LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.3

(this follows directly from LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.2)
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HASTINGS, 1962

On the last Friday in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Andrew had arrived by taxi at ten-thirty in the morning. Lillian was pruning blackcurrant bushes. George, slowly recovering from his second stroke in three years, was doing a jigsaw puzzle on the dining-room table with his one good hand.

Tanned from a recent Mediterranean holiday, Andrew looked very continental in a dark green blazer and white slacks. He was staying in Bexhill with Laurence Dickinson, a local hotelier who’d been a friend of Andrew’s since his schooldays. He brought Lillian up-to-date on his work (a display and artwork agency he’d formed last year in partnership with a colleague from Selfridges), his flat in South Kensington, the latest West End shows, some of the London society scandal which had been eclipsed by the trial of the Admiralty spy Vassall. He said he was thinking of breaking up with his girlfriend, who’d been presented to Lillian over tea in Fortnum & Mason’s, the Honourable Fiona Something-hyphen-Jones, a glamorous and brittle blonde debutante whom his mother would have as reluctantly welcomed as a daughter-in-law as any of her over-sophisticated predecessors - not that wedding bells had ever, even faintly, sounded in Andrew’s life.

‘I’ve been thinking I may go and live abroad,’ he suddenly announced.

Lillian looked up from her pruning. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘What’s brought this on?’

‘I just feel I’ve about had it with England,’ he said casually, as if giving up his country, a flourishing new business, an elegant home he’d converted himself, his life in London, his friends and interests, was no more difficult than changing stations on the radio. It was a relief that George was beyond voicing his feelings. He had never forgiven Andrew for declining to join the firm which had anticipated his involvement since before he was even conceived: George Rutherford & Son, Building Contractors. There had been a mighty row when Andrew took a summer job window-dressing for a local department store in the summer before he went up to university (where he dropped out after two terms), and a worse one when he came home from national service and announced that he was going to do the same job fulltime in London. He told his parents he was ‘just about finished’ with Hastings. Now he was finished with England.

‘Where are you thinking of going?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure. Italy maybe. There are some exciting things going on in interior design there.’

‘Is that what you want to concentrate on?’

‘Well, I’m a bit fed up with shop windows and posters. Will you mind?’

Lillian straightened up and turned to face the 24-year-old son her husband considered to be a wastrel and whom her mother would have called a ‘reprobate’. Tall and slim with dark, almost black, hair swept back from his narrow face, he took after neither of his parents so much as Lillian’s maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister whom she only knew from photographs - a heart attack had felled him in his pulpit long before Lillian was born. Morally, of course, Andrew was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Who would be next in the long line of girlfriends or - Mother would faint at the thought - mistresses: some sultry beauty from Roman high society?

‘Will I mind if you go away?’ she echoed. ‘Of course I’ll mind, but if it’s what you want to do you must do it.’

‘Are you sure you won’t mind?’ he asked again less than ten minutes later. His career had taken him to London without consulting her. Now he seemed anxious for her to countenance this latest, farthest step. Lillian minded very much, but she rephrased her previous answer: ‘It’s your life,’ she said; ‘you must lead it your own way.’

Later they went in and had tea with George, Lillian interpreting George’s strangled attempts at speech. The Italian venture was not mentioned. After tea Lillian drove him down to the hotel Laurence Dickinson owned on the Hastings seafront. She stayed for one round of cocktails with the two men.

Two days later, on Sunday, the day Khrushchev backed down over the Cuban missiles, the day Laurence’s house in Bexhill was burned to the ground, Andrew turned up at nearly midnight in Laurence’s Bentley with a Frenchman called Charles, which Andrew pronounced ‘Sharlz’. A year or two younger than Andrew, Charles had come to Sussex to be Laurence’s chauffeur. He spoke English with little accent and few grammatical errors, although with Andrew he conversed mainly in French. Lillian found his devastating film-star looks vaguely disconcerting. Andrew slept in his old room, ‘Sharlz’ in Sylvia’s former room, now painted in nursery colours for the grandchildren.

After breakfast the next morning they left for London. Two weeks later, still driving the Bentley, now stuffed with suitcases, they returned, arriving at Sunday teatime. They were leaving the next day for France and Italy. Andrew had resigned his partnership in the Mayfair agency and surrendered the lease on his penthouse flat in Onslow Gardens. He left some of his luggage in the attic and asked his mother to store the rest of his personal effects when they were delivered by Harrods; his furniture was being sold with the lease.

In spite of the warning of this decision in the garden two weeks earlier, Lillian was none-theless panicked by the suddenness of its realization. She’d had no time to prepare George, whose seesaw recovery was going through a bad patch; any emotional outburst might set him back weeks.

In fact George took it calmly, fatalistically. Their son was a lost cause anyway: what really was the difference between South Kensington and Southern Europe? Lillian fed him his dinner before dining with Andrew and ‘Sharlz’ at the Mermaid Inn in Rye, a favourite for family celebrations. The mood in their corner of the handsome Tudor dining room was far from celebratory. Even Andrew was not on form. Charles struggled to make conversation, talking about Provence where he’d spent most of his childhood. Racked by anxiety over George and the feeling that she was losing altogether the son she loved, Lillian was relieved when Charles drove them home in the Bentley.

Back at the house, while Charles went to run a bath for Andrew (the way he waited on her son hand and foot was another thing that disconcerted Lillian), George did something Lillian had not seen in the twenty-seven years of their marriage: hunched in his wheelchair, he wept, tears pouring down his face. Whether he was weeping from the frustration of being turned into an invalid or because Andrew was hammering a last nail into the rejection of his father’s dreams Lillian was not to know, for she never questioned him about it. Visibly shaken, Andrew went upstairs to take his bath and did not reappear until morning.

And in the morning he left. A hired car, a Mercedes, was delivered before breakfast. For a five-pound tip the man from the car-hire firm was only too willing to return the Bentley to Laurence Dickinson at the hotel. Charles seemed to have left Laurence’s service, although Andrew could surely not afford a full-time chauffeur, still less a valet.

Lillian wheeled George out to the drive while Charles and Andrew were loading suitcases into the boot. Charles shook hands with Lillian and George and thanked them for their hospitality in his beautifully modulated English before seating himself behind the wheel of the Mercedes.

Andrew embraced his mother and kissed her on both cheeks, and then – something he had not done since he received a scooter for his seventeenth birthday - he hugged his father, wordlessly. He climbed into the front of the car beside Charles and they drove off. Andrew waved once as they turned into the main road.

Lillian and George watched the car until it disappeared round a bend in the road. Neither spoke. Lillian did not cry; it was as if George had wept for both of them the night before.

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VENICE 1966

Signora Marini rang at seven thirty. After a light lunch in her hotel Lillian had gone out again, feeling restless after the morning’s frustrations. Following the signs to the Rialto, she wandered among the stalls where thirty-one years ago she’d bought silk pyjamas for her husband of four days. Now she had no one for whom to buy things; there was nothing in all of Europe that Sylvia couldn’t obtain more cheaply in Hong Kong, and Andrew would not welcome his mother’s choice of pyjamas. She drank a cup of weak tea under a quayside awning before retracing her steps to the hotel, where she took a long siesta. She was about to step under the shower when the telephone rang.

The Italian woman’s tone was less brittle this time. Her voice conveyed concern, even a measure of warmth. Her husband, she said, would cut short his work in Ravenna and return to Venice tomorrow in order to see Lillian, by which time they hoped to have news of Andrew’s whereabouts.

‘Is it usual for my son to go off and leave Mr Marini in charge of the business without even saying where he is?’ Lillian asked.

The other woman hesitated a moment before replying. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘Although it’s quite common for them to be working on projects in different places.’

‘I understand that,’ Lillian said. ‘My late husband was a building contractor, so I’m familiar with some of the work involved. But surely you always know where he is?’

‘Well –’ Mrs Marini hesitated again – ‘we do know who he’s with and we have some idea of the area they’re in.’

‘I don’t think I understand.’

‘It’s not as complicated as all that really. He’s cruising in my father’s yacht with my –’ once more she hesitated – ‘half-brother? Is that the correct term?’

‘Do you mean stepbrother?’

‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

‘So, Andrew’s merely on holiday?’ Lillian said.

‘Well, you could call it that, except that he’s been away for nearly three months.’

‘Three months!’ Lillian echoed. ‘Surely he can’t afford to leave his work for that long?’

The bitterness of her tone during the first call returned as Mrs Marini replied: ‘Andrew always manages to afford to please himself, as I’m sure you must know.’

‘But I gather your husband is able to run the business without him?’

‘No,’ the other woman said simply. ‘Carlo’s very good at chasing up deliveries and organizing workmen, but the creative side has always been Andrew. This house in Ravenna is the last project on the books. If Andrew doesn’t come back, then that’s the end of the business.’

‘But surely he will come back?’

‘Who knows? Personally, I don’t think he will.’

‘Well, I’m appalled at his irresponsibility,’ Lillian said.

Mrs Marini sighed. ‘I’m afraid Andrew’s life here has not been marked by a show of responsibility. Mrs Rutherford, there’s so much more to this than I can begin to explain. And there’s a lot I'd rather leave to my husband to tell you. May I invite you to tea tomorrow, and then Carlo will take you back to Venice for dinner?’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Lillian said, ‘but couldn’t Mr Marini come to Venice and dine at my hotel?’

‘He could,’ the other woman admitted, ‘but if you’ll excuse my frankness, I’m curious to meet you. I would offer to come to Venice myself, but I’m having a rather awkward pregnancy and boat journeys are a bit of a trial.’

‘I’m not very keen on them myself normally,’ Lillian admitted, ‘although I’m beginning to enjoy them here.’ She wrote down Mrs Marini’s instructions as to which vaporetto she must take to the Fondamenta Nuove to connect with the ferry service to the islands. There was a ferry that left at two thirty-five. A neighbour’s son would be waiting by the ice-cream stall at the Burano landing stage. Lillian should ask for Marcello.

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