Late Season Read online

  In the sunlit pasture nothing had changed, the animals with their heads down as still as a photograph and overexposed, the colour bleached out of the whole vista to Justine’s eyes, which were still adjusting to the light. Leaning against the house, she took some deep breaths, and tried to laugh. No more off-road, she decided; better to follow Montale’s path, cows or no cows. And despite their impressive horns the cattle suddenly seemed friendly to her now; after the spectral gloom of the empty forest, they looked familiar, companionable and tranquil, and if she followed the fence around the edge of the pasture she would be safe enough even from a charging bull. She sat quiet for a few moments, then decided to go, now, before she changed her mind, like falling off a horse. She felt invigorated suddenly, to be doing even this small thing on her own, without Lucien to lead the way, to advise and warn and take charge.

  If she was going to be methodical about her expedition, Justine decided, she should shut up the house even if she only planned to be out of sight for half an hour or so; Tom and Louisa had already secured their portion, so there wasn’t much to do after all. As she drew in the shutters in the kitchen, at the back of the house the trees seemed very close in the half-light, and she heard the soft thud of a plum as it fell on the meagre, dusty grass. She went upstairs.

  Justine had closed their shutters earlier to keep out the heat of the sun as it fell full on the front of the house; on the threshold of Martin and Dido’s room she paused. Beside Dido’s bed the basin lay still, clean and empty, and both beds were neat? their blue and white checked quilts smooth and straight. Two of Martin’s shirts hung on a rail, but she could see nothing of Dido’s. Justine wondered who bought Dido’s clothes for her now, who took her shopping? Maybe Martin just gave her money; the thought made her unaccountably sad, of the lonely girl wandering about the shops and trying to remember what her mother would have wanted her to buy. A scuffed sports backpack leaned against the foot of the girl’s bed. Justine gazed at the little nylon bag, the last repository of Dido’s privacy; she thought of the child’s pale, tortured face as they had lain her on the bed in the dark. She tried not to think of Lucien’s insinuations, but suddenly she felt a kind of creeping dread, that none of them were taking responsibility for Dido. What if, like Evie, she had secrets she needed to tell them, but didn’t dare? And before she could think about what she was doing Justine knelt down and pulled the zip open.

  Inside there were two rolled T-shirts, a pair of jeans, shorts and a tangle of underwear and beneath them a couple of paperbacks. At the bottom of the pack was a photograph in a small leather frame. Justine recognized it immediately; it was a picture she had taken of Evie several years before on a picnic, head on one side, Dido’s small arms around her neck. She was smiling a little, and it seemed to Justine now as though there was something wary in the look she gave the camera, something in her eyes that didn’t match the smile. Slowly Justine pulled it out, remembering the day, remembering Lucien standing behind her and telling her about the light meter, how to set the shutter speed. There seemed such a distance between that bright spring afternoon and the day they found Evie’s body, so much road to be travelled to get her to that point, to despair.

  Justine turned the frame over in her hands; a grimy piece of folded paper had been pushed in behind the photograph and without thinking she began to pull it out. At the top she could just see something in Evie’s handwriting: ‘Dearest’. Suddenly Justine pushed the paper back in and thrust the frame back into the backpack, the paperbacks on top of it and the clothes, and zipped it shut. She felt a wave of cold shame at her curiosity, at how easily she had justified her invasion of Dido’s hiding place. If she wanted to say something to us, surely she could? She’s known us all her life. Quickly Justine closed the shutters, the darkness blotting out the backpack, the clothes, the sad, neat beds. She took the stairs back down three at a time.

  The cows barely registered Justine’s passing as she skirted the trees, although an angry horsefly circled her as she walked bare-headed under the midday sun. Batting at it, even that small effort bringing her out in a sweat, she looked back at the house, fortified now against intruders, every shutter closed. As she approached the trees at the far end of the pasture an opening appeared that had not been visible from the house, a broad path thick with weeds leading steeply downhill, the path still hugging the fencing to her left, and a clearing below. The herd obviously grazed down here too, to judge from the pats of cow dung worked over by parasites, and Justine was glad that she hadn’t met the big animals lumbering up that narrow path, where there would not have been room for her too. This was much more their territory than hers, after all, and for a moment Justine felt a flicker of curiosity about the forest’s native inhabitants. Not just the animals but the people too, the farmer, the villagers tending the olives higher up; they might be in there now, for all she knew, walking or foraging, invisible beneath the miles and miles of forest. After all someone had even lived here in this deserted place before it had been turned into a holiday home.

  In the shade the horseflies disappeared, the terrain flattened and suddenly Justine could hear water, trickling and gurgling somewhere to her left. Behind the fence now was a hazel coppice, great thick clumps of slender wands that arched towards each other gracefully and joined overhead like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral or something less lofty, like a crypt. The clumps enclosed a dark, musty space, and the ground beneath them was thickly carpeted with dead leaves. The sound of the water, it seemed to Justine, came from beyond the hazel screen and she could smell the river now; cold, mysterious and seductive.

  The path ended in a small turnstile surmounted with a sign warning of grazing animals, and carefully Justine fastened it behind her. She walked through a stand of some giant umbelliferous plant, dusty with seed and swaying in the light, she felt the sun on her face and suddenly she was there at the river. Straight ahead of her it flowed in a wide bend around the semi-circle of loose gravel and weeds where she found herself standing, and the far bank was a great cliff of rock, sandstone stippled with lichen and moss and more than forty feet high.

  Upriver the water’s course flowed down towards her, straight and shallow as far as the eye could see, its banks crowded in with vegetation. To Justine’s left, downriver and back towards Il Vignacce it narrowed substantially, pouring through some large boulders that almost blocked the river’s flow and acted as a dam, creating the deep pool she could see in front of her. Apart from the ceaseless, slippery gurgle of the water, the little beach where she stood was cool and very quiet, and with the trees enclosing her from behind and the massive, sombre cliff-face ahead, it could not have been more secluded. Justine felt as though she had walked through a door into another world.

  In the summers he had stayed here as a boy Paolo had spent many days wandering in the valley below his grandmother’s house, and although he could no longer be sure of all the pathways that criss-crossed the nature reserve, some having been erased by new growth and new ones worn by the forest animals, many were still the same.

  These days Montequercio, it seemed to him as he trudged down through the trees, was full of old people. He wondered where all the other children had gone, the ragged companions of his boyhood summers, and where their descendants were? A new generation. Some of his generation, of course, were still around although they were no longer young; Montale’s baby brother Giovannino, who ran the bar now, had been one. Paolo wasn’t young either, but the life of the contadino, always out in the elements tending to olives and vines, had turned those of his contemporaries still in the village into little old men. Some of his generation, he supposed, had left the village to work in the city – in Siena, or Grosseto, or even Rome – and those who had remained had generated few or no children to run about in the piazza as they themselves had done, or to play war games in the woods.

  Anna’s was the only remaining podere, or farmhouse, for quite some distance now. When it had been his grandmother’s house, they had had two or three n
eighbours, not close, but near enough, a little two room shack between them and the main road, and a small stone house with a tin roof higher up the hill, but the new generation preferred to work in computers than to tend the land and these little farmsteads had fallen into ruins. Sometimes the old people, the parents who now lived in flats in a block on the edge of town, would come out to potter about the overgrown olive groves. Creakily spreading out the nets to catch the fruit in the winter, cutting back the weeds, gathering a few wild plums or mushrooms, they were to be seen everywhere in the countryside these days, scratching their heads and spreading their sinewy old arms in despair at the way nature had got the better of them, and time, and something called progress that took their children away from the land.

  As a town boy and the son of Anna Viola, Paolo had been treated with suspicion at first, but as his ancestral family was at least local, he had eventually been allowed to join in. And in the summer holidays a different set of rules seemed to apply among the children. Outside the schoolyard and out of reach of their parents for most of the day, they formed their own alliances. Paolo and a loose group of five or six others, a subset of which would meet up most days in July and August, had built a tree house together in the oak across the road from Anna’s house one year, and a few of its nails and planks were still visible now.

  As they grew older and bolder they had dared to venture further in from the inhabited edge of the forest, to stray from the paths where their parents had led them in search of mushrooms or chestnuts. There were some marked sentien, ramblers’ paths, through the woods, which were signed with splashes of red paint on the trees, although they were not always reliable. The local boys knew their way around, however, and soon enough Paolo learned to as well, recognizing this tree stump or that odd-shaped growth of ivy, a rock or a stream or a clump of hazel. The route he had taken today, down to a waterfall they had often visited as children, Paolo had chosen because it was the most familiar; he didn’t want to get lost.

  Only once had the young Paolo come close to losing his way in the forest below his grandmother’s house, and that was because he had set out too late. His mother had always told him not to go off after three or so in the afternoon because once darkness fell, it would be too late; he would never find his way out and would starve there. And although she didn’t name it, he knew she didn’t like the thought of him going right down to Il Vignacce; if he wanted to swim, she would say, why not go to a bathing place higher up, in the light? But there had been three of them, Giovannino, Paolo and another boy whose name he could no longer remember, he’d been dead so long, hit his head and drowned in the same river at the age of seventeen. They had egged each other on, off on a hunt for a mythical cave where there might be treasure, or dead men’s bones.

  They had been still at least a kilometre from home when twilight had come quite suddenly, with a mist that seemed to rise up from the uneven leafy ground and a dimming of the oudines of things. Overhead the boys had been able to see that the sky still held some brightness but was beginning to take on the electric blue of dusk, the shreds of cloud turning pink high above them in the setting sun. And down among the trees the green and brown, the patches of sun that filtered through the leaves all suddenly turned grey and indistinct, darkening away by the minute.

  The baker’s son had whimpered about ghosts, and Paolo had thought of his grandfather, buried somewhere out here in a shallow grave with an English soldier, and others, no doubt: Italians, Germans, gypsies. Giovannino’s olive-skinned face had suddenly seemed very white in front of him, a bleached moon shape looking back in alarm, but by some miracle, by some trick of character, some combination of determination and an instinctive, tenacious understanding of the landscape, it had been Giovannino who had pulled them round. Like a whirlwind he had suddenly set off uphill at speed, dragging the other two in his wake, and he had not stopped until they reached the brow of the hill one along from the podere, Paolo’s grandmother’s light visible from where they stood, and the road.

  It was odd, thought Paolo, that Giovannino and he did no more than nod at each other now across the zinc of his bar, but, then, life was like that. Giovannino had been married, so he’d heard, but had not had children and was divorced now, and somehow Paolo could not bear to hear abut all that. Perhaps that’s how it will all end for all of us, he thought, despondently, trying to put the image of Livia and his own barren, failed marriage out of his mind. Livia had wanted no more than one child, she had told him firmly early on in their relationship. But then, of course, she had seemed to, change her mind about even that.

  As his promotion at the hospital proved slow in coming she had begun to look at him with a kind of lingering, doubtful consideration, weighing up the pros and cons of their union quite openly and without including him in the debate. The subject of children had become – critical, and suddenly it had opened between them, wide and dangerous as a crevasse. Paolo closed his eyes involuntarily at the thought, stopped in the silence, and breathed deeply the clean scent of vegetable decay. Now she was kept in a grand apartment out in Monteverde by her new lover, a wealthy man in late middle age who had already had a family. For all he knew she sat there looking out over the city from leafy suburban isolation and had given up work altogether, because she had left the hospital. It was no longer any business of his, but still he couldn’t quite erase the memory of her, of what she and he had done together; he couldn’t pretend it had all been meaningless.

  Firmly Paolo closed off that train of thought and surprised himself by successfully stopping the unravelling of guilt and humiliation that usually followed when he began to think about Livia. Perhaps it was doing him good, being away from the city; it wasn’t just for his mother’s sake, after all, that he came. And besides, he could smell the river now; the air grew fresh and cool, he always thought, near the water, and the sound of it slipping over the rocks was infinitely seductive. He quickened his pace.

  The waterfall that gushed out between the two great square slabs of sandstone wasn’t much more than a trickle now; in the spring the river above it would be at least a metre deeper with the accumulation of the winter’s rains, and the evidence of the April floods was visible even now. The grey stalks of the vegetation beside the river still held the clogged remains of last year’s leaves, and dried-out weed was caught, tangled like hair, high in the bushes along the bank. Paolo climbed the few steps up on to the rocks and looked down at the deep black pool below the waterfall. In the air before his eyes an iridescent blue dragonfly appeared, hovered briefly on black wings then dropped to the water’s surface, a swallow on its tail. Paolo remembered coming here to fish, or play at fishing, mostly just sitting on the warm stones in the sun and dive-bombing into the pool below. The turquoise of a kingfisher flashed across the dark water, then from behind him, quite distinct from the soft liquid rush of the river over the stones, Paolo heard a sigh.

  Upstream as she lay back and floated in the cold, dark water Justine looked up at the leaves moving gently overhead against the pale sky. She could feel the warmer water that lay on the surface of the river and beneath it the cool of the constant moving current slipping onwards, moving like something living around and below her. Justine sighed involuntarily in response to the sensation, and closed her eyes. She hadn’t brought a swimming costume; she hadn’t thought of swimming, just of finding the river, but had suddenly found herself seized by the luxury of her own private river, where no costume was needed. She had thought it would be just a muddy stream but when, in the heat, she had seen the deep pool beside the cliff of rock and had felt the cool breath of the river air her only thought had been to get in.

  It had seemed such a wonderful piece of luck, suddenly, that she should be here alone, and the day so warm; Justine knew that she wouldn’t get another chance like this. She spent so much time confined in her clothing, long sleeves, thick sunscreen, that sometimes she found herself wondering whether her body was suffocating. But here, dappled in the green shade, supported
by the cool brown water, she looked down at its undulating outline below the surface and it looked as though that was how it was meant to be, the configurations of pigmented and unpigmented skin like those on a leaf changing colour, or moss on a stone.

  Justine stood up, the bottom of the river soft and sandy beneath her feet, and the water came as high as her hip. She looked up at the blank roughness of the cliff face, the water sliding off her back into the river, and wondered what was on the other side.

  Paolo heard another sound from upriver, a tiny disruption in the smooth, regular gurgle of the water and, curious, he began to make his way in that direction, jumping carefully from stone to stone and trying instinctively not to make a noise himself. He didn’t know what he expected to see, exactly; an animal perhaps, an otter or a deer splashing in the water, but whatever it was he didn’t want to disturb it. At the bend, where the river curved back and opened out beneath a cliff he saw something white flicker and raise itself on the other side of a willow clump, and he looked.