LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.6

(this follows on directly from LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.5)
**************************************************

Lillian declined a dessert or a liqueur. She drank a cup of black coffee while Carlo ate a chunk of stale-looking local cheese and served himself from a bottle of grappa which the wine-steward left on the table.

She was sure there was more - much more - to be told. ‘You said something earlier about a scandal two years ago,’ she reminded him; ‘and some people leaving under a cloud. Was Andrew involved with these people?’

‘Well, yes, he was,’ Carlo admitted. ‘Except that he didn’t really get into that set until the year they left. For our first year we were busy just trying to make ends meet, although right from the start Andrew was sniffing out the local scene to see who was worth getting to know.’

‘But why did these people leave?’ Lillian persisted.

Carlo paused for a moment, sipping his grappa, before embarking on a description of what he called ‘the moral climate of Venice’. In spite of tourists and day-trippers and the Jet Set it remained, he said, a small and gossipy community, very provincial: ‘a lot like Hastings, according to Andrew!’ Lillian laughed at this improbable comparison. Every season produced its crop of scenes and scandals, he went on, and certain families were known to have outrageous skeletons in their closets; but for the most part the residents led circumspect lives in a town where it was impossible to keep anything secret for long.

In recent years a number of very rich new immigrants had settled in the city, buying and restoring apartments and palaces, entertaining and befriending the local nobility and expatriate artists. During the summer of 1964, one of these newcomers had exceeded the relatively elastic bounds of propriety by insulting the wife of the chief-of-police on the beach at Lido. The incident triggered a strong reaction from the normally easygoing questura.

The first victim of the ensuing ‘purge’ was not the man who had offended the questore’s wife but an art-dealer from London who, despite the intercessions of influential friends, was expelled from the country. He was put on a train to Paris where, within days, he committed suicide. Others were similarly ejected or had their residency permits revoked. A few more chose flight as the wisest course, resulting in a minor exodus in the autumn of 1964.

‘And was Andrew involved in this “exodus”?’ Lillian asked.

‘It was about then that we moved to Burano,’ said Carlo. ‘Although this really had nothing to do with it.’

‘But why did they leave?’ she enquired again. ‘This poor man who killed himself, what was he guilty of?’

Carlo poured himself another grappa. ‘Well, the questore - chief-of-police - was a strange and vindictive man, a Sicilian. He had a few bees in his bonnet: Communists –’ he shrugged – ‘and one or two other things.’

She gave a derisive laugh. ‘Come now, Charles – I’m sorry - Carlo - I know I’m just a country bumpkin, but you can’t expect me to believe that people who could afford to restore palaces were Communist sympathizers.’

Carlo drained his glass at a single draught. He met her eyes levelly.

‘They were homosexuals,’ he said.

A waiter refilled Lillian’s coffee-cup. She picked it up with fingers that suddenly trembled. ‘Are you trying to tell me that my son is a homosexual?’ She pronounced the word in the popular English manner, with a long first ‘o’: Homer-sexual.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Rutherford,’ Carlo said.

* * *

Lillian sat in the small cabin of the launch as it surged across the black waters of the lagoon under a deep violet sky in which only the moon and Venus were visible.

Grateful for the privacy, she wept. Bob Sadler had been right: Andrew was lost to her, further away than Sylvia and the grandchildren, as lost – almost – as George. The closeness she thought she’d shared with her son, the closeness of which she’d boasted to Carlo, had been founded on an illusion. She had never really known him, who he was – what he was.

Preoccupied with this revelation of a different Andrew from the one she’d come to find, she was unaware of the route the launch was taking until, just as they emerged under a canal bridge into St Mark’s Basin, ahead of them a cruise liner escorted by two tugs steamed majestically out of the Giudecca, blotting out the church of San Giorgio.

Awed in spite of herself, Lillian dried her eyes and went forward to stand beside Carlo, keeping her balance with her hands on the windshield. The launch rocked as they crossed the liner’s wake. She sat down on the padded seat in the cockpit and drank in the view of the floodlit Doge’s palace, the campanile and the Salute. Carlo smiled at her. Reducing speed as they entered the broad mouth of the Grand Canal, he pointed out some of the palaces and told her who lived or had lived in them.

Another memory surfaced from her honeymoon: the jolly gondolier who’d ferried them from the Rialto to St Mark’s, naming the palaces and their owners – counts and dukes and princes. She even recalled, faintly, the scandalous tales with which he’d regaled them of the lives of the nobility. George had been sceptical; Lillian believed every word because she wanted to believe that aristocrats still, in 1935, despite wars and revolutions, lived a life removed from the morals and conventions of ordinary people.

Now, repeating the experience thirty-one years later, these were the homes of people Andrew knew or had known. Here was the converted monastery that Barbara Hutton had bought early in her matrimonial career. Here, an exquisite Renaissance palazzo whose owner’s homosexual lover had sparked off the 1964 ‘purge’ by insulting the questore’s wife. Here, a low white building with a beautifully terraced garden that housed Peggy Guggenheim and her collection of modern art; she sometimes paraded drunk and nude on the terrace to attract passing gondoliers. Lillian was shocked at how easily she accepted this titbit of outrageous gossip (she knew that Peggy Guggenheim’s father had gone down with the Titanic; Titanic lore had been a hobby of George’s). Here was a stately sombre palace that had formerly belonged to Winston Churchill’s mistress (the notion of a rival for ‘Winnie’s’ darling Clementine was one that Lillian would not believe). Here was the British consulate; and so on – churches, galleries, showrooms, the homes of rich nobles and exiles.

As she must have done on her honeymoon, Lillian was content to sit back in the gently rocking boat and surrender herself to the spell of the moonlit canal. She twirled the stem of the yellow rose in her fingers. Glimpses of dim alleys and backwaters contributed as much to the aura of enchantment as did the blatant splendours of the Rialto Bridge or the floodlit Ca’ d’Oro. And yet, within the elegant drawing room of a building just before her hotel a family was watching television only feet above the water, as indifferent to the magic and mystery of the Grand Canal as the residents of a semi-detached house in Hastings to the road outside their front door.

‘I’m sure it hasn’t all been easy for you,’ she said, surprising herself with the calmness of her remark, as they glided to a standstill at the landing-stage of her hotel, ‘but how lucky you’ve been, you and Andrew, to have lived with all this.’

* * *

ISLAND OF GIGLIO

Fabrizio yawned. Too much local wine, too much dope. Also he was bored. For the second day running they had sailed the 50 kilometres to the volcanic outcrop of Montecristo only to find the sea too choppy for snorkelling. Il frocio (he always thought of him as ‘the queer’) lacked the nerve to try scuba-diving and after an unpleasant experience off Stromboli Fabrizio was wary of going down unaccompanied.

The Corsican girl had joined them for dinner again. Her mother had another headache. The girl was sure her mother was screwing one – or possibly all three – of her absent father’s crew. The liver in the purportedly best of Porto Giglio’s few restaurants had been indigestible, the red wine as heady as Marsala. The girl ate and drank with relish, prattling away to il frocio in French, a language in which Fabrizio was far from proficient.

Back on board his father’s yacht (half the length and a quarter of the draught of the Corsicans’) they drank more wine – and smoked. A moonlight swim failed to clear Fabrizio’s head. And the girl kneed him in the groin when he tried to fondle her breasts underwater, although he was certain she had been groping il frocio.

The lighthouse beam swept over the small harbour, briefly illuminating the girl sprawled on the padded banquette facing the cockpit. She was wearing Fabrizio’s robe. She wore it carelessly, exposing most of her over-large untanned breasts which were already beginning to sag. Her face was unmemorably pretty; the dyed blond hair, still wet, clung to her skull. Her eyes were closed but she was not asleep. A smile played at the corners of her mouth.

Reclining on a lounger inside the cockpit, il frocio was watching Fabrizio watch the girl, also with an amused expression. He too wore a towelling robe, drawn tightly across his chest with only his calves and feet exposed. Unlike the girl, who’d merely discarded her swimming costume in the aft cabin and put on the robe, il frocio had lingered in the forward cabin to dry and groom his hair. After the first joint and their swim he reverted to his usual mentholated English cigarettes, while Fabrizio and the Corsican girl rolled and smoked two more joints.

Sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the deck with his back against the gunwale, Fabrizio still wore his bathing trunks, a brief slip which barely contained a swelling erection. A few drops of water ran out of his hair and he shook his head. He felt a flare of anger that the girl seemed less interested in what he was putting on show than in that which il frocio modestly kept hidden.

Fabrizio rose unsteadily to his feet, crossed to the girl and tugged open the robe. Her eyes opened, she started to laugh and pushed him away with both hands. He clung to the robe and she rolled off the bench with the cushions still beneath her. Her head banged onto the deck and she shouted a curse as tears streamed from her eyes. The robe had fallen completely open. A thin neat scar crossed her belly: an appendectomy? A surgical abortion? The triangle of dark brown hair below the scar resembled damp moss.

Fabrizio fell on her and pawed at her breasts. She cursed him again and struggled. He put one hand over her mouth and with the other started to pull off his trunks, trapping the girl with his weight. He glanced up as the lighthouse beam passed over again. Il frocio still wore an amused expression. The sound of cats hissing and growling carried clearly across the water from the rocky hillside beyond the harbour.

The body beneath Fabrizio squirmed. After a last triumphant glare in the direction of the Englishman, he concentrated his attention on freeing himself from his trunks. His mouth slavered at the Corsican girl’s wobbling breasts with their wide flat nipples.

From his chair above the writhing pair Andrew Rutherford looked down and laughed.

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