The Savage Garden

    'Selling insurance.'

    Adam struggled to control his temper. 'You know nothing about my relationships with my friends.'

    'I've seen all I want to.'

    'You can't just write off two years of my life like that.'

    'Why not? You did.'

    'Fuck off, Harry.'

    Harry leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette. 'I might just take you up on that. I haven't slept in days and I've got an early start.'

    'You're leaving?'

    'You wish. No, I thought I'd have a slog round Florence.'

    Heading upstairs together, Harry asked if he could borrow some of Adam's clothes. He tried on some trousers, a shirt and a linen jacket. 'Christ,' he said, checking himself in the wardrobe mirror, 'it's little Lord Fauntleroy.' He also said, 'I'll need some cash.'

    'I just sent you some!'

    'Believe me, you don't want to know.'

    'Believe me, I do.'

    'The Swiss girl came back.'

    'You're right, I don't want to know.'

    As Harry was leaving his room, Adam asked, 'Why are you really here, Harry? In Italy?'

    Harry hesitated. 'I'm not sure you're ready to hear it.'

    'I say, Holmes, not the Giant Rat of Sumatra?'

    Harry's blank expression broke into a smile. It was a private joke, a cause of much amusement to them as boys: a reference to a Conan Doyle short story in which Sherlock Holmes makes passing mention to Watson of a terrible incident in his past involving 'the Giant Rat of Sumatra ... a story for which the world is not yet prepared.'

    'Demmit, Watson,' snapped Harry, 'I said never to mention the Giant Rat of Sumatra.'

    TRUE TO HIS WORD, HARRY WAS UP EARLY. IN FACT, he'd already left the villa by the time adam awoke.

    The prospect of a full day free from Harry's unpredictable presence was a big relief. He needed time and space to concentrate. His work on the garden had ground to an almost complete standstill in the past few days.

    He had read deep into the night in order to finish The Divine Comedy, rising up through Paradise with Dante to the poet's final, blinding vision of the universe bound together by God's love. Adam had experienced no such epiphany, though, no Damascene revelation. As far as he could tell, there were no further associations between the poem and the memorial garden, aside from a brief mention of Apollo just after Dante and Beatrice have made their ascent from Purgatory to Paradise and Dante calls on the sun god to help him in the last stages of his journey.

    Any hopes that he would see things differently in the morning soon vanished. After breakfast he read through his copious notes, searching for missed connections, but drew a glaring blank. Heading for the garden, he barged through the gap in the yew hedge and made a brisk tour, defiantly disinterested. This slightly curious logic —that if he treated the place with indifference it might be more inclined to speak to him—proved unsound. If anything, he found it more inert, more stubbornly unresponsive, than he'd ever known it to be. Even the statues seemed bored by their roles, like a troupe of jaded actors at the end of a long run.

    Completing the circuit, he stopped at the grotto and entered. The low morning sunlight slanted through the entrance, dispersing the Stygian gloom. Apollo, Daphne and Peneus shone white as weathered bone against the rock-encrusted wall, a moment of drama trapped in marble by an unknown and rather heavy- handed sculptor.

    Peneus seemed strangely uninvolved with the scene unfolding above him, quite content where he was, sprawled along the rim of the marble basin, cradling his water urn. His expression was hardly that of a man who has just answered his daughter's plea to turn her into a laurel tree. Rather, he wore a look of weary resignation, the sort of look worn by Adam's father when asked to perform some tedious domestic chore.

    As for Daphne, her face suggested there were far worse fates to suffer than metamorphosis. She was frozen in the act of turning her head to look behind her at the pursuing figure of Apollo. Maybe her expression was intended as one of welcome release from unwelcome advances, but there was something ecstatic in the curl of her lips that implied she was actually enjoying herself.

    He studied Apollo carefully—Apollo, his last remaining link to The Divine Comedy. He was reaching for Daphne, but the gesture was hardly fraught with desperation and hopelessness, as it was in Bernini's famous sculpture of the same subject in the Villa Borghese. In fact, here in the grotto they looked more like an amorous young couple playing tag in the woods.

    His gaze dropped to the unicorn, its head bowed toward the empty marble trough. He ran his fingers over the stump of its missing horn, his mind turning to the drawing he'd come across in the papers gathered together by Signora Docci's father. It was a pen-and-ink sketch of the grotto executed in the late sixteenth century, therefore almost contemporaneous with the construction of the garden. The anonymous artist wasn't exactly overburdened with talent, but it was pretty evident that the unicorn had been missing its horn even way back then.

    Was it possible it had never had a horn? If so, what did this mean? If a unicorn dipping its horn into the water signified the purity of the source feeding the garden, what did a hornless unicorn signify? Impure water, not fit to drink?

    Instinct told him that nothing in the grotto had been left to chance, that each and every one of its