Mark Mills - The Savage Garden

"And you?" asked Adam.

"Me? Oh, I'm not easy."

"What's your worst characteristic?" asked the Chianti.

She thought on it. "My temper."

"Really? I don't see it."

"Pray you never do."

Adam laughed.

"So?" she asked. "Quid pro quo—your worst characteristic."

"An uncompromising sense of justice. It gets me into all kinds of scrapes."

"Very funny."

"Jealousy."

"Jealousy?"

"Yes."

"Of what?"

"I don't know. Everything. Other people's success. My girlfriend's old boyfriends. It's very mean-spirited of me, I know." "You have a girlfriend?"

There was a satisfying note of forced indifference in the question. It suggested that the answer mattered to her. He was glad to be able to say, "Not anymore."

"What happened?"

"I'm not quite sure."

He tried his best to explain, though, raking over the dead embers of his relationship with Gloria.

When he was done, Antonella said, "I don't like the sound of her."

"I should hope not. I've painted the blackest picture I can."

The couple at the next table turned and stared when she laughed.

Have you finished?

Yes.

So, Doctor, your prognosis?

Your reactions seem fine. Your leg muscles are still very weak, though, from lack of use. You really shouldn't move around unassisted. There's a danger you'll fall.

And the pain?

The tablets I gave you before should help.

They did.

You've finished them already?

Something a bit stronger might be better.

I'm not sure that's ... advisable.

My son is coming to dinner this evening, to finalize the details of the party. You did get an invitation, didn't you?

Yes, Signora, and my wife replied promptly. We are always honored to be invited.

Call me a foolish old woman, Doctor, but I wish to be on my feet when I greet Maurizio at the door this evening. And as I say, the pain can be really quite unbearable at times.

I understand.

It shall be our secret. I wouldn't want to worry anyone. I'll return this afternoon with something a little more... appropriate. Cheer up, Doctor. At Christmas your patient was at death's door, and now she's on her feet .

IT WAS ANTONELLA'S IDEA THAT ADAM KICK HIS HEELS for a couple of hours after their lunch. What with it being a Friday, she could break early from work and run him back to San Casciano. Piazzale Michelangelo was the designated pick-up point because it lay on her route out of town. The large, sweeping terrace sat on the hillside south of the river, offering a panoramic view over Florence, the terra-cotta roofscape breaking like a muddy sea around the towers, domes and spires.

He headed straight there, the prospect of trudging the streets of the city center on a bellyful of raw meat and red wine not a particularly appealing one. Better to flee the heat and make for the higher ground, the tree-clad slopes. Besides, the Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte was perched just above the piazzale, and it was one of the few places Professor Leonard had insisted he visit.

It didn't disappoint. It was a small building, beautifully proportioned and elaborately decorated, with an unusual elevated choir.

The interior was gloomy and pleasantly cool. He hovered close to a tour group of Americans, hitching a free ride. At a certain point, he allowed them to wander ahead. Something had caught his eye: a large zodiac set in the stone floor, like a giant clock face, the astrological signs of the twelve constellations made of inlaid white -marble.

He patrolled the circumference, wondering just what on earth it was doing here, this pagan symbolism in a Christian church. Did anyone know the answer? Had the guide passed over it because there was no explanation? The guide did mention the zodiac before leading her party from the church but offered no real illumination. Its presence there was open to speculation, she said. Adam found this strangely comforting. If its exact significance had gone missing over the centuries, then why shouldn't the same hold true for the memorial garden? Maybe he really was on to something. Maybe the book in his hand really did hold the key to some lost interpretation.

He had found nothing new in Dante's words to suggest this was the case by the time Antonella showed up at the wheel of an extremely small car. She called it her "blue frog" and she said she loved it. This didn't square with the way she treated the little Fiat 600, hurling it around the corners, wrenching it up through the gears until it was screaming in protest.

Crammed into the passenger seat, hurtling down a precipitous cobbled street, Adam found himself wishing he had opted to thumb a lift back to San Casciano. The city ceased abruptly, cobbles giving way to dirt and dust, stone walls to high, banked hedgerows. It was a narrow country lane. Very narrow. Must be one way. Had to be, given the speed they were traveling at.

It wasn't. But it was nice to know the brakes worked.

He asked Antonella to drop him off on the outskirts of San Casciano. It wasn't that he feared for the lives of the residents— although the thought had crossed his mind—he was more concerned that Antonella might sense something of what had gone on the night before if allowed to come face to face with Signora Fanelli. He was only delaying the inevitable. When Antonella suggested coming by the pensione in the morning and transporting his bags to Villa Docci, he could hardly refuse the offer.

He found Signora Fanelli on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the trattoria. It was a position he recognized. She got to her feet, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, which didn't help.

It was lust, he realized, pure and simple, unassailable. He was no different from Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of Dante's Hell, blown about for all of time by fierce winds, doomed by their— how had Dante put it?— dubbiosi disiri. Their dubious desires.

"Is everything okay?"

"Yes," he replied absently, thinking that he'd already reached the fifth circle of Hell in Dorothy L. Sayers' translation and he'd yet to come across a sin he hadn't been guilty of at one time or another.

"The money for Harry?"

"Yes. No problem."

How much further would he have to descend into Dante's ordered underworld before he could finally declare himself innocent of the transgression on show?

"How did you get back?"

He told her.

"She's a beautiful girl, isn't she?"

"Is she?"

"You don't think so?"

"No. Yes. I suppose."

"She's wild, that one. Well, not anymore. But she used to be."

"Wild?"

"Like her mother. But it's different now. They say she's changed."

"Changed?"

"That's what they say."

He headed for the bar in Piazza Cavour before dinner, as he did every evening, aware that this was the last time he would watch the ragged boys playing football, scampering to and fro between the goalposts chalked onto the walls, stopping to splash their faces with water from the old stone trough whenever one of them scored. The piazza started to fill—slow but steady trickles of humanity from the side streets—and the young footballers grudgingly relinquished their pitch to their elders.