“I believed their approval would be the drug you needed to bring you back to painting again, and then turn your ability to what so badly needs to be recorded on this earth: what is real and true and often threatened.”
“Truth! From the man who believes in unicorns.”
He took a breath. “I am so devastated by this, on your behalf. But you see, Clare, as I said before once, I have some fear for you. Please, don’t move away. What I must say now is so very hard for me to say.”
He said it, though.
At last.
He said that he knew, for one thing, that she had never been to the Amazon; he had many contacts, as she would undoubtedly understand. He confessed that at first he had thought that he would play along.
“But then I fell — bang!” He hit his forehead against a pillar to demonstrate the power of that bang. “And after this, I have wanted to bring you here and keep you safe and nurture you, for I have perceived that somewhere you have been badly damaged by the world. Yet what you have retained is so rare, and you can be so much more!”
Wasn’t that what she wanted? Rescue. Wasn’t that what she had wanted before, when they stood in her kitchen? Giving in. Being known, sheltered, understood?
Why was she holding back, saying, “Listen! I’m sorry my paintings didn’t stand up to those noble people’s noble scrutiny, and that the whole thing has been such an embarrassment for you, but —”
“For me? For me I do not care one fig! But I will never again have you exposed to such denigration, and then such foolishness with their damn song! I could have strangled the neck of that little man and pushed his ruby into his gullet.”
“Please! I’ve got to get out of here right now. Just drive me back. Tomorrow you can take me home. It was a mistake to come to La Celta. It gets me confused, if you really want the truth. It gives me uncomfortable ideas that I can’t afford. I have to go back to my real life now.”
He looked shocked. “This is our real life. We have made all these plans!”
“You made them, Gianni. But you have a few other serious entanglements, don’t forget.”
“No.” He pulled himself straight. He glared. “I have already crossed the Rubicon.” He straightened further, into a heroic stance, and she couldn’t help smiling.
“You have?”
“I have written to Eleanora this morning, when we came back from the garden, when I saw you so upset. I have told her she does not need me, and I have been blessed beyond all measure to find someone who does. I have told her that you and I will marry.”
“Wait …”
For one moonstruck moment, everything did wait. The glittering drops of the fountain paused mid-air. The silvered scene hardened. Even the shadows gleamed metal, reflecting an overreaching wish come true.
Then a throat-clearing just behind. Aldo, of the thousand-dollar jeans.
“I have been delegated to tell the young people we are about to move to the dining room for dinner.”
Ring For Champagne
GIANNI’S MOTHER HAD REDONE the dining room to celebrate the estate’s mythic roots, the walls papered in a design of Celtic knots set around Scottish scenes: a piper on a hill, a moon dancing on a rill, a stag at bay. She was explaining to the Barbareschi that the silk tartan table covering had been especially woven at Como. The napkin rings were amethyst and silver, each set with a rabbit foot.
Ralph Farnham put a hand on Clare’s elbow as he pulled out her chair, murmuring ,“Welcome to the higher echelons, old dear. Didn’t I once tell you that nothing could ever be good enough?” He looked pleased to have a fellow traveller on that road. “Just thank your glitzy little American stars that you’re the girlfriend,” he added, “and not locked in like some of us.” Federica shot a scowl mirroring the stag’s head on the wall.
Gianni was seated across from Clare, but not directly opposite.
A new arrival, Nunziata, had been put beside him, a woman of a certain age, making every effort to fend it off. Succeeding, too. Mulberry hair in wild curls. Green eyes. All the lines and wrinkles falling gracefully into place, under a toffee glaze of sun. How was it possible, also, to wear so few inches of very bright green silk and still signal elegance and class?
Nunziata’s husband was in Zurich. There was laughter around this. With Nunziata’s arrival, the tide of language swept into fast Italian.
“You must forgive us,” Nunziata said, leaning in Clare’s direction after another burst of laughter, offering cleavage down which Tomasso was sadly staring. “This is all my fault. I do not to speak your language very well.”
But Clare was glad to be left out. Since Gianni’s declaration, her ribcage had turned metallic too, like a true cage, so much racketing around inside.
Gianni’s bold pronouncement was sure to evaporate — that much came clear, as the nonsense in her chest settled down. Maybe he had written to his wife, but hadn’t posted the letter — or if an email, he’d neglected to press “Send.” He was making stiff conversation with Nunziata now, glancing Clare’s way from time to time, and she tried to telegraph him the message Don’t worry. I know it was just another lovely dream. She smiled. He looked more worried still, perhaps mistaking her smile for excitement at his supposed decision, imagining she’d taken him seriously, believed?
Carolina and Egidio were in fine form, tackling their antipasto with rapid tiny bites, and more than once bursting into snatches of song. Was this their concept of noblesse oblige, an attempt to keep the party lively and at the same time to cover up what they might now be thinking had been their insensitivity?
Gianni looked increasingly pale and tense, and Clare wondered if she hadn’t wished those overreaching wishes earlier today, would he have spoken as he had, and landed himself in such a pickle now?
Look what I’ve brought on him, she thought. She remembered him listing all the butterflies gone from the world, how he’d made those names into a poem. He’d battled the terrible sadness of extinction by saving what he could — even to the point of a defiant faith in things that never could be what he thought. Like the unicorn. Or her.
The consommé arrived. Carolina and Egidio turned to Clare. “In America, you have such soups!” they said. “We heard the jingle everywhere.” Egidio raised his spoon. “Mmmm good!” Carolina chimed in with the tune. The others laughed and clapped.
“Signora Livingston,” Carolina said. “In truth, you must be just a little homesick for your great country. Eager perhaps to return?”
Gianni pushed back his chair.
“Signora Livingston has no intention to leave. This evening I have asked my dear Clare to be my wife.”
The stag’s head bobbled on the wall, the rabbit feet skipped across the cloth; Clare had no idea how long it was before it all rearranged itself. If she had been prepared for this, she would have expected argument, outrage. But Gianni’s mother was looking at her, for the first time, with piercing interest. Even Tomasso had emerged from his protective detachment to nod across the table at his stepson, wearily, as if to say Welcome to the club. Everyone indeed seemed to quicken at the coming scandal, which would in a manner absolve them all by being even more notorious.
But little was said.
“Tomasso. Ring for some champagne,” Gianni’s mother ordered. “We must acknowledge this interesting news.” Gianni was beaming, as if all his earlier tension had been about finding the right moment to make his announcement. Tall crystal glasses were raised, though no one proposed a toast. Even the Marchese and his little grey mate seemed unable to rise to the correct ebullient protocol. The meal continued. Talk became general again. Carpaccio followed. Then quail. Clare found herself studying Mammà, the fatal trout, trying to calibrate Tomasso’s feelings for the woman who had cost him so much, and who was telling the story once again of her origins as a citizen of France, tossing her thin ringed hands, batting her bluerimmed eyes at Aldo now. Clare decided that Tomasso didn’t feel indifference to the once-fatal beauty after all, no. What his res
trained expression revealed was pure and intensely loyal hate.
The air in the room began to solidify. Clare imagined herself in distant years, at this table, repeating for the fifth time some story of her own past, and Gianni looking at her in that same way, everything long ago hardened between the two of them, the way the silver scene had earlier. He is the endangered one, she thought; but how skittery the truth was. She watched it dart round the table, thinking that for once she had to catch it, make it talk. Instead, she saw the Roman garden Gianni had promised he would build for her inside their dream villa, the garden where she would sit and paint, and he would watch: the beautiful place, walled up brick by brick, by that watchful love.
Gianni was giving minute attention to the many tiny bones of his quail, looking ravenous, relieved, subsumed by happiness. Clare got up from the table, intending just to find the powder room, but as she passed under the gaze of the little angels on the ceiling of the San Gimignano room, her meadow paintings called out in the semi-gloom. She gathered them together, slid them into Gianni’s portfolio, carried this with her to the arched front door as she went out to breathe the air.
Across the gravel court the musical iron gates were singing. It was like a dance, as she took one step down the marble staircase, and another and another, one flight to the right, doubling back to the left. She passed the fountain with the spouting dolphin, and kept going.
To Hell With the Devil’s Dogs
BUT SHE COULDN’T GET there from here.
“No no Signora, non è possibile!” the station agent insisted. A midnight train ran from the coast to Siena, yes, in one hour. And from Siena she might take a train to Chiusi later in the day, and from there …
Ah, but his brother had a car. His brother would drive her, if indeed she was in such a hurry. “Do not worry, I will wake him, no, my brother will be glad!”
And yes, the station agent said, he would keep the keys of the Land Rover for young Signor DiGiustini, for when young Signor DiGiustini came for them. He was so unquestioning that for a moment Clare let herself wonder if it happened often, young women fleeing from La Celta in the middle of the night. She let herself wonder this to pacify her guilt for the terse note she’d left, after tearing up so many others. And she’d already been so cruel, hiding from the lights of his car as he drove up and down the cypress road in search of her, keeping silent even when she heard his desperate calls. Eventually, when he must have returned to the villa to search the gardens again, she had taken the chance to collect her things, grab his spare set of keys. Write the note.
Gianni, it was lovely. But we let it go too far. I told you from the start that I was involved with someone else. I will leave the Land Rover at the train station. Forgive me. Clare.
She told the station agent’s brother that she had to hurry, that she was expecting a guest to arrive from America.
But if Gianni overtook them, it would be fate.
The station agent’s brother took her at her word and raced through the intervening hills and valleys and little villages at an alarming speed, scattering chickens, wobbling early riders on their bikes. Clare’s awful words coiled through her head: I told you from the start that I was involved with someone else. Of course she never could be, now. If you were very lucky you got one crack at what she’d had, the amazing thing she’d had, and if you weren’t brave enough or bad enough or heaven knew what else enough, then that was that. If I’d been different, she thought. How odd this barrier was, that separated her from what she could be if she were different: the she who knew exactly what it was that was happening in her life, could figure it out. The sky over the Val di Chiana was thick and grey with smoke. The station agent’s brother said there were wildfires in the hills. In Gianni’s refuge she had not realized how drought had settled. The sun came up red behind the city said to be older than Troy. The station agent’s brother skirted the base of the hill, just as Clare had the day she’d arrived, which seemed centuries ago, then up the rutted road, then pulled up on her grassy terrace. No one waited there. The house looked forbidding: hollowed of love. As she was too, for a purpose she could no longer keep straight. She threw her pack into the jeep, and crawled in after it. It was blazing midday when she woke.
Inside, the house was angrily clean, expressing Marta’s disgust, she supposed, at her going off with Gianni. When she and Gianni were leaving for La Celta, Marta had pulled her aside. “The married brother of your neighbour, Signora,” she’d hissed. “In the zona everyone will make poison of this now.”
“How will they know?”
The level, hard-scrubbed gaze. “In our hills here, Signora Livingston, when God sees, everybody sees.”
That day, Clare had smiled at the sweeping terribleness. Was Marta her rock now? The one she could cleave to, maybe find a scrap of motherly consolation for the awful right thing that she had done at last?
It was late afternoon when she hiked up to Marta and Niccolo’s to let them know she’d returned.
No one was there.
As she started back from the old house, across the wide gravelled yard, she caught a bright yellow gleam from inside one of the ramshackle sheds, a hue so bright, so unnatural, a glimpse so unlikely, that she caught her breath and crept closer.
Not a tractor. The half-gaping door suggested a longer, sleeker shape. She creaked the door wider. The place smelled feral. She heard a rustling she hoped was only rats. In the dim cobwebbed light, she met the slit-eyed complacency of a long, fast-looking car, yes surely a very expensive car, its tires removed, its body propped on olive crates. The Lamborghini.
But could it be here legitimately? She remembered Marta bristling when she’d asked if they had been storing any of her uncle’s things, taking her question the wrong way: What did Signor Kane have in any case that we would want? We have all our own things that we like!
The lawyer had told Clare clearly that all her uncle’s property had been left to her.
Clues rattled through her mind. Things she hadn’t picked up, or hadn’t wanted to. Marta’s indignation when she’d asked about tombaroli, Niccolo’s constant warnings that she should not walk in the hills. The way they’d bundled her out of their house after the announcement on TV about the looted bucchero.
A rush of adrenaline, as she pried open the locked compartment on the dash to take a look at the registration. The courage, then, of someone who’d already cut her losses.
But the dogs? The devil’s dogs and now the third one who is not so nice?
To hell with the devil’s dogs.
Luke left his gun.
THE REVOLVER WAS SURPRISINGLY heavy. How to carry it concealed? How to shoot it, for that matter?
She pictured three dogs coming at her, fangs bared, and shooting herself in the foot. She grabbed the old coat of her uncle’s that hung by the kitchen door — how appropriate, a shooting coat — and shoved the gun into one of the big cargo pockets.
When she was halfway up the meadow, it was exactly as she had pictured. Three huge brown-black mastiffs came bursting across the field with gaping jaws. She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket, got her thumb caught on one of the cartridge loops, finally got the gun out, cocked it, aimed at the centre dog and fired. The valley reverberated with a shocking sound, and when she looked, all three of the dogs were on the ground.
The dogs were shivering. It was Niccolo who growled, as he strode forward. Why would Signora Chiara do this, he demanded. His dogs were good dogs but molto sensitivo, why would Signora Chiara come with a gun and give them such a nervous shock? Why so frighten him and Marta, too? Marta by now also had appeared. They had come here every day, just as Signora Chiara would have wished, for there had been foreigners prowling again. They both crossed themselves to indicate the menace. Allora! With much peril to themselves, they’d made a point to come here — to be seen here — to defend her property.
Two of the dogs stirred, lifted their noses in the air — sprang up — ears forward, noses visibly searching the air c
urrents now. Together, their hindquarters shimmying as they tried to wag their stumpy tails, they came straight to Clare, sniffed her jacket voluminously, licked her jacket, threw their great selves against her as they rose on their hind legs and began to lick her face. Oh God, her uncle’s dogs! They recognized, if not her, at least the jacket that she wore. All the tears burst out of her that she’d held back all day, or maybe ever since she’d come to Italy. As she wept the dogs began to howl.
“Nero!” Niccolo called. “Ducé!” He tried to call them off.
“That’s okay,” Clare said. She fondled the ears of the darker one, then the other with the brindled coat. “Nero, Ducé — viene! ” she called. “Come!”
The dogs crowded close as she pushed past Niccolo, who hurried after her, protesting it was not safe to go up there, this was where the foreigners had been seen. Clare burst into a run, the dogs still at her heel.
AHEAD, BUT IN AN area she hadn’t earlier explored, on the eastern flank of the cliff where she recalled sheer rock with just some overhanging branches, now she thought she saw … what? An opening in the cliff face?
Niccolo tried to pull her back, “Signora! Pericoloso!”
“Sì molto molto danger!” Marta puffed.
Clare shook them off. Yes, an opening, the darkness in behind half-obscured by a tall straight slab of stone. The section of a door?
In front of this gaping space was a fall of rock, but not huge rock. Even as she hurried she was picturing, like a film run backwards, those rocks reassembling themselves into a cliff-like puzzle, with the bushes pulled down to hide it once again. She pictured how a box-joint box master might spy the cracks in a concealing wall that had been so cleverly erected millennia ago. How with loyal helpers, the rocks could be taken down. Then later put back. Then those loyal helpers might dare to take the rocks apart again, when the shameless new mistress of the place had gone off with the married brother of her neighbour.
The Whirling Girl Page 28