A Party In San Niccolo by Kent Christobel

Author:Kent, Christobel [Kent, Christobel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141909028
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

19

Frank and Gina, their heads bent close together over Jane’s huge bunch of keys, were laughing with relief; they had found Il Rondinaio at last, after some difficulty with the chatelaine’s directions and the inauspicious sight of a pair of magpies pecking ravenously at some pulpy, unidentifiable carrion at the entrance to the farmhouse’s avenue of cypresses. Gina stood on the doorstep, in the centre of the house’s massive stone frontage, and gazed down at the view. The neat terraces of the garden led down to some wild fruit trees and tangled shrubs, then below that the hillside dropped away and the vista opened up. She could just see a part of the viaduct, stretching across the valley; it looked almost dainty from this distance, elegantly elongated and austere in design, not the roaring concrete giant that had dwarfed her as she swam below it. Otherwise the black hills seemed quite empty, as Frank had said they were. She turned and entered the house after him.

Il Rondinaio was very dark and cool inside, every window shuttered against the heat, and the floor beneath Gina’s bare feet was rough, soft brick, pitted and pale. She entered what seemed to be a huge kitchen and dining room, at one end a slab of marble fitted with a stone sink, and burners, a griddle built in, even what seemed to be a wood-fired oven beneath a low clay chimney at the far end. The long room had floor-length windows, hung with fine gauzy curtains inside the shutters, a broad oak table at its centre, and on the table a pewter jug filled with branches of bay. The sombre, aromatic, grey-green leaves and berries against the dull gleam of the jug, the silence and the vaulted gloom in which a few dust motes disturbed by their entrance hung suspended in the broad shaft of sunlight that fell through the open door, gave the room a ceremonial, almost religious air, and Gina felt as though she should whisper.

It was strange, Gina thought, if what Frank implied about his private life was true, that Niccolò Manzini should be so committed to austerity in his work. Even his appearance verged on the monastic, although Gina wasn’t entirely convinced by it, still having a residual Protestant mistrust of that kind of theatrical asceticism. Then Frank threw open a shutter at the far end, then the windows themselves, and the great vaulted space was revealed as nothing more spiritually significant than a well-proportioned, handsomely decorated dining room.

All at once wanting to postpone the moment at which she would be left alone, Gina offered Frank some lunch; it was almost one o’clock and she felt ravenous suddenly. Frank went out, and soon returned with a handful of tomatoes from the vegetable garden, and they sat at the table outside and ate them in silence with the bread and hard sheep’s cheese Gina had bought in Siena, and some beer.

‘You’ll be all right on your own? I quite envy you, all this silence, and the pool – have you seen it? Around the back.

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