Water Theatre (3 page)

I reached for a towel, calling, “Hang on, I'll be with you in just a minute. Don't go away.” But the sitting room and kitchen were empty when I went down, though a newly filled bowl of fruit stood on the table in the dining area. Towelling my hair, I stepped outside and saw the woman sitting in the shade at the circular blue table. Sunglasses masked her eyes. A wide-brimmed straw hat with a silk ribbon hid most of her dark curls.

“Good morning,” she said, “I had not meant to discompose you,” and rose, offering a firm hand. Slim, in her late forties, she wore a shirt of lavender-grey silk hanging loose over ivory-coloured linen trousers. “I heard only this morning that you are arrived. If I knew last night…” Her ringed hands made a deprecating flourish. “There was no food in the house, I know. I have put milk and butter in the refrigerator and there is now bread in the box.” With a hint of reproach she added, “We were not expecting you.”

I took note of that familiar “we”.

“There's no phone here,” I explained. “I had to come at short notice and couldn't let Adam and Marina know. I thought I'd find at least one of them here.”

“I see. You wished to jump a surprise on them!”

“Spring.”

“Excuse me?”

“Spring, not jump.”

“Ah yes. Forgive me… my English… I am Gabriella. And you?”

I told her my name, there was a brief beat of hesitation before she opened her mouth and said simply, “Ah!”

“They've spoken of me?”

“Of course.” Her eyes, which had been briefly averted, returned now, bright with renewed affability.

“Do you know where Adam and Marina are?” I asked. “Is there any way to contact them?”

She gazed brightly up at me. “For the moment I don't think so.”

“It's rather urgent. I don't have much time.”

Somewhere higher up the hill a bell counted eleven in tinny chimes. We stood by the blue table in the fragrant day while she considered her response. Awhite sports car gleamed beside the shrine at the junction, where she had parked it. The morning basked in dry light.

She said, “I think you must wait for them.”

This woman was no peasant, but the statement had a peasant's obstinacy. It assumed that waiting was the usual condition here. Things might once have happened; one day something might happen again; in the meantime, waiting was the thing.

But the prospect of kicking my heels in this uneventful place held no appeal. I said, “Perhaps the neighbours know where they are? I heard them last night. Down here.” Crossing to the wall beyond the table, I looked over onto the salmon-coloured pantiles of a low-pitched roof. Another cottage was stacked on the side of the hill below Marina's, neater, in better repair.

“Ah,” Gabriella smiled, “so Capitano Mezzanotte is back! But I doubt he can help us.” I was about to suggest that it might at least be worth a try when I heard her chuckling softly at my back. “Of course that is not his true name,” she said. “It is our joke, yes? He makes use of the place only occasionally. Adam
called him by that name because he comes by night and always leaves early.”

“They,” I corrected.

“Yes,” she smiled.

“Captain Midnight. I see.”

“He is a very private man.”

“Public enough to keep me awake.”

She nodded, her lips pursed, but smiling still. It occurred to me that she and Adam must be on intimate terms to share such a joke. Were they perhaps lovers? If so, this woman might be just as resolute to protect him from the past as he had been to sever all ties with it. She wouldn't want me “jumping” any surprises on him.

I said, “You really don't know when they'll be back?”

Frustration must have shown in my face, but with a wry tilt of her head she evaded my question. “Things don't always work out as we expect. You must not be dismayed.” Abruptly she brought her ringed fingers together at her lips. “I have some small business to perform this morning. It will take me perhaps one hour or so. After then I will give you lunch at the Villa, yes? If you are agreeable, I will pick you up at, say, twelve thirty.” The smile was warm.

Lacking options, I decided to be “agreeable”, thanked her and asked whether it would be too far for me to walk.

She opened her hands and brought them together lightly at her chest as though catching a moth. “No, not far. But the road is steep,” she said. “It will be a hot walk.”

“I'm used to heat. I was in Africa a week ago.”

The smile broadened, the narrow shoulders wriggled a little beneath the silk. “I am forgetting. You are famous for your
ardimento
. Very well, go round the hill and take the road to the left, past the
convento
. You will see. Cross a bridge and in perhaps three kilometres there comes a gate with birds. Mythological birds.
Grifoni
?”

“Griffins, yes.”

“The drive will bring you. The door is open. Come through. I will expect you.” Again she offered her hand and quickly slipped it free.

From the dappled light of the awning I watched the sports car accelerate away around that steep, heat-stunned theatre of olive groves.

I breakfasted on coffee and fruit with the
Rough Guide
open on the blue table. Fontanalba was of too little consequence to feature in its pages, so I picked up the slim volume called
Umbrian Excursions
and was about to open it when I decided I'd better call Gail. Only the machine answered me. I left a message telling her what had happened, gave a satirical account of the conversation with Gabriella and insisted that I had no intention of hanging about in Umbria for more than another night.

“You were right,” I conceded, “I shouldn't have come. I'll make it up to you.”

Then I sat, staring at the olive groves, marooned by the silence.

For want of anything better to do, I picked up the book again. The title was embossed on the cover, though neither the author's name nor the publisher's colophon appeared there. Only when I turned to the title page did I discover that it had been written and privately published by Laurence Stromberg.

That extravagant man had been my contemporary at Cambridge, though I'd seen nothing of him since we bumped into one another in the crush bar of a West End theatre at some point in the mid-'60s. “But you're looking so well,” he'd crooned. “Quite the figure of the rugged hack, all tanned and rangy and doubtless badged with scars!” Then, with a wicked nudge he'd added: “Or has journalistic pribble-prabble merely deformed you into a cliché of your trade?” But Larry's style had already begun to feel anachronistic, and his own career as a theatre director was faltering. The last I'd heard
of him was a rumour that he'd been initiated into a secret order practising sex magic in South Kensington. It was the sort of gossip he might have started himself, which did not necessarily make it untrue. And the pages of his book revealed a familiar quirkiness now, for its various excursions were as much through the painted chambers of the author's mind as through the landscape of Umbria.

I skimmed through his account of the ancient augurs of Gubbio who'd read signs in the flight of birds, and then dipped into another on the oracular springs of Clitumnus. But I soon lost patience and put the book down. After a time I set out for Gabriella's villa.

Because Marina's cottage was perched halfway down the hill, some distance outside the medieval walls, I got my first real sight of the town when I looked up from the roadside shrine. Hunkered down behind its defences, Fontanalba was curled on its summit like a snail. Only a single bell tower and the crowns of two plane trees rose above the pinkish ramparts. The lane to the villa curved on round the hill, past the gate and a complex of buildings under a square tower topped by a Turk's cap dome.

The armorial carvings on the bastions of the town gate were hidden behind rough scaffolding, though I could see no sign of anyone at work. The dark archway opened onto a small piazza where the crown of the hill had been cobbled over. Houses sloped away along two narrow alleys, their roofs held down by top-heavy chimneys and flat stones. As far as I could see, there were no shops or bars, but midway down the wider alley an ornate niche had been built around the basin of a fountain. At the edge of the piazza, under the white glare of the Romanesque church, six plastic chairs waited for the shade.

Unaware of my arrival, a woman berated an old man from her vine-slung balcony. He brandished a bottle, stammered something back at her, and then slumped in the shade beside
the fountain. Not wanting to get caught up in a neighbourhood wrangle that might have been going on for a decade or two, I backed away, out of the gate, wondering what else people could do in such beleaguered proximity but bicker in the heat.

I followed the lane past the
convento
down to where an ancient bridge spanned a river that tumbled among stones through a green glen. On the far side, a steep climb brought me to a wooded ridge, and from there I looked back down on Fontanalba. The air was heady and resinous, the noon light a somnolent blue shimmer punctuated by the shrilling of cicadas. I saw no one as I walked.

The griffin-guarded gates stood open. The last turn of the long, winding drive through trees revealed the palatial scale of the house. At the centre of a wide court with a parterre garden, water plashed from an elaborate fountain. Beyond it, a loggia shaded a number of doors at ground level. All of them were locked, so I climbed a sweep of stairs to the terrace above. From there, with its ochre stucco peeling in the sunlight, rose the main body of the villa.

I stood for a while beside a stone urn, taking in a view that reached beyond the statuary and pinewoods to the hazy plain far below. Turning back to the house, I saw that a door stood open in the portico beneath a second – and grander – upper loggia. I stepped through into the cool entrance hall.

The house was as silent as a painting of itself. Along the length of the hall's airy tunnel three chandeliers floated like tasselled marine creatures. Mellow light from a glazed door at the far end fell along walls painted with
trompe l'œil
prospects of trees and bowers and hills. I coughed to make my presence heard and, when nothing happened, walked along the hall to a central atrium, where a transverse corridor offered access to rooms on both sides. I was standing by a statue which had a missing hand, wondering whether to shock the place out of its trance by shouting, when a man wearing a white
jacket appeared down the corridor. Startled to see me there, he advanced quickly across the tiles and listened, unconvinced, as I explained I was there at Gabriella's invitation. His chin was unshaven, his mouth tight, his blue eyes menacing. He growled something that might have accused me of breaking off the statue's hand and hiding it. His own hands, which were matted with black hair, gestured extravagantly. “No, no,” he decided and, in the ensuing torrent of Italian words, two were uttered with emphatic force: “
La Contessa
”.

When I failed to utter any intelligible response, he grimaced, indicated that I should wait a moment and turned away into the first room down the corridor. Leaving the door ajar so he could keep an eye on me, he picked up a phone from the desk and dialled a number. I could hear only his side of the conversation and understood little, so I looked at the bookcases. Many finely bound volumes were ranked there along with other books that looked dumpy and probably dated from the early days of printing.

With a twitch of his finger the man summoned me to the phone.

“Forgive me” – I recognized Gabriella's voice above the crackle – “I am delayed longer than I thought. But I have asked Orazio to take care of you.”

I said, “I think he'd rather throw me out.”

“Oh dear, he can be fierce, I know, but I have told him that the fault is mine. I will come soon. Please, make yourself at home. Enjoy the pool. There are towels and robes in the pool house.”

I hesitated a moment before saying, “You didn't tell me you were a
contessa
.”

“Ah! You do not care to have surprises springed on you?”

“Sprung.”

Laughing, she said, “English has no pity.”

On impulse I asked, “Is Adam there with you?”

“Adam? Why do you ask that?”

“I don't know. I get the feeling you're keeping something from me.”

“And you feel you should have everything at once?”

“You think I deserve less? Besides, I told you, I don't have much time.”

“Today is too hot to hurry,” she decided. “Enjoy your swim.”

I would have said more, but she was gone.

Orazio indicated that I should follow him out into a courtyard, where he opened a door concealed in the wall by a screen of boxwood. Immediately I heard the sound of water somewhere below. Descending a stone stairway, we came out into a secret garden. I caught the gleam of water issuing out of a lion's mouth to cascade down a channel cut into the steps of a small neoclassical temple which overlooked the pool. White parasols shaded two sun loungers in an arbour of bougainvillaea. A long marble table flanked by marble benches stood nearby.

Orazio beckoned me inside the temple, where a stone nymph poured water down into a basin shaped like a scallop shell. It wasn't hard to imagine someone bathing there, naked as foam-born Venus, but the steward was impatient to show me how a modern shower had been fitted into one side chamber, while a refrigerator, well stocked with drink, hummed in another. He poured me a beer. I thanked him for his trouble. Mollified, he brought olives and pistachios to the table outside, then he left me alone.

I swam several lengths, took a shower, dressed and lay down on the lounger. The beer was strong, the heat of the day soporific. A line of cypresses beyond the pool stood motionless. I might have been lying in a world where sunlight spellbound all things to stillness except water. Pouring from the lion's mouth, down the stairs into a shallow slipper bath and thence into the pool, it flowed out again unseen. It was as if this green and secret garden existed solely as a thoroughfare for water. Nature and
art had consorted here to serve its purposes. The spirit of the place breathed in its sound, and now that sound was passing through me till I was left with only a diminishing sense of separate existence.