The Takeover Read Online Free PDF

demonstrated an allergy to Pietro with his Bulgari steel watch, his Gucci shoes and belt, his expensive haircut, and with his Porsche being endlessly cleaned by the house’s young lodge-keeper in overalls.
    Big Clara lumbered up from the pool to the house, clutching her heart. She was not yet fifty but she looked much older and yet behaved like a child of twelve which evidently she still felt herself to be. ‘A headache,’ she said in her babyish whine. ‘It’s too hot. You need a professional to clean out the pool. He’ll never understand the chlorine. I’ve got a headache. He has no capacity. You need a man, a real man. He’ll never learn.’
    Letizia sprang up from her seat beside Nancy Cowan, full of what it took to cope with Clara in their native tongue. Letizia’s young skin glowed in the late afternoon, her pale blue eyes had a fishy bulge. She swung around in her folklore skirt, her red platform clogs and smocked blouse, gesticulating with her healthy arms. As a specimen, Letizia at eighteen was rounded-off and complete; the finishing touches were already put, there was no room for further contention between character and contours, there was scope only, now, for wear and tear. She was much as she would be, she thought much as she would think, and looked not much different from what she would look, at forty-eight.
    The grumbling servant having been coped with, Letizia returned to her garden chair beside her brother and Nancy, with a grin full of healthy teeth.
    Nancy Cowan held out her hand for the copy of Byron which Pietro had taken to look at.
    ‘He must have come here in winter,’ Pietro said, ‘since he wrote about the wind tearing up the oak tree.’
    Letizia leaned over Nancy Cowan to examine the lines. ‘He says the wind spares the lake, which is true. Nemi is a very secluded spot. Was Byron at Nemi in winter, then?’
    ‘Look, you’ll have to get a Life of Byron.…’
    ‘I think Papa has a biography of Byron. Pietro, do you know?’
    ‘…something you ought to know about, though. Byron’s always—’
    ‘He was a lame lord…’ Pietro had taken the book from Nancy and was reading aloud from the biographical foreword to the poems: ‘…a spendthrift and a rake.…’
    ‘What is that spendthrift…?’ Pietro reached for the dictionary. Nancy Cowan began explaining Byron while the air grew cooler, the light faded over the lawn and Letizia suddenly recollected a bit of Byron’s history from her earlier schooldays.
    Just then Letizia was called to the telephone and cursing in Italian went indoors to answer it.
    Nancy caught Pietro looking closely at her, and turned her head to look back into his face.
    ‘Would it embarrass you if I asked you a question?’ he said.
    ‘You’ve just asked me an embarrassing one,’ she said, to gain ground, and was never to know what Pietro’s other embarrassing question might be, for Letizia returned by way of the kitchen door to say, ‘Papa has asked our landlady to dinner. She phoned Papa at the office. Her name was Mrs. Radcliffe but she got married again to an Italian. La Radcliffe wants to see us.’
    ‘What’s she like?’ Nancy said.
    ‘We’ve never seen her. She rents the house through an agent. She’s a rich American, Madame Radcliffe, and now she’s a Marchesa married to a nobleman from the north. I hate Papa for renting a house from an American in our own country. It should be round the other way. Why doesn’t Papa buy a villa?’
    ‘Italians own property in England,’ said Nancy.
    ‘That is different. They settled there for two, three generations. They was poor.’ Letizia looked angry, unable to clarify her thoughts, if indeed her feelings existed in thought-form. She slightly lost her grip on correct English. ‘There is many reasons,’ she said. ‘Here in Italy the foreigners takes everything.’
    ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Nancy. ‘I really hadn’t thought of it before.’ She thought of it now, looking with purely