What Rose said next

Rose was well into her stride by the time the second pot of coffee had brewed. She told me while she waited for it how much she enjoyed these nice long chats of ours: the great thing about me, she said, being the fact that I have so very little real involvement with events, and therefore no particular axe to grind. I didn’t see that this description did me any great credit – I’d have liked to have been thought just a little more closely involved in events than that! But I resisted the temptation to protest: judging that to have done so would have been an act of folly on my part, since to divert Rose now would be to send her careering off in directions that might have little bearing on the things I really wanted to hear.

I nudged her gently instead in the direction of Bill and Belle. I asked her how she thought they were holding up, beneath the close and continued scrutiny of Lady Macauley and all the others at the villa? Which was perhaps a calculated risk on my part, and might have invoked observations and opinions I’d really rather not have heard - but which in fact had the effect, just as I had hoped, of triggering a fresh conversational torrent from Rose.

“Oh Bill goes from strength to strength in the old lady’s estimation!” she acknowledged. “He can do no wrong whatever. Well, he never could of course, in her eyes, could he? She took to him unreservedly from the first. But now that he’s to be her son-in-law, he’s rocketed into some kind of stratosphere - and the only danger one can foresee is that people will grow bored with hearing about his virtues. It helps of course that Lady M is half in love him herself! She would have to have been, wouldn’t she, for the affair to have had any hope of succeeding at all? It was very clever of Belle to have found herself a man who bears so striking a physical resemblance to Sir Jack! She might have gone for quite another type - she has done so more than once in the past, with results that have been more or less catastrophic. But with Bill on her arm, she has suddenly become a person of importance in her mother’s eyes. The capacity to win and hold an impressive man - it’s the only quality the old lady respects in a woman, say what she will to the contrary. And now that Belle has achieved it, she can hardly be considered, or deferred to enough. It’s dear Belle and darling Belle all over the place now, you know – she’s even talking of engaging a nurse, or a paid companion, just so that Belle is left free to devote herself to Bill!”

This seemed an encouraging development in my eyes – though I was to learn the next moment that it also had its downside. Lady Macauley could become as captious in Tuscany as anywhere else, and her delight in being the mother of a splendidly engaged daughter was beginning to wear just a little thin. She had been charmed by everything for a week - after which she had begun to grow querulous again, and to find fault with most arrangements. This had manifested itself first, and most of all in Florence, which they had visited as a party one day last week, and which, in the absence of Bill and Belle - whom she had she sent off to explore alone, ‘as lovers should' - had suddenly become impossible in her eyes. The streets were devoid of breathable air, she complained; their labyrinthine quality oppressed her, and the cobbles hurt her feet!

There were only so many marble statues one could look at without prostration, besides! She knew them all, the Madonnas and the Davids and the Moseses (“Heavens, what kind of a word was that?”). They were very remarkable of course, and Jack had loved them - but for a tired old woman they had too much about them of the tombstone and the grave. She had quite enough of that to come, she announced to the assembled company, as they sat over iced drinks in a shaded cafe. And she thought it would turn out to be a poor sort of reward indeed, for having lived one’s interminable life, if one were to arrive in heaven only to find it awash with statues by Michelangelo!

All this information was delivered by Rose in her usual deadpan style, with few pauses for breath. She seemed to see in it grounds for supposing that the Tuscan idyll was drawing to its natural end, at least for Lady Macauley; and that if she wished to enjoy any more of it herself, she would have to get a flight as soon as possible, and hurry back. And that there were others in the immediate party who would be sadly disappointed if the experience were to be brought to a premature close, she intimated, and enlarged upon next...

“David Porteous and his daughters have taken to it quite as to the manor born, you know. He’s in his element, as you can imagine; and his girls are making quite a show just now, with their frescoes, never mind about their bikini-clad persons by the pool! Poor Roland hardly seems to know where to put his eyes – and Pamela is quietly fuming. I believe it will be an infinite mercy to her when this whole thing has quietly ended – the strain of keeping up appearances is beginning rather dismally to show. Imogen has meanwhile been experimenting with painting on wet plaster in the loggia. Just as Leonardo did, she says – she has always longed to try it. It has created quite a stir, though I confess the intricacies of it are lost on me, and I think she’d probably have done much better to have let the plaster dry a little, first - the effects are rather blurred, at present.... Her father has gone down a treat of course, with all those old countesses, who think him very comme il faut and charming, and simply can’t get enough of him. There’s one in particular – she claims Medici descent, though from the look of her, I’d say she’s much more likely to have descended from Machiavelli! She has invited him to go and stay with her in Florence – she has some kind of a fantastic house there, apparently, and a daughter whom she’d like him to meet....”

It had begun to seem to me, listening to Rose’s account of the effect that David Porteous and his daughters had had upon life at the villa, that I had perhaps fled the scene at just the right moment. Though when she informed me in the next breath that they all, the Porteous contingent and the Baines one, were shortly to make their departure, and that the last days were to be spent quietly with just the family and herself, I began to have a change of heart, and wonder if I dared return?

Rose herself dispelled such thoughts for me with her next remark however. Again, she seemed to have read my thoughts; and there were all the signs of mischievous, if not distinctly malign intent, when she informed me that “Cesare has been asking where you’ve gone. He seemed quite disappointed when you weren’t of the party at the palazzo to meet his mother. You could do worse than get a foot in that establishment, you know – though I have to confess that I always wonder where the money has come from, in these deep old Italian families. There’s always the whiff of a Mafia connection, don’t you think? Of course that could be pure fantasy on my part - I’ve watched ‘The Godfather’ too many times perhaps? And Lady M tells me not to be absurd, anyway: she has known that family forever, she says, and there’s not a word to be said against them....”

It was vintage Rose, and throwaway stuff enough. But it was also enough to stop me in my tracks. And I quietly decided that an hour or two of thrilling conversation in a garden were not enough; that I was building romantic castles in the air where none existed, and that until I had received further word from Cesare myself, I would take no steps of my own to try to renew acquaintance with him. It depressed me though – and after Rose had finally gone away, I stomped off to the common with the dogs in quite a foul mood.


With some misgiving, I have decided to end Part Two at this point, and to begin the third and final part of the story with the next instalment. I realize now that the existing Part One is much too long, and stands in rather awkward juxtaposition with the two succeeding parts – but I’m confident I shall be able to put this right when I come to edit, and complete the final draft (offline!).