‘He didn’t. Tell me what happened when you came back.’
‘I knew they wanted me to stay out late but it started raining and, besides, the last bus is at one ten. When I was coming back on the bus I saw the lights on in the lemon house and a three-wheeled truck parked outside. I realised then what a stupid thing I’d done. I’d warned them that he was dying and that made them rush to get the stuff away. If I’d said nothing … Yes, I know he’d have died anyway but not like that, not … No! No, I should—I should have—’
‘It’s all right. It’s all right. Calm down. Breathe properly. Breathe. That’s better.’
‘They wanted to be ready when he died, you see, for when those men out there came in and asked for the inventory and started checking. I keep thinking that if I’d thought of telling Jim—he wasn’t one of those who say all Albanians are criminals. He was always friendly to me. If I’d thought—’
‘You were in no position to do anything. Don’t torment yourself.’ How easy it was to say.
‘Yes, I’m sorry, I know you’re right. Jim let me in without getting up. He heard my voice and pushed the button. I came into the house by the kitchen door. They didn’t notice me. I saw them down in the lemon house, the secretary and the lawyer and the two porters who always come. I used the servants’ passage and came in here through the small door. I thought he might have been ringing for me, he might have needed to get up. He wasn’t here. I’d left his wheelchair parked to the left side of the bed but that wasn’t here either. The French windows were open. It was still raining hard. I knew right away where he would have tried to go. Perhaps he wanted to die there, near the lily pond where he was always peaceful. But he didn’t get that far. He must have gone out on the dining terrace instead of keeping to the path that leads to the garden below it.’
‘Show me.’
The boy didn’t want to go out there but the marshal got him to his feet, insisted. Much as he disliked going out in the rain himself, it had to be done and done now before the reappearance of the prosecutor, the captain, the secretary, anyone, could interrupt the story. Their feet crunched on wet gravel and wet leaves slapped at their shoulders as they went in silence under the rose-covered archway. They came out on the open dining terrace. To their right a soaked figure in billowing marble drapery held up a hand in the mist as if trying to stop the rain, or stop something else. The shiny laurel leaves nodded and dripped.
‘He was lying here like a cat that’s been run over and left to stiffen in the road. The rain was pelting down on him. The wheelchair was on its side facing across at the lemon house. All the lights were on down there. He saw it all.’
‘Yes.’ The great doors of the lemon house were open. It was a fair distance but you don’t need to make out faces to recognise people you know well. Your friends. ’Yes, he saw.’
‘All that time afterwards, shut in my room while they were … messing with him, I tried to tell myself that he was in one of his childish states, like the last time he’d opened up the windows and got his feet wet and laughed. It’s not true. He knew he was ill. He knew I was out. He took his bell because it’s gone, I don’t know where. He must have heard something. He was in too much pain to sleep. He went out and he must have seen them. His friends. I know his mind was clear, you see. To stand up from a wheelchair, especially with only one hand to push you forward, you have to lift the foot-rests to set your feet on the floor and you have to put the brakes on. He did everything properly. He died standing up, watching his friends. He must have grabbed at the left arm of the chair as he fell. You can see the scratches on the guide wheel where he pulled it over with him. He was still gripping it. I didn’t find the bell, it was too dark. He was wet and stiff.’
‘Did you touch him?’
‘Just his neck for a pulse but I knew—and his hand, his left hand. It wouldn’t let go of the wheel. I felt for his eyes. They were open and it was raining in them, so I closed them.’
Tfou didn’t try and move him?’
‘No. I knew how heavy he was even when he was alive. I went and told them. They were carrying a painting to the lemon house. I think they were furious about being seen. They left me standing there while they talked in a whisper about what to do. I was scared myself but they were in a real panic. They told me to go to my room and to come in as usual at seven-thirty in the morning.
‘They were a long time getting him in and messing with him. I covered my head with the sheet, trying not to hear. I lay awake all night. I felt cold and stiff. I was wet, I suppose because I got in bed without getting undressed. I just took my shoes off.’
The marshal interrupted him. ‘You’re frozen now. Come on back inside.’
The room seemed even darker as the skies outside cleared.
‘Isn’t there another lamp you could switch on? Oh, thank goodness for that. You should change your shirt’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
The marshal opened the door of the corridor leading to the bathroom and Giorgio’s bedroom. ‘How much could you hear of what went on in this room when you went to bed? Did you understand what they were doing?’
‘I suppose so. That’s why I kept my head under the sheet, trying not to hear. I could make out their voices but nothing they said. Then they went away. I stayed under the sheet and my ears buzzed in the silence. Then the birds started singing. After a long time the alarm went off. Everything sounded normal but I knew it wasn’t, like in a nightmare. I didn’t come in here, I went to the kitchen and waited, looking out of the window. The kitchen maid arrived. She said, “You’re early. Have I to make his tea?”
‘I said, “No. He’s dead.” So that she would be the one to call the secretary. I didn’t steal his father’s things.’
The marshal said, ‘No.’
‘Afterwards I sat next to him until the doctor came. They’d put his blue pyjamas on. He didn’t like them.’
Those last minutes before the rain stopped, the marshal spent alone in the sitting room, thinking, not about Sir Christopher’s death but about his mother. It was true that this pretty sitting room was designed to keep out the heat, that porch arrangement with its thick foliage especially so. But that did make it sadly dark on a rainy afternoon even with the lamps on. He saw a big standard lamp and switched that on, too. He looked at Sara’s water lilies first. Much good had the painting ever done Sara. But what about the young woman who unwittingly robbed her of it? What was her name? Wasn’t it Rose? Or was that some connection in his mind with the garden? No, it was Rose. The silver-framed photograph of her parents had a dedication which confirmed it. On the wall near the small writing desk was a simpler wooden frame with a child’s effort at depicting the lily pond. An early effort by Sir Christopher before he could spell, write letters of even height, pronounce his own name. ‘To mumy from Kista.’
Baby abbreviations often lasted a lifetime. His own Toto would never be Antonio except to strangers.
Perhaps only the housekeeper who had been born here and shared Sir Christopher’s childhood knew that name, but she was a servant and must have called him Sir Christopher.
His own sister probably never knew it. His friendly poor relation probably didn’t know it. They should have known. They should have been near him at the end. They would have known which pyjamas he didn’t like.
When it stopped raining he went out. He returned to the dining terrace where Sir Christopher had died. Stooping, he soon discovered the brass bell where it had rolled behind a terra cotta urn spilling wet pink geraniums. He picked the bell up. The mist on the garden was dissolving and he felt the heat of the sun on his head and shoulders. Over by the lemon house a familiar figure was moving among the big pots. He rang the brass bell and the figure stopped, looked up, and waved in recognition. The marshal pointed and began making his way down the staircase to Rose’s secret garden.
They met at the lily pond.
‘How’s it going? Have they shown you the will?’
‘You’re not going to t
ell me you’ve seen it?’
‘Two of the gardeners witnessed it. Had to be nonbeneficiaries and they didn’t want anybody from outside. It’s a fake, of course—well, he signed it after a wobbly fashion but no one will question that since he’d lost the use of his right hand. He couldn’t read, though. You ask Giorgio. The will’s a fake.’
‘It could have been drafted before. You don’t know—’
‘There was nothing for the gardeners, nothing for the household staff. He would never have done that.’
Of course. ‘The small bequests …’ Sir Christopher’s pleading voice, unable by then to articulate. The small bequests particularly … pe-ic-yery …’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll have everything drafted for tomorrow.’
‘They left him to die alone like a dog, but he was a genteman. Is there nothing you can do to them for leaving him alone like that?’
‘There is, there’s a law against failure to assist a sick or helpless person … but those two, Porteous and the lawyer, they’re not family. If anything, the blame would fall on Giorgio. Their word against his.’
‘Notjust his. We all know what’s been going on. We always hear things—’
‘I believe you, but this’—he indicated the marble plaque at their feet—'is an example of how gossip invents the wrong reasons for the right facts.’
‘You mean Rose didn’t catch him here?’
‘Yes, she did, but not with another woman. James Wrothesly’s wife found out something worse.’
‘He must have had a woman, though. Sara Hirsch was his illegitimate daughter. We all knew that. She used to come here, so she was real.’
‘Yes, Sara Hirsch was real.’
‘And will it come out now, the real secret?’
‘No.’
‘The story will go down in history as it is then.’
‘I expect so. That’s the way history is.’
‘I suppose you’ll want me to tell you all about the will.’
‘No. I want you to tell me what she wrote here, if you understand it. Rose, the lady who loved her garden.’
‘And abandoned it. I don’t know Latin but we all know what that says.
In the midst of this fountain of delights
Wells up some bitter taste to choke us
Even among the flowers.
‘We’re going to have to do some weeding in here, after all this rain.’
The evening sun beamed down from a warm blue sky. The last clouds were vast, dazzling puffs of white touched with gold and pink, cushions for rosy cherubs with gilded wings, a suitable frescoed ceiling for the city below.
Twelve
The Appeal Court confirmed the sentences of the porters, Gianfranco Giusti and Piero Falaschi, who got fourteen years each. Rinaldi had been convicted with them in the first instance but without the information about Jacob Roth and the photographs of the Monet painting, the porters’ claim that he was the instigator was unconvincing and on appeal the judgment was overturned.
‘I don’t suppose it came as any surprise to you,’ the marshal said. The prosecutor was driving them out to the country and he was very cheerful.
‘First rule of a happy life: Forget a case once it’s out of your hands. You can’t have been surprised yourself. We were lucky to get a conviction in the first instance. He had a good lawyer and we had precious little—in particular, no motive. I thought we were all agreed that the pleasure of putting Rinaldi behind bars was minor compared to that of Umberto D’Ancona’s success. They’ve done a lot, you know, his organisation. I may not have followed the appeal but I’ve been very interested in following that. Didn’t you see the article in last Friday’s colour supplement—“Cezanne returned to collector’s daughter”? I can’t imagine having D’Ancona’s energy should I ever reach his age. I haven’t got it now. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but publicisingjacob Roth’s sins wouldn’t have been as satisfying as finding out from a grateful Rinaldi just what was going on up at that villa all these years. What a triumvirate! Porteous, Rinaldi, and that smooth young lawyer. All wriggling their way onto the board of trustees so as to inherit control of the villa, plus Sir Christopher’s mother’s estate.’
‘We don’t know it all, though,’ the marshal pointed out. ‘Nobody will ever know how much stuff never made the inventory and vanished, some when Jacob was dying, the rest when Sir Christopher was moved downstairs, not to mention the famous “big robbery". I remember, the first time I went up there, Sir Christopher told me it was like Aladdin’s cave, that top floor.’
‘Did he? Well, it wasn’t when Maestrangelo and I went up there. Of course, there were signs. The pictures on the walls were none of them the same size as the fade marks behind them—bit amateurish that, I thought.’
‘They didn’t care. Porteous had a free hand to move stuff around as he pleased. The tax people haven’t given up yet, though, and, of course, the young gardener was a big help.’
Jim had turned up at Borgo Ognissanti Headquarters, bright as a button and as full of stories as ever.
‘Well, I think, and the head gardener thinks …’
And with the help of the captain’s fancy coffee-table book they were able to identify some urns and statuary that, if not listed in the inventory, had certainly once been in the garden. The photographs had been taken several years before when Jacob was still alive.
‘Of course,’ observed the captain, ‘we don’t know what Jacob and/or Sir Christopher sold and what was stolen from them by the people to whom they had been more than generous.’
‘The stuff filled the lemon house twice over,'Jim said, ‘and the head gardener says that Sir Christopher was bound by the terms of his father’s will that gave Rinaldi usufruct only, though he would have liked to leave Rinaldi his flat and shop. So… when Sir Christopher was gaga, the lawyer and the secretary sold it to him for a pittance. Wobbly signature on unread contract as on fake will and their fence’s lips are sealed.’
And they believed him but where was the proof?
Still, the prosecutor’s curiosity had been, in some measure, satisfied and so had the captain’s.
‘He actually smiled,’ remarked the prosecutor to the marshal now, ‘not there and then but afterwards—I mustn’t take the wrong turning here, like I’m always doing … is this it? Yes—did you see how pleased he was? I think he actually touched the frame with one finger. Do you remember?’
‘Well,’ murmured the marshal, feeling in his pocket for dark glasses as a lively spring gust drove off a rain cloud and the sun appeared, ‘not every day do you see a drawing by Leonardo in private hands.’
‘No,’ admitted the prosecutor. ‘It’s not the same, is it, as seeing one in the Uffizi? I don’t know why … At least they couldn’t make that disappear. Tagged by the ministry, it would attract far too much attention. Did you ever wonder what would have happened to Ruth and to the children, if Jacob had spent his energies and manic determination on being a painter?’
‘They’d have been just as badly off,’ said the marshal firmly. ‘Ruth would have taken second place to his painting instead of to Rose. She would have sacrificed Sara to Jacob’s demands and Sir Christopher would have still been a fourth-rate amateur painter. Only he’d have tried to get attention through his father’s reputation instead of through his fancy, tided friends.’
The prosecutor lifted one hand in surrender. ‘Forget I asked.’
The marshal himself had been satisfied on one point. He had an inkling now of what a rich man’s daily problems might be, first among them being money worries. Jacob’s grandiose ideas had been all very well at the outset. He’d bought that place for a song in the years under the postwar republic when the Florentine nobility had started to unload property in the face of new taxation and the confiscation of neglected land. He married the money to maintain it all but by the time he died it was no longer enough and, in recent years, Sir Christopher had started eating into his mother’s capital to keep his standard of living up to
the level of his expensive guests. Lapsing into full-time invalidism was the only alternative to ruin. The triumvirate had been wresting from Caesar an empire with just about enough money to keep it ticking over and nothing for the massive restoration needed after years of neglect. And they’d be bound by law to carry out the restoration because the villa was a registered building. The situation had long been desperate. They needed to liquidate everything possible, including the flats above Rinaldi’s in Sdrucciolo de’ Pitti and, especially, whatever they could subtract from what Sir Christopher had inherited from his mother, including the Monet. The last thing they needed was a daughter making an unexpected claim on the estate. The prosecutor had said that their Machiavellian minds would find a way, now they were rid of the problem of deceiving Sir Christopher and frightening Sara, and he had turned out to be right. Jacob’s trust stipulated that, after Sir Christopher’s death, the villa must be used for educational purposes. That was a broad term. It stretched easily to expensive residential courses taught by famous names to those rich enough and idle enough to populate the villa with the sort of people it was used to accommodating. As regards the clause mentioning the education of Jewish boys of talent, especially in the arts, D’Ancona, the only surviving Jewish trustee, had been outvoted and the clause was forgotten. It was good to think of Jim, a survivor if ever there was one, and the head gardener, of course, still caring for Rose’s garden, weeding it after the rain. She had loved her garden and, despite what she had suffered there, had left it in the care of those who loved it and her.
‘Do you think the car smells of cigars? Only, my wife thinks I’ve given up … We’re nearly there. I must say, you don’t seem too put out about that villainous trio getting away with it. After all, you did all the hard work.’
‘Me? No, no … Besides, God doesn’t pay on Saturdays.’‘ What? Do you know something I don’t know?’‘Oh, no. Nothing really. I hear a bit of gossip from up there now and then. I gather they still employ a few boys in straitened circumstances for a pittance. I also gather that they’re chosen for their looks rather than their clean records and that there’s been a lot of quarrelling about it. If the weather stays fine they’ll soon be wheeling out the lemon trees…’
Some Bitter Taste Page 21
