That was the last conversation Molly had in Italy about the matters which had concerned her so much that summer. After lunch she and Hugh packed together and early next morning they all set off for Pisa airport. Giovanna spent the next two days cleaning and scrubbing and removing all traces of the Pargeter family from ‘La Felicità’. Their lease was at an end and their temporary occupation over.
It was October and Molly was giving Jacqueline her tea in the kitchen of the house in Notting Hill Gate, baked beans on toast and bacon, of which she couldn’t resist eating a good deal. Henrietta had her homework spread over the table and Samantha was stopping and starting her way through a Chopin mazurka on the piano in the living-room. Hugh was leaving his office in Chancery Lane to come home. That morning he had received, to his considerable relief, a letter from Mrs Tobias, telling him that she intended to marry a certain Charlie Slotover, a partner in her ex-husband’s business, and, much to her regret, she felt that their lunching days were over.
‘Mum,’ said Henrietta. ‘I know you’ll say no to this.’
‘You want to go to the Muckrakers Club?’
‘I knew you’d stop me.’
‘What is it? A party?’
‘Chrissie Kettering’s birthday.’
‘Oh. Have you been seeing Chrissie lately?’ To her surprise Molly found that she felt very little curiosity about the matter.
‘No. A girl who goes to our school knows Chrissie. She told her to ask me. By the way, something awful’s happened to her.’
‘To the girl?’
‘No, to Chrissie.’
‘What?’
‘About her father.’
And then time rolled backwards, to the sunlit kitchen in ‘La Felicità’, with the deafening sound of insects, the smell of wild mint and fennel, and the silver olive trees and purple hills beyond the windows. Molly held her breath for a moment and then said, ‘What about her father?’
‘He was killed in an accident. Some time ago. I think it was just before we came home.’
‘An accident?’
‘A lorry, I think it was. In somewhere called Urbino. Is that where you went? The driver didn’t even stop, so Chrissie’s not at all sure how it happened.’
Time stopped and Molly thought, what have I done? I found Buck Kettering. But who else did I lead to him? Who had wanted him found so that the death of her improbable lover, the untimely end of Signor Fixit, might be avenged? She paused with a fork full of Jacqueline’s baked beans raised to her lips. ‘I found you, Buck,’ she said to herself. ‘Did I kill you by finding you?’ But the question, as she asked it, immediately sounded absurd, belonging to a crime of passion between strangers, far from her home, living in a house she would never see again. What was left to her was a new passion in her own life, a love affair with her husband which had been lit as a small fire, maybe by a spark from a furnace.
Time stopped and then returned to London in the rain, to October, to homework and the children’s tea. She ate the baked beans gratefully.
‘Can I go, Mum?’
‘Yes. Of course you can go.’
Molly was looking at the notice-board on the wall to which were attached lists of school dates, vital telephone numbers and some of the children’s drawings. Pinned to it there was a postcard reproduction of ‘The Flagellation’ by Piero della Francesca, said, by some, to be undoubtedly the greatest small picture in the world.
Summer's Lease Page 27