The Savage Garden (20 page)

    He felt a sudden sense of unease, strong enough to drive him from the glade. Regaining the pathway at the tree line, he glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see someone keeping Venus and Adonis company. But they were alone.

    Antonella had given him directions. A track ran close to the bottom of the memorial garden, and if he followed it to the south, it would eventually climb through olive groves and past her farmhouse.

    He found the track without difficulty, but something impelled him to double back to the Temple of Echo and take one last look up the garden. The pasture climbed gently toward the grotto with its bodyguard of cypresses. From here the ground rose sharply to the amphitheater—Flora pearl-white in her concave shell, the triumphal arch looming above her on the crest.

    The wind had swelled and was now sweeping straight down the valley toward him, pouring in a constant flow, like invisible liquid. He stood stock-still, staring into it, letting it wash past him into the trees. His eyes started to water. He blinked a few times.

    That's when it came to him.

    Gregor Mendel.

    A name from his school days. Biology classes. Mendelian genetics.

    He pulled the photograph of the Doccis from the notebook. His eyes darted across it—from father to mother, then to each of the children in turn.

    Emilio, Maurizio and Caterina all shared their parents' obsidian eyes; but even if they hadn't, even if one of them had been born with blue eyes, that would have been okay by Mendel. It would simply mean that both parents carried a recessive gene for blue eyes, which, if combined, would make for a blue-eyed child. They were more likely to have dark-eyed offspring, but it was possible. It was impossible, on the other hand, for two blue-eyed parents— each carrying a double dose of the recessive gene—to produce a dark-eyed child.

    If Adam was right, then the same rule held for another physical trait: the earlobes. Unattached earlobes, where there was an indentation between the bottom of the ear and the side of the face, symbolized the dominant gene. Which meant, therefore, that two "recessive" people with earlobes directly attached to the side of the face could not have a child with unattached earlobes. It seemed ridiculous, but it was true.

    He checked the photo one more time.

    There was no mistake. Emilio Docci was the only one in the family whose earlobes hung free. Not dramatically so. But it strongly suggested that he was not his parent's son.

    No, it was possible to be more precise.

    The clear physical resemblance between Emilio and Signora Docci placed her maternity beyond doubt. It followed, therefore, that Emilio was not his father's son, or rather, that he had not sprung from the loins of the man standing to his left, the man gripping the back of the divan in a parody of patriarchal self-importance.

    The unavoidable question had barely formed itself in his head when the answer came to him. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe it was written in his conversations with Signora Docci, but he had failed to read it.

    The air of mild alarm conferred on Emilio by his large eyes and his long neck had struck a dim note of recognition in Adam, but he was wrong to have ascribed these traits to a passing similarity with some indeterminate creature or bird. He had seen the look before, yes, but it had been in an old framed photograph hanging on the wall of a room in Cambridge: a photograph of the Jesus College rowing crew, eight gangling young men clutching their oars like pikestaffs.

    "Don't be too impressed," Professor Leonard had said to him when he remarked on the photograph, "I'm not sure we ever won a single race. In fact, I know we didn't."

    ADAM WAS LATE FOR LUNCH, NOT THAT IT MATTERED. The other guests were considerably later, and Antonella herself was running well behind schedule. In fact, she was foraging around in a sorry-looking vegetable patch beside the farmhouse when he appeared up the track. She was wearing a crumpled T-shirt, shorts and no shoes. She looked magnificent. And angry.

    "Someone has been stealing my tomatoes."

    It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to steal her tomatoes; they were so small and pitiful.

    "Forgive them. They must really be in need."

    Antonella's affronted scowl softened to a smile, and she laughed.

    It was a narrow house built around two sides of an open yard paved with bricks. On the third side rose a barn, connected to the house by a high wall with an arched gateway bearing a carved escutcheon of the Docci family, with its rampant boar. The stucco on the house had crumbled away in parts to reveal stone walls beneath. An exterior staircase led to the human accommodation on the second floor—"The animals live downstairs, well, not at the moment."

    The rooms were barely furnished; they didn't require it. The floors, doors, ceilings and walls were all features in their own right, all ancient, all handcrafted. Her bedroom consisted of little more than a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a couple of pictures. It was enough. The sight of her discarded nightshirt on the unmade bed was mildly distracting.

    A ham was boiling away on the stove in the kitchen, the largest room in the house by some margin. Its beams were browned with age and smoke, and there was a table big enough to plan an invasion on. They weren't going to be eating here, though; they were going to be eating outside. Which is where Adam came in.

    His job was to rig up a tarpaulin as a sunshade in the yard. Everything he required was in the barn, including the trestle table and chairs.

    Antonella approved of his construction, and once he'd laid the table and folded the napkins and found cushions for some of the chairs, she joined him outside, rewarding him with a glass of the wine he'd brought. She examined the label approvingly before she poured.

    "I thought you were a student."

    "Grandmother's best."

    "To grandmother," she said, offering her glass to be clinked.

    "Grandmother. May she live to be a hundred."

    "Oh, don't worry, she will. Maurizio is convinced of it."

    "Maurizio?"

    She smiled enigmatically.

    "What?" demanded Adam.

    "He is a bit nervous, I think. No one knows what her plans are now that she has . . . come to life again. He has waited a long time for the villa. He thought it would be his when Nonna died."

    "I hope he doesn't blame me."

    "You?"

    He told her how Maurizio had searched him out in the garden with his concerns about his mother. He told her he had detected a degree of antagonism on Maurizio's part, although he didn't reveal that he had repaid like with like. He also mentioned the painkillers, reckoning she had a right to know. Antonella seemed more surprised by the fact that Maria had shared the information about the doctor's visit with Maurizio.

    "She doesn't like Maurizio."

    "Or maybe she's just genuinely concerned for your grandmother."

    "Maybe."

    "I know I am. She could be running herself into the ground."

    "If she is, nothing will stop her."

    "That's very fatalistic."

    The slight barb wasn't lost on Antonella. Her eyes fastened on him, dark and hard.

    "I love my grandmother, but I also know her well."

    They were rescued by the sound of an approaching vehicle. It blew into the yard in a cloud of white dust: one car, three couples crammed into it. The yard was soon filled with the sounds of laughter.

    Two hours later, it was still echoing off the walls. No amount of food or wine—and both kept rolling down the staircase from the house—could dampen it. They even played a game of hoops in between two of the courses. The game was a gift to Antonella from her brother, Edoardo, a private joke lost on the rest of the company, and one the siblings refused to share.

    Edoardo had his sister's jet-black hair and olive skin. He was a year or so younger than her, big and ebullient, humorous and shrewd. It was hard not be sucked along in his slipstream. The only person who seemed impervious to its pull was his girlfriend, Grazia—a fellow law student. She was also the only person who didn't speak English, not that this stopped her trying to speak it, and at the breakneck speed she spoke her own language. The result was a tumbling Babel of words, most of them French. Whenever Edoardo tried to correct her, she would round on him and say,
"Zitto! Capisce. Non e vero, Adamo?"

    "Shut up. He understands. Don't you, Adam?"

    To which Adam would invariably reply, "Absolutely."

    "Absolutely" became something of a calling cry. It started when Enrico, newly wed to Venetian Claudia with the cornflower-blue eyes, was offered a top-up of wine. "Absolutely," he replied. And it went from there.

    Italy is changing fast, now that we've joined the Common Market. Absolutely. Domenico Modugno should have won the Euro- vision Song Contest with "Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu." Absolutely.

    The word only lost its currency when, as the coffee hit the table, someone remarked that the Christian Democrat Party was riddled with former Fascists.

    "Be careful what you say," chipped in the cartoonist who wanted to be a painter. "Their uncle was a Fascist, was he not?"

    It was Edoardo who replied. "Absolutely. And it was Fascists who killed him. So what does that tell you?"

    The cartoonist apologized for the comment, was forgiven, and the word didn't rear its head again. The mood remained buoyant, but Adam now found himself struggling to keep up. The banter and the bonhomie had been welcome diversions; they had allowed him to forget about the photograph tucked between the pages of his notebook lying on the sideboard in the kitchen. But now that Emilio had barged his way into the conversation, back into Adam's thoughts, there was no ignoring him.

    While the others rattled on around the table, his mind wandered elsewhere—to Gregor Mendel and recessive genes and ear- lobes and the old photo of the rowing crew on the wall of Professor Leonard's rooms in Jesus College. He tried to prevent them straying further afield, into darker territory, where his conversations with Fausto lurked.

    He chipped in from time to time, covering for his distraction, and when the other guests finally left, he was relieved to be forced back to the world around him, pumping hands and kissing cheeks and waving as the car disappeared up the hard white track to San Casciano, carried on a billowing dust cloud.

    He said he'd help tidy up, an offer gratefully accepted by Antonella. They worked hard, methodically, until all that remained was a pile of dripping crockery on the draining board and a red wine stain on the bricks in the yard, where a glass had been toppled.

    They retired to a makeshift wooden bench on a grassy rise beside the barn. It was a calm and peaceful spot, the shifting shadows retouching the landscape as the sun slowly dropped away to the west.

    "What a place to live," said Adam. "You're very lucky."

    "Oh, I pay for it. The estate needs all the money it can get."

    "Things are bad?"

    "Not just here—everywhere."

    She explained that the family that had occupied the house for countless generations had recently moved on, abandoning the countryside for the town, as many were now doing. The moment new tenants were found, she'd be out.

    He was surprised to hear that the estate was run on a sharecrop- ping basis—
mezzadria
—an arrangement whereby a family received a house and some land rent-free from the Doccis in exchange for half of the produce generated.

    "It sounds almost feudal."

    "That's because it is—from the Middle Ages—but things are changing now. There are politicians in Rome who say
mezzadria
must go. If it does, everything here will change. My grandmother worries a lot. I tell her not to. Maurizio is rich, he will make things work."