The Visconti House by Elsbeth Edgar Read Free Book Online Page B

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 Thoughts of the terrible day had been replaced by thoughts of the mysterious Mr.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