A Favourite of the Gods and a Compass Error Read online

  •

  Anna decided that as the facts were out now, she might as well see the lawyer herself. He was sent for, came, and was received in Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie’s presence. He began by complimenting Anna on her beautiful Italian.

  “But then you see, I am Italian,” Anna began graciously and was about to complete what she always offered on these occasions: “Italy is my adopted country,” when for the first time she had an intimation of what she was to bring about. It was to her a truly ghastly moment and she wished to cry out to put a stop. She saw Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie in her voluminous dark silks and the neat and handsome lawyer carrying on, rapidly. She felt unsteady, there was a swish of noise inside her ears and she was seized by total fear: it was like being in a bolting carriage in a dream—then came a rush of giddy wicked daring. When she regained composure, there was left something like a sense of triumph; it was the heady draught of self-destruction.

  She cut in: “Please explain to me exactly the position.”

  Well, said Signor Giglio, were they to presume that their client wished to leave the country?

  Mrs. Throgmore nodded.

  Taking her children with her?

  “It is her right.”

  This was a cardinal point. Would the father wish to oppose this move?

  He would.

  “He would,” said Anna.

  That was what he had presumed. The father would wish to keep the children. So—naturally—would the mother. He said, la mamma.

  “They belong to her,” said Mrs. Throg.

  In fact both parties wished to keep the children. One could not expect this to be otherwise, one could not expect the father to step back, it would not be natural, not human. There would be a general outcry. They must see that the prince would not be able to hold up his head if he allowed his son to go.

  “You are taking the prince’s interests to heart,” snapped Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  But Anna, because her manners were better or because she held a higher opinion of the legal profession, apologized. “I know you are bound to tell us where we stand. Please go on.”

  “If maternal custody is opposed,” said Signor Giglio, “as undoubtedly it will be, the ultimate decision lies with the court.”

  “The prince is guilty.”

  “There is an allegation, one might call it a strong presumption of adultery. But is it proved?”

  Mrs. Throgmore wrung her hands.

  Proved as it would have to be in a court of law—with all the attendant publicity—if the case were fought?

  “He can’t deny it.”

  “Rank perjury,” said Mrs. Throg.

  “Ladies,” said Signor Giglio, “we cannot even bring it into court unless we have evidence.”

  “But his guilt is as plain as night!”

  Signor Giglio said he had no wish to go into detail as to what constituted valid evidence of adultery. They must take it from him that it had to be quite specific within certain rules. The parties involved were popular in Rome, very popular indeed. . . . It might not be at all easy to find a witness to testify against them.

  Surely these things could be arranged? In this country, said Mrs. Throg.

  “I was speaking of a creditable witness,” said Signor Giglio. Even so, they would be far from having clinched the matter. Adultery was indeed a serious matter, a grave matter, but was it not here a case of adultery of longstanding, established adultery as it were? There was the question of time. The Court might consider the offence already long condoned by the injured wife.

  “Tell him about the dancing girls and the farmer’s wives,” said Anna.

  Cases of casual adultery, said Signor Giglio, reprehensible no doubt, but the Court might hold the view that they were not of a gravity sufficient to take away the father’s custody of the son, his only son, the heir to his name. “And that is the very heart of the issue: we would have to have conclusive proof of a profligate life, of actual moral depravity, to induce them to deprive this father of this son.”

  Mrs. Throgmore made an exclamation of disgust.

  Anna said, “I see.”

  “We should have to fight very hard, and it would be an ugly fight. It sounds far-fetched, but the defendant may even bring in counter-allegations.”

  “Let them try!” said Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie. “As you are aware, Signora, there is such a thing as bought evidence,” said Signor Giglio who was not as invulnerable as he had had to let himself appear. “Altogether we have a chance to win, but I should not put it too high.”

  “Then do you wish to see the mother deprived of her children?”

  “Most certainly not. It was my duty to point out the elements of this particular situation. It contains an insoluble element, we are faced with a veritable Solomonic tangle.”

  “And what course can you suggest?”

  “The expected one would be for the principessa to forgive her husband and continue life with him for the children’s sake.”

  “You will find her adamant,” said Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  “There is another way,” said Signor Giglio. “If the principessa were to give an undertaking to remain in Italy, so as not to bring up the children abroad, it would change the complexion of the matter considerably. If she consented to stay, set up her residence anywhere she chose within the Kingdom, and allowed some arrangement for access to the children by the prince, there could in my opinion be few difficulties.”

  “Would the prince have access to her?”

  “Not at all. The principessa would be entirely free of any former obligations.”

  “Ah,” said Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie. “And you might live in Florence, dearest.”

  “Signor Giglio,” Anna said in a clear voice. “Do I understand you to say that the main difficulty arises from what is regarded as my son’s position in his father’s family?” He inclined his head. “Very well then, I have decided. I shall leave the custody of the boy to the prince. I reserve access, of course, the boy can come to me from time to time. I shall not remain in Italy. My daughter and I will live abroad. I shall keep her custody; naturally.”

  “Naturally.” “And I shall not grant access to her father. I consider his influence noxious in the highest degree to a girl her age. Will this meet your difficulty, Signore?”

  “Admirably.” Signor Giglio all but applauded. “A most ingenious, a most lawyer-like solution and, if I may say so, a most generous one.”

  “Much too generous,” said Mrs. Throgmore. “She is an angel upon earth.”

  “With the true heart of a mother. Principessa—I stand here as your legal advisor, and in that role I must ask you to re-consider carefully the sacrifice you are about to make; but as a man of feeling, a lover of human nature, on behalf of one of our Roman families, on behalf of Italy—I must also thank you.”

  Anna smiled. “I think this will be all for today,” she said and began to rise.

  Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie bustled to offer her arm.

  “Thank you. I require no assistance,” said Anna.

  •

  When Carla was back in Rome, she found a pretty kettle of fish and told her brother so. After she had been to Anna’s, she changed her tone. “My God, I had no idea things had gone so far. You must do something, Rico. At once.”

  “What can I do?” said the prince. “It’s she who got us into this absurd mess. Let her get out of it.”

  •

  To Carla, Anna had behaved as if she were a visitor from a distant past. She refused to discuss matters; all she said was, “I have made up my mind. I can see my way.”

  Carla was not without boldness. She was able to say with warmth, “Anna, look at me—have you never been tempted to take a lover?”

  Anna pursed her lips and stared at her with distaste.

  “Then believe me, it is you who are not like the rest of us—can’t you see it as what it is? Our mother loved our father and she did.” She tried her last shot. “Anna, I . . . I have had lovers.”

  “Yo
u, too.”

  •

  The next day the prince received a letter from the lawyers. It set forth what was being done in no uncertain terms. It ended by informing him that the ladies would be leaving the country at an early date, as soon in fact as certain preparations had been made; until then the prince should leave the common roof and was requested to do so at once. He was thunderstruck.

  He ran upstairs. Outside Anna’s door, a woman he had not seen before sat knitting. The door itself was locked from the inside. After a few moments the key turned and Mena came out to him; she was weeping. Behind her stood Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  “Good morning,” said the prince.

  Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie looked through him.

  Mena wept more loudly.

  “What is it?” said the prince.

  “I cannot say it.”

  “Will you not give your mistress’s message?” said Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie.

  “Please, Mena,” said the prince.

  “It should not be spoken.”

  He stood, waiting to hear.

  Mena said very low: “ ‘Tell the prince I will never see him again as long as I live.’ ”

  •

  Carla turned over the lawyers’ letter. “It cannot mean what it says. We must have legal advice.” The prince said it was too dangerous; once you let the lawyers in, it was out of your hands, you found yourself doing things you had never meant to do. He went off to the club to ask friends.

  The first man he ran into was Monfalconi. Monfalconi gave him a slap on the back and said, “Coraggio.” The prince gave him a wan but grateful smile. In the billiard-room he found one of his brothers-in-law, Carla’s husband, who blustered a bit at first. Couldn’t Rico manage her? Never could, said the prince. Then the brother-in-law, also, spoke of legal advice.

  Together they went off to see their family man, who was called Rossi. He sent out across the street for three little cups of coffee, and they settled down to talk. Much of it Rossi knew already by the grape-vine; the prince had the other lawyers’ letter on him and laid it on the table. Rossi pulled a very long face. They lit cigars and they thrashed it out in one way and another but it all boiled down again to the same thing at the end: the prince did not have a leg to stand on. It was all too well sewn up. There must have been a master-mind behind it, Rossi said. Ah, if she had claimed the boy, if she had not turned herself into Niobe by that gesture, it would be a very different story. As it stood there was not much the prince could do, nothing to stop her from carrying out exactly her intentions; unless, that was, he succeeded in persuading her to stay——

  He’d be damned, said Rico.

  “Now, now,” said his brother-in-law.

  “She can do as she pleases—she can stay or she can go, or she can go and come back——”

  “He’s upset, poor fellow,” the brother-in-law said to Rossi.

  Rossi said, in a long practice he had yet to see a wife who actually left her husband. It was all the other way. “You don’t want to push her? You do want to get your wife back?”

  The prince said, “Gran Dio, she’s impossible! But I’m fond of her.”

  As for the girl, Rossi said, that was quite plain: if the mother went, the girl went with her, the girl belonged to the mother.

  “What does no access mean? That he cannot have her on a visit?” asked the brother-in-law.

  “It means more than that, it means that the prince will not be able to see her at all. But well, how old is the girl? She’ll be of age in a few years. Now, as to the financial questions——”

  To hell with them, said the prince.

  “That’s all very well,” said Rossi, “but I’m here to protect your interests. I’ve got to know how matters stand.”

  “You ought to know. Your father was in on the whole thing.”

  “And well do I remember him telling us how stubborn you had been. Your wife brought you a fortune—yes, yes, it was quite a fortune—but there was no settlement. It was all left in her name.”

  “She’s welcome to it. To what’s left of it,” said Rico.

  “They’ve had her income,” said the brother-in-law. “What she gets from America. It comes every year. How can he do without that?”

  “We’ll survive,” said Rico.

  “She must be asked to contribute to the boy’s education,” said Rossi. “She must be aware that you cannot pay for that and keep up the house in Rome.”

  “We can carry on at Castelfonte.”

  “Don’t be stubborn again. You remember how you fretted when your father died and you saw how things were and felt afraid you wouldn’t be able to keep the palazzo open for your mother and the girls?”

  “Rossi,” said the brother-in-law, “we don’t want to lose Constanza.”

  “Is that it? I’m afraid you may have to, unless you manage to persuade the mother to change her mind and stay. Or hide the girl. . . .”

  •

  When they stood in the street, the brother-in-law said, “Where do you want to go, Rico?”

  “I don’t know,” said the prince.

  “Don’t worry too much. We’ll think of something.”

  They started walking. When they were crossing the Piazza Navona, the prince stood still. “When we had that first trouble with Anna, Maria saw three white peacocks. It must have been round here. I haven’t thought of them since. Now I wish I had paid more attention to them then.”

  “And what would you have done?”

  “Quite,” said the prince. “You are right.”

  “Warnings that come too early are of precious little use,” said the brother-in-law.

  •

  They had Rossi try to call on Anna. He was not admitted and told to get in touch with Signor Giglio instead. When it was Carla’s husband’s turn, he learned that Anna was no longer at home to any member of the prince’s family.

  “You could kick down that door,” said Carla who had come with him that far. Her husband pulled her away.

  A priest offered to remind Anna of her obvious duty. He was received and she rather touched his heart. She told him, he revealed, that she was leaving for the good of the prince’s soul, she was doing it for his sake, not her own. As for that, she was renouncing all further happiness in this life. “I believe her, poor woman. I had to tell her that she is taking a great deal on herself. Her ears are closed. She would not accept that such things are not for her to decide. Whatever may be sinful in her conduct, she is atoning for it by great suffering.”

  •

  “What is it, Socrate?”

  “A signature.”

  “You seem to know all about it?”

  “How can I help it, Eccellenza?”

  The prince signed receipt, broke the seal and read. “It’s only about my leaving the house—the common roof. It went out of my head.”

  “There can be no question of it,” said Carla. “Your own house.”

  “Well, have you packed, Socrate?”

  “Certainly not, Eccellenza.”

  “All right. I shall stay where I am. There’s no sense in moving. I haven’t set eyes on her for ten days—the house is large enough for the two of us.”

  •

  When Mrs. Throgmore-Wylie heard about this, she said to her circle, “Those people are all cads.”

  •

  That evening Mena asked to have a word.

  “She has sent for the principina.”

  “It has come,” said the prince.

  “I am delaying the message for as long as I dare.”

  “Grazie.”

  “I am doing it to save her from herself,” said Mena.

  •

  By night Maria’s husband had a plan. The two brothers-in-law with Carla stayed late to settle it. It had at least the virtue of simplicity. Maria’s husband had a terra, a bit of land in the Basilicata. Anna had never heard of it, the land had come to him only recently at the end of a law-suit. There was a house of sorts; it was a remote place in a re
gion itself remote from the sight-seer’s Italy; the country people were loyal. If Constanza were to go there and lie low, it would take weeks, months more likely, for her to be found.

  “Years,” said Carla’s husband. “Anna would want to go about it quietly.”

  “A fine figure she’d cut, scouring the countryside for her own child.”

  The prince kept his hand in his pocket and said nothing.

  Meanwhile . . . well meanwhile time was gained. Time worked wonders. While there was time there was hope.

  They became quite happy working out the details. Socrate was to go to Castelfonte by the early train and prepare the ladies. Maria’s husband was to set out South and prepare the ground. Maria was to accompany her niece. They discussed the route. Carla wanted to avoid their passing through Rome, or at least have Constanza veiled. The prince talked of borrowing once more his neighbour’s motor car, but was told it would never get beyond Potenza. They envisaged a boat steaming down the East Coast to Taranto. Carla said, Maria would sooner die. They settled for the railway followed by a team of mules. At midnight they parted. Auguri, they said to one another. Auguri. . . .

  Carla’s husband stopped by at Rossi’s house. They had promised to do nothing without his consent. Rossi killed it flat. People might laugh but the authorities would assist the principessa, and the prince would have put himself irretrievably in the wrong.

  So Carla’s husband had to go back and ring the bell at the palazzo to say it was all off. The prince if anything seemed relieved.

  •

  When they met again the next morning it was with a sense of urgency. They knew that Anna’s message had gone through to Castelfonte; they had seen trunks going down the stairs. At noon Rossi joined them.

  He looked young and strong and well-slept, and he was freshly shaved. He might have something, he said, he had not been idle. He did not know how much it might amount to. Did Cortina d’Ampezzo mean anything to them?

  They looked blank.

  “I have an Austrian waiter who will swear that three years ago the principessa spent a night at an hotel there with a man.”

  “It can’t be possible,” said Carla.

  “Per Bacco!” said her husband.