The Whirling Girl (7 page)

IT TURNED OUT THESE people all knew each other well. Some had been students together on an international dig, years ago. There was laughter about how terrible the food had been; how all the men had loved Luisa because she'd shared the salami from her sandwiches. Only her husband didn't laugh. Clare pondered the symbolic possibilities of salami. And, as the talk curved more and more into Italian, she was content to observe, stealthy as a lizard, in the tangled vine of laughter and in-talk.

She saw how Luke Tindhall rolled his eyes whenever Dr. William Sands made a point; she saw how the beautiful Contessa's eyes dwelled on William Sands in an almost proprietary way; she saw that Carl, the German, was indeed sick with love for the Danish boy, and how the boy's sad gaze was drawn to William Sands, and how William seemed oblivious to these looks, or shrugged them off. Indeed how, as the evening wore on, his mind slipped away to the hilltop settlement which his excavation was bringing back to life. Earlier he'd told her his team had come upon an extensive temple complex on that hilltop. Clare pictured it now: on the roof, huge gilded figures had once walked the sky, the gods that had lived before the gods we knew. He is an outsider like me, Clare observed as he absented himself in thought.

Then, in an instant, the table became electric. The beautiful Dane reached across for a bottle of wine, at the very moment that William reached for it too. Their fingers touched. William's hand recoiled. His glance ricocheted across to his wife with such force that Nikki broke off her conversation, looked up, caught the anguished look in the young Dane's eyes. That was how Clare remembered it, seconds later, when Nikki Stockton had already resumed her conversation, smiling brightly, twisting her long braid into a loop, letting it fall.

Clare knew she should avert her stare, but wasn't fast enough. Nikki looked up again, turned that bright smile on her. “We haven't heard anything about Clare's adventures yet!” she said in that brassbell voice.

“Oh, I'd much rather go on listening to all of you!”

“
Aiii
, enough archaeology!” Federica said. “I agree. Our guest of honour must tell us of her adventures. I have promised my brother I would tell him everything!”

“It's hard to know where to start.”

“How about orchids?” Nikki said. “William likes rare blooms.”

Federica banged the table. “So we will hear about orchids please.”

“Orchids?”

All eyes were on her. She could hardly back out now. She stood; she felt the belt with the silver buckle straightening her backbone, the goat head grinning.

“The sheer gorgeousness of
orchidae
is their most compelling feature, naturally …”

She felt her hand reach up, to remove one pin and then another from her hair, while at the same time she slipped into a scene that she had imagined for her book, a painting that had taken weeks. She was gliding into it again as she had during those weeks, seeing and recording every detail.

“Imagine rounding a bend on a muddy trail, and coming on tiny
Brassavola
hanging in cascades, like ropes of pearly spiders. Breathtaking! In the columns of green light filtering from high above. And the silence. Sometimes in the rainforest the racket is remarkable. But sometimes the silence is so deep that you feel yourself completely absorbed, invisible, though you know that around you are hundreds of silent, watching eyes. Picture stumbling upon the rare blue orchid, glowing in the humid semi-dark! One can search for weeks and never come on one.”

She had them. They were rapt.

“But to a botanist the diversity of
orchidae
is equally interesting.” She smiled, to indicate recognition of the edge of pedantry in her tone. “Did you know that some orchids are big as shrubs, others are vines? Or that in Australia there's a variety that even grows underground?”

Her husband had mentioned this. She had never truly understood. He was actually in Australia at this very minute, having invented another expedition of his own, to escape from his new wife's unexpected onslaught of triplets. (At least I didn't do that to him, Clare thought.)

“Orchids have a long history,” she moved on quickly. “The ancients valued them for treating sexual disorders, the name deriving from the Greek for testicle, because of the swollen underground stems. I am sure you are familiar with the Doctrine of Signatures put forward by Dioscorides, which holds that if a plant looks like a human organ, it is good for treating that particular part of you.”

Luke Tindhall clapped, managing to bring a note of irony to the sound.

She reached for another sip of the garnet wine, then took her audience in a dugout along the flooded waterway linking the Amazon and the Orinoco, then on an expedition hacking its way over the
Serra Tumachumac
through to Roraima and into Venezuela. She paddled them in search of caimans, describing how in the dark you could tell the different species by the colour of their reflected gaze: the little spectacled caiman with his golden eyes popping up like pince-nez above his snout; the dwarf forest one with his orange stare; and the dreaded gigantic black caiman with the ruby red glare. She talked of the fearsome bugs, the gorgeous birds, the silent snakes, the racket of howler monkeys in the night, and the jaguar's terrifying call.

“
Fantastico!
Were you often frightened?” the beautiful Luisa asked.

“Sometimes it was terrifying, yes. Oh, but at the same time, you must imagine the thrill and beauty of those jungle calls echoing through the forest's majestic solitude …”

All the time she spoke, Luke Tindhall was looking at her. They were all looking at her. Her tongue was silver thanks to the wine from the
terroir
of the unicorn; her tongue was silver and her words were gold, and the evening turned out to be about her after all.

LUKE TINDHALL DROVE HER home. As they got into his chunky antique car, he asked if she would like a tour around the area next day, the tombs at Orvieto perhaps, or the very interesting museum at Murlo, an hour's drive through the hills? Perhaps a little lunch along the way?

She settled into the creaky half-sprung seat, breathed in the leathery smell of the old car, and the smell of Luke. He began humming. She caught him glancing at her out of the corner of his eye as he turned out of Farnham's drive.

“Aren't you going the wrong way?”

“The magical mystery tour.”

He turned off onto a narrow track that followed the level of some abandoned terraced land. The headlights caught gnarled ghosts of frost-killed olive trees, then plunged sharply downhill, burrowed through woods, straddled a dried-up stream. When they came to a rusted iron gate, which he wrenched open and failed to close, she thought, At least I know one thing about him now: he wasn't born on a farm.

They emerged onto an open patch. She recognized the black silhouette of the hill with the ruined tower, directly across the way. He stopped the car, came around and opened her door. The grass was silvered by the moon. She felt hazy and insubstantial as he put a hand on her shoulder, which was the best way, in the dark, only flesh, not even words. Things rustled in the woods, maybe foxes. Two bats crossed the air in a looping sweep, one within wing tip of the other.

“Careful,” he said, “Better stay close to the car just in case.”

Did he mean because of dogs?

A light flared across the rocky patch where they were standing. He was brandishing a torch. “Look,” he said. “I have not mentioned this to anyone, for good reason.” The glaring circle slid over an area of large oblong stones. “The cut suggests that this was laid down well before the Romans. On your land. This leads directly to your house.” He angled the beam to where the stones succumbed to grass and spiny weeds, the barest overgrown path disappearing into farther trees.

Had he brought her here to show her a bit of ancient road?

The light swung full on her face, catching her out, catching the whole humiliating swarm of emotions in her moth eyes, her expectation, her willingness and loneliness and need to be obliterated by another human body.

“Right,” he said, “Come on.”

Before she could say anything, he was helping her back into the car. They bumped along again, through pools of moonlight, pools of shade. When the track arrived at a second gate leading from the woods to her house, she jumped out of the car without another word.

The Wild

CLARE WOKE TO THE ringing of a phone. She heard a beep on the answering machine. Luke Tindhall's voice. Another beep. Gone.

She pulled the duvet over her head. Bits of the previous night started to rain down. She burrowed under the pillow. She'd not only talked too much, she'd given a lecture — all that was missing was the slide projector. Then the drive home. Was he coming to pick her up this morning?

Oh, absolutely no! She jumped up, pulled on her jeans. She would ignore the death-knell headache. She grabbed a pear, a slab of cheese, her painting gear.

She would expunge the whole of the night before, and especially that moment when he'd turned the light on her and seen right through her.

It was useless to tell herself last night everybody hadn't seen right through her.
He must have been a very fond uncle
. To pretend that the whole dinner had not been pulsing with a creepy frisson of the unspeakable that she had been giving off. But she had her own singular method of escape.

She headed up into the olive grove and then the woods, refusing to think about the devil dogs Niccolo had said did not exist. She climbed along a hillside of myrtle and oak, trying to clear her head of everything but the unfolding of one scene, then the next, like the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings. No wonder all the great art came from here.

She settled on a rock beneath a scraggy oak where a clump of early poppies flickered, truly all silk and flame. Ruskin's phrase. The small flames wavered even in the quiet air.

DURING THE TWO SOLITARY years in her cramped sun porch studio in Vancouver, Clare had imagined herself painting in the wild, with the voice of an amiable, tough and exacting companion whispering in her ear. The voice of the extraordinary Margaret Mee, who had first brought the Brazilian Amazon into bloom for the world to see — who had travelled by leaky boat and dugout to the remotest regions, facing every sort of difficulty and danger. Not just the creatures of the jungle and the water world, but drunken rubber tappers with murderous intent, and tribes rumoured recently to have eaten those who offended them. Clare had read and re-read the diaries. Right into her late seventies, Margaret Mee had made painting trips along the Amazon and its many tributaries, bringing to the world the first awareness of the tragic destruction there.

And now here Clare was, in the wild, plodding through a swamp of emotions, with a headache that would have done a rubber tapper proud. She took a deep breath. As she began sketching the poppy's stems and leaves, as her pencil traced the shape before her and at the same time created a line that had an elegance of its own, a thrill of pure pleasure ran through her, warm as chocolate, addictive as a direct infusion of the essence of the woodland all around, the quiet sounds, the rich scents.

A gust set the leaves of all the trees and bushes rustling. When the poppy ceased trembling, she turned her attention to a single bud, the rough texture of the calyx, the tiny swellings at the base of each hair. Only the buds had these hairs. The hairs themselves she would leave until later, when she brought the finest of her brushes into play. Then how sensuous, to turn to the looping contours of the petals as she sketched in the full flowers; to slip into the depth of satiny red-black where one petal shaded another.

She began to create the shadow mix: a squeeze of ultramarine from the fat crushed tube, then alizarin, then a small dollop of chrome. First the stems, then the leaves, then the blossoms, finally emerging in three dimensions yet still colourless. This was a lovely point, when the work could almost be complete as it stood. The way we could see, if we could see clearly in the silver of the moon. The way she might even have seen last night but for the wine, when she stood with the man on the rocky patch of ancient road and everything was silvered.

The preliminary green coat to bring the plant into vividness, shade by shade. Metal yellow, once again, combined with Prussian blue and a speck of crimson.

The poppy is painted glass, seen among the wild grass far away like a burning coal fallen from heaven's altars. Ruskin again. A tall order to mix that colour. Start with a thrilling spurt of Winsor red, then lemon, drop by drop, gentled onto the petals, skirting the ovaries. A thin liquid glaze, which quickly dried.

Painted glass! She recognized a prickle of loss that had been on the edge of her mind all morning — the petal that had fallen from the chandelier the night before. She'd meant to take it home.

A second glossy coat of red brought up the crinkly surface of the petals, the tiny reflections of one another the petals held. Now for the black markings: black was never truly black. She felt the pull of this thought, tempting her to follow down its twisting path. She pulled back. This moment required as much concentration as grand prix racing, as with the finest of brushes she outlined the stamen filaments, a delight she never ceased to feel at supplying such tiny details. Those stamens with their delicate stems, waving their lollypop heads, and the radiating pattern of striations on the ovary at the centre of this cluster, and the almost-invisible hairs on the closed bud and on the poppy stems.

The sun had arced across the sky. The bell from the saint's basilica tolled as Clare applied her final brush strokes. She felt herself becoming small enough to slip into the miniature world she had created. No one would find her here and bring her to account.

CLARE SLOTTED THE PAINTING into the aluminium case in her pack.

She let the flickering of the flower fill her head to stave off the hungers that could settle; nothing to do with food, nothing to do with anything she ever understood.

Red. A country to get lost in, all on its own. Crimson, carmine, cochineal — all those little bugs dying in the cause of flaming colour. Red lead. Red arsenic from Brazil. Vermilion made from cinnabar, and cinnabar itself, more an exotic destination than a colour.

This was not the path she'd come along before. It was chilly now. In the falling light it wasn't hard to imagine nymphs and satyrs wandering these ancient hills. She had the sensation of being watched, though not by human eyes; just an ageless watching. The track disappeared into a slope overgrown with last year's bracken. She realized she had been following some animal path. Through thick brush she caught a glimpse of the hill with the tower, and thought that if she plunged straight down the slope, surely she would find a proper path. But her feet went out from under her. Suddenly, she was scraping down a rocky cliff, her fall broken only as she managed to grab hold of a bush. How far? Twenty feet? Thirty? She came to rest in a nest of brambles.

She was about to untangle herself, when she froze. A flash of movement below. Then a moan. She peered through the tangle of vines.

Four legs. A single back.

Even the sight of the two pairs of dropped pants, of William Sands's white head thrown back, of Anders Piersen with his arms braced against a rock, didn't dim her sense that this was the rutting of a single mythic beast. And like the watchers she'd imagined moments ago, she watched. Only when the double creature reached its double spasm, did she shrink back to be out of sight.

She was not sure if it was gulps of weeping she heard from the Danish boy. But she was weeping; hiding her face in brown leaves and tiny shoots of new bracken, flooding them with salt.