Bitter Remedy (2 page)

‘What villa, Alec? What are you doing?’

The gardens are now more famous than either the building or the family that once lived there, and when people talk about the ‘villa’, the gardens are what they mean. They outclassed the villa even in its heyday, as well as the three generations of the family, which failed to see that building the family mansion in the flatlands below a fortified hill town meant they could never dominate. By the time the great-grandson realized the mistake and had bought the highest house in the town, the historical centre of the town itself had become depopulated.

The microcosmic qualities of the gardens are exceptional. This patch of ground lying flat all year under an unrelenting sun and surrounded by stinking marshes and mosquitoes manages nonetheless, thanks to the exceptionally cool underground waters, to host Alpine flowers as well as Mediterranean plants. The garden has its own icy river, rising in a deep underground spring and forming a lake before it allows the water to flow out into the brown marshes outside. The villa even has its own mountain, which is just high enough to generate a unique weather system for this blessed patch of land by causing the rising moisture from the marshes and the nearby sea to form clouds that pile up and cool down against the black slate cliff face that makes up the western prospect of the mountain, which also casts a cool shadow over one-third of the grounds and half the villa. As night falls, the clouds move up a little, burst, and water everything below.

On top of this mountain sits the town of . . .

She turned over the torn page, and found only a few more lines of text from the bottom half.

The land is marshy in places, silty in others, clayey here, and acidy there. Springy turf, thick mud, soft grass, bright red dust, and fine-grained pH-perfect soil alternate so that almost any kind of plant will find perfect conditions, but no invasive species can traverse the boundaries of the soil types.

Outside the window the hills had now turned purple and grey as the sun dipped below the horizon. The lights of the shopping centre, the IKEA car park, and the motorway were shining like beacons of distant hope, and she badly wanted to get out of this ghostly apartment block before it got dark.

It seemed Alec Blume was taking a holiday. Well, good for him. As for her, she had two children to look after, one of them his.

Chapter 2

Standing in the middle of a carefully designed maze of privet and jasmine bushes, well-tended but not grown high enough to function as a labyrinth for anyone but the smallest children, Alec Blume was nonetheless disoriented. He felt his dark trousers, heavy shoes, dark blue shirt, and beige jacket were too heavy for the soft green vegetation around him. He remained still, listening for the sounds of the other people he had expected to find, but hearing only the whisper of insects flitting between the pool and the plant stalks, and the fat buzz of a bee landing on a yellow floret. Had he mistaken the day?

One thing was certain: the villa made its own sounds. They could be mistaken for individual human sounds, for whimpers and throaty rasps and faraway cries, but not for the comfortable, generalized hubbub of visitors gathering at the beginning of a course, the sound of a teacher greeting them. Evidently he had come to the wrong part of the garden.

Although sweating now, with the hives on his chest smarting, it made him shiver to turn his back on the empty windows of the villa, which he imagined watching him. He turned round again, and it seemed as if the whole building had shuddered and taken a lurch in his direction. Something seemed to be moving in the corner of his left eye. He turned round again, this time with more resolution, ignoring the sensation of shimmering from behind, the hints of voices and muffled curses, and the sense of danger. These were precisely the sensations that he had come here to cure. He swallowed a Doxepin to stop the itching, and dismissed the sounds, so that even if someone in the villa had been screaming at that precise moment, he would have dismissed the sound as too faint, and he continued walking away, shoving a Lyrica pill under his tongue to calm his frayed nerves.

With the help of directions from a gnarled gardener who had disconcertingly sprung from a bush as he was passing, he found his group on the far side of the garden, behind the gate lodge he had parked in front of, but then ignored, presuming, for no particular reason, that the villa was the appointed meeting place. They were all looking in his direction, waiting for him, and, politely, he waved and quickened his pace a little, though none of them waved back. When he drew close, a slender young woman in blue jeans and a soft yellow cotton shirt with a paisley motif, folded her arms and shook her head in what seemed an exaggeration of amazed disappointment, given that he was only a few minutes late. The others in the group seemed to be regarding both him and, oddly, the young woman with some hostility.

‘You didn’t get my email?’ she accused as soon as he was within earshot.

‘No email,’ said Blume, pausing to register his surprise and catch his breath.

‘Is that your car out front?’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and nodded.

‘Guest parking is down the road. You go around the corner, and then turn left. It was signposted. That courtyard is ours. It’s not for guests.’

‘Nothing is for guests,’ said a young man, a leather satchel slung across his body, wooden beads on his wrists, an observation which made his girlfriend giggle and a middle-aged woman stamp her foot and say, ‘Exactly.’

Blume spread his hands seeking explanation.

‘You would have come round the side of the gate lodge and found us immediately in the spice garden, where we were scheduled to meet, instead of wandering around the gardens on your own like that, and getting lost. Were you at the villa?’

‘Near it,’ admitted Blume, smiling at the young woman. ‘Anyhow, a gardener, a small brown man in dirty clothes, showed me the way, and here I am.’

‘My father, you mean,’ she said.

‘Oh. I didn’t mean to . . .’ But he never got to finish his apology, because now the young man with the satchel had had enough.

He made a fist of his right hand and attacked the palm of his left with it. ‘This is total bullshit. We came all the way out here to the arse-side of nowhere . . .’ He glanced over at his tanned girlfriend who giggled again at his wit.

‘I thought I had cancelled all the bookings. Do you have more than one email?’

‘Silvana, that’s your name isn’t it? Well, listen to me, Silvana,’ said the young man, ‘are you trying to tell us,’ he swept his arm to include his sniggering girlfriend, the middle-aged woman, and Blume, ‘that we are at fault for daring to have more than one email?’

To avoid watching the flush of embarrassment that was spreading upwards from the soft spot in the centre of Silvana’s throat, Blume plucked a leaf and rubbed it between his fingers.

‘It’s just I probably sent the cancellation notice to the address you signed up from . . . I’m sorry. The Polizia Provinciale came the other day. I have a problem with ASL health and safety permits. I sent out an email immediately cancelling, just after they left.’

‘Only in Italy,’ said the young man, who indeed looked as if he had travelled to many places in the world, picking up a bead or a talisman to decorate his body in each one.

At last the older woman spoke up. ‘I expect you shall be refunding our travelling expenses.’

‘And maybe something for the sheer waste of fucking time. And false advertising,’ said the young man. ‘Isn’t that illegal? Maybe we should report you to the police.’

Blume, now intent on smelling his fingers, glanced up at the word ‘police’. I have thyme on my hands, he thought in English, then surprised himself by laughing out loud at his own private joke. ‘I would be surprised if they gave much thought to your complaint,’ he said, earning a grateful glance from Silvana.

‘Oh, we have an expert,’ said the young man with a shake of his curls.

Blume extracted a nasal spray, shot a jet up his nose, and snorted rudely with the back of his nose and throat.

‘
Ma vaffanculo
,’ said the young man. He turned to his girlfriend. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘I don’t think I would have enjoyed spending three days with that couple anyhow,’ said the middle-aged woman, once the young couple was out of hearing range. ‘So, Silvana, about the refund for fuel? I came down from Milan for this.’

‘Milan? That’s very far,’ said Silvana.

‘You say that like you doubt my word,’ said the woman. She repeated the concept to Blume. ‘She says that like she doubts my word.’

‘I am inclined to believe you are Milanese,’ he told her.

She peered at him suspiciously, seeking irony. Then, as the sound of the young man angrily revving his engine in the car park reached them, she said, ‘Three hundred and thirty euros. Toll charges and fuel, down here and now the trip all the way back.’

Silvana blinked. ‘I’ll need to ask my father for that. Do you mind waiting?’

The woman sighed. ‘We’ve waited this long, what’s another few minutes?’

This last was addressed to Blume, who, however, had turned his back on her and was wandering aimlessly back into the garden. He did not need a refund, and he certainly did not need company.

Silvana found him a quarter of an hour later outside the crumbling villa at a point where the wooden stays keeping the wall up were overgrown with sprays of white and pink flowers. He had his hands pressed on the small of his back and was staring upwards to the boarded windows on the third floor, as if looking for something. He did not seem to notice her come up behind him, and she was afraid she might startle him, but when he turned round, he seemed completely unsurprised to see her there.

She held out a wad of banknotes. ‘Your refund.’

‘I don’t need a refund.’

‘I did send emails, you know.’

‘I’m sure you did,’ he said.

‘Are you sure you don’t want the money?’

‘Quite sure.’ He waved his hand at the crumbling mansion. ‘So this is the villa we were supposed to be staying in?’ When she nodded, he continued, ‘I’m no expert, but it seems to me you’d need to spend a few hundred thousand to fix it up, and thousands per year in maintenance. How were you expecting a weekend course on Bach Flower Remedies to pay for that?’

‘I am not trying to fix up the whole house, just a section of it.’

‘It looks like a dangerous place. I can see why they did not give you permission to hold classes in it.’

‘The classes would have been back at the lodge. The sleeping quarters were supposed to be in the villa.’

‘Then I definitely see why you got no permissions. Hardly any of the windows even have glass in them. Creepy place to sleep, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘It was not here. At the back of the villa, where it is structurally solid, we did a conversion. You’re not supposed to be here.’

He looked at her, seeking clarification.

‘You ignored the striped tape cordoning the area off. This side of the house is unsafe. Did you not see the sign saying this is off-limits?’

‘Actually . . .’ He seemed on the point of explaining himself, and then simply shrugged. ‘Sorry. I’ll go back now.’

He had authority and was wearing it lightly. She had naturally used the formal ‘Lei’ with him, but was surprised, and a little put out, when he used it back at her.

‘Come round the other side, and I’ll show you. But use “tu” with me, please.’

‘With pleasure. As long as you do the same with me.’

‘Of course, Mr . . . ? I have your name on my computer, but I am afraid I can’t remember it.’

‘Alec. Alec Blume.’

‘Oh!’

‘You seem surprised?’

‘No. I remembered the unusual name. I thought you would be more foreign.’ She led him round to the front. ‘The main door is still boarded up.’

‘Where is the part where the course participants were supposed to be staying?’

‘I told you, at the rear. Basically opposite where we are now.’

‘Shall we go round and see?’

‘Why?’

‘No reason,’ said Blume. ‘I just want to see what I am missing.’

‘I don’t really feel like gazing upon my failure,’ said Silvana.

‘I could go round myself, I suppose.’

‘No. I’ll come with you. Just stay outside the plastic tape, or what’s left of it. You don’t want a piece of masonry falling on you. We have to keep a wide berth, make a detour through the garden, and the path is not direct, as you’ll see. It’s sort of like having to creep up on the building from behind.’

The villa walls were plastered with yellow warning signs.
Pericolo Crollo. Vietato ingresso ai non addetti. Non Entrare
. They walked off to the right, following a D-shaped path that led them into the garden away from, then back to the building. On their way, Blume stopped to drink from a fountain, once sculpted but now so weather-worn that the stone seemed to have melted.

‘Is the water all right here?’

‘Of course!’ said Silvana.

‘You can’t always be sure,’ said Blume. ‘I was visiting a tomb recently in Rome. The graveyard has hoses and fountains for the flowers, you know? And there was a man there drinking from it. I didn’t like the idea, drinking water that comes up from graves.’