The Battle of the Villa Fiorita by Rumer Godden

Author:Rumer Godden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504040365
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

8

‘Pia? Who is Pia?’ asked Caddie.

‘Rob’s little girl.’

‘I didn’t know he had a little girl.’ Fanny thought she had not known it either. She knew of Pia, of course, but it had not really dawned on her, perhaps not really on Rob. He was oddly silent about his affairs while I … I have been making a clamour, thought Fanny, as she had thought when she had touched the split olive tree, still making a clamour; she had been selfish, so absorbed in her own children that she had forgotten the existence of his. How could I? she thought, ashamed.

‘Pia is ten, almost two years younger than you,’ she told Caddie now. ‘Her mother, Lucia, died when she was born.’

‘Her mother died? Oh! Then Rob didn’t put her away.’

‘Caddie! What an expression.’

‘That’s what the Bible says.’

It was only, Fanny told herself, that those words had caught Caddie’s attention; she meant nothing deeper than that, but all the same Fanny seemed to glimpse something formidable in Caddie. ‘Nonsense. She’s only half aware of what goes on,’ she told herself, but Rob did not seem to think so. ‘That child’s an infant Hannibal,’ he said.

‘Why Hannibal?’ Fanny smiled.

‘Hannibal took a solemn oath he would never be at peace with the Romans. I’m the Romans,’ said Rob. ‘He crossed the Alps; they had never been crossed by an army before. I don’t remember hearing of a child fighting a divorce.’

‘Rob, don’t be absurd. Caddie’s not fighting, not consciously, Hugh perhaps, but …’

‘Caddie is fighting,’ said Rob, ‘and she’s a good fighter. In fact I’m not sure she isn’t the general, and her arguments are like elephants. They squash you flat.’

It had been his own fault. He had introduced it, the thing they had been careful not to talk of all through that dinner at the Continentale, until warmed by the wine, the good food, the intimate atmosphere of the restaurant, he had been moved to try to talk of himself and Fanny in a way he had thought a child would understand. Perhaps, too, Saladin was pervading his mind. ‘If this were a tournament – and life is a tournament,’ he had said – ‘if your father and I were knights … well, we fought, and I won Fanny. If I won her, shouldn’t I be able to enjoy her?’ But Caddie had no use for knights, she lived strictly in the present. ‘I won Topaz, and I wasn’t able to enjoy him,’ she said.

Her face had gone back to the sullen heaviness he had known before and she laid down her knife and fork. It had taken Rob ten minutes and all the blandishments of the waiter, the display on the trolley, to get her to eat again. She had torta di mandorle. She had never tasted anything as delectable, but for ever afterwards torta di mandorle tasted, to Caddie, of treason.

‘She will sleep it off,’ Rob had said, but Caddie’s broken night stayed broken. With the first dawn she had appeared at Hugh’s bedside.

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