Then Anna had taken pity on him; it was, after all, too much to ask. The world did not work that way, giving to those who have not, taking away from those who have. You don’t have to leave your family, she said. And only then had she told him, once it was too late and her voice was dull with despair, the only thing he might have left his wife and child for.
‘I did tell him. In the end.’
‘What did he say?’ asked Paolo, his eyes on the ground.
What had he said? ‘Really?’ he’d said, and he had sighed, a long sigh as though one burden had been lifted only for another to be placed on his shoulders, and he’d raised his head from between his hands to look at her. A look of such stunned confusion as she had never seen.
‘He – he was happy. In a way.’ Cautiously Anna looked at Paolo.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t known what Luca thought about children; it was practically a part of his political manifesto: he believed that one was enough, that they were a luxury the world could not afford. She thought it was part of his determination to deny himself until the world had become a more just place; she had never thought, in her spinsterish naivety, that she would fall pregnant (how could she not have known? she wondered now) and his conviction would be put to the test. But she did, and it was. She thought of the look she had seen in Luca’s eyes when realization dawned and wondered how she could describe it to her son. Disbelief, alarm; wonder, longing. It’s not as simple as that, she wanted to say to her son; you wait. Perhaps he already did know.
‘I don’t think he ever got as far as worrying about what would happen once you were born. But I think the idea – that you were there, on the way – I don’t think he could help himself. He was happy. Perhaps – after –’ She stopped. Perhaps, she wanted to say, after he left me, he began to think of all those other things; but looking at Paolo’s averted face she thought, perhaps that’s enough. And it was true; when Luca had left her, he’d looked happier than she’d ever seen him.
He’d walked down the greasy, dark, malodorous stairwell as if he was sleepwalking, into the street but then, just as he stepped off the kerb to walk away and she thought, what have I done, he turned and waved back up at her in the window. And that was the last vision she had of him, his face upturned and suddenly smiling, dazed with happiness, saluting her.
‘I don’t think he could have been more proud of you, Paolo,’ she said, knowing it to be true, ‘if he’d known you. You’re just like him.’
Paolo lifted his eyes at last, but just then, from below them, in the valley, they heard a cry.
Justine hadn’t heard a sound, she only knew that Louisa had vanished. She looked back up the hill but could see only the stones of the path, red with dust, and the dense undergrowth on either side. She shouted, and for a moment she thought she heard a weak cry in response, but a bird started up in the hedge at her shout, floundering and flapping in noisy alarm, and she couldn’t be sure. Scrambling back up the hill, reaching for the stones with her hands to help her up, she was soon panting with the effort, and although the sky was overcast now her shirt clung to the sweat forming on her back. Justine was in a panic; she’d been careless; she shouldn’t have gone on so fast. She should have turned to look back.
Justine had almost retraced her steps to the top of the steep part of the slope where they had set off together and she had last seen Louisa, when she heard something like a sob, only angrier. The path was enclosed here with vegetation, crowding up on either side, and Justine looked wildly about, trying to judge where the sound had come from.
‘Louisa?’ she called ‘Lou?’
‘Here.’ There was something confusing about the direction from which the answer came; Louisa’s voice was muffled and it almost seemed to be emanating from underneath her.
‘Down here. Oh, bloody hell.’
A stunted cork tree, its trunk stripped up to shoulder height, stood at the edge of the path where Justine had stopped. It was surrounded by lesser trees; etiolated saplings, some hazel and clumps of something tough, prickly and aromatic like myrtle, lined the path edge. Justine leaned against the trunk of the cork tree and peered forwards into the undergrowth. It was not what she had expected; the ground, which she had assumed to be level, fell away sharply at the edge of the path, where a landslip must have sheered off the natural slope. Beneath her feet Justine could feel the earth crumbling away, and she took a step back. Standing as close as she dared to the edge she leaned against the tree and cautiously she looked back into the shadows.
‘Louisa?’ she said again.
‘Here.’ Louisa’s voice was clear now, coming up to her from the foot of the slope.
The flat glare of the overcast midday made it difficult to see anything at first, but gradually her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she could make out Louisa’s blonde head in the shadow below. She was hunched over her knees, but when Justine called down to her she tipped her head back and looked up, her small pointed chin giving an impression of defiance although even at this distance everything else about her body language betrayed distress.
‘Careful!’ she called up sharply to Justine. ‘It just drops away there.’
Cautiously Justine turned and lowered herself backwards down the bank; it was about twelve or fifteen feet down, not sheer rock, but hard, dry earth, a lump of stone or a root offering a handhold here and there, but more often crumbling away under her scrabbling fingers. All the same, it took no more than a minute for her to get down, slithering the last few feet and landing with a gasp and a thud next to Louisa.
Louisa looked at her anxiously, still hugging her knees. Justine put an arm around her shoulders.
‘Are you hurt?’ she asked. ‘What have you done?’
Louisa winced as she extended her right leg, and let out an exclamation of frustration and pain mixed.
‘Bloody hell. It’s so stupid,’ she muttered angrily. ‘I’d stopped, just for a minute – I thought I saw some more of those porcupine quills. I was just catching up, climbing down behind you. I put out my hand for support, to lean on the tree up there, must have missed it. I didn’t see – ow!’ She broke off as Justine gingerly pressed a swollen-looking ankle.
‘That hurt,’ she said, crossly. ‘No, sorry. It’s not your fault.’ She looked back up the bank to the filigree of leaves, black against the light, at the top. ‘I didn’t realize it sloped down like that.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I wasn’t concentrating. I didn’t look where I put my hand, I went to support myself on the tree and I went over the edge. It’s ridiculous!’
She sounded outraged. Justine looked at the slope, from which roots protruded like coarse hair, exposed by the landslip, gauging the distance Louisa must have fallen.
‘I couldn’t believe how far down I went,’ Louisa said. ‘I put out my hand to try to stop myself.’
There was a raw-looking graze on Louisa’s forearm and the heel of her hand, and Justine could see twigs in her hair. But she seemed full of angry energy again, which was a welcome change from abject misery.
‘It’s my ankle, that’s the only thing. It got caught in something. As I came down. A tree root, or something.’
‘Lucky you didn’t break your neck,’ Justine murmured absently, following Louisa’s gaze up to the light. It seemed a long way back up, and a quick assessment of their situation confirmed her fear that they were going to have trouble getting out of the forest unaided. The mobile had long since lost its signal, she couldn’t haul Louisa back up that bank on her own, and even if there was a way out of the undergrowth further down, she’d need guidance to find it. In the background she could hear the fading chug of the logging lorry; surely it couldn’t have got far. Quickly she made a decision.
‘Look,’ she said, seizing Louisa by the arm, ‘if I climb up and run back to where we were, where the road forked, maybe I can catch up with the lorry. They might be able to help get you out. Back to the road.’
Uncertainly Louisa nodded and, un
willing to waste any time, Justine jumped up. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Panting up the steep slope, Justine found herself wishing she was fitter; up and down these stones twice in one day at speed and her lungs were burning. She thought of Louisa sitting alone at the foot of that steep slope in the dark, and felt a shiver of claustrophobia. Better get back quick. She climbed on; the logging lorry could never have got down this road. She wondered how long it could have been since this way out of the woods was passable other than on foot; when had Il Vignacce become so cut off? With the little hidden village perched so tantalizingly close on the next ridge, this must once have been the natural way out.
At the fork the going was easier; the road Justine turned on to was almost level, the rust-red gravel fine and dusty. She began to run. The laboured sound of the lorry ahead of her grew louder, it was obviously moving with painful slowness; she could hear her own breathing too, rasping as it burned her throat. She rounded a bend, and there it was, swaying ahead of her. She could no longer run, but she was almost there; she could hear their voices, although she couldn’t make out what they were saying. The men looked at her incuriously as she approached, then, at her frantic gesturing, one of them shouted back over his shoulder and the vehicle came to a halt. Within a few steps she was upon them.
There were three men sitting on the back of the truck, another perched perilously on top of the load, standing as the truck stopped. Justine saw the face of the fifth man, the driver, gleaming with sweat as he craned his neck to look back at her from his cab. Justine could not have spoken straight away, even if she had formulated the words, she needed first to catch her breath. As they watched her, one of the three men facing her removed the stub of a cigarette from between his dark lips and flicked it down into the dust. He said something out of the side of his mouth to another of the men and they all laughed; nothing about the laughter invited her to share in it with them. Then they fell silent, watching her.
Trying to control her breathing, Justine spoke, but the words came out in a rush. She concentrated on slowing her speech down, enunciating in her best Italian, but the men showed no sign of understanding.
‘My friend is hurt,’ she said again, ‘I need help.’ But their faces did not change; they looked at her as though she was an animal in a zoo, an inferior species trying to communicate. The fourth man jumped from the top of the log pile to the ground; it was quite a height, some nine or ten feet, but he landed silently. He came along the side of the lorry towards her, and behind him Justine could see the driver climbing down from his cab.
Justine felt her throat tighten in panic; all she could see were their dark, expressionless faces bearing down on her. The driver, whose face she still could not see, said something in a thick, guttural voice and without turning away the man who had spoken earlier replied. Their speech was quite unintelligible to Justine; it was not Italian. It could have been dialect, some North African language, Albanian; something dense and glottal. She made one last brave attempt to communicate, looking from one to the other of the men as she tried to extract a response, any clue that they were willing to help her, but again they laughed. Justine felt her sense of being able to judge the situation slip. No, she thought. She turned and ran.
Paolo and Anna were almost at the road and they paused in their argument as they saw the pale flicker of a figure running along below them. Whoever it was, was partially screened from them by the bracken and the rich striated brown of the umbrella pines’ bark; the sound of coarse laughter echoed up from the road below. The impression was of a raucous gathering; suddenly the forest seemed full of life and sound, not an empty place.
Anna sighed. ‘You see, it could have been anyone. Just someone out walking, startled by something. Nothing to send us off on a wildgoose chase.’ She looked weary, perhaps in anticipation of the effort of beginning her story again. Paolo felt sorry for her, and guilty; he didn’t want to force her.
‘Come on, Mamma, it sounded like someone in pain. Don’t you think?’ Paolo said uncertainly, unsure whether the sound they had heard had been an appeal for help.
Anna shook her head a little. ‘I don’t know how you could tell,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Did they teach you that in medical school?’
Despite himself Paolo laughed. ‘You learn that one on the job,’ he said. ‘Still, I don’t know how we’d track down whoever it was, not in all this.’ He gestured around at the great expanse of trees below them, moving a little in the wind, the leaves of the holm oaks and poplars showing silver as they shivered in the breeze.
‘If they’re on the path, maybe well come across them,’ said Anna, in an attempt to console him. Slowly they set off again, climbing down through the ferny groundcover to the path below, the path that would eventually lead them to Il Vignacce. It was quite light up here, where the trees grew sparsely, but looking down the path the foliage seemed to encroach much more and the way seemed dark. Overhead the sky was a pale, uncertain blue, the sun lacking the strength to illuminate.
Once she was out of sight of the lorry, turning around once to be sure no one was following her, Justine’s panic slowed, and when she turned off downhill at the fork, she began to feel foolish. And yet, how could she tell? She hadn’t been able to make them understand. And even supposing she had physically dragged one of them down to where Louisa lay, how claustrophobic then would that dim ravine feel, just Louisa, Justine and one of them, one of those laughing men, the three of them confined just out of sight of any passer-by? She clambered down across the stones of the path, aware that it was cooler now; aware of cloud closing in overhead; it occurred to her suddenly that it might come on to rain, sooner or later, and she felt a qualm.
She approached the corner where she had left Louisa and was overtaken by anxiety that she would not recognize it, that she had already passed the cork tree overhanging the scree, or that when she got there Louisa would be gone. But there it was and there, when Justine craned her neck, half-afraid still, to peer down the slope, was Louisa.
‘Lou?’ she heard herself whisper.
‘Oh!’ Louisa looked up, gasping with relief. ‘It’s you. I –’ She tried to stand, to get closer to Justine, reached out for a hanging branch, but her ankle gave way and she let out a yelp of pain.
‘Careful!’ called Justine. ‘Sorry, I – there’s no one. We’ll have to manage on our own. Wait there.’
‘Couldn’t I – perhaps, with you up there, I could get up some of the way on one foot, and you could pull me?’ Louisa was trying to sound brisk, her old self. Doubtfully Justine shook her head. Louisa was trying to stand again, and to show willing Justine took off her backpack and set it carefully aside. She lay down, her body over the edge of the path, and leaned down towards Louisa’s hand, which was fluttering palely at her in the dim light. But there were at least a couple of metres between them, and even though Louisa was hardly a heavyweight, Justine simply wouldn’t be able to pull her up.
‘No,’ she said, reluctantly, ‘it’s not going to work. I’m coming down.’
The bank seemed to crumble and give way beneath her fingers even more this time, and a fine shower of dust followed her down. Justine could not imagine hauling Louisa back up without incurring more damage to her ankle, or somewhere else; what if they both fell, and neither could climb out? What if the ankle was broken?
Justine tried to let none of these misgivings show when she reached Louisa; she put an arm around her.
‘I think,’ she began, ‘I think we’re going to have to walk out, on our own.’
‘All right,’ said Louisa, uncertainly, but she wasn’t looking at Justine. Justine followed her gaze, up the bank to the path.
A shadow had fallen across the bright space above them, and she heard voices. Someone had stopped up there, just where Louisa had fallen and at once Justine thought of the loggers. Then she remembered the backpack. She’d left the backpack on the path. She subdued her mounting panic, and listened. They were speaking Italian. She to
ok a deep breath, and shouted.
‘Aiuto! Help.’ The voices stopped.
Paolo, who had stopped at the sight of the small backpack resting, almost hidden, by the side of the road, turned towards the sound.
‘Ecco!’ he said triumphantly, turning to Anna. She made as if to go to the edge of the path, following the voices. Gently Paolo put out a hand and stopped her.
‘No, Mamma, let me have a look first. Just wait here. ‘OK?’ Reluctantly Anna stopped; seeing that he was right.
‘Arrivo!’ he called back into the undergrowth. ‘I’m coming. Stay there.’ He elbowed a clump of gorse aside and holding on to the trunk of the cork tree, leaned forward to look down in the direction of the voices.
The sound of a voice offering help in English, even heavily accented English, was somehow infinitely reassuring, and Justine saw Louisa’s shoulders sag with relief. Just as well, she thought, even if we do look like idiots. Better able now to see in the half-light, she could see that their rescuer was a tall man, dark and broad-shouldered, and he seemed to be having less trouble than she had making his way down the slope. When he turned to face them at the bottom she felt almost sure it was the man she had seen earlier, talking to the elderly woman. He had an open, rumpled face, and looked concerned, and for some reason in his presence Justine felt herself relax.
‘OK, OK,’ he said, turning at the bottom, and there was a note in his voice, cheerful, soft and practised, that Justine liked. ‘What has happened?’
‘I fell,’ said Louisa, reluctantly, looking up at him. ‘I hurt my ankle.’
‘Ankle?’ he said, pondering. Louisa extended her leg in front of him in the half-light, wincing again, and he nodded.
‘Attention,’ he said, ‘be careful. The caviglia, yes. Ankle. Anything else?’ he asked. ‘Your head? Your –’ he tapped his back and made an exasperated sound to himself. ‘schena. Back. Spine?’
Louisa shook her head. ‘No, no. Nothing else.’
Justine was silent, watching his careful solicitude and startled herself by the realization that she wished it was her ankle he was turning so gently in his hands. He glanced across at her for a moment in the gloom, and she saw him frown a little, as if trying to remember something. He turned back to Louisa.
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