Summer in the City

by Fiona Collins

  I hope the wine is not making me morose. Salvi turns to look across the courtyard and I swear I see him winking at a woman three tables down.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks, turning back.

  ‘I’m a bit hot.’

  ‘It’s nice to sit with your face in the sun, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really.’ I drink more of my wine, in an attempt to flip my mood. I need to be brighter, more breezy, much more interesting and more interested in him. ‘So, how are you?’ I ask. ‘How’s your case going? And work in general?’

  ‘Well, I’ve hired a new clerk, Jennifer Dixon,’ he says, as though I should remotely know who that is. ‘I’ve been going over some things with her this week. She’s pretty sharp.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ I suddenly feel as dull as the dullest dullard; that if Jennifer Dixon is sharp, I am a sat-upon loaf of bread.

  ‘Notes for a new case tomorrow. Domestic violence. High provocation. We’re expecting it to go on for weeks.’

  ‘Sounds interesting,’ I say. I have no further questions, Your Honour, I think; I know nothing whatsoever about the law. The word ‘provocation’ has seeped into my brain, though, like cold mercury. What does he mean: the victim, male or female, asked for it? He’ll get his client off because the other person deserved it? I think about rape trials. About men like Jonas, in Tenerife, who choose how they operate with clear and careful minds, so those they abuse are led into muddied and confusing waters of their own, unable to get things straight no matter how many times they relive them. What sort of a witness would I be to his crime? Would Salvi tear me apart if he was the defence counsel for that particular male scum? I know the answer to this. That’s why I didn’t report it.

  ‘It could so easily have been a murder case,’ he says with a regretful sigh, as though he has thoroughly missed out. ‘Hey, did you know there was a murder here once, in one of the cloisters?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Wine is not good for me, I think. I am definitely morose.

  ‘It was one of the monks,’ Salvi continues. ‘His throat was slit. Over there, I think.’ He turns and points with his thumb to the middle arch of the cloister behind him, across the courtyard, where the wisteria is heavy and weeping. ‘Struck down by one of his own.’

  ‘Another monk did it?’

  ‘Yes. The motive was never determined. Jealousy? The stir-craziness of being shut in here, no wine, no women. Who knows? Grim, though, eh?’ He grins. ‘Although it adds a certain magic to the place.’

  ‘Magic?’

  ‘Well, you know … mystery, tragedy, intrigue, a monk’s robe, steeped in blood, dragging across the flagstones … I love all that stuff.’

  I take a deep glug of my wine. ‘You love tragedy?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Tragedy and the twists and turns of fate … it’s exciting.’ Salvi sits back in his chair like he has said a Great Thing. ‘So here we are, Prue,’ he adds, with a wink. ‘Lunching in a place of both abject beauty and downright ugliness.’

  I’m horrified. I’m sure he is staring at my left cheek. I move my hand up to my face and rest my fingers on my nose so my palm covers my birthmark. God knows what state it’s in. I haven’t checked it since I left the flat and now it is burning in the sun under three layers of foundation and a thin coating of SPF 50.

  ‘It is very pretty here,’ I say. I really want to divert from ugliness. I don’t want to think about the murdered monk, blood on his robes, over in the cloisters, bleeding to death. Tragedy. And least of all my face. My birthmark is scalding to the touch now. I really want to swap seats again with Salvi, but I daren’t ask.

  Food arrives. Two waiters bring bowls of soup and a wide shallow dish of courgette fritters, plus a huge bread basket, filling our table with them.

  ‘Ah, brilliant,’ exclaims Salvi, his big eyes lighting up. He is a man who devours, I think. Who devours life when I have always just picked at it, like a bird.

  He encourages me to start with the steaming bowl of lobster bisque I would ordinarily find delicious but I am so so hot. I slurp at it half-heartedly and drink more wine. I feel slightly ill, in my lovely buttercup dress with the big white flowers, as Salvi chatters on, in his lovely position with his back to the sun, a carousel of life and personality. He is dazzle to my dull; sparkle to my leaden apathy. Why did he say that about ‘downright ugliness’? I feel I can’t recover from it. I feel I can’t recover from what Kemp said, either. That he wanted me. Because I was ugly and available.

  When the soup bowls have been pushed to one side, mine barely touched, Salvi looks at me from across the table – my face a blazing fire – and says, ‘I like you. I like you very much.’

  ‘Do you?’ My stomach flips a little, from its position of low-slung wallowing in my ugliness.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s in it for you?’ I ask.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ he laughs, his head back and his mouth wide open, and I wish he would stop laughing and lean across the table and kiss me as I need to be kissed, right now. I really, really need to. ‘You are what’s in it for me. You, Prudence.’

  I am drunk, I realize. Proper wobbly, no-return drunk. The sun in my face is becoming unbearable. My cheeks are so fucking hot. I want him to either kiss me or let me run from here, into shade and air. I don’t want the three further courses. I don’t want any more wine.

  ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ he says.

  He’s staring right at my left cheek again, but instead of saying ‘Shut up!’ or ‘Don’t be stupid!’, I decide to say ‘Thank you’ as I really really want to believe he means it, and he smiles at me as though that dress is just slipping off and flying clean away and I am already in his bed, which is where I want to be, all my rough edges cloaked in desire and magic and the mystical and the conundrum that is this man, Salvi Russo. I want him and I want him to want me. My choice.

  A breeze is picking up, in the courtyard – edges of tablecloths are being lifted; hems of dresses are fluttering. I look up and there are some frayed clouds in the sky now, drifting in apparent innocence across the azure oblong ceiling above us. The starters are cleared away and the main course appears. I try a tiny bit of the steak and it’s delicious. The half-shade in the courtyard is slowly creeping over tablecloths and cutlery and faces now – a stealthy eclipse. It sweeps like a monk’s robe over the courtyard until the whole of it is engulfed and our table, too, is in shade.

  ‘Oh, no more sun,’ says Salvi, looking incredibly disappointed.

  ‘Yes.’ I exhale slowly, so relieved the sun has disappeared behind a scud of grey cloud. We used to cloud watch, Angela and I on sunny days, except I was always doing the reverse: hoping a bundle of cotton wool would block the mocking yellow circle that highlighted the worst of me all too clearly.

  ‘Do you want the rest of that?’ Salvi asks, eyeing my steak.

  ‘No, you can have it.’

  Salvi slides his plate over and I plop the remainder of my steak, raw and bloody, on to it. The sky continues to darken and one corner of our tablecloth flips up on to Salvi’s plate and immediately soaks up a little of the blood puddled there, as he eats.

  ‘Can I come back to yours after this?’ I ask. The blood seeping up the white of the tablecloth has almost reached his little finger. There is a crash and the tinkle of glass behind us, accompanied by an ‘Oh fuck, Jeffrey!’ from a Patsy Stone blonde in a jade two-piece – the rising breeze has toppled a champagne flute off a neighbouring table. It’s almost dark now in the courtyard, cool and delicious and dark.

  Salvi nods. He lays down his knife and fork and calls over the waitress. I offer to pay half but he waves me down. He tips generously and we stand up and he takes my hand in his as he guides me through the tables and out through the arch of the cloister that leads to the dark passageway, between the cobbler’s and the deli, and as we come out on to the street the skies are furiously grey and the wind has really whipped up: a strange, hot wind that attacks and disarrays the ruffles of my dres
s and detonates my hair.

  ‘From the Sahara,’ says Salvi, and I remember the summer winds we sometimes get, which coat cars with dust so they are photographed for eerie-looking pictures in the newspapers and everybody can’t stop talking about it, but nobody minds, really, as these rare, random winds from the Sahara make England feel – just fleetingly – exotic and Arabian. ‘My car’s this way.’

  CHAPTER 31

  Monday morning dawns hot and bright. From Salvi’s bedroom window all I can see is a square of royal-blue sky and the trail of an aeroplane.

  ‘Yep, yep, Dino. That’s all done.’ Salvi’s in the kitchen. On the phone. It must be his landline as his mobile is on the bedside table beside me. The tap is running. The cafetière is being filled. Mugs are clanked from the cupboard. ‘Yep, sorted. Ha, no. But you know how it is. Good image for the club, though. Yeah. Yeah, mate. No, no, I’ll see you there. Yes, absolutely fine. OK, mate, yeah, have a good one.’

  The bed is unmade. I am a little undone; despite the black satin sheet wrapped round my left leg and trailing over my naked stomach.

  We didn’t sleep together.

  Salvi drove too fast, way too fast, in his Aston Martin something-or-other, all turquoise and leather, on the way here. It frightened me. Initially, we purred through the streets, Salvi courteously letting drivers out, braking evenly at traffic lights, humming along to the radio, driving executively, but somewhere near his flat, on a more open stretch of road, the car surged forward, and Salvi turned up the radio – the song ‘Halo’ by Texas; its soaring instrumental break with all those strings, in the middle, an interlude and a crescendo – and laughed at my terrified protests as we scalded along at a terrifying speed, flying past the identical black doors of elegant townhouses, streaking towards the end of the street and a looming set of red traffic lights …

  ‘Fucking hell!’ I cried, as we came to a high-performance but very sudden stop, my heart hammering in its incandescent cage.

  Salvi laughed. He reached across me and snapped down the tan leather sun visor. There was a mirror on the underside, winking at me, a little light above it.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘It really put the colour in your cheeks.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ I snapped. My face in the small mirror was flushed, with fear and fury. My eyes were wide, my make-up a little smudged. My birthmark, that rocky terrain, was covered but crusty-looking – always there, always there. But I was glowing, somehow. I looked alive.

  ‘Come here,’ he said, and I found myself leaning towards him and I knew when we kissed my anger would seep right out of me and fly from the open car window up to the dark, Saharan sky.

  He kissed me and I forgot the fear and the danger. He kissed me again as we pulled up to his building and as we tumbled through his front door and up his stairs. He kissed me as my dress was flung to the floor, like a rag; he kissed me as he threw me back on his bed and I prayed he’d consume every part of me until there was nothing of me left and someone else, hopefully, was in her place. My choice. My choice.

  I’m still here. He didn’t touch me. As I lay back on his bed, naked and ready – to be devoured, swallowed up; erased, not loved, but erased – he stopped. He just stopped and looked at me. Smiled at me. Pulled the satin sheet up over my body and tucked it around me, like a shroud. Then he smoothed his hand slowly and gently down the bad side of my face, while I lay breathless, and told me I was something else, that I was really something else.

  ‘Don’t you want to sleep with me?’ I asked; begging, pitiful. I needed him. I needed the validation. I needed him to need me.

  ‘No, I’m going to save you,’ he said, and I didn’t know what he meant, and I was so disappointed, as he was supposed to be my miracle, my promise of something – yes, I did crave to be loved, I did – I wanted love and romance and happiness, all the things that other, normal-looking people obtained so easily. But then he said, ‘Bad girl,’ so tenderly I was confused and humiliated and happy, all at the same time, and he sat down beside me and stroked my hair and the side of my face and gazed at me until I fell asleep – too early, way too early – and I eventually let the disappointment ebb from me like the tide from an abandoned beach at the end of a long summer’s day.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asks, from the doorway now, a white towel wrapped round his waist and a coffee mug in his hand. It’s early; it’s only about 6.15.

  ‘I’m thinking this is usually something a woman asks a man,’ I say. ‘And the man is usually thinking nothing at all, or about the football scores, or what time dinner is.’

  Salvi laughs. ‘What else?’ he asks.

  I want to say, I’m wondering why you don’t want to sleep with me, why you have brought me back to your flat twice now to simply put me to bed. Instead, I say, ‘I’m thinking you’re way too cool for me,’ which is also true. Everything about Salvi is, isn’t? His career, the street performing, friends called Dino … Dino must be another Italian professional, I muse. A member of The Profilo, that gentlemen’s club. Maybe he’s a barrister too.

  ‘Probably,’ Salvi laughs. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’

  ‘You?’ I hazard, shifting my body slightly so the sheet rides further up my leg and a black silky corner slips from my stomach.

  ‘You can make scrambled eggs,’ he says. ‘Eggs are in the fridge.’ He goes to the wardrobe and pulls a white shirt from it. A dark suit. A serious tie.

  ‘You’ve got to go already?’ Disappointment. Again. It spreads through my body like ink.

  ‘Busy day in court.’ He quickly dresses. He’s now on the edge of the bed, putting his shoes on. I want to reach out and slip my hand under his expensive cotton shirt to touch his back, but I think better of it. It’s OK; he’s busy, he’s important. He doesn’t have to sleep with me if he doesn’t want to. I just feel ashamed that I’ve asked him to. That I’ve invited him to take a part of me, but have been rejected.

  ‘Right, that’s me,’ Salvi says, standing up. ‘You can let yourself out, like before.’

  He walks from the bedroom and into the kitchen. I hear him pick up his keys and zip them into his briefcase.

  ‘Wait,’ I call, from my satin shroud. ‘When will I see you again?’

  He flicks his head back round the bedroom door and grins at me. ‘I’ll call you,’ he says.

  CHAPTER 32

  The landline phone rings, making me jump. It’s been ultra-quiet in The Palladian this evening, after a day of not doing very much at all (since I arrived back from Salvi’s flat at 10 a.m., all I’ve done is guzzle water, read about the life and times of Jackie Onassis and slump in my chair, ruminating on the excitement and confusion that is Salvi Russo). A day brought to an ennui-filled conclusion by a light early supper of bruschetta with cured ham and mozzarella, and I’ve been dozing fitfully in my chair since about six o’clock. Dad has been comatose since about five. He opens his eyes, too, at the jolt of the phone.

  ‘Angela?’ he suggests.

  ‘It hasn’t been three months,’ I counter, going to the phone in no hurry and hoping whoever it is will ring off before I get there. ‘Perhaps it’s PPI. Remember how Nonna got so fed up with cold-callers she used to hang up every single phone call she got, even if it was her own friends or the doctor’s surgery?’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ says Dad. ‘Answer it, then, in case it is Angela.’

  ‘Hello?’ I say into the phone.

  ‘Oh, I thought you weren’t going to bother answering,’ says a cool voice. It’s her. ‘You sound tired.’

  I want to say, ‘I was up all last night, shagging’, even though I wasn’t – what exactly was last night? – but instead I say, ‘Do I? You sound chipper, as usual. Just come across a new cupcake recipe?’

  ‘No,’ says Angela. ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s good, thanks. To what do we owe the pleasure?’

  She ignores me. ‘Been out anywhere else?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say absent-mindedly. ‘Liberty and the Alber
t Hall and the Shard. Do you want to speak to Dad?’

  ‘Not just yet. Any news?’

  ‘Like what?’ She never asks for news. ‘We’ve been to the Albert Hall and Liberty and the Shard,’ I repeat. I won’t tell her anything about Salvi. My sister and I don’t have that kind of relationship. We have the kind of relationship that if I told her the miracle that I’ve met someone, she’d bang on about Warren for twenty-five minutes without a breath, both to convince herself she still likes him and to maintain her one-upmanship.

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ she says.

  Well, this is no surprise. There’s always something to boast about or to be a drama llama over: a milestone reached at school or nursery for one of her kids; an altercation with another Alpha Mom at the school gate in which she emerged indignant and victorious – most of which is already on Facebook.

  ‘I’m going to write to Mum in Sweden,’ she says. ‘To Torge’s address, if he’s still there.’

  ‘Are you?’ Now this is unexpected. Angela never says anything unexpected on the phone; I could pretty much write every line of every conversation, like a script. ‘Why?’ I take the phone into the bedroom. ‘Just checking a label of something of mine, for Angela,’ I call out to Dad. ‘Why are you going to write to her?’ I ask.

  ‘I realized something the other day,’ she says. She suddenly sounds a little breathless. ‘That my two girls are the same ages we were when Mum left that first time. For her little “holiday”. It shook me, actually. Made me hold on to them really tight. But I want to write to her. Find out if she’s happy.’

  ‘Why do you care if she’s happy? I doubt she’s sitting there musing that about us.’

  ‘She might be,’ says Angela, and I know she is pouting. That, whatever her age, she will always be pouting about something. ‘She might be thinking about us all the time but be too scared to get in touch.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I say. ‘I think it’s all too late.’