Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

feels not tired but oddly tough, preserved. An old salt cod, he says to himself, but for some reason what he envisions instead is a burl on a tree. At Santa Radegonda, a vast country house in Gorizia that nowadays exists only in the heads of a few old people, there was in the children’s garden an arbor composed of burled nut trees trained together for centuries. The grotesque, knobby wood, garish with green leaves, inspired hundreds of nursemaids’ tales of hobgoblins. Inside were a rustic table and chairs made of the same arthritic wood. The quick and the dead. A miracle of craft in the garden of a house where such miracles were common—and all of them grist for Allied and German bombs. He seems to see that arbor with something inside flashing white, like Elizabeth’s legs, but then the Tavor takes hold and he sleeps.

2. R

EMEMBERING

E

ASTER

The storm has blown itself out into a brilliant blue morning, and Elizabeth lies in bed below an engraving of a cow-eyed Circassian bride and reads the diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume II, 1920–1924. She imagines Bloomsbury denizens with long faces and droopy, artistic clothes making love with the lighthearted anarchy of Trobriand islanders. Through the window she can hear Edo talking in his surprisingly awful English to the gardener about damage to Cruciferae in the kitchen plot. Rows of broccoli, brussels sprouts, and a rare black Tuscan cabbage have been flattened. The gardener replies in unintelligible Scots, and Elizabeth laughs aloud. She finds it shocking that she can feel so happy when she is not in love.

They met when she was depressed over the terrible, commonplace way things had ended with her married lover from Milan, with all her friends’ warnings coming true one by one like points lighting up on a pinball machine. She had sworn off men—Italians in particular—when a gay friend of hers, Nestor, who spoke Roman dialect but was really some kind of aristocratic mongrel, invited her to Scotland to spend Easter with him and some other friends at the house of a mad old uncle of his. Nestor and the others didn’t show up for their meeting at Gatwick, so Elizabeth bought a pair of Argyle socks at the airport shop and took the flight up to Aberdeen on her own. It didn’t feel like an adventure, more like stepping into a void. After the tawny opulence of Rome, the obstinate cloud cover through which she caught glimpses of tweed-colored parcels of land far below suggested a mournful Protestant thrift even in scenery. She listened to the Northern British accents around her and recalled her mother’s tales of a legendary sadistic Nanny MacGregor. In her head ran a rhyme from childhood:

There was a naughty boy,

And a naughty boy was he

He ran away to Scotland,

Scotland for to see.

Nestor was not in Aberdeen, had left no word, and the mad uncle was disconcerting: white-haired, thin-legged, with the pitiless eyes of an old falcon. He was exquisitely unsurprised about her coming alone, as if it were entirely usual for him to have unknown young women appear for Easter weekend. Jouncing along with her in a green Land Rover, he smoked one violent, unfiltered cigarette after another as she talked to him about Rome, trying to conceal her embarrassment and her anger at Nestor. Air of a near-polar purity and chilliness blew in through the window and calmed her, and she saw in the dusk that the landscape wasn’t bundles of tweed but long, rolling waves of woodland, field, and pasture under a sky bigger than a Colorado sky, a glassy star-pricked dome that didn’t dwarf the two of them but rather conferred on them an almost ceremonial sense of isolation. No other cars appeared on the road. They passed small granite villages and plowed fields full of clods the size of a child’s head, and Elizabeth felt the man beside her studying her without haste, without real curiosity, his cold gaze occasionally leaving the road and passing over her like a beam from a lighthouse.

Edo was wondering whether his young jackass of a nephew had for once done him a favor. But he himself had offered no kindness that merited return, and Nestor was ungenerous, like the rest of Edo’s mother’s family. Perhaps the girl’s arriving like this was a practical joke: he remembered the time in Rome when a half-clothed Cinecittà starlet had appeared on his terrace at dawn, sent by his friends but claiming to have been transported there by group telekinesis during a séance. But Elizabeth’s irritation, barely lacquered with politeness, was genuine, and lent a most profound resonance to her odd entrance. In the half-light he admired the gallant disposition of her features below her short, fair hair, the way she talked in very good Italian, looking severely out of the window, from time to time throwing her neck to one side in her camel-hair collar, like a young officer impatient with uniforms.

“We’re on my land now,” he said after forty minutes, and she observed ridges of pleated dark forest and a jumble of blond hills. Down a slope behind a wall of elms was the house—a former grange, two hundred years old, long and low, with wings built on around a courtyard. With windows set deeply below an over-hanging slate roof, it looked defensive and determined to endure; on each wing, black support beams of crudely lapped pine gave it the air of an archaic fortification. When Edo opened the Land Rover’s door for her and she stepped out onto the gravel, the air struck her lungs with a raw freshness that was almost painful.

“Why do you live here?” Elizabeth had changed from jeans into a soft, rust-colored wool dress that she wore to the bank on days when she felt accommodating and merciful. She stood in front of the fire with one of the red Venetian goblets in her hand, feeling the airiness of the crystal, balancing it like a dandelion