The Takeover Read Online Free PDF Page A

night in his Porsche, his St. Christopher medal dangling on his chest, speeding the length of the boot of Italy and back to be with some group of young men who clustered round the film director wherever the film should be in the making. Italy is a place much given to holding court. Pietro, when he was not at one or another court, was happier at home now than he had been in recent years because of the presence of Nancy Cowan.
    She was thirty-six, well-informed, rather thin, long-nosed, tender-hearted towards anyone within her immediate radius at any one time. She had come in answer to an advertisement in The Times , bringing her Englishness, her pale summer dresses, her sense of fair play, and many other foreign things with her. Letizia had been at first delighted to find that the English tutor was so easy to walk all over in intellectual matters; it was as if Miss Cowan had anything you like instead of views of society or political stands. But at times she suspected that Nancy Cowan really didn’t feel it worth while to give her own opinions; sometimes it almost seemed, in fact, as if Nancy was making herself agreeable to either the brother or the sister simply because they mattered very little to her. Letizia, when this feeling struck her, would force her own views the more strongly, and would sometimes speak her mind to the point of insult. Pietro thought Nancy’s malleability to be very feminine, and with an intuitive artistic sense of economy, he set out to get his father’s money’s worth out of her in his studies. It seemed likely that their father was already sleeping with her. It would have been possible to find out for sure, but Pietro felt too young and sex-free to make the effort; it would have been unhealthy, indelicate, but Pietro one night when they were taking their coffee after dinner in the garden, from the way Nancy Cowan responded to the night-beauty, decided that his father had wooed and won her there. She was also better-looking in the moonlight, quite handsome as in a film; and then, again, the manner towards Nancy of the big fat whiney parlour maid, Clara, told Pietro something. He supposed it also told Letizia something, but he didn’t expect Letizia to acknowledge any such unsevere facts about their father or their English tutor. It was thoroughly in keeping, though, that Papa was getting all full value out of Nancy Cowan, as was she from the job.
    The brother and sister sat reading Byron with Nancy in the shady garden a few yards from the house. It was six in the afternoon. To humour Letizia, Nancy had bent her English lessons in the direction of local lore. A poor rescued drug-addict in the wreckage of his twenties was cleaning out the swimming-pool under the direction of a gardener and fat Clara. This simple operation made a terrific background noise since Clara’s only tone for all occasions was one of lament, and the gardener, in trying to make a simple instruction penetrate the saved youth’s brain, treated him as if he were hard of hearing. The youth, who had been brought in by Letizia from Rome that morning, would be given a meal and an old pair of Pietro’s trousers for his services before he was taken back to the welfare centre. A few such garden chores got done in this way; only garden chores, since Letizia did not bring these strange people into the house for fear of what they might see and be tempted either to take away or send their friends to procure. To her father, Letizia’s protégés were more or less what in the old days were gypsies. To the eyes of Nancy Cowan they were young drug-addicts just like the London variety. Letizia referred to them as ‘our new social phenomena’ and this, oddly enough, was the title they liked best; they seemed to respond to Letizia, to her statistics and her sociological language which apparently gave them a status in life, and it was rarely that any one of them attempted to take undue advantage of her or ask her for money. Mostly they