At the top of the stairs introductions were effected. Cecilia saw now that Mrs. Green’s eyelids were swollen as if she had been recently crying. She wished that they had not called at such a time and began to seek about in her mind for a way of indicating to Harold—never very sensitive in these matters—that they should not prolong their visit. “You are probably busy just now,” she said. “Harold and I can—”
“I was just saying to my wife, you look as if you’ve been in a blitz,” Chapman said.
“Do come in,” Mrs. Green said. “Things are a bit in a mess, I am afraid.”
This, it was immediately clear to the Chapmans as they looked around, was no more than the truth. It was not just a matter of disorder, though this was considerable; there was a quality of ruin about the inside of the house as there was about the outside—it seemed a place that people might have lived in once but had long since abandoned.
The schooling of manners, natural warmth, the traditions of her hospitable nation operated on Mrs. Green now. “Can we offer you folks a cup of coffee?” she said.
“That would be great,” Chapman said, before Cecilia had time to demur. “What on earth has happened to your fireplace?”
All that was left of this was the exposed back wall of the chimney, charred and blackened by a century of smoke; all the front part of the hearth had been wrenched out.
“We wanted a smaller fireplace,” Mr. Green said. “The one that was here before was huge, very fine in its way but all the heat went up the chimney. We discussed it with this man Blemish, who has been acting as our project manager. They came and took the fireplace out but nothing further has been done.”
“The draft is worse than ever now.” An inveterate optimism lightened Mrs. Green’s face. “Of course,” she said, “it doesn’t matter so much in this warmer weather.”
Chapman stared for some time longer at the black, gaping hole that had once been the fireplace. “Looks as if someone has thrown a bomb down the chimney,” he said. “I wanted to bring you up-to-date with the latest developments in the road situation.”
“Road situation?”
“Yes, the Checchetti have now driven stakes into the road at a distance—”
“Harold,” Cecilia said, in a voice considerably firmer than usual, “Mr. and Mrs. Green have troubles enough of their own by the look of things. I don’t think they want to be bothered with our little squabbles.”
This belittling phrase seemed to Chapman extremely disloyal and he resolved to take it up with Cecilia later on. For the moment, clearly enough, the way was blocked. He waited for some moments in the hope that the Greens, their curiosity aroused, might ask for further details. But they showed no interest whatsoever. Old people, he thought, self-centered, set in their ways … “What have they been doing to your roof?” he said.
This question seemed to act as a precipitating factor for the Greens. They began to speak eagerly, supplementing each other’s account, their voices often blending in a single tone of bitterness and woe. From the very beginning there had been problems, but the real trouble had started with this ditch around the house; the builder had begun to dig a trench all the way around and fill it with cement so as to secure the foundations.
“The house is not built on rock as they expected, you see,” Mrs. Green said. “It was an imprevisto.”
“They filled one side in and started on another,” Mr. Green said. “Then they asked for some money.”
“We paid it; there didn’t seem much alternative.”
“Then they told us we would need a cordolo.”
“That’s an imprevisto too.”
“What is a cordolo?”
“It’s a kind of concrete reinforcement going all the way around the house, just below the roof.”
“Why do you need one?”
“Well,” Mr. Green said, with a reasoning air about him that Cecilia found strangely touching. “This is an earthquake zone, you know.”
“I know that,” Chapman said. “But we have had our house converted without needing one.”
“No, you see, it’s because they are putting this band of concrete around the base of the house. This geometra they have, that’s a kind of surveyor, he says he won’t be able to sign that the house is soundly built unless they put in this reinforcement below the roof.”
“I am sorry,” Chapman said, “I am not following you.”
Mr. Green felt a certain increase in authority at being in a position to explain this technical matter. “Well, you see, otherwise all the stress would be on the upper half.” He raised both hands and extended the fingers to make the shape of a square. “If the base is gripped tight and there is an earth tremor, all the shock is transmitted to the upper part, there is no give.”
“No give?”
“None at all.”
In the silence that followed upon this, they could hear the light, continuous rustling of the plastic sheet above their heads. “But they must have known,” Cecilia said. “They must have known from the beginning that if they put the concrete around the base they would have to do the cordolo too.”
“Mr. Blemish says they didn’t know how the geometra was going to react. The snag seems to be that he is such a stickler for the regulations, so kind of meticulous that he won’t go over the line by even the slightest degree.”
This sounded improbable to Cecilia, but she could see from the faces of the Greens that they wanted very much to believe it and she could understand why: to cease believing in the good faith of these people would be a nightmare worse than the one they were going through. They were much older than she was but they struck her now as sorely in need of protection, not on grounds of frailty—they were both active, wiry-looking people—but because of this tenacity in maintaining the bonds of faith, their own, other people’s. Bonds of faith that hold the world together, she thought. They had probably put nearly everything they possessed into this house. “That’s a beautiful picture,” she said, pointing at the wall behind the Greens. “Verrocchio, isn’t it?”
“Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ,” Mr. Green said. “We bought that print forty years ago, when we came here on our honeymoon. First thing we did when we got here was hang it up on the wall. It is kind of symbolic for us, that picture.”
“We are saving it up,” Mrs. Green said. “We are waiting for the house to be finished, then we are going to see the original. It is sort of like a present we are making each other. Perhaps you folks do that, give each other presents, things you do together?”
“No, not really,” Cecilia said.
“You know, to celebrate. It’s in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. The kneeling angel, the one on the left, that was painted by Leonardo.”
“He was apprentice to Verrocchio, you know, when he was about seventeen or eighteen,” Mr. Green said.
Both the Greens had brightened up considerably, Cecilia saw, with this change of subject. “You can see it is Leonardo’s work, can’t you?” she said. “It is less three-dimensional than the other figures, more in plane with the picture surface. Do you see what I mean, Harold?”
“Verrocchio was a sculptor too,” Chapman said, dredging up a fact remembered from his reading.
“That’s right,” Mrs. Green said. “He did that wonderful equestrian statue, the one in Venice.”
“Yes, I know the one you mean.” Cecilia looked for some moments more at the picture, at the beautiful congruence of the figures, the outstretched arm of the Baptist making an arch, the dipping chalice and the hovering dove at the apex. “Baptism of a standing figure, it’s like a coronation too, isn’t it?” She was touched by the way the Greens had confided their love for this picture to more or less complete strangers. It came to her again that they needed sheltering somehow. She wanted to say something comforting to them, something reassuring …
“Sounds to me as if you have been taken to the cleaners,” Chapman said. “They have started messing about with the roof before the trench is filled in. That does
n’t promise well. Who is this Blemish anyway?”
“He is our project manager.” Mrs. Green’s voice quivered a little saying this and Mr. Green put a hand on her shoulder. “This house was habitable when we bought it,” she said. “It was primitive but it was habitable. Now it is getting impossible for us to live here. We go to the bathroom and look up to see this plastic sheet where the roof tiles should be. It rustles and flaps all the time.”
“Come and have a look for yourselves,” Mr. Green said.
The Chapmans were taken to look at the bathroom and then at the internal staircase, one of the few pieces of work Esposito had actually completed. Huge vertical cracks had opened up on either side of the landing.
“This is the latest development,” Mr. Green said. “There were no cracks here before.”
Chapman stepped up close and inspected the cracks. They ran down in jagged lines from the corners formed by the angle of the staircase with the ceiling. At their widest they were over an inch across. “They have opened the whole house up,” he said. “Have you got any kind of contract? Well, if I were you I would have it checked by a lawyer. It so happens that I know of an excellent one. I’ll give you his name and number, if you like. He has been very helpful to us in our dispute with the Checchetti family, which far from being a little squabble is a fundamental issue of principle. They are trying to blackmail us, you know. Do you know what they have done today?”
“Signor Chapman, Harold Chapman, gave me your name,” Fabio said. “He recommended you very strongly.” He watched as the lawyer tapped lightly with a pencil on the desk before him. It had been a struggle for him to come here; it meant admitting fraud on the one hand and foolish credulity on the other, more or less in equal measure. The lawyer would be accustomed to these things of course; but they would normally be represented in separate persons, whereas Fabio felt that he embodied both and the feeling made him uneasy. The habitual melancholy of his face deepened as he sat forward in one of Mancini’s luxurious armchairs and began his story. His difficulty was made strangely greater by the fact that a thin shaft of sunlight was slanting through the venetian blind at the window and falling across Mancini’s shoulder and the side of his head, dressing his hair in radiance and obscuring the upper part of his features in a bright haze.
He did not try to conceal anything. He told the lawyer how he and Arturo had made out a bill of sale by mutual agreement, how in this way the house and land had passed from his ownership to that of his partner. A paper transaction, he repeated—no money had changed hands. But the deed of sale had been drawn up and witnessed by a notary; it was legally binding.
Mancini nodded and laid the pencil carefully down on the desk. “What did you set the price of the house at?”
“Two hundred million with the land and outbuildings.”
“Yes, I see. About half its market value. You naturally wanted to keep the tax on the sale as low as possible.” Mancini smiled. “Fictitious sales are still subject to taxes,” he said.
The smile had seemed to Fabio more a motion in the brightness lying round the lawyer’s face than an actual movement of the features. “It seemed to make sense at the time,” he said. “I get a pension, you know. I had a career as a racing driver before my accident. It is a reduced pension because I took as much as I could in cash to help me buy the house. Even so, it prevents me from getting the tax concessions you are entitled to if your income is derived solely from direct cultivation of the land. Now, Arturo, you see, has no pension, no income of his own at all …”
“I see, yes. And of course by selling the house rather than simply making it over as a gift, you saved on transfer tax. In certain cases a gift of that kind is counted as the realization of an asset by the donor, who might then be liable to capital gains tax on any increase in its value since it was originally acquired by the said donor. You have had the house for several years?”
“Yes, ten years.”
“In that case the increase in value would be considerable. No, you were right to do it as a deed of sale.”
“Right?”
“Entirely right, I think, yes. A shrewd move, Signor Bianchi.”
Fabio narrowed his eyes to get a better look at the lawyer’s face, thinking this might show something sarcastic or derisive in it. “Shrewd? But it was disastrous, it was entirely stupid, I am going to lose the house because of it.”
“That is an entirely different issue.” Mancini leaned forward out of the light and now his head and face were clearly visible to Fabio, the full gaze of the wide-open eyes, the luxuriant sweeps of hair on either side. “We must distinguish,” he said. “Making distinctions is one of the most intensely human of our attributes. The actual transaction you entered into with your partner was not stupid at all. On the contrary, it was very reasonable under the circumstances, reasonable, I mean, in the sense that it was designed to save you money and there are not many things more reasonable than that. Saving money, or increasing your stock of it, is an activity everywhere regarded as normal. In the whole of Italy there would hardly be a dissenting voice. Of course the transaction was fraudulent in that it was designed to deprive the state of its rightful dues and there are penalties for that if it comes to legal process. But as a private arrangement with limited aims, it was, as I say, eminently reasonable. The use your partner is trying to put it to, that is another matter altogether.”
Fabio found it hard to endure such a calmly objective way of looking at his loss. He felt a spurt of anger toward this man behind the desk who talked so smoothly about other people’s troubles, took a view of such Olympian detachment. All the years of warmth and companionship, the struggles to make ends meet, the labor of every day, their physical joy in each other. Not just mine, he thought—I can’t be deceived in that. But he had always known there was a difference. He had singled Arturo out, taken him up. Arturo had responded to the promise of protection and would do so again … What had Monti said on that evening of the visit, of which Fabio was now ashamed? People who live together on close terms build their house around them day by day. This house Arturo had already taken from him because the fabric of it was love and trust. And now here was this man before him, talking so reasonably, so dispassionately.
But it was not only resentment that he felt: there was some quality in the lawyer, some emanation of personality, that made one want to secure his sympathy and understanding. Fabio wanted him to understand the enormity of what had happened, to realize that these quibbling distinctions were as nothing compared to his sufferings, the desolation of Arturo’s treachery. But there is no language for pain. He could only repeat the facts, seek to magnify the injury. “He has left me alone,” he said. “He has deserted me after all these years. I took him to Verona for the opera season at the Arena, every year without fail, tickets in good places for all the operas. One year I took him to Egypt to see the first performance of Aida against the background of pyramids, a historic occasion. We are both fond of opera … Now he does this to me, he tries to take the roof from over my head.”
“Yes, this attempt to dispossess you, that is the heart of the business. His going away, that is neither here nor there, if you will forgive me, it is merely a matter of emotions. I suppose he became, you know, disenchanted. People change, things form and dissolve. That is the way of the world, Signor Bianchi, do you not agree? I used to be more interested in emotions than I am now. These days it is the machinery that interests me more. But I understand how you feel. This attempt to deceive you and cheat you is very wrong; it is a great treachery your friend has been guilty of.”
“Machinery …” Fabio felt moved by this expression of sympathy. “He has brought everything there was between us down to machinery,” he said. “A car is more than an engine. It is bodywork, it is upholstery, it is beauty of design. He plotted it all beforehand, in cold blood. After I had done so much for him.”
Mancini nodded but made no immediate reply. It seemed to him that his new client was rather too absorbed in the
role of wronged father. This companion had perhaps grown weary of being taken here and there. Perhaps this bid to dispossess his benefactor, steal his habitation, had been no more than that, an attempt to annihilate the grounds of a generosity long resented. What better way of asserting independence than taking over the presidential palace? “Yes,” he said, “I agree, quite despicable. Italian law as at present constituted encourages such tricks. It makes no provision at all for the rights of men who live together and then separate. In law your partner is entitled to nothing, not a single lira. If you had been a married couple the one leaving would have been able to claim compensation for the years of work and service. He or she would have been entitled to share the value of the house.”
“I suppose so, yes.” Neither in face nor in voice was there any indication that Fabio felt this as an injustice.
Mancini waited a moment, then sighed and shrugged slightly. “Be that as it may,” he said, “he has wronged you, so much is certain.”
“What can I do? Take him to court for fraud? I know that would mean admitting my share in it, but perhaps we can get the deed of sale annulled.”
Mancini shook his head. “That would be a thorny path indeed. In my younger days I insisted always on the letter of the law. I applied the law with devoted consistency and I prospered, because the law applied with devoted consistency enriches lawyers to the same degree that it impoverishes their clients. Then I saw that justice rarely resulted from this and at the same time I began to feel bored. The due process of law is mainly a tedious rambling, Signor Bianchi. He would deny fraud, of course. We would have to try and show that his income had not been sufficient, that he could not have disposed of such a sum of money. For this we would need documentary evidence, in the nature of things rather difficult to obtain. No, my advice to you would be different.”
He stopped and leaned back in his chair. Fabio saw him close his eyes, or at least surmised he had done this—the shine of the eyes ceased as if eclipsed by the sunlight that still lay about his head. There was silence in the room for the space of two minutes or so. Then the lawyer’s voice came again, rather deep in tone, unfaltering and unhurried. “Two acts of deception have already taken place. The first is the fraudulent transaction by which you two sought to evade the proper taxes by making a fictitious deed of sale. The second is the application of this fictitious deed by your companion as if it were not fictitious at all. A trick within a trick, we can call this. So we must now use a third trick to defeat him—or rather a series of tricks arising rather beautifully from within it, like the petals of a flower. However, as preliminary condition, it requires a third party, a man completely honest. Not so easy to find. Have you got a friend of such a kind, someone you can trust without reservation?”