The Savage Garden

He found a pensione on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station. The owner informed him that he was in luck; a room had just fallen vacant. It was easy to see why. Adam made a speculative survey of the dismal little box in the roof and told himself it was only for one night.

He stripped off his shirt and lay on the sagging mattress, smoking a cigarette, unaccustomed to the humidity pressing down on the city Was this normal? If so, why had no one thought to mention it? Or the mosquitoes, for that matter. They speckled the ceiling, waiting for night to fall and the feast to begin.

He squeezed himself into the shower room at the end of the corridor and allowed the trickle of water to cool him off. It was a temporary measure. His fresh shirt was lacquered to his chest by the time he’d descended four flights of stairs to the lobby.

The storm broke as he stepped from the building, the sharp crack of thunder echoing around the piazza, the deluge following moments later as the amethyst clouds deposited their load. He stood beneath the awning, watching the raindrops dancing on the road. Water sheeted down from overflowing gutters; drain holes were lost to sight beneath spreading pools of water. And still the rain came, constant, unvarying in its strength. When it ceased, it ceased suddenly and completely.

A church bell struck half past the hour, and immediately people began to appear from the shelter of doorways around the piazza – almost as if the two events were connected, the bell alerting the inhabitants of the quarter to the passing of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.

Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the pavements into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sound of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.

A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence’s ‘unique cultural and artistic heritage’, which he’d detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno – no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.

Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tommaso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy-wonder, dead at twenty-seven. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes – Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with – but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.

His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough-hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country labourers by some unforgiving landlord. Adam’s face was buried in his hands, a broken man. Eve covered her nakedness in shame, but her face was raised, crying out to the heavens. All the anger, frustration and incomprehension in the world seemed contained within that gaping, shapeless hole Masaccio had given her for a mouth.

The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.

They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio’s Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden – pinched and emaciated.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.

It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.

‘American?’ asked the Frenchman.

‘English.’

The word came out wrong – barked, indignant – a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.

He looked at the man’s perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted run-off.

He only realized he was staring when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, ‘Yes…?’

Adam gestured to the frescoes. ‘Las pinturas son muy hermosas,’ he said in his best Spanish.

As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio’s genius, he wondered whether his antagonism towards them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.

3

Has the Englishman arrived yet?

No, Signora.

When?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

That’s what he said in his letter. The twelfth.

I wish to see him as soon as he gets here.

You’ve already said, Signora. You won’t forget?

Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.

Gently. Don’t push.

I’m sorry. Turn over, please.

You don’t have to do this, Maria.

I know.

I’m happy to hire someone else.

You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?

You’re a good woman.

Thank you, Signora.

Just as your father was a good man.

He had the highest respect for you too, Signora.

There’s really no need to be quite so formal, not when you’re giving me a bed-bath.

He had the highest respect for you too.

You know, Maria, I believe you’re in danger of developing a sense of humour in your old age.

Turn over, please.

4

They left Florence through the Porta Romana, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.

The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were travelling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.

Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam’s earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grunt and nod his assent – an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

When the road levelled out he turned and peered through the rear window, searching for a glimpse of Florence. The city was lost to view behind the tumble of hills rolling in from the south. Somehow it seemed appropriate; she was hiding herself, even now.

All morning he had walked her streets, the stone chasms hacked into her, grid-like. Her buildings were no more welcoming – the palaces of rusticated stone, modelled on fortresses (or so it seemed); the churches with their unadorned exteriors, many sheathed in black-and-white marble; the museums housed in all manner of forbidding structures. And yet, behind those austere façades lay any number of riches.

Adam had chosen carefully, almost mathematically, limited as he was by the short time at his disposal. There had been disappointments, acclaimed works which had left him feeling strangely indifferent. But as the taxi worked its way higher into the hills, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it had been a first foray, a swift reconnaissance. There would be plenty of opportunities to return.

San Casciano sat huddled on a high hill, dominating the surrounding countryside. Its commanding position had largely determined the course of its history, apparently, although the entry in Adam’s guidebook made no mention of the last siege the town had been forced to endure. Even as the taxi approached, it was evident that the ancient walls girdling the town had not been constructed to withstand an assault by the kind of weaponry available to the Allies and the Germans.

These weren’t the first scars of war Adam had witnessed. Even Florence, declared an ‘open city’ by both sides out of respect for her architectural significance, had suffered. As the Allies swept up from the south, the Germans had dug in, blowing all but one of the city’s historic bridges. They may have spared the Ponte Vecchio, but this consideration came at a price. The buildings flanking the river in the vicinity of the bridge were mined, medieval towers and Renaissance palaces reduced to rubble, the field cleared for the forthcoming battle. As it was, the Allied troops had simply crossed the Arno elsewhere on makeshift Bailey bridges and swiftly liberated the town.

Years on, the wound inflicted right in the heart of the old city remained raw and open. If efforts had been made to restore those lost streets to their former glory, it was not evident. Modern structures with smooth faces and clean sharp lines stood out along the river’s southern frontage, like teenagers in a queue of pensioners. The very best you could say was that the space had been filled.

In San Casciano that work was still going on. The town was pockmarked with the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings left to lie where they’d fallen. Impressively, Nature had reclaimed what she could in these plots. Young trees sprouted defiantly; shrubs had somehow detected enough moisture in piles of old stones to put down roots and prosper; weeds and ferns sprang from crevices in crumbling walls. The bland new concrete edifices that studded the historic centre were further evidence of the severe pounding the town had taken.

The Pensione Amorini had been spared. One part of the ancient vine clinging to its scaling stucco façade had been trained over a pergola, which shaded a terrace out front, overflow for the bar and trattoria occupying the ground floor. Signora Fanelli was expecting him – he had phoned ahead from Florence – and she summoned her teenage son from a back room to help with Adam’s bags.

‘Oofa,’ said Iacopo as he tested the weight of both suitcases. He left the heaviest – the one containing the books – for Adam to lug upstairs.

The room was far more than he had hoped for. Large and light, it had a floor of polished deep-red tiles, a beamed ceiling and two windows giving on to a leafy garden out back. It was furnished with the bare essentials: a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. As requested, there was also a desk, though no chair, which brought a sharp rebuke from Signora Fanelli.

Iacopo skulked off in search of one, his parting glance holding Adam to blame for this public humiliation. He returned with the chair and disappeared again while Signora Fanelli was still demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the bathroom plumbing to Adam.

Adam declared the room to be ‘perfetto’.

‘Perfetta,’ she corrected him. ‘Una camera perfetta.’

She relieved him of his passport, flashed him a smile and left. Only her perfume remained – a faint scent of roses hanging lightly in the air.

He hefted his suitcase on to the worm-eaten chest at the end of the bed and began to unpack. She must have had the boy young – seventeen, eighteen – though you’d have said even younger judging by her looks. For some reason he’d pictured an elderly woman, small in stature and of no mean girth. Instead, he was being housed by a stringier version of Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze.

It was a pleasing thought.

Another image from the same film barged its way into his head unbidden – Burt Lancaster’s over-muscled physique squeezed into a leotard – and the moment passed.

The road to Villa Docci proved to be a dusty white track following the crest of a high spur to the north of town. It rose and fell past ochre-washed farmhouses, hay meadows giving way to olive groves and vineyards tucked behind high hedgerows ablaze with honeysuckle, mallow and blood-red poppies. His mother would have been thrilled, stopping every so often to call his attention to some plant or flower. That was her way. But all Adam was aware of was the mocking chant of the cicadas pulsing in time to the pitiless heat.

He was about to turn back, convinced that he’d made a mistake, when he saw two weathered stone gateposts up ahead. Beyond them an avenue of ancient cypresses climbed sharply towards a large villa, the trunks of the trees powdered white with dust thrown up from the driveway. There was no sign beside the gateposts, but a quick glance at the hand-drawn map Signora Docci had sent him confirmed that he had at last arrived.

Nearing the top of the driveway he stopped, uncertain, sensing something. He turned, glancing back down the gradient, the plunging perspective of the flanking cypresses.

Something not right. But what? He couldn’t say. And he was too hot to ponder it further.

The cypresses gave way to a gravel turning area in front of the villa. There were some farm buildings away to his left, down the slope, beyond a stand of holm oaks, but his attention was focused on the main structure.

How had Professor Leonard described the architecture of the villa? Pedestrian?

Admittedly, his own knowledge of the subject was drawn almost exclusively from a battered copy of Edith Wharton’s book on Italian villas, but there seemed to be nothing whatsoever run-of-the-mill about the building in front of him. Though not as large or obviously grand as some, its symmetry and proportions lent it an air of discreet nobility, majesty even.

Set around three sides of a flagstone courtyard, it climbed three floors to a shallow, tiled roof with projecting eaves. Arcaded loggias occupied the middle and upper storeys of the front façade, while the wings consisted of blind arcades with pedimented and consoled windows. There was not much more to it than that, but every detail of it worked.

The building felt no need to proclaim its pedigree; rather, it exuded it like a well-cut suit. You were left in little doubt that the hand of some master lay behind its conception – long-dead, unrecognized, forgotten. For if one of the more illustrious architects of the period had been responsible for bringing it into being, that fact would have been preserved in the historical record. As it was, he had found almost no references to Villa Docci during his preliminary research.

He skirted the well-head in the middle of the courtyard and mounted the front steps. There was a stone escutcheon set in the wall above the entrance door, a rampant boar the centrepiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bell pull.

She must have been observing him from inside, waiting for him to make his approach, for the door swung open almost immediately. She was short and stout, and she was wearing a white blouse tucked into a black skirt. Her dark eyes reached for his and held them, vice-like.

‘Good morning,’ he said in Italian.

‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’m Adam Strickland.’

‘You’re late.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry.’

She stepped aside, allowing him to enter, appraising him with a purposeful eye as if he were a horse she was thinking of betting on (and leaving him with the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be reaching for her purse any time soon).

‘Signora Docci wishes to see you.’

At either end of the long entrance hall was a stone stairway leading to the upper floors. When she made for the one on the left, Adam fell in beside her.

‘May I have a glass of water, please?’

‘Water? Yes, of course.’ She changed tack, heading for a corridor beside the staircase. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

He didn’t mind. It allowed him to cast an eye around the interior. Any suspicions that the quiet elegance of the villa’s exterior owed itself to little more than chance vanished immediately. You sensed the same poised hand at work in the proportions of the vast drawing room that occupied the central section of the ground floor, giving on to a balustraded terrace out back. The flanking rooms were connected by a run of doorways, perfectly aligned, which generated a telescopic sense of perspective and permitted an uninterrupted view from one end of the villa to the other.

Adam retreated at the sound of approaching footsteps, not wishing to be caught snooping by the maid, or the housekeeper, or whatever she was.

Signora Docci lay propped up on a bank of pillows in a four-poster bed of dark wood, reading. She inclined her head towards the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.

‘Adam,’ she said, smiling broadly.

‘Hello.’

‘Thank you, Maria.’

Maria acknowledged the dismissal with a nod, pulling the door closed behind her as she left.

Signora Docci gestured for Adam to approach the bed. ‘Please, it’s not contagious, just old age.’ She laid her book aside and smiled again. ‘Well, maybe it is contagious.’

Her hair hung loose, tumbling like a silver wave around her shoulders. It seemed too long, too thick, for a woman of her advanced years. A tracery of fine lines lay like a veil across her face, but the flesh was firm, shored up by the prominent bones beneath. Her eyes were dark and wide-spaced.

He extended his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

They shook, her grip firm and bony.

‘Please.’ She indicated a high-backed chair near the bed. ‘I’m glad you’re finally here. Maria has been fussing around for days, tidying and cleaning.’

It was hard to picture: stern, monosyllabic Maria preparing for his arrival.

‘She is a good person. She will let you see that when she’s ready to.’

He was slightly unnerved that she’d read the thought in his face.

‘So, how was your trip?’

‘Good. Long.’

‘Did you stop in Paris?’

‘No.’

‘Milan?’

‘Just Florence. And only for a night.’

‘One night in Florence,’ she mused. ‘It sounds like the title of a song.’

‘Not a very good one.’

Signora Docci gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘No,’ she conceded.

Adam took a letter from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. ‘From Professor Leonard.’

She laid the letter beside her on the bed. He noted that her hand remained resting on it.

‘And how is Crispin?’ she asked.

‘He’s in France at the moment, looking at some cave paintings.’

‘Cave paintings?’

‘They’re very old – lots of bison and deer.’

‘A cave is no place for a man his age. It’ll be the death of him.’

Adam smiled.

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘I know, it’s just…your English.’

‘What?’

‘It’s very good. Very correct.’

‘Nannies. Nannies and governesses. My father is to blame. He loved England.’ She shifted in the bed, removing her spectacles and placing them on the bedside table. ‘So tell me, how is the Pensione Amorini?’

‘Perfect. Thanks for arranging it.’

‘How much is she charging you?’

‘Two thousand five hundred lire a day’

‘It’s too much.’

‘It’s half what I paid in Florence.’

‘Then you were had.’

‘Oh.’

‘You should pay no more than two thousand lire for half-board.’

‘The room’s large, clean.’

‘Signora Fanelli knows the power of her looks, I’m afraid. She always has, even as a young girl. And now that she’s a widow, well…’

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ she shrugged. ‘Men are as men are. Why should they change?’

Adam’s instinct was to defend his sex against the charge, but the news about Signora Fanelli’s marital status was really quite agreeable. He chose silence and a grave nod of the head.

‘How long will you be with us?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Is it enough time?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never studied a garden before.’

‘You’ll find it’s a little neglected, I’m afraid. Gaetano left last year. It was his responsibility. The other gardeners do what they can.’ She pointed to some French windows, which were open, although the louvred shutters remained closed. ‘There’s a view behind those. You can’t see the memorial garden from here, but I can point you in the right direction.’

Adam pushed open the shutters, squinting against the sunlight flooding past him into the room. He found himself in an arcaded loggia. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out the commanding view Patchwork hills spilled away to the west, their folds cast by the lowering sun into varying grades of shade. There was a timeless, almost mythi cal quality to the panorama – like a Poussin landscape.

‘It’s special, isn’t it?’ said Signora Docci.

‘If you like that kind of thing.’

This brought a laugh from her. Adam peered down on to the gardens at the rear of the villa, the formal arrangements of gravel walks and clipped hedges.

‘There are some umbrella pines at the edge of the lower terrace, on the left. If you walk through those and follow the path down, you’ll come to it.’

Just beyond the knot of pines the land dropped away sharply into a wooded valley.

‘Yes, I see.’

He pulled the shutters closed behind him as he reentered the room.

‘Why put it down there? In the valley, I mean.’

‘Water. There’s a spring. Or there was. It’s dry now, like everything. We need rain, we need lots of rain. The grapes and olives are suffering.’ She reached for a slender file on the bedside table. ‘Here. My father put it together. It’s not much, but it’s everything we know about the garden.’

Adam was to come and go at his leisure, she went on. He was more than welcome to work out of the study if he wanted to, and of course the library was at his disposal. In fact, he was to have free run of the villa, everything except the top floor, which, for reasons she didn’t explain, was off limits. Maria would prepare him something for lunch if he wanted it.

‘We don’t stand on ceremony around here. If you need something, you just have to ask.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

‘Non c’è di che,’ replied Signora Docci with a mock-formal tilt of the head. ‘Come back and see me when you’ve walked round the garden.’