The Whirling Girl (6 page)

A POOL ON A lower level caught the last rosy light. Clare set her glass on the balustrade. The gas-pump wine seemed to have drained away again; it had not buoyed her as she'd hoped. On the far side of the terrace she heard a woman's brassy American voice, joined by a mellow Italian one. She didn't look around.

The view was so remarkable. How dreadful to be standing with laughing people in the background, an empty glass in front of her, looking out over countryside that her uncle had made seductively real to her. There, directly across a narrow gap, was the city supposedly older than Troy, topped by the ruined tower. There was the Etruscan wall. There, to the south, a glimpse of Lake Trasimeno where Hannibal had won a battle that had turned those waters red. What if I crack apart tonight? Clare thought. What if everything flies out, a black cloud of leather-wing bats and devils, like in some medieval painting?

The moon was rising behind the house. If her uncle's property did adjoin this somewhere in the woods, surely she could bushwhack her way home with the help of that moon. But the young Dane, Anders, came up beside her, proffering a platter of red, oozing bruschetta. He stared at her with such alarming intensity that she wondered if he was going to ask her to read his thesis. Instead, he started telling her how keenly he had been following the work of Geoffrey Kane, how he looked forward to talking to her about it when they could find a quiet opportunity. She took a slice of bruschetta and held it, trying to control herself enough to speak.

“Here,” Anders finally said. “I will give you this.” He reached into the pocket of his shirt for a newspaper clipping. “Please remember, I am the one
simpatico
you can trust.” He strode into the house.

He had given her an article from the
International Herald Tribune
. By Fufluns. Her uncle really had used the name of the Etruscan Dionysus.

To find herself holding that bit of yellowed newspaper was one thing too much. She shoved the clipping in her pocket, wheeled around, and took a blind step towards escape.

SHE FOUND HERSELF GLUED to a stocky weathered man, with the tomato-garlic thing oozing between them.

“You're supposed to eat it, not wear it,” he said as they peeled apart. “Just a little Italy tip. When in doubt, treat anything they hand you as food.”

He was very tanned, but shaggy; he made her think of a shaggy lion. His eyes were so blue she wondered if he wore contact lenses.

He would be the archaeologist who worked for Sir Harold Plank. The giveaway? The half-unbuttoned shirt, the chest hair.

“You must be the niece of Kane,” he said.

It was marvellous and pathetic how one's mood could turn around. A vain, grizzled man looking at her in a carnivorous way. She found herself laughing.

“The niece of Kane? And this is the mark of Kane?” she said, looking down at her shirt. “What a mess. And yours too!”

“Don't give it a thought. I was wondering how to introduce myself.”

“I'm leaving. We'd better pass like mess-ups in the night.”

“Terrible idea.”

“We'd have to stand with our faces to the wall.”

“We'll face them together.” He doubled his fists, pummelled the air. “We'll say we were attacked by errant comestibles and had to beat them off with sticks.”

“That could work.”

He dropped the fists and looked weary, as if the nonsense had taken more out of him than it deserved. He turned to gaze out over the valley in a Lion Rampant sort of way. He might have been a blocky statue, if Clare were to ignore the hot-hide smell pulsing through the lemony aftershave. The silence extended. She studied his big hands braced on the stone wall. Wide fingers. A battered ring twisted to form a snake with a ruby eye. He was consciously letting the silence harden, she thought. She could feel silky currents sideslipping in the dusk

“I've seen your book,” he said. “Your friend Sir Harry tells me you're tackling Tuscany now. Where to after that? Karnak, I suppose.” She tried to remember where Karnak was. “I'm not sure that fits my schedule.”

“What? Not see that famous wall which records of the spoils of Thutmose the Third, from his campaigns in Syria!” His voice shifted into the singsong. “
And My Majesty saith, all these plants exist in very truth. My majesty hath wrought this, in order for them to be before my father Ammon, in this great hall forever and ever.
”

He turned sideways, one hand above the other, palms down, like a figure in a frieze. “Carved in hieroglyphics, of course.”

“THIS GUY TRIES TO sound erudite, but don't be fooled.” The brassy-voiced woman who'd come up beside them made Clare think of one of those ballet figures by Degas: a short tulle skirt, platform sandals laced like ballet slippers, black hair skinned back before it fell into a long braid, and clusters of gilded oak leaves on her ears.

She laid her palms on either side of Luke Tindhall's face, kissed him on each cheek, oblivious of the man with the white ponytail now frowning at her side.

“All Luke really does is throw money around,” she said to Clare. “We have to keep buttering him up, hoping he throws some in our direction. I'm Nikki Stockton.” She shook Clare's hand. Her grip had crunch. “This is my husband William Sands.”

The husband gave Clare a grave and attentive nod.

“William is the director of an excavation in the hills in Umbria,” the ballet woman said, “A hilltop fortress settlement that spans all the Etruscan centuries.”

Her husband was shifting his feet. Luke Tindhall was shifting his too.

“We hope you will come up and see the dig,” the woman said, “even if Luke here has such a busy schedule. Right, William?”

But the man with the white ponytail turned and walked away. Luke Tindhall stood back, sizing the woman up. “So Nikki, what do we have here tonight? In training for the Giro d'Italia, are we?” And Clare realized that the ballet costume was actually put together out of lycra bike shorts under cheesecloth-like panels, and a lycra muscle shirt.

“It's a mood piece,” Nikki said. “To get you in the mood to pedal up to our dig.”

She then turned an almost hungry intensity on Clare, and started to rave about how moved she'd been by Clare's description of the dangers facing the biosphere of the Amazon basin, and how she had felt as if she were actually there with Clare on those travels.

“By the way,” she added, “I'm a sort of artist, too.”

She pulled at one of her oak-leaf earrings. Bits came to pieces in her hand. She undid the drawstring of a little silk pouch she wore on a cord around her neck and tucked in the gilded fragments, all the while explaining that she worked in the conservation lab associated with her husband's dig, where she did measured drawings of the archaeological finds. As she went on to describe the work, Luke started tapping his foot. “There is this really enlivening tension,” Nikki was saying, “between the detailed hours of measuring and recording, and the magic of reconstruction. How from a few recovered fragments it is possible to recreate what an artefact would have been when it was whole.” She pulled at her other earring, which also came to pieces in her hand. She stuffed these into the embroidered pouch.

“That's so pretty,” Clare said, empathizing with this clearly nervous performance.

“This? It's handy.” Nikki gave an elfin grin. “I keep little discarded things in it. Like thoughts.” Then she bent and peered at Clare's waist. “I've always wanted a belt with a big silver buckle. Did you pick that up on your travels?” Clare noted the strands of grey in the long black braid as the woman then exclaimed, “Why it's a goat's head! Where did you find it?”

“I won it, in a rodeo.”

They all laughed. Clare excused herself to go and sponge her shirt.

NIKKI STOCKTON WAS WAITING in the corridor when Clare came out of the powder room. She led Clare to a spot further along the terrace under a gnarled wisteria vine, where a round table had been set with bright pottery dishes, a clutch of wine bottles in the centre. Ralph Farnham was there. He said the wine had been sent along in Clare's honour from the Sienese estate of Gianpaulo, the botanical brotherin-law, who was a bit delayed. He eased Clare into a chair where all the bottles had their labels turned in her direction: a mini-phalanx of rearing unicorns, symbol of the brother-in-law's sanctuary for endangered species, he explained.

The wine was so dark it was like sipping liquid garnets — garnets from caves where unicorns really might still hide, Clare thought as she sipped. The entire setting was a fantasy, an outdoor Aladdin's cave, and when she looked up into the vine she saw a chandelier made up of hundreds of Venetian glass flowers, each with millefiori petals that threw bouquets of jewelled light. Farnham said the chandelier had been designed by a famous glass master in Murano, as a gift from his spendthrift brother-in-law to his wife Federica. Clare heard a small tinkling sound. One of the glass petals had fallen on her plate. Across the table, Nikki Stockton gave that elf grin and spread her hands as if to say don't blame me. Clare cradled the tiny petal in her palm, noting how its curve held a scattering of still-tinier flowers, turquoise and rose and lapis, with ruby centres as well as minute gold stars. She would take it home for inspiration; a good omen surely for a flower artist starting on a new venture.

She felt Luke Tindhall looking at her. She tucked the petal under the rim of her plate. Beside her, washed into indiscretion on a tide of his brother-in-law's wine, Ralph Farnham began telling of a scandal involving his wife's mother. Clare only half-listened, conscious of Luke Tindhall's stare. “A lovely mess!” she heard Farnham say in conclusion, “Only in Italy, old dear. Unless you count our Royals …”

AS MORE GUESTS APPEARED, one or other of them squeezed in beside her whenever the previous one got up, like musical chairs. A bearded Italian with a beaky nose introduced himself as Vittorio Cerotti, and, in a fate-filled tone, said that while he was the local inspector of archaeology, yes, as Signora Livingston may have heard, he was also “the husband of this beautiful apparition,” indicating the woman who hovered behind. “The Contessa Dottoressa Professoressa Luisa di Varinieri.”

The Contessa! A vision indeed, though hardly as Clare had expected. She was wearing an outfit that might have drifted straight from one of the famous tomb paintings in Tarquinia, a gauzy dress and red boots with curling toes and a headdress that reared from her shoulders like an elegant cobra hood. When the vision settled beside her, Clare found herself confessing about the imaginary adventures she'd engaged in as a child with the little Etruscan girl; how she'd spent hours imagining the clothes they would wear, poring through her uncle's books on tomb painting and a reference book about Etruscan mirrors.

“You must call me Luisa!” The Contessa seemed charmed. “Of course, fashion is so much more important than some bluestockings would have you believe. For as I am sure you know,” she sweetly added, “by studying the costumes that are portrayed, particularly as engravings on Etruscan mirrors, we are able to pinpoint quite accurately the era of such discoveries.”

She leaned close. In a caffè latte voice, she confided to Clare that it was one of her greatest tragedies that, although thanks to such mirrors there were excellent records of what Etruscans had worn through the ages, still, as things stood, the entire popular literature of the Etruscans had been lost.

“However, your uncle, in one of his last articles, hinted at quite a remarkable discovery. Perhaps soon we will have tea and, as you might say, compare notes?” In the warmth of that almond smile the long-forgotten sugary sensation of a schoolgirl crush settled on Clare. She wanted nothing more than to become a helpful friend to this beautiful older woman.

When Luisa di Varinieri rose, Carl slipped into her place. “We are all fond enemies around this table,
ja
?” he said. “This is the sad case with academics. We are all in hot pursuit of intellectual treasure. I believe every one of my dear friends here is equally intrigued to know what Geoffrey Kane may have discovered, what information he might have left behind in his notes and papers.”

Clare nodded. She held out her glass, determined to ignore the truth she'd just glimpsed slithering through the jewelled light. Perhaps none of this — the wine, the friendliness — was really about her. Maybe her entire life had not been about her, if she looked at it that way. “Here's to intellectual treasure, then,” she said to Carl. They clinked glasses and refilled. At her request, he taught her toasting phrases from other parts of the world, where his work had taken him:
Na zdrowie
in Warsaw,
Noroc
in Bucharest, and, in Catalonia,
Txin txin
. She told him about drinking manioc liquor among the Yanomami, a wordless experience, she said. When the young Dane took Carl's place, she said
Skaal
, and thought no wonder the big German was in love with him, anyone would be; he smelled as compelling as he looked, just the faintest whiff of well-washed armpits overlaid by tarry soap. Anders was a linguist, he told Clare. She was just about to tell him about the Yanomami, and the night she'd spent among them in a hammock in one of their great circular grass houses, when the man in the white ponytail sat down across the way. Anders began in plangent tones, sure to carry, to talk about his doctoral thesis, in which he proved a positive link between the ancient language of the Etruscans and modern Ukrainian.

A TERRACOTTA TRAY PUSHED through the beaded curtain in the doorway, followed by a figure in a white dress with many descending ruffles. A dangerous coil of ash dangled from the cigarette in the centre of the red pursed mouth.

Federica.

Federica glared around. “Would you believe Gianpaulo was halfway here when Eleanora called to say their girl has croup! So now he is on the way to Bologna, yes! I have had to call Eleanora to say, ‘Please do not make me have to tell you that just because you run the family business you do not run all our lives.'”

She caught sight of Clare.

“Ah, of course.” She came around, grasped Clare by the shoulders — taking in the sponged shirt, the belt, the boots, the jeans. “You are the niece of my difficult neighbour, who never had the courtesy to call on me.” She kissed Clare on both cheeks, then made her way back around the table, flopped into a chair, crossed one brown leg over the other, pushed both hands up into her cap of short black hair. “Oh that woman!” she sighed, through a curl of smoke.

“Meaning the wife of the little brother,” Ralph explained. “Please do not imagine otherwise.”