The Lovers Read online

  MORRIS LANGLO WEST was born in St Kilda, Melbourne, in 1916. At the age of fourteen, he entered the Christian Brothers seminary ‘as a kind of refuge’ from a difficult childhood. He attended the University of Melbourne and worked as a teacher. In 1941 he left the Christian Brothers without taking final vows. During World War II West worked as a code breaker, and for a time he was private secretary to former prime minister Billy Hughes.

  After the war, West became a successful writer and producer of radio serials. In 1955 he left Australia to build an international career as a writer and lived with his family in Austria, Italy, England and the USA. West also worked for a time as the Vatican correspondent for the British newspaper, the Daily Mail. He returned to Australia in 1982.

  Morris West wrote 30 books and many plays, and several of his novels were adapted for film. His books were published in 28 languages and sold more than 70 million copies worldwide. Each new book he wrote after he became an established writer sold more than one million copies.

  West received many awards and accolades over his long writing career, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the W.H. Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature for The Devil’s Advocate. In 1978 he was elected a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 1985, and was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 1997.

  Morris West died at his desk in 1999.

  THE MORRIS WEST COLLECTION

  FICTION

  Moon in My Pocket (1945,as Julian Morris)

  Gallows on the Sand (1956)

  Kundu (1957)

  The Big Story (US title: The Crooked Road) (1957)

  The Concubine (US title: McCreary Moves In) (1958)

  The Second Victory (US title: Backlash) (1958)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1959)

  The Naked Country (1960)

  Daughter of Silence (1961)

  The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

  The Ambassador (1965)

  The Tower of Babel (1968)

  Summer of the Red Wolf (1971)

  The Salamander (1973)

  Harlequin (1974)

  The Navigator (1976)

  Proteus (1979)

  The Clowns of God (1981)

  The World is Made of Glass (1983)

  Cassidy (1986)

  Masterclass (1988)

  Lazarus (1990)

  The Ringmaster (1991)

  The Lovers (1993)

  Vanishing Point (1996)

  Eminence (1998)

  The Last Confession (2000, published posthumously)

  PLAYS

  The Illusionists (1955)

  The Devil’s Advocate (1961)

  Daughter of Silence (1962)

  The Heretic (1969)

  The World is Made of Glass (1982)

  NON-FICTION

  Children of the Sun (US title: Children of the Shadows) (1957)

  Scandal in the Assembly

  (1970, with Richard Frances)

  A View from the Ridge (1996, autobiography)

  Images and Inscriptions (1997, selected by Beryl Barraclough)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Terms used in the text do not always reflect current usage.

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  First published in Great Britain in 1993 by William Heinemann Ltd

  Copyright © The Morris West Collection 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

  Phone:

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  Cover design: Julia Eim

  Cover image: iStock

  ISBN 978 1 76029 773 2 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 76063 845 0 (ebook)

  For JOY,

  Companion of so many voyages

  Earth-mother to a scattered family,

  and for FINN,

  Latest addition to the tribe,

  with much, much love

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  A Letter from Rome

  BOOK ONE

  The Cruise of the Salamandra d’Oro

  INTERLUDES

  New York to Rome

  BOOK TWO

  A Weekend at Mongrifone

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Since this is the last novel I shall write, I beg to make a confession. This is a fiction, but a fiction transmuted from many realities: fragments of personal experience, portraits of men and women met along the pilgrim way, landscapes of islands and continents where I have sojourned in a travelling life.

  I have come now to an age when the curtains between fact, fiction and the final mystery are wearing thin, so the reader must beware of too hasty identifications. He is not he: she is not she. It’s a trick done with mirrors!

  The Farnese family became extinct in 1731. I have given myself the pleasure of resurrecting it by the addition of an ennobling predicate ‘di Mongrifone’.

  The heraldry of this resurrected family has been designed by Archbishop Bernard Bruno Heim, who for nearly forty years has been the accepted authority on all matters of heraldry in the Roman Catholic Church. He has designed the coats of arms of four popes, and the seals for their administrations.

  He bears no responsiblity at all for the follies of my Giulia or the machinations of her family and their modern peers. He lived through the epoch as I did. Unlike me, he has been bound by a clerical discretion not to record it.

  Morris L West

  Arms of Principessa Giulia Farnese di Mongrifone

  PROLOGUE

  A Letter from Rome

  Manhattan 1992

  Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had a chameleon reputation. The austere brass plaque outside his chambers in the Rue St Honoré in Paris described him, inadequately, as Counsellor in International Law. His wife, Louise, who was a very witty lady, described him as ‘a floor-walker in the Tower of Babel’, because his life was spent in a series of displacements: Beijing, Buenos Aires, London, Sydney, New York, Moscow.

  He defined himself with a certain irony: ‘My clients think I’m a magician. They pay me large sums of money to negotiate impossible bargains between incompatible characters under mutually contradictory systems of law. Of course there’s no magic! It’s a parlour trick I learned at my children’s birthday parties. Everyone has to get a slice of the cake. I make a big ceremony so they all feel uplifted by the sublimity of the occasion. I’ve got a good eye and a steady hand and I cut clean. For the rest, I’m an agreeable fellow who listens more than he talks and kisses ladies’ hands, never tells Irish jokes and sleeps with his own wife and not his client’s.’

  He was born under the sign of Taurus and this was his sixty-fifth birthday. He had spent seven weary hours of it in a Wall Street boardroom trying to mediate an agreem
ent between his own clients, a group of European bankers, and their counterparts in a US consortium. Both parties had lent heavily to an international corporation cobbled together out of a grab-bag of small but profitable enterprises which, the prospectus had promised, would merge into a single giant organism, spawning money as, a termite queen spawns offspring by the millions in her anthill.

  In fact, the investors and the bankers were landed with a genetic freak, doomed to disaster from day one. Within three years, the shareholders’ funds were all gone, loan covenants were in massive breach and the monster was dying on its feet, bleeding money by the minute. Unfortunately, the demise was a slow and expensive event because the bankers could not agree whether to dispatch the animal at one stroke or dismember the living body limb by limb for an extra margin of salvage. The Europeans wanted a swift execution. The Americans favoured a slow butchery. At five in the afternoon, Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh decided he had had enough. He invoked the Chair:

  ‘By your leave, sir! I have a statement to make, a final statement on behalf of my clients. They consider this debate has gone on long enough. They want the matter put to the vote forthwith. Before the motion is tabled, I beg to remind our colleagues of two lessons they all learned at business school: lesson one, never send good money after bad; lesson two, never try to butcher your own beef. It’s a bloody business. Leave it to the professionals. My advice, which my clients accept, is that at opening of business tomorrow, you file all necessary documents in all jurisdictions for the appointment of liquidators to wind up the company. Now, my clients have given me permission to withdraw. Today is my birthday. I’m going to spend what’s left of it in a private memorial service for my vanished youth. No flowers by request. Cash donations or contributions of liquor may be sent to my hotel. God keep you from harm in this wicked city! I bid you good evening!’

  The exit raised a laugh and a small round of applause. It also took the last heat out of the debate, so that before he reached his hotel the bankers had voted by a comfortable majority for the immediate dissolution of the corporation.

  The concierge handed him his key with a bunch of faxes and mail, most of it from his office in Paris. All of it could wait until he had washed the dust of the city out of his pores and the sour taste of business jargon out of his mouth.

  Finally, bathed, shaved and fortified with a drink, he began to work through the messages: birthday greetings from Louise and the family vacationing together in Ireland, sundry letters and a fax from an Italian company – Impresa Romagnola:

  We wish to retain your services as special counsel in certain matters affecting Italian shareholders of this company and their relations with American interests.

  Our need is urgent. It would be necessary that you arrive in Rome not later than Saturday the fourth of May and remain at least until the evening of Monday the sixth. You are kindly requested to confirm your acceptance and your arrival time by fax to this office. You will be met at the airport and lodged in comfortable accommodation just outside Rome. During your stay all our communication facilities will be at your disposal.

  In respectful anticipation of your consent, we enclose a bank draft for fifteen thousand US dollars to cover an initial retainer and your travelling expenses. We hope most earnestly that you will accept our brief.

  I have the honour to be, sir,

  Pietro Lombardi

  President.

  The tone was impersonal and a touch peremptory, but fifteen thousand dollars was somewhat more than a courtesy deposit.

  He checked his diary and the airline schedule which he always carried in his briefcase. Today was Thursday, the second of May. He could fly out of New York on Friday evening and arrive in Rome early on Saturday the fourth. He could be back in Paris on the Monday evening, a full week before Louise returned from her holiday. He was about to call her when he remembered that in Ireland it would now be after midnight. No matter. Tomorrow would be soon enough. She was used to his sudden moves and quite incurious about his business affairs. Their lives were conducted in a good-humoured shorthand perfected by thirty years of intimacy. Louise had defined it once and for all: ‘Bryan reserves his eloquence for paying customers. I’m happy with his table talk and his pillow talk and his silences, which are sometimes more interesting anyway.’

  Immediately he began to organise. A call to Alitalia secured him a first-class seat to Rome on the Friday flight. A fax to Impresa Romagnola confirmed his acceptance of their brief and his arrival time at Fiumicino. It was the way he liked to run his life: Tac! Tac! Decide and do. And when the act was done, tip your hat over your face, drowse and dream in the sun.

  He was going through the rest of the correspondence when a hotel messenger delivered a document package in the plastic container of a courier company. The envelope inside it was made of heavy hand-milled paper, embossed with a coat of arms, sealed with red wax and addressed in a bold, cursive hand.

  For a long moment he sat, staring at the envelope, weighing it in his hands, running his fingertips over the embossed emblem on the paper and on the seal itself. He had not seen it for forty years, but he recognised it instantly, as he recognised the handwriting.

  The coat of arms was a shield surmounted by a coronet and draped with tasselled cords. The charge on the shield was a pattern of fleurs-de-lis. The coronet itself was a female one and the knotted cords also were a female embellishment. They signified that the bearer belonged to an ancient princely house – the Farnese of Mongrifone.

  There was a paper-knife on the desk. He slit the envelope with great care and took out the letter.

  My dear Friend,

  For the past forty years I have made it my business to know where you would be on your birthday. I have never written to you, though I have often wanted to do so. Instead, on each anniversary I have gone to the chapel at Mongrifone, made a prayer for you and, afterwards, sat in the villa garden listening to the small sound of the water and remembering the journeys we made together in that long-ago springtime.

  This time, however, I find myself in great need of your presence and your support. So I am asking you to visit me at Mongrifone. We are both long past the age of indiscretion, so there can be no question of scandal. Nevertheless, I would not, for a moment, risk an embarrassment to your wife or your family. Therefore, I have arranged for you to be invited to act as Special Counsel to Impresa Romagnola, which is one of our family companies.

  I still have the medallion you gave me. I have worn it like an amulet every day of every year. So, the gold is much rubbed; the Graces have aged somewhat; Mercury has lost some of his sparkle. However, the inscription is still legible: vocatus extemplo adsum!

  ‘That’s how I’ve remembered you always: as the lover with wings on his feet, who would come instantly to my call. I hope I haven’t left the call too late.

  Ti voglio ben assai,

  Giulia

  Time was suddenly suspended; space was emptied about him. Every sense was quickened by a swift surge of memories: the drift of her perfume, the texture of her skin, the pulse and passion of her voice. Her urgent, imperious script invoked them all, like the score of a symphony, read in silence, yet heard in rich harmonies through all the caverns of the soul. Even after forty years of separation and silence, the music had power to tempt him back into the perilous uplands of the love-country.

  Long practice in the law had made him a sceptic. Thirty years of stable marriage had taught him that love was a plant which needed patient nurture if it were to survive the stresses and erosions of time. In spite of his Celtic origins, he did not believe in ghosts; yet far back in his subconscious was a region haunted by unexorcised memories and dilemmas still unresolved.

  This letter, for instance, was both pleasant and poignant to contemplate over a drink at the end of a long business day in New York. On the other hand, it would take a deal of explaining to Louise who, for all her good humour, would tolerate no trespass on her family turf. She had enough Italian to know that ‘Ti voglio ben
assai’ did not mean ‘Have a nice day’ and the spectacle of Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh as a winged messenger hurrying to the call of an old lover would please her not at all!

  Immediately he reminded himself that there was no way in the world Louise could possibly know about Giulia. That affair had ended years before Louise had come into his life – which made it only the harder to explain, even to himself, why he felt obliged to honour a promise made in the heat of passion forty years ago.

  Why indeed? One of the rewards of age was that the truce between the present and the past was easier to maintain. Time dulled the pain of all grieving, took the edge off most guilts. Nonetheless, his encounter with Giulia had left him so wounded in his self-esteem that he had locked the memory away in the deepest recesses of his subconscious, determined never to contemplate it, never never to discuss it. He had held to his resolve. He was a natural and entertaining storyteller, but on this subject he had never indulged himself in anecdote or allusion, even of the most trivial kind.

  Now, totally unprepared, he was beset with memories, besieged by phantoms: himself, a big, freckled red-head, with a Navy discharge, and a brand new law degree leaving his home place in Sydney, Australia for the Grand Tour of postwar Europe. The ship that carried him was a Greek rust-bucket called the Kyrenia, which came out loaded with migrants and went back half-filled with cut-price tourists, while she tramped the intervening ports for bodies to fill her vacant cabins.

  In those days and in that shuddering hull the journey from Sydney to Athens and Genoa took six long weeks; but for Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, with two hundred sterling pounds in his pocket and five hundred more in a circular letter of credit on Coutts Bank, every hour of every day was a new adventure.

  His pulse-beat had always been in rhythm with the swing of the sea. Even in his callow days as junior Watch Officer on a corvette, he had the reputation of a man who could smell the weather and find a sea for the helmsman in the most turbulent stormwater. This voyage was like a chaplet of recollections – the jewelled islands and cays of the Great Barrier Reef, the misty shorelines of the East India archipelagos, the slow enveloping smell of Asia as they came at midnight to drop anchor in the Singapore Roads, the bare cliffs of Aden giving off heat like an oven.