‘Then I’ll send Claudia out here.’
‘She won’t like it.’
‘Who’s paying?’
Stella sat her sister down in the drawing room and went in search of Claudia, who was reading Ciao! in the kitchen.
‘Claudia, Mrs Travis isn’t well. Could you possibly sit out by the pool for a while, just while Zoe’s in the water?’
Claudia made a gesture to indicate that such a responsibility was less than a gnat’s arse to one who had so many, and withdrew, taking a slab of cooking chocolate from the fridge before doing so. Stella, who suspected that beneath the maid’s steely exterior there beat a heart of purest granite, reflected that it was probably national pride which ensured that no matter how misanthropic by nature, Claudia must force herself to be good to children.
She returned to George who was tearstained but composed.
‘Drink?’
‘No, thanks – oh, go on.’
Stella poured them both a more than medicinal shot of Calvados.
‘So?’
‘So he’s pissed off.’
Stella refrained from making any sarcastic comment along ‘poor baby’ lines. ‘He’ll get over it.’
‘I know. I just wish it could be yesterday.’
With a pang, Stella recalled that cry of their childhood years when things went wrong, or doom seemed imminent. Yesterday! Paradise – when everything was all right.
‘If it was yesterday you’d still have it all to come. Tonight, it’s over.’
George laughed feebly, sniffing. ‘I suppose.’
‘Of course. And this time tomorrow the sunny uplands of your family future will open up before you once again.’
‘Uplands is right. I never lost all the weight after Zoe – God knows what I’d be like this time. The largest mammal to walk the south of England.’
‘With the greatest cleavage. Buy plenty of tents with plunging necklines, he’ll be eating out of your hand.’
‘I wish.’ George gulped at her drink. ‘I sometimes wonder if he fancies me at all, or whether I’m just the nearest available repository.’
Stella thought of the afternoon’s conversation with Kirsty.‘You’re never going to know that without asking the sort of questions you’ll wish you hadn’t. My advice is, behave as it you have no doubts. Flaunt that stomach, flash those knockers, massage his machismo and anything else you can lay your hands on. Make him feel like a sex god for getting you up the stick again.’
George sent her a watery smile. ‘What’s all this? This doesn’t sound like the old Stella.’
‘What was that?’
‘You know. Choose ’em, use ’em, lose ’em.’
‘Well,’ she replied, ‘maybe I’m a changed woman.’
And the next day was the first of her escapes.
It was nothing dramatic, she simply drove to the next village and walked about. She went into the small, perfect church, she found a forge where a silent man made creatures out of black iron, she bought tomatoes and a round, flat, floury loaf and she found the local equivalent of the Paradiso and sat inside with her book, with the soft click and murmuring of pool being played in the dim recesses at the back.
When she returned in the early afternoon and went upstairs for a siesta, Mark was bobbing in the pool while Kirsty lay face down on a lounger in her pink bikini, her arms dangling over the sides.
‘Hallo. Where is everyone?’
‘Resting.’
‘What, Zoe too?’ Kirsty nodded.
‘I think I’ll do the same.’
Upstairs she passed the door of Zoe’s room and saw her niece spark out on the rumpled sheets. She went in to admire for a moment the extraordinary perfection of the very young which was only enhanced by grubby soles of the feet, a felt-tip bracelet drawn on the wrist, and a smear of chocolate at the corner of the mouth.
The villa lay silent, tranced in siesta. Stella’s own room – selected on her arrival by droit de chatelaine – was on the top floor, the converted half of a loft space, its heat kept bearable by an electric fan, but more than compensated for by its seclusion and the view on three sides from its deep-set windows.
Her foot was already on the first of the wooden stairs when she heard a sound from the direction of George and Brian’s room: the steady, quickening, urgent pulse of sex – familiar and unmistakable. She couldn’t help listening for a moment, wistfully. But as she continued up the stairs she consoled herself with the knowledge that all was well.
Four days later, with the people-carrier packed up, they stood out on the drive while the kids made a final trawl of the bedrooms. Brian slapped the roof of the car as though it were a horse’s rump.
‘I thought it was pure affectation when George persuaded me to buy this thing, but now I know it was part of her evil scheme.’
‘Really?’ said Stella. George was rummaging in her le Sac, and now withdrew, muttering about sunglasses. Brian nodded at her retreating backview.
‘Tums out she’s expecting.’
Stella reacted on cue. ‘Fantastically well done! Found out what’s causing it yet?’
‘Ha bloody ha.’
‘Go on, you’re thrilled to bits.’ She kissed him and he gave her a more than fraternal squeeze.
‘I am actually. God knows why. More bloody expense.’ The children emerged from the house. ‘Haven’t told them yet.’
‘They’ll be disgusted.’
Brian laughed fruitily. ‘Probably! The old aren’t supposed to have goatish habits. Come on, you rabble, wheels turn in thirty seconds, where’s your mother?’
‘In the bog.’
He grimaced at Stella. ‘That’ll get worse before it gets better in my experience.’ He leaned towards her confidingly. ‘Tell you what, my darling, you’ve got it right.’
This being rhetorical she didn’t reply, but as she waved them off she reflected that he had meant just the opposite.
After George and Brian left, there was a two-day interval before Roger and Fran arrived for a week, and a two-day period when they overlapped with their successors, Helen and Bill Rowlandson. In the wake of the Travises the villa was eerily quiet. Stella missed the children.
Roger and Fran were very nearly the perfect guests. The ‘old hippydom’ to which Jamie had once glancingly referred stood them in good stead when it came to sharing other people’s houses. They were serene, adaptable, happily self-sufficient or appreciatively convivial as required, and enjoyed a partnership of unparalleled amiability. That was the only word Stella could think of to describe it. She suspected that passion did not feature largely in their relationship but if so they were a wonderful advertisement for the deep, deep peace of the double bed. She was starting to form the impression that if marriage were to be tolerable it must either be fraught and fecund like her sister’s, or tranquil and complacent as this one was.
Five days passed. Five days of calm, filled in the Turners’ case with blameless sightseeing and postcard-sending. Stella accompanied them on only one trip, to Florence, but even there they went their separate ways, Fran and Roger to OD on culture, Stella to meander less purposefully. The meanderings took her first to a jewellery shop of such ineffable elegance and modernity that she hesitated on the threshold and had to remind herself quite forcibly that it was only a shop and that her plastic was as good as the next person’s.
The shop contained nothing as prosaic as a counter, though there was a circular glass table in the centre from which protruded a revolving glass cylinder that rose to the ceiling. The cylinder contained a pale swirl of thicker glass, so that the effect created was that of smoke rising in a transparent chimney. A woman in an aerodynamically tailored cream shantung shift and pearls stood at the back of the room and murmured ‘Buongiorno’ with the languor born of a seller’s market. The last time Stella had encountered such glacial elegance and condescension was at the Elmhurst Clinic, and the memory stiffened her sinews.
There were perhaps a dozen pieces at most displayed in
the shop, but Stella craved one of only three in the window. She pointed and the woman glided to her side on a wave of Giò.
‘That necklace – may I see it?’
‘The collar?’
‘Yes.’
The woman lifted it out and presented it to Stella on her upturned palms. It was a paper-thin circlet of beaten silver with a single asymmetric leaf hanging from it. It wasn’t often Stella craved such a thing, but she craved this.
‘Can I try it on?’
‘Of course.’ The woman indicated a mirror.
Stella put it on, fumbling with the minute clasp. The woman’s cool fingers came to her assistance.
‘Thank you.’
‘Molto bella.’
The necklace was so fine it seemed like silk rather than metal, and so perfectly designed that it moulded itself to her thin collarbones as if it had been made for her. The woman stood with folded arms. Stella sensed a softening of her attitude, not attributable to a likely sale but to a shared appreciation of the piece.
‘I’ll take it.’
The woman waited for a second until she had undone the necklace and then withdrew to her lair behind an arras at the back of the room. Stella realised that the price had not been mentioned by either of them – the woman presumably from a discreet assumption of wealth in her customers, she through sheer pigheadedness.
It was stupendous. More than she had paid for any single item in her life, besides her car, her London flat and the Villa Paresi. She hoped that the woman would think it was insouciance rather than shock which kept her numb-faced as her card was swiped.
But the moment she emerged into the beat and bustle of the sunlit street she forgot the money. To have bought beauty, for its own sake, was a pleasure she scarcely ever permitted herself. Now she knew why people did it.
She entered a web of twisting back streets and turned into the narrow door of a church. Inside it was dark; and so cool that her skin shrank into goose pimples. As her eyes grew accustomed to the twilight she took in the pale, circular dome with its gorgeous bucolic fresco of a shepherd and his sheep . . . a lush, doe-eyed Mary behind the altar, her blue robe swept in an involuntary and wholly Italian flourish around her legs . . . the Bible in a glass case . . . drooping fresh flowers and strident artificial ones . . . white walls and gilt candelabra . . . the austere and the exotic, the sacred and the sexy.
Stella was an unbeliever but she liked the sequestered anonymity of these Italian churches. There was an assumption of faith, or perhaps an acceptance of humanity, that she found absent in any church she’d been into in England. She bought a candle, lit it and added it to the half dozen or so already in the rack. Thought of her lost baby. Then placed another next to it, gently, for Robert.
She sat down on one of the hard chairs and took her necklace out of its bag, then its box. She held it in her hands, wondering if this constituted the worship of Mammon. It didn’t feel like that. As she smoothed the ripples of silver between her fingers she could imagine that this was how it would feel to tell the rosary – a way of concentrating, of focusing the mind.
As she sat there she heard the door open and footsteps clicked on the stone floor. There was a pause – for holy water, a genuflection, the sign of the cross – and the footsteps came up the aisle. A smart matron in a leather coat and spike heels went to a chair at the front and knelt down, bowing her head on to a hand heavy with rings. After a couple of minutes she sat back and performed a few swift repair rituals, patting her hair, dabbing her eyes and cheeks with a tissue, smoothing her collar, before sweeping out with magnificent composure.
Stella allowed the silence to lap round her again for a while, and then returned the necklace to its bag and left. With her hand on the door she turned and made a swift mental obeisance to the kindly building – a genuflection of the heart.
Brimming over with a kind of benign melancholy, she treated Fran and Roger to a historic lunch, and became slightly drink.
‘So,’ she said over the linguini, ‘are you all Pitti-ed out? Got the t-shirt and the blisters to go with it?’
‘It’s all quite wonderful,’ declared Fran.‘Such a comfort, somehow, to know there is another plane of existence.’
‘Was,’ Roger corrected her.
‘Not at all, the great stream of human creative endeavour goes on. Look at Stella.’
‘Steady on,’ she said.
Roger looked embarrassed. ‘How have you spent the morning?’
‘I bought a necklace and sat in a church.’
‘An excellent balance by the sound of it.’
‘Come on then,’ said Fran, ‘let’s see.’
They exclaimed over the necklace, and over the lunch. ‘It’s all so beautiful,’ said Fran. ‘So unnecessarily troubled over.’
Roger agreed. ‘It’s the unnecessary bits that make the difference.’
‘It was so lovely of you to invite us.’
‘My pleasure. It was the least I could do.’
‘If you mean Ailmay, all those years ago – please! It’s hardly the same.’
‘No, you’re right,’ said Stella. ‘Ailmay changed my life.’
It was not Helen and Bill Rowlandson’s fault that their arrival threw out the balance at the Villa Paresi. It was simply that the balance depended on Stella, who now found herself perched precariously on the tightrope between two sets of old friends who no longer had anything in common. It was unwise, as the last in, to assume greater intimacy with either side; at the same time, if only for selfish reasons, she wished the forty-eight hours that they were together to run smoothly.
Jamie’s mother Helen was a creamy Home Counties beauty who neither swam nor sunbathed and whose personal style resembled, in Stella’s opinion, that of a model in her mother’s back numbers of Vogue, known as Mrs Exeter. Only with the greatest effort could Stella accept that Helen was just five years older than her. On the other hand, since Helen had looked much the same for as long as Stella could remember, it seemed likely that this state of affairs would continue into the future, to Helen’s probable advantage. They had nothing in common except Jamie and Bill, with whom Stella had had a brief and unmemorable liaison some fifteen years ago. She was painfully aware that in Bill’s case a second pounce was a distinct possibility. Just as she knew Brian’s robust flirtatiousness to be entirely safe, so she sensed Bill’s lustfulness in every small avoidance of her eye and touch, his breezy, cowardly, feigned indifference.
She was sure that Fran and Roger were not aware of this, and just as sure that Helen was. Over dinner on the Rowlandsons’ first night she enquired after Jamie.
‘And how is the boy whose spiritual guidance I’ve so assiduously undertaken?’
Bill snorted. ‘You did a good job. He’s godless, like they all are.’
‘He’s doing very well,’ protested Helen. ‘Expanding his horizons as we speak.’
‘In what way?’
‘We liked Ingrid,’ remarked Roger, as it reading Stella’s thoughts. ‘I suppose she’s no longer around?’
‘Good heavens, no,’ laughed Helen, dismissing this youthful aberration with silvery lightness. ‘That was years ago. We do need to bring you up to speed.’
‘So what is he doing?’ repeated Stella.
‘Bumming round Europe,’ replied Bill, ‘with that waste of space Jonno and two females.’
‘And is one of those a special female?’ asked Fran.
‘Yes,’ said Helen. ‘His current girlfriend, Nina. She’s very nice. We like her, don’t we, darling?’
Stella detected a glint of steel in this enquiry, which had the desired effect, because Bill agreed that, yes, they did.
‘Actually,’ went on Helen, ‘we wondered if we could ask you a small favour?’
‘Hang on, hang on!’ Bill raised a hand like a policeman stopping traffic. ‘Less of the “we”. You wondered. And the favour you want to ask is not by even the most magnanimous standards small.’
‘Anyway,’ said Stella, ‘ask
away.’
‘The thing is,’ said Helen, ‘they’re swanning around the Black Sea ports at the moment, as far as we know. He’s been keeping in touch by e-mail, I don’t know if there’s an internet café round here?’ Bill spluttered. ‘There might be, they’re everywhere these days . . . Anyway, the last we heard he was in that neck of the woods, but they’re rapidly running out of cash and we simply wondered—’
‘Simply!’
‘Do shut up, Bill, we simply wondered if we could let him have this address if he desperately needed a staging post.’
‘Of course. I can’t think of anything nicer.’
‘Really? You must lead a sadder life than I thought,’ said Bill.
Stella ignored this. ‘I may not have taught him the Good Book, but I can provide him with food, drink and loose talk any time. And his pals as well.’
‘There’s absolutely no need for that. I mean, the contingency will probably not arise anyway, but if it does it goes without saying that no one’s expecting you to—’
‘For crying out loud, Hel,’ said Bill loudly, ‘if they’re potless and starving she can hardly say, “I’ll take that one and not those.” It’s love me, love my dogs. That’s what I object to.’
‘But I don’t,’ said Stella firmly. ‘And there’s a cybercafé in Florence in the Plaza Medici. I’m not going anywhere for a while. Simple.’
After dinner, with coffee, Strega, and Dean Martin warbling on the stereo, Stella wandered off, thinking like a discreet matchmaker to leave the two couples to it, so she was put out to discover Bill hot on her heels. Or not so much hot as following at an elaborately unconcerned distance, positioned between her and the soft lights of the villa.
‘You’re right,’ he said, as though she had spoken. ‘A walk seems like a good idea.’ And when she didn’t reply, added: ‘This is an incredible place, how did you find it?’
‘In the newspaper, as one does.’
‘It’s sensational. A person could get used to this sort of thing.’
She continued to walk and he, to her annoyance, to follow, not drawing level but remaining about three paces behind her.
The Grass Memorial Page 53
