They had left the boys with Lucien, who had looked at first as though he might have raised an objection if Justine had allowed him an opportunity, but she hadn’t. Sam and Angus paid him little attention, anyhow, continuing some obscure game behind the house while their morning was planned for them at the front. When Justine and Louisa walked around to find them the boys were standing with their backs pressed flat against the stone of the house, their hands behind them, sharing an expression of comical complicity, of some activity stifled halfway through. Justine thought of the endless secrets that had to be kept from parents by children, or so they thought; their private games, the speculation about adulthood, their perceptions of their parents. Wearily Louisa told them to be good, and they just nodded in silence, dimpling with suppressed laughter.
There had been no sign of Martin and Dido other than the front door to their side of the farmhouse standing open in the sunlight, but Justine had not gone across to explain. She told herself, by way of excuse, that they would be back soon enough; the truth was, she felt reluctant to explain why she and Louisa needed to be on their own; she didn’t know where it might lead. There was something about Martin’s sceptical gaze that, she thought, would expose any attempt to disguise what was going on; he would know immediately, she thought, that Tom had gone, that Louisa was near to desperation, and that it had something to do with Evie. And then there was Dido, whom they all wanted to protect; surely it would do her no good to see it all unravel in front of her. If that was what was going to happen.
Besides, Justine told herself robustly, it might be good for the men to work together for once, instead of maintaining the stand-off that had characterized the holiday so far. Briefly Justine wondered why Lucien was like this with other men; never explicitly hostile but ceaselessly, subtly competitive and territorial. Perhaps only she could see it; or perhaps they were all like that; Tom and Martin too, but she could only see it in Lucien.
First Justine and Louisa had gone upriver a little way, away from the bathing pool; this was where the most obvious path up to the ridge had been indicated, Justine decided, on the old map. They had gone through a stile and down a narrow track fenced on either side with rusty barbed wire, and the air had become damp and cool as they approached the gurgle of the water. They had glimpsed the sunlit clearing of another pasture through the trees at one point, and elsewhere heard the sound of cowbells reverberating in the dusty green light that hung between the tree trunks. It had been difficult to tell from the sound whether the animals were behind or in front; the effect was curiously eerie, the hollow sound indicating the invisible presence of another creature, like a foghorn in mist.
They had walked beside a narrow stream through the arched hazel clumps that formed a dark roof over their heads, crossed the river on stepping stones that were warm from the sun and then began to climb. The sound of the cowbells had receded, to their relief; neither of them looked forward to an encounter with a bull, dangerous or otherwise, in the confined space of the valley floor. They climbed with only the rasp of the cicadas for company, and even those sounded fainter now than they had been in previous days as if the insects could feel the approach of autumn and were conserving their strength.
The change of perspective that came as they climbed up out of their valley and away from Il Vignacce was a revelation that cheered them instantly. The first steep climb had taken them scrambling over a path studded with rocks rust-red with iron ore and glinting here and there. Around them in the dense woodland as they climbed they could hear the rustle and snap of forest creatures startled by their approach, and at one point Louisa stopped, with an exclamation of surprise, having come across a handful of tortoiseshell-striped porcupine quills, scattered like spillikins across the path. She gathered them up.
‘Dido might like them. Don’t you think?’ she said to Justine.
Then Justine had rounded a bend just ahead of Louisa, and stopped short, Louisa coming up behind her with a sound of surprise. Suddenly they could see into the next valley, and on a hill on the far side perched the stone houses of a tiny hamlet, much smaller than Montequercio, no more than half a dozen dwellings straggled along a ridge but inhabited. There were washing lines with tiny shirts hanging to dry, the unmistakable shape of an espaliered fig like a splayed hand against a south-facing wall, and some terraces of olive trees.
The knowledge that there was a next valley at all came almost as a revelation to Justine, ridiculous though it made her feel. She had pored over the old map with Lucien, but she had found it quite indecipherable. The map’s antiquity, the crabbed copperplate script that described long-extinct farmsteads and houses, the broken lines that should have indicated paths but seemed to lead nowhere, the tightly packed contours that denoted hills and valleys, none of it had made any sense to her. So to have managed to scramble out of the river valley and come upon this view of the outside world was like the cool breeze they now felt on their faces. It dispelled the feeling Justine had begun to have that, apart from yesterday’s brief excursion to civilization, which had already begun to seem like a disturbing dream, they were in some lost place dangling in isolation at the end of a long dirt track, just Il Vignacce and the main road and no fellow human beings in between, just the cow bells, the endless trees and the trickling water.
The women trudged on, around another bend and then another, winding forward and back across the unforgiving, pine-clad face of the hill in full sun, working their way on and up. Occasionally a splash of red paint on a tree had encouraged them, just as one or the other was about to speculate on whether their path led anywhere at all. At one point, not far up the hill, they paused for breath, looking around through the ranked trees, and Justine saw that they weren’t alone. Some distance away in a clearing she saw a man’s back, a tall, broad-shouldered man, his hand resting on an elderly woman’s shoulder as she sat next to him. They seemed to be talking. The sight encouraged her; the implication of their presence was that to be out walking was quite natural, not quixotic or hysterical, not something only a foreigner would undertake. And there was something about their attitude, the man’s kindly, thoughtful aspect, smiling down and listening, that made her feel comforted, among friendly, civilized people.
She and Louisa passed the ruin of a building, too tall to be a cowshed, stone-built, picturesquely ivy-clad, and half-swallowed up by the forest. The untended, overgrown wreckage of some olive terraces straggled below it, the bent old trees waist high in long, silvery grass and the delicate blown globes of seedheads, and the whole human construction almost completely reverted to wilderness. Both Justine and Louisa stopped together when the ruin came into view; it was a pretty place, and it was hard to see why it might have been abandoned.
Then quite suddenly they were at the top; catching their breath, they looked out at the vista. They could see a series of interlocking valleys, their outlines softened by the vegetation, and the little village they had seen earlier was strung along a ridge in the distance and bleached pale gold by the midday sun. Then they looked back at each other.
Louisa’s face had the wiped look that sustained exertion brings. ‘So,’ said Justine, ‘what’s been going on? What’s this all about?’ Up here in the open air, she thought, it would have to all come out.
There was a moment or two of silence, filled by the noise of insects and the distant whir of a chainsaw. They must be near the clearing where the logging was carried on, Justine found herself thinking. Then Louisa sighed. ‘I should – I probably should have told you about it a long time ago. Right at the beginning, even. It’s just that she said – Tom said she didn’t want anyone else to know.’
‘To know what?’ Justine looked at Louisa, who looked away. ‘Was she –? Louisa, was Evie having an affair with Tom?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ said Louisa. ‘Not for sure.’ She stopped, and Justine suppressed her impatience.
When she saw that Justine was waiting, reluctantly Louisa went on. ‘He says – well, when I asked him, outright,
oh, about two or three months after she disappeared, he – I’ve never seen him so angry. Outraged. But I don’t know what I was supposed to think. He was so unhappy, it was like he’d been bereaved, properly, as though she meant more to him than anything else, and he just didn’t get over it.’
‘But he said no? He denied it?’ Louisa nodded.
Justine frowned ‘But he was –’ the question seemed even more intrusive, somehow, to Justine, and she hesitated to ask it. ‘He was in love with her, but he didn’t actually –’
Unhappily Louisa nodded again. ‘He didn’t say that exactly, but I suppose that’s the only explanation. He just said, he didn’t know how I could ask the question. He said I couldn’t understand, that he loved her in a way I wouldn’t understand. He wanted to help her. To protect her.’ She snorted, trying to express contempt, but sounding only unhappy. Her chin cupped in her hands, elbows on her knees, she stared into the distance, across the tree tops.
Justine thought of Tom; it must happen, she supposed. You marry someone, and then you find someone else – the odds made it almost inevitable, the odds against your locating the perfect match, falling in love right away and finding it reciprocated, keeping it up all through courtship and marriage and work and responsibility and ageing. Is that what happened to me, Justine wondered, so briefly that she barely settled on the thought before turning away from it again, did I find the right person? She supposed that perhaps you never knew until it was too late, and you glimpsed the right person, at a party, on an aeroplane or in the street, over the shoulder of the one you’d settled for. Evie had always been that kind of person; you longed to be like her, to have some of what she had – taste, spontaneity, humour. And what would be the right thing to do, then? What had Tom done?
Slowly, Justine thought back to the words Louisa had first tried to take back. ‘so – when you said, she didn’t want anyone to know –’ Louisa bit her lip, but Justine went on. ‘What did you mean?’
Louisa looked at her helplessly. ‘He told me not to say anything.’
‘About what?’
‘On the day Evie disappeared, she came to us first. After she’d dropped Dido at school, she came to our house. I saw her.’
Justine felt as though her face had been frozen; she could barely move her jaw, and the words came out thickly. ‘What did she say?’
Louisa sighed and passed a hand across her eyes. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there – I was at school, helping in the classroom with Sam. He’s been having trouble with – oh, never mind. I was just on my way back, at the end of the street, walking down towards the house, and she – she was leaving. She turned the other way’
Justine pictured their pristine terrace, pelmeted damask at the windows, white stucco porches and bay trees like lollipops stationed at the doors, and Evie, the last sight of Evie. A back view maybe of her red coat coming down the steps from Louisa’s dark green front door, as jaunty and bright as a magpie, a splash of renegade colour in the spotless affluence of the street. She was overwhelmed suddenly by a sense of longing; how she wished she had been there to call Evie back, or even to be the last one to see her, hers the last friendly eyes laid on her. She felt a trickle of sweat running down her back beneath her shirt, cooling instantly in the wind. The wind sighed in the umbrella pines along the ridge behind them, and across the valley the treetops seemed to be glittering beneath the brilliant sun, and she thought how strange it was to be discussing this here; a London street, Evie’s last hours on a cold day in England, laid out between them on a foreign hillside.
She started again. ‘But – why –’ Justine broke off, the realization dawning that this had not come out at the inquest, that this might be seen by some – by the police – as vital information withheld. As incriminating. But then, she thought, Evie was alive when she left their house. So it would not be incriminating, but the opposite. She tried to order her thoughts, to set the facts straight in her mind but they were like the contours on the map; she could not tell which were hills and which valleys. Doggedly, she persisted, concentrating on what she knew to be significant facts.
‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’
Louisa put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes as if to clear something from them.
‘I asked Tom, when I got in, and he said she hadn’t been over, that it must have been someone else. If I’d said, to the police, that I thought I saw her, but I was wrong – well. It would have sounded odd.’
‘Could it have been Evie?’
‘Well,’ said Louisa slowly, ‘at first, when he denied it, I decided I could have been wrong. But – well, you know Evie. It’s hard – it was hard to mistake her for anyone else.’
Justine nodded, but she didn’t say anything. She waited for Louisa to go on, and after a moment or two she did.
‘When we realized she’d disappeared that very day, when Martin rang, I did wonder. Tom had been – odd that day, when I got back. Pale. I asked him again, could she have come to the door and he hadn’t heard her ring. Tom said no, and he was working in the drawing room by the window, so he would have seen her even if he hadn’t heard her.’
She shrugged, weary. ‘And he never said anything, all through the inquest, said nothing. It never occurred to me – Tom’s not someone who’s good at covering up, in my experience. I mean, just look at him. He’s not doing a good job, is he?’
Louisa wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and left a smear of dust. Her hair too was dull with it, and dry as straw. She looked as though she had gone beyond caring how she looked.
‘So?’ Gently Justine prompted her. ‘so how did you find out, that it was Evie at your house that day?’
‘I asked him again. After – oh, a long time after the inquest. He was still so depressed, and it wouldn’t get better. And he admitted it. I think’ – she hesitated – ‘I think he missed her so much, by then, that he wanted to share it with someone. That he’d been the last one to see her.’ Louisa put her face in her hands, and Justine knew what she must be thinking: why me? What did Evie have that I don’t have? She would be too proud to say it, though. Gently Justine put a hand on her shoulder.
From somewhere back along the dirt track they could hear the intermittent roar of a heavy vehicle approaching, and distractedly Louisa turned her head towards the sound. Justine sat up straighter, thinking; it seemed to her that something was still missing from Louisa’s account.
‘So, the thing she didn’t want anyone to know – was that she had been to see Tom?’ This made no sense to her; and indeed Louisa was shaking her head.
‘No.’ She sighed. ‘I think there were plenty of things she wanted to keep secret, and I don’t think Tom told me everything. But he did tell me she told him she hadn’t been well, and she was leaving, and not to say anything about her having been there.’
Not been well? Remembering Evie’s face, grown thin suddenly, Justine thought furiously; had there been anything at the inquest about Evie’s health? Something – there had been something, something small, not life-threatening. Something mentioned in passing. Justine couldn’t remember. ‘Leaving Martin and Dido?’ she asked. ‘she was leaving them?’
Louisa nodded. ‘I think he just thought she needed a break; that’s one of the things that he’s blaming himself for, for not making sure. I don’t think he knew she was going to – harm herself. Because he would have stopped her. Wouldn’t he?’
The roar of the flatbed lorry bumping up the track towards them grew loud in their ears and a cloud of orange dust heralded its imminent arrival. Louisa looked at Justine beseechingly. And Justine put an arm around her friend’s shoulders, grateful that the din prevented her from saying anything more.
18
The wedding dress had not been made for her marriage to Paolo’s father; it was instead of her marriage. Anna felt the absurdity keenly as she tried to explain it to Paolo, that she had begun the dress only after his father was dead. As he looked wonderingly at the waterfall o
f white silk crepe, she saw he recognized her work in the tiny buttons down its back, in the handstitching and embroidery. She had taken down the old roll of wedding crêpe given to her when she left the workshop for Cinecitta – a fine joke, they’d thought it then, to give it to her, thirty-five and never been kissed, for all they knew anyway. Or maybe they really had all hoped she would marry; perhaps the girls had been being kind after all, Laetizia with the wall eye, Chiara with her string of boyfriends and the rest of them, twittering and giggling after her; perhaps they had thought that the white crepe might bring her luck. Whatever their motives, none of it mattered now. Anna, thirty-eight, pregnant, unmarried and a widow all at once, was never going to walk down the aisle.
Anna had made enough of them over the years to be able to construct the perfect wedding gown in her sleep, and that was almost what she did. Through the remaining months of her pregnancy, after work and before exhaustion took over, fumbling her quick fingers and weighing down her eyelids, she made the dress. She laid out the fabric on her cutting table and, with her great shears, crisply she cut a close-fitting bodice, darted front and back for a young girl’s narrow ribcage, not a woman six months gone. She shaped and tacked and hemmed a draped neckline, a long train, little puffed shoulders and long, narrow sleeves. She covered forty-eight tiny buttons with silk, four for each sleeve and the rest down the length of her spine, and sewed forty-eight tiny loops to hold them. She finished the dress three days before Paolo was born, when another woman might have been edging baby blankets or smocking a christening gown.
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