The Savage Garden (2 page)

    The note was waiting for him in his pigeonhole when he returned to college. He recognized the handwriting immediately. It was the same barely legible scrawl that adorned his weekly essays. The note read:

    Dear Mr. Strickland,

    Apologies for making this demand upon your busy schedule, but there is a matter I should like to discuss with you regarding your thesis.

    Shall we say 5 p.m. today in my office at the faculty? (That's the large stone building at the end of Trumpington Street, in case you've forgotten.)

    Warm regards,

    Professor Leonard

    Adam glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes to get across town. The bath would have to wait.

    Professor Crispin Leonard was something of an institution, not just within the faculty but the university as a whole. Although well into his seventies, he was quite unlike his elderly peers, who only emerged from their gloomy college rooms at mealtimes, or so it seemed, shuffling in their threadbare gowns to and from the dining hall, across velvet lawns whose sacred turf it was their privilege to tread. Few knew what these aged characters did (or had ever done) to justify the sinecure of a college fellowship. Authorship of a book, one book, any book, appeared to suffice, even if the value of that work had long since been eclipsed. For whatever reason, they were deemed to have paid their dues, and in return the colleges offered them a comfortable dotage unencumbered by responsibilities.

    Professor Leonard was cut from a far tougher cloth. He lectured and supervised in three subjects, he continued to offer his services as a college tutor, and he remained involved in a number of societies, some of which he had also founded. And all this while still finding time not only to write but to be published. By any standards it was a remarkable workload, and one he appeared to shoulder quite effortlessly.

    How did he manage it? He never hurried and was never late; he just loped about like a well-fed cat, giving off an air of slight distraction, as if his mind was always on higher things.

    He was deep in slumber when Adam entered his office. The first knock didn't rouse him, and when Adam poked his head around the door and saw him slumped in an armchair, a book on his lap, he knocked again, louder this time.

    Professor Leonard stirred, taking his bearings, taking in Adam. "I'm sorry, I must have nodded off." He closed the book and laid it aside. Adam noted that it was one of the professor's own works, on the sculpture of Mantegna.

    "No court in the land would convict you."

    Professor Leonard invited irreverence, he actively encouraged it, but for a moment Adam feared he had overstepped the mark.

    "That might be funnier, Mr. Strickland, if you'd ever bothered to read my book on Mantegna. Which reminds me—how
is
your serve?"

    "Excuse me?"

    "Well, the last time I saw you, you were cycling down King's Parade in something of a hurry. You were gripping two tennis rackets, and the young lady riding sidesaddle was gripping you." "Oh."

    "Has it improved?"

    "Improved?"

    "Your serve, Mr. Strickland. We would all feel so much happier if you at least had something else to show for your absence."

    "I work hard," bleated Adam, "I work late."

    Professor Leonard reached for some papers stacked on the side table next to his chair. "Since you're here you might as well take this now." He flipped through the pile and pulled out Adam's essay. "I probably marked you lower than I should have done."

    "Oh," said Adam, a little put out.

    "Thinking about it, you might have had more of a point than I credited you with at first."

    "Which point was that?"

    "Don't flatter yourself, Mr. Strickland. To my knowledge—and I read it twice—you only made one point. The others were lifted straight from the books I suggested you read." He raised a long, bony finger. "And some I didn't suggest. . . which, I grant you, displays more initiative than most."

    He handed the essay over.

    "We'll discuss it at greater length another time. Now, your thesis. Have you had any further thoughts?"

    Adam had flirted with a couple of ideas—Islamic iconography in Romanesque architecture, the use of line in early Renaissance drawing—but the professor would recognize them for what they were: lazy speculations on some well-trodden fields of study. No, best to keep quiet.

    "Not really."

    "You still have a year, of course, but it's advisable to start applying yourself now, certainly if you wish to show us something of your true colors. Do you, Mr. Strickland?"

    "Yes," said Adam. "Of course."

    "How's your Italian?"

    "Okay. Rusty."

    "Good, then I might have something for you."

    The professor explained that he had recently been contacted by an old acquaintance of his. Signora Docci, the lady in question, was the owner of a large villa in the hills of Tuscany, just south of Florence. "An impressive, if somewhat pedestrian, example of High Renaissance Tuscan vernacular," was how the professor described the architecture of the building. He saved his praise for the garden, not the formal arrangement of Renaissance terraces abutting the villa, but a later Mannerist addition occupying a sunken grove nearby. Conceived and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, this plunging patch of woodland was fed by a spring and modeled on Roman gardens of the period, with meandering pathways and rills, statues, inscriptions and neoclassical structures.

    "It's a very unusual place," the professor said. "Extremely arresting."

    "You know it?"

    "I did, some years ago. It has never been altered—that's rare— and I know for a fact that no proper study has ever been conducted of it. Which is where you come in, if you want to, that is. Signora Docci has kindly offered it as a subject for one of my students."

    Mannerist was bad, a little too overblown for Adam's taste, and he'd have to do a lot of reading up. Italy, on the other hand, was good, very good.

    "Maybe a garden isn't quite what you had in mind, but don't dismiss it. . . . Art and Nature coming together to create a whole new entity—a third nature, if you will."

    Adam didn't require any more encouragement. "Yes," he said. "Yes, please."

    EXAMS WERE UPON THEM BEFORE THEY KNEW IT, AND gone just as quickly. They celebrated, got drunk, punted off to Grantchester with picnics, danced at college balls and hurled themselves fully clothed into the river—memories irreparably tarnished for Adam by Gloria's decision to end their relationship on the last night of the term. The situation was nonnegotiable and, true to character, Gloria made no attempt to feign a remorse she clearly didn't feel. She did manage, however, to offer him one scrap of consolation: as he would no longer be coming to stay at her family's pile in Scotland, he would be spared the maddening attentions of the summer midges.

    "Cattle have been known to hurl themselves off cliffs because of the midges." These were her last words to him before he stormed out on her, slamming the door behind him.

    The following day everyone trickled off back to their real lives. For Adam, this was a faceless suburb to the south of London, and a Tudor-style villa with Elizabethan yearnings. Thrown up just after the war, the house only existed because a German air crew had taken one look at the lethal hail of flak over the city and promptly jettisoned their payload before running for home.

    Adam and his brother had once dug a trench at the end of the garden—the first line of defense against invasion by some imagined enemy force—only to find themselves unearthing the remains of the terraced houses that had previously occupied the plot. Harry had taken those fragments of brick and tile and glass, sinking them in plaster of Paris, producing a mosaic in the shape of a house: the first telltale sign of his calling that Adam could recall.

    Adam searched out old friends from the neighborhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag and Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth—that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.

    His mother was delighted to have him home and keen to show it, which usually meant she was unhappy. Whenever she smothered him with affection, he had the uneasy sensation she was using him as a rod with which to beat his father: You see what you're missing out on? His father was more withdrawn than ever, and not best pleased. He had wanted Adam to give the summer over to work experience—a placement with an acquaintance of his at the Baltic Exchange. It was a wise thing to develop a working knowledge of the Baltic Exchange before a career in marine insurance at Lloyd's. It was a wise thing to do, because that's exactly what he himself had done. In the end, though, he conceded defeat.

    The arrangements had gone without a hitch: a letter to Signora Docci, her reply (typed and in impeccable English) saying that she had secured a room for him at a
pensione
in the local town. Aside from rustling up a bit of funding for Adam from within the History of Art Department, Professor Leonard had not needed to involve himself. He did, however, suggest that Adam meet up with him in town before leaving for the Continent.

    The proposed venue was a grand stone building close by Cannon Street station in the city. Adam had never heard of the Worshipful Company of Skinners, although he wasn't unduly surprised to discover that the professor was associated with a medieval guild whose history reached back seven centuries. They passed through paneled chambers en route to the roof terrace, where they took lunch beneath an even layer of cloud like a moth-eaten blanket, the sun slanting through at intervals and picking out patches of the city.

    They ate beef off the bone and drank claret.

    The professor had come armed with a bundle of books and articles for Adam's mental edification.

    "Read these right through," he said, handing over copies of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
and
Fasti.
"The rest are for reference purposes. You'll find the family has an impressive library, which I'm sure you'll be given access to." The professor was reluctant to say any more about the garden—"You don't want me coloring your judgment"—although he was happy to share some other background with Adam.

    Signora Docci lived alone at Villa Docci, her husband having died some years before. Her eldest son, Emilio, was also dead, killed toward the end of the war by the Germans who had occupied the villa. There was another son, Maurizio, soon to take over the estate, as well as a dissolute daughter, Caterina, who now lived in Rome.

    The rest of lunch was spent talking about the professor's imminent trip to France. He was off to view the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux—his third visit since their chance discovery by a group of local boys back in 1940. He recalled his frustration at having to wait five years for the war to end before making his first pilgrimage. Thirteen years on, he felt it was now possible to trace the influence of that primitive imagery on the work of contemporary artists. In fact, it was to be the subject of an article, and possibly even a book.

    "Europe's greatest living painters drawing inspiration from its oldest known painters, seventeen thousand years on. If that isn't art history, I don't know what is."

    "No."

    "You don't have to humor me, you know."

    "Of course I do," said Adam. "You're buying lunch."

    Later, when they parted company out on the street, the professor said, "Francesca . . . Signora Docci.. . she's old now, and frail by all accounts. But don't underestimate her."

    "What do you mean?"

    Professor Leonard hesitated, glancing off down the street. "I'm not sure I rightly know, but it's sound advice."