‘I am Paolo Viola. My mother lives up there.’ He jerked his head uphill. ‘In fact, I am a doctor,’ he said, as though by way of explanation for his line of questioning. ‘Ortopedia. Orthopedic surgeon.’ He held out his hand, and despite themselves both women laughed at the formality of his hand held out, and the improbability of a doctor being here just when they needed one. In the gloom Justine saw him smile for the first time, and Louisa shook his hand.
‘It’s too dark here to see,’ said Paolo Viola. ‘There is a way down here, I think, that goes back to the path. Where – where have you come from?’
‘Il Vignacce,’ said Justine, speaking for the first time since his arrival. ‘Down there’ – she nodded to the path –’near the river?’
He nodded. ‘OK. I know. Perhaps we can get there. I just – my mother. One moment.’ He leaned back and called up to the path, where they could see someone standing on the path against the light. ‘Mamma!’ He spoke rapidly in Italian, and Justine made out only the name of their house: Il Vignacce, and an affirmative response. She took in the measured, rational way he dealt with their situation, his concern for his mother. Paolo turned back to them.
‘She will go down there. My mother. Is there someone who speaks Italian?’
Justine grimaced. ‘Only me, really,’ she said, ‘but maybe they’ll manage.’
He shrugged philosophically. ‘Perhaps.’
They both smiled at once, then Paolo turned back to Louisa, quickly.
‘I can carry you,’ he said, matter of factly, and before Louisa could protest he had leaned towards her and in a swift motion picked her up, first across his body as you might carry a child, then gently manoeuvring her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift.
‘This way,’ he said, gesturing with his free arm across the slope in the direction of the river, where the undergrowth seemed to thin out a little and more light filtered between the evenly spaced trunks of trees. Obediently Justine followed him towards the light, Louisa’s blonde head resting passively on his shoulder.
As she made her way carefully down the rocky path following Paolo’s instruction Anna felt quite breathless with the effort, not just of the walk, which although it required circumspection was not strenuous, but of revelation. It was actually a relief to be alone, she thought, concentrating on stepping from one stone to the next; it gave her a breathing space to think about how to get to the end of her story. Except that she didn’t want to get to the end.
The wind was getting up a bit, and Anna looked up at the sky, where, although it was still relatively clear overhead, the cloud was moving smoothly in banks across the horizon. She hurried on down the hill towards the river. She knew this path well, although it was a long time since she’d been down here; not since her departure from the country as a girl had she come down so far. Higher up, she remembered, was the old Neri place, up towards Iesa, the village on the ridge. They’d had olive groves and what had once been a beautiful house – three storeys high with a hay barn and a cowshed and fig trees. It was all overgrown now, no roof on the house any more, so Giovannino said. It had been on the road out once, long ago, out of the woods to civilization, but time, war and neglect had put paid to that.
Now the road stopped at Il Vignacce, unless you were on foot.
Down this way, where she now walked, led to the hazelnut groves that flanked the river; as a child she’d hidden and played house in their deep cool shade, splashing in the little streams that fed the Merse. She recognized the steep red canyon of the path, the last stretch of the way to the river, and it came back to her how easy it had seemed to clamber down from stone to stone then. How little a child is able to predict old age, she thought, still baffled herself by how easily she had slipped from being a girl to being an old woman. And just beyond, just across the river and up through the trees, was Il Vignacce.
The closer she drew to the old farmhouse and recognized, one after another, the secret landmarks of her childhood wanderings, the more Anna wondered at her superstition for all these years. She had avoided coming down here for so long, just as she had avoided thinking about Luca, and now that it was all here in front of her once again it seemed so unexceptional. It had no special power; it hid no secret horror. Suddenly it came to her, and the thought made her feel unaccountably tired, that it didn’t matter where her father had died, just as it didn’t matter where Luca had died. What mattered was keeping going, after all. She pulled her son’s coat closer around her and picked her way down into the gloom of the hazel copse that would lead her directly to the river.
It was just as she remembered it; there was the trickle of brown water, the valley floor thick with leaf mould darkened by the seeping damp of the river. She heard the solemn clang of cowbells somewhere over to her right, between her and Il Vignacce, and stepped lightly across the water towards the sound.
The sun came out again just as Anna walked up from the river, out of the trees and towards the bright open pasture, and the first thing she saw was a long table laid for lunch. It stood beneath a pergola on her side of the house but the scene was unpopulated; Il Vignacce itself, bathed suddenly in light, seemed deserted, although the door stood open. It was silent and there were no deckchairs or children’s toys on the sun-bleached grass; nothing to indicate the presence of the English visitors except the table and the open door.
Anna looked across the pasture and then she saw them in the distance beneath the trees that ringed it: a tall slender girl, long hair down her back and the hump of a backpack on one shoulder, was walking slowly away, two boys, smaller figures, running ahead of her. As she watched they slipped between the trees on the far edge of the field and with this tiny, marginal activity gone, the scene was empty once again.
Anna approached the fence and stopped at the gate. She was close to the table now; she could even see the finely cut shadows of the leaves on the pergola cast on the white linen of a tablecloth still stiff with creases from the drawer, shifting as the feathered foliage moved in the wind. The table was set for eight with plain, heavy china – Piero Montale’s third best dinner service, no doubt, thought Anna, not good enough for their grand new house. A handful of pale pink cyclamen and their mottled, heart-shaped leaves wilted a little in a glass jar at the table’s centre as if pining for the shady obscurity of the woodland where they’d been found.
Anna could smell cooking: wine and tomatoes and garlic; a bowl of salad and some bread were already on the table. Feeling her responsibility as a mother she wondered what the time was; she hadn’t thought it was so late, not time for lunch already? Surely not, if the children had been allowed down to the river to swim? In the silence, the hiss of a tap turned on inside the house made Anna jump; almost as abruptly it stopped, and she heard a muttered, angry exchange of words she did not understand in the dark interior. A man appeared in the doorway, a water jug in his hand.
Anna had seen him before, of course; Montale had introduced them in the market square. She’d almost forgotten that as she hurried down here, that she’d met them already: the children, the woman and the three men, one dark, one fair, and this one, tall, green-eyed, curly-haired and handsome. He looked different today; almost unrecognizable, in fact, as the open, cheerful type whose hand she had shaken in the square. As he came through the door he was frowning and Anna felt self-conscious, unable to tell if it was because of her, or something that had happened inside the house before he saw her. Then, as they looked at each other, she saw recognition dawn in his eyes, and Anna found herself both relieved and unsettled by the change that came over him. With what seemed like an effort his brow cleared, with deliberate care he set the jug down among the plates, and he smiled politely across the table at her.
Remembering why she was there, Anna approached the gate. ‘Permesso?’ she asked, waiting for permission to cross the threshold. He nodded and reached for the latch and opened the gate, turning as she entered to glance back at the house. There must be someone else here, she thought, with relief.
>
‘There is – one of your party is injured,’ she said in Italian, pointing back towards the river, and he looked blank. She tried again, slowly, frustrated by her inability to speak his language.
‘The signora has hurt her leg,’ she said, patting her ankle, grimacing to indicate pain, then pointing back into the trees. ‘Not serious, I think. Niente di grave. My son is bringing her.’ She mimed a carrying motion, and although the man still looked a little uncertain she thought he understood. He motioned to her to sit down, and turned towards the house.
‘Martin!’ he shouted, something curt and reluctant in his tone. Another man, the dark one, came out of the house, looking, by contrast, quite composed, but Anna could tell, even with her limited experience of men, that she had interrupted something between these two. She took a deep breath, and began again.
21
It took about twenty minutes to get to a place where they could stop, where there was enough light to get a good look at Louisa’s injury. Paolo walked ahead of Justine in silence, slowly and steadily so as not to jolt Louisa who lay as still as a child on his shoulder. They had to make their own path through the undergrowth, some of it sticky with burrs, or clinging with tiny, thorny tendrils; unfamiliar climbing plants like vines gone wild. and again Justine was glad that she and Louisa were not trying this alone; it was one thing to be on a marked path, quite another to be in the middle of nowhere.
Paolo seemed to be aware of Justine behind him; once he paused and half-turned to make sure they were all still together. It was humid and Justine lifted the back of her hand to her forehead to wipe away the sweat and grimaced at him apologetically; he looked quite cheerful, still, even under his burden, and barely warm. From his shoulder Louisa exchanged a sheepish look with Justine.
‘Not far now,’ he said. ‘You can hear the water.’ But Justine could hear nothing. She shrugged, and he shook his head, smiling at her. ‘Soon,’ he said, and together they walked on.
For something like twenty minutes more they struggled through the undergrowth, Justine’s legs aching now from the effort of negotiating the uneven terrain, then suddenly they came to a clearing and it was then that Justine heard the sound of the river. Ahead of her Paolo stopped, and bent to set Louisa down carefully on a broad, flat rock beside the water. Justine looked around them; they were at a narrow stretch of the river, where the water was sluggish and shallow across pebbles between densely overgrown banks, a few large boulders diverting the water’s course here and there. It was quite idyllic, in fact, and as she gazed at the dark water and heard the soft liquid sound of the stream for a moment Justine forgot why they were there at all. She found herself wondering where the pool she had swum in, and the cliff that had enclosed it, might be from here. She turned to Paolo, about to ask him, but then she saw that he was busy.
He was kneeling at Louisa’s feet; carefully he took her bruised ankle between his hands. The flesh was puffy and swollen around the joint, and beginning to discolour. Louisa flinched when he touched her foot, her face pale and set; at her tiny gasp Paolo automatically murmured something in Italian, intent on his examination. Justine watched as very gently he felt around the joint, running his hand along the awkward conjunction of bone and muscle and cartilage. His hands were not as she would have imagined a surgeon’s, his fingers not fine and slender but big, almost clumsy-looking, like a workman’s. All the same, she could see Louisa’s shoulder sag a little as she relaxed, and he seemed to know what he was doing.
Then Paolo sat back on his heels, and sighed. He looked up at Justine, but he was focussing on something else; the injury, perhaps. His eyes were dark brown, and turned down a little at the corners, giving him a slightly melancholy look. He opened his mouth to speak but then his focus changed, and it was as though he could see her and she had made him forget what he was about to say. He frowned a little, and looked back down at the ankle he held between his hands.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘It is not broken. A –’ He made a twisting motion with his hands, and looked at Justine for help.
‘A sprain?’ she said, tentatively. Nodding, he smiled, and Justine felt something, a kind of fluttering, behind her chest wall, but she held his gaze.
He tapped his forehead. ‘My books – when I was studying, some of them are in English. Sprain, I remember.’ He turned to Louisa, who was looking at them quizzically. ‘So,’ Paolo said, smiling. ‘Don’t worry. Just put your foot in the water for a little, here, where it is cool. The swelling will become less. Then from here,’ he gestured along the river, ‘it isn’t so far to Il Vignacce. Soon we can go on.’
Gingerly Louisa lowered her foot into the water, which, although it looked dark from a distance, was very clear, and let out a little gasp of relief as her ankle dipped below the cool surface.
Paolo laughed abruptly. ‘Leave it there,’ he said, standing up; Justine found him beside her, and together they looked around in silence. They were surrounded by dense vegetation, willow, bird-cherry, bog-oak and hazel growing unimpeded in the fertile soil of the river valley, branches dipping low over the water and enclosing them. It was very quiet.
‘I swam in this river,’ said Justine. ‘It must be deeper up there?’ She pointed towards Il Vignacce.
Paolo nodded. ‘It is a beautiful river,’ he said. ‘Very clean. Very pure. When I was a boy, I would swim here too. Sometimes with my friends, sometimes on my own. But not at Il Vignacce; there was no pool there then, I think.’ He stopped, looking down at the water, as if he was thinking of something else. Then he looked up at her again. ‘Are you here – for a long time?’
Justine shook her head slowly, looking around at the clearing, the enfolding green of bushes and trees, unwilling to leave it suddenly. ‘Not much longer. Until the weekend, perhaps. It depends.’
On whether we can stand each other for that long, she thought but did not say. The future had never seemed less certain; despite the fact that a holiday usually was more definitely circumscribed than most things – flights booked, channel crossings arranged. So significant did that parcel of time seem to be in the planning, no one ever dared imagine a holiday curtailed, the reasons would have to be too serious to contemplate. Death; critical illness; the breakdown of relationships. Irreconcilable differences. But once you were all gathered there, in the healing idyll of your own meticulous planning, close-up the whole structure seemed laughably flimsy. Things flew apart. She heard the echo of something Martin had said – it seemed like years ago, not just the previous evening. Something about stresses working towards disintegration.
Paolo said nothing as all this went through Justine’s head; but just went on looking at her.
‘But you like it here.’ Looking into Paolo’s broad open face, Justine nodded. It wasn’t a question; it was as though he knew what she was feeling, knew that she didn’t want to leave. And something in his expression, so thoughtful and sympathetic, seemed to be telling her that she didn’t have to. Suddenly self-conscious she put a hand to her face, pushing her hair back; her sleeve fell down to the elbow of her raised arm.
‘Ah,’ Paolo said, as if he had understood something and reached for her, touching her forearm, ‘vitiligo.’
Justine flinched, and in her throat she felt her breath catch, a sense of having been discovered.
‘It is quite common here. In Italy,’ he said, mildly.
She could feel his warm fingertips on the soft, vulnerable skin inside her elbow, where it was very white, and suddenly she felt faint, as though he had touched a pressure point, somewhere where nerves clustered. She dropped her arm and turned quickly towards Louisa.
‘Better?’ she said, lightly.
Louisa looked at her curiously, not fooled. ‘Mmm,’ she said, slowly, looking from one to the other of them. She looked back at her foot, white against the dark stones on the river bed and lifted it, dripping, from the water. ‘Yes,’ she said, more firmly, ‘I think so.’
For a moment, Justine realized, she had forgotten about Tom, and E
vie, and the rest of them. About Lucien, too. Better get back, she thought with resignation; sort all this out.
The sound of bells started up behind Il Vignacce, not the occasional languorous clang they had become accustomed to but a tolling as insistent as an alarm. Then the cows were there in the woods above them, an incongruous sight among the trees but clambering with surprising agility until they reached the road, the real road, out of the wood, where their pace slowed as abruptly as it had quickened. The lead cow, meandering now on the gravel path, let out a bellow, and the others followed, the calves skidding and slithering behind her on the stones as they descended. They drew up in front of the house like a reception committee, or a lynch mob, nuzzling the fence and staring. Your time’s nearly up, they seemed to be saying. On the other side of the fence stood Lucien and Martin, staring back.
Anna sat at the table, where they had pulled a chair out for her, and absent-mindedly pulled at the hem of the tablecloth where it was coming down. Heavy, coarse linen, block-printed with a pattern of rust-brown grapes around the border, it smelled of the cupboard. They had brought her a glass of water, too – well, the dark one had; she had felt suddenly quite weary, as though she had come a long way, and found herself among strangers. She didn’t know what they were saying, but she could tell they didn’t like each other. She looked across at the animals making their way down the road, and wondered what had set them off in such a hurry. A vehicle higher up probably; Montale on his way down in the pick-up, or someone else.
‘You just stay here then,’ said Martin contemptuously.
Lucien didn’t turn towards him at the words, but instead stared straight ahead, eyeing the cattle with dislike.
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