The Whirling Girl (23 page)

HER UNCLE HAD BEEN angry?
But when he returned from San Angelo that day he was changed?

Clare did find herself hiking down, thinking she would visit the church. It was unlikely she'd find stray thoughts of her uncle's lingering there; but if the building dated from the time of Charlemagne, maybe some sort of ancient wisdom would seep from its walls.

The roadside was brilliant with the riot of flowers calling attention to themselves, a carpet of purple vetch, plum red snapdragons, clustered spike of
aconitum
, the red-stemmed towers bumbled over by huge black bees. Her fingers itched to take a pencil, a chalk, a brush, even a pen. She thought of Nikki Stockton's fluid lines in ink. What was that pen getting up to this morning?

When she reached the bottom of the hill, she found she couldn't

enter the church in her agitated state. Instead, she found her steps turning in a different direction, towards the cell of the hermit whose work she'd come to have a kinship with. So what if the cell was somewhere near the old mill where Luke Tindhall lived. He'd be off on some other jaunt, maybe pursuing that “intriguing little possibility” he'd mentioned to the British women, sneaking around behind the back of his employer.

She started off through the little village. She passed a small run-over snake, its body flattened in the shape of a question mark, its tongue a splash of red. The road climbed through vineyards. In the angle of a terrace wall ahead, she saw a niche with a shrine, and a weathered sign,
Molino di Metelliano
, at the entrance of the lane.

The Temple of Eridu

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN so easy to keep on walking. But he was dressed in rumpled khaki. He looked tumbled by cares. Ahead of him walked two cats on long red leashes, as he came out onto the road. Who couldn't help but laugh at the sight of a man walking cats?

“Luke,” she said.

He said, “Clare.”

“Nice cats,” she said. “Do you take them with you everywhere?”

“Oh for heaven's sake, they're not mine. I'm just minding them for my hosts while they're off in the States. One of my few duties is to take them for walks now and then, so I got it in my head to train them to the leash.”

“Good practice. Maybe you can work up to ocelots.”

She could have walked right by and skipped all that; instead she stood and watched as he bent down and undid the leashes. The cats trotted back down the lane.

A Vespa buzzed up the road, rattling the silence with its wasp-like shift of gears. In its wake the air hung heavy and super-charged.

He said, “Come on, I'll show you my waterfall.”

“I've come to visit the hermit, actually.”

“Right this way.”

When they came to a sign indicating the path to the hermit's grotto, she didn't point it out. The cats were waiting for him by a little wooden bridge over a stream. The bridge led into a lane where alders and rangy chestnuts arched above. Beyond, on a rise, was a fine old tile-roofed house, with pots of lavender and geraniums and strawberries flanking stone steps. He said this had once been the miller's house. The building behind, by the stream, had been the mill. Two millstones leaned against the wall, wider in diameter than he was tall.

He led her along a narrow path between the old mill and the water, then across a bridge made of a single plank. An amber pool brimmed behind a dam of tumbled rock. The pool was shaded, but one flat rock lay in the sun, and on the far side a lacy fall of water slid from the woods above.

She pulled off boots, t-shirt, jeans. She shed underpants and bra, and dove.

He followed. From the centre of the pool, she turned and treaded water to observe. The water was brown and gold and rippled around her. She didn't care about the nature of his stare, whether or not it was amused, admiring or dismissive, whether it was struggling to reduce her to the triteness of a white swimming insect trapped in the amber of the pool.

He was having troubles with the buttons of his shirt. He was not as cool about this as he would have liked. Maybe that explained the meanness of his stare. He looked great against the backdrop of the rocks and trees, a primitive figure, a centaur: shaggy head and powerful haunches and much black curling body hair, his squat effective-looking penis flopping as he hopped to remove one red sock and then the other. The gorgeous curve of his white bum as it slipped beneath the water, before he pulled her under.

IT IS MUCH LATER, late afternoon, when she wakes in panic, unable for a moment to figure out where she is.

She is staring at a framed drawing, a masculine figure making forceful love to a life-size swan, a tangle of powerful limbs and drooping, submissive wings and feathers. She decides she is still asleep, for this image has filled her dreams, the picture and the question it raises, which seemed in sleep to trouble her above all others. In the myth, wasn't it the other way around? Wasn't it the god who took the form of a swan? That phrase, that question, has circled through scenes not of two figures coupling, but of the ordinary anxieties that often plague her nights, the misplaced handbags, wallets, keys, the cars that refuse to start, the conviction that if she could grasp the conundrum of the drawing, the taxi would arrive. Dressed in a sheet she was waiting for a taxi, and plucking feathers from the woman in the drawing.

The shutters are closed. The upturned slats let in the sound of the stream. On the other side of the bed, Luke stirs, heaves himself up, pads into the bathroom. She recognizes the shape of him with a shock of loss, of further panic, as if in all those misplaced objects jangling through her sleep she saw herself. When she hears him flush the toilet she closes her eyes. He pauses at the end of the bed. She feels his stare.

He stands there for such a long time before he bends, runs one finger up the inside of her leg, twirls her pubic hair, traces the line of her hip, circles first one breast then the other, draws a long slow ticklish line down to the hot bruised part between her legs again.

Without opening her eyes, she says, “So now I understand.”

“What baby, what?” These words muffled for now he is kneeling on the end of the bed and setting to work again with his impertinent tongue.

“Why the artist gave Leda the feathers.”

He does not want to know, of course; though he was pleased when he first led her in here, when she paused to admire the reproduction on the opposite wall, which he explained was a fresco from the town hall in San Gimignano: a medieval couple in a bath, the woman up to her lovely white-globed breasts in hot water. They'd walked back naked from the pool. He'd worn her underpants on his head, a trophy, a celebration of how he'd held her to the hot rock in the sun, how he'd gone at it and would not let her go until she satisfied him with her scream of pleasure.

What baby, what? Now I understand the artist put the woman in feathers to reveal the situation's true psychology, her submission, ambiguous and cloaked, though maybe the mute swan screamed
. She almost has to laugh as she imagines his reaction if she tried explaining all of this. Instead, as the slatted light grows dim they carry on, replaying several other myths she remembers from her peculiar classical education: first pinioned beneath him and wondering if that was the origin of the word; then emulating that poor girl, Io, who for her pains got changed into a cow; and then she tries for Semele, who ended up burned to a crisp.

OH, HOW SHE WISHED. For she gave everything, and the room reeked of promise, just as the whole of the outdoors had earlier. Yet time and again, at the crucial point, the flame in her receded. Even on the rock the first time, the scene slammed shut behind a kind of glass partition; Clare was an observer. This was her old story. But from her first meeting with Luke she'd sniffed the promise of something harsh enough to break her through into the actual moment. In some subliminal layer of her mind she'd imagined all of this perhaps exactly as it happened: rough, wordless, and exhausting. If that was not enough, nothing would ever be enough.

Later when they were sitting in the tub, not unlike those figures in the fresco — when she was up to her neck in the hot water of her lies and excited cries — unexpectedly,
Because I am so lonely
she heard. She felt a sick pang. How could she be where she was? She saw Gianni's hair springing up, wild, as he urged her to be something different, better; his face, oddly broken the way it had looked just before she ran out her kitchen door.

I am so lonely
.

“Scram!” she said out loud.

Luke said, “Hey. I haven't washed my willy yet.”

She turned back to the other one, the real one — the one who peered no further than her slippery surface — and tried to push him under. They wrestled, covered in bubbles, and ended up slipping around on the bathroom tiles in a new sort of embrace, both of them laughing, overwhelmed, delighted.

LUKE COOKED SPAGHETTI TOSSED in garlic and oil. She grated a mountain of parmesan. They drank much of a two litre cardboard box of wine and ate the pasta and then a carton of lemon
sorbetto
he found at the back of the freezer. He poured them both a fine large brandy, which they carried back to bed. They lay in the dark and sipped their drinks by the pale light of the moon sifting through the slats of the shutters. “So tell me my proud beauty …” he began.

The next thing she knew, it was morning.

CLARE WOKE TO THE sound of Luke splashing in the shower. Her head ached. Her limbs ached. What remained of her brain was mush. She forced herself back into the web of sleep till the smell of coffee filtered through.

The hot water was used up. Her clothes were out by the pool. She trailed into the kitchen wearing the shirt he'd lent her the night before, her head throbbing. Luke was padding around barefoot, wearing an unbuttoned shirt and thick yellowy-white underpants.

“Aren't you a pretty bird,” he said. He took a blue-striped bowl and poured it half full of espresso, half full of steaming milk. “Here, get this inside of you.” He pulled on a blue-striped butcher apron. “I'm going to make you a first-rate fry-up, girl.”

She took one caffeine-laden sip, followed by another. She realized she was starving. And remembered something. The moment came back to her, from just before she'd crashed into sleep,
So tell me my proud beauty
…

It had been about her uncle. She remembered bits of it now, his pretend-joshing and only half-coherent attempts to steer towards the matter that was all anyone cared about, before he'd collapsed into snores.

Luke was holding the egg carton, demanding, “One or two?”

She said, “I don't suppose you've got any chocolate ice cream stuck away in the back of that freezer?” It turned out that chocolate ice cream, on toast with bacon and syrup, was the precise fuel she needed.

“SO TELL ME MY proud beauty,” she said when breakfast was over, “Where exactly were you when you said you were in Rome?”

It was almost sweet to see him squirm.

“Come on,” she persisted. “My spies are everywhere, you turkey. I happen to know you were in Turkey. And it had something to do with your discovery at that dig in Iraq, didn't it? Something you'd found that dated back thousands of years, that you were telling those tweedy British women about.”

He tried to pretend he didn't know what she meant.

She sat quietly and stared, the memory flashing back as she waited, of how her uncle had taught her to be very quiet just like this as they flicked their fishing lines into the pool where the big cutthroat swam. She waited. She could glimpse Luke's secret swimming when he met her gaze. He half wanted her to see.

The project Luke had joined involved a Neolithic village site north of Baghdad, where the earliest level of habitation dated back roughly to 7000 bc. The team's mandate was to assess and record damage from the recent war, and take some protective measures. But the director had covertly nobbled a U.S. military squad to do a bit of heavy digging, before that group got shipped home. A shocking business, Luke said, and heaven only knew what damage might have ensued if the Heritage Bureau had not got wind of what was going on.

Luckily before that, one afternoon, Luke — he fisted his chest to emphasize the Lukeness of the matter — braved the perishing temperature during siesta time (three in the morning was the start of a normal work day) to explore on his own.

He followed the remains of a mud brick wall at the bottom of the pit the backhoe had hacked down to the lowest village level, and then he, Luke, accidentally struck a corner brick with his trowel in a way that produced a hollow sound.

It would have been unconscionable, of course, to strike it further, to break it open. Yet somehow, as he tried gently to pry the brick loose, it fell to pieces anyway. What he was looking at among the crumbled clay was a rough circle of obsidian, with a polished surface so undamaged that even in the deep shade of the pit he could clearly see his face in the black volcanic glass.

A mirror of an advanced craftsmanship that could only have come from somewhere other than this modest village culture. The obsidian surely from the volcanic mountainous area of eastern Turkey, and the making of it too. An almost identical one had been found at Çatalhöyük, with a similar convex and exceptionally polished planar surface.

A mirror from Anatolia, found at a level at least two thousand years earlier than any other obsidian item had been found in Mesopotamia.

When he lifted the mirror, he found more evidence that in the earliest of times, trade had seeped down the Tigris from a far more advanced culture to the north. He found a clutch of tiny stoppered jars and a nest of copper beads.

CLARE SHOOK HER HEAD, imagining the moment: Luke crouching at the bottom of that hole, oblivious to the murderous heat.

“But then all those finds got commandeered by the Iraqi authorities?” she said. “I'm sure that's fair. But still, I hope you got pictures.”

No such luck. Just as he was gathering the pieces, a shadow fell across the pit, and next thing the director was scrambling down and stuffing them into various pockets of his khaki shirt. That was the last Luke saw of that little hoard.

A funny look crossed his face. He reached into one of his shirt's many pockets. “Though I do keep just this with me, for luck — and inspiration.”

It was a tiny black jar, acorn-size.

He twisted out the stone stopper, waved the jar under Clare's nose. For a moment, sharp and poignant, the Gardens of King Herod, with their precious balsam, floated through the bacon-smelling kitchen.

The vial contained a still-potent residue of perfume made from the fabled terebinth tree, he was telling her, a tree native to those same Anatolian uplands, whose resin had been coveted from earliest times as a base for perfume, for its healing properties, and for more mundane uses as well, such as a caulking for boats. “The same ruddy boats that brought that little bundle of exotic goods down the Tigris in the first place from what were then the forested copper-bearing Anatolian uplands,” he said.

What this meant — he'd had the spark of insight right there, in that sweltering hole, though he had not told a single other soul to this very day — what this meant was that he, Luke, had likely stumbled upon not just evidence of trade in luxury goods coming down from the north at a far earlier date than anyone had so far postulated, but evidence of a thriving, trading, manufacturing, and very ancient city somewhere up in Anatolia, so far undiscovered.