Free The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane Page A

letter.”
    Irritation is never a good debating tactic with my mother. But it’s the one I usually end up using. For once my mother ignored my sharpness. She brushed objections away with the same gesture that sweeps the ashes of what she is smoking from her work shirt.
    “I don’t care what he said. He doesn’t want to be remembered. He wants to be part of who you are—the way you mightlook, or talk, or move, or maybe even write. He wants you to be a little bit like him. Because you’re alive. Not because he’s dead. That’s all. He wants to be heard a little in your voice. He wants a little of who he was then to be a little of who you are. Now.”
    My mother almost never cries. But sometimes her voice becomes briefly, almost imperceptibly, shaky.
    “That’s all we want,” my mother told me. “That’s all the past ever is.”

CHAPTER SIX
    I T WAS LATE in the muggy August of 1922 that Julian Morrow—not yet Sir Julian—noticed a couple in the old part of the town. They were on the bridge of the Via Carriona, inspecting a marble statue. Visitors, obviously.
    Morrow stopped. He smoothed his moustache and beard with his left hand as if moulding thoughtfulness into his face.
    He was wearing a comfortable suit of the palest yellow—the light, rumpled linen a far better choice for the weather than the houndstooth jacket of the gentleman he was considering. It was already hot.
    Julian Morrow drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He patted his brow. He adjusted a soft-brimmed Borsalino. It was a favourite of his summer hats. He was about to start over the street but his crossing was interrupted by two heavy carriages pulled by yoked oxen.
    It was unusual to see tourists. Carrara was off the beatentrack. A correspondent for an English travel journal had recently complained: “Thanks to a surfeit of marble, there is not the shadow of anything that can be called ‘society’ in Carrara.” This, so far as Julian Morrow was concerned, was not a bad thing.
    The wagons each had a single canvas strap holding rough blocks of stone in place on their wooden flatbeds. An old woman and a few hungry-looking dogs hurried out of the way.
    Morrow’s calculations were these: The couple was English, possibly American. Of some means, judging by the cut and quality of their clothes. He guessed that they were in Carrara because the wife—younger, very pretty—had an interest in art or history or something of that nature that the husband, Baedeker in hand, was accommodating.
    This presented promise. But what is important to know about Julian Morrow is that his calculations were so coincident with his own pleasure that he hardly thought of them as calculations. It was what he most enjoyed about this place: business was part of the same pleasure he took in the temperature, in the light, in the mountain air on his freshly shaved cheeks. It was a delight resplendent and swift, like water slipping over stone.
    There had been some morning rain in Carrara.
    He looked down at the toes of his own shoes, poised at the curb. They were the darkened brown of a saddle. They were well worn but well looked after. They were made of excellent leather. The runoff from the morning shower was clear in the marble gutter.
    J ULIAN M ORROW WAS SOMEONE who was good to know—certainly that was the reputation he fostered. He invited people to visit him. That these people might prove to be customers and clients was not beside the point. It was just not an objectiveMorrow was inclined to make very obvious. He was too good a salesman for that. They came to see his quarries, to tour his workshops, to stay with him at his villa.
    His love for the place was so obvious that it was not so much an emotion that he shared as a characteristic he was unable to hide. His girth was substantial and his shoulders were broad, but these were only part of the reason he was so often described—even by Italians—as larger than life.
    He loved the industry and art of the