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  He made a rapid calculation. 'You'd need to be discreet. And it has to be a favour.'

  'Cool. I like people to owe me.'

  Michael gave Adamson his phone and fax details.

  'I'll make some calls and get back to you.'

  'OK.'

  'Then we work out the plan.'

  He wondered how to phrase it. He wanted to be forceful. He was deeply put off. 'No we won't.'

  Adamson laughed. 'Listen, buddy. If this picture's real, it's the biggest break you'll ever get.'

  'I beg your pardon!'

  'You'd be leap-frogging into the bigtime.'

  He was appalled.

  'Think about it.'

  'I don't want to think about it. I'm not interested!'

  Adamson rang off.

  Michael stared at the phone in a kind of marvel, almost exhilarated by Adamson's opportunism. He was worse than the worst clichés, a two-dimensional parody of Hollywood greed. Michael sprang off the bed and walked round the room with a strange smile on his face. And then he laughed. He knew why he had called Adamson. It was not really for advice, though he needed that pretext. The honest reason was that he wanted to know what had happened to Adamson's soul. Because Adamson was his anti-type: wealthy, successful. And if success had turned him into this, it meant that Michael could at least pardon himself for being a failure.

  It was good to be sure of such things at last.

  Chapter Six

  Hilldyard had suggested a nine-thirty rendezvous at the bus stop, at a point where Viale Pasitea diverged from the coast road, and Michael was nearly late because he had not gone to sleep until 5 a.m. and then woken to such a drugged and drowsy head that he could only dress so fast, and was positively disabled in his efforts to gather things for the trip: sunglasses and raincoat, sunblock and pullover, notepad but not camera (which he was ordered to leave), all of which inclusions, exclusions or double-checkings overlapped a dizzy sock-hunt and fretful shave.

  He hurried up the road to the top of the town, dry-mouthed and unwell. The air was close, the sky overcast. There was a blanket of cloud over the sea and vapour in the folds of the mountain.

  Hilldyard sat on the parapet by the T-junction. He was watching the scene at the pasticceria, where under the awnings two old men with cloth caps and cavernous eyes looked out on the world. They sat on metal chairs, sipping espresso. They were imperturbably absorbed, deadpan, silently wise to everything an Italian street could offer. Beside them a German cyclist with veins running over his legs like electric cables chomped through a pastry.

  Michael greeted the author, shrugged at the weather.

  'Don't worry. It'll burn away.'

  'In October?'

  'This isn't British cloud. It's Italian fluff. No staying power. No grit.'

  He asked if he could run for a coffee at the bar.

  'Look sharp. Our carriage is due.'

  Up here a coach seemed impossible. The corner was too tight, the kerb too cluttered by grocery stalls. Locals sauntered across the junction as if it were a pedestrian zone and old boys sat on the parapet, looking at the view as if nothing had ever happened here or would. And yet, when the coach did arrive, looming at first-floor height, and barely squeezing round the corner, everyone took an interest. The old men called out hoarsely. A Tweedledum personality in braces and cords stood at the vehicle's rear sizing up traffic flow. A bescarved signora dug Michael out of the bar and directed him to the head of the coach, where Hilldyard waited with a feeble queue of three people, and whence the high-booted driver now made his disembarkation. The driver was portly, Napoleonic. He strolled along the flanks of the coach allowing passengers to drag their own bags from the hold. The locals hailed him like a returning general, a hero of the corniche, a herald from the outside world. He crossed to the bar to give something to the proprietor and allowed the crowds a thirsty glimpse of his leather boots and high bearing.

  The two men, aware of their dutylessness, stumbled on to the coach, which was almost empty. As the bus hovered, sundry others ascended and took up places, none of them bothered by a sense of expectancy. There was nobody much from the rest of the world here and Michael felt the extreme unseasonability of their trip.

  'This ride,' the author said solemnly, 'is a cavalcade of vertigo.'

  Michael eased into his seat.

  'Machismo in a bus driver,' said Hilldyard, 'is a terrible affliction.'

  'Yes.'

  'Keep your eyes on the horizon and relax into the G-force.'

  'It's all right,' he said.

  He was not feeling too good.

  An old man with a stubbly chin and sunken eyes sat across the aisle. He watched the figure of a mama, who heaved herself on to the coach, trailing four children and making an obese entry down the aisle. Michael was transfixed. The woman's belly was inflated, her breasts had subsided into pendant tubers, the arms were of mighty girth. She bore an authority as great as her size, as if the eruptions of her corpulence were a kind of sovereignty. She commanded the children into their places, quashed a hair-pulling outbreak, and then yanked up an armrest and sat across two seats. Her innocently pretty six-year-old looked down the aisle and found a full stop to her curiosity in the smile of the old man. He bared his tooth gaps and caught Michael's eye in a round-up of good will. Michael smiled at the unblinking bambina, and then at the man who shook his head sadly. These little innocents, he seemed to hint, would soon face the world's cares, some of them indigenous to Italy: the problems of corruption, of political incompetence, of over-eating and excessive talkativeness in women. The little ones – they were not the cause of all this – but one day they would perpetuate it.

  The bus honked its horn and pulled away. The ride had begun, and all eyes went to starboard, towards the spiralling view of Positano.

  The coffee had done something to Michael's stomach. He felt odd, unsettled. He folded his hands and forced his attention. He would not speak unless spoken to. This was Hilldyard's excursion.

  The view, even in dull weather, cast its slow spell. Positano was soon removed behind projections of rock. The road curved ahead, now leading to the grey spread of the Tyrrhenian Sea, now burrowing back into the cleft of a cove, past netted escarpments of rock. One saw waves impacting on honeycombed spits of limestone, water bursting from pockets, the docile bulk of the sea swaying against the gums of cliffs. The ride was hard on vision, a constant challenge to bearings. The body tensed with each hairpin turn, braced itself against the swerves and lurches. After several headachy zigzags the road straightened out for a mile, tendering at last a steady view and a stable speed so that he could gaze in relief at the far reaches of the sea, which was partly glaucous, and in the distance, under spokes of light, partly sparkling.

  He was still in a kind of pain. He did not know from where it came. It was not fatigue; it was more like a rent in the soul, an inner breach. He held on to the arm of his seat possessed by the idea he should not be here. He should be at home, organising his life; except that he had no life. There was only nothingness to be organised, things that could not be shaped or squared. He swallowed, trying to calm himself. He had to let the mood evaporate. He would have a second coffee in Ravello and catch up with himself there.

  'Look at that,' said Hilldyard, pointing through the window at a blow-up dinghy with an outboard motor buffeting across the sea.

  'Bonking the waves like a disembodied phallus.'

  Michael laughed and looked for himself. 'Zooming along.'

  'I just hope it isn't mine.'

  'Probably a sea god's.'

  'Damn thing's going to beat us to Amalfi.'

  He needed a pee in Amalfi. They had anyway to change buses and Hilldyard sprang from the first vehicle on to the tarmac, running between lines of parked minibuses and shouting, 'You've got a hundred and fifty seconds. Run!'

  He did not admire Amalfi. Half the waterfront was a bus terminal. The tree-lined promenade throbbed with traffic. He made his way back from the gabinetto, trying
to walk off a headache before climbing back into the atmosphere of a bus.

  He discovered the Ravello bus, not by its sign, but by the striking sight of Hilldyard sitting in the front passenger seat and gazing through the bubble of the windscreen as if the convex glass were an amplification of his power of vision. Michael sat down across the aisle from him. They exchanged nods, signifying the happy execution of his trip to the loo and their satisfactory transfer to the Ravello bus. This was the last leg of Hilldyard's pilgrimage and whereas the old man had seemed on the coast road slackly interested and in fact rather glazed by the reeling spectacle, and was equally casual about serviceable Amalfi, once the bus got moving and began its long, slow climb he sat up for a better view and his expression began to change. A threshold had been crossed, a point at which sensation was quickened by memory. The view opened out. The cold sea and gnashing rocks fell behind them, as did the shuttered, off-season villas along the coast, and the bus hoved into upland scenery, through valleys of turning colour. As their altitude increased, the mountains receded to a proper serenity of distance, tracing a wavy line against the sky. Sunlight impinged gradually, imperceptibly. Smoke from a bonfire became an electric flash. A hilltop basilica was momentarily touched off. Warmth lurked in the airy heights around them.

  Hilldyard sat meekly, rocking with the motion of the bus as it braked and turned. He scanned the wide view, as though listening for something, pressing his cheek against the window. Michael felt his own attention quickening as if, even now, on the winding approach road that scooped under Ravello's mountainous plinth, way beneath the leafy level of the town, he sensed the beginnings of an exaltation that would build over the next hour or so to its point of climax in the Cimbrone Gardens, on the famous balcony; and he knew now that, however jaded he was, he felt the renewal of a longing for that unimaginable prospect. Hilldyard's insistence on the place was a challenge. Ever since his arrival in Positano Hilldyard had been relaying him this impression and pointing out that sight, detailing the topography of his inspiration, as if he attached high importance to the existence of such impressions. In showing Michael something that moved him he was demonstrating what he himself was, what composed him. And if Michael realised that the author was returning to the locus of an emotion which he had consciously deposited at Ravello for future redemption, he also understood that Hilldyard offered the chance of Michael's own initiation in the enchanted garden. Hilldyard was asking him to become an artist. He was offering a tonic against worldly cares. He was drawing him into the secrets of solitude. He had mentioned before that Ravello taught him the self-sufficiency of experience. 'I write, of course, like a devil possessed, and for years it bothered me how people could live, have their experience, and leave it unwritten. You see, in my case, I felt I'd not really seized life until I had it down in words, although it struck me at the time how tyrannical that feeling was: that life couldn't just be lived, allowed to pass through the senses and enjoyed, like iridescent sand through fingers. And then I perceived that writing itself was only an agreeable form of awareness, induced by procedures and disciplines specific in my case to the novel, and that this state could be had without writing, by a form of noticing in which one's subject matter is painted on memory there and then. It's as if by noticing things one becomes them. By noticing the details of life one has one's life to the highest degree. Writing is then the form you choose, but not the raison d'être. The raison d'être is an awareness of detail behind feeling. And that anybody can have.'

  The bus terminated in the Piazza Duomo, and the two men edged out into the daylight, finding their feet on the tarmac square.

  Hilldyard fluttered a hand vaguely. 'The cathedral.'

  Michael nodded. 'Do we go there?'

  'No thanks.'

  'Is that the Villa Rufolo?' He pointed at an avenue of cypress trees behind a gate.

  'After lunch, probably.'

  'Do you want to go to the garden straightaway?'

  'I think so.'

  'May I–' he had spotted a caffè – 'catch up with you?'

  'You're all waterworks today.'

  'I'm parched for a coffee.'

  'Coffee's no substitute for sleep.'

  'I can't sleep here.'

  'I'm sure there are some excellent hotels round about.'

  'A coffee might be cheaper.'

  'Meet me on the belvedere at one o'clock.'

  'The belvedere?'

  'The Panorama. Then lunch. Food, wine, all the coffee you can drink.'

  Their paths diverged, Hilldyard drawn off by an invisible current across the piazza, Michael moving through empty chairs and tables to another pasticceria. He drank his espresso quickly, not wanting to fall too far behind. He was curious to see how the garden affected Hilldyard and concerned to stay in the author's slipstream, as if Hilldyard's rediscovery of the place needed to be chaperoned. Michael felt strongly his duty of response and participation. He had been brought to Ravello for something special and he needed to stem the uneasy feelings, the edginess and upset, the whatever it was that unsettled him, and ready himself for the important thing.

  He made his way around the edge of the piazza, turning at the corner where Hilldyard had disappeared a few minutes before and finding himself on a pedestrian concourse of no particular charm. More than one sign urged the way to Villa Cimbrone, as though the summer hordes needed extra persuasion to get out of the square and away from the souvenir shops. The walkway was crazy-paved, inauspicious. It took him past the walled properties of three-star hotels, swimming-pool compounds, the gate of a monastery and the backs of low sheds. A hundred yards later he halted and glanced at his wrist-watch. It was noon on a Friday morning. What was he doing? He was following an old novelist along a footpath in southern Italy.

  He thought of Adela Fairfax. She was on the beach, perhaps, waiting for the sun to blossom, waiting for him to get back to her. He thought of Nick Adamson asleep in Los Angeles. The business of the film, he realised, was an intrusion. It weighed on him uncomfortably that he had to raise it with Hilldyard. Around the world people were planning their futures, working out how to profit and get ahead, and Michael, on this footpath in Ravello, wanted no part of it.

  Just when he thought he was lost, he realised he had arrived. Before him rose a wooden door in a garden wall. A handbell dangled on a piece of string. A Gothic tower oversaw all who arrived. The effect was like a frontispiece, an invitation to enter.

  He pulled the rickety doorbell and heard nothing. There was no entrance sign; there were no visitors to follow. After a wait he tried the doorlatch, which clicked easily, and found himself following the door on its hinged swing into a cloistered courtyard. Above were the mullioned casements of a Moorish villa, pale sky. In the middle of the courtyard a sundial momentarily acquired a diagonal line. There was a brochure on a wooden chair and a barrow of potted plants under an arch. He passed through the arch into full daylight and found himself standing on a flagstone drive that separated the northern aspect of the villa from the tower, now resembling a prop from a Pre-Raphaelite picture. No one came to point the way or sell him a ticket; the villa's windows were opaque, indifferent; and despite the barrow there was no sign of a gardener anywhere. If Hilldyard were here, he had slid off surreptitiously. Michael strolled to the middle of the pathway and had his first look along the avenue that ran all the way from the villa, under stone bridges and between atomic mushroom pines to a distant point of light: the fabled panorama. He patted his pockets. He had the garden to himself.

  He cast a backward glance at the panes of the villa, as if to ensure some absent host of his good intentions, and, in an attempt to escape the self-consciousness of being the garden's only visitor, he left the avenue up a flight of steps. The higher path was narrower. He went carefully at first, almost testing the scene with the soles of his shoes and sinking into concentration with each slow step. He let his ears adjust to the points of birdsong, which came at him mysteriously from lost tiers in the spectrum of sound. He
took the hint of pine needles and dew into his lungs, the scent of greenery and mould. He enjoyed the crowding vegetation. There were rhododendrons here, ilex trees, resinous conifers.

  There was much to see: a sequence of gardens, some formal, others rambling and overgrown. The first had classical parterres billowing with salvia and tobacco plants. The second was an Egyptian terrace, with temple and bronze goat and the suggestion of pagan worship, through which he drifted to the ramshackle expanse of the rose garden, a grassy opening backed by cedars and surrounded by statues. He strolled easily across the space, taking in the shadow on an amphora, the fan-vaulted upper branches of a pine. He knelt before the blossom of a late pink rose, heard a bee's wing buzzing within its petals, looked through thistles at the far elevation of the mountains. The ground was matted with the furry hulls of sweet chestnut, dashed open, and the red fruitballs of the strawberry tree. Purple anemones were scattered in the grass.

  Further down, where the hill dropped through the rising stems of chestnut trees, Mercury sat in his pagoda, his profile clear against far vineyards. Walking along an avenue of cypresses that towered to mystical heights, Michael came to a temple to Bacchus, with a stone bench before it, on which he could sit and rest and stare at the lissom figure of an adolescent boy holding a beaker to his lips and tensing his buttock into an eternal hemisphere. Michael placed his hands between his legs. Light gilded the branches. Sun warmed the dusty earth. Nothing stirred except the fluctuating dapple on the temple's fluted columns and the trail of smoke in the valley. He relinquished himself to a slow joy, a depthless relaxation. The garden was immeasurably suggestive. It opened one up, salved the eye. Every vista stirred imagination; and as one lingered beneath the cedars or by the speckled beds of the rose garden one felt the pang of one's pure self, the soul's emotion.

  He waited on the stone seat, gravely gazing at the valley, and felt this emotion as a kind of knowledge. It sowed in him a strange compassion for his life, its losses, its peculiar beauty. Things had gone wrong and it was good to be here, alive to the garden, as though it were the first place on earth to be warmed by the sun and as though one could return, after all, to Eden.