Late Season

by Christobel Kent

  Anna Viola stood, a little stiffly, and gestured her readiness to help, but her son, with a sound of mild exasperation, remonstrated with her in Italian before offering himself in her stead.

  ‘No,’ said Justine, ‘thank you.’ Suddenly she felt uncomfortable that Paolo and his mother were here, with Lucien like this, sitting like a great sulky child at the table. She nodded at Louisa, on whom the day seemed to have taken its toll. Installed close to the house in a reclining chair with her ankle elevated, she looked browbeaten and weary as Sam and Angus both pulled at her elbow, asking if there was ice cream. ‘Could you really show the boys your waterfall?’ Justine went on. I think they’d love it.’

  Paolo nodded. ‘Of course, I will.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Will you come too?’

  The invitation was stiffly correct, but he looked directly at her, appealing to her to accept. She liked him, Justine decided suddenly, reckless with wine. And she liked his mother.

  But she sighed. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, feeling that life, and holidays, were more complicated and burdensome than was tolerable, sometimes. Why shouldn’t she just go? Maybe I’ll follow later.’

  Paolo nodded. ‘Hey,’ he called to Sam and Angus, ‘the waterfall?’

  They abandoned Louisa without a backward glance, ice cream forgotten, and were at his side. Anna and Justine, in spontaneous unison, laughed at their eagerness.

  Once they’d gone, only Lucien and Justine remained at the table; Justine looked across at Louisa, sleeping peacefully in her armchair beside the house, and decided not to disturb her. She looked like a child asleep, all the lines of age and anxiety softened, and Justine thought, poor Louisa. Poor Tom.

  Lucien was silent, brooding over something. His skin had darkened already, Justine noticed, and the faded blue of his shirt made it look even darker.

  ‘Thanks for lunch, Lucien,’ she ventured. ‘It was great. I think even the Italians were impressed.’

  Lucien shrugged slightly; looking out across the pasture.

  ‘I’ll just go and help Martin with the washing-up,’ she said, impatient suddenly and trying not to sound it, pushing back her chair. ‘Then I might walk down and get Dido with him. I’d like a swim.’ She wasn’t prepared for Lucien’s response.

  ‘Can’t he do it on his own?’ he exclaimed with sudden savagery, standing up and turning away from her. ‘I’ve hardly seen you on this holiday. I’m packed off to the supermarket, or you’d like a walk with Louisa. Or having a heart to heart with Martin, your new best friend.’ He didn’t look at her.

  Justine was taken aback. ‘It’s only the washing-up,’ she said. ‘Come and talk to me while I’m doing it, if you want.’ Although even as she said it she realized with a faint sinking sensation that he was right; she had hardly seen him so far this holiday. And that she didn’t really want him to follow her inside now.

  At home, it was clear to her suddenly, they hardly saw anyone else, she was Lucien’s exclusively – pampered and fed by him like a favoured pet; the two of them cocooned in a state of perpetual cosy intimacy. Out here in the wilderness, the shock of realizing what had been going on outside their relationship all this time, all the turmoil in their friends’ lives to which she had been oblivious, her life with Lucien seemed myopic and suffocating. And, she suddenly suspected, he didn’t like her talking to other people, and she wondered why.

  So when Lucien responded to her suggestion by turning away from her in refusal, wordlessly angry, she was relieved. All the same, automatically she tried to placate him, her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Maybe we could all go down to the river,’ she said. ‘Later.’

  Lucien sighed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said grudgingly, turning back towards her. He was frowning; something was still bothering him, Justine could see.

  ‘He wasn’t the perfect husband, you know,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Martin. He wanted her under his thumb. Would you like that? He frightened her, with all that brooding intensity of his, that’s what I think.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Justine. ‘How do you know?’

  Lucien shrugged. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘You weren’t the only one she talked to, that’s all.’

  Justine frowned, but Lucien just shook his head. ‘Go on then, if you’re going,’ he said, and there was no warmth in his voice. Standing close to his smooth, handsome face, which she knew almost as well as she knew her own, Justine couldn’t tell what he was thinking any more. If she’d ever known. And as she turned away she had a sense of foreboding, as if something cataclysmic was about to happen between them and she was powerless to prevent it.

  Inside everything was cool and neat; a rug was folded on a chair, the washing-up that had been the bone of contention already dried and stacked. She could look right through the house and out of the low window at the back, framing a view of slender tree trunks stippled and soft with lichen. They stood motionless for as far as she could see, in a green haze, poised and waiting.

  She almost tripped over Martin in the gloom; he was leaning back on the sofa and staring at the ceiling. When her eyes adjusted to the dim light she could see that he was smiling.

  She sat down beside him. ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said.

  Montequercio was almost asleep in the dull, warm afternoon. It was the time of the siesta, almost every window was shuttered against the flat light and lizards flickered undisturbed up the soft pink brick of the walls, a little disorientated, perhaps, by the signs of change in the weather. Inside mothers and grandmothers, their duties temporarily suspended, the kitchen floor clean and the dishes put away, would be sitting with their feet up in the dim light still in the floral aprons they used for cooking lunch. They would close their eyes just for a moment, while their husbands or sons were already snoring beside them in a favourite armchair, a copy of the sports paper open and unread on their sagging knees.

  One or two restless souls, of course, would be found out even on such an afternoon; the kind of woman who never stopped scrubbing, for example, her knuckles red and raw from housework that was never done. She might be hanging her dishcloths to dry or nipping to the grey dumpsters on the main road with her rubbish tied neatly in plastic bags, looking up at her neighbours’ closed shutters and wondering how they found the time. Lonely widowers, or the kind of man – or woman – for whom an afternoon watching a spouse’s breast rise and fall in sleep, mouth dropped unflatteringly ajar, was an uncomfortable reminder of how little life resembled the future he had imagined for himself.

  So, to accommodate these, and the occasional thirsty tourist in transit, both the Cinghiale and the Bellavista stayed open in the afternoons. At one o’clock sharp the few shops closed; the Co-op, the newspaper stand, the pasticceria all pulled down their blinds and their proprietors retired for a long lunch. The little oval piazza would empty out quite suddenly, bleached white and dusty as a desert ghost town. But for Carlo and Giovannino, the barkeepers, the long, dead afternoon stretched ahead of them, a time to wipe down counters, clean out the ice-cream cabinet and re-order the stock room. Across the empty piazza they would eye each other, these two, to gauge which of them was losing most money in these stifling, lifeless hours.

  This afternoon, however, Giovannino had three customers in the dim interior of the Cinghiale, even though one of them hardly counted, being his own brother, Piero. As both a man incapable of idleness and one for whom the company of his wife was not unalloyed pleasure, Piero abstained from taking a siesta on both counts. Generally he spent the time riding from one part of his land to another on his tractor, talking to his cows down in the valley or roaring about in his pick-up, checking the olives and keeping the Albanesi who cut cork for him up to the mark.

  Today Piero had dropped in to the bar because his wife’s cooking had reached a new low. He didn’t understand it, when he thought of the magnificent kitchen he’d built for her, with a wood-burning griddle for meat, a big range, fitted cupboards and everything she could possibly want. But she was o
bsessed with the microwave she’d made him install; she scoured the supermarket for ready meals although they were still a rarity in Montequercio, marvelling over the convenience. So here he was, on a stool at the bar, ruminatively chewing his way through a fat fistful of fragrant meat and herbs and proper Tuscan bread, his mood slowly improving.

  ‘Will you be shutting up, down at Il Vignacce, after this week?’ asked Giovannino, who was taking down all his bottles of aperitivi and liquori – crème de menthe, Averna, scotch, the lot – and carefully wiping them off. ‘It’s been booked up all summer, am I right?’

  Piero grunted, barely looking up from his sandwich. Giovannino went on, contemplatively.

  ‘Amazing. A full five months rent. You have to admit,’ said Giovannino, shaking his head disbelievingly, ‘you’d never have said you’d have ended up renting the old place to people like that. People with money to burn. Tourists, eh?’

  Piero raised his head at this, eyes narrowing suspiciously. ‘Do you think I should be asking more for it?’

  Giovannino shrugged. ‘Could be. But don’t you see my point? It was an albatross, that place, a millstone round our necks. Bad luck, ever since the war. And now look.’

  Piero went on eating. ‘Suppose so,’ he said, eventually. ‘Early days yet, though, so don’t come asking for your share of the profits quite yet, eh?’

  Giovannino raised his eyes good-naturedly to the ceiling. ‘None of my business, Pierone. I’m not after your money. I certainly don’t want the hassle of slogging down there every five minutes collecting foreigners’ rubbish. Unblocking their sinks.’ He replaced the last of the bottles on the shelf behind the bar, clean and sparkling now, each one polished off with a dry cloth, and came around the bar to stand in his doorway. He looked up at the sky for a moment, then turned back to his brother.

  ‘And I don’t want to be having to drag them all out behind the tractor, when it comes on to rain and they want to go home.’ Giovannino nodded outside. ‘Because the rain’s coming, that’s for sure. Tomorrow, maybe tonight. Better hope most of it falls on Siena.’

  Piero grunted again, refusing to rise to his brother’s bait. He took a long draught of his beer, draining it. He set it down on the marble counter with a chink, but his brother the barman paid no attention.

  ‘No wonder you don’t make any money in this place,’ said Piero.

  In the dim recesses of the bar Giovannino’s other two customers were eating slowly, without obvious enjoyment. Tom and his companion seemed to have other, more serious matters on their minds than the excellence of the porchetta, to judge by their faces and the silence between them. Tom cleared his throat.

  ‘This must be difficult for you,’ he said. ‘Coming to meet us all like this. Perhaps you’re nervous?’

  Opposite him sat a pale, red-haired woman; a woman Lucien had seen crying in a Florentine backstreet the previous day with Martin’s arm around her. Rossella. She took a sip of water, considering his words. Slowly she shook her head. ‘I feel as though I know them – you – already, I think.’

  ‘And will you tell them?’ Tom asked. ‘Everything?’

  Rossella spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I feel I have an obligation. To Evie. And they have to know, don’t you think?’

  Tom pushed his plate away, the sandwich half eaten. ‘Yes,’ he said, with a sigh. ‘Of course.’

  They both fell silent for a moment, looking through the gloomy interior to the bright rectangle of the door and the marketplace beyond. But neither of them seemed ready to leave quite yet.

  Giovannino glanced down the room at his customers, but they didn’t summon him, so he went on with his ruminations. ‘Just think what old Anna Viola could get for that little podere, if she felt like letting it out,’ he said, turning to his brother. ‘A lovely place, that is, a view all the way down to Grosseto on a good day, a bit of land.’ He sounded pensive, thinking of the time he’d spent there as a boy, fooling about in the woods with the others, Paolo and the rest. Paolo’s grandmother had made very good schiaccata all’ uva, flat bread with the first sweet black grapes baked into it, and chestnut pudding, though she hadn’t often wasted it on her grandson’s friends. His stomach rumbled at the memory, and he realized he hadn’t eaten yet.

  Piero wiped off his mouth with a handful of napkins, his chin shiny with aromatic grease, and this time fixed Giovannino with a reproving stare.

  ‘She’s got more sense, that Anna Viola,’ he said. ‘Nice woman, too.’ He was thinking of the wave she gave him every time he headed on down to the woods, and of the stories his parents had whispered to him about her. Anna’s father shot by the Germans as a partisan down in the valley, at Il Vignacce itself; the father of her child dead before Paolo was born. Not that she’d ever said a word, not Anna; they’d heard it from her mother, who couldn’t help defending her daughter against the women of the village and their rumour mill.

  Giovannino smiled, glad to have provoked his brother into saying something at last. He nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, chewing it over. ‘Nice woman.’

  At that they both fell silent, and the other two customers walked up to the bar to pay. Giovannino had almost forgotten they were there, tucked away behind the jukebox with their water and their sandwiches; he’d been about to get out the mop and do the floors. Piero seemed to recognize them. He shook the man’s hand and as Giovannino went into the back room for his mop he heard his brother ask them politely how everything was going. But when he returned they’d gone, left him a tip on the bar and brought their plates back to save him a trip to their table.

  ‘He’s one of them, one of my lot,’ said Piero. ‘The English down at Il Vignacce. Looks like he’s found himself an Italian girlfriend.’

  After contemplating the bottom of his empty glass thoughtfully for a moment or two, with a reluctant sigh Piero replaced it on the bar and went to the door, where his brother joined him, mop in hand. In the piazza the Englishman and his companion were climbing into a dusty old Volvo with English plates. An odd couple, thought Giovannino, in passing. In silence the brothers looked up at the threatening sky, where far overhead the black outline of a tiny plane was visible against the grey, the high-pitched stutter of its engine fading in and out on the breeze. A drop of rain fell at Giovannino’s feet on the stone pavement.

  24

  They sat side by side on the sofa, looking out of the window out to the back of the house, overheard only by the trees. A sweetish smell, of the decaying plums perhaps, drifted in from outside. The front door was a bright rectangle, light falling through it on to the soft red brick of the floor.

  As Justine’s eyes adjusted to the half light she could make out the outlines of the walnut sideboard, the gleam of the long kitchen table, through a door the worn marble of Louisa and Tom’s bathroom, the pile of clothes Louisa had been folding that morning still sitting on the bed. In the silence all was peaceful; she didn’t want to leave this place, Justine thought again. She turned to Martin, at last; he was looking at her thoughtfully.

  ‘Did you mean it,’ she said, ‘about Tom? Buying the place in Grosseto? It looked like it was news to Louisa.’

  Martin leaned his head back and laughed. ‘Yes, poor Louisa. I think she’d had enough surprises for one day. I’m sorry about that.’ He paused, frowning. ‘The truth is, I hadn’t planned it, no. It was a spur of the moment thing, when Tom and I were talking last night. But I think it’s a good idea, actually Don’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ said Justine slowly, thinking of Louisa’s creamy white London drawing room, her silver frames and gardenias, her French-polished tables, and how it might compare with something like this room, this farmhouse, isolated, at the mercy of the climate, gloomy perhaps in the winter. Louisa’s mother. Could Louisa live without all that? Perhaps that was what Louisa needed, to get away from all that; Tom struggling to keep his head above water, her mother’s querulous, needling presence. She tried to picture Louisa on a parched Mediterranean hillside, with unpredictable
plumbing and hectares of grapes to harvest.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, pondering, leaning her own head back against the sofa cushions and turning it on its side to look at Martin, ‘you’re probably right. Louisa could do it, even if Tom couldn’t.’ Martin laughed, and she felt herself liking him, despite Lucien. ‘But it’s a bit of a risk, isn’t it? And have you got the money? And you and Tom – how would you get on? I mean –’

  ‘Well,’ said Martin, considering, ‘risk. Everything’s relative. As for the money, I haven’t done badly’ He sat up then, elbows on his knees, being practical.

  As he said it Justine realized she had never had any idea whether they had been rich or poor, he and Evie. But now, after even so few days with Martin, she realized, he could quite plausibly be a millionaire. He gave off that kind of calm certainty, about everything except his daughter, anyway. You could imagine him unruffled, making quick, clever decisions, day in, day out.

  ‘Good,’ she said, meaning it; thinking, they probably need it.

  Martin went on. ‘And Evie’s life was insured, we were both insured.’

  For some reason Justine found this information faintly disturbing. Martin looked at her.

  ‘So I wanted to spend that money, the money they paid me after she died, on something –’ He hesitated, looking for the right way to explain. On something for her.’

  ‘And Tom?’Justine looked at him.

  ‘Tom?’ said Martin, mildly. ‘You mean, could I work with him, knowing he was in love with Evie?’

  Justine stared at him.

  ‘It isn’t news to me, Justine,’ he said, turning to look at her. She could see his face clearly now, an open face, unafraid. ‘Not Tom.’