The Whirling Girl (37 page)

AS CLARE APPROACHED, WITH the dogs at her heel, the heavy boom of a radio had the meadow grasses cowering. Two policemen were sitting on lawn chairs near the tomb entrance, with a small table between them holding pots of yogurt, a bag of fruit, a round Tuscan loaf, two small roasted birds. They invited her to join them. They were handsome, charming, sweet — and absolutely determined that the entrance to the tomb remain barred to her. It was the regulation. It was out of their hands.

She asked if much had actually been determined inside — were the artefacts still all there?

They shrugged. This was their first shift. They didn't know.

Then how soon would someone turn up who actually did know? She was the landlord here, after all.

Shrugs and smiles.

When she finally decided to ignore them, when she began to clamber over the rocks to damn well go in anyway, they rose together, clasping the submachine-gun-looking pistols that they wore. Their smiles disappeared.

“Are you going to shoot me? Are you going to kill me, because I'm trying to get into my own tomb?”

If they caught the irony, they didn't show it. Before she stamped away, she took a good kick at the booming radio and sent it croaking across the field.

She stormed up the hillside, taking a steep shortcut over to the olive grove, determined to rush home and call the head of the Soprintendenza in Florence, or some higher-up in Rome, or the Pope.

Puffed out at the top, she paused and turned to look down at her lovely meadow; hers for a short time more, silent again at least.

No.

Was that singing down there now?

“
I love to go a-wandering, along the mountain track; and as I go, I love to sing, my knapsack on my back …
”

I must have knocked that boom box cuckoo, she thought.

“
Falderie …! Falderaaaaa!
”

But weren't those familiar voices?

“
Falder ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! My knapsack on my back …!
”

A pair of diminutive figures carrying alpenstocks, wearing straw hats, were trudging out of the woods. What had happened to the
reumatismo
, the fatigue? The two of them were making their way relentlessly up the field, until they came to a stop in front of the Carabinieri. The policemen sprang to their feet, doffed their tall hats. Within seconds they were actually ushering the Barbareschi in through the entrance of the tomb.

And why am I surprised? Clare thought, as she stumbled back down. Why am I even bothering to be shaking mad, to discover that in the rock-paper-scissors hierarchy of Italian law and order, a Marquis tops a uniformed policeman and the owner of the land?

“Do not even think of waving that Kalashnikov at me, you bozo!” she snapped, as she tried to barge past the men now standing at attention outside her tomb. She struggled in their grip. Egidio popped his head out. Carolina followed. After some rapidly twinned phrases in Italian, Clare was released.

The noble couple were all smiles. “Signora Livingston,
avanti!
What a great pleasure to welcome you. We have been on our way to visit you, indeed, but first thought we would come to see this remarkable discovery which we have been seeing on the television.”

They drew her in, then whispered, “Please, you must understand that the vigilance of the good men outside the door will have much intensified, of course, since the contretemps yesterday at the American excavation on Poggio Selvaggio — with the disappearance of an artefact.”

“What?”

“Quite a little scandal,” they said. “Indeed, this little!” Egidio held up thumb and forefinger, a half-inch apart. “What has gone missing has been just one small bead. We saw this also on television, it is all over the news! A matter small, yet very serious, especially when we have allowed the Americans to come and excavate our sites, and then they become lax.”

“Oh!” Clare said, “But surely … There could not possibly be any …”

Her words tumbled over themselves as she tried to explain that the American, Dr. William Sands, was an academic of the highest reputation, and furthermore …

“Do not discompose yourself, Signora Livingston.” The twin expressions now were strict. “Our time is limited, and we have much bigger things to discuss!”

Bigger things? What could be bigger than such a contretemps? She remembered Luke saying that a missing bead had almost shut down some prestigious Middle Eastern excavation. But surely Harold Plank would use his great influence to help sort this out, now that he and William had established cordial relations. Surely he would.

Clare pulled away from the double hand laid on her shoulders.

What nerve, welcoming her. But at least she was in. She lit her flashlight, ducked through the low doorway into the dank inner chamber.

Everything was gone. Just the funerary beds remained, with their carved stone headrests, and no staining.

There would be much to be learned even from this emptiness, she supposed; there always was: clues in the carving of the ceiling, the beds, the rock shelf where all that dark pottery had stood. She'd have to go somewhere else to see the
bucchero
, the fantastic shapes, the carved friezes that had so fired her imagination. She'd have to inch her way through further tortuous bureaucratic channels.

Carolina and Egidio poked their heads in.

“Signora Livingston, please, we must talk.”

Then graciously, sweetly, horribly — crowding into the inner chamber with her, cloying the small space with a powerful miasma of violets — they began an elaborate apology. They had realized, they said, how wrong they had been, how utterly mistaken, and how — yes — stodgy, too.

“Which is unforgivable in us, is it not dear Carolina?”

“Oh yes Egidio, ‘stodgy' will not do!”

They came bearing not just apologies, they said, but gifts that would warm the tender tendrils they feared she had subdued within her shy, mistaken breast. On and on went the floral rhetoric, which Clare could hardly follow.

They had come, she finally understood, to purchase her meadow paintings. Ever since seeing them, they had been unable to forget them. Consequently, they must have them. “Or we will be unable to rest, dear Carolina, will we not?”

“And when Egidio is unable to rest, Signora Livingston, I must confess that he quite wears me out!” A girlish giggle. “And so, I beg you to take pity on a woman not quite so young as she once was!”

Clare tried to cut in, terrified that they would start singing again.

“Stop!” Carolina demanded. “We must tell you, also, that we come as self-appointed emissaries from the broken-hearted. We have, yesterday, taken it upon ourselves to pay a visit to Bologna, to speak at length to Signora Eleanora Gasperini DiGiustini on your behalf.”

“You didn't!”

They had.

How often, since leaving La Celta, had Clare thought of the photo in Gianni's study. The little girl looking up wickedly at her father; the boy with the level eyes. Eleanora, with her enduring expression. A face pretty, but worn with the demands of keeping so many things together, even strays like her husband, keeping the cord from completely fraying.

Clare had not thought with kindness of that woman, because remembering the sight made her sad; yet, at the same time, she'd recognized the woman's morose implacable strength.

“A lovely woman, and so perceptive!” Egidio and Carolina were saying. “She agreed almost immediately, when we had fully explained, that to stand as an impediment to a love such as yours with her husband would be a crime against love itself. You see …” they joined hands, “Love is to us the thing most important in this universe.”

Clare said, “But it's not.”

Pitying smiles. “You are mistaken, dear.”

“Does Gianni know you did this?”

“We did not have to ask. We knew when we saw a broken man.”

“Do his children also understand?”

They looked at one another. The children were blown off in a shrug.

As to the arrangements with Signora DiGiustini, those could be quite straightforward, they were sure. Certainly there would be no problem. The Barbareschi had connections both in the highest legal circles and in the Vatican. However, more pressingly, in the interim, they intended that Clare should paint for them just a few more pieces of her imaginative floral fantasies, so that they could arrange a show entirely of her work, which they were now convinced had no peer.

Clare's flashlight was burning dim. The carved-out rock walls inside the cliff were closing in. She remembered Nikki talking about the door opening into a mountain, the magic land within. The two expectant faces were smiling up at her. Such a fine line separated her now from stepping right through into neverland, with these trolllike figures offering her the poisoned jewel. The ceiling shuddered as a replacement police helicopter roared overhead. She could hardly breathe in the violet-laden air.

“No,” she said.

They looked up with disbelieving double blinks.

She said, “You must go back to Signora Eleanora Gasperini DiGiustini and tell her that you were wrong. You must say that her husband was suffering a momentary delusion, and that he needs her help. You must say that the woman he thought he was in love with has done things in the past that even he would not be able to redeem. Tell her not to be a fool. Tell her to set aside her discouraged strength for once, and help him. Tell her to go and join him in his garden. He is lonely. She can help him. Please.”

She couldn't see the gnome-like couple now. They had dissolved in the salt of her tears. She pushed out into the flat hot sun, ran down through the meadow, the dogs lolloping ahead. She found them waiting by the jeep. When she opened the door, they jumped into the back. She kept driving until she reached the sea.

Appointment in Ankara

FANTASY! FANTASY.

Clare had thought that, hadn't she, when she first sat in Cortona's beautiful piazza? She was an outsider, a stranger, stepping into an elaborate setting for an opera. Would it help to think of the past weeks as an opera?

She pictured the soprano dipping her pen into her inkwell — not here, at the table where she once listened to absurd talk of resin fungi, but up in the corner room with the balcony, wearing silk just lightly stained by tears, “
Oh caro Signore mio, one last adieu
…”

Two elderly women started across the square, arms linked, dressed in venerable clothes, attractive shoes with heels no higher than their elderly feet could handle, their bulky bodies leaning together as they smiled and talked of local gossip, of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was their faces that caught her, faces as beautifully worn as the stones of the buildings around them; these were the faces of those who fitted here, understood exactly who they were.

Yes, adieu. For I have an appointment in Ankara as soon as the property deal is completed, in a few minutes, at the lawyer's. I am going off with the man I “have to say is important.” Because he is. And in Turkey I too will do important work at last, making drawings of his sherds, his broken pots; we will make a whole new world out of things that have been smashed.

The thimbleful of coffee jittered in her cup as a noisy group settled at the next table, a man waving for a waiter, a woman spreading a map of the town, another woman opening up the book of a poet who had made the town famous. They were hoping to find the poet's house.

Any moment, Luke and Sir Harold would arrive.

HAROLD PLANK HAD BEEN busy during the seven days that Clare was away. Last night, Luke had brought her up to date on all that had gone on; how Plank had made a fast trip to London, then to Florence, then back to London once again, getting everything in place for next year's excavation; how he had managed to work out an agreement allowing him to become the recognized eminence behind the exploration to take place on her place (his place as it was about to become), though the actual work would be under Italian direction.

But what had happened at Poggio Selvaggio, Clare had quizzed Luke; did that all get sorted out? The disappearance of the bead?

Luke had said she shouldn't worry.

What did that mean? she persisted. Had Harold Plank gone up there? Was he impressed with the work? Did Luke think Plank would be able to help solve whatever the problem was?

Luke said yes, Plank had gone up there. “Crikey, Clare, I've had a few other things to think about.” But yes, Luke was sure it had all been sorted out.

Earlier today, on her way to meet Luke here, Clare had learned that this was not the case at all.

She and Nikki had been driving in opposite directions. They both pulled to the side of the road. A grey, humid morning, though now the mist had burned off; the air thick with water and doubts; the Medici fortress casting an indistinct damp shadow. Nikki crossed the road, opened the passenger door of the jeep, and got in beside Clare. How different she looked. Old jean jacket, cotton bandana twisted round her forehead, hands furrowed with ground-in earthy pigments.

“You've been busy,” Clare said.

“I hardly leave my studio.” She seemed older, carved and dry, but more beautiful. With a flash of the old Nikki, the sliver of a grin, she said, “I'm glad you're back.”

“But not for long.”

She told Nikki the sudden plan.

“Are you sure this is the right thing for you?”

“Am I sure?”

Nikki gave her a squinty look. Clare said of course she was sure; it had just taken her a while to figure out, that was all.

“Well … good.”

“Yes, good.”

Clare thought that the look that passed between them, then, encompassed everything that wasn't said — how “good” could mean that, at some point, you had to make a decision, even if that decision rested on the median point between better or worse. How, always, some freewheeling part of each of them would link up, to comprehend the predicament of the other. She recalled what Nikki had said once about wanting to give her something.
Was this it?

Then she asked Nikki what had transpired at Poggio Selvaggio — what was this thing she'd heard about a theft?

It was ridiculous and terrible, Nikki said. “And I think it was my fault.”

When Nikki explained, Clare could see that it might have been. After Harold Plank had helicoptered up to the dig, Nikki had shown the delegation from his Foundation around the lab. Surprisingly, Plank had spent a long time among the small finds, admiring objects one wouldn't have thought he'd care about: the fragments of black-glaze ware, the terracotta loom weights, the stamped
rocchetti
. Then — because someone had told him the little drama of how a bead had gone astray on the day that Clare had visited the dig — and how Clare had saved the situation — he'd insisted on seeing that particular bead, too.

“He talked a lot about you, actually,” Nikki said. “How does he feel about you hooking up with Luke, by the way?”

“I have no idea what you mean.” Clare heard her own tone, still keeping up the fiction of her involvement with Plank; it seemed she would drag her deceits across oceans, they would come humping behind her across deserts to keep her company. At least I'll never be alone. “So the bead, though, the bead,” she said. “It went astray again? But then surely it did turn up again?”

Nikki said no. She thought what had happened was that when the group from the Foundation departed, she had accidentally left the door of the lab unlocked. Nor had she been entirely sure, later, that she'd remembered to replace the bead in its proper file box.”

“You're not that absent-minded.”

“No, I'm not. Maybe it was something subconscious, do you think?”

What happened next, she explained, was that when Anders came in the following morning, he reported the bead missing.

“Anders,” Clare said.

Nikki shrugged. Of course he had to report it to William, she said.

But somehow the news got out more widely. William was summoned to Perugia to explain to the Umbrian authorities why his operation should not be shut down altogether if this was an indication of the care that was being taken.

“But couldn't Vittorio Cerotti speak for him?” Clare interrupted, “Or Luisa, who surely has pull in those parts?”

Nikki's face pinched up. “Hell no. They have been too occupied these days with the goings-on up in Florence.”

So then, Harold Plank, far from setting things right, had issued a press release stating that though the Foundation had been interested in the project at Poggio Selvaggio, he was now forced to disassociate himself altogether.

“And he was never associated with us in the first place. Why should he go to all the trouble to make that statement? And how did the word about its disappearance get out? William hoped to exhaust every avenue before bringing it to wider attention, and that was bad enough, questioning the students and staff, the searches!”

Nikki turned and frowned at Clare, almost as if she expected Clare to help with this conundrum. “And why did I let all that happen, do you suppose? So careless! But Clare, all this fuss for such a tiny object! And really, no one would have wanted to steal it!”

Clare remembered, though, how she had felt when she'd held the blue bead: the flutter of possessiveness just because it was so small, yet told so much. She remembered saying something about that to Luke. Of course Luke had laughed. No, pretended to laugh, she told herself now, as she waited for him in the square. She reminded herself of the worth of the person underneath the complicated crust, someone struggling to connect himself to matters of lasting importance to the world, despite his faults — despite even what she'd found out about him during the week when she'd run away, which, in an odd sense, was the thing that had brought her back. Yes, worthwhile; the person who held the key to her becoming of some worth herself, finally, as she helped him with his work.

She had driven off feeling guilty after talking to Nikki. If Vittorio Cerotti had been too preoccupied in Florence to speak up for William, it must have been because he'd thrown whatever influence he had behind helping Harold Plank. And if Harold Plank's public statement had anything to do with his ambitions regarding Clare's place, she should do something, right this morning, while she still had the power, while the place was still hers.

She knew she wouldn't stand up to him, not when a smooth transition meant everything to Luke. She saw this truth about herself as constant: how every good decision got fogged up that way. Even the vow she'd made while she was down at the sea.