‘Friends of yours?’ murmured Tom to Lucien as he stood.
‘Ah, yes, sort of,’ said Lucien vaguely, turning away from Tom and smiling half-heartedly at the woman and her companion, who were now almost upon them.
‘Darling,’ said the woman, and over Justine’s head she enfolded Lucien in a professional embrace, pressing first one cheek and then another against his. Justine could smell her scent, as it enveloped her in an expensive musky cloud. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary,’ said the woman, ‘do you know, I’m always recognizing people in this bar. I think everyone who’s anyone must come here, sooner or later.’
‘Penny,’ said Lucien, each of them holding the other by the forearms now in a kind of stand-off. ‘How lovely.’ He broke away and turned to introduce her.
‘This is Penny Montgomery and – or are you Penny someone else, now?’ he said, turning his smile on Penny Montgomery’s companion, who looked back at him without any change of expression. He too looked faintly familiar, although Justine could not place him exactly.
‘Oh, yes, didn’t you know? I was sure we invited you to the wedding…’ said Penny’ momentarily vague. ‘This is my husband, John Truman, so I’m Truman now. Montgomery still at work though.’ She grimaced apologetically. ‘Have to keep up the corporate identity.’
‘Penny runs a PR firm,’ said Lucien.
Then Justine remembered her; she’d run some newspaper awards ceremony’ and Lucien had gone on being sent an invitation, Mr Lucien Elliott and Guest, for years after he’d stopped writing his column. Penny Montgomery must have had a soft spot for Lucien; it wouldn’t have been unusual. Women found Lucien attractive. Justine was surprised Tom hadn’t recognized Penny, as he’d always been invited to her receptions too, naturally enough. And Penny had always been there in person, power-suited and shiny-haired, greeting her guests as they arrived and liaising conspicuously with speakers and sound technicians.
‘This is, er, my wife, Justine,’ said Lucien, and Justine saw a barely perceptible lift of the eyebrows as Penny looked her over. She was used to this reaction, which she interpreted by now as a mixture of surprise that Lucien should be married at all (their wedding had been a quiet affair, Lucien didn’t want a big, vulgar splash) and resentment that he should be married to her.
Penny turned away to bestow the same perfumed embrace on Tom; it was obvious that he knew perfectly well who she was, too. But certainly she had changed, Justine thought; to start with her body seemed to have shrunk to half its previous size, with the exception of her breasts which seemed to have gained independence and stood unnaturally high and round. She had a different image too; no longer brisk and suited, she seemed preternaturally teenaged, even down to the navel ring that winked above her velvet jeans. Perhaps this was how PR queens were supposed to look these days, and she had to keep up, or it could be the influence of her new husband. Justine could see Louisa leaning forward eagerly towards the glamorous presence, and even she had to admit the evening had been given new life by the diversion.
‘Sit down,’ said Tom, pulling an extra chair in to the table. ‘Here have my seat I’ve got to go and get the boys’ anyway.’ As he stood to go after them Tom seemed to think of something, paused and put a hand on Lucie’s forearm. Lucien looked uneasy.
‘Lucien,’ he said’ and although Tom may have intended his communication as an aside it was certainly audible to all of them, ‘invite Penny and – John? – invite them along this evening, why don’t you?’ He smiled broadly at Lucie, discomfiture, then he turned on his heel and left in search of the boys.
‘How lovely,’ said Penny, seizing Tom’ chair then simultaneously lighting a Silk Cut and wafting a hand in the waiter’s direction. Her husband sat down beside her with an audible sigh.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what are you all doing here?’
15
Anna was taking some washing in from the line strung between the almond trees beside the house; the sun was almost down and the dew was beginning to form in the crystalline evening air. The hills were blue in the dusk and the beauty of it struck her suddenly with a melancholy force, perhaps because such a view should be shared and she so rarely had anyone to share it with. It was not like Anna to think like this.
Luca – she had not permitted herself to think of Luca for almost forty years, but now, it seemed, she was going to have to – Luca had never been here, to her mother’s house in the hills. Of course, he could never have come. She had told him about it, at his prompting; reluctantly, though, worried that he would be disappointed. It was where she came from, the place that appeared in her dreams, the kind of thing one shares with a lover, although Anna didn’t know that then, she could only think of his elegant wife, and how she might compare.
She looked back at the terrace, where Paolo was sitting in the last of the sun, reading a book at the table with the concentrated attention that was, like his smile, only now beginning to remind her of his father. They had known each other for so short a time, she and Luca, barely six months, and had been lovers for only half of that, that Anna found it strange that she should suddenly be able to recall him with such clarity. She had sealed the memory up against the light and buried it for all those years and at last it was to be opened, it contents musty and outdated but perfectly preserved, the faces undimmed by the passage of time.
Anna felt a stirring of dread. What could she say to Paolo that would satisfy him after what she now admitted must have been so many years of imagining, and yearning? Was his father dark or fair, fat or thin, good – or not? Paolo had inherited his father’s dark skin and his beautiful smile, but like the Violas he was strongly built, had always been a sturdy child, not tall, with a broad face and hands, a strong Roman nose. Luca had been narrower, with an almost ascetic look, and deep-set, dark eyes. She thought of Luca as she had first seen him at Cinecitta, shouting from a stack of pallets in the woodyard to a taciturn audience of carpenters and metalworkers. She hadn’t given him much thought then, hadn’t exchanged a word nor even a look with him, but his face had reappeared in her dreams for days afterwards.
They hadn’t had long together, but it had felt as though Anna had known him for all of her life. There was plenty that was known about him; everyone knew where he was from, how he was formed, politically; there were other things only she ever found out. He had been the son of contadini, like her, but from a village to the south of Rome instead of the north, and from the plains, not the hills, his family had been devastated by the war. His father had died in Russia, conscripted into fighting for the Germans on the eastern front, his mother had died of pneumonia brought on by starvation and only he and his two sisters survived, although they were never the same, so he said. Luca had not said what had happened to his sisters during the war but she had not needed to be told; the stories were too familiar, too dully terrible to be exaggerations, the starvation, rape, mutilation, torture that had become commonplace treatment of women as the Allies advanced and the fighting intensified. Luca had needed to set those things right, or at least to be moving in the right direction, against the tide. A good man, until she came along, anyway.
How could a mother explain that to a child, that he had been the cause of so much unhappiness? That if he had not been born his father might still be alive? How could she begin? She smiled at Paolo as she passed, disguising her thoughts; her arms full of washing that smelled of bracken and birch; of autumn in the air. In the spring it would smell of almond blossom, foaming pink and sweet.
Perhaps she could begin by telling him where they had met, she and Luca. Paolo knew that, at least, or thought he did; he had guessed it from the first time she had taken him to Cinecitta. The inescapable sense that his family was there, somehow, by the way he was recognized and touched like a talisman by the extras, the workers in the canteen, his downy head stroked with affection from the first day she brought him to work with her. He didn’t know that was because of her, not of Luca, that none of them, as far as she knew, knew who his father h
ad been any more than he did. Or not for sure, anyway.
At one time she had thought that Paolo would want to work at Cinecitta, he loved it so much, but then the times had changed, the old studios had become moribund and the atmosphere, although not entirely gone, was not the same either. Almost to her relief her son had seemed to become jaded with the place; as he grew, and the film studios declined, he seemed to realize the foolishness of looking for his father there, among the great actors lording it on the back lots.
‘Come inside, caro,’ she said. ‘It’s getting cold.’
Paolo looked up from his book, something about Italy and her dissidents, some history, with a look of faint, wary surprise and Anna wondered whether he knew, already, and was just testing her. She transferred the washing to one arm and rested her free hand on his shoulder.
‘In a minute, mamma,’ he said, and carefully he placed a marker in his book.
Down at the far end of the long restaurant table, Justine looked across the debris of their first course – a green pool of olive oil on a plate, transparent slivers of ham and some bruschetta still uneaten, a crushed cigarette packet, half-empty bottles and ranks of smeared glasses – at Lucien. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she didn’t need to; with Lucien it was quite enough to watch and besides, she could probably guess. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to the elbow and his finely shaped brown forearms rested on the table; between his hands he was fiddling with the silver paper from a cigarette packet as he talked easily to Louisa, occasionally looking up at her with his heartbreaking half-smile. He seemed to be in a good mood again. To give him credit, although he obviously hadn’t wanted Penny Montgomery and her husband to come to dinner, once it had become inevitable he had been very gracious about it, making polite conversation with them about the charms of Il Vignacce and undiscovered Tuscany.
‘Miles from anywhere,’ he said, ‘absolutely unspoilt.’ Waxing lyrical, overlooking the inconvenience of the unmade road and the leaky fridges; he was good at that. From time to time, like this, quite unexpectedly Justine would be reminded of how she had fallen in love with him.
The night of Tom and Louisa’s Christmas party had been bitterly cold, the pavements glittering with frost outside the long, uncurtained windows of their drawing room. The party, by the time Justine arrived, was already on the wane, the room was half empty and the few conversations still going on were desultory, petering languidly out as people began to yawn and drift home. Lucien had seemed to want to keep Justine to himself, to stop her from leaving, and together they had stood in a warm corner by the fire that smelled of the eucalyptus and pine that Louisa had used to decorate the mantelpiece. Lucien had begun to talk to her about his garden. He had mentioned a pleached lime hedge he was planting, going into detail over the pruning, the colours of the leaves in spring against the sky, the scent of lime blossom and the bourbon roses with which he planned to underplant the trees. He seemed so committed, so absorbed.
Justine had never been accustomed to masculine attention; not blonde, not tall, not beautiful, she thought of herself as the opposite of eye-catching, and that had suited her well enough. She had always worked alongside the few men employed at the publishing house, their professional relationship undisrupted by any unprofessional advances on either side. She told herself that this was a good thing; it made for a harmonious and uncomplicated working day, but around then, around the time of that party at the tail-end of another year of office celebrations and pairings-off, it had begun to fret at the edges of her consciousness, the sense of having been left out.
But as Justine had stood there in Tom and Louisa’s drawing room with her glass of flat champagne, looking down at the dying fire and listening to Lucien, she felt as though she had entered a parallel universe in which she was quite a different kind of woman. She felt the warm glow of Lucien’s attention, his passionate need to describe his garden to her as though she, uniquely, would be able to understand its beauty, to sympathize with his choices and the obstacles he had had to overcome to create it. What drew her, what mesmerized her, was not just that Lucien’s subject, so appealing, so sensual, was quite unlike the usual, bored conversation, about work or gossip or televison, that people made at parties. It was the sense Justine had that she had been chosen by him; at one stroke she was no longer superfluous, she had become desirable.
Lucien had had other girlfriends. People – not well disposed – had pointed them out to Justine, at the beginning; a tall, supercilious society blonde called Juliet Fleming, a sculptor who managed a house full of artists in Hoxton; Claudie Richler, who worked in the city as a currency dealer, and had a little cocaine habit. Lucien was still on good terms with all of them, which was a good sign, Justine thought; sometimes he went out for a drink with one or the other of them, and Claudie Richler had asked him to design her roof garden.
Justine had even been introduced to one or two at parties, and she had never known whether to be pleased or dismayed that none of them were anything like her. They invariably treated Lucien with amused fondness, not quite seriously, and Justine was only very occasionally made to worry, by something someone said or a look that passed between them, that there were things about Lucien she didn’t know, things he had experienced with other women that they didn’t share. Lucien hadn’t married any of them though, as he pointed out to her on occasion. She looked across the table at him now and felt a wave of longing, or perhaps it was insecurity; the need to reach over and touch his smooth brown forearm, to claim him.
In Florence the restaurant Tom had chosen was in the brick-vaulted cantina of a huge, dark palazzo in the Santa Croce area of the city, where the streets were even narrower and more tortuous, it had seemed to Justine as they had made their way there, than those they had negotiated in the day. Down below street level, however, the restaurant was warm and bright, already bustling with custom, the air full of the seductive smell and sound of cooking and a long table laid along one wall, waiting for them; when they arrived Martin was already there, sitting at one end of the table, alone and so preoccupied he barely seemed to notice they were there. Then he seemed to pull himself together, shook the Trumans’ hands and they had all shuffled around the table, jockeying for position at the table miraculously relaid to accommodate the unexpected additions.
Tom had orchestrated the seating with gusto; he seemed to be enjoying himself. The food was served promptly, which was just as well; the alcohol seemed to have sharpened everyone’s appetite. They had drunk more than enough, between them; Tom and Penny in particular had been drinking steadily since they sat down at Rivoire and showed no sign of slowing now. Although neither was obviously drunk, there was an air of recklessness about Tom in particular.
Justine was between Martin and Penny’s husband, John Truman, with Penny herself opposite; Lucien had ended up as far from her as he could be, with Louisa on one side of him and Dido on the other. Behind Louisa, as she listened to Lucien talking (about cooking, Justine decided, as she watched him dip his forefinger in the puddle of olive oil and hold it up to Louisa), Angus was snaking his small arms around her neck, pulling her back towards him while she tried to pry his fingers off her throat, smiling and listening all the while.
Justine watched them together, mother and son entwined, and she thought Tom had been right about how alike they were, although most observers might have disagreed. Louisa was so decorous and fair and calm where Angus was dark and stubborn and wild, but Justine knew that beneath her carefully maintained poise Louisa was as obstinate and irrational and determined as her younger son. It occurred to Justine that perhaps, when you had children, your secrets all were spilt, your childhood tantrums and foibles recalled. Looking at Lucien, wondering what he had been like as a child, Justine supposed that exposure might suit some parents better than others.
Beside Justine Martin was eating with quiet concentration. Only when he had finished the last crumb of his bruschetta did he look up, wiping oil from his chin with a napkin. He smiled at her
apologetically.
‘You met a friend,’ said Justine, smiling back, ‘so Tom said. I did wonder what the odds would be against meeting someone, just like that, out of the blue. And then these two turned up, too.’ She inclined her head very slightly across the table at Penny, hoping not to draw attention to the gesture.
Martin looked at her oddly.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the odds, well, that depends. Probability.’ Justine remembered that Martin’s undergraduate degree had been in mathematics, and wondered whether she was about to get a lecture, whether in fact, this was the kind of thing that interested Martin. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s a good subject, actually’ And he leaned back, and looked at her. ‘Things aren’t as random as we often think. Birthdays, for example – they aren’t randomly spaced throughout the year, certain dates are more common than others, for a number of reasons.’
Justine nodded, thinking of Valentine’s Day, power cuts, evenings drawing in. All the reasons for conception on one day and not another. And Evie disappearing, she thought, but did not say. We all thought that was out of the blue, didn’t we? Out of nowhere.
Martin went on. ‘Throwing a dice, there you can estimate probability; that’s a random event. But when you calculate some odds, there are factors, why one horse is the favourite and not another. We just can’t see them, not if we don’t know anything about racing, anyway. Holidays, for example.’
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