Poltergeist

TWO PIECES OF PAPER. What a taunt. What a hugely successful trick.

For the past week, Clare had strained and dug and scrambled, first with wild excitement, then stubbornly, until the truth sank in. Those hand-drawn maps were merely two more misdirections on the trail of tantalizing scraps her uncle had left her, a puzzle pitched exactly to the clever-little-girl mind he used to love to feed, but leading to a final bitter payback.

Nothing. Not an inkling. Day after day she’d scrabbled, shovelled, pried.

“That’s it,” she’d said late yesterday as she limped down along the dried-up stream, her arms aching from trying to pry boulders, her back bent out of shape. If there was anything to find along that horseshoe rim of cliffs, it had been buried by whatever had caused rocks, boulders, earth to slide from the slope above centuries ago.

The contents of the inlaid box were still spread over the table, the sofa, the floor, as it had been for the whole week. Clothes she’d pulled off in exhaustion, the sink full of dirty dishes, the crowbar dumped by the door.

Luckily Marta had been off all week helping a granddaughter have a baby. This morning she’d be back. Clare was surveying the disaster she had to clean up first, when she glanced out and saw Nikki Stockton driving up the lane. Perfect trickster timing.

CLARE STOOD VERY STILL in her smelly long black shirt — all she was wearing. Maybe she could pass as a shadow if Nikki peered through the glass.

When she finally went to answer the door, Nikki was aiming a camera up into the wisteria vine, bending backwards, one foot stretched in front, an extreme arch to her back, the theatrical effect heightened by her black-and-red harlequin pants, the red blouse with wing-like sleeves that fell and fluttered as she turned this way and that, clicking away with hands that looked to have been bleached though were still somewhat grey, and were patterned now with vines and scrolls that ran past her wrists and up her arms; fine black-ink twining lines, coloured with what looked like henna in several red and marigold shades.

Nikki said, “Oops!” as if she’d been caught doing what she shouldn’t. “I hope you’ll forgive me for just dropping by so early, but something a bit unsettling has happened.”

IT WAS BECAUSE OF Luke Tindhall’s name turning up on one of the cartons, she said; so she’d decided she’d better let Clare know.

The day before, a student with their dig had been out hiking in the hills above Trasimeno and had come upon an old shed that had been broken into. There were bits of exploration equipment scattered around, and that torn-open carton which bore Luke’s name. So Nikki herself, earlier this morning, had driven over and checked. She’d been too creeped out to go inside the shed, she said, but she’d thought she’d better let Clare know so she could get in touch with Luke, in case the equipment was to do with the Foundation.

Clare said, My goodness and how strange; she didn’t know anything about this. But probably, yes, she should let Luke know.

“I was thinking,” Nikki said, “maybe you would like to come along with me, now; because I went home and got a honking big padlock to replace the broken one. But I’d rather have company when I went back there.”

Nikki was still outside the door. Clare waved her over to a wicker arbour chair, while she went in and jammed all the papers back into the box, under the bronze she-wolf.

The idea of leaving everything and driving off with this harlequin figure with the hennaed hands sounded like a Houdini-type escape.

She showered, then made a fake call to London in a voice that would carry to the arbour, leaving a fake message for Luke.

NIKKI’S IDEA WAS TO take a back road to a viewpoint over the lake, then sneak down to the shed. She said if the “bad guys” had come back they could catch them red-handed. “Like this …” She raised her own decorated hands from the wheel in a strangling gesture.

No one was lurking near the shed. But Nikki insisted they stick to the plan of sneaking down. The climb involved scrambling over a steep ledge. Nikki went first and braced herself to ease Clare down, and when Clare’s foot slipped she was caught in a tight wiry embrace, so that their cheeks rubbed together. Clare caught a whiff of Nikki’s foxy smell.

They found a metal detector in the bushes near the shed, wires and gizmos strewn around. This would surely mean that someone really had followed Luke’s car from Tarquinia. It was only when she and Nikki had gathered all the equipment up that Clare began to wonder.

Nikki hung back when Clare pushed open the battered door. As it creaked open, she caught a tiny glitter on the floor just inside. A pink crystal. Like one from her shawl. And another, further in. And several more. Maybe the beads had dropped from Nikki’s bag when she was here before? But Nikki had only surveyed the shed from outside, she’d claimed.

Nikki was right behind her. “So? Can we carry this stuff in? Is it safe?” She was holding the end of her pigtail across her upper lip, feigning an evil moustache, a devilish kid.

A word flashed up. Poltergeist.

Clare said, “All clear. No bad guys. Just you and me. So let’s do it, let’s get this place locked up.”

WHEN THEY’D FINISHED LOCKING up the shed, Nikki climbed onto a large flat boulder. After a moment, Clare joined her there.

Was it really possible that Nikki herself had been the one to break into the shed? If so, the dropped crystals would be a message, wouldn’t they?

Clare looked out at the aquamarine jewel of the lake, the far-off towns, the peaceful shore where once a battle had raged that turned the water red. She had said yes, once, right here.

Nikki stretched her red-wing arms. “Anders Piersen is moving into our tobacco shed. I guess you knew that.”

“No.”

“It turns out that he and William have a surprising amount in common.”

Anders was going be William’s personal assistant now, she said, the idea being that he could also assume those day-to-day details that had kept Nikki away from her work at the lab, where there was a backlog because the conservator from London was late arriving.

“Talk about the law of unintended consequences, eh? Here’s one William didn’t foresee when he came up with that very practical idea! Two goofing-off women, just a-sittin’ in the sun. So come on — sit — so we can goof off properly.” She took Clare’s arm and pulled her down.

The morning was full of the scent of herbs and sun-warmed grass. High above a hawk was circling. The sky was that endless blue.

Nikki held out her hennaed hands. “So what do you think? Would I make a lovely Eastern bride? Like Thais?”

“What’s that from again? Remind me.”

It was from a poem by Dryden, Nikki said. “Alexander’s Feast.” About a beautiful courtesan urging on Alexander the Great, so that in a drunken revel he burned down the city of Persepolis. She had been listening to a recording of it, which a friend from college had sent her, while she applied the henna. She and her friend used to recite it when they got dressed up to go out on dates; they’d goof around about how they were going to set the town on fire.

She reached for Clare’s hand before Clare thought to shift away.

She traced a stem of grass up a finger, traced a curlicue at the wrist. Why didn’t they go back to her place? she asked. She could do Clare’s hands too. Then even if they didn’t exactly burn up the town, they’d at least light up the countryside.

The ticklish blade was moving up Clare’s arm. “Yes, I remember that now,” Clare said. “We learned it in school. It has a chorus that goes ‘None but the brave ... None but the brave deserves the fair.’”

She slid off the rock.

Would her life take a turn in that direction, now? She remembered how Nikki had caught her tight when she slipped on the cliff. She looked up. The moment seemed burned there, fiery orange, like a petroglyph. And beyond was the lake where Clare had said yes when she didn’t mean it.

She could say yes again.

She could say yes, and yes could bloom.

None but the brave deserves the fair.

“Look, there’s a hawk,” she said.

THEY WERE ON A FAST road driving east along the lake, towards Perugia.

Clare had fibbed and told Nikki she needed to get home; she had a pressing deadline, a publisher who was hounding her. But Nikki had insisted that there was one place that Clare really ought to see while they were out. Clare’s publisher would never forgive her if she, a famous flower artist, missed this chance to visit the remarkable monastery garden in Perugia when she was so near. This was a medieval garden in a cloister, a hortus sanctus where medicinal plants were still cultivated, some of which were only otherwise available to see in very old Italian herbals. But the place had been planned, too, as a sort of refuge for the spirit, laid out in a philosophical manner.

A monastery garden in Perugia.

When you follow the intricate philosophical paths that have been laid out, when you breathe the healing air, you will also find yourself in the centre of the truth of your own life.

How many monastery gardens could there be in a place the size of Perugia? She couldn’t go there. She would see nothing. She would hear nothing but that voice. But she caught such stark disappointment when she insisted that she didn’t have the time that in the end she’d agreed to go along.

It wasn’t until Nikki had Clare safely captive in her van that she’d said, raising her moustache pigtail over her lip again, that now that she had Clare in her power she was going to take her, after they’d been to the garden, to a trattoria in the hills where they served a chocolate mousse cake that double-soothed the soul.

NIKKI WAS HAPPY NOW; Nikki was chattering with the determination of someone who would not allow her vision of the day to go off course. She had brought watercolours and extra brushes and she intended that she and Clare would paint together in the cloister garden. Her words tumbled through Clare’s thoughts as they drove.

The sky clouded. Everything Clare had sought to leave behind earlier had trailed her. A new worry assailed her. What if in her rush to get away she hadn’t properly locked the box? What if Marta pried into it? Or what if the maps actually meant that she should have been searching further up the slope, and Marta had already given the maps to Niccolo who was busy digging up there right now? But worst was the way her past had come fuming out of that box, the musty awfulness that she could still smell clinging to her skin, her clothes.

THEY PARKED BELOW PERUGIA’S city walls. A moving staircase carried them up through a former tyrant’s dungeons and underground realms. When they emerged, the day had turned brilliant again, breezy.

Nikki strode ahead, her red sleeves fluttering, leading Clare off the main street and down many sets of pink marble steps. A circular tower topped with a roof like a Pierrot hat reared above a wall; the monastery tower, Nikki paused to say before she darted ahead again like one of those birds in a folk tale, leading Clare on to some predetermined end, through the gates, across a cloistered courtyard, out into a sunny area where the air smelled dizzyingly of herbs. This was certainly the place that Gianni had spoken of. The air was pungent with loss.

“Giardino dello Spiritio.”

Nikki picked up a pamphlet and was reading aloud from it in Italian. It explained the metaphorical concept of the garden, how it had indeed been laid out to an elaborate philosophical plan, how every plant had cosmic significance, how at the very centre of the area where they now stood was the Cosmic Tree. A meandering philosophically significant pathway led from here towards a further cloister sheltering the hortus sanctus, the garden of native blooms and healing plants.

Nikki folded the pamphlet into her satchel and grasped Clare’s arm to lead her onto that path. But Clare could not follow.

“Go on ahead. I’ll join you in a minute. I need …”

Nikki frowned, tugged at her long braid, as if this might hurry Clare along. Clare seized the first excuse that came to her. “I need to find something about this in English. I’ll go back to the entrance to see if they have one.”

“Nonsense!” Nikki said. “Ridicolo! Che sciocchezze! The Signora wishes a brochure, when she has me as her humble guide and translator?” She fished out the pamphlet again, struck a pose. “Ecco Signori, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, in this direction we come to the Grove of Meditation, then pass the Tree of Good and Evil, into the Sacred Wood.”

“Please,” Clare said. “Don’t wait. I’ll just dash out and see if I can get some literature to take back with me.”

Nikki looked around. A young man was plunging a fork into the grass, on the slope leading to the Cosmic Tree. She hailed him. Clare protested. Nikki waved that aside and explained to the young man, who was coming over, that her friend needed a book about the garden, but in English.

“Ah!” He turned to Clare, with an enchanting smile. “If you will wait just one minute.”

Clare tried to stop him, but he’d already dropped the fork; he was sprinting towards an official-looking building by the cloister wall. This was ridiculous; more so, in this place of healing and healthy air, that she could hardly breathe. “Go,” she finally told Nikki, not caring anymore if she was rude or not, “Please just go!” Finally, with the mock bow of an offended courtier, Nikki spun away along the main path and on into the Grove of Meditation, the harlequin pattern of her pants merging with the dappled shade.

It was very hot. The young man returned. “One minute more,” he said, “and my friend will come. Until then, it is better you wait in the shade of our Albero Cosmico.” He walked her to the Cosmic Tree.

The bells in the monastery tower began to ring. A scattering of hard oval leaves drifted down. The young man seemed determined to keep her company. More cosmically aligned minutes ticked by. He gestured to a circular plaque laid into the nearby grass, painted with heraldic figures. “Do you like this? It is my opera.”

His opera. In other words, he meant it was his “work.”

“Are you a painter?”

“A little.”

“Do you do other work like this? Do you sell it?”

He laughed. “I do it for joy!”

He picked up the fork again. Probably the whole episode of helpfulness had run its course in a charming, inconclusive, Italian sort of way. How he went at his work in the garden though, the filigree of tattoos on his brown arms rippling as he plunged the fork into the dirt again and again. She couldn’t help musing how in Italian opera was the word for a job of creative work. One of those simplistic thoughts that strangers had, who knew nothing of this country, never would …

“Allora! Finalmente!” The fork hit the ground. The young man bounded across the lawn. He grasped an approaching figure by the shoulder. Clare closed her eyes.

She did not deserve this.

Gianni crossing the lawn towards her.

Clare standing beneath the Cosmic Tree.

“BUT THIS IS IN Italian.”

“Sadly, yes.”

He slipped the book into his jacket pocket, where it spoiled the line of his fine wool suit.

He took a deep breath.

“I will presume to say that you do not need a book at all, if you will allow me to point out that this design, laid out by my friend the director, Dr. Menghini, will lead us initially, with good fortune, to the Garden of Eden, where all things can begin again.”

She stopped him. “Listen —”

“Oh, no. Please. I am the one who needs — !”

They stood facing one another. An iridescent flash sailed by, a dragonfly. All sound dropped away, not a bird, not a workman’s voice. An opera in reverse?

“How did this happen?” she finally said. “How did you turn up? Gianni, why are you here?”

“I came to talk with my friend, Director Menghini,” he said, “regarding the symbolism of the haven he has created.”

“The symbolism.”

“Since a week ago, I have been in need of reassuring structure for my thoughts. Yes, this I must allow myself to say.”

He spread his hands as if to balance this against a safer observation.

“I have long wanted, in my own garden, to make a design not just rational and practical — for one must understand that symbolism is not logic, nor is it, as the critic de Campeaux tells us, geometry.” She pictured his words clambering up some elaborate trellis, while his thoughts, like hers, were much closer to the ground. “But rather,” he forged on, “an experience of the totality which gives birth to the drama of the self.”

“Are there resin fungi in this theory, too?”

“If you like, I can put them in.” His smile flared, wobbled. Now words deserted them both. A trio of elderly German women crowded by, clucking at the obstruction in the centre of the path. Gianni cleared his throat. His Adam’s apple bobbled above his pristine collar. Clare scuffled a pebble. A British family stepped carefully around them as if they were signposts spelling danger. A small child ran smack into Clare.

“I have an idea,” Gianni said. He took her arm. “Down there is the shop of the alchemist.”

He guided her off the path and down rocky steps to a sheltered hollow at the base of the tower, where they were out of sight. A tiny window looked into a mock-up of an alchemist’s shop: a stuffed owl perched beside a skull, evil liquid bubbling over artificial coals, coloured bottles on a dusty table, dry weeds overhead.

“It is for children,” he said. “But today, by a special prescription, they are almost all in school.”

“I WILL HAVE TO go and find my friend,” Clare finally said, when words became a reasonable proposition once again.

“The one with the long braid?”

“How did you know?”

He said he had seen Clare talking with this woman at the dinner of the snails.

“Were you lurking in the background at the festa?”

“I did not think of it as lurking. I was meditating deeply on life, like the Baron in the Trees.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. Could it be that she did not know this novel by Calvino? Well then, they would have a lovely time, on some winter’s night, when he read it to her.

On some winter’s night.

As they moved back to the path to the Garden of Healing, he told her how the monastery had stood in wild countryside when it was first constructed; how it had been a refuge during episodes of plague; how its records had been burned by Napoleon; how it had been a passion of his friend Menghini to restore the garden to what it would have been in the time before Columbus, to recreate what a monastery garden would have stood for, a corner of earthly paradise.

They went through an archway into a walled inner cloister. Nikki was sitting cross-legged on a path between the raised beds of plants, sketching with furious concentration, one page, over to the next. As they came up behind her, Clare caught a glimpse of sketch after sketch of long-stemmed flowers with up-thrust bursting petals, all with faces — no, not faces, just hers. Nikki snapped the book shut when she heard their footsteps on the gravel.

Gianni said quietly to Clare that he would like to propose that together they all go to a fine place he knew for lunch. “If you will promise, afterwards, not to escape this time. If you will not give me the hand-off when I drive you home.”

She watched the petals of a large blue poppy waver on the shifting air. “The hand-off?” she said, laughing. “Maybe not.”

Then, over-loud, she called, “Nikki — I’d like you to meet Gianni DiGiustini.”

Nikki said “Hi.” Avoiding Clare’s eye. “Yes, I remember seeing you at the snail festa.”

“Gianni has invited us to lunch,” Clare said.

“Oh, Gianni has invited us to lunch?” The same intonation as Clare’s. She coiled her braid into a loop on top of her head, and pushed her pencil through to hold it. “Beautiful thought. But you know what? I shouldn’t be here at all. While I was waiting for Clare, I remembered that I’d already promised to collect our field director’s parents on the train from Florence. And, in fact, now I am late. Oh, dear.”

Did Gianni notice how every word vibrated with disappointment?

He said, “Well then, if it makes it more convenient, I will be pleased to run Signora Livingston home.”

Nikki stood up, brushed herself off, then pushed past Clare. “But tell me,” she said to Gianni, “when our field director’s parents go to Florence, his mom always heads to the DiGiustini boutique, to pick up what she calls little gifts to take home. Gold jewellery with a horse-harness motif. Is there a connection?”

Yes, Gianni said, that was his stepfather’s business. “Tomasso was once a manufacturer of farm machinery, but my mother persuaded him to make harnesses for the more expensive mares.”

Nikki said the field director’s parents would be impressed to hear that she’d nearly had the real goods for lunch!

Together they walked back to the Corso Cavour, Nikki chatting brightly to Gianni. At the top of the escalator, she broke away and with her arms extended, red sleeves fluttering, led them down through the underground regions of the ruined castle, past traces of ancient roads, piazzas, arched dungeon walls, and out into a late afternoon thick as gold with all that simmered in the air.