She was impatient to return and paint the anemone, to capture it, capturing her unruly feelings that way. She would need to hurry. This anemone was known also as the windflower, because in the slightest breeze the petals would release.
Niccolo’s face had grown stern. Why would she ask if it was safe here? This was her property.
But the dogs?
Dogs? Had she seen some dogs? No! But someone had told her …
He made an explosive noise that blew fingers of both hands wide.
This was mischief, she thought he said. This was someone making superstizione, spreading that old story.
Old story?
“Assolutamente malo!” he said. Evil, worse! For someone to spread this old story of the devil’s dogs. He had cultivated these olives for her uncle for twelve years, and before that for the old ones down the hill, and these were the most fertile hectares in the zone. To say anything else was the talk of snakes and worms. No. This was her place and he would keep it safe. No need to worry about dogs. He narrowed his eyes with an expression that made her think of a wall of ancient stones. He and his wife had no other life now but this duty they had accepted, to care for the property that had been passed to the niece of Geoffrey Kane.
“Allora,” he said, as if this settled the matter, gesturing towards the main road, “Marta viene. Subito!”
“E Marta parla Inglese!” he added, in a tone that suggested this clinched everything else he’d said.
Clare heard the wasp-like buzz of a new contraption. A woman in a lilac-printed cotton dress, sitting very upright on an ancient scooter, turned into the lane.
“AH SIGNORA CHIARA, BENVENUTI in Toscana! Sono Marta, Marta Dottorelli. Scusi scusi, sono tardi. Come va?” All this was wheezed in a high-pitched voice that carried with the power of a buzzsaw. The woman switched off the motor, jammed the kickstand into place, and pulled two bulging net bags from the carrier. Clare scrambled down steps leading from the lowest terrace, past the washing lines to the kitchen door. She found herself crushed in the arms of the small powerful figure, the net bags swaying somewhere behind.
This contact was so unexpected, so overwhelming, that Clare felt the start of tears. The woman had dropped what she was carrying. Holding Clare out at arm’s length by the shoulders, gazing into her face, reaching up to touch her hair, her cheek, as one might outline the face of a beloved daughter, “Ah bella bella, bellisima!” she exclaimed. “Yes, you are just as Signor Geoffrey described. An angel, veramente una Botticelli, si si si. This hair, eyes like the sea!” In her whirlwind of exclamations, she sucked Clare into the kitchen. She said Clare had not eaten yet, she was sure. She had brought a stillwarm cake of chestnut flour. She would make some coffee!
She pulled out a wraparound print apron, and a pair of slip-on plastic shoes to replace the leather pumps she left at the door. The other bag was full of greens and weeds she had cut this morning along the roadside: dandelions for a salad to give “Signora Chiara” strength, and ramponcioli and nettles, which would make a fortifying soup. Yes of course she knew where everything was; she had been coming here in the mornings twice a week for twelve years. Oh, no. Signora Chiara was not to worry about the paying. This had all been arranged by Signor Geoffrey!
Signor Geoffrey had promised she and Niccolo would stay on, Marta explained; he had promised they would remain, to give the house and the vineyards care.
After all that, Clare could not possibly dash back to the terrace to paint the anemone. She drank the fierce coffee that had erupted from the tiny stovetop espresso pot. She ate the chestnut cake. When she returned to the sunny hollow beneath the olive tree, the windflower had flown so completely that she could not locate the stony hollow where it had been.
CLARE WANDERED THE TERRACES. These olives must require so much care. The trees looked ancient, almost sculpturally pruned and carved. Niccolo had tended them most of his life? He would be jobless if she sold? But he was old too, almost ancient, wasn’t he? If she did manage to hold on to the place, how would she afford to run it? Not for the first time, she cursed the divorce settlement she’d agreed to, which had been based on her going back to work in the botany lab and her hope that the Amazonia book would bring in real money. Her husband had been happy to foster that; he helped set up contacts for her, leading to publication with a prestigious American university press. He’d also been propelled by a sense of guilt, because she would have been along on his Amazon expedition if he hadn’t left her to satisfy his lust with the sharp-toothed student with the ring through her nose.
The leaves ruffled silver. It felt like a memory of a different, parallel life, wandering among these trees. The sun streamed down with the sweet weight of honey. She found a grassy hollow and lay back, studying the quality of the light. Painting here would require a different palette, not the supersaturated tones she’d called up for her jungle scenes. A blue wood forget-me-not nodded, almost out of focus, near her cheek. You are Myosotis sylvatica, she told the little blurry flower; you are part of the family of the mints. It made her feel safe, not a fake at all, to know this. I know the name of everything, she told herself, and what I name I conjure into being. She pictured herself like the goddess Flora wandering the fields, bestowing names, making things real, bringing them to view; and wasn’t that what her paintings of Amazonian flora had done, whether she had actually set foot there or not? Had she not brought the endangered and voiceless into view?
As she drifted, she heard a distant whistle that reminded her of the dog whistle her husband used to use. But Niccolo had said there were no dogs. This reminded her of her husband, too. When she’d asked her husband if he was sleeping with the girl whose thesis he’d been supervising, he’d said, Jesus, I can’t handle all this suspicion, I can’t even look at a student without you getting suspicious. She’d said, The trouble is, I remember how you looked at me. He’d said, You.
Circaea Livingston Philippiana
A COURIER VAN WAS backing down the lane when Clare returned to the house. She found Marta in the kitchen with a butcher knife in her hand, in front of a large crate. Marta whirled to face her.
“Ah Signora, I was hoping to find the right tool, for you to open this — look what has arrived.”
It was a case of Brunello di Montalcino, Special Reserve. Straight from the winery, courtesy of Sir Harold Plank. “To cheer your palate, inspire your brushes, warm your introduction to the Tuscan sun,” read the accompanying note, handwritten on embossed Plank Foundation stationery. He’d added a private phone number, too: his flat in Mayfair. He must have couriered the note to the winery in time for the wine to be couriered from Montalcino.
The envelope had been lying on the kitchen table when Clare came in the door. “Allora, Signora” Marta had said. “See how careless the delivery man has been — how this letter just fell off when he set the case down, and not even sealed!” Clare was so surprised by the gift, that only later did she wonder if the kettle boiling on the stove had anything to do with the note not being sealed.
Marta sang praises to the lavish nature of the gift. “It is the most famous of our Tuscan wines. This must be from someone who likes Signora Chiara very much.”
“No no,” Clare said quickly, remembering the moment over lunch in London. “He’s just a business contact. An archaeological contact really.”
“Ah! U’ arqueologo!” Such a stony look, before Marta pulled the vacuum cleaner from a curtained alcove and hauled it up to the next room. Clare heard the clatter of it being dragged down the ladder stairs, then its fearsome howling in the room below. What was that about? She’d never had anyone work for her before. What had she said wrong? Archaeologist?
She shrugged, lifted a bottle of Brunello from the case, closed her eyes, ran her fingers up and down the cool, upstanding cylinder.
Someone who likes Signora Chiara very much … Harold Plank had made that much clear. And she’d liked him, too. Though later she’d wondered if it was only when he learned that she’d inherited t
he property of Geoffrey Kane that he had decided to help her. (“A fine writer, your uncle,” as he plucked an oyster from the shell.)
SHE’D COME ACROSS his name back in Vancouver — an eminent figure who had endowed the British Museum’s new Etruscan gallery and was said to dispense largesse to select projects around the world, though he never travelled himself. When she got to London, she’d tried to make an appointment to see him, and had been stalled: so she’d barged right into his office and set one of her books on his desk. She signed it with a flourish before he could object. After he’d leafed through, carefully examining the full-page illustrations (“Very nice, very nice”) he looked up and carefully looked over the length of her, then invited her to lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand. It wasn’t till the treacle pudding that he’d offered to set up Tuscan contacts for her. Then he’d offered to move her from her Bloomsbury hotel to a “nice little suite at the Ritz, more fitting for a lass like you.”
Such cheerful North Country forthrightness. She’d pictured the enormous grey-satin room, the soft forgiving light from alabaster sconces. How she would remove his plum-and-grey-striped tie, his striped shirt from Savile Row. How she’d solve the little trouble of slipping down his crisp white boxers, with his penis springing through the fly. But there had been no hard feelings when she refused. In fact, his face had taken on an expression of wry delight, as if such a refusal were something rare.
Earlier, he’d been telling her about a cabinet of curiosities he kept, “in a nice little Edwardian inlaid case that fits into a corner of my study in the Yorkshire Dales.” She pictured her refusal being placed into that cabinet too, tucked into a vial of cloudy ancient Roman glass, along with select items of Etruscan bronze such as she’d been so intrigued with in the Museum.
In the Etruscan gallery she’d moved along from case to case, pulled by objects that had a strange sense of brightness radiating from them. A bronze hand beckoning, green with age, with little horned men growing out of every finger; a dancing woman wearing pointed shoes, whirling, the movement evident in her whipping sleeves, a seventiered incense burner balanced on her head. Every functional object brimming with the energy of a further life that seemed to simmer inside the cast bronze shapes. She could look at those things for hours; she could look at them for a lifetime and still see something new. Did this wealthy man, this philanthropist who had endowed the collection, experience this too? Did he enjoy looking at them so much that some pieces had found their way into that inlaid cabinet in the far Yorkshire Dales? She had no reason to believe this; it was supposition, based on the discomfiting suspicion that the morals of others might be as unruly as her own.
The sound of the vacuum had long since stopped. What on earth did Marta find to do down there, or for that matter in the house at all, day after day? How often did she come? When Clare went downstairs she found Marta leafing through a copy of her Amazon book, though she wasn’t sure she’d left the case open earlier in her rush to get out her painting gear.
Marta threw out her arms. Allora, who would have known that Signora Chiara did such work? This book was splendido, molto molto notevole! And to think that she, Marta, had the honour to have in her house now not just a painter, but an author, un’autrice famosa! All this wheezed out in what Clare couldn’t help picturing as a verbal smokescreen to cover the embarrassment of being caught.
“I’d like you to have one of these books,” Clare said, to make up for her doubting thoughts. “Here, I will sign one right now, for you and Niccolo.” They stood together, as Marta proudly turned the pages of her copy.
Marta paused, at the one illustration that Clare always tried not to think about. She studied it intently. “Che cosa strana!”
Clare felt her jaw and shoulders tighten. Extraordinary, the things the body decided all on its own: as if it had to gear up for a fight of some sort, when really, who in the world was going to call Clare on this, or even know?
When Marta had tucked the book away, she told Clare that the lawyer’s office had called. She said that Clare had an appointment for nine o’clock on Monday morning.
Clare said, “Then I’d better call back to confirm.”
Marta said there was no need. “I have already done this for you, Signora Chiara.” She urged Clare to come upstairs and have some of the nettle soup. Clare decided to put off setting a few ground rules: and that she’d prefer to make her own arrangements about such things. She praised the soup lavishly instead. She said she would like to sketch the weeds that went into such a healthful soup, if Marta would tell her where they grew.
Marta, shining the copper pans, turned, wiped her hands on her apron. Her glassy stare made Clare think of a fox she’d seen once in the window of an antique shop, stuffed with secret knowledge.
She said, “Signora Chiara should take care. A beautiful woman wandering alone in these hills.”
“Take care of what? The house book says there is nothing to fear.”
Ah, but there were strangers in the district now, Marta said. Sicilians. Telephone workers, they claimed to be. She resumed scouring, giving fierce attention to her task, even though the pots were brilliant before she started. Clare lifted another spoon of soup, her hand shaking. No doubt she was just tired. Of course she was tired, all the travel, all this so new; but it was starting to feel unreal to have these helpful figures moving implacably into her life: the husband, Niccolo, like a gnarled tree stump come alive, and the glassy-eyed Marta with the red-grey hair. Yes, like the fox-figure in the window.
Then, “Oh Christ!” she heard herself say, as some of the green liquid spilled onto the front of her silk shirt. “That does it. I won’t go.”
The scowl Marta turned on her was enough, alone, to banish the green stain. A puff of irritation. “Signora, when I have finished this, I will wash your blouse.”
Clare protested.
Marta insisted.
She said that if the Signora was going to go to the party in her honour — and if her luggage still did not arrive — then naturalmente it would need to be washed!
Clare frowned. Had she told Marta about the invitation? In the tangle of two languages, and her dismay at finding her movements so closely monitored, she wasn’t sure, anymore, exactly what information had been passed between them.
“Allora!” Marta said, “All the same, the Signora will need to learn who the good neighbours are!”
And the good ones, it seemed, did not include Ralph Farnham and his Italian wife, Federica. Ralph Farnham thought he ate the cream, just because he’d married into the family of the Inghirami; and the Inghirami themselves believed they were the cream. In the old days, they had owned all the land in these near hills. But even though the father had lost that land, and lost his money, Signora Federica still behaved as if it all was hers, and had continued to ride her horses all over Clare’s uncle’s property before Signor Geoffrey had it fenced. Also, the husband of Signora Federica’s good friend, the Contessa, was the local archaeological inspector; he had tramped all over Clare’s uncle’s property too, with his thick eyeglasses peering as if he had any business there. Clare would meet this Contessa and her husband at the home of the bad neighbours too, Marta warned.
Marta threw her rag into the sink. She pulled off her rubber gloves and threw them in the sink as well. “Allora, now give me the shirt.” Handing Clare the blue-sprigged cotton wraparound apron, she said “You can wear this.” Then her face softened. This was such a mercy that, ridiculously again, Clare felt the start of tears as Marta’s roughened hand stroked her cheek.
“Beautiful Signora Chiara, you must forgive me if I am sometimes cross. It is not you. It is the life in general. Now go and have a bath in the tub downstairs. Tonight you need to be rested!” She held out her hand for the shirt.
Clare’s silk shirt was long — almost a tunic when she wore it outside her jeans. She pulled it up to start unbuttoning. Marta’s eyes widened with shock. Clare started to turn her back. “Sorry!”
Marta gra
bbed her by the shoulder. “What is this?” She reached towards Clare’s belt buckle, snapped her hand back as if it might get burned. “Why do you wear this?”
Clare frowned. “I always wear it. I’ve had it for years.”
The big silver buckle was in the form of a goat head, heavy, showy. But Clare wore it for quite other reasons.
“Maligno!” Marta said. “Pericoloso!”
Clare tried to laugh this off. “I know it’s in pretty bad taste.”
Marta blew out her cheeks in a puff of disapproval. Then she sighed, spread the hands that the life in general had roughened, as if there were just too many things about Clare that needed to be corrected. “Allora, go! If I do not wash this now it will not be ready. Afterwards, I will take my motorino to the store and buy some things for you to eat, or you will starve. No no no. This I always do. For me it is no trouble.” She squeezed lemon on the stain, rubbed in salt, went out the back door.
I’M GOING TO HAVE to get control of this soon, Clare told herself. But in fact it was a relief to slip obediently away in Marta’s apron. And really, when had she ever, truly, been in control? Maybe only during the years she’d worked on the Amazon book, absorbed in the twinning of scientific accuracy and make-believe?
She paused on her way to the bath to admire the remaining copy she’d brought with her. Despite the serious qualms its publication had raised in her, she loved that book. She stroked the glossy cover, noting again the sheen she’d achieved on the ribbon-like petals of the Galeandra devoniana, the elegant curve of the stems, the intricate pattern of the roots. The painterly quality of the botanical portraits had received some fine reviews. Yet Clare had begun the work for reasons personal, out of profound shock to learn that a fifth of the world’s plant life was headed for extinction. In the Amazon this meant that many plants would die that had yet to be discovered, identified. She had not expected the work to get such notice. If she’d foreseen it, she would have been more careful, she later told herself many times, and would not have felt the constant jitter of apprehension ever since.
The Whirling Girl Page 3