The Whirling Girl (21 page)

LATER, AS CLARE DROVE UP her lane, she sighted Nikki Stockton's orange van. She didn't see Nikki, until something hit her on the head. The woman was stretched out on a high branch of the old oak tree, that grin of hers hovering up there too. Less than anything just now did Clare, covered in chocolate, want to find Nikki Stockton waiting in a tree. Had she dropped by to relive the awful day at the dig? To make Clare feel worse by trying to make her feel better?

Nikki swung herself down from branch to branch, her wide gypsy-looking skirt poofing out around her like a parachute as she jumped.

On the drive home, Clare had wondered seriously, for the first time really, what on earth she was doing here. Her aunt was after her, demanding that she sell the house, and threatening legal action if she didn't hurry. But even aside from that, how could she, Clare, have imagined succeeding in the project of living here? She was not one of those people who came to foreign places and bought houses and had brilliant insights and wrote amusingly of all the loveable local characters. She'd met two local characters, and they bullied her. She'd fallen in love with a man who tried to bully. Since then she'd been waiting for him to call.

“I hope you'll forgive me for just dropping in,” Nikki said, picking herself up from the ground. “That woman who works for you was just leaving on her
motorino
; she said you'd probably be home soon, from your lawyer.”

Nothing for it but to ask Nikki in. “And look!” Clare said, “I seem to have this cake. Chocolate turned out to be essential, after meeting with the lawyer.”

“I can relate to that. In our experience the whole country is covered in legal documents two miles thick.”

She followed Clare down to the kitchen, but luckily refused a slice of cake. Clare would have hated her to see the mess inside the box. She made tea, and poured it into the castle-pattern cups, noticing too late that she'd given Nikki the mended one. Nikki didn't say why she'd come. She sipped her tea and looked around the kitchen with bright pecking eyes.

“How's the work going?” she finally said.

Clare had noticed ink stains on Nikki's hands again. She pictured her in the archaeology lab making drawings of shards and fragments, then engaging in the
magic of reconstruction
that she'd described. She felt sick with envy at the thought that at least Nikki's work must be going fine.

A loud knocking at the arbour door excused Clare from having to say anything about her own work.

THE DRIVER OF A florist's van was holding a long white box a little smaller than a coffin, which he insisted would be too heavy for the Signora, and carried down to the kitchen. When she lifted the lid, the room flared with the light of three dozen yellow roses, emitting a scent of lemon and paradise.

She read the card. Forced a smile. Turned to Nikki with a helpless shrug. “Sir Harold Plank must have got the impression that his Man in Italy didn't behave well the other day. But he should have sent these to you.”

Nikki volunteered to cut the stems while Clare fetched the copper ewer from the mantel in the other room. Clare could hear her going at it, while she stood by the fireplace and took deep breaths. Roses. From the wrong person. And there'd been that moment when her heart had ballooned into the stratosphere. She glared around the room to force back stupid tears, then caught the eye of the bronze she-wolf behind the chair, still saddled with that ridiculous lamp. She should throw the thing out.

She joined Nikki in arranging the flowers. No matter what, they were beautiful, though several seemed to have lost their heads. She found herself cheered at the thought that even a rose could lose its head.

CLARE FOLLOWED NIKKI'S VAN around curve after curve, oak forests on one side, a narrow valley on the other, then down through a little town in the next valley.

“These days I've started painting shadows,” Nikki had said to Clare, when they'd finished their tea. “Shadows?”

“Yeah, I take away the objects and paint just the shadows that they cast. It's fun. Why don't you come and see?”

Nikki and William had purchased their old farmhouse from the Contessa's family ten years before. The land all around the area had once all belonged to Luisa's family too, Nikki said, as they walked up a narrow cobbled path. She pointed out the roof of a much larger villa, just visible through the treetops, where Luisa had grown up. Now Luisa owned just a small stone cottage, even further up the hill, which she used as a retreat for work and study.

They passed under a great fig tree shading the flagged entrance yard. The adjacent tall narrow building was a tobacco drying shed, Nikki said. She and William were renovating it into a guest house for visiting friends.

Inside, waiting at the table, was Luisa di Varinieri herself, drinking a cup of chamomile tea. She scolded Nikki for buying herbal teas when there was chamomile growing just outside, between the stones, and mint as well. She told Clare that her own little cottage was redolent with the sweet curative scent of drying herbs. She said that when Clare finally came to visit their apartment in Cortona, Clare would be most interested to learn more about all such local lore, which she, Luisa, had absorbed while growing up, “as naturally, you understand, as one breathes in the country air.”

Luisa launched, then, into the reason for her visit — which was to tell Nikki that she must teach William to behave, at last!

“What do you imagine my father would think, if he knew that the work he had begun — on what was then, of course, his property — should be in peril now because William refuses to concede one iota of his pride. Yes, yes, yes, Vittorio told me about the debacle the other day on Poggio Selvaggio. How idiotic to be rude to Tindhall, then stalk off.”

Clare tried to interject on William's behalf. Luisa waved that away. Oh certainly, everyone knew that Tindhall was impossible, she said. But this was not the point. The point was that Nikki would have to teach William better manners in general, because his refusal to suffer fools greatly compounded his troubles.

“And if I may say so,” she added, “William should also be a little careful, in future, about his association with young acolytes.”

Clare was glad that she'd been standing by the open back door just then, and that she was wearing her camera. She turned away and snapped shots of the view over the fields. A scene came back to her that she'd witnessed earlier, up in the public gardens in Cortona. A young woman and a child had been sitting on a bench across from the playground, the child scuffing pebbles, the woman with her chin towards her chest, the two of them quite separate from all the other mothers and grandmothers who were knitting, talking, giggling on the benches just beside. The branches of the lime trees swayed above, just coming into full heart-shaped leaf. But the bronzed sunlight seemed to cast no shadows, and Clare had a sense of how in this small, supremely beautiful place there would be no secrets, either; this would be the price people who lived here would pay.

Now Luisa was telling Nikki that she would just pop back up to her own cottage and bring down some proper herb teas. She had one made from artichoke leaves, which William should be drinking. She said she insisted that Vittorio drink it. An excellent anti-choleric. She would be back in half an hour.

When she'd driven off in her Cinquecento, Nikki said, “So — are you ready? I'm dying to see what a real artist thinks of my first efforts.” She stood with her hands on her hips for a moment, head to the side, sizing Clare up, then pulled down a ladder in the kitchen ceiling, which led to her upper sanctum, she said.

“After you,” she said, with a mock bow.

Then, “No. Wait. It's such a mess up there. Give me a minute.”

It was considerably more than a minute that Clare waited, listening to Nikki rustling around, opening cupboards, bundling things away.

IN THE ATTIC, FOUR low windows gave onto four different views of the Umbrian countryside — or would have, if the attic had not been crowded with pieces of lumpy furniture stored there ever since various of the houses on the di Varinieri estate had been sold off.

“Luisa still feels she has ancestral rights to the attic,” Nikki said. “But these are kind of like company.” She opened the lid on an upright piano, played some bars of “Chopsticks,” took another of those theatrical bows, then flopped into a high-backed chair. “So anyway …” gesturing across the room. “What do you say?

In a space cleared by a low west window, vegetables and various types of fruit were arranged on a plank set on bricks: onions with papery skins, artichokes, some ruby plums, an eggplant, golden pears. On an adjoining table, a sheaf of watercolours was loosely spread. The shadow paintings. Not a bit as Clare had tried to imagine as she drove here — not sharp outlines of negative space. Instead these were compositions of deep pooling shades,
all the shades that absence has
, Clare thought — with, between them, just the faintest mottling of shapes that might have been. Evocative and lovely. They caught Clare's heart; then a pinch of envy followed. Nikki was watching her closely. But before Clare could find words for the stirring melancholy effect of these pieces, a downstairs door slammed, and the Contessa was back, calling “Nikki, Nikki!”

“They're so remarkable!” Clare said quickly, “They take my breath away.” Nikki brushed past to go back down. Clare leafed through the shadow paintings again, while the voices of the Contessa and Nikki rose and fell just out of range. She heard the two women go out the front door. She looked around the attic, wondering what other work Nikki had stashed away, presumably unfinished pieces she didn't want Clare to see. The door of a cupboard across the room had a corner of something sticking out the bottom.

In Vancouver, Clare had a friend who claimed that when she had people over, first she would fill the mirrored cupboard in her bathroom chock full of marbles, which made a loud betraying clatter when a curious guest opened up the cupboard to have a peek.

Clare stood with her fingers poised above the handle of this cupboard door. It was a corner of wallpaper that protruded underneath, a pale blue background and some sort of trellised pattern; it had been drawn on, Clare could just partly see, with dark inky lines.

Her face.

When she pulled open the door, nothing clattered out except the image of her own face, repeated again and again on wallpaper draped loosely from one of the cupboard shelves, her face worked into the pattern of a climbing rose with fat horny stems, five fleshy leaves, against a grey lattice that also held a nasty-looking bird with an evil eye. She could see all this clearly because of a candle — a burning candle — on a higher shelf inside, which had guttered and then flared as she opened the door.

It was very old wallpaper — probably an end left over from some room in the villa where the Contessa had grown up. As Clare absorbed the shock of what she saw, she had to smile at the thought of what Luisa would say if she knew what Nikki had done to this roll of antique paper which, almost surely, she would still think of as hers. It took just a second more to grasp that the shelf with the candle held an arrangement of other things all associated with herself — not just associated, but hers. Her pen, angled atop another ink drawing of her own face. Really well done, she had to admit, just a few swift lines. But also something that gave her a further start — a blue plastic bead glued to the centre of her forehead like a jewel in the forehead of an Eastern bride. For an instant, she thought it was the bead she'd almost stolen. Could Nikki have caught the moment when she'd held it longingly in her hand, read her expression? Her castle-patterned mug was in there, too. The one Marta had glued together, holding five yellow rosebuds. So that was how those roses lost their heads. And, right below the candle, where it fully caught the light, was the Venetian glass petal that had fallen on Clare's plate that night at Farnham's. She remembered Nikki grinning at her across the table after it had fallen,
Don't blame me!
In the candlelight, the tiny flowers in the glass flared jewel tones and the gold stars cast elongated shadows like figures with stretching arms, seven of them, like a flock of dark angels unexpectedly set free.

CLARE HEARD THE CONTESSA'S car drive away, heard Nikki come back in the door. She blew out the candle. What was Nikki thinking to have a candle in that flammable space; was she mad? She kicked the end of the wallpaper inside and closed the cupboard.

When Nikki got back up the stairs, Clare was examining the watercolours again. She and Nikki looked through the sheaf of them together and discussed the challenges of working in this medium. Nikki said that until she'd been inspired by Clare, she had not attempted any artwork at all, beyond archaeological drawing. Clare asked Nikki how she got those poignant colours, what paints she used?

Terra rosa, Nikki said. Moon glow, raw umber.

HOW COULD CLARE HAVE driven off and said nothing? Nikki would know she'd looked into the cupboard. Had that been the point of asking her over? For her to look?

Or would she know? The candle could easily have gone out on its own. Clare had not taken the pen.

She had hesitated, yes, before she closed the cupboard door, unwilling to leave the pen. What had stopped her?

Certainly there was something very creepy about all this; but marvellous, too. In the way a completely unexpected glimpse into another person could be marvellous, filled with wonders, monsters, the uncanny. What had Nikki intended her to see inside that cupboard? An installation piece? A shrine? Her face — beautifully done, yes — but making of Clare something that she was not. No hint of the struggles and ugliness her face had succumbed to, lived through. Her image, gridded again with that fleshy flower, that ugly bird, but looking supercilious, sublime. She thought of Nikki staring at the painting in her Amazonia book where the writhing
Selenicereus
fastened onto the tree trunk, pulling out its essence. Artists did that. She did that. She hoped she'd left the pen because she had not wanted to take away the instrument vital to Nikki's new work, creepy as that was. But more likely, she'd left it because it had just seemed plain unlucky to be the one who did anything to break off someone else's moment of creative flight.

Much later — all night — the colours of Nikki's shadow paintings pooled in Clare's dreams, and those words ran through the channels of her sleep as if they were the lines of a poem she had forgotten.
Terra rosa, moon glow, raw umber
.