Late Season Read online

  Justine opened her mouth but said nothing, unable to decide which assertion to respond to first, and Louisa smiled at her from behind her dark glasses And then Lucien came out of the dark interior of the house wearing a T-shirt. He looked over at the boys dozing in the shade and walked across to the two women, lowering himself down beside them on the grass.

  ‘All right for some,’ he said, and Louisa pretended outrage. ‘We are on holiday, Lucien,’ she pouted.

  Lucien, leaning on his elbow, looked down at Justine with a half-smile. He smelled of grass and sweat and his blue-green eyes were almost luminous against the dark skin of his face.

  ‘I thought I’d go off for a walk. I’m sure I saw some wild fennel growing higher up, when we arrived. This place is full of great stuff.’ He looked at Justine for a half-second, but when she said nothing he directed his gaze back at Louisa.

  ‘How lovely,’ said Louisa. ‘You mustn’t do all the cooking, though, Lucien. I’ll do it tonight, how about that? Or we could have a barbecue.’

  Lucien shrugged. ‘Fine. Whatever.’ And he jumped up and with a wave headed off towards the wooden gate in the stock fencing, and the dirt road that led out of the valley, back towards civilization. Tom was still motionless, slumped in his deckchair beneath the pergola, but Martin raised his head briefly from his book and looked at Lucien as he vaulted the gate. Above him the shutters to the house were all closed against the heat and Justine wondered how Dido was doing.

  The two women watched until Lucien disappeared from view, then Justine laid her head down on the grass, and with the warm sun on her cheek she pretended to sleep.

  7

  Anna had kept the shutters closed all day against the heat, and the dim room was deliciously cool. Paolo set the dishes from lunch down on the table and as his eyes adjusted to the light he looked around the room that he still thought of as his grandmother’s kitchen.

  The aluminium canisters of sugar and coffee and flour, the stone sink and the chipped green enamel gas cooker were all exactly the same as they had been in his childhood; his mother saw no need to change anything, to put in a washing machine, a dishwasher (just for my one plate and one glass? she would ask him when he made the suggestion) or a heating system. Montale would bring her logs for the stove in the back of his pick-up, and she would split them herself on a chopping block behind the house, unless Paolo was here to do it for her. He resolved to cut a pile that would last her, if not until his next visit, then at least for a week or so.

  Paolo loved his mother without reservation. As a child he had only slowly become aware that she was unlike other children’s mothers in many ways, the least of which was that she had no husband. Even that wasn’t so uncommon; there were plenty of young widows about in those days, but soon enough he had learned from his classmates, from the fact that some of the mothers were not so keen for him to associate with their sons, that there was something less acceptable about his own mother’s single status.

  Throughout his childhood Anna had treated him with careful seriousness; gentle and softly spoken, she never raised her voice against him except once – when he had stepped off the pavement in front of a car – and even then he had heard the anguish in her voice as she reprimanded him, and then burst into tears. Anna had always seemed interested in his thoughts and opinions, giving them serious consideration in any discussion, whether it was the reason for the sky’s being blue, or the injustice of his not being allowed sweets, or to go to buy firecrackers with a school friend of whom she disapproved.

  Anna had taken him with her to work, too, if he was ever off school with a bad chest, as happened some damp winters. He would sit quietly with his school books on a little stepladder that turned into a stool in a corner of the wardrobe lot in Cinecitta where she worked then, and he would watch out for film stars. Although mostly all he saw were extras coming in for repairs.

  Their costumes, Roman tunics or peasant outfits that might be used a hundred times in different films, were rarely washed, presumably because the cinema audience couldn’t smell them, and they had a peculiar odour, multilayered, sweetish and musty, that made Paolo cough for all its exoticism.

  Cinecitta wasn’t what it had once been, even at seven or eight years old Paolo could see that, and the seamstresses spent a lot of time grumbling about its decline. There was little money for new costumes, and by then much of their labour consisted of unpicking and re-making old things, making do. The productions were vulgar, and close-up the props were chipped and peeling, their gold and red, their painted brick and clapboard fading in the sunshine, and the plaster on most of the great hangar-like buildings that accommodated the film sets was coming off in slabs. The studios seemed to the small boy like a great surreal necropolis, a graveyard full of the carcasses of old films, the bones of ancient Rome shoved up against the remains of a wild West saloon.

  In the late forties, the years of neorealismo, Cinecitta had been a place of great Italian artists, passion and high principles. Then, after that, the money had come in from the Americans in the years after the war, when they weren’t allowed to export currency from Italy and had to put it somewhere, and the studios became a boom town. He had heard the story from his mother, in fragments here and there; the Americans had come looking for good seamstresses in Rome and had found Anna, who had been finishing a spring suit for an American producer’s wife at the time; a suit of violet shantung silk with amethyst buttons. She had been seconded from the workshop in Trastevere to make costumes at Cinecitta and had become one of hundreds of artisans and craftspeople – carpenters, plasterers, jewellers, watergilders, architects, painters, all drawn by American optimism and American money, but united by a kind of passion too.

  ‘It was really like a city, full of life. Beautiful,’ she would say, with a little smile.

  She must have met his father there too, Paolo reasoned, and on his visits to Cinecitta as a boy he had looked out for him, surreptitiously. He knew Anna would have put a stop to such nonsense if she’d known exactly why he found the place so fascinating; the topic of his father was the one thing she sidestepped.

  ‘You don’t need to know, Paolino,’ she would say, her face stubbornly opaque, looking down at her work. ‘It won’t do you any good.’ Then she would look up, take in his expression of frustrated longing, and shake her head. ‘You would only be disappointed, and it’s not as if you could go and see him.’

  His father was dead, that was what she always said, and sometimes he believed her. But the film studios were such a place of surreal invitation as to encourage his fantasies. Walking back to the station in the evenings they would pass actors heavy with make-up, cigarettes dangling from their fingers as they gossiped in costume, Egyptian slave girls or can-can dancers, the men lounging in groups in their spurs and stetsons or eating plates of pasta while they waited for their call to the set. It was a world in which the usual rules did not apply. Some would nod to Anna, or wave to Paolo as they passed, and he would feel the glow of their attention all the way home.

  When he wasn’t looking out for his father Paolo had liked to watch his mother sewing, a furrow of concentration between her eyebrows, her fingertips rough with pricking, a callous on her right ring-finger where her brass thimble rubbed the knuckle. She must have been in her late forties even then, but he had thought her very beautiful, with her fine arched eyebrows and serious expression, her small waist and rounded white forearms. And clever too, able to gauge the width of a seam by eye when obliged to disguise an actress’s pregnancy, or to let out an evening gown for another who had put on weight. He sometimes wondered whether his mother wouldn’t have made a fine surgeon, given the right education.

  Through the door that led outside Paolo could see Anna’s shadow moving to and fro, clearing away the remains of their lunch. His mother was slower in her movements these days. He registered this fact on each visit, although the pile of exquisitely embroidered napkins – for whom? he wondered – on the polished side table in her sitting room b
ore witness to her industry. Not that she had any choice out here, with wood to chop for the stove and snow to clear from the path; even the knowledge that chestnuts and mushrooms were now ready to be gathered in the next valley, Anna saw as an imperative, summoning her on a walk of four kilometres or more.

  Although professionally Paolo was well aware of the benefits of exercise for someone of his mother’s age he couldn’t help but feel impatient with her boldness. He knew what might happen to her, so far from anywhere, if for example she were to slip while shovelling snow; he could visualize her bones as clearly as if he saw them on an X-ray screen, hollow and brittle as a bird’s. Anna appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the warm golden light, the vine leaves glowing as the sun shone through them above her head.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘there’s some English down at Il Vignacce, and so late in the season too. Shall we have a fire tonight?’

  Paolo frowned at the apparent non sequitur. ‘Mamma, are you quite well?’ he asked. ‘Are you cold?’ The room was cooler than it was outside, but still, it had been like high summer as they ate their lunch on the terrace in the sun.

  ‘No, no.’ Anna sounded mildly exasperated. ‘I was just thinking, it is September, they will be cold down at Il Vignacce, the sun goes so early. And even up here it’s cool in the evening, and a fire is so nice, isn’t it? That’s all I was thinking, I’m not losing my marbles, not quite yet.’

  Paolo’s brow cleared, and he put an arm around his mother’s shoulders, that had once seemed broad and strong to him, and now were as insubstantial as a child’s in his embrace. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’ll split some wood for you.’ He paused, considering Il Vignacce, which he still thought of only as a heap of stones down by the river where Montale had some pasture, the cows cropping the tough grass that grew among the ruins.

  ‘English down there? Well, they’re supposed to be hardy types. And it’s fine just now, eh? As long as it lasts.’

  It was late, and down in the valley the black trees that towered over the old farmhouse were silhouetted against a sky darkening every moment, from cobalt blue to navy; Il Vignacce was in darkness except for the single light over the front door. The windows were dark, although not all of the shutters were closed; they had been opened for some air in the boys’ bedroom where they lay asleep uncovered on their beds, their quilts tumbled together on the floor. They were open too at the back of the house where Dido was sleeping, soundly now, on her front with one hand beneath her body and the other hanging limply down to the clean basin that had been left on the floor by her bed. Her pale face, turned sideways on the pillow and facing the window, was smooth and peaceful; it had lost the odd, lopsided look Justine had seen earlier. The windows of Dido’s room opened inwards and on their glass the reflection of a flame leapt and flickered in the dark.

  The fire was burning strongly in the woods behind the house, casting the flickering shadows of the five adults around it against the slender trunks of the few trees illuminated by the flames. Four large slabs of wood, massive as railway sleepers, had been set perhaps by Montale around the fire, and on these Lucien, Justine, Louisa and Tom had arranged themselves. Martin was standing, leaning against a tree and looking into the flames.

  Beyond them the forest seemed very dark, but not entirely still; the night was full of small sounds. Justine was lying on her back on the wood, feeling the warmth along the side of her body and looking up through the dark filigree of leaves to the blue-black sky beyond them. As she looked, one hand shielding her face from the fire’s glare, she began to see the stars, more than she ever remembered seeing before. The air, still warm to Justine’s northern skin, was electric with the trilling of insects and suddenly she felt outnumbered; how few the five of them seemed, huddled around their fire while out in the forest the dry leaves rustled with the tiny footsteps of a hundred different species and over their heads the sky pulsed with thousands of silent, winking stars.

  Tom sighed contentedly, and Justine looked over at him. The children were asleep, they had all eaten a campfire supper of fat, spicy Italian sausages fried over a makeshift griddle, tomatoes and the remains of yesterday’s bread, and a bottle or two of red wine from their dwindling store had been drunk. Everyone seemed tired, even after a day spent doing very little, and no one spoke. Perhaps it was down to the previous day’s hard travelling, but Justine thought it was more likely to be due to the strain of coexistence, the small stresses attached to accommodating another set of adults and more; maybe this was why so much tranquillizing alcohol was necessary on holiday. And there was the worry over Dido, although she had seemed better on her brief reappearance among them. In her pyjamas, a boy’s striped pair, she had seemed pale and very young as she came down for a glass of water, her footsteps soft and light on the wooden stairs. Dido had seemed a little shaky, but at least she no longer looked as though she was suffering.

  Justine and Lucien had never really been away with other couples, bar the odd night spent under a friend’s roof; Lucien liked intimacy, and he disliked crowds, and other people’s children. (Justine always found herself justifying his inability to tolerate children in this way, as though he would like his own, although, she admitted in her gloomier moments, she had no proof that he would.) But before she had met him Justine, as a single woman without responsibilities, had often served as a useful last-minute substitute on various villa holidays with assortments of friends, at least once before with Tom and Louisa. In Justine’s experience without benefit of wine on shared holidays a fight would break out within twenty-four hours, and as it was, most reached a low point after three or four days. It was around this time that the holiday accommodation suddenly turned from a perfect sanctuary into a grubby, untidy house just like the one they had left behind, and resentments – over cooking, over restaurant bills, over where to go in the morning – would have had time to reach the boil.

  All the same, Tom’s sigh seemed happy enough, so far. Leaning up on his elbow on his wooden bench he looked across at Louisa, her fair skin glowing pink with the reflection of the flames.

  ‘Where shall we go in the morning, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Well,’ Louisa and Lucien both spoke at once. Louisa went first.

  ‘We need to buy food,’ she said. ‘And wine. There’s a supermarket in the village, what’s it called?’

  ‘The village? Montequercio,’ said Tom. ‘It doesn’t seem to be in the guide books, but it looked OK. From what I saw on Saturday, anyway. Didn’t you think?’

  ‘We don’t want to do that drive too often, though, do we?’ said Lucien. ‘We should be able to stock up for several days at least, if we’re careful.’ He sounded enthusiastic. ‘Get flour and yeast, I could get that wood oven going, make bread. Tins, pasta, that kind of thing.’ Lucien leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked into the fire. Justine saw the reflection of the flames in his eyes, and she knew he was relishing the prospect of their – his – survival techniques being tested.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Louisa, doubtfully. ‘What about fresh milk, though, we won’t be able to get more than a day or two’s supply of that?’ Justine smiled with relief; like her, Louisa obviously didn’t see subsistence rations as part of the perfect holiday. ‘And fruit and salad, fresh things – the fridges are awful. They dribble.’

  Tom snorted. ‘And besides, we don’t want to go stir crazy, do we? Or spend two weeks eating pasta and tomato sauce.’

  Justine saw Lucien curl his lip. ‘Come on, Tom,’ he said, mockingly. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’

  ‘Oh, adventure,’ said Tom. ‘The thrill of the foreign supermarket? Tempting, but no, thanks. I’m just a humble wage slave, we don’t like adventure much. Not on holiday, anyway.’ And he smiled, but Justine could see that both men were squaring up for a row. Already, she thought with exasperation, and caught Louisa looking at her. They exchanged weary glances.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Justine. ‘Tomorrow, anyway, we’ve got to go and get stuff.r />
  ‘We – some of us, anyway – we can see what there is in the village. There might be a market; do you think Dido would be up to that?’ She looked up at Martin, who had until then neither moved from his position nor spoken.

  He nodded. ‘Maybe,’ he said. They looked at him. He sighed and went on. ‘I think she needs some peace and quiet, for a while. If we ever find the river, just walks and a bit of swimming.’

  ‘What happened, then?’ asked Lucien curiously. ‘This afternoon. You didn’t find the river at all?’

  Martin shrugged. ‘Well, we found a trickle; we should have followed it, I imagine it would have led down to something more like a river. But there was a sign about a bull, and Dido seemed – anxious, so we cut across country for a bit. Then we took a while finding our way back to the path; it can be quite tricky, and I think she got a bit panicked. We had been walking for a long time, and I think she could tell I didn’t know where we were. That’s when she began to get the flashing lights in front of her eyes.’ He stopped abruptly, as though aware of having fulfilled his obligation to deliver the information requested.

  OK,’ said Tom kindly. ‘We can take it easy for a bit. Justine seems to think the river was the other way, anyway. We’ll find it tomorrow’.

  Martin nodded, and pushed himself away from the tree. He stood over them for a moment. ‘I think I’ll go up,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave her alone for too long. And I’m tired, too.’ At once they all agreed with him, nodding and wishing him a good night, and together they watched him go into the house.

  For some moments no one spoke.

  ‘Are you going to review any restaurants while you’re out here?’ Lucien asked Tom casually, as though to fill a gap. ‘Tuscany must be stuffed with them. Get us all a nice blow-out on expenses?’