THE WOMAN WHO WANTS IL LORD INGLESE'S WEALTH

Two years after his death, someone from a modest pensione claims to be Harold Acton's half-sister, and

to be rewarded accordingly, reports Michael Sheridan Florence SIR HAROLD Acton's spectacles, neatly folded, rest upon the table in his private library. A black-and-white studio photo- graph of a sulky young man — 'to Harold, from Evelyn, 1924' — is propped against a bookshelf. On the last aesthete's writing- desk, a flower freshly plucked from his for- mal Tuscan garden adorns a portrait of his mother. His high-backed armchair of crim- son velvet still bears the imprint of his form. It is as if Sir Harold, who died two years ago, had just stepped out of the room for a stroll.

In death, however, neither the Acton reputation nor his estate enjoys any peace. The bewildered board of New York University, to whom Sir Harold bequeathed his Renaissance home, La Pietra, and his art collection, finds itself contesting a case in the Italian courts brought by a 79-year-old woman called Liana Beacci. She claims to be Sir Harold's illegitimate half-sister, the offspring of an affair between his father, Arthur Acton, and an Italian secretary. Since the estate itself is literally priceless (although estimates range from $100 million to $500 million) and was accompanied by an endowment of at least $25 million, it is not hard to see why Signora Beac- ci, with her own numerous and vocal progeny, is after her slice of the inheri- tance. The appeals court in Florence has upheld her right to pursue a pater- nity case. Her lawyer, Andrea Cecchetti, wants the courts to order the exhumation of Arthur Acton — who died in 1953 — for DNA tests on his remains. Should they prove inconclusive, the plaintiffs might then seek to disturb Sir Harold himself in his repose in a Florentine cemetery.

Quite how could a life dedicated to the punctilious observance of good taste con- clude amid such squalid indignity? Antho- ny Powell is said to have observed that Sir Harold was 'as much a figure as he was a writer', and even his heirs and executors admit that his contribution to the arts lay as much in whom he knew as in what he created. But retracing his own story through the faded salons of La Pietra, in fusty libraries overlooking the Arno and smart lawyers' offices, the eerie feeling arises that here is an original Anglo-Italian plot that neither E.M. Forster nor Henry James would have scorned.

In 1903 Arthur Acton, a comfortably off Englishman, arrived in Florence with his American bride, Hortense Mitchell. Theirs was a marriage, like that of Lord Curzon, which united European style and transat- lantic funds. Hortense's father was a pros- perous Chicago banker, and her wealth provided the bedrock of the Acton fortune. They bought La Pietra: a property of five villas set amid 57 acres of olive groves and gardens. Harold Acton was born in the summer of 1904, in the same upper bed- room of the main house where he died almost 90 years later. There were mutter- ings in Anglo-Florentine society about Arthur Acton's background, but, by the standards of the age, Florence was a toler- ant place accustomed to residents of lurid notoriety in their own lands. Hortense, some claim, found it dull and drank too much. Arthur did not. He collected art and enjoyed a seigneurial life at La Pietra. In those balmy days, the estate lay well beyond the city suburbs and a succession of Italian servants and secretaries came to wait upon its master's pleasure. One of the secretaries was Ersilia Beacci, a graceful young woman from Umbria. It is a fact that in the gloomy side rooms of the villa, usual- ly locked up during Sir Harold's lifetime, one gazes upon an unusually high number of early Renaissance madonnas of the Umbrian school, with their mobile, quest- ing features, all collected by his father. It is also a fact that in February 1917 Ersil- ia Beacci gave birth out of wedlock to a daughter, Liana. There seems little dispute that Arthur Acton provided for both of them with a generosity that must have fallen like the riches of Croesus upon an ordinary Italian fam- ily of the time. He bought Ersilia an entire palazzo on the Via Tomabuoni, then and now the most fashionable street in Florence.

While the young Harold Acton was acting the aesthete at Oxford with Waugh, Ersilia was opening a pensione in her palazzo which took in English visitors of modest means — it remains in business to this day.

In the 1930s, Harold Acton set off for China and did not settle in Flo- rence until after the second world war. Meanwhile, it is claimed, Arthur Acton paid for Liana's education in England and Switzerland. She still speaks what might be called Agnelli- dynasty English: expensively absorbed elo- cution that remains a touch exotic. Successive telephone conversations with the Beacci household today yield another bizarre twist in the plot, for they produce an elderly lady of obvious distinction who insists that she is not the Signora Liana, declines to identify herself, yet professes an oddly intimate familiarity with the Signo- ra's wishes. In this somewhat disembodied fashion, one learns that Arthur Acton con- tinued to see Liana until his death. 'We have a complete biography of Arthur, from notes which he dictated to her while he was painting portraits of her in his studio on the Lungarno between 1947 and 1951,' the voice insists, in Agnelli-dynasty tones. `When Arthur died in 1953, his wife did not even go to his funeral. But the Signora Liana did and Harold even called for her in his car to take her to the funeral. Of course, he knew all about her. They were good friends until the last five or six years.'

Arthur Acton left no will and Ersilia Beacci, too, died in 1953. No claim was made by the Beacci family on the estate at the time of Arthur's death — proof, say New York University's lawyers, that Liana's pretensions are mischievous; evi- dence, say her supporters, that she expect- ed her half-brother, it lord inglese, as he is wrongly known locally, to look after her. `Quite a few people in Florence are on her side,' explains a friendly journalist on La Nazione, the city newspaper. There is cer- tainly an underlying local resentment and here we enter E.M. Forster territory over the contrast between the English milord receiving royalty at his exquisite villa in the hills and the Italian half-sister reduced to running a pension downtown.

Those who knew Sir Harold well say he never mentioned the existence of any ille- gitimate relatives, and one can imagine his delicate shudder at the idea of the scandal becoming public. But there were rumours about it among the small and rather pre- cious Anglo-Florentine colony while he was alive. During the postwar years, La Pietra flowered as Sir Harold lived out the role of grand and gracious host. His mother died in 1962, an event which reinforced his determination to preserve with complete fidelity the world that his family created before the Great War. 'He did want to keep everything absolutely in place as his parents had it,' observes Michael Mallon, his literary executor, 'every lacquered table. Nothing was ever moved.'

To step into the villa, which is not open to the public, is to enter a gilded cloister of tranquillity far removed from the clamour of modern Florence beyond its gates. It is nothing less than the Italy of the Edwar- dians, preserved, not perhaps in aspic, but in amber. One can only imagine what the Princess of Wales, a guest in the 1980s, made of it.

Mr Mallon, who was once secretary to the late Sir John Pope-Hennessy, has set about a massive task. 'The papers are in the most incredible muddle,' he says. Bun- dles of letters from people like Gertrude Stein, Somerset Maugham, D.H. Lawrence and Graham Greene are stuffed into draw- ers and Renaissance cupboards all over the house. So far he has retrieved only a set of correspondence with Norman Douglas. This literary treasure trove will occupy scholars for years to come.

There seems to be little sense of urgency over the Beacci case, because New York University's lawyers are confident they will see Liana off. 'Even if she was to prove paternity, the maximum she could get under Italian law would be 25 per cent of Arthur Acton's estate" explains Andrea Scavetta, who acts for NYU. 'And of course most of the money came from Sir Harold's mother, and the law recognises no claim on the mother's estate. So she could get very little. The fact is she's started this action now when nobody is left alive to contradict her.'

Well, up to a point. Sir Harold is said to have left three wills. In one of them he left one of the five villas at La Pietra to the companion of his later years, a German named Alexander Zielcke. The two men collaborated on a coffee-table book, Tus- can Villas, in 1973. Mr Zielcke, then a young photographer, has lately turned to modern abstract painting. Those who have seen the will say Sir Harold also left to Mr Zielcke his own jewellery and his mother's jewellery. People who had been close to Sir Harold say he became 'isolated' towards the end of his life and that Mr Zielcke pro- tected him off from callers. A British his- torian, Dr Edward Chaney, who had worked on the Acton letters, says he had been expected to be appointed literary executor, but was disappointed.

Mr Zielcke himself is not talking, not least because he is still said to be reeling from the effects of an acidic profile of Sir Harold that recently appeared in the New Yorker. Its author, an American writer named David Plante, depicted a sad and mildly sordid scene of a lonely old man, dependent on a catty circle of male com- panions, steadily drinking and suppressing his own homosexual tastes out of a snob- bish fear of social ostracism. Whatever people think of the social arrangements at La Pietra, the consensus among Sir Harold's friends is that the piece was an unpleasant cocktail of the snide and the naive. 'Harold was a fastidious man from an entirely different era,' says one. 'Of course he didn't parade his emotions like a politically correct American novelist.' Mr Mallon, more guardedly, confines himself to the accurate observation that 'he had very beautiful manners, which of course can mask a lot of feelings'. Until the end of the 1980s, young men were, indeed, fre- quently invited to take tea in Sir Harold's salon and to survey from its windows the Brunelleschi cupola ascending beyond La Pietra's perfect gardens. But these were occasions of irreproachable decorum at which the young visitor's main challenge was to keep up with his host's standard of rarefied politeness. So the general indigna- tion over Mr Plante was increased when among Sir Harold's last correspondence there came to light a fawning thank-you letter from him, expressing his gratitude for the visit which he subsequently proceeded to caricature.

If we have moved effortlessly from areas where angels fear to tread into the realms of The Aspens Papers, it is not difficult to see how Liana Beacci's lawyers could cre- ate a sensation in the courtroom, should they be allowed to drag such matters into the public domain. Some shrewd Floren- tines reckon that the Beaccis may have cal- culated that even if they stand to win only a small proportion of the estate, they could collect a settlement from NYU to avoid the embarrassment of a prolonged and revela- tory case. So far, the NYU lawyers intend to make a fight of it. The penurious British Institute of Florence, which also benefited from the Acton will, is hoping that the Americans' resources will win the day. But in the labyrinthine workings of the Italian legal system the case could turn as much on public sentiment as upon evidence, per- ilous territory for the inheritors.

Sir Harold took his generosity to the Americans after his old university, Oxford, turned down his offer of the legacy with a lack of imagination that still beggars belief. The new owners of La Pietra have made one smart move in appointing a no- nonsense Yorkshireman, Michael Holmes, the former British Consul in Florence, as its director. Mr Holmes brought a Catholic priest to Sir Harold's bedside to administer the last sacrament on the morning of the day he died. If anyone can reconcile the practical necessities of Sir Harold's estate with the precious aesthetic personalities that still flutter around its fringes, it is Mr Holmes. It was said of Sir Harold that when one heard his refined, singsong speech, one was listening down the century to the voice of Oscar Wilde, whose vocal mannerisms were copied by Robert Ross and in turn mimicked by the young Acton. But Oscar's echo has fled the silent salons of La Pietra and Mr Holmes's blunt tones have taken command. In the circum- stances, that might be just as well.

The author's Romans has been issued as a Phoenix paperback, and he will shortly join the foreign staff of the Sunday Times.