The engine of a motor-car started. ‘Buonanotte!’ the old man called out, and then Otmar wished their visitor goodnight also. There was a flash of headlights as the car turned on the gravel before it was driven off.
Again Mr Riversmith stood up and this time I did so too. I led him from the terrace into the house, and to my private room. I switched the desk-light on and pointed at my titles in the glass-faced bookcase. I watched him perusing them, bending slightly.
‘You’re an author, Mrs Delahunty?’
I explained that the collected works of Shakespeare had been part of the furniture at the Café Rose, together with the collected works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. That was my education when it came to writing English. I knew ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by heart, and the part of Lady Macbeth and ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ I said:
‘You might like to call me Emily.’
There was something about his forehead that I liked. And to tell the truth I liked the way, so unaffectedly, he’d said he didn’t grasp what I was endeavouring to relate to him. There was reassurance in his sombre coolness. He kept coming and going, emerging when he was troubled, hiding because of nerviness when he wasn’t. Clever men probably always need drawing out.
‘You’re Capricorn,’ I said, making yet another effort to put him at ease. ‘The moment I heard your voice on the phone I guessed Capricorn.’
He turned the first few pages of Bloom of Love. There was a flicker of astonishment in the eyes that had been so expressionlessly opaque a moment before. He picked up Waltz Me to Paradise, then returned both volumes to where he’d taken them from.
‘Most interesting,’ he said.
‘Your ants are interesting too, Tom.’
Perhaps it was ridiculous to think that a professor of entomology in his middle years would ask if he might take Little Bonny Maye or Two on a Sunbeam to bed with him, but even so it was a disappointment when he didn’t. We stood without saying anything for a moment, listening to the sound of one another’s breathing. I kept seeing his ants, running all over the place, a few carrying others on their backs, all of them intent upon some business or other.
‘I would listen if you told me, Tom. About your ants.’
He shook his head. His research was of academic interest only, and was complex. An explanation of it did not belong in everyday conversation.
‘What was it you didn’t grasp, Tom?’
‘What?’
I smiled encouragingly, wanting to say that if he smiled more himself everything would be easier for both of us, that it was a pity to possess such strong teeth and not ever to display them. I asked him to pick out Precious September. By Janine Ann Johns, I said, and watched him while he did so.
‘Open it, Tom.’
I asked him to look for Lady Daysmith, and to read me a single sentence concerning her. There was an initial hesitation, a shifting of the jaw, the familiar tightening of the lips. I sensed a reminder to himself of the care, and love, that had so cosseted his sister’s child in this house.
‘Lady Daysmith knelt,’ he read eventually. ‘She closed her eyes and her whisper was heard in the empty room, beseeching mercy.’
He replaced the volume on its shelf and closed the glass-paned door on it.
‘Sit down, Tom. Have a glass of grappa with me.’
He rejected this, but I begged him and in the end he did as I wished because I said it was important. I poured us each a glass of grappa. I said:
‘Lady Daysmith had her origins in a Sunday-school teacher.’ I described the humility of Miss Alzapiedi, her gangling height, the hair that should have been her crowning glory. ‘Flat as a table up front. I turned her into an attractive woman, Tom.’
‘I see.’
‘All her life she never wore stockings. Her skirts came down to her shoes.’
He began to rise, his drink untouched.
‘Drink your grappa, Tom. I’ve poured it for you.’
He sipped a little. I told him that that was how it was done: you turned Miss Alzapiedi into elegant Lady Daysmith. I told him how Miss Alzapiedi had come to my assistance when I mixed up God with Joseph. I didn’t claim that making her Lady Daysmith was a reward. It was just something that had occurred.
‘But it’s nice, Tom. And it’s nice that an old man who’s had the stuffing knocked out of him can still find his last reserves in order to create an English garden in the heat of Umbria.’
‘Yes, indeed.’
Illusion came into it, of course it did. Illusion and mystery and pretence: dismiss that trinity of wonders and what’s left, after all? A stick of an old creature in misery as he walks up and down a hospital corridor with a holy statue in it. The suffering in the heart of a Sunday-school teacher who wears her dresses long. Dismiss it and you’re face to face with a violent salesman of sanitary-ware, free-wheeling about with young girls on expenses. Dismiss the conventions of my house in Umbria and Quinty, for one, would be back where he started.
‘If I gave Quinty his marching orders, Tom, he’d take his gypsy with him and they’d end up on a wasteland. They’d make a shack out of flattened oil-drums. They’d thieve from people on the streets.’
‘Mrs Delahunty –’
‘I’ve seen the tourists here looking askance at Quinty, and who on earth can blame them? You must have thought you’d come to a madhouse when he began his talk about holy women. Yet eccentric conversation’s better than being a near criminal. Or so I’d have thought.’
Politely he said he found Quinty not uninteresting on the subject of hagiology. I smiled at him: once again he was doing his best. I remembered him walking beside Rosa Crevelli after we’d had lunch, making an effort to converse with her. He’d had a glass or two of wine, and I wondered if he’d thought to himself that she had an easy look to her. No reason why a reticent man shouldn’t have a fancy, shouldn’t go for that sallow skin and gypsy eyes, a different ball-game from Francine. But this wasn’t the time to wonder for long about any of that.
Perhaps in the morning, I suggested, we might look for a bark-ant together so that he could show me his side of things, since I’d been going on so about my own. For a start, I’d no idea if a bark-ant looked different from the kind of ant that lives beneath a stone. I asked him about that, pouring just a thimbleful more grappa into my glass. I said it was fascinating what he’d said about bark-ants behaving like human beings. I asked him how they came by their name. He didn’t answer, and when I looked up I discovered he was no longer in the room.
11
The old man showed me what he intended, passing on to me the gist of the deliberations that had taken place the evening before, how the Italian had pointed out that in order to create the different levels a mechanical digger rather than a ploughing machine was necessary. This, too, he could supply and operate himself. The General showed me where the terracing and the flights of steps would be. Part of the garden would be walled: the Italian had machinery for demolishing the half-ruined stables and moving the stone to where it could be attractively put to use.
The General repeated that the garden was a gift. But he did not feel he could make such drastic alterations without my agreement. He showed me where a fountain would be, and where the shade trees would be planted.