Bitter Remedy (3 page)

‘This is a garden, not a graveyard.’

‘True. The land outside the gardens is marshy, I suppose I was worried about that.’

‘I have lived here all my life and drunk the same water,’ said Silvana. ‘And there’s nothing wrong with me.’

As they reached the back of the building, where, indeed, the walls were straighter, and no windows were missing, she said, ‘You can smell the damp here.’

‘Like mushrooms,’ he said. ‘I find it soothing.’

‘Unless it’s in a bedroom,’ said Silvana. ‘OK, so here you have a walled garden coming out from the back of the villa, a perfect square. In fact, the area is precisely the same as the villa itself. In 1870, they added sheds, stables, and storerooms on this side, and, well, you’ll see in a minute, this is where we did the conversions. So strictly speaking, the intended living quarters were not in the villa. Through this gate here . . .’

They came into an enclosed courtyard. The central area was filled with prolific weeds, most taller than humans.

‘The former owners . . .’

‘The Romanelli family,’ said Blume.

‘You did your homework,’ she said. ‘The Romanellis, maybe because they did not have that many guests, converted the stables into storerooms and this courtyard into a vegetable garden.’

‘As if they didn’t have enough garden already,’ said Blume. He pointed to the far side, ‘Are those steps leading down to a basement?’

‘Presumably.’

‘So three floors, plus an entire basement. They built big in those days,’ he said.

She fished a key out of her jeans, unlocked a door next to them. ‘This is one of the converted stables.’ She switched on a halogen light. The fresh plaster was peeling and blackening already. Corrugated tubes were sticking out of the walls.

‘The wiring is not finished either,’ she said sadly. ‘We did up ten rooms like this. We had a
geometra
check for structural integrity, we got all the necessary permits, or almost all of them, the Region even made us sign a rider to our lease specifying that these improvement works would revert to public ownership in the event of a sale, even though that’s already part of the agreement.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘My father and I. We have a concession for the villa and the gardens, but it is owned by the Regional government. In the old days, you would get the concession practically in perpetuity and hand it down generation to generation, but these are tough economic times. The Region could even decide to repossess and sell the place. We get right of first refusal, and we would get a decent discount, but we’re still talking in terms of millions for the house and gardens.’ She pointed to the empty room. ‘Do you like those hexagonal tiles?’

‘Very much.’

‘You would not believe how much it cost to restore them. More than all the plastering and new wiring put together. They refused me the licence at the last moment. An inspector said it was not fit for temporary habitation, which of course it wasn’t because we did not want to invest any more until we were sure we could get the licence. We tried to explain it to him, but he would not listen. Anyhow, if you don’t mind . . .’

‘What?’

‘Can we leave now? It’s all a bit depressing for me.’

‘Oh, of course. I am sorry,’ said Blume. ‘You were doing a great job with those rooms. Funny isn’t it, the way the former stables and your gate lodge turn out to be far more habitable than the building to which they were meant as accessories.’

They returned to the courtyard.

‘Well, I suppose I’d better be getting back to Rome,’ he said.

‘That’s where you’re from?’

‘Yes. It’s a pity this didn’t work out for you. Maybe next time, you’ll have more luck. I hope they give you a licence, and you get this place done up.’

Together they contemplated the crumbling masonry, the rotten shutters.

‘Come on,’ said Silvana, ‘I’ll show you the way back. It’s harder than it looks to find your way. You tend to use the house as a landmark, but the paths follow a different logic. By the way, this section of the garden closest to the villa is the least looked after, because, well, my father says he’d need another three people to keep the whole place in order.’

‘I’m sorry for my description of him. I meant no offence.’

‘That’s all right. You were not to know.’

‘He does a fine job,’ said Blume, pausing to admire a tangle of high-growth weeds.

‘Only by avoiding this area. The seeds from those plants get everywhere.’

Blume turned his admiration of the white-topped plants into a critical frown. ‘Must be a nuisance,’ he said. ‘How about fire, to control them?’

‘Some weeds love fire. They thrive on it. The seeds need heat to pop open. And it’s illegal and dangerous, too, especially near the villa.’

They walked on in a comfortable silence. She pointed to an unkempt patch of weeds, one of the last before her father’s landscaping efforts reasserted themselves. ‘You see those really tall plants?’

He nodded.

‘Most of them belong to the carrot family.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really,’ she said. ‘They thrive on damp soil. There is a river running below this villa. That’s probably why the Romanellis were always sick and left here. Damp. Mould, mildew. The walls in the villa are sponges.

‘Big carrots.’

‘What?’

‘If those are carrots, they must be giant carrots.’

For the first time that day, Silvana felt she could laugh. ‘The carrot family, also called the apiaceae, includes all sorts of other things: parsnips, fennel, hedge parsley, celery. If you smell or taste them, you’ll see what I mean.’

Blume pulled off a handful of curved seeds and smelled them. ‘You’re right. Parsley, or . . .’

‘Angelica. That’s called garden angelica – I think. The seeds are used as flavouring in candies and cakes . . .’

Blume popped a handful into his mouth, and chewed for a bit. ‘Can’t say I’d want that in a cake. Too much like . . . parsnip or horseradish. That’s it. Horseradish. Excuse me . . .’ He spat out a few remaining seeds and fingered his teeth. ‘Bitter! Well, I suppose I should be going.’

‘I’ll accompany you.’

They walked back towards the gate lodge, and she explained the layout and how he had turned straight into the main gate ignoring the sign for parking ahead. ‘Not that it matters, of course. The car park behind the spice garden, well, it’s larger but its main advantage, I suppose, is we don’t get people parking outside our house.’

‘Spice garden? That sounds interesting.’

‘We were standing on the edge of it just now with the other guests. If you had used the right entrance, you’d have walked through it.’

‘I can’t get anything right.’ He pulled out his car key and bleeped open the door. ‘You know, I wouldn’t have been a good customer anyway. I don’t really believe in Bach Flowers, herbs, and all that sort of stuff.’

‘But you were open enough to give it a chance.’

‘I suppose,’ said Blume, rubbing his upper arm, then scratching his chest.

‘You seem anxious. Valerian is very good for that. I have some in the lodge. We live upstairs. Downstairs is my herb centre. Come on, I’ll give you a free sample. Are you itching, too?’

‘Bit of an itch. I have pills though.’

‘I have a balm that works miracles! You never asked me for any refund. It’s the least I can do.’

She entered the gate lodge. It was a long building, with two floors, but so low that a tall man could probably jump and grab the windowsill of the upper floor, which he noticed was accessible from an external staircase. Inside, in a far more successful version of the efforts in the stables behind the villa, they had cleared out the old agricultural equipment and whitewashed the lower part, which was divided into three rooms. The central section was a herbal store and laboratory, and he was quite impressed by the sanded floors, baskets, flowers, spot lighting, tasteful books, and the scent of dried and fresh herbs. One of the smaller spaces contained a large oak table. Beside it was a disused potter’s wheel and an old Singer sewing machine. Keys, rusty and unused, hung on the wall.

It should have felt pleasant and cool, but he felt suddenly constricted, and found himself hurrying outside again in search of more air. He drew a breath, which stopped halfway before he was finished. He drew another, which stopped a quarter of the way, and the one after that was even shorter. He coughed, then winced, then coughed some more, and, as he reached the outdoors, called back to Silvana, still searching for the balm, ‘I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a bit of water? Those seeds seem to be burning my mouth.’

She appeared on the doorstep, holding a jar of ointment. ‘Burning? They shouldn’t burn.’

‘Something is definitely burning my mouth and throat – and chest. It’s sort of a soapy taste.’

She looked at the pointless ointment in her hand, then at him.

‘What sort of weird cakes . . .’

‘Cakes?’

‘You said the seeds were used to flavour cakes.’ He stopped talking. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. He started fumbling at his shirt, which was soaked in sweat. On the third button, his finger slipped and he ripped it open. ‘Water.’ It was a command, not a request.

Silvana went running back inside, calling for her father. She filled a pitcher of water and brought it out to Blume, who was sitting slumped against his car now, breathing heavily. In the minutes since she had left him, he had turned deathly white.

‘Papà!’ she screamed. Blume grabbed the pitcher and poured the water into his mouth and over his face, then groaned and stretched out on his side.

‘Papà!’ Then she remembered her phone. She had left it in the store. She ran in, found it, fumbled with the keypad, and finally managed to call him. He answered almost immediately. ‘Papà, there’s a man here . . . no, listen, this is serious. He’s eaten something poisonous.
I
don’t know. It was . . . he just took a handful.’

‘Some sort of carrot,’ said Blume. ‘Call an ambulance, please.’

Silvana collected herself. ‘I am sorry . . . My father’s calling an ambulance. Look, there he is now!’

‘The ambulance?’

‘No, my father.’ She seemed to turn away from him as she said this, and then suddenly her face was right up in front of him, and her voice was bellowing and loud. Everything felt chubby, like in a Botero painting, and his stomach heaved. A sensation of enormous pressure filled his chest, as if there were a vastness of air in it and the only escape was through a thin tube that could block or burst at any moment. And there was a lot of pain. The air in his chest seemed to be expanding, forming an echo chamber in which he could feel his heart, thumping out of rhythm with his breathing, which, he realized, was coming in short rasps. Not red jumping pain like when a dentists drills into a nerve, but grey and spreading. He no longer felt his legs, but a new type of ache had spread to his arms. Usually an ache was a deep but dull sensation, a promise of pain to come, but this one had all the panicky urgency of a cramp. And now his bowels, too . . . A bony man, dark brown, soil embedded in the wrinkles of his wide forehead, a smell of earth from his clothes, was shouting something – then whispering, it seemed. Blume retched. The burning was intolerable, but he was afraid to scream in case his throat ripped itself open.

‘Cicuta possibly. I can’t think of anything else. It wasn’t a giant hogweed, was it? . . . Marshy there . . . Too far south, even for this garden.’

Blume tried to prop himself up, but found he could hardly lift his face from the ground. He focused his energy on speaking. ‘What is happening?’

A man’s voice, southern-accented, friendly, answered. ‘I can’t be sure, but my daughter thinks you just ate hemlock.’ It was the man with the chestnut face, the gardener, who seemed to see something amusing in all this. Blume sort of saw it, too; but was it possible to laugh at your own impending death? An image of Caterina came into his mind, and their baby daughter, Alessia, nine months old. Caterina threw him out of her life, but had named their child after him. He should leave a message for them, but none came to mind.

Five minutes later, the gardener, showing far greater strength than Blume could ever have imagined, dragged and pushed him into a dilapidated Fiat Uno.

‘An ambulance will take too long. I’ll get you to the clinic in town instead. Silvana is calling ahead.’

Blume was too big for the back seat and lay huddled up in foetal position, knees in chest. ‘Far?’ was all he managed to say.

‘Just up the hill,’ assured the old gardener.

Blume recalled plenty of gear grinding as they drove slowly up the winding road. With each hairpin turn, the car seemed to get slower, but to compensate, his mind was racing, his thoughts flying.

Chapter 3

It was Alina who, all those years ago, had discovered the free tickets to Hogwarts University of Magic in London. The offer was right there, flashing inside a pink star on the screen in front of them. Nadia was sceptical. This was her default mode; in part because life so far had taught her to be so, in part because she felt it was her role, being a year older than Alina. But Alina’s zeal was infectious, and the best of it was that the offer was for two people. Nadia had introduced Alina to the Harry Potter movies and books, and was pleased to see her friend as enthusiastic about the adventures as she was, so it seemed unkind to be sceptical.