The Whirling Girl (22 page)

Pizza al Diavolo

THE WORD
TOMBAROLI
WAS in Clare's head when she heard Marta's morning clatter in the kitchen.
Tombaroli
. As if the word had crept in under cover of Nikki's shadow paintings or had been lurking in Nikki's cupboard along with the pen, and this was how the pen had gotten into Nikki's cupboard. It was not Nikki's fault at all; the
tombaroli
did it. Clare burrowed further back to sleep, ignoring Marta's clatter designed to get her up, snuggling as long as she could into numbing sloth. Since that morning with Gianni, everything she'd done had been worthless. The idea about an Etruscan magic book was worthless, too cheesy for words. Gone was her ability to paint. She felt like one of those early flying dinosaurs that might, for a moment, have managed to lumber into flight, showing off, swooping over its companions who were getting more and more earthbound as they munched up the giant ferns, until suddenly it was sidelined by some abstruse Darwinian imperative and came crashing to the ground. It did feel like a kind of genuine extinction, a part of her that had been extinguished — not Gianni's fault, she knew that, but something in her that for inexplicable reasons had just gone missing, a part of her psyche.

And now, on top of her other problems — deciding if she was going to fight to stay on here, fight her aunt, fight Federica Inghirami if she had to, fight to find herself a new lawyer — she would have to talk to Marta about the information Alfredo Bandinelli imparted to her yesterday. She would have to do so carefully, to ensure that Marta and Niccolo would not think she was planning to dislodge them from their self-imposed duties or their home. This was such a daunting prospect that if Marta had not come into the bedroom with a letter the postman had just brought up the hill on his
motorino
, Clare might have stayed in bed all day.

It was a letter from a New York editor whom she had queried right before she'd left for Italy. She seemed to have persuaded this editor that the lavishly illustrated book exploring ancient magic and herbal lore was a most promising idea. The editor just needed sketches and a detailed outline right away, in order to convince the money people.

Remembering how she'd woken with the word tombaroli in her head, Clare decided that perhaps the editor would go for a different, but maybe even more intriguing, slant; this thought stirred her own curiosity. It propelled her out of bed.

MARTA WAS SCRUBBING THE terracotta tiles with borax. Clare asked her to sit down at the kitchen table. “I want to interview you,” she said. She made a show of getting out her notebook. “You will be my anonymous source. If you can give me any information, or any suggestions of people I might talk to, I will handle all that with great discretion of course.”

She didn't mention anything about the illicit artefacts that Vittorio Cerotti had told her of. She said she had read an article about
tombaroli
back in North America.

Marta stared.

“What I read made a lot of sense to me,” Clare said quickly, giving a spin to what Vittorio had told her, as if it might truly be honourable for Italy's artefacts to remain among those Italians who appreciated them, rather than being locked away in the basements of museums.

She'd barely started when Marta began to sneeze. It was the borax, she said. She opened the door to the rear patio and began swinging it back and forth. Then she got down on her knees and continued scrubbing. She knew nothing about what Signora Chiara was asking, she said. Signora Chiara must excuse her because she had still much to do, and tomorrow it was her niece's wedding. “How can I put on my good silk dress with these hands?” She held them out, raw and red, as if their condition were Clare's fault, as if it were Clare who had asked her to start rooting out the baking pan and cake tins from under the stove and now, too, to start piling them beside the sink, as if there was no end of tasks Clare was asking her to do and yet Clare came and bothered with questions about tomb robbers,
Madonna!

SINCE THAT AWFUL SCENE with Gianni, Clare had not ventured near the meadow.

Once or twice, remembering Vittorio Cerotti's concerns, she'd thought she should double-check if illicit digging had been going on somewhere up there. But that seemed so far-fetched, and the place was tinged now, spoiled by Gianni's accusations, the shipwreck of that scene. It made her queasy still. But with this new idea — and after Marta's strange reaction — she decided she must check back again.

Overnight a sharp wind had cleared the metallic atmosphere.

How peaceful the place was. Star of Bethlehem still blossomed, un-trampled, among the hillocks she'd imagined would be tombs; and, as she'd anticipated, the asphodel had produced a blood-red bloom, like a signal, a marker of the nourishing roots that lay below. But then it was the voice of Gianni that she was hearing,
On their streets of tombs as well, the Romans planted the most lovely and fragrant plants to nourish the spirits of the living and to feed the dead
. She saw him spread his hands. She reached out to touch his wrist. He told her that he had made the earth his choice.

As she hiked here, she'd actually told herself that she had rid him from her system, that a new project, a new involvement, would serve to put the final kibosh on the episode. But here he was again, racing through her bloodstream like a dire infection. The thought of seeing him again was hopeless. She was not going to search him out. He was never going to call.

As for the rest, as she explored the field again and all the humps and hollows, she had to admit that there was no secret in this meadow. The lawyer's words came back to her about the
burden of believability
. So believe this, she told herself, seeing the shimmering wealth of meadow life which, if she approached with her sketchbook, she knew would stiffen, rise against her, do everything to repel her advances; believe this: any distracting fantasy about what might lie buried here is exactly that, a distracting fantasy; these bushy mounds are just bushy mounds. Illogically but incontrovertibly, the very lack of illicit digging made that clear. If her uncle had had anything to say to her, if he had left any clue, she would have come upon it by now. It was pathetic that she had allowed herself to get excited about a dreadful oil painting and a message stamped on a plastic mirror.

She sought out the shade of a small umbrella pine on one of those bushy mounds. She felt ancient, older than the stones below her, as she closed her eyes.

A WHISTLING SOUND WOKE her. The one she'd heard before, sometimes at dusk, sometimes in dreams. She sat up so fast that she scraped her cheek on a thorn.
He did have something to say to me. Marta and Niccolo are the ones who know
.

How arrogant she had been; so self-preoccupied.

Marta and Niccolo knew everything about her uncle. If he'd left papers around, Marta would have read them; if messages had come in on his machine, Marta would have played them back; if he'd discovered anything, Niccolo would have spied out his movements and Marta would have read his notes. There would be very little of her uncle's life that those two would not know. They would have seen this as their right. Caretakers, taking care.

Perhaps they had things of his still in their care. Perhaps they had been withholding them until they found out Clare's intentions with the place. Perhaps that was what Marta's crustiness had been about.

WHEN SHE EMERGED FROM the wooded path leading from the topmost olive grove, Clare found herself looking down into a wide flat-bottomed basin where crumbling outbuildings sprawled at the base of a further hill, windows gaping or shuttered, arched and half-barricaded doorways big enough for machines to drive through. The house itself sat higher on the slope, patches of pinky-red stucco flaring in the evening light. Barn fowl were settling for the night. Some dogs barked out of sight. Then Marta came out onto the steps. She was wearing a deep blue smock sprigged with little flowers, as if she'd been cooking. She waved and called Clare into a single large room lit just by the strobes of a television at one end, a blazing fire at the other. Gone was any sense of hostility. Perhaps all that had been needed was the courtesy of a visit from Clare?

Niccolo rose from a deep chair in front of the TV, where he'd been watching a clip of a former prime minister singing. Marta ordered them both to sit, gesturing Clare to the big kitchen table. She took a ball of dough from a blue-striped bowl, flattened it with a yard-long rolling pin, set it on a flat stone among the flames, put an aluminium lid on top and covered that with ashes. “
Pizza al Diavolo!
” Niccolo rumbled from his velvet chair. When Marta took the lid off the bread, he heaved himself up, performed a bent soft-shoe shuffle on his way to get a sausage from the larder, then started cutting it up at the table. He poured out rough, heartening red wine. Marta sliced the hot loaf into eighths, opened each piece and slipped in some sausage, urged them both to eat. The TV was showing a beach scene with palm trees.

“I'VE NEVER TASTED ANYTHING this good!” Clare said.

The fire crackled. Outside the evening now threatened rain, but the room felt safe and cave-like, despite the blare of light and sound coming from the screen, where a handsome man in a silver tailcoat was stepping from level to level of moving platforms, belting out romantic decibels.

“I have been wondering,” Clare finally said, after summoning some clear Italian words, “whether my uncle left you anything to keep for me.”

Their two blank faces were all attention to the television now. “Whether he left you any of his things here,” she said in a louder, slower voice. “Perhaps asking you to wait until you thought I was ready?”

Marta jumped up, brought a bottle of deep green oil from the sideboard. Niccolo poured some into a saucer, pushed it across to Clare, cut her another wedge of bread.

“Here,” he said. “Taste! He has left you this, from the trees that are now yours.”

He said she should regard the greenness of the oil. Her terraces were very rare for the quality of soil. This was what her uncle had left, and he, Niccolo, had only hoped …

He stopped talking, mid-sentence.

THE SINGER HAD BEEN interrupted by a news flash. Two tweedy men were holding up a two-handled vase. The TV lights brought out its smoky black lustre and the fantastic shapes carved into the handles and around the belly in a frieze. The vase had been discovered as it was about to be shipped across the border to Switzerland, the newsreader said. Clare didn't get how or where, because, “
Boh!
” Niccolo went across and turned the television off.

Marta was standing and giving Clare a bony hug. Niccolo was saying he would with pleasure drive the Signora home, because — there was the thunder! Quick! Look! Already the first drops of the storm. No good for Clare to protest that it might be better for her to wait till it was over. He bundled her out into his three-wheeled truck and bucked it down the winding road, which was indeed suddenly awash, the headlights battering against a wall of water, worse than when Gianni had driven her home. Niccolo dropped her at the end of her own short drive. She was soaked by the time she got in.

NEXT MORNING, THOUGH MARTA came to work, she was quiet, watchful. There must be some great underground warren of unspoken local information, Clare supposed. Someone they knew — or someone in their family, or someone at the wedding they were going to attend today — must be suspected by Marta and Niccolo of being in the business of liberating the country's treasures, as Vittorio Cerotti had said was their excuse.

Marta's silence was so uncomfortable that Clare protested, as nicely as she could, that Marta should not be here today; she should be home getting ready for the wedding. Marta just shook her head and went on sweeping.

“Here, let me give you a hand with that, at least,” she said as Marta started shifting the kitchen table. “No, Signora, there is no need.”

“But I don't know where else to go,” Clare said, in a mock-wistful voice. “I am temporarily
perplessa
.”

Marta turned on her. She took both Clare's thin white hands in her strong red ones and held them tight. She said that if Clare had lost her way, she should walk down the hill to the church of San Angelo and sit there for a while. Did Clare know that church, by the field where a week ago was the fair? This church had stood there for a thousand years. The stone walls had heard a thousand years of big and little human sin. Even those who did not believe could bow their heads and learn to find their way.

She dropped Clare's hands and crossed herself. “Your uncle, before he left from here the last time, was angry when I told him he must do that. But he was in his last months more lost of heart than ever, always with a temper. I know he did what I suggested. For when he returned that day, he was changed. He came in and sat for a long time at the table.” She nodded back towards the other room. “He wrote some things. When I saw his face again, it was calm.”

“Do you know what happened to the things he wrote?”

“Beh!” Marta cut her off. “Why do you come and make the questions about his things. I have had Niccolo all night with the migraine because you come into his house and suggest we have something that we should not. What did Signor Kane have in any case that we would want? His furniture? We have the furniture more suited to our likes. His dishes? We have the cups and saucers of our parents! We have all our own things that we like!”

“Oh, no — please! I mean just his papers, his letters, the things he wrote. I was hoping that he had left you those, to keep for me. Because I've discovered nothing here, not one scrap.”

“Ah.” She softened. Yes, she said, she herself had thought it strange. The night before Signor Kane had left for America, his long table had been cluttered. He had already given Marta his old portable typewriter for her to take to her grandchildren. He had never been modern. That old typewriter was all he'd used, and she had wept when he gave it to her, but he had told her to cheer up; he'd said he was going to buy himself a laptop in the States to use at home when he returned. When she left the house that night all his papers were all over the table, as if he'd been sorting things. When she returned next day, there was nothing. Just some ashes in the fire.