ANGLO-TUSCANS


A Tale From The Italian Hills by SIMON HOWARD




© SIMON HOWARD





***



In memory of Anne, a freewoman of Cortona, and
Raif, who sang there – the only real troubadour I ever knew.

*****









‘Where you are is of no moment, but only what you are doing there.’

Petrarch.

****

‘…one must forgive one’s enemies, but not before they are hanged.’

Heinrich Heine.


*****








Chapter One
POSITIVE THINKING






Belinda Duguid lay alone under the mosquito net draped over her large old double bed, trying to shut out the sound of grillos chirruping below in the garden. Like most English people, and unlike the Tuscan peasant couple who had lived here before her, Belinda had left the windows and shutters open, hoping against hope that a tiny touch of breeze might ease her discomfort on this hot July afternoon. It had merely helped to increase the heat in the room all morning.
Now she focused all her attention on an American woman’s voice speaking from the CD player at her bedside.
‘I love my face!’ said the voice enthusiastically.
Belinda quickly looked around the empty room before sheepishly repeating what the American woman had just said.
‘I love my face,’ she whispered.
‘I love my nose!’ said the voice on the CD.
Belinda was unconvinced, so she only mumbled the refrain.
‘I lovemynose.’
‘I love my mouth!’
‘I love my mouth.’
‘I love my chin!’
‘I love my chin.’
‘I love my body!’
Oh, I do want to, thought Belinda.
‘I love my navel!’
‘I love my navel.’
‘I love my vagina!’
‘Oh, really!’ Belinda said out loud. ‘The Americans!’
She wasn’t fond of the Americans anymore. Not since the success of Frances Mayes’ Under The Tuscan Sun had made all the prices rise in the shops in and around Cortona, the beautiful hill town a few kilometres away which could be seen from several other hill towns in this part of Tuscany. A glass of wine now cost four times what it had three years ago. It was almost impossible to park in the town, and the roads were sometimes blocked by charabancs of American tourists making their pilgrimage to glimpse the author’s house, now a more important sightseeing destination than the Duomo Museum which housed its famous Annunciation by Fra Angelico.
In fairness, Belinda believed, no-one had been more surprised by her literary success than Frances Mayes herself, but nevertheless life in the Cortonese hills had become tougher for everyone except the shopkeepers and bar owners – and the estate agents, of course, several of whom seemed to come, for a reason Belinda could never understand, from Essex. There were times when her idyllic life in Tuscany owed less to Signorelli and Fra Angelico and more to Romford and Braintree than she liked to admit.
She sat up and looked at the CD cover. It was called New Ways To Positive Thinking.
The Americans always use shock tactics, thought Belinda. That’s why she’d given up EST years before. (Her fads went back a long way.) At one EST gathering, she’d been persuaded to sing One Currant Bun In The Baker’s Shop to an audience of three hundred strangers at a large church hall in London. It took her several years to live down the embarrassment, and even now, on hot sticky Tuscan nights, she sometimes relived the shame lying here perspiring on this huge empty bed, under this same protective mosquito net.
Suddenly she was disturbed by the sound of a motorino skidding on the gravel outside, followed by a crash and a voice crying ‘Ohfuckinellnotagain!’
‘I love my toes!’ said the American woman’s voice on the CD. She’d been travelling down her imaginary leg while Belinda was thinking about the Americans and her own humiliation through EST. At least Tony had been around in those days, though, to help her through life’s minefield.
Hurriedly Belinda got up from the large old bed, pushed aside the mosquito net and switched off the CD player before rushing downstairs thinking What can she have done this time?
In the kitchen stood a beautiful girl with her arm in a sling and bits of elastoplast dotted about her tanned forehead. Scabs covered her bare shoulder, and blood dripped onto the tiled floor from a fresh wound on her knee.
‘Julia!’ shrieked Belinda.
Julia hiccupped back at her.
‘Bloodyrottenroad,’ she muttered, fumbling around in a torn shopping bag. ‘I’m afraid we can’t have a frittata because all the eggs broke.’ She hiccupped again. ‘But I could probably scrape enough off the drive to make a carbonara.’
She hiccupped once more in celebration of her culinary escape.

***

‘I love my ass!’ said the American woman’s voice vibrantly.
Oh, I really wish I did, thought Belinda. I really do. Ass seemed so inappropriate, buttocks much more real.
She was back on the huge empty bed after lunch, veiled by its mosquito net, though the mosquitoes weren’t usually about at this time of the day. The carbonara had been surprisingly good, and though she’d detected a tiny piece of grit, and possibly some bark from one of the cypress trees, Belinda had forced herself to think positively about it. She always tried to be as encouraging as possible to Julia, whom she worried about much of the time and had taken on as cook for the summer. Julia was the younger daughter of friends in Oxford, where Belinda lived when she wasn’t staying at her Tuscan farmhouse – her casa colonica – to which she’d come early this year to complete the first draft of her fifth book on Italian design, the epic Marble Patterns In The Marbleless Churches And Chapels Of Tuscany.
‘I love my cellulite!’ proclaimed the American woman.
A loud crashing sound from the kitchen made Belinda push aside the mosquito net once more and run from the room as the American woman’s voice pursued her down the stairs.
‘I love my wrinkles!’ she called.
In the kitchen Julia was pulling a shard of glass out of her lovely hand.
‘Snothing,’ she mumbled drunkenly.
‘Julia, dear…’ said Belinda, unsure how to deal with this not uncommon situation, or even what to say next. Her mother was a very old friend, so Julia was almost a daughter to her. But the truth of it was that Belinda’s own youth had been so terribly different from this wild and beautiful girl’s – this was a youth which seemed to revolve around alcohol and injury, and a lot of both. She felt almost grateful when she heard a car drawing up, and went outside to see who had come.
‘Signora!’ cried old Alberto, stepping out of his Cinquecento.
White as bread, Alberto nevertheless spent much of his time out of doors tending, among other things, Belinda’s two hundred and forty three olive trees. In exchange for a few flagons of oil which she stored in an outhouse called the capànna, Belinda allowed him to harvest and sell the crop. An English visitor once estimated that Belinda’s thirty litres a year cost her one and a half million lire. However, she was determined to support local enterprise, play her part in the affairs of the village, and ensure the health of her trees. She refused to shop at the Co-op in the growing sprawl of Camucia, down on the plain, which she believed was putting people like Alberto out of business, even though English neighbours reported seeing Alberto shopping there himself.
Belinda bought all her household provisions from Gian-Carlo’s shop in the village, where she kept a tab all summer long with Gian-Carlo’s indecipherable writing on it. (Alberto and Gian-Carlo were implacable enemies, which explained why Alberto shopped at the Co-op. Belinda had a vague idea that one of them had been a Fascist during the War, and the other a Communist, but she couldn’t remember who’d been which.) At the end of each summer’s visit she and Gian-Carlo would go through the mountain of indecipherable receipts together till Gian-Carlo wrote down an astronomical total in surprisingly clear handwriting. Year after year, Belinda was too honourable to question the figure. And every year in recent times, she wondered how Tony might have dealt with the situation.
‘Signora!’ cried Alberto, beaming his white-faced smile. ‘Va bene?’
From the tiny car he took an oil flagon and a couple of bottles of his undrinkable home-made wine. People in the village said this opaque muck was the cause of his deathly complexion. As he strode towards Belinda waving his offerings, the American woman’s voice wafted down from the open bedroom window.
‘I love my nipples!’
Belinda suspected that Alberto secretly loved hers, and she was grateful that he couldn’t speak a word of English to tell her so. Another crash sounded from the kitchen.
‘Snothing really!’ shouted Julia from the shadows.
Then a second crash told Belinda that the shelf holding the saucepans had collapsed, presumably after being fallen against by a beautiful drunken body.

***

Older than Troy. That’s what they say about Cortona. It’s been in perpetual occupation for nearly 5,000 years, or so the claim goes. And there have been various occupations along the way. The most recent is by the foreign incomers and tourists and Frances Mayes’ devotees. Before that it was the Wehrmacht and the SS.
‘A lot of women were raped during the Occupation,’ says an English tourist drinking her expensive glass of wine and nibbling on a free crostino at one of the many new bars on the Via Nazionale.
‘Not only the women,’ says her French companion, a retired diplomat and naval officer.
‘And it’s said you can see a paint skid-mark on the wall at the Palazzone where Signorelli fell off his ladder and died doing his last fresco.’
‘Eh bien…?’



*****






Chapter Two
LIVORNO!

Belinda and Julia were driving to Pisa to pick up friends from the airport. Julia was sitting in the back of the car so that she could stretch out her bandaged leg. Belinda was confused by the road around Camucia which had been altered since last year. Unlike the lovely hill towns, the new sprawling urban complexes of Tuscany had no beautiful churches or palazzos to navigate by and all looked the same to Belinda. She was always getting lost, every time she visited the outskirts of Sinalunga or Arezzo or even the outer reaches of Florence. Camucia, though not large, was impossible.
Added to that, it was a bank holiday, a festa nazionale, even if she couldn’t remember which one was being celebrated. Belinda was knowledgeable about the Renaissance, but not so good on contemporary Italy. Also, she’d been foolish enough to drink more than one glass of Alberto’s revolting wine last night.
She couldn’t decide whether to take the autostrada via Florence or the superstrada past Siena. She asked Julia’s advice, principally to keep her involved in what was going on, as a kind of therapy, but got no answer. When she looked in the mirror, she saw that Julia was fast asleep and felt concerned. She couldn’t help noticing that Julia always seemed to fall asleep if she hadn’t had a drink for about twenty minutes.
Then she spotted two women getting into their car outside a shop. One was middle-aged and the other about twenty, probably her daughter. Belinda thought they looked friendly, so she pulled up and asked them in faltering Italian the best way to Pisa.
‘O Pisa!’ they shouted enthusiastically, then had a heated discussion together about the autostrada, the superstrada, the festa nazionale, Firenze, Siena and several other things, as far as Belinda could tell… She tried her best to follow them, but soon became hopelessly lost. At last the middle-aged woman, smiling kindly, told Belinda to follow their car.
She drove behind them out of the town and along a winding country road for several kilometres. For the whole journey the mother and daughter kept up an animated conversation inside their car, which swerved from one side of the road to the other as they looked at each other rather than the road and waved their arms frantically. Several times Belinda thought they were giving her signals to turn left or right, but they were just being Italian.
Eventually they stopped opposite a large old house and beckoned Belinda to follow them inside. She left Julia asleep on the back seat: an elegant, injured mound of rising and falling plaster and bandage. Grateful to be out of the heat, Belinda followed the two women into a large dark hall. A map lay on a round table.
‘Babbo!’ called the mother, picking up the map. Even Belinda recognised this as the familiar word for a father, though she had no idea whether it was used outside Tuscany. ‘Babbo!’
There was no reply, so they started to walk through the large old house.
‘Babbo!’ the mother called into one room after another. ‘Babbo!’
Eventually they entered the last room on the ground floor and there they found him: a frail, gaunt old man sitting in an old leather armchair, gazing into space. Belinda thought he looked as though he was in a trance. His daughter and granddaughter glowed with optimism when they saw him.
‘Babbo! Per arrivare a Pisa, che strada deve prendere – Firenze o Siena?’
The old man continued to stare into space.
‘Autostrada o superstrada per Pisa, Babbo?’
‘Eh?’ said the old man at last.
They shoved the map under his ancient nose.
‘Babbo! Per Pisa – Firenze o Siena?’
The old man’s glazed eyes wandered over the map, and then his stare settled on the far wall. The women leant forward to receive his verdict.
‘Babbo…’ they whispered expectantly.
Belinda was not hopeful, but she tried her best to think positively. Suddenly the old man looked up to heaven, then down at the map again. His frail old body gave a little tremble, and his lips began to move. His daughter and granddaughter strained to get closer to him. At last he spoke in what Belinda considered a gaunt, proclaiming voice.
‘Livorno!’ he said.
‘O Babbo!’ shrieked his daughter, glowing with pride. Her daughter also glowed beside her.
‘Livorno!’ shouted the old man again. ‘LIVORNO!’
Belinda worried that he might give himself a heart attack if he went on shouting Livorno! like this. Hurriedly she looked at the map, and it confirmed her worst fear. Livorno was beyond Pisa, further along the coast, and being told to drive towards Livorno didn’t in any way help her to decide between taking the autostrada towards Florence or the superstrada past Siena. Life in a foreign country could sometimes be so difficult. Especially Italy. She bade farewell to the frail old oracle.
‘Molto grazie, Signore. Arrivederci.’
The old man was by now gazing into a corner of the ceiling.
‘Arrivederci’ he said frailly.
The two women escorted Belinda through the various dark rooms and corridors towards the blazing heat of the summer morning as the old man’s voice rang out behind them.
‘Livorno! LIVORNO!’
‘Grazie, Babbo!’ his daughter called over her shoulder.
She tried to make Belinda take a cool drink, but she declined politely in her heavily English-accented Italian.
‘E molto gentile, ma…’
‘LIVORNO!’ wafted down the corridor and into the hall where they were standing. ‘LIVORNO!’
‘Grazie, Babbo!’

***

Belinda stepped into the road, where she found Julia standing beside the car, trying to improvise another sling around her other hand, which was dripping bright red blood in the sunlight.
‘Snothing,’ she said, smiling sweetly, ‘bloodydoorbangedshuttoo-quickly.’ She hiccupped.
You really should try to love your body a little more, thought Belinda. God knows, enough men do – especially around these parts, where Julia was never short of admirers – even if they were a little alarmed by the excesses of her drinking.
Belinda got into the car and started the ignition while Julia arranged herself on the back seat, spilling only a small amount of her blood onto the floor. Soon she was fast asleep.
Botticelli or Simone Martine? Belinda wondered as she tried to force herself to make the decision about travelling via Florence or Siena. It was the only way she’d be able to choose. Everything was so much more difficult without Tony. He’d have known which route to take, even if he wasn’t so good at telling a Piero from a Raphael.
Verrocchio or Duccio? she asked herself. Lorenzetti or Giotto, Pisano or Brunelleschi? It was enough to drive you mad. Even here in heavenly Tuscany.

***

A lizard rested under the shadow of a flower-pot filled with basil. Ants scurried across the stone path outside the kitchen, carrying away crumbs from a loaf and other kitchen scraps dropped by Julia as she cleared up after lunch. Upstairs, three middle-aged Englishwomen lay, sated, on Belinda’s huge bed under the mosquito net.
‘Are you absolutely certain it’s safe for her to cook in that condition, Belinda dear?’ asked Marjorie Lovejoy.
‘Oh yes, surely…’ said Belinda uncertainly.
‘As long as bits of her don’t start dropping into the pasta,’ said Hermione Ember, always given to blunt statement.
‘She drinks so,’ said Marjorie.
‘Obviously trying to forget,’ said Hermione. ‘What, I wonder?’
Belinda saw her opportunity to say something positive.
‘She seems to fall asleep without alcohol inside her.’
‘Then she should become a teetotaller and stop trying to kill herself,’ said Hermione bluntly.
Belinda pushed the play button on the CD player’s remote control and waited to be annoyed by the American woman’s voice.
‘I love my life!’
‘I love my life,’ echoed Belinda and Marjorie. Hermione remained silent.
‘I love my work!’
‘I love my work!’ boomed Hermione. She was Belinda’s literary agent.
Do I love my work? wondered Belinda. I certainly should do. What could be better than spending the whole of your adult life studying and writing about the Italian Renaissance, staying several months a year in Tuscany, knowing practically all the churches and chapels between here and Montalcino – and between here and the other side of Florence? Between here and the far side of Siena?
She’d studied every inch of some of these churches. If only she’d studied the Italians’ language as thoroughly, but she hadn’t, and she felt ashamed, comforting herself with the thought that, for all their love of talking, the Italians are basically defined by their visual sense.
That’s why the thrice daily passeggiàta is so important to them, she told herself. It doesn’t just provide an opportunity to catch up with local gossip, but gives people the chance to show off their latest Prada handbag, Ermenegildo Zegna shirt or Gucci shoes. So, people who thought you had to speak the language fluently to understand the Italian character were wrong. You had to know their great art: their duomos, their Michelangelos, Titians, Caravaggios and their wonderful frescoes. And Belinda certainly did.
Not only did she understand the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, she even knew the exact measurements of some of its great masterpieces, down to the last millimetre. What could possibly be better than that? Well, having someone to share it with, of course, and Tony had tried so hard, even though he wasn’t what you’d call arty. More mechanically inclined, really. Into digging dams and wells and terracing. That sort of thing.
Marble Patterns In The Marbleless Churches And Chapels Of Tuscany. Her latest book. It was only a working title, but it helped to keep her eye on the ball. It was a cataloguing and description of all the surfaces painted to look like marble: the green and white Apollino from Euboea which the Romans took with them as far as Colchester; Rosso antico in various shades of dark red, a name taken up by Josiah Wedgwood to describe his red stoneware; the oranges and yellows and off-whites and other variations or hues developed by masters and lesser painters to emulate the look of marble in churches where marble wasn’t to be found – or had been once, before it was stolen by invading armies.
Yes, surely she enjoyed – loved – this work, which bonded her, Belinda Duguid, to the aims and ambitions of those Tuscans who set out to define their culture and to change the world’s. Surely. It was certainly a sort of love. And then she started to worry about Julia again. Does she love her work? Oh, dear, I feel so responsible…
‘I love my orgasms!’ declared the American woman.
I can’t remember, thought Marjorie.
‘I never loved any of mine!’ shouted Hermione.
‘Oh, I very much enjoyed some of mine,’ said Belinda – at first surprised, and then appalled, by her own candour. She feared a return to that EST frame of mind when she so foolishly sang One Currant Bun In The Baker’s Shop to those three hundred strangers. She shuddered at the thought.
And then she remembered the time she’d spent here at Casa Cimabue with Tony: all his plans for the property, and his crazy inventions. Once, before Alberto had taken over the tending of the olive trees, Tony had designed and built an olive-picking machine. It was his pride and joy, and he named it Leonardo.
The whole neighbourhood turned out to see it one October morning at the start of the olive-picking season. Don Ettore Caballo the parish priest blessed the machine, while his faithful terrier Pasticcio sired yet another litter behind the capànna with one of his parishioners’ mongrels. Alberto broke a bottle of his undrinkable wine against the engine while Gian-Carlo announced to everyone that this was the best thing to do with it.
The whole congregation tensed as Tony’s great invention approached the first tree. It spread its long tentacles, grabbed dozens of olives and hurled them half a kilometre across the fields and down the hill. That was its one and only outing for years. Later that day, drunk on Alberto’s vile brew, Tony and several villagers wheeled the olive-picking machine into the capànna, where it would have stayed forever had it not been destined to make one more public appearance. It was used one starry night to help a man of God.
An English Jesuit, an old friend of Belinda and Tony’s, was driving away from the house after enjoying an excellent dinner prepared by Gian-Carlo’s wife Ines, the best cook in the area. The Brunello had flowed freely that night as well, since Jesuits always like the best of everything. Instead of going forward as he intended, Father Peter Hewitt, SJ shoved his gear-stick into reverse by mistake and sent his car flying off the terrace into the branches of one of the larger olive trees. Fortunately it was a sturdy old tree, so the Rev Hewitt’s vehicle remained suspended aloft and didn’t crash to the ground, as Belinda feared it might.
Word went round the village in no time, and soon a crowd had assembled around the Casa Cimabue.
Che cosa? What’s up? What to do? Nobody could work out how to get the car down, till someone had the brilliant idea of trying Tony’s olive-picking machine, Leonardo. A group of men crowded into the capànna and uncovered Leonardo, which was by this time full of rust, and poured benzino into the tank. They wheeled it out, and Tony cranked up the engine till it croaked back to life.
Shuddering and spluttering, the olive-picking machine approached the tree below the terrace and gently plucked both the car and the Jesuit from its branches before placing them safely on the terrace. Forever afterwards Tony’s contraption was known as la macchina divina, and Father Peter Hewitt as il padre volante, the flying priest.
‘I love my attitude!’ shouted the American woman.
‘Huh!’ sneered Hermione.
‘I love my determination!’
‘I love my determination,’ said Marjorie quietly.
‘I love my superiority!’
‘Mmmm…’ they all mumbled.
A crash outside let them know that Julia’s motorino had skidded on the gravel and crashed into the capànna housing la macchina divina.
‘Aaagh!’ wafted through the bedroom window from below, followed by a silence which suggested that Julia might have knocked herself unconscious this time.
All three rushed from the security of the mosquito net and downstairs to investigate.



*****

Chapter Three
LOST HOUSES





Balancing a tray on one splayed hand, Belinda gently knocked on Julia’s bedroom door with the other.
‘Uuuuuhhh…’ sounded from inside.
Belinda opened the bare old wooden door and stepped over the threshold cautiously, as though she were entering a foreign country, or possibly a distant planet. White bandages showed behind the whiteness of the mosquito net. Most of Julia’s lovely hair was hidden by a large bandage wrapped around her head, and other bandages covered an arm and a hand. Bloodstains speckled the pillow with vivid red. She had a closed black eye, but the other one slowly awoke and focused on Belinda.
I’m going to love your body, thought Belinda, even if you won’t, and I’m going to save it from you. Now that’s positive thinking.
She placed the tray on the bedside table, then sat down on the bed and began to pour porcini soup into Julia’s lovely mouth.
‘Julia dear, I thought we might go and spend a few days by the sea when you’re feeling a little better. Nice sea breezes and everything…’
Since the complications of the trip to Pisa Airport, Belinda had become aware that she didn’t know nearly enough about coastal Tuscany. She clung to the hills and their beautiful towns for comfort, and perhaps it was time for her to learn a little more about contemporary Italy. Seaside towns often tell you a great deal about life as it’s lived now, she thought, though she shuddered at the idea of Blackpool conveying to foreign visitors anything at all about English culture. However, a trip to the sea would be a good way of discovering more about the arcane workings of Julia’s impenetrable mind.
There you are, she told herself – the power of positive thinking. She felt quite elated.
‘Mmmmm…’ said Julia.
The CD started playing loudly from Belinda’s room.
‘I love my health!’ shouted the American woman.
‘I love my health!’ Marjorie and Hermione shouted back.
‘I love my money!’
‘Jesus Christ!’ boomed Hermione.
I wish I had some, thought Marjorie, though she wasn’t nearly as poor as she suspected. It gets a lot worse than that, the poor could have told her.
Hurriedly Belinda jumped up from the bed and ran onto the landing.
‘Dears!’ she implored them. ‘Think of poor Julia.’
At that moment a car drew up on the gravel outside, and almost immediately a dog barked. It was Pasticcio. Belinda rushed downstairs and opened the front door in time to see him urinating against the capànna where he had sired one of many litters all those year ago. Don Ettore was climbing out of his car, beaming at Belinda.
Buon giorno, Signora!’ he called to her, before saying proudly: ‘Good morning.’
Belinda knew that Don Ettore was learning English in order to increase his flock from among the foreign newcomers. He was spoilt for choice really: now there were British, Irish, American, Dutch, German, French, Belgian, even Australian people everywhere, and several other nationalities too. And all of them living in case calonica which the locals had long ago found too old and uncomfortable to inhabit anymore. They’d all moved into comfortable new housing developments in horrible places like Camucia.
Though for the first few years that Belinda and Tony occupied the now renamed Casa Cimabue, its previous owners, an old peasant couple forced to move out by their greedy offspring (who pocketed all the money paid by Tony), made an annual pilgrimage to see the old place and inspect the olives, tutting as they hobbled between the trees – till one year they were killed in a car crash on their way home to Camucia. A little Madonna beside the road marks the spot.
Don Ettore wasn’t too fussy about whether the newcomers were Catholic or not, and welcomed them all to Mass and church events - from the school play to the many concerts he encouraged in the little church grounds. He even laid on an annual festa di stranieri, a party for foreigners at which the locals would force huge amounts of food on them, and Alberto poured out endless glasses of his foul wine for the unsuspecting newcomers in the hope that they would buy cases of it the next day. Don Ettore had been giving Holy Communion to Belinda for years without acknowledging what he must have heard or at least suspected: that she was a faithful member of the Church of England.
‘Ow is the invaleed?’ he asked Belinda, waving a bag of peaches at her.
Before Belinda could answer, the American woman’s voice blared from the open bedroom window above.
‘I love my sexuality!’ she shouted.
‘Oh shut up!’ boomed Hermione back at her.
Then she must have somehow interfered with the CD, because it started playing manically, making it sound like a stylus had got stuck in the groove of an old vinyl record. The American woman’s voice said the same thing over and over again, faster and faster, like a mad mantra.
‘I love my clitoris I love my clitoris I love my clitoris I love my clitoris…’
Close to despair, and feeling far from positive, Belinda hurriedly ushered in the devoted priest to see her drunken, self-mutilating patient for whom she felt so responsible – and whose mother, her oldest friend, Belinda was keeping very much in the dark about her daughter’s youthful alcoholism.

***

Most of the pieces of furniture at Casa Cimabue were lovely old Tuscan chests and tables, wardrobes and chairs, washbasin stands and cabinets – bought over the years in Florence antique shops or at the market held in Arezzo over the first weekend of each month. But one corner of the house remained resolutely English.
A small room leading off Belinda’s study – her sanctum sanctorum, her boudoir (she didn’t know what the Italians would call it) – was stuffed with little reminders of home. Leather-bound copies of Jane Austen, the Brontës and Thackeray, back issues of Country Life and The Field, old Private Eyes, a 1920s croquet set, several Noël Coward records, a collection of opera programmes from Covent Garden, Tony’s Wisdens, his yellow and red MCC tie and his cricket bat: all vied with each other for space on the floor and on the bulging shelves.
And covering every inch of the walls, so different from the great oil paintings and frescoes of the Italian Renaissance, were 19th century English landscapes in watercolour, and prints of great and lesser English and Scottish country houses, some of which had been in her or Tony’s family many decades ago.
Whenever the Tuscan sun became too unbearable, or the mosquitoes too delinquent, or the locals’ tricks too complicated, Belinda retreated to this small haven and pretended she was back in Wiltshire, Knightsbridge, Yorkshire, Oxford or Perthshire – whichever she had most need of at the time. She adored Tuscany, but thought it wrong to believe that you can’t have too much of a good thing. You can.
In the public parts of her lovely house she was prepared to compete with all the other foreigners to be more Tuscan than the Tuscans, but in this sacred little spot she was going to be as English as she liked – or at least Anglo-Scottish, which Tony was, though she had a feeling the Scots spelt his surname Duiguid. (God knows, she had enough trouble getting people to spell it even the English way, and here in Italy it was practically impossible.) But her thoughts were rambling, and she was beginning to lose her thread. She wanted to concentrate on the holiday she intended to spend with Julia by the sea.
She would leave Hermione and Marjorie behind at the house. Secretly she would lock the door of the sanctum sanctorum, of course, and hide the key somewhere safe. They could drive the little run-around Fiat she kept as a spare car, and they’d probably be just as happy without her, pottering around antique shops and galleries and, especially in Hermione’s case, the many bars that had opened in town since the success of Under The Tuscan Sun.
In fact, Belinda would probably have been a hindrance because Hermione frequently liked to stay out late haranguing the locals wherever she went. All perfectly well meant, of course, even if she was sometimes surprised when Continentals of one kind or another took offence at some of her remarks.
Belinda was quite pleased that Hermione kept most of her travelling to within Europe as she suspected the Moslems, for example, however hospitable, might take great exception to some of Hermione’s forcefully expressed views on most controversial issues.
Funny, thought Belinda, the people you’re fond of. She remembered an interview she’d read years earlier with the novelist Timothy Mo, in which he said you sometimes get on much better with people whose political opinions are very different from your own, and can’t stand the ones whose views are close to yours.
The trip. She must refer to the Blue Guide (not the Rough Guide as Julia’s contemporaries would do). They’d better head in the direction of Grossetto. How could she know so little about the West of Tuscany? How could she speak and read Italian so badly, after all these years? Not that her heart wasn’t in it. It was. The trouble was how terribly easily you could get by in Tuscany with just English, and how lazy this made some people.
In the early years she’d hardly ever mixed verbs with nouns, usually spilling out a stream of either one or the other, operating a sort of linguistic apartheid. For ages she’d been meaning to sign up for an Italian course but had never got round to it. Apart from that, she just wasn’t terribly good at languages. Even her cleaner Maria, Gian-Carlo and Ines’s daughter, spoke to her in English. (Maria only cleaned for foreigners.)
She thought about her character, or at least what she knew of it, since she would never have claimed to be very psychologically self-aware. Belinda knew she was a bit old-fashioned. In truth, she believed she was like a misunderstood character in a 19th century novel: Anne Elliot, perhaps, or Elinor Dashwood, or Jane Eyre. Or Mrs Rochester? Don’t go there… That’s the trouble when you start trying to place yourself in literature – at first you think you’re Juliet, and you end up as the Nurse, thought Belinda.
And what of Tony? Not quite Captain Wentworth, it’s true, nor Colonel Brandon, and certainly not Mr Rochester. Perhaps the sweet, kind, loyal Fred in Brief Encounter. That would do, she thought. You can’t beat kindness. And you certainly can’t beat loyalty.
How appropriate, Belinda thought: Fred’s wife, the heroine of the film played by Celia Johnson, was called Laura, the name which Arezzo’s famous son Petrarch gave the great heroine of his poems, inspiring Europe’s lyric poetry forever after. Belinda, who conveniently forgot that he spent most of his life in Provence, had read some of the poems, but only in English translation. She reckoned that her appalling Italian was so vastly inferior to a decent translator’s there was no point in her even trying to read the originals.
She looked at the prints of English and Scottish houses, and thought about the lives of her and Tony’s ancestors. One picture in particular caught her eye: that of a huge pile in the North of England which, for Belinda, represented everything she would ever know about loss – more, even, than no longer having Tony around.
This great house was the darkest ghost in Belinda’s past. So dark that it had been the setting of a celebrated case many years earlier, when Belinda was forced into the spotlight of publicity and notoriety by the death of her parents – and the latest, worst piece of behaviour that her once-gilded, delinquent and far older brother David had ever perpetrated. At the time Belinda was about the same age as Julia, but so very different from her in every way…



*****

Chapter Four
ENGLISH THANATOPSIS





Somewhere in the frozen Northern garden, beyond the dark trees, a wounded peacock screamed in anguish. Massive pyramids of box stood like a great wall, black against the moon and trembling when the wind shook their bulk, as though the peacock had brushed past them and set up a chain reaction while staggering by, trailing its blood in the frosty grass. They even seemed to shake with anger, like the Furies…
Beneath the porch of the huge house, across its mighty threshold, lay the body of a well-bred gun-dog, broken almost in two by the force of a shotgun blast. Belinda imagined stepping over the poor creature and entering her old home, crossing the hall before opening the door of the drawing room where her aristocratic parents lay butchered by their only son who, in his own view, had judged and executed them for the crimes they had committed against him.

***

All passion spent, his royal moment passed, David Landor was seated in a crimson armchair, sipping whisky from a heavy glass. In his distorted mind he could already feel the weight of outraged loyalty forming ranks against him: the establishment, whatever that was; his parents’ tenantry, the aristocracy, the outraged morality of every class, the press, the police… The list would be endless. The tabloids, to use one of their own clichés, would have a field day. Everyone would, of course, except him. He listened to the wind rustling in the box hedges which ringed the house.
A dark-haired man of 34, David had the air of one who has known great buying power during his life. He’d also known the loss of it, which was part of the problem and, through the many failings of his personality, had devised poor remedies to make up for this. Wearing one of his best Savile Row suits, his old school tie and a fine pair of simple gold cuff-links, he’d dressed for the occasion before racing down from London in a Porsche borrowed from a friend.
As he sipped the whisky David saw, through the cut glass at the bottom of his tumbler, his father’s face looking surprised. The pattern of the glass broke up the old man’s features and seemed to separate his silver-topped head from the rest of his body. David lowered the tumbler again, noticing that the head and body were still divided. Then he remembered how the force of the shotgun’s blast had lifted the head from the trunk, shattering the neck and most of the shoulders. Emerging from the crater where Mr Landor’s collar had been, his Guards’ tie lay in tatters across his blood-spattered breast.
Taking another sip of the excellent whisky, David shifted his view and, as he looked through the golden liquid smearing the glass while it trickled down again, saw his mother impaled on the corner of a 17th century walnut chest, with her womb blown out.
Not for the first time in his life, David began to feel what people called the consequences of an action. As he thought about it, he tried to swallow but found that his throat was completely dry. A gentle shudder rippled through the whole of his body, making his organs tighten. More than at any time since his childhood he felt the overwhelming loss of his innocence. The process had begun long, long ago in this great house.
Adjusting his starched white cuff and its beautifully simple cuff-link, he stood up and poured himself another glass of whisky. Holding the decanter by its neck between his middle fingers, he grasped the stopper with the forefinger and thumb of the same hand, for a moment simply feeling their weight. Then he dropped the decanter onto the mahogany table, making a crashing sound, though the glass was too strong to break, and thrust home the stopper with a thud. The noises resounded in his ears for a while, since they were the only traces of sound in this enormous, empty house. (It was the staff’s night off, and the teenage Belinda was travelling in Italy with a friend who would later become Julia’s mother.)
The peacock was silent by now, presumably dead somewhere in the garden. When even the memory of the sounds had passed, David slapped his hand against the table and listened to the echo ricocheting off the far corners of the huge room. He looked around at his ancestors’ portraits on the walls and the several family photographs in silver frames, including one of Belinda doing her best to pretend that life wouldn’t completely defeat her.
The consequences of an action. And the sequence of events and feelings which had led up to it…
Sitting down again, he recalled the highlights of his shoddy life: the points of contact, which were rare; and the loss of it, which was not. He was always considered aloof, even when he was behaving wildly at parties. There was a separateness about him, as though the damage had started early in his life. Or was his isolation inevitable, as some people thought, due to his privileged position?
In this room he had celebrated winning his places at Oxford and Sandhurst before joining the Guards. Both family and staff had toasted the dashing young man with the perfect career ahead of him. And in this room he had suffered the vigil of shame which followed his being cashiered from the army. Here his parents read his Colonel’s letter.
‘This is a disgraceful case,’ it said. ‘You have abused the trust of everyone in the battalion – officers, NCOs and guardsmen alike – and shown yourself to be utterly unfit to hold a commission in HM forces, and for whom there is no longer a place in this regiment…’
Humiliation indeed. In certain sections of British society you can’t fall any further than that. And Belinda, as David’s only sibling, couldn’t fall much further either, or know greater embarrassment. She would be almost grateful for the EST rumpus later, to help her bury just a little of her shame.
In this vast room so much news of his various disgraces had been received. He remembered the years of high life: staying for months on end at Claridge’s; treating Europe like a playground for him and his glamorous set, the Mediterranean as a lake; living in a kind of paradise.
Followed by the fall: the prison terms he served after the perfect life had crumbled, when his promise had finally been denied forever. In reality he had been seeking the same goal in both worlds – in the public life of his first, privileged world, and in the shame of his downfall – joy through oblivion. Once, visited in his high security psychiatric hospital by Belinda, he had tried to explain this to her, but it was a concept too far, just too foreign for a simple, trusting mind like hers.
He recalled his school days, when his enormous income had often bought the indignities of others. Love had fought its first battle there, and been defeated by him so completely that it never dared to take him on again. At sixteen, a beautiful boy called Alex loved him, an emotion that David saw as weakness, and one that he would never let himself suffer from. One moonlit night, he abandoned the weeping, pleading Alex kneeling naked in the shower room. Later that night the miserable boy hanged himself from one of the cisterns.

***

For the first time in his life David, sitting here with his murdered parents in front of him, felt the terrible loss of love. Actually felt it, the loss of the thing he had never experienced in any of his many affairs with women. He couldn’t remember any of their faces. Not one. Not a single girlfriend, whore or mistress appeared before him now as he sipped his whisky. Instead, only blurred shapes drifted around his memory.
He thought about the buying power he had known. Waves of it, appearing now almost like a tidal sea rushing towards him. And the terrifying stillness when those waves had calmed, the buying power removed – leaving him stranded and empty. The courses of action he had taken then, and their awful consequences. While he felt the rhythm of this enormous sea at work within him, sitting here in the vast drawing room, what seemed like a single piece of driftwood bobbed towards him as he lay there on the shore…
Gradually an image became clear, and he saw the boy David, aged ten, weeping, his earlier hysteria having been spent and replaced by despair. Drenched in water, he was crouching at the top of the cellar steps and replaying the solicitor’s words in his mind.
‘…and, in addition to all this, the residue of my estate, I also leave to my grandson David for his immediate use the sum of ten thousand pounds, knowing that his parents will advise him sensibly on how to spend it…’
Buying power. This was his first opportunity: his grandfather’s enormous fortune to look forward to, and a huge sum for a ten-year-old’s immediate use. This was the first money of his own, and it provided him with a chance to give. He could buy presents for everyone. He suggested it at once, but they all declined, said no to young David. ‘No, no – of course not,’ they said. ‘It’s all for you. Spend it on yourself, like Grandfather wanted…’
He felt hemmed in, trapped, claustrophobic. They wouldn’t let him give, and he wondered if that meant he could never be free. He thought with both the fog and the clarity of a ten-year-old, and he felt that there was no chance of crossing the huge divide. Something snapped within, and he was lost forever. ‘I want to buy things for you!’ he screamed hysterically. Uncomprehending, they were desperately concerned about the boy. ‘David, you mustn’t,’ they said. ‘Now stop it. We don’t want anything. Just calm down…’
The talking failed, and David became more hysterical. In the awful panic, he heard his mother utter one last word to Jenny, a worried housemaid.
‘Water…’
Jenny made for the door, but David ran after her.
‘Jenny, let me buy you a nice new coat!’ he screamed, tugging at her apron.
She pulled herself free and vanished through the doorway. Dizzy, David turned back to his parents, pleading.
‘I don’t want the money! I want to spend it on you! Please let me – PLEASE!’
Jenny rushed back into the drawing room with a jug of water in her hands, followed by the cook and a kitchen-maid. David’s father took the jug and threw the water over his son, who started to choke amid his sobs. He saw everyone staring at him and cast his eyes down…

***

‘…will advise him sensibly on how to spend it…’
The words seemed to scrape inside his brain as he sat, drenched and sobbing, on the top step of the cellar stairs. He thought about an injured rabbit he’d tried to drown in the lake three years before, hoping to put it out of its misery. He remembered its ears pressed back against its exhausted body, the corners of its mouth turned down and the eyes too tired and afraid to move. Blood from its wound ran with the water in the lake. David was panicking and close to tears.
‘Oh please die,’ he pleaded. ‘For God’s sake, die. You’re so hurt. Just die, please don’t suffer…’
Quietly he let himself slide down the stairs one step at a time. He could hear the voices of concern on the other side of the cellar door, which he had locked. Gradually the voices became fainter, until at last an absolute silence hung over the dark cellar, a silence which seemed to clothe and even caress him and which soon began to feel completely comfortable and familiar, like a parent.
He started to play down here in the darkness, and knew it was a world he’d never leave, a silence from which he would never return.

***

Seated in the crimson armchair, David sipped his whisky, drumming his nails against the table beside him. Steadily he altered the rhythm, so that all four fingers and thumb hit the mahogany at the same time. In his hazy mind the tapping became the sound of an axe cutting into oak, somewhere in the wood...
David was eleven, walking down a path between the vast trees. At the centre of the wood, where several paths converged, stood the woodman’s son, John, who was the same age, and one of life’s victims. In his grubby hands he held a dying starling.
‘Let me see,’ said David, who was curious and wanted to share the experience with John.
With fear and resentment blazing in his eyes, John turned and fled with the injured bird, certain that David would kill it. David started to chase him along the path but, even as he ran along behind him, focusing on John’s dirty clothes, he didn’t really know why he was chasing him.
Suddenly, into the path stepped the woodman, Bowen, axe in hand, ready to protect his son. When he saw that it was David chasing after John, he lowered the axe and stared at him. Even at the age of eleven David knew that Bowen’s look of resentment went far beyond the immediate and the personal. But it also gave the aristocratic boy a sense of power: he felt like he was riding a strong horse, restraining massive force through the reins and cutting the beast’s mouth with the vicious bit as he made it obey him.
He held their stares for a while, then turned and ambled back along the path, not exactly happy, but certainly more knowledgeable about the status quo.

***

Putting down the cut-glass tumbler with a bang, David got up and walked over to a Georgian bureau. He opened a drawer, took out a scrapbook and began to read a cutting.
‘HIGH SHERIFF’S WOODMAN JOINS POLICE. John Bowen, until recently employed as head woodman on the estate of the county’s High Sheriff, Mr George Landor, is to join the police force. Mr Bowen, 21, grew up on the Landor estate, where his father, the late Mr William Bowen, was woodman before him…’
David slammed the book shut and closed his eyes.
The sound of whipping echoes around the farmyard. In the shadows of an old barn John, aged twelve, is stretched naked across the arm of an old plough, crying and biting his lip as David flogs him with a piece of shredded bamboo. Blood streaks his buttocks, and splinters of bamboo lodge in his ripped young flesh. A bit of bamboo flies off, and David bends down to pick it out of the sawdust scattered on the ground. Then holding it in his hand, he approaches John’s grubby, shaking flesh and cuts three deep lines in his arm.
‘That’s my mark,’ he says, almost caressing John. ‘It means you’re my property.’
John pisses himself with fear. David unzips his trousers.

***

David opened the scrapbook again and read:
‘PC PROMOTED SERGEANT…’
He smiled, remembering the three marks he’d cut into John’s arm. Then he noticed inside the drawer a loose cutting from The Times.
‘HIGH SHERIFF’S SON ORDERED TO KEEP OFF PARENTS’ ESTATE,’ it read. ‘A High Court judge today ordered a former Guards officer to stay away from his parents’ property…’
David stared at the cutting for a few moments before closing the drawer and sitting down again in the crimson armchair. He picked up the telephone and dialled a number. A voice answered. David spoke calmly.
‘Hello, could I speak to the Chief Constable, please?’
As he waited, he was struck by a small irony. His father, as High Sheriff, had been responsible for the comfort of visiting circuit judges.
‘Hello?’ said a new voice at the other end of the line.
‘Hello, Sir James,’ said David. ‘David Landor, here. Look, I’m afraid something bad has happened at the house… Yes, I’m at home… I know, but I am anyway. Now, the thing is, you’d better send some people over. It’s my parents… Yes, they’re dead… Yes… I won’t go into it now. I’ll wait here…’
He listened to the Chief Constable who, once he’d recovered from the initial shock, became a model of efficiency – which David, as a former soldier, greatly appreciated. He’d been dreading the idea of keen young police officers bearing down on him unrestrained. He had confidence in Sir James.
‘Good. I’m most grateful, Sir James. Sorry to cause you so much trouble. I’ll just sit here and wait…’
David replaced the telephone and poured himself another glass of whisky. He didn’t have to worry about getting his story right, as he was going to admit everything. He looked around the room again and walked over to a tall window. Drawing back the heavy curtains, he saw that the dawn was breaking. A glowing light was starting to cut across the sky. The wind had dropped, and the surface of the lake glistened. He drank his whisky and waited for the sound of sirens.
At last he heard them far away. Leaning his forehead against the cold glass of the window-pane he realised that his life had really ended many years ago – long, long before he had moved out of this house as a young man, when Belinda was just a child growing up so timidly within it and longing for his occasional visits before the court case which resulted from his growing violence against his parents.
Appearing through the gateway at the top of the avenue were two gleaming white police cars, their blue lights reflecting on the surface of the lake. He wondered what the officers would think as the house loomed so massively ahead of them. When they pulled up outside the great porch, he saw Inspector John Bowen lead his men up the stone steps, past the dead gun-dog, towards the front door. He moved away from the window and met them in the hall. Seeing John inside the house once more made him feel a sense of peace, almost a return to innocence.
Later, when he was driven away by the CID for questioning at the police station, he looked back and saw John standing at the top of the steps, in possession of the old place, and was quite content to leave the house in his care. The police car enveloped him and shone like a white avenging angel as it drove along the avenue. More police cars and an ambulance approached from the other direction, and the lake reflected a sea of spinning blue analeptic light as David Landor was taken away to be held, perhaps forever, within England’s protective bosom.

***

The pyramids of box stood quite still, paler in the early morning light which cut across them sideways. Between each one hung fresh cobwebs in which drops of dew were illuminated like beautiful pearls. The Furies had left, and the great hedges were now at rest. Beyond them, undiscovered so far, the peacock lay stiff on the frost-hard grass.
And Belinda Landor, at that time a timid girl of nineteen, returned prematurely from Italy but never entered the house or garden again. She received a lot of advice and care, understood nothing, and buried herself forever after in the treasures of the Italian Renaissance. People who didn’t know about the celebrated case would never have guessed that someone as seemingly uncomplicated as Belinda could possibly have known such darkness in her earlier life.
From time to time she visited her much older brother at his new home in Broadmoor. The scenes she witnessed there sometimes reminded her of those in Signorelli’s Last Judgment in the Duomo at Orvieto.



*****

Chapter Five
UNDER THE ETRUSCAN SUN





‘Now we don’t know very much about the Etruscans,’ said the English guide to her small party of British and American enthusiasts and tourists crammed alongside her in the little tomb on the outskirts of Camucia. ‘Note the tomb’s house-like shape…’
Everybody studied the roof-shaped ceiling.
‘These tombs are the most we have, apart from some wonderfully realistic statuary, painted vases and the marvellous metalwork you’ll see in the museum later this morning. If you look at this wall-painting, you’ll get the biggest clue, really.’
They all moved forward to inspect the picture on the wall.
‘We can’t decipher their hieroglyphs, though we can make out their phonetic structure. The language isn’t Indo-European, and the experts haven’t decided whether they originally came from Lydia or somewhere else in the East, or from the Italian mainland itself. They were probably the first rulers of Rome.’
‘I read somewhere that the Etruscans were very direct when discussing sex,’ said Hermione, fixing the guide with a ruthless stare.
The guide looked back at her cautiously, not quite sure where this was going.
‘What do you mean exactly?’ she asked.
‘Well,’ said Hermione, making sure that the entire group was paying attention, ‘if you turned up unexpectedly at your friends’ house while they were in flagrante, the slave answering the door wouldn’t say “Oh, sorry, the master’s busy pruning the roses,” or “the mistress is holding a mothers’ union meeting in the drawing room,” or use any other sort of euphemism…’ She glared at her rapt and wary audience, defying them to turn away. ‘He’d just say, “My master and mistress can’t see you now because they’re too busy fucking.”’
A shocked intake of breath passed around the group, the loudest coming from the American contingent who were only in this Etruscan tomb to fill in time before taking the charabanc tour past Frances Mayes’ house and other Tuscan Sun sites later. Had she not already been inside a tomb, Marjorie would have liked the earth to swallow her.
‘Oh, Hermione, dear,’ she groaned. ‘I think we’d better go and pick up some wine from the Co-op.’
And with a firmness usually unknown to her, she marched Hermione out of the tomb – leaping, as she hoped, more than 2,500 years in twenty seconds.

***

‘Signore!’ shouted Alberto as he spotted Marjorie and Hermione inspecting the shelves of wine in the huge Co-op.
Then he somehow made tut-tutting gestures simultaneously with his old mouth and skinny arms, and seemed to upbraid them for buying wine that wasn’t his own disgusting muck.
‘Oh, bugger off!’ said Hermione, beaming at him with what she imagined to be her sweetest smile as she loaded bottles of Chianti Rufina into her trolley.
She knew he couldn’t speak English, but her smile, far from charming him, appeared to frail old Alberto as a deep-felt curse. Subconsciously, he called upon old Etruscan gods to defend him from this brutal woman whose friendship with the Signora was a mystery to him. She was like a terrible spirit conjured up in the groves of ancient Etruria – or perhaps the enemy virgin-warrior Camilla who was eventually killed by the Etruscan Arruns’ javelin.
Hermione, sensing her triumph over Alberto, continued to pillage the shelves. She ignored the expensive bottles of Brolio, and both the Antinori and Frescobaldi labels (including the delicious Nipozzano), the Montalcino brunello and rosso, the Ruffino, the Ricasoli labels, and threw in more Rufina, plus a few bottles of Colli Senese.
Alberto watched in white-faced horror as he calculated the loss he would make on missed sales of his home-made brew. In common with all Tuscan men, who normally show reliable taste in their appreciation of wine, he had an overwhelming blind spot about the quality of his own wine-making ability.

***