The Whirling Girl (32 page)

WHEN GIANNI FOUND HER, she was surrounded by sheets of heavy expensive paper, all torn, scraps holding partial sketches, scraps daubed with colour: the creamy blossoms of the burning bush had curdled as she added cadmium; the ruffled leaves of bryony had transformed under her brush into green sponges; the blue poppy had kept whispering that, try as she might, she would never capture its thrilling shade, never have the energy to make a proper composition of it either: “Why not succumb to being kept and beautiful like me, enjoy your season in the sun? Why all this effort to be something more …?”

“Clare! Darling! I can't stand to see you weep.”

He held her, and it was the best of comfort; it was what primordial sea creatures might have felt when they gave up their struggle with the waves and let themselves get washed up onto the hot sand.

LATER, GIANNI TOOK CLARE riding into the woods. They rode past the turnoff to the villa, but she didn't mention it. He wanted to show her his rare pigs, he said, an endangered breed that lived best by foraging for herbs and nuts in the wild. She said, “Oh sure, absolutely I want to see your rare pigs.” In truth she still felt so ashamed, so desolate, so lost, literally lost. The woman who had lost what most intrigued him, soon to be supplanted, even if he didn't exactly know that yet; for certainly, as soon as you allowed something to become essential, as she'd allowed Gianni to be, you had already lost all power.

He was mounted on a tall black gelding. He looked splendid on a horse. She watched his hands on the reins, the delicate touch that controlled the spirited creature. She was riding a little bay mare that was his daughter's. The stable boy had let that slip.

She kept waiting for him to glance sideways at her in disappointment as her morning's failure settled on him: then to start finding little other things at fault, which would make it obvious that they were not on the same idyllic wavelength after all. In an upland area, they came upon workmen fencing meadowland where he hoped to raise the almost-lost Pomarancio sheep. She tried to say the right, enthusiastic things. He told her of plans to start a little herd of donkeys too, of a type almost extinct. “A few of these still roam the slopes of Mount Amiata,” he said. “Do you know that cone-shaped hill across the Val di Chiana from your lovely property?”

Her lovely property. Where it would soon be clear to both of them that she should return.

“But what my sister is undertaking is the best!” he said.

“Your sister? Sorry, I lost the thread there for a moment.”

He apologized, saying that perhaps he had not previously explained his sister's great experiment at her stables, which was to recreate the blood lines of the
Nobilissimo Nappolitain
, the famous Neapolitan courser, a steed which by the beginning of the last century had faded to memory. Federica was involved with the professor of genetics in Naples on this project.

“But how can this be done?”

He said that beyond the money he supplied for this research, it was a matter of “untangling,” to put it briefly.

“
You
fund this?”

He hit his forehead. “You see what a small person I am at heart, wanting in a weak moment to let you believe that I am big! I should have allowed you to believe that her husband Ralph is the one, as I know he loves to pretend.”

He added that in truth he did not fund it completely. His mother managed to squeeze a little from Tomasso their stepfather; but unfortunately Federica and Tomasso did not much like one another.

“So because I have my own inheritance, and because Federica's father was penniless when he died, I am glad to help.”

“I didn't mean —”

“No of course you didn't mean!” Still miraculously so fond, that smile of his. “But there is no reason why you should not ask. It is just —” He shook his head. “All families are complicated, but each Italian family is complicated in a different way. As Tolstoy would have written, if he had not had the great good fortune to be Russian.”

SHE LONGED TO URGE him to go on with this account. Sneaky curiosity plagued her now, greedy even. He had his own inheritance? He was not completely dependent, then, on either the stepfather or the business controlled by his discouraged-looking wife?

But it would be so easy to take the wrong step now.

“Tell me about this untangling,” she said instead. “Is it really possible, to bring back a breed of horses that has disappeared?”

“Ah!” He looked so happy to explain. “It is of course a research in its beginning stages. Briefly, here is the approach. The Neapolitan has contributed in a significant way to the creation of the Austrian Lipizzaner, among others. And so if we undo this,” he spread his fingers as if allowing the complexity to escape, “it will be possible to separate out again the strain.”

If we undo this
.

Luke.

For the first time since she'd come here, she consciously thought of Luke, pictured him undoing the work of a Stone Age carver by putting the chipped-off fragments back together, the happiest he'd ever been in his whole life. Where was he? She hadn't called him. Had he managed to persuade Sir Harold Plank? What if he was back in Tuscany? What if …?

“So you see,” Gianni added, “if such genetic research is possible, why I refuse to despair of the unicorn.”

THEY EMERGED FROM THE woodland trail. A wide stretch of meadow lay before them. Gianni said, “Shall we let our horses gallop?” Clare turned her mare on a long diagonal towards a hedged dry stream. The mare sailed across. She galloped on, conscious of the thud of his horse's hoofs just behind, until together they pulled up at the start of farther woods.

He dismounted, took the mare's bridle.

“I think we can have our siesta here,” he said. “Tonight we will dine late. This is the habit of Mammà, who is of course expecting us.”

He pulled it out of a hat, just like that. The meeting he knew she had been fearing.

Did she know him at all?

Who was he, in fact? What did he actually do with himself all day, all month, all year, when he claimed to be running this estate where everybody did his bidding, even his firewood carried up by doves? What actually went on in that beautiful brain, along with all the glittering ideas? Had he shrewdly planned the exact moment when he would present the dinner with Mammà as a
fait accompli
?

He put an unnecessary hand to her elbow, as she sprang off the mare. She pulled away to scramble up to a little knoll of deeper grass beneath an oak.

“
Attenzione!
Not up there! There might be snakes.”

“Do you know how many hours I've spent tramping in the grass never giving a thought to your deadly vipers?”

“Protected by innocence,” he said. “But now that you remember, you must come to know where they hang out.”

Oh absolutely
, the voices started slithering again,
Get to know where we hang out, and then grab a forked stick and read our forked tongues that have been whispering how you do belong here, Clare — really truly, and not just camped off to the side — how you must connive to make it legal, tie him down, and fast, before he tires of you altogether
.

He was undoing a blanket rolled behind his saddle. He spread it on the grass.

“Darling,” Clare heard herself say. “Dearest,” feeling her face change, as wrinkles of subterfuge started setting in. “Sweet Gianni, if I am to meet Mammà tonight, and Tomasso, too, you must tell me more about them.”

She had just bitten into a delicious, tainted thought. Wasn't it possible that his mother might turn out to be an ally? That Mammà might recognize in Clare a fellow homewrecker who ought to be encouraged; that perhaps she was fed up to the teeth with the hardworking little Bolognese in her vest with the sporting logo?

“
Carissimo
, you must tell me the complicated story about your father and Federica's,” she said. “How they both died, as you once told me — am I not right, such a tragedy my darling — that they died on the same day? And how it is that you are the one with the inheritance? Only of course so I do not make the wrong remark and make a hash of things.”

“‘Make a hash'?” A smile that could break her heart. How easy for this new conniving woman to make him smile. He said, “This is, in your idiom, for to ‘spoil' things? Like a greasy American breakfast with too many potatoes? Darling, you will never make this hash.”

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 smouldering 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.