‘I hope not,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make you a coffee. And you’re going to promise to tell me if you’re in the slightest bit worried.’
* * *
When he was holding her like this, cherishing her and protecting her, Mariana couldn’t have felt any less worried. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
She settled down to work again. An hour or so later, Angelo said, ‘I’ve got it! Look at this.’ He came over to her desk and placed the diary in front of her.
Leo’s handwriting was hard to read, and everything was in Italian. She squinted at the pages.
As if guessing what the problem was, Angelo said, ‘I’ve been working on this for a while so I’m used to Nonno’s handwriting. You’d expect an ex–art student to have that lovely spiky handwriting, but this is an atrocious scrawl. Shall I translate?’
‘I’ve got as far as the word “April”,’ she said with a smile, ‘so it might be a fair bit quicker if you do it.’
He smiled back. ‘My grandfather planned to visit a village called Barrington in Norfolk, where he knew Carulli had spent a couple of summers painting. He wanted to see if the cottage where Carulli had stayed was still there. He flew to London, then took the train to Norwich.’ He leafed through a few pages. ‘It’s the middle of May 1963. Here, he says he looked around the antique shops in Norwich. He bought some sketches and two watercolours, then took the train to Holt—the town nearest to Barrington. Apparently it was full of antique shops and bookshops, and he found some Carulli sketches there, too.’
He turned over to another page. ‘He walked from Holt to Barrington because that was the only way to get to the village. He found the cottages, took photographs and talked to the people who lived there. They worked on the farm belonging to the big house, and so had their family as far back as they remembered, but there weren’t any family stories about the Italian painter who’d come to stay in the village nearly a hundred years ago. He stayed in the Red Lion—the village pub—and he went up to the farmhouse to see if they knew anything.’
‘Did they?’
‘No. They suggested trying the big house.’
‘And that’s where he found the painting?’
Angelo grinned. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s brilliant!’ She flung her arms around him.
And then she remembered where she was, and pulled back. ‘Sorry. I got a bit overexcited because we’ve solved another bit of the puzzle.’ She didn’t dare quite meet his eyes. Or admit to herself that holding him in her arms, even briefly, had stirred up all kinds of odd feelings. Her relationship with Angelo Beresford had to remain strictly business. They wanted different things out of life. They weren’t compatible. She couldn’t trust the attraction.
‘He was lucky the painting wasn’t lost for ever,’ Angelo said. ‘They were renovating the house and had just cleared out the attic—they’d actually thrown the painting in a skip because it had been eaten by mice in one corner and they thought it was worthless. He asked if he could see it anyway and they said he could have it. My grandfather recognised what it was—the farmhouse he’d seen earlier, which had barely changed since Carulli painted it—and insisted on giving them money for it. He photographed the big house and the painting, as well as the farmhouse, and then he took the painting back to Italy and had a friend restore it in Florence.’
‘What a story,’ Mariana said. ‘That bit alone makes The Girl in the Window a really good candidate for the show.’
‘So is there a biography somewhere that says where Carulli painted things and when, to help us tie down the date?’ Angelo asked.
She nodded. ‘We know he went to England in the eighteen-sixties. He toured East Anglia and there are some watercolours—harvest scenes with trees, haystacks, poppies—but no oils. There’s a possibility that the one with the poppies might have been an early study for The Girl in the Window. I’d need to check.’ She bit her lip. ‘But if the people at the house were going to give the painting to Leo for nothing and he insisted on giving them money, that suggests to me that there isn’t going to be an invoice or a receipt.’