202. Love in the Dark Page 7

  “Go to bed, Miss Brown,” Mr. Chambers suggested. “You will have plenty of time to explore everything tomorrow. I know you must be tired.”

  “I am a little,” Susanna admitted. “It must be the constant vibration of the train.”

  “I would like to thank you,” Mr. Chambers said unexpectedly, “for the way that you have kept our patient interested during what has undoubtedly been a long and exhausting four days.”

  Susanna looked please and he continued,

  “I am convinced that it is very bad for him to work himself up, as he did all the way across the Atlantic, into an angry despair, railing against Fate and refusing to be optimistic about the future.”

  “I have tried to help him.”

  “And you have done so. I can only think that we were very lucky after so many disappointments to find you.”

  He must have thought that Susanna looked surprised for he added,

  “The advertisement had been in The Times for three days before you came to us.”

  He smiled as he went on,

  “I was getting extremely tired of hearing applicants mispronounce the simplest French words and I know that Mr. Dunblane felt the same.”

  “I am sorry for him.”

  “If he regains his eyesight in the end,” Mr. Chambers commented, “perhaps what has happened will do him good.”

  “Do him good?” Susanna queried.

  “Everything in his life has gone right for him up to now. He had been a golden boy in more ways than one.”

  “Like Lorenzo the Magnificent,” Susanna said without thinking.

  Mr. Chambers laughed.

  “I daresay you are right and you must look at the terracotta bust of Lorenzo by Verrocchio. It is one of my favourite works of art.”

  “I would love to see it.”

  “Then I promise you that I will make arrangements as soon as we are settled in to take you into the City and I know without asking that you want to visit the Uffizi Gallery.”

  “Of course!”

  She had gone to bed feeling excited. There was so much for her to see and now, as she stood in the sunshine in the garden gazing at the view, she realised that her imagination had failed to envisage even a tenth of the wonder of it.

  She walked further into the garden looking at the flowers with delight until she remembered almost guiltily that her employer would not be able to see them.

  She bent down to pick a few sweet-scented lilies which were so delicate and exquisite it seemed strange that they should be related to the huge arum lilies that one always associated with the decoration of Churches or even the more graceful bell-shaped Madonna lilies.

  Those she had picked, Susanna thought, were like tiny angel voices that could hardly make themselves heard in a Church choir.

  Then she felt shy because she had been whimsical.

  ‘Everything is so beautiful,’ she told herself, ‘that I must remember that I am the only ugly feature in a picture of translucent loveliness that could only be captured by a Master.’

  She was not complaining, she thought, about her own appearance, she was only using her common sense to prevent herself from being carried away into an ecstasy that she was not really entitled to.

  She walked round a clump of shrubs covered in blossom and saw to her surprise a large swimming pool. At least that was what she supposed it was, for she had never seen one before.

  She would have thought that it was merely an artificial pond if it had not been lined with blue tiles and surrounded by flagstones. Also the water was moving constantly and it was so clear that she could see the bottom.

  “Are you intending to have a swim, Miss Brown?” a voice asked her and Mr. Chambers joined her.

  “I thought it must be a swimming pool.” Susanna said. “I have heard that Americans have them in their gardens in America, but I have never actually seen one before.”

  “Mr. Dunblane’s father put one in when he converted the Villa,” Mr. Chambers explained.

  “Do you swim?”

  “I used to when I first came here,” he replied, “but now I find it rather tiring so I leave such strenuous exercise to young people like yourself. You will find the water warm even at this hour of the morning.”

  “Oh! I could not swim here,” Susanna said quickly, “though I did learn to swim when I was a child in the lake at my home.”

  “No one will see you,” Mr. Chambers answered, “and, as we try to provide our guests with everything they require, you will find a number of bathing dresses in the pavilion on the other side of the pool. Don’t be shy. Have a dip whenever you feel like it.”

  “Thank you, I will think about it.”

  She knew as she spoke that she would be far too shy to go into the pool being well aware how fat and ungainly she would look in a bathing dress.

  She had seen fat old women bathing at Brighton when she and May have gone there once to convalesce after having whooping cough.

  They had laughed at the spectacle people made of themselves bobbing up and down in the waves and Susanna knew that she would hate to be laughed at in the same manner.

  ‘At the same time,’ she thought a little wistfully, ‘I would love to swim in that beautiful pool.’

  Although Mr. Dunblane would not see her, Mr. Chambers might do so, besides Clint and all the servants.

  ‘No! It is something I will never do,’ she told herself resolutely.

  Carrying her lilies she walked back with Mr. Chambers to the Villa and found that breakfast was waiting for them on a sheltered verandah with a different view of Florence.

  Now there was the Arno glittering in the sunshine, spanned by many bridges and she could see clearly the oldest and most famous of them, the Ponte Vecchio.

  ‘How can I ever be grateful enough for being here?’ she asked with a little throb in her voice.

  Almost as if it was in answer to her question, Clint came into the room.

  “The Master wants you at once, Miss Brown,” he said. “He feels he’s bein’ neglected.”

  “Oh! dear!” Mr. Chambers exclaimed, “I should have gone to see him before I had my breakfast.”

  “There is no hurry for you, sir,” Clint said. “It’s the young lady he’s askin’ for and it’s best not to keep him waitin’.”

  “No – of course not,” Susanna said.

  She had not finished her breakfast, but she jumped up from the table and, picking up the little bunch of lilies, followed Clint along the cool passages and through a lovely courtyard surrounded with cloisters into an enormous bedroom.

  On a dais there was a bed, draped with curtains which fell from a high carved corona of flying angels and beneath them on the bedhead was an enormous Coat of Arms emblazoned with colour.

  Below it Mr. Dunblane looked very strange and unreal enveloped in his bandages

  “Where have you been?” he asked sharply. “No one has come to see me, although I suppose that you and Chambers were enjoying yourselves in the sunshine.”

  “I have been looking at the view and exploring the garden and found your swimming pool,” Susanna said. “It is all like a Fairy story.”

  “If you are envisaging yourself as the Princess in it, I must point out,” Mr. Dunblane said, “that the Prince is being somewhat neglected.”

  “I am sorry,” Susanna said, “but as it is still very early, I thought that you would be asleep.”

  “Sleep! Sleep! That is all anyone wants me to do. Nobody cares if I lie rotting in my bed as long as they can enjoy themselves.”

  “That is not true and you know it,” Susanna pointed out in her soft voice. “However grumble away if you want to, I am here to listen to you.”

  “I suppose you were going to say that you are paid to do so, you are – ”

  “I was not going to say that, but now you mention it, the answer is yes!”

  Mr. Dunblane gave a little laugh

  “Damn you. You never allow me to be really sorry for myself.”

 
“Why should I when you have so much to be grateful for.”

  “What?”

  “I am not going to reply to that question,” Susanna answered. “You can count your mercies as well as anyone else and what has happened to your Third Eye this morning?”

  “It’s not there!”

  “That I do not believe. So we will try and see if it works. Tell me what these are.”

  She bent forward as she spoke and held the lilies a little way from the hole in the bandages that he breathed through.

  “Did you pick them in the garden?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Susanna answered, “and, as they are small and insignificant, I thought that they would be gratified to be allowed to come and see you while their more flamboyant friends were left outside!”

  Mr. Dunblane laughed again.

  “You are an amazing woman! Well, you can earn your keep by reading me the newspapers if they have arrived, before I tell you when you can go and look at your own face in the Uffizi Gallery.”

  Susanna drew in her breath.

  If he only knew what she really looked like, she thought. Then she told herself that she would not spoil her own happiness and her own delight in being in Florence by telling him the truth.

  How amid such loveliness could she bear to say?

  ‘I am plain, ugly and fat!’

  “When you do allow me to visit the Uffizi,” she said aloud, “I will tell you whom I most resemble, Simonetta Vespucci, the model for Botticelli's Venus, or the intelligent young lady who sat for Fra Filippo Lippi.”

  She paused before she added,

  “I have read that she may have been Lucrezia Buti, who ran away from a Convent to be with the artist.”

  “Of course you must not forget to recognise me in Lorenzo the Magnificent,” Mr. Dunblane said.

  “Naturally,” Susanna agreed. “The things Mr. Chambers has told me about you makes me quite certain that you were Lorenzo in a previous incarnation.”

  She spoke mockingly and Mr. Dunblane said suspiciously,

  “I suppose that far from flattering me you are predicting that eventually I shall fall from grace and, apart from financial difficulties, succumb to gout.”

  “That is a long way ahead.”

  “In the meantime my sins have caught up with me in another form of punishment.”

  “Now you are being morbid, sir,” Susanna retorted. “How can your accident have anything to do with your sins?”

  “Perhaps like Lorenzo, I was puffed up with pride and determined to be first in everything I undertook. Surely you would say that the punishment fitted the crime?”

  “I should say nothing of the sort,” Susanna answered almost crossly. “I think this sort of introspection is very bad for you, so I will read you the news.”

  She saw that beside the bed there was an Italian newspaper and an American one. The Italian was a week old and she thought that it must have travelled with them from England.

  “There are two newspapers here,” she said. “Which would you prefer first, the Italian or the New York Times?”

  “You have the New York Times,” Mr. Dunblane exclaimed. “Why have you not read it to me before?”

  “For the very good reason that it was not given to me,” Susanna replied.

  “Well, read it now! Turn to the sporting pages and see if there is anything about the motor car trials.”

  Susanna looked at him in surprise. For the first time she thought that perhaps his accident had something to do with motor racing.

  Mr. Chambers had not mentioned it and she had thought in her mind that he had been involved in an ordinary road accident such as took place quite frequently since motor cars had appeared on the roads.

  Despite the fact that motor cars were restricted to travelling at sensible speeds they frightened the horses who often plunged about in their terror, upsetting the carriage that they were attached to and occasionally with disastrous consequences.

  Quite a number of her mother’s friends travelled about London in an electric Brougham and her father had talked of buying a motor car in which they could reach the country more quickly than they did behind his thoroughbred horses. This was very different, Susanna knew, from the motor car races that she believed, although she was vague about them, had been part of the American development of the vehicle.

  Henry was the one person in their family who was really thrilled by motor cars. In fact when he was home from Eton he talked about little else.

  Now, thinking back, Susanna had always been a good listener to her young brother’s enthusiasms and now she recalled his telling her that the previous year a Stanley Steam Car had reached an incredibly high speed on Daytona Beach.

  As she tried to find the sports page of the New York Times, not being familiar with that newspaper, she wondered, as Mr. Dunblane had, why it had not been given to her before.

  It was difficult as she glanced down the page to find anything about motor cars and then at last, she discovered it.

  “Oh! here it is,” she exclaimed at length.

  “What does it say?” Mr. Dunblane asked and Susanna read aloud,

  “There is no doubt that Felice Nazzaro’s Fiats, which dominated the major races this year, are expected to win the Targa Florios. Although Louis Coatalen, an expatriate Frenchman, has designed a 25 HP Hillman for the 190 TT.”

  “Is there nothing about American motor cars?” Mr. Dunblane asked sharply.

  Susanna looked quickly down the next few paragraphs and then read out,

  “It is anticipated that the world’s first supercharged car, a six cylinder Chadwick, will be seen in the new American Grand Prix race in Savannah and Robertson’s Locomobile is tipped to win the Vanderbilt Cup.”

  “What else?” Mr. Dunblane asked in a voice that was surprisingly urgent.

  “America is now very prominent in the motor world, her car production having exceeded that of France in 1906. Falcons have swept the market so far, but it is whispered that Henry Ford has put into production an amazing Model T, an ultra-simple, almost totally indestructible vehicle, which will bring reliable motoring within nearly everyone’s reach.”

  Before Susanna finished speaking, Mr. Dunblane gave a cry that was almost a scream.

  “Why was I not told this? Why the devil has it been kept from me?” he asked furiously. “Get Chambers, tell him to come here immediately!”

  He spoke so loudly and so fiercely that Susanna instinctively rose to her feet.

  “Go on, fetch him! What the hell are you waiting for!” Mr. Dunblane now bellowed.

  Frightened at his violence Susanna ran from the bedroom to find Mr. Chambers.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Susanna was on the terrace staring at the view when an hour or so later Mr. Chambers came and joined her.

  He was carrying a large pile of papers in his hand and she turned to say,

  “I am sorry – very sorry if I – upset him.”

  “It was my fault,” Mr. Chambers replied. “I brought the New York Times from London and very stupidly left it in the sitting room. Clint picked it up and thought that I intended for Mr. Dunblane to have it.”

  “He seemed to be upset because Mr. Henry Ford is bringing out a new car,” Susanna said, “and I thought perhaps he had investments in other makes.”

  She had been thinking as she was waiting that American fortunes that were made so quickly could doubtless disappear at the same speed.

  Her father had spoken of disastrous financial crashes on Wall Street and she remembered once a terrible commotion because some of his friends had invested in a gold mine in which the seam ran out.

  “It is something like that,” Mr. Chambers replied and Susanna felt that he did not wish her to ask any more questions.

  ‘It is no concern of mine,’ she told herself. ‘At the same time, if Mr. Dunblane loses a great deal of money he might have to sell this wonderful Villa and would certainly not be able to live in the comfort he enjoys now.’


  “I think Mr. Dunblane would like you to go back to him,” Mr. Chambers said, “and I suggest that after luncheon, while he rests, we go into Florence and you can have a quick look at some of the pictures that you are longing to see.”

  “Can we really do that?” Susanna asked excitedly.

  “We will try,” Mr. Chambers promised, “although if Mr. Dunblane wants you I am afraid that we shall have to wait until another day.”

  Susanna hurried back to Mr. Dunblane’s bedroom and, when she knocked on the door and he called out ‘come in’, she found to her surprise that he was not in the huge curtained bed, but sitting in an armchair by the window, which was wide open.

  “Oh, you are up,” she exclaimed, “I am so glad. I am sure it is important for you to breathe this lovely warm air.”

  “Stop fussing about me,” Mr. Dunblane replied, “and if you have something positive to ‘soothe my fevered brow’, I should like to hear it.”

  Susanna looked at him a little nervously, feeling that he was still upset.

  She had automatically picked up several books on her way to his bedroom and, because she was so excited with the idea of visiting Florence, she had not looked at them very carefully.

  Now she saw that one was the book that she had read to him before about Lorenzo the Magnificent and she felt that perhaps they had exhausted their conversation on that subject. Instead she looked quickly at the others to find something different that would interest him.

  Then surprisingly he said,

  “I have changed my mind. Talk to me, tell me about your life and why you have to earn your living.”

  It was fortunate that he could not see the startled expression in her eyes.

  “You will find that a very boring subject,” she replied evasively. “I would much rather talk about you or this wonderful Villa that your father has made so perfect.”

  There was no response to this and after a moment she said,

  “I would also like you to tell me about Florence. When people speak of a place they know, it is always so much more interesting than a guide book.”