Angels of the Flood (23 page)

Jeremy, the antique dealer’s son, tapped a gilt and marble console and said, ‘What’s left is hardly bargain basement, is it? Not an Ercol in sight.’

David was more interested in the pictures. It hadn’t occurred to him before that ordinary people had paintings like these in their homes. Francesca’s response was puzzling: she seemed to be enjoying their interest, but played down her uncle’s collection. ‘All this is fairly second-rate,’ she said, waving a hand in the direction of a pair of sixteenth-century saints. ‘The good paintings are up at La Rocca too.’

‘But these are genuine, right?’

‘Of course. Why would he want to have fakes?’

It obviously hadn’t occurred to her that some people could only afford fakes. David read the little plaque at the bottom of a small portrait. ‘Tiepolo?’ he queried.

Francesca shrugged. ‘It’s not one of his best,’ she said.

There was a snort of laughter from Dido, whom David knew would be making a mental note of this and filing it away under ‘Idiosyncrasies of rich friends’.

At Kate’s insistence they trooped into a small octagonal room with no windows. Apparently it was called the
camerino
and was where all the most valuable paintings had been hung when Francesca’s uncle still lived full-time at Villa Beatrice. Francesca stood near the door.

‘What were they?’ asked Dido, running the edge of her finger along the line on the paint where a picture had been.

‘A couple of Veroneses, a Raphael, a Piombino… I forget the rest.’

David let out a whistling breath. He didn’t know which was more impressive, the ones that Francesca could remember, or the fact that she’d actually forgotten some of them.

‘And look,’ said Kate, ‘if you shut the door, you can’t see where it is.’ She was about to demonstrate, but Francesca blocked her way.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear this room when the door’s shut. It’s so claustrophobic.’

‘Stand outside, then,’ said Kate. ‘I’ll show them.’

Francesca shrugged and went out into the hallway. On an impulse, David followed. He felt more curious than ever about Francesca now that he was seeing her in the house which had obviously played such a large part in her life. The place posed more questions than it answered.

Once the door was shut, the voices of the others were muffled, hardly audible. Francesca was visibly tense. David lit them both cigarettes and said casually, ‘I’m not too keen on small spaces either. That room’s pretty creepy, isn’t it? The sort of place Roman wives got walled up in as a penalty for being unfaithful.’

To his surprise, Francesca turned white as a sheet and pushed the door open. ‘Come out, all of you! Come on out, that’s enough! Come out I tell you!’

‘What is it?’ Alerted by the hysteria in her voice, they all tumbled out at once.

‘I don’t like you being in there,’ said Francesca.

They looked baffled. ‘Why not?’ asked Dido.

‘I just don’t.’ Francesca seemed close to tears.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Ross. ‘I thought the house was on fire.’

They continued the tour.

Most of the pictures were in a long gallery at the back, where the shutters were kept permanently closed to protect them. Francesca opened one or two, letting in just enough of the opaque morning light to illuminate them properly. There were murmurs of appreciation.

‘How did your uncle get them all? He must be fabulously rich.’

‘Yes,’ said Francesca simply, adding, ‘But I think he got most of them fairly cheaply. He was one of the people in Italy who did well out of the war. If you didn’t worry too much about which side you were on, there were plenty of bargains to be picked up. That’s how he got this estate, I think. He’s an unscrupulous old bastard, always was.’ There was no affection in the way she spoke about her uncle, only disgust.

Dido had examined all the pictures in the room one by one. ‘His taste is pretty morbid, isn’t it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, everyone is being tortured or raped or having their throat cut. Not a happy angel or a still-life anywhere.’

As soon as Dido had pointed this theme out, it became a competition to see who could find the most gruesome picture.

‘Here’s some poor sod being barbecued,’ said Aiden.

‘That’s St Lawrence,’ said Francesca. And it’s a gridiron, not a barbecue. He’s the patron saint of Florence.’

‘Doesn’t look as if he’s enjoying himself much.’

‘What about these naked lovelies?’ asked Hugo. ‘They look like a troop of nudist girl guides.’

‘Read the title.’

‘Ah yes. “The Rape of the Sabine Women”.’

‘There’s another rape in the big room,’ said Jenny. ‘I noticed it last night.’

‘Ugh, here’s a woman with what looks like two jellyfish on a plate,’ said Kate. ‘Only I’ve got a horrid feeling they’re not jellyfish at all. They’re her breasts.’

‘That’s St Agatha,’ said Francesca.

‘Gor-ree!’ Anna squealed.

But it was the painting between the two windows in the middle room that eventually won the contest, in David’s opinion. It showed a sort-of man stripped and naked and hanging upside down by his hairy legs. Several people were gathered round him and observing the proceedings with interest. One man held a knife.

‘“The Flaying of Marsyas”,’ Dido read. ‘Is he going to be whipped?’

‘No,’ said David. ‘Flaying means skinning alive.’

‘You’re kidding!’

‘He’s right,’ said Francesca. ‘Marsyas was a satyr who dared to set himself up in competition with the gods, and flaying was his punishment. My uncle’s got another version of it up at La Rocca. It’s a wood carving, only about as big as my fist but very detailed. It shows Marsyas bent backwards over a hurdle and they’ve already begun to take his skin off. They’ve made an incision down his chest and they’re peeling back the skin. It comes off quite easily, apparently, like peeling a tangerine.’

And he’s still alive while they do it?’

‘To begin with, yes.’

There was silence.

Jenny said, ‘At least this picture doesn’t show it being done.’

‘I think that makes it worse,’ said Kate. ‘Knowing what’s about to happen. It gives me the creeps.’ She looked round at the others and caught David’s eye, before adding quietly, ‘The moment when all the horror lies ahead.’

T
OWARDS NOON THE MIST
began to break up and sunlight shone through in patches. Aiden sat on the terrace, hunched over his guitar, and picked out a piece that sounded Spanish, and classical. He looked up gloomily when Larry and Jenny returned from a tour of the grounds. They reported that the garden was even better than the house itself, so David and a few of the others went out to explore.

It was a garden of contrasts, made more dramatic by the grey mist that gave way suddenly to bright shafts of sunshine. David’s idea of a garden was profusion of flowers round a lawn: this one couldn’t be more different. There were no flower beds or lawns, but a series of paths and terraces, some wide, some so narrow they had to walk in single file, which were defined by various kinds of hedging and ended in either a statue or an urn, or else in a vertiginous view over the surrounding countryside. On the neighbouring hills, the mist was peeling away in patches, prompting Anna to exclaim that nature was wreathed in chiffon scarves.

‘That’s the trouble with you, Anna,’ said Dido. ‘No one ever knows if you’re sending yourself up or not.’

Anna’s face got that hopeless look that David had first noticed after they’d made love, so he said, ‘I’d love to see one of your poems one day, Anna.’

‘Would you really?’ She seemed surprised.

‘Yes.’

‘I only show them when they’re good enough,’ she said proudly, before adding, ‘But none of them ever has been, yet.’

‘When one is, then.’

‘Okay.’ She drifted away.

He felt there ought to be more connection between them, somehow. What had happened in the little box room might not have been the stuff of great romance, but
something
had taken place, for Christ’s sake. But apparently not enough to make Anna treat him any differently than before.

He went off in search of Kate, finding her at the furthest end of the garden, where the dark columns of cypress gave way to scrub and little trees. She was standing with Francesca on the rim of a natural amphitheatre with views over the river.

‘This is the most amazing place I’ve ever been in,’ she was saying to Francesca. She turned to him. ‘Don’t you agree, David? You could have a proper outdoor theatre here, all it needs is some seats carved into the hillside and it’s ready to use.’

Francesca laughed. ‘Who would come here?’

‘Local people?’ asked Kate.

Francesca gestured with her arm towards the empty hills all around. ‘You may have noticed, Kate, that we’re a bit short on neighbours here.’

‘Then you’d have to import people.’ Kate wasn’t giving up on her idea. ‘Run some kind of summer school, maybe fill it with people who work in Florence and want to get away for a weekend.’

‘Like you?’

‘Yes, I’d come back here in a flash. And I bet David would too. How about it, David? Wouldn’t you like to help build an outdoor theatre here?’ He nodded, and she went on, ‘It’s criminal to let the Villa Beatrice just stand empty all the time. It ought to be full of people.’

Francesca thought for a moment, taking Kate’s idea seriously at last, then said, ‘Maybe you could help me, Kate. We’d make this an important place, wouldn’t we? Make a total transformation.’

‘Why not?’ Kate grinned.

‘It’s a brilliant idea,’ said David. Right then, standing on the edge of the Villa Beatrice’s garden, his prospects when he went back to England seemed suffocatingly dull: he’d get his hair cut and learn the daily workings of the dry-cleaning trade. In time, inevitably, he’d make a decent living and probably settle down with a nice girl with shoulder-length hair pulled off her face in a velvet headband and at weekends he’d improve his golf and go down to his local… Did it have to be like that? Why couldn’t he stay here and help Francesca build her dreams? He looked at Kate. Her eyes were shining with enthusiasm. He knew she hated the thought of going back to the kind of mind-numbing secretarial job her parents thought was appropriate as much as he did. Suppose the two of them simply stayed here? With Francesca? They’d find a way to make a different kind of future for themselves, after all.

‘Do you think so, David?’ Francesca was suddenly serious. ‘It would be so amazing if we could make some good come out of—out of all the pain and horror and…’

‘What pain?’ asked David.

‘It’s—’ Francesca seemed to be on the verge of confiding in them, but then she broke off abruptly. Mario was coming down the path to join them. David felt quick hate at the way this smooth Italian kept barging in at just the wrong moment. Francesca looked down and moved a pebble in a small arc with the toe of her shoe.
‘Ciao,
Mario.’

‘
Ciao tutti.’
He nodded a greeting to Francesca and David. He seemed to be avoiding Kate.

‘Where have you been?’ asked Francesca. ‘We thought you’d left.’

It turned out he’d gone up to La Rocca at about ten the previous evening to pay his respects to Francesca’s uncle and assure him that all was well at the Villa Beatrice. ‘I told him all your friends were charming and thoroughly respectable,’ he said. Kate said coolly that he had no right to slander them. On his return Angelica had ushered him in secret to one of the forbidden bedrooms.
Il dottore
must have a proper bed to sleep on. Unlike everyone else he looked rested and scrubbed, and he’d even had a shave. David thought how good it would be to see the smile wiped off his smarmy face. He hadn’t felt that hostile to anyone in years.

It was gratifying to observe that Kate appeared to be none too fond of Mario either this morning. He wondered what had happened after their smooching on the terrace to make such a dramatic change.

Mario seemed to be trying to make up to her for some reason. He said, ‘How you like the Italian garden?’

‘It’s beautiful.’ She was avoiding his eye. ‘We’ve been discussing how the Villa Beatrice might be used in the future.’

‘In future?’ he queried.

‘That’s right,’ said Kate. ‘So it can help people. Not everyone is obsessed with money, you know, Mario.’

He shrugged, then turned to Francesca. ‘You see your uncle now?’

‘If you like,’ said Francesca. David got the impression her agreement took him by surprise. ‘But Kate and David are coming with me. Is that okay with you two?’

David didn’t have a clue what all this was about, only that Mario did not like the idea. It was enough to persuade him. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’m up for it.’

They began walking back towards the house. Mario fell in beside Francesca, Kate and David walked a little way behind. David said in a low voice, ‘Where did you go, last night?’

‘Nowhere much,’ said Kate. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I just crashed.’ She gave him an odd look and he wondered if she knew about Anna.

As they drew nearer to the villa they could hear a strange high-pitched noise coming from the gritty area of driveway at the front.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kate. ‘Sounds like two sewing machines having an argument.’

David groaned. ‘Don’t you start. You’ll end up like Anna.’

‘They’ve found the Vespas,’ said Francesca, over her shoulder.

Rounding the corner of the house they came across Larry and Aiden bumping over the gravel on little scooters. Jenny was sitting on Aiden’s black cloak on the step. Larry, thin legs sticking out at an angle, was declaiming sections of ‘Hiawatha’ as he travelled, his squeaky voice just audible above the high-pitched buzz of the Vespas. They came to a wobbly halt in front of the others.

‘I’ve always wanted to have a go on one of these,’ said Kate.

‘Here, I’ll show you how,’ said Francesca, as Aiden obligingly got off.

‘What about the Zio Toni?’ asked Mario.

‘Yes, yes, I haven’t forgotten,’ said Francesca impatiently. ‘Why don’t you go in and tell him I’m on my way? Then he can really get into the party spirit. Look’—she was explaining to Kate—‘this makes it go faster and this makes it stop. And that’s all, really.’