formal anxiety into the distance.
‘This was an old Italian villa, the foundations are ancient Roman,’ said the girl calming down a little, ‘then along came an American woman with the money. She restores the house. She’s got other houses, all over Nemi, full of foreigners. We’re the only Italians and we pay her rent. Papa pays a huge rent. We had to put in a downstairs sitting-room. Before there was no sitting-room downstairs. We had to make over one of the garages at Papa’s expense. Papa likes the house so he pays and pays.’
The large maid came out with a tray of drinks and ice, wearing a baleful expression. Nancy smiled at her but this made Clara close her eyes as if in pain.
‘You shouldn’t criticize foreigners in Nancy’s presence,’ said Pietro. He was hoping to get a part in a foreign film just at that time and although it was unlikely that their English tutor had many friends among the thousands of foreigners in Italy, far less the Americans who were making the film, he felt there was nothing to lose by shutting his sister up a bit.
‘But Papa pays her to help us with our English and we’re talking English,’ Letizia said. ‘And tonight we have to talk English at dinner for our landlady.’
Their father’s car could be heard coming up the drive, whereupon Nancy Cowan smiled.
A sixteenth-century refectory table with some antique chairs from Tuscany waited for the party in a green damask dining-room. Some special-looking green and gold china was arranged on shelves in four flood-lit alcoves. The candles were ready to be lit in the silver candlesticks, the table was set for six, which meant that the seats were twice as far apart as they need have been. Letizia looked sulkily over the table, said nothing one way or another to the waiting manservant, then left the room through folding doors which led to the drawing-room. The manservant slipped out of another door to report, apparently, no complaints.
In the drawing-room Letizia’s father sat back on a sofa with his contented drink. Nancy Cowan sat by his side, tentatively and upright, near the edge of the seat Letizia, coming in from the dining-room, said, ‘We should have dined in the north room. The green dining-room is far too formal for six.’
The father, Dr Emilio Bernardini, elegantly thin with a pale skin and rather beautiful, very dark eyes behind a pair of scholarly spectacles, black-glossy hair and sharply defined eyebrows, had a look of the portraits of the Stuart monarchs. He was a business lawyer occupied between Rome, Milan and Zürich; in fact, a good part of his business was real estate, and the reason he had yet to sell his own family villa and had chosen to rent from Maggie Radcliffe the one in which he now sat was presumably known only to himself. Although it annoyed his daughter she was too well-fabricated within the business world of Italy to believe she could persuade the father to buy rather than rent. Whatever his reason, it was definitely in his own interest.
He replied in Italian, carelessly, that the dining-room was best for their landlady’s visit. Pietro, in the meantime, was telling Nancy he admired her dress.
Nancy answered, in correct Italian, that it was a new one. She added, ‘After my first long stay in Italy when I saw how Italians dressed, I felt I was underdressed in my London things, so I always get some clothes for the evening when I come to stay here.’
‘Do you mean we’re overdressed?’ said the charming father of the family.
‘In England, at this moment, for this occasion, we would be quite overdressed.’
The father contemplated his children and then herself with some happiness. ‘I think we all look very elegant,’ he said. ‘I’m glad we overdo it. Not long ago we overdid it far more.’
A new young man was shown in, whom Letizia had hastily summoned to dinner to make a respectable number. He, at least, had not overdone it, but was wearing a dingy, grey cotton round-necked shirt