The Immaculate Deception

6

The Rome to Florence bit was easy enough; simply a matter of going to the station, getting on the train and staring at the countryside getting ever more beautiful as the hours rolled by. An empty train as well, but not what it was. Argyll was getting old enough to feel nostalgic on the slightest pretext, and the replacement of the ancient, green wagons, which had once lumbered along stuffed with redundant conscripts, with shiny, new, fast and expensive super-trains offering the dubious delights of airline comfort made him sigh for a simpler age.

On the other hand, it was a much faster way of getting there; he hardly had time to read the newspaper before the train slowed down and pulled into Florence. Then the simpler age came back with a vengeance. Whatever innovations modernity has brought in its wake, they have, as yet, had little impact on the Florentine bus system which, though frighteningly thorough, is also incomprehensible to all except long-term residents.

So Argyll spent the next forty-five minutes shuttling between the dozens of stops outside the station in the hope that one driver would eventually admit to going in the right direction. Even when this hurdle was surmounted, all was not yet complete: the bus dropped him deep in the countryside at the junction of one small road and another even smaller, with no signposts and no one to ask. Just the freshness of the country in spring, before the terrible Tuscan summer has parched the landscape.

Simply being out of Rome was a remarkable tonic; he loved the place dearly, but there was no denying that it could be a touch smelly on occasion. And you only noticed the noise when it wasn’t there any longer, when all there was to hear was the lightest of breezes in the tall cypress trees and the sound of those few birds that had not yet been shot and eaten.

Very agreeable; but he couldn’t stand breathing in the fresh country air all day. He had a choice of two routes: to walk on along the road the bus had travelled, or to go down the little road to the right. Instinct told him to take the little path, so as was his wont he chose the other, on the grounds that his instincts in these matters were invariably wrong. Then, bag in hand and beginning to overheat, he trudged along for half a mile with not a house or a person in sight, until he paused to get his breath back. Only spring but it was already warm, and he was English. Anything more than tepid and he began to melt.

Silly to go back, daft to go forward. No phone. He cast around for inspiration, but there was none within reach, so he trudged round a corner and instead found salvation in the unlikely form of a man in a full three-piece pinstripe suit staring quizzically at an old Volkswagen with the front bonnet up.

‘Excuse me …’ said Argyll, in Italian.

‘Damnable thing,’ said this man in English, paying him no attention at all.

‘Pardon?’

‘Damn car. Damn people. D’ye see? Someone’s stolen the engine. Stop for a minute, come back, and it’s gone. No wonder it doesn’t go.’

Argyll looked in. True enough. No engine. ‘Isn’t it in the back?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘The back. That’s where they usually are.’

The man, tall and ramrod-straight with grey wispy hair and a look of astonishment on his face, gave up staring into the empty luggage compartment and turned to Argyll properly. ‘You a mechanic?’

‘No. But if you don’t believe me, have a look.’

Now ever more perplexed, he did as he was told, marched round to the back and lifted the rear compartment. ‘Good lor’,’ he said. ‘How extraordinary. Well, well.’

Then he turned back to Argyll. ‘How lucky of me to come across a mechanic. Perhaps you would be so kind as to get it going for me?’

‘I’m not a mechanic.’

‘You clearly have a way with these things, though.’

‘Well, hardly …’

‘Off you go, then.’

So Argyll did what he always did with recalcitrant cars: that is, make sure there was petrol, then tug every wire to see if any was loose. None was, but he must have done something, as the machine obligingly cemented his reputation as a wonder-worker by starting the first time he tried. His new-found companion was open-mouthed with admiration.

‘I won’t ask how you did that,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t understand, anyway. But my thanks, none the less.’

Argyll looked modest about his expertise. ‘Perhaps in return you could do me a small favour,’ he said. ‘Do you know a place called the Villa Buonaterra?’

The slightest of hesitations, and the smallest look of doubt crept across the older man’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do. Why do you ask?’

‘I’m meant to be going there. But I can’t find it. The bus driver said he’d drop me off at the nearest stop, but I don’t know whether he did or not.’

‘Two hundred metres, turning on the left.’ He turned away abruptly, got into the little car and drove off without so much as a word of thanks. Then stopped, reversed back to his original place, and wound down the window.

‘Ungracious,’ he said sternly. ‘Always a fault of mine. Come and have a drink this evening, if you are free. A mile further on. My little cottage. Just before the village.’

Then he drove off again. Argyll watched him go, feeling that it was one invitation he would probably be willing to pass up.

Had he also mentioned that, although a mere hop to the entrance gate, it was a further mile down the drive to the house itself, then Argyll would at least have been prepared. As it was, it took another half hour before he arrived, tired and dusty, at one of the most comfortably handsome bits of Renaissance architecture whose door bell it had ever been his privilege to ring.

As he waited for an answer, he stood under the entrance portico between the columns of crumbling ochre stucco, grateful for the cool of the shade. Ahead of him was the gravel driveway, lined with lichen-covered statues, to the side the formal garden, laid out Italian-style, geometrical and disciplined, but with none of the severity and bleakness that the French version introduced later. Beyond were the trees, and he could just hear the slightest rustling of the leaves in the light breeze. Buonaterra, good land, indeed. If he had a lot of money, he would also live in a place like this, and fill it with the loveliest things he could find. A huge amount of money, rather: back in the 1920s when Stonehouse was buying, he was competing against only a few odd museums and a handful of eccentrics like himself prepared to lay out good money on fifteenth-century Madonnas and the like. Now the competition was internet billionaires and multinational corporations. He didn’t know how many items of the Stonehouse collection, which once hung on these walls, were now hidden away in darkened bank vaults, but he suspected it was probably a fair proportion.

So now the pictures were owned by the money men, and the villa, once the country hideaway of the Florentine nobility, was overrun by students playing with their frisbees on the lawns. Progress with a price.

His air of melancholy peacefulness was just getting into its stride when the door opened and the soft accents of the American south brought him back to the new millennium. Half an hour later he had unpacked his bags, washed and wandered back down to find his new-found friend who had made it all possible.

‘How many students do you have here?’ he asked curiously, gazing around at what, to all intents and purposes, resembled a deserted country house, decorated with fine furniture, with not a trace of the institutional about it. He had imagined the wafting smell of boiled cabbage, the walls washed down in battleship grey, and the distinct signs of overuse everywhere. Nothing of the like to be seen.

‘Virtually none,’ replied his host, whose name was James Kershaw. ‘I don’t know why it is, but the chance of several months lounging in the Tuscan countryside doesn’t seem to carry much appeal to our students. Although I suspect that the faculty who come every year do their best to discourage anyone from trying it. The whole operation,’ he continued, leading the way on to the terrace at the rear which was laid out for lunch, ‘seems to have been lost down some administrative black hole. It was bought with a donation and can’t be sold again, thanks to the eccentricity of the donor. The Italian department has shrunk in recent years and we insist that no one comes without speaking Italian. So apart from a few graduate students, we only get half a dozen a year. And they’ve not come yet.’

‘So the rest of the year you live like Renaissance gentry.’

‘That’s it. Someone will notice and put a stop to it eventually, but I intend to enjoy it as much as possible while it lasts. Champagne?’ he asked, before adding: ‘Not real champagne, of course. If eight people got through a case of champagne a week, we might draw attention to ourselves.’

Argyll agreed that restraint was perhaps wise in the circumstances.

‘I’m pleased to see you. It’s pleasant to have some company in our exile here. What do you want, exactly?’

‘I have to write a paper. It’s got to be done in a couple of weeks, and I want to use the Stonehouse collection as the central point of it all. And I want to look for a picture that used to be here. You did buy all his papers when you took this place over?’

‘Oh, yes. No one else wanted them. Twentieth-century collecting was not a hot topic among the art historical fraternity then. Still isn’t. I don’t recall anyone ever looking at them. What’s the picture you’re after?’

‘A Madonna. I think it’s a form of Immaculate Conception.’

‘By?’

‘By the Master of the Buonaterra Immaculate Conception. That is, I don’t know.’

‘And you want to find out. Are you a dealer?’

A loaded question. Confessing to being a dealer in academic circles is about as respectable as confessing to having academic interests at a gathering of dealers. You get nods of understanding, and brave smiles, but the air of disdain which enters the conversation is quite unmistakable. Neither entirely sympathizes with the other, as the scholars consider dealers to be interested only in money, while dealers hold that the academics are vague and inefficient. It is generally quite the other way around, but no matter. Argyll was instinctively reluctant to confess his shameful past, and so babbled instead.

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