Late Season Page 5

  Although the animals themselves were more often heard than seen, on the valley floor there was plenty of physical evidence of Piero Montale’s livestock. Their hoofprints marked the soft black mud of the valley path where the river overflowed in spring, and everywhere horseflies hovered and buzzed, glittering like jewels over the animals’ splattered dung. The dangerous bull the sign referred to, however, was in fact more of a red herring. He was a docile creature and the only male among thirty or forty heifers, all of them considerably more confident than he, and with bigger horns. Just like me, Piero Montale would say, gesturing at his wife as he sat with his cronies in the village bar. Outnumbered. Outgunned.

  Sometimes the little herd would appear without warning from the woods above Il Vignacce and thunder down through the corral Montale had fixed up, designed to separate them from the visitors and lead them to the small barn that stood some distance from the farmstead. Sometimes they would come up from the river, galloping and clambering up the small steep path through the trees that hid the water from view, to the pasture where they would spread and out and stop, quite suddenly, cropping grass peaceably as though they’d been there for hours. They seemed to look on the occasional human visitors to the valley with absolute indifference, as though secure in the knowledge that these were only temporary invaders and soon enough they would have the place to themselves again. There were two calves this summer, both born in the heat of August and only just over a month old. They would buck and jump once they were in the open, mounting each other and tossing their curly heads, but the heifers only occasionally raised their huge eyes from the ground to look at them in mild reproof.

  A French family had complained earlier in the season that the herd attracted flies to the holiday cottage, but Montale had just shrugged at them sleepily. If they wanted to be free of flies, they could go to the city, he thought, where they would find mosquitoes instead. The truth was, Paolo Montale didn’t really understand the concept of the holiday, where one travels far from home and yet everything must be perfect; surely these two, he believed in common with many of his generation, were incompatible. Home was where comfort lay, and as for adventure, well, adventure was quite over-rated.

  This morning, the first morning of what would probably be the last rental of the season, the sky was perfectly blue and clear. The pasture was sparse and dry, dotted with clumps of thistle, and the woods around the clearing in which Il Vignacce stood looked almost black, darkened by months of uninterrupted summer sun. Beyond the reserve and out of sight over the horizon towards Siena, the smooth round hills were glittering with stubble and the end of summer, but in the woods change came more gradually. It was early yet for the colour of the trees to turn, but in any case there was a good proportion of evergreen among them, mostly holm oak, fir trees and a few umbrella pines higher up, and the forest canopy would remain more or less intact throughout the year, concealing the life carried on below.

  At the outer boundary of Montale’s land some sweet chestnut trees grew, which he harvested; chestnuts could be candied for marrons glacés and a good profit, puréed and canned, or dried and ground for chestnut flour. These trees, along with the dainty birches, were the first to colour, making a rusty yellow flare across the hillside when the first frosts arrived in October, but now their leaves were only just beginning to brown at the edges.

  Higher still, on the ridge where the new arrivals had passed the logging crew the night before, there were pine trees growing more sparsely, their numbers thinned regularly for firewood and fencing. The loggers this year, as they had been for several years, were immigrants from eastern Europe. No one was ever entirely sure where they came from, or indeed where they went at night; it was rumoured that they lived rough in makeshift camps buried deep somewhere in the hundreds of acres of forest, and the lumber yard who paid them well below the minimum wage turned a blind eye. The woods, however, had for centuries harboured all sorts of exiles from society; hermits, runaways, deserters and dropouts could all be accommodated easily in its fifty hectares of secluded terrain.

  The ridge was the highest point for many miles and on a day like this it offered a view across the whole reserve, but there was hardly a habitation to be seen: only a chain of electricity pylons swooping between the valleys and a single, incongruous stack of radio antennae and dishes at the top of a distant hill bore witness to the advance of civilization. Hidden among the trees and brambles were the remains of the odd shepherd’s hut, the wall of an old stone barn here and there or an overgrown chapel, but for the most part these were ruins that had decayed beyond the point at which they were distinguishable from their surroundings; they had been already absorbed back into the land. Even Anna Viola’s house was too far away and too small to appear as more than a terracotta smudge on the black hills.

  When Justine had first opened her eyes the sky through the open window had been silver grey at the approach of dawn, the air in the room was cool, and Lucien was asleep beside her. At home Justine often woke even earlier than this, unable to go back to sleep and unaccountably anxious – what about? Her doctor suggested she was under stress at work but Justine just laughed at her. ‘They’re just books,’ she said, but her heart sank a little as she thought of them in their raw form, piles and piles of paper bending her shelves, her head full of other people’s words. ‘I’m not a captain of industry. Plus I’ve got a full-time househusband to look after me, and no kids.’ The doctor, who had three children and for whom flexi-time was not working particularly well, had nodded, and Justine could see that she agreed. She had nothing to worry about.

  But this morning just before dawn Justine opened her eyes, looked around, and went straight back to sleep; when she woke again the sky was a brilliant, incandescent blue and beside her in the bed was only a tangle of sheets where Lucien had been. Luxuriously Justine stretched; her body felt changed, transformed by a few hours’ extra sleep and the sun slanting across her bed.

  Cleaning her teeth at the window in the bathroom (which was nicely plain, Justine noted with satisfaction: white porcelain, terracotta floor and a worn marble shelf), she found herself looking out into the woods that, on this side of the house, came very close. The trees were pale, tall and spindly, their trunks splotched and blistered with lichen, and they stretched back as far as she could see down a slight incline behind the house. The sun didn’t seem to reach down this far, and only a greenish light filtered down through the leaves to the dusty forest floor. Next to the house stood two bent old plum trees, their blue-black fruit littering the short grass behind the house in various stages of decay, and a nylon washing line strung between them that would be quite useless in the gloom.

  Having grown up in the cramped terraces of north London, Justine didn’t have much of a feel for the countryside; she thought of it, if she thought at all, as dark, damp, and faintly threatening. The nearest part of countryside to Muswell Hill, after all, was Epping Forest, a place of shallow graves and bodies discovered by early morning dog-walkers, and to Justine a beauty ‘spot’ had always meant a lonely place where young mothers were battered to death while their toddlers watched. At eight or nine years old she and her nearest sister, Rowena, would spin off down to Wormwood Scrubs on their bicycles to wheel them along the canal bank, where brambles grew in the shadow of the vast, rusting gas tanks that rose and fell mysteriously, and pages from dirty magazines were scattered among the reeds. It was as wild a place as anywhere she’d seen since, and the presence of vegetable growth – the coarse grass with its pornographic secrets, and weed like drowned hair just below the oily surface of the canal – had never seemed to Justine a sign of life, but of corruption.

  Even as an adult, Justine didn’t volunteer to leave the city; the walks she endured with her mother on visits to Essex were either through a dismal wood beyond the village, slimy underfoot with rotting vegetation, or along a river path where they had to pick their way in chilly, damp air through dog-turds in various states of decay. Here, though, it was different;
perhaps it was the emptiness, or the foreignness of it: the warmth of the air, the quality of the light or the sweet smell of dry leaf mould that hung in the dusty air, but Justine found it exhilarating. There was almost no sign that anyone had been before them, or at least no sign that Justine could read, and it stood silent and untouched, like a prehistoric forest.

  Between the trees out at the back of the house she saw a fire-circle, ringed with logs, and thought how much Lucien was going to enjoy himself. Lucien liked the countryside, although he had never lived there; he was always wheedling to buy a wreck a long way from London, somewhere unspoilt like Dorset or Shropshire, and plant a vegetable garden.

  The house they lived in now was Lucien’s, the same Notting Hill house where they had stumbled over his experiments in art on their first night together. Lucien had bought it when he had left university with a matured trust fund, and it was worth a bomb nowadays, or so everyone was always saying when they knew what it had cost him. It was a small Victorian terraced house with an old plum tree in the front garden, a pale blue-grey stucco façade and floor-length windows beneath a delicate verandah. The dainty glazing bars on the long windows were fragile with age but they were original, as were the pre-Raphaelite stained glass panels in the porch; it was shabby but beautiful, and in a part of London Justine could never have otherwise hoped to live. She loved it so much that she sometimes found herself surprised by a twinge of envy that Lucien should have come by it so easily; she wished it was hers, really hers.

  Justine had never earned enough to buy a place of her own, and with prices these days it was quite out of the question. It worked well: a fair division. Lucien did the housekeeping, cooked, cleaned (after a fashion) and provided them with a roof over their heads; Justine earned the modest cashflow. They had a nice circle of friends and they lived in an interesting part of London, thanks to Lucien; they could go to parties two or three times a week if they wanted and Notting Hill was full of bars and clubs. Sometimes, to satisfy Lucien’s longing for a rural existence, they went away for weekends, staying in a borrowed cottage in Norfolk (Lucien was good at that, calling in favours and offering house exchanges) or Dorset. Lucien would cook up something rich and foreign, a carbonnade or a daube, and they would go on frosty walks. And in the week, coming home from work after half an hour strap-hanging on the tube to find the house warm and full of the smell of new bread, or herbs and wine, Justine felt pampered, and loved. Justine’s workmates thought it was the perfect arrangement; it was funky, and modern, it was empowering to be the breadwinner and it’ll be great, they said, when you have kids.

  It wasn’t that Lucien couldn’t get a job; he was, everyone always said, one of the most competent people you could imagine, say, in a desert island sort of situation. He gardened, an interest that he had developed from very little knowledge when an old school friend had offered him a couple of weeks covering a gardening column for someone on sick leave on Tom’s paper. He made it work, though, keeping their small household supplied with ruby chard and cavolo nero out of the tiny back garden throughout the winter, making jam from the damsons on the tree at the front. Justine remembered suddenly that Lucien had once become quite annoyed with Tom for suggesting that his damson jam might have quite a high lead content, given the proximity of the North Circular to their front garden, and wondered whether that was the cause, or just a symptom, of their mutual dislike.

  Although Lucien had never completed his engineering degree – he had been sidetracked by a newly discovered passion for wood and had broken off to do an equally short-lived apprenticeship for a cabinet-maker – he would probably be able to construct a decent shelter. He was not like most men, that was the impression Justine had first formed of him when she had met him at the Fanes’ house and that was what had seduced her, that and his blue-green eyes. He didn’t talk about his job, or his car, or television, he talked about growing things, making things with his own hands. The feeling that she had Lucien’s undivided, passionate attention was quite new to Justine, who had spent her school life feeling as though she was being jeered at for her studiousness, her eccentric siblings or her mother’s artistic dress sense. Although there had, as her sisters knew but hadn’t told her, been boys who had fallen in love with her, none of them had been brave enough to say anything, so she never found out. So when Justine had suddenly felt Lucien looking at her the effect was as though she had drunk something strong and sweet that had gone straight to her head. He was so warm, so exuberant, so heedless. He was irresistible.

  Justine sometimes tried to imagine Lucien working in an ordinary way, with all the compromise and wasted time that involved, pretending to agree with a boss he would inevitably despise; Lucien wanted time to spend getting things perfect. And if that was a luxury not many people could afford, it was still a principle that was difficult to fault, or so she persuaded herself.

  The house was empty; downstairs in the kitchen just the memory of coffee lingered in the air and a cup of dregs stood on the table. Justine walked out into the sun, still in her cotton dressing gown. This was a holiday, after all. Angus and Sam were hanging upside down from the fence, over by the barn, and they waved at her, without righting themselves. It was hot already, and she wondered what the time was. Lucien walked out of the wide front door of Tom and Louisa’s half of the cottage, and smiled at her indulgently.

  ‘Hello, darling. Sleep well?’ He looked her up and down, still in her dressing gown.

  ‘Yes, lovely,’ Justine answered. ‘Where is everyone? How long have you been up?’ She looked around.

  ‘Oh, you know. A couple of hours.’ He spoke lightly, but she knew it was important to him, that she should have been asleep while he got on with things. Although she couldn’t imagine what things, exactly. He went on, ‘Tom and Louisa are inside, I think, sorting out some stuff for a picnic. Dido and Martin have gone for a walk, looking for the river. They went a while ago now.’

  Justine looked across the open pasture, to a distant fold in the trees to the south, a darker place that might or might not have been a path leading between them.

  ‘He sort of pointed down there, last night.’ She nodded across the field.

  Justine was the only one of the group with more than a word or two of Italian; Lucien spoke impeccable French, prided himself on it, but was clumsy in Italian and so refused to try. He disliked being less than perfect at anything. So when they had called at the owner’s house to be taken down to Il Vignacce and it had become apparent that neither Montale nor his wife spoke any English, Justine had been hastily chosen as their spokesman.

  The farmer had been friendly enough, though he had gazed at Justine’s chest for long enough to make her regret the low-cut sundress, and had asked them to follow him down to Il Vignacce. ‘Strada sterrata,’ he had said, peering into Justine’s face to make sure she understood that this was not to be a smooth ride. His wife, fortyish perhaps, and not Justine’s picturebook idea of a farmer’s wife, was a small, hard-bitten blonde in designer sunglasses. Hauling on the collar of their huge dog, some kind of bloodhound the size of a large calf, she had looked narrowly at Justine, then at Louisa, who was sitting nervously upright beside Tom in the car. The dog had jumped and bellowed at the car ceaselessly before, with a final yank on its chain Signora Montale had turned on her heel and back into the great baronial hall of their farmhouse. It had been an unsetding beginning.

  On their arrival at Il Vignacce the previous evening Montale had first instructed Justine to keep the rough wooden gates in the fencing closed against the grazing animals, shown her the gas tank, the electricity meter and two metal cages for rubbish, tucked away behind the house. Then as an afterthought he had mentioned the river, and pointed out across the field in the darkness to show her where they could swim. That much she could remember, but she had not asked for detail, assuming that in daylight it would be easy enough to see where the river was. However it was by no means clear now; a path led across the front of the house and then forked; one way led i
mmediately into the woods, the other went off at right angles, skirting the trees along the pasture.

  Lucien made a rueful face. ‘Well, they went that way,’ and he pointed the other way, where the path led downhill and immediately into the woods around the house. Justine shrugged.

  ‘Well, I don’t suppose you can get lost as easily as all that. Not if there’s a path to follow.’

  ‘I found a map, too,’ said Lucien. ‘On the wall inside.’ He turned towards the door and Justine followed him inside.

  The room was cool, the windows at the back open to the woods and letting the green light in. The big steel-shuttered front door opened directly into the kitchen, which was all Justine had seen of the house the night before; she wandered on, through the sitting room in search of Louisa, while Lucien began to manoeuvre the framed map down from the sitting-room wall.

  There was a bathroom, then a big bedroom off the sitting room, and there Justine found Louisa bent over the bed sorting piles of clothes and putting them away. The room was pretty; painted a vivid china blue, the ceiling was striped with beams of some dark wood and rough, pale terracotta tiles resting between them. It was not bright, but flooded with a grassy light reflected through the window from the broad pasture outside. Through the same window Justine could see Angus and Sam sitting on the fence and jousting now with sticks. Louisa squinted in the dim light as Justine came in, then smiled.