The Figures of Beauty by David Macfarlane

business card.
    M ORROW I NTERNATIONAL produced chancels, vestibules, lobbies, war memorials, altars, public conveniences, mausoleums, garden ornamentation, tombstones, embassy foyers, bank counters, office building facades, boardroom panels, and the grand bathrooms of royal suites, to name but a few areas of specialization. The brand was known anywhere anyone wanted substance, dignity, formality, luxury, and (it had to be admitted, on occasion) ostentation.
    “From excavation to installation” was the company’s early motto. This was phrasing that wanted for dignity, so Julian Morrow felt. His wife proposed “Purveyors of Fine Italian Marble”—a suggestion he politely ignored long enough for the company to attain a level of success that required no elaboration beyond his surname.
    Julian Morrow had not been born into stone. He had not grown up surrounded by marble. He was raised in a coal town in South Wales, the son of a mine company manager and aschoolteacher. As a young man he had seen opportunity in the construction trade. It was a skill he had: seeing opportunity.
    Morrow was already married, with three young daughters, and his building company was already successful when he embarked on a European trip with his wife and mother-in-law. It was, by far, the longest time he had spent alone with both of them together. His wife had planned the holiday six months after her father’s properly mourned death. It was in the second week of their itinerary that Morrow was unexpectedly obligated to get off the train in Carrara. For business.
    Morrow made arrangements to rejoin the ladies at the Hotel Baglioni in Florence two days later. He was confident he would not be missed. He’d been having some difficulty getting a word in edgewise. He wasn’t sure, exactly, what his business in Carrara would prove to be. But he’d never been happier to get off a train.
    On his first day in Carrara, he stepped from a smoky café in which he had taken shelter from a passing rainstorm. As he did, he looked down at the sidewalk’s curb and realized what it was made of. It was hard to tell if it was the marble itself or the shaft of sunlight on the white stone that could make something as ordinary as a gutter so beautiful.
    He did not need more society—although the ceaseless conversation his wife and mother-in-law had been having since Calais made him realize that his view was not everyone’s. The teas, the engagements, the babies, the illnesses, and the achievements in banking and accountancy of his many in-laws and their charming circle of friends were not great passions of his. Society had assisted him in his rise, but now that it was without this particular utility it was no longer as engrossing as it once had seemed to be.
    He had been longing for something when he stopped off in Carrara. He wasn’t quite sure what.
    I N THE CHILL STRICTURE of Cardiff’s sea-weather, in the restraint of boiled beef and parsnips, in the muted browns and civil greys, Julian Morrow was a provident husband, an attentive father, and a successful businessman. But Carrara brought out something else in him.
    He fell in love with everything: with the distant peaks and unfolding valleys, with the intimacies of narrow, sleepy streets, with the narrow runs of millstreams below the open windows of bedrooms. He loved the weather. He loved the air. He loved the pouts of acquiescence, the slow untying of sash and ribbon. He found profitable reasons to return. In less than a year he owned his first property.
    Now he visited his quarries. Now he climbed to newly opened marble terraces, argued with his managers, strode through shipping yards. He inspected orders, and he joined shoulder to shoulder with his men in the high-ceilinged, arch-windowed studios when they hoisted a piece of stone to their wooden, iron-braced turntables.
    He loved mornings filled with work that was so physical it could resist the chill of the mountains. He loved the noontimes subsequent