In the end it was hard to tell. A man’s voice, yes, speaking Italian. “Pronto. Lasciate un messaggio dopo il segnale acustico, per favore.” A message put out by the phone company, possibly.
She played it over and over.
THREE
The City on the Hill
IT WAS MORE THAN seven hundred years since the holy Santa Margherita of Cortona had made her way back across the wide Val di Chiana in disgrace, and entered the city to seek absolution, which was not immediately forthcoming. She had sinned in more than one particular.
She’d had an unfortunate start, being born not only beautiful but remarkably intelligent, with doting parents who made the mistake of sending her to be educated.
Then the mother died. The wicked stepmother came on the scene. The girl was ripped from school and made to work on the farm. But the damage was done. She had learned to read. Her head was filled with the ideals of the great romances of the age, La Chanson de Roland, The Romance of the Rose. Thus, when the handsome young lord of an estate across the valley chanced to come riding by, Margherita chanced to stray into his line of sight. She repulsed his advances. She knew there could be no proper relationship between a peasant and a noble. Yet, one dark and stormy night, she took a boat out onto the lake below the farm. The storm picked up. The boat flipped over. The young nobleman rescued her. And, now that fate had so conveniently spoken, she gave in and went off to live with him on his estate near Montepulciano.
For nine years she lived openly with him in great wealth and splendour, and she bore him a son. She gained much respect from the people of the town, even though her lover’s family refused to let them marry; for, in addition to her beauty, she had a quality that transcended social strata. Sometimes, though, she was stricken with an inexplicable sadness.
Then one day the young mother, now at the fullness of her beauty, was sitting in the tower room of the villa her lover had built for her, working at her tapestry. She glanced up occasionally to look over the fields and woods where he had gone off hunting. Suddenly, his favourite hunting dog came up the stairs and tugged at the minkedged skirt of her silk gown. She followed the dog into the woods, to a spot beneath a spreading oak where the ground had been disturbed. With her bare hands the young woman joined the faithful dog in scrabbling through the earth, scratching frantically in terror.
To this day no one knows how the young man was murdered, or who did the deed.
And, though beautiful Margherita had been admired in the town, it turned out that she hadn’t been that much admired. His family cast her out. She set foot across the valley, which was wild and swampy in those days, carrying her child. When her father refused to take her back, she sought shelter among the Franciscans. But they, too, turned her away. She was too beautiful, they said.
Finally, to rid herself of that fatal beauty, she scarred her lovely face, rubbed ashes in the wounds, knelt on hard stone and wept tears of blood, until at last the figure on the crucifix bent and summoned her to the business of sainthood; she was to restore the sick to health, raise the dead, enter the politics of the town by negotiating a peace between the Guelphs and Ghibellines.
Yet scandal followed her into her final holy days on earth. Malicious gossip spread about the long hours she spent in a cell high on the mountain, communing with her confessor. Not until she breathed her very last breath was her saintliness affirmed. As her soul left her body the air was filled with a cloud of fragrance, a wonderful perfume of flowers.
Now the holy Santa Margherita lies in a glass casket in the church on the hill, on the far side of the ruined tower.
CLARE THOUGHT OF THE saint’s story as she started up the road to Cortona for her appointment with the lawyer. It said a lot for the town, she thought, that their favourite saint had been followed all her life by scandal.
When Clare had first read the story, in Vancouver, she’d thought it started out like a classic fairytale. But in truth, what a complex and real woman the holy Margherita must have been. An impatient driver honked behind Clare, then zipped by in the precise threesecond interval required to avoid a head-on collision with a tourist bus. Clare resisted an urge to cross herself.
In switchbacks, the road climbed past terraces of olive trees, past a church built where the Virgin had once appeared to workers in a lime pit, up and up towards a cluster of ochre and cream and apricot houses floating surreally on a cloud of pink blossoms — till finally it skirted the massive Etruscan wall, providing vista after vista over the plain that ran northwards towards Siena, Florence, and further fabled destinations.
She found a parcheggio shaded by lime trees, where cars had installed themselves with happy disregard for allowing others in and out. She followed two young mothers pushing baby carriages up a long, steep, cobbled street. Steadily they pushed, in their fiveinch heels and short black skirts, talking, cooing encouragements to their babies, gesturing with their free hands which held cigarettes. Little shops, like glass-fronted caves, were tucked under brooding stone buildings on either side. When she finally reached the top, and stepped through an archway into the main piazza, Fantasy was the word that fluttered down from the tower of the Palazzo Comunale and settled in her heart.
The entire place seemed so hushed, despite the hum of voices and the steady undercurrent of footsteps echoing against stone buildings that were crenellated, arched, fronted by loggias or balconies, like a stage setting.
She sank into a wicker chair facing the piazza and ordered a cappuccino. Then, thinking of something she’d read in the guide book, she called the waiter back and changed her order to a caffè corretto. She was early for her appointment with the lawyer, and nervous. The waiter smiled gravely, as if it were not at all remarkable to want a doctored coffee first thing in the morning. With an almost pharmaceutical air he asked her which method of correction she would prefer: “Brandy? Grappa?”
“Which do you suggest?”
“This depends on what you wish to correct.”
She said she had to visit her lawyer in half an hour.
“Allora, grappa.” He clicked his heels. “Subito!”
As she waited for her drink, she pondered a tricky question she wanted to ask the lawyer. Hadn’t she heard that if there were the possibility of archaeological remains being found on a piece of Italian property, not only would the landowner not be allowed to undertake any excavation, but any finds would belong to the State?
But how to raise such a question without tipping off the lawyer (who, it seemed, was also Ralph and Federica’s lawyer) to the possibility that there might be such remains on her uncle’s property?
The waiter brought the thimbleful of espresso and the correction separately. Clare tackled the grappa first — a burst of firewater with a lingering and not entirely unpleasant aftertaste of gasoline. With a swoosh of iridescent wings, a flock of pigeons settled in the centre of the square. She imagined the morning here had been waiting for this moment to unfold. Metal shutters started rolling up. Shopkeepers appeared in their doorways and stood in the sun. Two girls in dangerous sandals ran to meet one another in the middle of the piazza in a swirl of pretty skirts. A covey of weathered men ambled in, discussing some serious matter in rumbling tones. A policewoman blew her whistle to stop an illegal motorist, and when a man dressed entirely in red walked towards the comely official figure, the policewoman blew her whistle at him too. The clock tower stood against a brilliantly blue sky.
“YES, IT IS A constant pleasure is it not?”
She turned to see Carl, the large German. He was wearing a crisp seersucker suit today, a fine leather bag over his shoulder.
“Many pardons, Miss Livingston, I did not mean to discompose you.”
“No, no. Please.” She gestured at the empty chair.
“I saw you observing the lively activity of our little city.” He lowered himself into the seat across from her. “The buildings surrounding this charming space are of such a human proportion, are they not? Yet also theatrical, the emphasis
on the façade, to accommodate a culture where so many of the rituals of life take place in public view.”
She smiled. “You put it so well.”
Perhaps he was the one she could sound out about the legal ramifications of finding archaeological remains on private property. “Are you planning to settle here permanently now? Is it tricky owning property here? I read an article describing Italy as one vast underground museum, referring to the fact — exaggerated, I’m sure — that there are so many buried antiquities that it’s hard to put a shovel in the ground, because if the smallest artefact comes to light the whole building project gets shut down.”
But she’d lost him. She followed his gaze across the square. The young Danish man, Anders, was in conversation with William Sands. How beautiful Anders really was, in his tight jeans and his lime green t-shirt, his golden hair combed up this morning into spikes; you’d have to be made of stone to resist if he grasped your shoulder the way he’d just grasped William’s. But William pulled away. Anders stood for a moment looking at the hand that had just been shunned. Then he turned on his heel and started up a tiny side street, lost to view.
“I must beg you to excuse me,” Carl said. Clare watched as he crossed the expanse of the piazza with remarkable speed for one so large. She pondered the sad fact that his palpable hurt, as he lumbered like a comic figure across the beautiful piazza, almost lightened for a moment her own concerns, as if we are all beads on an abacus of some great summing-up of suffering, she thought. She turned her glass round and round.
“Miss Livingston, I have been remiss.”
“Oh!”
For here was William Sands. She felt her face go hot. The raw image of yesterday superimposed itself over the tall straight serious figure standing before her.
She invited him to sit down.
He said he couldn’t stay, he had just come from a brief appointment at the Museo Etrusco; however, he wished to say that he was aware that he had lacked in courtesy the other night at Farnham’s in failing to express his condolences regarding her uncle.
Such stiff words. She wasn’t sure why her initial impression of him, from that night, came back with such force — that she liked him. Because he had held back from talking about her uncle? Or because the scene in the woods had left her with such an archetypal impression, as if she really had seen some mythic beast, which he and Anders both had been overpowered by — and that a man so determined, qualified, serious, could like anyone else be swallowed by that beast?
“Perhaps I should explain that I have serious reservations about the last articles your uncle wrote,” he said. “They stir up wrong attitudes. They give the impression — which one hoped had been abandoned years ago — that archaeology is about finding things.”
“It’s not?”
“These days we like to think it is about finding out about things. There is quite a difference.”
Hoping to lead the conversation in a helpful direction, Clare pulled out her notebook and asked him to elaborate. All night she’d been dreaming about those mounds in the meadow, peering into them sometimes the way she’d once peered into an Easter egg she’d been given as a child, which had a little round glass window at one end and a tiny scene inside. Surely there must be some radar that would allow her to peer down through the surface of those mounds. William was the person who would know.
As he eased himself into the chair across from her, though, she felt another pang for Nikki Stockton. This was such an attractive man, his very seriousness making him seem someone you would like to crack — was that the attraction to the younger man? The serious face, with freckles scattered across the pale skin; the very clean white hair, pulled back. She imagined how he would have looked when his wife first met him. He would have been a redhead then, she thought.
He was telling her how his site had been vandalized over the winter. Someone had dug a rough ditch right across the temple area on Poggio Selvaggio, destroying precious evidence, in search of treasure. “So perhaps I am over-sensitive. But the kind of articles your uncle wrote can stir up illicit appetites.”
He glanced at his watch. She noted the scratched crystal, the leather strap that was almost worn through. He gave her another of those beautiful grave smiles. His eyes were the colour of gravel in a stream, with that pebbled clarity. And he took his leave.
How could his wife stand it, she wondered. She started towards her appointment with the lawyer. The image came back to her of that pixie woman in her ballet costume put together out of biking gear, teasing Luke Tindhall, making smart remarks. Then Nikki’s expression after that electric moment at the dinner table when William and the Danish boy both reached for the wine.
THE LAWYER’S OFFICE WAS on the only level street in the town. One building joined to the next, almost like a cliff face, the little shops tucked in below. Clare paused in front of a window displaying just a single yellow linen dress and a pair of elegant high-heeled sandals like the ones on the young women who’d run to meet in the square. She felt guilty of an offence, in such beautiful surroundings, to be wearing the same silk shirt (washed by herself this time, so that it still retained a blush of tomato stain) and jeans. When she entered the office of lawyer Dottore Alfredo Bandinelli it was obvious that the young woman who looked up briefly (fashionable jacket of military cut, white shirt with flaring cuffs) was someone who would never end up glued to another person by a piece of oozing food.
The woman’s dark, heavily outlined eyes turned back to her computer. Clare coughed. The perfect pale fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. A woman in thick spectacles came out from behind a milky glass door and fell into a long conversation with the younger one.
Clare coughed again, then said, “Excuse me. I believe I have an appointment.”
“Signora Livingston?”
“Yes … Sì sì.”
“But I have called you,” the one with the glasses said with a frown. “Signor Bandinelli has needed to be detained away. I have already left you a message, one hour ago.”
“Oh. I guess I’d already started out.”
“Peccato!” A look implying that the shame was Clare’s, for such over-promptness.
“I suppose I should make another appointment.”
“No. It is better when Signor Bandinelli returns I will call you.”
“But I need to be able to plan.”
“Signora Livingston,” the woman said firmly, “Dottore Bandinelli has urgent family matters that have detained him. I cannot have any idea, when he might be able to return. Mi scusi, as soon as he can know, I will call.”
As soon as he can know, I will call. Mi scusi this is so. I will call, you will know!
As she went back out into the street, the words rang in Clare’s mind like a childhood skipping rhyme. What exactly did she need to plan? She’d keyed herself up, hoping the lawyer would have some personal word for her from her uncle, or that he had possession of his notes and papers. Now she’d avoided disappointment. Maybe that was the secret of life. She took another look in the window with the yellow dress. Avoid disappointment at all costs. The goat’s head buckle caught the light and grinned.
I WON IT, IN a rodeo, she’d said the other night, and got a laugh. Almost true. It was a dark amulet of sorts, to keep her conscious of a moment very long ago when she had won something in a split-second decision. A rancher from Oregon had picked her up on Fisherman’s Wharf, after she’d run away from the farm with her boyfriend and he’d left her stranded alone in San Francisco. The rancher said he could give her a job. He trained girls for the rodeo circuit; they had to be pretty ones of course, but they also had to know how to ride. Goat-tying was one of those events. “It’s quite a skill,” he told her. “They let the little sucker out of a chute, and you ride it down and throw yourself off and flip it over and tie up three legs with your piggin’ string.” It sounded fine, it sounded like exactly what she needed to get a lot of other things out of her mind. On the way over the sierra to his ranch, he stopped
at a tack shop and he bought her the belt. “She’s going to be a great little rider, this one,” he’d told the guy at the counter. She caught the look they exchanged. When they drove off again, his big hairy hand never left her knee. But it had been a snap to shake him when he stopped for gas — a sprint across the highway, and only moments waiting in the hot mean central California light, before a semi pulled over, the first of the blameless rides that eventually landed her safe in Vancouver with the dear old woman who’d helped her turn her life around.
Still, that moment in the tack shop could so easily have spiralled her in the other direction. With his hand on her knee, then moving up casually bit by bit towards her crotch while he hummed along to the radio, she’d been sure it was the other path she would take. Just go the inevitable way, the way she deserved and half-wanted. She still didn’t know what had made her run. The belt tied her back to that girl who hadn’t decided to run, just did.
“CIAO, HELLOOO, CLARE LIVINGSTON!”
The Contessa Luisa di Varinieri was striding towards her from the direction of the piazza. Before Clare turned to meet her she checked her reflection in the shop window, as if she might have visibly smeared herself with those memories just now.
“This is so wonderful!” Luisa exclaimed. “Vittorio and I have been very much disappointed not to have had you a little more to ourselves the other night.”
She gave Clare a kiss on both cheeks. She was wearing big gold earrings the size of jar lids, which gave Clare’s cheeks two little slaps. “Vittorio and I have been so hoping that you would come and have some tea,” Luisa said.
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