The Garden of the Villa Mollini Page 5

  On the wedding night, Clara Buig was very restless. The baby inside her, little Pietro, as Mollini called him, kept kicking her and her head seemed to be full of strange visions and fears.

  The dawn was icy cold, but as soon as the sky was light, Clara got up and dressed herself and went out into the garden. She didn’t wake Mollini. He lay snoring on his back with his legs apart.

  She walked towards the Villa Mollini itself, which seemed to beckon her. On the way, she came across an old stone well with delicate arching ironwork that she’d never noticed before. I expect it’s just ornamental, she thought, like everything else in this garden. But she was curious about it, so she walked to the edge of it and peered in. Much to her surprise, she found that she was looking down into darkness.

  Strawberry Jam

  WHEN I WAS fourteen, in 1957, my mother died. We buried her in the village graveyard and I wore new black shoes with high heels at her funeral. Sudden loss and the pinch of fashionable shoes were then and ever afterwards connected in my mind. I still feel my own mortality most acutely in my feet.

  It was winter. My father studied recipes for hot puddings. ‘Staying alive means keeping warm,’ he said. Suet and sponge were it, our existence. Yet I was growing, getting tall and thin, and these limbs of mine were as cold as marble. I put the high-heeled shoes away, wrapped up in tissue paper. When I remembered my mother, I thought about my own vanity and wondered when my life would begin. Passion, I believed, might warm me up. Folded inside one of my bedsocks was a photograph of Alan Ladd.

  As the spring came and the evenings got lighter, I spent a lot of time looking out of my window, as if trying to see in the familiar landscape of our neighbours’ garden the arrival of the future. This garden, separated from ours by only a picket fence, was never ever dug, pruned or tended in any way and in summer puffs of seed streamed off into the wind from its thistles and willow-herb and tall grasses, sowing themselves in our lawn and in my mother’s rockery. She had been a polite and timid person. Only once had she plucked up her courage and knocked on our neighbours’ back door and announced with great grief in her voice: ‘Your weeds are making my task very difficult, Mr Zimmerli.’ Walter Zimmerli had come out and stared at his wilderness, sizing it up like a man at a heifer auction.

  ‘The weeds?’

  ‘Yes. They re-seed themselves all over the place.’

  ‘And the solution?’

  ‘Well, if you could root them out . . .’

  ‘But look how splendid is the pink colour!’

  ‘I know . . .’

  ‘We like this: nature not disturbed. This is important to Jani, I’m afraid.’

  The only trees in the Zimmerlis’ garden were fruit trees: an old and graceful Victoria Plum, a crab apple and some lichen-covered Bramleys. Every Christmas, Walter Zimmerli set up a ladder and gathered the mistletoe that sprouted near the tops of the Bramleys. In summer, out came the ladder again and the crab apples and plums were picked, but most of the Bramleys left to the wasps and the autumn gales. We didn’t know why at first, till Jani Zimmerli came round with ajar of crab apple jelly for us. My mother tried to thank her. ‘It is not thanks,’ said Jani, ‘Walter and I, we love jam.’

  So in April I watched the blossom creeping out on the Zimmerlis’ trees and spots creeping out on my face. The sweet puddings streamed in my blood. My father began to learn the recipes by heart.

  Then, Mrs Lund arrived.

  I saw her first from my window. Walter and Jani Zimmerli came out into their orchard. It was dusk. Mrs Lund followed them like a little shadow. The three stood together quietly and stared at the trees. Mrs Lund set down the suitcase she was carrying and Walter turned to her and said something in German. Mrs Lund nodded and Jani nodded and then they picked up the suitcase and went back inside the house. At supper, I told my father: ‘The Zimmerlis have got a friend staying.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I saw her. She’s quite old.’

  My father put down his knife and fork on a plate of dumplings and gravy he couldn’t eat. ‘I suppose you’ll be keeping watch,’ he said.

  Watching the Zimmerlis had been an occupation of mine since the first summer of their arrival, but I used to watch the front of their house – from a window seat in our sitting room. I would wrap my face in the lace curtains and stare out at them. ‘Holly!’ my mother would snap. ‘Leave them alone!’ But I couldn’t leave them alone because I was fascinated by what they were doing. Outside their door, on the grass verge, they’d set up a table, shaded on hot days by a large faded umbrella, and here they sat – sometimes both of them, sometimes Jani alone – hour after hour, waiting for people to pass. They were trying to sell jam. The jam was delicious – we were among the few who knew this – and Jani had made pretty gingham covers for the array of pots. But two things struck me as strange. First of all, our houses are on a narrow, out-of-the-way road down which almost no one travels, so that Jani and Walter could sit at their little stall for an entire afternoon without selling one single jar of jam. Secondly, whenever a car did stop, the Zimmerlis never seemed to be content with the small commercial transaction, but began to treat the customers like old friends, talking and laughing and invariably trying to persuade them to go into their house for a glass of sherry.

  My mother didn’t approve of my spying on the Zimmerlis. When I told her they invited strangers in, she didn’t believe me. ‘The Zimmerlis wouldn’t do that,’ she said, ‘they keep themselves to themselves.’ She died disbelieving me. She’d never heard them pleading with strangers, ‘Just to keep a little company,’ but I had. And I also knew something else: the jam customers were the only people who ever went into that house. No real friends ever arrived. We, their closest neighbours, were never invited past the kitchen door. They gave us jam. They said good evening from their perch up the ladders. But that was all. No car except theirs ever stood in the drive. Even at Christmas their house was silent and the door closed. No light ever went on in the guest room. It was as if they had no past and courted no future, only this fleeting present – a few coins in the money tin and the company of strangers.

  Now, this elderly woman had arrived. For the first time ever, a light went on in the Zimmerlis’ spare room and I saw Jani at the window, drawing the curtains. I imagined this shadowy person, covered with the fat Austrian feather quilt, her possessions folded and put away. I imagined Jani and Walter next door to her, talking in whispers.

  And then I learned her name. I was in our garden, putting new alpines in my mother’s rockery. I looked up and saw someone standing at the picket fence and it was her. I smiled.

  ‘Very good weather,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. The winter’s over, probably.’

  ‘I think you must be Holly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well. Jani and Walter have spoken of you.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I stood up. I thought about my face wrapped in the lace curtains, a gross, gawping bride. Since my mother’s death, I suffered very often from shame.

  ‘My name is Mrs Lund,’ said the woman.

  ‘How do you do?’ I said.

  The weather people told us a hot summer was coming. The weeds in the Zimmerlis’ patch were growing green again through last year’s fallen mass. I waited for the Zimmerlis to set up the jam stall, but it didn’t appear. They had company now, they had Mrs Lund. I imagined them drinking sherry with her and talking about Viennese teashops full of delicate confectionery – apricot tartlets, apple flan, damson shortcake. She was their past, come to sweeten them, and for a time I envied them, because I knew my own past – our warm, comfortable life with my mother – could only come back as a cold memory. But after a few weeks of Mrs Lund’s visit, I began to notice a change in the Zimmerlis: they were losing weight.

  I had never known how old they were. Walter seemed older (fatter, with wilder greying hair) than my father, who was forty-three, and Jani seemed younger (more buxom, d
impled and healthy) than my mother, who had been forty-one. Certainly, I’d always thought of them as large, not bony and big as I was, but wide and squashy as only people nearing middle age become. But now they seemed reduced. Walter’s belly was smaller; Jani’s arms, hanging up her napkins and her tablecloths, were thinner. Even Walter’s laugh, not often heard these days, seemed altered, no longer the laugh of a heavy man.

  The diminution of the Zimmerlis struck me as odd. Then, one night very late (I’d taken Alan Ladd out of my bedsock and was smoothing him out on my dressing table) I heard Jani weeping. I turned my light off and went to the window. Jani was sitting on her terrace and her face was buried in her lap. After a while, Walter came out and knelt down beside her and leant his head against her shoulder. He spoke to her very softly and this was the first time that I ever thought of the German language as a comforting thing. But I also had a strong feeling – confirmed by my own sleeplessness – that something important was about to happen. And it did happen. That same night, Mrs Lund disappeared.

  I woke very late the next morning. It was Saturday. An unfamiliar chock, chock sound had woken me. When I looked out, I saw what it was: Walter Zimmerli was digging his garden! I called my father and we watched him together. A large patch of weeds had already been cleared and Walter’s back was soaked with sweat. He worked on without stopping, thrusting the spade into the earth, levering with his foot, smashing the clods as he turned them over.

  ‘Why?’ I whispered.

  ‘’Bout time, anyway,’ said my father.

  ‘Yes, but why? Why now?’

  ‘Dunno, Holly. People are often a mystery. You’ll find that out.’

  My father went downstairs as I stayed at the window. Then my father returned with hot muffins and milky coffee on a tray. He said I needed spoiling. Grief, he said, is very tiring. He made me get back into bed to eat the breakfast. Then I dozed. I was tired. And I had a dream that Walter Zimmerli had killed Mrs Lund, smashed her on the back of the neck with a marble rolling pin, and buried her in the garden. That was why – yes, of course, that was why – Jani had wept. They had murdered Mrs Lund.

  Then it was mid-day and I was at the window again. On and on Walter worked, with the spring sunshine hot on his neck. Nearly half of his garden had been cleared when I heard Jani call him in. He left his spade sticking into the earth.

  His subterfuge isn’t bad, I thought. If he’d cleared only a very small patch, a patch only three or four times larger, say, than the spot where Mrs Lund is buried, this might have appeared odd. As it is, he pretends he’s weeding his whole garden, getting rid of the willow-herb at last, answering his neighbours’ complaints. But he hasn’t fooled me! I saw Mrs Lund die in my dream. I saw Walter go out and begin to dig in the dead of morning. I saw Jani trying to help him, pulling with all her might at the grasses. Then I saw them go inside and wrap Mrs Lund’s body in a faded rug and stagger out, one holding her shoulders, one her feet, and lay her in a shallow trough that was only just deep enough to hide her. They smashed her in. Hurriedly, Walter piled the earth on top of her and began – even though he was tired by this time and aching with fear – to turn the soil around and beyond the grave. And this is when I began to hear it, the chock, chock of his terrible digging . . .

  I don’t remember what we did that weekend. I know my father took me out somewhere, to see my cousins perhaps, who lived in a big house by a river. All I know is that Walter Zimmerli worked on and on, almost without pausing until, by dusk on Sunday, no trace of the grass or thistle or willow-herb remained and the earth was raked flat like a seed bed and in the twilight Jani made a bonfire of the weeds and I heard the Zimmerlis laughing.

  During the next week, they began to plant. On their back porch were piles of wooden boxes stacked up. Each box contained twenty or thirty straggly plants and they set them in rows measured out with string about three feet apart. And I knew what they were: they were strawberries. I wanted to say to my father, ‘They’re planting strawberries on Mrs Lund!’ But I didn’t. I just stood on our side of the picket fence and stared at the Zimmerlis crouched down and at Jani’s skirt in the mud, and then I offered to help. They stood up and smiled at me. ‘Ah,’ said Walter, ‘very fortunate, eh Jani? Holly can be in charge of the straw.’

  As I worked, moving down the lines very slowly with the sacks of straw, I tried to test the feel of the earth under my boots. I knew where the body was – roughly – but the soil in the right hand corner of the garden was as flat and even as the rest. They did a good job, I thought. No one will ever know. Except me. Unless, of course, someone comes over from Vienna and they start to search. And I imagined how it would be then: they would find traces of Mrs Lund’s visit in the house – tweed skirts, shoes of Swiss leather, a tortoiseshell hairbrush bundled out of sight in a wardrobe – and then of course they would begin to dig . . .

  We finished planting the strawberries the following weekend. My father said I looked pink from all the fresh air and work, and I did find that my skinny hands and feet had been warmed up. Alan Ladd in my bedsock felt snug. And then the strangest, most unexpected thing happened: Walter Zimmerli gave me a key to his house. ‘We have to go away, Holly,’ he said. ‘We have to go back to Vienna to sort out some papers and things and we would be so grateful if you might water our many house plants.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jani, ‘we would be grateful. But we ask you not to touch anything, any precious things, and let no one else come in. We trust you to be this little caretaker.’

  I looked at the Zimmerlis: two solemn faces; two bodies, once weighty, growing thin with anxiety and guilt. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’d be happy to take care of your plants. And if the weather’s very dry, I’ll put our sprinkler on the strawberries.’

  It was May. For my birthday, my father bought me a blue and white polka-dot skirt and a white webbing belt. He said I was getting to look like Debbie Reynolds. ‘My hair’s thin,’ I said, ‘perhaps it’s our diet.’ So he started to learn a new set of recipes, casseroles and hotpots and fruit fools, and we began to flourish.

  Crime detection, wrote the Chief Constable of the Suffolk Police in our church news sheet, requires faith, hope, intelligence and also physical courage. I cut these words out and hid them in a shell box my mother had given me. The Zimmerlis left very early one morning and all the blinds and shutters in the house were closed.

  ‘I have a feeling,’ I said to my father, ‘that they’ll never come back.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said dreamily, ‘I have these peculiar thoughts.’

  I made myself wait one week before going into the Zimmerlis’ house. I ate well and went for long rides on my bicycle to make myself strong. Then I chose a Sunday morning. My father had gone to the pub. I took a watering-can and the door key and a wire coat-hanger. When I opened the Zimmerlis’ back door, all I could see was darkness.

  I was looking for two things: the murder weapon and the locked wardrobe. I flicked a light switch in the hall, but no light came on. The electricity had been turned off. I made my way in the dark to the kitchen. I set down the watering-can. Slowly, I tipped the slats of the Venetian blinds and sunlight fell in stripes onto the scrubbed table and an ornate dresser painted red and green. I opened every drawer and found all kinds of utensil – whisks and strainers, graters and slicers and scoops – but no rolling pin. The murder weapon, said the voice of the Chief Constable, is seldom easily found. However, it is sometimes possible to infer guilt precisely from the absence of the instrument of death from its accustomed place.

  I stood and looked at the room where Jani Zimmerli had made her cauldrons of jam. Was it possible that this Austrian woman with her sweet tooth never made pastry? Never made flans or strudel or pies? I didn’t think so. I imagined Walter and Jani – at least until they began to get thin – living on this kind of food, and yet nowhere in the kitchen could I find a rolling pin.

  There were some fleshy plants on the window sill. I ran
water into my can and doused them, pondering what to do next. No doubt my search for the rolling pin was futile. It lay, I imagined, in the mud of the river that flowed past my cousins’ house. When the summer holidays came, I would announce a diving competition. Meanwhile, I had to find the locked wardrobe.

  I made my way upstairs, carrying the wire hanger. I knew which side of the house the guest room was on, but I decided, first, to go into the Zimmerlis’ own bedroom. Drawing the heavy curtains, I noticed that the room had a strange smell. The odour in this one room was warm and spicy, as if Jani and Walter had been in it only moments before. I looked at the bed, covered with a heavy, intricate patchwork quilt and at Jani’s little dressing-table mirror draped with scarves and amber beads and a sudden, unexpected feeling of sadness came to me. It was obvious – so obvious! – that Jani and Walter had been happy here, in this room, in this house, but now, because of what they had done, their happiness was over and they would never be able to come back here. Change had come. To them. To me. Mrs Lund lay under the strawberries; my mother lay under the churchyard turf. One part of my life was gone.

  I sat down on the Zimmerlis’ bed. I didn’t cry. I made myself think about Alan Ladd and French kissing and the future. I promised myself I would take my black high heels out of the tissue paper and try them on.

  I got up and smoothed the quilt and walked, upright and purposeful, to the room where Mrs Lund had slept. I lifted the blind and looked around. There were two beds in the room, both narrow. Between them was an old washstand with a flowery jug and bowl. On the wood floor was a faded rug resembling almost perfectly the rug I’d seen in my dream. In the corner of the room, behind the door, was a mahogany wardrobe. This was so exactly like the wardrobe I’d imagined (mirror glass on the front, ornate classical carvings along the top) that I caught my breath and now hardly dared to move towards it. I looked down at the wire coat-hanger in my hand. In stories, people opened doors with coat-hangers, but would I be able to do it? I stepped forward. Only then did I notice that the key of the wardrobe was there in the lock.