The Savage Garden

by Mark Mills

  She did almost nothing; she just let him grow there in the moist warmth of her mouth, the palms of her hands resting gently against his thighs.

  Then her mouth was gone and she was standing once more, turning her back to him.

  He slid the zipper down and eased the dress from her shoulders until it fell and gathered in a heap at her ankles. She didn't step free of it until he had released the clasp of her bra.

  She beat him to the panties, bending to remove them, before turning once more to face him. She was breathing hard now, and she gripped him firmly in her hand as they locked mouths again, her tongue stabbing at his this time.

  Without warning, she pushed him back onto the bed and was astride him before he had time to shuffle himself neatly to the middle of the mattress. Her pelvis pressing against his hardness, her hair dense, abrasive, already damp.

  She cupped a hand behind his neck and drew his head off the bed, guiding his mouth to her breasts.

  She arched low, pressing her lips to his ear. "This is our secret," she whispered. "You understand?"

  He grunted.

  She removed her nipple from his mouth. "Do you understand?"

  "Yes."

  She forced him back onto the mattress. There was nothing he wanted more than to enter her there and then, but she wasn't having it, not yet.

  She edged her way up his body until her purpose was plain. Seizing the iron rail at the head of the bed to steady herself, she straddled his face and lowered herself toward him.

  TO ANYONE WHO DIDN'T KNOW, THERE WAS NOTHING IN their behavior to betray what had passed between them. The elderly Roman couple—the only other residents of the pensione still at their breakfast when Adam headed downstairs—smiled at him politely, as they had done for the past few mornings. No evidence there that Signora Fanelli had shared with them the details of her nocturnal romp with the Englishman. In fact, no evidence at all that it had ever occurred.

  It was only when she brought him his coffee that he detected something. She stood a fraction closer to him than she usually did when placing the cup and saucer on the table.

  He lingered over his breakfast in the hope that a private moment would present itself, an opportunity to at least acknowledge their steamy encounter. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't slipped from his bed while he was sleeping. His last memory had been of her astride him, exhorting him with words he didn't understand, the crucifix swinging at her neck, brushing his chest. That second time had done for him almost immediately. Had he even held her afterward? He hoped he had.

  The Romans finally pottered off, and when Signora Fanelli reappeared from the kitchen, she asked breezily, "Another cappuccino?

  "Thank you."

  The countertop coffee machine coughed and sputtered and hissed ominously. Adam pushed back his chair and strolled over.

  "Did you sleep well?" she asked.

  It sounded suspiciously like a dig.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "Why?"

  "I fell asleep."

  She fired a furtive glance at the door to the kitchen. "That was my intention. I have a business to run here. I also need my sleep." There was a pleasing edge of irony to her voice.

  Steam from a slender nozzle blasted some milk in a battered tin jug.

  "Eight years," she said, under cover of the racket. "Since I made love."

  "It's a long time."

  She twisted the tap closed and looked up at him. "It was worth the wait."

  "It was very special. No, incredible." He hoped she could see from his face that he wasn't being polite. She had taken him to a place he'd never been before.

  At that moment Iacopo entered from the terrace, breathless from running. Adam was probably wrong to detect something knowing in the boy's look.

  "Well?" asked his mother.

  "He's leaving in twenty minutes." "Signore Carnesecchi," she explained, turning to Adam. "He's going down into Florence."

  She was ahead of him, looking out for him. He'd told her he needed to send money to Harry.

  Iacopo passed by them, out of the room.

  "No one must ever know," she said.

  "I understand."

  "I live here. You don't. That's why it happened."

  There must have been something injured in his expression, because when she slid the cup of coffee across the counter she gave his hand a brief and stealthy squeeze.

  "Well, not the only reason."

  Signore Carnesecchi made a living from fruit and vegetables, which was mildly amusing. His surname translated as "dried meats."

  His wife and son were traveling with him to the market in Florence. They rode in the cab of the old open-sided truck while Adam squeezed in with the crates stacked in the back.

  Tomatoes predominated, with beans running a close second. Judging from the smell, there was also a batch of strawberries buried away somewhere. It was a bumpy but fragrant journey down out of the hills.

  Bouncing around on the boards, watching the world receding behind him, Adam caught himself in a flush of pride. Was it trivial that a beautiful woman had wanted him? He suspected it was. Was it immature and vindictive to imagine Gloria getting wind of the encounter? Certainly. But sitting there in the back of the truck, the sun warming his face, it felt good, he felt alive. And he hadn't felt alive for quite some while, he now realized.

  Eight years since she last made love—that's what she had said— which meant that he wasn't the first person she'd given herself to since the death of her husband. Araldo had been killed in 1945, right at the end of the war. Adam knew this because he had asked her while they were lying damp and entwined after their first bout on the mattress.

  It was a grim tale, which made her willingness to share it with him all the more touching. Araldo had been a victim of the bloodletting that followed the liberation of Italy by the Allies—an uncertain and anarchic time when many were held to account for their actions during the German occupation. If she knew the exact details, she didn't share them with him. She spoke vaguely of an accusation leveled against her husband. The word "collaboration" wasn't mentioned, but she did hint at an incident that had resulted in the arrest and execution of two local partisans by the Germans.

  She was more specific when it came to the details of what subsequently happened. Araldo left the house one morning for Impruneta, where he worked as a stonemason. He never arrived. They dragged him from his car on a quiet country road and put three bullets in his head.

  Who "they" were, she didn't know for sure, although she had her suspicions. A name sprang to Adam's mind too. Fortunately, it was the wrong name.

  Fausto had played no part in Araldo's death, she went on, of that she was fairly sure. He had shown his face at the funeral. A number of his comrades-in-arms hadn't.

  "You can't know a man—I mean you can't really know a man—unless you've known him as a child. I've known Fausto all my life, since we were babies in our mothers' arms. If I thought for one moment he'd had anything to do with it, or even that he knew it was going to happen and did nothing . . . well, I think I would have killed him by now."

  Sitting there in the back of the truck, this was a shocking and sobering statement to recall. At the time, however, it had exerted a strangely aphrodisiacal effect.

  The warehouse was a low steel-and-concrete structure in the San Lorenzo district of Florence. The streets around it were thronging with people. They parted like a bow wave before a boat, closing in again behind the truck. Most ignored him sitting there among the crates; some waved. A knot of grubby children made obscene gestures. When he returned them, he was pelted with stones snatched from the gutter.

  He helped unload the crates, then turned down Signore Carnesecchi's offer of a ride back to San Casciano in an hour's time. He said he'd make his own way back.

  The city was in the grip of a stifling heat, and he baked himself for a while on the terrace of a cafe in Piazza della Signoria, the tourists pouring past him in weary droves. He dro
pped off two rolls of film at a photographic shop on Piazza Repubblica and parted with some of the money in his pocket for a crude straw hat and a pair of sunglasses—purchases that might have felt extravagant if the cash hadn't been destined for Harry. God only knew what he would spend it on.

  There was no line worth speaking of at the American Express office. The counter clerk relieved him of his bundle of notes and, when questioned, pointed him in the direction of a reputable bookshop.

  They didn't have an English language edition of The Divine

  Comedy, but a long walk and four hundred lire later he was the proud owner of a battered translation by Dorothy L. Sayers.

  He toyed with the idea of settling down with it in some shady corner of the Boboli Gardens, or of visiting one of the many museums, galleries and churches on his list. They were idle thoughts, though. He knew where he was really headed.

  He had logged and stored away the name of the fashion house, as well as the district in which it was located. More than that, Antonella hadn't revealed to him. It proved to be enough. A newspaper vendor in Piazza Santa Croce directed him to the street and the building.

  It was a large crumbling palazzo. Adam stepped through a small door set in towering wooden gates and found himself in a generous courtyard open to the heavens. It was a world apart, sealed off, immune to the amplified din of the cars and scooters in the narrow street outside. You could even hear the soft fall of water in the fountain. There were other sounds too, snatches of activity drifting through the open windows around the courtyard: the staccato beat of a typewriter, someone answering a phone, the scrape of a chair against a stone floor. If the brass plaques attached to the wall outside were anything to go by, the building was home to a number of businesses.

  The fashion house where Antonella worked occupied the entire north wing of the palazzo, although you wouldn't have known it from the ground floor reception area. Cool and cavernous, it was also completely anonymous—no company name in sight, no products on show. A handful of modern leather chairs served as a small seating area, and an ornate rococo desk dwarfed the already petite receptionist behind it.

  The rubber soles of his shoes squeaked painfully on the tiled floor as he made his way over. She only looked up from her magazine when the noise ceased at her desk. She studied him with some interest, but seemed to find little to repay her curiosity. When he asked to see Antonella, her manner grew more obliging. She straightened in her chair, requested his name and reached for the phone.

  Adam cast an eye around him while he waited. The decor was a self-conscious blend of old and new. The chrome chandelier hanging from the high, beamed ceiling was positively futuristic, and there was an abstract metal sculpture bolted to the wall behind the receptionist's desk—a large circular monstrosity, some five or six feet in diameter, consisting of shards of steel welded together haphazardly. It would have had Harry in raptures.

  "Adam . . ."

  Antonella appeared at the foot of the stone staircase. She was wearing a navy blue linen dress that hugged her slender figure. Approaching, she kissed him on both cheeks.

  "Nice hat."

  "All the rage this season, or didn't you know?"

  She smiled. "I'm surprised."

  "Me too. I wasn't sure I had the right place."

  She glanced around her. "Umberto thinks it's good for business. He says it's—how do you say?—enigmatic. The rest is not like this. Come, I'll show you. Do you have time?"

  "I'm not disturbing you?"

  She dismissed the question with a wag of the hand.

  Adam thanked the receptionist as he passed by. "Don't mention it, sir," she replied sweetly, keen to win favor with Antonella.

  She wasn't the only one.

  The cutters and seamstresses toiling in the run of rooms upstairs all greeted her warmly. It didn't surprise him that she was liked, but she seemed to command a respect way beyond her years. The reason became clear when she pushed open yet another door.

  "And this is where I work," she announced. "It's very messy."

  Two windows, half-shuttered against the sunlight, overlooked the courtyard. There was a desk, some low bookcases, as well as a large workbench that filled the center of the room. She was right. Every available surface was loaded with clutter: piles of sketches, samples of cloth and leather, pots of pens and brushes, empty cups and overflowing ashtrays.

  "I want to say it's not normally like this."

  The only remotely clear area was an architect's drawing board against the wall, and maybe only then because it offered an angled surface. There was a half-finished drawing taped to it, a color sketch of a leather handbag. It was quite unlike any other handbag Adam had ever seen.

  "It's our new thing. Umberto wants us to do accessories—bags, belts, scarves, maybe even shoes."

  The walls were papered with more sketches, dresses mostly. They had loose, flowing lines, and all were cut from the distinctive cloths that were clearly the hallmark of the company: bold geometric designs in vivid colors. They were the same dresses Adam had witnessed taking life next door.

  "Does Umberto do anything around here?" he asked.

  "Umberto is a genius. I am only his hands." There was no trace of false modesty in her words. "I would introduce you but he's not here now."

  "Out with the Americans?"

  "Ah, you've spoken to my grandmother. Then you will know that she does not approve of what I do."

  "Has she seen it for herself?"

  Antonella seemed amused by the idea. "She thinks all fashion is trivial, which of course it is. But she doesn't understand that it can also bring pleasure." She picked up some material from the workbench. "Here."

  Only when he took it from her did he realize it was a piece of suede, as soft as silk.

  "Imagine that against your skin," she said. "Imagine a skirt made of it."

  "That might be asking a bit too much."

  She laughed and took the suede from him. "When are you moving in—to the villa, I mean?"

  "She told you?"

  "Of course."

  "Tomorrow."

  "You don't have to."

  He hesitated. "You think it's a bad idea?"

  "I think I haven't seen my grandmother so alive for a long time. But it doesn't mean you have to, just because she asked. She can be very ...prepotente."

  "Overbearing?"

  "I don't know the word, but it sounds right."

  "I want to," said Adam. "It's good for work, I'm near the garden, the library's right there. . . ."

  "And is this work?"

  She reached for his copy of The Divine Comedy, which he'd abandoned on the work bench.

  "No," he lied, "just never read it before."

  It was her idea that they sneak off for lunch. Beneath the trees in a small piazza around the corner, they shared a carafe of Chianti and a thick slab of bistecca alla fiorentina done with a light hand.

  The restaurant owner fussed around Antonella as if she were a long-lost daughter.

  Adam filled her in on Harry's predicament, which had brought him down into town at short notice.

  "When does he arrive?"

  "God knows. Maybe never. As soon as he gets his hands on the money, anything could happen."

  "But you want him to come or you would have told him not to."

  "I suppose," he said, surprised that it was so apparent to her.

  Her own brother, Edoardo, sounded like an altogether different character—levelheaded, responsible and reliable. "I don't know where he gets it, but he is proof that two negatives can make a positive."

  "And you?" asked Adam.

  "Me? Oh, I'm not easy."

  "What's your worst characteristic?" asked the Chianti.

  She thought on it. "My temper."

  "Really? I don't see it."

  "Pray you never do."

  Adam laughed.

  "So?" she asked. "Quid pro quo—your worst characteristic."

  "An uncompromising sense of justice. It
gets me into all kinds of scrapes."

  "Very funny."

  "Jealousy."

  "Jealousy?"

  "Yes."

  "Of what?"

  "I don't know. Everything. Other people's success. My girlfriend's old boyfriends. It's very mean-spirited of me, I know." "You have a girlfriend?"

  There was a satisfying note of forced indifference in the question. It suggested that the answer mattered to her. He was glad to be able to say, "Not anymore."

  "What happened?"

  "I'm not quite sure."

  He tried his best to explain, though, raking over the dead embers of his relationship with Gloria.

  When he was done, Antonella said, "I don't like the sound of her."

  "I should hope not. I've painted the blackest picture I can."

  The couple at the next table turned and stared when she laughed.

  Have you finished?

  Yes.

  So, Doctor, your prognosis?

  Your reactions seem fine. Your leg muscles are still very weak, though, from lack of use. You really shouldn't move around unassisted. There's a danger you'll fall.

  And the pain?

  The tablets I gave you before should help.

  They did.

  You've finished them already?

  Something a bit stronger might be better.

  I'm not sure that's ... advisable.

  My son is coming to dinner this evening, to finalize the details of the party. You did get an invitation, didn't you?

  Yes, Signora, and my wife replied promptly. We are always honored to be invited.

  Call me a foolish old woman, Doctor, but I wish to be on my feet when I greet Maurizio at the door this evening. And as I say, the pain can be really quite unbearable at times.

  I understand.

  It shall be our secret. I wouldn't want to worry anyone. I'll return this afternoon with something a little more... appropriate. Cheer up, Doctor. At Christmas your patient was at death's door, and now she's on her feet.

  IT WAS ANTONELLA'S IDEA THAT ADAM KICK HIS HEELS for a couple of hours after their lunch. What with it being a Friday, she could break early from work and run him back to San Casciano. Piazzale Michelangelo was the designated pick-up point because it lay on her route out of town. The large, sweeping terrace sat on the hillside south of the river, offering a panoramic view over Florence, the terra-cotta roofscape breaking like a muddy sea around the towers, domes and spires.