The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

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      The walk to Villa Docci failed to clear his head; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.

      He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.

      There was something not quite right about the place, and this was where its appeal lay. There were no great questions clamouring for answers; they were more like restless whispers at the back of his mind.

      According to the records, Flora had died in 1548, the year after Villa Docci’s completion, so why had her husband waited almost thirty years – till the very end of his own life – to lay out a garden to her memory? Then there were the small anomalies within the garden itself, not exactly discordant elements, but somehow out of keeping with the mood and tone of the whole. Why, for example, the triumphal arch on which Flora’s name was carved in its Italian form? It was such a pompous piece of architecture, crowning the crest above her like some advertising hoarding. At no other point in the itinerary did the garden look to declare its purpose. Rather, it encrypted it in symbols and metaphors and allegory.

      He was honest enough to know that a more pragmatic consideration was also pushing him towards a study of the garden over the villa: the file prepared by Signora Docci’s father. It offered a model from which to work, a template for his own thesis, a document easily massaged, expanded, made his own with the minimum of effort. It was short, and a tad dry, but thorough in its scholarship. There were numerous references in both the text and the footnotes, most of them relating to books or original documents to be found in the library. It would take a few days, but all of these would have to be checked out first, their suitability as potential padding material carefully assessed.

      Retreating to the cool of the villa, he found Maria prowling around, marshalling a couple of browbeaten cleaning ladies and handing out chores to Foscolo, the saturnine handyman.

      Adam set up shop in the study. Light and lofty, it occupied the northwest corner of the building just beyond the library, with French windows giving on to the back terrace. Unlike the other rooms of the villa, which were plainly and sparsely furnished, the study was crowded with furniture, paintings, objects and books – as if all the incidental clutter conspicuously absent from the rest of the villa had somehow gathered here.

      On the wall beside the fireplace was the small portrait panel of Federico Docci which Signora Docci had mentioned to him the previous day. It showed a handsome man of middle years whose sharp features were only just beginning to blunt with age. He was represented in half length, seated in a high-backed chair, his hands resting lightly on a book; through a window in the wall behind him, hills could be seen rolling off to a distant ocean. Painted in three-quarter face, there was something fiercely imperious in the tilt of his head and the set glare of his dark, slanting eyes. And yet the suspicion of a smile played about his wide and generous mouth – a contradiction which seemed almost self-mocking, attractively so.

      A vast glazed mahogany cabinet filled the wall behind the desk. Its lower shelves were given over to books, the majority of them relating to the Etruscans. A large section was devoted to anthropological texts. These were in a variety of languages – Italian, French, English and Dutch – and were decades old. The upper shelves of the cabinet were home to all manner of strange objects, mostly of an archaeological nature: clay figurines, bronze implements, bits of pottery, fragments of stone sculpture, and the like. On the very top shelf were two skulls, their hollow eye sockets deep pools of shadow behind the glass.

      Adam opened the cabinet door and, with the aid of some steps from the library, found himself face to face with the macabre display. They weren’t human skulls, but they weren’t far off – primates of some kind. Although similar in size, there were distinct differences. The skull on the left was narrower and less angular. Its partner had longer canines, jutting cheekbones, and a bony crest rising across the skull from ear to ear, met at its apex by two ridges running from the sides of the eye sockets.

      Adam reached out and ran his hand over the skull, his fingers tracing the cranial ridges.

      That’s when he heard the footsteps.

      He turned to see Maria enter the study from the terrace. The reproachful cast of her eye would have driven him from the library steps if he hadn’t already been descending.

      ‘Very interesting,’ he said pathetically, nodding behind him.

      ‘Would you like some coffee?’

      ‘Yes, thank you.’

      Maria stopped and turned at the door to the library. ‘Orangotanghi,’ she said, her eyes flicking to the skulls.

      ‘Oh,’ he replied in English. ‘Right.’

      The moment she was gone, he reached for the dictionary.

      He hadn’t misunderstood her.

      Despite her offer of coffee, Maria barely concealed her relief at not having to feed him at lunchtime. Towards three o’clock, she appeared in the study with a summons from the lady of the house.

      He found Signora Docci sitting in her bed, patting at her face and neck with a wet flannel. A typewriter sat beside her on the bed, an unfinished letter in its jaws.

      ‘I’ve asked Foscolo to prepare a bicycle for you,’ she said. ‘To spare you the walk every day’

      ‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’

      ‘I don’t want your death on my conscience, what with this heat.’

      She asked him how his work was going, and he came clean about his dilemma, now resolved.

      ‘You like the house?’

      ‘I do. A lot.’

      She СКАЧАТЬ