The Whirling Girl (18 page)

AS THEY MADE THEIR way down from the stands, the claxon of an ambulance sounded across the square. People squeezed between them in the rush to see what was going on. Gianni turned and gestured that he thought he was needed over there.

She went back and sat down. The crowd thinned, the ambulance left, she didn't see him anywhere.

When she finally did catch sight of him, he was deep in conversation with a woman on the far side of the piazza. His sister, Clare realized as her vision cleared after the first flush of pique. Federica seemed to be giving him a piece of her mind. Her cap of short black hair bobbed and glistened in the flood lights like a furious black beetle, while he stood with his hands spread, palms wobbling up and down, as if weighing what she said. He turned to walk away. She caught his sleeve.

Was Federica upset because she had spied Gianni with a woman not his wife? Surely she was used to that by now.

So was it because she'd seen him with Clare?

Suspicions swooped in then, huge and winged, like the shadows the flag bearers had sent swooping over the palazzo walls, suspicions so dramatic they were almost enjoyable. What if this was about the property dispute? What if Federica was so intent on that because she knew about the hillocks in the meadow? Indeed, what if Federica and Gianni were actually involved in the illicit activities that Inspector Cerotti had talked about? Hadn't he said that
tombaroli
could be anyone?

She saw Gianni reach for Federica's cigarette and drop it and grind it out, saw him lean in and tilt her chin, bend to kiss her, then whisper something in her ear.

“OH HELLO,” CLARE SAID when Gianni finally joined her. “No one died, I hope.”

Silence. Oh God, maybe somebody had died. But he shook his head. He said that an old friend, the local grocer, had suffered an attack, yes, but the medics said he would recover. It had been a reminder, he said, that life was very short. “We must not give it too many complications.”

Clare said she'd drink to that.

He gave her a close look, that sad smile.

He sat down beside her. Then stood again.

“I have been guilty,” he said. He knocked his forehead with his fist. His wedding band caught the gleam from the string of lights advertising the Savings Bank of Florence, and she thought, So now he's going to confess that he has a wife.

When he sat back down she concentrated on the remarkable shine on his woven leather shoes, though the shoes themselves were not new shoes, in fact they were very well-worn — maybe ancestral shoes, passed down through all the generations since some ancestor had beaten swords into ploughshares in Bologna? One thing she knew: it was not the wife who shined those shoes. The wife would be too busy running the family business, wasn't that what Federica Inghirami had said that night at Farnham's? “I have had to call Eleanora to say, ‘Please do not make me have to tell you that just because you run the family business, you do not run all our lives.'” Clare liked that turn of phrase.
Don't make me have to tell you that I don't give a damn about your wife
, she'd say when he confessed.

He cleared his throat. “When I came to collect you, I could not help noticing the watercolour painting on your table. The little orchid.”

“Oh that!”

“The painting is very unusual indeed.”

Unusual
. He'd hated it. She'd wanted him to see it. And he'd hated it.

Something wobbled on the edge of this, though. Maybe the mention of her painting was just to distract her, in case she'd seen him plotting? Could there be any doubt that he and his sister had been plotting? Look at his nervousness as he crossed his legs, uncrossed them, rapped his knuckles against that protruding chin.

“I have never in truth seen one like that,” he said. “Not with that particular striped lower petal, the exaggerated twisted tongue, those colours.”

“Yes, I was thrilled to come across it,” she said, recognizing how important it was not to let him know where she'd come across it.

“Do you think you have discovered, perhaps, another new species?”

She laughed. “New species? No. It was discovered centuries ago.” She gestured towards the palazzo across the square. “I found it growing in the museum archives, in the volumes of those wonderful old botanical paintings. The librarian kindly made me photocopies of all three volumes.”

He smiled. He said that he too had spent many hours with the remarkable collection, though strangely had missed that particular example. He said that perhaps soon, together, they might track down the true living specimen, where it still grew.

She looked away, embarrassed for him now, for such a transparent attempt to inveigle his way onto her fenced-off property, onto her upland meadow. Surely that was what this was all about.

“But this is terrible,” he said, springing up again. “For me to invite you here and then to have left you on your own for so long! Come, we must have some refreshment.”

IN THE CENTRAL PIAZZA all the tables were full. But the waiter in front of the Bar Toscano saw them coming, whipped a tray of crockery from a service table just outside the door, pulled out a chair for Clare. Gianni clapped him on the shoulder. After a few words together the waiter went off smiling, saying, “
Ah, sì! Sì sì sì si!
”

How, in just the short passage from one piazza to another, had Gianni managed to transform back into the man she'd spent a week having fantasies about? He leaned towards her and, with a kind of gleeful intensity that made her feel she was in an unsafe vehicle at top speed, started telling her a convoluted story she only half got, about a botanist he'd studied under, who had been a student of the famous Cappelletti.

He pretended to be astonished that she didn't know of Cappelletti, the former head of the Botanical Gardens in Padua, the oldest in Europe. He said that he too had worked at those gardens in Padua for a time, when he'd finished his studies. That was before — a pause in the rush of words — before other things drew him away.

Then a look of sadness winged across his face. “Cappelletti's watchword, you must understand, has been ‘In nature you must never wear blinkers.' This has been the most important lesson in my life. Though it has been hard.”

The waiter returned to set down tall, cone-shaped glasses brimming with a pale liquid that gave off a medicinal smell. Gianni raised his glass. He said, “
Cheenarrrr
.”

Clare said, “Cheenarrrr to you.”

He laughed, and wrote the spelling of the drink on a paper napkin, after catching the waiter's eye and ordering two more.
Cynar
. A very healthful liqueur, he insisted; brewed by monks, from artichokes.

She took a sip of the pale liquor. It slid down with such monkish reassurance that she took another.

“You must understand,” Gianni said. “Cappelletti was a man of insatiable curiosity! This has led him, for example, to his remarkable discovery regarding the life systems of resin fungi. And then —” Gianni threw up his hands, “By cultivating the species, Cappelletti was able to show that the organism does not utilize the elements of the resin itself to live, but rather its impurities!”

She caught a woman at a nearby table wondering what the handsome Italian could possibly be saying to captivate his companion. Clare wanted to laugh; if she'd had another hat, she'd have thrown it away, too, just to have the incomprehensible dissertation about resin fungi go on and on. The sky against the town hall tower was black as pearl. The piazza was lit up like a stage, groups of people gathering, gesturing, embracing, drifting into new groups or strolling from the scene. An opera. Someone should burst into song. A balcony jutted from the building above, entirely suitable for Juliet. Now the intense young man across from Clare was insisting she must come with him to Perugia. His mentor, the student of Cappelletti, alas, was no longer there; but it was essential that she visit this
Orto Medievale
, this refuge of medicinal plants in the monastery of San Pietro.

“You will like it there much,” he said. “When I returned, after some years of living a life where I was not at all engaged, when I sat within the walls of that monastery and breathed the exhalations of the healing plants and listened to the sound of bees, I understood I could no longer pretend to live one life and dream another. This was when I decided I must take all my best energies to save what I could of this earth's things. I know that when you walk through this place, when you follow the intricate philosophical paths that have been laid out, when you breathe the healing air, you also will find yourself in the centre of the truth of your own life.”

The truth of her own life
. She felt a prick of warning. But he leaned forward with that wind-rushing intensity. “You see, it is essential to believe that we are not bound up in the chains of the past, that our planet does not have to plough like an ocean liner ahead to its own destruction, that we can take the reins again, stop the chariot. That each one of us holds the golden key to our own lives!”

“My goodness.”

“Do you think I am extreme?”

She laughed. “Heavens, no.”

“Yes of course I am,” he said. “I am a fool tonight, hardly knowing what I am saying, because I have decided I must tell you a thing I have not dared so far.”

She bit her lip. Couldn't he just go on talking about resin fungi? But his frown was resolute.

“Ever since I have read your book,” he said, “Yes, more than once — for it was sent me by a colleague in the States — I have been fascinated with your paintings which are so proficient, so beautiful. Some much more than that. Some so full of life that it is possible to hear the rush of it bursting through the stems and leaves. I have been intrigued by how work so praiseworthy for its botanical accuracy might also be said to be infused with your dreams.”

So it was going to be a night of hide-and-seek after all.

But not a game. Not for her. If he knew Radescu, he knew everyone. He could kill her book and all she'd foolishly hoped it might accomplish.

“And in particular,” he persisted, “the remarkable nightshade which bears in part your name, which was growing, you tell us, in the spray of the Angel Falls.”

“Right.”

“
Allora
.” The long scarred finger reached up to touch his eyelids; first one, then the other, so they closed, as if only in the dark he had the courage to say whatever he was intending. She longed to close her eyes, too; to make this stop, or turn it into something else; the way she had closed her eyes when her uncle touched her, when she had managed to pretend he loved her. In the piazza people were jostling, laughing, joking. A labourer went by with a barrow. The man dressed all in red whom she'd seen on her first morning here was now trying to shove a bundle of hangers into a bucket far too small.

Gianni looked up.

“Ever since then, I have longed to meet the woman who so eloquently has brought attention to one of the planet's most endangered and most essential places.” He grabbed a fist of hair, as if to pull free the difficult words. “And now, since I have met her, and since I have come to know what a fine person Clare Livingston truly is — and then, tonight, when I have seen an example of how she may intend to use her extraordinary talents to present the flora of my own country — I have at first been taken aback, I must confess. But now I realize — as I said earlier — how it is foolish to make unnecessary complications …”

Such a sad, pleading expression; as if she could easily rescue them both from those complications, and free him from this embarrassment, by just admitting that her beguiling nightshade had been a fake. Surely she'd have the good grace to do him that little favour.

She had balanced long on the ledge of pretence. She was so tired from balancing there. Was it possible that there was someone who could see right through her, and not judge and condemn? She picked up the glass of monkish liqueur. It, too, urged confession.

What a fine person
, he'd said.

But once confession started, where would it stop? If she opened the tiny door it would all come out, her entire life of lies, lies concocted to cover other lies. Even to the child psychiatrist she'd lied; inventing more and more to keep him happy and intrigued. But this man, she saw, with his sad, beautiful amber eyes, was the one who might really trick her into true confession. And then what would be left of her? She glimpsed a splayed faceless flattened figure, like those outlines drawn on sidewalks after a shooting.

She took another sip of the liqueur, which seemed prepared to argue on her side now.
Who could ever prove your illustration was false
, it whispered through the grill of the confession box. For yes, the terrible big truth was that even species that no one had yet seen were dying out. It was entirely possible that her
Circaea Livingston
was the very last of its kind. She felt tears spring to her eyes at the thought that no one would ever come upon another!

Yet Gianni was pressing on, this relentless man who insisted that she confess her sins — no doubt because it would make him feel better about his own?

“So now I must ask you,” he was saying, “What drew you to the Amazon? What moved you to make your extraordinary paintings of that region, to discover a new species? I had meant never to explore this. But tonight, I realize that I must understand.” He leaned closer. The tilt of his chin reminded her of the moment when he'd bent to kiss his sister and whisper in Federica's ear.

“Understand what?” she heard herself demanding. “What?” she said again. “My account of the Amazon wasn't personal enough for you? I left out a few of the ten thousand insect bites, the chiggers, the worm that burrowed in my scalp?”

She heard her voice rise.

“Some reviewers thought it praiseworthy that mine was not just another macho adventure by some guy setting out to prove how tough he could be. Now you're saying it was like I wasn't really there? That's a little problem I have. The more deeply I feel about things, the less I am really there.”

He shook his head, distressed. But she couldn't stop. “Believe me, my ex-husband used to complain about that, too.”

She caught him glancing at the opal ring on her wedding finger. “Yes, very ex,” she said, now utterly fed up. “I exed him. Crossed him off. I keep this as a kind of amulet. I believe opals stand for tears. So are we finished with the third degree?”

She tried to push back her chair. He took hold of her wrist.