The Whirling Girl (31 page)

Always One Forbidden Room

BEFORE THEY WENT TO bed again, Gianni showed Clare a handdrawn, tinted map of the whole estate, which hung at the top of the tower stairs. It was really more like an illustration of a kingdom in a fairytale, with the villa as the focal point, situated at the end of the cypress drive, within acres of box hedges, herbaceous plantings, landscaped groves with hidden grottoes, and vast slopes of lawn. The villa was large and white, with a double baroque staircase folding back on itself to a regal arched entrance on the second floor. A fountain with dolphins spouted high plumes of water in the gravelled entrance court.

Very early the next morning, Gianni slipped out silently to meet his manager. Later, a phone rang somewhere in the apartment.

Mammà? Ever present. Never seen.

Perhaps never seen, in fact, by the likes of Clare. For it had all been a ruse, she decided, this story that the parents were off at the sea. They had their fine life up at the villa, and whatever the son and heir got up to in the
castello
they conveniently ignored.

That had been fine with Clare last night. But now, lying in the silky bed, sated, pampered, loved, she started hearing snaky whispers suggesting that having all this — having it and at the same time not having it — made her some kind of laughingstock. Then she was out of bed, wrapped in that long red robe, going through pockets, pulling open drawers, trying the doors to all the lower rooms, now locked, even the one where she'd seen the rosy bedspread and the doll. Eventually, she went to sit in one of the tower windows, crosslegged on the broad stone sill. She watched the sun come up over the far hills, a great ball of light that exploded across the sky, magnified by mist. She pictured the map of the estate, the fairytale kingdom. She thought how in fairytales there was always one room that the visitor was forbidden to enter, a kind of test.

When Gianni returned, he urged her to dress quickly.

“Come, we will find some little unicorn perhaps, for you who do not believe.” He led her to his garden, situated between the first defensive wall and a second one, in an area that had once served to shelter residents of the surrounding hamlets from marauding armies.

“Look!” he said. “Something even more remarkable.” He gestured towards a mass of scented bergamot among the crumbling stones of the garden wall. “We have some members of royalty who have lingered in their life cycle just for you. Our little Spanish Queens!”

A flash of saffron crystallized the light. A butterfly settled among the blooms, followed by another, a ripple of silver from its underwing, a pattern of black lace over the velvet wing-top. “She is one of our very rare ones,” he whispered. “In many countries she does not anymore exist. Do you know how many in Europe have become extinct?”

It was too terrible to think of. “No!”

“In Holland, this wealthy nation with its tulips and its diamonds, eleven species no longer come. In little Belgium, despite its chocolate and its fearsome civil service, there are thirty-two species which are extinct. Extinct. Is this not a dread word? Shall I tell you their names? Shall we make a poem?”

He walked back and forth in front of the crumbled wall.

“Redwing Skipper, Mazarine Blue, Purple-Edged Copper, SilverWashed Fritillary …”

On he went, and on; the litany of empty names the earth was becoming layered with, smothered by the silence of those wingless names. Clare saw herself creeping around in the long red robe, opening drawers, prying at locked doors, a larva of suspicion.

LATER, GIANNI TOOK CLARE around to meet some of his employees. He introduced her to Bastiano Gentili, his manager, telling Bastiano that she was “a most talented and famous artist who has come to grace us with her presence.”

When they walked away, Clare asked him, please, not to introduce her that way to others.

He broke a twig from a tree and snapped it, then turned to her with such a look. “Clare, I have been stricken,” he said, “Stricken, yes! — to think that words from me might have kept you from continuing the paintings for your new work.”

Stricken. Hair, eyebrows, not-yet-shaven chin hairs springing electrically.
Oh I love you
. How else to explain the welling-up need to do anything, anything, to prevent that sad ridiculous hair-springing stricken look.

She took his hands. She said it had been terrible of her to make him the scapegoat for the fact that, well, she was just feeling a little painted-out at the moment.

He looked relieved. He had so much hoped, he said, that this was all behind her now. “But I will make it up to you. I will.” His wind-blowing intensity again. “Here at La Celta, where you have time and freedom, I know you will find your muse returns.”

Then he took her to see the new lambs. “Tosti!” he called out to the shepherd, “Come! You must meet Clare Livingston, a great and famous artist who has come to us to recuperate her powers.” And by the time she met Manfredo of the many duties, “a most renowned botanical artist!” was what she had become.

“Please,” she said when they were out of earshot, “Don't do that.” She stamped her foot. He stamped his too. He said, “Then I will not.” They walked on. “But look!” He pointed to a creamy flower beside the byre where he kept rare white heifers. “See how this little one, which I believe in English is known as ‘common cow wheat' —” He gave it a nudge with his toe. “See how it trembles with anticipation for the moment when you will deign to make its portrait.”

So finally she confessed that there was something more than being painted-out going on. “I've lost it.” She tried to explain.

He turned her to him, ran his fingers down the sides of her face, as if there were tiny disfigurements in its composition that he could smooth away. “This is why I have brought you here, to my refuge,” he said. “To find it again.”

“Only for that?”

He smiled. No, he admitted, there were a few other reasons. “Come!” He led her to a haymow above the byre.

AND SO THE DAY passed; Clare was glad to hold at bay thoughts of the villa up the hill.

In the late afternoon, they returned to the walled garden. Gianni said he wanted her to see the hummingbird moths that came skimming in at that hour. But then — from behind a bush — he produced a gift, a most beautiful folding stool, the legs carved, with a seat of tooled Florentine leather. It had been made especially for her, by a craftsman in Florence, to use while sketching in his garden. Gianni had taken the liberty of smuggling along the pack with her art materials, he confessed, which she would find in the drawer beneath the bed.

When he caught her expression, his own face took on a childish, heartbreaking pout of disappointment. Then sternness clamped down.

“You do not wish me to push you,” he said. “I understand. Of course this cure will require rest, the breathing of this healthful air. But then, it will require that you try. Such talent as yours does not leave. You have left it. Here in my garden you will get it back.”

She saw him for a moment as a figure on a playing card, two opposite halves, and it was the sweet childish pouting upside-down half that she wanted to walk around the garden with. But he was saying, “For you see, my darling rare one, I have imagined the beautiful work we will accomplish here together. How we will aid and uplift one another.”

Aid and uplift?
Those snaky whispers slithered in again.
And you, Clare, are supposed to take part in all this aiding and uplifting without being good enough to be invited up to the villa?

“Gianni. Cut it out!” she snapped. “I'm a really flawed person. You don't know the half of it. And why is it so important that I paint? I think that's all you care about. It's weird. You've got some fetish about my painting.”

He turned pale. He put a finger to her lips. Then he took her arm and led her to a bench beside a bush whose flowers filled the air with a citrus perfume.

Did she know, he asked, that this was the famous burning bush?

If they should light a match here, on this hot evening, the vapour from the attractive flower would make the air catch fire!

But, he added, he had also learned another thing about this burning bush. It could heal wounds. There was a fresco of this in the museum in Naples, rescued from the wall of a villa like the one that they would soon build.

“Yes,” he rushed on, to sweep off her astounded look. “When you and I build our villa, I will make sure to have this little bush by the door, so that when we disagree we can quickly heal.”

“Hang on — have I missed something here?”

He sprang up. From behind the same wound-healing bush, he pulled a satchel containing a bundle of books and scholarly journals, including the journal she'd seen before with the article about the gardens of King Herod. He spread a thick glossy book on her knee, then squatted beside her to turn the pages. It was the book he'd told her of, about the gardens of Pompeii, the excavations carried on by a revered garden archaeologist.

Clare did not get a chance to examine that properly, either, because he was too impatient to reveal his main surprise. He also planned to make Clare a gift of a Roman garden.

“First, yes, we will make for ourselves that little villa, something closer to the ground; because when we grow old, it will be too hard to climb the tower. And in the centre of our villa I will make a courtyard with a peristyle garden for my beautiful rare one to sit in and to do her exceptional paintings!”

THAT NIGHT, AS CLARE floated, rare and cherished in the great silk bed, she was caught in filaments where his dreams twined with hers. When she began to emerge from sleep, he was gone. She wondered at the silence. She tried to follow a thread out of her dreams, remembering what he'd said the first day:
You have laid an enchantment here
. She lay staring at the great beamed ceiling as first light crept in, at the carved staircase leading to the parapet roof. They had not yet climbed through that trap door, to see the new set of stars.

But there was one door in this castle, truly, that she would have to confront. Not a door forbidding her to enter, but one she must push through. He wanted her to go back to her painting. Why imagine there was something uncanny about his wanting that? He had been thrilled by her ability, intrigued — possessive, yes, but at the same time possessed by guilt, because he blamed himself for damaging her confidence, and also for damaging what he must know had been the great pleasure and refuge of her work.

So she would have to master this. It was the key to the enchanted kingdom, that work of hers. She saw this as she lay staring at the staircase leading to the parapet, where in this light the carved flowers had become little grinning faces. Gianni himself might not completely know that what he cherished in her, needed most, perhaps the only thing he truly needed, was what he'd seen as her ability to transmute the painful beauty of the world. A responsibility almost too much to bear he'd called it, on that awful day in her kitchen.

Well then. If she was to remain here as his prize endangered love, she would have to put on the brilliant deceptive feathers of her so-called talent again, do it well enough to fool him anyway. As for herself, she thought now that maybe the work had always only been an excuse for not wholly living; that when he'd come along, she'd finally found what living was all about. She had to laugh as she got up, pulled on her clothes. Fine joke that the one thing she needed to keep this life alive was the one thing she could no longer do.

But she would.

Before she started down the tower stairs to the courtyard, she noticed a different door open this morning, on the lower floor of Gianni's apartment. She tiptoed close. Gianni's office. She hesitated on the sill, already feeling a sickish thrill of diminishment before she pushed across the room to the desk at the window, to pick up the photo in the silver frame.

The wife, two children, and Gianni. All standing together in a high-ceilinged room. The children were beautiful. A boy of perhaps thirteen, with dark hair like his father's and the same severe expression that Gianni sometimes wore. A girl who had disobeyed the photographer's instructions and was looking up at her father instead, with a sweet wicked grin, which he was returning. And the wife. Eleanora.

What had Clare expected? A perfectly groomed and haughty blonde perhaps, cashmere twin set, pearls — not the tired-looking woman in a sport vest with the logo of some junior team, the pretty mouth turned down with an expression sad but enduring, the brown hair not much thought about.

Clare held the photo, trying out a pleasing smile that the wife in the photo lacked. She felt the rest of herself disappear, while the smile remained. This was what it would be like, on and on, the fixed smile of the fifth person who both was and wasn't there.

But I can do it, she thought. The wife never comes here. This can be mine. She turned, still holding the photo, and looked around the room that held Gianni's personal things, his books and papers, his telescope, her Amazonia book, yes, on a gilt-edged table, and beside it the big leather portfolio he'd brought from the car. She was tempted to take a look in there. Then, from the sliver-framed photo she caught a flash of light as the sun came in, turning the glass into a mirror. She saw herself reflected and all the figures in the photo gone. Just herself, a woman with hair spun to gold, and behind her, through the reflected stone arches of the window, Siena's distant towers, the whole scene like a medieval fresco: the woman held in love's enchantment, beautiful and feckless, maybe even bad, who slips sideways into a life that isn't hers, slips there, stays there, doesn't care.

She continued down the fifty-two stairs of the tower, crossed the silent courtyard, found her way to the walled garden. Her task this morning was simple: by a simple effort of will and skill to start in on her new life here. The burning bush would be a perfect pick for her new true book, one that would make Gianni proud. It would be a book celebrating his garden and his life.
The Garden of the Unicorn
, she'd call it. She reached behind the bush for the stool.