The centre of the garden was a sea of flowers, only flowers, growing in reckless abandon and with no apparent order, not of variety, colour, height, nor size. Brunetti recognized roses, marigolds, zinnias, and saw others that looked familiar but remained nameless to him. The back wall was covered with climbing plants: cucumber and what looked like squash as well as some trellised fruit trees. The trees he had seen from the water stood near the right wall, in front of them a long row of coloured boxes on waist-high stands. An equally long row of rosemary and lavender was planted to the left. Colour rioted, shapes stood where they pleased, yet the whole was strangely harmonious.
Casati called to him from the front of the house, and Brunetti went towards his voice. ‘I’ll show you your room,’ Casati said and started up the stairs, still carrying Brunetti’s suitcase. At the top, Casati turned left and, passing a closed door, said, ‘That’s the bathroom.’ He passed the next door and continued to the last on the right side and opened it.
‘This is your room,’ Casati said and set the suitcase on a wooden rack next to a tall old wooden armadio that showed signs of having once been painted green. ‘I’m sorry you’re not closer to the bathroom, but this room has a view of the garden.’
‘It’s perfect,’ Brunetti said, glancing around. Brunetti loved square rooms, which answered some sort of impulse towards harmony in him. The double bed was of dark mahogany with a high headboard, like the bed his grandparents had slept in. There was a long walnut desk against one wall, east-facing windows to either side of it, another window in the wall to his right, this one facing south. Curious to see what was visible from the first windows, Brunetti went to take a look. As he approached, light flooded across his feet, warming his sockless ankles. There was the water, and, he thought, Treporti just on the other side of the canal.
He turned back to Casati, repeating, ‘It’s perfect. Thank you.’
Casati smiled as he said, ‘I’m not the one to thank, Signore. It’s Signor Emilio, who called me.’
‘Then I thank you for coming to get me and for carrying my suitcase.’ Before Casati could speak, Brunetti added, ‘And for rowing so beautifully.’
7
The compliment must have pleased Casati, who lowered his head in an attempt to hide his smile. To fill the silence, Brunetti went on. ‘I’ve rowed – though only off and on – since I was a kid, and recently I went out again with an old friend. But I’ve seldom seen anyone so completely in command. I could have been in an armchair.’ He decided he’d said enough and feared embarrassing the other man.
‘Thank you,’ Casati said. ‘I value your opinion.’
It was now Brunetti’s turn to be embarrassed. ‘I don’t know why you should, Signor Casati.’
‘You rowed with one of the best, so you know the difference,’ Casati said, a remark that confused Brunetti utterly.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand.’
‘Your father,’ Casati said. ‘You rowed with him, didn’t you?’
Brunetti’s mouth fell open in surprise he could not hide. ‘How did you …?’ he began. ‘Did you know him?’
‘We won the regatta in 1967,’ Casati said.
Brunetti stared at the other man. ‘Davide?’ he asked. ‘You’re that Davide?’ Without thinking, Brunetti crossed the room and wrapped his arms around the older man. ‘No, it can’t be.’ He stepped back from Casati and looked at him as though seeing him for the first time.
‘My father talked about you all the time, about that regatta and how you told him to take the oar at the back, and how you almost had a fight about it.’ Memories buzzed into Brunetti’s mind, and for an instant he could hear his father’s happy voice, telling about his day of glory.
‘He was the better rower,’ Casati said, then seemed to drift off to that same race, half a century ago. ‘We had a good boat, and that helped.’ He smiled again. ‘Old man’s chatter, I’m afraid.’
‘It was one of his happiest memories,’ Brunetti said. ‘Maybe the happiest.’
‘He didn’t have many happy ones after he came back from the war, I know,’ Casati said, then added, ‘I didn’t go to his funeral. My father was … and the doctor told me I should be with him because …’ He stopped and said, ‘Doctors.’ Then added, ‘I saw your mother once and tried to explain, and she told me I’d done the right thing. But I don’t know. My father had another week, but I didn’t know that at …’ His voice died away, and neither spoke for a time.
Brunetti turned away from the other man, and walked over to the window and looked down at the garden.
Unconsciously, Casati had slipped into the familiar ‘tu’.
The window was open, the air perfumed by the flowers below. Brunetti, urban to his marrow, was incapable of distinguishing the scent of one flower from another, but the scent pleased him. He looked down at the garden and at second sight made out the pattern more clearly: variegated colours in the middle; then the straight lines of fruit and herbs down the two sides. He could see shapes that from here looked like stacked boxes; packing cases, perhaps. ‘What are those?’ he asked, pointing at them.
Casati cleared his throat and came over to the window. ‘Flowers,’ he said.
Brunetti laughed and said, ‘No, the boxes. What are they?’
‘Beehives,’ Casati answered and gave Brunetti a puzzled look. ‘Haven’t you ever seen them?’ he asked, continuing to address Brunetti as ‘tu’, and thus establishing that he was speaking not to the son-in-law of Conte Falier come out for two weeks, but to the son of an old friend.
After some thought, Brunetti answered, ‘I don’t think so, but I probably wouldn’t have known what they were, anyway.’ He glanced down at the garden again and added, ‘They look like plastic.’ Brunetti knew, or thought he did, that beehives were of wood or straw.
‘These are,’ Casati said, sounding as if he’d been caught out in a lie. ‘I’ve got others that are made of wood.’
‘Down there?’ Brunetti said, waving down at the garden.
‘No, out in the laguna.’
This made no sense to Brunetti. The laguna was salt water. Bees needed, he thought, land and flowers to find pollen. Come to think of it, though he’d read about them, he really didn’t know much about bees. But he did know that he loved honey.
Curiosity got the better of him, and he asked, ‘Where in the laguna?’
‘Oh, on some of the barene,’ Casati said, suddenly sounding evasive.
‘But they’re just marshland in the middle of the water. Nothing can grow on them, can it? What happens when the tide comes in? To the hives, I mean.’
‘I’ve got the hives up on stands on the man-made barene because some of them are lower than the natural ones. So even when a high tide comes, the water doesn’t reach the hives,’ Casati said, moving away from the window and towards the door. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘I’d like you to find me something to do.’
Casati’s eyes narrowed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I’m going to be out here for a while,’ Brunetti said, suddenly conscious of how long two weeks might be. ‘And I’d like to do something physical.’
‘Such as?’ Casati asked, honestly puzzled, then suggested, ‘Ride a bicycle? Go jogging?’
Did he look so irredeemably urban? Brunetti wondered. ‘No, more like work. I don’t know, chop firewood or work in the fields or help you if you have to transport goods.’