Then a tiny frown appeared, a faint crease between Rossella’s eyebrows, and almost imperceptibly she nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said, slowly, ‘I know who you are.’
Paolo stopped, halfway across the room, hearing something in Rossella’s voice, and turned to look at her. Her pale cheek turning rosy in the firelight she looked up at him, and smiled faintly. He had the impression that she was about to say something but then a sound of voices raised next door intervened and they all turned to look in the direction from which the voices came.
‘What do you mean, she’s gone?’ Martin’s face was white. Tom put out a hand to steady him, or perhaps to stop him from hitting Lucien. Their faces – Martin’s and Lucien’s – were very close, and Martin’s fists were clenched at his sides.
Lucien shrugged. ‘That’s all she said. Gone.’ With a nonchalance that was not quite convincing, Lucien nodded towards Paolo, who had come to the door and was looking in, with a slightly dazed expression.
‘Perhaps we should get the locals to help look for her,’ said Lucien. ‘That’s what Justine said; and she’ll set off upstream after her. But the kid’s probably just gone off in a strop, don’t you think? She’ll turn up soon enough.’ For a moment Martin stared at Lucien, and Tom tightened his grip on Martin’s arm. But then he turned away, as though Lucien had not spoken.
‘Tom,’ he said, ‘would you – talk to – him. To Viola? Tell him to phone the – I don’t know, the police? Perhaps there’s someone else, the forestry people?’
Tom nodded. Lucien stood there defiantly for a moment or two then, ignored, turned on his heel and went inside. Neither Tom nor Martin looked after him.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Martin, desperately. ‘Now. Please, Tom? This is my fault. If she’s lost – it’s my fault.’ His certainty seemed all gone now; he looked stunned.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Tom. ‘Go on. I’ll sort it out. But Martin –’ Martin looked up. ‘If Justine’s going upstream, you go down. OK? Don’t leave the river – and if you see Justine, tell her the same. Or they’ll be looking for three of you, not one.’
Justine was no more than five hundred yards upstream from the little beach where Dido had last been seen when she heard Martin’s voice calling after her, ragged with desperation in the near darkness. She turned back; it took her no more than five minutes to reach him. He was standing on the bank where Dido had been sunbathing; in the clearing there was only the faintest residual twilight now, but at least the rain seemed to be easing.
‘OK, OK, Martin,’ she said, quietly. ‘We’ll find her.’ She could barely see his face but his agitation was palpable.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said, almost moaning. ‘We had a row. Lucien and I. She must have heard us – oh, God – I wasn’t thinking –’ She saw his head move, from this side to that, as though he was in pain. ‘I told Lucien he’d killed her; he said she couldn’t stand us any more. I didn’t know, God, I didn’t know.’
‘None of us did,’ said Justine. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
Martin made an anguished sound. ‘How long – when did the boys come back? She could have been gone for a couple of hours. You don’t think – she could have been taken by someone?’
Justine resisted his panic. ‘No – no,’ she said slowly, ‘There’s no one else here.’ But she felt that they couldn’t possibly know, surrounded by this vast darkness. She tried to sound convincing. ‘I think you were right before. She was upset, she didn’t want to come back, and now it’s dark, she’s just staying put. Waiting for us to come and find her.’
It seemed likely enough to her; Justine could remember the feeling clearly enough from her own childhood. They’ll be sorry, she would think, hiding in the tangle of brambles that obscured the garden fence, they’ll be sorry they didn’t think of me, but often enough no one ever even noticed she’d gone.
‘The important thing is, to get moving,’ she said. ‘You go downstream, I’ll go up. OK?’
Justine couldn’t see, but she thought he nodded; certainly he turned away from her where they stood in the lee of the great cliff and set off towards the distant muted roar of the waterfall downstream. It was as though he hadn’t been real; even the shadowy indistinct shape of him, a patch of darker darkness, was swallowed up in the night.
Now, thought Justine, I’m really alone, and then it hit her. It was over; there was no Lucien, she had no husband, she had no home, nowhere to go back to. She was alone in the dark. Justine waited for the panic to overwhelm her, bring her to her knees in the stream, but it didn’t happen. Instead she felt an exhilaration that expanded her lungs; she wanted to shout. She took a breath, to calm herself.
‘Dido!’ she called. ‘Dido!’ The rain was easing; from behind a cloud the thin gleam of the moon briefly showed her the river’s path ahead of her, sliding down towards her stippled with drops, and reluctantly she began to walk upstream.
Justine was wearing her sandals in the water and the leather soon turned slimy underfoot, but it made it easier to walk on the uneven riverbed. There were large stones, slippery with some kind of vegetable growth, and smaller, sharper ones, but she was glad she was here, in the open, not fighting through undergrowth in the dark. As she walked Justine continued to call out, trying to make it a cheerful sound, not angry, not desperate. It was slow going; after about half an hour the moon came out, casting its cold silver light on the pitch-black rippling river. Justine shivered, and for the first time the thought occurred to her that they might not find Dido.
Despite the exertion Justine was beginning to feel cold; the water felt icy now, her thin, damp linen dress was worse than useless, and she felt the first creeping insinuations of doubt. Surely, she thought, this is where she’ll be; Dido wouldn’t have left the river’s path; she’s got common sense. Has she, though? Justine felt a stirring of guilt at how little attention they’d paid to Dido, acting as though her mother’s disappearance was a puzzle to be solved, very little to do with her. But perhaps – if Evie’d been having an affair, perhaps Dido knew more than any of them. The thought struck her with a force that stopped her in her tracks. Had Dido known, all along?
Justine looked around her; she had reached a narrow stretch of the river, the banks stretched up steep and dark and mysterious on both sides, and she felt suffocated, suddenly.
‘Dido!’ she called, and now she could hear the fear in her voice, of what Dido might have done. ‘Dido, darling. I’m sorry. Can you hear me?’ She listened, holding her breath, but she could hear nothing, only the ceaseless gurgle of the water. She let her breath out in a sigh, about to walk on – but there was something, something that gave her pause. A low sound, not verbal, a mumbling as though someone was talking in his sleep. She felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck and she stood very still and listened. It came again, and slowly Justine raised one foot then another in the water, trying not to splash as she advanced towards the sound.
A little way ahead a large flat slab of limestone, perhaps six feet square, lay half in the water half on the bank; it looked smooth, by day perhaps an invitation to lie down there in the sun. Where the great plane of rock met the land one end was shrouded in shadow, surrounded by dense, bushy growth. Justine reached it, leaned down and placed her hands on its flat surface that gleamed white in the moonshine, and peered into the dark. Before her eyes had adjusted, before she could see anything in there, she heard the sound again, very close; a whispered, incoherent exclamation in a soft, high voice, a shocking, involuntary sound like something raving.
Justine pulled at the vegetation, ripping it aside to get a better view. As the moonlight shone past her and illuminated the whole surface now of the rock and the rough scree of a bank beyond it, she saw something curled up there. Someone. It was Dido, her head resting against her backpack, knees tucked up against her chest as though she was trying to keep warm. Her face was very pale, one cheek exposed to the moonlight, and her eyes were closed.
‘Dido?’ said Just
ine, reaching out to touch her. ‘Dido?’ She tugged harder now, almost shaking the girl in an effort to rouse her. She leaned down and looked into her face, their noses almost touching, but still Dido didn’t wake up; she wasn’t making a sound now. She was very cold.
30
The rain was all but stopped now, and Il Vignacce stood in the dark, its shutters closed against the night. The fire in the smaller half of the farmhouse had burned low; there was no one left to tend it, Anna, Paolo and Rossella having gone with Tom back up the hill for help. Upstairs, in Lucien and Justine’s bedroom, the room where they had begun to talk about having a child together some twelve hours earlier, a suitcase lay open on the bed. Lucien was packing.
At the foot of the stone staircase Louisa paused in the flickering firelight, and leaned on the banister. Her ankle was still painful, but the swelling had gone right down, and after a moment she took another cautious step up, and another.
Lucien wasn’t aware of her presence at first; she watched him from the door, observed the care with which he folded his soft denim shirts, his gamekeeper’s trousers, arranging them in the old leather suitcase. As she looked on he packed a cedarwood shaving bowl, a leather sponge bag, some tissue-wrapped purchases. On the marble-topped chest of drawers stood some of Justine’s things; a bottle of scent, a scarf, the tube of sunscreen, factor 60, and in the open wardrobe her clothes still hung, untouched. Louisa could see the carrier bags, too, from their afternoon’s shopping in Florence, standing by a chair, the red linen dress unfolded on top. Could it only have been yesterday?
She must have sighed, because suddenly Lucien turned. For a moment she thought he was going to give her the old familiar smile, but it faded before it had begun, and the expression that replaced it was barely recognizable; there was a kind of surliness in his face that she’d never seen before.
‘Boys in bed?’ he asked over his shoulder, as he turned to go on with his packing.
‘You’d better be quick,’ Louisa said shortly, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘If you want to get out of here before they get back.’ She felt unlike herself, looking in at Lucien from the outside; cool, dry, angry.
Lucien snorted, but didn’t turn round. ‘Come off it, Louisa,’ he said. ‘No one wants my help.’
‘Very convenient for you,’ said Louisa, looking at his back. ‘If you had any decency, you’d try to help anyway, whatever any of us thought. Dido’s out there on her own. And Justine. You’re a coward, Lucien.’ She sounded bitter, incredulous; she had thought Lucien was better than this.
‘I don’t believe in making things any more painful than they have to be,’ said Lucien over his shoulder. ‘For me or for anyone else. That’s a lot of sentimental crap.’ He closed the lid of the suitcase and turned to face Louisa. I lis eyes were flat and cold, his beautiful green eyes; he looked at Louisa as though she was a stranger.
‘Did you kill her, Lucien?’ she heard herself asking, and looking at the man before her, the man she had invited to countless parties and had known for more than a decade, she sincerely had no idea any more whether he was capable of it. Of murder. ‘Were you there with her?’ She could hear the sound of an engine somewhere far away, the beat of a helicopter’s rotors.
‘Don’t be stupid, Louisa,’ he said curtly. ‘Evie killed herself. Sooner or later they’ll prove it, I’m not worried. This is a – a witch-hunt, and you’re a lot of bloody primitive puritans. Besides, I’ve got an alibi. Fifteen guys on that yurt-building course in Wales. Oh, and one woman, in case you think fifteen guys would lie for a man they barely knew’
Louisa nodded, but she continued to look at him.
‘We had an affair,’ he said. ‘People do. It’s not a crime. Do you really want to sleep with the same man for the rest of your life? With Tom? Or are you just jealous?’
She shook her head a little, as though she was brushing him away. ‘So when it got serious,’ she said slowly, a bitter queasiness turning over and over inside her, ‘when she needed you, needed you badly, you just dumped her? Did you give her any explanation at all, or did you just leave her there, waiting for you? While she was planning to run away with you, you were booking yourself a fortnight on the other side of the country?’
He turned away again, and pulled the suitcase off the bed. ‘Come on, Louisa,’ he said impatiently. ‘Just because you and Tom have to cling pathetically to each other for the rest of your lives, doesn’t mean we all have to. Marriage isn’t what it once was, you know. Life’s for living.’
Louisa remembered something then, something Justine had said. Lucien saying they could have a child, at last.
‘If you have children…’ she said, slowly, ‘if you have children, it’s different, isn’t it? Or is that pathetic, too, looking after a child? Yes, I suppose you wouldn’t have wanted to be landed with the nappies and the childcare, would you? That kind of stuff is for women who can’t think of anything better to do, like me.’
Lucien shrugged, and came towards her, the suitcase in his hand, suede jacket over his arm. ‘I never planned on being a househusband, no. If that’s what you mean. Not my thing.’
Louisa went on. ‘What were you going to do, let Justine have your child, then leave her when you’d sorted out someone else to look after you?’
‘She’s the one that wants a child,’ Lucien said. ‘Let her manage it on her own.’ And he pushed past her, leaving her looking in to the empty room, the rumpled bed, the wardrobe half emptied.
He half-turned on the stairs and looked back up at Louisa on the landing. ‘Evie knew I wasn’t coming, really,’ he said, quite coldly. ‘She was kidding herself; she was a fantasist, you know. It was the best way; the only way to convince her it was over.’ And he turned away and went on down the stair.
Louisa stood at the top of the stairway in the shadow until she heard the sound of the car starting up outside, the creak of the gate and a bang as it closed behind Lucien. Only then did she start the slow descent on her throbbing ankle, one painful step at a time. When she reached the ground floor she sat, unable to go any further, beside the dying fire and waited.
High up on the ridge Tom and Paolo were on their way back from the village, Tom in front in the battered old Volvo, Paolo behind him in his own car. They rounded a bend, the Volvo braked and swerved suddenly and the next thing Paolo knew he was almost off the road. All he could see was the glare of headlights on full beam coming towards them, then the jaunty little hire car accelerated past, and was gone.
31
As she heard the whup of the helicopter approaching Justine clambered out of the undergrowth and into the stream. She stood in the icy water and waved her hands uselessly over her head in the pitch darkness, her shouts feeble against the colossal noise of the rotors. A searchlight swung below the machine, a cylindrical beam of white light trailing over the trees; Justine stood in the river and waited for it to reach her, but the helicopter swung away too soon, veering and pitching in the wind. Unable to believe it would not immediately return, Justine stood there a moment; but when the noise receded, she sank down on the rock and put her head in her hands. Think. Dido.
Had she had taken something? Drugs. An overdose. She climbed back over the rock and took hold of her, pulling at her unresponsive weight. She eased out a narrow wrist and felt for a pulse; after an awful, long moment of scrabbling fear she found one. She was unable to time it, but it felt slow, an age to wait for each tiny throb. She didn’t know what to do. Gently she eased the backpack from beneath the girl’s head, and unzipped it. She pulled out a zip-up cardigan, a book, some keys, identifying each by touch in the darkness. No pills, no blister pack or bottle. At the bottom of the backpack she felt the shape of the photograph in its leather frame, Evie smiling up at Lucien over her shoulder. She didn’t look at it.
Justine held the keys in her hand; on the fob was a tiny torch, a kind she knew; she twisted the end to turn it on and a feeble yellow light shone on her hand; she turned it in the light, registered the patch of paler s
kin, a pool of white over the bones and tendons strung inside her wrist, but she felt nothing. It occurred to her like a revelation that, however robustly her conscious mind might deny it, she’d always secretly been afraid that if she hadn’t got Lucien, no one else would accept her, like this, disfigured. But now it seemed so small a thing, barely noticeable, no worse than a freckle or a birthmark.
Steeling herself against the dark Justine turned the torch off again, to conserve what was left of the battery. Then she took the cardigan and tried to push Dido’s arms into it, to warm her up; her limbs felt lifeless and clammy, like rubber. The girl made a sound again, and Justine pressed her face to her cold cheek. ‘Dido?’ she whispered.
‘Mmm-mm,’ said Dido. ‘Mm-mum?’ There was a dreamy longing in her voice.
It’s me,’ she said, urgently. ‘It’s Justine. Wake up, Dido.’ She took the girl’s shoulders and shook her gently, and she could feel some resistance at last, some sluggish life returning to her muscles. Justine grabbed the torch and shone it into the girl’s eyes; Dido flinched and made a sound, a low moan. Justine knew she should look at the pupils – she recollected something about dilated, fixed and dilated. Dido’s eyes were bleary, unfocussed, but she caught the pupils as they contracted in the light. Not fixed, then.
‘Wha—wha?’ Dido’s voice was slurred and Justine could feel the girl’s body heavy in her arms, longing to fall back to earth, into unconsciousness. ‘My head – my head –’ she said, her eyes squeezed shut now.
‘Dido,’ she said, did you take anything? Drugs? Pills?’
‘Nnnnn–’ said Dido, but her head was lolling; she was trying to shake it. ‘No pills. Dad doesn’t – doesn’t – like—’
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