After Hannibal by Barry Unsworth Read Free Book Online Page A

people …

    Blemish had things to attend to in Perugia and it was after midday when he headed back home. He was pleased with his morning’s business and especially with the way he had handled the Greens. They were a promising couple; he had thought so from the start. He saw them now in his mind’s eye, standing side by side at the top of the steps, gray-haired, blue-eyed and guileless, smiling in welcome. Once again it came to him that they were like the deserving couple in a folktale, the ones who treat the mysterious guest kindly and get the magic goose. Only the simple-hearted could convey an impression like that. Fools, in other words. He felt renewed ill will toward them. He had gone there on business and they had tried to make him share in their life. Well, this time it would be the mysterious guest who got the golden eggs. They were like Darby and Joan, he thought. The tune of the song came into his mind and he hummed it for a while then sang the few words he remembered in a cracked baritone:
              
And when the kids grow up and leave us
              
We’ll build a house on a hill-top high
,
              
You and I
,
              
Darby and Joan, that used to be Jack and Jill
 …
    While still a mile away he saw the sight that always filled him with pleasure and pride: there it stood, huge, square-fronted, imposing, set on rising ground with low wooded hills behind and the
campanile
of the little town rising beyond it. His house, his and Milly’s, someone’s nineteenth-century extravagance, now their proud possession, vast, in style ecclesiastic-Gothic, with its narrow pointed windows, dilapidated balustrades, brick-built portico and crumbling terra-cotta moldings. There was an arcade of columns running down one side, like a cloister—it was this that had given them their idea for the medieval restaurant. Much of the roof of this had fallen in and the pavement of the walk was cracked and broken. There was a lot that needed doing; they were only at the beginning. But the Greens would make their contribution and with any luck it would be a substantial one.
    He found Mildred, the companion of his life, in the kitchen preparing lunch. “What is it to be today, my love?” he said.
    Mildred looked up from her pan. She made a strong contrast in physical type to Blemish, being thick-necked, sturdy and slow-moving, with a habit of lowering her head as if about to charge. She smiled at him now and the light of love was in her smile. “Green-pea pottage,” she said in her deep, reluctant voice. “I have used dried winter peas, as they used to do, and colored it with saffron. It was a favorite dish of Richard the Second.”
    “Wonderful.” Blemish gave Mildred two approving pats, one on each of her broad buttocks. “I think we are in prospect of more
cotto
,” he said. This was a familiar code word between them. Large areas of their flooring needed to be redone; they had decided ontraditional terra-cotta tiles throughout and so had fallen into the habit of measuring their gains in terms of these.
    “New clients?” Mildred said, stirring slowly at the brew.
    “I think so. An American couple. I have the strongest of feelings that they will want to enlist my services.”
    Mildred smiled placidly. She left business to him. In spite of her bulk and gruffness she was wedded to the notion of female fragility. Men were the practical ones, the relevant lobes were more highly developed. Women were more creative. She herself, for example, was planning to write a medieval cookbook couched in medieval prose—the sort of enterprise that would never remotely have occurred to Stan.
    “Ninety percent certain in my judgment,” Blemish said. “You get to know the look on people’s faces. Project management is as much a matter of psychology as anything.” He had a way, when pleased, of stretching his neck and raising his chin, and he did it now. “They are in difficulties with their