After Hannibal by Barry Unsworth Page B

bookshelves. There was enough space for them both to have a separate studio and they had already planned the way they would arrange these and the things they would have there.
    Later they went out to admire their three rows of vines below the house. The plants had not been pruned while the house stood empty and it was too late in the year to cut them now. They had trailing outgrowths, low to the ground, and thin unproductive shoots growing vertically upward—it would be a poor crop this year. But Mr. Green had bought a book on viticulture—in Italian, so he could improve his knowledge of the language and learn about cultivating vines at the same time. These slopes above Lake Trasimeno produced light, agreeable wines and Mr. Green was keen to go into things properly and make his own wine and keep his own cellar.
    They stood there for quite some time, admiring the small gushes of new leaf that were breaking out all along the length of the vines. Miraculous to see the stems, bare and dead-seeming for so long, begin to produce these fountains of green, the pinkish rosettes of the buds opening from day to day and spreading outward from the heart in bursts of leaf, as if there were some inexhaustible source of life and renewal in the brown, fibrous trunks.
    “Nothing could look newer than these leaves, could it?” Mrs. Green reached out and touched gently the soft, slightly spongy leaves.
    The light was fading now and it grew cooler. A nightingale began to sing from somewhere not far away. They listened to thefirst tuning notes, the sudden loud release of song. Another bird joined in, then another. Any lingering anxiety the Greens might have felt was dissolved in that lyrical nightfall. As they turned to go back indoors they felt quite certain that they had done the right thing to come here and buy this house.

    The following day the Chapmans had two visits, about an hour apart. The first was from Bruno, the Checchetti son-in-law, who had been dispatched with an ultimatum. His round face fixed in its faint, mindless, embarrassed-seeming smile, he delivered his message in the manner of one repeating a lesson—Cecilia felt sure he had been schooled in it. His wife had learned, he said, through her important contacts in the town hall, that the minimum legal width of a neighborhood road was two meters. At present, throughout the kilometer or so of its length, it was two meters and a half wide. It was slightly less than this below the Checchetti wall because of the rubble along the edge. But not much less, Bruno said. The Chapmans had a week in which to reconsider their position. If at the end of that time they had not paid over in cash, without any interference from a lawyer, the million lire they had promised toward the building of the new wall, they, the Checchetti, would put stakes in the road outside their house at an exact distance of two meters. This would still allow the passage of a car; but vans and lorries would not be able to get through.
    There was not much point, both the Chapmans saw, in expostulating with Bruno. He was merely doing what he had been told todo. “We will not give in to blackmail,” Harold Chapman said, and heard with habitual impatience his firm tones transmuted to the gentle, wavering ones of his wife, which seemed to thin out in the air and drift away. Cecilia was doing her best, he knew, but she did not sound like a woman who would not give in to blackmail.
    “We must be firm with these people,” he said as they sat together afterward over coffee in the kitchen. “We are coming to a crucial point in this business; it is fatal to show weakness.”
    Without quite knowing how she had offended, Cecilia knew that this was an indirect reproach to her. She knew too that any attempt to answer directly, even if in firm agreement, was liable to make him crosser. “I wonder who Signora Checchetti’s important contacts in the town hall are,” she said. “It is difficult to imagine that a woman like