The Whirling Girl (38 page)

AFTER RUNNING FROM THE Barbareschi, Clare had bypassed many seaside towns with no idea where she was headed. She finally turned off at the Ligurian city named for the saint who lay in the basilica in the town she'd fled.

She'd sat at a red-topped table in a floating bar, drinking a cold glass of crisp Ligurian wine, still unable to get the encounter with the Barbareschi out of her head. Those awful, unlikely people. How had they arrived at her place? There'd been no indication, when she went down, of another car. Sometimes, as she drove, she'd thought she'd made them up — made the whole incident up — just to propel herself out of there. Their report of the conversation with Gianni's wife was too terrible. Would they go back, carrying Clare's message? Would they set aside their goofy saccharine idea of what love was and persuade the hard-working Eleanora to go to Gianni in his garden, maybe just sit with him beside the burning bush, the bush that could set the air on fire, but also heal?

Across the harbour, the seafront buildings were all painted with
trompe l'oeil
, brilliant cornices, arches, elaborate fake doors leading to fake rooms.

There's always one room that you are not allowed to enter
.

If she'd never crossed the threshold of Gianni's private room, never picked up that photo, would she be in his unicorn garden right this minute, flourishing there, even painting once again, under his vigilant eye, his patient care?

She'd ordered another glass of wine and watched the frescoed buildings across the harbour bobbing in the evening sun. She'd eaten a dish of clams, taken a room with a harbour view in a hotel that welcomed dogs. It was through the use of her credit card that Harold Plank had traced her. He'd decided to give her a week to settle down, but she didn't find that out until much later.

Early morning traffic woke her as it veered around the corner just below, on the road to Portofino.

Five o'clock. No cafes would be open. There was no coffee machine in the room. No mini-bar with a pack of nuts. Nor was there any reading matter, except the hotel folder. What had been going through her head when she landed herself here in this room, with two dogs and nothing to eat and nothing to read? Not even a Bible in the drawer, surely an oversight in a room that looked across the harbour to the statue of a saint.

She delved into her backpack, which had been knocking around in the jeep ever since La Celta. Nothing as useful as a toothbrush. Though, for some reason, there was an eyeliner wedged at the bottom.

What the pack did hold was the collection of scholarly articles Gianni had given her. She'd forgotten about them. And the beautiful glossy book about the gardens of Pompeii, which brought his voice back to skewer her with the memory of a little villa,
closer to the ground, with a peristyle garden for you to sit in and paint
. What a cruel trick, to have accidentally dragged along a book invoking that.

The cover showed the reproduction of a mural from the wall of a Roman courtyard garden, with an archway leading in.
There's always one room that you are not allowed to enter
, yes; but you go there anyway. In imagination, if nothing more.

As she began to turn the pages, the same dreamy feeling of adventure stole over her that she'd had when she'd set off up the Amazon river in a small steamer boat from the once famous rubber city of Manaus, in the company of the talented and beautiful Margaret Mee …

She pulled the hotel counterpane around her and she was there, in a garden courtyard in Pompeii, peering over the shoulder of that artist all those centuries ago. She followed him as he moved around the garden selecting an appropriate wall surface for his work; then, as he applied such enchanting detail: a warbler on a branch, a spray of rose leaves behind, such lyric colours, the whole scene so alive. As she began to read the text, the compelling words of the famous garden archaeologist pulled her further into intelligent escape, led her into tiny flower-filled courtyards on humble Roman streets, grand ones in villas that had since been given names impossible to resist: the Villa of the Mysteries; the Villa of the Papyri, whose charred scrolls might still become readable one day; the Villa of the Scandalous Elagabulus, whose dining room had a retractable ceiling that allowed him to smother his dinner guests in cloudbursts of flowers …

Eventually she took the dogs out for a very fast walk, so she could get back to reading more. When she returned, she came on photographs of pollen grains which had been discovered in a loft holding a great store of carbonized plants. Shown as through a microscope, the minute specks of pollen became otherworldly shapes, folding into themselves like shells, unfurling as if winged, each one a composition, she realized, with a blow of something close to lust.

She tore through all this greedily, sitting on the floor by the bed, the dogs curled near, the periodicals spread around her. When she came again to the article describing the garden of the oasis palace of King Herod at Jericho, she found herself going back to it again and again, studying the layered sections of the excavation, the dotted lines showing the surface of the topmost layer of earth built up over ensuing centuries, a broken column bulging through the layers underneath, one sort of earth and below that another, and small stones pebbling the hollows that had once held the priceless balsam plants …

This had some use for her, beyond what the diagram represented. She didn't know what she meant. She took the eyeliner and made a blow-up of one of the illustrations on the tiled wall of the bathroom. She then studied it for a long time, before taking a shower. After the shower, and with some difficulty, she washed it off again.

Five days of reading. At the table by the window, breathing sea air and fumes; at sidewalk cafes; in one floating bar or another, with the frescoed ochre and gold and mint-green buildings across the water flashing in the reflected wave-scattered glare.

On the sixth morning, she became aware of a man at a nearby table watching her.

She had been poring through the article about the excavation of Herod's garden. During the past days, a resolution had been forming. But she'd noticed the man when he came in because he'd made a fuss about ordering a latte; then a bigger fuss when the waiter brought him a glass of milk, protesting first in loud American, then in bursts of French. Finally he gave up, drank the milk, and stared at her.

He had a bowl haircut and white puckered skin, as if it rarely saw the light.
A museum piece
, she thought, smiling, as she raised the American Journal of Archaeology between them. Then it turned out the man was a museum piece indeed. “I'm in there,” he said, when she unwisely lowered the magazine to take a sip of her own caffè latte.

She said, “Oh? Where?”

Big mistake, though would it have been better if she'd never known?

He came, sat beside her, and flipped the journal to an article about the Baron Lowenthall's Museum of Stone Age Artefacts in Paris. This was where Luke had worked, she remembered. The article concerned the exact specialty that Luke had told her about, retrofitting stone chips that had been flaked away by Stone Age flintknappers. When Clare mentioned Luke's name, the man's white face curdled with disgust. Oh he knew Tindhall all right. Tindhall had been a minor curator at the Lowenthall, when this man — Morton, his name was — had been brought in as an expert, to retrofit some stone chips recently discovered in a cave in the Dordogne. Tindhall had been fascinated with the process, had kept hanging around the basement where Morton was busy pursuing the delicate task, day after day. Then it turned out that the actual spear point, carved eons from the stone Morton had so laboriously put back together, was already in the museum collection. But when Tindhall displayed the two pieces together, as part of an exhibition that was widely touted throughout Paris, he failed to give Morton a word of credit in the catalogue, though Tindhall's own name, as curator, was all over the thing, front and centre.

As luck would have it, soon after this, Morton discovered Tindhall and the Baroness Lowenthall performing the horizontal waltz, as he put it, in a store room, heedless, in their lust, of the Neanderthal grave goods they'd pushed aside. Morton had moved quickly; Tindhall had been fired.

Of the many thoughts that went through Clare's head, as she left Morton reminiscing on this triumph, it did her little credit, she knew, that the first one was utterly self-serving.

During her days of reading, she had convinced herself more and more that there must have been gardens associated with the tomb in her meadow. But Harold Plank, in his determination to explore farther along the cliff face, had talked of bringing in a backhoe and other heavy equipment to move the rubble. And Luke — even when, earlier, she'd mentioned the possibility of gardens there — had brushed her theory aside.

But the property was still hers. Somehow she would manage to get in contact with archaeologists of the other sort, the garden sort.

Of course, such exploration would need funding.

And now Plank's right-hand man turned out to be not entirely what he cracked himself up to be. This did not mean that in the big things he was a fraud. But surely she could use Morton's information to get Luke to push her case with his employer.

Schemes — dreams — a new road ahead. Fired up with this, she headed back to Tuscany.

CLARE HAD WONDERED, SOMETIMES, what the world would be like if she were someone else. Would those around her also change? When she got back, Luke was very glad to see her. He was real, warm, alive, bulky — and different. Because she had become someone else? Because he sensed the sureness in her now?

If so, was the very sureness that changed him the thing that undid her?

LAST NIGHT SHE'D FOUND him packing his gear. Harold Plank, confident that the negotiations in Florence were falling into place, had agreed to expand the Plank Foundation's horizons and finance Luke's explorations in Turkey. Speed was of the essence, though. Luke was leaving for Ankara the day after next to get all the formalities sewn up. He had held off only for her return.

“It's the chance of a lifetime, Clare. But I sodding need you with me. Please.”

The Gift

LUKE CAME STRIDING ACROSS the piazza from the direction of the museum. He lifted an arm when he saw her. “Clare!”

He'd had a haircut. He was wearing some sort of greenish tropical-weight suit with one too many buttons and not enough girth. A narrow leather tie of the sort she hadn't seen for years. If he'd just come thrusting over like the old Luke, handsome and confident and feral, she might still have been able to get up and leave. But the agitation, the tie!

She said, “You're looking very spruce.”

“This is an important day.”

“What have you done with Sir Harold?”

“I'm picking him up later.” Luke paused, gulped. “He agreed to put off the appointment till this afternoon. I wanted to talk to you first, alone.”

Luke sat down across from her. He put his big hand over hers. Again he said, “Clare.” She said, “Luke.” With his other hand he fished into his breast pocket. He said, “I've …” He pulled out a box. “Well, the fact of the matter is that I've got something for you here.” He edged over a coaster, and carefully set the box on top. He took a deep breath. “For a fine, exceptional woman …” Eyes fixed on the table in front of him, as if intent on something many times rehearsed. “… With fine, exceptional qualities of every sort — a small token, to mark our stepping off together into the future.”

He pushed the coaster with the box towards her. A small square box, deep blue velvet, with the gold insignia of Cartier of London embossed on the lid.
Jeweller to Her Majesty the Queen
.

“I should have wrapped it,” he said.

“It doesn't look like the sort of box that wrapping could improve.”

“You can say that again,” the woman at the next table said.

Clare reached over and slipped the box back in his pocket, grateful for the intrusion.

“I think we'd better do this somewhere else. Come on, let's take a walk.”

They headed down the level street, past the perfume shop, past the shop of the woman who sold leathers, past the office of the notary where she would shortly sign away her peculiar heritage. Across the Piazza Garibaldi, where the same policewoman was directing traffic through that odd backing-and-turning routine. Up the slanting cobbled route she'd driven down to execute that same manoeuvre, ages ago.

Before we step off together into the future, he'd just said. The carefully thought-out words.

For a fine, exceptional woman, he'd said — with fine, exceptional qualities.

They reached the gate where the saint had come into the city. She turned and faced him under the tree that reached over the gate, its leaves parched, its blossoms gone.

The familiar creases on his face. His slicked, silly, short hair. His eyes that shifted from hers. None of the old bracing mockery, the rasping edge of lust. What happened to the lust?

The need to shock him flooded up — and to know him. But finally, above all, to have the true story that had shaped her life understood by someone else on the face of this earth. Maybe, then, stepping off into that future could be a new start.

She went over to sit on the low stone wall by the cobbled track. She said, “Luke, I need to tell you some hard things.”

“Clare really — there's no need.”

He thought she was about to tell him of Gianni. Of course. He'd been hoping to scrape by without ever knowing anything for sure.

“This is about what happened long ago.”

“Oh that.” As if he was positive he knew the gist of that already. But this was her chance — his as well — to define that future they were stepping into. She imagined them standing there together making a bonfire of their secret shames, becoming weightless.

Dry leaves. Clacking pods. The plain below seared by the flat iron of the summer sun. The Stations of the Cross leading up the hill. A good man she did not love, waiting with reasonable patience to hear a story he did not want to hear.

But she told him all of it — indeed, more than she'd allowed herself to know. The sense of power that the young girl had been infected with flared up in her again, the need she'd had to make the one who had shoved her away become evil as she was, to make him weep and be evil, too. She didn't dare look at Luke all the time she was talking, feeling the waves of rigidity coming off him, unable to stop peeling back the layers of her life.

“So you see, I'm not fine and exceptional at all,” she said at the end. “But there's something I still can never get straight — how all of this had such power over me all these years. I was just a kid, Luke. No matter what, I was just a kid.”

In the silence where her words had fallen she realized she was waiting for him to say,
Jesus yes, you were just a kid
.

He was scuffing a pebble, worrying it with the toe of his shoe, trying to get it to turn over. He finally shrugged. “Yeah, well I always figured the old guy had diddled you, and that's where you got those moves from, you dirty little girl.”

His shoe was brown. It had nail-hole dots. A thick-soled walking shoe. She reached down and picked up the stone he'd been kicking, clutched it tight until her palm hurt.

Imagine revealing herself like that. Imagine having taken herself seriously enough to have made a drama of herself like that. Her bones were melting with the shame of it. She pictured the bronze mirror from the tomb, the way the metal had blistered, bubbled, changed, turned green and in some parts actually replaced the cloth that once had covered the reflective surface.

How many lifetimes to learn a trick like that?

What had she imagined she would accomplish? She had never felt so lonely or so squalid, and not only about the story itself, but about the attempt to put it into words, make something of it, spark something with it …

She threw the stone over the wall.

“Yeah, so fiddle-diddle, right? So what!”

There. In truth it only took a moment for the molten mess to chill and harden, start sprouting its own protective layer. She knew what could happen, though. She remembered Luisa di Varinieri explaining how the corrosive elements in the patina could eat and eat away until there was nothing left of the inner metal; but this seemed a small price to pay.

So she stood up. He did, too. Her tone reassured him there wouldn't be any more hideous and embarrassing personal revelations; and she certainly would not be expecting any in return, which could be the very best way to live. So misguided, the urge to merge. She tapped his chest. “Well?”

“Yes. Exactly.” He reached into his pocket, if possible even more nervous than before, and justly so. As he pulled out the box, a piece of paper came with it, fluttered to the ground.

The receipt?

He seemed not to notice, preoccupied, working on more words to say? She bent down and retrieved it, but this didn't seem the moment to hand it back. She slid it into the pocket of her skirt.

The box pried open with the snap of a shell. Gold flared in the sun. For a moment this was all she saw, a coil of flashing little links. Then, half-hidden by the chain, she saw a knob of blue. A tiny miracle of blue, just as she remembered, the fullness of it inside the glass bead's skin.

“Oh.”

“A small thing that holds the world,” he said. “I remember you saying that. You told me if you had something that rare, you would wear it as a secret talisman.”

Each sentence dropped into the pit of her amazement, while currents of hot air argued in the branches of the acacia and set the dry pods rattling. Each sentence so unlike anything he had ever said.

What might have happened, now, if the last ten minutes had gone another way — if she'd opened the gift in the piazza, instead of here, without telling him her story? If his reaction to it had been different by even a degree? Would she have followed, intrigued, along this path of who he really was, someone even further from upright than she had imagined, someone sharing her faults and going one better, to conjure up this illicit gift? Would she have fallen for that? Been touched by that? Maybe even welcomed that? Would she have thrown up her hands at some great expectation suddenly released and banished, some enormous weight of personal expectation lifted from the world, from him, from her? Was this always how it was? People coming together, pulling apart? Was it all only a matter of timing?

“You're not saying much.”

“So tell me, Luke.”

He had mentioned to Sir Harold that Clare had taken a shine to the thing. “Seen the value of a little thing like this, I mean, which not everyone would see. This was when I was back in London, before Sir Harold came out here. He'd taken quite a shine to you of course. I wanted him to understand that you were so much more than just a pretty face.”

“You wanted to show the uniqueness of my inner being.”

“Right.”

Luke seemed to accept her saying this with some relief. She had a surge of sadness at how it must be for him, negotiating his way across this swamp, jumping from one unsure floating thing to another.

He said, “And I gather that later, when he visited the conservation lab, somehow or other —”

“Harold Plank took it?”

“Come on, Clare. You told me you yourself almost took it. And then, you see, he did want to make some gesture.”

“Gesture.”

“To show how pleased he is. That you and he … And then that you and I …”

“So this is actually a gift from Harry.”

“Well, Sir Harold …”

“Let's just call him Harry. Under the circumstances.”

“Yes. Well. Harry put the pieces together, true. But you see —” The big hand went to his heart. The snake eye pooled a tear of ruby light. Oh, and she saw, she really did, how hard it was for anyone to live a life with dreams and ideals and needs all melded into compromise and dross; such a close line we walked. So unfair that someone as dishonest as she was, so tarred, should cast such judgment — or use it as an excuse.

She closed the box. She put it in her pocket, where she heard the rustle of the slip of paper she'd picked up a moment before. The bill from Cartier? Made out to Harold Plank? With Plank's incriminating signature on it, too?

She turned to Luke. She would have liked to tell him that she understood how she'd asked far too much of him just now with her confession — how there was even the possibility, she saw now, that telling him had been a test she'd hoped he'd fail — and that she understood, too, the gamble he had taken with the gift, and that he truly had believed it might please her.

But maybe he saw. She hoped he saw.

She put her hands on his shoulders. “Don't worry,” was all she could manage. “I will make sure that everything comes right. I can do that.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “So go on now,” she said. “Get out of here.”

She said, “Send me a postcard when you get where you are going.”