Love, Lies and Linguine

by Hilary Spiers

  ‘Another?’

  Hester shakes her head. ‘Better not.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  Hester pulls a face, flicking a glance across the restaurant. ‘My sister.’

  ‘Oh, Hester, really there’s no need . . .’

  ‘She was barely civil.’

  ‘No, come now, that’s not fair. After all, I think I put her back up, didn’t I? Calling her Harry.’

  Hester barks a laugh. ‘A bit. Close friends and family only, you see.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Hester leans across to squeeze his hand. ‘Honestly, don’t worry about it. She’s been in a peculiar mood for weeks and was just looking for something to take offence about. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something I said.’ She smiles reassuringly but a little worm of guilt wriggles inside: she knows she’s being treacherous to her sister. Harriet has her moments, to be sure, but is of a far more equable disposition than Hester herself and doesn’t easily take offence; Hester recognises her own culpability in her sister’s present unhappiness.

  ‘Perhaps I ought not to have joined you for dinner?’

  ‘No, not at all. Don’t be silly. It was a pleasure.’

  ‘I’d hate to put anyone’s nose out of joint, least of all your sister’s. It must be tricky for you, though.’

  ‘For me? How?’

  ‘Well—forgive me—but I get the impression that she’s used to having you to herself.’

  ‘We’re not married to each other!’ says Hester with some of her usual tartness. He’s making Harriet sound like a clingy toddler.

  ‘No, no, no . . . I apologise. I didn’t mean to suggest—’

  ‘Lionel, do forgive me. No, no. Please. I was very sharp. It’s just—’ oh, the perfidy! ‘—I feel sort of responsible for her.’

  ‘Well, of course! You mustn’t blame yourself. It’s only natural you would be protective towards her and it does you credit but might I suggest there may be a smidgeon of—dare I say it?—jealousy involved?’ Lionel’s face flushes at his presumption.

  ‘Jealousy?’ stammers Hester, staring at him in disbelief. ‘You mean . . .?’

  He sits back. ‘Oh no . . . Hester, my dear,’ (she doesn’t miss the endearment), ‘I don’t mean me. Not about me! Good heavens, no; I wouldn’t dare flatter myself. I meant with your talents, your purpose . . . perhaps she feels—has always felt—a little overawed?’

  Hester drops her gaze, inspects the tablecloth, rolls the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps Lionel, in his diffident way, has hit the nail on the head. It assuages her guilt to think so. For who, after all, does not relish a little flattery from time to time? She supposes she is a natural leader; her career successes attest to that. The older sister, the role model . . . Fragments of their childhood float into focus: Harriet always following in Hester’s wake, the acolyte. All of which makes her conduct, her duplicity, the harder to stomach . . .

  ‘Hester?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Lionel’s concern draws her back to the present.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Have I upset you? Perhaps I ought not to have—’

  Hester waves his anxiety away. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, let’s stop talking about my wretched sister and enjoy the moment!’

  Lionel beams with relief. ‘I’m all for that. Shall we go through to the bar?’

  Hester seizes the initiative. You’re a long time dead, she can almost hear her father growling.

  ‘Won’t it be rather crowded? I just happen to have a bottle of Remy in my room, if you’re game.’

  ‘Oh, I’m game,’ says Lionel. ‘I’m most definitely game.’

  Harriet punches her pillow yet again in an attempt to wrestle it into shape. Curious how pillows can morph from supreme comfort one minute into a lumpy clump the next. She snuggles down irritably into the hot sheets and tries to immerse herself once more in her book, but for some reason Jackson Brodie is failing to charm, despite the lightness of Kate Atkinson’s touch. She tosses her Kindle aside and pads over to the window to edge the shutter open. Below, at the bottom of the terrace, a couple are embracing, arms around each other’s shoulders as they look out over the valley, their heads haloed in the light from the garden torches. At this distance, and without her glasses, she cannot distinguish their identity—not that it matters; it’s their closeness that irks. Snatches of indecipherable conversation drift up, accompanied by the occasional shout of laughter from the bar. Harriet curses Hester, curses Lionel, curses the heedless couples, smug in their coupledom. It’s not often that she feels sorry for herself, but tonight she’s at a particularly low ebb, so totally at odds with Hester, the holiday that was meant to bring them closer together appearing to have quite the opposite effect. Jim has been much in her thoughts ever since they arrived, that long-ago trip to Venice conjured by the warmth and smell of Italy and now burning bright in her memory, along with the feel of his strong, dry hand in hers. She manages her widowhood well enough usually, and it’s been a while since she has missed him so painfully; she knows her present ache is exacerbated by Hester and her new companion, but that awareness doesn’t ease the wound. In a tiny, shameful part of her heart, she feels aggrieved that it is her prickly sister who, unaccountably, seems to have captured Lionel’s affections. A tear leaks out; she brushes it away angrily and retreats to her mussed bed, to lie for hours staring sightless into the darkness.

  ‘This is very nice,’ says Lionel.

  ‘The Remy or my bedroom?’ says Hester coquettishly, enjoying the novelty of a man’s company.

  Lionel wags a finger. ‘You’re a dark horse, Hester.’

  ‘Hetty,’ says Hester, bestowing a rare honour on him did he but realise. ‘Do you make a habit of this?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Chatting up strange women.’

  ‘Is that what I’m doing? And are you? Strange?’

  ‘You should probably ask—’ she had been about to say Harriet, but swiftly corrects herself ‘—my friends.’

  ‘And how would they describe you, do you imagine?’

  Hester thinks for a moment. ‘Forthright, waspish, opinionated . . .’

  ‘Irresistible,’ says Lionel, laughing.

  The bedrooms at Il Santuario, while luxuriously appointed, are not designed for entertaining. Once the single armchair is occupied, the only other place to sit is the bed; Hester had initially perched on the edge, nursing her tooth mug of brandy, then, as they got comfortable and lost their inhibitions, she had kicked off her shoes and shuffled herself up the bed to lean against the headboard, cushioned by pillows. The situation reminds her of her university days: the hours spent in lengthy disquisitions on life, ambition, the future, fuelled largely by black coffee and the occasional cigarette. Oh, the agonies of those juvenile love affairs, the terrible, terrible poetry written at dead of night after too much dirt-cheap supermarket plonk (any amount was too much, she recalls, still able to conjure its horrible metallic aftertaste). What privileged self-indulgence!

  ‘Did you go to university?’

  ‘Alas, no,’ says Lionel. ‘We weren’t that sort of family. Straight to work as soon as possible, wage packet on the table Friday evening, pocket money doled out by my mother, who held the purse strings very, very tightly.’

  ‘Good grief,’ says Hester. ‘It sounds positively Lawrentian.’

  Lionel laughs. ‘What, tin baths and coal dust? Not exactly. My father was an insurance clerk. Not very romantic.’

  ‘But you escaped.’

  ‘After a fashion. Although I’m not sure it was much of an escape, becoming an actuary.’

  ‘Steady, though. Secure.’

  ‘And dull, dull, dull. It’s why I love cooking. The risks. The uncertainty!’

  ‘Going off-recipe?’

  ‘Exactly! Breaking the rules. Experimenting. Living dangerously.’

  ‘You could bungee-jump. Abseil. Go white-water rafting.’

  Lionel grimaces. ‘God, no
. Substituting crème fraîche for yogurt is about as daring as I get. Not like you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘All that business with . . . Dara, is it?’

  ‘Daria.’

  ‘I mean, that was terrifying.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Hester. ‘Yes, it was.’ A memory of her assault by Teddy Wilson—of all unlikely villains—in her own home assails her. She shudders. Her phone buzzes in her bag. As she reaches for it, Lionel checks his watch.

  ‘Late,’ he says. ‘I hope it’s nothing urgent.’

  Hester checks the message, goes pale, inhales deeply. ‘Sorry,’ she says automatically, before painstakingly replying, spelling out each letter separately.

  Lionel leans towards her, smiling at her ineptitude. ‘Don’t you use predictive text?’

  Hester shakes her head, frowning, rereading her message on the screen, while shielding it with her other hand.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  She hesitates.

  ‘Hetty?’

  Hester sends the text, then weighs the phone in her hand, mouth drawn. ‘How do you know you’re doing the right thing?’

  ‘About what?’ Lionel is mystified. ‘Is there a problem? Can I help?’

  She sighs wearily.

  ‘A trouble shared . . .’ says Lionel.

  ‘I think I might be about to make the biggest mistake of my life,’ says Hester, voicing at last the worry that has dogged her for weeks. ‘I might. But I can’t just sit back and do nothing!’ She turns to Lionel, her face stormy with anxiety and anger, eyes bright with unshed tears. The longing to unburden herself is unbearable.

  ‘Suppose,’ he says gently, reaching for her hand and closing his own around it, ‘suppose you tell me what’s going on, eh?’

  And Hester, grateful, apprehensive, and just a little bit tight, does.

  WEDNESDAY

  CHAPTER 11

  ‘Morning!’

  Regina Pegg marches purposefully over to where Harriet is sitting on a boulder in the hotel garden, tying the laces on her hiking boots. Well, she may call them hiking boots but they’re actually indeterminate footwear of uncertain provenance bought at a knockdown price at the local nursery. For two women with little interest in the garden, she and Hester spend a surprising amount of time at nurseries, pottering about and buying plants haphazardly, plants that rarely survive much more than a week once brutally wrenched from their cosseted environment and roughly transplanted into their neglected flowerbeds. They are, however, suckers for the bargain bins at such establishments, as these boots bear witness.

  ‘Golly!’ exclaims Regina. ‘Frightfully bright, aren’t they? Not much chance of getting lost in those!’

  Harriet inspects the virulent green boots with orange go-faster stripes along the sides more closely now Regina has drawn attention to them. They are admittedly pretty hideous; their saving grace, however, is that they are remarkably comfortable. ‘Not a pretty sight, I confess,’ she murmurs. ‘Still, they do the job.’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ says Regina heartily, hefting her rucksack onto her back. ‘How’s that sister of yours enjoying bashing the old pots and pans?’ Regina possesses an uncanny ability to worm out everyone’s life histories within seconds of meeting them that puts Harriet in mind of Peggy Verndale. In fact, with her ample bosom, wiry grey hair and capable hands, she bears a striking resemblance to Hester and Harriet’s bridge foe: she bets Regina plays a mean game herself.

  ‘Loving it,’ says Harriet, grunting with the effort of securing the second boot. These days she’s finding it increasingly difficult first thing in the morning to bend much past her knees.

  ‘Give it here,’ says Regina, hoisting Harriet’s leg up between her thighs like a horse’s hoof and deftly knotting the lace. ‘It’s a right bugger getting old, isn’t it?’ she says cheerfully, dropping the leg with as little ceremony. ‘Need a hand to wipe our bums before we know where we are.’ She changes tack without a breath. ‘I see your sister’s thick as thieves with that rather natty Lionel. Good for her, eh? Oh well, best be off. I see Sir’s on the march.’ As Harriet levers herself gingerly to her feet, Regina is already striding after their tutor, alpenstocks biting into the path purposefully. Harriet notes with a smile that it has taken Regina mere seconds to start a conversation with another of the would-be painters, Mary Martindale. She won’t know what’s hit her.

  The lengthy walk to their painting spot this morning allows her once more to reflect on the events of the previous evening. Not that the bulk of the night hadn’t been spent in much the same way. She had finally dropped off about four, plunging vertiginously into nightmarish dreams of Hester pushing her violently off her feet, while Daria, Artem and Lionel, inexplicably holding Milo, sneered from the sidelines. She had been relieved that their outing necessitated an early breakfast, so she had not had to encounter Hester—and undoubtedly Lionel, her constant shadow—so far today.

  ‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ says Bella, drawing abreast, Guy on her other side. The younger woman turns her face up to the sun; Harriet notices the tiny crow’s feet beside her eyes and a fine tracery of veins on her cheeks. She must be older than Harriet first thought. Bella lays a hand on Harriet’s arm. ‘Sorry about last night,’ she says with a little laugh. ‘I got a tiny bit smashed. I’m in the doghouse this morning.’

  Harriet glances over at Guy, who winks before turning a censorious face towards his wife. ‘Disgraceful,’ he says with a poor attempt at gruffness, before giving Bella an awkward hug. They both stumble on the uneven path.

  ‘Steady,’ Bella warns. ‘Harriet will think I’m still pissed. I promise you, I haven’t had a drop since breakfast.’

  Guy rolls his eyes.

  Harriet feels inexplicably emotional.

  They stop for coffee in a little hillside village, the only café opening on to the tiny square, shaded by gnarled olive trees; across the cobbles, an ancient crumbling stone fountain rimed with moss trickles fitfully.

  ‘Gosh.’ Panting, Harriet flops into a rickety metal chair. ‘How much further is it? I’m not used to all this yomping.’

  ‘Yomping? This is a mere stroll,’ bellows Regina. ‘Goodness me, Harriet, you should try a sketching holiday in Crete. That would really sort you out!’

  Harriet is not the only one of their small party to blench; Mary, out of Regina’s line of sight, pulls an appalled face, while Bella draws her hand swiftly across her throat and nods in Regina’s direction.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Regina booms as the three women erupt with laughter.

  ‘Nothing,’ splutters Bella. ‘I think we’re all a little light-headed from the altitude.’

  ‘Wimps!’ cries Regina good-naturedly, on her way into the gloom of the unlit café in search of a lavatory.

  ‘We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, being so unkind,’ whispers Mary, staring after Regina, her contrition somewhat undermined by her gleeful grin.

  ‘Nonsense.’ Bella is unabashed. ‘She gives as good as she gets. She’s a real sweetheart under all that bombast. Anyway, Harriet’s right. I’m absolutely knackered already. I signed up for painting, not The Long March.’

  Gervais, who had plonked himself in a chair with his back to everyone on their arrival, is unable to ignore his pupils any longer; from under his panama, he growls, ‘Fifteen minutes from here. You’ll thank me when we get there.’ He shrinks back into his jacket, tugging the collar around his neck and muttering to himself (but not so quietly that they cannot hear), ‘Pathetic.’

  The view is spectacular; Gervais hadn’t been exaggerating. The wide valley lies before them in a multitude of subtle greens; distant red-roofed stone farm buildings surrounded by umbrella pines pepper a steep hillside; rows of vines crisscross the landscape. The sun sparkles on a small lake barely visible in the late-morning haze, the air heavy with the resinous scent of the cedars that line the crooked roads beneath them. Fragments of an aqueduct punctuate the horizon like a run of decaying teeth.

  ‘Jus
t sketch your initial impressions—pencils only at this stage,’ Gervais calls out brusquely, as though affronted by the necessity of instructing his charges. ‘I’ll be round in due course to have a look at what you’ve done. Remember what I explained yesterday about landscape composition.’

  Regina wastes no time in erecting her portable easel and settling down on her collapsible stool. The other artists obediently set to. Sketchpads emerge from rucksacks and cloth bags, pencils and charcoal are readied and, tentatively at first but with growing confidence and verve, lines and whorls, shade and delineation start to mar the virgin paper. Gervais stamps off to a spot as far from his little group as he can manage without losing sight of them altogether, grunting, ‘Less is more,’ before cloaking himself in a solitude that no-one dares disturb.

  I’m glad this cost me so little, Harriet thinks irritably, having been offered, unasked, a substantial discount by Alfonso ‘to make up the numbers’ when deciding which activity to pursue. She is beginning to suspect that this particular course, far from being the select group Alfonso so beguilingly described, is in fact composed of unfortunates only now becoming fully cognisant of their tutor’s idiosyncrasies.

  Mary spreads out a small rug and invites Harriet, Guy and Bella to share it, but Harriet demurs with thanks, preferring to climb a little higher to take advantage of the shade offered by a rocky outcrop. She kicks aside some cigarette butts, a Pellegrino bottle and a ball of cling film littering the dusty ground, then cautiously lowers herself onto her bottom. The boulder offers support of sorts for her back. She tugs her sketchpad and pencils out of her knapsack and opens the pad to a blank sheet. Her pencil hovers over the page. And remains hovering.

  One of the many quirks of advancing age Harriet has come to accept, however reluctantly, is the tendency to overdramatise. During her long teaching career, she had always secretly prided herself on her no-nonsense handling of potentially serious situations. Young people had never alarmed or discomfited her as they had so many of her colleagues; their irrational rages, and occasional eruptions into abuse or violence, she knew were prompted mainly by fear: of an unfamiliar situation, of appearing small in front of their peers, of lacking the wherewithal to respond rationally to a perceived threat. So Harriet had become by default the member of staff most frequently called on to defuse a possible or actual confrontation. Perhaps it was her motherly approach, perhaps her diminutive stature, perhaps her apparent fearlessness—whatever the reason, she would wade in without a second thought, separate the would-be miscreants and demand an immediate cessation of hostilities. And generally succeed. Huge testosterone-fuelled youths would meekly desist at Harriet’s firm intervention, sheepishly ambling away to cool off, accompanied by their equally chastened mates; the extravagant threats of teenage girls, high on bravado, bitchiness and—increasingly in recent years—alcohol or worse, would drain away in the face of Mrs Pearson’s grim disapproval. And more often than not, those same troublemakers would surface in later years as respectable and biddable citizens, greeting Harriet warmly if their paths crossed.