The Savage Garden

by Mark Mills

  Then there was Benedetto, Signora Docci's husband. What had induced him to preserve the site of Emilio's slaughter, obliging his family to live with the memory while denying them access to the scene itself? He had consulted no one on the matter, and had clearly felt no need to justify his decision. Even allowing for his grief-stricken state, there remained something uncharacteristic, unkind even, about his behavior. It had the faintly fanatical whiff of an act of penitence, as if he were punishing himself. Or punishing someone else, perhaps?

  Maybe Benedetto knew the truth of what happened that night.

  It was certainly an explanation. And a good one. Yes. Benedetto had somehow unearthed the truth but he had chosen to keep the discovery to himself. The best he could bring himself to do was close off the top floor, a constant reminder to Maurizio—

  Adam caught himself in this act of folly—speculating about the guilt of a man he had already acquitted. Why couldn't he shake off his suspicions? They were still there, like a wind at his back.

  "Well?" said Harry.

  "What?"

  "Off with the fairies, were we? I said what about another bottle?"

  Antonella held up her hands in surrender. "Not for me. Any more and I won't get home."

  "So stay," said Harry. "The place is a little pokey but I'm sure we can find you a corner to bunk down in."

  Antonella smiled. "No, I must go."

  "I'll see you to your car."

  "Adam will see you to your car, and you will remind him to come back with another bottle of champagne."

  Antonella kissed Harry on both cheeks. "Good night, Harry."

  The moment they were lost to Harry's view behind a screen of yew, Antonella asked, "Why does he call you Paddler?"

  Adam explained that it had been a very young Harry's first stab at his newborn brother's name. Somehow it had lived on over the years, probably because Harry knew that it irritated Adam.

  "I like it," said Antonella, hooking her arm through his. It was a simple gesture—intimate and formal at the same time—and it gave Adam the courage to ask the question he had just vowed to himself he wouldn't ask.

  "Have you ever been up there?"

  "Where?"

  He pointed to the top floor of the villa. "There."

  "No."

  "Aren't you intrigued?"

  "Of course I am. But it's not possible."

  "What if I asked your grandmother?"

  "She would say no."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because I asked her. It was my eighteenth birthday. I thought it would make a difference. It didn't. I was so angry I almost took the key and did it anyway."

  "You know where she keeps the key?"

  Antonella drew to a halt. "Why are you so interested?"

  "Same as you, I suppose. Curiosity. Morbid curiosity. It must be a weird sight. And it'll be gone soon, gone forever."

  "And we'll all be happy when it is."

  Her car was parked at the edge of the courtyard.

  "Are you okay to drive?"

  "I think so."

  "Take it slowly."

  "I'm trying to," she said, "but it's hard."

  He could make out enough of her expression in the moonlight to know that he hadn't misunderstood her meaning. "Then take it quickly."

  Her teeth shone pale behind her smile. "Okay."

  They kissed more urgently than they had the first time. His hand strayed to her buttocks, his palm drifting over the firm, round contours, absorbing the information and sending it to his brain. She didn't attempt to remove his hand. Quite the opposite. Her fingers pressed into the muscles of his back in encouragement.

  When they finally broke off, he said breathlessly, "God, you have a beautiful . . . rear."

  "Thank you. So do you."

  He held her close and ran his fingers through her long hair.

  "When are you leaving?" she asked.

  "I don't know. Soon. That's why I didn't want Harry to say anything about the garden. I don't have an excuse to stay around now."

  "Were you right? Did something bad happen?"

  He hesitated. "Yes."

  They kissed again, briefly, and then she got into her car. Peering up at him through the open window, she said, "I'll tell you where the key is if you promise not to get caught."

  "It's a promise."

  She told him. She also reminded him to grab another bottle of champagne for Harry. Then she fired the engine and pulled away.

  It might have been a trick of the shadows, but he could have sworn he caught a flutter of movement behind one of the second- floor windows as the headlights swept the courtyard.

  Harry had removed himself to a stone bench during Adam's absence. He was lying on his back, staring at the star-stained sky. Adam popped the cork and filled their glasses.

  "Did you kiss her?"

  "Yes."

  "Bastard. She's too good for you."

  "Thanks." "It's true," said Harry. "I mean, you're a bright young boy and everything—" He broke off suddenly, snapping upright and fixing Adam with an intense stare. "My God, you are a bright young boy, aren't you?"

  "What?"

  "Yes, you are. I mean, I've always known it . . . but do you have any idea what you did today?"

  "We did it, Harry."

  "Rubbish. You were there, half a step away. You would have figured it out."

  Unaccustomed to hearing kind words from Harry, Adam wasn't quite sure how to react.

  "The first person in how many years?"

  "Three hundred and something."

  "I thought it was more."

  "We can push it to four if you think it'd make a better story."

  Harry laughed. "It's a great story. This is going to change everything."

  "Why?"

  "Well, you can't go off and sell insurance after this."

  "Why not?"

  "Why not!? Anyone can sell insurance. How many people can do that?" Harry thrust his hand in the general direction of the memorial garden.

  "What if I don't want to do that?"

  "You've got to."

  "Why?"

  "Why!? Because you see things other people don't."

  "No, I don't."

  "Yes you do. You always have. Even when we were kids. It's true, Paddler. You were always taking things apart, looking at them from the inside out. Mum always says: the only baby she's ever known that tried to smash its rattle open. We still laugh about it."

  "Oh, I'm happy for you both."

  "You look at things differently, you see things differently."

  "Then how come I looked at Flora and I didn't see her? Not really. I saw books."

  "So you learned something. You'll be better next time."

  "There isn't going to be a next time, Harry."

  Harry grew serious, almost aggressive. "Listen to me. It's not like the other night. I'm not talking about your friends, I'm not talking about the last two years of your life—I'm talking about the rest of it."

  "I know you are."

  "You can't become an insurance man."

  "I don't have a choice! Someone's got to, and you're not going to!"

  The vehemence of his reply was almost as shocking to him as it was to Harry.

  "Jesus, Paddler—"

  "It's true. The moment you said no to Dad, it was always going to be me."

  Harry placed his palms together. "Listen to me. It's your life, not his. Do you want his life? Well, do you? Living in a place like Purley with a couple of kids? Is that what you want, catching the same bloody train every morning, moaning about rationing, worrying about your pension . . . screwing your secretary because you don't love your wife anymore?"

  "Don't be ridiculous."

  "Screwing ... your . . . secretary," said Harry with slow deliberation.

  "Dad's not screwing his secretary." "Isn't he?"

  "You're drunk."

  "I wouldn't be telling you if I wasn't."

  Adam eyed his brother for a moment, th
en laughed. "That's good, Harry. You're still good, I'll give you that." He'd fallen for enough of these in the past to know what was coming next.

  "On Mum's life," said Harry solemnly.

  Adam sobered up fast.

  "His secretary ...?"

  "Vanessaaaaa."

  Vanessa was very smart, very well spoken. Her father was a high-ranking civil servant, and she knew all the dates in the social calendar by heart.

  "The one who likes operaaaaa. You can just see it, can't you? Dad snoring his way through Wagner, then running for the last train home."

  "How do you know?"

  "Mum."

  "She told you?"

  "I asked her. You must have noticed something—the house . . . her hair . . . shoes . . . she's let things go."

  Had he really been that blind?

  "She was asking to be asked."

  Adam dumped himself dejectedly on the bench beside his brother.

  "They've talked about it," said Harry. "He doesn't know what he wants to do."

  "Did he tell her, or did she find out?"

  Somehow it seemed important to know.

  "What do you think?"

  "Bastard." "You in thirty years if you're not careful. He made the wrong choice too. Remember how he used to make us laugh? He was a funny man once. How long since he was funny? How long since Mum drew a happy breath?"

  Adam lit a cigarette, then turned to Harry. "The Giant Rat of Sumatra?"

  "Like I said, you're a bright young boy."

  IT WASN'T SURPRISING THAT HE AWOKE SNARLED IN THE sheet. What surprised him was the fact that he'd managed to sleep at all. At some ungodly hour of the night he'd given up even trying to, surrendering to the turmoil in his head.

  He had never glorified his parents' relationship, never held it up to others or himself as a model marriage. But he had always expected it to be there, them to be there, together. It was one of those things you took for granted, like the passing of the seasons. Harry was of the opinion that it was something they had to work out for themselves. Adam's instinct was to head straight home and help in whatever way he could.

  A few hours of welcome oblivion had taken the edge off his panic. It also helped that he had something else to think about from the moment he swung his legs off the bed.

  He was the last to appear at breakfast. Even Antonella was already there. She was as eager as Signora Docci to get going immediately, although they did allow him to throw back a small cup of dense black coffee first.

  His sprained ankle had ballooned grotesquely overnight, and it screamed in protest during the long slow walk down from the villa. His mind, however, was on other things, toying with how best to reveal the story. In the end he just told it the way it was, taking each component of the garden in turn and exposing both its faces.

  Signora Docci fell silent when Adam pointed out the anagram of inferno on the triumphal arch, and she barely spoke from that moment on.

  Dante's Divine Comedy was the key text, he explained, not Ovid's Metamorphoses, with its tales of gods and goddesses and all their shenanigans. Ovid was a red herring. He was to be ignored.

  The story of Daphne and Apollo in the grotto was little more than a front, a cloak, a disguise. The sculptural arrangement needed to be looked at as a snapshot of a purely human drama: a young couple frolicking merrily while an older gentleman brooded nearby. It had nothing to do with the ancient myth it purported to represent. It was a depiction of Flora and her lover and a disconsolate Federico Docci.

  Harry had provided the breakthrough with his throwaway comment about the look on Flora's face. From her perch on the second level of the amphitheater, the adulterous wife was staring longingly at the distant figure of Apollo in the glade of Hyacinth. Apollo's unmasking as Flora's lover was the key that unlocked the mystery, exposing the whole masquerade. There was another clue to the importance of the sun god in Federico Docci's hidden design: a literary clue buried in the text of The Divine Comedy, when, just after he has ascended into Paradise, Dante calls on Apollo for inspiration, to help him in the final stages of his journey.

  What else did the grotto reveal once its characters had been exposed as the three parties to a Renaissance love triangle? There was Federico Docci—in the guise of Peneus—clutching an urn, filling the marble trough with water, which then overflowed into the gaping mouth of Flora, her face set in relief in the floor—no longer a river god providing sustenance to the goddess of flowers, but Federico giving his wife something to drink. What, though? If that symbol of purity, the unicorn bent over the trough, had never possessed its horn, as the sixteenth-century drawing suggested, then whatever it was, it was undrinkable.

  "Poison . . ." said Signora Docci quietly.

  "I think so."

  "But you can't be sure."

  "There's another clue. We'll come to it."

  From the grotto they traveled clockwise around the circuit, stopping at the glade of Adonis, with its sculpture of Venus grieving over her dead love. There was no need to explain the arrangement to Signora Docci and Antonella now that the central conceit of Federico's deception had been laid bare. Ignoring the "official" identities of the characters on show, it was a representation of Flora grieving over her dead lover.

  "You think Federico killed him?" asked Antonella.

  "It looks that way. In the myth, Adonis was killed by a wild boar."

  "Our coat of arms . . ." muttered Signora Docci.

  "Exactly."

  Signora Docci appeared a little overwhelmed by the revelation. She said nothing more, but she did pay Adam a heartfelt compliment with her eyes.

  At the foot of the garden stood the Temple of Echo, out the front of which lay Narcissus, peering into the octagonal pool: two youngsters, their love destined to fail, death their reward. If the correspondence was to be believed, Flora—like Echo—had died a slow and lingering death. That poison had been the cause of it was supported by the inscription running around the architrave beneath the dome: The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows. The words were those of Socrates, spoken shortly before he took his own life, poisoning himself with hemlock.

  The glade of Hyacinth, the final element in the garden, mirrored the glade of Adonis on the other side of the valley. But whereas the first glade they had visited portrayed the death of Flora's lover, this one told the death of Flora herself.

  In many ways it was the most interesting part of Federico Docci's carefully constructed program. It revealed the most about the man behind the murders, offering insights into his thinking. Because Federico Docci had found himself faced with a problem.

  It was easy to imagine his predicament.

  The disguise is perfect. The garden he has laid out in loving memory of his wife—the garden he wishes the world to take at face value—is thematically flawless. Flora is made to live again as Flora goddess of flowers. He sets her at the head of the garden, a queen surveying her subjects—Adonis, Narcissus, Hyacinth— each of whose tragic death was marked by the genesis of a flower. Tragedy, Survival, Renewal, Metamorphosis, Death and Resurrection: the themes weave together effortlessly. Only the story of Hyacinth presents a problem.

  It is ideal for his purposes, and certainly too good to consider abandoning. Zephyrus, the west wind, driven mad by his jealousy of Apollo, kills the object of their mutual affections. It's perfect, except for the fact that Hyacinth was a Spartan prince, not a princess. There is a problem with the gender. Federico gets round it by placing Hyacinth face down in the dirt, his/her hair covering his/her face, his/her body draped in a bulky robe.

  It's a cheat, not up to his usual high standards, and Federico knows it. He doesn't mind too much, though, because it obliges him to leave behind a clue—the unusual posing of Hyacinth—and he has to leave at least one clear clue in each section of the garden. That's obviously the challenge he has set himself. He wants people to know the truth, but only once there's li
ttle risk to himself. That is surely the reason he waits almost thirty years, till his own life has all but run its course, before laying out the garden.

  There was nothing more for Adam to say, so he fell silent. Harry slung an arm around his shoulder and grinned at the ladies.

  "Not bad, eh? For a young'un."

  "No, not bad at all."

  Antonella was far more fulsome in her praise, proposing a celebratory dinner that evening in honor of Adam's remarkable discovery.

  Adam and Harry assisted a flagging Signora Docci back to the amphitheater, each of them gripping a bony elbow, Antonella bringing up the rear. They speculated about the identity of Flora's lover, concluding that it must surely have been one of the many artists and writers who attended Federico's cultural gatherings at Villa Docci. A younger man, no doubt, more Flora's age than her husband's. Or why not a woman? This was wishful thinking on Harry's part, though not entirely misguided. Tullia d'Aragona, the Roman poetess and courtesan, had disappeared abruptly from the Florentine scene in 1548—the year of Flora's death. Maybe there was a connection, after all. Adam kept these musings to himself.

  Arriving at the amphitheater, Signora Docci asked to rest awhile on the stone bench. She also asked to be left alone.

  From a distance they saw her gazing up at Flora, dabbing at her eyes with the back of her hand every so often.

  It was ten minutes or so before she called for Adam to join her.

  "Are you okay?" he asked, setting himself down beside her.

  "You don't know what you've done."

  "What have I done?"

  "Something extraordinary. Crispin will be proud of you. I'm proud of you." She patted him on the knee. "At my age you don't expect to learn anything new."

  Harry seized the opportunity of a lift with Antonella to make another foray into Florence, despite Adam's warning that he was taking his life in his hands by climbing into a car with her. As they pulled away, he made a sign of the cross, blessing the vehicle.

  Returning inside, Signora Docci was nowhere to be found. He called her name. "In here," came the dim and distant reply.

  She was in the study, standing to the left of the fireplace, examining the small portrait of her ancestor, Federico Docci.