by T A Williams
Sophie chuckled at the thought. ‘Thanks for the offer, but I’ve got half a dozen people I know there who’d be only too happy to do the same, but physical violence isn’t the way forward. No, I’ll just have to hope that he comes to his senses and really does forget about me.’
‘You’d be pretty hard to forget.’
There was real warmth in Dan’s voice and Sophie caught a surreptitious wink from her sister. She gave Dan a little smile.
‘Thanks, Dan. It’s good to know I’ve got you on my side.’
‘Always.’
At that moment she felt her phone vibrate and saw that it was a call from Chris. ‘Hi, Chris, how’s things?’
‘Hi, Sophie, I’m fine thanks. Listen, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you with a definite date. It’s now confirmed that I have to be in Milan on Thursday next week. Would it work for you if I came down on the Friday afternoon and left again on Sunday morning?’
‘Of course, it’ll be great to see you anytime. It’s a pity you can’t come for longer, but maybe you’ll be able to come back again another time.’
‘As far as I can work out, there’s a train from Milan that gets me down to Santa Rita just after six. Would that be okay?’
‘That would be great. I’ll be waiting for you at the station. Call me if you run into problems.’
They chatted for a few minutes before he hung up and she glanced across at Rachel.
‘Chris – he’s coming on Friday, I mean a week on Friday.’
Rachel gave her another, broader wink. ‘Exciting…’ Sophie saw her shoot a mischievous grin over towards Dan. ‘The weekend after next’s going to be interesting.’
Chapter 12
The next few days passed quickly. When Sophie wasn’t out with Jeeves or agonising over the blank page that so far constituted the entirety of her attempt at a novel, she spent much of the time up on the top floor, sifting through the piles of stuff. She started by clearing one of the rooms completely so she could use it to store anything she felt might be worth keeping to be sold at the antiques fair. Things she deemed unsuitable for sale, she carried downstairs and soon a sizeable pile of unwanted rubbish was accumulating outside the back door. Rachel checked with Beppe to see what they should do with it all as there was far too much stuff for the normal bins and he advised them to let it mount up until it was all there and then he would rent or borrow a van and take it to the municipal dump.
The collection of things worth keeping grew at an alarming rate. Sophie found a set of fine-looking dining chairs upholstered in what looked like velvet. They were a bit worn, but still serviceable. There was a child’s train set still in its box and from the picture on the cover, it was quite old. In fact there were several boxes of children’s toys and Sophie wondered idly who their owners had been. There was a hefty wooden chest full of old magazines which was far too heavy for her to move, so she left it where it was and carried on piling up the smaller stuff. It certainly looked as though there would be no shortage of items to put on display at the antiques fair at the end of next month.
She contacted Signor Verdi about what to do with the proceeds of the sale and he assured her that Uncle George had already considered that. In his usual organised way, their uncle had specified that she and Rachel could split and keep any money they raised from the sale of items in the house. When she passed this news on to her sister, she suddenly found her only too happy to join in, no doubt hoping to happen upon an old master or a jewellery box crammed with gems. Alas, they found no paintings and no jewellery, although they did come across a couple of rather moth-eaten mink coats. It was clear that whoever had lived here prior to Uncle George had been wealthy, although, Sophie reminded herself, you didn’t normally find too many poor people living in a castle worth millions of euros.
As for her novel, she finally had a breakthrough moment one evening. She and Rachel had decided to treat themselves to dinner at the Vecchio Ristoro and it was as they reached the end of another excellent meal – this time including guinea fowl roasted in the oven with fennel and sweet potatoes – that the idea came to her. They were sitting at the same table as before, tucked to one side overlooking the castle gates, when she suddenly came up with the title.
‘Behind the Castle Gates.’
‘Sorry, what, Soph?’
‘That’s what I’m going to call my novel. As a title, don’t you think it sets the scene and hints at mystery? I can see the cover now – a forbidding-looking pair of gates with a medieval castle just visible behind.’
‘Forbidding-looking? I thought you were writing romance.’
Sophie paused for thought. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m going to write a mystery, with some romance of course, but a bit darker, maybe even with a supernatural element thrown in. And I reckon I’ll make it part-modern, part-medieval.’
‘I like the idea.’ Rachel winked at her. ‘So how about two modern-day sisters who inherit a castle and discover the secret history of what happened there way back in the mists of time?’
Sophie shook her head slowly. ‘I’m not sure – a bit too close for comfort, maybe?’
‘Well, instead of the two sisters, why not make it two or three cousins who barely know each other being forced to do what we’re doing? That could work.’
Sophie turned the idea over in her head and found she liked it. A lot. ‘That’s brilliant. So it can be the story of them getting to know each other, as well as discovering the history of the place.’
Rachel reached over and tapped the back of Sophie’s hand. ‘I suppose that’s what you and I are doing really – getting to know each other again after six years.’
‘On that note, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for days now.’ Seeing her sister still looking relaxed, Sophie took the plunge. ‘You’ve told me where you went and what you did after dropping out of uni, but you haven’t told me why. Why dump everything just a matter of months before graduating? I’ve never been able to get my head round that. Why, Rach?’ She sat back and reached for her half-empty wine glass. The smile had faded from her sister’s face by now and Sophie had to wait over a minute for the reply – and when it came it packed a punch.
‘If I’m being totally honest, there were a number of reasons, but the main one was you.’
‘Me?’ Sophie almost spilled her wine. ‘What did I do? I wasn’t even in Exeter then. I was working in London.’
‘You may not have been, but your ghost was.’
‘My ghost?’ Sophie felt herself struggling to understand.
‘Do you remember Doctor Grantham in the English department?’
‘The twentieth-century literature guy? Yes, I remember him. I always thought he was a bit full of himself. Fancied himself as God’s gift to academia.’
‘He remembered you well – very well in fact – and he never stopped rubbing your name in my face.’
‘What do you mean? Why my name?’
‘Because you were Miss Bloody Perfect, that’s why.’ There was a more bitter note in Rachel’s voice now as she stared down at her hands on the table top. ‘You’re the one who got the First-Class Honours degree; you won all the prizes; you were the star of the English Department. And it was always like that all the way through school as well. As for me – and Doctor Grantham spelt it out brutally clearly to me on numerous occasions – I was just a poor imitation of you.’ Sophie saw her look up from her knuckles and couldn’t miss the tears in her eyes. ‘There comes a time when always being treated as second best gets just too much to bear. It was when he told me my Christmas assignment was superficial and unimaginative and how you would never have handed in something so poor, that I just flipped. I told him where he could shove his assignment and I went out and got hammered along with Pablo – my Puerto Rican friend. The next day I packed my bags and we left.’
Sophie was flabbergasted. Of all the explanations she had been expecting, she hadn’t thought for a moment that she herself might have been
responsible, however inadvertently. She reached across and caught hold of Rachel’s hands in both of hers.
‘Rach, I don’t know what to say. Doctor Grantham had no right to bring me into it, but I had no idea you felt so badly about living in my shadow. In fact, with you being so popular and getting the best boyfriends, I always felt it was the other way round. I can honestly say I’ve been living in your shadow for years, since we were teenagers – sensible Sophie, the teacher’s pet, the swot, that was me, while you were the one everybody wanted to be with. But, please believe me, if I’d thought for a minute that I was affecting you like that, I’d have done something about it.’
Rachel turned her hands so as to grip Sophie’s fingers gently in hers. ‘What could you have done, Soph? It’s just that you’re brighter than me.’ Before Sophie could object, she modified her statement. ‘All right, it’s not necessarily a matter of intelligence. Maybe it’s not that I’m thick. Looking back on it now I can see that the fault was my own. I just didn’t have the same attitude to work as you did. I mean, I didn’t skip lectures or anything, but I always found a million reasons for not doing any more than the bare minimum.’
After a pause for breath, followed by a mouthful of wine, Rachel continued.
‘I went skiing in Austria with a bunch of friends in January that year and I copied the Christmas assignment almost word-for-word off the internet the day I got home, just hours before the deadline. I still object to what Doctor Grantham said, but there’s no question I did deserve a very low mark. The trouble was that by that time everything had been mounting up and it was the last straw. I just couldn’t handle it any more and I knew I had to get away – or so I thought. If it helps, I very soon regretted it. I was crying my eyes out before the plane had even taken off from Heathrow. You know that feeling when you know you’ve screwed everything up and it’s all your fault?’ She produced a little smile. ‘Of course you don’t, because you don’t make those sorts of mistakes, but, believe me, it hurt.’
‘Of course I do. I’ve made all sorts of mistakes – starting with Claudio for instance. But you should just have got straight back on another plane and come home again…’
Even as she said it, Sophie knew that this would have been an impossible ask for her sister, whose pride simply wouldn’t have tolerated it. To have slunk back like that would have been an admission of defeat. But the good news was that she now appeared to have got her life back on track. Sophie reached for the carafe and emptied the remains of the wine into their glasses.
‘Well, I’m terribly, terribly sorry for my part in what happened. If only I’d known… Look, let’s drink to the fact that you’ve got yourself sorted out now – and a damn sight better than me, for that matter. At least you have a clear trajectory to follow while I’m still floundering about, trying to work out what I want to do.’ She leant forward and clinked her glass against Rachel’s. ‘Cheers, Rach. Here’s to the future, not the past.’
‘The future.’ Rachel took a sip of wine and wiped her eyes before looking up again with renewed optimism. ‘And it’s looking amazingly bright for both of us, thanks to Uncle George.’
Sophie raised her glass again.
‘Here’s to Uncle George.’
Chapter 13
Next morning Sophie gave Jeeves a longish walk first thing and then left him with Rita while she and Rachel headed for the beach for a swim in the sea and to check the place out. Although it was still relatively early when they got down to Santa Rita, it was already heaving with people. Italian schools were now on holiday and there were holidaymakers all over the place. Sophie had taken her little car rather than the big Mercedes but even so it took two or three tours of the streets behind the seafront before they found a parking space. Goodness only knew how much busier it would become as August arrived and so many Italian companies and businesses closed down for some or all of the month. They made their way through the side streets to the promenade and walked along until they spotted the sign for Bagni Aurelia.
They descended a flight of steps to the sandy beach where a cheerful suntanned man, Rita’s nephew, greeted them and showed them to their ombrellone – literally big umbrella. This blue and white striped parasol had two sunbeds laid out neatly beneath it side-by-side, arranged directly perpendicular to the sea, the sand around them meticulously raked. This place wasn’t cheap, but it did offer a lot of amenities. The beach was maybe ten feet or so below the level of the promenade and changing rooms had been created underneath the walkway. Sophie and Rachel had their own lockable changing room and the use of hot showers and even a washing line to hang their wet costumes to dry. It was all very organised, but maybe a bit too regimented for Sophie’s liking, although she had to admit that being able to change without scrabbling about under a towel was a real bonus.
They left their street clothes in the changing room and set off down the beach to the sea. In fact, as soon as they came out of the shelter of the forest of parasols, the sand was so blisteringly hot they hopped as quickly as possible down to the water’s edge and splashed in gratefully.
‘Blimey, Soph, that sand’s scorching.’
‘The water’s great though. It feels a bit cooler than our pool, but that might just be after the hot beach.’
Together they waded out into the remarkably clean and clear water. The beach shelved gradually and they walked some way before it was deep enough to duck down and swim. The sea was flat calm and there were virtually no waves to disturb the glassy surface. Looking back at the beach, they could see it was made up of a series of sunbed encampments, each laid out with mathematical precision and each with its own set of colours. The spiagge libere, tiny ‘public’ areas of sand between each bagno, were packed with those unable, or unwilling, to undertake the considerable investment necessary to rent one of the coloured parasols. The water’s edge was a mixture of children splashing about while matronly ladies and paunchy elderly gentlemen strolled slowly up and down in the shallows and vendors of all nationalities, carrying everything from sarongs to counterfeit watches and hand-carved African figurines, plied their trade.
By this time Sophie and Rachel had acclimatised to the temperature and it was delightful to float lazily about, the salty water so much more buoyant than their pool. Sophie was bobbing gently in the water when she heard Rachel’s voice and glanced across to see her face looking suddenly serious.
‘Soph, will you tell me about mum, please?’
Sophie’s state of lazy relaxation changed abruptly. She had been trying to find the right time to bring up this subject but had kept putting it off. Now it had come.
‘You mean about her illness and her death?’
‘Yes. I feel so terribly guilty for not coming home to see her before she died, but I was in a bad place… in my head. Tell me, was it awful?’
Sophie felt a whole lot closer to her sister now, but she couldn’t help the host of dreadful memories that came bubbling up inside her head.
‘It was awful. Maybe not so bad towards the end – at least for mum, as she was drugged up – but for me it was ten months of hell. I had to put my life on hold and give up my studies for a whole year so I could look after her. Thank goodness I was able to do that. If I’d been working, I could have lost my job. Of course, by the time I went back to uni again, all my friends had moved on. As for mum, the thing she couldn’t understand was why you didn’t come to see her.’ She glanced over at Rachel again and was not surprised to see tears running down her sister’s cheeks. ‘Couldn’t you have borrowed the money or something?’
Rachel nodded. ‘I know. That’s what I should have done but it was so complicated. Like I said, I was working illegally and if I’d left the country they’d never have let me back in but, truth be told, I was afraid of what mum would say. Mum and I always had a bit of a love–hate relationship. We both know you were always her favourite.’
Sophie was about to object but she stopped herself. While she had no doubt that their mum had loved both daughte
rs, there was no getting away from the fact that her firstborn, the sensible, boring, hardworking one, had always been uppermost in her mind, if not her affections. Looking back on it now, it was so clear and so unfair, but at the time she had just accepted it as the natural order. Taking her silence for agreement, Rachel continued.
‘So if I’d come home I was afraid I’d have burned my bridges, or boats, or whatever it is you burn, as far as working in the States was concerned, and I knew what she would have said: “Look at you, ruining your life, wasting your time, while your sister’s such a success.” She never was one to mince her words when she thought I’d screwed up. I know she had every right to tell me off, but it didn’t stop it hurting.’ She ducked her face into the water to wash away the tears. When she emerged, she reached over and caught hold of one of Sophie’s hands. ‘I’m really, really sorry, Soph. I should have come home and I know that now. In fact, I knew that then, but I was too pig-headed to accept it. Above all, I’m sorry that you had to do everything. I should have been there for you and for her, and the guilt I still feel will be with me forever.’
Sophie clung onto her hand as she felt the tears spring to her own eyes. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and she could understand everything her sister had told her. She did her best to reassure her.
‘Mum had her problems, Rach, we both know that. It can’t have been easy bringing up two children all on her own and there’s no getting away from the fact that you weren’t the easiest, at least when you were in your teens.’ She caught her sister’s eye to show there was no sting intended in her words. ‘After you’d left, she asked after you at first but then she became so introspective she wasn’t really interested in much apart from herself and the cancer. By the end, she barely knew who I was and I’m sure she hardly noticed your absence. For me it was tough and, yes, I would have liked your help but I managed, and it all worked out. Just try to forget about it and use the experience to help you in the future.’