Mrs. Osmond by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

XX

The day had indeed cooled somewhat. The sunlit mist in the valley had softened from glitter to glow, and even the crickets seemed less desperate in the flinging out of their nets of scraped and numbingly vibrant song. In the shade of the house’s overhanging roof a little round wrought-iron table had been set up on the gravel beside the riotous rose-beds; it was covered with a linen cloth, and laid with all the implements requisite for the taking of afternoon tea. This delightful ceremony, so characteristically English, though gently anachronistic here, in the midst of so much southern vehemence of temperature and light, was one of Osmond’s more recently acquired affectations; in fact, the custom had been instituted at about the time, as the countess had not failed to note, of Lord Warburton’s appearance in Rome. That appearance had proved to be, to Osmond’s well-disguised but bitter disappointment, lamentably fleeting, the cause for lamentation being the fond father’s unfulfilled wish to marry his only daughter to the great man. Another well-gnawed bone of contention between husband and wife was Osmond’s unshakeable conviction that it was Isabel who, with much subtlety and deceitfulness, had prevented the marriage of Lord Warburton and Pansy, out of her unresting jealousy, and a simple determination to subvert her husband’s plans and desires wherever and whenever she lit upon them.

Tea was served by Giancarlo, the dustily frock-coated major-domo, whose rule here at the Villa Castellani had been well-established long before Mr. Osmond first took up residence in the house; such indeed was the aspect of venerable decay the servant displayed in his person that one might have been forgiven for thinking him not much younger in years than the casa di campagna itself, which, as a sheaf of yellowed parchments could show to a visitor’s inquisitive eye, had been standing for the better part of a millennium. He mumbled to himself as he attended to the master and his guest—the countess he addressed as Signora Osmond, evidently mistaking her for Isabel—plying the teapot with a gnarled brown quaking hand, and managing to leave in both their saucers a substantial spillage of tea as pale as straw. Osmond was surprisingly tolerant and even to a degree solicitous of the ancient retainer: the intricacies and contradictions of her brother’s personality were a recurring source of bafflement to the countess. In general she judged Osmond to be wicked, not in the magnificent manner of one of those figures from history whom she knew he so admired and matched himself against, a Machiavelli or a Lorenzo de’ Medici—she was sure there were more apt examples whose names she was not acquainted with, for there were wide gaps in her knowledge of the history of this exhaustingly historical land—but in cautious and petty ways, never venturing beyond the secure boundaries of his powers. He might torment his wife, which without doubt he had been doing behind closed shutters for a very long time, or contrive by any and every means

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