Trespassers (23 page)

Just below Fiesole, on the brow of its hill, was another elegant villa. The Albergo Villa San Michele was an ex-monastery which its French owner, Lucien Teissier, had furnished with
fifteenth-century
antiques and turned into the smartest hotel in Florence. His wife, Maura, was an old UCD mate of mine, so Lauro and I enjoyed the privilege of joining their lively group of polyglot friends. Maura, who had modelled for Balmain, was, and is, a tall, rangy beauty, and so were some of her fellow mannequins whom she sometimes invited to stay. Lucien, who adored the Tuscan countryside, often organised drives through it to places like Pienza (named after its founder, Pope Pius II) and Montepulciano, two elegant hilltop towns whose architecture we would admire before enjoying a lunch enlivened by generous amounts of the excellent local
vino nobile di Montepulciano.

On another Florentine hill, in the Villa dell’Ombrellino, lived Violet Trefusis, daughter of Edward VII’s mistress, Mrs Keppel, who was herself to achieve notoriety when Vita Sackville West’s son, Nigel Nicolson, published his account of her ardent lesbian affair with his mother. From delicacy he waited to do this until Violet had died, so what we knew of her at first came mostly from herself. She was an entertaining narcissist. Once, on arriving for
dinner, we were led by her friend John Phillips to a viewing spot at one end of an enfilade of rooms at the other end of which stood Violet, whose copious grey curls had been arranged to resemble an early Hanoverian monarch’s wig. When we reached her, she instructed John to take Lauro aside ‘to tell him who I am’. The two duly left the room and returned minutes later to let her know that Lauro had been enlightened as to her royal blood. This, of course, had long since been checked out by those Florentines who took an interest in such matters, and declared non-existent. The dates didn’t fit, so she was not the king’s daughter. But play-acting amused her, perhaps more than a serious claim might have done. It kept people talking.

One New Year’s Eve she threw a black-tie dinner party whose guests, when one of them fell ill, threatened to number thirteen. She asked Maura to lend her one of her own house guests to deflect bad luck, which Maura kindly did. But throughout the day, as Violet’s guests kept phoning to report mishaps of one sort or another, number thirteen continued to loom, so the borrowed guest – an amiable Irishman called Billy – had to be put off, then re-invited, then disinvited again. At the very last minute, Lauro and I were asked to drop round to Villa San Michele to collect and drive him to Violet’s, whose fear of what the penny catechism used to call ‘charms, omens and dreams’ must have been acute. This fear, as fear can, may have magnetised trouble, for early in the meal, she collapsed and, in my – unreliable? – memory, fell face first into her hors d’oeuvre. Her guests had to leave, and we were lucky to find a trattoria where we and Billy could see the old year out.

Violet, though, continued to entertain. Company revived her who, at times, could be conviviality itself, as she recycled anecdotes which didn’t spare the dead. A favourite one recorded a triumph over Berenson, whom she suspected of having tried to poach her titled guests.

‘I let him know,’ she told us, ‘that if he wanted to invite them, there was no need to send his butler to meet their train to try to lure them away.
I
could give him their names. Then
he
could invite them – and it would be “tit for I Tatti”.’

Even at the end there were triumphs. On a happier New Year’s Eve she had a house party whose guests’ names rang like those of characters in Proust. Among those I remember were the Duc and Duchesse d’Harcourt, the Comte de Ségur, a couple called Sheremetyevo who explained that they had not been called after Moscow Airport. No. On the contrary,
it
had been called after land which the husband’s family had owned. These guests impressed, not just by their pedigrees, but by their dramatic haute couture clothes. Being in a room with them felt like being a sparrow among humming birds. The Duchesse d’Harcourt, who was young, Spanish and a beauty, was particularly glamorous. So Violet was in her glory. She might be in her seventies and wobbly, but she could still give house parties which dazzled Florence.

Parties at the Teissiers were livelier and more French, with guests like the novelist Roger Peyrefitte, the banker Michel François Poncet, assorted girlfriends and other clever Parisians. The villa owners invited each other’s house guests, so now, remembering, I am unsure in which we were when I sat next to Philippe Jullian or James or John Pope-Hennessy or Emilio Pucci. Probably at Violet’s. I Tatti guests were more apt to be academics, or else to have been invited with an eye to
fund-raising.
The villa needed endowments, and its successive Harvard directors had the US talent for attracting them. Harold Acton, who complained about the failure of English institutions to compete, may not have grasped the difficulties. He had wanted to leave La Pietra to Oxford, but, on learning that Oxford feared that it would not be able to find the money needed to keep it up, left it instead to New York University. Fund-raising in England is hampered both by a tax system which gives insufficient tax breaks
to donors, and a habit of giving titles to the rich, which curbs any need they might otherwise feel to embellish their names by endowing art collections. When I was one of the directors of the Susan Blackburn Memorial Prize for women dramatists, which is offered both in the US and UK, our US colleagues found it far easier to raise money than we did in England.

In the palazzo where Lauro and I rented a flat for four years in the Sixties, everyone’s business was known to everyone else. The owner, Marchese Stiozzi-Ridolfi, was said to be an unlucky gambler, which may have been why he needed to take in so many tenants. Besides ourselves, there was the porter’s lodge, the Stiozzi-Ridolfi’s own area, a family upstairs called Cini, and, at the very top, three generations of a working-class one consisting of a matriarch called Nonna Rosina (‘Granny Rose’), her daughter, and several men whose relation to each other I never sorted out. Janet and Roger Rearick, the I Tatti fellows who had had our flat before us, warned us against having anything to do with Nonna Rosina’s daughter, who was a thief. She had been their laundress until Roger saw her son in the street wearing one of his best shirts. She claimed she hadn’t known, protested her innocence, swore that she’d kill the boy, and put on a dithyrambic scene which it amused Roger to mimic.

Meanwhile
our
son, Lucien, needed a babysitter, and Nonna Rosina set out to win his heart. She did this in the mornings while he waited for the car which would take him to kindergarten, and the
portiera
kept an eye on him while getting on with her chores. One of these consisted in killing chickens by catching their heads in a drawer, then slamming it shut.

Lucien might conceivably have taken the chicken-killing in his stride, if Nonna Rosina hadn’t seized the chance to cuddle
and coddle him while scolding the
portiera
for doing such a thing in front of a sensitive child. Her concern flattered him. So before we knew it, a bond had been forged and she was his babysitter. Then two weeks later something of ours went missing, which left us feeling so unpleasantly vulnerable that we severed relations with the manipulative Nonna Rosina, who pleaded with us to reconsider. Lucien, now called Luciano, did, too, but we held firm. The
portiera,
perhaps in revenge for the scolding, told us about a respectable widow who lived close by and would love to look after a pretty child like him. Nonna Rosina raged at her, bad-mouthed the widow, and took to ambushing us in
cortile
and street to confront us again and again and argue her case. Neighbours laughed at this story, improved it in the retelling and teased Lucien whom they called
il dottorino
because he looked so comically like Lauro, who was known as
il dottore.

The widow told us to call her Tata Rita, and the first correct – and passionate – Italian sentence I remember Lucien using was ‘
Non voglio andar da Tata Rita,
’ meaning, ‘I don’t want to go to Tata Rita.’ He repeated it for weeks. Then she too won him over – and he changed her way of life. She had been one of those
black-clad
widows who used to be seen all over Italy, whose mourning was so prolonged and deep that it isolated them from ordinary living. She hadn’t been to a cinema since her husband died several years before, fearing lest people disapprove. Now, though, she had an excuse: Lucien. She could go into cafés with him, too, and for walks in the park, where strangers complimented her on her attractive charge. Unfortunately he was so frightened by the wicked queen in
Snow White
that he had to be carried out wailing. This dashed Tata Rita’s hope of seeing how the film ended. Lucien also wanted to see this and begged for another chance, so we provided a second set of tickets, then a third, when the same thing happened again. But, as far as I can remember, neither he nor Tata Rita ever saw the end of the film. Instead
she started taking him on a long – remorseful? – bus ride to the cemetery to put flowers on her husband’s grave, and to Mass and various other church ceremonies. He loved these and to this day is drawn to the religion which both Seán and I had managed to escape.

I wondered if he had inherited my childhood addiction to terror.

1966, the year we left Florence, was the Year of the Flood. It came just months after our departure, and when we returned the next summer, mud marks on the walls showed how dangerously high the Arno, often a mere muddy trickle, had risen. Artisans, whose workshops were usually on street level, had suffered most, and museum artefacts were still being restored with the help of experts from a number of countries.

We, meanwhile, had spent the winter in Los Angeles, where Lauro was now a professor at the University of California (UCLA), and where Piero Bargellini, the mayor of Florence, came by to thank US donors whose money had helped repair flood damage. Remembering that his daughter-in-law and I had been colleagues at the Scuola Interpreti, he asked me to interpret his speech which, as he must have given it many times on his way to the West Coast, was by now highly polished. I still remember a wry Florentine joke which he told with panache. It described two artisans meeting in the street. One was holding a picture frame around his head, and the other asked why. ‘Oh,’ said the one with the frame, ‘I’m pretending to be a ruined work of art. All the money goes to those. Live people, like you and me, don’t get any.’ This went down well with the LA audience, who, with any luck, coughed up some funds specifically for the artisans. Documents in Florence’s State Archives had also suffered badly, due to having
been stored underground and to the building’s being just beside the river. But, as the archivists pointed out, the last time trouble threatened had been during the war, when it had been expected to come from aeroplanes.

Surprisingly the flood, despite all the damage caused, did a few good turns and one person who benefited was Tata Rita.

She, whose flat was above flood-level, had come into her own during the catastrophe. She had taken in needy neighbours and lodged and fed them and rejoiced in her own usefulness. Now, she told us, she had friends whom she might otherwise never have got to know. We hoped she had found some with whom to go to the pictures.

Ordinary Florentines were often more quick-witted and friendly than any of Tadini’s five categories of citizens. The greengrocer near our palazzo was a jolly, gossipy woman who added free, well chosen herbs –
odori
– to season whatever you bought. Tata Rita and even Nonna Rosina were warm-hearted, and the most flattering tribute I ever received came from Ida, the maid we shared with the Stiozzi-Ridolfi, who gave a farewell dinner for us in her garden before we left. It was actually a banquet, for she joined several tables together, invited a throng of neighbours and cooked enough food for a village fête – good food, too, as Florentine food almost always is. I was delighted, for I had always enjoyed chatting to Ida, who had the same playful feel for Florentine turns of phrase that Eileen did for Hiberno-English.

Catherine and Marie de Medici, two Florentines who married into the royal house of France, are credited with having brought
teams of cooks with them to Paris who taught the culinary arts to the French. This is sometimes disputed, but I find it persuasive for two reasons. One is that, to this day, regional and home cooking often seems better in Italy than in France. The other is the delight which Florentine housewives take in passing on their knowhow. In my first year in Florence my cooking standards, being still those of the Moo Cow Milk Bar, were so shamingly inadequate that I nerved myself to ask a fishmonger what to do with a slim, silvery fish on his counter which he told me was a
palombo.
Within seconds several of his customers had surrounded me and were asking practical questions – did I have an oven for instance? No? A hob then? Good. I could do a pot-roast. In no time, thanks to the clarity of their advice, I was able to go home and follow it with such ease that pot-roasted
palombo
with appropriate
odori
became my favourite stand-by. Only dictionaries let me down when I left Florence and learned that the English names were dogfish, mudfish or shark, all of which sound a lot less palatable than
palombo.

Towards the end of our four years in Florence, Seán, Eileen and I took Lucien to be baptised in the city’s ancient and lovely baptistery. Lauro, though not opposed to the ceremony, was, as usual, busy in the archives and did not attend. Lucien, who was now seven, showed himself, according to the officiating priest, to be
un bambino pieno di giudizio,
meaning, I suppose, a wise child, and, perhaps because of this, his affection for Catholicism still survives.

I forget whether it was J. B. Priestley or V. S. Pritchett who
wrote that, to children, their parents’ friends can look like comic monsters. The dispiriting thing is that it is when the adults’ brains start to fail and they struggle to hide this that the comedy can turn monstrous – or, at best, depressing. Seán, in his last years, hoping to keep Lauro and me from being upset by his slip-ups, turned these into anecdotes. He had, one letter confessed, poured boiling water into a freshly filled tea-caddy instead of the teapot, and another admitted having astounded his barber by offering him sixpence for a haircut, which had not been the going rate for years. Then, when I was visiting him in a hospital not far from Dún Laoghaire, where he was having tests, he asked whether we should let Eileen know that he was in Ennis.