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‘Women’s Institute spinster type,’ said Jessica. ‘Lord help us.’
Had they but known it, Marjorie was summing them all up in exactly the same way. She had no worries about George. A kind, intelligent man, with a tormented soul. What was worrying him so greatly? An experiment that had gone wrong? Or might he be being chased by foreign agents, keen on extracting atomic secrets? In a flash, she pictured men with hats drawn low over their faces, in belted raincoats, lurking in doorways…
They hadn’t talked much more on the train, merely exchanging remarks as to how odd this whole Beatrice Malaspina business was. Then she had returned to her own compartment, to sit by the window and marvel at the blue depth of the sea as the train wound its way down the coast.
They had met up again at La Spezia, where they transferred to a local train with wooden seats and an ancient engine, which reminded them both of wartime rail travel in England. They alighted at a deserted-looking station; what a long way down from the train platforms were in Italy, she thought, as she reached up for the suitcase that George was holding out to her.
‘Now, what is best for us to do?’ George said as he joined her on the platform. ‘This station is a good walk from the town, which, as you see, is up the hill. Perhaps there will be a taxi.’
For a moment her imagination ran riot again. The whole thing was a set-up, there was no Villa Dante, no will, no Beatrice Malaspina, they had been lured here to be kidnapped and killed after torture to extract secret information. At least, they could extract scientific secrets from Dr Helsinger. Her mind ran on sinister lines: remote Italian castles in the style of The Mysteries of Udolpho…would there be a readership for a modern gothic? People had wanted comforting reads during the war, Jane Austen, that kind of thing, but gangster movies were popular, and so…
She came back to reality with a jolt, as George’s voice repeated what he had been saying. ‘I heard a car, and I see a man approaching. I think someone has come to meet us.’
Now, when Benedetta had whisked herself out of the room, Marjorie felt in the bottom of her suitcase and retrieved a notebook. A hard-covered notebook which she had bought in Paris, unable to resist the allure of beautiful stationery. She shouldn’t be spending the lawyer’s money on any such thing, but she had forgone lunch, satisfying her hunger with a ham baguette. The difference in cost would surely cover the price of the notebook.
She sat down on the bed and opened the notebook. The blank page stared up at her, as so many blank pages had done for so long. She closed it again. She had bought it hoping to keep a journal of her travels, of her Italian adventure. Nothing more. Facts, only facts. She took a deep breath, dug in her handbag for her fountain pen, unscrewed the top, opened the notebook and resolutely wrote the date at the top of the page. She underlined it, and wrote beneath it in her copperplate script, The Villa Dante.
She put the notebook down, and went over to the window. Delia Vaughan, rather an exotic creature, with that mass of hair and vivacious eyes, and a beautiful speaking voice. Jessica Meldon—Mrs Meldon—a typical product of the English upper classes, no doubt a crashing snob; a pity Delia had felt it necessary to bring such a friend—and where was Mr Meldon, whose name was never out of the papers? The couple were estranged, so the gossip columnists claimed. A pity she was here; the Villa Dante didn’t at all seem the right kind of place for a flighty socialite who’d quarrelled with her husband.
THREE (#ulink_4a65260b-3da1-547b-96df-179c55c5b914)
They lunched on seafood risotto and arrosto of chicken, followed by cheese and fruit, and then, as they drank tiny cups of bitter black coffee, George politely asked Delia and Jessica if they would show him, and Marjorie, if she wished it, round the villa.
Jessica and Delia looked at each other.
‘Actually,’ Jessica said, ‘we haven’t seen much of it ourselves. We went to the beach after breakfast, and then you arrived. And yesterday, when we came, it was the evening, we only had candles and oil lamps, and were too tired after the drive to look at anything except our pillows, do you see?’
‘We weren’t sure about looking round, in any case,’ Delia said. ‘It seemed intrusive. But since the lawyer said we were to make ourselves at home, and there’s no host or hostess to offend…’
‘We can explore and discover the villa together, in that case,’ said George. ‘We can be systematic, let us go to the front of the house and begin our explorations there.’
He led the way round the outside of the house, and they stood for a moment at the foot of the shallow flight of steps that led to the three arches of the loggia. They looked up at the mellow façade, a faded cream with brown shutters at all the windows and a line of scooped terracotta roof tiles far above them.
George squinted owlishly up at the pediment. ‘It is very harmonious,’ he said. ‘You see that the windows on either side repeat the triangular shape above them.’
They walked up the flight of steps and through the front door.
‘Do you know about Italian houses?’ Jessica asked George. ‘I thought it must be eighteenth-century, but Delia says it’s older, because of the frescoes.’
‘Older than that,’ said Marjorie. ‘I dare say it’s been altered a lot, and probably was done over in the eighteenth century, but it must be Renaissance originally, only look at the proportions.’
‘Even older than the sixteenth century I think, in parts,’ said George. ‘Have you noticed that there is a tower at the back? That is mediaeval, I should say.’
Delia still found the trompe l’oeil disturbing as she wandered round, looking at the paintings. ‘It’s odd, the mixture of everyday and mythological. Here’s the servant in his tights I noticed last night, but over there is the story of Ariadne. Just look at the muscles on the Minotaur’s chest.’
Marjorie came over to have a look. ‘That must be Theseus, looking very pleased with himself. I never thought much of Theseus, he’s the kind of man who would be a politician in the modern world.’ She followed the images round to the other wall. ‘Here is Dionysus, on his ivy-clad ship, sailing in to find Ariadne on the beach. And here he is with all his maenads, dancing among the vines.’
‘Those grapes look real enough to eat,’ said Delia as they paused to look at an ebullient Bacchus with attendant nymphs.
‘They’ve been making a night of it by the look of them,’ said Jessica. ‘Look at the ceiling.’ She pointed upwards to a riot of gods and goddesses frolicking in billowing clouds. ‘Can you imagine what your father would have to say about it, Delia?’ And, by way of explanation to the others, ‘Delia’s father is something of a puritan.’
‘I don’t think he’d mind half so much about these as he would if the paintings were saints and martyrs. Those are what really irk him.’
They went through the wide central door which led into a second room, overlooking the gardens at the back.
‘More wall paintings, and windows that aren’t windows at all,’ said Jessica.
‘Classical landscapes,’ said George. ‘Very realistic.’
‘On this wall is Prometheus,’ Marjorie said. ‘That’s an odd choice, not nearly such a happy story as Ariadne and Dionysus.’
‘Who was Prometheus?’ asked Jessica.
Marjorie gave her a scornful glance. ‘He stole fire from the gods to give it to humans, and so they punished him.’
Delia looked at the eagle swooping down towards the bound figure, and shivered.
‘And over there,’ said Marjorie, ‘if I’m not mistaken, is a sibyl.’
‘Go on, then,’ said Jessica. ‘I’ve got my hand up. Who or what is a sibyl?’
‘Sibyls prophesied. This one is a Cumaean sibyl. She’s holding the golden branch to give to Aeneas so that he can go down into the underworld. In Virgil—you have read Virgil?’
‘Not to remember a word of it,’ said Jessica. ‘I was hopeless at Latin.’
‘Dido’s betrayer,’ said Delia, feeling on familiar ground there; she had sung the role of Dido. ‘Dido, queen of Carthage, Jessica; come on, you’ve heard of her.’
George had returned to the entrance hall and was investigating what was through the other two doors. One led to a marble staircase, and the other into a small antechamber, with only a pair of painted columns for decoration.
‘That’s the door to the dining room,’ said Jessica, standing with her back to the garden and pointing to the door on her left. ‘So the one opposite it is probably the drawing room. The arcade stretches right across the back. Wonderful shade from the summer heat.’
By unspoken consent, they went out of the doors into the vaulted arcade.
‘More frescoes, you see,’ said Delia, pointing to the female figures of Sapientia, Amor and Gloria Mundi.
‘And painted columns,’ said Marjorie. ‘What wicked satyr faces.’
How extraordinary it must be to live in such a house, surrounded by images of classical gods and goddesses disporting themselves with frivolous abandon over walls and ceilings. ‘Let’s go and see what’s in the tower,’ said Delia.
‘I think,’ said George, walking backwards, ‘that at one time the tower was attached to the main house. There is a wing stretching out on the other side there—’
‘Which is Benedetta’s territory, isn’t it?’ said Jessica, counting the windows. ‘Where the colonnade bit ends, there’s the octagonal room beyond the circular staircase, and then there’s a passageway that leads into the kitchens.’
‘Just so,’ said George. ‘So there would have been such rooms on this side. However, they are gone, and only this single tower remains.’
The three-storeyed tower was round, but had another section attached to it of a more regular shape. ‘Which is not nearly as old as the tower,’ Marjorie said.
‘How do you know?’ said Jessica.
‘It’s built of stones that are all the same size.’
The tower itself was built of a motley collection of stones and brick. Marjorie rubbed a finger along one of the shallow bricks. ‘Roman.’
‘We’ve caught ourselves a know-it-all,’ Jessica whispered in Delia’s ear, but not quietly enough, Delia suspected, for the remark to have escaped Marjorie, judging by the quick flush of colour on her cheekbones.
For a moment, she was annoyed with Jessica, who seemed to have taken one of her rare dislikes to Marjorie. Well, good manners would have to prevail, if they were to survive one another’s company until the fourth man arrived and the mystery of the will was solved.
‘It’s like something out of the Brothers Grimm,’ she said, moving away from Jessica and walking round the tower to find the entrance. A Rapunzel tower, and she was unreasonably disappointed when they reached the stout door to find it chained and padlocked. A faded notice was threaded on to a loop of chain, with Pericoloso written on it in red letters.
‘Which means dangerous,’ said Delia. ‘Oh, bother. Crumbling stonework, I suppose.’
Benedetta must have seen them by the tower, for her small figure hurtled out of the house, cries of disapproval on her lips as she hurried up to them, wagging her finger in a most definite way.
‘Is she telling us that the tower is out of bounds?’ said Jessica.
‘We can see that for ourselves,’ said Marjorie.
Delia was listening carefully to Benedetta’s flow of words. ‘I think she’s asking us if we’ve seen the salotto. That’s the drawing room.’ She shook her head, and Benedetta seized her arm, pulling her towards the steps and back inside.
‘Ecco!’ announced Benedetta, as she swung open the door to the main room of the house. The shutters were closed, but instead of opening them, she switched on the lights. ‘Il salotto.’
‘I was right, it’s the drawing room,’ said Delia. ‘Goodness, look at the ceiling.’ She turned to Benedetta and gestured to the shuttered windows, and Benedetta shook her head and made negative tutting sounds. Then she relented, and went over to the windows to open the shutters at the two windows which led out on to the arcaded terrace, George leaping across to help her.
Even with the shutters open, the light in the room was muted, but now they could see up into the vaulted ceiling, which was a deep, dark blue, scattered with stars.
‘How pretty,’ said Delia, tilting her head back to get a better view.
She had expected the drawing room to have heavy, dark wooden furniture, and she was surprised by the cream walls and panelling, and modern furniture, of a kind, she said in an awed way, that one mostly saw in magazines.
‘Comfortable, though,’ said Jessica, bouncing down on an immense sofa.
Benedetta looked pleased at their evident admiration, and burst into a torrent of Italian, from which Delia gathered that the room was entirely the work of Beatrice Malaspina. Benedetta was pointing with an air of pride at the frieze of figures painted along the walls at shoulder height. They were dressed in mediaeval costume, Delia saw, as she went to have a closer look.
‘Not old, of course,’ said Marjorie. ‘Old in style, but modern in execution. And how varied; look, this man is almost surreal, and this poor creature has been so cubified you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. It isn’t finished, either—there are the outlines of more figures that haven’t been painted in. I wish we could see it properly, this part of the room is very dim.’
There was another window on that side, with a closed, slatted wooden blind over it. Delia went to pull the slats open, but the string had no effect, and Benedetta came over to take it from her hand, shaking her head again and showing her that it was firmly stuck.
‘It’s like the pilgrimage to Canterbury,’ said Delia, peering at the figures, which were walking along a road, between buildings painted in a slanting two-dimensional way.
‘Not Chaucer, but another great mediaeval poet, I think you’ll find,’ said Marjorie. ‘Dante. Look, there he is, in the red hat, greeting the line of people. And the building he’s standing in front of is the Villa Dante, I’m sure it is.’
‘How very clever of you to recognise him,’ said Jessica.
‘There’s a famous painting of Dante in a cap like that,’ said Marjorie, sounding slightly defensive for the first time. ‘This is copied almost exactly, so it’s hardly clever of me. And, given the name of the villa, it’s not surprising to find a picture of him here.’
‘I wonder if the house actually has any connection with Dante?’ George said. ‘Perhaps he stayed here. Perhaps Benedetta would know.’
Delia was listening hard to what Benedetta was telling them about the figures painted on the wall. She shook her head, frustrated. ‘She’s too fast for me. I really am quite useless at Italian.’
‘We have to be grateful that one of us has any knowledge of Italian,’ said George. ‘I regret that I never learned the language, although, unlike Jessica’—with an apologetic smile in her direction—‘I was good at Latin.’
‘Oh, Latin,’ said Delia. ‘It isn’t at all the same, you know. They pronounce all the words differently, for one thing, and then one imagines that the Romans spoke in measured tones, like stone inscriptions.’
‘Whereas,’ said Marjorie, ‘they no doubt gabbled away like anything. Do you think that’s a portrait of Beatrice Malaspina?’
The painting hung on the far wall on a panel between two flat fluted columns. It was a full-length portrait of a woman dressed in evening dress in the style of the late nineteenth century, her hair swept up, a black velvet ribbon at her slender throat. Her dress was black, and cut very low. Paris, thought Delia, and what a beautiful woman she must have been. No, not exactly a beauty; striking, rather, with that mass of hair and those huge dark eyes.
Benedetta hurried over to press a switch that illuminated the painting from above. In the brighter light, Delia could see that the hair of the woman in the portrait was very dark red, not unlike her own, but with glints to it that hers didn’t have. ‘And just look at that diamond on the velvet collar, what a huge stone,’ she said.
Whatever else Beatrice Malaspina was, she had been rich. Or married to a rich man, which amounted to the same thing.
Or did it? Her mother was married to a rich man, but did that mean she was too? Far from it, with every penny counted, every item of expenditure having to be justified. Delia’s own first act of financial independence had been to open an account at a different bank from the one where all the family had their business; goodness, what a storm that had provoked. Father hated not being in control of her money.
‘I think it’s by Sargent,’ she said, after staring at the picture for a while longer. ‘We have a portrait of my mother painted by Sargent.’
‘A fashionable lady,’ said George. He was doing a swift calculation in his head. ‘How old would you say she was in that painting? Late twenties? Early thirties?’
Marjorie had her head on one side. ‘Past thirty. She looks slightly younger than she is because of the way the painter has chosen to light the portrait.’
Delia was surprised at how definite Marjorie was. Was she going to turn out to be one of those assertive women who always insisted that they, and they alone, were right? If so, she, as well as Jessica, would find her a tiresome companion.
‘In that case,’ George said, ‘we may make a guess as to when she was born. That is, if one can date a picture by the clothes, which is more than I can do.’
‘About 1900,’ said Delia. ‘I know something about clothes of that time,’ she added.
‘In which case, she would have been born in 1870 or thereabouts,’ said George.
‘So she must have been in her late eighties when she died.’
‘A good age,’ said George. ‘Let us hope that we live so long.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Marjorie, but so quietly that Delia only just caught the bitter words.
Delia had been drawn irresistibly to the piano which stood close to a window. She lifted the lid and tried a few chords, then pulled a face. ‘It needs tuning, but it’s a good one; nice touch, excellent tone, I should say.’
Benedetta was beside her, gesturing and talking much too fast. Delia sat back on the piano stool and gestured to her to slow down. Benedetta tried again.
‘It was Beatrice Malaspina’s piano. I mean, of course it was hers, this was her house, but she played it. At least, I think that’s what she’s saying.’
Benedetta seized Delia’s hand in a surprisingly strong grasp and tugged her up from the stool. ‘Okay,’ said Delia, disentangling herself with some difficulty. ‘What do you want to show me? Oh, a cupboard full of music, how heavenly. Here’s the full score of The Magic Flute. Perfect; I see Beatrice Malaspina as a Mozartian.’
‘Now we’ve lost her,’ Jessica said to George.
‘I take it Miss Vaughan plays the piano?’
‘Delia is a professional singer. Opera.’
‘Then it is a shame that the piano is out of tune,’ said George. ‘Otherwise we might have had the pleasure of hearing her sing.’
