Appointment in Ankara

FANTASY! FANTASY.

Clare had thought that, hadn’t she, when she first sat in Cortona’s beautiful piazza? She was an outsider, a stranger, stepping into an elaborate setting for an opera. Would it help to think of the past weeks as an opera?

She pictured the soprano dipping her pen into her inkwell — not here, at the table where she once listened to absurd talk of resin fungi, but up in the corner room with the balcony, wearing silk just lightly stained by tears, “Oh caro Signore mio, one last adieu …”

Two elderly women started across the square, arms linked, dressed in venerable clothes, attractive shoes with heels no higher than their elderly feet could handle, their bulky bodies leaning together as they smiled and talked of local gossip, of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It was their faces that caught her, faces as beautifully worn as the stones of the buildings around them; these were the faces of those who fitted here, understood exactly who they were.

Yes, adieu. For I have an appointment in Ankara as soon as the property deal is completed, in a few minutes, at the lawyer’s. I am going off with the man I “have to say is important.” Because he is. And in Turkey I too will do important work at last, making drawings of his sherds, his broken pots; we will make a whole new world out of things that have been smashed.

The thimbleful of coffee jittered in her cup as a noisy group settled at the next table, a man waving for a waiter, a woman spreading a map of the town, another woman opening up the book of a poet who had made the town famous. They were hoping to find the poet’s house.

Any moment, Luke and Sir Harold would arrive.

HAROLD PLANK HAD BEEN busy during the seven days that Clare was away. Last night, Luke had brought her up to date on all that had gone on; how Plank had made a fast trip to London, then to Florence, then back to London once again, getting everything in place for next year’s excavation; how he had managed to work out an agreement allowing him to become the recognized eminence behind the exploration to take place on her place (his place as it was about to become), though the actual work would be under Italian direction.

But what had happened at Poggio Selvaggio, Clare had quizzed Luke; did that all get sorted out? The disappearance of the bead?

Luke had said she shouldn’t worry.

What did that mean? she persisted. Had Harold Plank gone up there? Was he impressed with the work? Did Luke think Plank would be able to help solve whatever the problem was?

Luke said yes, Plank had gone up there. “Crikey, Clare, I’ve had a few other things to think about.” But yes, Luke was sure it had all been sorted out.

Earlier today, on her way to meet Luke here, Clare had learned that this was not the case at all.

She and Nikki had been driving in opposite directions. They both pulled to the side of the road. A grey, humid morning, though now the mist had burned off; the air thick with water and doubts; the Medici fortress casting an indistinct damp shadow. Nikki crossed the road, opened the passenger door of the jeep, and got in beside Clare. How different she looked. Old jean jacket, cotton bandana twisted round her forehead, hands furrowed with ground-in earthy pigments.

“You’ve been busy,” Clare said.

“I hardly leave my studio.” She seemed older, carved and dry, but more beautiful. With a flash of the old Nikki, the sliver of a grin, she said, “I’m glad you’re back.”

“But not for long.”

She told Nikki the sudden plan.

“Are you sure this is the right thing for you?”

“Am I sure?”

Nikki gave her a squinty look. Clare said of course she was sure; it had just taken her a while to figure out, that was all.

“Well … good.”

“Yes, good.”

Clare thought that the look that passed between them, then, encompassed everything that wasn’t said — how “good” could mean that, at some point, you had to make a decision, even if that decision rested on the median point between better or worse. How, always, some freewheeling part of each of them would link up, to comprehend the predicament of the other. She recalled what Nikki had said once about wanting to give her something. Was this it?

Then she asked Nikki what had transpired at Poggio Selvaggio — what was this thing she’d heard about a theft?

It was ridiculous and terrible, Nikki said. “And I think it was my fault.”

When Nikki explained, Clare could see that it might have been. After Harold Plank had helicoptered up to the dig, Nikki had shown the delegation from his Foundation around the lab. Surprisingly, Plank had spent a long time among the small finds, admiring objects one wouldn’t have thought he’d care about: the fragments of black-glaze ware, the terracotta loom weights, the stamped rocchetti. Then — because someone had told him the little drama of how a bead had gone astray on the day that Clare had visited the dig — and how Clare had saved the situation — he’d insisted on seeing that particular bead, too.

“He talked a lot about you, actually,” Nikki said. “How does he feel about you hooking up with Luke, by the way?”

“I have no idea what you mean.” Clare heard her own tone, still keeping up the fiction of her involvement with Plank; it seemed she would drag her deceits across oceans, they would come humping behind her across deserts to keep her company. At least I’ll never be alone. “So the bead, though, the bead,” she said. “It went astray again? But then surely it did turn up again?”

Nikki said no. She thought what had happened was that when the group from the Foundation departed, she had accidentally left the door of the lab unlocked. Nor had she been entirely sure, later, that she’d remembered to replace the bead in its proper file box.”

“You’re not that absent-minded.”

“No, I’m not. Maybe it was something subconscious, do you think?”

What happened next, she explained, was that when Anders came in the following morning, he reported the bead missing.

“Anders,” Clare said.

Nikki shrugged. Of course he had to report it to William, she said.

But somehow the news got out more widely. William was summoned to Perugia to explain to the Umbrian authorities why his operation should not be shut down altogether if this was an indication of the care that was being taken.

“But couldn’t Vittorio Cerotti speak for him?” Clare interrupted, “Or Luisa, who surely has pull in those parts?”

Nikki’s face pinched up. “Hell no. They have been too occupied these days with the goings-on up in Florence.”

So then, Harold Plank, far from setting things right, had issued a press release stating that though the Foundation had been interested in the project at Poggio Selvaggio, he was now forced to disassociate himself altogether.

“And he was never associated with us in the first place. Why should he go to all the trouble to make that statement? And how did the word about its disappearance get out? William hoped to exhaust every avenue before bringing it to wider attention, and that was bad enough, questioning the students and staff, the searches!”

Nikki turned and frowned at Clare, almost as if she expected Clare to help with this conundrum. “And why did I let all that happen, do you suppose? So careless! But Clare, all this fuss for such a tiny object! And really, no one would have wanted to steal it!”

Clare remembered, though, how she had felt when she’d held the blue bead: the flutter of possessiveness just because it was so small, yet told so much. She remembered saying something about that to Luke. Of course Luke had laughed. No, pretended to laugh, she told herself now, as she waited for him in the square. She reminded herself of the worth of the person underneath the complicated crust, someone struggling to connect himself to matters of lasting importance to the world, despite his faults — despite even what she’d found out about him during the week when she’d run away, which, in an odd sense, was the thing that had brought her back. Yes, worthwhile; the person who held the key to her becoming of some worth herself, finally, as she helped him with his work.

She had driven off feeling guilty after talking to Nikki. If Vittorio Cerotti had been too preoccupied in Florence to speak up for William, it must have been because he’d thrown whatever influence he had behind helping Harold Plank. And if Harold Plank’s public statement had anything to do with his ambitions regarding Clare’s place, she should do something, right this morning, while she still had the power, while the place was still hers.

She knew she wouldn’t stand up to him, not when a smooth transition meant everything to Luke. She saw this truth about herself as constant: how every good decision got fogged up that way. Even the vow she’d made while she was down at the sea.

AFTER RUNNING FROM THE Barbareschi, Clare had bypassed many seaside towns with no idea where she was headed. She finally turned off at the Ligurian city named for the saint who lay in the basilica in the town she’d fled.

She’d sat at a red-topped table in a floating bar, drinking a cold glass of crisp Ligurian wine, still unable to get the encounter with the Barbareschi out of her head. Those awful, unlikely people. How had they arrived at her place? There’d been no indication, when she went down, of another car. Sometimes, as she drove, she’d thought she’d made them up — made the whole incident up — just to propel herself out of there. Their report of the conversation with Gianni’s wife was too terrible. Would they go back, carrying Clare’s message? Would they set aside their goofy saccharine idea of what love was and persuade the hard-working Eleanora to go to Gianni in his garden, maybe just sit with him beside the burning bush, the bush that could set the air on fire, but also heal?

Across the harbour, the seafront buildings were all painted with trompe l’oeil, brilliant cornices, arches, elaborate fake doors leading to fake rooms.

There’s always one room that you are not allowed to enter.

If she’d never crossed the threshold of Gianni’s private room, never picked up that photo, would she be in his unicorn garden right this minute, flourishing there, even painting once again, under his vigilant eye, his patient care?

She’d ordered another glass of wine and watched the frescoed buildings across the harbour bobbing in the evening sun. She’d eaten a dish of clams, taken a room with a harbour view in a hotel that welcomed dogs. It was through the use of her credit card that Harold Plank had traced her. He’d decided to give her a week to settle down, but she didn’t find that out until much later.

Early morning traffic woke her as it veered around the corner just below, on the road to Portofino.

Five o’clock. No cafes would be open. There was no coffee machine in the room. No mini-bar with a pack of nuts. Nor was there any reading matter, except the hotel folder. What had been going through her head when she landed herself here in this room, with two dogs and nothing to eat and nothing to read? Not even a Bible in the drawer, surely an oversight in a room that looked across the harbour to the statue of a saint.

She delved into her backpack, which had been knocking around in the jeep ever since La Celta. Nothing as useful as a toothbrush. Though, for some reason, there was an eyeliner wedged at the bottom.

What the pack did hold was the collection of scholarly articles Gianni had given her. She’d forgotten about them. And the beautiful glossy book about the gardens of Pompeii, which brought his voice back to skewer her with the memory of a little villa, closer to the ground, with a peristyle garden for you to sit in and paint. What a cruel trick, to have accidentally dragged along a book invoking that.

The cover showed the reproduction of a mural from the wall of a Roman courtyard garden, with an archway leading in. There’s always one room that you are not allowed to enter, yes; but you go there anyway. In imagination, if nothing more.

As she began to turn the pages, the same dreamy feeling of adventure stole over her that she’d had when she’d set off up the Amazon river in a small steamer boat from the once famous rubber city of Manaus, in the company of the talented and beautiful Margaret Mee …

She pulled the hotel counterpane around her and she was there, in a garden courtyard in Pompeii, peering over the shoulder of that artist all those centuries ago. She followed him as he moved around the garden selecting an appropriate wall surface for his work; then, as he applied such enchanting detail: a warbler on a branch, a spray of rose leaves behind, such lyric colours, the whole scene so alive. As she began to read the text, the compelling words of the famous garden archaeologist pulled her further into intelligent escape, led her into tiny flower-filled courtyards on humble Roman streets, grand ones in villas that had since been given names impossible to resist: the Villa of the Mysteries; the Villa of the Papyri, whose charred scrolls might still become readable one day; the Villa of the Scandalous Elagabulus, whose dining room had a retractable ceiling that allowed him to smother his dinner guests in cloudbursts of flowers …

Eventually she took the dogs out for a very fast walk, so she could get back to reading more. When she returned, she came on photographs of pollen grains which had been discovered in a loft holding a great store of carbonized plants. Shown as through a microscope, the minute specks of pollen became otherworldly shapes, folding into themselves like shells, unfurling as if winged, each one a composition, she realized, with a blow of something close to lust.

She tore through all this greedily, sitting on the floor by the bed, the dogs curled near, the periodicals spread around her. When she came again to the article describing the garden of the oasis palace of King Herod at Jericho, she found herself going back to it again and again, studying the layered sections of the excavation, the dotted lines showing the surface of the topmost layer of earth built up over ensuing centuries, a broken column bulging through the layers underneath, one sort of earth and below that another, and small stones pebbling the hollows that had once held the priceless balsam plants …

This had some use for her, beyond what the diagram represented. She didn’t know what she meant. She took the eyeliner and made a blow-up of one of the illustrations on the tiled wall of the bathroom. She then studied it for a long time, before taking a shower. After the shower, and with some difficulty, she washed it off again.

Five days of reading. At the table by the window, breathing sea air and fumes; at sidewalk cafes; in one floating bar or another, with the frescoed ochre and gold and mint-green buildings across the water flashing in the reflected wave-scattered glare.

On the sixth morning, she became aware of a man at a nearby table watching her.

She had been poring through the article about the excavation of Herod’s garden. During the past days, a resolution had been forming. But she’d noticed the man when he came in because he’d made a fuss about ordering a latte; then a bigger fuss when the waiter brought him a glass of milk, protesting first in loud American, then in bursts of French. Finally he gave up, drank the milk, and stared at her.

He had a bowl haircut and white puckered skin, as if it rarely saw the light. A museum piece, she thought, smiling, as she raised the American Journal of Archaeology between them. Then it turned out the man was a museum piece indeed. “I’m in there,” he said, when she unwisely lowered the magazine to take a sip of her own caffè latte.

She said, “Oh? Where?”

Big mistake, though would it have been better if she’d never known?

He came, sat beside her, and flipped the journal to an article about the Baron Lowenthall’s Museum of Stone Age Artefacts in Paris. This was where Luke had worked, she remembered. The article concerned the exact specialty that Luke had told her about, retrofitting stone chips that had been flaked away by Stone Age flintknappers. When Clare mentioned Luke’s name, the man’s white face curdled with disgust. Oh he knew Tindhall all right. Tindhall had been a minor curator at the Lowenthall, when this man — Morton, his name was — had been brought in as an expert, to retrofit some stone chips recently discovered in a cave in the Dordogne. Tindhall had been fascinated with the process, had kept hanging around the basement where Morton was busy pursuing the delicate task, day after day. Then it turned out that the actual spear point, carved eons from the stone Morton had so laboriously put back together, was already in the museum collection. But when Tindhall displayed the two pieces together, as part of an exhibition that was widely touted throughout Paris, he failed to give Morton a word of credit in the catalogue, though Tindhall’s own name, as curator, was all over the thing, front and centre.

As luck would have it, soon after this, Morton discovered Tindhall and the Baroness Lowenthall performing the horizontal waltz, as he put it, in a store room, heedless, in their lust, of the Neanderthal grave goods they’d pushed aside. Morton had moved quickly; Tindhall had been fired.

Of the many thoughts that went through Clare’s head, as she left Morton reminiscing on this triumph, it did her little credit, she knew, that the first one was utterly self-serving.

During her days of reading, she had convinced herself more and more that there must have been gardens associated with the tomb in her meadow. But Harold Plank, in his determination to explore farther along the cliff face, had talked of bringing in a backhoe and other heavy equipment to move the rubble. And Luke — even when, earlier, she’d mentioned the possibility of gardens there — had brushed her theory aside.

But the property was still hers. Somehow she would manage to get in contact with archaeologists of the other sort, the garden sort.

Of course, such exploration would need funding.

And now Plank’s right-hand man turned out to be not entirely what he cracked himself up to be. This did not mean that in the big things he was a fraud. But surely she could use Morton’s information to get Luke to push her case with his employer.

Schemes — dreams — a new road ahead. Fired up with this, she headed back to Tuscany.

CLARE HAD WONDERED, SOMETIMES, what the world would be like if she were someone else. Would those around her also change? When she got back, Luke was very glad to see her. He was real, warm, alive, bulky — and different. Because she had become someone else? Because he sensed the sureness in her now?

If so, was the very sureness that changed him the thing that undid her?

LAST NIGHT SHE’D FOUND him packing his gear. Harold Plank, confident that the negotiations in Florence were falling into place, had agreed to expand the Plank Foundation’s horizons and finance Luke’s explorations in Turkey. Speed was of the essence, though. Luke was leaving for Ankara the day after next to get all the formalities sewn up. He had held off only for her return.

“It’s the chance of a lifetime, Clare. But I sodding need you with me. Please.”