Stricken. Hair, eyebrows, not-yet-shaven chin hairs springing electrically. Oh I love you. How else to explain the welling-up need to do anything, anything, to prevent that sad ridiculous hair-springing stricken look.
She took his hands. She said it had been terrible of her to make him the scapegoat for the fact that, well, she was just feeling a little painted-out at the moment.
He looked relieved. He had so much hoped, he said, that this was all behind her now. “But I will make it up to you. I will.” His wind-blowing intensity again. “Here at La Celta, where you have time and freedom, I know you will find your muse returns.”
Then he took her to see the new lambs. “Tosti!” he called out to the shepherd, “Come! You must meet Clare Livingston, a great and famous artist who has come to us to recuperate her powers.” And by the time she met Manfredo of the many duties, “a most renowned botanical artist!” was what she had become.
“Please,” she said when they were out of earshot, “Don’t do that.” She stamped her foot. He stamped his too. He said, “Then I will not.” They walked on. “But look!” He pointed to a creamy flower beside the byre where he kept rare white heifers. “See how this little one, which I believe in English is known as ‘common cow wheat’ —” He gave it a nudge with his toe. “See how it trembles with anticipation for the moment when you will deign to make its portrait.”
So finally she confessed that there was something more than being painted-out going on. “I’ve lost it.” She tried to explain.
He turned her to him, ran his fingers down the sides of her face, as if there were tiny disfigurements in its composition that he could smooth away. “This is why I have brought you here, to my refuge,” he said. “To find it again.”
“Only for that?”
He smiled. No, he admitted, there were a few other reasons. “Come!” He led her to a haymow above the byre.
AND SO THE DAY passed; Clare was glad to hold at bay thoughts of the villa up the hill.
In the late afternoon, they returned to the walled garden. Gianni said he wanted her to see the hummingbird moths that came skimming in at that hour. But then — from behind a bush — he produced a gift, a most beautiful folding stool, the legs carved, with a seat of tooled Florentine leather. It had been made especially for her, by a craftsman in Florence, to use while sketching in his garden. Gianni had taken the liberty of smuggling along the pack with her art materials, he confessed, which she would find in the drawer beneath the bed.
When he caught her expression, his own face took on a childish, heartbreaking pout of disappointment. Then sternness clamped down.
“You do not wish me to push you,” he said. “I understand. Of course this cure will require rest, the breathing of this healthful air. But then, it will require that you try. Such talent as yours does not leave. You have left it. Here in my garden you will get it back.”
She saw him for a moment as a figure on a playing card, two opposite halves, and it was the sweet childish pouting upside-down half that she wanted to walk around the garden with. But he was saying, “For you see, my darling rare one, I have imagined the beautiful work we will accomplish here together. How we will aid and uplift one another.”
Aid and uplift? Those snaky whispers slithered in again. And you, Clare, are supposed to take part in all this aiding and uplifting without being good enough to be invited up to the villa?
“Gianni. Cut it out!” she snapped. “I’m a really flawed person. You don’t know the half of it. And why is it so important that I paint? I think that’s all you care about. It’s weird. You’ve got some fetish about my painting.”
He turned pale. He put a finger to her lips. Then he took her arm and led her to a bench beside a bush whose flowers filled the air with a citrus perfume.
Did she know, he asked, that this was the famous burning bush?
If they should light a match here, on this hot evening, the vapour from the attractive flower would make the air catch fire!
But, he added, he had also learned another thing about this burning bush. It could heal wounds. There was a fresco of this in the museum in Naples, rescued from the wall of a villa like the one that they would soon build.
“Yes,” he rushed on, to sweep off her astounded look. “When you and I build our villa, I will make sure to have this little bush by the door, so that when we disagree we can quickly heal.”
“Hang on — have I missed something here?”
He sprang up. From behind the same wound-healing bush, he pulled a satchel containing a bundle of books and scholarly journals, including the journal she’d seen before with the article about the gardens of King Herod. He spread a thick glossy book on her knee, then squatted beside her to turn the pages. It was the book he’d told her of, about the gardens of Pompeii, the excavations carried on by a revered garden archaeologist.
Clare did not get a chance to examine that properly, either, because he was too impatient to reveal his main surprise. He also planned to make Clare a gift of a Roman garden.
“First, yes, we will make for ourselves that little villa, something closer to the ground; because when we grow old, it will be too hard to climb the tower. And in the centre of our villa I will make a courtyard with a peristyle garden for my beautiful rare one to sit in and to do her exceptional paintings!”
THAT NIGHT, AS CLARE floated, rare and cherished in the great silk bed, she was caught in filaments where his dreams twined with hers. When she began to emerge from sleep, he was gone. She wondered at the silence. She tried to follow a thread out of her dreams, remembering what he’d said the first day: You have laid an enchantment here. She lay staring at the great beamed ceiling as first light crept in, at the carved staircase leading to the parapet roof. They had not yet climbed through that trap door, to see the new set of stars.
But there was one door in this castle, truly, that she would have to confront. Not a door forbidding her to enter, but one she must push through. He wanted her to go back to her painting. Why imagine there was something uncanny about his wanting that? He had been thrilled by her ability, intrigued — possessive, yes, but at the same time possessed by guilt, because he blamed himself for damaging her confidence, and also for damaging what he must know had been the great pleasure and refuge of her work.
So she would have to master this. It was the key to the enchanted kingdom, that work of hers. She saw this as she lay staring at the staircase leading to the parapet, where in this light the carved flowers had become little grinning faces. Gianni himself might not completely know that what he cherished in her, needed most, perhaps the only thing he truly needed, was what he’d seen as her ability to transmute the painful beauty of the world. A responsibility almost too much to bear he’d called it, on that awful day in her kitchen.
Well then. If she was to remain here as his prize endangered love, she would have to put on the brilliant deceptive feathers of her so-called talent again, do it well enough to fool him anyway. As for herself, she thought now that maybe the work had always only been an excuse for not wholly living; that when he’d come along, she’d finally found what living was all about. She had to laugh as she got up, pulled on her clothes. Fine joke that the one thing she needed to keep this life alive was the one thing she could no longer do.
But she would.
Before she started down the tower stairs to the courtyard, she noticed a different door open this morning, on the lower floor of Gianni’s apartment. She tiptoed close. Gianni’s office. She hesitated on the sill, already feeling a sickish thrill of diminishment before she pushed across the room to the desk at the window, to pick up the photo in the silver frame.
The wife, two children, and Gianni. All standing together in a high-ceilinged room. The children were beautiful. A boy of perhaps thirteen, with dark hair like his father’s and the same severe expression that Gianni sometimes wore. A girl who had disobeyed the photographer’s instructions and was looking up at her father instead, with a sweet wicked grin, whic
h he was returning. And the wife. Eleanora.
What had Clare expected? A perfectly groomed and haughty blonde perhaps, cashmere twin set, pearls — not the tired-looking woman in a sport vest with the logo of some junior team, the pretty mouth turned down with an expression sad but enduring, the brown hair not much thought about.
Clare held the photo, trying out a pleasing smile that the wife in the photo lacked. She felt the rest of herself disappear, while the smile remained. This was what it would be like, on and on, the fixed smile of the fifth person who both was and wasn’t there.
But I can do it, she thought. The wife never comes here. This can be mine. She turned, still holding the photo, and looked around the room that held Gianni’s personal things, his books and papers, his telescope, her Amazonia book, yes, on a gilt-edged table, and beside it the big leather portfolio he’d brought from the car. She was tempted to take a look in there. Then, from the sliver-framed photo she caught a flash of light as the sun came in, turning the glass into a mirror. She saw herself reflected and all the figures in the photo gone. Just herself, a woman with hair spun to gold, and behind her, through the reflected stone arches of the window, Siena’s distant towers, the whole scene like a medieval fresco: the woman held in love’s enchantment, beautiful and feckless, maybe even bad, who slips sideways into a life that isn’t hers, slips there, stays there, doesn’t care.
She continued down the fifty-two stairs of the tower, crossed the silent courtyard, found her way to the walled garden. Her task this morning was simple: by a simple effort of will and skill to start in on her new life here. The burning bush would be a perfect pick for her new true book, one that would make Gianni proud. It would be a book celebrating his garden and his life. The Garden of the Unicorn, she’d call it. She reached behind the bush for the stool.
WHEN GIANNI FOUND HER, she was surrounded by sheets of heavy expensive paper, all torn, scraps holding partial sketches, scraps daubed with colour: the creamy blossoms of the burning bush had curdled as she added cadmium; the ruffled leaves of bryony had transformed under her brush into green sponges; the blue poppy had kept whispering that, try as she might, she would never capture its thrilling shade, never have the energy to make a proper composition of it either: “Why not succumb to being kept and beautiful like me, enjoy your season in the sun? Why all this effort to be something more …?”
“Clare! Darling! I can’t stand to see you weep.”
He held her, and it was the best of comfort; it was what primordial sea creatures might have felt when they gave up their struggle with the waves and let themselves get washed up onto the hot sand.
LATER, GIANNI TOOK CLARE riding into the woods. They rode past the turnoff to the villa, but she didn’t mention it. He wanted to show her his rare pigs, he said, an endangered breed that lived best by foraging for herbs and nuts in the wild. She said, “Oh sure, absolutely I want to see your rare pigs.” In truth she still felt so ashamed, so desolate, so lost, literally lost. The woman who had lost what most intrigued him, soon to be supplanted, even if he didn’t exactly know that yet; for certainly, as soon as you allowed something to become essential, as she’d allowed Gianni to be, you had already lost all power.
He was mounted on a tall black gelding. He looked splendid on a horse. She watched his hands on the reins, the delicate touch that controlled the spirited creature. She was riding a little bay mare that was his daughter’s. The stable boy had let that slip.
She kept waiting for him to glance sideways at her in disappointment as her morning’s failure settled on him: then to start finding little other things at fault, which would make it obvious that they were not on the same idyllic wavelength after all. In an upland area, they came upon workmen fencing meadowland where he hoped to raise the almost-lost Pomarancio sheep. She tried to say the right, enthusiastic things. He told her of plans to start a little herd of donkeys too, of a type almost extinct. “A few of these still roam the slopes of Mount Amiata,” he said. “Do you know that cone-shaped hill across the Val di Chiana from your lovely property?”
Her lovely property. Where it would soon be clear to both of them that she should return.
“But what my sister is undertaking is the best!” he said.
“Your sister? Sorry, I lost the thread there for a moment.”
He apologized, saying that perhaps he had not previously explained his sister’s great experiment at her stables, which was to recreate the blood lines of the Nobilissimo Nappolitain, the famous Neapolitan courser, a steed which by the beginning of the last century had faded to memory. Federica was involved with the professor of genetics in Naples on this project.
“But how can this be done?”
He said that beyond the money he supplied for this research, it was a matter of “untangling,” to put it briefly.
“You fund this?”
He hit his forehead. “You see what a small person I am at heart, wanting in a weak moment to let you believe that I am big! I should have allowed you to believe that her husband Ralph is the one, as I know he loves to pretend.”
He added that in truth he did not fund it completely. His mother managed to squeeze a little from Tomasso their stepfather; but unfortunately Federica and Tomasso did not much like one another.
“So because I have my own inheritance, and because Federica’s father was penniless when he died, I am glad to help.”
“I didn’t mean —”
“No of course you didn’t mean!” Still miraculously so fond, that smile of his. “But there is no reason why you should not ask. It is just —” He shook his head. “All families are complicated, but each Italian family is complicated in a different way. As Tolstoy would have written, if he had not had the great good fortune to be Russian.”
SHE LONGED TO URGE him to go on with this account. Sneaky curiosity plagued her now, greedy even. He had his own inheritance? He was not completely dependent, then, on either the stepfather or the business controlled by his discouraged-looking wife?
But it would be so easy to take the wrong step now.
“Tell me about this untangling,” she said instead. “Is it really possible, to bring back a breed of horses that has disappeared?”
“Ah!” He looked so happy to explain. “It is of course a research in its beginning stages. Briefly, here is the approach. The Neapolitan has contributed in a significant way to the creation of the Austrian Lipizzaner, among others. And so if we undo this,” he spread his fingers as if allowing the complexity to escape, “it will be possible to separate out again the strain.”
If we undo this.
Luke.
For the first time since she’d come here, she consciously thought of Luke, pictured him undoing the work of a Stone Age carver by putting the chipped-off fragments back together, the happiest he’d ever been in his whole life. Where was he? She hadn’t called him. Had he managed to persuade Sir Harold Plank? What if he was back in Tuscany? What if …?
“So you see,” Gianni added, “if such genetic research is possible, why I refuse to despair of the unicorn.”
THEY EMERGED FROM THE woodland trail. A wide stretch of meadow lay before them. Gianni said, “Shall we let our horses gallop?” Clare turned her mare on a long diagonal towards a hedged dry stream. The mare sailed across. She galloped on, conscious of the thud of his horse’s hoofs just behind, until together they pulled up at the start of farther woods.
He dismounted, took the mare’s bridle.
“I think we can have our siesta here,” he said. “Tonight we will dine late. This is the habit of Mammà, who is of course expecting us.”
He pulled it out of a hat, just like that. The meeting he knew she had been fearing.
Did she know him at all?
Who was he, in fact? What did he actually do with himself all day, all month, all year, when he claimed to be running this estate where everybody did his bidding, even his firewood carried up by doves? What actually went on in that beautiful brain, along with all the gl
ittering ideas? Had he shrewdly planned the exact moment when he would present the dinner with Mammà as a fait accompli?
He put an unnecessary hand to her elbow, as she sprang off the mare. She pulled away to scramble up to a little knoll of deeper grass beneath an oak.
“Attenzione! Not up there! There might be snakes.”
“Do you know how many hours I’ve spent tramping in the grass never giving a thought to your deadly vipers?”
“Protected by innocence,” he said. “But now that you remember, you must come to know where they hang out.”
Oh absolutely, the voices started slithering again, Get to know where we hang out, and then grab a forked stick and read our forked tongues that have been whispering how you do belong here, Clare — really truly, and not just camped off to the side — how you must connive to make it legal, tie him down, and fast, before he tires of you altogether.
He was undoing a blanket rolled behind his saddle. He spread it on the grass.
“Darling,” Clare heard herself say. “Dearest,” feeling her face change, as wrinkles of subterfuge started setting in. “Sweet Gianni, if I am to meet Mammà tonight, and Tomasso, too, you must tell me more about them.”
She had just bitten into a delicious, tainted thought. Wasn’t it possible that his mother might turn out to be an ally? That Mammà might recognize in Clare a fellow homewrecker who ought to be encouraged; that perhaps she was fed up to the teeth with the hardworking little Bolognese in her vest with the sporting logo?
“Carissimo, you must tell me the complicated story about your father and Federica’s,” she said. “How they both died, as you once told me — am I not right, such a tragedy my darling — that they died on the same day? And how it is that you are the one with the inheritance? Only of course so I do not make the wrong remark and make a hash of things.”
“‘Make a hash’?” A smile that could break her heart. How easy for this new conniving woman to make him smile. He said, “This is, in your idiom, for to ‘spoil’ things? Like a greasy American breakfast with too many potatoes? Darling, you will never make this hash.”
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