INTRODUCTION

I may take up detective work one of these days.
It would be quite my sort of thing.

THE COMFORTERS

I had an appointment with Muriel Spark in Arezzo, the Tuscan town where Vasari, fabled for hisLives of the Renaissance artists, was born and bred. Mrs Spark’s fax was brief and business-like. ‘My friend Penelope Jardine and I will come to Arezzo. I suggest we have dinner there at the Continentale Hotel (not far from the station) and we can talk then. Daytimes are very hot.’

The month was July, the year 1990, and only mad dogs and impatient tourists dared expose themselves to the unforgiving sun. During the mid-afternoon, when Spark’s working day habitually began, I hid in the hotel and watched an Italian soap opera on television. At six o’clock I took a stroll and by no grand design ended up at Vasari’s house in a shaded back street in thecentro storico. The house was cool, palatial, and empty save for the mute custodian who followed me from room to room with the air of someone who suspected something fishy was afoot.

In that place and at that time, the connection between Spark and Vasari seemed obvious. A fairly pious Catholic and a patriot whose allegiance was to the Medicis, Giorgio Vasari divorced himself from the religious and political issues of his day; art was his obsession. Of course, no one with even a passing acquaintance with her work would say that Spark was oblivious to great world events. On the contrary, they inform her fiction to an extraordinary if subterranean degree. From the rise of Fascism inThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to her satire of the Watergate scandal,The Abbess of Crewe, she was always aware of what was going on in the world at large. But she was never flatly topical: no one with her intellectual attitude to faith and its implications for the hereafter could be. Like Fleur Talbot, her alter ego inLoitering with Intent, her sense of herself as an artist was absolute: ‘That I was a woman and living in the 20th century were plain facts. That I was an artist was a conviction so strong that I never thought of doubting it then or since.’ Even when Fleur makes love her mind is elsewhere, despite efforts to think of General de Gaulle. How like Vasari’s hero, Uccello, droning on about the beauties of perspective while his wife tries to drag him bedwards.

In the Piazza Guido Monaco, theAretini had come out to play. Old men, gnarled as walnuts, dealt cards while their sons drank beer and their grandsons harassed pigeons. Growling motor bikes raced round the square at intemperate speed. ‘There is carnage every night on the roads of Italy,’ observed Muriel – as she will now be called – matter-of-factly. She was a mite early for our appointment and in phrase book Italian ordered a gin and tonic while Penelope Jardine – Penny – parked their car. They had been together for twenty years, sharing a rambling house deep in the Val di Chiana, fifteen kilometres from Arezzo. Centuries ago the house, which is attached to a parish church, had been inhabited by a priest who added rooms as necessity determined. Two separate families had lived in it with the priest and his mother, some twenty people in all. Now it offered books a home, roughly seven thousand of them. ‘I buy books,’ said Muriel penitentially, ‘I often advertise for books; I s