The Visconti House (6 page)

“Whatever is the matter?” asked Ms. McAlister, arriving five minutes later, key in hand to open the library, and finding her there.

Laura jumped up and attempted to look as though everything was fine. “Nothing, Ms. McAlister. I wasn’t hungry, so I came up early. I wanted to borrow some books.”

Eyes still questioning, Ms. McAlister unlocked the door. Laura managed a smile and slipped past her into the safety of the bookshelves. There she leaned her head against the metal shelving and tried to collect her thoughts.

How quickly she had fallen into this nightmare. She had never been popular, but she had never been unpopular, either. Despite her house, despite her parents, she had always managed to cling on and keep her head down. But now, it was all spinning out of control. When had this begun? And why?

Perversely, she thought of Leon. It had all started after he arrived. Not that she thought it was anything he had done; it was just his being there. She frowned.
Somehow she was ending up on the outside and ending up with him.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Ms. McAlister appeared behind her, making her jump.

Laura forced a smile and nodded. Even if she wanted to, how could she explain everything that had happened? How could she explain Leon?

She made a desperate effort to pull herself together. “I’m fine, just a bit tired. We’ve had some friends staying with us, some late nights.” That sounded normal. She didn’t have to explain that the friends were Harry and Isabella, nor that the late nights were spent having dinner in a room decorated with ivy and velvet. Laura changed the subject. “I have a project on medieval feasts. I need to find some information on the food they would have eaten.”

“You’re in the wrong spot,” observed Ms. McAlister. “This is the geography section.”

Laura knew the librarian didn’t believe her, but fortunately a skirmish near the entrance of the library drew Ms. McAlister away to investigate. Seizing the momentary reprieve, Laura hurried to the history section. There she found a pile of books and carried them to a table. Her mind went back to her mantra.
If only I didn’t have to go to school. If only I could just stay
home.
She pictured her little corner in her big room, the comfort of her blankets and cushions, the pleasure of her things, her dragon book with its delicate drawings and careful anatomical descriptions. . . .

She stopped, her thoughts seared with pain. She could never finish her dragon book now. Miss Grisham and Kylie had destroyed it for her. Destroyed it forever.

She tried to focus on an illustration of a medieval feast. Graceful ladies in flowing robes with coned hats and pointed shoes were seated at a long table, conversing with slender young men in doublets and hose. They looked happy, in a delicate sort of way. On the table was a large platter with a huge bird on it. Medieval people ate all sorts of birds, she read. Swans, peacocks, pheasants, and guinea fowl. Large birds were often stuffed with parts of smaller birds. A quail inside a duck inside a chicken inside a swan. Laura frowned, wondering what Harry would make of that, but the thought of Harry made her want to cry again, so she read on. There were no potatoes in England in the fourteenth century, the book said, and very little salt, which would mean never having fries. Warm, greasy, salty, sweet-smelling fries. She then remembered that she hadn’t had lunch and
there was the whole afternoon to get through on an empty stomach. Laura stared at the revelers in their embroidered clothes, enjoying their laden table and aching to transport herself there. Or anywhere, so long as it was far, far away from school.

She closed the book with a bang. How would she ever survive the afternoon?

By the time the bell finally rang at the end of the day, Laura was feeling utterly crushed. She trailed down the road, munching through the duck sandwiches that Harry had packed for her lunch. She barely tasted them, wondering how on earth she was going to endure four and a quarter more years of school before she would be free. She was almost at the train crossing before she realized that she was not alone; Leon was walking beside her.

“How long have you been there?” she snapped.

“Been where?”

“There. Here. Following me.”

“I wasn’t following you.”

Laura eyed him disbelievingly. “I can look after myself, you know. I don’t need you trailing around.”

“Oh, yeah? Like you were looking after yourself at lunchtime?”

Laura swallowed the last of her sandwich and
folded the wrapper into a little square. “That was different.”

Leon raised an eyebrow.

They crossed the train tracks, and he turned toward his grandmother’s house. Mrs. Murphy was in the garden, digging. She looked up at the sound of their voices, brushing back her gray hair with a dirty hand, which left smudges of soil mixed with sweat on her forehead.

“Hello, Grandma,” said Leon.

Mrs. Murphy straightened up. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”

Laura was horrified.
I am
not
his friend,
she thought, looking across at Leon. He too appeared to be weighing how to reply.

“This is a girl from school, Laura Horton.”

“Hello, Mrs. Murphy.” Laura smiled awkwardly and turned to go.

“You live in the Visconti house, don’t you?” said Mrs. Murphy, wiping her hands on the side of her skirt and coming over to the fence.

Laura turned back in surprise. “The Visconti house?”

“The big house up on the hill.”

“Yes,” said Laura.

“I remember when Mr. Visconti still lived there. He was very old then, and I was just a little girl, a tiny slip of a thing. You wouldn’t think it to see me now, would you?”

Laura did not know what to say, so she said nothing.

“Who was Mr. Visconti, Grandma?” asked Leon, sliding his bag off his shoulder.

“He was an Italian gentleman. Some people said that he had been an ambassador or a consul and that he had traveled all over the world. Others said he was a professor. No one really knew. He lived in the big house on his own.”

Mrs. Murphy paused, gazing toward the road. Laura sensed that she was seeing something neither Laura nor Leon could see.

“Every morning he would go for a walk,” continued Mrs. Murphy. “He wore a suit with a waistcoat and a watch chain, and there was always a flower in his buttonhole. He had long white hair and was very frail. He used a walking stick — an elegant one, black, I think, with a silver knob. We children used to laugh at him, I’m ashamed to say. He was such a strange figure with his flowers and his hat — he wore a straw hat in summer, I remember. No one wore hats like
that. He was so straight and so old. We would run after him sometimes, whispering, but he never seemed to mind. I don’t think he even noticed us.”

“Didn’t he have any family?” asked Laura, drawn into the conversation despite herself.

“Not that I know of. Strange, isn’t it? Him settling here in this small town with his grand house. All alone. People said there were paintings on the walls of his house. Murals.”

“There were.” Laura nodded. “Some of them are still there.”

“Fancy that! I didn’t really believe it.” Mrs. Murphy pushed back her hair again and sighed. “You never know with stories.”

“What are the murals like?” asked Leon.

“There aren’t many left now. Just patches. They were scenes, I think. Gardens and columns.”

“The outside inside,” said Leon, grinning.

Laura smiled a little smile, too. She liked that idea, the outside inside. “Sometimes the outside is literally inside now,” she volunteered. “The rain comes in through parts of the roof. And there is ivy growing under the door.”

“Gardens tend to do that if you let them,” agreed Mrs. Murphy. “They creep into everything.”

Laura looked at Mrs. Murphy’s garden. It had not been allowed to creep; rows of carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes were growing in straight lines. Two rosebushes had been pruned back to a few bare stalks, and a lemon tree was similarly stark. Still, there were green shoots pushing up through the dark earth and grass growing over the borders. Perhaps a little creeping was going on, after all.

“Would you like some tomatoes to take home?” asked Mrs. Murphy.

Laura wasn’t sure that she would, but she didn’t want to hurt Mrs. Murphy’s feelings, so she said, “Yes, if you have enough.”

“Sure. We have more than we can eat. Leon, go and fetch a plastic bag for me from the kitchen.” Mrs. Murphy bent over, groaning a little, and started to gather the ripe fruit. “These are the very last of the season,” she said, “but they should still have some flavor. Don’t they smell good?” She held up one for Laura to smell.

Laura sniffed and was surprised by the distinctive tang of the freshly picked fruit. She tried to think of a word to describe it but couldn’t.

When Leon returned, Mrs. Murphy put the tomatoes in the bag and handed it to Laura.

“It’s been nice meeting you, Laura Horton,” she
said. “Stop and have a chat next time you’re passing.”

As Laura climbed the hill to her house, swinging the rather grubby plastic bag, she realized with astonishment that she was feeling better. Thoughts of the terrible day had been replaced by thoughts of the mysterious Mr. Visconti who used to live in her house. All sorts of questions about him were buzzing in her head. Why had he come to the town? Why had he built the house? What sort of person had he been? She wondered why she had never thought about the house like that before. After some fruitcake and juice, she began wandering around, looking for traces of Mr. Visconti. She imagined him leaning on his walking cane, moving slowly from room to room, with all his things around him.

In her mind, she filled the rooms with paintings in heavy gilt frames, tapestries, and silver candlesticks. She hung curtains over the drafty windows and placed mementos of his travels on the mantelpieces and tables — cloisonné vases, Chinese fans, scenes of the pyramids — all in exquisite taste, like Mr. Visconti. All old, like Mr. Visconti. She could almost see him in the shadows, almost smell the musty, perfumed air, almost hear the sound of labored breathing, of clocks ticking, of a gramophone playing.

In her parents’ bedroom, she stood for a long time, staring at the fragments of paint, wondering what Mr. Visconti did in this room where the outside was inside. Did he sit here, remembering Italy, the Italy of his childhood? Or was it a fantasy world for him, a garden of delight? An escape? Then she came back to the questions she had been asking herself on the way home. Why was he here at all, in this small Australian town? And why was he alone? The questions jumbled and jostled in her mind.

There were no answers, however, and she was getting hungry. She remembered the tomatoes and wished that Harry was still there to cook them. Then, because he wasn’t, she decided she would try cooking them herself and headed back to the kitchen to leaf through the pages of her mother’s old cookbook. When she found an Italian recipe for tomato sauce, she stopped. The recipe looked relatively simple, and the sauce could be eaten with spaghetti, which she knew they had. She smiled. It would be right to eat it in Mr. Visconti’s house.

Luckily, most of the ingredients were in the cupboard, although she did have to improvise a little. Harry had left cloves of garlic hanging by the door, so she crushed them and added them to the onions.
Their smell made her think of faraway places and exotic tastes.

When the sauce was ready, she put the spaghetti into a pot of boiling water and set the table. It was still early, but she thought that it would be good to eat before they were all ravenous, which didn’t happen very often.

The kitchen table looked bare with only three places set, so she decided to pick some of the red roses from the bush outside the ballroom window to put in the center. As she stood on tiptoe to reach a particularly high bud, she wondered if Mr. Visconti had planted the bush. The bud was perfect, its petals still tightly folded, full of promise. Did Mr. Visconti put a bud like this in his buttonhole? Did he stop here, where she was standing, and smell this perfume in the evening air? And if he did, did it make him sad because he was alone, a long way from his birthplace? Or glad because he was here in a strange new land, smelling old smells in a new world?

Her mother exclaimed with delight when she saw the table, and her father sniffed at his bowl of spaghetti appreciatively.

“Mmm, this smells delectable,” he said. “I wonder what it tastes like.”

Laura watched as he put a large forkful in his mouth and chewed it solemnly, gazing up at the ceiling.

“Perfect.” He grinned at her. “I hope there’s enough for seconds.”

Laura saw her parents exchange glances, and she knew that they were both relieved to see that she was no longer wallowing in her misery.

“These tomatoes taste quite different from the ones in the shops,” said Laura’s mother, wiping her bowl with a chunk of bread. “Mrs. Murphy must be a very good gardener.”

“She’s a very tidy one,” replied Laura. She paused, then added, “She said she knew the man who built this house. Well, remembered seeing him, anyway.”

“He must have been very old then,” remarked Laura’s father. “The house dates to 1895.”