The Lovers Page 2

  His early masters – the Brothers and the Jesuits – had packed him full of learning, Latin and Greek and Romance Languages and Ancient History and the geographies of the great voyagers. All of it had lain fallow during the war years and the postwar ones when he was running to catch up with learning and with life. Now, suddenly, it was blooming like a flower patch in spring.

  He could sit on the bridge at midnight and make disjointed but comradely talk with the Second Mate, who came from Samos in the Dodecanese. He could curl up in one of the leaky lifeboats – God help all if they should ever be needed! – and make love with the young Portuguese widow wending her way homeward from Timor. He could huddle over an ouzo with the old bearded missionary from the uplands of New Guinea, who told him strange tales of the women who offered their first born to the pig-god and then took a piglet to the breast, of the man who could change himself into a cassowary and run faster than the wind along the mountain trails, of the sorcerers who were seen to be in two places at the same moment . . .

  But all this was overture to what he knew in his flesh and bones would be the grandest opera of all – the Passionate Pilgrim. It would tell the tale of de Courcy Cavanagh the Boy Wonder from the Antipodes, going back to his roots in Europe then scrambling happily among the spreading branches of his family tree which, so his elders had told him, spread far and wide: to Halifax in Nova Scotia, and Boston, and Manhattan, and even to the vineyards of Bordeaux, where the de Courcys and the Cavanaghs had come with the first flight of the Wild Geese.

  Well, maybe it hadn’t all been grand, but sure as hell there had been some high operatic moments, big passionate arias, moments of dark tragedy, muted in the end to safe, perennial operetta, in which the freckled-faced boy from down-under won himself a bride from the old quality and they bred themselves beautiful children and lived happily ever after, with himself a Docteur d’État in the European Community on which he had placed a bet while it was still a dream in the mind of Jean Monnet.

  It had been a gamble – Mother of God, what a gamble! He could have accepted to dine in the Temple and thence been called to the Bar in London. He could have accepted Lou Molloy’s invitation and done postgraduate Law at Harvard, made himself an American citizen and been hoisted to a lucrative partnership in Manhattan. Instead, pigheaded bogtrotter that he was, he had opted for the long slog for his Master’s degree at the Sorbonne, the year in Moscow wrestling with the Marxist legal system, the time in Rome and Madrid preparing his doctoral thesis on the mutations of the Codex Justinianus into modern times.

  It was Giulia who had urged him to walk this long way round to get the eggs. ‘You’re a hybrid,’ she told him. ‘You’re a native twig grafted on Celtic stock. In Britain, you’ll always be the outlander. No matter how high you rise, you’ll always be the upstart, the Wild Colonial Boy, patronised and damned with the same compliment. In America, you’ll be caught in the old trap, the immigrants at war with each other and the Brahmins against them all. Of course you’ll be among the winners, like the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds, with money running out of your ears; but you won’t like yourself any more. So it’s two choices only: go home and be king in your own cabbage-patch, or come to Europe, with all the other displaced tribes, and build it anew from the rubble upwards . . . Don’t you see, you were bred for this, because this is the country in which your mind lives. This is why you and I struck fire the moment we met . . .’

  He had believed her. His whole career attested the wisdom of her advice. The irony was that a scant two weeks after she had offered it, she had thrust him out of her life and closed the door in his face.

  She had done it calmly and lucidly. It was an act already understood and agreed between them. Their golden days were over; now she was summoned back to the world of business and statecraft to which the Farnese had been dedicated for centuries. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh could have no place in their convoluted lives. He had feared that and fought it from the beginning; but he was still unprepared for the bitterness of the end.

  Now, forty years later, Giulia was telling him that for her the loving had never ended and that she still counted upon his promise to come instantly at her call.

  In his hotel room in Manhattan, Cavanagh found a grace of laughter. God damn the woman! She hadn’t changed. She was still as arrogant and imperious as the long-dead princess for whom she was named – Giulia Farnese, called the Beautiful. He could still see the proud lift of her chin, the fire in her dark eyes, the toss of her lustrous hair as she demanded ‘Do this! Do that! Take me there!’ He could still hear the ripple of her laughter when he poured eloquent derision on her for a spoilt brat and a Roman snob and a chattel put up for auction in the marriage market by a down-at-heel prince. But she wouldn’t give him an inch of ground. She taunted him: ‘Giulia the Beautiful was sold by her brother to the Borgia Pope when she was fifteen, but the Romans fell in love with her and called her the Bride of Christ – or the Pope’s whore, according to their mood! And her gift to him on his deathbed was a third child, while her profligate brother finally became Pope himself! So, can you match that, my young vagabond? Can you?’

  Of course he couldn’t and he had to confess it. So, after the fight was the lovemaking, wild and wonderful, and after that the peacemaking and the whispered hopes that dawn would never come and the moonlit enchantment would last forever.

  It didn’t. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh was a fledgling attorney with the wanderlust still on him and all his hopes in his head and nothing but small wages in his pocket. How the hell could he compete with Lou Molloy and all his millions and his high connections in the Democratic machine, with Spellman and the Vatican and, through those, to Adenauer in Germany and Franco in Spain and the Farnese and their like in Italy and even to de Gaulle, walking on the water at Colombey des Deux Eglises?

  Lou Molloy! Now there was a character for you, a Black Irish buccaneer if God ever made one, supple as silk, with a smile like a summer’s day, full of dignities when he chose to be and dangerous as a cocked pistol if you crossed him. He was what the old folk used to call ‘a fine figure of a man’, flat bellied, straight backed, not an ounce of fat on him anywhere. He had big, innocent brown eyes and behind them a brain like a fine Swiss watch.

  His family was in the machine-tool business, essential reserved occupation, but he had served time as a volunteer coastguard using his own boat as an off-shore patrol vessel.

  After the war, everything was easy. The family fortune devolved to him. In the period of postwar shortages he doubled then trebled it. The Democrats wanted to run him for the Senate. He waved them off. That was the Kennedy playground and he’d rather pay to watch than get his nose bloodied in their family game. Besides, politics under the spotlight was not his style. He preferred the chess matches played in boardrooms and clubs and châteaux in France and villas in the Tuscan hills. Half his interests were in Europe now and he was convinced that Western Europe could develop into a viable political and economic entity, a land-bridge one day, between the Soviet States and the American continent.

  He had had a variety of lovers in his life and had treated them all – except one – with a tyrant’s disdain. Now it was time for him to take a wife and he would do it in the old dynastic style, with a union blessed by the Church and ornamented by tradition.

  Wise in the ways of Irishry in America, he sought – and paid handsomely for – counsel from the man they called ‘the American Pope’, Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York. By way of insurance he also talked with old Joe Kennedy and the McDonnells and the Cuddihys, who headed the Irish social set in Manhattan.

  In due time, a smiling Spellman conveyed the news that the Pope himself was nodding towards a possible bride, a twenty-four-year-old Italian princess with an ancient name and a father eager to establish his own transatlantic connections. Molloy, in his careful fashion, took the suggestion under advisement and agreed that subject to pre-nuptial agreement and the provision of a papal decoration for himself – the Order of
St Gregory would serve quite nicely, thank you – he would commit to the sacrament. It was typical of the man that he doubted neither his power to charm the lady nor his potency to match her in bed and endow her with beautiful children.

  Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had been witness to the wooing and was safely gone before the wedding. Of the marriage itself he knew nothing, save that a son had been born to the happy couple and that Lou Molloy had died in New York a week before his sixty-seventh birthday. Cavanagh read the obituary in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune whilst he was holidaying with Louise in Amalfi. For a brief moment he was tempted to send a telegram of condolence to Giulia; then he thought better of it. The past was safely buried, why open the vault and set the ghosts walking?

  Alone in his hotel room, looking over the long traverse of his past, Cavanagh was invaded by a winter chill. Not all this was pleasant reminiscence of young love and passionate encounters and lyric duets. There were guilts in it, too, betrayals and treacheries in which both he and Giulia had played their special roles. There were lies and shabby little stratagems, the games of spoilt children who cared not at all for the hurts they inflicted. He wondered how much Molloy had seen at the time or guessed over the years, how much he had chosen to ignore to maintain his honour and the stability of this most convenient marriage.

  Suddenly his own company was intolerable to him. He tossed off the lees of his drink at a gulp, put on his street clothes and headed up Madison to a small bistro where the patron served drinks at an old-fashioned zinc bar and madame dispensed onion soup and coq au vin and a wraith-like girl played piano and sang Piaf songs. He was known. He was welcomed. He could sit quietly over his food and not feel too solitary while he remembered his first encounter with Lou Molloy, on a June day forty years ago.

  The Salamandra d’Oro

  BOOK ONE

  The Cruise of the Salamandra d’Oro

  Summer 1952

  By the calendar it was late spring, but it rained that morning: hard, driving squalls which brought flurries of hail from the foothills above the town. The Old Port was deserted. The freighter-men from Italy had unloaded their wicker baskets and were waiting for the delayed deliveries of rose blooms and carnations from the hothouse growers. The fishermen had sorted and sold their catch, washed their nets and gone home. Their painted boats rocked gently in the tideless basin. In the dockyard, the shipwrights were working under cover. The trawler, hauled up on the slips for scraping and painting, looked like a hulk abandoned after a tempest.

  As abruptly as it had begun, the rain stopped, the cloud lifted and the port was bathed in pale spring sunshine. Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh finished his coffee, paid the score and walked out of the Bar Felix, through the Porte Marine and along the Esplanade to the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbour. He was a big fellow in those days, red haired, tall, deep in the chest and broad across the shoulders, with ham fists and bright blue eyes and an easy grin. He was only twenty-five but he had the weathered, young-old look of a man with a certain amount of living behind him. Even Felix, the patron, who had small faith in mankind, less in women and none at all in God, treated this one with reluctant respect.

  He had fetched up in Antibes a week ago, looking for a place to rest his feet. He let it be known that he had made his way on foot across the frontier. He had landed in Genoa from Australia and was fully resolved to spend the summer tramping around Europe – unless of course he could find a berth as a crewman on a pleasure yacht.

  ‘I wish you luck.’ Felix had dismissed the notion with a flick of his dish-cloth. ‘How many pleasure yachts do you think we get in here nowadays? The war’s been over since 1945 but we’re still up to our necks in shit! Indo-China, the Russians blockading Berlin, the Chinese pouring their troops into Korea. We’ve still got that great cesspool on the edge of the port where the Boche blew their mines! And they call this a peace?’

  Nobody had bothered to answer. Felix was entitled to gripe in his own bar. His problems were well known. His first wife had divorced him. His second had run off with a cigarette salesman from Paris. His only son had stepped on a Viet Minh land mine.

  But Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had his own reasons to be hopeful. In Madame Audiberti’s pension he had met Marie-Claire, who came from Corsica and who worked with the Société Glémot: yacht brokers, ship chandlers and provedores. Marie-Claire had an angel face and a happy devil in her dark eyes, and a ready lust for Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh. She had told him of the imminent arrival of the motor yacht, Salamandra d’Oro, Boston registry, heading from Alicante to prepare for a Mediterranean cruise. Her master had wired ahead for fuel, fresh water and a list of provisions as long as your arm – all luxury stuff, liquor, pre-cut meats, deep frozen foods, fresh fruits and vegetables. They also wanted local labour for two days of scrubbing, painting and bright-work. The Port Captain had her listed for Berth No. 3.

  So, experienced by now in the ways of dock-rats and five-dollar-a-day hitchhikers, Cavanagh perched himself on a bollard at Berth No. 3 ready to take Salamandra’s stern lines, run the hose from the water-hydrant, and then either pick up a tip or offer himself for hire. To which end he carried always on his person his passport, his Navy discharge papers and the final Captain’s report on his competence as a navigator and watch officer.

  The only value of the latter document was that it was authentic and, given half a chance, he could demonstrate the skills it described. However, he had learned early that the whole Mediterranean littoral was crawling with ex-Navy types driving all sorts of craft from motor torpedo boats to clapped-out freighters, all running contraband, guns, cigarettes, whisky, and warm bodies from North Africa to Europe. That sort of job was easy enough to find and it paid good money; but Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh had survived one war and he had no desire to get his head shot off by a trigger-happy Customs man or to spend his precious sabbatical in a Mediterranean gaol. So perched on his bollard he fished out a battered copy of Mistral’s lyrics and waited for the Salamandra d’Oro to poke her nose past the grey bulk of the lighthouse.

  At ten o’clock precisely she slid into the basin: a hundred feet of sleek white hull with a clipper bow and a square transom with a golden salamander displayed in relief under her name plate. She had a low profile and a broad beam, acres of afterdeck and a sheltered area for sunbathing abaft the wheelhouse. This was a real sea-boat built for cruising comfort with nothing stinted in the way of craftsman work. The crew moved and worked like trained sailors: a winch-man in the bows, ready to let go the anchors, one man aft with a heaving line, a deckhand laying out the fenders, although there was not another vessel within hailing distance. Whoever was running this craft did things by the book – starboard anchor dropped well up into the wind, a good spread for the port hook, then a slow steady reverse into the berth. Cavanagh held up a hand to signal that he was ready to take the stern lines. Two minutes later, the vessel was made fast, the gang-plank was lowered and the deckhands were coiling ropes on the afterdeck.

  A few moments afterwards, a tall dark fellow in immaculate whites came to inspect the stern moorings. Cavanagh hailed him.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. Are you the master of this beauty?’

  ‘Owner and master.’ He had a flat Boston intonation with a touch of the Irish in it. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘The word’s about that you’ll be hiring day labour through Glémot. I’m your first applicant and the best you’ll get by a country mile.’

  ‘Are you now?’ A faint vinegary grin twitched at the dark one’s lips. ‘And who may you be?’

  ‘Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh, sir, Australian passport, ex Navy, clean discharge and a captain’s report which says I’m a good bridge officer with two years of combat duty.’

  ‘But now you’re on the beach?’

  ‘Not quite. I’ve just finished a law degree and I’m giving myself a working holiday in Europe.’

  ‘And you’re looking to bum a free ride round the Mediterranean for the summer?’

  �
�On the contrary,’ said Cavanagh agreeably. ‘I was offering for day labour, scrubbing, painting and varnishing. I doubt I’d want to serve under you at sea. I’m a good-humoured fellow and I’d have trouble with that sharp tongue of yours. I bid you good day sir.’

  He was already five paces down the esplanade when a shout stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Cavanagh.’

  ‘Sir!’

  ‘I’ll expect you aboard at seventeen hundred hours. You’ll get an apology and a drink.’

  Cavanagh gave him a wide grin and a snappy salute.

  ‘It’s a gentleman’s offer. May I know the name of the man who made it?’

  ‘Molloy. Declan Aloysius Molloy.’

  ‘I’ll accept the drink, Mr Molloy, but I’ll make the apology. I’ve been on the road too long. I’m forgetting my manners.’

  ‘I look forward to our drink Mr Cavanagh.’

  ‘And a very good day to you Mr Molloy.’

  It had been an edgy little exchange: two Irishmen playing ‘waltz-me-round-Willie’, each waiting for the other to tread on the tails of his coat. Even so, it had ended well – oh yes, by God! Better than well – though he still wasn’t sure whether Molloy was inviting him to discuss a job or setting him up for a fall to pay for his impudence. Either way he’d best come to the meeting well groomed and with all his wits about him.

  His first call was on Marie-Claire at the Glémot establishment. For a modest fee she signed him on to their crew-register for service on foreign vessels. Then she helped him choose a pair of white trousers, a white shirt, white deck shoes. She gave him a discount of ten percent and a passionate embrace for good measure – which left him no choice but to invite her to lunch at the Relais de la Galette. After lunch he suggested an hour in bed, but she declined. Too long an absence would get her fired. Good jobs were scarce; eager lovers were much easier to find. So Bryan de Courcy Cavanagh took his siesta alone and dreamed of white sails on a wine-dark sea and brown girls leaping over the horns of bulls in the sunshine of ancient Crete.