The Whirling Girl

by Barbara Lambert

  He said the castle had been a monastery long ago. Then a wealthy family bought it. Now there was an old caretaker who would guide them through the ruins. When the caretaker took them to the chapel and swung a flashlight over the peeling gold-starred ceiling, those stars would shower at Clare’s feet.

  “Oh please,” she laughed. “You don’t actually look like someone who says such goofy things.”

  “No? How then do I look?”

  “When I first saw you — when you got out of your Mercedes — you made me think of a face on a coin. Later, when I was going through a book in the house, about ancient history, there you were.”

  “Who was this, pretending to be me?”

  “He wasn’t very nice.”

  “No one with a face on a coin is very nice. It comes from being too close to the money. Not a problem I have.”

  “This one was Mithridates of Pontus.”

  “He was not so bad. It is true he had every Italian in his kingdom put to death, the little children too, but perhaps they had misbehaved. We have learned from this, it is not good to over-discipline.”

  For a moment more his face remained in silhouette, the noble puzzled profile of a king with weighty problems. When he turned, when they looked at one another, it was delicious to decide to let expectation spin out a little longer, then join hands and run down the pier, across the park, across the street, up the steps of the ristorante where their table waited by the open window.

  LATER SHE WILL NOT recall quite what they said. It was easy, buoyant — the way you can sometimes speak a foreign language in a dream. What she will recall is how they foraged through the menu, like famished children. She will remember tagliatelle with seafood bathed in saffron, and a noble white wine from Montepulciano fetched from the private cellar of the restaurant’s owner. Above the table a lamp of tasselled silk held them in an island of mellow light, and beyond this, the ebb and flow of many conversations. The fine attention Italian diners gave to their food. The large party of Germans at a central table, where a beautiful blonde child raised laughter by loudly calling “Ciao!” over and over, and, at the instigation of a party of elderly Italians nearby, “Ciao bella!” She will remember that they both ate prawns rolled into zucchini flowers, and that they finished with a sorbetto of passion fruit.

  THE STORM DID NOT start until they were back outside. A flash that split the clouds and sent the moon to cover, and then another and another. Fat drops of water exploding on the sidewalk. By the time they reached the shelter of his car they were soaked. The rain banged on the roof, “E per te ogni cosa c’e …” At Ossia, the street through the town was like a river. “… Ninna-na, ninna-ne …” Lightning seared the sky, exposing the city on the hill, the Medici fortress, and the buildings huddled on the slope bleached to bone.

  A crash of thunder directly overhead. “Does this happen often? I’m sorry. I hate storms.”

  “I think only very strange people like them. Like me. You should not be sorry.”

  Maybe he would understand if she explained. But what each flash made clear was how she would never do that, yet how she was tied completely to the past, and how desperate she really was. She saw the triumvirate leaning in, giving a belligerent thirteen-year-old girl the third degree — her aunt, her grandmother, and her ancient doctor — her aunt’s face slicked by vengeance into a pale determined slate. She heard the leaded panes of the windows of the farmhouse rattling the way they had that night. The trees soughing and snapping on the ridge. She smelled the old living room’s damp and musty smell. She remembered how in a great crack of lightning all the lights went out. It was not until years later, not till she was married, that she understood how badly the doctor had botched the procedure. She would never have a child.

  The rutted road was a torrent as Gianni bucked the car up her hill.

  Before she could say anything, he was opening her door, a small penlight in his hand. The rain had stopped, but water poured from the gutters and the stone steps were slick. His light played around the terrace. They stopped by her door. Behind him, the Medici fortress loomed against the inky sky, a warning of all she had no right to expect.

  She rose on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Good night, Gianni. It was lovely.”

  She couldn’t see his face, his shape merging with the formidable outline of the broken fortress. “… Then I should call you?”

  She said, “Oh, yes. Please call.”

  The Gardens of King Herod

  ALL NIGHT SHE TOSSED and turned. Had it been a mad thing to let him go? Or the proper Italian thing, which someone of Gianni’s background would appreciate and understand?

  She thought she’d only slept for a minute. She heard the ringing of the phone. She heard Marta’s voice, explaining that Signora Livingston was still in bed.

  “No.” She rushed out, bundled in a sheet.

  It was Luke Tindhall. He was calling, he said, because his employer had called him and wakened him from a perfectly good sleep, merely to get his impressions of the dig at Poggio Selvaggio.

  “And?”

  “And?” Mimicking her voice. “And were you a good boy, Tindhall? Did you lie through your pearly whites?”

  “You are a reeking idiot, you know.”

  “Beg pardon, Ms. Livingston. I must say that you, on the other hand, were looking very fetching last night, wrapped in that splendid bit of cloth.” She pictured him making a gleeful sardonic bow. “And so you’ve come to know the famous Gianpaulo. Ah, well. All the pretty ladies get to know Gianpaulo DiGiustini sooner or later, though I’d imagined you were made of sterner stuff. Don’t worry. I won’t pass it on to Harry Plank.”

  ALL THE PRETTY LADIES.

  She’d known that, hadn’t she?

  How unreasonable to trail into the kitchen and tell Marta she was ill, she was going back to bed. Marta should go home. How unreasonable to curl under the covers in a ball, until she heard the sound of a car pulling in. Then how unreasonable to leap up, start wildly brushing her hair, pull on shirt and jeans.

  It was Ralph Farnham. This time she did manage to stop him at the door.

  = He, too, said she’d looked fetching last night. “Late, were we?” eyeing her rumpled state.

  He’d dropped by, he said, because Federica had told him that their joint lawyer was back in town, and he’d been thinking that the lawyer must have those papers of her uncle’s that she hadn’t been able to locate, and so he’d thought he’d let her know the chap was back, because his agent was dead keen.

  “Hang on,” Clare said. “Don’t get too close. I think I might be coming down with another bout of dengue fever. It’s catching as hell. I’d rush right home and take some Echinacea, if I were you.”

  TIME TICKED BY. CLARE didn’t dare go far from the phone. She got out the photocopies of the hermit’s botanical books, and forced herself to select some suitable local plant to work into a composition. She settled on Erythronium bifolium maculosum, liking its spiky little upright blooms which looked hopeful, though ugly.

  As she sketched it in, she felt the plant resist. She tore the sketch in half, started again. When she looked up she saw the painting of the orchid, still propped against a vase. She heard Gianni’s comment. Very unusual indeed. She rose to hide it in the drawer of the sideboard, with the collection of her meadow paintings.

  Instead, she took the rest of the paintings out, spread them, and reassessed them.

  They, too, were unusual — certainly for work purporting to be purely botanical. But even with their flaws they were alive, she thought now, and they reflected true moments in her life, the best of her. Important to remember that when she’d painted these, just as with the little orchid, she had been true. There was one place in her life where she could go, where she was true.

  All the same, when she set back to work, not just the Erythronium resisted, everything resisted. Some great immoveable ice block had settled over her, encompassing her. Blocked. She’d never felt this before. She c
losed her eyes and tried to look at the situation objectively, say from across the room. What to do about the woman frozen inside a mammoth ice cube?

  The phone rang. It was Gianni.

  He had to confess regret, he said, that their evening together had so abruptly ended.

  She said, “Me too.”

  Even though she could see all those pretty ladies dancing round him, maybe even in her meadow, dancing round and round in a ring, she knew by the sick relief flooding her that of course, no matter what, she would join in.

  HE MUST HAVE BEEN calling from the bottom of the hill. When she stepped from the bedroom shower, he was bounding up the stone stairs. She could have called out for him to hang on. Instead she went through, wrapped in a big lavender-smelling towel, and beckoned him in. The next thing was obvious. She would let the towel fall. Or he would come and remove it.

  But that ice block had moved to the centre of the room, and they were peering at each other through it. He said, “Oh I am sorry to have —” She said, “Oh, no. I didn’t know you’d get here so soon —” He said, “Unfortunately I was —”

  She said, “I’d better go and dress. Just make yourself at home,” dipping in a mock curtsey, holding the hem of the towel.

  He was carrying a thick manila envelope. He put it on the table, looked around the room. “Could I perhaps look at that little orchid again?”

  She said sure, she would get it out when she came back.

  Like hell, she thought, glancing at the sideboard where she’d stowed it along with all the other paintings.

  Could I perhaps look at that little orchid?

  Imagine coming into a room where a woman was half-naked, and asking that. The face in the mirror when she dressed was the ugliest face she’d ever seen. She pulled her hair into a knot.

  CLARE MADE COFFEE. the ice block followed, and hunkered between them in the centre of the kitchen table. She began to wonder how she could have thought he was attractive. Look at him sipping from the mug with the castle painted on it, centuries of seigneurial correctness behind that sip. In every generation, the rustle of pretty ladies off to the side. Look at him examining the design, God only knew what was going on inside his noble forehead. Look at that ridiculous big nose and tilted-up chin.

  It was a relief when Niccolo tapped on the kitchen door, hunched

  and gnarled, the shadowy branches of the old quince tree gnarling cave-like behind him, so that for a moment she thought, rescued by a gnome. Niccolo was holding a green plastic thermos. He said Marta had sent him with soup, because the Signora was not well. He eyed Gianni suspiciously before he started back up the hill. Clare found herself wondering if Marta had really sent the soup, or if Niccolo had brought his lunch soup as an excuse to check on her visitor. Gianni had broken off his contemplation of the mug. She offered him soup. He said no, he did not think at the moment he could eat.

  Then he clapped his forehead, as if rescued. “But I have forgotten!” He ran up the steps into the living room, came back with the manila envelope. He pulled out a fat academic-looking publication with a creamy white cover, grey-blue printing. The American Journal of Archaeology. He handed it to Clare. She found herself smoothing her hand over the ivory-feeling surface of the cover, wondering what sort of a reclusive dolt she really was that it should make her feel happy just to hold the journal, then to flip the pages, see blackand-white photos set into text about excavations around the world, footnotes, book reviews, a hefty index, graphs and maps. Gianni had brought it because it contained a long article on the excavation of ancient gardens, written by a friend.

  “Gardens? I had no idea there was such a specialty!”

  His face lit up — and then the whole room lit up. He said the very earth itself was the artefact some archaeologists studied. He said his very dear friend was now an expert in this field, as Clare would learn when she read of his friend’s excavations of the gardens of King Herod the Great, in Jericho.

  “Herod! Who made Salome dance?”

  “No, that was I think the uncle. Still, even with him, we must not be too quick to believe the stories that we hear from these many centuries away. This is, in part, my point.”

  He turned to photographs and diagrams, which detailed the process involved in the excavation of the gardens of that biblical king. He seemed relieved by her interest. He explained that through his friend’s work, gardens once so marvellous and lush that Cleopatra had forced Caesar to obtain them for her from Herod — these gardens had been able to come alive once more, at least in our minds and understanding, in the way such archaeological projects could bring things back to life.

  “The palm groves where the balsam grew,” he said, “the famous Balm of Gilead! See here what would have been the luxuriant plantings in Herod’s courtyards — all revealed in this plan, discovered by the changes in the earth, the variations in the stratigraphy …”

  Clare leaned close to the folded-out plan showing the many phases of the excavation. It was fascinating to think of recapturing something as ephemeral as a garden. To think that the earth itself could hold subliminal memories.

  “And from these excavations of Herod’s gardens,” Gianni was saying, “we learn that he was not such a terrible king as his enemies have told us, but a man who loved flowers.”

  “That seems a bit of a leap. I’m sure that lots of really bad people loved flowers.”

  He admitted that, yes, this king had done some bad things, and also he went a little mad; however, Gianni’s friend had assured him that the story of the slaughter of the innocents was “… what you might call perhaps, in your idiom, somewhat dicey historically. We must think, too, about the general ethos of the times.”

  “Oh sure,” Clare said.

  IT WAS BEAUTIFUL TO watch Gianni now, in his excitement. To find herself caught up again, as with his riff about the unicorns, the resin fungi thing — to be whirled along, not knowing where he aimed to take her.

  He was walking back and forth in her kitchen, which had been designed for people much shorter. He dodged clusters of lavender and dried herbs hanging from the beam between the table and the stove. He plucked a spray of tarragon, crumbled it, buried his face in his palms, looked up, widening his eyes in pleasure at the scent, as his words tumbled on.

  From clues in the earth itself, he said, it was also possible to gain a new understanding of ancient minds. He said his friend had also been privileged to work with the great Wilhemina Jashemski at Pompeii, where even in their smallest, most humble shops and tiny homes the inhabitants had devoted space to flowers. Thus it became clear that the Romans, too, were nicer people than previously had been supposed.

  He paused, fixed her intently. “On their streets of tombs as well,” he said, “they planted the most lovely and fragrant plants to nourish the spirits of the living and to feed the dead. My friend helped to excavate these gardens on their streets of tombs.”

  He’d said it twice. Their streets of tombs. So this was where it all had been leading!

  He closed the journal, as if the preamble was over and the real subject about to begin. He would make up some excuse now, she thought, to inveigle his way up to her own street of tombs.

  She tried to remain detached, yet interested. What would he say, exactly? What would she say? Did she really have a member of the tombaroli in her house? Would she soon have one in her bed? The suspicion of being used, manipulated, was queasily exciting, though her gut clenched too. Breathlessly she watched him spread his hands, his surprisingly scarred hands.

  “I also have made the earth my choice,” he said. “I have changed my life to do this. For this reason, truth and accuracy of botanical depiction have become of prime importance to me.”

  Truth and accuracy. She’d been ready to take a tomb robber to her bed, and he’d turned into the chartered accountant of botanical correctness?

  “Oh yes,” she said, “absolutely. Accuracy is important in my work. But as to truth,” she gave her head a little knock with her fist
, “I’m afraid you’ve caught me out in a fib.”

  His dark eyes flared over her.

  She said, “I promised to show you the orchid. But I decided it didn’t cut the mustard. This morning I ripped it up.”

  HERE WAS NICCOLO AGAIN, at the door. This time, she went right out and closed it behind her, took a breath of morning air, remembering how fine it had been sitting in the sun outside Niccolo’s shed, sharing his morning snack, understanding almost nothing that he said.

  Niccolo had hurried back to warn her that once again he’d loosed the dogs in the fenced woods. There was evidence of strangers tampering with the wire.

  “I thought you said there were no dogs.”

  No, she had been mistaken, he said; he’d told her that she was in no danger from the dogs, because since her uncle died he kept them penned. This was followed by a thick wordy tangle.

  She thanked him for letting her know.

  Because, even if she’d understood, she would not have believed a word, not from Niccolo, not from the man in the kitchen. Who knew what Gianni was really after, or what he saw in her? He’d got her right in so many ways. Yet he’d misjudged her in ways that she’d never bring herself to explain. It was like being stuffed inside a bag to think of trying to explain. What did people want? A diagram of the north and south of her? Warnings of false lodestones and the places where the map ended and she had more than once slipped off? As she turned to go back inside, she saw that the sky had sealed over with the white of a blinded eye.

  “LLISTEN, GIANNI —!”

  In the space before she stepped back into the kitchen, resolve had settled on her.

  But he wasn’t there.

  She heard the scrape of wood on wood. In the living room she caught him turning from the sideboard, with one of her meadow paintings in either hand. Others were spread on the table.

  “What the hell?”

  He laid the paintings down with extreme care, his face growing very pale, all of him paling, the arms in the white t-shirt falling to his side and becoming whiter than the shirt, or so she imagined. She imagined all of him fading away, a shape held up only by his clothes, pale with shame. When he looked up he was frowning, though.