The Baron in the Trees

SO THIS WAS WHAT it was all about, the excruciating sweetness of this business that took up such an inordinate portion of the human brain, sweeter than hard rock candy. None of the sorrow of lovemaking with him, the expectation and the drop. He made her think of the boy in the garden: it is my opera. His joy spread marvellous contagion.

“But you are looking at me again,” she said, many hours later.

“You don’t like that I look at you? Or I should wear a mask?” He brought the rumpled sheet to the level of his eyes. “A blindfold?” He pulled a pillow case over his head. “I should grope?”

“No, I like it too much.”

The foolery fell away, replaced for a moment with a look so serious it was scary. “I feel the same.”

ON THE DRIVE FROM Perugia, he had been silent for such a long spell that she’d started feeling the same confusion as when they’d started for the wedding. Then he’d stopped the car, fixed her with the first of his scary looks.

“What?” she’d said. “Don’t just look at me like that.”

After a long silence, he said, “I will have to tell you. They do not stretch to Timbuktu.”

“Oh …”

“It is not such a geographical catastrophe as that. The few, the very few women in my life I have been involved with since my marriage —”

“Gianni! I never …!”

“No, this is important. Before we begin together, I need to tell you about my marriage and my life.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

But he persisted. He said that he should have informed her, immediately at the start, that he had no business to claim anything of her. Nor to lecture her either, on her very small deficiencies.

“You’ve got that right at least. Though they are not so small.”

He said that she had the most beautiful and intriguing deficiencies he had ever seen. “But we are talking now of mine.”

She touched his lips to hold them closed. He removed her finger, held it, and studied it as he explained that beyond the fact that he was married, he must tell her that his wife was a woman honourable and beautiful and upstanding, the mother of his two children.

“But she doesn’t understand you. It’s okay. I get it.”

“You have every right to be cynical,” he said.

The fact was that Eleanora understood him very well; they understood each other, which in no way made the pain less that they did not jibe, “as you might say in your idiom,” in any way other than in the serious commitment to their children’s welfare. “Also in our agreement that since I have abandoned involvement in the family consortium, Eleanora will run it absolutely.”

He was still talking to her index finger, which was not at all the well-manicured finger of the wife who ran the consortium. A dismal start, Clare thought, that such a small part of her could not stand up to comparative scrutiny.

He said, “Already my mother has broken this consortium once, by taking away the husband of the wife of my dead father’s brother. This was before I was born, after both my father and Federica’s father died in a tragic accident on the same day.”

He shook his head. “It is a little complicated.”

His mother was very beautiful, he added. (He was looking at Clare now. Everything she had heard about Italian mothers flashed before her.)

“Gianni, I do not want you to go through this!”

But he had to. He had to explain that though he and Eleanora did not jibe, it was a union he would never dissolve. Never would he submit his children to the shadow of such shame as he, Gianni, had grown up in.

“So my exceptional Clare, for whom I have waited all my life, I beg you to understand that though there have been other women, yes, there has been not one who has filled me with this confusion of delight I feel each time I think of you.”

He broke off, as if the great storm of emotions under that noble brow had finally blown away all his words.

She said, “So now can I have my finger back?”

“You must not joke.”

THEN, SO MUCH LATER, in the tumult of the sheets, with that same look, almost dire, he reared above her. “‘He knew her, and so he knew himself,’” he said. “This is from the story I will read to you of the Baron in the Trees. ‘He knew her, and she knew him, and so also knew herself. For although she had always known herself, she had never been able to recognize this until now.’”

He pulled her close, so close. “But the story ended badly,” he said. “For in spite of what they learned, those lovers were too wary. The man went mad. The woman spent a long life wandering chilly foreign cities in regret. Please — let you and I take care, that we never will be wary!”

I could die now and I wouldn’t care, she thought. He could have women stretching to the moon. He could be an axe murderer and I wouldn’t care.

“I am here to protect you,” he told her.

“From what?” She wanted to laugh, but he was holding her too tight.

“From everything,” he said. “This is my life’s calling as you will remember. To protect all things rare.”

CLARE LAY BESIDE GIANNI later, in the dark, and pondered how the truth of her that was linked to any former chain of events had dipped to another level altogether. Even in sleep he was irresistible; he let out just the occasional murmur, as if he was slipping through his dreams as gently as a stream; she longed for him to carry her along. But he already has, she thought. She curled into him and allowed herself to drift on that little current, marvelling at how from the first moment this had been fated, a tale where many perils had to be surmounted before the beautiful reward. True, there were dangers still. But as long as she kept a clear understanding of where she stood in this, that she was at the centre not of his total life but at the centre of this lovely dream they were making together, as long as she asked no more — and what more could she ask? — she was blessed.

“CLARE, WHAT IS IT? What?” He was gripping both her hands. “You were sobbing, you were touching all over your face.”

He had turned on the bedside light. “You were rubbing your fingers on your cheeks, your forehead, so hard. What a dream. You must tell me. Come.” He held her close.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s gone. You chased it off. You were here.”

“Yes, I am always here.”

THE NEXT MORNING SHE woke in a state of happiness so extreme that she thought she should ground herself, for safety’s sake. She should call Luke — at least to alert him to the dismal outcome of her searches in the upper field, so he could adjust his plans or schemes.

But what if ?

That little thought surfaced, again, about something during her searches that she might have overlooked. She flicked it to the side. She pictured taking Gianni to the meadow to show him what was there, making him the gift of the fascinating botanical questions the place raised.

Again, at that, something clenched. Not just the inevitability, then, of revisiting the matter of her paintings, painful to her on several levels now that her gift had so strangely packed up and left; but the feeling that to go there with Gianni, to the field of frantic hopes she and Luke had shared, would be the true act of betrayal.

But I have already betrayed Luke, she thought, remembering how that first night, in the bath, Gianni had drifted into her mind, and how after that, at unexpected moments, she’d feel an inner little tipsy surge when the thought of Gianni occurred. At these moments everything developed a fevered glow. Surely that was love, which had been incubating in her all along, while the odd barbed thing that had hooked her to Luke was twisted mainly to a fear for him, for the way that he’d torn down his own defences and shown himself to her — seemed to have done that, she told herself now, because wasn’t it likely she’d been just a necessary step towards his dream of exploration in Anatolia?

CLARE AND GIANNI HAD just stumbled up from the big bath downstairs, wrapped in towels, when Marta came in. She thumped a warm loaf of chestnut cake on the table — freshly baked for Signora Chiara’s breakfast, she said, giving Gianni a look. She thumped down cups and plates, and a pot of espresso so strong the tiny cups jittered with disapproval.

Later, she took Clare aside and told her in a harsh whisper, as if this was something the Italian visitor should not hear, that Niccolo had brought in yet another dog, one who was particularly cross, to patrol her land, because he had developed some further concerns.

Oh good! Bene, bene, eccellente! Clare said; the more dogs the better! She played it up. The dogs were part of a drama the two of them were acting out to demonstrate their importance to the place, she decided. She said she hoped Marta would thank Niccolo for taking care of these concerns.

Today she had enough concerns of her own. She was off to visit Gianni’s estate near Siena. Gianni had assured her that his wife lived in Bologna, as did his children, too, most of the time. He had such a desolate expression as he told her this. And though his mother did live on the estate, with “ninety percent certainty” she and his stepfather would be at the sea, at their place at Lerici. But Clare had overheard Gianni talking on the phone to that beautiful Mammà; she had heard him mention her name, describing Clare as “una donna con molti grandi talenti!”, and Clare figured that with ninetynine percent certainty Mammà would be waiting at some mullioned window to spy on her.