Nats strolls down the hall and gently closes the door after them. Artem and Finbar emerge from the sitting room, regarding her with undisguised admiration, Artem miming applause and Finbar raising a grimy thumb.
Then they all turn to face Ben.
CHAPTER 35
Nestling in the heart of this picturesque village, a magnificent character cottage (Grade 2 listed), beautifully restored whilst retaining many original period features. Hall, sitting room with inglenook fireplace, study, kitchen, breakfast room with bi-folding patio doors, two bedrooms, bathroom with separate shower cubicle, delightful south-facing rear garden with decked patio and small pond.
Grade 2, thinks Harriet, no thanks. Peggy has bored the sisters for years over many a bridge table with the restrictions placed on Stand-fast House by its listing. It had taken decades to secure permission for a conservatory and the sisters had heard all they ever wanted to—and more—about the Verndales’ battles with the planning department and the local Civic Society, whose eagle-eyed members patrol their fiefdom relentlessly in search of actual or proposed infringements. And a pond . . . not ideal when an adventurous baby like Milo visits.
She clicks on the next possibility.
Set in a delightful spot on the eastern fringes of this much sought-after village, a rare opportunity to purchase a very pretty and tastefully presented cottage with a pleasant outlook to two sides (Pleasant . . .? Not stunning? Or delightful? What, then? Something commercial? Industrial? Derelict?). The snug porch (read, tiny) provides the welcome to Bramble Cottage (too twee by half), leading through to the compact (oh dear, oh dear) open plan kitchen and homely (Chintz? Knickknacks?) sitting room. The modern high-spec kitchen is fully fitted while the sitting room reflects the cottage’s historic past with beams (low, undoubtedly; hazardous for tall visitors. Like Hester), open fireplace with wood-burning stove, assorted nooks and crannies (knickknacks, definitely, and probable dust traps) and original stone floors (cold, presumably, no matter what the outside temperature). A door conceals a neat staircase (i.e. narrow) leading to a comfortable landing with pleasant views (Oh God, ‘pleasant’ again—do these agents not have a thesaurus?). The main bedroom has pleasant views (aargh!) over farmland (Dust and smells all summer. That is, assuming it isn’t earmarked for housing development). Up further stairs (With my knees?) to another double bedroom, also with views (Of course it has views! Unless it’s a windowless cell. But views of what? Too hideous to reveal?). The garden is all to the front of the house and enjoys a good degree of privacy (and excellent cover for burglars) thanks to the high hedges. A small garage (built in the days of the Morris Minor and thus useless for any modern car) is set back from the cottage. Viewing essential.
Or not, thinks Harriet sourly, removing her glasses and rubbing her eyes. She sits back wearily from the computer, where—after Alfonso’s help in getting her online in the games room (the computer at home being almost exclusively Hester’s domain)—she’s been trawling Right-move for the past hour. Just to be on the safe side, she tells herself. Already, she’s requested full particulars of four houses in their local area to be sent to her at The Laurels. Mary was right: better to do something, take charge of events and plan ahead than cower helpless in the face of others’ machinations. And all this knowledge at one’s fingertips, thanks to the internet!
A thought strikes her. Of course! With luck, she’ll be able to set the wheels in motion before they get home. Seconds later, she types a name into the search engine and starts to scan the results. The hotel is silent as she pads past the now-deserted reception desk on her way back to her room.
‘Morning!’ says Harriet cheerfully as she slides into a chair opposite Lionel some six hours later, having just made a brief but productive phone call, kept short on the pretext of avoiding extortionate overseas mobile charges. ‘Beautiful morning, isn’t it?’
Lionel looks a little nonplussed by the warmth of her greeting and half rises.
‘You don’t mind me joining you?’
‘No, no, not at all,’ he stammers, looking around anxiously as he sits again. ‘May I order you some tea or coffee? I’m sure Hester will be down shortly.’
‘I’m sure she will. I hear you’re staying on until Monday too.’ Harriet bestows on him her sweetest smile. She’s feeling back in control once more, after her nocturnal activities and this morning’s phone call.
He looks across the table nervously, like someone encountering an animal whose friendliness is in doubt. ‘Well, yes . . . yes, I am as it happens. I had nothing urgent to hurry back for.’
‘Oh?’ says Harriet, still smiling. ‘Lucky man.’
Lionel, on high alert now, looks desperately towards the door, the garden, anywhere Hester might conceivably be. What’s taking her so long?
Harriet, face now cradled in the palm of her hand, waits.
‘Oh, look! Here she comes!’ Lionel’s face is washed with relief.
Harriet notes that despite the hour Hester has applied a little makeup and the merest dab of scent. Aha. The sisters greet one another warmly, but Harriet nonetheless registers the subtle but unmistakable look of complicity that flashes between Hester and Lionel as he holds out her chair for her and then resumes his seat.
‘You missed the others,’ Harriet says, unfolding her napkin.
Hester raises her eyebrows—her plucked eyebrows—in query.
‘On the minibus to the airport. They all left about half an hour ago. Regina, Bella and Guy send their best.’
‘How kind,’ says Hester, looking around for a waiter. ‘I’m afraid I slept in rather. That’s why I’m so late.’
But not so late that you didn’t get made up and perfumed, thinks Harriet.
‘We meant to say our farewells last night, but somehow . . . Lionel, dear, I don’t suppose you could rustle up some tea for us?’
Unusually, there are no members of staff to be seen in the dining room, which, awaiting the next influx of guests, is empty but for their party. Lionel leaps up to do her bidding and disappears in the direction of the swing doors that lead into the hotel kitchen. There is a small hiatus.
‘I thought I would walk into the town this morning, get a bit of exercise,’ says Harriet. ‘It’s supposed to be well worth a visit. Besides, I’m almost out of shampoo. And I wondered if I might find a Guardian. I’ve got crossword withdrawal symptoms.’
‘I have shampoo,’ says Hester. ‘In my room. You know, the complimentary sachets.’
‘I know. So have I. But I’d like to stretch my legs.’
‘I might come with you.’
‘That would be nice,’ says Harriet, silently adding, as long as it’s just you. ‘Lionel won’t mind?’
Hester swiftly swerves around Harriet’s trap. ‘Lionel?’ she says, as though astonished he should figure in the equation. ‘I hardly think so. He’ll be perfectly happy in the garden, reading.’ Having tried to downplay his importance in the scheme of her own activities, she now realises she sounds as though she can predict if not dictate his actions. She vigorously smears greengage conserve onto a roll. Harriet reaches for the butter.
‘Tea’s on the way,’ says Lionel, hurrying back from his mission. The sisters regard him brightly and chorus their thanks. Rather than reassure, their overenthusiastic response unsettles him further. Gingerly, he lowers himself onto his seat and sets about splitting a roll, addressing the task with intense concentration. Harriet solicitously edges the butter dish over to him.
‘Harry and I are just going to walk into Camerino after breakfast.’ Hester smiles across at him. ‘I told her you wanted to finish that book of yours.’
Lionel recognises the hint for what it is and nods.
Hester turns to her sister. ‘Lionel’s quite a reader,’ she says, as though vouching for his credentials before a sceptical jury. It unfortunately comes out as a rather patronising does-he-take-sugar? comment, and Hester realises it the second she says it.
Harriet is unable to resist the bait. ‘Oh.
How lovely. What sort of books do you like?’
Lionel’s bread and jam stalls halfway to his mouth. Something in the way both Harriet and Hetty are regarding him—the one with faint amusement, the other with what he reads as muted alarm—panics him. He senses that much hinges on his reply, that he has unwittingly been lured into a minefield. Should he lie? Pretend a fondness for some author he might imagine Harriet would approve of? He opts for the truth.
‘Oh,’ he says with what he hopes is a manly self-deprecating laugh, ‘nothing highbrow, I’m afraid. Typical male stuff—all war, espionage, and blood and thunder!’ He shovels the bread into his mouth to forestall any further comment.
‘War?’ says Harriet. ‘We like books about the war, don’t we, Hetty?’
Hester frowns. ‘Do we?’
‘Yes! The Siege. The Greatcoat. Helen Dunmore,’ she explains to Lionel.
He gulps. ‘A woman?’
Oh dear, thinks Hester. Oh dear, oh dear . . .
‘Yes,’ says Harriet levelly. ‘Imagine! How on earth did she know what to write?’
The track—not worthy of the name of ‘road’, being unmade and heavily rutted—up to the main highway is steeper than either of them remembers. By the time they pass the crumbling pillars that mark the boundary to Il Santuario, Harriet is considerably out of puff, although struggling not to show it. Hester, in contrast, strides out purposefully, her longer legs forcing her sister to break into a semi-jog from time to time to keep up. That’ll teach her, thinks Hester, still rankled, humiliating Lionel like she did. Poor chap didn’t deserve that. She had parted from him in the garden with a whispered, ‘Don’t let her get to you,’ but his wavering smile suggested he found that of scant comfort.
‘Could we take it a little less energetically?’ pants Harriet. ‘I’d really like a chance to admire the scenery and take a few pictures.’ Harriet pulls out her phone and readies herself to take a photo, forcing Hester to stop.
Hester smiles to herself. It seems to take Harriet an inordinate length of time to find an aspect that pleases her, by which time her breathing has steadied, although her forehead still glistens from the exertion.
The sisters stroll at a more modest pace along the edge of the road, the occasional passing car stirring up clouds of fine dust. Ahead, above thickly forested slopes, stand the honey-coloured medieval stone walls of Camerino encircling the ancient cathedral, the twin-towered Duomo, the churches and university of this tiny jewel of a town. Below them the valley swoops down to the river, the fields striped in a dozen shades of green, interspersed from time to time with expanses of huge yellow sunflowers, their broad faces smiling up at the sky.
As they trudge along in apparently companionable silence, Hester frets to herself, Should I tell her? Beside her, reviewing the events of last night, Harriet thinks: Should I tell her?
‘Been a bit of a week, hasn’t it?’ says Hester finally, in an opening gambit, as she bats away a cloud of midges dancing over her head. She has decided to put this morning’s little hiccup to one side for the moment; however, the words sound forced and banal. Not what she intended at all.
‘A bit,’ agrees Harriet, thinking: Here it comes.
‘I feel so guilty.’
‘Hetty, don’t. You mustn’t—oh my God, watch out!’ Harriet yanks Hester up the verge out of danger as a bright red Maserati surges by and careers around the sharp bend ahead, spitting grit. Falling awkwardly in a heap against the bank, they crush a clump of wild flowers, releasing a cloud of drowsy bees. The fall takes Harriet momentarily back to that fateful drawing trip. ‘That was close,’ she says shakily, pulling Hester to her feet. The feel of her sister’s skin under her hand provides an odd comfort, like their embrace in the garden a few days earlier. She squeezes Hester’s arm, then slips hers through it and hugs it to her side. Together they clamber back down to the road and start to climb the hill again towards the town.
A breeze springs up out of nowhere, rippling across the fields in a shiver of leaves, sunflowers swaying in a shuddering dance. Hester glances up. ‘Where the hell did they come from?’ Two bulging grey clouds have materialised overhead, incongruous in the china blue, and almost instantaneously one or two fat raindrops splat down, sizzling on the hot tarmac. Another hits Harriet squarely on the crown of her head and trickles down the back of her neck, tracking refreshingly through the sweat. They have barely had the chance to register the abrupt change of weather and look around for shelter before rain is drumming furiously on the road, creating instant rivers that course down the hill, saturating their shoes. Peering through rain-spattered glasses, Hester spots a tiny ridge-tiled terracotta structure beside the road a little further ahead. ‘Quick!’ she yells, grabbing Harriet’s hand and pulling her up the incline. ‘Run!’
A lorry trundles by, sending up a spume of water that catches Harriet squarely across the midriff. They stumble, laughing, breathless and sodden, into the little sanctuary, both having to duck to avoid hitting their heads on its arched entrance. Inside, the roof is high enough for Harriet to stand upright; Hester is forced to adopt a comical crouch.
It’s a wayside shrine, a simple Madonna painted on the back of the plaster niche, the Virgin’s face and robes streaked and faded with time and damp, stubs of yellowing candles around her feet. Rubbish, blown in by wind or traffic, litters the floor: cigarette and crisp packets, squashed and torn, battered tin cans and a single sheet of newspaper; Berlusconi, his hand-sewn hair poking up like freshly planted saplings across his pate, smirks his wolfish smile through a patina of muddy footprints. A thin rusted metal bar runs the width of the shrine to protect the Madonna. The sisters test its strength and perch awkwardly on it, unpeeling wet clothes from damp skin and flapping them in an ineffectual attempt to get dry. Harriet heels off her walking shoes to remove her socks and wring them out.
‘This feels faintly sacrilegious.’
‘What, all this garbage?’ Harriet stirs it with her foot. ‘There ought to be some whiskery black-clad crone in permanent residence, armed with a broom, repelling all non-believers.’ She sweeps a glance around their cramped temporary quarters. ‘Or a bloke.’ Both think immediately of Finbar, ensconced in his own not dissimilar sanctuary, and this brings in its wake the thought of home, and all the complications that now threaten their life in England. Both sense the change of atmosphere, an opportunity lost. The chance of reconciliation, of secrets shared and confidence regained, seems to have been washed away with the rain.
CHAPTER 36
Finbar, Artem and Nats impale Ben, frozen at the end of the hallway by the kitchen door, with identical contemptuous stares. Artem’s eyes rise as cold as ice to take in the shattered staircase, then sweep across to the sitting room, to the floor strewn with discarded cans and bottles and shards of china, pools of beer and lager—and worse—staining the floorboards, the ruined wallpaper. He turns his unforgiving eyes back to bore into Ben once more. One word drops into the silence: not English but Belarusian; just a single word, but its meaning couldn’t be clearer. It seems no words in Artem’s extensive English vocabulary can express the depths of his disgust. Ben’s roiling stomach churns.
‘Sceleris plenissime!’ growls Finbar, which must, despite Ben’s incomprehension, surely be intended to heap more coals of shame on his head.
Only Nats says nothing, and somehow her silence is even more painful than the men’s expletives. She flicks her glance away as though even looking at Ben offends her.
Artem jerks his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the front door. ‘Out.’
Ben’s legs refuse to move. Leave? What about the cottage? What about the damage? What about . . . everything?
Artem reads him immediately. ‘Tomorrow morning. In the daylight. We assess the full extent of this . . . devastation.’ He virtually spits the word.
Ben, head down, eyes glued to his feet, shuffles down the hallway, hugging the walls so as not to touch, to defile, anyone. As he goes to pass Finbar, Artem leans forward and h
isses, ‘But you can at least thank this gentleman before you crawl away, you little shit. Thanks to him the house is still standing. Thanks to him we were able to get here in time to save your—’
‘Sorry arse,’ inserts Nats helpfully, looking anywhere but at Ben.
‘Arse. Yes.’ Ben has never heard Artem swear before, certainly not in English, and he is shamed afresh at the catastrophe that has driven this usually so contained of men to such lengths. He gulps down the bile of humiliation and manages to whisper through nerveless lips, ‘Thank you, Finbar. Thank you all.’
‘Now get in the car,’ snarls Artem.
‘No, I—’ The thought of having to sit in close proximity to Artem, to any of them, is more than he can bear. As for coming face to face with Daria . . . He’d rather walk all the way home to an empty house and nurse his shame and self-disgust alone.
‘Shut up!’ Artem gives him a savage shove between the shoulder blades that propels him out of the door and onto the path, where he only just manages to keep his footing. ‘Get in!’
Harriet’s battered old car sits askew in the lane. Ben scrambles in and cowers in the back, trying to make himself as small as possible. He catches snatches of a short conversation between Artem and Finbar, then hears the latter start off up the lane on foot. Seconds later, Nats jumps in and slams the passenger door, Artem insinuates himself awkwardly into the cramped driver’s seat, yanks his door shut and, executing a clumsy three-point turn, surges back towards the main road, waving at Finbar as they pass him.
No-one speaks. The tension in the little tin prison is unbearable. Ben buries his face in his hands trying to blot everything out, but he cannot escape the sound of Artem’s ragged and enraged breathing. Nats’ thin shoulders remain resolutely turned away from him, every line of her averted head a reproach.
Love, Lies and Linguine Page 22
