It was the other strands of Malatesta’s character, especially the unscrupulousness, which stayed her hand when she tried to write anything. Of course she recognized that many patrons of the arts, and artists themselves, were not necessarily good people. The men in particular seemed often to be egocentric, condescending and vindictive. They were in the habit of treating their models, lovers and wives abominably. But, for the most part, they weren’t rapists or murderers, as reputedly was Malatesta. She pressed her knuckles into her temples, an old childhood habit she believed renewed her powers of concentration.
At that moment, someone rapped on her door. She sat bolt-upright. She never had any visitors. Her first thought was that something had happened to her parents, or to Phoebe. When had she last spoken to them?
“Agnes? Hi! Are you in there?”
She opened the door to see Irma, a round-faced woman with an infectious laugh, who had a room two doors down the hall.
“You’ve got a visitor waiting outside,” Irma told her. “I just bumped into him on my way back from getting coffee.” She held up the giant banded paper cup, as if compelled to show the evidence.
“He’s hot. Very hot,” Irma confided. She rolled her eyes, and blew on the coffee’s rising steam. “Well, have a nice day!” She smiled, and hurried away.
“Thank you,” Agnes called after her, doubtless a little late for anyone more practised in common courtesy.
She was perplexed. Hot. She knew only one person who fit Irma’s description. But it couldn’t be. Campbell hadn’t even spoken to her since their “encounter” in the Ark, other than “hello” with a smile he could have easily bestowed on a sparrow.
Nevertheless, she glanced quickly in the mirror, fluffed her hair with her fingers, and patted on some lip gloss. Then she ran downstairs to the lobby where her heart leapt so high in her chest, she pictured it as a salmon, pink and sleek, cresting sea spume. Flying. She was. Through the glass doors, she could see him sitting outside on the stone steps, with what looked like (but surely it couldn’t be?) a black leather jacket slung over his shoulder.
“Hi,” she said, as she pushed through the doors, armed with her best guise of cool dignity. “Did you want to see me?”
Her heart was no salmon now, but a creature whose wild battering might at any moment break through the confines of her ribs. And she shivered because she was cold, dressed in only a thin T-shirt, leggings and her little red velvet slippers with their flimsy soles.
He swung around and stood up to face her. The sensuous smile and his unreal beauty, more breathtaking even than she remembered, completely undid her. “Dissolved in a dew.” That was what was happening to her fatuous resolve to maintain a self-protective distance from him.
“Beautiful day,” he said, his right hand sweeping to take in the crystalline air and the pure light that seemed to bound from point to point.
“Yes, it is.” She smiled, but with her lips compressed. It was true. How sharp and clear everything looked.
“I wondered if you’d like to go for a ride. It’s not too cold, and there’s no wind. We could spend a few hours touring along the coast. Interested? Or are you too busy?”
Already, he was pulling on his jacket, making it evident there was no time to waste if he was to make the best of the day.
“Ride?” she asked. Did he mean bicycles?
“The bike,” he said. “The Vulcan. There.” He pointed to a gleaming machine parked across the road. What most surprised Agnes was how much it looked like an art object: the bike declared its own power through its bold marriage of crimson and black, and the immaculate curvature of the casing over what she assumed must be the engine.
“I’ve never been on a motorcycle,” she said. She felt she had to be honest in case her inexperience posed some risk.
“Great! All the better! You’ll love it. But if you’re coming, we have to start soon. You’ll need a warm, windproof jacket and shoes with good thick soles.” He looked down at her slippers. “I’ll be waiting over there.” He pointed to the Vulcan. She saw how powerfully the bike magnetized him, his whole body inclining a little toward it.
Like a boy with his horse eager to surge into the world, she thought fondly, as she ran upstairs. The salmon back again. Flying. She told herself she would not think. She cast a baleful glance at the abandoned Burckhardt, and immediately looked away again. She hurriedly pulled on jeans, put on socks and running shoes; then rummaged in her closet for the periwinkle blue windbreaker, with hood, that she had found a couple of weeks ago at a garage sale. She remembered to pick up her wrap-around sunglasses, but forgot about gloves, an omission she would later regret when she had to chafe at her chilled, benumbed fingers every time they stopped. Much later, she wondered whether her cold hands on that ride were a premonition, of which she ought to have taken note. But even if she had registered such prescience, how could she have stopped the calamitous train of events that followed?
As she listened carefully, Campbell rapidly went through the essentials. Sit up straight and keep her feet on the foot rests. Put her arms around his waist. Trust him; he knew what he was doing. Do not move abruptly or do anything to startle him.
He handed her a helmet which she tried to put on over her sunglasses. But the glasses were too wide and she found herself stuck, the helmet wedged halfway on, halfway off. She winced. How damned ungainly she was. He was probably thinking she looked like a huge insect; doubtless he was wishing he had never asked her to accompany him at all.
“Here.” She could hear him, but not — at least for the moment — see him. She was relieved he did not sound either irritated or impatient. She felt his breath on her face and then a little tug at her temples, as he extricated her sunglasses. Then he took off her helmet.
She blinked in the sunlight. He kissed her lightly on the nose. Yes, he did. Her lips parted in a tiny “o” of astonishment she hoped he did not notice.
“Try these,” he said, handing her a pair of sleek, light-weight goggles. Only after she put them on did she wonder if these were the goggles Kit usually wore. I must not think about that now, she admonished herself, as she slid the helmet on and pulled the strap taut under the chin. Then she mounted the bike, settled in behind him, and put her arms about his waist as instructed, trying to keep her hands steady so as not to betray her nervous anticipation. Of the ride, or what might follow the ride?
An inarticulate cry escaped her as the bike lurched forward with a roar. Her whole body reverberated to its headlong, inexorable demand. She had never before felt so physically fragile: she was a creature made of eggshell riding the back of a dragon. This bizarre picture actually made her giggle and for a moment she shed some of her constricting fear. She became wholly alert then to the startling new way of being in the world that Campbell and the bike offered her. It was as if they were flowing unimpeded into the very heart of things: the rusty gold of shorn corn fields on either side; the invigorating air spangled with speedwell blue; and the pearly shimmer on the horizon she supposed must be the sea. She had not expected this extraordinary transformation of self and perception. She and Campbell and the Vulcan were particles in the flow of the world.
She was wrenched from these fanciful thoughts by Campbell’s sudden swerve around the sad remains of a blown truck tire. She only just managed to rein in her panic, certain his abrupt manoeuvre would tip the bike. But, as he straightened out and they roared forward again, she felt the fear return in earnest, creeping up her spinal column and the back of her neck. She told herself this rising anxiety was just the flip-side of the exhilaration she had felt only a few moments before; that if she just turned the terror inside-out, like a glove, and wore it well, she could recover the cleanly alert attention that gave her such a fluid stronghold in this precipitate, speeding world.
They accelerated to pass two cars driving slowly in tandem. Perhaps the drivers were lost, she thought, or searching for some elusive crossroads. Very soon, Campbell turned right and she saw ahead a brillian
t sheen from which rose an evanescent fan of rainbow light. The sea, she thought. In fact, it was a small bay and as they drove past she caught sight of a rocky outcrop whose deeply incised crevices suggested one of those hidden faces she often glimpsed in Piero di Cosimo’s mountain crags. She was never sure whether these secret faces were glowering or benign.
As they rushed on through the bright clear morning, she thought that of course the animistic features she had seen in the rock must be kindly. How could they be anything else on such a day? She had been so certain she would never touch him again; yet here she was, on the back of his bike, her arms circling his waist. Tendrils of his hair, which was rather long at the back, escaped his helmet and blew across her lips. Although she still rode inside her fear, the marriage of dread and bliss gave everything about the ride a scintillating sharpness. When he pulled into a travellers’ stop, he kissed her lightly on the mouth as he helped her off the bike.
“Hungry?” he asked.
She was not — at least in the sense he meant. She was feeding greedily on the vast resource love was. Like an infinite honeycomb, a sweet, sticky substance you lapped up, and then shivered in delight. She saw herself reflected in the plate-glass window of the restaurant as they walked forward together. How mysterious and powerful she looked in the helmet and goggles. “I am perfectly happy,” she told herself. “Nothing will ever surpass this.”
But something did. An hour later, after guiding the bike down a hard-beaten path between swathes of dried rushes and salt-hay, he took her inside a half-moon shelter the sea had carved in the rock. She barely had time to stare up at their craggy roof before he pulled her close and thrust his tongue deep in her mouth. She was overcome. He had not kissed her on the mouth at all in the Ark. She read this new intimacy as symbolizing a great advance in their relationship. Joined to him in this way, she felt she was disappearing into a vast red cavern where desire kept overleaping itself. She became aware he had taken off her jacket. His left hand slipped under her T-shirt, his right under the waistband of her jeans in a quick-silk movement that partook of magic. His fingers were both inside and outside her, taking her deep down again into that undertow of saturating pleasure where she would willingly drown.
She was embarrassed at how wet she was, but he did not seem to mind. “You are very, very sexy,” he whispered in her ear. “Did you know that, Agnes?” She came then, and swayed against him, almost sobbing because everything was so intense. Not just erotic and emotional, but something else, she was certain. Some fragment of soul they had exchanged in this place.
“I really want to have you completely this time.” He spoke in quiet earnest, enunciating each word carefully, like a prayer. He extracted a wrapped condom from his pocket. “Is this all right with you?”
“Yes.” What other answer could there possibly be?
It hurt at first much more than she’d anticipated; like the rasping burn on her palms when she’d had to shimmy up a rope in gym class. He strove, in his practised and considerate way, to bring her along with him, but she was too conscious of the residual discomfort, and above all of the way he filled her, to achieve another orgasm. When he came, she was for some seconds inside a dark red rippling tunnel, where she ceased to know her own bounds and his shudders and moans were hers. But her chief sensation was an unqualified wonder that he was inside her. She was no longer virgin, but for this instant queen, because he was unspeakably beautiful and had taken her fully out of desire.
He did not stay beside her as long as she would have wished. He pulled on his clothes and sat, face turned away from her, looking out at the water. He lit a cigarette.
She was pulling her T-shirt over her head as he spoke. “You okay?”
When she could see again, it was still his back he presented to her, and she felt an irrational hatred for the cigarette on which he seemed so intent.
“I want to ask you something,” he said.
She felt her stomach lurch. What was he going to say? Why was she always expecting to be hurt? She made herself ready.
“You wouldn’t tell Kit, would you?” He looked so worried, she almost cried out in alarm.
“It’s only,” he went on urgently before she could respond, “that she’s going through a tough time right now. Her aunt in Ireland died suddenly last week. Kit’s there now with her mother, for the funeral. But with her mother the way she is, on track one minute and totally off the rails the next, the whole thing is going to be a real strain for her. So . . .”
Did his request make her angry or just sad? She was uncertain. “No,” she said. “I would never tell her.”
“Or anyone?” he asked, concern still a visible cloud in is eyes.
“Or anyone,” she repeated.
In some curious way, this concession struck her as a sacrifice. She was taking a symbolic bullet in the breast for his sake. Yet she was jubiliant as well that he had not said: “Well, it’s been a blast, but you understand why it can never happen again.”
Or the unthinkable: “I’ve never made love to a girl as ugly as you before.”
There was still a chance, in other words, that this might happen again and again. And because he had said nothing to wound her irrevocably, she could still keep the memory of being with him sacrosanct.
He came and put his arms around her. “You’re sweet and understanding, as well as really sexy,” he said — words she was sure she would repeat to herself every day, without irony or rue, until she was a very old woman.
As they rode back, she was amused to see that the shadow-shape he and she and the Vulcan made on the tarmac resembled a single hybrid, its elements as strongly forged as a satyr’s with his human torso and goat-legs. She felt exhilarated; the bike’s vital, primitive energy was speeding them to a future so potently charged, her body buzzed with awe, wrapped around the core of abiding fear.
When they neared town, she spotted the church spire not far from her dorm and behind it a dense dark-grey cloud whose bulging scallops suggested a doleful face in profile. This shape was disturbingly familiar, yet she could not place where she had seen it before.
“Thanks,” he said, as he dropped her off. Then: “Would you like to do it again some time?” His smouldering look told her he did not mean just the bike ride.
“Yes.” Dazedly, she watched him ride away, then ran up to her room, wanting to trill madly like a lark.
She did not shower or even wash her hands because she wanted to keep his scent on her as long as possible. Almost immediately, she sat at the computer and began to write her essay. Something about the bike ride, the machine’s sculptural perfection and the dangerous lure of its air-cleaving speed, allowed her to slip inside the contradictory character of Sigismundo Malatesta. When at last she finished, at two in the morning, she went wearily to bed, her head filled again purely with thoughts of Campbell and everything he had said and done to her.
At six, she woke from a dream that had her clutching at her throat in panic. She had dreamt she was the elegant, bare-breasted young woman in Piero’s portrait of the great Florentine Renaissance beauty, Simonetta Vespucci. Behind her, setting in relief her delicate chin, fine nose and smooth high forehead, was the ominous scallop-edged cloud like the one Agnes had seen above the spire.
The portrait had another unsettling torque, an attribute the eye fastened on with fascination and loathing in equal measure. This was the slender, green, live snake twined around the base of Simonetta’s white throat like a necklace. And if the lovely woman were to move just a millimetre, Agnes always worried, or even took just a slightly deeper breath, might that not cause the living necklace to inject its venom into the white neck or the high little breasts with their proud nipples? And what then would become of the lady’s calm, pure regard?
Why had he created such a cruelly mesmerizing image, a picture that made one catch one’s breath in apprehension? The snake must be a viper, nurtured and warmed by the Tuscan sun. Agnes could not begin to imagine baring her breast and then slippi
ng such a creature about her neck, regardless of its exquisite emerald scales. In bed, she shuddered, put her head down again and tried to sleep; but she could not. The dream image was still too strong and far too close for comfort. She could not begin to fathom its significance.
The lethal snake-necklace continued to haunt her over the following days, even sometimes blighting the recollected bliss of all that had happened in the cave by the sea.
NINE
Piero and the Snake Necklace
PIERO HAD CAUGHT SIGHT OF Simonetta Vespucci once, when he was a boy. She rode a white horse and was flanked by her mounted attendants, forming a majestic train en route to an entertainment hosted by one of Florence’s great families. What had struck him most about the noble lady was the overwrought artifice of her coiffure. Pulled tightly back from her brow, her thickly braided golden hair was looped into fantastic shapes, like the twining tentacles of the squid he sometimes saw for sale in the market. The plaited coils were encrusted with jewels that winked in the light of the torches her attendants carried. He thought they might be rubies and pearls. But he had then seen few real jewels and could not be certain.
Hunting Piero Page 10