The Whirling Girl

by Barbara Lambert

  The box pried open with the snap of a shell. Gold flared in the sun. For a moment this was all she saw, a coil of flashing little links. Then, half-hidden by the chain, she saw a knob of blue. A tiny miracle of blue, just as she remembered, the fullness of it inside the glass bead’s skin.

  “Oh.”

  “A small thing that holds the world,” he said. “I remember you saying that. You told me if you had something that rare, you would wear it as a secret talisman.”

  Each sentence dropped into the pit of her amazement, while currents of hot air argued in the branches of the acacia and set the dry pods rattling. Each sentence so unlike anything he had ever said.

  What might have happened, now, if the last ten minutes had gone another way — if she’d opened the gift in the piazza, instead of here, without telling him her story? If his reaction to it had been different by even a degree? Would she have followed, intrigued, along this path of who he really was, someone even further from upright than she had imagined, someone sharing her faults and going one better, to conjure up this illicit gift? Would she have fallen for that? Been touched by that? Maybe even welcomed that? Would she have thrown up her hands at some great expectation suddenly released and banished, some enormous weight of personal expectation lifted from the world, from him, from her? Was this always how it was? People coming together, pulling apart? Was it all only a matter of timing?

  “You’re not saying much.”

  “So tell me, Luke.”

  He had mentioned to Sir Harold that Clare had taken a shine to the thing. “Seen the value of a little thing like this, I mean, which not everyone would see. This was when I was back in London, before Sir Harold came out here. He’d taken quite a shine to you of course. I wanted him to understand that you were so much more than just a pretty face.”

  “You wanted to show the uniqueness of my inner being.”

  “Right.”

  Luke seemed to accept her saying this with some relief. She had a surge of sadness at how it must be for him, negotiating his way across this swamp, jumping from one unsure floating thing to another.

  He said, “And I gather that later, when he visited the conservation lab, somehow or other —”

  “Harold Plank took it?”

  “Come on, Clare. You told me you yourself almost took it. And then, you see, he did want to make some gesture.”

  “Gesture.”

  “To show how pleased he is. That you and he … And then that you and I …”

  “So this is actually a gift from Harry.”

  “Well, Sir Harold …”

  “Let’s just call him Harry. Under the circumstances.”

  “Yes. Well. Harry put the pieces together, true. But you see —” The big hand went to his heart. The snake eye pooled a tear of ruby light. Oh, and she saw, she really did, how hard it was for anyone to live a life with dreams and ideals and needs all melded into compromise and dross; such a close line we walked. So unfair that someone as dishonest as she was, so tarred, should cast such judgment — or use it as an excuse.

  She closed the box. She put it in her pocket, where she heard the rustle of the slip of paper she’d picked up a moment before. The bill from Cartier? Made out to Harold Plank? With Plank’s incriminating signature on it, too?

  She turned to Luke. She would have liked to tell him that she understood how she’d asked far too much of him just now with her confession — how there was even the possibility, she saw now, that telling him had been a test she’d hoped he’d fail — and that she understood, too, the gamble he had taken with the gift, and that he truly had believed it might please her.

  But maybe he saw. She hoped he saw.

  She put her hands on his shoulders. “Don’t worry,” was all she could manage. “I will make sure that everything comes right. I can do that.”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “So go on now,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  She said, “Send me a postcard when you get where you are going.”

  THE STORY SHOULD END there.

  Watching the woman climb the hill, following the Stations of the Cross, it is obvious what she is planning. She will confront Harold Plank and concoct a deal. She will make certain the bead is returned. William Sands will see his credibility restored and the financial future of his project will be rescued. The name of Plank will become synonymous, in fact, with the archaeology of settlement, rather than the excavation of glamorous tombs. And, though he will accept this reluctantly at first, the very nature of the patient, farreaching exploration will change him and he will blossom, for he is a good and genuine man at heart — also quick to see which way the wind is blowing. He will back off entirely from any claim to the cliff face in the field across from the famous Tuscan hill town, accepting the wisdom that this remarkable discovery would best be excavated under the co-directorship of former local inspector Vittorio Cerotti and his wife, together with an extensive team of American garden archaeologists, funded by his foundation sub rosa. Then, wonder of wonders, the necropolis along that cliff face will reveal surprising evidence of a hitherto unknown Etruscan literary oeuvre, on which the esteemed Contessa Dottoressa Professoressa Luisa di Varinieri will write a long, much-footnoted paper.

  All that could have been predicted just from the woman’s stride as she climbs the hill, as she crosses the burning stones in front of the basilica, walks the long aisle, stands in front of the glass casket of a saint, says some words that come to her then, then not before.

  No need to follow her to the next day, and the next.

  Ambiguity

  CLARE THOUGHT, TWO DAYS later, how simple and straightforward everything had seemed. Harder of course to bring even some of it about — to engage in blackmail, if that was what it was, to stride from one kind of person to another. A process that rarely has lasting results, a voice wanted to say.

  She loaded her brush with terra rosa, that rich red of Tuscan

  fields. The paint was gritty with the substance she had mixed in. She thought how everything important took place very close to the ground, how useless it was to try for perspective at great height. Look how the colour adhered to the copper sheet. Look how the metal surface — in some parts still bright, in others an extreme and gorgeous rotting blue — reflected the three-dimensional quality of paint mixed with flecks of rocky earth; how this broke up the light, so the colour seemed to glow from within. Imagine receiving this surprising gift from the ground, this new idea.

  Up in the olive grove, she heard the clatter of Niccolo’s cultivating contraption sputter to a halt. Silence rushed in.

  Niccolo.

  Only yesterday she’d stood exactly here, shaking, looking out across the valley, wondering who she’d imagined she was. This was after she’d returned from seeing Harold Plank. Shaking at that, and at her situation generally, wondering how she would manage. Acknowledging, too, that there was one more essential thing left undone.

  She’d opened the makeup case, removed the metal box that held the ashes, wrapped the casket in the beaded shawl, and put the two hand-drawn maps in there, too. She would carry this bundle to the meadow and bury it at the base of the horseshoe cliff near the entrance of the tomb, in a place she hoped would remain undisturbed. The rest would be left up to time and alchemy — whether over centuries the casket would corrode, fall apart, the contents join the soil of Tuscany, or whether the metal would leach into the fibres of the shawl, replace the cloth with a rough and lasting weave. Either prospect would have pleased him, she thought. But if instead the casket were discovered whole, in fifty years or a thousand, the mystery this would present would surely have pleased him most.

  The spot she’d chosen, among the fallen rocks, had been hard to dig. The pile of earth beside the hollow struck her as hard-won and significant, and when she’d completed the burial, she’d rubbed some between her fingers. Hard clay in the process of turning itself into limestone, before tightening back into the ball our planet would be again one day, whirling and
shining and cold and hard, not the faintest memory in the entire universe that we were once part and parcel of it, formed like this hard matter from the dust of stars. She’d scooped the remaining soil into her pack.

  As she was finishing up, from the direction of her olive grove, she’d heard the surprising sputter of Niccolo’s cultivating machine.

  WHEN THE THOUGHT OF Marta and Niccolo had surfaced over the past weeks, she’d pushed it away, sick at what had happened — at what she’d allowed by negligence at first, and then allowed by not pursuing. What was Niccolo doing back on her place, now?

  Simple. He had come to cultivate the olives. He did not think that she would want to neglect the olives, but also he did not think she understood their care. He had promised her uncle that he would give the olives care.

  When he saw her clambering down the hill into the grove, he looked straight at her. As she approached, he subjected her to a stare that was round, dark, powerful, scrutinizing, and at the same time hardly personal: as if possessed of much larger and timeless concerns.

  Niccolo, an old man and a thief, speaking for the land. Who was she to imagine that any value it held was not his as much as anyone’s? The stare did not so much ask the question as make it irrelevant altogether. Any suspicion between them was over now, it suggested. There was no need of explanation on her side, any more than on his. What was important was the matter of the olives.

  Important, further, that the house Marta had tended should still be tended; that the niece who had been put in their care should receive that care. Consequently, here was Marta coming, with a bag of greens.

  Like phantoms of Clare’s first impression of them — their gnarled goodness and kindness, the simple country virtues she had imagined welcoming her here — she saw how Marta and Niccolo would creep back into the supporting edges of her life, unless she put up her hand, said Stop! Right now.

  Her eyes travelled over the terraces as this possibility gathered

  itself up, became thin as air. She saw the scarred, carved, ancient trees with their load of bitter little stony fruit, saw the olives maturing, plumping out, preparing for the chill month sometime in early winter when they would fall or be battered to the ground. How did all of that take place? What was the procedure for turning green nodules into spaghetti with oil and garlic? She was hungry. Ambiguity. That word suddenly danced up in front of her, gleamed. Then she caught a further gleam. In the grass, down the hill at the edge of the terrace with the washing lines — a piece of copper, long and partly curled. No, several pieces of similar shape and length, which until now had been hidden beneath the tall green weeds, exposed as the growth turned sere.

  How to explain the way things happen? The way at the same time as she was saying to Niccolo, “Vieni, vieni! Come on and help me haul this in!” she’d been seeing the transforming purpose it would serve.

  Bashing copper drainpipe into sheets was soothing. Bashing it flat, bashing it thin.

  When had these remnants been left behind? There was so much she did not know of the history of this house. The shiny condition of the conduits on the roof made her think the work had been done not long ago. He’d left everything in good shape. With forgiveness? Or with a plea for forgiveness, which he could never otherwise express? You could dig and dig, but what could you ever truly hold? Fragments to arrange in one pattern or another.

  She found a sledgehammer in the shed, laid the copper segments on the flagstone porch and pounded, raising a hell of a din and sparks. After several hours, this resulted in three mauled, dented, marvellously textured sheets, each measuring about five feet by two.

  This morning she had felt very calm. After she had propped the first copper sheet up on the trestle table, she didn’t need to search out the illustration from the journal still in her pack: “Figure 5. A section of King Herod’s garden taken in the northeast corner.” Her hand remembered the image it had traced on white hotel bathroom tile. She was pleased to lay it down again in conté crayon, with strong lines. The stratigraphy took on the weight of her years, in gritty paint mixed with soil. Beyond the window, light rippled across the Val di Chiana. A haze of heat obscured the farther hills. She had climbed a long way for this calm.

  SHE WOULD NOT STOP breathing just because she caught the sound of a car coming up the hill, though still very far away. Just because she heard it turning in to her drive, caught snatches of the song on the radio, heard footsteps on the stairs, heard them crossing the stone terrace, then the scrape of the wooden door. No, this did not mean her brush stroke would be any the less controlled. Look at that flare, that burst of colour. Just because the cavity of the human chest was not built to contain such an explosion, that did not mean she would not stand back and squint at her work, deeply absorbed, before she turned.

  He said, “I am so glad you have decided not to sell your lovely place. I was very much heartened when your friend Nikki came to tell me. Though I confess I did not recognize her at first, with that shorn hair.”

  Across the valley, the haze thinned. The saint’s town gleamed for a moment, and then was gone, like the meaning of what she had just heard.

  “So you will live here,” he said.

  “Yes. Here.”

  He came and stood beside her. He smelled of hot sun, water, sand. He leaned in close towards the copper sheet, studied the texture of the paint, then the clutter of squeezed tubes and the little hill of grainy soil she had gouged, the paint-smeared pocks and valleys. She steeled herself for the moment when he would ask what she was doing. But she had forgotten the essential thing.

  “This is very beautiful,” was all he said. “This is very … avant garde, I would have to say. Yes, this is what they will pronounce, in the galleries where the new work of Clare Livingston shows.”

  She had forgotten how his foolishness roamed into the deep woods of those that had vanished, how he would work to bring them forth, no matter what, though they insisted their time was past or had never been.

  Acknowledgements

  WITHOUT LONG HOURS IN a hammock at Molino di Metalliano (gazing up at Cortona’s Etruscan walls) this book would either have been written a whole lot quicker — or not at all. So thank you, right off the top, to Dan and Sharon Callahan.

  And without generous help from the Canada Council for the Arts, so many books in our country would not have been written, including this one.

  ALL WRITING IS TRAVELLING, but with this novel I stepped into spheres I’d previously only glimpsed. Most rewarding on that journey have been not just the detailed help and advice I’ve received, and the valuable things I’ve learned from people with extremely demanding lives, but the friendships along the way.

  IN THE WORLD OF the Etruscans:

  Many thanks to Dr. Greg Warden, Director of the Mugello Archaeological Project at Poggio Colla north of Florence, who so generously, over so much time, has given me not just the benefit of his insight into the Etruscans and the archaeological process as a whole, but also courage --

  And to: Sybille Haynes, author of the marvelous Etruscan Civilization: A Cultural History for so amiably sharing her wisdom and knowledge; Dr. Eric Nielsen, Director of the excavations at Poggio Civitate near Murlo, for replies to detailed questions; Nancy de Grummond, for her important works including (specific to this novel) A Guide to Etruscan Mirrors; Susan Stock, Metals Conservator at the Royal Ontario Museum, for crucial details including the “raking light” and the “pseudomorph”; Krysia Spirydowicz, Professor of Artifact Conservation at Queen’s University, for information about work in an archaeological conservation lab and in the field; Sarah Kupperberg, for insights into Etruscan landscape archaeology; Suzanne Lopez: for the tombaroli.

  And for illuminations in a broader context: Kathryn Gleason, Cornell University, whose work on the excavation of ancient gardens led Clare Livingston to the gardens of King Herod; the late Dr. Wilhemina Jashemski, for fascinating phone interviews about her life work of excavating the gardens of Pompeii; artist Victoria I, for sharin
g the experience of working with Dr. Jashemski on A Pompeian Herbal; Naomi Miller, University of Pennsylvania, for conversations about art, archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoethnobotany — and the prime importance of “a high tolerance for ambiguity”; Michelle Wollstonecroft, for sharing her work at Çatalhöyük; Brian Fagan, for the wide-ranging resource of his many books and for cordial replies; Jason Jeandron, of Archaeological Prospectors in New Brunswick, not only for so aptly quoting Winston Churchill, “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see,” but, in particular, for the gradiometer and its quirks.

  And lastly in the world of archaeology — sadly — huge thanks to the late Andrew Sherratt, archaeologist and world pre-historian, for his many seminal written works — and for a generous and lively conversation during which one of my characters got led permanently off the beaten track.

  AT THE START I knew little of botanical art, except that I thought I knew what I liked. So I am particularly grateful to the internationally exhibited artist Mary Comber Miles, for her insights into this discipline (which demands sensitivity and acuity both in art and in science) and for her friendship. And to Leslie Bohm for an entire morning of watching her paint a magnolia spray, while she told me about scientific work in the botany lab.

  NOW THE IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I hold none of the above responsible for glitches, inaccuracies, or infelicities. Nor will any of you find yourselves in this novel. And if I have played around with the topography, here and there, well come on — this is a work of fiction.

  DURING THE VOYAGE OF the book itself, I had invaluable feedback from my daughter Shaena Lambert, and from Eva Stachniak, Theresa Kishkan, Jamie Evrard, Jennifer Glossop and Blanche Howard. And thanks to Kathleen Conroy for the little goats.

  I owe such gratitude, too, to my children and their partners: Jamie and Alexita Lambert, Shaena Lambert and Bob Penner, John and Marie Lambert, and to all the rest of my family near and far, for the delight and interest of having them in my life. Above all I am so thankful to my husband Douglas, my partner in travel and rest, for his love and support in every way.