The Whirling Girl

by Barbara Lambert

  She had them. They were rapt.

  “But to a botanist the diversity of orchidae is equally interesting.” She smiled, to indicate recognition of the edge of pedantry in her tone. “Did you know that some orchids are big as shrubs, others are vines? Or that in Australia there’s a variety that even grows underground?”

  Her husband had mentioned this. She had never truly understood. He was actually in Australia at this very minute, having invented another expedition of his own, to escape from his new wife’s unexpected onslaught of triplets. (At least I didn’t do that to him, Clare thought.)

  “Orchids have a long history,” she moved on quickly. “The ancients valued them for treating sexual disorders, the name deriving from the Greek for testicle, because of the swollen underground stems. I am sure you are familiar with the Doctrine of Signatures put forward by Dioscorides, which holds that if a plant looks like a human organ, it is good for treating that particular part of you.”

  Luke Tindhall clapped, managing to bring a note of irony to the sound.

  She reached for another sip of the garnet wine, then took her audience in a dugout along the flooded waterway linking the Amazon and the Orinoco, then on an expedition hacking its way over the Serra Tumachumac through to Roraima and into Venezuela. She paddled them in search of caimans, describing how in the dark you could tell the different species by the colour of their reflected gaze: the little spectacled caiman with his golden eyes popping up like pince-nez above his snout; the dwarf forest one with his orange stare; and the dreaded gigantic black caiman with the ruby red glare. She talked of the fearsome bugs, the gorgeous birds, the silent snakes, the racket of howler monkeys in the night, and the jaguar’s terrifying call.

  “Fantastico! Were you often frightened?” the beautiful Luisa asked.

  “Sometimes it was terrifying, yes. Oh, but at the same time, you must imagine the thrill and beauty of those jungle calls echoing through the forest’s majestic solitude …”

  All the time she spoke, Luke Tindhall was looking at her. They were all looking at her. Her tongue was silver thanks to the wine from the terroir of the unicorn; her tongue was silver and her words were gold, and the evening turned out to be about her after all.

  LUKE TINDHALL DROVE HER home. As they got into his chunky antique car, he asked if she would like a tour around the area next day, the tombs at Orvieto perhaps, or the very interesting museum at Murlo, an hour’s drive through the hills? Perhaps a little lunch along the way?

  She settled into the creaky half-sprung seat, breathed in the leathery smell of the old car, and the smell of Luke. He began humming. She caught him glancing at her out of the corner of his eye as he turned out of Farnham’s drive.

  “Aren’t you going the wrong way?”

  “The magical mystery tour.”

  He turned off onto a narrow track that followed the level of some abandoned terraced land. The headlights caught gnarled ghosts of frost-killed olive trees, then plunged sharply downhill, burrowed through woods, straddled a dried-up stream. When they came to a rusted iron gate, which he wrenched open and failed to close, she thought, At least I know one thing about him now: he wasn’t born on a farm.

  They emerged onto an open patch. She recognized the black silhouette of the hill with the ruined tower, directly across the way. He stopped the car, came around and opened her door. The grass was silvered by the moon. She felt hazy and insubstantial as he put a hand on her shoulder, which was the best way, in the dark, only flesh, not even words. Things rustled in the woods, maybe foxes. Two bats crossed the air in a looping sweep, one within wing tip of the other.

  “Careful,” he said, “Better stay close to the car just in case.”

  Did he mean because of dogs?

  A light flared across the rocky patch where they were standing. He was brandishing a torch. “Look,” he said. “I have not mentioned this to anyone, for good reason.” The glaring circle slid over an area of large oblong stones. “The cut suggests that this was laid down well before the Romans. On your land. This leads directly to your house.” He angled the beam to where the stones succumbed to grass and spiny weeds, the barest overgrown path disappearing into farther trees.

  Had he brought her here to show her a bit of ancient road?

  The light swung full on her face, catching her out, catching the whole humiliating swarm of emotions in her moth eyes, her expectation, her willingness and loneliness and need to be obliterated by another human body.

  “Right,” he said, “Come on.”

  Before she could say anything, he was helping her back into the car. They bumped along again, through pools of moonlight, pools of shade. When the track arrived at a second gate leading from the woods to her house, she jumped out of the car without another word.

  The Wild

  CLARE WOKE TO THE ringing of a phone. She heard a beep on the answering machine. Luke Tindhall’s voice. Another beep. Gone.

  She pulled the duvet over her head. Bits of the previous night started to rain down. She burrowed under the pillow. She’d not only talked too much, she’d given a lecture — all that was missing was the slide projector. Then the drive home. Was he coming to pick her up this morning?

  Oh, absolutely no! She jumped up, pulled on her jeans. She would ignore the death-knell headache. She grabbed a pear, a slab of cheese, her painting gear.

  She would expunge the whole of the night before, and especially that moment when he’d turned the light on her and seen right through her.

  It was useless to tell herself last night everybody hadn’t seen right through her. He must have been a very fond uncle. To pretend that the whole dinner had not been pulsing with a creepy frisson of the unspeakable that she had been giving off. But she had her own singular method of escape.

  She headed up into the olive grove and then the woods, refusing to think about the devil dogs Niccolo had said did not exist. She climbed along a hillside of myrtle and oak, trying to clear her head of everything but the unfolding of one scene, then the next, like the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings. No wonder all the great art came from here.

  She settled on a rock beneath a scraggy oak where a clump of early poppies flickered, truly all silk and flame. Ruskin’s phrase. The small flames wavered even in the quiet air.

  DURING THE TWO SOLITARY years in her cramped sun porch studio in Vancouver, Clare had imagined herself painting in the wild, with the voice of an amiable, tough and exacting companion whispering in her ear. The voice of the extraordinary Margaret Mee, who had first brought the Brazilian Amazon into bloom for the world to see — who had travelled by leaky boat and dugout to the remotest regions, facing every sort of difficulty and danger. Not just the creatures of the jungle and the water world, but drunken rubber tappers with murderous intent, and tribes rumoured recently to have eaten those who offended them. Clare had read and re-read the diaries. Right into her late seventies, Margaret Mee had made painting trips along the Amazon and its many tributaries, bringing to the world the first awareness of the tragic destruction there.

  And now here Clare was, in the wild, plodding through a swamp of emotions, with a headache that would have done a rubber tapper proud. She took a deep breath. As she began sketching the poppy’s stems and leaves, as her pencil traced the shape before her and at the same time created a line that had an elegance of its own, a thrill of pure pleasure ran through her, warm as chocolate, addictive as a direct infusion of the essence of the woodland all around, the quiet sounds, the rich scents.

  A gust set the leaves of all the trees and bushes rustling. When the poppy ceased trembling, she turned her attention to a single bud, the rough texture of the calyx, the tiny swellings at the base of each hair. Only the buds had these hairs. The hairs themselves she would leave until later, when she brought the finest of her brushes into play. Then how sensuous, to turn to the looping contours of the petals as she sketched in the full flowers; to slip into the depth of satiny red-black where one petal shaded another.


  She began to create the shadow mix: a squeeze of ultramarine from the fat crushed tube, then alizarin, then a small dollop of chrome. First the stems, then the leaves, then the blossoms, finally emerging in three dimensions yet still colourless. This was a lovely point, when the work could almost be complete as it stood. The way we could see, if we could see clearly in the silver of the moon. The way she might even have seen last night but for the wine, when she stood with the man on the rocky patch of ancient road and everything was silvered.

  The preliminary green coat to bring the plant into vividness, shade by shade. Metal yellow, once again, combined with Prussian blue and a speck of crimson.

  The poppy is painted glass, seen among the wild grass far away like a burning coal fallen from heaven’s altars. Ruskin again. A tall order to mix that colour. Start with a thrilling spurt of Winsor red, then lemon, drop by drop, gentled onto the petals, skirting the ovaries. A thin liquid glaze, which quickly dried.

  Painted glass! She recognized a prickle of loss that had been on the edge of her mind all morning — the petal that had fallen from the chandelier the night before. She’d meant to take it home.

  A second glossy coat of red brought up the crinkly surface of the petals, the tiny reflections of one another the petals held. Now for the black markings: black was never truly black. She felt the pull of this thought, tempting her to follow down its twisting path. She pulled back. This moment required as much concentration as grand prix racing, as with the finest of brushes she outlined the stamen filaments, a delight she never ceased to feel at supplying such tiny details. Those stamens with their delicate stems, waving their lollypop heads, and the radiating pattern of striations on the ovary at the centre of this cluster, and the almost-invisible hairs on the closed bud and on the poppy stems.

  The sun had arced across the sky. The bell from the saint’s basilica tolled as Clare applied her final brush strokes. She felt herself becoming small enough to slip into the miniature world she had created. No one would find her here and bring her to account.

  CLARE SLOTTED THE PAINTING into the aluminium case in her pack.

  She let the flickering of the flower fill her head to stave off the hungers that could settle; nothing to do with food, nothing to do with anything she ever understood.

  Red. A country to get lost in, all on its own. Crimson, carmine, cochineal — all those little bugs dying in the cause of flaming colour. Red lead. Red arsenic from Brazil. Vermilion made from cinnabar, and cinnabar itself, more an exotic destination than a colour.

  This was not the path she’d come along before. It was chilly now. In the falling light it wasn’t hard to imagine nymphs and satyrs wandering these ancient hills. She had the sensation of being watched, though not by human eyes; just an ageless watching. The track disappeared into a slope overgrown with last year’s bracken. She realized she had been following some animal path. Through thick brush she caught a glimpse of the hill with the tower, and thought that if she plunged straight down the slope, surely she would find a proper path. But her feet went out from under her. Suddenly, she was scraping down a rocky cliff, her fall broken only as she managed to grab hold of a bush. How far? Twenty feet? Thirty? She came to rest in a nest of brambles.

  She was about to untangle herself, when she froze. A flash of movement below. Then a moan. She peered through the tangle of vines.

  Four legs. A single back.

  Even the sight of the two pairs of dropped pants, of William Sands’s white head thrown back, of Anders Piersen with his arms braced against a rock, didn’t dim her sense that this was the rutting of a single mythic beast. And like the watchers she’d imagined moments ago, she watched. Only when the double creature reached its double spasm, did she shrink back to be out of sight.

  She was not sure if it was gulps of weeping she heard from the Danish boy. But she was weeping; hiding her face in brown leaves and tiny shoots of new bracken, flooding them with salt.

  THE WOODS WERE FULL of normal sounds again.

  Had she made that up?

  She heard the whine of a Vespa somewhere not too far.

  When she pushed her way out through the brush, she saw she was on the rocky bit where Luke Tindhall had stopped the night before. How had she ended up inside the fence? Shaken, she sank down on the stretch of close-fitting stones.

  A line of ants was making its way along one of the stones, unaware that they were travelling the ancient Etruscan road. Had Tindhall actually said this was part of an Etruscan road? The area was wide enough to take a horse-drawn wagon, like the old one she used to play on behind the barn. She knelt, ran her hand over the stones, let her thoughts escape into the possibility of where this might lead, if it really had been a road. The pavers were much larger than cobblestones, and so closely fitted that barely any grass grew between. The stone she knelt on reached from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder, and was about two thirds of that in width. All were roughly this size, the outer ones worn with deep grooves, as wide apart as a wagon’s wheels.

  Might this once have led from Cortona? Did this slope connect to the back slope of the city by a ridge farther up the narrow valley? Maybe this was once a major route, right past her uncle’s house and on towards Umbria, to the Tiber, then down to Rome? Now she wished she’d paid more attention the night before.

  AS SHE WALKED ON, the paving disappeared and the track became so overgrown that she was amazed Luke had taken his car through here. She caught a glimpse of the tiled roof of her uncle’s house through dense trees. Then she saw the stream, angling down the wooded slope above.

  Surely this was the scene in the ugly painting in the downstairs room! She sat on a rock, tried to calm her imagination. The water ran in sparse rivulets before it reached this overgrown track, but she could see from the wide jumble of the rocky bed that with rain this might become a torrent. And those rocks, so badly depicted in the painting, were as large as the paving stones she’d just passed, and also worn into deep grooves. What if they were part of that same ancient road? What if they’d been thrown about by an earthquake long ago, but previously had led to some secret votive spot above, not rediscovered until this moment? What if only since the quake had the water followed the line of least resistance down the ancient paving?

  She began edging her way uphill along the stream bed, following its gentle curve through a growth of tall alders bearded with moss. She scrabbled from stone to stone, emerging eventually into a high boggy meadow where the late sunlight flickered with blue butterflies and bees. At the far end a limestone cliff, horseshoe-shaped, circled three sides of the grassy space, but debris had slipped down from the slope above. Perhaps that earthquake long ago? Great rocks and bush-dotted scree, with the cliff face showing only here and there. Above, the hillside continued thick with brush and trees, no trace of cultivation.

  She scrabbled up a knoll to her right, hoping to gain a view, amazed to find how high she’d climbed in following the gradual looping of the stream. She was on a level with the tower on the opposite hill. When she turned in the direction of her uncle’s house, she could look right down on the olive terraces; back the way she’d come, where the stream flowed from the meadow, the tall alders now blocked the low rays of the sun.

  So, if not for those trees, it would have been possible to look right up to the ruined fortress from the meadow — and possible for anyone up there to peer down into that sweet secluded spot.

  If not for those trees, her meadow (already she thought of it as hers) would be a secret no more, crowded with butterfly catchers and picnic parties.

  Then she noticed that what she’d thought was debris that had slid down the cliff was actually a series of separate mounds, covered in rock and brush and trees. They too would have been in view of the city on the hill but for the intervening growth of trees. She heard her uncle’s voice: “Here we have the essential element for an Etruscan city of the dead — in view of the living!” Could those be burial mounds, over underground tombs? Maybe painted inside
, replicas of real Etruscan houses, beautiful houses for the dead, right here on her property?

  A sudden sharp whistle from the direction of the olive grove made her whirl around.

  Nothing but the encroaching dark.

  She stumbled, and stumbled again, as she scrambled down the slope and across the meadow; she slipped on rocks as she navigated the stream. Bushes whipped and scratched as she forced her way along the overgrown path, scrabbled over the stile. Ahead of her, the house hunkered dark, empty. The scent of wisteria enveloped her, followed her inside when she’d managed to get the door unlocked.

  THE LIGHT ON THE phone machine was blinking.

  She’d not played Luke Tindhall’s message, that was it. The answering machine was ancient, one of those with keys and a playback tape. Then that voice with its mix of upper-class and rough: “So sorry, a bit of a hitch, I’ve had a sudden call to … Rome.” She noted the hesitation, as if he’d pulled the destination from a hat, before he went on to say that he’d arranged for Dr. William Sands to show her around that morning, instead. “… However, I’ve managed to root out a collection of your uncle’s newspaper pieces. I’ll pop them up the hill in half an hour, before I head off to the train. Cheerio.”

  “Cheerio!” she said back, “Old bean!”

  There was no package she could see outside the door.

  But there was a second message on the machine. Nikki Stockton had also called that morning, on behalf of her husband William, to say that unfortunately William couldn’t show Clare around as arranged by Luke after all. Something had come up.

  Nikki. The ballet woman. That costume. That bright pixie smile. Clare saw her stuffing the shattered oak-leaf earrings into the little pouch at her neck — then the moment when Nikki looked up and saw her husband’s hand recoil from Anders’s hand. The scene in the woods flared up, as Clare played the message again, listening for a shadow under the bright tone. She played it twice more, looking for what? Something that might link the two of them? A sinew of pain? When she had erased the message, she realized that there would surely be a recorded answer message on the machine. Whose voice would she hear? She sat for a long time trying to work up the resolve to play it.