‘And Venus again represents Chastity?’
‘Exactly Venus pudica.’
She smiled when he adopted the well-known pose of Venus in her shell, modestly covering her nakedness.
‘It’s a good theory,’ she said.
‘You think?’
‘Yes. Because if it’s right then Flora is a symbol for the erotic, the sexual’
‘Yes, I suppose she is.’
Antonella turned her gaze on Flora. ‘Do you see it now?’
He looked up at the statue.
‘See the way she stands – her hips are turned away, but they are also…open, inviting. Her arm covers her breasts, but only just, like she doesn’t care too much. And her face, the eyes, the mouth. She is not un’inno-cente.’
He could see what Antonella was driving at. Maybe he was wrong to have attributed the slight slackness of the pose to the inferior hand of a secondary sculptor. Maybe that sculptor hadn’t been striving for delicacy and poise, but for something looser, more sensual. No, that was wrong. He had somehow managed to achieve both – a demure quality coupled with an erotic charge.
‘So I’m not wrong?’
‘Huh?’ he said distractedly.
‘I’m not alone. You see it too.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Possible? It is there or it isn’t,’ came the indignant reply.
‘You’re not wrong.’
‘Everyone else thinks I am. My grandmother thinks I imagine it, and this says very much about me.’
‘What does she think it says about you?’
Even as the words left his mouth he realized it was an impertinent question, far too personal.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she replied, ‘because we are right and she is wrong.’
He found himself smiling at the ease with which she’d deflected his enquiry, sparing him further embarrassment. His mind, though, was leaping ahead, questions already coalescing. Was it done knowingly? And if so, why? Why would a grieving husband allow his wife to be personified as some prudish yet pouting goddess, some virgin-whore?
The questions stayed with him as they moved on down the slope to the grotto buried in its mound of shaggy laurel. They entered silently, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The marble figures stood out pale and ghostly against the dark, encrusted rock of the back wall. In the centre, facing left, was Daphne at the moment of her transformation into a laurel tree, her toes turning to roots, bark already girding her thighs, branches and leaves beginning to sprout from the splayed fingers of her left hand, which was raised heavenwards in desperation, supplication. To her right was Apollo, the sun god, from whom she was fleeing – youthful, muscular, identifiable by the lyre in his hand and the bow slung across his broad back. Below them, an elderly bearded gentleman reclined along the rim of a great basin of purple and white variegated marble. This was Peneus, the river god, father to Daphne.
The story was straight from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: the nymph Daphne, fleeing the unwelcome advances of a love-struck Apollo, begged her father to turn her into a laurel tree, which he duly did. It was an appropriate myth for a garden setting – Art and Nature combining in the figure of Daphne. As the file pointed out, there was a relief panel depicting the same scene in the Grotto of Diana at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli. But here in the memorial garden the myth had an added resonance, mirroring the story of Flora – a nymph who also underwent a metamorphosis following her pursuit by an amorous god.
This last observation was Antonella’s. It wasn’t in the file, nor had it occurred to Adam, which was mildly annoying, although this wouldn’t prevent him, he suspected, from claiming it as his own for the purposes of his thesis.
Antonella explained how the water poured from the urn held by Peneus, filling the marble basin. A lowered lip at the front then allowed it to overflow into a shallow, circular pool set in the stone floor. This was carved with rippling water, and at its centre was a female face in relief, staring heavenwards, the gaping mouth acting as a sink hole. The hair of this disembodied visage was bedecked with flowers, identifying it as that of Flora: the goddess of flowers drawing sustenance for her creations from the life-giving spring water.
It was an exquisite arrangement, faultless both in its beauty and in its pertinence to the overarching programme of the garden. The only false note was the broken-off horn of the unicorn crouched at Apollo’s feet, its head bowed towards the marble basin. This was a common motif in gardens of the period. A unicorn dipping its horn into the water signified the purity of the source feeding the garden; it announced that you could happily scoop up a handful and down a draught without fear for your life. At some time since that era, though, the unicorn had lost the greater part of its horn.
Adam fingered the truncated stump. ‘It’s a pity’
‘Yes. What is a unicorn without its horn?’
‘A white horse?’
Antonella smiled. ‘A very unhappy white horse.’
They headed west from the grotto on a looping circuit, the pathway trailing off into the evergreen woods blanket ing the sides of the valley. They sauntered through the shade, chatting idly as they went. Antonella lived across the valley in a farmhouse she rented from her grandmother. The old building was delightfully cool in summer but bitterly cold in winter, and she had a rule that whenever the well water froze she would decamp to her brother’s apartment in Florence. She and Edoardo were the children of Signora Docci’s only daughter Caterina, a woman whom Professor Leonard had referred to as ‘dissolute’, something Adam found hard to square with the self-possessed creature stepping out beside him.
Her parents were divorced, she explained. Her mother lived in Rome, her father in Milan, where he was given to business ventures of a distinctly dubious nature, which promised (and invariably failed to deliver) untold wealth. She said this with a note of mild amusement in her voice.
By now they had passed through the first glade, with its triad of free-standing sculptures representing the death of Hyacinth, and were nearing the small temple at the foot of the garden.
‘And what do you do?’ Adam asked.
‘Me? Oh, I design clothes. Can’t you tell?’ She spread her hands in reference to her simple cotton shift dress.
‘I…Yes –’
Her smile stopped him dead. ‘My dresses have more colour. Although they’re not really mine. There is someone else’s name on everything I do.’
‘How come?’
‘I work at a fashion house in Florence. There can only be one name.’
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
‘What a serious question.’
‘I’m a serious chap.’
‘Oh really?’
‘Can’t you tell?’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘All my friends are on a beach. Me, I’m here studying.’
‘Only because you have to, and only for two weeks. From what I hear, you will probably see a beach before the end of the summer.’
This meant one thing: the news from Professor Leonard of Adam’s indolence had not stopped with Signora Docci.
‘I dispute that.’
‘What?’
‘Whatever you’ve heard.’
‘The good things too?’