The Whirling Girl

by Barbara Lambert

  But he would tell her, yes, he said. Above all he wanted her to know him, completely. This was perhaps the one thing we could do upon this earth, he said: we could give to the one we loved the gift of our true self.

  He took a deep breath, raised his hands to his temples, closed his eyes. Almost, she wished she hadn’t tempted this poison to race through her blood.

  He began to tell her of the shame that he had been born to wear. That was how he phrased it, born to wear. She tried to listen from a distance. She watched the start of a great grey gap widening between them. If she was clever, he would never know how far she’d sailed.

  When Gianni finished telling the story, Clare could see how the scandal would have been enough to make a little boy determine never to subject his own children to the shame of such a thing. She recalled Ralph Farnham’s gleeful comment: Only in Italy, old dear. Unless you count our Royals, and she thought that, yes, it might be a peculiarly Italian sort of shame that Gianni had to “wear,” as he put it. Nothing he had done himself, and nothing that would later prevent some elderly aunt from settling her personal fortune on him — the kind of shame, in fact, that all who knew of it would quite love: like seeing a little boy dressed in a clown suit whenever he was taken anywhere. Easy to make a farce of it: the beautiful young wife; the feckless older husband who loved nothing more than tramping the fields with dog and gun; the agriculture student, a family friend who came to stay. The inevitable affair. The day of the double tragedy, the husband falling on his gun, the lover falling from his horse. And the lover’s wealthy older married brother rescuing the penniless young widow who’d been left with a daughter and an unborn child.

  “And when I was born, my dear mother — twice bereaved, and with perhaps misguided romantic stubbornness — linked the name of her lover Giano, the father I never knew, with that of Federica’s father, Paulo, in naming me Gianpaulo, making my bastard heritage clear for all to see who had a mind to laugh behind their hands. My stepfather Tomasso allowed this. He has always allowed Mammà everything. But me, he looked right through from the very start. I was the child invisible. Though he made sure, all the years I was growing up, that I knew I was the one responsible for the fact that there was no speaking between the family in Bologna and ours in Siena, that I was tarred with this, you see.”

  He held out his hands as if the tar were still there, as if it might stick to everything he touched. Clare thought that in the world of shame as she knew it, this might be in the minor leagues. No matter. Tar was tar. Even if no one else saw it, you could never wash it off.

  “Only when the family business fell into further trouble,” he was saying, “did I become visible. Eleanora’s father came with financial rescue. Then it was ordained that the sole remaining marriageable DiGiustini should seal that partnership in marriage.”

  “Oh my love,” Clare said. “Dear love.” She kissed his eyelids. She cradled him.

  Mammà

  CLARE’S COURAGE EVAPORATED THE moment Gianni’s cream Mercedes, freshly washed and smelling of new wax, rounded the final upper bend of the cypress drive. High and almost musically ornate iron gates came into view, and then the grounds themselves; they so far outreached anything she’d ever experienced of a higher realm of living that she was almost relieved to see the red Alfa parked by the dolphin fountain, to see Ralph and Federica getting out — Ralph tripping on the gravel, recovering, Federica in the long red dress like a red tree trunk striding impatiently ahead. As the four of them converged at the bottom of the stairs, Ralph pulled Clare into an embrace, whispered in her ear that he’d always admired that yellow frock. “And now my dear, you will meet the fatal trout, you lucky thing.”

  “Who?”

  “I thought you were quicker. I refer to the dear old trout, our former femme fatale. You will have to get past Cerberus up there first, though, I fear.”

  He rushed her up the baroque staircase to introduce her to the austere brown-tweeded figure waiting on the landing at the top. The stepfather, Tomasso. A tall man with very upright carriage and a restrained hound-like face blotched by age, who produced a grimace that might have passed as a smile. When he greeted his stepdaughter, his expression was even more removed. When his wife appeared, Clare thought the look he trained on her was infinitely weary.

  “Gianpaulo!” Gianni’s mother called out. “How clever of you to bring this lovely girl again.”

  She took Clare’s hand, leaned forward with a conspiratorial purr loud enough for everyone to hear. “I always tell Gianpaulo that you are my favourite of all the girls he brings.”

  In the moment before, Clare had been thinking that this might indeed go well. Mammà had been making her way across the portico with a cane, looking frail but very game, and much older than Clare had imagined, despite the blonde hair spun into a meringue around the glossy face.

  My favourite of all the girls he brings.

  Even now, meeting blue eyes vague with charm, Clare found herself reluctant to credit the malice of that remark. Ever since the afternoon, she’d felt ashamed of her spurt of ruthless ambition, if that really was what it had been — all of it washed away in the great flood of sweetness and concern she’d felt for Gianni, pure loving concern, when he’d told his story. She’d thought that if she wore that tonight, it would protect her when she met his family. They’d see she wanted nothing for herself except his happiness.

  Gianni was at her elbow, his tone to his mother warm and half-teasing, as if this were the most delightful small folly, to make such mistakes. “But I have told you, Clare is a visitor from Canada, Mammà.”

  Mammà smiled indulgently at her son. “Why did you never divulge that this lovely girl was from America?” She tightened her grip so that Clare felt the slippage of diamonds on several fingers. “Come, we are all sitting through here in the San Gimignano room. I want you to meet some people we have invited just for you. Did you know I was almost born an American myself?”

  “Mammà!”

  “When my grandfather was ambassador, we sailed out to America you know.” Gazing up at Clare, eyes rimmed in pale blue mascara. “Papa had gone ahead on business. He intended to meet the boat and take my mother straight to the embassy, so that when I arrived in the world it would be on Italian soil. But I was too quick for them. I was born aboard the Franconia, which meant that I came into the world a citizen of France. Do you know Papa’s first words when he saw me?”

  She glanced merrily around at them all, as they might want to join in on the family story, then tightened her grip on Clare’s hand.

  “I was the first grandchild of this generation, you understand, and Papa had promised his father a boy. He was so disappointed that he cried out, ‘She is yellow — and she is a girl — and now they tell me she is French!’ He never let me forget that. ‘She is yellow, and she is a girl, and now they tell me she is French.’”

  “Not ambassador, Mammà! Grandpapa was the consul general.” Federica Inghirami managed to shift her cigarette far enough to perform her greeting kisses without setting her mother’s hair on fire.

  “Yes Fifi, of course.” Mammà turned back to Clare. “So you can imagine what a confusion this has caused all my life! The Bolognese are very proud of their history, you know, and when you update your papers and they learn that you are a Galluzzi-Carbonesi, yet you were born in the territory of France, they do not know what to make of you.”

  She took a hobbling step back, still holding Clare’s hand, almost a dance step. “My dear, how lovely to see you again, and to think Gianpaulo has hidden that we have this in common. I was born on the way to America, you know. I remember my father recounting to me that on the day I was born one of his workmen said, ‘It is a good day, isn’t it, Marchese? ’ and he replied, ‘No, it is a terrible day. She is yellow, and she is a girl, and now it seems that she is French.’ We laughed at that many times, until he died.”

  “Mammà, we are dying of thirst and Ralph has driven like a fool.” Federica handed Ralph the smould
ering butt of her cigarette. He dropped it into a planter at the top of the baroque stairs.

  Gianni’s mother turned to her husband. “Toto, yes come! Why are we standing on the stairs?” Tomasso’s expression, as he took her arm, was bleak.

  THE CAVERNOUS ROOM THEY moved into had trompe l’oeil frescoes on either side. On the left was the town of San Gimignano as seen from a distance, with all its tall slim towers; on the right, a view down onto tiled roofs and countryside, as from the top of one of those towers. In each the artist had included an easel in the foreground, which held an almost completed version of that same scene, and an empty camp stool.

  “He wished to be there, you see — so he painted the town instead, but left himself out of it,” Gianni’s mother was explaining. “I have always thought that was clever. He was a prisoner here, in this house, during the war — or perhaps he was allowed to spend the duration hiding here. I have never quite learned the story.”

  The domed ceiling swirled with figures rising heavenward on beams of radiance. Little angels peered over the rim. At the far end of the room, through arches of a loggia, was the actual distant presence of Siena, silhouetted against the blue-black evening sky, jewelled in lights. Gianni’s mother was saying that the villa had been designed by a famous seventeenth-century architect to take advantage of that view.

  Clare had heard somewhere that one did not admire the possessions of the rich, but she couldn’t help exclaiming, “This is a breathtaking room.”

  “Yes, we think it is quite amusing,” Gianni’s mother said.

  AT FIRST CLARE DID not see those guests invited just for her. They sat so still, and they were so very small.

  “Carolina, Egidio — here we have the little friend of Gianni,” Mammà said.

  There was a stir among the cushions in a far island of chairs and sofas. A tiny elderly couple turned their faces from a book they had been studying together. Carolina was all in grey silk, with white braids around her ears; Egidio wore a tiny barrel-chested velvet suit, a red stone the size of a quail’s egg pinning his cravat. When Clare came close she saw it was her book they had been studying.

  But they were not merely Carolina and Egidio. A pause, like a silent drum roll, preceded the introduction of the Marchese di Barbareschi and the Marchesa.

  They sat beaming up at Clare. She felt all the objects in the room coming to discrete attention. Still, their joint smiles were mild, and very kind. They spoke more or less together in a verbal braid, one finishing or starting the sentences of the other, and occasionally both at once.

  “So my dear,” they said. “We have looked with interest at your work in this volume, and it strikes us as quite adequate indeed, though understandably derivative of Margaret Mee. But most promising. You are clearly young. We speak, it must be fairly claimed without beating around the bush, as the most extensive collectors of such material perhaps in Europe, possessing not only the best of recent practitioners but many rare folios and florilegia.” They paused, expectantly.

  Clare glanced towards Gianni. Where was this going?

  He was studying his shoes.

  “And we have been promised,” the duet continued, “Indeed, we have been thrilled to come up from Rome for this: we have been assured that we will see new work where the most skilled techniques of botanical art are combined with the portrayal of cleverly imagined species, which might be precisely what we had hoped to find for an exhibition we are planning — a most daring one, we must proclaim — of material along such lines.”

  “Oh!”

  Gianni did not meet her eye, instead crossed the room, pulled a bell rope by the marble fireplace.

  “Gianni?”

  He raised a hand to ward off her inquiry, smiled a guilty smile, “Aspetta! Just one moment.”

  In less than a moment, a butler-looking person entered carrying the leather portfolio last seen in Gianni’s study in the tower. The servant handed the case to Gianni, who set it on the sofa, flipped it open, pulled out Clare’s meadow paintings one by one and laid them out on the broad low table in front of Egidio and Carolina.

  CLARE COULDN’T LOOK AT Gianni now. She tried to get her feelings straight. It was theft — secretly taking her work, bringing it for these strangers to peer at, setting her up to be publicly judged! But she couldn’t snatch the work away. That would be too embarrassing for him. She did glance up. He looked very pale but determined, that tense determined windswept look.

  The Marchese and his wife leaned close. Clare couldn’t help holding her breath as they picked up this painting and that one, glancing occasionally at each other. Despite her shock, she felt a tingle of excitement. She hadn’t looked at these paintings herself for so long. Now she saw that they were so — yes — really beautiful. At least to her. They spoke to her. Some with intricate, interlocked, massed compositions, yet paying homage to each individual specimen; others eloquent with secrets shimmering both above and below the soil, delicacy and boldness combined. How they took her back to those hours working in the meadow, when she’d felt she could fly. And now these aristocratic people, these experts, these renowned collectors, were giving them such close attention; surely they would know that these were far more than just cleverly imagined species, that something of far greater worth was going on in these compositions; and then Gianni, too, would accept that these had not been fairytale inventions. The sickening sense of having to prove the truth of her work would vanish, like magic, without her ever having to burst the bubble of enchantment they shared.

  Silence in the room. Then the whisper of displaced air from the puffy sofa cushions as Carolina and Egidio at last settled back, looked up at Clare with kindly smiles.

  “How sweet,” Carolina said. “Have you thought of doing designs for decorator cloth? Or wallpapers perhaps!”

  “Absolutely!” Edigio said. “This, for example, is very like the paper in the cabana of the Browns we stayed in, near Galveston, only more meticulously observed.”

  “We have a very good friend in Como,” Carolina said, “who manufactures and exports all around the world! Will we put you in touch?”

  Clare caught a covert fluttering of glances among the others, all still standing around as if in the presence of royalty, as perhaps they were. Even Mammà was still upright, leaning on her cane, perhaps not exactly following the contretemps but delighted that something amusing was going on.

  Wallpaper.

  Clare tried to look as if she had not picked up the devastating slight. Ashamed, at first, not just for herself but for these people, too; for how truly barbarically cutting those sweet smiling remarks had been. But perhaps they didn’t understand, she told herself. Perhaps they moved in a higher realm where you could drop these small indictments on the needy, for their own good. Drop them lightly and move on. And maybe they were right.

  “But come!” the Marchese di Barbareschi said. “You must tell us about yourself.” His wife reached out a hand, drew Clare down between them. “You are from America we understand.”

  As if on cue, they began to sing in harmony, “Oh the sage in bloom, is like perfume, boom boom boom boom …” They reached across Clare to clap one another’s hands. “Deep in the heart of Texas! Reminds me of the one I love, deep in the heart of Texaaaaas!”

  The Marchese blew Carolina a kiss. She giggled like a girl. “We had such a romantic holiday in Texas, that time we stayed near Galveston!” Then, seized with a fit of coughing, she rustled for a lozenge in her tiny grey woven-leather reticule.

  “Alfredo, water!” Gianni’s mother ordered the butler who still hovered near.

  Carolina leaned close to Clare. “It has been just a little difficult, as you can see, for us to come all this way from Rome, Egidio with his reumatismo, and me with my fatigues.”

  Another guest came in just then — white-haired, cold-eyed, long-fingered, dressed in pale blue denim. He was introduced as Aldo. He said, “Santa Maria I am parched, where in heaven’s name are the drinks?”

  Gianni�
�s mother said she had forgotten the drinks, because Gianni had been showing the paintings of his little friend.

  “Toto!” she called to her husband. “What are you thinking of?”

  CLARE GOT UP AND went out to the loggia, trying to collect her emotions and her thoughts. The setting was extraordinary. This was almost the worst, to be here, in this setting, suffering this tangle of confusions. A full moon had risen, presenting a scene of black and silver, everything of an extreme unreal perfection which at the same time felt as if it had been simmering all her life just below her skin. Whose eye could this have been designed for, if not for hers? The succession of descending terraces and clipped boxwood hedges that had been arranged with such intelligence, leading down to a lit-up fountain spraying a basket of water that exactly held the view of Siena, its lights quivering and shifting as if set on this liquid crown, an effect conceived centuries ago by that same famous architect, no doubt, who’d conceived the domed ceiling in the room where little angels had peered at her while the noble couple judged her paintings.

  Gianni came and joined her. She should be angry, but how could she be as angry as was called for? It must have been humiliating for him to put her work forward, then to have its worth so saccharinely scorned. The best thing would be for her to plead a headache, ask him to take her back to his place right now.

  He said, “Clare you must not take this too much to heart.”

  So he wasn’t even going to pretend it had not been a disaster?

  She said, “Why on earth did you do that, hold me out like that?”

  He tried to take her hand. She pulled it away. She said, “You did not like those paintings!”

  He said no, no, that was completely untrue! He had always known those paintings were remarkable. He had told her they were remarkable. He had felt sure that when the Barbareschi saw them they would recognize such singular talent, despite the slightly fantastical nature of the work.