The Dandelion Clock Read online

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fruit segments, sometimes. Some other stuff.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that. Well well. And last of all – there are others, like I said, but these are the ones she’s keenest to get you to talk about – starbursts and seedheads; dandelions particularly, apparently, and motifs with the same shape-patterns as dandelion seedheads. So. Think you can come up with something for her?’

  In my head there is a ghost of a voice: my voice, lodged somewhere out of sight in a different time. It’s still a crap joke, Jamie, I hear myself saying; and a moment later, there is the ghost of Jamie’s voice also: All the best ones are.

  I say, ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Good. I’ve been up to look over the gallery. Paul Horshot’s in charge. It’s going to be tremendous, Alex. There’s advance publicity coming out right now. Deborah’s working the press for us, and we’ll probably do a preview showing the day before it opens – get the reviews out on the day, which should be good. And Alan Harper wants you to say something at a kind of drinks and vol-au-vents bash, which I know isn’t your kind of thing, but would be very good for the momentum of it all. It’s – wait a moment – it’s two days before, on the twenty-second. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Alex? Alex, are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Look, Max – I’m not sure—’

  ‘I can get you out of it if you’re really not happy, but I think it would do us a lot of good. Get you some more sales. Get me some more commission. Please all of the people all of the time.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the party. I meant – I was trying to say that I’m not sure I can be back tomorrow. It’s got complicated this end. I may have to stay a while longer.’ I have no idea why I say it. The words are out of my mouth before I’ve even thought them through.

  There is a sharp silence. At last he says, ‘Alex, how long are you talking about? The weekend?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right – just. But let’s not cut things too close here. This is the big one, remember?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  Suddenly he laughs. ‘You really hate all of this, don’t you?’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the house was perfect and you were inventing rising damp so you can sit in the sun and keep out of my way.’

  ‘Actually, it’s been raining,’ I tell him.

  ‘Whatever. Look, enjoy yourself, all right? Have some beers in between fixing up builders and all that. When things are sorted out, give me a call. I suppose we’ll all survive without you for a few more days.’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘And don’t forget to think over those ideas Julia came up with. They’ve got to go to press by the fourteenth at the latest, and she’ll need some time before that to put it all together.’

  ‘I will. I’ll call you, Max.’

  ‘Bye, Alex,’ he says, still sounding amused, and the line goes dead.

  The valley is warm on the walk back from town, smelling of sage and greenery. The last of the puddles on the road are turning to dust now, though the leaves of the roadside asphodel and myrtle still have their newly washed crispness. Going over the conversation in my mind, I can’t help feeling I haven’t said what I meant to, that I have been somehow sidetracked. I seem to have bought myself time here, and I don’t know quite why I should have wanted to do that. But it’s done now. Perhaps I can call him later in the week; perhaps things will be clearer by then.

  I sit on the edge of the verandah to eat, and great blue-black bees zoom over the garden while I pile torn pieces of bread high with cheese and salami I’ve bought on the way back from town. I am very hungry. I had nothing to eat last night. Through my head go the things Max said, and especially the questions Julia Connell wants answered. I can’t stop going over them. Why has she picked these things?

  I can feel my mind floating through the questions, drifting. There is almost a physical sensation. I remember this. I remember it from very, very long ago, and I fight it, pushing it back from me.

  Jamie says, ‘Oh, Alex is no good with things like that. If you leave him alone he goes dreamy. He’s probably been sitting doing that half the time.’ He grins, and his eyes sparkle for a moment in the afternoon sun. ‘He’s mad,’ he adds.

  There is a broken pane of glass in the French windows next to me, cracked where a stone has struck it. I stare at it: the central star-like contact point, the silver-edged cracks radiating from it like ribbons of metal. I force Jamie’s voice from my head and concentrate instead on this broken pane, staring at it with a kind of foolish fixation, as though it will keep from me these ghost voices. The little fused nebula of dense, almost white craquelure around the hole – a starburst, a sudden splash in flat-calm water, like gossamer—

  Anna’s hands reaching above me, her neatness, her precision, and a deep blue that is almost black – set with stars—

  I shiver, rub my eyes. I am back where I should be.

  It is gone now; I looked last night, before going to sleep. So much has changed. In all the time that has passed, I suppose it would be strange if it hadn’t.

  The hall and the kitchen and the front room have been repainted. The colours are all wrong. As an artist I know this. The colours aren’t right for the rooms, or for the house. The kitchen: the kitchen has always been white. Now it is a pale russet which, in yesterday’s evening light, makes it look like an abattoir. The front room, which my mother had painted herself – a kind of smoky umber which made it very cosy and comforting – is now a light, airy blue, cavernous and sterile. They are errors of judgement, all of them, and I imagine – as with the window – people getting an unconscious sense of something amiss, something not right, from the colours. It frustrates me.

  Upstairs, the walls are the wrong colours. And the ceiling of my room – Anna’s ceiling of stars – has been painted over.

  That is the worst thing.

  She had said it was like the night sky when the sun has died, but the real night hasn’t yet come. I can see her reaching up to paint in the last details: careful, always accurate, until at last the ceiling is set with glittering silver against an expanse of blue-black that pulls your eye in and in for ever.

  * * *

  There is the sound of running water from the shower; the faint sound of traffic from the main street, a long way away; the occasional agitated burring of a Vespa in the little side-street over which the window opens. Florence is warm and easy and the spring air fills the room. I am lying on my bed, shoes off, staring at the plaster on the wall opposite, listening to the sounds. On the floor beside me are my things: a case with clothes, another with sketch pads and boards, inks, pens and pencils, charcoal, Conté, tubes of acrylic and watercolour and oils, brushes, linseed oil and turpentine and white spirit, rags and nibs and craft knives. More than I’ll need, I am sure, but I find it difficult to decide what not to take: some part of me hates the decision, and I always end up carrying too much.

  On the other bed are Anna’s bags and cases. I glance at them, and the way the sun is falling across them from the open window makes me think for a moment that they would be good to draw – even if only a quick thumbnail sketch. But I am too lazy and tired. I let my eyes go back to the plaster of the wall, which is traced with patterns of age like maps.

  The room is very tall and light, with a high doorway and high, shuttered windows, the shutters now hooked back to let in the afternoon. There is a second door through to the bathroom, and from this comes the sound of water hissing on tiles, sometimes constant, sometimes shifting its pitch. I realize after listening for a while that the changes must be Anna moving about under the flow, blocking it more and less from moment to moment with her body.

  The moment I realize this, I am imagining seeing her: the water on her skin, her head back, hair drenched and clinging, the slenderness of her neck and body. It is as if the wall has dissolved for a second and I can see through it. I feel something clench in the pit of my stomach at the sight of h
er, and then I force the image from my mind. I actually make myself shake my head and smile ruefully, as if someone might be watching me and checking my reaction – is he her lover or her friend? – and I have to be seen to do the right thing.

  But it is difficult to get her out of my head.

  She has changed a lot in the five years since I last saw her. I see it the moment I catch sight of her in the airport in Pisa – a difference about her I would never have guessed at. It’s the same when we embrace: something that has altered, something I can feel for the short time I’m holding her, before she pulls away and grins and we start to talk. I keep looking. I can’t help it. Even on the train I keep stealing glances at her, hoping she won’t realize. And I keep trying to find what the things are that have changed; and I keep failing. She has her hair shorter now, to the nape of her neck rather than to her shoulders. But I’ve seen that before: it’s the hairstyle she had when I first knew her. And she is five years older. But the physical changes are, when I isolate them, so slight, and I still see that she has changed a lot, and I don’t understand.

  We drag our cases up the staircase of the sixteenth-century palazzo hidden away in the backstreets near the Duomo and sign in. The proprietor glances approvingly at Anna and nods to me as he shows us to our room. Inside, she goes straight to the windows, opens them to let in the sound and light of the city afternoon.

  ‘Well, we got here,’ she says.

  ‘We did.’

  She slings her cases on the bed and looks around. ‘Huge room. How can it be this big and still be so cheap?’

  ‘It’s out of season,’ I say, shrugging. ‘And we have to eat out.’

  ‘Suits me. God, I’m stiff. My feet are killing me.’ She’s kicking off her shoes as she speaks. ‘There’s time for a shower, isn’t there? You don’t want to rush off and do anything right away?’

  ‘No. Fine by me.’

  ‘Good. I’m going to soak myself. I feel all shrivelled up, like a prune.’

  I make a face, and she laughs.

  ‘I do. It’s flying. I hate flying. Excellent – they’ve given us towels.’ She’s going round the room inspecting things. ‘And a writing-desk. That’s nice. I had the most awful flight. You should have seen who I had to sit next to.’

  I think briefly. ‘Not – an old woman who fell asleep and kept blowing bubbles?’

  She stops in her pacing of the room, looking at me quizzically. ‘No. You say the weirdest things sometimes.’ As she talks she goes round to her bed, sits down, pulling off her trousers. ‘No – it was this business-man type, maybe forty. Such a letch. I thought I was going to get groped for sure.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. Spineless. I kept the second half of my Coke ready, though, so I could chuck it over him when he did. That’s probably why I’m so dehydrated.’

  She stands up and pulls her shirt off over her head. I look quickly away, pretending I haven’t noticed. I know she doesn’t care – wouldn’t mind me seeing her standing there in her underwear – but I’m not sure I can carry off the pretence that I don’t care. It’s easier to look away. She says, ‘Not a bad view either. There’s a little square down there, and a tree. I think that’s a church. You know all this stuff better than I do. You’ll have to tell me about it later.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ I say, looking fixedly at the writing-desk in the corner. I hear her walk over to where the towels are laid out, bare feet padding on the stone.

  ‘I’d say I won’t be long, but I probably will be,’ she says, a smile in her voice. I risk looking up. She has a towel wrapped around her, and I am able to pretend that, as far as I’m aware, this is how it’s always been.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ I say. ‘Take as long as you like.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll see you in a bit.’

  She closes the door after her and, a few moments later, there comes the first hiss of water from the shower, and somewhere far off the rumble and clang of air through the plumbing of the old building. I am left lying on my bed, staring at the wall, trying to keep the thought of her out of my head.

  I look again at her luggage. Bags and suitcases. There is still something about them that draws my attention, but now it doesn’t feel as if they’re a good composition for a sketch; it’s something else which I can’t readily identify. I stare at them, and can feel myself frowning. Something is – I don’t know what. Not right? What can be not right about suitcases? But something—

  I look back to the wall, try another rueful smile, and this one works better. In the next room Anna is naked, and that is what’s bothering me. Because I shouldn’t be thinking of her like that. Because she’s Anna. The suitcases – the suitcases are square and prosaic and dull and incredibly unerotic. That is why they keep nagging at me, tugging at the corners of my mind. In a way, it all makes perfect sense.

  I almost laugh at the convolutions of it all. Alone in a room, trying not to laugh, not allowing myself to think of the girl showering just behind the wall, filling my head with her casually piled suitcases instead. Mad Alex, Jamie would have said.

  I like him the moment I see him: the way he is staring at the distance, the way he is alone in the garden, the way his face seems to be looking out and at the same time lost in something inside him.

  Physically we are quite different. Jamie is a year older than me, and taller. While I have my father’s straight fair hair, Jamie’s hair is dark and a little wavy. He is shaped differently, too: where I am rather stocky, he is slender, and he is never as clumsy or awkward as I am. Even before he sees me, and speaks to me, I like him.

  In my childhood, all is confusion for a time, and then out of this confusion I begin to make sense of my world. Jamie helps me with this, sees things I don’t, asks the questions I can’t, until between us – eventually – we manage to piece together the whole picture. The focus shifts and sharpens and sense and understanding happen.

  But most of that is still to come. I am six, and Jamie’s parents move into the house at the other end of the row from ours.

  The house at the end has been empty for a time. Next door to us live Signora Bartolomeo Cassi and Lucia. The signora is well into her eighties, my mother says, and Lucia doesn’t look all that much younger. Adults say that Lucia is the signora’s maid, that’s she’s been with her ever since she was a young woman of nineteen. The children of Altesa are not taken in, though, and know Lucia to be a witch, and they keep an eye open for her on Fridays, when she comes into town shopping. There is a sign to make to ward off her spells when she looks at you in a certain way. For the rest of the week, both she and the signora stay mostly out of sight.

  Beyond them live Signor and Signora Brunelli, who have twin two-year-old girls. I think my mother likes the babies; she and Signora Brunelli sometimes have coffee in our front room and watch the twins crawl and toddle round the floor. The twins will both learn to talk very early, and their parents will be proud to have such intelligent babies.

  The house at the end is the largest of the four. The new occupants are already talked about in the town before they arrive; the father is English, and though the mother is Italian, she comes from the north, from the city. In Altesa’s small-town world, this makes them as much foreigners as my family. There is a boy, too, I hear. The thought of another boy who is a foreigner intrigues me. In my head, I start to think what kind of boy he will be: whether he’ll be like me, slow and bad at reading; whether his father will work in the English bank in the city like mine; whether he will get in trouble sometimes like I do.

  There have been vans and cars coming and going all day at the other end of the road, and I have seen men carrying boxes and furniture in through the gates of the house there. But I am told not to get in the way, and by early evening the vans are gone again. I can’t get rid of my curiosity. At the bottom of our garden is a tree whose branches are low enough for me to scramble up into, and it is easy from there to climb onto the garden wall and drop down behind it.

  Back h
ere, the level of the ground is higher than it is in our garden, and it makes the wall seem lower. It’s a strange thing and I don’t understand why it should be so, but it is. I know this little patch of waste ground well. Sometimes I spend hours out here sitting or lying among the rocks, watching lizards skittering around in the sunlight. When they first come out, in the early morning, they are slow and sleepy, but by midday they have heated up and are like brown bullets ricocheting off the stones. Once I see one with two tails, lighter than the rest of its body; it lives somewhere near where the wall adjoins Signora Cassi’s house, and I wonder if it has been caught in the kitchen by Lucia.

  Sometimes, too, I sit here, out of sight of anyone, and do the thing my mother calls staring into space and my father calls lying.

  I go along to the end of the wall, and laboriously find footholds and handholds to help me clamber up. I peer over the top, and for a moment I don’t see him, he is standing so still.

  The garden here is, again, larger than ours, and sunnier as well. There aren’t so many trees, and some angle of the valley side seems to have positioned the lawn so that it catches the evening sun straight-on. The doors and windows of the house, all around the ground floor, are open, and I can hear voices – a man and a woman – inside. There are some of the boxes that came from the van, standing on the edge of the grass, waiting to be taken in.

  I let my attention wander around the garden, and it is now that I see him: in the shade of a tall purple bush in the border, standing with his hands in his pockets, looking upwards towards where the valley crest reaches the skyline. For a second I think he is looking right at me, but then I see the faraway expression on his face, and know he hasn’t seen me. We stay like that for some time more, he staring at the horizon, I staring at him, like children frozen in a fairytale. Then my foot slips a little, and the sound reaches him, and he shivers and sees me. He looks at once wary, but almost as quickly the wariness vanishes and is replaced by curiosity. He glances towards the house, once, then runs across the garden until he’s standing below me.