by Sarah Lean
“Peter, remember that day at the waterfall? When you said you heard Frank and my mother talking and you knew Frank was leaving?”
I waited but Peter didn’t reply.
“Why did you go there, Peter? We said we were going to meet at the waterfall. Why did you go to my house first?”
Peter dropped the stone, turned away. Why is it that the things that people don’t say bother you the most?
“Peter?”
“I wanted to warn Frank…” he said, at last. “But then I saw Frank and heard he was leaving, and so I thought I didn’t need to tell him any more.”
“So whatever it is you can tell me because it doesn’t matter now.”
Peter picked up another stone and threw it at the wall, knocking down everything he’d just built.
“What didn’t you tell him, Peter?”
“Frank should have taken Harry with him! He should have and then… and then…” He swung around. “Harry could live here, couldn’t he? I mean, you can come up at the weekends. And when I’m here, we’ll come together. In the holidays. Every day.”
“Why would Harry need to live here, Peter?” My heart was beating fast, like I’d heard the crack of the snowdrift over on the mountain and it was about to fall, and I saw Peter take a deep breath to get ready to tell me.
“Because Papa is going to turn our meadow into a new vineyard because of what happened here with the avalanche, and Harry won’t be able to stay with you any more.”
“Your meadow?”
Peter held his head in his hands and sat on the ground, saying, “It’s our meadow. It always was. That’s why I came to see you that first day when Harry arrived. To tell you the meadow was ours. But Harry was in the meadow, and I really liked him, so I asked Nonno and he said it would be OK for Harry to use the meadow for a while, until Papa decided what he wanted to do with it.”
I walked away from him, sank down in the grass, like an empty sack of nothing. Freshest, greenest meadow he’d ever seen in his life. And Harry wasn’t even safe there.
Now it all made sense. Peter’s enthusiasm about helping me put Harry and Frank back together was because of this. Peter was standing by his family. I closed my eyes from the sun, from the things I didn’t want to see. Why did people keep hurting Harry?
“Why does your dad need the meadow now?” I asked, angry.
“For vines, because of the avalanche, I just told you that.”
“But what I mean is, why more vines?”
“It’s business,” he said, looking away.
“Money, you mean,” I said, something boiling in me. “How much more money do you need?”
“Don’t, Hope.”
“Well, it’s true! You and your family have got everything.” We both stood and faced each other. “Harry’s going to have nothing and nobody and I won’t have Harry with me, and you… and you? What will you have? More of everything!”
“Don’t say that!” Peter’s shoulders dropped.
“You have to tell him, Peter; make him see. This isn’t right. Harry will have nothing if your dad takes the meadow. And neither will I. I don’t want to lose Harry, and Harry... how will he survive over here on his own?”
“He’s my papa,” Peter said.
“And Harry… Harry’s like my family too. And family means everything around here, doesn’t it!” I pushed him. “Especially if you’re a Massimo!”
I pushed him again but he was ready for me.
“I can’t help I’m a Massimo!” he shouted, standing in front of me holding my arms. I didn’t think he was trying to stop me pushing him again; he was making sure I stayed there with him. “And I have tried to tell him! He said he’ll let Harry use the casot and field.” Quietly, he added, “For now.”
Nothing on the outside ever stayed the same, but I held on to everything true I had inside. It didn’t actually surprise me that Peter would have tried. I didn’t blame Peter, either, and I wouldn’t have given up our friendship for anything. I couldn’t lose anyone else important in my life. But the Massimos had all the power around here and I couldn’t stand the thought of Harry on the mountain by himself.
“I tried, really I did,” Peter said. “But he won’t listen to me.” He let go of my arms. “And it doesn’t make sense to him about you and Harry being cherries and almonds.”
It stopped me in my tracks.
“You actually told him I said that?”
He nodded.
He did understand the order of me, and always had, and I didn’t know why I’d never understood that before. But I knew I stood even less chance than Peter of persuading Peter’s dad.
I thought of Harry lying down on the mountain road, ready to give up.
“I can’t let Harry down,” I whispered. “Not now. Not when I’ve made him keep going, for me.”
“Then don’t tell Papa he has to give up the meadow for a donkey. He won’t understand that.”
“But that’s what I want him to do.” I turned away. Peter hooked his arm through mine, drew us back together, and we walked, me leaning against him.
“I do love Harry, Hope.” He blushed.
“Not more than I do.”
He smiled without looking up.
“You and Harry are the best pair.”
“Like us, though?”
He nodded.
“Are you jealous?” I said.
His face flushed.
“No.”
“You are.”
He blushed again. “What flavours are we?”
I smiled. “You pick.”
“Anchovies and olives.”
“They’re both the same though, strong and salty, and I don’t even like anchovies.”
“But I really do.”
“So you’ll be olives then.”
He grinned. But this didn’t change anything about the meadow.
“Remember Bruno?” Peter said, more serious. “Remember how he barked about the avalanche? And Harry, hee-hawing?”
I frowned. “You think I should bark or make noises like a donkey?”
He tried to disguise a smile. “No, although you’re the kind of person to do something like that.”
I couldn’t help smiling back.
“What I mean is you could speak to Papa. Speak to him and say something that will make him understand.”
I wondered, in the end, who Peter would stand by, and if I could let the words I wanted to say out in to the world. Or if Monsieur Massimo would want to hear them.
My mother was walking down the drive to meet me when I got home, like she’d been waiting, looking out for me. I wanted to tell her about the meadow but before I had a chance to say anything she handed me a postcard.
“Go read it,” she said. “I’ll be in the studio. If you need me… for anything.”
I went up to the roof terrace. I touched all the things I kept in the curve of the roof tiles before I could look at it.
The word Australia was printed across the bottom.
So I knew where Frank was. He had gone home. I tried to find details in the photograph, something that told me more than that one word. There was sun, sand, waves, but nobody in the picture. A perfect beach. Empty. Did he feel like that too?
I turned it over and caught my breath. He’d always made me something for my birthday and Christmas, but never given me a card. The things I kept in the curves of the roof tiles were all the words he had needed to say. Pieces of wood left over from projects, that we’d look at and guess what they could be, that almost looked like what they would be even before he’d chiselled and sanded and worked at them. Hummingbird, the letter H, mermaid, donkey, cherries, knot. They all meant something at the time.
I hadn’t seen Frank’s writing before and, even though he’d gone, it felt like he’d invited me into another part of his world.
Seen my brother for the first time in twenty years.
Not staying long though. There’s something else I got to do. Harry won’t let you down.
Frank.
Short sentences, as if he’d had a whole heap of things to say but no room to talk about them. No love, not in words, but I saw the space he’d left around the words. I felt the room he’d always given me to think, to be me.
I read it again and again, until it seemed like he’d written me a whole chapter of a book. A story we were both still in.
I ran down to the studio, calling my mother’s name. She was painting and looked over her glasses and shoulder, as if for a moment she was going to warn me to leave her alone, which she was in the habit of doing when she was painting.
She hesitated. She’d always said that it had better be important if I disturbed her like that while she was working, but this was different and so was she. Immediately I was distracted from what I wanted to tell her when I saw what she was painting.
“It’s me!”
She lay down her brush.
“I thought I’d… I wanted to try something new.”
Even just with the wild strokes and simple shapes she’d made so far, I could see the picture was of me asleep on her sofa. There were photographs of me pinned to her wall that she’d been copying.
“Don’t say anything yet,” she said, although I didn’t know what to say anyway. It was too new to know how I felt.
“Is it for us?”
She wiped at some paint on her hands, scratching at a dried patch on her nail.
“I’ve got the real thing, why would I need a picture? You know, I don’t remember my life, how it was before you. I was so busy trying to get everything to fit in with me that I hadn’t thought about how I fitted into the whole picture. I think all along you’ve been my perfect other half.” She laughed. “That sounds like the world according to Hope Malone. Actually –” she held out her hand to draw me over and we stood in front of me (me!) and stared – “I thought I might be able to get a buyer for this. I could get quite a lot of money for it if you agree we can sell it, as it’s you after all.” I looked into her eyes, waiting, because I knew she had so much for me right that minute, all the best in her.
“I suppose Peter has told you now about the meadow.
“You knew about the meadow already?”
“Nanu told me the other day, and I was going to tell you but Peter thought he should.” Before I had chance to say anything else, she said, “We could use the money from selling the painting, see if we could buy the meadow from the Massimos for Harry.”
My mother was different. Frank and Harry had changed us both in lots of ways, and we could only see it now Frank had gone.
“Who’d want a painting of me?”
She looked at the paint on her fingers. “Your father might.”
“Would he?”
“Talk to me, Hope. You can, you know. If you want to.”
Me? His daughter. Was I his daughter? What did it mean if there were these names for us but we weren’t actually being these people. Maybe this was another storybook to open, but not now, not yet. Mum had said it as if she wasn’t sure I would talk to her. Maybe I’d not given her a chance to understand me either.
“Yes, I do want to. But not today.”
“When you’re ready.”
What I really wanted to know more about was her. Why had she painted me like this? Asleep. Lying on her sofa the day that Frank had left. Shadows across the room, the sunset through the window behind, the soft glow of it over part of me, darkness over the rest of me.
“Why did you paint this picture?”
“Because I saw something about you that day that I’d never seen before. Often you don’t notice something about a person that’s there all the time, but then when you were asleep, I noticed it was gone. As if in your dreams you were free of... I didn’t know what. And I realised that there’s always been something you carry around with you that I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on, almost as if you were expecting something to be taken away from you at any minute.” She swallowed, cleared her throat and steadied herself. “I’m sorry if there have been times when I didn’t get the order of things right for you. I’m sorry if I didn’t make you feel safe, if things didn’t fit very well for you.”
It made me think of Harry.
All along I’d not realised that the thing that had gotten to me the most about Harry was that he hadn’t just fallen and been hurt that one day when Frank had crossed his path. Harry had been falling and falling and falling. And maybe Frank had realised it that one day. He wasn’t like the tourists I’d met. He was a quiet sort of person who watched and watched, and he could see there was much more to a story than most of us do. He saw that it had been happening for a long time, again and again, and instead of pitying Harry, he set him free. But Harry must have been hurt so many times that he couldn’t help being stuck with habits that he thought would make him safe. He only learned to break his habits because… because of me?
My mother led me over to the sofa and we held each other as if we were two halves of just one person.
“What is it?” Mum said.
“What’s a papa supposed to be like?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no experience either.”
“Shall I tell you?”
Even before I’d spoken she must have heard it coming.
“Frank,” I said. She closed her eyes, nodding. “And you know why? Because he protected Harry and me all this time until we felt safe enough to grow by ourselves.”
I leaned on her. “He brought Harry all the way across the world because he was looking for a place for Harry.”
“Only at first.”
“That means…” I thought for a minute. “That means he always wanted to leave Harry with me, only I wasn’t ready, either.”
“Oh, Hope.”
“Don’t worry, Mum, I am ready now, but that’s why we have to keep protecting Harry because he can’t talk about all the things bothering him in his little donkey world, and we are going to have to figure it out for him.”
We lay back and stared at the ceiling for a long time, both of us thinking. I wondered if one day my real father and I would want to try to see if we fitted together. How would I know if I never said those words to him?
“Frank is travelling because he’s gone back to his old habits,” I finally said, “but Harry and I – and you – we’ve learned some new ones.”
“Which is pretty brilliant when you think about it,” Mum said softly, tears on her face, like snow melting all at once. “What did Frank say on the postcard? I didn’t read it. Somehow it seemed just for you.”
“He said Harry wouldn’t let me down.”
She suddenly laughed through the tears and said it again as if it was true, like one of those things Madame tells you to make you behave thoughtfully. “Of course he won’t! What a beautiful donkey Harry is.” She kept laughing. “Still here, standing by you…”
“By us…”
“By us – no matter what happens to him. So loyal. Frank was right about him all along. Oh my God, Hope!” And in that second both of us sat forward. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she gasped.
“My birthday!” I said because that’s what had popped into my head right then as an answer.
“Your birthday? Oh, that wasn’t what I was thinking, I thought I’d paint Harry and sell some—”
“Can we have my party here?”
“Here?” She sighed heavily, but not as if she was bothered, more like it was a big task she’d already resigned herself to facing. And I loved her for that. “But how does that help Harry?”
Dogs were barking in the village, and if you asked me right then what was going to happen next, I’d have said that only the mountain knew.
The Massimos were also determined to throw the party.
Nanu wouldn’t hear of it when I asked Peter to tell her that Mum and I wanted to organise it. It was only three days away and she’d planned the menu already, listing on her chubby fingers what she was going to cook. Nonno shrugged and threw
up his hands. Food wasn’t something he had any say in.
Peter dragged me out of their kitchen to say, “I’m not being rude, honest, Hope, but my parents want it to be special, what with me – us – becoming teenagers. You know what they’re like.”
“And Harry? Remember we said it would be his birthday too?”
“Yeah, I know, but anyway, Nanu’s already asked everyone, and I mean everyone. Monsieur Albert, all the people who work in the vineyards and their families, everyone!”
I needed to start again because I’d gone about this the wrong way.
“All we have to do is get them to come to my house instead,” I said.
“How are we going to do that?”
“Peter, do you want to help Harry or not?”
“Yes, of course, but—”
“I’m not asking you to choose me over your family, I promise. Just help me.”
He smiled, and said, “OK,” and we went back into the kitchen.
“Nanu, you’re the best cook in the whole village.” And I did mean it. “Isn’t she Peter?”
Peter translated and Nanu smiled, ducked her head as if she was shy.
“Best in the whole Pyrenees,” Peter said when I nudged him, nodding enthusiastically.
She flicked her tea towel towards us at the compliment.
“Marianne really, really wants to do it, but you know she’s not very good at cooking. And also she’s on her own right now.”
Nanu’s eyebrows turned up over her eyes. Frank flashed into my mind, the sharp feeling of him being gone, but I carried on. “She needs friends. We don’t have any other family and she needs people around her. So would you please, please help her?”
Nanu waddled over and put her arms around me. She pinched my cheek and smiled.
“Did she understand?” I whispered to Peter.
“I understand,” Nanu said.
“Nanu, we want to have the party at our house but please would you do the cooking for us?” I asked.
“Please, Nanu, it’s what I want too,” Peter said.
After a lot of Italian talk between them, which involved arms waving a lot, it was agreed.
