Taking Lives (16 page)

Maria sat straining to hear what we were really saying.

‘I always thought we should meet,’ I said.

Hart looked quizzical. Of course, he’d wonder why we never had; he must know my name.

‘I admire your iconographic work,’ I said. ‘It’s something to have things to say about flower pictures. We should be grateful.’ He didn’t respond to flattery. ‘You are,’ I said, ‘our distinguished colleague.’ I rather missed the huge Portuguese words - the banks call even their most dubious customers ‘excelentissimo’ in letters - that are not even meant to be convincing.

Hart said, ‘I don’t know your work, I’m afraid. Your area.’

‘I once wrote a thesis about Duccio and the issue of whether he painted in his own hand.’

‘Duccio.\a146 Hart said.

‘It was a perfect academic piece,’ I said. ‘Three laps around the subject, with footnotes.’

I was sure I should not have said that. Soon the effect of the perfect shave would be dissipated; my learning would expose me, a minor academic bureaucrat out bluffing.

‘But you,’ I said, ‘have the gift of finding things that nobody else finds. In the most unlikely places.’

‘Really?’ he said. I should have noticed it was the proper, affectless New York ‘really’, an invitation to try again, if you must.

‘The Museum is not entirely happy, of course. But the Liber Principis really should be published. The collection is astonishing.’

I didn’t know, but he was exercising his schoolboy Latin: the Book, nominative, of the Prince, genitive. He was no wiser.

‘And of course very valuable. Anyone would want a part of it. The Museum’s claim always seemed to me rather tenuous, in any case.’

I thought he got the point. ‘Your interest,’ he said, ‘it’s business or duty? Or pleasure?’

‘All of them. It’s always good to know things first. And there’s always money in it.’

I read Maria wrong. I thought she was unimpressed by the talk, that she was watching everyone else. An old woman in black, struggling to hold red dahlias for the market. A girl who couldn’t not smile. A man in a black cardboard suit, one arm ending like a pig’s trotter. Five bank clerks in shirtsleeves on the verge of making a joke. Cops weighted on the spot by their stupendously polished boots.

‘So you deal, do you?’ Hart asked. It was all the sense he could make of someone talking about books and money in the same breath.

Maria leaned forward. She had me placed among the bureaucrats, the decorous professionals, and she would not easily change her mind.

‘I do business,’ I said. ‘Material people wouldn’t find anywhere else, material they want to keep for themselves. They don’t mind a gap in provenance as long as the story is convincing on the whole.’

Maria said, ‘What’s provenance?’

‘History,’ I said. ‘Who owned a painting and when, and where it’s been.’

‘You mean they don’t mind buying stolen goods?’ Maria said.

I smiled. It was meant to be a knowing, sophisticated but non-committal smile. I was lucky it didn’t fade under the glare of all that interpretation.

‘We must have dinner,’ I said to Hart. ‘We have a lot to discuss about the Liber Principis.’

I could see Maria was about to ask questions again. But Hart got in first.

‘How long will you be here?’ he asked, as though he was sure it would not be long enough for a meeting.

‘For a while,’ I said. ‘I have family business to settle. I’ll be around.’

The whole conversation, Maria thought, was like listening to the radio and having the battery die on you slowly.

When we left, Maria says she had more coffee and more water. She was puzzled. Foreigners usually arrive when they’ve run out of life elsewhere: tired, retired, maybe angry, looking for a change so complete they often forget mere material details like having an income. They don’t come, like Hart, like John Costa, trailing their old lives with them and living them still, strongly enough to start a fight.

Something truly foreign had arrived.

It was too hot for business, but Maria went to her office anyway, shut off the phone, and sat. She would have gone home, but it was lunch hour, and Amandio would be there.

He now came to sleep at the house. Her mother was kind in the evenings, distracted in the mornings, stocking and managing and watching Amandio like the shop itself. One night, she tried to make broa, even though the cooking cousin was around. She fixed flour and water, fed sugar to the yeast, pummelled the dough and let it rise until it got up out of its bowl and started over the table in a soft, deliberate flood. She squeezed it, pummelled it, but it had a fearful resiliency. She slapped it on to a metal sheet, still growing, still moving, and burned it thoroughly.

Amandio tasted. He smiled vigorously. Maria didn’t.

‘It doesn’t bother you, me being here?’ he said.

‘Of course not.’

‘I wouldn’t want to bother you,’ he said. He was eating the broa steadily, doing his duty by Maria’s mother. Maria wasn’t. Her mother looked on.

‘I know you’ve been used to having Mother to yourself -‘

Maria said, ‘I have to go to the office.’

She felt displaced for the first time. It wasn’t just a matter of losing the steady comfort of home. Home was life. The local rule says people stay in their family, at the family house, until they’re married. True, she should have married years ago, but despite her different kind of life home still bound and defined her: this house, this town, this valley.

Anywhere else, like the few weeks she once spent in Paris, she’d have to rely on illusions and sketches: other people’s maps, guides, histories, geographies, memories, anxieties, what you read in the paper, what they tell you on TV news, a road sign world, all warnings and indications, which she’d never be able to grasp as entirely as this small place. Here was the place she knew best, knew in her bones and on her skin, season in, season out.

She found Amandio snoring in a chair one night, flesh like the raw yeast rising in the broa and a slick of oil on top.

The next day, she bought a new dress, two new dresses. One was quite short. She thought about changing her hair colour. These were not things that usually concerned her, but it was good to make such tiny decisions. It was practice.

One afternoon, she looked at an apartment in the nearest big town: three rooms, fourth floor, a block painted the colour of smoked salmon. The walls didn’t seem enough to separate people’s lives, and the blocks were jammed together in a new part of town; there was scaffolding and raw brick in every direction.

She liked that. She didn’t smoke in the flat, although she wanted to, because she needed the place to be full of new air.

I crowed to the Deputy Director, explaining punctiliously how I had done the impossible: found Hart.

‘And?’ the Deputy Director said. ‘And now what?’

Christopher Hart lay in blue water in a borrowed pool, staring at a blue sky: suspended like a billboard of holiday or the covenanted pleasures of a cheap cigarette.

Maria watched. She had found him the pool, after all.

They were on a hillside, looking out to trees and scree and fields, but Hart said he saw only perfect blue. He told Maria he wanted the English words for this particular blue: robin’s egg, perhaps. Gentian. Cerulean. He thought about drowning in this blue. He wanted to live for ever in this water until the faint, mean chlorine bleached him white.

That would have been easier, I suppose.

He can’t have liked people who knew his stolen self, who had business with Christopher Hart. In the places he used to choose to be, people take you at face value, then they take your face value and pick that apart, then they magnify rumours and tease one another with possibilities. Everybody makes up themselves and then everybody else.

Any time he touched the poolside, levered himself out of the water, he would have to be Hart the professor again: a character already written. He had to cope with whatever it was that this John Costa reckoned Hart had done, or might yet do. But he wanted to be any Christopher Hart he could imagine - subject to credit and bank balances, of course.

In the water, still cool under a hot sun, he turned and swam a couple of lengths, water smoothing muscles down. Out on the dry tiles he expected a world he already knew, more or less: wild daughters, people who teach, probably a cokehead falling out of a dress, unintellectual people with days so empty they start to hunger for a new book, people who take up art, the gardeners, people who drink and, of course, the designated fuckers: the ones who produce the gossip for the rest. There would be divisions by nationality, each group allowed its interest in the old country - because it was ruined, polluted, black-faced or steely, because none of them meant to go back. There would be class divisions for those who liked them.

He levered himself out of the pool, shook himself like a dog. Maria says it seemed the pool was suddenly claustrophobic, that down time was alarming him. He nodded to her, and ran off to change. He didn’t say goodbye to his hosts.

He drove away up the hill. She heard brakes going on sharply, wheels dragging against stone in a sudden turn. He’d come to a dead end.

He came down the hill at a furious pace, speeding and braking, until he could rush out on to the bends of the main road below. There, he drove like a man racing, a man with no destination or purpose except getting distance under his wheels.

‘I’m glad you got on with Christopher Hart,’ Maria said, disingenuously.

‘We’ve talked a bit since,’ I said. ‘We keep running into each other, somehow.’

‘You’ll have things in common,’ Maria said, meaning: coming from somewhere else, being part of cities and a world of words she didn’t know.

‘About my father’s house,’ I said. ‘I think it’s time I moved on.’

Maria said, ‘You want to shut it down, or sell it?’

If I said ‘sell’, there would be an orderly, unemotional process of breaking up my father’s life and passing it on to someone else. It would not be my responsibility. I couldn’t stop it any more.

I said: ‘Shut it down, I suppose.’ Then I added, because I needed someone to listen, ‘I can’t sell it yet. I feel strange selling something when I don’t quite know what it meant to him.’

Maria said, ‘Lock it up. Go away and think.’

‘But I’ll be here a little longer.’

‘You have business?’

‘In a way.’ I had a man to intimidate or persuade into confession, a man who so far seemed remarkably uninterested in my various hints and offers; if he had stuff for sale, he was not selling to me. I could hardly tell Maria this.

But I did say I wanted a house. I asked if there might be anything in the village where Hart was living. Maria said that might be possible, because people had holiday houses in Formentina.

She found me a house by the week, for at least a month.

I called Anna to explain.

‘Come back,’ she said, using her close voice, none of the crispness and diction of her usual talk. ‘You’ve been away long enough.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s just this Hart business - and my father’s estate isn’t settled.’

‘You have lawyers for that.’

‘It’s more complicated than that. Personal stuff. That business with the grave.’

‘I can’t talk long. I have to get to college.’

‘I love you,’ I said. I am a creature of habit - work, love, dinner times - and sometimes habit saves you from decisions. ‘I miss you. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

‘Just don’t get lost there,’ Anna said.

‘I asked the Museum for a month more.’

‘I feel like bloody Penelope. Except I’m not knitting. I’m

writing lectures.’ ‘I’m coming back.’

‘You’re only saying that because you thought of staying.’ I wondered if she was teasing me. I didn’t think so.

Neither of us liked this sensation of a past cracking under us like ice.

Maria came by just to see if Hart was all right, if the house was all right, on her way to fetch water, because she happened to be passing. But she didn’t feel the need to list the excuses.

Hart couldn’t close the door on her, or send her away. He knew the rules for small places too well. He told me so.

She showed him the spring, a mile and several folds of mountain away: a park big enough for seven trees, a pipe in a mass of official tiles where water always ran. But there were people there, two families packed up in a taxi and a pick-up truck, and they were pulling leaves together to make a fire to cook a picnic. She pointed out the mountains to Hart, the purple of heather, the scent of pine and she changed the subject to lunch.

On the way back, she had run out of things to say. But the attention she was paying had become electric.

I parked the car in Formentina. I took out weekday luggage, the kind that goes out on a Monday, back on a Friday: neat, black, on wheels, a statement that a man travels with a job to do. I carried it to the door of the small house just above the road. I unlocked the door. I put on all the lights in the house even though there was no need for them. I was signalling: I’m here, in the house between you and the road.

Of course, a dealer wouldn’t need to do such a thing. His persistence would be so sweetly oiled that it seemed inevitable, and resistance simply bad manners. I didn’t have that trick.

I went up to see Hart late that afternoon.

He didn’t bother with any preliminaries. ‘Maria says you told her you work at the Museum,’ he said.

He could have known that already, known my name and the little hieroglyphic block of my signature from times he’d asked the Museum for favours.

‘I should explain,’ I said.

I had wanted him to think I was some corrupted dealer operating on the black. I just couldn’t bear the notion of doing it well, of convincing anybody: Maria, for example.

‘But you talk as though you deal in art,’ he said. He paraded his sense of puzzlement.

‘I think I rather gave that impression,’ I said.

‘You said as much.’

‘Dealing isn’t the point,’ I said. ‘I am Assistant Keeper of Drawings at the Museum. I’m concerned with the Liber Principis. The Museum is.’

‘You want to buy this book? For the Museum? Or one of those clients who doesn’t care about provenance?’