She was desperate for some comparable ritual structure to contain the roaring in her head. She wanted banished as well the lingering erotic charge of Kit’s counterfeit caress. She felt tainted by that touch, and corrupted, even though she had not succumbed.
Every aspect of Kit’s revelations reeked of the irredeemable. The best Agnes could hope for — although damning for Kit — was that this unspeakable tale of murder and revenge was factitious, either hellish delusions arising from a genuine illness or a superbly duplicitous performance. There was no doubting Kit’s fervency, but such dramatic intensity might also be cunning practice.
And if madness or mendacity was the best that could be hoped for, then the worst was that it was all true, including Campbell’s casual mockery of her sexual inexperience, affection and trust. She did not believe such a Campbell ever existed. Kit had invented him, just as she had invented the Fergus who killed him. Or had she?
Agnes could still call up the physical and emotional unease she had experienced when Fergus was in full messianic flight, urging them to love the lowly worm and despised sewer rat. Those extreme diatribes had suggested a mind off-kilter, if not unsound. Then there was the disturbing lewdness he seemed always to exude, a sexuality so flagrant and pressing you found your eyes drawn repeatedly to the smooth bulge below the plastic belt. She recalled her dream nightmare of Kit suckling a rat. Did it prefigure, and corroborate, the truth of Kit’s account?
And what of the plague rat she had pictured decomposing in the whisky? She must get the alcohol out of her room, and remove that tangible threat at least. She slipped a loose shirt on over her nightgown and, after dismantling the chair barricade, picked up the decanter. The cut glass and substantial stopper made it heavier than she had anticipated. Like Kit, she went down the stairs barefoot, but because of the decanter’s burdensome, awkward weight, she could not run. The cold stone made her arches curl. To compensate she rose on the balls of her feet and nearly tumbled headlong. She righted herself, gripped the decanter grimly and proceeded slowly down, aware that what she bore was her own fate in a glass casket. Her own lovely, liquid fate where she could find not just solace, but a quick, much-needed shot of unalloyed joy.
She has been without a drink for so long. Over two months. Surely by now she has learned moderation? Hugh will not mind if she has a sip or two. After the night she has been through, who would blame her for indulging in a little whisky?
It was not until she reached the kitchen and set the decanter down that she saw clearly how close she had come to folly. To cast off her hard-won sobriety so carelessly would be tantamount to self-slaughter. What had she been thinking? If she succumbed, she would let down both Paul and the Higher Power from which had emerged Laelaps, her saviour spirit-dog. She would let down Piero di Cosimo, whose enduring corpus had inspired her to break open the constricting cage of her life.
She picked up the decanter with its forever-tempting Talisker and carried it through the maze of hallways to Hugh’s study. She remembered exactly where it had sat on top of his ebony drinks cabinet with its ornate lacquer-work of grapes and drooping fire lilies. Once she had safely deposited it, she glanced around, absorbing the steadying influence of the scholar’s room, the desk, the solid tubular pen, the walls of books.
I too am a scholar, she reminded herself. I have a task that is sacrosanct—to me, if no one else. Nevertheless, standing there barefoot, newly braced and chastened, she had to confront the blighting doubts Kit’s febrile outpouring had seeded in her. If she could not tell if Kit was lying, how could she be certain that Piero di Cosimo had indeed cared about the lives and well-being of animals? How could she be sure there was an enigma at the heart of The Forest Fire, an enigma many-layered and profoundly truth-bearing; how could she know that the painting was not just a spectacular virtuosic display by an artist who had a peculiar talent for depicting animals? Perhaps it was no more than that, and there was no moral or spiritual significance to the animals’ poignant expressiveness. Only paint and cunning artistry, an ultimately hollow mimesis.
It was then she heard a car door slam and an engine turn over. She ran out of the study and down the milk-white hall to the front door. She opened it in time to see Kit starting off in the Land Rover, her hair unbound and streaming though the open window. There was someone seated beside her. Agnes feared at first it might be Hugh, trussed and gagged in readiness for execution near some water-filled quarry. Then she saw the passenger was a much slighter person than Hugh. Although the night was warm, he wore the hood of his jacket up.
She knew even before he turned and looked at her, expressionless, whose pale pinched face she would see shadowed by the little hood. Horace Fairhaven.
Mayday! Mayday! Her perplexity thickened.
She watched until the Land Rover’s rear lights dipped below the hill. That Kit was gone, at least for now, gave her some respite from curdling anxiety in the face of a manic power whose compulsions defied her understanding.
She re-entered the villa, locked the front door and set the bolt fast. She was relieved to think of Hugh sleeping soundly in his bed, ancient and intact.
Her own room had been transformed, and transformed again; now it was purged of Kit’s presence. Before she lay down, in faint hope of sleep, she packed her bag in case there was need for a hasty departure.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Flight
FOLLOWING THE INSTRUCTIONS ON THE note Hugh left for her in the kitchen, Agnes entered his study at precisely ten. Scant sleep and a tinny ringing in her ears made her feel uncommonly brittle. She had to take conscious note of how to set one foot in front of the other. What if it was all true and Hugh was in real danger? And the antithesis? But on examination, she found she could not seriously entertain the idea Hugh was a party to Kit’s baroquely unkind jest, if jest it was. He could not be that uncouth or sadistic. Or amoral.
It was on this word Agnes leant more and more to characterize Kit’s shocking disclosures and proposals. Whether true or untrue, these ugly outpourings had to be rooted in disease — perhaps full-blown schizophrenia or very early onset dementia, an illness indelibly set in the brain’s cells. Not Kit’s fault then; only a randomly imposed curse whose cumulative wasting of a life Agnes shrank from imagining.
Hugh was sitting at his desk, his figure completely obscured by the high-backed, upholstered chair. Only his left hand was visible, his thumb clamping down the single sheet of creamy vellum. Agnes waited, in a yearning tension, to see if the spotted hand would move the merest fraction. She was desperate for some simple proof he was not already dead.
He coughed; she let out a long pent-up breath. “You wanted to see me . . .” She hoped he would not remark on the tremour in her voice.
Hugh’s chair swivelled around to reveal an unnerving sight. His skin was an opaque grey and he seemed to have lost weigh overnight, all of it from his face. The veins at his temples stood out like icy rivers. He folded his gnarled hands and brought them level with his chest. It was not a gesture she had seen him use before. She had the impression he was shielding his heart from her offensively youthful gaze.
“I fear I must cancel our session today.” These few words cost him an obvious physical effort. “The injections sometimes leave me drained for a day or two. And so once again, you are at liberty. You have work of your own to pursue without doubt.”
“Thank you.”
He did not acknowledge her empty courtesy; only swung his chair back to face the desk. This time, not even his hand was visible to her. She could understand his desire to seal himself away; it humiliated him to expose his frailty, even to her.
Nevertheless, she had no choice but to press him for some clarity now. If she did nothing, he might be murdered, and then she could well go mad. There, she had thought the forbidden, impolitic word, which evoked a Bedlam of fouled sheets, manacles and gibbering mouths pressed to iron bars. In daring to entertain this damning word, she confronted her own fear of contamination. How ductile might h
er mind be, subjected to the repeated hammering of a formidably persuasive power that could turn black white, and make evil deeds appear to be essential salutary measures?
“Is Kit . . .?”
He cut her off, swirling back to complete her sentence. “Gone? Yes. To Siena. She has a counsellor there who provides some succour. ‘Stabilizes’ is darling Kit’s word.
“A ghastly thing for her to have witnessed. Were you also there?” He asked this as if the idea had only just occurred to him.
“Yes.”
“An unspeakable shock for all of you, no doubt. But then, you did not have Kit’s strength of attachment to the young man.”
The tiny, loudly protesting figure that sprang up inside Agnes was solider-like in bearing. Thus she discovered that her love for Campbell was undiminished, even if he had betrayed her in heartless pillow-talk with Kit.
“No,” she dissembled, in face of the enraged interior solider who sent out clarion blast after blast. “I saw her drive away,” she blurted out. “It looked as though there was someone with her. I thought it might be her relative, her . . .” She groped for a term to dignify the soiled origins of the blood connection, the child engendered on a small-boned Irish nurse in a rape committed by an old man with a diseased mind. Was Horace Kit’s uncle? He seemed rather to be her gnarled, grimfaced knight at arms, without the physical weaponry. Agnes saw him again on his knees, imploring Kit not to go to the sit-in at the animal laboratory. And later, when the truck disgorged the aggressive security guards in their riot gear and Campbell was trying to make his escape, Horace had physically restrained Kit from getting on the bike. His two companions had looked so like bodyguards he’d contracted for just that purpose. Why? Had Horace known the wire was there, strung so taut it hummed Campbell’s death-song? Obviously, he was still obsessed by Kit, as evidenced by his presence here. Had he always wanted her for himself? Was Horace, with his habitual malignant glare, capable of murder? No, surely not. This was far too tangled a thought. Her weariness was casting shadows, shrouding her reason.
“Yes,” Hugh said. “An eccentric little man. Always wears a jacket with the pointed hood up, whatever the weather.”
“That is her cousin. His name is Horace Fairhaven.”
“I did not know of the blood relation,” he said gravely. “There is certainly no family resemblance. He could be a creature of the underworld, a haunter of culverts, in comparison with our glorious Kit. How dark and shrunken the house seems without her resplendent presence. I intend no offence,” he added.
This uncharacteristic apology confirmed for her how ill he must be. She left him, without another word.
On the way back to her room, she considered the unintended mocking irony of Hugh’s phrase “at liberty,” given that all her thoughts were dungeons. Perhaps if she walked, made a show of striding off into the sunlight, she could cast them off. She put on her hat and, prompted by an overriding caution, took up her money belt with both wallet and ID. She remembered then that she not asked Hugh about Kit’s passport. For now, the idea that he would seize and hide it away struck her as absurd, even obscene, as she mentally posited his sad debility against Kit’s rampant vigour.
She closed the front door behind her so forcibly that the monkey-shaped knocker rattled. She studied the tiny, forlorn brass face with its widened eyes that conveyed both anguish and alarm. The fact he wore a chain made her wonder if the monkey might be modelled on an actual macaque, kept long ago at the villa as a plaything or conversation piece. If so, she hoped he was never tormented with sharpened sticks or made to perform antic dances decked out in baby’s frills.
She decided to go into the wood and then to the top of the hill the forest flanked. Looking down on the villa might give her some perspective on Kit’s perverse confession. It occurred to her again just how easy it would be to run, hand in her notice, call a taxi and go to Florence where she could lavish her attention on Piero’s paintings in churches and galleries throughout the city. Why did she persist in staying? The answers that came were the same ones she had thrashed out during the night. She had made a promise to Paul. She must see this penitential course through until her eight-week contract was up. And she must decide what to do with the information she now held. If what Kit had said was the truth, didn’t she have a moral obligation to seek medical help or legal counsel on her behalf? If she left now, she would never know, really know, what had transpired. If she stayed, she could perhaps clear away the murk so that she could do something — to help, to purify, to bring tortured Kit some ease. She had no idea how. What would Peter do? For reasons she did not fully understand, she had begun to see everything that transpired at Villa Scimmia as an integral part of her personal Twelve Steps. Unless of course, Kit embarked on some misadventure that would make her stay impossible . . . but Kit had gone for counselling and would be better on her return.
Kit will come back, calm, rational and self-contained. She will have forgotten the substance of midnight’s delusional ramblings. Agnes realized she was talking to herself in the soothing tone Nana had used when she was a child and forked lightning had turned the world livid and terrifying. All is well, Nana would say, stroking her temples.
As she skirted the left wing of the house, she heard the shrill squeal that had penetrated her dream on the previous night. She stopped and was reprimanded by silence. The piercing sound was only her nerves playing tricks, sorely stretched from lack of sleep and chafing anxiety.
She entered the wood at a point directly below the hill’s crest. Here she found a well-trodden path, which looked promising and likely to lead her surely upward. It seemed a fine portent. She could not entirely expunge the fancy that Piero once had walked where she did now, following the same switchbacks, seeing the same laurel, yew, elm and oak. At times the foliage above and around her was so dense she was enveloped by a gloom that sent a chill foreboding through her blood. She recognized it was the atmosphere of Piero’s Hunt that reigned in these lightless passages. Here the shadows were thick enough to slice with a knife and the trees, stripped of all apparent fluidity and grace, were stolid columns bounding a murderous ground.
In the painting, it was not at all clear that any of the animals would escape alive. Only her girlish, ardent wishing saved them. At the top of the hill to which they fled, there was a naked, brutish hunter waiting, his cudgel hoisted high to smash them as they came. If she could make a single change to Piero’s work, it would be to paint over that muscular hunter on the hilltop because he ate shadows and bloody meat and slaughtered hope.
When she reached the top of the hill she found no hunter, but the surprising gift of a small meadow, whose grass was still a rippling green despite the advancing autumn. The remnant wildflowers, cinquefoil, yarrow, saxifrage, had preserved their lively colours and she settled down carefully among them to look down at the red-tiled roof of Villa Scimmia. From this remote, tranquil perspective, she could imagine it was Kit she saw there far below, her hair bright in the sun and her arms flung wide. A newly healed Kit, whirling in delight to be so transformed.
In the afternoon, Agnes turned to the always “tantalizing ambiguities” of The Forest Fire. How could one small, jewel-like canvas, with its marvellous predominant menagerie, contain so many teasing enigmas and paradoxes? Why did this sublime pastoral scene on the very edge of extinction, with flames lapping at its periphery and exploding at its core, nevertheless have the power to delight and console? She kept coming back to the notion there was an abiding joy at the painting’s heart. She derived such pleasure and renewing wonder from looking at the diverse company of animals assembled in the foreground like a diplomatic contingent, even if some, like the ox and the crane, cried out in alarm, while others, like the deer and man-faced boar, stood silent and serene. Stark against the opalescent green-gold fields, the hares that fled the encroaching conflagration were the merest Zen-like stroke of the brush. Yet Piero had so exactly caught their fluid movement, she heard them rushing by.
In that certain vital flicker his brushstroke captured, she perceived how the joy co-inhered in the terror. So the hasp sprang in her mind at last: the truth the boar’s calm regard prompted her to examine was Heraclitean. She had misread the long tongues of flame as purely destructive, like the duplicitous, fear-mongering words of politicians and demagogues. In fact, the flames were mutable. “For he is like a refiner’s fire,” she remembered Nana warbling, her accompaniment lagging a little behind the sure bass on her recording of Messiah.
Fire had the power to purify and refine, as much as it had to raze and destroy. Which aspect of fire will you seize upon: to illuminate or devastate? That was the question the boar with Piero’s face asked. How will you use language, your defining human tool? She looked approvingly and with admiration at the ploughman who shouldered the yoke so that the oxen could run free. He knew the answer.
She was quietly exultant and grateful to have stumbled on this new and far more fluid understanding of why the painting had always filled her more with innocent felicity than fear. She celebrated by opening a bottle of San Pellegrino to accompany her dinner of arugula salad and linguini spread with the barest tracery of pesto, greenly potent as spring.
She was jolted awake. Someone was driving an iron spike into her shoulder. She struck out blindly and opened her eyes to find a world awash in blood.
“Agnes.” The name hissed in her ear brought her fully to consciousness, the torrent of blood first contracting, then congealing, to become Kit’s loosened hair covering them both. The spike, Kit’s nails — again.
“You’re hurting me, Kit.” The gruesome thought came that Fergus had spoken these same words to her on his last night on earth, initially in a drawl, his speech sodden with pleasure; then more and more shrilly, until the terminal screech.
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