You were in a theatre company? I asked.
The description will serve[71], my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. You must remember I was very young in those days.
Acting needs no excuse.
I wasnt excusing myself, Aunt Augusta said sharply, I was explaining. In a profession like that, age is a handicap. I was lucky enough to leave in good time. Thanks to Mr. Visconti.
Who was Visconti?
We were talking about your Uncle Jo. I found an old house in the country which had once been a palazzo or a castello[72] or something of the kind. It was almost in ruins and there were gypsies camping in some of the lower rooms and in the cellar an enormous cellar which ran under the whole ground floor. It had been used for wine, and there was a great empty tun abandoned there because it had cracked with age. Once there had been vineyards around the house, but an autostrada had been built right across the estate not a hundred yards from the house, and the cars ran by all day between Milan and Rome and at night the big lorries passed. A few knotted worn-out roots of old vines were all that remained. There was only one bathroom in the whole house (the water had been cut off long ago by the failure of the electric pump), and only one lavatory, on the top floor in a sort of tower, but of course there was no water there either. You can imagine it wasnt the sort of house anyone could sell easily it had been on the market for twenty years[73] and the owner was a mongoloid orphan in an asylum. The lawyers talked about historic values, but Mr. Visconti knew all about history as you could guess from his name. Of course he advised strongly against the purchase, but after all poor Jo was unlikely to live long and he might as well be made happy. I had counted up the rooms, and if you divided the cellar into four with partitions and included the lavatory and bathroom and kitchen, you could bring the total up to fifty-two. When I told Jo he was delighted. A room for every week in the year, he said. I had to put a bed in every one, even in the bathroom and kitchen. There wasnt room for a bed in the lavatory, but I bought a particularly comfortable chair with a footstool, and I thought we could always leave that room to the last I didnt think Jo would survive long enough to reach it. He had a nurse who was to follow him from room to room, sleeping one week behind him, as it were. I was afraid he would insist on a different nurse at every stopping place, but he liked her well enough to keep her as a travelling companion.
What an extraordinary arrangement.
It worked very well. When Jo was in his fifteenth room he told me I was back that week in Milan on my tour and I came out to see him with Mr. Visconti on my day off that it really seemed at least a year since he had moved in. He was going on next day to the sixteenth room on the floor above with a different view and his suit-cases were all packed and ready (he insisted on everything being moved by suitcase, and I had found a second-hand one which was already decorated with labels from all kinds of famous hotels the George V in Paris, the Quisisana in Capri, the Excelsior in Rome, Raflfes in Singapore, Shepheards in Cairo, the Pera Palace in Istanbul).
Poor Jo! Ive seldom seen a happier man. He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room, and if fifteen rooms had seemed like a year, then he had several years of travel still before him. The nurse told me that about the fourth day in each room he would get a little restless with the wanderlust, and the first day in the new room he would spend more than his usual time in sleep, tired after the journey. He began in the cellar and worked his way upwards until at last he reached the top floor, and he was already beginning to talk of revisiting his old haunts. Well take them in a different order this time, he said, and come at them from a different direction. He was content to leave the lavatory to the last. After all these luxury rooms, he said, it would be fun to rough it a bit[74]. Roughing it keeps one young. I dont want to be like one of those old codgers one sees in the Cunard[75] travelling first-class and complaining of the caviar. Then it was that in the fifty-first room he had his second stroke. It paralysed him down one side and made speech difficult. I was in Venice at the time, but I got permission to leave the company for a couple of days and Mr. Visconti drove me to Jos palazzo. They were having a lot of difficulty with him. He had spent seven days in the fifty-first room before the stroke knocked him out, but the doctor was insisting that he remain in the same bed without a move for at least another ten days. Any ordinary man, the doctor said to me, would be content to lie still for a while.
He wants to live as long as possible, I told him.
In that case he should stay where he is till the end. With any luck[76] hell have two or three more years.
I told Jo what the doctor said, and he mouthed a reply. I thought I made out, Not enough.