Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Earhole reappeared. I showed him the metal-lined drawers I had built into the dissecting table. When packed with ice, they helped to slow the process of decomposition. I plucked the key to the Grand Duke’s ice house off the wall and gave it to him.

‘Take the handcart,’ I said. ‘Bring as much as you can manage. And hurry. Every second counts.’

While he was away, I cut off the girl’s hair and laid it in a wooden tray, then I shaved her head and removed the hair from her armpits and her groin. That done, I coated her body in a thin layer of hemp oil. She gleamed in the candle-light as if she had just broken out in a sweat, but I was the one who was sweating. I tested her fingers. Still no sign of stiffening.

In fifteen minutes Earhole had returned. Rigor mortis occurred four to six hours after death, depending on the temperature. In Pampolini’s opinion, the girl had died between seven and eight o’clock. It was now midnight. Even with the doors wide open and the ice-filled drawers, I didn’t think I had more than an hour to prepare the body for casting. After that, manipulation would prove impossible.

I propped my notebook open at the relevant page. Guided by drawings I had made during the summer, I bent the girl’s left arm at the elbow, leaving her hand resting on her belly. I liked the elegant, elongated diamond of air that opened up between her arm and her waist, and there was a kind of tenderness about the hand. A subtle sensuality as well. To keep the arm from moving, I fitted a small right-angled cushion filled with sand against the outside of the elbow. Walking round the table, I straightened the girl’s right arm so it lay flush against her body, her palm and the inside of her elbow facing upwards. Casting the delicately curling fingers wouldn’t be easy, but they were an integral part of the image I had in mind. I placed the hand in a three-sided wooden box, which would lock it in the chosen position. As for her legs, they needed to mirror or complement the arms. Leaving her left leg extended, I eased her right knee outwards a fraction, then brought her foot back in so that the sole almost touched the left ankle. I wedged more sand-filled pillows between the legs to stop them straightening, then I stood back. The girl looked natural, relaxed and — strange, this — solitary. The angle of her head was wrong, though. If I turned her face towards her left shoulder — if she appeared to be avoiding the viewer’s gaze, in other words — it would leave her poised between modesty and invitation, and I would be combining the dreamy grace of Poussin’s ‘Galatea’ with the boldness of his ‘Sleeping Venus’. That, at least, was my intention. I was conscious of Earhole in the shadows, watching.

‘Are you tired?’ I said.

‘A bit.’

‘Why don’t you sleep?’

Covering two lengths of string in pig fat, I fixed them to the girl’s left leg, one on either side, so they stretched all the way from her hip to her ankle, then I reached for the sack of powdered gypsum and heaped several scoops into a bowl. When casting Fiore’s hands, I had used lukewarm water, and the plaster had set too rapidly. This time I would use cold water and a sprinkling of grog — a pulverized burnt clay — which would slow down the chemical reaction and give me a little more control. I stirred the mixture until it formed a creamy paste, then started to apply it to the leg, careful not to dislodge the bits of string. I worked fast, methodically. My mind, unanchored, floated free.

I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke …

Stufa’s words.

That night in the carriage, I had thought at first that he was taking an interest. How naïve of me! All too soon, he had become dismissive, if not openly contemptuous. What had he called my work? Histrionic. Gratuitous. And it didn’t bother him if he upset me. Not in the slightest. In fact, he seemed to want to upset me.

Did I scare you?

His cheekbones sticking out like knuckles, a sharpness to his mouth, his tongue. That black flower again, its petals opening and closing …

My eyes grew heavy. I let my head rest on my arm and found myself returning to Siracusa. I was on horseback, the volcano behind me, its slopes the colour of a pigeon’s wing. I passed white convent walls, the air keen with ripe lemon and wild sage. Below me, far below, the soothing lap and flop of waves. The sea.

I came round a bend in the road and the town appeared ahead of me, the pink dome of my old college rising out of the clustered buildings, the wide bay of the Porto Grande glittering beyond.

My throat tightened.

I rode across the shallow harbour, then past a group of fishermen and up Via Dione, high-sided, sunk in shadow. I stopped outside our house. Someone had dropped a melon, and it had split open, a gash of crimson showing in the dark-green rind. I climbed the steps and went inside. The smell of dried roses, beeswax, flaking plaster. The tiles earth-brown, vein-blue. The doors ajar, the rooms peaceful, cool.

And then an image that seemed lifted from my memory. My father in his study, bars of gold light laid out on the floor. The nobleman he worked for — Gargallo — was standing close to him and talking in a low but forceful voice. Gargallo with his lavish clothes, his head of dark-brown curls …

I saw my father’s mouth twist. He turned his back on his employer and spoke to me without so much as a glance in my direction.

Go and find your mother.

As I backed out of the room, Gargallo looked round, and his expression, which had been affronted, softened into a smile I neither understood nor trusted.

Come here a moment, he said.

I ran for it.

Then I was downstairs, under the pear tree. From a distance, my mother looked the same, but when I stepped forwards, into the sun, I saw how she had changed, and it was hard not to burst into tears, thinking of all the moments I had lost, all the time I had used in other ways. And I had aged as well. There were lines on my forehead, around my mouth. I had no grey hair as yet, but the whites of my eyes were muddy, no longer the pure egg white of a child’s. I told her what Jacopo had been saying. I had wormed my way into the family. I was a leech, a misfit. I didn’t belong. He said all that? she murmured. I do belong, I said, don’t I? Of course you do, she said. He’s wrong, then? Yes, he’s wrong. But I’d had to prompt her, lead her, and I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me, something she couldn’t say. I held her close, and the years since we had last seen each other unrolled before me like a wave breaking, the years kept unrolling, over and over, the ache I had thought I was used to, the wound I carried no matter where I went …

The waves grew louder, and I lifted my head and looked around. Earhole was asleep on the divan, his knees drawn up towards his chest, one hand beneath his cheek. The night was quiet but for the push and pull of his breathing; it was his breathing I had heard inside my dream. I stood up and crossed the room. His fretful face, his poor mank relic of an ear. I fetched a blanket. Drew it over him.

The flames of the candles paled and then became invisible as the window high above me brightened. The moulds for the legs and feet were finished, and I was working on the girl’s right arm. The casting of her right hand alone had taken more than an hour, requiring seven interlocking piece-moulds. As I straightened up and stretched, I heard Earhole shift behind me.

‘I’ve been asleep!’

He sounded amazed, as if sleep was a feat he had attempted many times, but had never quite achieved.

The ice had melted, I told him. Could he fetch another load?

I began to mix a new batch of plaster.