The Whirling Girl (25 page)

Under the Earth They Began to Sing

TARQUINIA! THE CITY OF the painted tombs. The place that had shimmered on the edge of Clare's imagination all her life, and doubly so since she'd begun imagining what might lie under her own meadow's hilly mounds. Tarquinia, where the little tombs had brilliant frescoed walls showing scenes of banquets, music, dance and sport, of love and death and the afterlife, scenes portraying the Etruscans — the wealthy ones at least — as they had lived through their predestined generations, in opulence and splendour, under the shadow of the knowledge of their numbered days.

Luke had thought he could persuade her not to go along with him?

When they both cooled down, he tried to convince her that of course he'd been going to tell her of his plan. The reason he didn't want her along was that the world of Etruscology was such a small one. Everyone would know she was Kane's niece. The eyes of the
clandestini
were everywhere.

“Think about what happened with old Lerici,” he said.

“Who?”

Carlo Lerici, he said. “A retired industrialist back in the 1950s, who invented a way to discover which humps and hillocks actually contained unrifled tombs. Before long, everywhere Lerici's little scientific entourage went the hills were alive with wandering shepherds, and bingo — a rash of looted tombs.”

“I don't think I'd exactly attract that much attention.”

“Don't kid yourself that you're indistinct.”

The purpose of his subterfuge, he insisted, was to provide her, as owner of the land, an opportunity to assess whether her property did harbour anything worth exploring, without at present disturbing either the land or the authorities. Because she should understand that when it came to digging ruins, everything belonged to the State. Naturally, if anything significant came to light, he would make sure they called in the proper authorities right away — and the police too, he said, to provide protection. But it was smart to get a look at how the land lay, “before we get buggered up in the great Italian bureaucratic mire!”

He talked, as he gathered up his clothes, still imagining he'd be going on his own.

She went into the kitchen and cut eyeholes out of a plastic shopping bag, pulled it over her head, tied it round her neck with a string. He was bending over a map when she came back.

“Time for me to get moving,” he said, without looking up.

“Great. I'm ready. If I'm travelling incognito, I figure this should work.”

DRIVING TOO FAST AND in silence, Luke threaded the tiny lanes at the bottom of the hill, took the road towards Ossaia, turned on the radio. The song she'd heard that night with Gianni began to play. She reached over and turned it off. They branched across the plain towards Montepulciano, took a long diagonal under that city's walls, then around many further curves; past woods and upland meadows dotted with fluffy sheep; past Pienza, designed by a Renaissance pope; past San Quirico, careening through countryside that offered such heart-lifting vistas that finally Clare couldn't keep up her side of the huff any longer.

“What exactly is this equipment we're going after?” she asked. “How does it work?”

In that superior tone of his, he said that his contact was rounding up instruments that “utilized several different modalities.”

“Like what?”

Magnetic survey, he said. Perhaps some old-fashioned resistivity. Maybe a spot of GPR. It was technical.

“I'm pretty technical, too.”

“Hmmm.” The big hand lifting from the wheel. The snake ring glinting. The hand hesitating, then settling hopefully on her thigh. “I noticed.”

“You don't know anything about me.”

“I know what I like.”

The sky was blue. Another castled town popped up on the horizon. They were going to the sea.

They raced through a landscape that kept changing every few miles, scenes now tidy and ordered, now wild. They crested a ridge. Lake Bolsena lay below, a lapis oval set in a ring of hills and woods and golden cliffs. Luke said he knew a small hotel there where they would spend the night. She pictured a room with a balcony, bougainvillea, dinner under the stars. Finally they swung off onto a much quieter road, a straight white country road where ripening wheat glittered under rows of olive trees, the land sloping down to the distant sea, hazy, purple-blue. Tarquinia appeared ahead on a rise: massed buildings, a spire. In a field on the outskirts were many narrow tile-roofed huts, like rows of garden sheds. This was the famous necropolis, Luke said; those were the tombs. The huts were to protect the stairways leading down.

“Ah, and there's Cerotti. Bang on time.”

“You don't mean
Vittorio
Cerotti! Luisa di Varinieri's husband?”

“Who else?”

So the august inspector of archaeology himself was Luke's mysterious contact — now waiting to put Luke in touch with some unnamed person who was supplying the exploration equipment?

Cerotti did not look in the least perturbed to have Clare turn up. Perhaps the need for secrecy was all in Luke's mind, the prying eyes of the
clandestini
too.

VITTORIO OFFERED TO SHOW her around the necropolis until it was time to go along and meet the anonymous supplier.

“First I will introduce you to a
tomba
that reflects a period late in the history,” he said, leading them down steep stone steps. “This will illustrate the sense of fatalism and despair that was felt at the time of imminent collapse of the culture.”

The air became clammy, warmer. He paused, turned back.

“But you will imagine the surprise that greeted the rediscovery of these paintings. Our Etruscans for centuries so silent, their cities vanished, their cemeteries the haunt of wandering shepherds. Yet suddenly, these long-dead people from underneath the earth began to sing!” He flung out his arms, as if about to conduct a choir.

At the bottom of the steps, they were brought up short by a heavy pane of glass; it was necessary protection, for just the breath of observers could cause damage to the painted walls. Vittorio pressed a switch. He pointed out a figure with a bearded profile not unlike his own.

“Here we see Charun with his large hammer persuading the dead man to go through the door to the underworld, helped by his friend the blue demon with the snakes. The snakes also have beards.”

He added that he had recently, in
Studii Etruschi
, published an article about those bearded snakes.

On the frescoed walls much of the paint had peeled away, yet the effect was eerily brilliant, the rotting green of the hook-nosed Charun, the virulent blue of the demon in a toga that was the rusty red of clotting blood, the spotted serpents coiled around his arms. Easy to imagine the awe this would have caused by torchlight as a procession entered to lay out another family member on one of the stone beds already holding the remains of others, those uncanny brilliant figures flickering in the torchlight. Clare peered in fascination, but Luke glanced at his watch, worried about the appointment with the still-mysterious supplier. Vittorio was happy to answer Clare's questions though, and to expound at length about the pigments the painters would have used: the dark tones derived from oxides, by-products of mining activities in the Tolfa hills, and blues in part from copper (a recipe lost since Roman times), the greens from malachite. The paints, he emphasized, would have been very expensive, very rare.

When they emerged, he turned on Clare fiercely. “When you write of our Etruscan use of colour,” he said, “you must understand it was linked with prestige and status in the eyes of the people. It is important to state how the colours themselves have been used politically, as symbols to express power.”

“What was that all about?” Clare whispered, as Vittorio strode ahead along the gravel path. Luke said that Vittorio was an old Marxist, still stuck in the school determined to politicize archaeology, which made his position in the Soprintendenza difficult, perhaps even shaky these days, given a change of wind.

“Which makes things good for us,” he said.

Next, Cerotti led them down into the Tomb of the Bulls, where he expounded on the political implications of the scenes of buggery in the pediment. Clare couldn't help egging him on as she took notes, though Luke tugged at his hair in impatience. When they emerged, he pulled her aside. “I don't suppose you'd care to stay here in the necropolis like a good little researcher, rather than coming along any further and for sure fucking the whole thing up?”

“How much time will we have to come back here, after?”

“None.”

In truth, Clare was glad to stay back alone. She peered into as many tombs as were accessible to the public, fascinated. They had been cut out of solid rock, yet mimicked real houses of the living, stone ceilings cut and painted to resemble wooden beams — even one sprigged with tiny flowers like a wallpapered bedroom ceiling — another that gave the impression of a tented pavilion, showing trees beyond the tent openings, and a chorus of revellers dancing through, women in see-through floating garments, men in wraparound skirts held by belts of shells and flowers. She wandered and dreamed that something of such remarkable delight might lie beneath the surface of her own meadow, waiting to burst from the earth to sing.

Cat Among the Pigeons

BY THE TIME LUKE returned to pick Clare up, he no longer felt comfortable stopping for a night, not with all the equipment in the car. The backseat was crammed full of cartons and odd-looking carry cases and bundles wrapped in lumpy plastic, which he'd been unable to squeeze into the trunk.

“That's an awful lot of gear,” she said, as they drove away from Tarquinia. “How are we going to pack it all up to the meadow?”

He said they'd only be taking selected items, once he'd got it sorted.

“Like what?”

A long silence.

“Like what?” she said again.

He said for goodness sake he'd have to take another look at the terrain first. His tone was so grudging that Clare started wondering if he was not as familiar with that equipment as he'd like. After another silence he said that electrical resistivity would be one method they would use. The Etruscans tended to pile loose earth around the entrance after a tomb was sealed. Loose earth was more likely to retain water. Ergo, lower electrical resistance.

“Ergo a light bulb goes off in the prospector's head suggesting that's the place to dig.”

He started drumming his fingers on the wheel.

“Listen,” he finally said, “I've been thinking.” He broke off, ran his hands through his hair. “I've been giving thought to how we should manage things.”

“The exploration?”

“Well of course that,” he said. “But also …” His voice trailed off. The drumming started up again. They were on a small country back road. Abruptly, he pulled to the side. He turned and looked at her, a long unnerving look. Finally, “Christ!” he said, “Tindhall, get a grip.” He shook his head, hit his fist on the wheel, pulled back onto the road. Some miles passed.

The fact was, he finally said, that Harry Plank had been onto him from the beginning about finding a toehold in Tuscany. Now Plank was interested in purchasing her property.

“I thought Harold Plank hated travel.”

“He does, but if it turns out that we were on to something, Plank will want to be in on the kill.”

“The kill.”

“You know, like with the opening of King Tut's tomb at Luxor. Lord Carnarvon arriving just in time to be photographed.” He frowned, considering this. “Of course, Carter delayed opening the tomb didn't he? He waited for Carnarvon's arrival.”

Clare had figured out, of course, that the roses, the Brunello, all of that, hadn't really come her way because of her. Like everyone else — more than everyone — Plank did want in on the kill. From the moment she'd turned up in London, probably, Plank had seen her as his lead to whatever it was her uncle had discovered, and had set
his man Tindhall
to the task of getting her lined up, little knowing that Luke had an agenda of his own. And, in a sacrifice to British archaeology, as Luke had merrily put it to those loathsome tweedy types, Luke had undertaken the task.

But he'd kept buggering it up. That night when he drove her home, shining his flashlight in her face, then yanking her out of there,
Right, come on!
That day at the dig, making sure the whole thing went wrong. Why? Was that the way so many things in his life went wrong, starting with his time in
sodding academe
?

And I'm as much of a mess-up as he is, Clare thought; maybe that's the sad but undeniably sizzling truth that gets us going.

A few minutes ago, when he'd pulled off the road back there, so nervous before putting Harold Plank's plan to her, she'd imagined she picked up something else in his stare. She'd been shying away from thinking what might come of it if she did not take care. But now she couldn't help asking. “You know that night when you drove me home from Ralph and Federica's? What was that about?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Too much to drink.” He shrugged.

“Don't give me that.”

“Not my finest hour.”

“So?”

So in a nutshell, she'd called it right.

He confessed that when Harold Plank assigned him the project of buttering up the botanical lass, he'd obediently read her bio, leafed through her book, brushed up on the history of botanical art, culled a useful phrase or two. He'd studied the black-and-white author photo. The woman was a considerable stunner, which surely meant that in London Harry Plank would have exercised his
droit de seigneur
. But Luke figured he was owed a bit of payback for the way he'd been damn near killed by Kane's dogs.

Then he'd watched Clare during dinner, a young woman having the insouciance to turn up wearing a flashy western belt and boots and jeans among the self-referential Inghirami, implying they were no more fearsome than any other tribe she'd met on her travels!
Well now Tindhall, lucky dog
, he'd started to think.
This one's worthy of a little tussle in the name of British archaeology
.

“That's all pretty sick,” Clare said. “But it doesn't exactly explain why you dumped me, more or less, once you'd got me alone in the woods.”

It was hard to explain. When he'd switched on the torch to take a small preprandial peek, there were those eyes of hers, wide and troubling as the sodding Sargasso, eyes that could sink a man if he wasn't careful.

“We don't have to worry about you sinking though,” she said, hoping she was right.