The Savage Garden by Mark Mills Page A

north wing, big, with its own bathroom. It's yours if you want it."
        He wasn't sure if he'd heard right.
        "It's an invitation."
        "To stay?"
        "Not forever," she said with a small smile. "Think on it. You don't have to decide now. And I won't be offended if you say no."
        "Thank you."
        "It will save you money."
        "It's not my money, it's the faculty's."
        "That doesn't mean you can't spend it on something else. Crispin doesn't need to know. And if he did, he'd hardly ask for it back. Am I wrong?" "No."
        "So?"
        It wasn't the money. Something else altogether accounted for his hesitation.
        "My brother's coming to stay."
        "You never mentioned you had a brother."
        "I try not to think about it too much."
        Signora Docci smiled. "When is he arriving?"
        "That's not the kind of question you ask Harry."
        "And what does Harry do?"
        "He's a sculptor."
        "A sculptor?" She sounded intrigued.
        "Of sorts. He's very modern—lots of welded steel dragged off scrap heaps."
        "Is he presentable?"
        "That's not a word I've ever associated with him."
        Signora Docci laughed. "Well, there's another room for Harry if he wants it. You decide. It doesn't matter to me either way."
        But it did, he could see that; he could see an elderly woman about to be displaced from her home and extending an invitation of hospitality, possibly her last. What settled it for him, though, was the chance it offered to see more of Antonella. If their paths hadn't crossed in the past few days, it was only because he was always long gone, back at the
pensione
in San Casciano by the time she showed up to visit her grandmother in the evening.
     

        SIGNORA FANELLI WAS A LITTLE PUT OUT TO HEAR THAT Adam would be leaving, less so when he offered to cover the cost of the room for a full week.
        "When will you go?"
        "Not tomorrow, but the day after that day." He made a mental note to look up the Italian for "the day after tomorrow."
        Signora Fanelli was busying herself in the trattoria, polishing glasses in readiness for the evening trade. The front of her dress was cut lower than usual, and a gold cross dangled alluringly at her cleavage. He hadn't registered it before, but there was something of Flora in her high collarbones.
        "The Signora really invited you to stay?"
        "Yes."
        "Strange."
        "Why?"
        "She's very private."
        "She doesn't seem very private." "She wasn't. Before. She was very . . . vivacious."
        "What happened?"
        She looked up with her large dark eyes. "The murder, of course."
        "You mean Emilio?"
        "A bad thing." She crossed herself with the barest of movements, drawing his eyes once more to her low neckline.
        The family had never really recovered from the death of Emilio, she went on, although Signora Docci's husband, Benedetto, had taken it worse than she had. He faded from view. He was rarely seen out and about, not even at harvest time when the grapes and the olives were picked and pressed. Then suddenly he was dead, of a heart attack. In her opinion, those Germans might just as well have shot him too, because he was dying from the moment they killed his eldest boy.
        "What happened to them—the Germans?"
        "Killed, both of them, in the battle of Florence."
        "Justice."
        "You think so? Two lives for one? Ten, maybe . . . fifty ... a hundred of their lives. To kill him like that, a man who had welcomed them into his own home."
        The memory still angered her. It was a physical thing, shocking to an English eye.
        She swept a stray strand of hair out of her face. "They changed this place. It's not the same. Everyone knows what happened here, and we still feel it. What they did in a moment, we live with forever."

        Later, when he had