LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.5

(this follows on directly from LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.4)
*************************************************

At Carlo’s suggestion Lillian went up to the bathroom to freshen up before dinner. Marcello had arrived with his mother while Carlo was still elaborating on the Monfalcone ‘empire’, which consisted of hotels and villas throughout the Italian mainland and islands.

When she turned off the water she could faintly hear the gentle voice of her daughter’s namesake talking to Adriana Marini in the adjoining bedroom. The Italian Silvia was a striking young woman of Adriana’s age, her alabaster face framed by auburn hair drawn severely back in a style that complemented the starkly simple black dress of a widow. She had greeted Lillian in broken English.

So Andrew was cruising the Mediterranean with the son of a prince-cum-hotel-tycoon. Laurence Dickinson owned hotels along the coast of Sussex and Hampshire, but he was just a businessman, like George, a member of Lillian’s golf club.

She heard Carlo’s voice added to the conversation in the next room. He called her into the bedroom when she left the bathroom, so that she could take her leave of his wife. The rest seemed to have done Adriana no good at all. Beneath a white counterpane she too was almost colourless; the angularity of her fine features now appeared more a morbid symptom of her illness than an aspect of good bone structure. Lillian stammered an apology for the intrusion of her visit.

Even from her bed Adriana contrived to be gracious; only the reediness of her tone betrayed her sickness as she assured Lillian that it had been a pleasure to meet her, that she hoped to see her again. The Italian Silvia shook Lillian’s hand and murmured a few words in her stumbling soothing voice.

Outside the front door Marcello jumped nimbly into a smart motorboat the size of a Venetian taxi-launch. He was coming with them to Torcello, Carlo said, to stay with his grandmother. They helped Lillian aboard. There was a small curtained cabin, but she elected to sit on a folding padded seat in the cockpit. Marcello stood inside Carlo’s arms, holding the wheel as they puttered past the berthed barges and skiffs, under another wooden bridge and out into the lagoon.

Carlo increased speed, to Marcello’s whooping delight, and they skimmed between fishing nets slung from low poles and on into the channel the ferry had used. Now there were marshes on both sides, the reeds thick with a plant the colour of heather. Carlo gunned the motor down and they turned into a narrower canal; branches overhanging a low wall drooped almost into the water. A long S-bend brought them to a low slender stone bridge. Fifty yards further the canal ended in a sharp curve under a second bridge. Other launches were moored along the final stretch, taxis from the city and a few smaller motorboats. Carlo deftly slipped between two of these craft, cutting the motor, and looped a rope over a wobbly pole in the water.

Marcello was ashore in seconds. Carlo gave Lillian his hand as she stepped onto the bank. They walked up to the bridge. Beyond the canal stood a two-storey pale-yellow building with a single gable in its red shingle roof. A sign on a wooden frame with climbing plants and an awning proclaimed it to be the Locanda Cipriani.

The boy took the lead as they walked along a tree-lined path toward a church of pale brick and stone without the ornamentation that characterized Venice’s churches. It had a separate bell-tower, similarly plain, and a red brick baptistery with a colonnade of worn slim pillars. This was the oldest cathedral in the lagoon, Carlo told her, with mosaics dating back to the eleventh century.

Marcello led them through the wrought-iron gate of a private house opposite the church. Immediately he ran a few steps to a sinister-looking statue of a large figure with a face like a gargoyle, hunched in a half-sitting position under vines laden with tiny white grapes. To Lillian’s surprise the boy climbed into the lap of this monstrosity, wrapped his arms round its thick neck and kissed the fearsome face, giggling as he did so.

Carlo laughed. This was the home of Silvia’s parents-in-law, he explained; the old man was one of the custodians of the buildings. The pretence had been made that this statue was the boy’s great-grandmother who had been turned to stone as a punishment for gossiping. Marcello continued to giggle and hugged closer to the great head.

The sun was low in the sky but there was still a fair amount of light. Lillian produced her camera, opened the shutter to its widest aperture and took a couple of pictures of the boy, who posed proudly on the gargoyle’s lap.

‘I’d like copies of those, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Carlo said as Marcello disappeared into his grandparents’ house. He made no effort to follow the child, but ushered Lillian out of the garden and back along the path in the direction of the Cipriani.

‘If you want to go in and see the family, please don’t hold back on my account,’ said Lillian. ‘I’m in no hurry to eat.’

‘I’m afraid there’s what you might call “bad blood” between me and them,’ Carlo said. ‘Silvia’s husband and I are cousins and we were boyhood friends, but later we had a - a falling-out.’

‘Silvia’s a very good friend to your wife,’ Lillian said when he showed no sign of elaborating on this feud.

‘She is indeed,’ he agreed.

‘It broke my heart to lose my husband last year –’ was it his resemblance to Andrew that made this easier to say? – ‘but at Silvia’s age it’s a much greater tragedy. Will she always wear black?’

‘Until she marries again. That’s the custom here.’

‘I hope she does. It’s a terrible waste of such a beautiful and gentle person. And the boy will need a father, especially when he’s growing up.’

Carlo hesitated. Then he gave a bitter laugh that bore echoes of his wife’s. ‘I’m Marcello’s father,’ he said.

* * *

Carlo was clearly a familiar and favoured patron of the Cipriani: he was greeted warmly and with much joshing by the waiters. The maître d’ seated Lillian with some ceremony at an outside table under a lattice of vines with bunches of black grapes. Illumination came from hanging oil-lamps converted to hold electric light bulbs; in the slowly deepening twilight they glowed feebly.

‘I’ve been coming here for years,’ Carlo said as he sat down opposite her. ‘I used to bring ladies here in the days when I made my living as a gigolo.’ He laughed cheerfully. ‘They're probably thinking I’m back in business.’

‘I certainly hope not,’ Lillian said primly, almost snatching the menu proffered by the maître d’ which afforded a measure of camouflage for her embarrassment.

She declined a further apéritif. Carlo ordered another Tom Collins for himself. He insisted that she try two of the house specialities, their own cannelloni and calf’s liver in an onion sauce.

When their order had been taken and Carlo’s drink arrived, he leaned back on the rear legs of his chair and lit a cigarette. He smiled at Lillian.

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Which one?’ she enquired coldly: ‘Andrew’s or yours?’ The two revelations that he was Marcello’s father and had been a gigolo had combined to blunt her open-mindedness towards this handsome young man whose life and fortune seemed to have been so closely linked with her son’s.

Carlo laughed again, an easy natural laugh. ‘Both,’ he said. ‘They're inextricably involved. Even now, though it’s months since I last saw or even spoke to him.’

‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘I don’t expect you to. In fact I doubt that you ever could. There’s so much you don’t know. And I’m not sure how much I should tell you.’

‘I’d honestly rather you didn’t hold anything back. Andrew and I were always very close, although I guessed he was - keeping things from me even before he came here.’

‘Well, as an Italian I’m used to male secretiveness. But I’m only half-Italian. My mother was English, or at least Scottish. She was a “free thinker”, one of those unconventional women who reacted against a Victorian upbringing. She died in France when I was sixteen, but long before then we had a complete rapport. There was nothing I couldn’t tell her, discuss with her.’

‘And your father?’ In spite of her reservations Lillian’s curiosity had been roused.

‘Oh, he was just a simple fisherman who captured the heart of an eccentric Scotswoman who came to paint Burano. He loved her, although he probably never began to understand her. He died when I was only a child, so I didn’t really know him. Theirs is a fascinating story in itself.’ He took another gulp at his drink. ‘But that’s by the by. I only mentioned my mother because there were things I felt able to confide in her which most sons wouldn’t be able to discuss with their mothers.’ He made a bland gesture with his hands.

‘I wish I had some inkling of what you're talking about,’ Lillian said helplessly.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Rutherford. I suppose the problem is with the things I’m trying not to talk about.’

‘Frankly you frighten me. Your wife seemed to imply that Andrew has left Venice for good. Did he leave under some kind of cloud? Has he committed some sort of crime?’

Carlo smiled. ‘No, nothing like that. Although –’ he laughed briefly – ‘Andrew would have loved to leave Venice under a cloud, as you put it. He does have a flair for the melodramatic. Actually there was a bit of a scandal here a couple of years ago, when a few people did leave very much under a cloud. No, really, it’s just that - there are some things it’s not easy to talk about with somebody else’s mother.’ He tailed off with another eloquent gesture.

His parents’ encapsulated history, with its aura of romance and adventure, had helped to dispel Lillian’s fleeting hostility. Now, as she perceived the direction into which his story seemed to be leading, she began to feel the return of embarrassment. Affecting a casualness that was far from real, she said, ‘Don’t feel you have to spare my feelings. I know that before he left London Andrew had a whole string of girlfriends. I’m afraid I was very strictly brought up myself, but I think I came to accept that Andrew adopted a totally different standard.’

She paused, and then, since Carlo still seemed reluctant to continue, she added: ‘You’ve already told me that Silvia’s son is your child, so if Andrew has some similar dark secret, then for God’s sake tell me. I can appreciate your - your respect for my age and the fact that I’m his mother, and I don’t expect you to spell it out in chapter and verse, but please, you must tell me something.’

Carlo sighed. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be easy.’

The cannelloni arrived at that moment, along with a carafe of white wine. As they ate, Carlo began to fill in the missing three and a half years of her son’s life.

Their first year had been a struggle, he said. UK Exchange Control penalties, two extravagant months in Paris and the South of France on the way to Venice, and the downpayment on the lease of an attic flat in a decaying palace on the Cannaregio virtually exhausted Andrew’s capital.

‘Why didn’t you live in your house in Burano?’ Lillian asked.

‘Burano wasn’t chic enough for Andrew.’

‘But an attic was?’

‘An attic in a palazzo was,’ he said with a smile.

While Andrew modernized the apartment to advertise his potential in the interior design field, Carlo took a job as barman at the Europa Hotel where he’d worked once before. Thanks to some old contacts that Carlo was able to revive Andrew began to receive the odd commission: posters and exhibition catalogues; window-displays; the redecoration - at marginal rates - of a few small apartments.

As his reputation increased, the commissions became bigger and more frequent: house conversions in the hills to the north of Venice; a penthouse flat for a university professor in Padua; a ski lodge in Cortina for a film producer from Rome (Lillian and George had received a New Year card from Cortina in 1964); two villas on the Aga Khan’s Costa Smeralda in Sardinia; eventually, a small palace off the Giudecca for a nephew of Countess Volpi, the doyenne of Venetian society.

Carlo quit his job at the Europa so that he could supervise the ‘works-in-hand’, leaving Andrew free to move on to the design side of new projects. They rented the office in San Marco and engaged a secretary. Andrew now decided that it might after all be amusingly ‘déclassé’ to live on Burano and ‘commute’ to the office by motor-launch. They used the profits from the sale of their lease to damp-proof and modernize Carlo’s house, which had only been intermittently occupied since his father’s death in 1946. The installation of a shower and a bed that folded up into a closet converted Andrew’s studio at 253 San Marco into a pied-à-terre for those nights – ‘there were many of them,’ said Carlo - when his social life kept him in Venice.

Lillian leaned back as the waiter placed her main course in front of her. The calf’s liver was served in a sauce of onion and unfamiliar herbs. Carlo sent Lillian’s compliments to the chef. The maître d’ returned with a single long-stemmed yellow rose, the colour of the outside of the restaurant, with the chef’s compliments.

They watched through the lattice of vines the last minutes of a spectacular sunset. Carlo broke the silence:

‘I suppose you know he’s a terrible social-climber?’

Lillian laughed. ‘And a name-dropper!’ she said.

He grinned. ‘Is it true he knows Princess Margaret?’

‘He’s supposed to have met her at a couple of parties,’ Lillian said with a sceptical shrug.

‘And - excuse me asking this - is he really a second cousin of the Duke of Devonshire?’

Lillian laughed again with genuine delight. ‘“Second cousin” is a bit strong! My mother-in-law used to say her father’s family was “distantly related” to the Devonshires, but my husband and his brother always took it with a pinch of salt. We decided Andrew must get his snobbishness from his grandmother.’

Lillian felt another great surge of grief for George. How he would have loved to hear this latest instance of their son’s name-dropping his dubious ancestry! Would she ever again have someone to share these moments of droll humour with, she wondered; or would she now only laugh with strangers, like this grinning partner of Andrew’s who knew nothing of the aching sorrow behind her smile?

‘I was sure he was making it up,’ he confessed and went on to talk about Venetian high society while Lillian, her appetite lost, struggled to finish her meal. There was a constant round of parties, he told her: luncheons and dinners, receptions and cocktails, variously given by local notables and wealthy foreigners. Through his work and his ingenuity Andrew contrived to be on every guest list, cultivating the acquaintance of counts and countesses, princes and princesses, a French duke and duchess, even the former queen of one of the satellite Communist states.

‘One way or another he found a way to charm them all,’ Carlo said. ‘Andrew is a real chameleon, changing his colour to suit every set, every ambience.’

The apex of Andrew’s social career came in September 1964 when he was invited to the Volpi Ball, the most glittering event in Venice’s calendar which took place annually at the end of the film festival.

Although the Hemingway crowd had dispersed even before the author’s death in 1961 and the Jet Set had largely deserted mainland Italy in favour of Sardinia, anybody who was somebody – ‘and quite a few who were nobody,’ Carlo added - descended on Venice for at least part of ‘the Season’ which began in mid-August and culminated in Countess Volpi’s ball in the second week of September.

Among the guests at the 1964 Volpi Ball were Jacqueline Kennedy, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Mick Jagger and Twiggy.

‘Andrew revelled in it,’ said Carlo. ‘He flew to Rome to order a new dress suit especially for the occasion.’

‘Did you go?’ Lillian asked.

‘Oh no, I wasn’t included in the invitation. He took an American sculptress and from what I heard, left her to fend for herself while he got himself introduced to as many of the bigger celebrities as he could corner. He talked about it for weeks.’

************************************************