The Savage Garden Read Free Page A

They passed through paneled chambers en route to the roof terrace, where they took lunch beneath an even layer of cloud like a moth-eaten blanket, the sun slanting through at intervals and picking out patches of the city.
        They ate beef off the bone and drank claret.
        The professor had come armed with a bundle of books and articles for Adam's mental edification.
        "Read these right through," he said, handing over copies of Ovid's
Metamorphoses
and
Fasti.
"The rest are for reference purposes. You'll find the family has an impressive library, which I'm sure you'll be given access to." The professor was reluctant to say any more about the garden—"You don't want me coloring your judgment"—although he was happy to share some other background with Adam.
        Signora Docci lived alone at Villa Docci, her husband having died some years before. Her eldest son, Emilio, was also dead, killed toward the end of the war by the Germans who had occupied the villa. There was another son, Maurizio, soon to take over the estate, as well as a dissolute daughter, Caterina, who now lived in Rome.
        The rest of lunch was spent talking about the professor's imminent trip to France. He was off to view the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux—his third visit since their chance discovery by a group of local boys back in 1940. He recalled his frustration at having to wait five years for the war to end before making his first pilgrimage. Thirteen years on, he felt it was now possible to trace the influence of that primitive imagery on the work of contemporary artists. In fact, it was to be the subject of an article, and possibly even a book.
        "Europe's greatest living painters drawing inspiration from its oldest known painters, seventeen thousand years on. If that isn't art history, I don't know what is."
        "No."
        "You don't have to humor me, you know."
        "Of course I do," said Adam. "You're buying lunch."
        Later, when they parted company out on the street, the professor said, "Francesca . . . Signora Docci.. . she's old now, and frail by all accounts. But don't underestimate her."
        "What do you mean?"
        Professor Leonard hesitated, glancing off down the street. "I'm not sure I rightly know, but it's sound advice."
        As Adam sat slumped and slightly inebriated in the deserted car on the train journey back to Purley, he was left with the uneasy sensation that the professor's parting warning had been the true purpose of their meeting.

        A week later, Adam was gone. He changed trains in Paris, aware that this was as far south as he had ever traveled in his life. On Professor Leonard's advice, he slipped some francs to the guard and was allotted a spare sleeping compartment to himself.
        He didn't sleep. He tossed in the darkness, France rattling by beneath him, and he thought (far more than he would have liked) of Gloria and of the look on her face when she had said to him, "I don't know why. I think maybe it's because you're a touch boring."
        He might have been less stung if they hadn't just made love. Twice.
        "Boring?"
        "No, not boring, that's unfair. Bland."
        "Bland?"
        "No."
        "What, then?"
        "I don't know. I can't put my finger on it. I can't think of a word."
        Great. He was a category unto himself—a unique category, indefinable by words but falling somewhere between "boring" and "bland."
        He had lost his temper, hurling a pillow across the room and swearing at her. He could still recall every moment of the long walk back to his own college, creeping down the staircase from her rooms, stepping through the pale dawn of Trinity Great Court, the bittersweet taste of self-pity rendering him immune to the daggered look from the porter on duty in the lodge.
        Pathetic, really, when looked at from a distance, from the darkened sleeping compartment of a train hurtling