Restoration

by Olaf Olafsson

  Or perhaps you didn’t hurry? Did you close the door behind you and talk to him for a while in the dwindling light? Did you handle his toys, sit on his bed, and open one of the books you used to read to him before he fell asleep? Did you tell him, perhaps, what you would have liked to tell him while he was alive? I do. I go to his room every day and talk to him. I haven’t touched a thing. Everything is just as it was, everything except for the picture that has gone.

  I had gone to Montepulciano in the morning for supplies. We hadn’t said a word to each other for almost a week, and I had decided to clear the air when I returned from my trip. I asked myself if I was prepared to tell you the truth. The thought alone of confessing made me so sick that I had to ask the driver to pull over. The sun was setting, but the temperature had risen as the wind dropped. I walked away from the car and threw up. I wondered if I should turn back and spend the night in Montepulciano but made up my mind to continue. I had to pretend to be brave despite having no idea what I was going to say to you. I had no way of justifying what I had done.

  You were gone when we came home. I wasn’t surprised, but it didn’t cross my mind that you would not come back. I assumed you had left on one of the solitary riding trips you had started to take. That’s what Pritchett thought too when I ran into him outside the chapel.

  I stayed in my room for the rest of the evening. The thought of confessing had left me exhausted. Every now and then I heard shooting to the east of the villa but otherwise it was quiet. Pritchett said there had been flare-ups all afternoon, minor skirmishes between the partisans and the Fascists. He had been helping the fattore fix the olive press and spoke about the progress they had made. He was very pleased and maintained that the press had never been in better shape. “Good,” I said, “good,” and was relieved when he left the room.

  I got news of you in St. Moritz just before Christmas but that turned out to be a mistake. Nothing since then. It’s been nine months and three days.

  I talk to you as I lie in bed in the evenings, just as I used to when you were here and everything was fine. I tell you about the events of the day, now that the war has come to our valley and the Germans and the Fascists watch our every move. I tell you the things that I hesitate to write in this diary for fear that the Germans will find it when they come back. I’ve received a warning because of the rumors that I help the partisans and shelter Allied soldiers. I don’t care about myself, but I can’t endanger the children and our people.

  I can’t trust anyone I don’t know. The other day a German came here claiming to be a deserter. He begged for shelter and asked us to burn his uniform. I showed him the door. He was unconvincing. His eyes were shifty and his story didn’t ring true.

  This morning a young woman appeared at the bottom of the hill and collapsed there. I noticed her by chance; I often find myself scanning the turnoff. Perhaps I’m looking for you. She’s injured and has slept all day. There is no identification in her luggage apart from a letter in a language I don’t understand, probably Danish. She’s pale, Nordic-looking.

  Fortunately, the summer days are long. I scurry about from morning to night, trying to be useful. There are twenty-four refugee children staying with us now, most of them from Genoa and Turin. Schwester Marie, our Swiss nanny, is run off her feet looking after them, and although she has two girls to help her, she takes on so much herself that I worry about her. Giovanni’s death affected her just as much as us. I know you will shake your head when I say that but it’s true. She spent more time with him than we did during the last year. We’re both to blame.

  Alice closes her diary, screws the lid on her slender pen and puts it away in the drawer of her dressing table. All is quiet as she gets out of bed, walks barefoot across the floor, and, picking up two loose tiles in the corner, puts the book in the cavity underneath. She replaces the tiles, then takes two steps backward and inspects the floor, making sure no unevenness is visible where Pritchett loosened them.

  SHE WAS ENGLISH AND HAD MOVED WHEN SHE WAS five with her mother from London to Florence where she grew up among her countrymen who flocked there in search of novelty. Many of them were wealthy, from good families, and collected art and doted on their cats and dogs, giving them names that she found comic at first, then absurd with the passing of time—Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo. The English kept to themselves. Their numbers had multiplied after the Great War and the city had an English doctor, a chemist, and even a dentist; English shops that sold tea, tweeds, mackintoshes, and tennis racquets; and two English newspapers, the Florence Directory and the Florence Herald, which reported the news from home and from their little colony.

  Her father was dead, her mother remarried to a nouveau riche Englishman who composed third-rate operas when he wasn’t in bed, convinced that he was dying. They were keen for her to find a husband. An Englishman.

  He was Italian, the son of a minor landowner but a titled nobleman. He was ten years older. Marchese Claudio Orsini. Her mother said she was heartbroken, and her stepfather took to his bed in the midst of a new opera. They co-opted friends and relatives to try to talk some sense into her and when that didn’t work, they asked the vicar at the English church on the Via La Marmora to tell her what God thought of the arrangement.

  They were married in the Salone dei Matrimoni in Fiesole. Her mother fell ill just before the ceremony and stayed in her room throughout. Lady Paget, who made shoes of velvet and silk that no one could walk in, gave them a crocodile for a wedding present.

  “If you’re lucky, he’ll eat your husband,” she whispered to the bride.

  The Florence Herald published a picture of the newlyweds, or rather of the bride, as the groom was barely visible, on page two. The piece accompanying the picture reported who had attended the wedding and hinted that Claudio’s family was not as wealthy as Alice’s.

  Claudio was tall and sturdy, with deep-set eyes and a large nose. He had broad, slightly clumsy hands and thick fingers. He was not talkative; the English said he was gauche. He wasted few words on them. At the reception, Alice’s stepfather whispered in his ear that Alice had only married him to annoy her mother. Claudio smiled.

  They fled on their wedding night. They fled the grandiose English dinner parties, the fancy-dress balls and amateur theatricals. The gossip, the squabbles and feuds. The sleep-drugged mornings, the idle afternoons. The pointlessness. She had tried to overcome it by volunteering at San Domenico where she helped to nurse the poor, but it didn’t change a thing. She was twenty-two and saw no prospect of ever doing anything that mattered. They changed clothes in their hotel room, leaving dress and suit on the bed, grabbing the suitcases they had packed earlier and rendezvousing with the driver at the rear entrance as arranged.

  They fell asleep in the car once they had cleared the city and did not awake until dawn. By then they were not far from Pienza, and the driver had stopped because he needed directions for the last stretch. Claudio pulled a map from his pocket and they pored over it together while Alice got out of the car to stretch her legs. She walked to the edge of the escarpment a short way from the car and gazed over the valley that opened out beneath her. Mist lay over it. Trees jutted up at the top of the slopes, but down below the mist was like a lake, blue at first, then silver as it began to disperse. Claudio came over and told her that they would have to turn around; the driver had taken a wrong fork several kilometers back. They were heading for a small farm that their friend Cecil Pritchett knew was for sale and thought would suit them. Pritchett lived in Montalcino. He was an architect who had left Florence several months before in search of change and was one of the few members of the English community to accept Claudio when Alice introduced him. The two men had formed an instant rapport. They were similar types and shared an interest in architecture and gardening, both feeling most at home in the countryside. Pritchett had never liked his Christian name, so those who knew him referred to him only by his surname. He was single and some of his countrymen claimed that his tastes did not run
to women. But Claudio dismissed such gossip with a laugh.

  They had arranged to meet Pritchett at nine. He was going to give them breakfast before taking them to see the farm.

  Instead of returning to the car, Alice pointed to a house emerging from the mist on the other side of the valley.

  “That’s not it,” Claudio said, then realized what she meant. “Are you serious?”

  “Doesn’t it look empty to you?” she asked. “Maybe it’s for sale.”

  “Or maybe not,” he replied.

  “Come on,” she said. “Please. Look, it’s so beautiful.”

  They went to meet Pritchett first.

  “Val d’Orcia?” he exclaimed. “Nothing but barren, wind-blasted slopes. The crete senesi. No one wants to live there.”

  She was in such a rush to be off that she barely touched her breakfast.

  “Can we go now?” she kept asking, like an impatient child. “Can we go?”

  In the end the men gave in, woke the driver who had been napping on a couch in Pritchett’s studio, and set off. It was not far, but the journey proved arduous, for the roads deteriorated the closer they came to the house on the hill.

  “You see,” Pritchett said. “No one drives here unless absolutely necessary.”

  The driver came to a halt as the road entered a dark forest. Fallen tree trunks lay across the track.

  “You’ll have to walk from here,” he said.

  Alice leapt out and almost ran up the slope. Pritchett and Claudio followed behind. When they caught up with her, she was standing outside the villa, at a loss. The roof had partly caved in, the bricks in the walls were cracked, and the garden was a wilderness. The front door turned out to be unlocked, but when Claudio asked her if she wanted to go inside, she shook her head.

  “The whole place is falling apart,” she said. “I’m sorry I dragged you here.”

  He pushed the door. It gave way and he entered the dark house, climbed the stone staircase that greeted him in the middle of the hall, and made straight for the glassless window above the front door.

  “This is paradise!”

  She and Pritchett followed him inside.

  “You’re only saying that for my sake,” she said when they came upstairs. “There’s no need.”

  He put his arms around her and pointed out the window at the unsown fields bathed in sunshine, at the river winding through the valley.

  “I’m saying it for our sake. It’s perfect. This must be fate.”

  Pritchett tracked down the owner and they bought the estate two days later, free of all encumbrances apart from those relating to the outlying farms.

  The estate covered 3,500 acres of the most inhospitable corner of the province of Siena. There was no vegetation on the hills except the odd fir tree, stunted bushes, and scrub. The soil was clay, and the gray ridges rising one after another away from the buildings resembled the backs of the local oxen. The buildings were all in a tumbledown state; there was no electricity or central heating, no bathroom, and the kitchen was unusable. Everywhere there was a smell of damp. Where the roof was open to the elements, owls had nested in the loft, while mice had even colonized the grand piano in the day room. Grass sprouted between the stones of the courtyard and terraces around the buildings, and reached up under the tips of the sails of the windmill that was crumbling into the ground higher up the slope. The river Orcia flowed through the valley but was running low when they arrived, and the white, sun-baked boulders standing out of the shallow water were visible from far away.

  There were twenty-five tenant farms on the property, all in disrepair. Their roofs leaked, and the tenants—desperately poor peasant families, illiterate and deeply distrustful—had stuffed dirty rags into the window openings where the glass had broken. It was the duty of the landowner to maintain their cottages and pay half the total cost of cultivating the land. In return he received half of the harvest. But here the landowner had neglected his duties for years. The fattore was supposed to look after the tenant farms on the landowner’s behalf, but his employer ignored his demands and his clients had lost faith in him. He was in his sixties, a short, sturdy figure, who was overjoyed with Claudio’s enthusiasm. For three days they rode from farm to farm, visiting the tenants. Claudio promised improvements, but the farmers were afraid to hope that anything would come of it.

  Alice’s friends and family warned her against it. “Madness,” they said, “you don’t have the first clue about farming, brought up with a silver spoon in your mouth. Think what you’re doing. There’s the fox-trot at Stevens on Saturday night, a new delivery of hats and coats expected in the shops after the weekend, the opening night of your stepfather’s opera next week. He’ll be hurt if you don’t come. He’s dedicated the work to you . . .”

  It was obvious that they should ask Pritchett to assist them. Before moving to Montalcino, he had restored numerous apartments for the English in Florence, as well as country villas outside the city. He had a reputation for being hardworking and efficient, and they both trusted him implicitly.

  Pritchett took care of the buildings, Claudio the farm. Alice withdrew half her patrimony from the bank, her husband most of his savings. They worked tirelessly on the improvements, and gradually San Martino began to take on a new appearance. When the mercury mine at Monte Amiata closed, they employed everyone who had worked there, some two hundred men. They built roads to the tenant farms, restored the buildings, dug wells, constructed dams and bridges. They planted vines and olive trees, cleared fields for wheat, and put in irrigation systems. They blocked the wind erosion with twenty-five tons of gravel and soil dug from the bed of the river Orcia and its tributaries and laid irrigation pipelines up the slopes. Greenhouses rose near the main house and a five-hundred-acre area was planted with cypress trees, dotted with oaks. At first, they had no machines for harvesting. Farmers and field hands gathered at dawn and worked until dusk, forming a long row and walking the fields side by side. The plow was drawn by Maremma oxen, huge light-gray beasts. Years later, workers and oxen were superseded by harvester, tractor, thresher, bulldozer, and steam-powered plow.

  After the first six months at San Martino, Alice and Claudio offered Pritchett a share in the farm if he would be willing to dedicate the next few years to its restoration. He didn’t have to think long; since he had given up on Florence and moved to Montalcino, business had been slow. Alice and Claudio were ideal clients—rational, thoughtful, and reasonable—and a project like this would perhaps never be offered to him again. He sold his little farm in Montalcino, where he had spent a total of five nights since his work at San Martino had begun, packed up his belongings, and moved for good.

  In the summer of 1934, Alice began to keep a diary.

  “I live on a farm in the south of Tuscany. Chianciano, the nearest village, is twelve miles away, the railway station six. Our house stands on a hill with a view of a wide valley. On the other side is Monte Amiata, its lower slopes covered with cypresses and beeches but farther up you can see chestnuts attempting to climb toward the top. On this side, however, the land is cultivated. We grow potatoes, wheat, and olives. In the mornings before sunrise the valley is covered by a blue mist; in the evenings it returns . . .”

  Silence was banished from the houses, the owls fled the loft, the mice made themselves scarce. Around the main villa they created an English garden, giardino inglese, where perfect order reigned, independent of divine caprice. One terrace succeeded another, divided by tall hedges that concealed here and there a grassy dell. Climbing roses and wisteria covered the pergolas between the terraces, and in front of the small conservatory two dolphins spouted water into a fountain, casting a shadow onto the patio in the late afternoon. In the shade next to the villa, Pritchett arranged an old stone bench and table. A lemon tree overhung the bench where Alice would sit and read on hot days.

  Claudio and Pritchett toiled from morning to night, earning the trust and respect of the workmen and tenant farmers. But Alice felt that they r
egarded her as odd. She withdrew, refusing at first to accompany her husband on visits to the farms where she was expected. When she did finally give in to persuasion, she was insecure and anxious. She borrowed some clothes from one of the maids, not wanting to look overdressed, then changed her mind and dressed up as if she were attending a function in Florence.

  The tenants stood in a huddle in front of the cottages, staring when she arrived on her horse. She had difficulty finding the right words. They would bring her a chicken or eggs or cheese, as was traditional, but she found it impossible to accept food from such poor people. Perhaps it was obvious? Or did they think she was too haughty to accept a few eggs or the hen that laid them?

  She gave up after a few farms and went home. There she shut herself in her room and wouldn’t come out until her husband returned from the fields and tapped on her door.

  “They were right,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My mother and the others. I have no business here.”

  She did not cry; it was not her way.

  That autumn, when Claudio had given up hope that his wife would ever get used to living in the countryside, he found her late one morning standing with a group of children in the English garden. They had slipped away without permission from their homes on the farms to see the big villa that they had heard was now like a palace. Alice had spotted them from her bedroom window, stealing into the garden and pausing behind the fountain, watching entranced as the dolphins spouted water at each other.

  She had hurried out with cold drinks and fruit and managed to keep the children from running away. They proved to be both hungry and thirsty. Claudio found her as she was herding them off to the kitchen to give them lunch. She read them a story in the library after their meal before sending them home.