Late Season Read online

  So the indistinct black-and-white image was all that remained of Evie, a shoulder bag on her arm that might have been big enough to contain spare clothes, a toothbrush, to indicate that she was on her way somewhere, that she would be going to bed that night. But the shoulder bag had never been found, perhaps its contents were lying half-buried on a sand bar or a mudflat, the bag itself disintegrated to nothing more than a buckle and a zip. The inquest returned an open verdict. It was extraordinary to Justine that so momentous a thing could happen and yet leave so little trace.

  12

  Justine came out of the dark of the steep, narrow stone staircase that led to the viewing platform and blinked in the brilliant sunlight. She was – they were all, now, as she was the last one up – perched on the very top of the stupendous, logic-defying dome that dominated every view of Florence. She stood with her back to the platform’s central pillar and looked out over the sprawling city as it shimmered in the mild September sun; the view was breathtaking. Up here, so far above the dark, narrow streets of the medieval city, the sky seemed suddenly vast and perfectly blue, just streaked here and there with wisps of cloud. Justine could see domes of terracotta and verdigris punctuating the red-tiled roofs and the grid of the city’s streets all seeming to converge on the huge cathedral, she could see beyond the city to the hills and the suburbs. At the airport, beside the green river winding out to the west, a distant aircraft was coming in to land and she could almost, or so she imagined, sec where the soft blue air met the sea at the western horizon.

  A little below them and perhaps a hundred metres away was the pink and green candy-stick of the bell tower where other tourists, tiny as dolls, were standing pressed against the wrought-iron grilles with their cameras. To the south, dark-green hills spiked with cypresses rose out of the crowded city, here and there on their slopes façades of marble and gold glittered like buried treasure among the trees. Breathless after the climb – 463 steps to the top – and half-stunned by the volume of humanity on the streets below after the silence of the forest, Justine stood still for a long moment or two, grateful for the cool solidity of the stone at her back and the distance between her and the crowded streets.

  The plan to come to Florence had been made over breakfast, and to everyone’s surprise had been suggested by Martin.

  ‘I’d like to see the Medici library,’ he stated abruptly, standing by the door with his cup of coffee. ‘Evie – Evie often talked about it, the Michelangelo staircase. She said you had to see it. Among other things.’

  Startled, no one could think of a reason to disagree straight off; after all, it was no more than an hour away, the treasure-house of European art. And Martin seemed determined.

  ‘I didn’t know Evie knew Florence,’ said Justine.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Martin. ‘In her year off before university she spent a couple of months here, some art history course or other. Staying with a family’

  They looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, sounding reluctant, there’s an exhibition of Da Vinci’s machines, I think. At the library’

  Dido made a face. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she said, ‘machines?’

  The ghost of a smile appeared on Martin’s face. ‘You don’t have to come, if you don’t want to,’ he said.

  Louisa had an idea. ‘Why don’t Justine and I take Dido shopping?’ she said. ‘We could do something together in the morning, then split up. We could meet back up at the restaurant in the evening?’

  Tom looked at her with weary indulgence. ‘Very selfless,’ he said. ‘Whatever happened to culture? I suppose I get the boys, then?’ At this Sam and Angus, for whom the prospect of a library visit or a shopping trip had generated no enthusiasm, cheered and jumped, pulling at his arm.

  ‘Don’t look like that,’ said Louisa. ‘You could take the boys to the park, or something. I’m sure there’s a good park in Florence, isn’t there? The Tivoli? Boboli?’

  ‘Yeah, Dad, a park,’ said Sam. ‘That’d be OK. And maybe they have arcades there, you know, games arcades? Even in the bar yesterday they had Grand Theft Auto.’

  Tom sighed. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, in mock despair, and the others, even Martin, had laughed. Even as Justine laughed with him, though, she thought Tom looked tired, his eyes rimmed with pink; it was as if there was something inside draining him, syphoning off the avid, robust vitality she had always thought of as Tom’s defining characteristic.

  Justine looked at Tom now; flushed with the exertion of their climb he looked exhilarated as he knelt against the rail with his arm around Sam and pointed across at the hills and the domes that punctuated the city skyline. There was something about being so high that Justine felt too, the giddy, euphoric sensation that came with danger and the dramatic change of perspective. Whatever it was, Louisa seemed immune to it though; she was standing, stiffly holding Angus’s hand with white knuckles, trying not to look down. The boys had climbed all the way up on their own, even the last, steep, claustrophobic steps up inside the curved skin of the dome with only a flimsy handrail for support where Lucien, who did not like enclosed spaces, had become rather tetchy.

  Angus and Sam had particularly enjoyed the gallery that led half-way around the inside of the dome, high above the nave, because it afforded them point-blank views of the garish visions of hell painted on the ceiling. They had had to be shushed to stop their giggling at the devils impaled on pokers, and writhing naked bodies, as they were in danger of offending the faithful below. It was here, not right on the top in the open air, that Justine had felt the vertiginous lure of the drop, the urge to lean too far over the handrail and free-fall down, just to see what it felt like.

  She felt a weakness in her legs at the thought, and into her mind’s eye flashed a picture of Evie at the flaking rail of a cross-channel ferry, looking down at the white flare of its wake, considering how cold the water might be, how far down there was to fall. Justine held on tight as she edged around the gallery; below her it was a sheer drop two hundred feet down to the cold gleam of the apse’s marble floor where worshippers knelt, tiny as ants below them, and the tourists shuffled in herds from one side-chapel to another.

  Once out of the trapdoor at the top, Justine felt nothing but exhilaration in the bright day, the glorious panorama wheeling around them. Beside her she heard Lucien sigh, and she turned to look at him.

  ‘God,’ he said, ‘it’s a bore, isn’t it, this tourist trail? The place is heaving.’

  He looked around the viewing platform which, although not empty, was far from heaving. Justine said nothing, not wanting to disagree with him straight away.

  Lucien went on. ‘I don’t know why we decided to come here, really. It’s so over-rated. Did you see all those groups? Following their guides just like sheep.’

  Mildly, Justine protested. ‘We walked through some beautiful bits. I bet if you wander about on your own this afternoon you’ll find some undiscovered part of Florence. You’re good at that.’

  Lucien didn’t answer, but he stepped forward a little and looked out over the city, considering.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said reluctantly. He looked across at Louisa, who was pulling at Tom’s sleeve in an attempt to persuade him to go back down. She looked anxious, one eye on the boys as they pressed against the apparently insubstantial, waist-high rail. Dido appeared beside her, coming around the rail from the far side of the platform with Martin’s hand resting protectively on her shoulder.

  ‘Do you really want to go shopping with those two?’ he said. ‘A girls’ outing?’ He sounded disgruntled. ‘They’re just designer con-merchants, those shops, Prada, Gucci, it’s all rubbish produced in the third world, you know. It’s an international conspiracy.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Justine, which constituted a refusal to comment. She diverted him. ‘I think it would be nice for Dido,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to be buying designer handbags, you needn’t worry. And I quite like shopping, once in a while.’

  There was defiance
in her voice, because Lucien had always maintained to their friends, without always asking her opinion first, that she was above all that. She stood alongside him in the fight against global capitalism. If left to herself she would probably agree with him, but there was something about being press-ganged into it that she resisted. And although Lucien was very inventive and thoughtful in his gift-giving – coming up with vintage scarves, hand-woven rugs, bits of salvaged marble sculpture – sometimes she longed for the vulgar thrill of a shiny handbag, a high-heeled shoe or a tissue-wrapped frock. And she did like shopping, once in a while. She thought of Evie. Dido was looking across at them, and Justine smiled at her.

  ‘I’m going back down,’ said Lucien shortly. And he turned and walked towards the exit.

  Paolo stirred at the sound of the cars passing, but only a little; he drifted in and out of sleep and the tail-end of a dream of surgery. He dreamed he was in theatre, masked and gowned, trying to repair a child’s complicated fracture subcutaneously, looking at the luminous splinters of bone on an X-ray screen, but every time he slotted them together they sprang apart. He struggled awake. The bed was warm, outside the sky was an electric blue where the points of a few stars were still visible.

  I need to get back to the hospital, he thought, wearily. Back to work. He knew he had to make a decision.

  Anna had seen the English cars go past, in a hurry, off to the main road. Too early for just a shopping trip, she thought, and besides, they were all going this time, so perhaps it was a day trip somewhere. I hope they know to get back before it’s too late, she thought to herself; I wouldn’t like to be bumping down that road in the pitch darkness.

  There was a cool edge to the air this morning, Anna thought, as she stepped out on to the stone flags of her shaded terrace, but it wasn’t unwelcome. The older she got the more Anna grew to appreciate the autumn; it took age and experience, she understood now, to stop longing always for the summer to come. And, after all, autumn was the most delicious season; the little vans from the vineyards loaded with round golden muscatel grapes as sweet as nectar would turn up in the market square, announcements of the arrival of truffles were chalked up outside grocers’ shops and porcini in wooden crates appeared on every corner in Siena. There was a great deal to be appreciated, even so late in the year.

  Upstairs she could hear Paolo moving about, up early today. She wondered what had got into him; he was quite unlike himself. He had something on his mind, but at least it wasn’t Livia any more.

  Anna had never liked Livia, and that was the truth, and she couldn’t see what Paolo saw in her. She was pretty, Anna admitted grudgingly, and she could see that perhaps a mother was not the right person to analyse her son’s love life. Paolo had been too romantic, perhaps; he had believed her to be what she was not. There had always been something about Livia that had seemed wrong to Anna; she didn’t want children, she didn’t cook; she enjoyed her work in the hospital labs, certainly, but she was paid good money for it too. She made no sacrifice for anyone else; she wasn’t interested in home-making. Still, Anna thought uneasily, they might have said that about her, too, as a young woman; living away from home, independent, and selfish; at the time it had not seemed that she had any choice; it hadn’t seemed as simple as that.

  Of course when Anna herself had fallen in love it had not been as simple as that either; her lover had had a wife of his own to provide for him. When for the first time Anna had tried her hand at home-making, laid the table for them in her attic flat, he had stood and stared at the rolled napkins and the water glasses, frowning as though aware for the first time that he was doing something wrong.

  Anna took a cloth and wiped the dew from the table on her terrace, and quickly, with a briskness born of long practice, she pushed the memory away. In a week or two the table would have to be put away for the winter, she reflected. Not quite yet. She heard Paolo in the kitchen and she went back in to the warm dark room. He still had that dazed look about him, dark circles under his eyes, face a little crumpled with sleep, and she heard him sigh as he filled the espresso pot.

  He looked around at the sound and smiled when he saw her. ‘Mamma,’ he said.

  She reached for the coffee pot.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

  Obediently, for once, even feeling a kind of relief at being told what to do Anna sat at the kitchen table and watched Paolo spoon the coffee into a pyramid in the metal filter then carefully screw on the lid, his big hands surprisingly deft. He took even the smallest task seriously, she realized; he never did anything carelessly. Perhaps that had seemed dull to Livia.

  ‘What shall we do today then?’ he asked, sounding cheerful, to her surprise.

  ‘I haven’t thought,’ she said. ‘Is there something you want to do?’

  Paolo paused, considering something. ‘I’d like to look for mushrooms,’ he said, surprising her again. ‘On my walk yesterday I thought I saw some of those yellow ones you like, down by the river. Perhaps we could go down there again.’

  His expression had changed; no longer distracted, Paolo was looking at her a little warily, and for some reason Anna was reminded of her son as a small boy trying to pull a fast one. The throaty burble of the little aluminium coffee pot indicated the arrival of the coffee, and Paolo turned from her to take it off the flame before it burned.

  Anna considered his back. ‘All that way down there?’ she said, reluctantly. ‘What, you mean near Il Vignacce?’

  He shrugged, pouring the coffee, his back still turned. ‘Yes, that way. Is it too far for you?’

  Anna wondered why Paolo wanted to go there, after all this time. To see the foreigners? She looked at him, her head on one side. If he wants to go, she thought, taking a deep breath. ‘No, not at all. I think the walk would do me good.’

  He turned to face her and smiled, but before he could say anything she went on.

  ‘But I think it might be better tomorrow; then we could call in on those people at 11 Vignacce. They won’t be there today, because I saw them going off in their cars first thing this morning. They must be off on a day trip. Did I mention I met them yesterday?’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Paolo, and she could tell straight away from his tone that it was, as she had suspected, the English at Il Vignacce he wanted to get a closer look at, not the yellow mushrooms. ‘When was that?’

  ‘In town, of course,’ Anna said. ‘When you were on your walk. Well, that’s to say, I met some of them. Montale introduced us. We’re their neighbours, if you think about it, even if they are seven kilometres away. I expect they’d like visitors, stuck down there, don’t you think?’

  Paolo shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Were they friendly?’

  ‘Yes, for English people. You know, polite. I don’t know if I met all of them; I think perhaps there was one missing, who stayed behind. But the children were lovely, two boys, and an older girl but she kept very quiet. I said you might be able to tell them a thing or two about hiding places in the forest.’ She looked up guilelessly at him from the table, and saw him smile.

  OK, OK, Mamma. Tomorrow we’ll go for a walk, and maybe we’ll go down there and look for the mushrooms. So what about today?’

  13

  ‘Do you think I need to, you know, change my – the way I look?’ At the plaintive note in Louisa’s voice Justine looked up from the two-day old newspaper, and frowned.

  Louisa was scrutinizing her image in a huge, up-lit mirror. It covered the back wall of the gleaming wood and steel interior where they were waiting for Dido to emerge from a changing room. Down a cobbled street somewhere behind the cathedral, the shop was intimidatingly fashionable, and, if it hadn’t been for their desire to please Dido, the women would probably not have gone inside.

  Silver speakers hung from the ceiling, as gleaming and curvaceous as flying saucers and vibrating with bass noise; the music might have been from Mars, too, for all the common culture Justine found in it. A willowy, dark-haired salesgirl, beautiful eno
ugh to be a model, was folding sweaters on a glass table in the centre of the long showroom, her movements so decorous and soothing that she might have been observing a sacred rite. Beside the mirror, where Louisa was standing, was a row of velvet-curtained cubicles into which Dido had recently disappeared with an armful of low-slung jeans and shrunken-looking sweatshirts.

  ‘Why?’ asked Justine. She was not used to hearing Louisa express self-doubt. Perhaps, she thought with alarm, it was a sign of age.

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Louisa, ‘I don’t know.’ She sounded bewildered. ‘Tom’s – he’s not himself. He drinks all the time.’ She turned to Justine. ‘He doesn’t eat. I wondered if it might be me.’ She turned away again and looked at herself, perplexed.

  Justine followed Louisa’s gaze; framed by the mirror, dressed in a version of her neat, pastel uniform which today consisted of a pale-blue sweatshirt and cropped cotton trousers, Louisa looked, as she always did, small, trim and pretty. Ever since Justine could remember Louisa had been the same, never doubting her own taste, decisive, practical and unruffled by fashion or her mother’s criticism. Louisa’s appearance, like so much else in her life, seemed to Justine to be a matter of discipline.

  She had been very determined, for example, to regain her figure after the boys’ births – Justine remembered Louisa saying at the time that she didn’t want anyone to be able to guess that she’d had children – and she had succeeded.