The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

of a rarity in San Casciano. Apparently, the last foreign visitors of any note had been a bunch of New Zealanders – the ones who’d liberated the town from the Germans back in 1944. Fausto described in elaborate detail, much of it lost on Adam, the fierce siege that had laid waste to his birthplace – a sad inevitability, given San Casciano’s pivotal role in the main German line of defence south of Florence.

      Despite this, Fausto seemed to harbour a grudging respect for the German military machine which had so successfully slowed the Allied advance northwards, mining bridges and roads, its troops fighting a relentless rearguard action against overwhelming odds, taking severe casualties but never losing their discipline or their fighting spirit, forever melting away, withholding their fire until you were right on them, and always ceasing fire at the first sign of the Red Cross.

      Fausto was speaking from first-hand experience. He’d been a member of a partisan group who’d assisted the Allies in their push on Florence, fighting alongside the British when they entered the city; men from ‘London Liverpool Manchester’.

      And Hastings?

      No, that was something else, Fausto explained – an interest in historic battles.

      He was lying. He knew more about the Battle of Hastings than was healthy for any man to know. They were well into the third bottle of wine before Harold even got the arrow in the eye.

      Fausto was enacting this event with a slender bread-stick when Signora Fanelli appeared at the table.

      ‘Fausto, leave him alone, look at him, he’s half-dead.’

      Fausto peered at Adam.

      ‘Leave the poor boy alone. Go home. It’s late,’ Signora Fanelli insisted, before returning to the bar.

      ‘A beautiful woman,’ mused Fausto, helping himself to yet another of Adam’s cigarettes.

      ‘What happened to her husband?’

      ‘The war. It was a bad thing.’

      ‘What?’

      Fausto’s dark eyes narrowed, as if judging Adam worthy of a response.

      ‘We were fighting for our country. Our country. Against the Germans, yes, but also against each other – Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, Fascists. For the future. There was…confusion. Things happened. War permits it. It demands it.’ He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. ‘Giovanni Gentile. Do you know the name?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘He was a philosopher. A thinker. Of the right. A Fascist. He had a house in Florence. They went to his door carrying books like students, carrying books to fool him. And then they shot him.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘When they start killing the men of ideas you can be sure the Devil is laughing.’

      ‘Did you know them?’ asked Adam.

      ‘Who?’

      ‘The ones who did it?’

      ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

      ‘It’s the first chance I’ve had.’

      Fausto cracked a smile and he laughed. ‘I talk too much, it’s true.’

      ‘What?’ called Signora Fanelli from across the room. ‘I don’t see you for months and now I can’t get rid of you?’

      ‘I’m going, I’m going,’ said Fausto, holding up his hands in capitulation. Turning back to Adam, he leaned close. ‘Things can make sense at the time, but as you get older those consolations no longer help you sleep. It’s the only thing I’ve learned. We all think we know the answer, and we’re all wrong. Shit, I’m not sure we even know what the question is.’

      Adam drew his own consolation from the words: that Fausto was even more drunk than he was.

      Fausto drained his glass and rose to his feet. ‘It’s been a pleasure. You be careful up there at Villa Docci.’

      ‘Why do you say that?’

      ‘It’s a bad place.’

      ‘A bad place?’

      ‘It always has been. People have a tendency to die there.’

      Adam couldn’t help smiling at the melodramatic statement.

      ‘You think I’m joking?’

      ‘No…I’m sorry. You mean Signora Docci’s son?’

      ‘You heard about Emilio?’

      ‘Not much. Only that he was killed by the Germans during the war.’

      Fausto crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘So the story goes.’

      There was no time for Adam to pick him up on this last comment.

      ‘Out!’ trumpeted Signora Fanelli, advancing towards them wielding a broom.

      Fausto turned to meet his attacker. ‘Letizia, you are a beautiful woman. If I were a richer man I would try to make you my wife.’

      ‘Ahhhh,’ she cooed sweetly. ‘Well, you’re about to become even poorer. Three bottles of wine.’

      ‘I’ll pay,’ said Adam.

      ‘He’ll pay,’ said Fausto.

      ‘No he won’t,’ said Signora Fanelli.

      Fausto delved into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled notes and dropped them on the table. ‘Goodnight everybody,’ he said with the slightest of bows, ‘Fausto is no more.’

      He left via the terrace, the life somehow draining out of the room along with him.

      Signora Fanelli set about stacking chairs on the tables. ‘Fausto, Fausto,’ she sighed wearily. ‘You mustn’t take him too seriously, he’s a bit depressed at the moment.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘The Communists did not do well at the election in May…only twenty-two per cent, the poor things,’ she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.

      Twenty-two per cent sounded like a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate.

      ‘You’re not a Communist?’ Adam asked.

      ‘Communism is for young people with empty stomachs. Look at me.’

      He had been, quite closely, and he would happily have paid her the compliment she was fishing for if the Italian words hadn’t eluded him.

      ‘Fausto isn’t so young,’ he said.

      ‘Fausto was born an idealist. It’s not his fault.’

      He had wanted to sit there, chatting idly, observing the play of her slender hips beneath her dress as she worked the broom around the tables. But she had dispatched him upstairs with a bottle of mineral water and firm instructions to drink the lot before bed.

      This he had failed to do.

      Instead, he had flopped on to the mattress and set about constructing a gratifying little scenario in his head. His last memory before drifting into drunken slumber had been of Harry barging into the room just as Signora Fanelli was peeling off an emerald green chenille bathrobe.

      7

      The walk to Villa Docci failed to clear his head; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.

      He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.

      There was