Late Season Read online

  He had seen a woman’s body before, of course, seen Livia’s countless times. More recently, though, his patients’ were the only bodies he examined, and the effect, naturally enough, was not like this. It seemed a long time since he had seen a body that was whole and private, not suffering, not offered to him for his professional opinion. And with Livia it was the other extreme; there had been no vulnerability in her nakedness, no part of it that was revealed heedlessly, without careful calculation of its effect, all flaws carefully concealed.

  She was standing oblique to him; through the insubstantial screen of the willow Paolo could see her back, the flare of a hip, the hollow curve from the hipbone into her belly and the outline of one sloping breast. Her head was tipped back and her hair hung in a single dark hank between her shoulder blades as she looked up at the cliff. Her skin was very pale, and her whole white voluptuous outline was reflected back at him again in the motionless silvered surface of the pool. He could not tell in the flickering shade cast by the moving trees above them but he thought he saw something on her white skin, something like a tracing, faded lines drawn on her body; a map. Then, before he could think what to do next, she turned and walked out of the water, and the effect of the full length of her walking carelessly out of the water brought him down to his knees.

  She picked up something that was in a heap at the edge of the water with a quick movement and pulled it over her head, something light and thin that stuck to her wet skin; hidden from her at least for the second or two in which her head was shrouded by her dress, Paolo ducked his head down. He sat back on the small stones beside the water, his head in his hands, finding intolerable the possibility that she should find him watching her. He sat there for some minutes without moving, and when he raised his head again, she had gone.

  10

  The afternoon was advanced and the light was beginning to leave the pasture when at last Justine heard the crunch of the car’s tyres on the gravel road above the house, high up and far away at first, ominous in the silence as they approached, very slowly. As she watched the car’s shape moving slowly down to her through the screen of trees, it seemed to Justine a long time since Saturday night and that first, endless, drive down through the forest in the dusk. She felt a strange reluctance when she thought of taking that road again, out of the woods, as though she was growing to love her captor.

  There was only one car, with Martin and Dido in the front and Lucien lounging on the back seat. He waved up at her, grinning, as she swung open the gate and closed it behind them.

  ‘How have you been? Any sign of life down here?’

  Extracting himself from the car Lucien came over to her and stroked her back reflexively, low down at the base of her spine. Over his shoulder Justine could see Martin looking across at them, and she felt uncomfortable. She couldn’t imagine what kind of a ride home they must have had, Martin and Lucien; they seemed quite determined not to communicate in anything more than the most perfunctory way. Suddenly she felt quite impatient with them. Registering Lucien’s question, she stepped back from him to answer, and let his hand fall away.

  ‘No… No. No one. How was the village?’

  ‘Nice. I mean, nothing special, but there was a market and a good restaurant. Surprisingly good. We had lunch; I mean, we thought once we’d done that road, God, it took for ever, we might as well stay out for a while, don’t you think? The others went to Siena, and these two’ – he gestured with his head back at Martin and Dido, now unloading plastic bags from the car’s boot – ‘they went to some monastery or other, or an abbey, the one we saw in the guide book, with the relics. A bit of the true cross, or something; a Cistercian abbey, ruined. They picked me up on the way back.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Then, realizing something more was expected of her, ‘Sounds good.’ Justine didn’t quite feel like telling Lucien about her day somehow.

  ‘Oh,’ Lucien said, as an afterthought, ‘and we met our neighbour. Our landlord introduced us, the farmer, what’s his name. Montale. He was at the supermarket.’

  ‘Neighbour?’ Justine frowned, and looked around at the empty hills.

  ‘Up at the top. You know, just where the off-road bit starts, the beginning of the reserve.’

  ‘Oh,’ Justine said, remembering the pretty old house she’d thought might have been theirs before Montale had roared on past it. ‘What are they like?’

  ‘An old lady, Anna something,’ said Lucien. ‘Friendly. I think she was, anyway, neither of them speaks English, not really, not her or the farmer. Dido worked some of it out, didn’t you?’ He turned and Dido, who was just emerging from the house, looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘The old lady?’ Dido brightened. ‘She was nice, wasn’t she? She seemed to like us, I mean the boys and me, the children.’ She coloured a little, bobbing her head down. ‘She said we should go and see her and she’d give us some of her olives.’

  ‘Did she really?’ said Lucien. ‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian, Dido.’ He sounded curious.

  Dido shrugged and turned away. ‘I’ve been doing it a year,’ she said.

  When she didn’t say anything more Lucien turned back to Justine. ‘Aren’t they wonderful, the Italians,’ he said, full of enthusiasm. ‘So hospitable.’

  Justine nodded, but her heart sank at the thought of Lucien working his charm on the locals. Then she thought of something. ‘Dido,’ she said, ‘I found the river. Do you want to come for a swim?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  Justine was taken aback by the enthusiasm of her response.

  ‘Brilliant. Dad!’ She turned to Martin, who was already looking at her. ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Of course you can go,’ he said, a quizzical expression on his face that warmed Justine to him a little, a look of fondness, and Dido ran past him into the house, leaving a little hum of happiness in her wake. On impulse Justine turned to Lucien.

  ‘I think maybe,’ she said, uncertain of how to phrase it, ‘it would be nice if it was just me and Dido, for a bit? You and Martin can sort the supper out, can’t you, put stuff away or something? Come down later.’

  She thought for a moment that Lucien was going to resist, as something like annoyance flickered briefly in his eyes, but then he shrugged.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’ll be getting dark soon, anyway.’

  Dido appeared in the doorway, a rolled towel under one arm.

  ‘I’ll get mine,’ said Justine. ‘Just a sec.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Dido, ‘oh, wow.’ She turned in a circle, looking up at the cliff. Already it was cooler down here; the sun had almost left the little clearing, and the river was even darker in the deep shadow below the cliff. The effect was to make the little clearing mysterious.

  They ran into the water together, and Justine was surprised by how cold it was. She turned, waist high in the centre of the stream, and faced Dido. There was something about the girl’s shape that recalled Evie, strong, rounded and golden with health. Her temperament, however, and her body language, seemed quite different. Where Evie had been expansive and uninhibited, Dido seemed turned inward, her shoulders drawn together, elbows tight against her ribcage.

  Perhaps it was Dido’s age that made her shy – although Evie had not been much older when she and Justine had first met – or just the physical shock of the cold water. Justine didn’t want to think about Evie, not standing here in the water. She didn’t want to remember the way she had been told Evie was found, floating face down in a muddy estuary, her body bloated by a month’s immersion, her hair caught in the samphire and pale marsh flowers. She found herself wondering whether Dido had seen her mother’s body; had she asked to see it? Did she dream of Evie coming back, walking but of the water, as Justine sometimes did?

  Dido smiled at her, a tentative smile, then turned to look up at the cliff. Justine caught a glimpse of something, a flash of colour low on her back, hip height. It was a tattoo, a tiny scroll inked in red; it said, Love. And suddenly Justine realized that Dido might have quit
e another life than the one she had imagined for her, not the life of the serious child she had known always sheltered by her mother’s bountiful, vivid presence, the girl who was now bereft. She was a girl who’d gone along to a tattoo parlour, who maybe had a gang of friends, who thought about clothes, and boys.

  ‘Is that real? When did you have that done?’ asked Justine. ‘You’re brave, aren’t you?’

  Dido turned, blushing, her hand on her hip covering the word. ‘Dad was furious,’ she said. ‘Went on about hepatitis, but I was careful about where I went. It was registered and everything.’

  ‘Did – when –’ Justine didn’t know how to ask, but Dido seemed to guess what she wanted to know, and shook her head.

  ‘It was a couple of months ago. After Mum – but she wouldn’t have minded, you know, she would have stuck up for me. And it took my mind off it. Everything. I just wanted to do it.’ Dido stuck out her lower lip defiantly.

  ‘OK, OK, it’s – pretty, anyway. Nice.’

  Justine ducked down in the cold water, laughing at the shock of immersion, and swam off down to the rock face. Dido followed her, and they sat together on a small ledge that protruded from the base of the cliff. The rough stone felt warm still against their backs, but around the small clearing the colours of the trees were growing dark as the light faded overhead, where birds had begun to wheel and scream in the dusk. Autumn was coming, Justine thought, as she saw them massing high in the sky in great swarms, tiny and black as insects.

  They sat there watchfully for a moment or two, both aware of the darkness falling and the trilling evening song of the cicadas as it started up among the leaves all around them, but both of them, Justine thought, reluctant to go back quite yet.

  ‘When did your migraines start?’ Justine asked, wondering aloud. Dido looked down at her hands, which were white against the dark water.

  ‘A couple of years ago. The doctor said that’s common, they often come on with puberty. They got worse when – since Mum died.’

  The word rang cold in the air, and Dido looked at Justine with her chin up, as if to say, there, I’ve said it. Justine returned her gaze, and nodded. She looked down at her thighs, the paler patches flowering over her knees, and absent-mindedly placed a hand on one to cover the white.

  ‘I expect that’s normal too,’ she said. ‘Have you been – all right, without your mum? I mean I know you can’t have been, really, but –’ She felt herself floundering.

  ‘Dad’s managing OK,’ said Dido quickly. ‘He’s good, actually. A good dad, you know’ Good, thought Justine. Bloody Lucien; why did he have to say that about Martin?

  Dido went on. I just – sometimes it’s horrible. Not knowing, why she did it.’ She turned to Justine. ‘Do you know? Why she did it?’

  Justine stared at her, taken aback. Something in Dido’s voice and the directness of her gaze gave Justine the impression that she wasn’t asking her out of desperation, not casting about for help from any source; it was as though she thought Justine might actually have the answer. She felt overwhelmed with pity for the girl, caught between childhood and maturity, not knowing what the adults knew, afraid of the secrets they might be keeping from her.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘If I knew I would have told you and your dad a long time ago. I think, if it wasn’t an accident – which it might have been – then she must have been very unhappy’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dido, but she was frowning. For a moment Justine thought Dido was going to say something else, but if she was she changed her mind, because suddenly she pushed herself away from the rock and in a few strokes swam across the dark water. She turned back smiling towards Justine as if, despite herself, the water had released her. She’s longing to be set free of all this, thought Justine.

  Looking at the wake that flared behind Dido in the black water, suddenly Justine became aware that the light was almost gone from the sky it reflected, and that the path back to the house led through the dark trees. She shivered. ‘Time to go,’ she said, wading past Dido and out of the river. Together, shivering and laughing in a panic that was only half-feigned, they tugged their T-shirts on over their damp bodies and made for the little lych-gate in the trees while it was still just visible.

  *

  Up on the brow of the hill Anna’s house was closed up against the night, only a crack of light visible here and there from the outside where the shutters didn’t fit tight. On her terrace an iron chair was tipped forward against the table, in case it rained, although the inky sky was still as clear as it had been in the day. The air was cool, though, cooler than it had been the night before, and if Anna and Paolo had still been on the terrace looking down across the valley they would have seen the beginnings of a mist lying feather-soft among the trees far below. Along the course of the river and out of sight of Anna’s terrace it was drifting and setding, between the clumps of thorn and thistle in the empty pasture and through the hazel and bog-oak where the black water rippled and slid over the stones in the shallows.

  Inside the house was warm and bright, and a sweet blue hint of woodsmoke from the stove hung in the air. Anna stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the little sitting room with a cup of coffee for her son and found him standing over the stove, looking down and frowning. He had been quiet all day.

  ‘What’s wrong, caro?’ she asked. He cleared his throat and looked up; he didn’t look unhappy, just a little dazed, unfocussed.

  ‘Is it Livia?’ And suddenly his face cracked open and he smiled, the wide easy smile that she hardly remembered having seen since his childhood, when he would run towards her with something to show her. It had not occurred to her before that it was his father’s smile, but now she saw it.

  He’s Luca’s age now, she thought, well, the age he was, when I fell in love with him. Can so many years have passed? And to her astonishment, because it was so utterly unfamiliar a sensation, she felt like crying. Suddenly the sense of having been cheated, or having cheated herself, was overwhelming, the thought that not only her life but her son’s too, had been all eaten up by hard work and stubbornness, her determination only to look ahead, never back.

  But Paolo was shaking his head, still smiling at her. ‘Not Livia,’ he said. ‘Mama, you know it’s all over between Livia and me, don’t you? It’s all right, I don’t care too much about it any more. And you can admit it now, you never really liked her, did you?’

  Anna shrugged, pretending indifference, but she was smiling too. ‘She might have grown on me,’ she said, but Paolo was laughing now. He put his arm around her, and gently took the cup from her hand. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s have some of that grappa you made, with the plums.’

  By midnight the last light was off at Il Vignacce, and all three cars were back in their place below the trees, two of them streaked with dust from the day’s expedition. The farmhouse, which by day sat solid and respectable in its clearly circumscribed plot, surveying its pasture and dominating the landscape, was now invisible, swallowed up in darkness. Around it the night sounds of the forest seemed to have taken charge, quick scuttlings and rustlings on the leafy floor, the ebbing sound of the insects, gradually silenced by the cool night and an owl far away somewhere. Overhead the great starry expanse of sky hummed with light, as billions of miles away the gases of tiny nameless constellations flared and burned and shooting stars arced silently down to the horizon.

  Justine and Lucien lay side by side in the moonlight, and, for once, Justine was not the only one awake.

  Lucien turned on his side to face her. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked. Justine frowned, looking straight ahead through the open window for a moment before reluctantly meeting his eye.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, half evasive, half genuinely curious to know Lucien’s reason for asking.

  ‘Well,’ he hesitated, and Justine knew he was trying to find a way of phrasing it that didn’t make him sound plaintive, but that made him sound innocent. He didn’t want to have a conversation about babies, and sudd
enly Justine realized that she didn’t want to either. She waited.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet,’ he said. ‘And I haven’t seen much of you.’ He put a hand out sideways across her body beneath the quilt and stroked her stomach through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. Justine turned away very slightly, and his hand stopped.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I think it’s seeing Martin and Dido, you know. It brings everything back.’ She was aware that this was only half the truth, but that was something at least.

  Lucien let out a faintly contemptuous sound; he tried to turn it into a pensive sigh, but did not succeed entirely. ‘Look, I know you sympathize with him, obviously, but – don’t you think he’s – odd? He’s hardly said a word since we arrived. Do you remember how many times the police interviewed him when Evie disappeared? They must have thought –’

  Justine interrupted him, knowing that if he went on she would not be able to sleep, she would be so angry. ‘Yes, Lucien, I know you don’t like him, but not everyone’s like you. Give him a chance. He must feel pretty uncomfortable –’ but Lucien, musing, or thinking aloud, interrupted her this time.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is that. I mean, all of us always wondered what on earth Evie was doing married to him, he must have known that’s what we were thinking. Christ, it makes you wonder what Louisa was thinking of, getting us all out here. Particularly –’ He stopped.

  ‘Particularly what?’ asked Justine.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lucien. ‘Just, well, we weren’t ever that close. Not with him. Not a recipe for a relaxing holiday’ He sounded uneasy.

  ‘That’s not what you meant, is it?’ said Justine. There was a silence, then Lucien sighed heavily.

  ‘Well, you know Tom was always – mooning about over Evie. In love with her.’ He pronounced the word with impatience. ‘It was a standing joke, you must have noticed. At his parties?’