The Simple Rules of Love

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘For that you'll have to marry a prince,’ Pamela would reply, shaking her head and smiling mysteriously.

  And here he is, thought Cassie, returning her attention to Stephen, who was busy now writing down the name of the local manager of the car-hire firm and promising to take the matter further. Her prince, without a crown, but with lips that begged for a smile and a claim that he loved her enough to want to die without her. He wasn't what she thought she had been looking for but, then, fairy-tales were all about the answers to life's desires arriving in unexpected packages. And he was certainly full of the unexpected: that week there had been tickets to the Royal Opera House one night and a surprise lunch the following day. Leaving Frank's house in Ebury Street, she had literally bumped into him at the bottom of the steps, leaning against the railings reading a newspaper. ‘Surprise,’ he had said. ‘Surprise lunch at Ken Lo's – we haven't had a Chinese in ages.’ She had wanted to say she was too busy, that she had calls to make and bills to tot up, but had stopped herself, wary of disappointing him and behaving like a spoilsport. Most women, she had reminded herself, would give anything for a man to behave so spontaneously, so romantically. So she had said yes, what a treat, and tucked her bulging bag of paperwork under her arm for the walk to the restaurant. They had had a wonderful lunch, drinking more than they should have and laughing in happy, covert union at a neighbouring couple, who looked smart and bored and asked for cutlery instead of chopsticks.

  The sports car worked a sort of magic. Even before they had negotiated their way out of the hiss and hoot of Rome, a reckless, binding sense of fun arose between them, like a genie released from a bottle. They lowered the windows and the roof, put on their sunglasses and took it in turns to try every one of the buttons on the dashboard, squealing like delighted children at the results. Between Cassie's faltering efforts at map-reading, Stephen sang ‘King Of The Road‘, using the many traffic standstills as an opportunity to beat out a rhythm section on the steering-wheel. And then, just as the fun and Stephen's voice were in danger of wearing out, they found themselves on the right road sweeping north, with the dusty greens and yellows of rural Italy in high summer unrolling before them like a new carpet. With the warm wind blasting in their faces and roaring in their ears, there was too much noise to talk. Yet within it a happy silence reigned – a silence Cassie would have bottled and stoppered if she could. It was such a far cry from the mute tension of other recent car journeys that after a while she shouted, ‘I love you, Stephen Smith.’

  ‘And I love you, Cassie Harrison,’ Stephen yelled back, recklessly taking his eye off the road to plant a kiss on her cheek.

  They arrived at the villa a couple of hours later, windswept and dry-mouthed but still glowing with a rediscovered sense of intimacy. Peter skipped out to the car to help them with their bags, proudly listing the villa's many virtues as he led the way through its porticoed entrance and into the wide, marble-floored hall. Everyone was either on the tennis court or round the pool, he said. They had barely moved all week. Helen and Serena kept talking about a trip to Todi but had yet to get round to it. Thanks to Maria's impressive catering, they were eating and drinking like lords and waistlines were expanding, although there was an impressive air-conditioned gym in the basement for those willing to make the effort.

  ‘But I'm not allowed to go in there,’ whined Genevieve, who had appeared, shivering in a wet swimsuit, through one of the arched doorways leading off the hall, ‘not even to sit on the bicycle.’ Having delivered this information, she skidded out of sight, while Peter shouted after her about drying her feet before coming into the villa. ‘Little monkey.’ He grinned at Cassie and Stephen, gesturing for them to follow him through one of the other arches. ‘We've put you in here,’ he announced, pushing open a door at the end of the corridor, ‘because we thought it would be nice and quiet. There's an en suite, of course. All you can see is the tennis court, but that's not such a bad view, is it?’

  ‘It's lovely,’ murmured Cassie, strolling to the window to watch Theo serve to Clem, who swung and missed, then ducked as Chloe, clearly commandeered to man the base line, managed a neat lob back over the net. ‘American doubles… We used to play that, do you remember, Peter?’ She turned to smile at her brother. ‘Because Elizabeth always said she was too useless to play.’

  Peter rolled his eyes. ‘Certainly do. You should see her in the pool, though. She's a hell of a swimmer - I'd quite forgotten.’

  ‘Where's Ed? More to the point, how is Ed?’ added Cassie, leaving the window and peering round the bathroom door. ‘Such an appalling situation it's hard to know what to say to them all, isn't it, darling?’

  ‘Impossible,’ agreed Stephen, who had little desire to dampen his spirits by dwelling on the new predicament facing his fiancée's family. Ed's stupidity remained beyond words, but within that lurked the infinitely more irksome fact, so blithely pointed out by Cassie, that his soon-to-be nephew had haplessly conceived a child during the course of one coupling, while he and his fiancée had waged almost a year's campaign of unprotected sex with no result. Stephen's qualms about fatherhood remained as strong as ever, yet within that there now existed a ring-fenced sense of failure. Not truly wanting a child was one thing, but Stephen was beginning to see that not being able to have one was another matter. The paradox annoyed him almost more than the see-saw of emotions it invoked. He hated, too, the compulsion to resist voicing such dilemmas aloud. Increasingly, it seemed, all his most serious preoccupations – making certain of Cassie, getting nowhere with his work, not to mention the possibility that he was firing blanks – were things he had to keep to himself. Stephen's brain bulged sometimes from the sheer pressure of it, especially when he made mistakes, like hovering too near the Ebury Street house and having to think on the spot. He'd got away with it, but for hours afterwards – during the Chinese meal and throughout the journey home – he had been aware of a trembling all over his body, as if he was suppressing too much, as if something had exploded inside and all the aftershocks of energy were rippling up and down his limbs, looking for a way out.

  After such tensions Stephen was in a state close to euphoria at having arrived on a fresh wave of intimacy at the villa – somewhere he could enjoy his fiancée instead of watching her, where maybe he would feel sufficiently inspired to add some readable paragraphs to his manuscript, where even, as Cassie herself clearly hoped so desperately, Fate might step in on the pregnancy front and they'd have their own baby to worry about instead of their nephew's.

  ‘I thought this was to be a work-free two weeks,’ exclaimed Cassie, after Peter had left them and Stephen had pulled out his laptop from inside a folded towel in his suitcase. ‘You'll need an adaptor anyway, won't you?’

  ‘Not by the look of it,’ grunted Stephen, squatting down to examine the wall space under one of the bedside tables. ‘There are sockets for every kind of plug… Blimey, this place is something else, isn't it?’

  ‘But having that thing means you're going to work,’ complained Cassie, sufficiently confident of their new-found closeness to put on a display of genuine petulance. Stephen, she reminded herself, had been madly keen for her to take a break from her work.

  ‘One never knows when the muse might strike.’ He peered out from under the bedside table, then glanced quickly away as the real reason for his recent pitiful lack of literary output gusted across his mind. With the holiday having started so well, he was aware suddenly of all his recent vigilance as both uncouth and unjustified. Maybe he would tell her about it one day, Stephen thought, struggling to his feet and putting his arms round her. Maybe when they were old and in armchairs by a fireside, as solid and indestructible as her own dear parents had been when he'd first met them at Ashley House, he would confess it and make her laugh. ‘You are my first priority,’ he said gently, ‘and always will be.’

  When Roland put his head round the door a few minutes later they were kissing. ‘Oh – sorry.’

  ‘Don't be silly,’ said Ca
ssie, pulling free and planting a kiss on each of her godson's burning cheeks. ‘How lovely to see you – and looking so well. I'd give anything for a tan like that. What's your secret, other than swimming and tennis?’

  ‘I don't play tennis,’ muttered Roland, fiddling with the hem of his T-shirt. ‘But I've been drawing quite a bit… the views and so on.’

  ‘Of course you have, you artist you.’

  Roland looked at his feet, contemplating how hopeless adults could be at knowing what to say and abandoning any idea of expanding now on his one and only talent. Much of his eagerness with his sketchbook stemmed from Clem's nonchalant announcement at the start of the holiday that she had not – as he had supposed – forgotten about his paintings but had delivered them to her artist friend for comment. Delighted, he had begged her not to tell anyone, then promptly blurted out the news to his mother, who had hugged him and said she'd keep her fingers crossed; though quite what for Roland was unclear. He was increasingly aware that someone liking or not liking his work didn't matter. He painted because he had to, because it gave a shape to things and made him feel better.

  Meanwhile Cassie's gaze had followed her godson's to his bare feet, with their too-long nails and tide mark of dirt round the heel. ‘I so enjoyed our shopping trip, didn't you?’

  ‘Uh… yeah… Thanks again for the jeans and the shoes,’ muttered Roland, dutifully, trying not to squirm at the thought of the dusty shoebox in the bottom of his wardrobe and his recollection of the man they had met in the shop, the gay man, who had looked at him in that unforgettable way, as if he knew the very thing about which Roland himself remained so curious yet so uncertain. One of the more excruciating consequences of his cousin's recent misfortune had been a talk from his mother on the dangers of unprotected sex. Roland had endured it with pink-faced stoicism, knowing she was trying to be helpful but wondering how she would feel if he confessed that the good sense of using condoms was for him beginning to have other implications. He had thought, too, wickedly, that if Carl called him, as his request for Roland's telephone number at the end of term suggested he might, the last anxiety on his mind would be an unwanted pregnancy. There would be other terrors – hordes of them but not that. ‘I just came to say,’ he stammered now, ‘that Uncle Peter told me to tell you he's serving cocktails on the terrace.’

  ‘Cocktails on the terrace?’ squealed Cassie. ‘Is he now? Give us a minute to change and we'll be right there. Oh, Stephen,’ she murmured, after Roland had closed the door, ‘I'm so happy I could burst. I wish we could get married now, this minute, while everything feels so beautiful and right… on the terrace with a few bougainvillaeas in my hair, surrounded by my family. Of course I still want the big wedding and everything, but I had no idea that planning it would be quite such an ordeal. Forgive me, darling, please, for getting so stressed out. I'm going to try harder from now on, I promise, not to let it get on top of me, to make sure that the next five months are plain-sailing, to remember that all that matters is us standing side by side in St Margaret's and saying our vows… Oh, Stephen…’ She put her hands to her face and began to cry quietly. ‘Sorry,’ she sobbed, ‘I'm just so happy.’

  ‘Hey, hey there… you funny old thing! If this is happiness what do you do when you're sad?’ Stephen pulled her close, cradling the curve of her head with one hand and pressing her to him. She stopped crying and nestled into him, so snugly he could feel the squash of her breasts against his chest and the rise and fall of her breathing. Aroused by the embrace and his own restored sense of happiness, Stephen was dismayed to note that the many luxurious touches in the villa did not include a lock on their bedroom door. Sex would have to wait until darkness protected them. No matter. He was good at waiting, after all, he reflected ruefully, not just in bus shelters and behind lampposts but in the wider scheme of things. Hadn't he waited all those years for Cassie to reciprocate his love? And in the last few months, too, hadn't he been biding his time, not panicking, doing what he could? And here it was, the reward, the reciprocated love, just as in the early, heady days but better, somehow, for the intervening patch of terror that it might all be slipping away.

  ‘Roll on January,’ he whispered, groaning softly as he nuzzled her neck, inhaling the musky scent, loving the way she pressed against him in response, loving, above all, the certainty that he was wanted.

  Two days later Helen and Serena set off on their long-postponed trip to Todi. After endless discussions as to who should go and which car to use, the only person who decided to accompany them was Cassie. The younger members of the group, hearing talk of palazzos and duomos, had backed off with various excuses, except Theo who, having discovered from his mother's guidebook that the main piazza had been used as a location in several famous films, was sorely tempted to go along for the ride. What prevented him was a sudden enthusiastic offer of Clem's to have a proper readthrough of his script. The offer, which took place during breakfast, had raised the question Theo had been hoping to defer about how he planned to fund the project. At mention of his trust fund, Ed scraped back his chair and left the table, while his parents exchanged a glance and swiped butter across their toast. ‘We'll talk about it later, Peter had said finally, ‘when we've all had more time to consider.’ Theo had let the moment pass, though inwardly his resolve to fulfil his project had hardened, making it all the easier to put his script before the option of sightseeing.

  Among the grown-ups, decisions about how to spend the day had been no less complicated. Pamela could see the glinting sixteenth-century dome from her window and longed to go, but feared for her stamina in the heat, which had been gathering weight all week, swelling round the villa as if it might crush it out of existence. She would let the other women down, she was sure, needing rests and cups of tea while they were still eager to explore side-streets and click their cameras. Even in her hat and thinnest frock, sitting on a chair in the shade of the orange trees clustered between the pool and the tennis court, she had found she could only last half an hour or so before a dizzying urge overtook her to escape into the synthetic cool of the villa's interior. In spite of gentle encouragement, she had so far resisted swimming as a mode of refreshment. They were all so young and sturdy-limbed that the thought of revealing her flimsy flesh, as white and blue-veined as French cheese, was faintly repulsive, even to her. Yet beneath that there lurked a deeper reserve, about how it might feel to have cold water sliding over her limbs, whether it would make her mad again and needing pills. She hadn't renewed her prescription for several weeks and wanted to keep things that way.

  ‘I'll save Todi for another day, I think,’ she had said at last, busying herself with washing the breakfast dishes, although Helen had instructed her not to. She worked slowly, watching her hands swell in the heat of the water, and thinking, with sudden longing, of the inoffensive grey drizzle through which the lane had ascended as the left Heathrow.

  ‘And I'm going to stick with this, thanks,’ grunted Charlie, patting another of the fat bestsellers he had bought at the airport, as if the decision arose from a new passion for detective stories rather than lingering low spirits. ‘Like Mum says, maybe another day.’

  ‘Same for me,’ said Peter, whose mind had fast-forwarded to the irresistible notion that his wife's absence might allow him to put through a call to Delia. ‘And, of course, someone should keep an eye on our youngest,’ he added quickly, seeking refuge from his guilt in the obvious virtue of the observation.

  ‘But I can do that,’ protested Elizabeth. ‘I don't want to sightsee. It's far too hot. And, anyway, Genny and I already have plans, don't we, poppet?’ She winked at her youngest niece, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in her swimsuit, her face and limbs already glowing a luminous white from Helen's lavish applications of sun-block.

  ‘I'm going to learn to swim,’ explained Genevieve, solemnly, ‘not using armbands. When I do it I will get an ice-cream.’

  Helen laughed. ‘Oh, Lizzy, thank you – what a wonderful idea. So you could com
e, Peter, darling,’ she added, returning her attention to her husband. ‘We'd love you to, wouldn't we, ladies?’

  Peter frowned, pretending to think. ‘No, I'll pass all the same.’

  ‘But, darling, you'd love it,’ exclaimed Helen, genuinely baffled. Peter was the biggest culture-vulture of the family. ‘The cathedral's called Santa Maria della Consolazione, it's early sixteenth-century and there are at least three other churches, the ruins of a medieval fortress and a Roman amphitheatre.’

  Peter shook his head. ‘Maybe another day – we could do a boys' trip, eh, Charlie?’ he joked, glancing at his brother and Stephen, who had excused himself on the grounds of doing some work on his book. ‘I tell you what, though, I'd love a newspaper if you can find one – anything in English, but preferably the Financial Times.’

  ‘A newspaper, honestly,’ scoffed Helen, grinding the unfamiliar gear-box of their hired car as they set off down the dusty drive at last; ‘they say they want to get away from it all but they don't, really.’

  ‘Like Stephen,’ agreed Cassie, who was sitting in the back, ‘scuttling off to work.’

  ‘And Charlie saying he wanted proper bacon with his eggs,’ put in Serena, wanting to join in the merriment and trying not to reflect on the fact that this was virtually all her husband had said to her for almost twenty-four hours. Rather than exposing their problems, as she had at first feared, being so surrounded was helping to mask them. There was always a conversation going on, someone or something to respond to. No one could have guessed at the guillotine of silence that now descended at every moment they were alone.