I
T ONLY CAME INTO view at the last minute, shielded from her by the mass of willows that grew up beside the river; Caterina Giottone only saw it in time to do a little swerve and wobble on the
motorino
, and she was safely past. The high, white flank of a truck, lifting equipment on its flatbed, the flicker of red and white tape; intent on getting to work, she didn’t look back, so that was all she saw. Then she hit the patch of ice and it was just as well she hadn’t been craning her neck to look behind her or she’d have been on the tarmac with a broken bone or two.
The scooter steadied when she changed down a gear. Hunched over the handlebars, Caterina – Cate to her friends – crept up the hill. It was cold; oh, Jesus God, it was cold.
It was so cold that even through her layers of fleece and wool and leather, Cate could no longer feel her toes. The defined ridges of her cheekbones, exposed to the breathtaking, knife-sharp chill, felt as though they had been flayed. As her
motorino
sputtered to the crest of the hill, Orfeo finally came into view and Cate reflected, as she did on her way to her place of work most mornings, that it was nothing like home.
It was partly the geography. Cate had grown up in the wide, flat Val di Chiana, where you could see for miles and everywhere you looked
there was habitation: the great grazing plains of the Chianina cattle punctuated by square, turreted farmsteads, hay-barns and, increasingly, by
capannoni
, the low grey hangars of light industry. The closest hills to Cate’s home village were soft and round and topped with towns and bell-towers, their slopes clustered with restaurants and bars and crowds of teenagers.
This place was a different matter, the Etruscan Maremma; two hours to the south, yet the hills were rocky, barren, inhospitable and wild, surmounted by the occasional bleached and silent village. To a town girl like Cate it seemed so empty, dusty and brown and bare and wild in the depths of winter, the leafless trees and desiccated brambles clinging like cobwebs to their slopes. Cate had been renting a room in the closest town to the castle, a flyblown place on the edge of the plains called Pozzo Basso, and on her eight-kilometre
motorino
ride in to work, she passed only the occasional farmhouse as she wound through the silent hills.
Some of them had become ruins, overrun with wild vines, reabsorbed by the landscape. They gave Cate a chill, the half-discernible mounds beneath ivy, the scattered stones, like half-buried bodies. They made her think, how quickly a human being would disappear.
They called the castle quite simply Orfeo, though what remained of the Orfeo family themselves were holed up in Florence in their luxurious villa, the castle being too uncomfortable, too draughty, too expensive to heat. Most of the staff, unlike Cate, were locals, their families associated with the place for generations, and the Trust meant nothing to them; the prodigal son who had crossed the Atlantic in the thirties, made his money in steel during the war and then returned, in awe of the American way, to set up an English-speaking artists’ retreat. They tolerated the Trust, run from offices in Baltimore, but fifty years didn’t count for much in this landscape, pitted with Etruscan caves, where even the Romans were relative newcomers.
Ginevra the cook had once expressed surprise that Cate didn’t commute from home, if she didn’t want to live in; she was of a generation for which it would be entirely natural for a twenty-nine-year-old unmarried woman to live with her parents – or, in her case,
mother and stepfather – even if it meant a long drive to work. But Cate, who had spent most of her teenage years arguing with the stubborn, old-fashioned man her worn-out mother had married when Cate’s father left them, had not lived at home now for more than ten years. She had worked on the cruise ships off the Florida coast, restaurants on the Côte d’Azur, even a coffee bar in Bath, England, but this place – the Castello Orfeo, two hours’ drive from where she’d been born – sometimes seemed the most foreign of them all.
And this morning more than most, Cate was wondering whether the fact was, she simply didn’t belong here. Had this been coming a long time? Perhaps; the winter season was certainly harder going than the summer; the guests wondering what they were doing in the middle of nowhere, in the cold and the rain; this wasn’t the Italy they’d signed up for. But yesterday had been a tough one; yesterday everything had seemed to turn sour. Yesterday, nothing had gone right.
On a sharp, wooded bend the convex mirror that discreetly marked the rear entrance to the castle came into view. Cate turned across the bend between the trees and revved to get the little Vespa over the stones and rubble of the rear access road. Visitors and guests were not encouraged to use this route, though it represented a considerable shortcut: there was no view, no avenue of trees, no framing of the castle’s lovely, forbidding profile, and the terrain was rough. This way, one approached through a gloomy thicket of overgrown holm-oak trees, and the flank of the castle loomed up quite suddenly overhead.
There was a small clearing in the trees marked by a flagpole where the staff’s assorted vehicles were parked, out of sight, and Cate dismounted and pushed her moped into the space unofficially reserved for her. Down to her right was the laundry building, and the studio apartment, where the curtains were firmly drawn; it would be a while before that one was up. In her pocket, her mobile tinkled its merry little ringtone. Vincenzo.
She tugged off her helmet and set the mobile to her ear. ‘V’cenz.
Caro
.’
They hadn’t been together so long; five months. He’d met her in the late-night supermarket in Pozzo where he worked, buying herself
some beers on the way back to the bedsit she rented over a biker bar. Vincenzo was younger, by a year or two, and he had led a quiet life. He looked at Cate and she knew he saw a girl who had travelled the world, who had earned her independence, who drank beer on her own late at night; his eyes shone when he looked at her. He was sweet, mostly.
‘Yeah,’ she said, in response to his question. ‘Just arrived. Fine, yeah, I’m fine.’
She’d told him her troubles last night, and he was looking out for her, that was all, even if it felt oppressive. Turning to register that the gardener’s pick-up was parked in its usual place, she said, ‘Mauro’s back.’
Vincenzo was on the early shift and she knew he’d be at the till, between customers; he wanted to know if he could see her tonight, making his case. Really what he wanted, Cate knew, was to move in with her; she let him talk, looking around her absently. If the pick-up was evidence, then the surly Mauro, factotum, handyman and gardener, had returned – to the Director’s fury, he’d spent all yesterday helping a farmer haul cattle out of a stream on the other side of the valley. But something was different; she didn’t yet know what it was. The phone wedged under her ear as Vincenzo talked, Cate opened the shiny box on the moped’s rear and pulled out the bulging canvas satchel she took to work. Her fingers felt like frozen sausages, even inside the gloves.
‘OK, darling,’ she said gently, ‘tonight, should be great. Can I call you though? Got to get inside, I’m freezing.
Un bacio
, OK
? Un bacio
.’ Grumbling, he let her go, and Cate hurried under the trees towards the castle.
Even though it was six months since she had started at Orfeo, Cate still did not quite understand its principles. Between five and ten guests arrived every ten weeks, all – or almost all – single people, and all creative people of one kind or another. You could have described them as artists, Cate supposed, but while she always thought of artists as painters or sculptors, Orfeo’s guests might be poets or writers of novels or plays, or they might make tiny indistinct objects out of feathers and clay or compose operas using the sounds of underwater creatures.
Whatever they did, they were disposed around the place, accommodated in the castle’s apartments and outbuildings for those ten
weeks, fed and watered; they were entertained, now and again, with expeditions here and there, to galleries or churches, or by visiting speakers. Cate had always assumed they were here to work, but some of them seemed to do nothing at all, and certainly no proof of achievement was ever demanded of them. Put frankly, Cate knew nothing about art. And this lot – well. They were an alien species to her. But then again – a couple of Americans, an English novelist, a Norwegian poet – Cate reflected, as she headed round the walls for the castle kitchen, that wasn’t so surprising. They
were
foreign.
There were often a couple of Italians too – although this time only one, and as he was from Venice he was exotic enough to a girl from the landlocked plains of the Val di Chiana – but even they were supposed to conduct every conversation in English, the castle’s official language. The Norwegian and the young American woman, who both wanted to improve their language skills, occasionally tried to engage the staff and the Italian guests in their own language, but it was frowned upon. Cate couldn’t find fault with the house language rule, because it was the reason she, an outsider, had been brought in. Her English, and her calm, quiet way with funny foreigners, learned on the cruise ships. But this rule, like so many others, was weird; it made the place like a strange kind of island state among the lonely hills. In fact, what Orfeo seemed most like to Cate sometimes, with its prohibitions and punishments, its smiling, implacable headmistress, was a boarding school, or a prison.
The kitchen and dining room were housed in the old stable block that clung to the rear of the castle, its blind side, and there was a staff entrance in the wall that enclosed the complex, then a small stretch of close-cropped lawn. The vents from the room that housed the castle’s heating system were billowing steam, and the grass was crunchy with frost under her heavy boots. The door to the kitchen was ajar. Cate heard the voices and she stopped, her bag slung over her shoulder, her breath clouding in front of her, and listened.
There were too many voices, and they were raised too high. The Director didn’t like racket, particularly not Italian racket. Cate had been brought in after a kitchen girl – waitress was too modern a word, it seemed, for the castle’s image, everything had to have the mediaeval
touch – had muttered something rude in Italian to an American woman. Not even a guest, but a guest’s wife, visiting for the evening. The girl had been dismissed; apparently she’d shouted across her shoulder all the way out, her rough, defiant Tuscan accent resounding around the courtyard.
So it was unusual to hear this kind of clamour of heedlessly raised voices; even if there was a row – and there were plenty – it would without fail be conducted in a kind of hissing, spitting, under-the-breath mode. So: something had happened.
Cate liked to know what she was walking into, so she stayed still on the crisp frosted grass, thinking. From the other side of the hill, from the little huddle of farm buildings where the others lived, the dogs bayed, the sound bouncing across the slopes. That first sight of Orfeo from the crest of the hill had been different somehow this morning. In her mind’s eye Cate checked off the detail of what she’d registered: trees, the dark, crenellated silhouette, the windows too mean and narrow for the façade, and the great gate into the courtyard standing open. Was that the cause of the commotion?
Still out of view of the kitchen door, Cate backed away, retracing her steps quietly to the small gate that would lead her back outside the walls. They were kind enough to her in there, but she was an outsider still. She needed to be prepared. She looked at her watch; it was barely eight o’clock and she was still early for work. Standing there another minute, she looked back where she’d come from, took in the trees, her
motorino
, Mauro’s pick-up and Ginevra’s Punto, the granary, the flagpole. The flag had been lowered; she’d never seen it like that before: that was one thing, certainly, even if she couldn’t see the significance of it. And she registered that the castle’s big 4x4 was nowhere to be seen. The Monster, they called it,
Il Mostro
.
Well
, thought Cate, puzzled,
nothing much then
. An open gate;
Il Mostro
out on some jaunt. Had the
Dottoressa
been going somewhere last night, after dinner, in the car she seemed to treat as her personal property? Or this morning, even? But it was too early for her to be up and about, and anyway Cate glimpsed something now, in the gap in the trees a hundred metres away where the main drive led to the great gate.
A low blue shape. A police car.
And she ran across the frosty grass to the door, bursting into the kitchen as though she’d just arrived, and they all fell silent.
A
S SANDRO DROVE ALONG the Via Senese in the grey dawn light, keeping the pink Vespa in his sights, he was on autopilot. After three days he could have done it blindfold: Sandro had always had a knack for navigation. If not for negotiation.
Last night he and Luisa had talked about the job, which had surprised Sandro. Delighted him, to start with.
She had already been home when he walked in, at 7.30.
He’d followed the girl to school, where she had remained all day; he’d followed her home again. He’d followed her to a bar in Galluzzo where she’d had hot chocolate with three girlfriends, then she’d gone back to the house.
Luisa had been cooking
polpettone
, and the mingling smells of veal and pork and herbs and wine issuing from the oven had lifted his spirits higher than they’d been for weeks. He had put his arms around her gratefully at the stove, and she’d turned and pecked him quickly on the cheek before returning to her pans.
Sandro had sat at the table, and poured himself a glass of the Morellino di Scansano he’d picked up from the wine shop in Via dei Serragli on the way home, as a celebratory gesture; a job was a job. The owner, a tall, husky blonde he occasionally wondered about – her voice
too deep, her Adam’s apple too prominent – had recommended it; she, or he, had excellent taste.
Luisa had opened the window to pull the shutters to, and he’d seen her shiver in the icy air. Something about the chemo had returned her to the menopause, and she was still prone to tearing off cardigans in a sweat.
‘You’ll catch your death,’ he’d said, in exasperation.
‘I’m all right,’ she’d said impatiently, then seemed to relent. She’d pulled on a sweater that was draped across the back of a chair; Sandro didn’t remember having seen it before. Cinnamon-coloured, fine merino. Expensive looking. If Luisa had felt his eyes on her, she hadn’t acknowledged it.
‘Nice sweater,’ he’d said mildly.
‘Isn’t it?’ she’d said, offhand. ‘Old stock, hardly cost anything.’
He should have been glad she was taking pride in her appearance. ‘You look beautiful,’ Sandro had said awkwardly. ‘My beautiful wife. Come and have a glass with me.’
‘In a minute,’ she’d said, her back to him again and stirring something in a pan.
‘What are you making now?’ he’d asked.
‘Just some ragu. For the freezer. Thought I might as well, while I was at it. Bought twice the quantities at the market.’
Something about this cooking marathon had begun to unsettle Sandro. But before he’d been able to formulate his unease Luisa had pulled off the apron and was in the chair beside him. Her skin bright against the fine brown wool of the new sweater, she’d raised the glass Sandro had poured her.
They’d talked about Carlotta, and Sandro had felt the wine and the warmth of Luisa’s attention mellow him. Lull him.
‘Sounds like a normal teenager to me,’ Luisa had said.
‘We never took drugs,’ Sandro had replied. He’d been twenty or so when he met Luisa; close enough to Carlotta’s age.
‘Things were different then,’ Luisa had said, the ghost of a smile on her lips. ‘We had no money.’
She’d taken a tiny sip of her wine; Sandro knew she’d read somewhere that more than a glass a day increased your chances of breast
cancer. She’d never been a drinker, never; he’d wanted to say, there’s no reason to it,
cara
. Don’t look for a reason.
‘There’s that,’ he’d said. ‘True, we had no money.’
Not that we’ve got much more now.
‘But there were no drugs, either, not like there are these days.’
Luisa had given him a sharp look. ‘Not so many,’ she’d said. ‘But they were around.’
‘How would you know?’ Sandro had been taken aback. His wife shrugged, and it came to him that her shoulders were as slender now as they had been when they’d first been courting. She raised an eyebrow, gave him a sly smile.
‘When I first started work – there were girls who took – certain pills. Drugs that kept them slim. The American students brought plenty over, amphetamines, I suppose. They called them speed. Don’t you remember the jazz club behind the station?’ Her eyes dancing, with mischief, or nostalgia.
And Sandro had remembered it, though he hadn’t thought about the place in thirty years; not that he’d ever been inside it when it was open. It had been closed down in the late sixties, boarded up and derelict until it reopened as a discount shoe store a couple of decades later. The
Gatto Nero
.
‘Did you ever go there?’ he’d asked her curiously. ‘To the
Gatto?
’ Thirty years, and still there were things he didn’t know about Luisa.
‘Once or twice. The photographer took me there.’
The photographer had predated Sandro; he’d been twenty years older than Luisa and a friend, not a boyfriend. Sandro had been bitterly jealous of the man all the same; it had only occurred to him when he was in his fifties himself that the photographer, now long dead, had almost certainly been gay. Luisa had adored the man; that was all Sandro knew.
It was an age since they’d talked like this. Their marital speciality had been peace and quiet. And not since long before the cancer had they gone over old, old, times. Sandro had known he should go with the flow, enjoy it, but he could not, quite. What did it mean?
‘An only child,’ Luisa had said, shaking her head. ‘They’re all only children these days. A recipe for disaster.’
‘Don’t know about that,’ Sandro had said ruminatively. He hadn’t told her how the child had been conceived; the precious child. Would they have had a child of their own, he and Luisa, if they’d ever overcome their shame and consulted the experts? They’d never know.
‘I suppose they’re only doing the right thing, nip it in the bud if she is into drugs,’ he’d continued. He’d thought of the girl giggling with her friends over hot chocolate. ‘Though so far she hasn’t put a foot wrong. End of the week generally, though, that’s when she goes out, Thursday, Friday: last night she stayed in.’ He had shot Luisa a glance. ‘So I guess I’ll be late back tomorrow.’
Luisa had nodded, looked suddenly anxious.
‘She’s a nice kid,’ Sandro had said, touched. ‘She’ll be all right.’
‘Good,’ Luisa had said, giving him a little pat, getting back to her feet. On the table her glass had been barely touched.
‘So what’s this all about?’ Sandro had inquired as he bent to check on the progress of the
polpettone
.
‘What?’ Luisa had said over her shoulder.
‘This cooking frenzy,’ he’d said, smiling. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’
He hadn’t really thought there would be a reason. But there was.
‘Lay the table,’ she’d said, ‘and I’ll tell you.’
He’d known he wouldn’t like it.
Just outside the city walls the pink Vespa went across a big junction on amber, and Sandro jumped the red after her, because suddenly he just didn’t care. A delivery van blared his horn, cutting behind him, and Sandro didn’t even look round.
The sun was just up, topping the hills of the Casentino to the east, shining down the silver length of the Arno as he wound under the huge umbrella pines that lined the Viale Michelangelo. They were almost there; ahead of him Carlotta Bellagamba slowed, the little Vespa swaying, as if she too was taking in the view. As if she too was brought up short by it, their staggering city. The low, flat sun gleamed off the golden ball that topped the vast red dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, and beyond it to the south-west the distant Appennines were dusted with snow.
The pink Vespa darted to the left at the last minute; an old man in a hat and overcoat hopped angrily out of the way. Sandro took the turn in leisurely pursuit.
The school – the Liceo Classico Marzocco – was the best, naturally enough. The high plastered walls that lined the street – no more than a country lane, it might seem to the outsider, with overhanging wisteria and magnolia – concealed some of the most exclusive properties in the city. Ahead of Sandro his target was slotting her Vespa into a long row of mopeds in front of a pristine façade, as she’d done every day he’d been watching her.
Sandro drove on at a sedate pace, and once out of sight he pulled up in someone’s drive and hopped out.
The pavement outside the school was crowded now with students smoking and chatting, stamping their feet in the cold and laughing before going inside. They were leaving it to the last moment; it was gone eight now. Sandro walked slowly so as to give himself time to pick Carlotta out. He had to step off the pavement, it was so crowded, and then a shiny, powerful new Audi forced him back into the crowd, coming to a halt right in front of the school gates. A handsome, moustachioed older man in an impeccable suit – a bit of a Frollini, thought Sandro, 1,000-euro suit, nice tan, and disliked him on sight – climbed out and began to lecture the lanky, long-haired boy who climbed sulkily out of the passenger seat. Son, or grandson? Son, Sandro decided; this man was clearly wealthy enough, and smooth enough, to have picked up a woman of childbearing years later in life. He seemed entirely indifferent to any obstruction his wide, low car might represent. Eventually the boy sloped off and, after standing an arrogant, leisurely minute to watch him go, the man climbed back in to the Audi and left.
Impatiently Sandro waited for the big car to move off, half an eye on the tall boy, moving through the crowd. To his mild surprise it was at Carlotta that the lanky boy stopped, Carlotta, in her violet knitted hat, and stooped to greet her. He was casual, but Carlotta’s body language told Sandro that if the kid wasn’t her boyfriend, she wished he was. This was the first time Sandro had seen him, which would imply that he
didn’t observe the school timetable very scrupulously. His long hair was smooth and shiny, and he was carrying an ex-army backpack. Carlotta put her hand through his arm; he didn’t object. They went inside.
Sandro waited, leaning against the wall of the school as he had done every day, in case she came back out. There were young people practised in the techniques of truancy; they knew enough not to just go missing, they knew how to sign themselves in then slip away. But there was also this: the street was so lovely in the sharp blue light, so suddenly peaceful now that the students had disappeared inside, that he felt he might stand there all day. So as not to have to think.
The school stood opposite a low stone wall behind which the ground fell away and down into a little valley filled with olive trees and an immaculate villa before rising again to meet his beautiful city’s imposing mediaeval wall, slanting across the hill. It was possibly the most perfect view Sandro had ever seen: the silver-green of the trees, the golden stucco of the villa, the rough grey stone of the city’s fortifications and the distant, stately outline of the great cathedral beyond them. Woodsmoke was drifting up from somewhere on the slopes below, the light was rosy with the early hour, the sky was an almost impossibly clean, clear blue.
Luisa.
It turned out that standing here was not the way to avoid thinking, after all. Sandro stamped his feet in inarticulate frustration, and the sound grated on the quiet air. He should be hand-in-hand with Luisa walking through these narrow lanes and gazing on the city; they should be enjoying their retirement.
Smoothing things over had never been Sandro’s strong point in the marriage – he preferred to sit out a disagreement in silence – but he had tried last night; in fact, he thought he’d succeeded. Luisa had genuinely thought he was delighted for her; it wasn’t like her to deceive herself but perhaps, on this occasion, she had just heard what she had wanted to hear.
‘Darling,’ she’d said, tapping the wooden spoon on the side of the pan, replacing the lid, untying the apron, ‘there’s something I need to tell you.’
Six months earlier the words would have raised the hairs on the back of his neck. But that terror had eased; now Sandro had the luxury of a lower-grade anxiety, the nagging, guilty, self-pitying kind that said, what about me?
‘Well, not so much tell you,’ she’d reconsidered, ‘as ask you.’ Her eyes had danced. And she’d held his gaze. How was it, he’d found himself wondering, that after all the poison they put in her system, her skin still had that soft, luminous look? They’d said something about not going in the sun, about some effect or other the chemo could have, but it couldn’t be just chemical: she’d looked glorious, transcendent in the steam from her pans.
‘Go on,’ Sandro had found himself smiling into her eyes. How bad could it be? He was worrying over nothing; she had good news of some kind, that much was clear.
‘They’re promoting me,’ she’d said, a smile twitching at her lips. She’d tucked a stray hair behind her ear and Sandro had seen that she was wearing a little make-up. ‘Well, sort of, anyway.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Sandro had managed to say. ‘
Cara
, that’s great.’ Then he’d considered. ‘But you’re the manageress. How can they promote you when you’re already in charge?’ He was still smiling but he could hear himself sounding querulous, questioning her news. Grudging her the triumph.