and was never late; he just loped about like a well-fed cat, giving off an air of slight distraction, as if his mind was always on higher things.
He was deep in slumber when Adam entered his office. The first knock didn’t rouse him, and when Adam poked his head around the door and saw him slumped in an armchair, a book on his lap, he knocked again, louder this time.
Professor Leonard stirred, taking his bearings, taking in Adam. ‘I’m sorry, I must have nodded off.’ He closed the book and laid it aside. Adam noted that it was one of the professor’s own works, on the sculpture of Mantegna.
‘No court in the land would convict you.’
Professor Leonard invited irreverence, he actively encouraged it, but for a moment Adam feared he had overstepped the mark.
‘That might be funnier, Mr Strickland, if you’d ever bothered to read my book on Mantegna. Which reminds me – how is your serve?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Well, the last time I saw you, you were cycling down King’s Parade in something of a hurry. You were gripping two tennis rackets, and the young lady riding side-saddle was gripping you.’
‘Oh.’
‘Has it improved?’
‘Improved?’
‘Your serve, Mr Strickland. We would all feel so much happier if you at least had something else to show for your absence.’
‘I work hard,’ bleated Adam. ‘I work late.’
Professor Leonard reached for some papers stacked on the side table next to his chair. ‘Since you’re here, you might as well take this now’ He flipped through the pile and pulled out Adam’s essay. ‘I probably marked you lower than I should have done.’
‘Oh,’ said Adam, a little put out.
‘Thinking about it, you might have had more of a point than I credited you with at first.’
‘Which point was that?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself, Mr Strickland. To my knowledge – and I read it twice – you only made one point. The others were lifted straight from the books I suggested you read.’ He raised a long, bony finger. ‘And some I didn’t suggest…which, I grant you, displays more initiative than most.’
He handed the essay over.
‘We’ll discuss it at greater length another time. Now, your thesis. Have you had any further thoughts?’
Adam had flirted with a couple of ideas – Islamic icon ography in Romanesque architecture, the use of line in early Renaissance drawing – but the professor would recognize them for what they were: lazy speculations on some well-trodden fields of study. No, best to keep quiet.
‘Not really’
‘You still have a year, of course, but it’s advisable to start applying yourself now, certainly if you wish to show us something of your true colours. Do you, Mr Strickland?’
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘Of course.’
‘How’s your Italian?’
‘Okay Rusty’
‘Good, then I might have something for you.’
The professor explained that he had recently been contacted by an old acquaintance of his. Signora Docci, the lady in question, was the owner of a large villa in the hills of Tuscany, just south of Florence. ‘An impressive, if somewhat pedestrian, example of High Renaissance Tuscan vernacular,’ was how the professor described the architecture of the building. He saved his praise for the garden, not the formal arrangement of Renaissance terraces abutting the villa, but a later Mannerist addition occupying a sunken grove nearby. Conceived and laid out by a grieving husband to the memory of his dead wife, this plunging patch of woodland was fed by a spring and modelled on Roman gardens of the period, with meandering pathways and rills, statues, inscriptions and neoclassical structures.
‘It’s a very unusual place,’ the professor said. ‘Extremely arresting.’
‘You know it?’
‘I did, some years ago. It has never been altered -which is rare – and I know for a fact that no proper study has ever been conducted of it. Which is where you come in, if you want to, that is. Signora Docci has kindly offered it as a subject for one of my students.’
Mannerist was bad, too overblown for Adam’s taste, and he’d have to do a lot of reading up. Italy, on the other hand, was good, very good.
‘Maybe a garden isn’t quite what you had in mind, but don’t dismiss it…Art and Nature coming together to create a whole new entity – a third nature, if you will’
Adam didn’t require any more encouragement. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes please.’
2
Exams were upon them before they knew it, and gone just as quickly. They celebrated, got drunk, punted off to Grantchester with picnics, danced at college balls and hurled themselves fully clothed into the river – memories irreparably tarnished for Adam by Gloria’s decision to end their relationship on the last night of term. The situation was non-negotiable and, true to character, Gloria made no attempt to feign a remorse she clearly didn’t feel. She did manage, however, to offer him one scrap of consolation: as he would no longer be coming to stay at her family’s pile in Scotland, he would be spared the maddening attentions of the summer midges.
‘Cattle have been known to hurl themselves off cliffs because of the midges.’
These were her last words to him before he stormed out on her, slamming the door behind him.
The following day everyone trickled back to their real lives. For Adam, this was a faceless suburb to the south of London, and a Tudor-style villa with Elizabethan yearnings. Thrown up just after the war, the house only existed because a German air crew had taken one look at the lethal hail of flak over the city and promptly jettisoned their payload before running for home.
Adam and his brother had once dug a trench at the end of the garden – the first line of defence against invasion by some imagined enemy force – only to find themselves unearthing the remains of the terraced houses that had previously occupied the plot. Harry had taken those fragments of brick and tile and glass, sinking them in plaster of Paris, producing a mosaic in the shape of a house: the first tell-tale sign of his calling that Adam could recall.
Adam searched out old friends from the neighbourhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag and Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth – that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.
His mother was delighted to have him home and keen to show it, which usually meant she was unhappy. Whenever she smothered him with affection, he had the uneasy sensation she was using him as a rod with which to beat his father: You see what you’re missing out on? His father was more withdrawn than ever, and
