Bad Sisters

by Chance, Rebecca

  He does carry it well, she had to admit. And, to be fair, the hair does balance the nose . . . Still, if he has a sister with a nose like that – well, I bet she had it fixed a long time ago.

  ‘The car is over there,’ he said airily, waving his hand ahead of them, as he bumped the trolley into the road and started pushing it along the centre line, oblivious to a taxi behind him honking crossly.

  ‘Um, I think you’re supposed to walk on the pavement,’ Devon said, hesitating for a moment, then stepping down to follow her suitcases.

  Gianni waved his hand again, dismissively this time. ‘In Italy,’ he said, drawing the ‘I’ of Italy out so long the word sounded like ‘Eeeetaly’, ‘we design the roads very well and the pavements very badly.’

  Devon waited, but that seemed to be all he was going to say on the subject. The taxi honked again; Gianni, without slowing his pace, waved his hand again behind him, this time with an unmistakable gesture.

  ‘Won’t he get cross?’ she asked nervously, glancing behind her at the taxi, whose bumper was barely two feet away from them. The driver scowled at her.

  ‘Of course! It means nothing,’ Gianni said cheerfully.

  He bumped the trolley across another road, over a concrete walkway, and down the other side, to the short-stay parking lot; after a brief but vigorous argument with the official at the ticket kiosk, he returned with a validated ticket, frowning deeply.

  ‘Ma vaff’,’ he muttered. ‘Che ladri!’ He glanced at Devon as he pushed the trolley towards a battered old Golf. ‘Thieves,’ he said darkly. ‘All thieves, all corrupt. Italy is a very sad place.’

  ‘You don’t look sad,’ Devon ventured, which made him burst out laughing. He looked, she noticed, just like a little boy when he laughed. A very hairy little boy with a very big nose.

  ‘No!’ he said, his eyes slanting and bright. ‘No, you are quite right, Mees Devon! I am not sad! In fact, I am very happy!’ He pronounced his ‘h’s with great care, as if it were a very difficult task. ‘It is a sunny day, I am with a beautiful woman – how can I not be happy!’

  He beeped open the Golf and started throwing Devon’s expensive suitcases into the boot with a brio that made her wince.

  ‘And now,’ he said, opening the passenger door and bowing to her, ‘I drive you to Chianti!’

  The seat of the Golf was saggy, the plastic dashboard chipped. A Magic Tree in the shape of a pineapple hung from the rear-view mirror, looking as old and battered as the car. Gianni fired up the engine, hit the button to turn on the CD player and shot out of the parking space in what felt like one continuous movement. Devon squealed, reaching frantically for her seatbelt.

  ‘Ah si, bene,’ Gianni said, glancing over at her. ‘Is the law now, the belt. I forget always.’

  He fastened his own seatbelt, rolled down his window, extracted a packet of Marlboro Red from the breast pocket of his shirt, and held it out courteously to her, all the time firing the car around a roundabout, through an amber light and into a stream of traffic.

  ‘No, no, thank you,’ Devon said faintly, cringing back in her seat. Some sort of Italian rock music was playing, a man with a very loud, hoarse voice yelling about something that sounded very important over the thump of drums and guitars.

  Gianni tipped a cigarette into his mouth, clicked down the car lighter and settled his left arm comfortably onto the open window embrasure, squinting happily into the sun.

  ‘This is Vasco Rossi,’ he said, gesturing at the CD. ‘A very famous Italian singer. You know him?’

  Devon shook her head, which made Gianni turn enquiringly to her, not having heard a response.

  ‘No!’ she practically screamed. ‘No, I don’t know him! Please keep your eyes on the road!’

  Gianni laughed in the most amiable way possible and leaned further towards her.

  ‘He is the most famous Italian singer,’ he informed her. ‘This song, it is about a man alone with a woman. She is crying, and he tells her to stop.’

  The cigarette was hanging precariously out of the corner of his mouth; Devon squirmed back in her seat to avoid having any ash spilled on her.

  ‘Please!’ she said, in total panic now. ‘The road!’ She flailed her arms towards it, indicating where he should be looking.

  ‘Oh, I drive these roads since I am a little boy,’ Gianni said breezily, still barely glancing towards the road ahead. ‘I can drive them con la benda. How do you say that?’

  He took both hands off the wheel and put them over his eyes to pantomime what he meant. Devon screamed, which didn’t faze him in the slightest.

  ‘It’s a blindfold!’ she shrieked. ‘That’s how you say it!’

  ‘Grazie,’ he said airily, replacing one hand on the wheel and spinning it to send them towards one of the motorway tollbooths. He squealed to a halt in front of the barrier, pulled out a ticket, muttered curses under his breath at how long the bar was taking to lift, and shot away again when it was only halfway up, barely avoiding smashing into it with the roof of the car.

  ‘Look,’ Devon said, furious now. ‘Rory pays you, right? He’s your employer, and I’m his guest, so you have to do what I say, and I’m telling you to slow down! OK?’

  Gianni shot up the entry ramp to the motorway, nipped across two lanes, straight across the path of two huge lorries, and settled into the fast lane.

  ‘Certo, signora,’ he said affably. ‘Ecco!’

  He took his foot momentarily off the accelerator, bringing the speed down from 140 to 130 kilometres per hour. Behind them, a BMW flashed its lights and honked impatiently, yelling, ‘Ma va a cacare!’ Gianni twisted the wheel, shot in front of a lorry in the middle lane, and gave the BMW the finger out of the window as it whipped past, doing at least 180.

  ‘What’s the speed limit here?’ Devon asked in a tiny voice.

  ‘Cosa?’ Gianni asked blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Devon muttered.

  Too frightened to look at the road any more, she pulled down the plastic visor and slid open the mirror cover; the mirror was scratched and bent, but she could see herself well enough as she untied her headscarf, shook out her hair, and speared her fingers through her curls to rearrange them. Then she picked up her big silver Hayden-Harnett bag and rummaged through it to pull out her transparent Clinique cosmetics case. Reapplying make-up always calmed her down, but that was impossible in a car with a bad suspension bumping at high speed along a motorway. Instead, she extracted a purse vial of Marc Jacobs’ Lola, popped off the top, and sprayed herself liberally with the rich perfume: the scent of rose, fuschia, peony and geranium filled the car. Normally she would have thought it very rude to spray herself with such a strong perfume in a comparatively enclosed space, but Gianni hadn’t asked her permission before he lit up his stinky cigarette, had he?

  He sniffed the air appreciatively. ‘Mmm!’ he said. ‘Molto buono! Molto feminile,’ he added approvingly. ‘Very feminine. That’s the right word, yes?’

  ‘Yes!’ Devon said quickly before he turned to look at her again.

  ‘A woman should be feminine,’ Gianni said, whipping the Golf sharply left, across another lane, to take the motorway exit. ‘A man should be a man and a woman should be a woman. You, Mees Devon,’ he added, looking at her as he fired the car at one of the exit tollbooths and squealed to a halt mere inches from the barrier, ‘are very feminine. This is a very good thing.’

  Devon was about to tell him off for making personal comments when she realized that he wasn’t even listening to her; he was chatting with the man at the tollbooth, a big guy with a shaved head who was giggling at something Gianni had just said.

  ‘This is Aladino,’ Gianni said to Devon, gesturing at the man. ‘He lives in our village, Greve. He is very funny at parties.’

  ‘Ciao!’ Aladino said, bending to get a good look at Devon. ‘Ooh! Bellissima!’

  Gianni said something which made Aladdino laugh even harder; he handed Gianni his change and called
to Devon, ‘Ciao, bella! A presto!’

  ‘He says see you soon,’ Gianni informed her as he gunned the Golf again. ‘Greve is a very friendly place.’

  Oh great, Devon thought. What, I’m supposed to hang out with tollbooth attendants and caretakers while I’m here? She knew this was snobbish of her, and she was ashamed of it. But she had grown up in such poverty, such reduced circumstances, had struggled so hard to better herself and put those days behind her that she felt as if it would be a huge step backwards to find herself making friends with guys who collected motorway tolls, or picked other people’s guests up from the airport for a living.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Gianni asked, as he wove the Golf at high speed down a series of back roads. ‘We can stop for a little aperitivo, if you would like.’

  Devon did want a drink and a snack, but she had no intention of spending a moment longer with Rory’s annoying caretaker than she had to.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said stiffly as the car whipped round a curve at terrifying speed and then shot over a pretty little stone bridge.

  ‘You are tired from your flight,’ Gianni said, unabashed. ‘Laura has put food and wine for you in the house. And tomorrow she will come to ask you if you want to go with her to the village, to see the shops.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting her,’ Devon said pointedly, to indicate that Gianni was flirting with her in an inappropriate manner, considering that he had a wife at home.

  The car jerked and then corrected itself; Devon grabbed the bottom of the seat in panic. The singer called Vasco Rossi was howling now. Gianni tapped another cigarette out of the packet and lit it up.

  ‘You will like Laura very much,’ he said cheerfully. ‘She, like you, is very beautiful.’

  ‘Oh good,’ Devon said sourly, rolling down her own window to ventilate the car. She had to admit that the view was exquisite; she had been to Tuscany before, but only on a whistle-stop tour of Florence and Siena. She had never been into the countryside before.

  ‘This is not the pretty part,’ Gianni, who seemed to have a disconcerting ability to read her thoughts without even looking at her, informed her. ‘This is the industrial road, down in the valley. Here we make cotto – terracotta – and press the oil. That is very smelly. It is nice to do it not so close to where most people live. Up in the hills,’ he took both hands off the wheel to gesture expansively, ‘it is very pretty. Much more than this.’ He smiled at her. ‘I think you want to arrive at the villa quickly, so I take the fast road. It is very straight.’

  Devon, who was almost getting whiplash from Gianni’s driving, could only be grateful that he had taken what he considered the less curvy road. They passed through a charming-looking village, low white-painted buildings with red-tiled roofs, bustling squares and several bars and restaurants: one bar, called Va! Va!, had little wrought-iron tables on the pavement, by the roadside, with people sitting at them, chatting and smoking. Gianni braked to a screaming halt, leaned across Devon to wave at everyone, yelled something at a table occupied by a dark-skinned man with a thick head of hair and a skinny girl in tight trousers, high heels and an entire eye pencil’s-worth of black liner round her eyes, yelled abuse at the drivers behind him who were honking because he was blocking the road, and sped away again, throwing his cigarette out of the window as he went.

  ‘It is a very nice bar,’ he said to Devon. ‘That is the owner, Remsi. He is Turkish. Very nice. Also they have calcetto – football on the table. Do you play?’

  ‘No,’ Devon said coldly, as the car zipped out the other side of the village.

  ‘I will teach you,’ he offered.

  ‘Lovely,’ Devon said even more coldly. ‘We can all go to the bar with your wife.’

  The Golf bumped over a bridge, jerked hard left and up a dirt road so steep that Devon gasped in shock.

  ‘Perfetto!’ Gianni said, laughter in his voice. ‘You, me and my wife – we will all go to play calcetto! Very nice. Oh, guarda – look! A fagiano!’

  A cock pheasant rose, whirring, from the side of the road. Devon could barely look, though; on the far side of the car, the hill dropped away so sharply she was terrified. The wheels were bouncing over huge potholes, she was being tossed from side to side like a boat in choppy water; silver-grey olive trees and twisted vines thick with bright green leaves fell away on each side of the narrow dirt road. They tilted up a wide avenue lined with thick oaks and pines, and at the top more vine groves drew a gasp of appreciation from her, because each was planted with a rose bush at the end, which were blooming richly in the warm weather.

  ‘The roses are lovely,’ she exclaimed, unguarded for a moment.

  ‘They warn us if the mildew is coming to the grapes,’ Franco said, bouncing the Golf between the groves, past a field of walnut trees, the green grass thick with bright red poppies. ‘Also, they are beautiful. You like roses?’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ Devon said frigidly again, back to warning him off flirting with her.

  The car turned between two big stone pillars, up a winding gravel drive, and her heart lifted. It positively soared as she took in Villa Clara, a large, elegant house painted pale cream, sitting in a nest of stacked green ornamental gardens, a small fountain playing in the centre of the little lawn in front of the villa.

  ‘Eccoci!’ Gianni said, spraying gravel everywhere as he pulled the Golf to a halt next to the arched wooden front door below a wrought-iron balcony. ‘Welcome!’

  He lugged her bags out of the boot and carried them into the house; for a lean, wiry man, he was unexpectedly strong.

  Well, he does work in the fields all day, I suppose, Devon reflected, following him up the stone staircase, very much amused by the fact that his shirt was tucked neatly into his jeans. Very Italian – no English man would dress like that. He does have a nice bum. But I expect that’s all the manual labour.

  ‘Rory, he stays in there,’ Gianni said, gesturing to a high door as they emerged into a stunning anteroom with pale salmon walls and an elaborately tiled floor. ‘But you do not sleep with Rory, no?’

  ‘No!’ Devon said furiously. ‘I’m a married woman!’

  Oh God, Matt – what am I going to do? she thought with a deep pang of guilt.

  ‘And your husband? He comes with you?’ Gianni said, lugging the bags into a huge, white-painted room, its large bed made up, neat piles of stacked towels resting on a wooden antique trunk at its foot. ‘It is a big bed! Room for a husband!’

  He grinned at her as he dropped her bags on the stone floor.

  ‘He has to stay in London,’ Devon snapped, fishing in her handbag. Gianni might be unspeakably annoying, but she still had to tip him. ‘Here.’ She handed him a ten-euro note.

  Gianni’s thick eyebrows shot up till they disappeared behind the mass of curly hair over his forehead. He shoved the note in his jeans pocket: then he took her still-outstretched hand, bent over it, and planted a warm kiss in the palm.

  ‘Molte, molte grazie, signora,’ he said softly, looking up at her, still holding her hand, his thumb lightly stroking her palm. ‘Ci vedremo presto, lo prometto.’

  Devon was riveted to the spot. Her jaw dropped. She stood there, amazed, as Gianni dropped her hand, stepped round her carry-on case and strode out of the room. She listened to his footsteps crossing the tiled antechamber and running lightly down the stairs, the front door slamming behind him; then she ran over to the window and peered out to see him walking across the drive, presumably back to the cottage she could see across the lawns, the cottage he shared with his wife. His curly hair bounced in the breeze, his slim figure moved easily as he tapped another cigarette from the packet. He was whistling; she could hear it clearly.

  Oh my God – I’m watching the caretaker walk away. I’m watching the caretaker’s bum walk away. I can’t take my eyes off it.

  Gianni didn’t even turn round to see if she was looking at him. He had to be the most confident, annoying, self-centred man she had ever met in her life. The first man ever t
o pay her compliments while simultaneously absolutely ignoring her requests. He’d disregarded half the things she said, she realized. He’d ridden roughshod over her. And then he’d kissed her hand – not even her mouth! Her hand! – and held it for a moment, and that had been the single sexiest thing that had ever happened to her in her life.

  She hadn’t even realized she was attracted to him until that moment. And now she couldn’t think about anything else but him – Rory’s caretaker. His married caretaker. Who chain-smoked, drove like a maniac, had a beautiful wife, and who had looked up at her with his slanted dark eyes, for that long moment holding her hand, as if he was longing to do a series of unbelievably filthy things to her. All of which, God help her, she would let him do without breathing a word of protest. Things she had never done with anyone.

  Devon sank down onto the wide, soft mattress, staring straight ahead of her, but unseeingly, the elegant framed watercolours of fruit and vegetables hung on the white walls completely invisible.

  My God. If I feel like this just because he kissed my hand, I’ll go to pieces if he kisses me anywhere else!

  What the hell am I going to do?

  Deeley

  It was grey outside again the next morning and raining, but Deeley didn’t care. In fact, she preferred it. The low dark clouds made her feel cut off from the rest of the world, reminding her that she was on a small island off the coast of France, and that nobody knew where she was. It was strangely comforting being marooned in five-star luxury, in a suite as plush as the inside of an expensive jewellery box; thick carpets, heavy curtains, velvet armchairs, silk cushions, all in rich tones of chocolate and chartreuse and plum. She had come back to it yesterday afternoon after her spa visit, put on her silk pyjamas, and curled up on the big sofa, watching TV and dining on room service in solitary splendour. This morning, she’d swapped the dinner tray for the breakfast one; she was eating more than she ever had, steak and fries, eggs Florentine, toasted muffins, food she had barely touched in her years of living in LA.