Siena Summer

by Teresa Crane

  She wanted Kit Enever.

  ‘Miss Isobel. Miss Isobel?’ Lucy, carrying a coal-bucket, peered timidly through the half-open bedroom door.

  Isobel stirred. ‘What is it, Lucy?’

  The girl came into the room and busied herself with the fire. She glanced over her shoulder for all the world as if the room were full of people. ‘It’s Mr Kit, Miss Isobel. He’s back. I saw him in the village this morning. He wanted me to bring you a letter.’

  Galvanised, Isobel sat up. ‘Where is it? Give it to me, quickly.’

  Lucy straightened, easing her back, and shook her head. ‘Oh, no, miss. I dursn’t. I told him, I dursn’t. If Mr Brookes found out—’

  ‘Oh, you stupid—!’ Isobel dropped her face into her hands for a moment, then lifted it again. ‘What did he say? How did he look?’

  ‘Same as ever, miss. Hardly limps at all. But I didn’t speak much to him. I said, I dursn’t. If Mr Brookes was to find out—’ She shrugged helplessly. ‘Just thought you’d like to know, miss; that’s all.’ She picked up the scuttle.

  ‘Thank you, Lucy.’ With sudden energy Isobel swung her legs from the bed, reached for her dressing-gown and went in search of Poppy.

  *

  Poppy never forgot those following, hectic days. She carried notes and messages. She watched the feverish excitement in her sister’s eyes and wondered that her parents could not sense it. Elizabeth, poorly again, and this time in worrying pain, had taken almost permanently to her bed. Miss Simpson left to visit her family in Yorkshire for the Christmas holidays. Nobody checked on a small energetic girl’s comings and goings.

  Plans were laid.

  The Christmas tree went up in the drawing-room. Cook purchased and plucked the goose. Presents were wrapped. Local schoolchildren arrived on Christmas Eve to sing carols at the door. Stockings were hung. It was the first Christmas after the war, and the staidest of souls was intent upon enjoying it.

  Only Poppy was unsurprised to wake up on Christmas morning to discover that Isobel, with no word, had gone.

  Part Two

  Italy, Ten Years Later

  Chapter Five

  The train jolted, slowed from a walking pace to a crawl and finally – and not for the first time – stopped altogether. Poppy Brookes, dozing in a corner seat, started awake and peered sleepily out of the window. Rolling hills stretched to distant mountainous heights, the vineyards and olive groves that cloaked their verdant slopes lying in almost breathless stillness beneath a cloudless sky. It was very hot. Poppy’s close-fitting cloche hat was making her head itch; the height of fashion it might be, but it hardly qualified as the most sensible piece of headgear to be wearing on a stifling and crowded train in the middle of Italy. She took it off, ran her fingers through her short, damp hair, studiously avoiding the interested gaze of the young man opposite who had beamed at her hopefully every time their eyes had met. It had not taken her long to realise that in Italy a young woman travelling alone was something of a novelty; nor that a knee-length skirt that would not raise an eyebrow in London was rather more likely to attract attention here. She glanced at her wristwatch. They were over an hour late. Who on earth had started the rumour that the Fascist government had managed to get the Italian trains running on time? The high excitement with which she had begun this journey had long since evaporated in tiredness and nervous frustration; all she wanted now was to reach Florence, where Kit had promised he would be waiting for her. The arrangements from then on would be up to him, and for all her hard-won – and very real – independence, for once she would be happy to have it so. She only hoped that he did not intend them to travel straight on to Siena. If she didn’t get a night’s proper sleep soon, she would quite certainly go mad and bite someone.

  She could not resist a small grin at the silly thought; the young man’s smile widened eagerly. She bent her head, reached into her handbag for a handkerchief to wipe her already scarlet face, and her hand touched the letter. Poppy fingered it thoughtfully. It had arrived at Tellington Place on the day of a particularly bitter row between Poppy and her young stepmother; she could not deny that a desperate need to escape from the young woman who considered her an unwelcome intruder in her own home and made no bones about showing it had greatly influenced her decision to come to Italy to visit Isobel and Kit. But there had been more to it than that. The tone of the letter itself had concerned her, and Kit’s brief postscript – ‘Poppy – please come – Isobel needs you. K’ – had made up her mind. Not, she thought with a somewhat bleak honesty, that anyone had made any great effort to unmake it for her.

  Indeed, her father had taken little persuading to fund the trip. Only little Thomas had shown any sign of upset at her decision to spend the summer with the sister she had not seen for ten years; and that, she suspected was more out of self-interest than anything else. Poppy was the only one in the household who ever bothered to protect her small timid half-brother from the bigger, bullying John, four years his senior. She sighed a little. She had never been able to understand why, after her mother’s tragic and painful death from cancer just a few months after the end of the war, her father had so quickly remarried. Nor, no matter how hard she tried, could she see why he had chosen a woman younger than his elder daughter with a spiteful temper and the brains of a flea. Her stepmother Dora, so far as Poppy was concerned, had no single redeeming feature. To be sure she had given George Brookes the two healthy sons that he had obviously wanted, but she had also spent his money, antagonised most of his friends and complained constantly and bitterly about being buried, as she put it, in the country.

  She and Poppy had seen little of each other during the early years of the marriage – George Brookes’ solution to the problem of having, so to speak, a daughter beyond requirements having been to pack her off to school within months of her mother’s death and more or less leave her there. But for the past two or three years, since Poppy had come home, the relationship had deteriorated from bad to impossible. The letter had given her not only a reason to go, but a place to go to, and she had jumped at it. Now Kit awaited her in Florence, where he had been to deliver some paintings to his agent, and would escort her on to Siena. If, that is, this beastly train ever decided to move again—

  Just as she thought it, in a protesting shriek of steam the train did indeed begin to move. Poppy sat back in her seat and closed her eyes.

  Kit.

  What would he be like? Had he changed? She had, that was certainly true, how could it not be? The years between ten and twenty must surely bridge a greater gap than any other ten years of a life? She remembered him so very clearly; and yet she knew from this vantage-point that she had never really known him at all. She suspected that she had been a little in love with him; certainly none of the young – or even of the older – men who had shown interest in her since had borne any comparison with him. And she was honest enough to admit to herself if to no one else that, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, he was the yardstick she had used. In defiance of Dora’s – and even her father’s – opinion that in a world as short of men as post-war England, she should take the first offer to come along and be grateful for it, she had remained obdurately single. Not, she had to admit that she had been actually overwhelmed with opportunities to do otherwise.

  Her father had favoured an elderly widower friend of his who had a business in Canterbury and three married sons all older than Poppy herself. Poppy had declined firmly. A pathologically shy young man from the next village had, to Dora’s unflattering surprise, paid court for a little while – if, Poppy thought wryly, a few occasions sitting in virtual silence in the drawing-room whilst the poor boy’s acne-marked face turned from fiery red to a death-like pallor and back again could actually be termed paying court – but he, too, to her stepmother’s chagrin, had been shown the door. There had been a short and not terribly exciting dalliance with a boy she had met at the tennis club and another with the son of one of her father’s friends. Not once had a spark ignited in
her. Sometimes she almost came to believe that it never would. She knew what she wanted, or thought she did. She wanted not Kit, but what he had somehow come to represent to her. The trauma of what she had seen in the summer house she had buried deep. In the unutterably miserable school years that had followed she had remembered only his gentleness, his teasing smile, his kindness to a rather awkward child. His elopement with her sister was the absolute embodiment of romance. If she couldn’t have that, she didn’t want anything.

  She had followed their wanderings around Europe through the cards and drawings that Kit had regularly sent to her – from Honfleur, from Paris, from Rome, from Florence and finally from Siena – and from the occasional letter that Isobel had penned. They had settled in Siena four years ago when Isobel had been pregnant with their son, Robbie. When Poppy had tried to inform her father of both facts, he had turned stonily from her. Isobel’s name was never mentioned in the house.

  Behind closed lids Poppy tried to conjure her brother-in-law’s face, and could not. She could produce only a recollection of thick, curling brown hair, sharply sculptured cheekbones, a straight mouth that crooked when it smiled. Would she even recognise him when she saw him again? On that slightly unnerving thought she dozed again.

  *

  In the event it was he who found her. A lone English girl standing by a fair-sized pile of luggage in the seething mass of manic activity that was an Italian station did, after all, she realised later, stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. Hot, nervous and dog tired, she stood watching the noisy activity about her when a quiet voice spoke beside her. ‘So here you are. At last. My little Mouse, all grown up.’

  She turned. He was not as tall as she remembered him, neither did she recall that he was so slender; but it came to her immediately that she would have recognised his face anywhere. For one faintly awkward moment they stood smiling at each other. Then he opened his arms and she flung herself into them. ‘Oh, Kit, Kit! It’s so lovely to see you! How’s Isobel? And little Robbie? Are they both well? Oh – I am just dying to see them!’

  He put her from him, laughing. ‘They’re both fine. Fine. Let’s worry about you for a moment. How was the journey?’

  Poppy rolled her eyes. ‘Gruesome. There was a hurricane in the Channel and I was seasick and it seemed to take at least three days to get through France and I missed the connection in Milan and had to wait for hours and a horrible little man wanted to buy me dinner and I had to be very rude to him to get rid of him—’ She ran out of breath.

  ‘A hurricane?’ he asked, the gleam in his eye belying the amazement. ‘In the Channel?’

  She laughed. ‘Well, nearly. I swear it. And now this wretched train has taken—’ she consulted her watch ‘—three and a half hours to make a two-hour journey. Make me a promise.’

  He beckoned to a porter. ‘Anything.’ His face was alight with laughter.

  ‘Don’t tell me that the train that’s leaving from platform nine in ten minutes is the only train for Siena for three days. If I don’t stop going along for at least half an hour I swear I’ll die.’

  ‘You can do better than that.’ He bent to help the porter with the luggage, and straightened, smiling. ‘As it happens, the next train for Siena isn’t until tomorrow. I’ve booked us in to a small hotel, the one where I usually stay when I have to come to Florence. It isn’t the Ritz, but the food’s good and the beds are comfortable, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and it’s near the Ponte Vecchio.’ The crooked grin she remembered so well flashed. ‘Are you going to put that hat on?’

  She glanced down, half-surprised, at the crumpled thing she held in her hand. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Probably never again, actually, daft thing that it is. Would you like to say that again?’

  ‘I said, Are you going to put that hat—’

  ‘No, don’t be silly! The bit about good food. And comfortable beds.’ Poppy tilted her head back, shaking it, closing her eyes. ‘I’d forgotten there were such things.’

  *

  ‘Better?’ Kit surveyed her across the table, smiling.

  Poppy pushed her empty plate away with a sigh of contentment. ‘Much.’ She leaned her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands, watching him. ‘There’s so much to talk about,’ she said after a moment. ‘So much to catch up on. It’s hard to know where to start, isn’t it?’

  He nodded, leaned forward to replenish her glass from the jug that stood. on the table between them.

  ’Let’s start with “How are things at home?”’ His voice was gentle.

  She held his gaze for a moment, then shrugged a little and her eyes dropped. Absently she played with the crumbs on the tablecloth, pushing them into tidy piles with her fingertip, flicking them apart with her nail. There was a noticeable moment of silence. Then, ‘Best not to talk about it, really,’ she said, glancing up at him with a quick, too-bright smile. ‘I’d hate to make you cry into your wine.’

  He was watching her with sympathy in his eyes. ‘Poor Mouse. Is it really that bad?’

  She pulled a funny, self-deprecating face. ‘Only Mondays to Fridays. Weekends are worse. Anyway—’ she continued briskly before he could speak again ‘—that wasn’t what I wanted to catch up on; I know quite enough about it already. It’s you and Isobel – and little Robbie, of course. And your painting, and where you live, and whether you like it, and—’

  ‘Whoa!’ Kit held up his hands, laughing.

  ‘I’ve kept every single one of the cards and little paintings you sent me. I used to take them out and look at them – imagine the romantic life you were leading. The only distinction I ever achieved at that beastly school that Papa sent me to was through having a sister who’d run away to Paris to marry an artist! The girls all imagined that you looked like Rudolph Valentino.’

  He raised amused eyebrows. ‘I trust you disabused them?’

  Poppy opened large, innocent eyes that gleamed with mischief. ‘Of course not. It would have spoiled the fun entirely.’ Her laughter died. She regarded him for a moment, steadily and soberly. ‘Why did Isobel write to me?’ she asked then. ‘Why was she so desperate for me to come? And why did you say that she needed me? Is something wrong?’

  He did not for a moment answer, but picked up his glass, turning it in his hands, his face impassive. Then he looked at her. ‘It hasn’t been easy for Isobel. Right from the start it hasn’t been easy.’

  She waited, watching him.

  He sipped his wine. The small dining-room was full. The sound of conversation and laughter rose and fell about them like the ebb and flow of water. A child cried fractiously. ‘There are some things you don’t know,’ Kit said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  He drew a long breath. ‘Isobel and I ran away together because she was pregnant.’ He closed his eyes for a moment as if in a spasm of pain. ‘I’m sorry. I put that very badly. What I mean is that if she hadn’t been, things might have been different.’

  ‘How – different?’ Poppy was staring at him.

  ‘Your father might have come round. We might have been able to lead a more – shall I say conventional – life. A more comfortable life, certainly. It might, I think, have suited Isobel better if we had. However—’ He shrugged a little, ran a finger around the top of his glass.

  ‘What happened? To the child?’

  ‘Isobel miscarried. In Paris, two months later. Some few months before your mother died.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  He reached to touch her hand. ‘You were too young to be told such things. And no one else cared. That’s what Isobel found so hard. She was so sure—’ He stopped.

  ‘What? What was she so sure of?’

  ‘She was so certain they would forgive her. In the beginning, for her, it was almost make-believe – running away with me – getting married in Paris – she was living a fantasy. It didn’t occur to her for a second that your father wouldn’t forgive her. That in a few weeks, a few months perhaps, he wouldn’t be begging her to come ho
me. There had never been a time, until then, when Isobel hadn’t got her own way—’ Kit took another sip of wine, his eyes distant. ‘It was difficult for her. And the miscarriage and the blow of your mother’s death left her weak for quite a long time. I’m not sure she ever really got over it, either physically or mentally. She was very poorly when she had Robbie—’

  ‘And now she’s pregnant again.’ Poppy’s voice was sharper than she intended.

  He looked at her very steadily. ‘Not intentionally,’ he said quietly.

  Poppy felt a flood of warm colour rise in her face.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had no right to—’

  ‘You have every right.’ Kit put his elbows on the table and leaned towards her, his face intent. ‘Poppy, I’m worried about her. She’s being—’ he hesitated ‘—very difficult. And physically she isn’t strong. I’m sure that having you around will buck her up no end.’

  ‘I hope so. At the very least I can help her with little Robbie.’ Her lips quirked to another small, self-deprecating smile. ‘I’m good at looking after other people’s children. It’s the only thing Dora ever found me useful for.’

  He leaned back, returning her smile. ‘You and she don’t get along.’ It was not a question.

  The smile widened to a grin. ‘The devil and holy water come to mind.’

  Kit cocked his head quizzically. ‘Are you suggesting your young stepmother is the devil?’

  Poppy opened her eyes wide in mock outrage. ‘And are you suggesting that I’m wet?’ she asked offendedly.

  He gave a little yelp of laughter.

  Poppy tapped her nose knowingly. ‘Scarlet by name, scarlet by nature, that’s me. You ask Dora. She knows.’ He reached to take her hand. ‘Oh, Poppy, Poppy, I am so very glad you’ve come. You’re going to be so enormously good for us all.’