Kitabı oku: «The Savage Garden»

THE
SAVAGE
GARDEN

MARK MILLS

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

August 1958

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Sample from House of the Hanged

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Praise

Also by Mark Mills

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Caroline, Gus and Rosie

Epigraph

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets

August 1958

Later, when it was over, he cast his thoughts back to that sun-struck May day in Cambridge – where it had all begun – and asked himself whether he would have done anything differently, knowing what he now did.

It was not a question easily answered.

He barely recognized himself in the carefree young man cycling along the towpath beside the river, bucking over the ruts, the bottle of wine dancing around in the bike basket.

Try as he might, he couldn’t penetrate the workings of that stranger’s mind, let alone say with any certainty how he would have dealt with the news that murder lay in wait for him, just around the corner.

1

He was known, primarily, for his marrows.

This made him a figure of considerable suspicion to the ladies of the Horticultural Society, who, until his arrival on the scene, had vied quite happily amongst themselves for the most coveted award in the vegetable class at their annual show. The fact that he was a newcomer to the village no doubt fuelled their resentments; that he lived alone with a ‘housekeeper’ some years younger than himself, a woman whose cast of countenance could only be described as ‘oriental’, permitted them to bury the pain of defeat in malicious gossip.

That first year he carried off the prize, I can recall Mrs Meade and her cronies huddled together at the back of the marquee, like cows before a gathering storm. I can also remember the vicar, somewhat the worse for wear after an enthusiastic sampling of the cider entries, handing down his verdict on the marrow category. With an air of almost lascivious relish, he declared Mr Atherton’s prodigious specimen to be ‘positively tumescent’ (thereby reinforcing my own suspicions about the good reverend).

Mr Atherton, tall, lean, and slightly stooped by his seventy-some years, approached the podium without the aid of his walking stick. He graciously accepted the certificate (and the bottle of elderflower cordial that accompanied it) then returned to his chair. I happened to be seated beside him that warm, blustery afternoon, and while the canvas snapped in the wind and the vicar slurred his way through a heartfelt tribute to all who had submitted Victoria sponges, Mr Atherton inclined his head towards me, a look of quiet mischief in his eyes.

‘Do you think they’ll ever forgive me?’ he muttered under his breath.

I knew exactly who he was talking about.

‘Oh, I doubt it,’ I replied, ‘I doubt it very much.’

These were the first words we had ever exchanged, though it was not the first time I had elicited a smile from him. Earlier that summer, I had caught him observing me with an amused expression from beneath a Panama hat. He had been seated in a deck chair on the boundary of the cricket pitch, and a burly, lower-order batsman from Droxford had just hit me for six three times in quick succession, effectively sealing yet another ignoble defeat for the Hambledon 2nd XI.

Adam turned the sheet over, expecting to read on. The page was blank. ‘That’s it?’ he asked.

‘Evidently,’ said Gloria. ‘What do you think?’

‘It’s good.’

‘Good? “Good ” is like “nice ”. “Good ” is what mothers say about children who don’t misbehave. Boring children! For God’s sake, Adam, this is my novel we’re talking about.’

Probably best not to mention the over-zealous use of commas.

‘Very good. Excellent,’ he said.

Gloria pouted a wary forgiveness, her breasts straining against the material of her cotton print dress as she leaned towards him. ‘It’s just the opening, but it’s intriguing, don’t you think?’

‘Intriguing. Yes. Very mysterious. Who is this Mr Atherton with the prodigious marrows?’

‘Ah-ha!’ she trumpeted. ‘You see? Page one and you’re already asking questions. That’s good.’

He raised an eyebrow at her choice of adjective but she didn’t appear to notice.

‘Who do you think he is? Or, more to the point: What do you think he is?’

She was losing him now. The wine wasn’t helping, unpalatably warm in the afternoon heat, a wasp buzzing forlornly around the neck of the bottle.

‘I really don’t know.’

Gloria swept the wasp aside with the back of her hand and filled her glass, topping up Adam’s as an afterthought.

‘He’s a German spy,’ she announced.

‘A German spy?’

‘That’s right. You see, it’s wartime – 1940, to be precise – and while the Battle of Britain rages in the skies above a small Hampshire village, an altogether different battle is about to unfold on the ground. As above –’

‘– so below’

Were they really quoting Hermes Trismegistus at each other over this?

‘And who or what is Herr Atherton spying on?’ he persevered, regretting the question almost immediately.

‘A secret submarine base in Portsmouth harbour.’

So this was where two years of English literature studies had led her, all that Beowulf and Chaucer, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: to a secret sub marine base in Portsmouth harbour.

‘What?’ demanded Gloria warily.

‘I was just thinking,’ he lied, ‘that your narrator’s a man. Unless she’s a woman who happens to play cricket for the village team.’

‘So?’

‘It’s a challenge, I imagine, writing a male narrator.’

‘You don’t think I’m up to it?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Four brothers,’ she said, holding up three fingers. ‘And it’s not as if you’re the first chap I’ve ever stepped out with.’

This was a truth she liked to assert from time to time, dishing out unsavoury details to drive home her point, although she was too angry for that right now.

She tossed the remainder of her wine away, the liquid crescent flopping into the tall grass. She got to her feet a little unsteadily. ‘I’m going.’

‘Don’t,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Stay’

‘You hate it.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘You’re wrong. I could be jailed for what I’m thinking.’

It was a crass play, but he knew her vulnerability to that kind of talk. Besides, this was the reason they’d skipped their lectures and come to the meadow, was it not?

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, capitalizing on her faint smile, ‘I suppose I’m just jealous.’

‘Jealous?’

‘I couldn’t do it, I know that. It’s great. Really. It hooked me instantly. The drunken vicar’s a great touch.’

‘You like him?’

‘A lot.’

Gloria allowed herself to be drawn back down on to the blanket, into their sunken den, out of sight of the river towpath where the stubby willows bristled.

His fingers charted a lazy yet determined course along the inside of her dove-white thigh, the flesh warm and yielding, like new dough.

She leaned towards him and kissed him, forcing her tongue between his lips.

He tasted the cheap white wine and felt himself stir under her touch. His hand moved to her breasts, his thumb brushing over her nipples, the way she liked it.

Sexual favours in return for blanket praise. Was it really that simple?

He checked his thoughts, guilty that his mind was straying from the matter in hand.

He needn’t have worried.

‘You know,’ said Gloria, breaking free and drawing breath, ‘I think I’ll give Mr Atherton a granddaughter. My hero needs to lose his heart.’

The note was waiting for him in his pigeonhole when he returned to college. He recognized the handwriting immediately. It was the same barely legible scrawl that adorned his weekly essays. The note read:

Dear Mr Strickland,

Apologies for making this demand upon your busy schedule, but there is a matter I should like to discuss with you regarding your thesis.

Shall we say 5 p.m. today in my office at the faculty? (That’s the large stone building at the end of Trumpington Street, in case you’ve forgotten.)

Warm regards

Professor Leonard

Adam glanced at his watch. Fifteen minutes to get across town. The bath would have to wait.

Professor Crispin Leonard was something of an institution, not just within the faculty but the university as a whole. Although well into his seventies, he was quite unlike his elderly peers, who only emerged from their gloomy college rooms at mealtimes, or so it seemed, shuffling in their threadbare gowns to and from the dining hall across velvet lawns whose sacred turf it was their privilege to tread. Few knew what these aged characters did (or had ever done) to justify the sinecure of a college fellowship. Authorship of a book, one book, any book, appeared to suffice, even if the value of that work had long since been eclipsed. For whatever reason, they were deemed to have paid their dues, and in return the colleges offered them a comfortable dotage unencumbered by responsibilities.

Professor Leonard was cut from a far tougher cloth. He lectured and supervised in three subjects, he continued to offer his services as a college tutor, and he remained involved in a number of societies, some of which he had also founded. And all this while still finding time not only to write but to be published. By any standards it was a remarkable workload, and one he appeared to shoulder quite effortlessly.

How did he manage it? He never hurried and was never late; he just loped about like a well-fed cat, giving off an air of slight distraction, as if his mind was always on higher things.

He was deep in slumber when Adam entered his office. The first knock didn’t rouse him, and when Adam poked his head around the door and saw him slumped in an armchair, a book on his lap, he knocked again, louder this time.

Professor Leonard stirred, taking his bearings, taking in Adam. ‘I’m sorry, I must have nodded off.’ He closed the book and laid it aside. Adam noted that it was one of the professor’s own works, on the sculpture of Mantegna.

‘No court in the land would convict you.’

Professor Leonard invited irreverence, he actively encouraged it, but for a moment Adam feared he had overstepped the mark.

‘That might be funnier, Mr Strickland, if you’d ever bothered to read my book on Mantegna. Which reminds me – how is your serve?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, the last time I saw you, you were cycling down King’s Parade in something of a hurry. You were gripping two tennis rackets, and the young lady riding side-saddle was gripping you.’

‘Oh.’

‘Has it improved?’

‘Improved?’

‘Your serve, Mr Strickland. We would all feel so much happier if you at least had something else to show for your absence.’

‘I work hard,’ bleated Adam. ‘I work late.’

Professor Leonard reached for some papers stacked on the side table next to his chair. ‘Since you’re here, you might as well take this now’ He flipped through the pile and pulled out Adam’s essay. ‘I probably marked you lower than I should have done.’

‘Oh,’ said Adam, a little put out.

‘Thinking about it, you might have had more of a point than I credited you with at first.’

‘Which point was that?’

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Mr Strickland. To my knowledge – and I read it twice – you only made one point. The others were lifted straight from the books I suggested you read.’ He raised a long, bony finger. ‘And some I didn’t suggest…which, I grant you, displays more initiative than most.’

He handed the essay over.

‘We’ll discuss it at greater length another time. Now, your thesis. Have you had any further thoughts?’

Adam had flirted with a couple of ideas – Islamic icon ography in Romanesque architecture, the use of line in early Renaissance drawing – but the professor would recognize them for what they were: lazy speculations on some well-trodden fields of study. No, best to keep quiet.

‘Not really’

‘You still have a year, of course, but it’s advisable to start applying yourself now, certainly if you wish to show us something of your true colours. Do you, Mr Strickland?’

‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘Of course.’

‘How’s your Italian?’

‘Okay Rusty’

‘Good, then I might have something for you.’

The professor explained that he had recently been contacted by an old acquaintance of his. Signora Docci, the lady in question, was the owner of a large villa in the hills of Tuscany, just south of Florence. ‘An impressive, if somewhat pedestrian, example of High Renaissance Tuscan vernacular,’ was how the professor described the architecture of the building. He saved his praise for the garden, not the formal arrangement of Renaissance terraces abutting the villa, but a later Mannerist addition occupying a sunken grove nearby. Conceived and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, this plunging patch of woodland was fed by a spring and modelled on Roman gardens of the period, with meandering pathways and rills, statues, inscriptions and neoclassical structures.

‘It’s a very unusual place,’ the professor said. ‘Extremely arresting.’

‘You know it?’

‘I did, some years ago. It has never been altered -which is rare – and I know for a fact that no proper study has ever been conducted of it. Which is where you come in, if you want to, that is. Signora Docci has kindly offered it as a subject for one of my students.’

Mannerist was bad, too overblown for Adam’s taste, and he’d have to do a lot of reading up. Italy, on the other hand, was good, very good.

‘Maybe a garden isn’t quite what you had in mind, but don’t dismiss it…Art and Nature coming together to create a whole new entity – a third nature, if you will’

Adam didn’t require any more encouragement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’

2

Exams were upon them before they knew it, and gone just as quickly. They celebrated, got drunk, punted off to Grantchester with picnics, danced at college balls and hurled themselves fully clothed into the river – memories irreparably tarnished for Adam by Gloria’s decision to end their relationship on the last night of term. The situation was non-negotiable and, true to character, Gloria made no attempt to feign a remorse she clearly didn’t feel. She did manage, however, to offer him one scrap of consolation: as he would no longer be coming to stay at her family’s pile in Scotland, he would be spared the maddening attentions of the summer midges.

‘Cattle have been known to hurl themselves off cliffs because of the midges.’

These were her last words to him before he stormed out on her, slamming the door behind him.

The following day everyone trickled back to their real lives. For Adam, this was a faceless suburb to the south of London, and a Tudor-style villa with Elizabethan yearnings. Thrown up just after the war, the house only existed because a German air crew had taken one look at the lethal hail of flak over the city and promptly jettisoned their payload before running for home.

Adam and his brother had once dug a trench at the end of the garden – the first line of defence against invasion by some imagined enemy force – only to find themselves unearthing the remains of the terraced houses that had previously occupied the plot. Harry had taken those fragments of brick and tile and glass, sinking them in plaster of Paris, producing a mosaic in the shape of a house: the first tell-tale sign of his calling that Adam could recall.

Adam searched out old friends from the neighbourhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag and Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth – that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.

His mother was delighted to have him home and keen to show it, which usually meant she was unhappy. Whenever she smothered him with affection, he had the uneasy sensation she was using him as a rod with which to beat his father: You see what you’re missing out on? His father was more withdrawn than ever, and not best pleased. He had wanted Adam to give the summer over to work-experience – a placement with an acquaintance of his at the Baltic Exchange. It was a wise thing to develop a working knowledge of the Baltic Exchange before a career in marine insurance at Lloyd’s. It was a wise thing to do, because that’s exactly what he himself had done. In the end, though, he conceded defeat.

The arrangements had gone without a hitch: a letter to Signora Docci, her reply (typed and in impeccable English) saying that she had secured a room for him at a pensione in the local town. Aside from rustling up a bit of funding for Adam from within the History of Art Department, Professor Leonard had not needed to involve himself. He did, however, suggest that Adam meet up with him in town before leaving for the Continent.

The proposed venue was a grand stone building close by Cannon Street station in the City Adam had never heard of the Worshipful Company of Skinners, although he wasn’t unduly surprised to discover that the professor was associated with a medieval guild whose history reached back seven centuries. They passed through panelled chambers en route to the roof terrace, where they took lunch beneath an even layer of cloud like a moth-eaten blanket, the sun slanting through at intervals and picking out patches of the city.

They ate beef off the bone and drank claret.

The professor had come armed with a bundle of books and articles for Adam’s mental edification.

‘Read these right through,’ he said, handing over copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti. ‘The rest are for reference purposes. You’ll find the family has an impressive library, which I’m sure you’ll be given access to.’ The professor was reluctant to say any more about the garden – ‘You don’t want me colouring your judgement’ – although he was happy to share some other background with Adam.

Signora Docci lived alone at Villa Docci, her husband having died some years before. Her eldest son Emilio was also dead, killed towards the end of the war by the Germans who had occupied the villa. There was another son, Maurizio, soon to take over the estate, as well as a dissolute daughter, Caterina, who now lived in Rome.

The rest of lunch was spent talking about the professor’s imminent trip to France. He was off to view the Palaeolithic cave paintings at Lascaux – his third visit since their chance discovery by a group of local boys back in 1940. He recalled his frustration at having to wait five years for the war to end before making his first pilgrimage. Thirteen years on, he felt it was now possible to trace the influence of that primitive imagery on the work of contemporary artists. In fact, it was to be the subject of an article, and possibly even a book.

‘Europe’s greatest living painters drawing inspiration from its oldest known painters, seventeen thousand years on. If that isn’t art history, I don’t know what is.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t have to humour me, you know’

‘Of course I do,’ said Adam. ‘You’re buying lunch.’

Later, when they parted company out on the street, the professor said, ‘Francesca…Signora Docci…she’s old now, and frail by all accounts. But don’t under estimate her.’

‘What do you mean?’

Professor Leonard hesitated, glancing off down the street. ‘I’m not sure I rightly know, but it’s sound advice.’

As Adam sat slumped and slightly inebriated in the deserted carriage on the train journey back to Purley, he was left with the uneasy sensation that the professor’s parting warning had been the true purpose of their meeting.

A week later, Adam was gone. He changed trains in Paris, aware that this was as far south as he had ever travelled in his life. On Professor Leonard’s advice, he slipped some francs to the guard and was allotted a spare sleeping compartment to himself.

He didn’t sleep. He tossed in the darkness, France rattling by beneath him, and he thought (far more than he would have liked) of Gloria and of the look on her face when she had said to him, ‘I don’t know why. I think maybe it’s because you’re a touch boring.’

He might have been less stung if they hadn’t just made love. Twice.

‘Boring?’

‘No, not boring, that’s unfair. Bland.’

‘Bland?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t put my finger on it. I can’t think of a word.’

Great. He was a category unto himself – a unique cat egory indefinable by words but falling somewhere between ‘boring’ and ‘bland’.

He had lost his temper, hurling a pillow across the room and swearing at her. He could still recall every moment of the long walk back to his own college, creeping down the staircase from her rooms, stepping through the pale dawn of Trinity Great Court, the bittersweet taste of self-pity rendering him immune to the daggered look from the porter on duty in the lodge.

Pathetic, really, when looked at from a distance, from the darkened sleeping compartment of a train hurtling through the French night, for example. He tried to stem the flow of his thoughts, or at least divert their course. When he failed, he turned on the light and worked on his Italian grammar.

Dawn rose, bringing with it the barely discernible mass of a steep Alpine valley. A few hours later, they were free of the mountains.

All he saw of Milan was the Fascist splendour of the Stazione Centrale as he hurried between platforms to make his connecting train. He was aware of the heat and the smell of unfamiliar tobacco, but not much else. He briefly glimpsed Shelley’s ‘waveless plain of Lombardy’ before nodding off.

A deep and dreamless sleep carried him all the way to Florence, where he was woken brusquely by the guard, who talked at him in a language quite unlike the Italian he’d learned at school and recently brushed up on. Ejected on to the platform, it certainly wasn’t the kind of reception he’d been led to believe he might receive in Italy.

He found a pensione on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station. The owner informed him that he was in luck; a room had just fallen vacant. It was easy to see why. Adam made a speculative survey of the dismal little box in the roof and told himself it was only for one night.

He stripped off his shirt and lay on the sagging mattress, smoking a cigarette, unaccustomed to the humidity pressing down on the city Was this normal? If so, why had no one thought to mention it? Or the mosquitoes, for that matter. They speckled the ceiling, waiting for night to fall and the feast to begin.

He squeezed himself into the shower room at the end of the corridor and allowed the trickle of water to cool him off. It was a temporary measure. His fresh shirt was lacquered to his chest by the time he’d descended four flights of stairs to the lobby.

The storm broke as he stepped from the building, the sharp crack of thunder echoing around the piazza, the deluge following moments later as the amethyst clouds deposited their load. He stood beneath the awning, watching the raindrops dancing on the road. Water sheeted down from overflowing gutters; drain holes were lost to sight beneath spreading pools of water. And still the rain came, constant, unvarying in its strength. When it ceased, it ceased suddenly and completely.

A church bell struck half past the hour, and immediately people began to appear from the shelter of doorways around the piazza – almost as if the two events were connected, the bell alerting the inhabitants of the quarter to the passing of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.

Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the pavements into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sound of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.

A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence’s ‘unique cultural and artistic heritage’, which he’d detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno – no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.

Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tommaso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy-wonder, dead at twenty-seven. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes – Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with – but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.

His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough-hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country labourers by some unforgiving landlord. Adam’s face was buried in his hands, a broken man. Eve covered her nakedness in shame, but her face was raised, crying out to the heavens. All the anger, frustration and incomprehension in the world seemed contained within that gaping, shapeless hole Masaccio had given her for a mouth.

The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.

They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio’s Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden – pinched and emaciated.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.

It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.

‘American?’ asked the Frenchman.

‘English.’

The word came out wrong – barked, indignant – a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.

He looked at the man’s perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted run-off.

He only realized he was staring when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, ‘Yes…?’

Adam gestured to the frescoes. ‘Las pinturas son muy hermosas,’ he said in his best Spanish.

As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio’s genius, he wondered whether his antagonism towards them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.

3

Has the Englishman arrived yet?

No, Signora.

When?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

That’s what he said in his letter. The twelfth.

I wish to see him as soon as he gets here.

You’ve already said, Signora. You won’t forget?

Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.

Gently. Don’t push.

I’m sorry. Turn over, please.

You don’t have to do this, Maria.

I know.

I’m happy to hire someone else.

You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?

You’re a good woman.

Thank you, Signora.

Just as your father was a good man.

He had the highest respect for you too, Signora.

There’s really no need to be quite so formal, not when you’re giving me a bed-bath.

He had the highest respect for you too.

You know, Maria, I believe you’re in danger of developing a sense of humour in your old age.

Turn over, please.

4

They left Florence through the Porta Romana, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.

The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were travelling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.

Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam’s earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grunt and nod his assent – an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

When the road levelled out he turned and peered through the rear window, searching for a glimpse of Florence. The city was lost to view behind the tumble of hills rolling in from the south. Somehow it seemed appropriate; she was hiding herself, even now.

All morning he had walked her streets, the stone chasms hacked into her, grid-like. Her buildings were no more welcoming – the palaces of rusticated stone, modelled on fortresses (or so it seemed); the churches with their unadorned exteriors, many sheathed in black-and-white marble; the museums housed in all manner of forbidding structures. And yet, behind those austere façades lay any number of riches.

Adam had chosen carefully, almost mathematically, limited as he was by the short time at his disposal. There had been disappointments, acclaimed works which had left him feeling strangely indifferent. But as the taxi worked its way higher into the hills, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it had been a first foray, a swift reconnaissance. There would be plenty of opportunities to return.

San Casciano sat huddled on a high hill, dominating the surrounding countryside. Its commanding position had largely determined the course of its history, apparently, although the entry in Adam’s guidebook made no mention of the last siege the town had been forced to endure. Even as the taxi approached, it was evident that the ancient walls girdling the town had not been constructed to withstand an assault by the kind of weaponry available to the Allies and the Germans.

These weren’t the first scars of war Adam had witnessed. Even Florence, declared an ‘open city’ by both sides out of respect for her architectural significance, had suffered. As the Allies swept up from the south, the Germans had dug in, blowing all but one of the city’s historic bridges. They may have spared the Ponte Vecchio, but this consideration came at a price. The buildings flanking the river in the vicinity of the bridge were mined, medieval towers and Renaissance palaces reduced to rubble, the field cleared for the forthcoming battle. As it was, the Allied troops had simply crossed the Arno elsewhere on makeshift Bailey bridges and swiftly liberated the town.

Years on, the wound inflicted right in the heart of the old city remained raw and open. If efforts had been made to restore those lost streets to their former glory, it was not evident. Modern structures with smooth faces and clean sharp lines stood out along the river’s southern frontage, like teenagers in a queue of pensioners. The very best you could say was that the space had been filled.

In San Casciano that work was still going on. The town was pockmarked with the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings left to lie where they’d fallen. Impressively, Nature had reclaimed what she could in these plots. Young trees sprouted defiantly; shrubs had somehow detected enough moisture in piles of old stones to put down roots and prosper; weeds and ferns sprang from crevices in crumbling walls. The bland new concrete edifices that studded the historic centre were further evidence of the severe pounding the town had taken.

The Pensione Amorini had been spared. One part of the ancient vine clinging to its scaling stucco façade had been trained over a pergola, which shaded a terrace out front, overflow for the bar and trattoria occupying the ground floor. Signora Fanelli was expecting him – he had phoned ahead from Florence – and she summoned her teenage son from a back room to help with Adam’s bags.

‘Oofa,’ said Iacopo as he tested the weight of both suitcases. He left the heaviest – the one containing the books – for Adam to lug upstairs.

The room was far more than he had hoped for. Large and light, it had a floor of polished deep-red tiles, a beamed ceiling and two windows giving on to a leafy garden out back. It was furnished with the bare essentials: a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. As requested, there was also a desk, though no chair, which brought a sharp rebuke from Signora Fanelli.

Iacopo skulked off in search of one, his parting glance holding Adam to blame for this public humiliation. He returned with the chair and disappeared again while Signora Fanelli was still demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the bathroom plumbing to Adam.

Adam declared the room to be ‘perfetto’.

‘Perfetta,’ she corrected him. ‘Una camera perfetta.’

She relieved him of his passport, flashed him a smile and left. Only her perfume remained – a faint scent of roses hanging lightly in the air.

He hefted his suitcase on to the worm-eaten chest at the end of the bed and began to unpack. She must have had the boy young – seventeen, eighteen – though you’d have said even younger judging by her looks. For some reason he’d pictured an elderly woman, small in stature and of no mean girth. Instead, he was being housed by a stringier version of Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze.

It was a pleasing thought.

Another image from the same film barged its way into his head unbidden – Burt Lancaster’s over-muscled physique squeezed into a leotard – and the moment passed.

The road to Villa Docci proved to be a dusty white track following the crest of a high spur to the north of town. It rose and fell past ochre-washed farmhouses, hay meadows giving way to olive groves and vineyards tucked behind high hedgerows ablaze with honeysuckle, mallow and blood-red poppies. His mother would have been thrilled, stopping every so often to call his attention to some plant or flower. That was her way. But all Adam was aware of was the mocking chant of the cicadas pulsing in time to the pitiless heat.

He was about to turn back, convinced that he’d made a mistake, when he saw two weathered stone gateposts up ahead. Beyond them an avenue of ancient cypresses climbed sharply towards a large villa, the trunks of the trees powdered white with dust thrown up from the driveway. There was no sign beside the gateposts, but a quick glance at the hand-drawn map Signora Docci had sent him confirmed that he had at last arrived.

Nearing the top of the driveway he stopped, uncertain, sensing something. He turned, glancing back down the gradient, the plunging perspective of the flanking cypresses.

Something not right. But what? He couldn’t say. And he was too hot to ponder it further.

The cypresses gave way to a gravel turning area in front of the villa. There were some farm buildings away to his left, down the slope, beyond a stand of holm oaks, but his attention was focused on the main structure.

How had Professor Leonard described the architecture of the villa? Pedestrian?

Admittedly, his own knowledge of the subject was drawn almost exclusively from a battered copy of Edith Wharton’s book on Italian villas, but there seemed to be nothing whatsoever run-of-the-mill about the building in front of him. Though not as large or obviously grand as some, its symmetry and proportions lent it an air of discreet nobility, majesty even.

Set around three sides of a flagstone courtyard, it climbed three floors to a shallow, tiled roof with projecting eaves. Arcaded loggias occupied the middle and upper storeys of the front façade, while the wings consisted of blind arcades with pedimented and consoled windows. There was not much more to it than that, but every detail of it worked.

The building felt no need to proclaim its pedigree; rather, it exuded it like a well-cut suit. You were left in little doubt that the hand of some master lay behind its conception – long-dead, unrecognized, forgotten. For if one of the more illustrious architects of the period had been responsible for bringing it into being, that fact would have been preserved in the historical record. As it was, he had found almost no references to Villa Docci during his preliminary research.

He skirted the well-head in the middle of the courtyard and mounted the front steps. There was a stone escutcheon set in the wall above the entrance door, a rampant boar the centrepiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bell pull.

She must have been observing him from inside, waiting for him to make his approach, for the door swung open almost immediately. She was short and stout, and she was wearing a white blouse tucked into a black skirt. Her dark eyes reached for his and held them, vice-like.

‘Good morning,’ he said in Italian.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’m Adam Strickland.’

‘You’re late.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

She stepped aside, allowing him to enter, appraising him with a purposeful eye as if he were a horse she was thinking of betting on (and leaving him with the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be reaching for her purse any time soon).

‘Signora Docci wishes to see you.’

At either end of the long entrance hall was a stone stairway leading to the upper floors. When she made for the one on the left, Adam fell in beside her.

‘May I have a glass of water, please?’

‘Water? Yes, of course.’ She changed tack, heading for a corridor beside the staircase. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

He didn’t mind. It allowed him to cast an eye around the interior. Any suspicions that the quiet elegance of the villa’s exterior owed itself to little more than chance vanished immediately. You sensed the same poised hand at work in the proportions of the vast drawing room that occupied the central section of the ground floor, giving on to a balustraded terrace out back. The flanking rooms were connected by a run of doorways, perfectly aligned, which generated a telescopic sense of perspective and permitted an uninterrupted view from one end of the villa to the other.

Adam retreated at the sound of approaching footsteps, not wishing to be caught snooping by the maid, or the housekeeper, or whatever she was.

Signora Docci lay propped up on a bank of pillows in a four-poster bed of dark wood, reading. She inclined her head towards the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.

‘Adam,’ she said, smiling broadly.

‘Hello.’

‘Thank you, Maria.’

Maria acknowledged the dismissal with a nod, pulling the door closed behind her as she left.

Signora Docci gestured for Adam to approach the bed. ‘Please, it’s not contagious, just old age.’ She laid her book aside and smiled again. ‘Well, maybe it is contagious.’

Her hair hung loose, tumbling like a silver wave around her shoulders. It seemed too long, too thick, for a woman of her advanced years. A tracery of fine lines lay like a veil across her face, but the flesh was firm, shored up by the prominent bones beneath. Her eyes were dark and wide-spaced.

He extended his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook, her grip firm and bony.

‘Please.’ She indicated a high-backed chair near the bed. ‘I’m glad you’re finally here. Maria has been fussing around for days, tidying and cleaning.’

It was hard to picture: stern, monosyllabic Maria preparing for his arrival.

‘She is a good person. She will let you see that when she’s ready to.’

He was slightly unnerved that she’d read the thought in his face.

‘So, how was your trip?’

‘Good. Long.’

‘Did you stop in Paris?’

‘No.’

‘Milan?’

‘Just Florence. And only for a night.’

‘One night in Florence,’ she mused. ‘It sounds like the title of a song.’

‘Not a very good one.’

Signora Docci gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘No,’ she conceded.

Adam took a letter from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. ‘From Professor Leonard.’

She laid the letter beside her on the bed. He noted that her hand remained resting on it.

‘And how is Crispin?’ she asked.

‘He’s in France at the moment, looking at some cave paintings.’

‘Cave paintings?’

‘They’re very old – lots of bison and deer.’

‘A cave is no place for a man his age. It’ll be the death of him.’

Adam smiled.

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘I know, it’s just…your English.’

‘What?’

‘It’s very good. Very correct.’

‘Nannies. Nannies and governesses. My father is to blame. He loved England.’ She shifted in the bed, removing her spectacles and placing them on the bedside table. ‘So tell me, how is the Pensione Amorini?’

‘Perfect. Thanks for arranging it.’

‘How much is she charging you?’

‘Two thousand five hundred lire a day’

‘It’s too much.’

‘It’s half what I paid in Florence.’

‘Then you were had.’

‘Oh.’

‘You should pay no more than two thousand lire for half-board.’

‘The room’s large, clean.’

‘Signora Fanelli knows the power of her looks, I’m afraid. She always has, even as a young girl. And now that she’s a widow, well…’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Men are as men are. Why should they change?’

Adam’s instinct was to defend his sex against the charge, but the news about Signora Fanelli’s marital status was really quite agreeable. He chose silence and a grave nod of the head.

‘How long will you be with us?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Is it enough time?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never studied a garden before.’

‘You’ll find it’s a little neglected, I’m afraid. Gaetano left last year. It was his responsibility. The other gardeners do what they can.’ She pointed to some French windows, which were open, although the louvred shutters remained closed. ‘There’s a view behind those. You can’t see the memorial garden from here, but I can point you in the right direction.’

Adam pushed open the shutters, squinting against the sunlight flooding past him into the room. He found himself in an arcaded loggia. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out the commanding view Patchwork hills spilled away to the west, their folds cast by the lowering sun into varying grades of shade. There was a timeless, almost mythi cal quality to the panorama – like a Poussin landscape.

‘It’s special, isn’t it?’ said Signora Docci.

‘If you like that kind of thing.’

This brought a laugh from her. Adam peered down on to the gardens at the rear of the villa, the formal arrangements of gravel walks and clipped hedges.

‘There are some umbrella pines at the edge of the lower terrace, on the left. If you walk through those and follow the path down, you’ll come to it.’

Just beyond the knot of pines the land dropped away sharply into a wooded valley.

‘Yes, I see.’

He pulled the shutters closed behind him as he reentered the room.

‘Why put it down there? In the valley, I mean.’

‘Water. There’s a spring. Or there was. It’s dry now, like everything. We need rain, we need lots of rain. The grapes and olives are suffering.’ She reached for a slender file on the bedside table. ‘Here. My father put it together. It’s not much, but it’s everything we know about the garden.’

Adam was to come and go at his leisure, she went on. He was more than welcome to work out of the study if he wanted to, and of course the library was at his disposal. In fact, he was to have free run of the villa, everything except the top floor, which, for reasons she didn’t explain, was off limits. Maria would prepare him something for lunch if he wanted it.

‘We don’t stand on ceremony around here. If you need something, you just have to ask.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Non c’è di che,’ replied Signora Docci with a mock-formal tilt of the head. ‘Come back and see me when you’ve walked round the garden.’

Adam was leaving the room when she added, ‘Oh, and if you see a young woman down there, it is probably my granddaughter.’ A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. ‘Don’t worry, she’s quite harmless.’

He passed through the drawing room and out on to the flagstone terrace at the back. From here a flight of stone steps, bowed with centuries of wear, led down to a formal parterre – an expanse of gravel laid out with low, clipped box hedges arranged in geometric patterns. Lemon trees in giant terracotta pots were dotted around. He had read enough to know that the climbing roses and wisteria trellised to the retaining wall were a later addition in the ‘English style’ which had swept the country the previous century, consigning so many ancient gardens to the rubbish heap of history. Parterres had been ripped up to make way for bowling-green lawns, which soon burned to a crisp under the fierce Italian sun. Borders had been dug to house herbaceous plants suited to far gentler climes, and all manner of vines and creepers had been let loose, scaling walls and scrabbling up trees like unruly children. In many cases, the prevailing winds of fashion had wrought wholesale destruction, but it seemed that here at Villa Docci the original Renaissance terraces had survived almost entirely unscathed.

This was confirmed when he descended to the lowest level. A circular fountain held centre stage, set about with tall screens of tight-clipped yew, dividing the terrace into ‘rooms’. The formal gardens stopped here at a high retaining wall which plunged twenty feet to an olive-clad slope occupying the sunny lap of the hill. There were stone benches set at intervals along the balustrade, embracing the view. At the north end of the terrace was a small chapel pressed tight against a low sandstone cliff, its entrance flanked by two towering cypresses, like dark obelisks. At the other end lay the grove of umbrella pines which Signora Docci had drawn his attention to from the loggia.

He settled himself down in the resin-scented shade of the pines and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the villa standing proud and grave on its knoll, like some captain on his poop-deck. All of the upper windows were shuttered, suggesting that the top floor was not only out of bounds but also out of use. He smiled at the thought of a deranged relative, some mad Mrs Rochester, closeted away up there.

Viewed from this angle, there was an air of austerity about the building, a robust, fortress-like quality. And yet somehow this seemed in keeping with both its setting and function. It was not a pleasure palace; it was the centrepiece of a working estate. The farm buildings, just visible from where he was sitting, were arranged around a yard below the villa. There was no shame in the association, and the villa declared as much with the artless candour of the face it chose to present to the valley. Again, he was left with a palpable sense of the mind behind the design.

In almost no time he had fallen under Villa Docci’s spell, and the idea that he might have to devote his time to the study of a small part of its garden, one component stuck way down in the valley, was already a building frustration.

The answer came to him suddenly and clearly. He would change the subject of his thesis. Who could protest? Professor Leonard? On what grounds? Their remit as students was broad to the point of being all-embracing. If Roland Gibbs had settled on a mouldering Romanesque church in Suffolk as a subject for his thesis, how did an Italian Renaissance villa-estate compare? He would have to play the Marxist historical card – that angle was increasingly popular within the faculty – not art and architecture for their own sakes, but as manifestations of the socio-economic undercurrents of the time.

His heart already going out of the matter, he opened the file Signora Docci had given him and began to read. The language was rich, formal, turn-of-the-century.

Flora Bonfadio was only twenty-five years old when she died in 1548 – the year after she and her husband Federico Docci, some two decades her senior, took possession of the new villa they had built near San Casciano. Not much was known of Flora’s history. Some had speculated that she was related to the poet and humanist Jacopo Bonfadio, but there was no hard evidence to this effect. As for the Doccis, they were a family of Florentine bankers who, like the Medicis, originated from the Mugello, a mountainous region just north of the city. Although they had never risen to the Medicis’ level of prominence – who had? – by the sixteenth century they were nonetheless established as successful financiers. They had to have been for Federico Docci to afford the luxury of carving out a country estate for himself and his young wife.

Villa Docci instantly became a port of call for artists and writers, and was renowned, apparently, for the extravagant parties thrown by its generous host. This was not an unusual development. To create a cultural watering hole in the hills was the goal of many wealthy Florentines, almost a necessary stage in their development; a chance to share some of their ill-gotten gains with the more needy while rubbing shoulders with the greatest talents of the age. High finance and high art coming together as they have always done. A simple trade in an age driven by patronage.

Adam recognized only two names on the list of those reputed to have attended Federico’s gatherings at Villa Docci. The first was Bronzino, the well-known court painter. The second was Tullia d’Aragona, the not-so-much-well-known-as-notorious courtesan and poetess. Her inclusion lent an appealing whiff of scandal to the list, hinting at dark and dangerous goings-on at Villa Docci. Whether or not this was true, Federico’s dream of a rural salon was abruptly shattered after a year with the death of his wife. There were no records as to the cause of Flora’s untimely demise. Federico must have been devastated, though, because he never remarried, the villa and the estate passing to another branch of the Docci clan on his death.

Amongst all this historical fog, one thing was clear: in 1577 Federico had laid out, according to his own design, a small garden to Flora’s memory.

Adam turned the page to be presented with a hand-drawn map of the garden. He instinctively closed the file. Better to approach the place blind and untutored the first time, as Professor Leonard had suggested.

The pathway meandered lazily down into the valley, a thread of packed earth, untended and overgrown. The trees on either side grew denser, darker, as he descended, deciduous giving way to evergreen: pine, yew, juniper and bay He heard birds, but their song was muffled, diffuse, hard to locate. And then the path gave out. Or at least it appeared to. Closer inspection revealed a narrow fissure set at an angle in the tall yew hedge barring his way.

He paused for a moment then edged through the crack.

Beyond the hedge, the path was gravelled, with trees pressing in tightly, their interlocking branches forming a gloomy vault overhead. After a hundred yards or so, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides and he found himself in a clearing near the head of a broad cleft in the hillside. This was evidently the heart of the garden, the central axis along which it unfolded.

To his right, set near the top of a tiered and stone-trimmed amphitheatre, stood a pedestal bearing a marble statue of a naked woman. Her exaggerated contrapposto stance thrust her right hip out, twisting her torso to the left, while her head was turned back to the right, peering over her shoulder. Her right arm was folded across her front, modestly covering her breasts; her hair was wreathed with blossoms; and at her feet flowers spilled from an overturned vase, like water from an urn.

Unless he was mistaken, Federico Docci had cast his wife in the image of Flora, goddess of flowers. This was not so surprising, but the conceit still brought a smile to his lips.

If there was any doubt as to the identity of the statue, on the crest above, a triumphal arch stood out proud against a screen of dark ilex trees. On the heavy lintel borne up by fluted columns, and set between two decorative lozenges, was incised the word:

The Italian for flower: ‘Flora’ in Latin. There was something telling, tender, about Federico’s decision to employ the Italian form of his wife’s Christian name -an indication, perhaps, of a pet name or some other private intimacy lost to history.

Two steep stone runnels bordered the amphitheatre, descending to a long trough sunk into the ground. Leaves and other debris had collected in the base of the trough, and a dead bird lay on this rotting mattress, pale bones showing through decaying plumage. A weather-fretted stone bench was set before the trough, facing the amphitheatre. It bore an inscription in Latin, eroded by the elements, but just possible to make out:

ASTIMA FIT SEDENDO ETQUIESCEKTDO PRUOENTIOR

The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser. Or something like that. An appropriate message for a spot intended for contemplation.

The presence of an overflow outlet just below the rim of the trough steered his gaze down the slope to a high mound bristling with laurel and fringed with cypresses. From here two paths branched off into the dark woods flanking the overgrown pasture that ran to the foot of the valley, and at the far end of which some kind of stone building lurked in the trees.

A flight of shallow steps led down to the mound. Adam skirted the artificial hillock, wondering just what it represented. It didn’t represent anything, he discovered; it existed to house a deep, stygian grotto.

The irregular entrance, designed to look like the mouth of some mountain cave, was encrusted with cut rock and stalactites. The angle of the sun was such that he couldn’t make out what lay inside.

He hesitated for a moment, shook off a mild foreboding, then stepped into the yawning darkness.