Late Season Read online

  This morning there was a market and the oval piazza was bustling with activity; Carlo’s outside tables were all occupied. From her vantage point Anna could see at least two families, parents and children alike dressed in the tourist uniform of shorts and T-shirts and all eating big confections of Carlo’s pastel ice cream, great mounds of the stuff stuck with wafers, cigarettes russes and tissue paper parasols.

  Perhaps the English were here at the market; wandering among the stalls. Anna tried to remember what they had looked like in the half-light of Saturday evening as their dusty cars had bumped past her house, and failed. Children, yes, and one dark woman and one fair, but that was all. Anna looked about; the English were not easy to spot by their clothes, but their colour usually gave them away; particularly after a day in Italian sun, their thin, pale northern skin would flush, turning an unmistakable pink, like a salmon or a sunset. Anna paid Giovannino, picked up her basket, dusted a mote or two of sugar from her coat, and walked out into the sunshine.

  The market came to Montequercio twice a week: Monday and Thursday, and it was popular with the foreign visitors. There was a hardware stall selling cheap pans, coffee pots and chopping boards, another hung about with flowered pinafores and aprons, a vegetable stall and a man from Pienza who set out pungent roundels of pecorino, black and yellow and burnt orange, on a trestle.

  Sometimes in high season a woman from Siena came down with rails full of old white cotton petticoats and nightgowns, embroidered, lace-trimmed and pintucked, or just plain shifts with a stitched initial to distinguish them. The visitors bought armfuls of them to take back to England or Germany or Holland, but Anna found it poignant to see them heaped up, the very same garments her mother and grandmother would have worn, sometimes still with nametags sewn in for the owner’s last visit to the hospital. They were hand-stitched and rough with years of bleaching and although the lace was mostly just machine-made she could still remember her mother coming home from the market with a couple of metres of the same lace for trimmings and exclaiming over it.

  These days there was competition for the market in Montequercio; there was a supermarket in the village now; not quite within the walls themselves but just outside, handily situated on the main road where it caught much of the passing trade. The local people, by and large, seemed to like its brightly lit shelves and more generous selection of produce than the dark, poky little shop in the village had ever offered, and they were as happy to stand and gossip there, blocking the aisles, as in the piazza.

  But although it was clean and smart and new, with automatic doors and ranks of shining trolleys, many of the foreigners would not have considered it much of a supermarket. It closed for almost four hours for lunch, for one thing, and in the scalding afternoon heat disconsolate backpackers could regularly be seen sitting on their rucksacks waiting by the supermarket’s doors, which would remain firmly closed until a quarter to five, while inside the supermarket’s workers were to be heard, tantalizingly, enjoying their leisurely lunch break. It ran out of fresh milk and bread in the morning and its wine shelves, vegetable stands and delicatessen counters contained largely only local produce.

  In fact Anna didn’t mind the supermarket at all; it seemed really just like a larger, better-lit version of Signora Montale’s old place. And it was an excellent opportunity to observe the goings on of the incomers as they stumbled over their shopping lists at the bread counter and stacked their trolleys with items the regulars would have considered quite unnecessary. Today, though, it was Piero Montale she bumped into outside the supermarket, looking a little sheepish as he tried to conceal some shop-bought ravioli from her.

  ‘Signora Viola,’ he said, smiling his benevolence. Anna. How’s it going?’ He clasped her hand between his and pressed it in a warm, vigorous handshake.

  Anna extracted her hand carefully, but smiled at him all the same. ‘Good, Piero, thank you. My son’s staying with me, he’s getting some things done at the house, you know.’

  ‘Now you know you can ask me, don’t you?’ the farmer said, opening his arms in an expansive gesture. Anything you want done?’

  Anna looked at him shrewdly; she was fond of Piero Montale, but she knew these farmers, nothing was for free. She nodded, all the same.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve got some English visitors down there by the river, then? I hope it stays nice for them.’

  Montale shrugged. ‘Yes, of course. It’ll be fine; summer’s not quite over yet, is it? And for them, you know, they’re used to nothing but rain over where they come from, isn’t that right? Who am I to argue?’

  Anna nodded absent-mindedly, watching as two cars with English plates rounded the bend. They had come from her direction, from the woods, and they looked very much like the cars that had passed her house on Saturday evening; she saw confirmation in Montale’s eyes as he followed her gaze, and raised his hand in a salute to the cars’ occupants. They swung in across the road from the supermarket and parked.

  9

  Paolo had chopped half a winter’s worth of logs, most of them pine and ash, each split neatly in four and now stacked beneath the overhanging roof of the lean-to at the back of the house. Now, showered and dressed in a fresh shirt, he stood on his mother’s terrace and looked out over the hills. There was something about the soft September light, the mild blue air, the damp sweet scent of autumn just beginning to creep in below the summer overtones of dry grass and stubble, that inspired in him an involuntary sigh of deep satisfaction. Paolo drank his coffee, black and sticky with sugar, down in one, the little cup almost hidden in his large hand; on a day like this he could see why his mother lived here.

  Paolo was not a country child, as his mother had been; he had not been out of Rome until he was seven or eight, when his great-grandmother had died. Until then his territory had been the hard cobbled streets of the city, thronging with people at every hour of the day and night, the black flocks of priests on every corner, shopkeepers in their doorways, and the noise of their traffic never ceased. On his battered bicycle Paolo would rattle through the steep, narrow alleys of Trastevere on his way to school or dodge between café tables on an errand for his mother, recognized everywhere by barmen and grocers and flower sellers. He didn’t even notice the noise; to him that, had always been simply how life was led, every moment filled with sound, every street with people.

  The countryside had been a revelation to Paolo, as a boy; its vast emptiness, and its silence. Nor was it just the absence of traffic, the whine of motorini echoing against the solid stone of the narrow city streets, the insistent puttering of little delivery vans, horns sounding; even the voices of the country people were quiet by comparison with those of the city dwellers, as though they had forgotten how to speak. They would chew every utterance over like a ruminating animal for long moments of silence before delivering it, and when they did open their mouths they seemed determined to cut their words as short as they could.

  As for the landscape, Paolo had seen grass before, and trees, naturally, growing between the stones of the Colosseum, out among the catacombs, in the park of the Villa Borghese and the private gardens to be glimpsed through Roman archways and behind the studded doors of great houses. But this had been different – wilderness stretching as far as the eye could see, not ornamental, not enclosed, not safe.

  Paolo looked out over the undulating black hills and wondered whether it was true, what they said about the Albanesi. Perhaps the valleys and forests of Albania were much like this, perhaps they were mostly country people for whom the prospect of living rough in caves and derelict cowsheds held no fears. Certainly the immigrants from Eastern Europe to be seen around Rome seemed to be afraid of nothing, rattling through the streets in their beaten-up old cars that practically scraped the cobbles, always smoking, dark-skinned, unsmiling and ruthless. His grandmother’s house was not well enough secured to withstand a determined burglar; although the doors and shutters were stoutly made and kept in good repair there were no steel r
einforced triple-barred security locks, such as the foreigners seemed to require. But Paolo was fond of the old house, and reluctant to persuade his mother to blight its pretty façade with heavy security, even had he thought such persuasion would succeed.

  It had taken Paolo some time to understand on his first visit as a boy that this was the house in which his mother had grown up and that the tiny, silent old lady to whom she introduced him, dressed in faded black and wringing her hands, was his grandmother. Her face was dark and deeply lined; she had small, rough, very clean hands that she had placed on either side of his chin, soft and cool as little paws against his skin, holding him still and looking into his face. It seemed to him that she was looking for something. As Paolo grew older, as his visits to Montequercio became regular and he came to know his grandmother, he did sometimes wonder why Anna had not brought him sooner. Eventually, of course, he understood, just as he came to understand what his grandmother was looking for in his face.

  A mild breeze stirred the birches below the house and as he watched the leaves flutter Paolo suddenly felt glad to be out of the city. The sky was a bright clear blue, incandescent in the morning sun, the day was already beginning to feel warm, and he decided to go for a walk.

  *

  Two cars were gone from Il Vignacce, but the little Italian hire car remained below the trees, irrepressibly shiny and cheerful in the gloom. Justine walked to the bright opening of the door from the kitchen, holding her coffee, which was black because the milk, like most of their other provisions, had already run out. She leaned against the warm stone of the door surround and looked out across the pasture. For the first time since they had arrived Justine was alone, and as she looked at the empty expanse of trees and listened to what seemed at first like silence but turned out to be composed of many small sounds she felt a delicious, guilty sensation of relief and exhilaration mingled.

  She had been surprised that Lucien had gone back to civilization so eagerly, after all his eulogizing the simple life, but then, of course, he could never resist a foreign market, the possibility of picking up some obscure condiment or cooking tool for a couple of pence. And the food, too; Lucien would not have trusted Louisa and Tom to come back with the proper provisions and she could imagine them squabbling in the supermarket over what kind of pasta to buy, how many tins of this and that. How much wine.

  Tom had been drinking a lot, Justine thought absently, much more than she remembered; perhaps that was why he was looking old. Lucien wasn’t much of a drinker, really, he never had been; he liked to remain in control. His abstemiousness had always marked him out from the men she’d known as a student, it had made him seem mature. Now, Justine sometimes thought she wouldn’t mind if he got drunk, once in a while, if he just let go. The thought drifted into her head that she might find something out if he did, and as she looked out over the field at the grazing animals that were now scattered across it, she let the thought settle. She decided that she would find the river; that would be her task, and when the others returned she would have something to show for her day of leisure. At the moment, however, the cows lay between her and the path Montale had indicated the other night in the dark, and she wondered whether, despite Martin and Dido’s failure, there might be another way.

  The cows had appeared that morning, as they were all getting ready to go. Much earlier, just after dawn Justine, lying in bed, had heard the chunter of an invisible tractor somewhere across the pasture, a strange, faintly sinister mechanical sound after two days in which their senses had become accustomed only to the soft organic noises of the forest, the sounds, at first almost inaudible, of birds and insects, and leaves falling. The perpetual clang of the cowbells, somewhere just out of sight. As Justine lay there listening the noise had changed to something in a different register, like a water pump. Lucien, who was awake for once, had decided that the farmer was filling a tank with water from the river, perhaps for the cattle. The pump had stopped after a time, the tractor engine started again and eventually puttered away into silence. But Justine wondered whether the sound might not have registered with the herd as some kind of signal, because they appeared as abruptly as though they had been summoned.

  The shadows cast by the trees had begun to shorten as the sun rose higher in the sky, when a bellowing had started up in the trees behind the house. Extraordinarily loud against a background of only birdsong and insects and almost shocking in so apparently empty a landscape, the lowing had echoed around the hills, the same call repeated again and again. Then a great dun-coloured cow, as beautiful as a painting, had galloped up out of the trees and stopped in front of them as they loaded the cars. The first cow was swiftly followed by others and they thundered on the dry pounded earth through the corral that led them to the pasture; the children ran to climb on the fence and look at them, even Dido. They seemed obscurely delighted by the animals’ appearance, as though they were longed-for guests, and they whooped and shouted as if they were at a rodeo.

  Justine had been surprised to see that only two or three of the cows wore bells, despite the din they had made, and those the large, sleek ones; the Alpha females, she christened them. All the fully grown animals had long curved horns and were a pale creamy colour; there only seemed to be one bull among them; a modestly sized, docile-looking creature, he had smaller horns than the rest. There were two calves; darker and redder than the adults, but with large white-lashed eyes, their uninhibited jumping and kicking mirrored the activities of the younger humans squealing at them from the fence. Justine had watched Dido perched above the boys and happy at last, her wide, radiant smile startlingly like Evie’s and unfamiliar at the same time.

  Justine didn’t think Martin and Dido would stick with the others in Montequercio, or at least not for long; there was some ruined abbey or other he’d said he might take her to. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Martin, particularly after last night; he wasn’t the kind of man to let anyone know what he was thinking, which was why they speculated so hard about him. A witch-hunt. Perhaps it was because Justine had loved her own father so much that she felt protective of Martin and Dido’s relationship; she was biased. But then again, it seemed as though he needed someone on his side.

  Reluctantly, Justine found herself thinking about Evie. Before the holiday, she had begun to forget her, she realized. She had resigned herself to the fact that Evie no longer existed, she hadn’t just gone off on holiday, on another adventure. She had – she thought they all had, she, Tom, Louisa, Lucien – somehow accepted the disturbing circumstances of her death as a kind of abstract problem that could never be solved. Perhaps that was how life worked, she’d thought; however terrible something seemed when it happened, in the end you forgot. But the moment she had seen Martin and Dido again she had realized that she was just deceiving herself. It wasn’t finished, not forgotten, not yet, not for him.

  Reluctantly, Justine allowed the awful bare facts of Evie’s disappearance to reassert themselves; she had forgotten nothing, it seemed, after all. On that last morning Evie had taken Dido to school, which in itself was unusual; when Evie did not come back and that night Martin phoned Justine to ask if she knew anything, it was one of the only clues, and he seemed to fix on it. Dido went to a school in West London, not far, in fact, from Tom and Louisa’s house in Hammersmith and a forty-minute tube ride from the Laws’ home in Crouch End. Since the age of eleven Dido had been trusted to make the journey on her own; there was no sense in going by car in the rush hour, and even if the time and money needed for one of her parents to accompany her had been immaterial, she wouldn’t have wanted them there.

  On that particular day Evie had taken the tube with her, though, all the way to school and perhaps Dido had been pleased at the novelty, just for once; the thought brought tears to Justine’s eyes. She wondered how many times Martin must have asked Dido what Evie had said when she said goodbye, and with what anxiety and grief Dido must have tried to recall the last words her mother said to her. Justine found herself shak
ing her head involuntarily in an attempt to rid herself of the image. She sat down on the stone steps that led across the front of the house, looked out across the field and sighed.

  In the pasture the cows were almost motionless, their heads all lowered to the short, dry grass. Occasionally one would turn and seem to look across at the house without curiosity. The silence and the space, all to herself, suddenly seemed immensely luxurious to Justine, like a great private garden. It was such a relief to be alone. A guilty pleasure.

  The sun’s heat prickled the back of Justine’s neck and the sound of the insects in the trees seemed to intensify. She walked around to the back of the house, to see where the herd had come from. Behind the house the shade of the trees, where the cattle had spent the last two days wandering in the cool green light, seemed very inviting, and Justine could see that a shallow, rocky, gorge led down through the trees, mossy and leaf-filled, like a dry, overgrown river-bed. Perhaps in the winter it channelled the rainwater down to the river; Justine knew from the map she and Lucien had pored over yesterday that the river, in fact, wound around the house, that it lay just out of sight down the hill.

  On impulse, Justine went closer, then opened the small gate behind the house that led into the trees. She began to climb down the rocks, moss-green and velvety with lichen beneath her feet. All around her the trees stood in ranks like silent, motionless figures, and Justine felt the first prickle of apprehension as though she was being observed, as awkwardly she made her way down the steep incline. She could see no sign of the river, although some way off sunlight seemed to penetrate the forest to a greater depth, as if perhaps there was a clearing further ahead. But the air seemed hazed by something, cobweb or a mist of tiny insects, and Justine could not see clearly. She turned to look back up at the house, but she had descended further than she thought and it was no longer visible; it might have been miles away and she alone in the woods. Then she felt something on her face, the touch of something light and clinging, and that was enough. Her heart thudding painfully in her throat, Justine ran back up the hill, two or three leaping steps and the house came back into view, but she did not slow down until she was back inside the gate, the cropped grass surrounding the house beneath her feet.