The Whirling Girl (15 page)

THE FINAL PAINTING IN Clare's book of Amazonian travels was the one she considered the most powerful. In it, a decaying tree hosted the rare
Selenicereus wittii
, a plant with uncanny writhing pleated wrinkles and protrusions, the whole merging from green to red. Ghostly trees stood behind, in swampy water. Smoke filtered through. Between the dead trees were glimpses of animals fleeing fire, the terrified face of a spider monkey, the singed wing of a macaw.

When Nikki pulled out her copy of the book for Clare to sign, she asked Clare to sign that particular painting as well. “Ever since the night I met you, I've looked and looked at this. The way you make one smell the terror and feel the pain. I feel like I was there with you, plunged right into that scene of fire and burning flesh.”

Fire and burning flesh.

Her voice was that same un-nuanced brass, but illogically Clare felt the temperature dip, the way a sudden chill is said to fill a room as some unseen presence passes through. How foolish to think that a particular need had been loosed here of some all-consuming sort. Did Nikki imagine a hot cord between them? That if Clare could paint a scene that radiated such pain, she would understand how Nikki was peering into the shadows of her marriage? Clare took a deep breath of the suddenly altered air, and breathed in Nikki's almost rawhide smell, which she hadn't noticed before.

They'd been bending together as Nikki turned pages of the book. Clare pulled back and reached for her fountain pen. “Yes of course, sure, I'll sign this one, if you like.”

Each full-page illustration was set into a thick white border. Clare inscribed her name with a flourish, and drew in the little stick figure. She loved the feel of the fine pen, which she'd bought for herself when the book was published. She had intended to use it for drawing, too, because — unusual in fountain pens — it worked well with India ink. But so far she hadn't used it for anything but book signing. It was a talisman, a treasure, one of the few expensive things she'd bought for herself.

Nikki took up the pen, weighed the fine balance of it, admired the sleek black shape, the gold nib.

“Does this accompany you on all your travels?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Clare said. “It's had a very adventurous life. It even fell overboard once — a bit scary, diving into piranha-infested waters to get it back. I wrote the entire first draft of the manuscript with it.” She laughed. “A word of warning, though. Never try to carry a fountain pen through airport security in Brazil. They're terrified you'll barge up into the cockpit and try to write a sonnet.”

Before Nikki drove away, she mentioned the collection of botanical paintings that were kept in the archives of the museum. She said she'd been thinking it might be helpful to Clare if they went there together. She could help Clare wend her way through the archival chain of command. These things weren't always straightforward over here. She said that if Clare was free, they could go up to the museum tomorrow. She began leafing through a notebook, pushing ahead to set up this plan. She tore out a page where it seemed she'd written the museum's number even before coming here.

“How about if I call and make an appointment, right now?”

“Oh, my!” Clare said, “
Accidenti
, as they say here! Tomorrow I've finally got an appointment with that lawyer.”

WHY HAD SHE DONE that?

She could perfectly well have gone with Nikki to the museum. There was no appointment with the lawyer, whose important family business was taking a good long time. Clearly Nikki needed someone to talk to. In a society where everyone found out your business even if you went as far as Rome, maybe she had pinned her hopes on Clare as a seasoned outsider, a world traveller who could help her navigate the foreign land she'd surprisingly stumbled into upon discovering her husband was in love with a pretty boy? And God knows, Clare thought, I could do with a friend. But how could she hope to have a friendship with someone she'd lied to so many times in just half an hour? Inventing Lady Plank. Giving Lady Plank the name of the Rottweiler her ex-husband had got rid of when it bit the postman!

She caught a flick of movement on the ceiling. The jewelled lizard beady-eyeing her again. Flick! Gone! How did they manage to come and go before her very eyes? Like the truth of any other thing. She turned and looked into the sideboard's cloudy mirror. She started twirling, as she had that first day, round and round. There and gone, there and gone. She sank, dizzy, onto the couch. When she rose, she saw Nikki had left the page with the number of the museum archives. She decided to go there tomorrow anyway, on her own. She called, and a Dr. Ruccoli, who spoke excellent English, said yes of course,
certamente
, she could see the ancient volumes, though, he emphasized, she must come promptly at ten.

It wasn't until Clare reached for her beloved pen to record the appointment that she realized it too was gone.

Yellow Dress

CLARE GAVE THOUGHT THAT night about how to get her pen back. Nikki must have slipped it into her satchel — accidentally, of course — when she put the book in there. But Clare still felt guilty about Nikki. The better person who now and then attempted to get out decided that before she called about the pen, she should try to do something in response to Nikki's plea for help regarding the Plank Foundation. Having let the fiction of a special relationship with Sir Harold Plank grow even wilder, the paradox was that she really couldn't call him now.

Still, she could at least call dreadful Luke Tindhall and persuade him to go along with her on the expedition to the dig. After all, he'd said she should give him a buzz. She decided she would do that, as soon as she got back from the museum.

UP IN CORTONA THERE were posters for the wedding pageant everywhere, and workmen in medieval dress were stringing lights and erecting bleachers in the piazza where the museum palace loomed. It was three days until she would see the famously philandering Italian again. If, in the meantime, some other woman had not caught his attention by throwing away a hat, a shoe, a thong … She tried to put the event out of her mind as she climbed the four flights of stairs to the museum archives.

Dr. Ruccoli had instructed her to come promptly at ten. But when she got there, “
Sfortunatamente
,” she was told by a man with crumbs on his magnificent moustache, “Dr. Ruccoli will not be able to be in today.” This other man had no idea that Clare had been expected — and no knowledge about the hermit's work. He flipped through a card file, but found no listing for this hermit. He disappeared into a back room, and was gone so long that she began to suspect that a caffè corretto had summoned him to the bar across the piazza.

While she waited she studied a family tree that covered one whole wall across the room, a painting of a true leafy tree, with white name-filled little globes attached to every outstretched branch, the generations of some ancient family strung out like Christmas lights, and a helmet and sword and shield at the base of the trunk, emblazoned with the family crest.

Eventually, the man with the moustache did push back through the green baize door. As he set down three large leather-bound volumes, he told her that whoever her informants were, they had been wrong. The paintings in these rare volumes were the work of a wealthy abbot who had lived in the valley below, the Abate Mattia Monetti. Yes, a hermit of the same vicinity had played a part in the endeavour, but had been merely the abbot's helper, his plant-collector.

The man called in an assistant to keep an eye on her, and then she heard him clattering down many stone steps to the street below.

WHAT A RESOURCE WAS here! Even though the drawings were not exceptional — a patient record done in ink, washed with colour — still, as she turned the pages it began to feel like taking hold of a kindly and responsible hand, walking with this long-ago presence through the local woods and hills, every significant plant noted, its find spot recorded. I know this man, she thought; he is someone with the same passion the best part of me has, the need to record these smallest, most fragile fleeting living things. She decided that the patient humble work really had been done by the hermit, but that he'd allowed renown to pass from him, with all else. She imagined him fleeing the royal court, leaving behind the politics, the intrigue, maybe heartbreak too. It was peaceful, wandering with him through the pages, slipping back through centuries.

But then the family tree on the far wall began to distract her. She started hearing an aristocratic gnat-like chorus, all those generations going back to valiant noble ancestors humming that she, Clare, was going to attend a historic re-enactment of a wedding in the company of one of their young ilk, and she had nothing remotely smart enough to wear. The yellow dress from the shop window on the main street drifted in, swishing around the room, skimming over the table, flaring in the dim mullion-windowed light, brushing against her then darting away. She glanced at her watch. Soon the shop would be closing for the long midday break.

SHE RAN DOWN THE narrow street towards the main piazza, shocked at herself for dashing away, for arranging to spend a small fortune, too, to have the contents of those volumes photocopied from the microfiche the museum had made, and all because of a dress that would almost surely be sold.

A voice hailed her. She caught that edge of upper-class and rough.

She knew who it was before she turned. “Clare Livingston! Halloooo!”

Luke Tindhall, standing with his arm raised, the ruby eye of the gold snake ring catching the light. He'd seen her stop. There was no use pretending she hadn't seen him too.

No time now. Too bad.

CLARE LAID HER NEW purchases on the bed.

Imagine spending what amounted to two weeks' salary at the lab for a linen dress so short there was barely room for it to wrinkle, a pair of spike-heeled sandals, a clutch of creamy silk panties that were little more than wisps, and a strapless bra, a marvel of Italian engineering, accented with tasty little butter-coloured flowers.

All that, and she'd blown the opportunity of helping Nikki Stockton as she'd planned, by snubbing Luke Tindhall. She flinched to think of how she'd left him standing in the middle of the piazza, with that foolish raised arm. What had her time in Italy actually been but a wrong step here, a wrong step there.

Clare Livingston, the great explorer, forever lost and scattering such a trail of bad karma that she never would be found.

AFTER A GOOD NUMBER of rings, the phone in Harold Plank's Mayfair apartment was picked up to the rumbling of someone who might have been wakened from a siesta. Clare nearly clicked off, but when she identified herself he sounded pleased. She pulled herself together and thanked him warmly for the Brunello. She'd been meaning to write a note, she explained. She hoped he'd understand that during her first days in Italy she'd been so busy.

Good, he cut in. He certainly hoped that his man Tindhall had been helpful. He chuckled, said that as Tindhall had been
ex communicado
since Clare's arrival, he'd taken that as a sign that his man had been satisfactorily showing Clare around.

The word
Ankara
had been on the tip of Clare's tongue — as in, how helpful it had been for Luke Tindhall to drop off an envelope of her uncle's newspaper articles before he flew off there. But what if Harold Plank didn't know about his man's trip to Ankara?

She went straight to the point instead, about the excavation at Poggio Selvaggio, the important work of Dr. William Sands, how fascinating it sounded, how she'd been invited to go up there.

Oh yes, that settlement site, Sir Harold Plank said, his tone implying, just as the Contessa Luisa di Varinieri had suggested, that this sort of project didn't much spark his interest. But of course, he said, if Clare thought it was something Tindhall should take in, he would call Tindhall, immediately, and insist he go along.

When she'd hung up, Clare ran her finger along the phone cord, as if a clue might have settled among the coils. So what had Luke's trip to Ankara been about? She couldn't help an unfortunate little flip of fellow-feeling for someone who, like her, might have a slippery relationship with the truth.

The Orientalizing Bead

WHEN CLARE THOUGHT OF the trip to Poggio Selvaggio later, what flashed before her was a dreamlike picture of a group gathered round to peer at some small incongruous thing that had assumed mysterious importance. The plan, as it evolved after Clare let Nikki know that Luke was coming, was that Luke would pick Clare up en route, and the whole group would meet at a certain crossroads in Umbria at ten, after William had collected some students at the train station. He would also be picking up two women from the Middle Eastern Institute in London, scholars he'd met at a conference on “The Future of the Past” the year before, who were travelling on to Jordan after a whirl through Tuscany. Carl and Anders Piersen would be coming too, from Chiusi, where they had recently moved into an apartment. Vittorio Cerotti, the inspector, would be along although his wife the Contessa couldn't make it.

Oh, and how dreadful about Clare's pen, Nikki said. “That's a bitch — but hey, it's sure to turn up.”

LUKE WAS THREE QUARTERS of an hour late. His antique car looked freshly washed and waxed, and the bulky, lionish totality of him looked intensely washed and waxed as well, contradicting the sullen look he gave her. The scrubbing hadn't dispersed the cloud of pheromones jittering around the inside of his car, as he manhandled it through curve after curve, the ruby snake eye glinting.

When they came to the intersection at the bottom of her hill, he turned west instead of east, saying that Harold Plank wanted her to see the great Orientalizing tombs, just up the valley.

“When exactly did Sir Harold suggest this?”

He shrugged. His resolute blockish silence started to eat up the air. But then a lake of poppies swung into view, blood-red against the surrounding green, and a huge mound rose out of a field, a hill covered in grass and bushes and trees. If the land had not been cleared around its base for ongoing excavation work, this gigantic “melon tomb” really could have been mistaken for a true hill, bigger by far than the hillocks in Clare's meadow. Of course, this had been built for generations of princely families. But the old question nagged her, the one Marta had tossed aside: where had all the less princely people been buried?

What did archaeologists have to say about that? she asked Luke. He too tossed the question aside. The valley had been the bread basket of Tuscany for almost three thousand years. Any smaller tombs down here — and the Etruscans always placed their cemeteries on a lower level than their cities, he told her, in a superior tone — would have been ploughed under centuries ago. Or they would have been victims of the
tombaroli
.

“Do you mean professional tomb robbers? Who exactly would they be?”

He shot her a look. “They don't fill out census forms.”

He turned the car, headed back onto the smaller road that would take them to their meeting place.