He certainly looks a good deal older than that. Perhaps it is the poetry.
He certainly looks a good deal older than that. Perhaps it is the poetry.
I have never much cared, she said, for men with umbrellas, but he was charming as a child. She looked out of the window and I looked too: a new housing estate in red brick straggled beside the line and on the hill beyond a medieval village crumbled away behind its ramparts.
Why was he crying? I asked.
He wasnt crying. He was laughing, she said. Something about Mr. Visconti. I havent seen Mario for more than thirty years, she said. He was a sweet boy then too sweet perhaps to last. The war came. We were separated.
And his father?
I never associated sweetness with Mr. Visconti. Charm perhaps. He was a terrible twister. Very generous with cream buns, of course, but one cant live on cream buns. Perhaps I am being unfair. One is apt to be unfair to somebody one has loved a great deal. And after all he was kind to me from the very start he found me my situation[135] in Italy.
At the theatre?
I cant think why you persist in calling it a theatre. All the worlds a stage[136], of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.
I was a little shocked by her unexpected attack on Shakespeare. Perhaps it was because he wrote verse dramas like Mario. You were talking about Mr. Visconti, I reminded her.
I must admit he was very kind to me in Paris. I was quite heartbroken when I left Curran. I couldnt appeal to your father because I had promised Angelica to stay away, and when Curran left, after our final quarrel, he took everything except the cash in the church collecting-boxes and twelve tins of sardines. He had an unnatural passion for sardines. He said they calmed his nerves, that eating them was like pouring oil on troubled waters. There was enough in the collecting-boxes to pay my passage across the Channel and I was lucky to get this job of mine in the Rue de Provence. But I wasnt really happy there, and I was grateful to Mr. Visconti when he took me to Italy. The work, of course, was the same, but I enjoyed the travel from one city to another. And every eight weeks when I came back to Milan I enjoyed seeing Mr. Visconti. Cream buns were a great improvement on sardines. Sometimes too he would pop up unexpectedly in Venice. He was a twister, no doubt of it, but there are many worse people than twisters. She sighed, looking out at the dull scenery of the Po. I grew to be very very fond of him. Fonder than any other man I have ever known. Except the first, but the first is always a special case.
How did you come to retire? I asked. I was going to say from the stage, but I remembered her inexplicable dislike of the term. I had not forgotten Tooleys trouble, but I thought it only fair to let my aunt finish first with the memories stirred up by the sight of Viscontis son.
Your Uncle Jo left me all his money. It was quite a shock. The house, too, of course, but there was nothing to be done about that. Its still crumbling away near the autostrada. I settled the house on Mario when I had to leave Italy because of the war and I think he sometimes takes a woman there to spend a week-end in the ancient family palazzo. He even calls it the Palazzo Visconti (hes a bit of a snob: quite unlike his father). One day theyll want to build a connecting road to the autostrada and then the state will have to pay him compensation if he can show that the house was inhabited.
Why didnt you marry Mr. Visconti, Aunt Augusta?
Theres no divorce in Italy, and Mr. Visconti was a Catholic, even though a nonpractising one. He even insisted on my being received into the Church. It was his wife who had all the money and that hampered Mr. Visconti badly until he managed to get his fingers on most of what Jo had left me. I was very careless in those days and Mr. Visconti was very plausible. It was lucky that no one would buy the house that at least was left me for a time. He had a scheme for selling fresh vegetables tomatoes, particularly, of course to Saudi Arabia. At the beginning I think he really believed he would make our fortune. Even his wife lent him money. I shall always remember the conferences at the Excelsior in Rome with Arab notables in long robes who arrived with a dozen wives and a food-taster. Mr. Visconti would take a whole floor[137] in the Excelsior you can imagine that made quite a hole in Jos money. But it was very romantic while it lasted. I had my fun. Mr. Visconti was never for a moment dull. He even persuaded the Vatican to put in money, so we had cardinals for cocktails at the Grand Hotel. The Grand had once been a convent, and I suppose they felt more at home there. They were greeted at the door by flunkeys with tall candles, and it was a wonderful sight when the Arabs and the cardinals met, the desert robes and the scarlet skull-caps and all the bowings and embracings and the genuflections of the management and the kissing of rings and the blessings. The Arabs, of course, only drank orange juice, and the tasters stood at the bar sampling each jug and occasionally snatching a whisky and soda on the side. Everybody enjoyed these parties, but only the Arabs could really afford their fun, as it turned out.