhetoric of his trade. He did not attempt to persuade or to dominate the occasion, but sat, leaning on a stick, with a peasant hat perched on his white head, making the first and last apologia for his mountebank’s career.
‘This is the way it ends, my children. This is the way I think it is meant to end – an old fool sitting in the garden with the women. I used to be afraid of it, you know. Today, for the first time, I can see there might be a pleasure in it. When I was young, and that was a long time ago, the signori who owned this villa used to drive through San Stefano in their carriages on the way to Siena. They had coachmen and outriders, and the women – they looked like princesses to me – used to sit holding their handkerchiefs to their noses as they drove through the village. I remember myself, a snot-nosed urchin with the backside out of his breeches, shouting for coppers while the coachman flicked at me with his whip. A long time ago, but I remembered it every month, every year, as I was climbing up out of the dung-heap. One day I would have a coach and the woman with the lace handkerchief would be my woman, and I would sit in grand array at the opera and ride on the Corso in Rome and kiss hands in the salons. I did it all, as you know. I’ve dined with kings and presidents and walked into a reception with a princess of the blood on my arm…eh! What is it now? Not dust and ashes. I can’t say that. A rich time? Yes. But every so often I would dream of the snot-nosed boy and reach out my hand to lift him into the coach – yet I could never touch him. Neither could I escape him. He would always come back and I could never be sure whether he mocked me or blamed me. So, for him, I think, I took my revenges on the world into which I had climbed, even on you, Valeria, my child. It has taken me a long time to understand that they were revenges on myself as well. When I married your mother I was poor and ambitious and I loved her. When I was famous and courted I regretted her. In you I tried to make her over again in the image of what I had desired. A strange thing, you know. She was wiser than I. She told me many times the price was too high and that when I had paid it I would regret it. You, child, I regret most of all. You were right, you know, when you said I made you pay for everything I gave. Nothing for nothing! It was the bitterest lesson my snot-nosed urchin had to learn. He could never believe in gratuity – the kiss that cost nothing or the hand to help a neighbour out of a ditch. He’s learnt it now, from you, Ninette, even from that pig-headed Landon of yours. But you, my Valeria, have had to pay for the lesson….’ His voice faltered and he blew his nose violently. ‘Forgive me, child, if you can. If you can’t, believe at least that I love you.’
‘It’s enough, dottore,’ said Ninette Lachaise softly. ‘The loving is enough – and that Valeria should know that the loving is there.’
She lifted the old straw hat and kissed him on the forehead and laid one cool hand for a moment on his cheek. Then she left them, Valeria with her tears and the old advocate with his regrets, to the healing of the last summer sun.
‘Now!’ said the old man in his brisk, pragmatic style, ‘now we dry our eyes and see if we have grown any wiser. You will know now, child, that I am telling you the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s see what we can do about this marriage of yours. Tell me honestly now: what’s the trouble between you?’
Valeria Rienzi lifted a ravaged face and stared at him blankly. ‘It’s plain enough, isn’t it, Father? I’ve been a fool and Carlo needs something that I can’t give him.’
‘We’ll admit the foolishness,’ said Ascolini with his old sardonic grin. ‘We’ll lock it away and bring it out occasionally to remind us not to be fools again. But what about Carlo? What does he want?’
She shrugged unhappily. ‘I wish I knew. A mother perhaps, or a child bride fresh from convent school!’
‘He has the child bride,’ said Ascolini cynically. ‘But she’s no good to him because she’ll be locked away for three years. As for the mother, he can’t do much about that unless he finds a clucking widow with a forty-five-inch bust.’
‘Don’t make jokes about it, Father. It’s serious.’
‘I know it’s serious, child!’ The old man was testy again. ‘But we don’t throw up our hands and go wailing through the town. We do something about it.’
‘What, for instance?’
‘This girl, Anna Albertini. Ignore her. If Carlo wants to go hanging round the convent garden with the girl on one arm and a nun for a watchdog on the other, let him. He’ll get sick of it in time. Pity’s a thin diet for a man of thirty-five. If he wants to try the widow or a chicken from a pavement cafe, ignore that, too. Swallow your pride and take him for what he is, and while you’ve got him see if you can’t make him into something better. It’s been done, you know. And you do have something to work on. You saw him in court. He was another man. You’re a woman. You may be able to bring the same man out in bed. Look, child.’ He turned to her and imprisoned her wrists in his old strong hands. ‘There’s always one who kisses and one who turns the cheek. Sometimes the one who turns the cheek learns to like the taste of kissing. It’s worth a trial, isn’t it? You’ve had your playtime. There’s autumn after summer. If it doesn’t work, what have you lost?’
‘Nothing, I suppose. But don’t you see, Father, I’m lonely now. I’m scared.’
‘Wait till you get to my age,’ said Alberto Ascolini with a grin ‘–the last winter, when you know for certain there’ll never be another spring. Courage, girl! Go and put on a new face and let’s see what carrots we can find for this noble ass you’ve married!’
The Hospice of the Good Shepherd Sisters reared its grey bulk over a spread of garden and farmland and dark cypresses. Its nearer aspect was forbidding: a big wall of tufa stone topped with spikes and broken glass, wrought-iron gates backed with a close mesh of chain wire, and, beyond them, the hospice itself, an old monastery building, four storeys high, solid as a fortress, with barren windows and a television antenna rising incongruously above its ancient tiles. An elderly porter opened the gates and raised his hand in a half-hearted salute as they passed. A pair of inmates shuffling across the lawn turned and stared at them with glazed, indifferent eyes. A young nun, with the sleeves of her habit rolled up, was clipping flowers, trailed by a group of women, aimless as hens in a barn-yard. A vague oppression crept over Landon as he thought of all the misery penned in this place, last refuge of those who, by act of God and self-delusion, had failed to come to terms with life.
Yet not all the deluded were behind bars. There were all too many who, like Carlo Rienzi, created for themselves situations charged with explosive and destructive possibilities. Carlo had become, overnight, a public figure, thrust into limelit eminence, and yet the shrewd eye could see already how the pillars and buttresses of his personality were slowly withering away. The cracks were plainly visible, the dangerous cant towards indulgence and self-deception. How, or which way, he would fall was anyone’s guess, but Landon was prepared to give long odds that he would decline inevitably in the direction of Anna Albertini.
Even for a middling sensual man, the association with an attractive young woman of twenty-four was fraught with danger. Add to that the character of the girl herself – her enforced dependence, her immaturity, her capacity for tragic decision – and there were all the elements of a classic melodrama.
How many times could the world blow up? The answer was plain to Landon now, plainer than it had ever been: as often as a man chose to reject the simple pragmatic rules of human experience and arbitrate his private destiny without respect to duty, obligation and his nature as a dependent animal.
The Greeks had a word for that, too: Nemesis – the ultimate and inevitable catastrophe, when a man pulled down the roof-trees of the world on his own hapless head. The trouble was that other heads were broken as well and he generally did not survive to mend them.
Landon was still chewing on that tasteless cud when the Sister Portress, a horse-faced woman with gentle eyes and an uncertain smile, opened the door to them. She showed them into the visitors’ room, a large, bare chamber, furnished with high-backed chairs, twin statues of the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Lourdes, and smelling vaguely of lamp-oil and floor-wax; then she trotted off to find the Mother Superior.
Landon wilted at the thought of spending a couple of hours in this ascetic atmosphere, but Carlo reassured him with an unexpected smile: ‘Don’t worry, Peter. This is just to condition us to piety. They keep it for chaplains and doctors and visiting bishops. When Anna comes I imagine they’ll give us the freedom of the garden.’
Thank God for that!’ said Landon drily.
Rienzi gave him a rueful, boyish smile. ‘Don’t be too angry with me, Peter. After all, this is my decision and I have to carry the consequences – good or bad.’
‘Do you, Carlo?’ Landon was still smouldering. ‘If that’s what you believe, then you’ll do what you damned well please. I’m leaving tomorrow anyway, so why should I care?’
‘I want us to be friends,’ said Carlo Rienzi. ‘I have a great affection for you, Peter. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with you all the time, does it?’
‘A man who pleads his own cause has a fool for a lawyer, Carlo. A man who wants to be his own doctor is a bigger fool still. You’ve had my advice. I can’t force you to act on it. Now please drop the discussion, like a good fellow.’
At that moment the Mother Superior came in: a small, grey woman with a fine-boned face, who reminded Landon of Ascolini’s marchesa. She had the air of a great lady born to wield authority, and Landon thought she could be a very formidable superior indeed.
When Carlo presented himself she gave him a warm greeting: ‘I followed your case with great interest, Mr Rienzi. The men of my family have been associated with the law for many years, so I had a special interest. You made a magnificent plea.’ To Landon she extended a graver courtesy: ‘We’re very happy to see you here, Mr Landon. Professor Galuzzi speaks of you with great respect. If you would care to visit us at any time to see our methods or talk to our staff you will be most welcome.’
Landon bowed his acknowledgment and the Mother Superior went on with what was obviously a well-prepared exordium: ‘We are all very interested in Anna’s case, gentlemen. She was admitted early this afternoon, as you know, and we had none of the difficulty usual with new patients. Professor Galuzzi has given instructions that she is to be allowed as much freedom and responsibility as she can take. She will have all the privileges accorded to our advanced patients: a room of her own, time to read and sew, an hour of television each day, and a few cosmetics. These are special privileges, but so long as our people are orderly in their habits, obedient in their demeanour, there is no reason for them to be reduced. With regard to visits, there is a normal visiting day once a month. However, Professor Galuzzi suggests that for the present it would be best for Anna if we arranged a visiting day every six weeks. If she makes good progress, then we shall go back to the usual schedule.’
‘Neatly done,’ Landon thought. Galuzzi had a clear head and a shrewd eye, and in this little grey woman he would have a strong lieutenant.
She went on in her crisp, businesslike fashion: ‘We have another rule, too, which we have found most useful. When visitors come they are generally accompanied – unobtrusively of course – by one of our Sisters. However, as Mr Landon is here with you today, I think we can dispense ourselves from the practice.’
For the first time, Rienzi was able to get a foothold in the conversation. Anxious as a Dutch uncle, he said: ‘I have a great personal interest in Anna, as you know. If there is anything I can do to make her happy you have only to call me.’
The Mother Superior smiled indulgently. ‘I assure you, Mr Rienzi, she will have the best of care. Our medical staff is well trained and devoted. Professor Galuzzi is a constant visitor. Our Sisters are especially trained to maintain a reasonable discipline while spending as much kindness as possible on our patients. Today you may find Anna a little restless. This is natural. It is her first day and she is new and strange; but she will settle down quickly. Also, she is a healthy young woman and it is natural that from time to time she will be irked by confinement and by the lack of the company of the opposite sex. But we are trained to watch for these things and to offset them.’ She stood up and smoothed down the skirt of her habit. ‘If you’ve brought any gifts for her I’d like to see them now.’
Awkward as a schoolboy, Rienzi displayed the packages: a box of chocolates, a hair ribbon, a religious medallion on a small gold chain, a sewing kit. The old nun passed them all with a smile, but insisted on taking the scissors out of the sewing box. ‘Not because of Anna, Mr Rienzi, but because of the danger of their falling into other hands.’
Rienzi blushed and apologized. ‘It was thoughtless of me. I’m sorry.’
‘On the contrary, Mr Rienzi, you’re a very thoughtful man. Anna is lucky to have your support.’
At the same moment, Anna Albertini walked hesitantly into the room and Rienzi held out an eager hand in greeting. ‘Anna, my dear! How good to see you!’
‘And you, Mr Rienzi.’
The formal address and the tentative handshake belied the pleasure in her eyes. Rienzi presented her to Landon. ‘You remember Mr Landon, Anna? He was a great help to you before the trial and during it.’
‘Of course.’ She gave him a cautious smile. ‘Mr Landon was very kind to me. I won’t forget that.’
‘You look well, Anna. I know you’re going to be very happy here.’
The girl said nothing and the Mother Superior cut in briskly: ‘I must be off. I have work to do. Take the gentlemen into the garden, Anna. Walk them down to the place where you saw the Sisters saying their prayers.’ She explained herself with a smile to Landon: ‘It’s the Sisters’ garden. You’ll be more comfortable there. You won’t be bothered by the inmates wandering around the grounds. Before you go, Anna will bring you back here for coffee.’
When she was gone, Carlo displayed his gifts, and while they were admiring them together Landon took a long look at Anna Albertini. She was dressed, like all the inmates, in a frock of grey cotton with long buttoned sleeves and a cloth belt sewn to the frock itself. She wore black stockings and black shoes. Her hair was shorter now, drawn back from her face and tied with a wisp of blue ribbon. Her hands were uneasy, but her face still wore the look of calm and classic repose which he had noticed on the day of their first meeting. There was more colour in it now, more animation in the eyes and in the voice. Her gestures were restrained, her movements studiously modest, so that she looked more like a fledgling nun than a prisoner serving sentence for murder.
For all his past judgments of Rienzi, Landon had to admit that he could see nothing but innocence in this first moment of meeting. There was no trace of sensuality, not so much as a hand’s touch or a glance to hint at intimacy or collusion. Anna was now calling Rienzi by his first name, but the most suspicious eavesdropper would have found nothing to blame in the tone or the inflection.
When her first excitement was over, Anna piled her gifts one one of the chairs and then took the two men out into the garden. She walked between them, reserved as a novice, rehearsing with simple pleasure the details of her first day after the trial.
‘Everyone was so kind to me. At San Gimignano they made me a special supper and the nurses were allowed to come in and talk to me. One of them did my hair, another brought me a prayer-book. In the morning I was allowed to walk by myself in the garden and the warden’s wife gave me coffee. Everyone said how lucky I was and what a wonderful thing you had done for me. I felt very proud. They’ve given me a nice room here. There are bars on the windows, but there are curtains, too, with flowers on them, and everything is white and clean. Sister Eulalia took me for a walk and showed me some new kittens in the gardener’s shed. She told me funny stories about the people we saw, and tonight there is to be a concert with some very famous singers from Rome.’
Landon’s first impression was of her extreme simplicity, her preoccupation with trivial things, her contentment with the narrow ambit of enclosed existence. But when Carlo began to question her about what she had read, about how she liked to spend her time, about the programmes she had watched on television, Landon caught a glimpse of a lively, if limited, intelligence and a very adequate judgment.
For the first time, she expressed an interest in what she might do after her release. She had once seen a fashion show and she wondered whether she might later qualify as a mannequin. If this failed, she thought she might like to train as a stenographer. She wanted to know whether there was any training available in the hospital. She asked questions about Carlo’s work and Landon’s, and her queries, if elementary, were still eminently sensible.
Carlo’s method with her was sound. He probed for her interest, stimulated it with questions and then set about filling in the blank spaces in her information. His talk ranged widely, but he avoided any subject which might arouse her to discontent or revive old memories of childhood or married life. He made jokes for her and laughed at her mild comedies. And all the time he walked separate from her, hands clasped behind his back like a genial parent at finishing-school.
But for Landon there was something missing from the picture. It was too placid, too sober. Its pathos was too muted, its motif too mild. There was nothing in it to justify Carlo’s desperate hope, or his own fears, or its importance to Anna herself. Landon could not believe that the performance was being staged for his benefit. Rienzi was too poor an actor to bring it off and Anna had had no warning to prepare for a deception.
Then understanding began to dawn on Landon. This was not the whole performance, but a prelude, a ritual entry into another stage of communion. He saw, or thought he saw, how they would both need something like this. They were poles apart in nature, education and experience. They would meet too rarely and for too short a time to leap at once into a high ground of understanding. The girl would be subdued by the daily disciplines of the institution. Carlo would have to discipline himself lest the exacerbations of his life drive him into indiscretion. So each of their meetings would begin like this: slow talk to skim the surface of the sleeping thoughts, a slow pavane along the garden paths – to what?
Their walk brought them finally to a low stone wall, broken by a wicket gate which led into the private domain of the Sisters: a croquet lawn screened on all sides by close-grown shrubs and, beyond it, more private still, a sunken garden with a fish-pond and a shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.
This was where the nuns came for their recreation and to say the Rosary in the cool of the evening. This was their retreat from the thankless labours of the hospice and from the intrusion of the sick ones shambling about the grounds.
‘Here –’ said Anna suddenly, ‘here I feel for the first time that I’m free. Not free as I used to be, but as I will be one day.’
She was not looking at her companions, but around the garden and over the tips of the cypresses to the pale sky where a solitary hawk wheeled and hovered in the slack air. Her eyes shone, her face was transfigured by a swift glow of vitality.
‘You see that fellow up there? When I was a little girl in San Stefano, they used to call him the chicken-stealer. You know what I call him now? I call him Carlo. He hangs about up there for hours and hours and you think he’s never going to come down. Then, all of a sudden, he drops – plop I – like a stone.’ She turned to Landon, flushed and laughing. ‘Just like Carlo I All the time I was in prison, all the time during the trial, he seemed to be so far away – miles and miles away among the great ones. Now – look! – he’s here with me, in this garden.’
Landon stole a quick glance at Rienzi, but he was bending over a rose bloom, studious as any botanist. The girl laughed again in childish mockery.
‘Carlo doesn’t think he’s a hawk. He likes to make out he’s a wise old stork with long legs and a long advocate’s nose with a pair of spectacles on it. You should have heard the lectures he read me when he came to see me! He sounded just like Mother Superior today. “Anna must be a good girl. Anna must do as she is told. She must learn her lessons and be tidy and patient and co-operative.”’
‘Anna’s a lucky girl,’ said Carlo coldly, ‘but she laughs at the wrong things.’
‘You told me once I needed to laugh!’
‘I know, child, but …’
‘I’m not a child! I’m a woman. That’s what you want me to be, isn’t it? That’s what you were saying all the time, during the trial. Now you call me a child.’
She said it petulantly, as if it were an old complaint, and then stood, downcast, biting her thumbnail, waiting for Carlo to reprove her again. This time he was more gentle with her. He smiled benignly and said: ‘Anna, the things I tell you are the things that will make you free. You’re much better off than we ever expected you to be. Three years isn’t such a long time and they’ll go much quicker if you live each day for itself. This is a good place to be. The Sisters are kind people. If you’re obedient and easy for them to handle we may have a chance to get you out of this place sooner. That’s not a joking matter.’
‘But I’ve been cooped up so long. Now I want to fly free like the chicken-stealer. I want to wear nice clothes again and look in shop windows and …’
‘I know, I know.’ His voice took on a softer, crooning note. ‘But I’ll come to see you as often as I can. I’ll bring you presents. You’ll find the days will go faster and faster. Besides, it takes a whole winter to make the spring flowers – but in the end they come.’
She was penitent now, like a calculating child who asks for cake only to win a caress. She said humbly: ‘I’m sorry, Carlo. I’ll try to be better. I want so much to please you.’
‘I know you do, Anna. Now forget it like a good girl and let’s talk about something else.’
For Landon, it was an embarrassing experience, like stumbling on a drunken courtship half-way down the stairs. Anna was seducing Carlo with pity while he struggled with the clumsy fiction of paternal solicitude. How long they could keep it up Landon did not know. By all the signs, they had been practising for some time, and perhaps they had developed a stronger tolerance than most for this courtship by mutual deception. But sooner or later one would crack. The fairy tale would come apart at the seams, and then – caps over the windmill and hell to pay!
Landon had had more than enough for one afternoon, but he endured it for another half hour, pacing with them up and down the croquet lawn, listening to their talk, adding an occasional banality of his own, and watching how easily and unconsciously they lapsed into the conventions of their unconventional attachment. Finally, he gave up and suggested to Carlo that it was time to leave.
Carlo looked at his watch and said, resentfully: ‘Well, if you feel you must…but it will be some time before I can see Anna again.’
Anna was even more reluctant. She laid an urgent hand on Rienzi’s arm and demanded: ‘Please, Carlo! Before you go, could we have a few words in private?’
‘Would you mind, Peter?’
No, he would not mind. He would be glad to be rid of them for a while. He would smoke a cigarette and stroll for ten minutes more while they exchanged whatever secrets they had with the Madonna in the sunken garden. Carlo led Anna to the stone steps that separated the two enclosures and when she disappeared down the other side he came back for a hurried word with Landon.
‘I’m sorry, Peter. All this must be very boring to you. But you see how it is. This is her first day here. She’s restless. And I’d feel guilty if I left her unsettled. I shan’t be very long.’
Guilty or innocent, Landon had to tell him. Once outside the gates of the hospice, chameleon love would change colour again and crawl back into the pigeon-hole marked ‘grand illusions’, a high, secret place beyond all reach of reason. He clamped a firm hand on Carlo’s wrist and gave him the warning: ‘Carlo, you’re my friend and I’ve got to say it. You’re walking on eggs in this affair. Whatever she says, however she says it, this girl is hot for you. And you’re at least warm for her. Pull out now like a sensible man! Say goodbye to her and call it a day. Please, Carlo!’
Carlo tried to wrench away, but Landon held him as the other blazed in low, bitter invective: ‘If today hasn’t shown you the truth, Peter, nothing will. You’ve got a dirty mind! You’ve said all this before. Now it’s once too much. Let me go, please!’
‘One thing more, Carlo!’ It was on the tip of Landon’s tongue to tell him of his talk with Galuzzi and of the suspicion under which he lay already. Then he thought better of it. Why the hell play hangman to a man plaiting his own rope? Landon shrugged and let him go. Carlo stalked angrily out of sight into the sunken garden while Landon settled himself under an autumn tree and smoked a tasteless cigarette.
He smoked another, and a third. He paced the lawn for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Then, utterly exasperated, he went in search of Rienzi and Anna. He had hardly set foot on the first stone step when he heard their voices, and for the first time in his life he played the keyhole spy.
Rienzi and Anna were sitting on a stone bench in an alcove opposite the shrine. They were facing each other with half the length of the bench between them, but Anna was holding Carlo’s hand and pleading with him: ‘You’ve told me many times, Carlo, that no one can live without love – some kind of love. I know you’re married, so I mustn’t ask that kind. But I’m not a child, so you mustn’t offer me that kind either. What have we got, Carlo? What can you give me to keep me alive in this place?’
Landon could not see Rienzi’s face, but he could sense the uneasiness in him and his effort to hedge his answer in that bland dominie’s voice: ‘You’re very precious to me, Anna, my dear – for many reasons. All those weeks I held your fate in my hands. You were and still are my prize. Of course I care for you deeply.’
‘Is that all?’
It was the voice Landon had heard first on Professor Galuzzi’s tape – dead, flat and colourless. Rienzi protested feebly: ‘No, Anna. You know it isn’t all. But, for the rest, I’m not even sure myself. I doubt I could put it into words.’
‘But I have words, Carlo …I love you!’
Rienzi was badly shaken, but he still tried to humour her like a child. ‘Love is a big word, Anna. It means different things at different times. The way you love me today may be a lot different from the way you love me tomorrow.’
‘Do you love me, Carlo?’
Landon saw him hesitate a moment and then heard him surrender: ‘I – I love you, Anna.’
But she was not satisfied yet. She pressed him urgently, raising his reluctant hands and holding them to her breast. ‘How do you love me, Carlo? How?’
It was Rienzi’s last ditch and he knew it. Landon could feel him gathering himself, fumbling for the words that were his final defences against her. ‘I – I don’t know that yet, Anna. That’s why you must be patient with me. I need time, we both need time to get to know each other, not in the crisis of a court-room, not here in this place, but outside, in a world of normal people. This thing between us, Anna, needs to grow naturally, like a plant. If the flower looks different from what we expected, it will still be beautiful, still good for us both. Can you understand that?’
To Landon’s surprise and Carlo’s evident relief, she accepted it. She hesitated for a moment and then said, in her childish voice: ‘Yes. I do understand. I can be happy now, I think…. Will you please kiss me goodbye?’
Rienzi looked at her for a long moment, then, with touching tenderness, but with no vestige of passion, he cupped his hands under her chin and kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he released her and stood up. Puzzled and disappointed, she faced him, picking a scrap of lint from his lapel with nervous fingers.
‘You did that as if I were a little girl.’
Rienzi smiled gravely and shook his head. ‘No, Anna! You’re a woman. A very beautiful woman.’
‘Then kiss me like one! Make me feel like a woman. Just once…just once!’
Landon wanted to shout to him: ‘No, don’t do it!’ but shame held him back. The next moment the girl was in Rienzi’s arms and they were kissing passionately like lovers, while the marble Madonna looked on dumbly and any wandering nun might shout their ruin over the roof-tops.
Then, without any warning, it happened. With a single, convulsive gesture, Anna thrust Carlo away from her. Her face was a contorted mask of terror and hate. As Carlo stared at her, unbelieving, she opened her mouth in a high, hysterical scream: ‘They’re killing her! They’re killing her!’ The next moment she was tearing at his eyes and face, tiger-wild and shouting in insane accusation: ‘You’re the one! You’re the one who killed her I You…you!’
It took all their efforts to wrestle her back to the hospice, where four muscular nurses buckled her into a strait-jacket and carried her away. The Mother Superior looked at them with shrewd, dubious eyes and then called a Sister to dress Carlo’s torn face.