The Whirling Girl (20 page)

IT WAS BEAUTIFUL TO watch Gianni now, in his excitement. To find herself caught up again, as with his riff about the unicorns, the resin fungi thing — to be whirled along, not knowing where he aimed to take her.

He was walking back and forth in her kitchen, which had been designed for people much shorter. He dodged clusters of lavender and dried herbs hanging from the beam between the table and the stove. He plucked a spray of tarragon, crumbled it, buried his face in his palms, looked up, widening his eyes in pleasure at the scent, as his words tumbled on.

From clues in the earth itself, he said, it was also possible to gain a new understanding of ancient minds. He said his friend had also been privileged to work with the great Wilhemina Jashemski at Pompeii, where even in their smallest, most humble shops and tiny homes the inhabitants had devoted space to flowers. Thus it became clear that the Romans, too, were nicer people than previously had been supposed.

He paused, fixed her intently. “On their streets of tombs as well,” he said, “they planted the most lovely and fragrant plants to nourish the spirits of the living and to feed the dead. My friend helped to excavate these gardens on their streets of tombs.”

He'd said it twice.
Their streets of tombs
. So this was where it all had been leading!

He closed the journal, as if the preamble was over and the real subject about to begin. He would make up some excuse now, she thought, to inveigle his way up to her own street of tombs.

She tried to remain detached, yet interested. What would he say, exactly? What would she say? Did she really have a member of the
tombaroli
in her house? Would she soon have one in her bed? The suspicion of being used, manipulated, was queasily exciting, though her gut clenched too. Breathlessly she watched him spread his hands, his surprisingly scarred hands.

“I also have made the earth my choice,” he said. “I have changed my life to do this. For this reason, truth and accuracy of botanical depiction have become of prime importance to me.”

Truth and accuracy
. She'd been ready to take a tomb robber to her bed, and he'd turned into the chartered accountant of botanical correctness?

“Oh yes,” she said, “absolutely. Accuracy is important in my work. But as to truth,” she gave her head a little knock with her fist, “I'm afraid you've caught me out in a fib.”

His dark eyes flared over her.

She said, “I promised to show you the orchid. But I decided it didn't cut the mustard. This morning I ripped it up.”

HERE WAS NICCOLO AGAIN, at the door. This time, she went right out and closed it behind her, took a breath of morning air, remembering how fine it had been sitting in the sun outside Niccolo's shed, sharing his morning snack, understanding almost nothing that he said.

Niccolo had hurried back to warn her that once again he'd loosed the dogs in the fenced woods. There was evidence of strangers tampering with the wire.

“I thought you said there were no dogs.”

No, she had been mistaken, he said; he'd told her that she was in no danger from the dogs, because since her uncle died he kept them penned. This was followed by a thick wordy tangle.

She thanked him for letting her know.

Because, even if she'd understood, she would not have believed a word, not from Niccolo, not from the man in the kitchen. Who knew what Gianni was really after, or what he saw in her? He'd got her right in so many ways. Yet he'd misjudged her in ways that she'd never bring herself to explain. It was like being stuffed inside a bag to think of trying to explain. What did people want? A diagram of the north and south of her? Warnings of false lodestones and the places where the map ended and she had more than once slipped off? As she turned to go back inside, she saw that the sky had sealed over with the white of a blinded eye.

“
LLISTEN, GIANNI —!
”

In the space before she stepped back into the kitchen, resolve had settled on her.

But he wasn't there.

She heard the scrape of wood on wood. In the living room she caught him turning from the sideboard, with one of her meadow paintings in either hand. Others were spread on the table.

“What the hell?”

He laid the paintings down with extreme care, his face growing very pale, all of him paling, the arms in the white t-shirt falling to his side and becoming whiter than the shirt, or so she imagined. She imagined all of him fading away, a shape held up only by his clothes, pale with shame. When he looked up he was frowning, though.

He said, “I could not believe that you had truly torn up that fine work.” He was looking straight at her, through her. He said, “Of course I should not have done this, but now I am taken by these compositions.” He lifted another from the drawer. “Such feeling, such imagination! Ah, if only —”

She couldn't help gratification flooding through her (
such feeling, such imagination
). “But what?” she demanded. “If only what?”

He looked so stern. “If you were illustrating a fairytale,” he said, “this would be one thing. But here I see you again, as with the orchid, inventing variations for our native plants — making these fantasies for a publication which, I had supposed, was to be a serious study of our native flora.”

He still had the nerve to lecture her? A married man famous for exponential feats of womanizing and a meddling snoop as well, taking the moral high ground?

Almost anything would be okay but this — okay if he'd bounded across and said what a sweet little faker she was (though she wasn't, not with these), still it would be okay, and she would trust him the way she'd decided moments ago that she would as she'd stepped in the door, and she would take him to see her hidden meadow. But this agonized inner wrenching of his — it filled her mouth with the sour taste of childhood upchuck.

He took a visible breath. He said, “Very well, I will plainly ask why you do this counterfeit work, which does not go at all with the truth of you.”

“Why should anything about me disturb you so much?”

“You know!” he said. “You do.”

SHE DID.

She'd been holding it off, but right from the first instant on the autostrada, in that first glance, there had been the flash of fate. Rescue was what she'd felt when he came up behind her on the highway. The flare that could burn away the dross of both their lives. Alchemy — however unreasonable and unscientific.

If only he would complete the rescue. The room had begun jittering in the glare of an oncoming migraine from her past. But he pressed on, saying how fine she was, how talented, saying how devastated he would be if she came to his country with such talent and used this in creating an imaginary place, filled with clever fabrications …

“I have no idea what you mean!”

Again he said, “You do! You must!” He said she of all people must understand how the beauty of the world was often a responsibility too much to bear, for he had seen this in her paintings.

“Oh, Clare! What I would do to have your ability to capture the world as it truly is, and turn it into an image transcendent. But to have this gift and use it falsely —”

“Falsely!”

He glared, his hair springing wild as he picked up the painting of the orchid. “Then can you show me the place where this grows?”

The room was closing in. “I told you, it grows in there.” She pointed to the pile of photocopies. “Where? In what page?”

Now the faces of the long-ago inquisition were pressing.
Bad. Wicked. Obscene. Ruined
.

“This is sick,” she managed to say, bile rising in her throat. “I absolutely don't get how you can come here and make these accusations.”

“Because I fear for you!” But he looked lost now, too. “Because I need you.” He took a step towards her. “Because I am so lonely. Clare!”

SO LONELY. SHE HAD the impression of his face shearing into pieces at this confession. Oh and how well she knew the way loneliness could leave her feeling branded, shameful.

She thought of the little boy she'd imagined, always overreaching with some grand idea, now grownup and wanting to save not just the endangered world but her too. Tripping up again, mismanaging the whole thing, aware now not only of botching that, but of giving away some disgraceful emptiness in himself.

She wanted to hold the moment while she found the words to set this right. But her body was already spinning out of control, the room spinning too, and sickness burning up into her throat. Her face twisted as she tried to stem this, and she could see him misreading her expression, assuming it was disgust at the shameful part of himself he'd just blurted out. She struggled for control. It was no use. She had to dash out onto the back terrace where her stomach heaved and heaved.

Whatever she was trying to get rid of, she would not. When her breathing settled, she heard him starting his car.

The Shades That Absence Has

CLARE HAD EXPECTED THE long-absent Dottore Alfredo Bandinelli to be careworn, pale, and distracted, surrounded by tipping heaps of untended paperwork. Instead, behind a vast polished desk, which held just a single piece of sculpture in deep blue glass, Alfredo Bandinelli was tanned and alarmingly good looking. His eyes held a hooded alertness that sent her own scurrying back to the sculpture. This turned out to be a male torso with a glassy penis butting up against the plinth.

When she came out of his office a half hour later, she felt as if she were emerging from a murky funfair tunnel where strange objects had flown at her in the dark, maybe bats. She tried to figure out exactly what she had learned.

She had clung to the hope that he might have had custody of her uncle's notes and papers, and perhaps — no matter how wrenching — some personal communication her uncle had intended her to have. But there was nothing. Further, not only would there be “some small delay” before the legal complexities regarding the boundaries of her uncle's property could be solved, and consequently a delay in transferring the title, but — alarmingly — there also turned out to be what he called “the small matter of your inhabitants.”

She was still trying to get her head around the implications as she started back down the level street. She passed the store where she had bought the yellow dress. A single pair of silk pyjamas graced the window now, the sort that one might slip into late on a night when the yellow dress had been removed by someone else's long, scarred fingers; pyjamas to sip prosecco in, play footsie in, before the whole business started up again; pyjamas intended for an Italian woman who knew what was going on. As it turned out, the yellow dress had been, too — and certainly not for the likes of Clare, who could not spend half an hour with a lawyer without becoming more confused than before. She'd nodded as Alfredo Bandinelli leaned back in his sleek leather chair, made a steeple of his fingers, and talked about those “inhabitants” of hers, “who inform me that your esteemed uncle promised to make provision for them, in perpetuity, to go on living and working on this piece of land which they have only with greatest reluctance been forced to sell to him ten years ago …”

She paused at the window of a
pasticceria
, an Aladdin's cave of piled-up meringues and jewel-like sugared fruit and slabs of nougat, and stacks of the famous
panforte
of the region, in a dozen varieties, pale, dark, peppered, fruited, chocolate-covered, or dusted with a snow of powdered sugar.

A chocolate mousse cake was front and centre.

“In other words,” she'd said to Alfredo Bandinelli, “I am the legal owner of Marta and Niccolo Dottorelli's home?”

He'd said yes, that this would with “seeming assurance indeed appear to be so.” Therefore should she, “in times of the future,” become free, herself, to sell the land, she would be dispossessing the Dottorelli family, contrary to what had been “her esteemed uncle's wishes.” Though, true, there was nothing in writing to this effect, there was, all the same, “the burden of their believability in such matters, which has proved to weigh heavily should such disputes be unfortunate enough to proceed to court.”

Clare went into the pastry shop and bought the chocolate cake. She carried it along to the public gardens where she settled on a bench that looked out over the valley.

It was a day of thick-grained coppery light. The far hills had disappeared. Gone, too, was the hill town where the saint had run off with her noble lover. Clare sliced into the cake with the plastic knife she had asked for in the shop. A knife and a plastic coffee spoon. It was surely sinful to compare the saintly woman's predicament with her own. But there was this. Ever since those peculiar, painful moments which ended with Gianni driving away, something had happened in Clare's bones. Not that they had become fragile, leached of love, but that her bones felt crystallized, prey to rays of baleful energy from the great god-awful light years of empty sky. How to explain the need to feed those leached bones? Looking across the valley into the dense coppery mist, she found herself wondering what might happen to another sort of woman who really did hold saintly potential. Santa Margherita's lover died, love died. But, afterwards, what if her transformation truly had been cosmic; what if her bones started picking up holy vibrations like an old-fashioned radio crystal set? For the saintly, of course, that would be food enough. Clare cut another slice of the oozing cake.

Something else had happened. Clare's easy facility with brush and paints had left her. Her work now was stiff and prissy and ultracorrect, and she tore up sketch after sketch.

The chocolate mousse cake was doing its good work. As she dipped spoonfuls straight from the box, the world around looked even more beautiful for being inaccessible behind this thick pane of downright worthlessness.