Some Bitter Taste Read Online Free PDF Page A

of his condition and it was very frightening for him.’
    ‘It must have been,’ said the Captain, ‘very frightening indeed.’
    The captain himself was an elegant man. A quiet and serious man. Certainly not soft, though. Quite the opposite.
    ‘He’s back to normal now. But the fear remains.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘So he must rest and avoid anything that would excite him. He is using a wheelchair as a precaution and it’s parked out of his sight once we transfer him to a chair. He’s very proud and doesn’t mention the business at all, so I beg you …’
    ‘You need have no fear,’ insisted the captain. The marshal, who knew him well, heard the hidden impatience in his voice. Porteous, if he heard it too, cared nothing about it and tattled on about Sir Christopher’s dislike of doctors and Sir Christopher this and Sir Christopher that and Sir Christopher the other. The marshal was reminded of someone, or so he thought. Then he got it. Those officious, unctuous priests who were always strutting and smirking with self-importance around the pope when you saw him on the TV news. No doubt, if they ever gave voice, it was the same story—the Holy Father this and the Holy Father that … after the shooting, how long ago was it … time passed so quickly.
    ‘This way, please.’ He opened the door. A brilliant rectangle of fresh gold and green. The marshal blinked and replaced his sunglasses. They walked between lemon trees, many of them as high as themselves, and again, as in his own kitchen, the marshal picked up the sharp scent of home and childhood. But these lemon trees were in decorated terra cotta pots, standing like guards all along a gravel walk at the far end of which was what must be the limonaia, its tall brown shutters open, its great doors ajar. Behind the lemons, to left and right, low razored hedges divided the various vegetables of the kitchen garden. The marshal, who was always interested in food, took a good look at what was growing there and was very curious to see, beyond the usual beans and salads, a patch of sweet corn. No doubt on an estate this size—and he knew it to be very big—there’d be a farm with hens. Odd place to grow your hen food, though. The man was a foreigner, of course, but his workmen surely weren’t.
    Halfway to the lemon house they turned left on a path leading to a high clipped hedge backed by young cypresses. They went through a narrow gap, a gateway in a lichened wall, and down some steps into a rectangular garden enclosed on the opposite side by a high wall with an arbour direcdy facing them beyond a lily pond. Once inside this garden, which looked to the marshal like a sort of outdoor room, they could see, to their right, the city under its cloud of pollution over a low balustrade flanked by tall cypresses. To their left, in the direction of the house, a stone staircase led up to a semicircular terrace, its curve enclosed by a high hedge with statues placed in niches. Two of the green niches were empty, the marshal noted as they were led across on a raised path to the arbour, a circular plinth, with a vine-clad wrought iron roof supported at the back by a curve in the lichened garden wall and in front by two stone pillars. There, in a deep wicker chair, Sir Christopher sat in leafy shade. Beside him were paints and a half-finished picture on an easel. There was no wheelchair in sight, though the marshal’s eyes searched for it under cover of his dark glasses, and Sir Christopher rose slowly to greet them as they arrived. Perhaps it was the thought of a wheelchair, coupled with the memory of his mother after the stroke, but the marshal was expecting someone old, wrapped in rugs, perhaps even in bedroom slippers. Sir Christopher was pale and tired-looking but he was wearing a cream linen suit and a patterned bow tie. He didn’t look particularly sick and he was younger than the marshal had expected, in his late fifties at the most. His hair was dyed brown. Porteous