Late Season Read online

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ Justine asked, looking around the room. ‘Everyone’s been up for hours, while I was asleep. Where’s Tom?’ She saw the smudged dark circle of a wine stain on the marble-topped bedside table.

  ‘Oh, somewhere,’ said Louisa, carelessly, but her eyes were averted. ‘Supposed to be helping me sort stuff out for a picnic. He has a habit of wandering off.’

  Justine nodded absently, ‘How are the others? Martin and Dido?’

  Louisa frowned slightly. ‘It’s hard to tell,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘I didn’t want, you know, to launch right in. Talk to them about Evie straight away. I mean, maybe they don’t want to, I’m sure I wouldn’t.’ She sniffed. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘Martin just had a cup of coffee with us and he was straight off with Dido, he didn’t seem very keen on hanging around to chat. But there’s plenty of time.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Justine felt a pang of disquiet at the thought of Martin’s predicament – and Dido’s, come to that, although she might feel differently – stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, the focus of all their sympathy and curiosity for the duration. She might have said something, but then Lucien called her from the next room.

  ‘Come on,’ he was saying, with satisfaction, ‘here we are. ‘I’ve found us.’

  5

  The hospital where Paolo Viola worked stood on a gently sloping hillside on the northern edge of Rome, and was one of a handful of hospitals serving the historic centre and the towns in the city’s northern orbit. A long building of some eight storeys high, the hospital had first been built in the nineteen thirties, when the deep balconies along its eastern face had surveyed terraced gardens with a distant view of Rome, but now suburban development had eaten away at the land, and a four-lane arterial highway hummed beneath the walls.

  Higher up the hillside, though, a handsome, decaying villa was still visible through its overgrown garden, once the summer house of some extinct ducal family, and this was the view from the staff room on Doctor Viola’s ward. As he collected his jacket and battered leather briefcase from a metal locker Paolo looked up through the grimy window at the fading red plaster of the old building’s façade, almost obscured by a great fig tree still heavy with unpicked fruit that was now turning black and withered. A balustraded balcony missing a pillar or two overlooked the rear of the hospital, but in eight years Paolo had never seen anyone appear on it, unless you counted the wild cats that roamed the grounds. He thought of his mother and her own little terrace on the edge of the wilderness and sighed, another furrow appearing on his already rumpled forehead. He felt chilled, bone-weary, and decided he needed a coffee before he set off. But the aluminium pot on the staff room’s electric ring was cold, and he pulled on his coat, picked up his bag and took the lift down to the hospital bar.

  Tucked away on the first floor in a windowless corner of the hospital the bar was run by two women, Katia and Nicoletta, one pretty, one not, but both sharp-tongued and sardonic, always raising their eyebrows at each other as they shared some secret joke that Paolo generally interpreted as being at his expense. There was also a henpecked barman who did not speak unless spoken to and kept his eyes on his Gaggia. One of Paolo’s patients, a mechanic from the city who’d broken both legs and his collar bone when a car fell on him, sat in a wheelchair by the door, unshaven, his neck in a brace and smoking meditatively. Paolo nodded to him and the man raised a hand.

  Katia, the pretty one, was working the till; she was a dyed blonde, with sparkling blue eyes and frosted pink lips, wearing a white shirt with a bow tie. She pouted at Paolo as he asked for his espresso, calling him Dottore with exaggerated deference and winking at Nicoletta, who stood behind the pastry counter which, at this time of day, contained nothing more appetizing than a sticky, flaking croissant.

  Refilling the cabinet with sandwiches for the lunchtime rush, Nicoletta was barely tall enough to see over the counter but she was straight-backed and strong as a horse, if her short forearms, ropy with muscle, were anything to go by. Her hair was spiky and dyed aubergine, with pale, heavy skin and capped teeth, and she bantered with Katia in an odd, high-pitched voice, breathy as a cartoon character’s. No wonder the barman keeps his head down, Paolo thought, not for the first time, as he took the thick china cup from the bar. How old am I, he thought, still seventeen, to be scared of these girls? After all, he could only go on blaming Livia for so long. And he winked at Nicoletta, who shot a glance at Katia, and giggled.

  Paolo took his coffee to a zinc shelf against the far wall, where he was hidden by the heavy fluorescent coats of a group of ambulance drivers. They were winding down after a long night, drinking grappa. Paolo took out his mobile.

  Paolo could hear that his mother was in the big kitchen by the echo on the line, and he knew that as soon as he rang off she would get out the eggs and the flour and start on the agnolotti and one of his favourite secondi, maybe a nice slow-cooked stufata. Sad, he knew, but after a couple of weeks making himself packet risotto at the end of a working day, or guiltily eating a sandwich standing up under the mocking eyes of Katia and Nicoletta, the thought of a day or two with his mother was infinitely comforting. Even if she would feel the need to interrogate him, again, about Livia’s departure.

  When he had said goodbye Paolo tucked the little silver phone into one of his pockets, took the cup back to the barman, who received it without meeting his eye, and nodded a gracious goodbye to the two women. As he walked out of the warm, smoky bar and set off downstairs Paolo could hear their laughter ringing behind him in the cold concrete stairwell.

  *

  In her kitchen a little more than a hundred miles to the north Anna was standing at the big kitchen table where her mother had made pasta for special occasions just like this one; birthdays, Christmas, feast days. The return of the prodigal son, not that Paolo had ever been a prodigal, not really. The table was topped with smooth, cold marble and had a groove in the wood along one end to hold the long rolling pin, also of marble, that was necessary to roll the pasta dough to the proper elastic fineness. The table top was floured and covered with fat crescent-shaped agnolotti, stuffed with veal and ham minced very fine; Anna had made too many, of course, but Paolo could always take some back with him to Rome, with a jar or two of sauce. People were always saying you could, freeze fresh pasta, a notion she regarded with some suspicion, but the thought of Paolo returning home with food she had made comforted her in ways she could not fully articulate to herself.

  Certainly these days, she decided, one never knew what an unscrupulous supermarket might put into their ravioli, and she suspected Paolo didn’t pay too much attention nowadays to what he was eating. He wouldn’t seek out a proper pastificio artigianale in the backstreets of Trastevere, where the pasta was rolled by hand and the stuffing made only from fresh ricotta or good cuts of meat. If such a thing still existed, Anna reflected sadly, thinking of the city she had once known. She wiped down her rolling pin, and weighed it in her hand considering, not for the first time, what an excellent weapon it would make if, as she was always being warned, a gang of Albanesi were to come calling in the middle of the night.

  Anna set the agnolotti on a tray, cleaned the floury table and got started on the stufata that was one of Paolo’s favourite dishes. She had a nice piece of shin of beef that she had bought the day before in Montequercio on a gamble that Paolo would be able to come, taken off the bone and cut into pieces. She chopped some shallots, a piece of pancetta very fine and a stick of celery, and set them on the stove to brown in a big enamel dish that had been her mother’s, like most of the contents of the kitchen.

  The house, too, had belonged to Anna’s parents; it was where she had lived as a child with her parents and paternal grandparents on the edge of the forest. The family had for generations farmed a small piece of land between the house and Montequercio, to the northwest; perhaps two hectares of arable fields and a little bit of grazing that supported four or five dairy cows. Anna’s grandfather had planted a few vines at the b
ack of the house, where the soil was pale and chalky, not red with metalliferous minerals like the earth in the forest below them. Her father always said their vineyard was a little patch of soil that must have been cast up millions of years ago from the Val d’Orcia thirty miles to the east, where the best wine came from. It was God throwing them a little something over his shoulder, a handful of wine-making soil so that Montalcino shouldn’t have all the best grapes. Their secret, the Violas’ and God’s. Montale worked the land now, a state of affairs that would have mortified Anna’s grandfather.

  In the front garden, overlooked by Anna’s terrace, there were five little olive trees, silvery even in winter. Their fruit went to the co-operative oil press with everyone else’s every December. A few buckets of olives went in, and a demi-john or two of oil came back, eventually. The same went for the grapes; it was subsistence farming more or less, but, with the vegetable garden supplemented by mushrooms and chestnuts from the woods below, they had managed between them. The war barely affected them to start with, but after a year things changed, and the war was no longer something that was happening a long way away. The Germans arrived, and Anna’s grandmother took to burying flasks of oil and wine to hide them.

  Then one day in the late summer a young man had arrived at the house while Anna was in the vegetable garden picking beans before supper. His Italian was jumbled and he spoke with a peculiar accent, stuttering and over-enunciating his vowels and dressed in an odd mixture of clothes – green serge trousers, a worn striped shirt, a peasant’s cap – none of them clean. Anna could still remember him as clearly as though it had only been yesterday that he’d walked out of the forest, a pleading look in his pale blue eyes. He had had untidy fair hair, thinning back from a high forehead although he was still young, only a few years older than Anna, she thought. His skin was a golden brown, not olive like an Italian’s; he had spent the last six weeks, most of July and all through August, walking north and the back of his neck and the tops of his ears were burnt and peeling.

  He had come from near Naples, he said, standing in the kitchen as the five of them stood around him. The Germans had a camp for prisoners of war there. He had escaped with three other prisoners one night, just by running the wire when they calculated that the guard was looking elsewhere. Two of the others had been shot before they got over the fence, and he hadn’t seen the third since Rome, where they’d decided to separate, for safety’s sake. He’d tried to take a train just north of the city, but had panicked when he saw the grey of soldiers’ uniforms on the platform. He was without papers, naturally, and could not risk any confrontation with the Italian authorities or the German troops, so he began to walk. Anna had thought of him walking all that way, and she could not imagine it. She looked at his feet, in heavy boots white with dust, and considered how long it took her to walk into Montequercio, no more than seven or eight kilometres from her home. She thought of having to do almost a hundred times that distance in a country far from her home, and she felt sorry for the prisoner as he stood between them and pleaded.

  Anna’s parents and grandparents had gone off together into the front room, looking serious. They left her in the kitchen with the young man, where she could hear them whispering fiercely next door. Sitting on the rush-seated chair that still stood beside the back door, he had tried to smile at her, but there had been something so desperate in his look that she just stared down at her hands. They had come back in and taken him outside to the granary at the back of the house, and she hadn’t seen him again. She had heard the noise, though, shouting and banging when the Germans came a few days later to see how much grain the Violas had harvested and found something else besides.

  You had to keep something hidden – oil, wine, chestnut flour – her mother told her, just in case they turned up looking. Perhaps in the panic of the moment of the escapee’s arrival it hadn’t occurred to her parents that the soldiers might come looking in the granary at this time of year, or perhaps they thought the young Englishman would be gone in a day or two and the risk was a calculated one. In the granary, at least, they could say he’d found his own way in there, they hadn’t helped him. But, as it turned out, the enamel plate with olive stones and a crust of her grandmother’s bread on it, that the soldiers tripped over in the dark when they opened the big wooden door, gave the game away as certainly as if they’d found the escaped prisoner drinking coffee in their kitchen.

  And that was how Anna’s childhood came to an end. On a September morning much like this, with the trees still dark around the house, grapes on the vine and the last of summer in the mild air, she had watched from an upstairs window as the soldiers led her father and the young Englishman away, not towards Montequercio but down the dirt road into the woods, towards Il Vignacce and the river. She could see her grandfather hold tight to her mother’s arm to prevent her from running after them, and her grandmother’s face stony with grief as she watched them go. When the soldiers came back they were alone, and since that day Anna had not been down that road, not all the way to its end.

  The house was cold and silent in the days following her father’s disappearance, and Anna’s grandparents and her mother talked in whispers. Anna wanted to go into the woods and look for him, but she was not allowed to leave the house and at night she heard her mother weeping in the bed beside her. Her grandfather went out, though, two nights after her father had been taken, and had come back at dawn with dirt under his nails, his eyes red-rimmed with lack of sleep, or something else. Three days later a German convoy was ambushed on the main road nearby with a homemade mine. Rumours ran around Montequercio about who might have been responsible, and suddenly more soldiers arrived. A platoon commandeered the presbytery as a military post and groups of them were to be seen in the bar, challenging anyone they didn’t like the look of. They didn’t come back out to the Violas’ farm, though: perhaps they were biding their time, or perhaps they thought they’d flushed out the subversive element there.

  On the Sunday two weeks after Anna’s father had been taken, a handsome woman in city clothes appeared at the house. Her name was Eleonora Vannucci, a cousin from Rome, and Anna’s mother had been expecting her. They drank small cups of coffee at the kitchen table and ate a cake Anna’s mother had made for the occasion, talking in hushed voices that sporadically were raised with emotion. Anna’s mother and grandmother appeared to be in disagreement over whatever was under discussion, while their guest acted as mediator; Anna could hear her speaking in a soothing, reasonable voice to Anna’s mother when she seemed on the point of tears, although she could not make out the words.

  Anna’s grandfather stayed outside, smoking; she could see him from her window, pacing between the olive trees. Then they called Anna into the kitchen. The war, it seemed, changed everything. Montequercio had become a dangerous place for their family, who had lived there for generations, and Anna was to go back to the city with Signora Vannucci. She was to be apprenticed at sixteen years old, as a seamstress to an atelier in the city.

  Signora Vannucci had offered to accommodate Anna among her own family, to feed her and act as her guardian for as long as she was away from home. The family apartment, though, was at odds with her cousin’s smart clothes. On the ground floor of a crumbling tenement below the walls that ran along the Tiber at the heart of the city, it was dark and damp and it smelt of drains all year round. The stove was dirty and there always seemed to be a crusted pot sitting on it, a reproach, reminding Anna of her mother’s scrubbed and spotless kitchen and making her feel queasy. In the summer the air was thick with mosquitoes. Anna’s bed was a small cot behind a curtain in the kitchen, but she worked too hard to spend much time there.

  The city was full of Germans, but Anna spent her days up high above them in an attic in Trastevere that contained four trestle tables, two highly polished sewing machines and a wall stacked with rolls of cloth and trimmings. The seamstress under whom Anna was to learn the trade was more of a businesswoman than a worker herself, these days, a w
ell-built woman with heavy red gold in her ears and five girls doing the sewing for her. Two of these were more accurately described as mature women than girls, and were motherly towards Anna, for which she was grateful; the atmosphere was not unlike school, in fact, strict silence with occasional outbursts of gossip and laughter, and Anna found it easier to setde to the work than she had expected. She stayed in the attic workroom nine hours a day, embroidering flowers, sewing invisible boning into bodices and beading on to silk crepe for wedding dresses and evening gowns. Somebody somewhere obviously still had the money to buy these things, and occasion to wear them; Anna never asked where they were to go.

  She had found it hard to get used to the noise, at first; not just the cars and motorbikes, their spluttering engines amplified by the tall buildings and narrow streets, but the hard sound of foreign voices below the window, and steel-capped boots ringing on the cobbles when everyone else was inside under curfew. In the evenings as she walked home through the grimy, narrow streets Anna found herself longing for the soft outlines of trees and hedgerows and the long meadow grass around her, imagining them silver in the dusk and breathing out the scent of river-mist and dead leaves. And at night she dreamed of the silent forest, her mind played out scenes in which she ran from the invaders and hid among the bracken on the ridge and the hazel along the riverbank. Over and over again she escaped, she saved her father, her mother, her grandmother and hundreds of faceless prisoners and she ran and jumped from rock to rock and ran on again through the bent, twisted red trunks of the cork trees, looking for her home. She had always planned to come straight back, as soon as she could, but things changed.