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  Evie had met Martin when she was out with Justine one evening, drinking in a student bar in Bloomsbury. Louisa had stopped living like a student as soon as she was able, what with married life and a smart job as a PR in Belgravia, but Justine and Evie didn’t shrug it off quite so quickly. This bar, which offered cheap alcohol and a cheerful, noisy crowd in the basement of a decaying student building just off the roar of the Euston Road, was the kind of place they often visited in the early days of their working lives. At that time Evie had been learning to restore stained glass in a workshop in Fulham; she was good at it, and hardworking, although dismissive about her talent. It was the first of a series of artistic skills she managed to acquire over the subsequent fifteen years, although she never made money at any of them, and sometimes it seemed she did that deliberately, shy of making too much of any talent she had. Meanwhile Justine was laboriously trying to become a copy-editor like her father in her cramped cubicle on the third floor of an office block.

  They were both impoverished and on the ungroomed side of pretty, although, where Evie exuded physical confidence, Justine had a tendency to hunch and to pull her sleeves down. She always found, though, that after an hour or so with Evie she would be standing up straighter and laughing louder. Evie was a crash barrier and a safety net, encouraging, putting her arm around Justine, laughing helplessly at her stories of office life. That evening there had been a live band crashing away in one corner of the basement room and a few people were lurching drunkenly to the music, then Martin had appeared beside their table and asked Evie to dance. He was abrupt and his expression was serious, but Justine had known Evie wouldn’t say no; she never did.

  Justine had watched them together across the room; Martin had barely moved, Evie in front of him had begun to dance exuberantly as usual but had slowed down, they moved closer to each other and Justine could see that they were talking although she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She could remember quite clearly that even across the crowded bar Martin was different; unlike any of their other contemporaries he didn’t seem like a boy at all, but full-grown. Even at twenty-one he exuded a kind of strength, an intensity that Evie responded to without being able to help herself, as though she was physically being pulled in by him. She was tall but he was taller; from that distance he made her look delicate, vulnerable, in need of his shelter, her face tilted up towards his, fascinated. Perhaps, looking back, Justine thought what she had been too naive to think then, that it had been a sexual thing. And certainly that had been a part of it. But there had been something else, too; a fierce, unsentimental quality to Martin’s intelligence that had mesmerized her, demanded her attention and her dependence. Later, Justine had wondered if those things had somehow ceased to be enough for Evie.

  It was clear that something had happened when Evie got back to Justine that evening: her eyes were bright and although Martin remained on the other side of the room, leaning against the wall with a glass of beer in his hand, she told Justine that she was going to see him again the following evening.

  At first, of course, Justine and Louisa had assumed that Martin would last no longer than Evie’s other boyfriends, but soon enough it became obvious that she couldn’t let him go. He took Evie away from them in a way no other relationship had; they met alone in new places, rarely going out with others. But Evie was in love with him, that was clear; whenever Justine saw them together it was obvious that they would rather be alone, they didn’t want things diluted in some noisy communal space where they couldn’t hear what each other was saying. They went away that summer to Morocco for three long months, both on unauthorized absence from their courses, and when they came back, dark and exotic from travelling, there was no coming between them.

  And they did look right together, somehow: Evie so vivid and Martin sombre; she seemed to need him as much as he needed her, which was not how it usually worked with Evie. And it turned out, soon after their return from Africa, that Evie was pregnant with Dido. She didn’t need to announce it, she just grew, insouciantly, under their noses, and then, with three days’ notice, invited them all to her registry office marriage to Martin the month before Dido’s birth.

  They had all stood there on the steps of Marylebone Registry office throwing confetti over Evie and Martin, Evie defiantly huge in scarlet satin, her belly standing in for a bouquet, while the traffic roared past on the Euston Road. Like a bright caravanserai they had all paraded across six lanes of traffic in their finery to the reception, which was a picnic in the rose garden of Regent’s Park with champagne drunk from the bottle and chocolate cake. Looking back, Justine thought that Evie had showed no sign of having been forced into it, either by Martin or by social pressure. As some of their friends had suggested at the time; she had seemed extravagantly happy.

  Justine, however, remained single, and she didn’t mind at all, or thought she didn’t. Living in a bedsit in a blackened, crumbling Georgian terrace on a main road in south London, she relished the order and tranquillity of a solitary existence. She was working as a junior editor in the fiction department of a large publishing house, had her own small office, neat piles of tagged and annotated manuscripts bending the cheap shelving and filling her with pride. Barely paid enough to cover her modest rent, Justine looked forward to her work, and rode the bus up to Bedford Square every morning full of eager anticipation; she had a few friends to lunch with, her own space and peace. That seemed to be enough, for the time being, although she certainly assumed that this was not always how it would be. It seemed a long time ago, now, to Justine; a time when she had thought it was just a beginning, all that patient, close work on manuscripts that would, one day, lead to something greater.

  Then Dido arrived. When Justine came into hospital to see her Evie had seemed so happy it seemed as though she needed a curtain pulled around the bed to disguise it, for decency. But she was changed, too, somehow. Somewhere she kept quite secret. Justine had seen it, almost by chance, when she had decided to drop in one evening to see Evie about a month after Dido had been born. Instead of the radiant mother she’d seen in the hospital, Justine found Evie pale, red-eyed and thinner; her strong shoulders fragile, her jawline sharpened. Alone with Dido in her arms in a cold, untidy kitchen she had actually looked afraid. Justine had never seen her look afraid of anything before.

  ‘Is she breathing?’ Evie had asked, straight away. ‘I don’t know – sometimes she seems to be hardly breathing.’ She had held Dido out to Justine. The baby looked, to Justine’s inexpert eye, perfectly healthy, golden and round-cheeked, and most certainly breathing. Bemused, Justine had shaken her head a little.

  ‘Of course she’s breathing,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter, Evie?’

  Evie pushed a sweaty tendril of hair out of her face. ‘She had a cough, that wouldn’t go away. Wheezing. Nothing serious, the doctor said, but I lie there listening to her breathe at night, and I don’t know –’ She broke off, breathed a deep painful sigh.

  ‘You just haven’t had enough sleep, Evie,’ Justine guessed. ‘Look at you. Sit down, I’ll make a cup of tea.’ She turned to put the kettle on but Evie didn’t move, stood there swaying in the middle of the floor.

  ‘I sometimes wake up,’ said Evie, almost talking to herself, ‘at two, or three, before it’s light and I think, what if I couldn’t move? What if the baby was crying and I couldn’t get out of bed to go to her? It’s not just me, you see, not just me now. If I’ve fallen asleep on my arm and it’s gone dead, I just panic. I –’

  Then she had stopped, abruptly. Justine had made her a cup of tea, they’d sat at the table and talked about something – clothes, work, breastfeeding. Evie hadn’t said any more then, nor ever again, not explicitly, and when next Justine had come round, making sure to ring first this time and let her know, the kitchen had been warm, and ordered, and Evie’s hair clean. It seemed as though she was entirely her old self, smiling again, encouraging, holding out Dido for Justine to hold. Justine was surprised by how relieved she felt.<
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  The three of them maintained contact – Justine, Evie and Louisa – although they probably saw a little less of each other as every year passed. At first it was dinner most weeks in one household or another, but gradually this dwindled to a drink now and then. This was natural; it happened among other groups of friends, they observed, as responsibilities other than those belonging to friendship intervened in their lives. And Evie in particular, Justine felt, was always close; even if they hadn’t seen each other for six months, they would pick up again as before. She would admit things to Justine perhaps she didn’t tell anyone else; when Dido had a tooth extracted under anaesthetic only Justine ever knew how terrified Evie had been, and when Martin went through a difficult patch with the business and was hardly there.

  Louisa and Tom would always invite Justine to their sought-after parties, though – a summer one in the garden, with tubs of clipped box and strawberries in the punch, and another at Christmas, with branches of yew and trailing ivy, in their huge drawing room. Sometimes Evie was there, dressed in something bold and impractical, a red velvet coat with bare legs and scuffed stilettos, Dido toddling at her feet, sometimes with Martin, too, gazing at her. Sometimes they didn’t come.

  Justine always went, at the beginning, then she began to feel ill-at-ease, not quite groomed enough in the glamorous company Tom and Louisa had begun to keep. Tom was an influential journalist by then; he wrote about the food industry, breaking stories about inhumane conditions and adulterated foodstuffs that won him awards. As a result their parties were full of booming news editors and women in cocktail dresses and high heels looking sharply around, gauging the calibre of the company with a professional eye. Justine had missed three or four of the Fanes’ parties in a row when she told herself one Christmas that she was being a coward and a disloyal friend, plucked up her courage, and got on the tube to Hammersmith. She had splashed out on a new dress, black and close-fitting with long tight sleeves, and found herself knocking on their dark-green front door on a frosty evening.

  It was Lucien who had opened the door for her, Tom and Louisa having been detained elsewhere; he had been invited because he and Tom worked for the same newspaper. He’d looked her up and down approvingly on the doorstep, until she’d blushed and tried to push past him.

  And that had been that. He had kept her next to him for two hours, holding her forearm as they talked in a quiet corner of the breakfast room, the overflow from a particularly well-attended evening. Afterwards they had gone home together to his house in Notting Hill which at that time had been full of junk sculpture and Edwardian display cabinets they had tripped over in the dark. Justine had often thought of that night since as she lay next to Lucien while he slept, wondering whether these were the kind of memories that kept marriages together.

  Even in the dark Justine had removed her clothes with caution, but the next morning when Lucien drew back the curtains and let in the wintry morning light she had not had time to draw the sheet up and her body had lain there, exposed. He had said nothing; Lucien had never said anything and so she felt he must not mind it, the marks and configurations of brown and white on the concealed parts of her body, the pools of bleached skin that over her adolescence she had watched expand overnight like an oildrop on water; to Justine then the relief had been so powerful as to feel more like a victory. Later, of course, she had not been so sure.

  For a year or two Justine, and Lucien, became regular visitors again to the parties in Hammersmith. But then Lucien had given up the gardening column when he’d felt it cramping his style, and they hadn’t been back since to Tom and Louisa’s.

  Justine had gone on seeing Evie, of course; Lucien did not entirely approve, for some reason, of the idea of a girls’ night out. He implied he thought it tacky; disapproving largely on grounds of taste, it seemed. Evie would escape from domesticity for a snatched drink in a pub near Bedford Square now and then, but more often Justine found herself turning up for supper at their little house, where Dido would be put on her knee to bat the table with her small hands and shriek. Once Dido had started at school she would shyly bring out her pictures for Justine, big splashy poppies or detailed drawings of her home with furniture and stick people in the rooms. Evie didn’t go on about Justine having children of her own, but Justine would sometimes catch her looking at them together, Dido on her knee playing peek a boo behind her hands, and she knew what Evie was thinking.

  Evie’s outward life didn’t change, not much; she did some freelance restoration work, learned how to proofread for a pittance, the odd review for an old boyfriend, and her bedroom was still a heap of tangled silver sandals and Victorian piano shawls, beads hanging from an etched glass mirror on the dressing table. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to learn to drive, or wear something sensible, like jeans, just because the other mothers at Dido’s school did.

  Once or twice Justine did find herself wondering where it had all gone, the time, the potential, all the things they had thought Evie would do. And occasionally she looked tired, and right at the end Justine remembered noticing that she looked her age, suddenly; grown up; thirty-five. Beautiful, still, and perhaps more beautiful; her waist a little thicker, little lines around her eyes, her cheekbones sharpened, but not a girl any more. That was how she’d looked under the Tiffany lamp that last evening, talking about adolescence, questioning Justine about her marriage, was she happy. Had something been bothering her? She hadn’t talked about herself, or Martin. She never talked about him, in fact.

  Martin was a biochemist by training, had started up a small business involved in the manipulation of genetic material which turned out to be very profitable; he never discussed his work with Justine or any of them, so she knew little more than that. He worked to a very strict schedule, but he was not like other businessmen of Justine’s acquaintance, the few men at the publishers’ she worked at, for instance; he never seemed to be late home because he had gone out for a drink with colleagues, and he always turned down invitations to conferences in exotic locations, Venice or San Francisco or Berlin. His first thought on finishing work always seemed to be to get home to Evie and Dido; they were his passion, a physical addiction. Martin had no time for trivial activities, golf or socializing.

  And although Justine had wondered when they had no more children, the three of them did seem to her to be perfectly, economically happy, wound tight around each other in their little warm house. There had been many times over the past year that Justine had found herself wondering whether she had missed something, whether going over there with her own problems, she hadn’t paid any attention to something Evie had wanted to tell her. And the uncomfortable conclusion she arrived at each time was that it was entirely possible; she could easily have failed Evie.

  The trip to Il Vignacce had been Louisa’s idea; almost a year to the day after Evie had died, she’d found somewhere really cheap on the internet, and it would be good, she said, for Martin and Dido, or for Dido at least.

  ‘The poor girl,’ she’d said, phoning Justine at work and taking her by surprise. ‘Don’t you think it would be nice for her, more of a family to be with, not just the two of them?’ When she had made stalling noises, thinking of Lucien, Louisa had insisted, ‘Come on, it’ll be fun. None of us have had a decent holiday in years, and it’s pretty cheap, isn’t it? Of course it’ll cut into term time a bit, that’s why it’s not so expensive. But it’ll just be a week, ten days at most – ‘I’ve booked two weeks, but really it’s so cheap we can leave when we want – and I can sort that out with school, and I’m sure Martin can too.’

  ‘Well,’ Justine said, unsure still, ‘I’ll talk to Lucien.’

  ‘Do, darling,’ said Louisa, ‘because it won’t be the same without you. And I’ll need someone to talk to, won’t I?’ So Justine agreed, just a little bit flattered that Louisa wanted her to come so badly, and considering, on reflection, that a holiday with someone other than just the two of them might not be a bad idea.

  And Lucien had gru
mbled, first at the expense because he hated spending any money at all, perhaps because he didn’t earn any. Then there was the thought of spending more than an evening with Tom, with whom he did not get on. And other people’s children. But Justine had persisted, and it was her money, after all, although she didn’t say that.

  So Louisa had booked Il Vignacce. In fact it was Martin’s response Louisa had worried about, not Justine’s, or Lucien’s; although she wasn’t one to shirk a difficult conversation she had found herself feeling uncharacteristically nervous, waiting for him to pick up the phone so that she could invite him and Dido on the holiday. But he had agreed straight away; it had almost been as though the whole thing was already on his agenda.

  4

  Il Vignacce faced south, and in the morning the sun rose over the ridge to its left, the shadow cast by the tall trees receding only slowly from the broad pasture that stretched out in front of the old stone building. The river was on that side, too, although they couldn’t see it, meandering silently along the eastern side of the clearing at the foot of a steep, wooded bank that concealed it from the house.

  The wooded spurs and valleys that made up the hundreds of hectares of the reserve of the Alto Merse where the farmhouse lay hidden were interlocked like fingers, the river zig-zagging between them. There were side valleys too, where tiny tributaries would come down from the hills to the north or east to join the river and the walkers who occasionally visited the area could easily, unless they were very experienced or in possession of a carefully annotated map, lose their way entirely. Following the river did not always work in establishing the walker’s bearings, as where it met a tributary it might appear to fork; sometimes it seemed to dry up entirely up a blind valley, or end in a boggy, flooded field with no clear outflow. Signs would appear on gates: Bestiame in Brado, or Toro Pericoloso, Attenzione, that might throw the nervous walker entirely and send him back to retrace his steps rather than confront a snorting bull in so enclosed a space.