Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  The nun considered, then she smiled, a surprisingly worldly smile. ‘I think that our ospedale will continue in any case. And perhaps if some generous person were to give us money for it, we would lose our little assistance from the authorities. But a benefactor for the gardens, that could affect nothing, could it?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Julia said gravely.

  ‘Do you have all this money, Julia? You do not have the look of a rich woman.’ There was no surprise, or curiosity even. Only the calmness that Julia loved.

  ‘I have a business, in England. Some shops. I gave many years to them, perhaps too many. I think that now the time has come to sell. If I did sell, Mother, I would like to use my money to pay for the gardens.’

  More than like, Julia thought. It would give me more happiness than almost anything else I could imagine.

  She said, ‘The work would take a year, perhaps. We could employ local men, and Signor Galli might advise us where to turn for expert assistance. And once the restoration is complete, I think that the gardens could be maintained by two, perhaps three workers. Maybe one man with help from some of the residents here, like Guido and Tomaso. And myself, of course.’

  The plans came to her mind ready-formed, as if her subconscious had established every detail.

  The Mother Superior looked at Julia. ‘Do you intend to make our gardens your life’s work?’

  Julia thought of the simplicity of life in the palazzo, the friends that she was beginning to make inside its walls and in the houses that clung around them, and then of the sweep of the terraces overlooking the sea. She remembered her empty flat in Camden Town, and the dull, busy streets. There was nowhere she wanted to be except Montebellate.

  Only Ladyhill, and that was impossible.

  ‘If you will let me,’ she answered.

  The nun smiled again. It was agreed that Julia and Nicolo could begin to plan the restoration of the entire garden.

  The sale of Garlic & Sapphires was less easy. The business was doing better than it had ever done, since the very beginning. For Julia, in her isolation at Montebellate, it had been both reassuring and saddening to read the reports and balance sheets that were forwarded to her, and to realise that she was no longer needed. It would be a relief, in a way, to cut herself off altogether. But Julia still cared enough about her business to want to find the right buyer. It had taken enough years of her own life, and too much of Lily’s childhood, to be worth less than that.

  The sale took weeks of long-distance calls, while independent valuations took place, then more talks, and finally haggling between solicitors. Julia made two brief trips to London, seeing no one while she was there and feeling each time as though she was visiting a foreign city. At last, at the beginning of the summer, a deal was struck. Julia’s shops would be owned by an astute, cold-eyed young businessman and his warmer, vaguer, artist wife. Julia thought that they would do well together. At least her creation would not be swallowed up and obliterated by a bigger chain.

  The contract was signed, and a very large sum of money was credited to Julia’s Italian bank account. It arrived none too soon. The money left over from the sale of the house by the canal had already been poured into the gardens. Julia flew back to Italy, with the sense that she was going home for good.

  Then it was July, and Lily’s summer holiday. To Julia, it seemed a painfully long time since she had seen her, and yet the months had gone so quickly that she had had no time to look for the village house that she had intended to make into a home for herself and Lily. Julia went to see the Mother Superior again.

  ‘I could ask Signor Galli if Lily might stay in his house …’

  ‘But you would like to have your daughter with you here, of course. There are other guest rooms. We have no shortage of space for our friends, Julia.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia said.

  She borrowed Nicolo’s car, and drove to Naples to meet Lily’s plane.

  Lily came out in a press of other travellers, but Julia saw her immediately. They ran to each other, and as she hugged her Julia felt Lily’s new height, and her adult shape emerging from the childish roundness.

  ‘You’ve grown,’ she said.

  ‘And you’re thin, Mum. And you’re so brown.’

  ‘I’ve been working very hard. Look at my hands.’ Julia held them up. The fingers were ingrained with earth and the nails were cracked and split. Lily looked at them, amazed. In the car park, beside Nicolo’s rusty Fiat, Lily asked, ‘Is this your car?’

  Julia laughed. ‘It’s a special occasion, I borrowed it. I haven’t got a car. I haven’t got a house, either. You’re coming to stay at the palazzo.’

  In her letters, Julia had described everything. She had telephoned Lily too, and told her about the sale of Garlic & Sapphires. To her surprise, Lily had received the news as if she had been expecting it.

  ‘You didn’t care so much about the shops any more, did you?’ she said. ‘Not like the way you used to when I was little. I thought you loved them more than me.’

  ‘I didn’t. I was doing it for you.’

  ‘I know that now.’ Lily had laughed, the laughter sounding close at hand, for all the miles that separated Ladyhill from Montebellate.

  Now Lily was in the car beside her, peering between the hurtling airport buses at the press of Neapolitan traffic. At Julia’s words she turned round in dismay. ‘We’re staying in the palazzo? With the funny people?’

  ‘They’re not funny, Lily. They’re ill, or damaged, or old. Otherwise just the same as you.’ Julia had spoken sharply. It was an inauspicious beginning. ‘Never mind,’ she said quickly. ‘You haven’t said about you. Tell me everything you’ve been doing.’

  Lily’s letters had already told most of it. With amusement, Julia noticed fewer references to Marco Polo, many more to Lily’s friend Elizabeth and their doings together. It made her think of Mattie and herself, at Blick Road Grammar School.

  ‘Have you seen Mattie?’

  ‘Yes, she came with Mitch. He’s nice. Mattie’s got a Jaguar, a white one.’

  ‘Mattie has? Can she drive it?’

  Lily laughed a lot. ‘Not very well.’

  Julia had written to Mattie, but Mattie had never been a great correspondent. Her notes in return were superficial, sometimes illegible. The veil that had descended between them showed no signs of lifting.

  Lily chattered on as they drove. When they came to the coast she leaned forward in her seat. ‘Look at the sea. Isn’t it blue?’

  Julia pointed at the conical hill rearing ahead, with Montebellate crowning it. As they began to wind up the hairpin bends, with the scents of wild thyme and curryplant drifting through the open windows of the car, Lily’s talk died away. She looked nervous, peering upwards. She asked abruptly, ‘Mummy? Are you all right?’

  Julia touched her hand. ‘Everything is all right.’

  But the first days of the visit were not a success.

  Lily stood in the doorway of Julia’s room. She looked at the narrow bed and the single chair drawn up to a table spread with gardening books and plans.

  ‘Is this all there is?’

  ‘Yes, because it’s all I need. Not everyone lives in nice houses in London, or in manor houses in Dorset.’

  ‘I know that,’ Lily said mulishly.

  ‘Do you?’

  At the refectory supper she sat in silence, hardly touching her food.

  Julia had her work to do, and she went calmly on with it. During the day Lily shadowed her, or else she sat apart in the secret garden. Julia knew that she was sulking, felt angry with her, and then relented. It was Lily’s holiday, after all.

  ‘I’ll take you down to the beach this afternoon,’ she offered. ‘We can take some of the little ones, too.’

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with all those kids. People will stare at us. You’re my mother.’

  ‘And you’re my daughter. But we don’t own each other, do we? You have proved that for us both.’

&n
bsp; Lily tried to outstare her. ‘I don’t like it here. All these old people, and sick kids, and nuns. It’s creepy. I can’t eat my food with them slobbering and grunting all round me. I thought I’d be coming to your house. Like it used to be.’

  Julia’s expression didn’t change. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I can’t remove the people. They belong here, and we don’t. And you are twelve years old. You can face a little uncomfortable reality, can’t you?’

  ‘Not if it’s drool and prayers and snotty kids,’ Lily muttered darkly.

  It was Tomaso who saved the day.

  Julia had noticed him watching Lily. He eyed her pale skin and her pretty clothes, and then turned away scowling when anyone caught him at it. Lily pretended not to notice him at all.

  Lily had been at the palazzo for ten days when Julia, driven to snapping point by her sulks, sent her out into the secret garden to do some work. She gave her the shears, and told her to clip some of the hedges. It was an easy, if laborious job. It should keep Lily usefully occupied for an hour or so. It was much later when Julia finally finished what she was doing and went in search of her. She wasn’t in the walled garden, although the shears were lying in the middle of the parterre. Some of the box had been clipped, surprisingly well. Julia went out on to the highest terrace and looked down. The sea was the pale opal of early evening, and the sky above an infinitesimal shade paler. Lily and Tomaso were leaning against the wall at the bottom, looking out over it.

  Julia turned aside, and went back up the steps to the palazzo.

  Later, she said, ‘I’m glad you’ve made friends with Tomaso.’

  ‘He clipped the hedges for me, that’s all.’ Lily tried to be dismissive, but her need to talk overcame her. If Elizabeth was here, Julia thought, hiding her smile, I’d never hear about anything. Casually, Lily added, ‘He’s okay looking, don’t you think? For an Italian?’

  Tomaso had black curly hair, and limpid brown eyes. He had a broken tooth that made his smile rakishly appealing.

  ‘Oh, for an Italian,’ Julia agreed.

  After that, Lily’s mood changed dramatically. She devised an ingenious hiding and chasing game for the stronger children that led them up and down the garden terraces. And at one refectory supper she took a place beside Guido and talked to him while he crumbled his food into his awkward mouth. And she and Tomaso pretended to bump into each other everywhere, and then glanced quickly away, blushing.

  ‘How do you talk?’ Julia asked. Lily knew no Italian, and Tomaso didn’t have a word of English.

  Lily looked surprised. ‘We manage fine.’

  After some thought, Julia agreed to let Tomaso take Lily down to the sea on the old blue bus that left the Montebellate square twice daily. And after the first time, the expedition was regularly repeated.

  ‘Does Alexander let you go out with boys?’ Julia asked. ‘Be sensible, won’t you?’

  Lily looked levelly back at her. ‘I know what you mean. And I’m not silly.’

  Not half as silly as I was, Julia thought.

  She wrote a letter to Josh. She didn’t have to describe Montebellate to him, nor the view that spread beneath her open shutters. Josh did reply to the letter, many months later. He told her that he had been working in Argentina, and then had travelled back very slowly, through Peru and Colombia. Josh had no more ties than he had ever had.

  There was the inevitable evening when Lily came home with her red mouth swollen and her eyes starry.

  Julia sat with Nicolo with the planting plans and designs from the experts in Rome spread out in front of them. She told him about Lily and Tomaso.

  ‘What do you feel about it?’ he asked.

  Julia put her hands over her face, rubbing under her eyes. ‘Old,’ she answered. ‘I’m thirty-three.’

  Nicolo put his hand on her bare shoulder. His touch was dry and light, like a falling leaf. ‘How old do you think it makes me feel, to hear you say that?’

  Julia took his hand between her own. ‘You’ll never be old.’

  ‘I am quite ancient,’ Nicolo said cheerfully. ‘Too old, sadly, for anything except friendship.’

  ‘Friendship is enough.’

  Nicolo sighed. ‘Try to tell that to Lily and her Tomaso.’

  Lily spent six weeks at the palazzo. By the end of the time she was as brown as Julia, and she seemed to have grown up again. To Julia, she seemed to be on the very heartbreaking edge of the divide between girl and woman.

  On the morning of her departure, everyone who could came out into the courtyard to say goodbye to her. Tomaso waited at the edge of the crowd, hanging back to the very last moment. Then, when Lily looked around for him, he edged forward. He kissed her, very formally, on both cheeks and then stepped back again. Lily hesitated, and then nodded. Her smile had turned shy again. She held her head up and walked quickly after Julia. In the car, on the way down the hill, she cried a little, very quietly. Then she dried her eyes and watched the sea receding.

  ‘I can’t wait to see Elizabeth,’ she announced at last.

  At the airport, on the point of saying goodbye, Lily asked suddenly, ‘Can I come back another time?’

  ‘Of course you can. Whenever you want. Next time, I’ll have a house for us. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to spend your holidays in a hospital.’

  Lily beamed at her. ‘I’m glad you did.’

  After she had gone it occurred to Julia that they had, all unexpectedly, come close to friendship.

  All through the summer and on into the autumn the consultations with experts and the garden planning went on. Nicolo had found a garden historian in Rome, and he came and spent a week amongst the palazzo papers researching the original plantings. Through his discoveries the Montebellate gardens were linked back to the classic gardens of Northern Italy on which they had been modelled.

  Designers and horticulturalists came, bringing with them stonemasons and marble masons who examined the cracked pillars and urns, and began the exhumation of the classical statues from their crypts of weeds.

  When the summer season was over, the workmen moved in to begin the job of clearing the ground. Fredo, Vito’s nephew, who closed down his beach pizza bar in mid-October every year, came to lead the gang of labourers. Rotavators were towed in, and trucks loaded with topsoil and fertiliser and fresh gravel ground their slow way up the hill to the village.

  Julia and Nicolo and the nuns watched with childlike excitement as the magnificent bones of the garden were raked bare. And as the work of clearing went on, plans for the restored planting arrived. In the late evenings, under Nicolo’s red-shaded lamps, they pored over the lists of santolinas and lavenders and helichrysums, cistuses and helianthemums and hundreds of bulbs.

  Julia paid the huge bills, signing the cheques with a flourish of satisfaction.

  At the end of the autumn, the first batches of plants arrived from the nurseries. These, and the spring bulbs, would be planted out while there was still some warmth in the ground. The rest would wait until the end of the short winter. She walked out in the sharp early mornings, with the thin mist wrapping around her ankles and the white sea like flat metal under the colourless sky. Fredo and his Uncle Vito knelt to unwrap the earthy balls of plant roots, and pressed them gently into the planting holes. Julia worked beside them, firming the moist earth around the neck of each plant, touching the crowns of cropped shoots as if to bless them. Fredo smiled at her as she sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead with earth-blackened hands.

  In the first summer after the planting the garden lay fresh and raw, with the statues standing blindly in the haze of new green. Julia watched with fierce pleasure as each new shoot uncurled. She walked the terraces, up and down, seeing the hard lines of the long walls and wide steps soften with foliage, and the grey and white of stone and marble fade by contrast with the brilliance of blossom.

  Under the hot sun, she felt the garden’s vitality inside herself as well as all around her. She felt an erotic charge that made her lift her h
ead and straighten her back, aware of the pressures and recesses of her body under her faded cotton dress.

  Fredo came up from his beach bar in the evenings, to help with carrying the tubs of dirty water from the palazzo for siphoning on to the beds. He watched her all the time, smiled at her more often.

  One evening, when the late darkness was falling, he caught her alone on the lowest terrace just within the sound of the sea. She was working not far from the point where she had first seen Lily and Tomaso together. She stood up as soon as she heard him approach, but he was already close and they almost bumped together.

  ‘Sera,’ Fredo murmured. She twisted her head away, then looked back at him, feeling the heat in her cheeks. Fredo had muscular, thick shoulders and damp black hair showed at the neck of his shirt. The hair tangled with a gold chain on which hung a crucifix. She had often seen it dangle while he worked, before he tucked it away again in his shirt front. There was a white, crescent-shaped scar in the brown skin at his jawline. She had never noticed that before. He was so close that she thought she could see the blood pulsing beneath it. She could smell his clean sweat, and see the sheen of it in the hollow of his throat.

  Dizzily, she thought, I could put my mouth there. Taste the salt. And she thought of the other things, too.

  Her heart thumped in her chest, and her head swam. It would have been easy to let her head fall forward, by slow, slow degrees, and let it rest against him. The heat of their skins would flash and burn.

  Fredo moved the one half-step that brought their bodies into contact. He put his hand at the small of her back, heavy and hot, moving her hips against his. He put the fingers of his other hand on her breast. Julia almost screamed. Fredo’s white teeth showed as his mouth opened.

  Fredo had a wife and several children, down on the coast. Julia put her hand up, closed her fingers round his wrist and lifted his hand away. She stepped back, into coolness, into safety. She nodded at Fredo. Not angrily, not dismissively. A neutral, concluding gesture. Then she turned away and managed to walk up a flight of stone steps. Another and another, and up to the palazzo. She reached her room and closed the door. There was no lock so she leaned against it, the palms of her hands pressed to the panels. She realised that she was panting, like a dog. After a long time, she crept across to her bed and lay down. She lay on her back, stretched out, staring up at the white roof. She ran her fingers over the taut skin inside her thighs, touched herself.