Circaea Livingston Philippiana

A COURIER VAN WAS backing down the lane when Clare returned to the house. She found Marta in the kitchen with a butcher knife in her hand, in front of a large crate. Marta whirled to face her.

“Ah Signora, I was hoping to find the right tool, for you to open this — look what has arrived.”

It was a case of Brunello di Montalcino, Special Reserve. Straight from the winery, courtesy of Sir Harold Plank. “To cheer your palate, inspire your brushes, warm your introduction to the Tuscan sun,” read the accompanying note, handwritten on embossed Plank Foundation stationery. He’d added a private phone number, too: his flat in Mayfair. He must have couriered the note to the winery in time for the wine to be couriered from Montalcino.

The envelope had been lying on the kitchen table when Clare came in the door. “Allora, Signora” Marta had said. “See how careless the delivery man has been — how this letter just fell off when he set the case down, and not even sealed!” Clare was so surprised by the gift, that only later did she wonder if the kettle boiling on the stove had anything to do with the note not being sealed.

Marta sang praises to the lavish nature of the gift. “It is the most famous of our Tuscan wines. This must be from someone who likes Signora Chiara very much.”

“No no,” Clare said quickly, remembering the moment over lunch in London. “He’s just a business contact. An archaeological contact really.”

“Ah! U’ arqueologo!” Such a stony look, before Marta pulled the vacuum cleaner from a curtained alcove and hauled it up to the next room. Clare heard the clatter of it being dragged down the ladder stairs, then its fearsome howling in the room below. What was that about? She’d never had anyone work for her before. What had she said wrong? Archaeologist?

She shrugged, lifted a bottle of Brunello from the case, closed her eyes, ran her fingers up and down the cool, upstanding cylinder.

Someone who likes Signora Chiara very much … Harold Plank had made that much clear. And she’d liked him, too. Though later she’d wondered if it was only when he learned that she’d inherited the property of Geoffrey Kane that he had decided to help her. (“A fine writer, your uncle,” as he plucked an oyster from the shell.)

SHE’D COME ACROSS his name back in Vancouver — an eminent figure who had endowed the British Museum’s new Etruscan gallery and was said to dispense largesse to select projects around the world, though he never travelled himself. When she got to London, she’d tried to make an appointment to see him, and had been stalled: so she’d barged right into his office and set one of her books on his desk. She signed it with a flourish before he could object. After he’d leafed through, carefully examining the full-page illustrations (“Very nice, very nice”) he looked up and carefully looked over the length of her, then invited her to lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand. It wasn’t till the treacle pudding that he’d offered to set up Tuscan contacts for her. Then he’d offered to move her from her Bloomsbury hotel to a “nice little suite at the Ritz, more fitting for a lass like you.”

Such cheerful North Country forthrightness. She’d pictured the enormous grey-satin room, the soft forgiving light from alabaster sconces. How she would remove his plum-and-grey-striped tie, his striped shirt from Savile Row. How she’d solve the little trouble of slipping down his crisp white boxers, with his penis springing through the fly. But there had been no hard feelings when she refused. In fact, his face had taken on an expression of wry delight, as if such a refusal were something rare.

Earlier, he’d been telling her about a cabinet of curiosities he kept, “in a nice little Edwardian inlaid case that fits into a corner of my study in the Yorkshire Dales.” She pictured her refusal being placed into that cabinet too, tucked into a vial of cloudy ancient Roman glass, along with select items of Etruscan bronze such as she’d been so intrigued with in the Museum.

In the Etruscan gallery she’d moved along from case to case, pulled by objects that had a strange sense of brightness radiating from them. A bronze hand beckoning, green with age, with little horned men growing out of every finger; a dancing woman wearing pointed shoes, whirling, the movement evident in her whipping sleeves, a seventiered incense burner balanced on her head. Every functional object brimming with the energy of a further life that seemed to simmer inside the cast bronze shapes. She could look at those things for hours; she could look at them for a lifetime and still see something new. Did this wealthy man, this philanthropist who had endowed the collection, experience this too? Did he enjoy looking at them so much that some pieces had found their way into that inlaid cabinet in the far Yorkshire Dales? She had no reason to believe this; it was supposition, based on the discomfiting suspicion that the morals of others might be as unruly as her own.

The sound of the vacuum had long since stopped. What on earth did Marta find to do down there, or for that matter in the house at all, day after day? How often did she come? When Clare went downstairs she found Marta leafing through a copy of her Amazon book, though she wasn’t sure she’d left the case open earlier in her rush to get out her painting gear.

Marta threw out her arms. Allora, who would have known that Signora Chiara did such work? This book was splendido, molto molto notevole! And to think that she, Marta, had the honour to have in her house now not just a painter, but an author, un’autrice famosa! All this wheezed out in what Clare couldn’t help picturing as a verbal smokescreen to cover the embarrassment of being caught.

“I’d like you to have one of these books,” Clare said, to make up for her doubting thoughts. “Here, I will sign one right now, for you and Niccolo.” They stood together, as Marta proudly turned the pages of her copy.

Marta paused, at the one illustration that Clare always tried not to think about. She studied it intently. “Che cosa strana!”

Clare felt her jaw and shoulders tighten. Extraordinary, the things the body decided all on its own: as if it had to gear up for a fight of some sort, when really, who in the world was going to call Clare on this, or even know?

When Marta had tucked the book away, she told Clare that the lawyer’s office had called. She said that Clare had an appointment for nine o’clock on Monday morning.

Clare said, “Then I’d better call back to confirm.”

Marta said there was no need. “I have already done this for you, Signora Chiara.” She urged Clare to come upstairs and have some of the nettle soup. Clare decided to put off setting a few ground rules: and that she’d prefer to make her own arrangements about such things. She praised the soup lavishly instead. She said she would like to sketch the weeds that went into such a healthful soup, if Marta would tell her where they grew.

Marta, shining the copper pans, turned, wiped her hands on her apron. Her glassy stare made Clare think of a fox she’d seen once in the window of an antique shop, stuffed with secret knowledge.

She said, “Signora Chiara should take care. A beautiful woman wandering alone in these hills.”

“Take care of what? The house book says there is nothing to fear.”

Ah, but there were strangers in the district now, Marta said. Sicilians. Telephone workers, they claimed to be. She resumed scouring, giving fierce attention to her task, even though the pots were brilliant before she started. Clare lifted another spoon of soup, her hand shaking. No doubt she was just tired. Of course she was tired, all the travel, all this so new; but it was starting to feel unreal to have these helpful figures moving implacably into her life: the husband, Niccolo, like a gnarled tree stump come alive, and the glassy-eyed Marta with the red-grey hair. Yes, like the fox-figure in the window.

Then, “Oh Christ!” she heard herself say, as some of the green liquid spilled onto the front of her silk shirt. “That does it. I won’t go.”

The scowl Marta turned on her was enough, alone, to banish the green stain. A puff of irritation. “Signora, when I have finished this, I will wash your blouse.”

Clare protested.

Marta insisted.

She said that if the Signora was going to go to the party in her honour — and if her luggage still did not arrive — then naturalmente it would need to be washed!

Clare frowned. Had she told Marta about the invitation? In the tangle of two languages, and her dismay at finding her movements so closely monitored, she wasn’t sure, anymore, exactly what information had been passed between them.

“Allora!” Marta said, “All the same, the Signora will need to learn who the good neighbours are!”

And the good ones, it seemed, did not include Ralph Farnham and his Italian wife, Federica. Ralph Farnham thought he ate the cream, just because he’d married into the family of the Inghirami; and the Inghirami themselves believed they were the cream. In the old days, they had owned all the land in these near hills. But even though the father had lost that land, and lost his money, Signora Federica still behaved as if it all was hers, and had continued to ride her horses all over Clare’s uncle’s property before Signor Geoffrey had it fenced. Also, the husband of Signora Federica’s good friend, the Contessa, was the local archaeological inspector; he had tramped all over Clare’s uncle’s property too, with his thick eyeglasses peering as if he had any business there. Clare would meet this Contessa and her husband at the home of the bad neighbours too, Marta warned.

Marta threw her rag into the sink. She pulled off her rubber gloves and threw them in the sink as well. “Allora, now give me the shirt.” Handing Clare the blue-sprigged cotton wraparound apron, she said “You can wear this.” Then her face softened. This was such a mercy that, ridiculously again, Clare felt the start of tears as Marta’s roughened hand stroked her cheek.

“Beautiful Signora Chiara, you must forgive me if I am sometimes cross. It is not you. It is the life in general. Now go and have a bath in the tub downstairs. Tonight you need to be rested!” She held out her hand for the shirt.

Clare’s silk shirt was long — almost a tunic when she wore it outside her jeans. She pulled it up to start unbuttoning. Marta’s eyes widened with shock. Clare started to turn her back. “Sorry!”

Marta grabbed her by the shoulder. “What is this?” She reached towards Clare’s belt buckle, snapped her hand back as if it might get burned. “Why do you wear this?”

Clare frowned. “I always wear it. I’ve had it for years.”

The big silver buckle was in the form of a goat head, heavy, showy. But Clare wore it for quite other reasons.

“Maligno!” Marta said. “Pericoloso!”

Clare tried to laugh this off. “I know it’s in pretty bad taste.”

Marta blew out her cheeks in a puff of disapproval. Then she sighed, spread the hands that the life in general had roughened, as if there were just too many things about Clare that needed to be corrected. “Allora, go! If I do not wash this now it will not be ready. Afterwards, I will take my motorino to the store and buy some things for you to eat, or you will starve. No no no. This I always do. For me it is no trouble.” She squeezed lemon on the stain, rubbed in salt, went out the back door.

I’M GOING TO HAVE to get control of this soon, Clare told herself. But in fact it was a relief to slip obediently away in Marta’s apron. And really, when had she ever, truly, been in control? Maybe only during the years she’d worked on the Amazon book, absorbed in the twinning of scientific accuracy and make-believe?

She paused on her way to the bath to admire the remaining copy she’d brought with her. Despite the serious qualms its publication had raised in her, she loved that book. She stroked the glossy cover, noting again the sheen she’d achieved on the ribbon-like petals of the Galeandra devoniana, the elegant curve of the stems, the intricate pattern of the roots. The painterly quality of the botanical portraits had received some fine reviews. Yet Clare had begun the work for reasons personal, out of profound shock to learn that a fifth of the world’s plant life was headed for extinction. In the Amazon this meant that many plants would die that had yet to be discovered, identified. She had not expected the work to get such notice. If she’d foreseen it, she would have been more careful, she later told herself many times, and would not have felt the constant jitter of apprehension ever since.

She flipped the pages, allowing belligerence to ripen towards the entire academic establishment which she pictured, still, as crouching ready to find fault — and towards Dr. Lester Wildman, her ex-husband, in particular.

IT WAS ON THE night she’d learned for certain not only that her husband was sleeping with the doctoral student, but that she, Clare, had been bumped from the Amazon expedition and the student was going in her place, that Clare had created the painting of Circaea Livingston Philippiana.

She had already taken a leave of absence from the botany lab to prepare for the trip. Amazonia was hers; she refused to give it up. She’d lived in it, in imagination, for an entire year: canoed rivers teeming with piranha, trekked jungle paths braving all manner of poisonous snakes, waded swamps roiling with crocodiles, fallen asleep to the racket of howler monkeys. Indomitably, through heat and mud and teeming rain, she had crouched on sopping logs or in tippy dugout canoes to capture — to save! — likenesses of its creatures and its plants.

And I married you just to get there, she’d almost hurled at Lester Wildman, though this was far from true.

She’d set out to attract him long before she’d known he was hoping to put together such an expedition. He was not only head of the department, but he knew everything, talked beautifully, had travelled widely. A rangy, almost ugly, incredibly compelling man in his forties, old enough to be a father figure, the mentor she’d always longed for. Married, but she’d told herself the appeal was intellectual, not much more. At that point, Clare had still been reeling from the end of her off-and-on affair with her childhood psychiatrist. (To the psychiatrist’s credit, he was the one who’d given her the strength to make it as far as grad school.) She had decided to devote the rest of her life to recording and painting all the grasses of the world. Grass was so humble. It got so little respect. “In art I mean,” she’d explained to Lester Wildman when she visited his office to put the thesis topic to him. “Think of it, where do you ever see grass in paintings, except to be trodden underfoot, or to provide an anonymous carpet for some woodland scene? Take Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe. The herbe may get top billing, but even the loaf of bread gets more respect. Or Monet’s Field of Poppies, where the entire field is just a blur.”

Dr. Lester Wildman said, “All the grasses of the world! Would that leave you time for lunch?”

She had been with Lester Wildman for seven years, one way and another. Secret girlfriend, open girlfriend, marriage-breaker, wife; then just another in the string of his betrayed. When she learned that he had crossed her off the expedition, she threatened to make an enormous stink, to blacken his name with the university as a serial philanderer, go to the press, whatever it took. But what good would it do? If the university cut the funding for the trip, she would still be sitting there at home. She could see she’d scared him, though.

So she made the deal. She would write the book she’d intended to write, and she would execute a series of paintings of the endangered flora of the Amazon basin, as she’d dreamed of doing. She already knew the subject so well that she wouldn’t really truly need to be there, though it broke her heart. Eminent Dr. Wildman would supply her with the alternate resources she required. She got him to sign an agreement promising her access to herbarium specimens from collections across the continent. Beyond that, she would use photographs as reference, and botanical articles and any other source she chose.

THE PORTRAIT OF THE Circaea began as a doodle that same night, fuelled by rage. It was a version of deadly nightshade, which she’d read was a distant relation to the Amazonian plant that provided a basis for one of the recipes for arrow poison.

The painting took on a life of its own, as she began to combine implausible elements: giving the flower a rocket-like appearance, exaggerating the curled-back petals behind the pointed nose cone of the anthers, drawing in some darkly shaded fruits like tiny pomegranates with cracks opening to sharp-barbed seeds. Gorgeous, she dreamed it into life in botanical exactitude: side sketches of the root, some split-open fruits showing a larger view of the poison seeds. A mix of Paynes grey with ultramarine and magenta produced a virulent purple for those fruits.

So there it was, her first discovery on the expedition — named not in her own honour, no, but in that of the supposed revolutionary ancestor her aunt had often talked about.

When she signed the painting, she added the little stick figure too, half-hidden among the leaves, which she later added to all the paintings for the book. During the rest of the work, which took her two years, she kept Circaea Livingston Philippiana near for inspiration. She had not intended to include it in the package she sent off to the publisher; but, somehow, it got in with the rest — perhaps a subconscious desire to bring the whole project to a halt before it was too late? Though to be fair, nowhere in the written text had she stated that she, personally, was the one trekking through the swamp and rainforest. She’d merely phrased things in a careful — if extremely lively and first-hand — sort of way. And, during that two-year imaginary trek, she had become convinced of her ability to convey truths with a clarity and perspective that might have eluded her if she had actually been battling the rigours of remote Amazon travel while experiencing the urgency to record as much as she could of the botanical riches of that endangered part of the world. Terrible, if by this one piece of egregious self-indulgence, the whole work might be smeared with disrepute.

Still, when the art director wrote and asked for details of the imaginary plant’s find spot, struck by the weird beauty of it, asking for clarification that this was a new species Clare herself had discovered — at that point she could have made an excuse to withdraw at least that one painting, couldn’t she? Instead, stubborn bravado kicked in. She’d written back to say it had been found almost hidden by the spray of the cascade that plunged from the lost world atop Mount Roraima, a waterfall of such height that it was lost in mist before it reached the ground.

AS CLARE STARTED INTO the bathroom alcove in the semi-gloom, her toe struck a solid rock-like thing. It was a large chunk of brain coral, intended as a doorstop she supposed, now bloodied from her wounded toe.

She limped across and started running hot water into the tub. She’d be turning up at this gathering of Etruscan glitterati not only dressed in jeans, but lame as well.

Lame, but very cautious and well behaved, she told herself. She would not let her nervousness propel her to that extra drink, especially with Ralph Farnham’s Italian brother-in-law who knew all about the Amazon there. She was a serious woman on a serious academic quest. As the bath filled, she stared into the steamy mirror, traced the face there, leaving a cartoon outline: the too-wide-apart eyes, the sharp cheekbones. The off-kilter mouth of a bad angel.

Chiara, my angel girl.

SHE HAD TO CLUTCH her gut. A pain, sharp as fire, ran up from her insides into her throat.

How could she have imagined — here, in his house — that she could keep all that tamped down?

She reached for the brain coral, in an urge to smash that pretendoblivious face in the mirror. Then she heard Marta start the motorino. Marta, who peered and pried. What had she been up to down here when the vacuum was whining? Had she peered into Clare’s things? Had she tried to pry into the case that held her uncle’s ashes?

That obscene request of his.

The plastic case was where she’d left it, squat and ugly, in the other room on the floor. She’d better find somewhere safe for it, till she came to terms with what to do about its awful contents. How could he have requested this of her? Who was he, anyway, who had he become? That obituary. Had he thought it terrifically clever, that Shakespearean echo, leaving his wife his second-best regrets? Clare thought of the desperate sparked cleverness he’d had, and how her aunt had always cut him down. Did he have to die to get the last word in? Was that why he went back to the States to die? To get the last word in? In all the years since his disappearance, what could he possibly have known about the girl he’d abandoned to the aunt and the grandmother and the ancient doctor on the night the evidence was scraped away?

How could she have acceded to his request about the ashes; refusing to think about it, except as part of an adventure, popping the cremated remains into the plastic makeup case, telling herself she’d been clever when the customs guy in Rome shook the heavy case and she’d given him her best smile and said, “Makeup. I need a lot.”

She began tearing books from a shelf to make a hiding place.

So many books.

Did you read all these? she wanted to scream.

And why why why did you bring me here?

In her half-blind state, she dropped a large volume; it landed on her damaged toe. She let out a howl.

The villain this time was Ancient History, with Revised Edition appearing below the title in gilt letters on the cracked-leather spine. Ancient history, revised. Something appeasing in that thought. When she flipped the book open, the old pages released a soothing smell of knowledge long contained; a sweet druggy feeling stole in, of drifting back to a distant time, beyond her bad time, beyond the good time that had preceded it, to a time where she could disappear or become another person altogether, a priestess casting enigmatic divinations, a warrior queen. She turned the pages, admiring the etchings set into the text. A page came loose in her hand. She tried to work it back so that it rested firmly against the binding, and in doing so caught a glimpse of an etching on the second side.

A face on a coin.

For a moment she was back on the autostrada, catching the profile of that man in her mirror, the grand furrowed brow, the high-bridged nose, the up-thrusting chin. She shook her head, remembering her idiotic reaction: rolling down the window, then zooming off. The startled look on his face — she remembered that clearly, too; how it had said, Come back, come back, you’ve got it wrong. Our meeting like this was fated.

No, I didn’t get that wrong, she thought now; that’s exactly why I ran away.

The mouth on this coin-face held a hint of petulance. And so it might. This was Mithridates of Pontus, scourge of the Romans in the East; a man who had been determined to get what he wanted for a long time, even taking a small dose of poison every day of his life in the hopes of holding death at bay.

She slid the page firmly back, then cleared a space on the shelf and hid the case that held the ashes behind Ancient History and other books.