The Whirling Girl (9 page)

“YES, IT IS A constant pleasure is it not?”

She turned to see Carl, the large German. He was wearing a crisp seersucker suit today, a fine leather bag over his shoulder.

“Many pardons, Miss Livingston, I did not mean to discompose you.”

“No, no. Please.” She gestured at the empty chair.

“I saw you observing the lively activity of our little city.” He lowered himself into the seat across from her. “The buildings surrounding this charming space are of such a human proportion, are they not? Yet also theatrical, the emphasis on the façade, to accommodate a culture where so many of the rituals of life take place in public view.”

She smiled. “You put it so well.”

Perhaps he was the one she could sound out about the legal ramifications of finding archaeological remains on private property. “Are you planning to settle here permanently now? Is it tricky owning property here? I read an article describing Italy as one vast underground museum, referring to the fact — exaggerated, I'm sure — that there are so many buried antiquities that it's hard to put a shovel in the ground, because if the smallest artefact comes to light the whole building project gets shut down.”

But she'd lost him. She followed his gaze across the square. The young Danish man, Anders, was in conversation with William Sands. How beautiful Anders really was, in his tight jeans and his lime green t-shirt, his golden hair combed up this morning into spikes; you'd have to be made of stone to resist if he grasped your shoulder the way he'd just grasped William's. But William pulled away. Anders stood for a moment looking at the hand that had just been shunned. Then he turned on his heel and started up a tiny side street, lost to view.

“I must beg you to excuse me,” Carl said. Clare watched as he crossed the expanse of the piazza with remarkable speed for one so large. She pondered the sad fact that his palpable hurt, as he lumbered like a comic figure across the beautiful piazza, almost lightened for a moment her own concerns, as if we are all beads on an abacus of some great summing-up of suffering, she thought. She turned her glass round and round.

“Miss Livingston, I have been remiss.”

“Oh!”

For here was William Sands. She felt her face go hot. The raw image of yesterday superimposed itself over the tall straight serious figure standing before her.

She invited him to sit down.

He said he couldn't stay, he had just come from a brief appointment at the Museo Etrusco; however, he wished to say that he was aware that he had lacked in courtesy the other night at Farnham's in failing to express his condolences regarding her uncle.

Such stiff words. She wasn't sure why her initial impression of him, from that night, came back with such force — that she liked him. Because he had held back from talking about her uncle? Or because the scene in the woods had left her with such an archetypal impression, as if she really had seen some mythic beast, which he and Anders both had been overpowered by — and that a man so determined, qualified, serious, could like anyone else be swallowed by that beast?

“Perhaps I should explain that I have serious reservations about the last articles your uncle wrote,” he said. “They stir up wrong attitudes. They give the impression — which one hoped had been abandoned years ago — that archaeology is about finding things.”

“It's not?”

“These days we like to think it is about finding out about things. There is quite a difference.”

Hoping to lead the conversation in a helpful direction, Clare pulled out her notebook and asked him to elaborate. All night she'd been dreaming about those mounds in the meadow, peering into them sometimes the way she'd once peered into an Easter egg she'd been given as a child, which had a little round glass window at one end and a tiny scene inside. Surely there must be some radar that would allow her to peer down through the surface of those mounds. William was the person who would know.

As he eased himself into the chair across from her, though, she felt another pang for Nikki Stockton. This was such an attractive man, his very seriousness making him seem someone you would like to crack — was that the attraction to the younger man? The serious face, with freckles scattered across the pale skin; the very clean white hair, pulled back. She imagined how he would have looked when his wife first met him. He would have been a redhead then, she thought.

He was telling her how his site had been vandalized over the winter. Someone had dug a rough ditch right across the temple area on Poggio Selvaggio, destroying precious evidence, in search of treasure. “So perhaps I am over-sensitive. But the kind of articles your uncle wrote can stir up illicit appetites.”

He glanced at his watch. She noted the scratched crystal, the leather strap that was almost worn through. He gave her another of those beautiful grave smiles. His eyes were the colour of gravel in a stream, with that pebbled clarity. And he took his leave.

How could his wife stand it, she wondered. She started towards her appointment with the lawyer. The image came back to her of that pixie woman in her ballet costume put together out of biking gear, teasing Luke Tindhall, making smart remarks. Then Nikki's expression after that electric moment at the dinner table when William and the Danish boy both reached for the wine.

THE LAWYER'S OFFICE WAS on the only level street in the town. One building joined to the next, almost like a cliff face, the little shops tucked in below. Clare paused in front of a window displaying just a single yellow linen dress and a pair of elegant high-heeled sandals like the ones on the young women who'd run to meet in the square. She felt guilty of an offence, in such beautiful surroundings, to be wearing the same silk shirt (washed by herself this time, so that it still retained a blush of tomato stain) and jeans. When she entered the office of lawyer Dottore Alfredo Bandinelli it was obvious that the young woman who looked up briefly (fashionable jacket of military cut, white shirt with flaring cuffs) was someone who would never end up glued to another person by a piece of oozing food.

The woman's dark, heavily outlined eyes turned back to her computer. Clare coughed. The perfect pale fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. A woman in thick spectacles came out from behind a milky glass door and fell into a long conversation with the younger one.

Clare coughed again, then said, “Excuse me. I believe I have an appointment.”

“Signora Livingston?”

“Yes …
Sì sì
.”

“But I have called you,” the one with the glasses said with a frown. “Signor Bandinelli has needed to be detained away. I have already left you a message, one hour ago.”

“Oh. I guess I'd already started out.”

“
Peccato!
” A look implying that the shame was Clare's, for such over-promptness.

“I suppose I should make another appointment.”

“No. It is better when Signor Bandinelli returns I will call you.”

“But I need to be able to plan.”

“Signora Livingston,” the woman said firmly, “Dottore Bandinelli has urgent family matters that have detained him. I cannot have any idea, when he might be able to return.
Mi scusi
, as soon as he can know, I will call.”

As soon as he can know, I will call.
Mi scusi
this is so. I will call, you will know!

As she went back out into the street, the words rang in Clare's mind like a childhood skipping rhyme. What exactly did she need to plan? She'd keyed herself up, hoping the lawyer would have some personal word for her from her uncle, or that he had possession of his notes and papers. Now she'd avoided disappointment. Maybe that was the secret of life. She took another look in the window with the yellow dress. Avoid disappointment at all costs. The goat's head buckle caught the light and grinned.

I WON IT, IN a rodeo,
she'd said the other night, and got a laugh. Almost true. It was a dark amulet of sorts, to keep her conscious of a moment very long ago when she had won something in a split-second decision. A rancher from Oregon had picked her up on Fisherman's Wharf, after she'd run away from the farm with her boyfriend and he'd left her stranded alone in San Francisco. The rancher said he could give her a job. He trained girls for the rodeo circuit; they had to be pretty ones of course, but they also had to know how to ride. Goat-tying was one of those events. “It's quite a skill,” he told her. “They let the little sucker out of a chute, and you ride it down and throw yourself off and flip it over and tie up three legs with your piggin' string.” It sounded fine, it sounded like exactly what she needed to get a lot of other things out of her mind. On the way over the sierra to his ranch, he stopped at a tack shop and he bought her the belt. “She's going to be a great little rider, this one,” he'd told the guy at the counter. She caught the look they exchanged. When they drove off again, his big hairy hand never left her knee. But it had been a snap to shake him when he stopped for gas — a sprint across the highway, and only moments waiting in the hot mean central California light, before a semi pulled over, the first of the blameless rides that eventually landed her safe in Vancouver with the dear old woman who'd helped her turn her life around.

Still, that moment in the tack shop could so easily have spiralled her in the other direction. With his hand on her knee, then moving up casually bit by bit towards her crotch while he hummed along to the radio, she'd been sure it was the other path she would take. Just go the inevitable way, the way she deserved and half-wanted. She still didn't know what had made her run. The belt tied her back to that girl who hadn't decided to run, just did.

“
CIAO, HELLOOO,
CLARE LIVINGSTON!”

The Contessa Luisa di Varinieri was striding towards her from the direction of the piazza. Before Clare turned to meet her she checked her reflection in the shop window, as if she might have visibly smeared herself with those memories just now.

“This is so wonderful!” Luisa exclaimed. “Vittorio and I have been very much disappointed not to have had you a little more to ourselves the other night.”

She gave Clare a kiss on both cheeks. She was wearing big gold earrings the size of jar lids, which gave Clare's cheeks two little slaps. “Vittorio and I have been so hoping that you would come and have some tea,” Luisa said.

Even if the invitation was motivated because the Contessa
so hoped
that Clare had come upon those non-existent papers of her uncle, well, why not? Clare, too, wished she'd found them. If anything worthwhile from her uncle did turn up, maybe we could work together, she was thinking now. It was fascinating to postulate the discovery of popular Etruscan literature, not just material to do with religion and ritual. She remembered seeing a photo of an Etruscan funerary bed; it had carved stone replicas of folded linen books beside the stone pillow. What fun to discover what those lusty people, so fond of banqueting and wine and dance, really read in bed.

Also, Luisa and her husband, the archaeology inspector, would be the very people for Clare to sound out regarding her own quest.

“I saw you talking with my dear friend William a few minutes ago in the piazza,” Luisa was saying.

Perhaps Clare frowned? She felt a pinch of unease to think that nothing here might go unobserved. Luisa caught that.

“Oh, we know everything about each other in these little towns,” she said. “It is the blessing and the bane of Italian life that we live so much in public.” She fluttered her beautiful hands. “I was very glad to see him talk to you.”

She leaned close, exuding a musky amber scent. “William has these little problems at the moment, and I feel sure you will want to help.” She glanced around as if someone might be crowding in to listen. “You see, the funds for his excavation might be in trouble, because of a stupid girl.”

“A girl?”

“A student on the dig last summer, who unfortunately is also the daughter of the chancellor of William's college. William had to send her home to Santa Monica because she had such a monstrous attitude. Now she has spread all sorts of lies.”

“Oh. But I don't see how I —”

“If someone could pass back a report to London, to the Plank Foundation, of how very important this excavation on Poggio Selvaggio is, it might be very influential for William to find new funds.”

“Isn't that Luke Tindhall's job? To assess these things?'

“Ah, Tindhall!” She threw up her hands. “He and William are unfortunately most
antipatico!
”

“Well then, if your husband … if Vittorio is the inspector of archaeology in these parts, wouldn't it be more persuasive if he made the recommendation?”

Luisa spread her hands, an expression half-helpless, half-amused.

“In confidence, I must tell you that there is a little long-ago history between William Sands and myself, which makes it complicated to put such a proposal to my husband. I know you will understand.”

Whatever the implication of that was, Clare couldn't help feeling a sweet twisty pleasure in being pulled into the confidence of the beautiful Contessa.

“You see, since I met you,” Luisa said, “I have not been able to help wondering whether someone who had the direct ear of Sir Harold Plank perhaps could assist?”

Clare flushed. Harold Plank must have quite a reputation among the Etruscan community, a community she was beginning to realize was very small.

The direct ear of Harold Plank.

She had to smile, recalling his ears. She'd spent a good two hours with them inclined towards her across the table at Simpson's in the Strand, over their plates of oysters, rare roast beef, treacle pudding, wine and port — ears unusually large and turned forward (
the better to hear you with, my dear
), shell pink and shiny, as was his bald head. The most seductive memory of that extremely seductive lunch was the way the man listened — a gift surely rarer than anything he kept in that cabinet of curiosities in the Yorkshire Dales.

How much direct-ear time did a case of Brunello imply? Clare had planned to write a polite note of thanks, figuring that was that. Now Luisa was telling her that what Sir Harold Plank must be made to understand was the great importance of William Sands's work. Luisa suspected that such slow and painstaking excavation of a settlement was not the glamorous sort of project that Sir Harold wished his foundation to fund, even though it was revealing a picture of Etruscan life over a period of many hundred years. Plank would be hoping for Tindhall to come upon some more sensational discovery, such as artefact-filled tombs.

“Do you think there are any undiscovered treasure-filled tombs?” Clare interrupted. “Ones that have not been rifled long ago?”

Luisa laughed. “Treasure filled? We serious archaeologists never admit that this is what we hope.”

“But?”

“My dear. Here is what it is important for Sir Harold Plank to know. In Italy, the situation is a little unfair. It is not simple for a foreigner to get a permit to work at any Etruscan site. If Sir Harold has these dreams of glamorous exploration, he must put them away. William Sands has managed to get the permit for his work because of an early friendship with my father, who was a keen amateur archaeologist, and well-connected with the Soprintendenza. If the Plank Foundation is looking to help a worthwhile project, they should look no further than William's excavation on Poggio Selvaggio.”

She stepped back, a pretty laugh belying a look that was stern.

“It is a sin, truly, that in Italy the strict bureaucratic procedures are not quite as important as personal connections. But it is well to understand.”

“All the same,” Clare said, “I don't see how I —”

She stopped. She'd been about to explain that she did not have that sort of influence with Plank, but then she caught the grin of the silver goat's head in the shop window. How could it hurt to have that little extra gloss?

“Look, why don't we go and have a coffee,” she said. “You can fill me in on the procedures over here.”

Luisa glanced towards the clock tower on the city hall. “
Accidenti!
Now I am very late for an appointment with the Director of the American School. How busy they keep one; one hardly has time to breathe.”

Clare felt a sting of foolishness at the picture she'd just formed of settling down with Luisa at a little table in the piazza, the two of them leaning close, easing into further intimate chat.

“But we are expecting you for tea.” Luisa took a card from her briefcase and pressed it into Clare's hand. It listed degrees from Florence, Oxford and Bryn Mawr.

She blew Clare a kiss. “I will be very cross if you do not come!”

“Oh, absolutely I'll come,” Clare said. Then, glossing that fib with a second one, “About Harry Plank,” she called, “I will drop a word in his ear.”