After a time I went out onto the loggia. A fine haze hovered across the wooded hillsides and the plain, veiling the scene with a filmy, insubstantial air. I stood, suspended in beauty, wretched and bereft, staring down at the ornate fountain and the clipped hedges of the parterre. Then I began to boil with rage.
All this should never have happened. I should have been hiking the trails of the Cascades with Gail right now. We might have reconnected with each other again under that clear sky. Instead I’d let the Brigshaw family wreck my life once more.
I was bracing myself to go downstairs when a door opened at the far end of the loggia, and Allegra stepped barefoot onto the tiles. She was wearing a white, calf-length cotton nightdress. Her hair was loose and tousled about her shoulders. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and then blinked across at me, saying, “I hope you slept better than I did.”
“I doubt it,” I answered. “I lay awake most of the night.”
“Something on your mind?”
“Lots. Too much. Mostly what a big mistake I made in coming here.”
Surprised by my tone, she said, “That seems a pity. Are we a disappointment to you then?”
“Not you.”
“Then who? My mother? It can’t be Adam – you haven’t spoken to him yet.”
“Marina’s response to me was pretty much what I expected.”
“So Gabriella then?” Her eyes subjected me to sharper scrutiny. “Did you quarrel with her last night?”
“Why would you think that?”
Allegra shrugged and gazed back at the view. “I don’t know. I just thought I picked up some sort of tension between you.”
“Perhaps because I don’t accept her at as the fount of all wisdom.”
“That sounds rather bitter! Did she get under your skin?”
“Not bitter,” I said, “merely sceptical. As I am about most aristocrats. I don’t care for the casual way she confronts people.”
After a moment she said, “But then you don’t know her very well.”
“Well enough, I think.”
“Then you should know there’s nothing at all casual about Gabriella.”
“Irresponsible then. Altogether too convinced of her own righteousness.”
“I rather think she has rattled you a bit,” Allegra smiled. “Her manner can have that effect at first. I’ve seen it happen before.”
Now it was my turn to look away. “Well, I’m sorry to disabuse you, but I can’t say it bothered me very much.”
“You’ve changed,” she said quietly. “Since last night I mean. You feel different to me. Something not good must have happened.”
“You might say that.”
“Are you going to tell me about it?”
“It’s nothing that concerns you. Nothing to do with anyone here.”
She stood, leaning on the balustrade, waiting for me to say more without demanding it.
Eventually I said, “I just picked up a message on my phone. My partner has left for the States. She made it clear she wasn’t coming back this time. It seems I’m a single man again.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said.
“We’ve been through a lot together. I wasn’t ready to let her go.”
“But it wasn’t just your choice, was it?” She held my cold stare for an instant, then gave me a wry smile. “Or perhaps it was?”
“I see you like to speak your mind. You’re like your mother in that.”
“I would hope so,” she said, then added, without looking at me, “Did she really break your heart? What happened between you and Marina?”
“I’d rather not talk about it. Anyway she’d only tell you I was lying.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because that’s what she believes. Because life is sometimes so unjust it’s more than possible for two well-intentioned people to do each other harm without either of them being wholly in the wrong.”
“You’re speaking of some sort of misunderstanding?”
“Worse than that. I’m suggesting that there may be something perverse at the very heart of the way life operates.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said firmly, and glanced away as if losing interest. “So what now? Will you be leaving today?”
“I don’t see any point in hanging around.”
“Even though Adam wants to see you?”
“I doubt that he and I have anything much to say to one another these days.”
“Are you quite sure about that?”
“Sure enough.”
“He’ll be disappointed,” Allegra said. “And I would have thought a good journalist would take more care to establish the facts of a situation before rushing to judgement. But it’s up to you.” Then she turned away with a nonchalant shrug and went back into her room.
I was left fuming at myself, frustrated once more by the trick women have of walking away as if they’ve won an argument when not a word they’ve uttered has carried any logical force. I turned back into my room and threw myself onto the bed. I closed my eyes, and was filled with the dreadful certainty that if I opened them I would see the dead body of my father lying beside me, cold as clay, not a motion of breath from his slack mouth, the flesh wasted under his cheekbones and ribs.
A sense of absolute moral defeat accumulated inside me. And then I remembered how once, many years earlier, my father and I had wrestled across the stacked bales of cotton waste in the warehouse of Bamforth Brothers’ mill. For lack of paid work elsewhere, Adam and I had been taken on among my dad’s team of casual labourers during our first long vacation. Along with a feckless old Irishman called Paddy, a tubby Polish refugee nicknamed Piggy and two young Pakistanis, Mohammed and Saleem, we’d unload the lorries when they came in, stack the bales of cotton waste in the warehouse and cart them to the mixing chambers and machine rooms as they were needed. One hot day, Adam and I had fooled around in the lunch hour, trying our strength against each other across the bales. Comical figures in our baggy blue overalls, we were wrestling in a jokey way that suddenly turned into a serious contest. But I was bigger than Adam, more solidly built, and when I came out on top, my father – who had been watching us fight – challenged me to take him on.
I tried to laugh the moment away. Retorting that I was afraid of getting beaten, he pushed at my chest. I pushed him back, and then it was as if all the years of mutual bafflement and hurt swooped down on us in the dusty arena of the warehouse, and we were struggling, each gripping the other’s hands, puffing and blowing as we moved unsteadily across the stack of stuffed tares.
I could see the resolution in the grey-green irises of his eyes, the certainty that he was strong enough to knock me over and pin me down. My back began to bend as he strained his sinews to throw me. We both tried to laugh, just once, as we swayed together there. I could feel his breath warm at my cheek, the coarse skin of his hands gripping mine, his muscles flexing. Gathering my strength, I broke free and made to turn away, wanting to put a stop to it; but he grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back again with a taunt.
We were no longer laughing as we staggered across the bales. I was inches taller than him, younger, stronger in the lungs, less worn. I had him gripped by the wrist while my bent right arm pushed at the top of his chest, just below his throat, forcing his body backwards. Quite suddenly I knew I was going to win. In the same instant I saw the light in his eyes falter. His knees buckled under him, he slipped and collapsed back onto the rough tare. I followed him down into the rising dust, pinning his hands back near his shoulders as my weight slumped across his chest. I held him down, vanquished, unable to move anything but his eyes. There was a smell of hemp sacking in my nose. White flakes of cotton clouded the air. My eyes were fixed on his. I took in the mix of pride and pathos there, and the heat of triumph surging through my body instantly expired.
When I turned away, I saw Adam staring down at us in dismay.
I had recalled that moment on the hot June afternoon of m
y father’s dying as I sat listening to the rasp of his breath beside his bed, where he lay deep in his morphine dreams, no longer aware of the raw bedsores at his back. And now it was as if his poor body was stretched at my side again, on this high Italian bed where I lay, feeling impotent and defeated. I heard a car arrive in the courtyard. A murmur of voices rose off the terrace below the loggia.
I lay there for a long time, and even as the knowledge that Gail was gone out of my life coursed through me, I knew that I was aching for Marina. Hadn’t Gail anticipated the ease and speed with which my feelings would make that shift? But was it a sign of my faithlessness or of my fidelity that they should do so? And, if the latter, which Marina was it that I ached for? The girl who had come into my bedroom at High Sugden all those years ago and listened with rapt attention to the story of the Golden Bird? Or the one I had once watched dancing to the flash of the thunderstorm on that Pennine hill outside the cattle byre? Was it the woman whose love I had finally won one night in London years later and then almost immediately lost again? Or was it the blind woman with whom I’d talked last night in the dark garden, the figure in whom all the previous Marinas were resumed, and who still, after all this time, seemed to want as little as possible to do with me and would be glad enough to see me gone?
After a time I heard a splutter of gravel outside as the car which had arrived earlier drove away. Then I heard my father’s gruff ghost growling that I couldn’t just lie on that bed for ever, that I should shape up and make a better bloody fist of things. So that was what I did.
Dressed in the clothes I had slept in, I went out onto the loggia. The voices I had heard were those of two gardeners: an old man, tanned like shoe leather, in a green apron, and his younger assistant, who was snipping with shears at the hedges of the parterre. The doors along the loggia were all closed. I found the way back down the staircase into the atrium, and saw no one. The thought occurred to me that I could just walk out to where I’d parked my car and slip away. In the circumstances it was probably the wisest thing to do, but I would have despised myself for doing it.
I stepped into the courtyard at the back of the house. That too was deserted, but as I crossed the terrace the sound of voices lifted from the lower level beyond the boxwood hedge. The women were down by the pool. I heard Marina’s voice, and then Allegra’s. I stopped in my tracks. All my earlier anger had evaporated, leaving a sediment of grief for everything that had gone wrong in our lives, a grief that threatened to overwhelm me when I thought again of Marina’s blindness amid this blaze of morning light. Unready to face her yet, I decided to walk round the courtyard before going down to the pool.
The path took me along the pergola, past the boxwood screen towards the shady tunnel in the centre of the rear wall. Under the small, railed balcony that looked down from a door above the arched entrance, an iron gate now stood open.
My footsteps echoed in the vault. At its far end the tunnel narrowed to a damp, encrusted grotto with a grating let into the floor. To the left the carved-stone figure of a brawny satyr held a nymph in his embrace. Both of them brandished full wineskins. On the right, a Nereid proffered a conch shell, while her Triton-like lover carried a fat dolphin. The figures were open-mouthed and bare-breasted, their gaze less riotous than lewd, as they pointed the way through to what lay beyond.
I came out into a sunlit place more like a Jacobean stage set than a secret garden. Ahead of me lay the straight edge of a marble pool, in which golden carp were swimming. The far side of the pool followed the same elliptical curve as a high, elaborately ornamented façade. Two muscular wild men supported a dark archway at its centre. At either side the wall was carved into niches, each housing a smaller nymph-like figure. Birds, animals and grotesque masks were festooned in the panels between. Above them, on the moulded entablature and tympanum, men in armour sported with garlanded women, while at the apex of the pediment stood a single, meditative statue of ambiguous gender. The wooded hillside rose steeply behind the wall, looming so close that it seemed the arch could open only onto a thin recess. Yet as I stood gazing at this fantasy of the baroque imagination, I heard a door thud shut in there, and Gabriella stepped out into the light. She was followed by Orazio and a bare-chested workman in oil-stained jeans. All three stopped in surprise to see me standing by the pool.
Gabriella turned and muttered something to her servants, who immediately came either way around the marble edge of the pool to brush past me with a nod as they entered the tunnel. Gabriella remained centre stage at the far side of the pool, as though guarding that dark entrance. Her reflection swayed and fractured in the bright water.
“I came to say goodbye,” I said, “and to thank you for your hospitality.”
“You are leaving?”
“I’ve done what I came to do.”
“And you will not wait for Marina?”
“If she really wants to see Hal, I think Allegra should take her. My presence would only complicate things.”
Gabriella nodded. “But you have not yet seen Adam.”
“I’d only disappoint him,” I answered. “As no doubt I’ve disappointed you.”
Her shoulders gave a little shrug. “I have no such feelings.”
“How is Adam, by the way?” I asked.
“He is resting still. Dottor Galletti has seen him, and is not concerned.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Perhaps you’ll remember me to him.”
“I don’t think he forgets. He will come down soon. You will not wait for him?”
“I think it’s better if I just go.”
Nodding again, she said, “You have read what he has written?”
“Yes, I read it.”
“Ah!” she said. “And that is why you are leaving? Very well. I understand.” She gestured to the stone extravaganza at her back. “So you will miss to see the operations of my teatro d’acqua after all.”
“Another time perhaps.”
“No, I don’t think so. Such things are offered once only.” She drew in her breath, shook her head. “And Marina? Allegra? You have said goodbye to them?”
I watched the water light flicker over the reddish-gold back of a carp. “I wonder if you might do that for me.”
Gabriella gave a small derisory laugh. “Marina said that you have betrayed her hopes for you before, and that you would do so again.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” I said. “But it doesn’t much matter now.”
“No,” she agreed. “So you will carry your heavy ghost back to your young American innamorata. What a shame you are afraid of us, Mr Crowther! You who are not afraid of bombs and guns and wicked men.”
“I’m afraid of them all right,” I said. “But of you? No, I don’t think so.”
“Oh yes,” she smiled. “I think it is perhaps because I chose to show you my scales.”
“I think I made a mistake coming here at all.” Then I added, “But I shall remember you, Contessa, with a rather weird sort of pleasure.”
“I shall remember you too, Mr Crowther, as a meschino who might have been something more. Go then. I will speak to the others for you. I wish you well. Goodbye.”
Sick at heart, I drove to the cottage, threw my things into the grip, stopped to look at Marina’s frescoes for the last time, and then locked the door behind me. Franco Gamboni and his brother stood in the track watching me place the key under the flowerpot. Their dog panted beside them.
“Ci vediamo presto, Signor Martin,” Franco said, and then asked me a question.
“Inghilterra,” I answered speculatively.
“Arrivederci allora,” he said solemnly, watching me climb into the car.
I waved and started the engine. He felt like the one friend I’d made in Italy. As I reversed to the junction, the dog danced round my wheels, barking.
I made a left at the shrine, and was adjusting the sun visor above the wheel when I saw a habited figure waving as he ran down the lane from the convento.
“Signor C
rowther,” Fra Pietro called. “Aspetti! Un momento, please.”
Reluctantly I braked. He stood panting at the window of the car. “There has been a telephone call,” he said. “From the villa.”
“I’ve said my goodbyes.”
“But not to Adam, I think. He has given me a message for you. He said… un momento… I have written his words here.” Fra Pietro opened the scrap of paper in his fist. “Dog Fox got it wrong,” he read. “I got it wrong with less reason. Forgive me. Let’s talk.” The monk peered at me. “You will understand this, I think?”
“Does anybody understand Adam?” I said after a time.
Fra Pietro shrugged. “God understands him.”
“Which god, Fra Pietro?”
The friar gave me a worried frown, then said, “God, Signor Crowther. There is only the one God.”
“Not in Adam’s world.” I smiled at the friar’s perplexity. “You were more right than you think when you called him a fool.”
Fra Pietro shook his head and said, “But you will talk with him as he asks?”
I reached for the handbrake. “Just give him my regards.”
In my rear-view mirror I saw him bless the swirl of dust left in my wake.
*
I could have been gone, clear of it all, high on the far side of the clouds, had I not seen the sign that said “Fonti del Clitunno”. Even then I might have ignored it, but in my current state the sign also said, “Check me out. Satisfy your curiosity. You have nowhere else to go right now.”
A few day-trippers wandered the springs under the afternoon sun. The sky had a murky brown cast to it where clouds were piling up for a storm somewhere to the east, yet the air around me felt kindly and serene. I watched people fishing in the trout tanks for a time. Then I went to look at the bubble-blowing naiad carved in relief on the monument to the poet Giosuè Carducci. Eventually I decided to do what it seemed I had come to do. Settling for a quiet place on the bank, I looked down into the eyes of the spring.
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