She led him to another pastoral canvas, this one more lyricaclass="underline" a young shepherdess next to a brook, gazing wistfully out of the frame as her flock wandered in the background. French again, of the same period.
“This was two years later. The Bride of Lammermoor. Walter Scott. Classic stuff. Here …”
Another portrait. French again, but clearly earlier, from the romantic style and of a rather vapid-seeming aristocrat. He examined the notice: Hyacinthe Gabrielle Roland, later Marchioness Wellesley. It wasn’t easy to imagine the woman’s round, naive face, with its flush of curls and gullible stare, succumbing to Maggie’s talents.
“I had to put on weight for that. You need puppy fat for Jane Austen. That took me, oh …” She placed a finger against her cheek. “… three weeks to hit the mark. You can’t hurry gorging. First time I got to take my clothes off.” She cleared her throat. “But at least it was art. Ha-ha.”
The discomfort inside her was distant but discernible.
“Why do you do this?”
“Because I like it. Do you need another reason? Being someone else. It’s … distracting.”
She was taking him to another canvas, one he knew he would dislike the moment he saw the familiar, neurotic swirls beginning to take shape as they approached.
“This is me when I’m older,” she went on. “Maybe not a movie at all. Maybe me. Whoever that happens to be.”
It was a woman in her late thirties, posed like a siren on a dreamy sea, her face tilted at an awkward angle towards a Mediterranean sky, her full body half clothed in a revealing, swirling dress that flowed over her flesh with the liquid sinuousness of the waves beneath. In the background nymphs and mythical creatures revelled in some impenetrable diversion. It was reminiscent, vaguely, of Raphael’s Galatea in the Farnesina.
“I never much liked Dalí,” Costa admitted. “He doesn’t seem to like the people he paints.”
“Agreed. She looks like a bad actress being forced to smile for the audience. If I’m still getting paid for that when I turn forty, I’ll be happy.”
“So this is where you come for inspiration?”
“No. I told you. I come here to possess, or to be possessed. By a dead girl in a French painting. Or a forgotten English aristocrat. Anyone, as long as it works.”
She leaned towards him, as if he were a child. “You don’t honestly think they go to the movies to see me, do you?”
“Where’s Beatrice?” he asked, avoiding the question.
Without a word she took him to another canvas. He stood in front of the work and felt, finally, at home.
“Dante came before Raphael, remember,” Maggie whispered. “So what do you expect?”
It took him back to Italy in an instant. The simple beauty, the placid tempera colours, the classical, relaxed posture of the figures: a winged Cupid with his bow, a young woman, in long medieval robes, reclining opposite him, staring at his tender face, in anticipation, perhaps in fear. They were in the kind of garden that might have been found in many a canvas adorning the walls of the museums of Florence: thick with trees, dark in places, shot through with light in others. In the distance three muses turned around each other, dancing.
The centuries passed, some ideas stayed the same. Costa leaned down and looked to see its origins. Maggie was right: Pre-Raphaelite, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, from 1877 but fired directly by the Renaissance, and Botticelli in particular.
He turned to Maggie Flavier, now blonde, looking much, as she had first said, like an attractive young waitress from a 1950s TV show. When she wore the guise of Beatrice on the screen, under the directorial control of Roberto Tonti, she was someone different entirely: this woman from another time, a different now pretending to be a different then.
“I knew you’d ask,” she said as she retrieved some ribbons out of her bag. Costa watched as she wound the coloured strands through her hair, loosely styling them, after a fashion, in the manner of the braids on the figure in the painting. He could see her Beatrice still, beneath the dyed blonde tresses, beneath the tan she’d acquired somewhere along the way.
“You were perfect,” he whispered.
“I am perfect,” she corrected him. “When I want to be.”
He looked at the nameplate: Love and the Maiden, 1877.
“I have nothing else to show you here,” she said. “But there’s a view. If we wait long enough, we could see the best sunset in the world. Well, in San Francisco anyway. I used to love it when I caught the bus, waiting for my mother to get back from the studios, wondering what she’d say.”
“Where?”
“Through the woods,” she murmured, her green eyes never leaving his face for a moment. “Where else?”
9
It was a short drive. They stopped in a deserted car park next to a stand of eucalyptus. Nearby there was a group of picnic tables and a site for tents alongside a campfire pit. He’d almost forgotten about the yellow car he’d seen on the way to the Legion of Honor. No one seemed to have followed them, though it was impossible to be certain in the narrow, winding pathways they drove along, the old green Jaguar swaying on its ancient suspension as if it were some ageing vessel navigating a rolling hilltop sea.
They got out and the smell of the trees — strong and medicinal — was everywhere. The grey trunks, shedding bark like bad skin, ranged around them, disappearing into the hazy blue distance. He’d read the signs on the Presidio when he’d walked in the lower reaches. The forest was the creation of man, not nature, planted by the military who had once occupied this narrow stretch of territory to the north of the city. He liked this idea, the notion of a land that was made, not simply inherited. To him it seemed novel.
“Down there,” Maggie said, pointing, “lie Baker Beach and the Pacific Ocean. Call this a city? Four miles behind us there’s Union Square and Market and all that crap. Here.” She made a circle around herself, eyes closed, smiling, face pointed to the sky. “Here is peace and paradise. I used to spend the night here sometimes when my mother didn’t come back from L.A. It’s a world.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Do you know something worthwhile that isn’t?”
“Quite a lot of things, to be honest.”
“Did your wife feel the same way?” she asked nervously. “She was an FBI agent once. She must have …”
He stayed silent, wondering.
“It was in the papers,” Maggie said. “Sorry. I looked. I had to. None of us has secrets anymore, you know.”
“You could have asked.”
She shook her head. The blonde locks, exactly Emily’s colour, fluttered in the wind.
“No. You don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to make you. All the same, I had to let you understand I know. Otherwise it would hang over us both. Me wondering whether to ask. You wondering whether to tell.”
He gazed past the trees, trying to guess how far it was to the beach and what they might find there.
“She wasn’t afraid of danger,” Maggie said simply. “That was what killed her. Didn’t it?”
“No. A man killed her. A deranged man I should have stopped. But I didn’t. I was too slow. Too … indecisive. I thought …” This knowledge would never go away. “I thought I could negotiate some solution in which no one got hurt.”
That failure almost nagged him more than anything. It was a curiously indeterminate kind of guilt.
“So you want everything to be safe from now on. You want everyone close to you to wear some kind of armour that stops them from being touched by what’s bad.”