The Whirling Girl Read Free

he’d set for her — this was why he’d brought her here? He must have left behind notes and papers — a true paper chase, giving further clues?
    She started pulling books from the shelves, tearing open the desk drawers, checking out the alcove behind the staircase where she found a great luxurious tiled bath — then racing up the stairs, searching through the rest of the house, shying past the door into his bedroom, to pull open every drawer and cupboard.
    Nothing. Except to discover that the great beautiful room upstairs was badly lit. How would she do her work? She spied the top of an angle-poise lamp poking up behind a big fireplace chair, but this turned out to have a tiny lemon-sized bulb, and worse, the lamp was wired to an almost unmoveable bronze statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf, the whole contraption so extraordinarily tacky that she could only shake her head. The low table this sat on was covered with a beautiful shawl of heavy silk, fringed with coloured crystal beads. The beads made a tiny tinkling music when she reached down and fingered them, before she worked up the courage to push open the bedroom door again and fumble for a light switch.
    BESIDE THE BED THERE were three books.
    Absurd to imagine he had made sure exactly those three books would be in that position, certain to catch her eye.
    The two Everyman volumes were on top, worn gilt print on the spine, above a pattern of flowers.
Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria
. So many times she’d seen him pull one or the other from his pocket. She knew exactly where the art nouveau design on the frontispiece of Volume One would be stained because a child had spilled cocoa on it. She knew the page she should turn to, in order to find, in the upper left corner, a small black-and-white illustration:
Etruscan Dancing-Girl
. She knew how either of those compact little books would feel if she were to pick it up and open it at random:
Sutri, Nepi, Norchia, Pitigliano, Tarquinii
. The names of places that had held queerness and splendour. She had learned to read by spelling out those names, often pronouncing them wrong.
    And under the top volumes? Without coming a step closer she recognized the book he had kept on a shelf in his study in that other farmhouse in western Washington, never knowing (she had thought then) how she had crept in there almost from the time she could read, to sound her way through the true grownup versions of the stories he had told her ever since she was very little. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Oxford edition, on the cover the helpless form of the young god of war, asleep, pinkly draped across the lap of a Venus who smiled a creamy smile.
    A whistle broke the silence.
    Just a bird?
    She remembered a stout burled stick in a copper stand by the kitchen door. When she went to get it, foolish or not, she noticed a hunting coat hanging on a hook by the door, an old green coat with cargo pockets and cartridge loops.
    She took the coat down. She buried her face in the quilted lining, caught the smell of once-familiar tobacco. Finally, a whiff of him. She sank down at the kitchen table, and stared through the glasspaned door to where the kitchen light shone on a flowering quince. A pinkish-white petal floated down, and then another. Watching this, waiting for another petal to fall, breathing the smell that the old coat released, she understood how absurd all this other caution was, how it hardly mattered about the thieving gypsies and the strangling Calabrians.
    After a while, she turned the pages of a loose-leaf binder on the table. It held information about the house, the pages yellowed, typed with an old machine where the c and the g struck above the line of type. “If you hear noises in the night, they will be these: a wild boar (
cinghiale
) rooting in the woods beside the house or among the olive trees; a porcupine grubbing out the arum lilies along the drive; a screech owl. There is nothing to