After Hannibal

  He had made a point of waving acknowledgment because it was a part of his policy of Britishness. Italians did not go in so much for this courteous stuff. The gestures they made at the wheel were nearly always expressive of contempt, or impatience shading into fury. Blemish felt that standards should be kept up. We are all fellow travelers along life’s highway, he was fond of saying. Once an Italian stepped into his car, he shed all sense of common humanity, he acknowledged no limits. Individualistic, some might call it—Blemish called it anarchic and antisocial. So he smiled and nodded and waved quite elaborately at any smallest concession and made a point of stopping to allow cars to come out of side roads or pedestrians to get across the streets, while his fellow drivers jostled dangerously to take advantage of such weakness, and those trapped behind, furious at having to wait, shouted that he was a shit of loose consistency.

  Abuse Blemish did not mind if he felt in the right. He was whistling lightly between his teeth as he drove on. It was a fine morning, and the Greens were an excellent prospect. He felt cheerful as he negotiated the scattered stones and pieces of masonry that lay partly across the road at this point—it looked as if the wall had collapsed. These neighborhood roads were a disgrace anyway, even without walls collapsing on them. Unthinkable in Britain, of course.

  However, with a swing entirely characteristic in its suddenness, he was swept now by feelings of violent antipathy for the country of his birth, polluted offshore island, riddled with snobbery and kinky tories, who would want to live there? Not me, Blemish told the landscape. He would never go back. He had been unfairly dismissed from his post in the Public Works Department of Lambeth Borough Council. Lucky to escape prosecution, they had said. What kind of language was that? They were bloody lucky he had escaped prosecution; he could have told a few stories, by God, yes. And they knew it. Anyway, nothing wrong with taking gifts, it was sound business practice. Gifts, commissions, rake-offs, they were what made the world go round. Life was a pattern of giving, receiving, giving again. Like the Three Graces. No good saying that to the Lambeth Public Works Department, of course—no play of mind there whatever, no culture worthy of the name.

  A road like this was in itself a gift for some people, he thought: the people who might come from time to time to level it off, build up the verges, lay some gravel down. All work done by private agreement; they could charge what they liked, especially where foreigners were concerned. His own house was six miles away, on the western side of Lake Trasimeno, a vast ruinous palazzo in need of extensive restoration, with twenty-three rooms, most of them presently uninhabitable except for insects and small mammals. He and the companion of his life Mildred were striving under difficult circumstances to have the place restored to its former splendor. At least there was a good road to it, well packed down with stone, easily passable in all weather.

  He thought of Milly now. She would be in their little green-house probably, or in the kitchen garden. She had said she was going to plant out the seedlings of marjoram and hyssop, her medieval herbs as she jokingly called them—it was their dearest wish, his and Milly’s, to convert the whole ground floor of their house into a medieval restaurant with a medieval kitchen adjoining. He could picture her as she went about her tasks, slow of movement, ample of form. An earth mother, he thought, that’s what you are. To coin a phrase.

  The Greens’ house was well above the road, at the end of a rocky driveway. Some way beyond, Blemish saw the roof of another house. Newly laid tiles, he noticed. He had heard that an English couple named Chapman had bought it. Foreigners buying houses all over Umbria now, excellent for business.

  The track went round in a curve, climbed fairly steeply for a few yards, leveled off as it neared the house. Both the Greens, having heard him approach, appeared at the top of the external steps that went from ground level to the upper floor—the ground floor was not yet fit for habitation, having long been used, as customary with Umbrian farmhouses, for keeping pigs and cows in. As he opened the car door, Blemish looked up and saw the couple standing side by side, both silver-haired, both the same height, both wearing smiles that seemed closely similar, slightly peering and bemused. There was a symmetrical, emblematic, fairy-tale quality about this, as if the Greens were waiting for the disguised benefactor who would recognize their worth and grant them a wish. Blemish was not a benefactor but he was superstitious in his way and he sensed in that moment that the occasion was auspicious.

  He unwound his long-legged frame from the Vauxhall, called up a cheery good morning and took the steps at a fast pace. Shaking hands at the top, the couple were full of apologies for the state of chaos within. Tall and narrow-shouldered and long-necked, Blemish towered above them, blinked soft brown eyes, murmured quite so, quite so, only to be expected.

  The interior was indeed cluttered. The Greens had left their furniture in storage in Michigan and were making do for the time being with the bits and pieces left by the previous owners. But their clothes and books and smaller possessions were still half in and half out of the various packing cases they had arrived in. They were like elderly castaways, beached up here. There were extensive stains of damp on the walls. “The water is getting in from somewhere,” Mrs. Green said.

  They offered him coffee but Blemish explained that he had a hernia and coffee was not good for it. This was quite untrue but Blemish often had an impulse to falsehood, and especially with prospective clients. A successful lie put you ahead psychologically, gave you the moral ascendancy you needed, right from the word go. It belonged to the same order as the briefcase he carried, the tweed jacket, the neat collar and tie.

  Herb tea then. They had bought some orange blossom tea, Mrs. Green said. They had got it at a wonderful little shop in Perugia, in the Via dei Priori. It was a shop that had just about every kind of dried flower and herb that a body could possibly imagine. “The scents from it just kind of wash over the street,” Mrs. Green said. “You don’t find shops like that back home.”

  “This is back home now, honey.” Mr. Green went to a carton of groceries still lying on the floor, took a jar and unscrewed the top. “Just you smell this.” He held out the jar. He had very bright blue eyes, wide and undefended now in the pleasure of imparting something to their visitor. Mrs. Green was smiling in full approval.

  Blemish declined his long neck and sniffed. “Wonderful.” He experienced a deep, malignant throb of hostility toward these people. They were condescending to him, treating him as a hireling, someone who could be subjected to random odors on a whim. A professional man like himself. Well, he thought, he who laughs last … “A real scent of the south, that is,” he said.

  While the tea was being made and while it was being drunk the Greens explained their situation. They were in quite a mess with the house, it seemed. “We got to know about you quite by chance,” Mrs. Green said. “A friend of our daughter’s, who is teaching in London, saw your advertisement in the Sunday Times, where you offer expert advice to people who have bought houses in Umbria and want to have them put to rights.”

  Blemish nodded. He had registered the fact that the Greens had friends, family, possible support. But it was distant; it did not seem likely that they had close connections in Italy. “Yes,” he said, “we undertake the management of the whole project from the moment of purchase.”

  “We got off to a bad start,” Mr. Green said. They had made the cardinal mistake of trying to get the work done while they were still living in Michigan, attempting to communicate by phone and fax, and making occasional visits.

  “We were spending a whole lot of money and getting nowhere,” Mrs. Green said. “People made promises but nothing happened.”

  Blemish sighed and shook his head. “Yours is a story we hear frequently. In this country they tell you what they think you would like to hear. That is their way, you know. That is the Mediterranean temperament. One of the most important aspects of our work here is mediating between different cultures, bridging the gap.”

  “We could nev
er find out the true situation,” Mr. Green said. He looked at Blemish and smiled. His face was fine-drawn and the smile came slowly but it was as guileless in its way as the eyes. “We were beginning to lose trust in folks and that is one mistake we don’t want to start making at our time of life.”

  Unable to see any meaning in this last remark, Blemish blinked softly and waited. He had a slow, strangely voluptuous way of lowering his eyelids when he wanted to show sympathy.

  “We always thought of coming to live in Umbria when we retired,” Mrs. Green said. “We came here for vacations when we could afford it and sort of looked around. Our daughter wanted us to go to Florida but we always loved Italian art and history, especially the early Renaissance.”

  “And the landscape and the light,” Mr. Green said. “The whole deal.”

  “All that too.” Mrs. Green smiled at Blemish. “That is the setting, isn’t it? I mean it can’t be separated. This is where those wonderful artists lived.”

  “Well of course,” Blemish said; “it makes the property more desirable, without the shadow of a doubt.”

  Mr. Green widened his eyes with a sort of gleeful solemnity. “We came to Italy for our honeymoon, you know.” He pointed at the wall behind Blemish. “We bought that print in Florence forty years ago,” he said. “At the Uffizi Gallery.”

  Turning, Blemish saw a picture of a nearly naked, long-haired man standing in a stream and another pouring something over his head out of a sort of metal cup. A white bird hovered above with outstretched wings and there were two blue-gowned kneeling figures at the side. “A highly professional piece of work, that is,” he said. “Yes, very striking.”

  “First thing we did when we came to live in this house was to put it up on the wall. Andrea del Verrocchio. One of the greatest painters of all time. We saw the original all those years ago when we were just married and we never got to see it again.”

  “We are saving it up,” Mrs. Green said. “We are saving it till the house is finished. When everything is done and we are really settled in we are going to make a trip to Florence and stand in front of that picture.”

  “We were both art teachers, you know.” Mr. Green smiled at his wife with open affection. “We met at art school. Lucky day for me.”

  “A fair number of our clients have artistic leanings,” Blemish said, “especially in the Trasimeno area.”

  “We took the plunge, sold up and came over here. It seems to be the only way to get things done. Then the architect kept revising the estimate—it doubled in the course of a single month. We have got rid of her now.”

  They would have had to pay a tidy sum for that too. Blemish felt a pang at the thought of this wasted money. “You don’t need an architect at all,” he said. “All they know is how to draw up plans.”

  The Greens talked on and Blemish listened carefully. These two old people were very confiding—he had no need really to ask many questions. They told him they had sold their house in Michigan. They told him what the architect’s original estimate had been, how alarmed they had felt when it had jumped up and jumped up again. They told him the point at which they had realized that they could not continue with the architect, as the estimate had reached a level beyond their resources. By the end of the recital Blemish knew within a few thousand dollars what the Greens were ready and able to spend on the conversion of their Italian house. In other words, and as he put it familiarly to himself, he knew what was in the kitty.

  “No, a surveyor is enough,” he said. “What they call a geometra here. A geometra will know far more about the practical side of things than an architect. We employ a geometra who is quite outstanding. There was a case like yours only a couple of months ago. Their geometra kept on taking measurements and asking for more money. No building work was done. In despair they turned to us. We sent our geometra in. As simple as that. If you went to visit those people now you would find them happy and smiling in a tastefully refurbished dwelling.”

  “What exactly would you do for us?” Mr. Green asked.

  “Engage a good and experienced builder. Get him to cost everything and make a proper estimate. Oversee the work, make sure things were done properly and that your wishes were made known to the builder—we speak good Italian.” This at least was true. Blemish had understood very early the advantage of knowing more Italian than his clients. He had embarked on an intensive course while still under investigation at the Lambeth Public Works Department. “In short,” he said, “we would carry the project through to its conclusion.”

  “And your charges?”

  “Forty thousand lire an hour, plus expenses—things like phone calls and petrol.”

  “Let’s see now,” Mr. Green said. “That is about twenty-four dollars, isn’t it? Well, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. How soon could your builder be ready to start if we decided to go ahead?”

  “We are rather busy just at present.” It didn’t do to seem too eager, Blemish knew. In his way he was a student of business dealings. And when you come right down to it, he was fond of saying, what other dealings are there? The key to the whole thing was to let the others make the running. The Greens must be made to feel that he was doing them a favor, saving them from disaster. “The builders we work with and trust are all committed at this moment in time,” he said. “There is no way I would engage a builder I knew nothing about. We work to a very high standard of service.”

  “Well, we want to get things moving.” Mr. Green glanced around the room. “Things aren’t too comfortable here at present.”

  Blemish rose. “You will need to think it over,” he said. “It never does to take decisions too hastily. Patti chiari, amicizia lunga, as the Italians say—clear agreements, long friendship. You have the phone number. Remember,” he called up as he inserted himself into the car, “siamo sempre qua, we are always here.”

  Standing side by side at the top of the steps, the Greens watched him drive away. In the silence following the car’s departure they heard the faint drone of a lawn mower somewhere high up behind them. They remained there for some time looking at the curving line of the road and the steeply rising terraces beyond. There were remnants of mist in the air, fluffing the lines of the hills, softening the edges of everything. The fig trees below the house were naked still, their pointed shoots dark silver in the sunshine.

  After some moments of silence the Greens turned and smiled at each other, sure of each other’s feelings, sure that their pleasure in the peace and the beauty of the place was shared. Throughout the forty years of their marriage they had always had this communion of feeling, always been completely happy in each other’s presence. Mrs. Green’s eyes were bright. “We are looking at the hills that Perugino and Piero della Francesca looked at,” she said.

  Later they went out together and stood looking up at the house, the ancient broken tiles of the roof, through which the rain came in, the walls where the packing of clay between the stones had crumbled away, the darkness and dankness of the ground floor, where for most of the century farm animals had been kept. There was a lot that needed doing to the house but the form of it was beautiful. It sat there, long and low, dressed in the time-warmed colors of its stone, the outside staircase with its broad terra-cotta steps leading up to the colonnaded porch. It would be a beautiful house when it was finished—this was something the Greens told each other often.

  “This Blemish seems a smart young fellow,” Mr. Green said. “Doesn’t know a whole lot about painting.”

  “Perhaps he can do something for us.” Mrs. Green took her husband’s arm and they began to walk back to the house. “Perhaps this is the turning point.”

  “Twenty-four dollars is not so much and we can discontinue with him anytime we like—he is not asking for anything in writing.”

  “He seemed straightforward enough,” Mrs. Green said.

  “Funny way with his eyes sometimes,” Mr. Green said. “Kind of sleepy. Why do you think he kept referring to himself as ‘we’?”

&nb
sp; Later that morning a wind sprang up and it began to feel colder. Harold and Cecilia Chapman walked the half mile or so to the Checchetti house and inspected the collapsed wall. No attempt had yet been made to clear away the rubble that lay along the edge of the road below the house. The width of the road was considerably reduced, Harold noticed; there was room enough for a car to pass and probably a van or medium-sized truck, but nothing any bigger. That faint whisper of alarm sounded again. This was the only way out to the village by car; the road did not proceed beyond the German’s place, petering out in vineyards and deeply rutted tracks unfit for motor vehicles of almost any sort. Anyone who wanted to get onto the road leading to the village and the greater world beyond had to go this way.

  “Just as I thought,” he said. “This wall had no foundations whatever. It looks to me as if they laid the blocks down flat, with hardly any digging at all.”

  At this point they were joined by the Checchetti, father and daughter, who converged on them from different directions. Of the husband there was nothing to be seen. The two approached rapidly and in complete silence. Then, while still some yards away, they came to a halt and fell to regarding the strewn debris of their wall. This muteness, which had seemed strange at first, Cecilia now recognized as a powerful dramatic device: the Checchetti were hoping that the sight of the wall with themselves standing by it as tragic witnesses would plead their case more powerfully than words.

  “Tell them,” Harold said, “what they know full well already, that their precious wall had no foundation, they built it on the cheap and this heavy rain has brought it down.”

  While Cecilia was still struggling to convey her husband’s meaning more gently and tactfully, the father retreated to a distance of some dozen yards and began shouting loudly.