Innocence

PENELOPE FITZGERALD

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Part 2

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Penelope Fitzgerald Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been shortlisted for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have provided introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction

Penelope Fitzgerald liked to begin her late novels with quiet acts of indirection. The first sentence of The Blue Flower contains a disrupting double negative; The Beginning of Spring opens with a character leaving the very city where most of the book’s action is going to take place. We are being put on our guard, politely warned not to take things for granted. But neither of these novels begins in as apparently wrong-footing a way as Innocence. Though the novel is to be set in Florence in 1955, its first chapter plants us back in mid-sixteenth-century Italy, at the Villa Ricordanza, inhabited by the Ridolfis, a family of aristocratic midgets. The Ridolfis dote on their young daughter, and so practise many kindly deceptions to convince her that her genetic condition, far from being a handicap, is not even an aberration. She is surrounded only by those the same size as herself, and is never allowed to leave the villa to discover the truths of the outside world. She is also provided with a female companion, Gemma, a dwarf (as opposed to a midget), whom she pities, and then pities the more when a sudden spurt of growth occurs. Poor girl, about to become a giantess, a freak, and to have to face this fact … and so the daughter, who has ‘a compassionate heart’, comes up with a solution for Gemma, as well-meaning in its intent as it is ghoulishly cruel in its actuality.

After these first four pages, we suddenly jump four centuries to the modern world, by which time the descendants of that Ridolfi family have become normal-sized and are nowadays eccentric only in socially acceptable ways. So were we just being presented with a colourful back story, an attention-grabbing anecdote from the guidebook? Not at all. That genetic aberration of the Ridolfis may have been fixed over the succeeding centuries, but there are other family characteristics, less physical than moral, which have survived:

No more midgets among them now. Still a tendency towards rash decisions, perhaps, always intended to ensure other people’s happiness, once and for all. It seems an odd characteristic to survive for so many years. Perhaps it won’t do so for much longer.

Innocence is a book about the law of unintended consequence; about bad outcomes of good intentions; about the unexpected power of the guileless; about the pursuit of happiness, and our assumption that happiness might be the natural, indeed deserved, result of love. It is also about the strange manner in which love may arise, the inconvenient ways it may express itself, and its often awkward consequences. These are large and meaty themes, though it is characteristic of Penelope Fitzgerald that their presence grows on our awareness slowly, even furtively. Just as she thought it bad literary manners to overburden the reader with too much information or research, so the real heart and purpose of her fiction are often camouflaged. Note, for instance, the double use of ‘perhaps’ in the quotation above, as if the author were saying: perhaps I’ve got it wrong and this isn’t the case at all, and anyway perhaps you are the better judge of my story than I am.

We tend to think of innocence as a passive virtue, displayed by those who wait and suffer; ‘innocent’ is naturally paired with ‘victim’. Fitzgerald is more interested in the active components of innocence, so that in the novel it is less a noble virtue, let alone an indicator of moral superiority, and more a practical characteristic, a way of dealing with the world. So Chiara Ridolfi, aged seventeen, is ‘ready to regard the world as a friend’; she doesn’t tell lies, ‘not even in the concert hall’; and she assumes ‘as a child does’ that those she loves must also therefore love one another. One comic example of the impact such innocence makes on the outside world is in her driving, described as ‘alert and reckless’. More serious and central is her manner of falling in love with (the Southern, self-made neurologist) Salvatore. In this she is just as alert and just as reckless, breaking social codes as she would drive through a traffic light. But her innocence also expresses itself in an intensity and relentlessness which Salvatore often cannot handle, any more than he can handle the intolerable sympathy his mistress Marta displays when he gives her up:

It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.

The opposite of innocence is calculation, as displayed by Monsignor Gondi, a Ridolfi connection by marriage, who is constantly scheming and networking. (There is also a ‘shrewd’ gardener at La Ricordanza who has a cameo role.) But apart from these, all the characters in the novel exemplify different ways of being innocent. The Ridolfis have their ‘trust in the triumph of good intentions’. Salvatore is ‘pure and simple, self-created, self-determined, forewarned and unclassifiable’. His ‘serene willpower’ serves him well with patients, but away from work he constantly misreads others, often deciding in advance how they will behave, only to be innocently surprised and monumentally exasperated. Sannazzaro, the old friend of Salvatore’s father, has a ‘pure irreproachable heart’ and ‘all the nobility of life’s authentic losers’. His political hero is Gramsci, whose idealism was his own form of innocence (Fitzgerald mentions Gramsci’s denunciation of Stalin, which led to his being disowned by the Party). On Cesare Ridolfi’s estate there is even a whole colour-coded dovecote: white pigeons in the loft, white angora rabbits on the ground floor – a menagerie of innocents awaiting their massacre.

Happiness, and the application of innocence in its pursuit, is the plot’s motor. There are some, of course, who do not believe in happiness, or rather regard it as none of our business: the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, back in the 1560s, had warned his Ridolfi brother that ‘human happiness must be left to Heaven’. Maddalena Ridolfi, sister of the current Count, was briefly married to an Englishman whom it proved impossible to make happy; later, she is ‘tormented’ by ‘the failure of old people to be happy’. Cesare, their nephew, seems not to have considered the question at all. Sannazzaro believes obsessively that Salvatore cannot be happy unless he buys back his family land in Mazzata. It is left to the novel’s two young proponents of innocence, Chiara (the Count’s daughter) and her English schoolfriend Barney, to both believe in happiness and actively pursue it. Barney, all of eighteen, has a ‘capacity to dispel opposition, like a tractor going solidly through … heavy ploughland’, and, tractor-like, she drives at three successive targets, hooting her love in their direction. This does not seem a perfect strategy. Chiara, unlike Barney, does not yet know her own mind, being constantly distracted by ‘the unsettling vision of other points of view’ – until she meets Salvatore. ‘Alert and reckless’ meets ‘self-determined, forewarned and unclassifiable’. She now declares to Barney that ‘every minute of her life’ is wasted ‘unless we can be together and unless he’s happy’ (the assumption presumably being that if he is happy, so will she be). He, in turn, when Aunt Mad wonders what kind of man he is, declares: ‘The kind that loves your niece Chiara, and would give his life for her.’ There is no doubt that they are both equally stricken – ‘they loved each other to the point of pain’ – and yet their whole relationship proceeds by a sequence of misunderstandings and shouting matches, with Salvatore constantly irate, or about to become irate. Fitzgerald daringly chooses to show only this combative aspect of their relationship. Theirs must be one of the least romantic romances in fiction. Or is she perhaps hinting that it is only the sentimental among us who assume that love leads to happiness? As Salvatore at one point asks himself: ‘What is all this about happiness? We never talked about it in Mazzata.’

When analysing Fitzgerald’s fiction, it feels crude, almost indecent, to strip out and isolate main themes like this, because her novels, more than most, are organic and interwoven, textured like life. Here, matters of innocence and love inextricably overlap with other concerns: about imagination versus reality, historical authenticity, the nature of art, and – the moment where theme and treatment merge – the question of human misunderstanding. Innocence is constructed around and through a number of masterly scenes, usually between two people, in which minor to major misunderstandings occur: between Giancarlo and Chiara, Maddalena and the dressmaker Parenti, Salvatore and the lawyer Nieve, Maddalena and Mimi, Chiara and Salvatore, Barney and just about everybody, and (a surprising conjunction, which operates the plot’s final lever) Maddalena and Sannazzaro. Even the clearest expressions of truth and feeling – as in Barney’s vast and touching declaration of love for Cesare – may seem less clear cut to their recipient. As for Chiara and Salvatore, they finally attain what Fitzgerald calls ‘their own system of misunderstanding’. This, we are invited to feel, is some kind of marital achievement, as sound a basis for living together as any other.

Innocence is a novel which, atypically for Fitzgerald, is studded with dates. She always brought to the fiction she set back in time (the term ‘historical novel’ seems misleading, diminishing) a profound sense of period, the result of considerable research worn as lightly as possible. Innocence has this too; but it is also backed up constantly with dates: from the 1568 of the opening scene to 1904 (premiere of Madam Butterfly), 1910 (present of a wristwatch to Giancarlo), 1921 (last time Parenti made a dress for Aunt Maddalena), 1924 (flood compensation for Gentilini’s family), 1937 (death of Gramsci), 1942 (closure of tomatocanning factory in Mazzata), 1943 (last time Chiara’s diamonds were worn), up to 1955 (year of the novel, when Chiara meets Salvatore). There are almost thirty such dates, some of a public nature, some private to the novel’s world, some passingly thematic (thus Butterfly is a love story in which an innocent is destroyed). Fitzgerald clearly wants us to think of the novel’s action as something rooted in the previous half-century of Italian history; but perhaps these marker-points were also felt necessary in a novel in which the characters are so often at sea about one another’s meanings.

And just as Fitzgerald takes care over the novel’s prehistory, she also – much less obviously, and on only a couple of occasions – attends to what will happen beyond its conclusion. Both moments occur in Part Two. Chapter 2 begins:

Looking at the photographs of a wedding taken nearly thirty years ago one can’t believe that so many, who now look as they do, once looked like that.

This is followed by a description of Chiara’s wedding photographs – in other words, we are in 1985, the year of the novel’s composition. So who is looking at them, who is this ‘one’ who ‘can’t believe’ in what time has wrought? Is it the author, is it the reader, or one of the characters, or all three of us sitting side by side? It might be a reasonable assumption at this point that the novel intends to expand upon those thirty years before its end. As it would, even more strongly, with the second flash-forward, in chapter 23. Here Barney, having set her sights on her third possible He, confidently announces to Chiara that ‘You must let us know … if you’re ever in Chipping Camden.’ Fitzgerald continues:

Chiara had never heard of this place, it was entirely new to her. But during the later stages of her life, at times when things were not going well for her, the bewildering phrase used to come back to her without warning.

But that is all we are allowed. There is to be no filling-in of the three decades, of what those in the photographs look like ‘now’, and of which things did not go well, and exactly how badly they went, for Chiara in her twenties, thirties and forties. Is this frustrating? Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.

But the novel is full of such surprises (it is also probably the only one of Fitzgerald’s to contain the word ‘fuck’). It is as shrewd and calculating as its main characters are not. It rarely goes where we think it will (a lesser novelist, for instance, would almost certainly have ‘allowed’ Barney to end up with Cesare); nor does it end as we might expect. A concatenation of circumstances – three misunderstood positives adding up in Salvatore’s mind to one massive negative – leads Chiara’s husband to Cesare’s estate where he asks to borrow a shotgun. Could it be that Chiara Ridolfi’s ‘innocence’, like that of her sixteenth-century ancestors, is about to have similar sanguinary consequences? In a scene perfectly poised between seriousness and absurdity, Salvatore asks Cesare if he will try to prevent him from killing himself. Cesare, who suffers from a kind of conversational innocence – never saying anything unless obliged to, and then speaking only truthfully – replies, ‘I don’t know.’ As if to prove it, he hands Salvatore the gun and unprotestingly lets him go off to shoot himself. A further concatenation of circumstances prevents this happening. Distraught, Salvatore asks, ‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’ Cesare replies: ‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’ There is a Beckettian allusion here, and Fitzgerald was an admirer of the playwright. But she was not a Beckettian writer herself. Her cosmology was less bleak, and also part-lit by religious belief. So the word ‘miracle’ is dropped in as an explanation of how Salvatore is saved from suicide (not as big and obvious a ‘miracle’ as at the end of The Gate of Angels, but even so one the author deems worth naming as such). The closing scene is in fact less Beckettian than Chekhovian: in the gulf between a ‘modern, scientific’, self-made character and a decent if dozy backdated bunch living out of their time; in the botched – or interrupted – attempt at suicide; and in the admission that work and life must continue, because that is what has been allotted to us.

Penelope Fitzgerald was nearly seventy when Innocence – the first of her four late, great novels – was published in 1986. It was profoundly not of its time or of its time’s mood. Though set in the recent past, it was not the fashionable recent past: the overlooked Fifties rather than the flashier Sixties. Nor was it one of those charming Anglo-Tuscan novels which play genteelly on the clash of cultures and serve to remind English readers of pleasant summer holidays. It is, on the contrary, a fully Italian novel, peopled with Italian characters, and whose English ones are brash and baffled outsiders. Its title announces its high-minded theme, while its original cover (chosen by Fitzgerald herself) showed a detail from Pontormo’s Visitation in the church of San Michele, Carmignano, near Prato. When Innocence came out, it was mostly well reviewed, though not shortlisted for the Booker Prize, whose jury – of four women and one man – gave the prize that year to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Amis’s last decade was one of sour and narrowing decline and loosening syntax; Fitzgerald’s last decade was one of artistic reinvention, heightened ambition, and a constant, generous yet amused interest in the world. Writers, over the long run, are judged by the truths they detect about the human condition, and the artistry with which they represent those truths. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence will last as long as mature and careful novel-readers continue to exist.

Julian Barnes

2013

Part One

1

Anyone can tell when they are passing the Ridolfi villa, the Ricordanza, because of the stone statues of what are known as ‘the Dwarfs’ on the highest part of the surrounding walls. You see them best from the right hand side of the road, driving towards Val di Pesa. Strictly speaking they are not dwarfs, but midgets, that’s to say they represent adults of less than 1.3 metres, pathologically small, but quite in proportion.

Because the villa’s grounds slope sharply away to the southwest nothing, from the road, can be seen beyond them. You just see the coping and the gestures of the midgets, poised against the airy blue wash of the sky. Some of these gestures are welcoming, as though signalling to the passer-by to come in, some suggest quite the contrary. You can buy coloured postcards of the villa, but the statues don’t look quite the same as they do in old engravings, or even in the older postcards. Perhaps some of them have been replaced.

The owner of La Ricordanza, in 1568, was a member of the Ridolfi family, certainly, but a midget, married to a midget, and with a daughter, born to them after many disappointments, who was also a midget. They seem to have been by no means the only family in this predicament, or something like it, at the time. There were, for example, the Valmarana at Monte Berico, just outside Verona. Here the daughter of the house was a dwarf, and in order that she should never know that she was different from the rest of the world, only dwarfs were allowed into the Villa Valmarana as her playmates and attendants. At the Ricordanza, however, Count Ridolfi consulted a medical man of scholarly reputation, Paolo della Torre, who practised at Torre da Santacroce. Paolo advised him in a letter that it was all very well for the Valmarana, who had an abundance of dwarfs in both the villages beneath their walls. Travellers through those parts used to make a detour to see these dwarfs, and if none appeared the carriage-driver would offer to get down from his seat and root them out of their dwellings to be looked at. It was not realized at the time that the inhabitants of Monte Berico suffered from a lung disease and the low concentration of oxygen in their blood produced a high incidence of dwarfism.

‘Such people would not be suitable to serve your worship,’ Paolo went on. ‘I would advise you not to lament the scarcity of them at the Ricordanza. In respect to stock, or race, we must remember that, in Macchiavelli’s words, Nature has implanted in everything a hidden energy which gives its own resemblance to everything that springs from it, making it like itself. We can see the truth of this in the lemon tree, whose smallest twig, even if the tree is unfortunate enough to be barren, still has the fragrance which is the soul of the lemon.’ This letter was relevant, and it was civilized, but it was not helpful. With great difficulty and many enquiries the Ridolfi followed up reported instances of midget families, so that by the time she was six their only child had a retinue suitable to her position, a tiny governess, a tiny doctor, a tiny notary, and so forth, all to size. The child never went out, and was confident that the world consisted of people less than 1.3 metres high. To amuse her, a dwarf (not a midget) was sent for from Valmarana, but without success. She pitied him, because she thought how much he must suffer from knowing that, as a dwarf, he was different from anyone else at Ricordanza. Then, in trying harder and harder to make her laugh, he fell and cracked his head, which made the little girl cry so bitterly that he had to be sent away.

The Ridolfi suffered from having to practise so many deceptions on their daughter. But deception, to a quite unexpected extent, grows easier with habit. The whole property had, of course, been extensively adapted, although only one of the special stairways through the gardens remains today, with its miniature steps of grass and marble. As to the statues, none of them were made by local sculptors, though so many stone-quarries were handy. The commission was given to someone completely unknown, thought by some authorities to have been a Turkish prisoner of war.

At the same time Count Ridolfi heard of a little midget girl, illegitimate but of good family, who lived as far away as Terracina, and they arranged for her to come and live with them. Fortunately she was born dumb, or, at all events, when she arrived at the Ricordanza she was dumb. It was impossible, therefore, for her to describe the human beings she had seen while she lived outside the walls of the villa.

All the care and attention of the little Ridolfi were now for Gemma da Terracina. Having failed to teach this new and beloved friend to talk, which was something even the cage birds could do, she asked to give up studying Latin and Greek herself, or, at least, never to have them read aloud. Music was an even more serious matter. The Ridolfi had a private organist, and nobody who has ever seen it will ever forget the toy-like instrument in the salotto, whose sounds are still as clear as a bird’s. It must have been a sacrifice to silence this organ, and probably quite a needless one, since there was no proof that Gemma was deaf.

But less than twelve months later Gemma began to grow at a very noticeable rate, as though her body had set itself to make up for its eight stunted years. By the next spring she was a head taller than the family doctor, who lived with the chaplain and the notary in a suite of rooms built for them over the chapel. The doctor, consulted, had very little to suggest. He tried administering oil of juniper to stunt the growth, and then, when this failed, a remedy of Pliny’s, who says that Greek tradesmen used to rub a hyacinth bulb over young slaves to prevent the growth of pubic hair. The Ridolfi began to fear that their doctor was a fool. In anguish, they searched on all sides for better advice. Della Torre was, once again, of little comfort. Another letter of his, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale, points out the folly, in the last resort, of attempting to reverse Nature. ‘Don’t be so concerned,’ he adds, ‘with the matter of happiness.’ There is also an exchange between Ridolfi and his brother, the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, who says nothing about Nature, but warns that human happiness must be left to Heaven. ‘Certainly,’ the Count replies, ‘as far as I myself am concerned, but surely I am right to exert myself on other people’s account, what better study could there be?’ And his daughter was not in the least concerned about herself, only about her friend. She knew, after all, that if Gemma were ever to have to go back to the outside world, where no-one was more than 1.3 metres in height, she would be treated as a monster — dumb, into the bargain, and unable to explain herself. The whole situation was cruelly embarrassing already. And the little girl took to walking a few steps ahead of Gemma, so that their shadows would be seen to be the same length.

The Count reflected that neither Nature nor Heaven has allowed for anyone, certainly not for any child, with such a compassionate heart as this only daughter of his. Impossible and unthinkable to separate her now from Gemma, and he was driven to promise her that if she could think of any way to help Gemma in her desperate condition they would try it, no matter what the cost.

She was now about eight years old, the age at which the mind works logically and without hesitation on what it has learned so far, because it is not troubled by the possibility of any other system. It was for this reason (for instance) that she had never questioned the fact that she herself was confined to Ricordanza. She knew, on the other hand, something about pain, and that it was worth suffering to a certain extent if it led to something more appropriate or more beautiful. Sometimes, for example, when it was a special occasion, she had her hair curled. That hurt a little. The lemon trees, too, on the terraces of the Ricordanza, were sometimes dipped by the gardeners in boiling water, so that they lost all their leaves but the new leaves grew back more strongly.

Meanwhile, Gemma had taken to going up and down the wrong steps in the garden, the old flights of giant steps which had been left here and there and should have been used only for the occasional games. The little Ridolfi made a special intention, and prayed to be shown the way out of her difficulties. In a few weeks an answer suggested itself. Since Gemma must never know the increasing difference between herself and the rest of the world, she would be better off if she was blind — happier, that is, if her eyes were put out. And since there seemed no other way to stop her going up and down the wrong staircases, it would be better for her, surely, in the long run, if her legs were cut off at the knee.

2

This story is not the one given out nowadays in the leaflet provided by the Azienda di Turismo or by the Committee for Visiting the Most Beautiful Villas of Florence — it starts in the same way, but ends differently. Nor, probably, is the Ricordanza, for all its high and airy position, for all its lemon terraces, really one of the most beautiful villas of Florence. Nor, in a sense, is the present Count Ridolfi really a Count, although the leaflet calls him that, because all titles were abolished in Italy after the Second World War. And, in the course of their descent, the Ridolfi family has taken so many turns and half-turns, so many doubtful passages, that the past generations can hardly be held responsible for those of the twentieth century. No more midgets among them now. Still a tendency towards rash decisions, perhaps, always intended to ensure other people’s happiness, once and for all. It seems an odd characteristic to survive for so many years. Perhaps it won’t do so for much longer.

3

In 1955 Giancarlo Ridolfi, at the age of sixty-five, had made a serious decision to outface the last part of his life, and indeed of his character, by not minding about anything very much. But his resolution was shaken not only by his love for his daughter Chiara, but by concern for his elder sister, Maddalena. This was at the time when Chiara, having just turned eighteen, told them that she wanted to marry a doctor, Doctor Salvatore Rossi. He was young, not so very young, thirtyish, a specialist at the S. Agostino Hospital, clever, very hard-working. ‘Hard-working, I suppose that means he’s from the South,’ said Maddalena.

Giancarlo had been born in 1890, by which time the Italian nobility had been put in their place, and no longer held important public office. His father had brought him up quietly on the small family farm of Valsassina, thirty kilometres to the east of Florence. All of them lived quietly, in reduced circumstances (the Ridolfi were never, at any time, successful with money). The old Count had his clothes made by a country tailor, and went down in the evening to drink wine, the wine from his own estate, at the village cantina, where jokes improved every time they were repeated. Until the 1900s the family had never been to the seaside and had no idea that it might be a place to go to, instead of the mountains, for holidays. In 1904 they suddenly all went to Milan, about which they had known nothing either, to hear the first performance of Madam Butterfly. It was as if the clouds had opened, then they went back to Valsassina. When the cinema came to the village they were allowed to go to the tattered old Terza Visione movies which were projected onto the whitewashed yard wall of the cantina. If anyone got up to go to the urinal their shadows crossed the screen in giant’s form. The one other concession which the old Count made was to buy his son a new kind of toy, a wristwatch: this was in 1910, not long after the first wristwatch was created for the aviator Santos-Dumont. After that he liked to ask the small boy, whenever occasion arose — Well, tell us the time! — but the occasions weren’t so frequent in a place like Valsassina where the hour of the day was obvious enough from the length of the shadows. All the same the tenants in the fields and the servants who joined in the conversation as they handed round the dishes couldn’t resist asking the child to take another look — Tell us the time!

When he was eleven, the father died. The younger brother stayed on at the farm. Relatives took Maddalena and Giancarlo in hand, but they were separated. Giancarlo was sent first to England, and then to Switzerland, to learn business, but could make nothing of it, and not much more of the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, which he studied at university. He fought through the First World War in the cavalry, and was employed afterwards in the Remounts department. In 1931 his old philosophy teacher became one of the handful of professors who protested against Fascism. He was dismissed, and appealed for help. Giancarlo remembered that Croce had taught that politics were a mere passion, not the right occupation for a thinking man, but did not like to let his teacher down. As a result he found himself under house-arrest at the cliff-like family palazzo in Florence. Most of the rooms were let out, but only very low rents, if any, are paid to a man in disgrace. He was obliged to tell Annunziata, the cook, that he had no ready money, by which he really meant that he seemed to have no money of any kind. Annunziata knew this, and told him that he ought to take good advice.

His younger brother was an uncommunicative man, with a wife who was not encouraged to talk either, and a silent little son. But there was a brother-in-law, a Monsignor Gondi who was at the Curia and knew everyone in Rome. Giancarlo consulted him, and Giuseppe Gondi went so far in compromising himself as to answer by post, though in general terms. ‘So far you have not been well advised. Pray and meditate constantly, and follow the traditions of your country and of the ancient nobility.’ Giancarlo thought over these words and their unspecified meaning for some months, and then followed the strongest tradition of nobility he could think of by marrying a wealthy American. But he had no acquisitive sense, and when war broke out once more she left him, an ageing father with a two-year-old daughter, and in the same precarious state as before.

How unfortunate that Maddalena, violently opposed to Mussolini and living in England, should have married a man who quite mistakenly thought she was a wealthy foreigner, and whose main interest lay in watching waterfowl and wading birds! However much thought one took, how could such a man be made happy? The turn their marriages took brought Giancarlo and his sister together again, or at least brought both of them to the apartment in the Piazza Limbo.

In appearance Maddalena had a meagreness which suggested that she might not be long for this world, although this was contradicted by her persistent good health. Her firmness Giancarlo would have appreciated if there had been any way of telling what she would be firm about next. Take the matter of the third and fourth fingers of her right hand. They were missing, having been taken off with a pair of sharp poultry-nippers by a thief sitting behind her on the 33 bus coming back from Bagno a Ripoli. The diamond ring given her by her English husband in their happier days was of course the object. The incident was not at all an unusual one, and the strong-minded Maddalena refused to make any kind of official complaint. She regarded the loss, she said, as a tax which all those who have something to be stolen must expect to pay. ‘Calculate in any given year to pay out one-fiftieth of your movable possessions,’ she said. On that principle, Giancarlo told her, she would lose one finger every five years. ‘How long do you intend to live?’

Chiara, coming and going from an English convent school, was distressed by her Aunt Mad. There was the matter of the Refuge for the Unwanted. The failure of old people to be happy tormented Auntie Mad. The rest of the population endures their company only on sufferance. No-one, even under religious obedience, enjoys being with the old for long periods — with one exception, however, babies, who are prepared to smile at anything even roughly in human shape. Why not, therefore, a Refuge where the old folk could wear out their days looking after homeless infants? The toothless would comfortably co-exist with the toothless. ‘But these ancients won’t be competent, they’ll forget which child is which.’ ‘At times, possibly.’ ‘They’ll drop them.’ ‘One child or two, perhaps, but what a sense of usefulness!’ In the confusion of the postwar, during the quarrelsome rebuilding of Florence, it was easy to do unusual things, even bribery was scarcely necessary. Pretty well all that she had left Maddalena spent on her foundation. It was in via Sansepolcro, and fortunately cost very little to run. The old women were all from the country. They were used to washing clothes in cold water, and scrubbing the floor with sand.

Giancarlo couldn’t remember what his sister had been like in their childhood. Remote though it was, she must, surely, have been like something, but never, he thought, like me.

Perhaps, at the moment, sitting in the second floor flat of the decrepit palazzo, in a salon full of marble statuary, as yellow as old teeth, but with a freshness in the light from the river only a street away, they were doing no more than talking things over, as others do. What distinguished them was their optimism. Even disagreements between them produced hope.

If Chiara was to marry this Doctor Rossi, where was the wedding lunch to be? They had thought, of course, of the Ricordanza. It was true that at any celebration there Annunziata would be an absolute nuisance. Insanely cautious, she insisted that any guests from Rome (with the exception of the Monsignore), or indeed from anywhere south of the Umbrian border, were likely to need watching. Before and after they left she counted the spoons in a raucous whisper. That had happened, for instance, when Giancarlo, with the idea of raising money on the property, had given a lunch party at the villa for some Roman bankers. But the scheme had been likely to fail in any case. Giancarlo was not the kind of person who ever made money. He should have applied himself harder to his business studies in Switzerland.

But then it turned out that Chiara didn’t, while deeply anxious not to distress anyone, want her wedding to be at the Ricordanza. ‘Where she used to play all morning!’ Mad exclaimed, ‘in the shadows of the lemon trees.’ It seemed, however, that Dr Rossi wasn’t in favour of it. But surely Chiara had a will of her own?

‘Of course she has,’ said Giancarlo. ‘That is why she is able to change her mind.’ And it became clear to them that Chiara wanted a country wedding. ‘That means the farm. I shall go out to Valsassina and talk to Cesare about it myself. He won’t know what’s going on, it won’t have occurred to him to ask. I shall go to Valsassina tomorrow.’

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