He said, “I could not believe that you had truly torn up that fine work.” He was looking straight at her, through her. He said, “Of course I should not have done this, but now I am taken by these compositions.” He lifted another from the drawer. “Such feeling, such imagination! Ah, if only —”
She couldn’t help gratification flooding through her (such feeling, such imagination). “But what?” she demanded. “If only what?”
He looked so stern. “If you were illustrating a fairytale,” he said, “this would be one thing. But here I see you again, as with the orchid, inventing variations for our native plants — making these fantasies for a publication which, I had supposed, was to be a serious study of our native flora.”
He still had the nerve to lecture her? A married man famous for exponential feats of womanizing and a meddling snoop as well, taking the moral high ground?
Almost anything would be okay but this — okay if he’d bounded across and said what a sweet little faker she was (though she wasn’t, not with these), still it would be okay, and she would trust him the way she’d decided moments ago that she would as she’d stepped in the door, and she would take him to see her hidden meadow. But this agonized inner wrenching of his — it filled her mouth with the sour taste of childhood upchuck.
He took a visible breath. He said, “Very well, I will plainly ask why you do this counterfeit work, which does not go at all with the truth of you.”
“Why should anything about me disturb you so much?”
“You know!” he said. “You do.”
SHE DID.
She’d been holding it off, but right from the first instant on the autostrada, in that first glance, there had been the flash of fate. Rescue was what she’d felt when he came up behind her on the highway. The flare that could burn away the dross of both their lives. Alchemy — however unreasonable and unscientific.
If only he would complete the rescue. The room had begun jittering in the glare of an oncoming migraine from her past. But he pressed on, saying how fine she was, how talented, saying how devastated he would be if she came to his country with such talent and used this in creating an imaginary place, filled with clever fabrications …
“I have no idea what you mean!”
Again he said, “You do! You must!” He said she of all people must understand how the beauty of the world was often a responsibility too much to bear, for he had seen this in her paintings.
“Oh, Clare! What I would do to have your ability to capture the world as it truly is, and turn it into an image transcendent. But to have this gift and use it falsely —”
“Falsely!”
He glared, his hair springing wild as he picked up the painting of the orchid. “Then can you show me the place where this grows?”
The room was closing in. “I told you, it grows in there.” She pointed to the pile of photocopies. “Where? In what page?”
Now the faces of the long-ago inquisition were pressing. Bad. Wicked. Obscene. Ruined.
“This is sick,” she managed to say, bile rising in her throat. “I absolutely don’t get how you can come here and make these accusations.”
“Because I fear for you!” But he looked lost now, too. “Because I need you.” He took a step towards her. “Because I am so lonely. Clare!”
SO LONELY. SHE HAD the impression of his face shearing into pieces at this confession. Oh and how well she knew the way loneliness could leave her feeling branded, shameful.
She thought of the little boy she’d imagined, always overreaching with some grand idea, now grownup and wanting to save not just the endangered world but her too. Tripping up again, mismanaging the whole thing, aware now not only of botching that, but of giving away some disgraceful emptiness in himself.
She wanted to hold the moment while she found the words to set this right. But her body was already spinning out of control, the room spinning too, and sickness burning up into her throat. Her face twisted as she tried to stem this, and she could see him misreading her expression, assuming it was disgust at the shameful part of himself he’d just blurted out. She struggled for control. It was no use. She had to dash out onto the back terrace where her stomach heaved and heaved.
Whatever she was trying to get rid of, she would not. When her breathing settled, she heard him starting his car.
FIVE
The Shades That Absence Has
CLARE HAD EXPECTED THE long-absent Dottore Alfredo Bandinelli to be careworn, pale, and distracted, surrounded by tipping heaps of untended paperwork. Instead, behind a vast polished desk, which held just a single piece of sculpture in deep blue glass, Alfredo Bandinelli was tanned and alarmingly good looking. His eyes held a hooded alertness that sent her own scurrying back to the sculpture. This turned out to be a male torso with a glassy penis butting up against the plinth.
When she came out of his office a half hour later, she felt as if she were emerging from a murky funfair tunnel where strange objects had flown at her in the dark, maybe bats. She tried to figure out exactly what she had learned.
She had clung to the hope that he might have had custody of her uncle’s notes and papers, and perhaps — no matter how wrenching — some personal communication her uncle had intended her to have. But there was nothing. Further, not only would there be “some small delay” before the legal complexities regarding the boundaries of her uncle’s property could be solved, and consequently a delay in transferring the title, but — alarmingly — there also turned out to be what he called “the small matter of your inhabitants.”
She was still trying to get her head around the implications as she started back down the level street. She passed the store where she had bought the yellow dress. A single pair of silk pyjamas graced the window now, the sort that one might slip into late on a night when the yellow dress had been removed by someone else’s long, scarred fingers; pyjamas to sip prosecco in, play footsie in, before the whole business started up again; pyjamas intended for an Italian woman who knew what was going on. As it turned out, the yellow dress had been, too — and certainly not for the likes of Clare, who could not spend half an hour with a lawyer without becoming more confused than before. She’d nodded as Alfredo Bandinelli leaned back in his sleek leather chair, made a steeple of his fingers, and talked about those “inhabitants” of hers, “who inform me that your esteemed uncle promised to make provision for them, in perpetuity, to go on living and working on this piece of land which they have only with greatest reluctance been forced to sell to him ten years ago …”
She paused at the window of a pasticceria, an Aladdin’s cave of piled-up meringues and jewel-like sugared fruit and slabs of nougat, and stacks of the famous panforte of the region, in a dozen varieties, pale, dark, peppered, fruited, chocolate-covered, or dusted with a snow of powdered sugar.
A chocolate mousse cake was front and centre.
“In other words,” she’d said to Alfredo Bandinelli, “I am the legal owner of Marta and Niccolo Dottorelli’s home?”
He’d said yes, that this would with “seeming assurance indeed appear to be so.” Therefore should she, “in times of the future,” become free, herself, to sell the land, she would be dispossessing the Dottorelli family, contrary to what had been “her esteemed uncle’s wishes.” Though, true, there was nothing in writing to this effect, there was, all the same, “the burden of their believability in such matters, which has proved to weigh heavily should such disputes be unfortunate enough to proceed to court.”
Clare went into the pastry shop and bought the chocolate cake. She carried it along to the public gardens where she settled on a bench that looked out over the valley.
It was a day of thick-grained coppery light. The far hills had disappeared. Gone, too, was the hill town where the saint had run off with her noble lover. Clare sliced into the cake with the plastic knife she had asked for in the shop. A knife and a plastic coffee spoon. It was surely sinful to compare the saintly woman’s predicament with her own. But ther
e was this. Ever since those peculiar, painful moments which ended with Gianni driving away, something had happened in Clare’s bones. Not that they had become fragile, leached of love, but that her bones felt crystallized, prey to rays of baleful energy from the great god-awful light years of empty sky. How to explain the need to feed those leached bones? Looking across the valley into the dense coppery mist, she found herself wondering what might happen to another sort of woman who really did hold saintly potential. Santa Margherita’s lover died, love died. But, afterwards, what if her transformation truly had been cosmic; what if her bones started picking up holy vibrations like an old-fashioned radio crystal set? For the saintly, of course, that would be food enough. Clare cut another slice of the oozing cake.
Something else had happened. Clare’s easy facility with brush and paints had left her. Her work now was stiff and prissy and ultracorrect, and she tore up sketch after sketch.
The chocolate mousse cake was doing its good work. As she dipped spoonfuls straight from the box, the world around looked even more beautiful for being inaccessible behind this thick pane of downright worthlessness.
LATER, AS CLARE DROVE UP her lane, she sighted Nikki Stockton’s orange van. She didn’t see Nikki, until something hit her on the head. The woman was stretched out on a high branch of the old oak tree, that grin of hers hovering up there too. Less than anything just now did Clare, covered in chocolate, want to find Nikki Stockton waiting in a tree. Had she dropped by to relive the awful day at the dig? To make Clare feel worse by trying to make her feel better?
Nikki swung herself down from branch to branch, her wide gypsy-looking skirt poofing out around her like a parachute as she jumped.
On the drive home, Clare had wondered seriously, for the first time really, what on earth she was doing here. Her aunt was after her, demanding that she sell the house, and threatening legal action if she didn’t hurry. But even aside from that, how could she, Clare, have imagined succeeding in the project of living here? She was not one of those people who came to foreign places and bought houses and had brilliant insights and wrote amusingly of all the loveable local characters. She’d met two local characters, and they bullied her. She’d fallen in love with a man who tried to bully. Since then she’d been waiting for him to call.
“I hope you’ll forgive me for just dropping in,” Nikki said, picking herself up from the ground. “That woman who works for you was just leaving on her motorino; she said you’d probably be home soon, from your lawyer.”
Nothing for it but to ask Nikki in. “And look!” Clare said, “I seem to have this cake. Chocolate turned out to be essential, after meeting with the lawyer.”
“I can relate to that. In our experience the whole country is covered in legal documents two miles thick.”
She followed Clare down to the kitchen, but luckily refused a slice of cake. Clare would have hated her to see the mess inside the box. She made tea, and poured it into the castle-pattern cups, noticing too late that she’d given Nikki the mended one. Nikki didn’t say why she’d come. She sipped her tea and looked around the kitchen with bright pecking eyes.
“How’s the work going?” she finally said.
Clare had noticed ink stains on Nikki’s hands again. She pictured her in the archaeology lab making drawings of shards and fragments, then engaging in the magic of reconstruction that she’d described. She felt sick with envy at the thought that at least Nikki’s work must be going fine.
A loud knocking at the arbour door excused Clare from having to say anything about her own work.
THE DRIVER OF A florist’s van was holding a long white box a little smaller than a coffin, which he insisted would be too heavy for the Signora, and carried down to the kitchen. When she lifted the lid, the room flared with the light of three dozen yellow roses, emitting a scent of lemon and paradise.
She read the card. Forced a smile. Turned to Nikki with a helpless shrug. “Sir Harold Plank must have got the impression that his Man in Italy didn’t behave well the other day. But he should have sent these to you.”
Nikki volunteered to cut the stems while Clare fetched the copper ewer from the mantel in the other room. Clare could hear her going at it, while she stood by the fireplace and took deep breaths. Roses. From the wrong person. And there’d been that moment when her heart had ballooned into the stratosphere. She glared around the room to force back stupid tears, then caught the eye of the bronze she-wolf behind the chair, still saddled with that ridiculous lamp. She should throw the thing out.
She joined Nikki in arranging the flowers. No matter what, they were beautiful, though several seemed to have lost their heads. She found herself cheered at the thought that even a rose could lose its head.
CLARE FOLLOWED NIKKI’S VAN around curve after curve, oak forests on one side, a narrow valley on the other, then down through a little town in the next valley.
“These days I’ve started painting shadows,” Nikki had said to Clare, when they’d finished their tea. “Shadows?”
“Yeah, I take away the objects and paint just the shadows that they cast. It’s fun. Why don’t you come and see?”
Nikki and William had purchased their old farmhouse from the Contessa’s family ten years before. The land all around the area had once all belonged to Luisa’s family too, Nikki said, as they walked up a narrow cobbled path. She pointed out the roof of a much larger villa, just visible through the treetops, where Luisa had grown up. Now Luisa owned just a small stone cottage, even further up the hill, which she used as a retreat for work and study.
They passed under a great fig tree shading the flagged entrance yard. The adjacent tall narrow building was a tobacco drying shed, Nikki said. She and William were renovating it into a guest house for visiting friends.
Inside, waiting at the table, was Luisa di Varinieri herself, drinking a cup of chamomile tea. She scolded Nikki for buying herbal teas when there was chamomile growing just outside, between the stones, and mint as well. She told Clare that her own little cottage was redolent with the sweet curative scent of drying herbs. She said that when Clare finally came to visit their apartment in Cortona, Clare would be most interested to learn more about all such local lore, which she, Luisa, had absorbed while growing up, “as naturally, you understand, as one breathes in the country air.”
Luisa launched, then, into the reason for her visit — which was to tell Nikki that she must teach William to behave, at last!
“What do you imagine my father would think, if he knew that the work he had begun — on what was then, of course, his property — should be in peril now because William refuses to concede one iota of his pride. Yes, yes, yes, Vittorio told me about the debacle the other day on Poggio Selvaggio. How idiotic to be rude to Tindhall, then stalk off.”
Clare tried to interject on William’s behalf. Luisa waved that away. Oh certainly, everyone knew that Tindhall was impossible, she said. But this was not the point. The point was that Nikki would have to teach William better manners in general, because his refusal to suffer fools greatly compounded his troubles.
“And if I may say so,” she added, “William should also be a little careful, in future, about his association with young acolytes.”
Clare was glad that she’d been standing by the open back door just then, and that she was wearing her camera. She turned away and snapped shots of the view over the fields. A scene came back to her that she’d witnessed earlier, up in the public gardens in Cortona. A young woman and a child had been sitting on a bench across from the playground, the child scuffing pebbles, the woman with her chin towards her chest, the two of them quite separate from all the other mothers and grandmothers who were knitting, talking, giggling on the benches just beside. The branches of the lime trees swayed above, just coming into full heart-shaped leaf. But the bronzed sunlight seemed to cast no shadows, and Clare had a sense of how in this small, supremely beautiful place there would be no secrets, either; this would be the price people who lived here would pay.
Now Luisa was telling Nikki that she would just pop back up to her own cottage and bring down some proper herb teas. She had one made from artichoke leaves, which William should be drinking. She said she insisted that Vittorio drink it. An excellent anti-choleric. She would be back in half an hour.
When she’d driven off in her Cinquecento, Nikki said, “So — are you ready? I’m dying to see what a real artist thinks of my first efforts.” She stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, head to the side, sizing Clare up, then pulled down a ladder in the kitchen ceiling, which led to her upper sanctum, she said.
“After you,” she said, with a mock bow.
Then, “No. Wait. It’s such a mess up there. Give me a minute.”
It was considerably more than a minute that Clare waited, listening to Nikki rustling around, opening cupboards, bundling things away.
IN THE ATTIC, FOUR low windows gave onto four different views of the Umbrian countryside — or would have, if the attic had not been crowded with pieces of lumpy furniture stored there ever since various of the houses on the di Varinieri estate had been sold off.
“Luisa still feels she has ancestral rights to the attic,” Nikki said. “But these are kind of like company.” She opened the lid on an upright piano, played some bars of “Chopsticks,” took another of those theatrical bows, then flopped into a high-backed chair. “So anyway …” gesturing across the room. “What do you say?
In a space cleared by a low west window, vegetables and various types of fruit were arranged on a plank set on bricks: onions with papery skins, artichokes, some ruby plums, an eggplant, golden pears. On an adjoining table, a sheaf of watercolours was loosely spread. The shadow paintings. Not a bit as Clare had tried to imagine as she drove here — not sharp outlines of negative space. Instead these were compositions of deep pooling shades, all the shades that absence has, Clare thought — with, between them, just the faintest mottling of shapes that might have been. Evocative and lovely. They caught Clare’s heart; then a pinch of envy followed. Nikki was watching her closely. But before Clare could find words for the stirring melancholy effect of these pieces, a downstairs door slammed, and the Contessa was back, calling “Nikki, Nikki!”
The Whirling Girl Page 17