Angels of the Flood

by Joanna Hines

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you just do.’

  ‘Maybe when you’re thirty, or something.’

  Francesca giggled. ‘I think he’s resigned to a long engagement.’ She sounded happy as she said, ‘Good night, Kate.’

  ‘Good night, Francesca.’

  They laughed, rolled over and were asleep within minutes.

  Kate was woken just as it was getting light. Francesca was sitting up beside her; she was panting with fear. ‘Go away,’ she gasped. ‘Leave me alone! I won’t do it! No!’

  Sleepily Kate reached up and patted her shoulder. ‘Francesca, wake up. You’re having a nightmare. Wake up, it’s just a dream.’

  It took a little while for Francesca’s fears to subside. At last she let out a long breath and lay down next to Kate again.

  ‘What was all that about?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Just a dream,’ said Francesca. ‘A bad dream.’

  Chapter 23

  Morning After

  DAVID WOKE WITH A fur-lined mouth and nausea in his guts. It was more than a straightforward hangover. He was depressed and angry, disgusted with the others and sick with himself. Last evening, he’d looked out of the window and seen Kate and Mario, first talking then kissing. He’d turned back into the room and bumped into Anna who seemed to be at a loose end too, and danced with her to stop himself from storming out onto the terrace and making an even bigger fool of himself than he had done already. He’d really thought he was getting somewhere with Francesca, but it turned out she’d just been using him to get her away from the argument with that creep Mario. After a couple of dances it was ‘Arrivederci, David,’ and she was off to amuse herself with someone else. And thanks to her, he’d missed his chance with Kate as well. There was no doubt, from what he saw through the window, that the smoothie Italian doctor meant business.

  He was still debating whether to march out and pick a fight with Mario when he noticed that Anna was a very sexy dancer indeed, especially up close. She might look like she’d stepped straight out of a Victorian vision of Camelot, but she danced like a sensuous snake, writhing and coiling herself around him, in a way that suggested he might do well to try some kissing, which he did, as an experiment. She didn’t seem to have strong feelings one way or the other about the kissing, but after a bit she leaned back and looked up at him in an appraising way, then said, ‘There’s a room at the back where we can be private.’ She led him by the hand down a long corridor into a small room which looked like some kind of store, with boxes stacked up on one side and on the other a narrow green army camp bed with a couple of blankets.

  It suddenly dawned on his wine-fuddled brain what was being offered. He moved forward to kiss her but she was already pulling her sweater off over her head, so he stooped down instead and picked a pale green sock from the floor. Its mate was not far away. ‘Looks like someone’s beaten us to it,’ he said. When he stood up again, Anna was down to bra and pants. He’d never known it was possible for clothes to come off so quickly. He was standing there holding the pair of pale green socks when Anna unzipped his fly and put her hand inside his Y-fronts. After that, everything happened extremely fast, like a speeded-up version of a blue movie.

  It had all been much too fast, David realized as soon as it was over. But when he mentioned this to Anna, she said that no, it was fine by her. Long hair falling in curtains over her face and shoulders, she was already pulling on her trousers.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I thought we might try again. More slowly.’

  Anna thought not. He observed that she was pulling on the pale green socks.

  ‘Are those yours?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  David propped himself up on one elbow. He felt deflated in many different ways. ‘Who was it the first time?’ he asked.

  She turned to look at him. ‘Larry,’ she said. Her face looked pinched and childlike, in a way he’d never noticed before.

  ‘Larry? I thought he and Jenny—’

  ‘She’d gone off with Aiden.’

  ‘Jesus!’ David leaned back so quickly he cracked his head on the wall. The pain and shock made him feel savage. ‘Are you always the consolation prize?’ he asked.

  She was fully dressed. She looked down at her shoes and said quietly, ‘I just keep looking for something.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you found it with me?’

  ‘No.’ Sadly. She gave him a little smile, a consolation prize for him too, then she turned and walked out of the room. He heard her shoes squeaking unevenly away down the corridor.

  He groaned, rolled over and started to pull on his trousers. This had been all wrong, wrong, wrong, more wrong than he could have believed possible. Too fast, too furtive, too cold and heartless. But above all, Anna was the wrong person. Francesca would have been all right, but it was Kate he really wanted. Just how badly he’d wanted her, he didn’t realize until he sat on the edge of the little camp bed and pulled up his trousers. It must be someone’s fault that it had all gone so horribly wrong. Kate’s? Maybe, but he preferred to put the blame on Mario. He felt sick with jealousy at the thought of Kate and Mario together, right now.

  He was going to put on his shoes, but instead he rolled back onto the camp bed and fell into a gloomy sleep.

  David emerged from the store room to find the morning world muffled and white. A shroud of mist had drifted up from the river during the night, so that when they threw back the shutters the rooms filled with eerie mist-light, making them seem larger, cooler, more impersonal. Their footsteps were dulled on the marble floors, voices and laughter were echoey and distorted.

  No one had slept very much or very comfortably. David’s little camp bed had been one of the choicer options. After all his anxieties about who they’d paired off with, he discovered that Kate and Francesca had spent the entire night together on a couple of flat cushions; Hugo had slept between two Louis Quinze chairs which slowly parted company leaving him suspended like a human hammock between them. He woke finally when the hammock broke. David was relieved to see that there was no sign of Mario anywhere.

  The villa’s hot water gave out after the first bath. The housekeeper told them triumphantly that it would take hours for the water to get hot again. Still, the Villa Beatrice was different. This was an adventure. Angelica’s hostility only made them giggle. They stretched and yawned and warmed themselves with coffee and cigarettes.

  And then they set out to explore.

  When they arrived the previous afternoon they had noted in a haphazard sort of way that it was an interesting place, but the Villa Beatrice had been a stage-set for their party, hardly a real house at all. Now, in the chilly early morning mist-light, they saw that the house was solid and full of character, not a stage-set at all, and that it had its own very real magic. Cool, airy rooms opened onto a long terrace that overlooked the valley and the hills beyond. David was curious to know what kind of people it had been built for: wealthy merchants, perhaps, with fine clothes, or aristocrats with innumerable servants. Whoever the original occupants had been, they would have been as horrified as Angelica to see the place swarming with mud angels.

  Nursing their cups of coffee and their hangovers they wandered from one huge room to another. The furniture was sparse but enormous, the kind of pieces that David had thought only museums and houses open to the public contained. Francesca was dismissive. ‘Just the stuff that was too big to move up to La Rocca,’ she said. ‘My uncle has taken all the best bits with him.’

  Jeremy, the antique dealer’s son, tapped a gilt and marble console and said, ‘What’s left is hardly bargain basement, is it? Not an Ercol in sight.’

  David was more interested in the pictures. It hadn’t occurred to him before that ordinary people had paintings like these in their homes. Francesca’s response was puzzling: she seemed to be enjoying their interest, but played down her uncle’s collection. ‘All this is fairly second-rate,’ she said, waving a hand in the direction of a pair of s
ixteenth-century saints. ‘The good paintings are up at La Rocca too.’

  ‘But these are genuine, right?’

  ‘Of course. Why would he want to have fakes?’

  It obviously hadn’t occurred to her that some people could only afford fakes. David read the little plaque at the bottom of a small portrait. ‘Tiepolo?’ he queried.

  Francesca shrugged. ‘It’s not one of his best,’ she said.

  There was a snort of laughter from Dido, whom David knew would be making a mental note of this and filing it away under ‘Idiosyncrasies of rich friends’.

  At Kate’s insistence they trooped into a small octagonal room with no windows. Apparently it was called the camerino and was where all the most valuable paintings had been hung when Francesca’s uncle still lived full-time at Villa Beatrice. Francesca stood near the door.

  ‘What were they?’ asked Dido, running the edge of her finger along the line on the paint where a picture had been.

  ‘A couple of Veroneses, a Raphael, a Piombino… I forget the rest.’

  David let out a whistling breath. He didn’t know which was more impressive, the ones that Francesca could remember, or the fact that she’d actually forgotten some of them.

  ‘And look,’ said Kate, ‘if you shut the door, you can’t see where it is.’ She was about to demonstrate, but Francesca blocked her way.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear this room when the door’s shut. It’s so claustrophobic.’

  ‘Stand outside, then,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll show them.’

  Francesca shrugged and went out into the hallway. On an impulse, David followed. He felt more curious than ever about Francesca now that he was seeing her in the house which had obviously played such a large part in her life. The place posed more questions than it answered.

  Once the door was shut, the voices of the others were muffled, hardly audible. Francesca was visibly tense. David lit them both cigarettes and said casually, ‘I’m not too keen on small spaces either. That room’s pretty creepy, isn’t it? The sort of place Roman wives got walled up in as a penalty for being unfaithful.’

  To his surprise, Francesca turned white as a sheet and pushed the door open. ‘Come out, all of you! Come on out, that’s enough! Come out I tell you!’

  ‘What is it?’ Alerted by the hysteria in her voice, they all tumbled out at once.

  ‘I don’t like you being in there,’ said Francesca.

  They looked baffled. ‘Why not?’ asked Dido.

  ‘I just don’t.’ Francesca seemed close to tears.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Ross. ‘I thought the house was on fire.’

  They continued the tour.

  Most of the pictures were in a long gallery at the back, where the shutters were kept permanently closed to protect them. Francesca opened one or two, letting in just enough of the opaque morning light to illuminate them properly. There were murmurs of appreciation.

  ‘How did your uncle get them all? He must be fabulously rich.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Francesca simply, adding, ‘But I think he got most of them fairly cheaply. He was one of the people in Italy who did well out of the war. If you didn’t worry too much about which side you were on, there were plenty of bargains to be picked up. That’s how he got this estate, I think. He’s an unscrupulous old bastard, always was.’ There was no affection in the way she spoke about her uncle, only disgust.

  Dido had examined all the pictures in the room one by one. ‘His taste is pretty morbid, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, everyone is being tortured or raped or having their throat cut. Not a happy angel or a still-life anywhere.’

  As soon as Dido had pointed this theme out, it became a competition to see who could find the most gruesome picture.

  ‘Here’s some poor sod being barbecued,’ said Aiden.

  ‘That’s St Lawrence,’ said Francesca. And it’s a gridiron, not a barbecue. He’s the patron saint of Florence.’

  ‘Doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying himself much.’

  ‘What about these naked lovelies?’ asked Hugo. ‘They look like a troop of nudist girl guides.’

  ‘Read the title.’

  ‘Ah yes. “The Rape of the Sabine Women”.’

  ‘There’s another rape in the big room,’ said Jenny. ‘I noticed it last night.’

  ‘Ugh, here’s a woman with what looks like two jellyfish on a plate,’ said Kate. ‘Only I’ve got a horrid feeling they’re not jellyfish at all. They’re her breasts.’

  ‘That’s St Agatha,’ said Francesca.

  ‘Gor-ree!’ Anna squealed.

  But it was the painting between the two windows in the middle room that eventually won the contest, in David’s opinion. It showed a sort-of man stripped and naked and hanging upside down by his hairy legs. Several people were gathered round him and observing the proceedings with interest. One man held a knife.

  ‘“The Flaying of Marsyas”,’ Dido read. ‘Is he going to be whipped?’

  ‘No,’ said David. ‘Flaying means skinning alive.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Francesca. ‘Marsyas was a satyr who dared to set himself up in competition with the gods, and flaying was his punishment. My uncle’s got another version of it up at La Rocca. It’s a wood carving, only about as big as my fist but very detailed. It shows Marsyas bent backwards over a hurdle and they’ve already begun to take his skin off. They’ve made an incision down his chest and they’re peeling back the skin. It comes off quite easily, apparently, like peeling a tangerine.’

  And he’s still alive while they do it?’

  ‘To begin with, yes.’

  There was silence.

  Jenny said, ‘At least this picture doesn’t show it being done.’

  ‘I think that makes it worse,’ said Kate. ‘Knowing what’s about to happen. It gives me the creeps.’ She looked round at the others and caught David’s eye, before adding quietly, ‘The moment when all the horror lies ahead.’

  Chapter 24

  Vespas

  TOWARDS NOON THE MIST began to break up and sunlight shone through in patches. Aiden sat on the terrace, hunched over his guitar, and picked out a piece that sounded Spanish, and classical. He looked up gloomily when Larry and Jenny returned from a tour of the grounds. They reported that the garden was even better than the house itself, so David and a few of the others went out to explore.

  It was a garden of contrasts, made more dramatic by the grey mist that gave way suddenly to bright shafts of sunshine. David’s idea of a garden was profusion of flowers round a lawn: this one couldn’t be more different. There were no flower beds or lawns, but a series of paths and terraces, some wide, some so narrow they had to walk in single file, which were defined by various kinds of hedging and ended in either a statue or an urn, or else in a vertiginous view over the surrounding countryside. On the neighbouring hills, the mist was peeling away in patches, prompting Anna to exclaim that nature was wreathed in chiffon scarves.

  ‘That’s the trouble with you, Anna,’ said Dido. ‘No one ever knows if you’re sending yourself up or not.’

  Anna’s face got that hopeless look that David had first noticed after they’d made love, so he said, ‘I’d love to see one of your poems one day, Anna.’

  ‘Would you really?’ She seemed surprised.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I only show them when they’re good enough,’ she said proudly, before adding, ‘But none of them ever has been, yet.’

  ‘When one is, then.’

  ‘Okay.’ She drifted away.

  He felt there ought to be more connection between them, somehow. What had happened in the little box room might not have been the stuff of great romance, but something had taken place, for Christ’s sake. But apparently not enough to make Anna treat him any differently than before.

  He went off in search of Kate, finding her at the furthest end of the garden, where the dark colu
mns of cypress gave way to scrub and little trees. She was standing with Francesca on the rim of a natural amphitheatre with views over the river.

  ‘This is the most amazing place I’ve ever been in,’ she was saying to Francesca. She turned to him. ‘Don’t you agree, David? You could have a proper outdoor theatre here, all it needs is some seats carved into the hillside and it’s ready to use.’

  Francesca laughed. ‘Who would come here?’

  ‘Local people?’ asked Kate.

  Francesca gestured with her arm towards the empty hills all around. ‘You may have noticed, Kate, that we’re a bit short on neighbours here.’

  ‘Then you’d have to import people.’ Kate wasn’t giving up on her idea. ‘Run some kind of summer school, maybe fill it with people who work in Florence and want to get away for a weekend.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Yes, I’d come back here in a flash. And I bet David would too. How about it, David? Wouldn’t you like to help build an outdoor theatre here?’ He nodded, and she went on, ‘It’s criminal to let the Villa Beatrice just stand empty all the time. It ought to be full of people.’

  Francesca thought for a moment, taking Kate’s idea seriously at last, then said, ‘Maybe you could help me, Kate. We’d make this an important place, wouldn’t we? Make a total transformation.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kate grinned.

  ‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ said David. Right then, standing on the edge of the Villa Beatrice’s garden, his prospects when he went back to England seemed suffocatingly dull: he’d get his hair cut and learn the daily workings of the dry-cleaning trade. In time, inevitably, he’d make a decent living and probably settle down with a nice girl with shoulder-length hair pulled off her face in a velvet headband and at weekends he’d improve his golf and go down to his local… Did it have to be like that? Why couldn’t he stay here and help Francesca build her dreams? He looked at Kate. Her eyes were shining with enthusiasm. He knew she hated the thought of going back to the kind of mind-numbing secretarial job her parents thought was appropriate as much as he did. Suppose the two of them simply stayed here? With Francesca? They’d find a way to make a different kind of future for themselves, after all.