Hunting Piero

by Wendy MacIntyre

  “This is the kitchen.” Kit preceded Agnes into a long room, dominated by a scoured table of oak and a blue and orange painted bowl brimming with grapes. Agnes managed not to manifest her disgust when she realized the shadowy shape hanging from the ceiling was a ham upon a hook.

  “Hugh’s instructions are that you help yourself to whatever you want. You’re still a vegetarian, aren’t you?” This seemed more challenge than question.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you definitely won’t want to eat with us.”

  Agnes’s mind reeled at the implication. Dismay contended with revulsion and there was a terrible taste in her mouth, as if Kit had forced upon her slivers from the ham upon its hook. Had she always eaten meat? And if so, had Campbell known? The very idea of his lips touching those of a carnivore revolted Agnes. She did not want his memory tainted by such a thought.

  “In these cupboards,” Kit slammed open their doors in a jarring percussion, “you’ll find dried pasta, jars of pesto and antipasto. Fresh eggs, cheese and vegetables in the fridge. And yogurt. Loaves of bread are usually here.” She pointed at a wooden box on the seamed counter.

  “There’s lots of decent Chianti. Take all you want. But you’re a whisky drinker, aren’t you, Agnes? Hugh’s partial to Single Malts, but his personal stock is out of bounds, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t drink any more, Kit.”

  “Really?” Kit’s feathery, flawless eyebrows were two cartoon-like arcs, signalling disbelief.

  “Really,” Agnes countered, aware even as she spoke that silence would have been the more mature and prudent response. Already, she had put herself on the defensive and exposed a vulnerability better kept hidden.

  “If you say so.” Kit’s mouth had become an odd excrescence amidst all that crystalline refinement, a piece of dough badly baked and fastened hastily to the bottom half of her face. I know you will fail, this sneering mouth said.

  Agnes worked hard at superimposing an image of Paul’s kind, elfin face over Kit’s.

  “I’ll show you your room now.” The tone verged on brutal.

  As Agnes turned to follow Kit out of the kitchen’s back door, there was a clatter of metal striking stone. She looked down and saw that the toe of her canvas shoe had collided with a crude, jawed instrument as long as her foot and wide enough to engorge it. She had a vision of what might have been: five bleeding stumps poking through rent canvas.

  “Oh,” Kit sounded more amused than alarmed. “I ought to have warned you about the rat trap.”

  “Are there rats?”

  “No rats,” Kit said.

  They entered a stairwell no wider than a coffin. The banister was greasy to the touch. A hollow was worn into the wooden steps from the countless feet that had run up and down over the centuries. It must be the old servants’ stairway, Agnes realized. Where else would Kit put her but in the servants’ quarters?

  “The rat trap,” Kit continued as they reached the landing and a whitewashed hallway stark as a convent’s, “is one of Hugh’s little jokes. He enjoys pointing it out to guests as a corrective to their idealistic notions of everyday life in the Renaissance. He tells them how many plagues swept through Florence between 1450 and 1600. Or is it 1560? I can’t remember dates. Of course, people then didn’t know rats were the carriers. But they didn’t want them in the grain, did they, or biting their babies? Honestly, Agnes, I would tell you if there were rats in the house. And the trap usually sits safely inside the hearth. The cleaning lady must have moved it when she was in and forgotten to put it back.”

  They were standing now at the open door to Agnes’s room, which was as characterless as a nun’s cell. There was not even a holy picture over the narrow bed with its nubby, fustian throw. The only other furniture was an unadorned chest of drawers, hand-hewn of butternut, and a bedside table with spidery legs, on which stood a lamp with a tightly pleated ochre shade.

  “You’ll be private here,” Kit said, “and you have your own bathroom just two doors down.”

  “Thank you.” Privacy would more than compensate for the room’s utter lack of charm. If she was to be nimble in negotiating Kit’s feints and genuine cuts, she would need a rooted sense of separateness to nourish her strength.

  “By the way, you’re not phobic about rats, are you, Agnes? You’re not afraid one will get in under your door, even when you’ve shut it tight?” Again, the mouth took on a shape at odds with the face’s perfection.

  “Fergus said we should love rats. Do you remember?” Immediately the words were out of her mouth, she wished she could bite them back. Why had she mentioned Fergus when it was he who had encouraged Campbell to stage the animal laboratory protest in the first place? And then there was the ghastly manner of Fergus’s death, inextricable from the mere utterance of his name. But perhaps Kit did not even know about their former professor’s gruesome end. She had fled to Boston immediately after Campbell died. Who would be foolhardy enough to tell her about yet another hideous death? She was already walking a razor’s edge: shearing off her hair and starving herself.

  Something strange was happening to Kit, the flesh tightening visibly on her bones. Her face appeared tiny and almost painfully delineated, an ivory miniature caved by instruments of rapier-quick precision. The eyes were far away. Was it Campbell’s severed head she saw, rolling upon the earth? She looked so stricken, her hands twisting in the air at her waist, as if grappling with some invisible antagonist.

  “Kit?”

  “Fergus was an evil man. You must not think of him. Banish him from your thoughts. Banish him.” She repeated this once more verbatim in a curdling voice, more male-sounding than female, and as disembodied as a medium’s under the full force of a spirit’s possession.

  Agnes shivered. The tone was guttural and robotic. The words fell so leadenly, they were almost wrenched from their meaning. It was as if Kit had been forced to learn them by rote, in keeping with a pendulum’s beat, on a hard-backed chair in a room with only a single beam of harsh light trained upon her. I must bring her back, Agnes thought. This cannot be one of her games. Kit was truly suffering now.

  “Kit! Kit!” She waved her hand in front of the unfocused eyes, a perhaps futile gesture she had seen used in movies. Dare she touch that exquisite face? She opted instead, to lay her forefinger, as gently as she could, on the back of Kit’s wrist. Immediately she pulled away. Kit’s skin was cold and damp, like a subterranean fungus.

  Was she in the grip of a psychotic episode? Was Kit psychotic? Agnes knew nothing of the nature of her family’s illness. The dire effects of alcoholism and depression she understood, but not the rending of a psyche so severe that another voice spoke through you. She wrestled with the unnerving sensation that a predatory colonizer had seized hold of the most alluring object in the house. I am being ridiculous, she told herself. This is the twenty-first century and Kit is not possessed. She is ill. She blames Fergus for what happened, but knows this is not so. Therefore she is at war with herself. The emotional and rational parts are in fierce contention. How do I bring her out of it? Should I call Hugh?

  It was instinct prompted her to whisper in Kit’s ear. Perhaps warm breath would dislodge the interloper. A childish and magical act. She smoothed away a few stray strands of Kit’s hair, and put her lips close.

  Kit’s hand flew up as if to brush away an invasive insect seeking entrance through her eardrum. Agnes sprang back so that she stood some distance away.

  Kit said in her normal voice: “There are fresh towels in the bathroom for you and a glass. You can drink the water from the tap. That’s it, I think. And call if there’s anything you really need. Or leave a note on the kitchen table. It’s the way Hugh and I communicate when he is holed up with his muse.” She grimaced prettily. “Are you all right, then? Got everything you need?”

  She was gone before Agnes had time to speak. The afterimage stayed a moment; the lovely sea-green woman in the doorway, her hand raised in a gesture of dismissal. I am done with y
ou.

  And thank God for that, Agnes thought as she shut the door.

  The room had a single small rectangular window whose shutters she folded back. The view was of the edge of the wood. She let her eyes rest on the surety of the towering, thriving trees, rooted here since before Piero walked this landscape. She lifted her eyes to where the green tips touched the sky, and was drawn ineluctably to the spires of three cypresses planted closer together than was usual.

  Her body cried out for sleep, while her mind agitated for a clarity it could not now provide. She slipped off her shoes and lay down. She lay down on that soothing green bed. The day’s accumulated vertigo assailed her. She had swallowed an ocean that slipped now this way, now that. If she tried to stand, she was sure she would fall over. She pictured her grandmother in her “gardening dress,” gloves and broad brimmed hat, all fashioned of the same lightweight cotton, standing smiling amidst a patch of peppermint.

  The dream that prodded her awake had an obscene quality that left a pall she could not shake. She had an urgent need to wash her hands and face and, as she groped for the bedside light, was visited again by the dream’s shocking parody of a portrait of the Holy Family. It turned her stomach. There was Fergus in Joseph’s place and Kit in Mary’s. But the baby, which Kit held perilously near her breast, was a rat.

  In the bathroom, Agnes rinsed her mouth and spat into the sink. She splashed water on her face, but avoided looking in the mirror. Why would her unconscious mind spawn such an awful picture? It was as if Kit was about to give the rat suck.

  The towel with which she dried her hands and face was thin and rough. She could easily abrade her skin if she was not careful. Were these crude amenities careless or deliberate on Kit’s part? She is unwell, Agnes reminded herself yet again. And besides, I am nothing to her, only a readily forgettable member of the crew of an Ark that sank ignonimously, taking her lover down.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Midnight Visit

  AGNES WAS WAKENED BY A shrill inhuman cry. A falcon fixed its glassy eye on the pale disc-shaped scar at the base of her throat, sensing the skin was thinnest there and ideal for piercing. By the time she opened her eyes, it had already carved its image in her brain. She saw the remnants of hasty slaughter, bloodied fur and snapped bone, a beak pecking a pinkish, swollen lump which was once a beating heart.

  She sat bolt upright and listened to the silence, wide and welcome, at one with the creamy texture of the walls. In the slatted morning sunlight, the room was no longer the hard white cell of yesterday, but cloudlike and malleable. She could work here and begin to shape the flitting thoughts that had come to her over the past few months touching on Piero’s fire and human speech. She must be vigilant in keeping these ideas separate from anything she tells Hugh, exactly as Paul counselled her.

  Paul is such a sweet man, isn’t he?

  Of course, Kit had never met Paul Otterly. She said that for the simple pleasure of raising doubt. Agnes then recalled the substance of last night’s dream where Kit appeared, not a woman of flesh, but a robot of bolted metal squares, with protruding rivets at temple and jaw. Only the real woman’s exquisite mouth and topaz eyes were unchanged.

  She must shake off these dark and baseless thoughts. It is a new day, as Nana would say, always with the utter conviction that made you believe, despite yourself, in infinite possibility and untold blessings. Agnes saw one of her grandmother’s small miracles when she threw open the shutters on this new Tuscan world. A snow-white rabbit, with marvellously erect ears, was zigzagging across the greensward toward the wood. He or she might well be a descendant of the one curled up on the naked thigh of Piero’s Venus. In that painting, the boyish war-god lover slept with his charming head tipped back, but Venus was awake, still caught up in the rapture of the recent coupling that made her body glow with secret knowledge.

  I have glowed and hummed with that secret, Agnes thought, under Campbell’s hands and tongue and supple strength. But she could not afford to dwell on such memories. Hot, prodding sexual desire might well undo her, topple her resolve to stay clean and sober. Under Campbell’s tongue and hands, under the whisky’s breathy fumes, she’d been capable of recklessness, loosed from reason. She was an infant, greedy for pleasure, more and more, higher and higher, to the point of oblivion.

  So she will stay clean, forgo lovely, quickening whisky in her life, because the alternative was death, preceded by a degradation that would strip her of all dignity. The encounter with Guam showed her how fast and far she could fall. She sensed there were many perils in the act of sex for her personally, not least her awful thirst for approbation. He took me to bed; therefore I am attractive. In the furnace of sex, Agnes the Monkey Girl was extinguished. But was she really? Or will Monkey Girl live on, until Agnes’s last breath, asking to be killed again and again, but never dying, not really? The doubts would linger: that she was only the physical means for another human being to satisfy a natural hormonal urge. Nothing more. And if she ever considered a sexual relationship again, what would save her from empty and conceivably squalid encounters? The answer was obvious — the sure steerage shared love provides. Might she one day be lucky enough to find that? For now, she could not entertain such dreams.

  At Villa Scimmia, she was being tested and must not fail. She must be chaste of thought and firm of purpose, even if her time here proved to be penitential. Sobriety was its own reward, was it not? She pictured Paul, probably asleep at this moment, in freshly laundered pyjamas of mulberry Egyptian cotton.

  No, of course Kit did not know him. Her machinations were another bump in the stretch ahead she must negotiate. Stay firm. Cling to the mast no matter what emotional storm Kit fomented. I have made my own little craft now, Agnes told herself, and yes, craft in the sense of cunning too. If Kit, under the contorted stress of her illness — for yes, this must be what it is — tries to undermine or humiliate me, I will not let her bring me down.

  The water for her shower was tepid and intermittent. She tried to read nothing into this; to excise the picture of Kit’s hand in some shadowy crevice of the house, playing with a stopcock.

  She was relieved to find the kitchen brighter and less dank than her initial impression had suggested on Kit’s perfunctory tour. The steel jaw rat-trap was safely stowed in the hearth. Where the ham had hung upon its hook was now a blessed void.

  The coffee in the large espresso pot on the stove was warm, if not hot, and bold enough to vulcanize her resolve to see the day through with dignity. It was not until her third sip that she spied the note tucked under the china fruit bowl. The calligraphy was idiosyncratic, muddied by a preponderance of dashes, heavily scored. She pictured Hugh slicing at the congealed ham with the same leaden strokes.

  Finally, she unravelled: AM sess’n. Any tm. Wlk in.

  Nana always said it was proper etiquette to knock, even when one had been granted a symbolic passe-partout. So Agnes was uncomfortable in her flesh, a child assaulting a norm, as she followed Hugh’s instructions to the letter. Walk in. Once the study door swung wide enough to reveal the room’s interior, what she saw so shocked her she was drained of all clear thought. The half-formed idea came that she had been drained of blood as well; that she was merely a stretched white sheet etched with droplets of acid.

  Kit sat in front of the window where yesterday her fingers had drummed their maddening staccato, naked from the waist up. Her breasts were two perfectly moulded ivory globes, with a faint tracery of fine veins as blue as Hugh’s ink. Each pink nipple was set in its own golden aureole. Her rich, thick hair was drawn back from her brow and wound into a dazzling confection of looped braids, studded with baubles and interleaved with strands of pearls. A green toy snake was twined with the slim gold circlet she wore at the base of her throat.

  On this theatrical duplication of Piero’s portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, Hugh fixed a regard that was by turns coolly appreciative and patently lecherous. Agnes was outraged and disgusted, not least by the mocking appropria
tion of an image that was chaste and idealized. Piero’s Simonetta was an embodiment of exalted Love, whose nature was almost divine. There was nothing at all louche or voraciously sensual about her.

  Not like this cheap display that dared to corrupt the sublime. Not at all like this coarse pantomime which reeked of an urgent eroticism to which Agnes felt pulled, despite her resistance. She was afraid of Kit’s powers on all levels. This self-admission dizzied her, and then she was angry again.

  Kit gazed at her from across the room with a bemused arrogance, as if to say: “If we asked, you would, wouldn’t you?”

  Hugh meanwhile feasted his eyes on Kit. Beside her flaunted glory, he looked perilously fragile. If Kit snapped her teeth upon the air, his bones would surely snap.

  It was at that instant Agnes saw the snake quiver. The thing around Kit’s neck was real, and full of venom.

  “Kit,” she screamed, “for God’s sake, it will kill you.”

  She was halfway across the room, ready to pluck the snake away by its tail when Kit threw back her head and laughed. Then, in a gesture as bizarre as it was contemptuous, she unwound the length of green rubber from around her throat, dangled the tiny head above her parted lips and then bit the toy snake neatly between the eyes.

  “Oh, Agnes, if you could see your face. You didn’t actually think it was real, did you?”

  Her laughter had the shrill grinding aspect with which Monkey Girl was so familiar. Purged of all true mirth or delight. Just a cutting instrument. Agnes wondered if there was a strictly feminine equivalent for puerile. She must keep in mind that Kit was unwell and therefore crude and consummately controlled by turns. Kit is unwell. This had already become an ingrained mental chorus, excusing flagrant rudeness. Kit is unwell. Have compassion.