‘Joking apart, it is extraordinarily decent of you to let us give your address to the Eurotrash.’
‘That’s not what they are, and I’d like to see them.’
‘Whatever you say. Thanks anyway.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘I say, Stella.’ She heard from his voice that he had stopped – a way of stopping her without touching, or asking her to. She did stop, but didn’t look at him. Gazed, instead, at the sky.
‘Stella, you know what I’m going to say.’
She sighed. Said woundingly: ‘Gimme a break.’
‘If a bloke can’t say it in this setting, where the hell can he? You know I’ve always cared about you. You still do it for me, you know.’
‘Thank God. It’s been preying on my mind: What if Bill’s lost interest?’
‘I love it when you’re sarcastic.’
‘Do you?’ She turned to face him. ‘Then I won’t be. Don’t kid yourself, Bill. You never cared about me, any more than I cared about you. We had a heartless little fuckfest – how many years ago? And if you entertained even the smallest notion of reviving it here, then think again. I’m paying. I reserve the right to chuck out.’ She took a couple of steps towards him. ‘Just think of that long drive home, nine hundred miles in the car with Helen wanting to know why it all ended in tears.’
‘Stella . . .’ He adopted a wheedling, would-I? tone, spread his arms in supplication. ‘What’s all the fuss about? Can’t a chap wax romantic with an old flame in Tuscany in July? Since when was that a hanging offence?’
‘Since right now.’ She stabbed a finger towards the ground. ‘Excuse me, I’m going back to the others.’
What happened next shocked her. He stood back to let her pass, but as she did so he caught her chin in his hand, wrenched her face round and kissed her, open-mouthed, on the lips, his head shooting forward, tongue darting, like a snake’s. It was over in a second and then he was walking in the opposite direction.
The next day was the second of her escapes.
An instant, and her period of fragile peace was over. She didn’t concern herself overmuch with the Bill incident, which though disgusting had not been repeated. But when he’d turned her face to his and forced his slippery tongue between her teeth it was as it he had thrust before her a picture of herself. Like a blackmailer he had gloatingly confronted her with her past. She couldn’t shake it off – who she was, what she had done, how she had behaved. It looked as if all that would stain and infect her life for ever.
After the Turners had gone, she told Bill and Helen she was going to try and do some work, and so left them to their own devices and fled. She drove towards Florence and stopped to visit a palazzo where it was rumoured that various international litterati had indulged in high jinks of the dope-and-doubling-up-variety between the wars. The house was huge and grand and the tiered gardens formal. She found it a gloomy, haunted place, in keeping with her mood. In some of the rooms, amongst the eighteenth-century magnificence, there were displays of photograhs of the dissolute English writer and his guests, their grinning faces mad and wild, so that Stella seemed to hear a shimmer of sound like gibbering ghosts in the stately rooms. Upstairs the writer’s own bedroom had been kept as it was, furnished in black and white like a thirties ocean liner, except for a single portrait of a contessa, heavy-eyed and swan-necked, who gazed disdainfully down towards the bed.
In spite of its strange and threatening atmosphere she spent all day at the palazzo, retreating to the gardens and sitting beneath a tree when a coach party arrived. Was she like those people in the photographs? And if she was, did it matter? They had not been wicked, surely, only venal and amoral, and was that so terrible? Whence, she asked herself fiercely, all this conscience? It had scarcely troubled her for years, why now, when she least needed it?
The coach party began to trickle out of the long gallery, through the double doors and down the broad, shallow flight of steps. They paused dutifully while the guide directed their attention back to the building’s stately facade. They were a group elderly yet sprightly, all neatly and appropriately dressed in pale drip-dry fabrics, trainers, baseball caps. The guide was speaking in English, but they might have been Scandinavian. The couple nearest to her were white-haired. The woman wore baggy beige trousers with a drawstring waist. As Stella watched, the man put out his hand and caressed his wife’s bottom. The attention of neither of them wavered as he stroked and kneaded, his middle finger occasionally probing the furrow between her ample haunches. When the group turned to continue their tour, the couple’s faces were perfectly collected and proper, the woman reading something out to her husband from the guide book.
Stella let them go by and then returned to the car, moving like a sleepwalker in the afternoon heat. She knew why the stupid, gross liberties of a man like Bill had so dashed her spirits, and why she could not bear to be reminded of her past. It was because love had come into her life. No matter how imperfect, how shabby and vexatious and compromised, it was love nonetheless. And that had changed her.
The Rowlandsons, to her intense relief, departed. Derek and Miriam Jackman arrived. They were a tonic. On holiday, Derek wanted nothing more than to do as he was told, to go, as he explained, where he was put, so long as it didn’t entail too much effort. His was an enviably steady, sanguine nature and here, as on stage, Stella felt herself temporarily anchored by him.
Miriam was a bustling sprauncy blonde, never less than immaculate, fearsomely organised, born to shop and flirt with waiters. When you went out with Miriam, as Derek pointed out, you just let her get on with it. She was a force of nature.
‘Now what I really need,’ she would declare musingly as she painted her toenails by the pool, ‘is a pair of tarty shoes.’
This would cause Derek to roll his eyes at Stella. ‘What can she mean?’
‘You know, darlin’, the sort you come to Italy to buy. Red crocodile, six-inch heel and ankle strap.’
‘Perfect for the superstore, Bexley Heath.’
‘No, it’s gotta be done!’ This was her catch phrase, relating to everything from shoes and earrings to restaurants and Renaissance churches.
With the Jackmans, Stella had fun. Fun was what Miriam was good at, and Derek went along with her. Unsurprisingly, for his wife was a woman without a mean bone in her body. Because marriage was, to Stella, a foreign and uncharted land, she never ceased to be amazed by its peculiarities – that some devoted unions could be sundered by a puff of wind while others, on the face of it far less propitious, could withstand any number of storms. Not that she suspected the Jackmans of weathering storms, exactly, but given Derek’s genial nature and his line of work the conditions could not have been entirely calm. Even her own professional relationship with him might for another woman have been a cause for jealousy, but on every occasion that she and Derek’s wife had met Miriam had treated it as a reason not for resentment but for friendship.
Another of her lines, spoken in a spirit of warm sisterly collusion, was: ‘Stella, he’s only a bloke, but I love him – someone has to.’
For his part Derek, because he knew Stella first and foremost through her work, knew her better than anyone. He was the only one among her visitors who in a quiet moment was moved to ask: ‘Everything okay, kiddo?’
They were sitting over coffee outside the Paradiso one morning when Miriam had elected to shop for dinner at the farmers’ market.
There was no point in trying to deceive him. He was direct but also wholly discreet.
‘I’ve been better.’
‘Thought so.’ He passed her a cigarette and lit hers, then his. ‘That what all this is in aid of?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is it working?’
She considered this carefully. ‘In a way. It is God’s little acre. And it’s given me time to think.’
‘Not too much, I hope.’
‘I’ve had plenty of company.’
Derek’s eyes followed a pretty girl
in a blue sundress. ‘Any romance?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Rubbish! You never looked better, girl.’
‘Thanks. Maybe that’s why.’
‘Don’t go getting all bitter and twisted.’
‘I’ll try not to, but I don’t see why not. Bitter and twisted’s been my stock in trade and my living for the past twenty years.’
Unexpectedly, he stroked her forearm briefly with his blunt pianist’s fingers. ‘You like to think that but it ain’t so.’
‘Derek . . . Who writes the damn’ songs?’
‘You do, and full respect to you. But the thing is they’re good songs, and good songs say all kinds of things you don’t mean them to.’
It was perhaps the nicest, truest and most loving thing that had been said to her in months. Stella had to turn her head away to hide her face.
‘Yeah?’ said Derek. ‘Yeah.’
The Jackmans left and Stella was alone at the Villa Paresi. With the end of her Italian idyll in sight she became restless, but resisted the urge to cut short her stay, for two reasons. One was because in spite of the restlessness she was reluctant to confront the uncertainties of her other ‘real’ life at home. The second more immediate and practical one was that Jamie and his friends might yet turn up.
By two days before her flight she had convinced herself that they were probably not going to, and was therefore astonished when one afternoon a sharp summons from Claudia recalled her from the shade of the olive tree to find four dusty figures on the far side of the pool.
‘Jamie!’
‘Any chance of a beer and a bed for the night, lady?’
She ran round and hugged him. No transgression of his father’s could tarnish her pleasure in seeing him. She kissed the beaming, blushing Jonno, too, and was introduced to the two girls. Jenny was freckled and Junoesque with her brown hair clipped so that it stuck up in a spiky fan. Nina was slender and black, inscrutable in wraparound shades. Claudia brought a tray of frosted stubbies and a bottle opener and they stripped off and took the beer into the pool with them, shrieking and larking about like children with the drop-dead gorgeousness of it all.
They were gorgeous, too. Stella sat on the side and thought this should have happened earlier, this boisterous physical happiness, this exuberance. What Manley Hopkins called ‘all this juice and all this joy’.
Nina stopped being inscrutable and came to the side with Jamie.
‘This is so, so great. It’s unbelievable.’
‘Glad you like it,’ said Stella. ‘I don’t always live like this.’
‘Jamie said you were cool, but this is outrageous . . .’
‘How were the olds?’ asked Jamie.
Stella did not break stride. ‘In good form, it was nice to see them.’
‘It’s really good of you to put us up, especially when you’re so pushed for space . . .’
‘That’ll do.’
Jenny, it turned out, was a legal secretary, Nina was a publishing PR whom Jamie had met via the breakfast show. Over dinner, they told their travellers’ tales. Amongst the usual stories of lost wallets, exotic rip-off, historic nights and wicked beaches were those other ones: those places and experiences that you could tell were even now forming the way they thought. Prague, where they’d stopped on the bridge before dawn and heard a lone violin playing . . . a ruined castle miles off the beaten track in Cyprus . . . a jungle village in Thailand . . . a horrific zoo in Malaysia . . . a whale that nuzzled the boat off Queensland and caused Jonno to lose his camera . . . and a valley in the Ukraine where they’d lost each other in the maze of vines.
‘That was creepy,’ said Jenny. ‘It was like they were actually growing while we were there. The Day of the Vines. Vines III, The Nightmare Continues.’
Jonno said: ‘It wasn’t that big an area, we were just disorientated. It only took us, what, half an hour?’
‘It was bloody miles from anywhere,’ said Jamie. ‘Three hours on a Coca-Cola lorry from Simferopol with the missing link at the wheel . . . Christ!’ They laughed ruefully, remembering. ‘It was Nina who dragged us there.’
‘It was brilliant.’ She turned defiantly to Stella. ‘It was the North Valley – where the Charge of the Light Brigade happened?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Crawler,’ said Jamie.
Stella ignored him. ‘And was it worth it?’
‘Yes, it was amazing. Unchanged. Haunted, you know?’ She batted Jamie’s hand away good-naturedly. ‘It was good being lost. The others were all out of sight, right, shouting and mucking around. I kind of stood there with these vines whispering all round and I was, like, all those men and horses died here. Their bones are probably right underneath where I’m standing. It was weird . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Brilliant.’
‘No, fair play, it was all right,’ agreed Jamie. ‘Hey, Jonno, show Stella what you found.’
‘She won’t be interested . . .’
‘Yes, I will.’
‘Hang on, I’ve got it,’ said Jenny. She went over to her rucksack and thrust her fingers into the outer pocket. Coming back, she handed a small object to Stella. ‘There you go.’
‘Cop that,’ said Jamie.
It was a brass uniform button, cleaned up but with some greyish soil still clinging to the engraving. She held it to the lamp, turning it in her fingers.
‘It’s wonderful . . . I’ve got a picture at home of a soldier from the Crimean War – a photograph actually. I should think it’s posed – sort of propaganda.’ ‘I’ve seen that,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s called “Golden Slumbers” or something.’
‘ “Only Sleeping”.’
‘Go on,’ said Jonno, ‘you keep it.’
‘Oh, no,’ she held it out, ‘I couldn’t, it’s precious.’
‘All the more reason to do what the man says’. Jamie engulfed her hand in both of his, curling her fingers round the button. ‘Take it. Peppercorn rent.’
And the next morning was the third escape.
On this occasion it was an escape only in the sense that the others didn’t know she had gone. They’d all sat up until two a.m. and she knew they wouldn’t surface before one. She went into Florence early enough to have her breakfast there, and to buy a couple of two-day-old English newspapers to keep her company over the cappuccino.
She didn’t even glance at the papers for a while because it was so pleasant to sit there and feel at home, and watch the natives on their way to work. When she did do so she read the broadsheet first, and then did some of the crossword – to sit at a table and not feel compelled to look up, that was a sign of accustomedness – before flipping through the tabloid.
The headline caught her eye: MOTHER CALLED ‘NEUROTIC AND INTERFERING’ BY DOCTOR WHO FAILED HER SON.
An enquiry has been called into the behaviour of a top ophthalmic consultant who hurled insults at the mother of a patient when she questioned his professional judgement. Mr Robert Vitelio, senior consultant in ophthalmics at St Xavier’s Hospital in north London, allegedly called Mrs Eleanor Stuart, 34, ‘neurotic and interfering’ and ‘a danger to shipping’ when she asked why she had not been kept fully informed about the condition of her son Conor, 10, whose eyesight was damaged in a cycling accident. Mrs Stuart claims that not only was she ‘treated like an idiot’ for voicing normal parental concerns, but that following the failure of a course of laser treatment Mr Vitelio implied that her attitude had been unhelpful and positively detrimental to Conor’s progress. Mr Vitelio has so far made no comment but one of his colleagues described him as a brilliant clinician not noted for his bedside manner. He and his wife, Dr Sian Vitelio, a GP, have recently separated. At her home in Ealing Dr Vitelio also refrained from commenting.
The incident is only the latest in a string of unfavourable publicity for the NHS which will do nothing to cheer the government . . .
Stella folded the paper and left it on the table with her payment.
That night they all got very drunk. T
hey ate at the café in the village and then visited both bars before catching the local taxi back to the villa. Stella was at her best, the way she had been on the night – how long ago – when she’d taken Jamie and Jonno with Gordon to the Criterion after the London show. She was flying, she could do no wrong, and she had the perfect audience. They were under her spell.
At the villa they put on a salsa CD and danced wildly on the terrace, periodically jumping, or falling, into the pool. They drank several bottles of wine and smoked dope.
Stella couldn’t remember going to bed. When she woke in the night, desperate to go to the lavatory, there was a warm, smooth body next to hers. Jonno. She wrapped herself in her swimming towel and went first to relieve herself, then to what had been Zoe’s little room, lying on the unmade bed with her head throbbing, and sick to her stomach.
It was late afternoon next day before she saw any of them, and it was Jamie who came down first, sliding into the pool and leaning against the wall alongside her.
‘Jonno wants you to know he’s sorry.’
‘Oh!’ She groaned and covered her eyes with her hands. ‘It takes two.’ ‘He was trolleyed.’ ‘We all were. No harm done.’ He began to swim away. ‘Jamie—’ ‘Yup?’ ‘You know Jonno . . . He’s not going to make some sort of big deal of this, is he?’
‘Hardly. It wasn’t the biggest success ever.’
She followed. She couldn’t remember. ‘No?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Jamie tapped his head. ‘You were with someone else.’ He crossed in three long strokes to the other side of the pool. ‘Does nothing for a guy to be called by the wrong name.’
‘Poor Jonno.’
‘Poor you,’ said Jamie. ‘Poor bloody Robert.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘Life seems more sweet that thou didst live
And men more true that thou wert one;
Nothing is lost that thou didst give,
Nothing destroyed that thou hast done’
—Anne Bronte, ‘Farewell’
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