The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

      Adam was awakened by a dull but persistent pressure in his right buttock. His fingers searched out the offending object but couldn’t make sense of it. He opened his eyes and peered at an unopened bottle of mineral water. Overhead, the blades of the ceiling fan struggled to generate a downdraught. He was flat on his back on the bed, fully clothed still, and the wall lights were ablaze, unbearably bright.

      He swung his legs off the bed and made unsteadily for the switch beside the door. The beat in his temples informed him that he’d drunk too much the night before. And then he remembered why.

      He searched the tangle of memories for irredeemable behaviour.

      Nothing. No. He was in the clear.

      He pushed open the shutters, allowing the soft dawn light to wash into the room.

      Unscrewing the cap of the mineral water bottle, he downed half the tepid contents without drawing breath. He hadn’t registered it before, but there was a tinted print on the wall above the bed – a garish depiction of Christ in some rocky landscape, two fingers raised in benediction. Presumably the artist had gone for a beatific expression, but the Son of God was glancing down with what appeared to be the weary look of someone who has seen it all before – as if nothing that unfolded on the mattress below could ever surprise him. He might even have been a judge scoring a lacklustre performance: two out of five for effort.

      Harry, thought Adam. Why Harry? Why now? And why hadn’t he, Adam, said no?

      The only consolation was that when Signora Fanelli had come to his room just before dinner with the news that ’Arry was on the telephone, he had assumed the worst, that their mother or father had suffered some terrible fate. As it turned out, the news was only marginally less calamitous. Harry was coming to visit.

      Reason had quickly stemmed the trickle of loneliness that welcomed the idea.

      ‘Why, Harry?’ Adam had demanded.

      ‘Because you’re my baby brother.’

      ‘You mean you couldn’t make my farewell dinner in Purley, but Italy’s not a problem?’

      ‘I don’t do farewell dinners in Purley, not when I’m in Sheffield.’

      ‘What were you doing in Sheffield?’

      ‘None of your business. Anyway, what’s the fuss – I phoned, didn’t I?’

      ‘No, as it happens.’

      ‘Well I meant to.’

      Of course, Harry couldn’t say when he’d be arriving or leaving – ‘For God’s sake, Adam, what am I, a fucking train timetable?’ – only that he had things to do in Italy and that he’d fit Adam in along the way.

      Fortunately, this time he’d be on his own, unlike his last impromptu visit. Harry had shown up in Cambridge earlier in the year with a fellow sculptor from Corsham in tow, a garrulous Scotsman with child-bearing hips and a face like a bag of spanners. Finn Duggan had taken an instant and very vocal dislike to the university and all associated with it. Leaping to his feet in the Baron of Beef on the first evening, he had challenged all the ‘snotty wee shites’ present to drink him under the table. A mousey astrophysicist from Trinity Hall had duly obliged, plunging Finn Duggan into a deep and dangerous gloom for the remainder of the weekend. Violence had only narrowly been avoided following Harry’s mischievous speculation that the loser’s beers had been spiked with some chemical cooked up in one of the university labs.

      No Finn Duggan this time, thankfully, but Harry required maintenance, supervision even. And Adam had enough on his mind already.

      For a brief while it had all seemed so clear: switching the subject of his thesis from the memorial garden to Villa Docci itself. But that was before he’d stepped through the breach in the yew hedge.

      Even now he couldn’t say just why the place had affected him so much. All he could point to was a vague sensation of having been momentarily transported somewhere else, a parallel world, unquestionably beautiful but also disquieting.

      No doubt the unassuming entrance was intended to produce the effect of stumbling upon a lost Arcadia, but there was something illicit in the act of pushing your way through a hedge that smacked of trespass, each subsequent step in some way forbidden. This sense of intruding was reinforced by the personal nature of what lay beyond the hedge: the touching tribute of a grieving husband to his deceased wife. The other Renaissance gardens Adam had studied in preparation for his trip were far grander stages on which the most high-blown ideas of the age were played out – Man and Nature in uneasy coexistence; Man imposing himself on Nature, moulding Her to his own ends, yet constantly fighting Her hold over him, struggling to rise above his baser instincts to the role ordained for him by God.

      Not that God or any other Christian imagery figured in the elaborate cycles set out by wealthy Romans and Florentines in the grounds of their country estates. The language of the garden was purely pagan, its world a mythical earthly paradise populated with marble gods and demi-gods and other outlandish creatures from Greek and Roman legend, where water gushed from Mount Parnassus, pouring along channels, tumbling over waterfalls, spraying from fountains and trickling down the rough-hewn walls of woodland grottoes.

      The memorial garden at Villa Docci sat firmly within this tradition, and although it couldn’t match its eminent counterparts at Villa di Castello, Villa Gamberaia and Villa Campi for sheer size and grandiosity, it stood out for its human dimension, its purity of purpose, the haunting message of love and loss enshrined in its buildings, inscriptions, and groupings of statues buried away in the woods.

      The hour or so Adam had spent strolling the circuit had intrigued him, unsettled him, whereas the villa itself had simply awed him with its serene perfection. The choice was no longer clear to him. Which of the two should he spend his time on?

      This was the dilemma he’d been struggling with over dinner at the pensione when a bottle of red wine had landed on his table with a thud.

      It was attached by a lean brown arm to a man whom Adam had noticed drinking alone at the bar. He was dark, rangy, handsome in a dishevelled kind of way. He pushed his lank hair out of his eyes.

      ‘Can I?’ he asked, in Italian, not waiting for a reply but dumping himself in the chair opposite. He glanced at the open file beside Adam’s plate. ‘It’s not good,’ he said.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Reading and eating at the same time. The stomach needs blood for digestion. When you read, the brain steals the blood.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘It’s what my father used to say, but he was an idiot, so who knows? I’m Fausto.’

      Adam shook the strong hand offered him. ‘Adam.’

      ‘Can I?’ Fausto helped himself from Adam’s pack, tearing off the filter before lighting the cigarette. ‘You’re English?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I like the English,’ declared Fausto, sitting back in his chair and plucking a stray shred of tobacco from his tongue. ‘London Liverpool Manchester A-stings.’

      ‘A-stings?’

      ‘The Battle of A-stings.’

      ‘Oh, Hastings.’

      ‘A-stings. Exactly,’ said Fausto, not altogether happy about being corrected, although it didn’t stop him filling Adam’s glass from the bottle of red wine he’d arrived with.

      Adam took a sip.

      ‘What do you think?’

      Adam knew the word for ‘drinkable’ in Italian. So presumably ‘undrinkable’ was ‘ non potabile’.

      ‘Excellent,’ he replied.

      Fausto smiled. ‘That’s why I like you English.