The Savage Garden by Mark Mills Read Free Book Online

plunging Finn Duggan into a deep and dangerous gloom for the remainder of the weekend. Violence had only narrowly been avoided following Harry's mischievous speculation that the loser's beers had been spiked with some chemical cooked up in one of the university labs.
        No Finn Duggan this time, thankfully, but Harry required maintenance, supervision even. And Adam had enough on his mind already.
        For a brief while it had all seemed so clear: switching the subject of his thesis from the memorial garden to Villa Docci itself. But that was before he'd stepped through the breach in the yew hedge.
        Even now he couldn't say just why the place had affected him so much. All he could point to was a vague sensation of having been momentarily transported somewhere else, a parallel world, unquestionably beautiful but also disquieting.
        No doubt the unassuming entrance was intended to produce the effect of stumbling upon a lost Arcadia, but there was something illicit in the act of pushing your way through a hedge that smacked of trespass, each subsequent step in some way forbidden. This sense of intruding was reinforced by the personal nature of what lay beyond the hedge: the touching tribute of a grieving husband to his deceased wife. The other Renaissance gardens Adam had studied in preparation for his trip were far grander stages on which the most high-blown ideas of the age were played out—Man and Nature in uneasy coexistence; Man imposing himself on Nature, molding her to his own ends, yet constantly fighting her hold over him, struggling to rise above his baser instincts to the role ordained for him by God.
        Not that God or any other Christian imagery figured in the elaborate cycles set out by wealthy Romans and Florentines in the grounds of their country estates. The language of the garden was purely pagan, its world a mythical earthly paradise populated with marble gods and demigods and other outlandish creatures from Greek and Roman legend, where water gushed from Mount Parnassus, pouring along channels, tumbling over waterfalls, spraying from fountains and trickling down the rough-hewn walls of woodland grottoes.
        The memorial garden at Villa Docci sat firmly within this tradition, and although it couldn't match its eminent counterparts at Villa di Castello, Villa Gamberaia and Villa Campi for sheer size and grandiosity, it stood out for its human dimension, its purity of purpose, the haunting message of love and loss enshrined in its buildings, inscriptions and groupings of statues buried away in the woods.
        The hour or so Adam had spent strolling the circuit had intrigued him, unsettled him, whereas the villa itself had simply awed him with its serene perfection. The choice was no longer clear to him. Which of the two should he spend his time on?
        This was the dilemma he'd been struggling with over dinner at the
pensione
when a bottle of red wine had landed on his table with a thud.
        It was attached by a lean brown arm to a man whom Adam had noticed drinking alone at the bar. He was dark, rangy, handsome in a disheveled kind of way. He pushed his lank hair out of his eyes.
        "Can I?" he asked in Italian, not waiting for a reply and dumping himself in the chair opposite. He glanced at the open file beside Adam's plate. "It's not good," he said.
        "What?"
        "Reading and eating at the same time. The stomach needs blood for digestion. When you read, the brain steals the blood."
        "Really?"
        "It's what my father used to say, but he was an idiot, so who knows? I'm Fausto."
        Adam shook the strong hand offered him. "Adam."
        "Can I?" Fausto helped himself from Adam's pack, tearing off the filter before lighting the cigarette. "You're English?"
        "Yes."
        "I like the English," declared Fausto, sitting back in his chair and plucking a stray shard of tobacco from his tongue. "London Liverpool