Summer Fever, page 10
‘Can you really not remember asking him to come?’
‘I didn’t ask him. Just because I was pissed …’
‘Stoned.’
‘Whatever. But I wouldn’t have forgotten that.’
‘Well, he can’t have made it all up.’ She sighs. ‘I don’t want to blow a load of money on a sodding well.’
‘They said we’d run dry in summer if we didn’t. Not just the pool. The taps, the loos, everything.’
‘That’s not what Massimo said.’
‘Tommaso says Massimo is an old man who doesn’t know what he’s doing any more.’
‘I liked him.’
‘Yeah, me too. Those two …’
‘What?’
Nick blows out his breath, tips away the rest of his water and goes to the fridge. He hesitates, then reaches inside for a beer. ‘I dunno.’
‘Well, I don’t like them.’
‘That thing they said, about babies –’
‘It’s not that,’ she cuts across him. ‘They scare me.’ She only realizes it’s true as she says it.
‘They’re going to come again in the week, with a few more men. Just to have a proper look.’
‘You literally just said you hadn’t agreed to anything.’
‘I haven’t!’ His voice breaks, shrill and boyish. He puts the cold bottle to his forehead. ‘Sorry.’
She sighs. ‘As long as they’re not expecting any money for that.’
‘No, they’re not. I mean, I don’t think so.’ He hands her the beer and gets another.
She needs a day off from the booze but she can’t resist. It’s cold and deliciously dry. It makes her care less almost instantly.
‘Well, you can deal with them. I don’t want anything to do with it. And ring Massimo. See what he says.’ A thought occurs and she tries to bite back the words, then says them anyway. ‘Why can you never be assertive? Why do I always have to sort this stuff out, like I’m your mother?’
He slams out of the kitchen. She watches him cross the garden, retracing the steps he’d not long taken with the two Italians. She knows he’ll be going to the barn behind Giuseppe’s House, where he keeps his tools and all the little projects he’s got on the go, none of them ever quite finished unless she nags and nags.
His shoulders as he moves out of sight are slumped again. He reaches up to rub at the nape of his neck where it’s recently been shaved at the barber’s in Castelfranco, the exposed skin still white and vulnerable. Her heart clutches traitorously. That she can’t even be angry with him without feeling guilty only makes her more furious. When the men come back, she’ll make sure Bastian is around. It’s not just his grasp of the language, it’s his physical solidity, too. She didn’t think those things would appeal to her but, in him, they do. Men like him … Women don’t mother that kind of man.
The Americans don’t return for dinner. She and Nick wait until half past eight, the food Nick has prepared keeping warm at the bottom of the oven.
‘It’s drying out,’ he says. ‘We’ll just have to have it cold tomorrow. Are you sure they didn’t say anything?’
She shakes her head, too irritable to answer the same question he’s asked her twice already. It’s not just Nick, though: she had been looking forward to dinner. There’s something about the decorum of the ritual – dressing up a little, laying the table formally – coupled with the intense beam of Bastian’s attention from across the table that heats her blood, causes it to run faster. The whole thing makes her feel alive in a way that turns the previous years grey and flat in retrospect. The messages were one thing, but having someone to flirt with in real life is something quite different. She feels she deserves a bit more of that after what has turned out to be a pretty shitty day. It doesn’t help that it’s a perfect evening, the air balmy and subtly perfumed in a way she hasn’t noticed before. Some flower or plant that has been waiting for a secret signal – another notch on the thermometer, an extra minute of sunlight – must have opened.
She finally hears their car out on the drive just after nine, anticipation swelling inside her so powerfully that she has to stand. Nick looks up from his almost-finished meal. They’d given in and eaten some odds and ends so they could save the expensive lamb for lunch tomorrow, not that she’d eaten much of anything.
‘Don’t be off with them, will you?’ Nick says, as she heads towards the hall. ‘Remember they’re on holiday.’
She doesn’t say anything. Apart from that moment in the kitchen when Nick stepped in about the bambinos comment, she hasn’t really liked him all day. She expects he feels the same.
‘Hey you,’ says Madison, when she catches sight of Laura framed in the doorway. ‘Oh no, are you pissed? Bastian said we should have called.’
Laura knows her face always gives her away and makes a mammoth effort to smile properly. She wonders what Madison read or misread there. Impatience that’s actually eagerness? All different kinds of frustration?
‘Don’t be silly, you’re on holiday,’ she says, with careful lightness. She’s glad Nick isn’t there to hear her parroting his words. ‘I’m just tired. Hormonal. You know.’
She doesn’t know why she’s said it but it’s actually true. She wouldn’t have if Bastian wasn’t still removing packages and bags from the boot of the car, though. It’s so ingrained in women not to embarrass men with talk like that, not to put them off.
‘Tell me about it,’ Madison is saying. ‘I’ve been ready to strangle someone all day. The waiter at dinner was so rude I felt like knocking him out. We should have come back. The food wasn’t a patch on Nick’s. Was it, honey?’
She turns and relieves Bastian of some of the shopping bags.
‘Hey, Laura,’ he says, ‘good to see you.’
She smiles and it’s easy to summon this time.
‘Shoes,’ says Madison, holding up the bags and doing an excited little dance on the spot. ‘And maybe a couple of purses. Well, it’s Italy, right?’
It’s a relief for Laura to perform with her, to shake off her mood in a way she couldn’t have done if it was only her and Nick. ‘I’ll make us all drinks,’ she says, to Nick, as the Americans go out to the garden.
He hesitates, then leans in to kiss her cheek, so briefly that he almost misses. She knows it’s done out of relief because she’s playing the game, being a good host. He’s nervous of her moods in a way he never used to be. Maybe the really harmonious marriages are just about pretending more: being so scrupulously polite that there are no gaps for contempt to sidle into.
Soon, so soon, they are on their third drinks: some rum, lime and mint concoction – she’d bookmarked the recipe on her phone. They’re strong, but taste deceptively healthy because of all the mint. She knows they’re drinking too much. It’s one thing for Madison and Bastian – they’re on holiday – but she and Nick can’t keep this up all summer or they’ll be alcoholics. The loosening that it brings is so seductive, though. She’s about to go and get some grissini to soak up the rum when Madison says it.
‘You know what this set-up would be perfect for, don’t you?’ She laughs, tosses her hair back over her shoulders. Bastian is looking off into the distance. Madison has been doing most of the talking and Laura doesn’t think he’s been listening properly for a while.
Nick smiles. ‘Er, a guesthouse? I thought that’s what we were doing.’
‘No, silly,’ says Madison, leaning forward to slap his knee, which she misjudges slightly, the slap too sharp, making him flinch. ‘I mean, you’d probably need a few more guests to make it really interesting.’
‘Oh.’ Nick’s eyes widen comically as he rubs his knee. ‘You mean keys in the bowl and all that?’
‘All that.’ Madison winks. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. Bast’s parents were into it, once they’d moved out of the city to the ’burbs. You wouldn’t have thought you could beat New York City for life experiences but that place, my God, flags on the front lawn and keys in the bowl.’
Laura tenses. Madison has got Bastian’s attention now. He’s had only one of the cocktails, switching to beer at some point she hadn’t noticed.
Madison finishes off her drink and puts the glass down by her feet. It overbalances but she doesn’t notice. She’s downed all three drinks so fast that Laura thinks she must have let herself get seriously dehydrated. Apparently they’d had wine with dinner and were in the sun all day. The same sun has long slipped below the hill-line now, but even in the low light Madison looks much more undone than Laura has yet seen her: mascara smudges under one eye, a grease stain on her vest top and the label at the back sticking out.
‘They moved out there when Bast was, like, thirteen. His sisters were already at college so he was the only one left. Mommy’s happy accident. It was her who wanted them to leave the city. She thought it might stop Bast’s dad working his way through the bored wives of the Upper East Side. But then they got out to Westchester and it was even worse.’ She laughs again and reaches to retrieve her fallen glass, only to put it down again when she sees it’s empty.
‘Let me get you another,’ says Nick, already on his feet, patently relieved to leave the conversation.
‘Water or soda. Thanks, Nick.’ Bastian’s voice is low and controlled.
Madison looks up at Bastian, waiting. For what, Laura isn’t sure. Details to add colour to the anecdote? Maybe it’s one they’ve told before at dinner parties, a double-hander that amused their friends. Laura doubts it, though, and she cringes for Madison, whose inebriation is making her slow, her smile beginning to falter now.
‘Hey, are you mad at me?’ she says, in a baby voice so intimate that Laura thinks her own presence must have been forgotten.
Bastian doesn’t reply and something about his silence and stillness makes Laura go cold. She gets up and heads for the kitchen, for Nick, whom she suddenly wants to be near for the first time all day.
Behind her, Madison continues to wheedle in her cutesy voice. Before she goes inside, Laura glances back in time to see Madison lift herself effortfully onto Bastian’s lap, straddling him. She looks away so fast that she cricks her neck, the hot pain of it making her blind for a second.
A muffled cry makes it impossible for her not to look again. Madison is in a heap on the ground, Bastian standing and looking down at her impassively. Laura realizes he must simply have got up, letting Madison slide off his lap to the ground. Transfixed at the kitchen door, revulsion, sympathy and something horribly like triumph whip through Laura, one by one.
Day 4
At breakfast under the pergola the next morning, Madison has the idea of them all going to Urbino for the day. Laura suspects that it isn’t spontaneous: Madison’s enthusiasm feels forced. She has a frenetic edge this morning, her eyes so bright they look glassy. Some of it is probably hangover but she’s also overcompensating for Bastian, who is quiet. Dangerously quiet, is the phrase that comes to Laura.
Last night, after Madison had talked about Bastian’s childhood, the atmosphere had soured irretrievably. Within a few minutes, Bastian had thanked Laura and Nick for the drinks, apologized again for missing dinner and gone up to bed – all this without a word to or even a glance at Madison. She’d followed him soon after, looking stricken.
And then, in the thick of deepest night, Laura had woken with the certainty that something had just broken the quiet. Not her own dreams, or something to do with Nick, still unconscious beside her, but something else. She crept out to the landing and the window whose shutters were never closed. She was already expecting to see those car lights again, retreating into the tangle of trees until the darkness swallowed them. But it was silent outside. Even the cicadas had paused.
Then she heard a sound, only it was from down the landing, a soft, barely audible susurration that could only have been a woman crying softly. Madison. She waited, straining so hard to hear that white noise boomed and hissed in her ears. She realized she was waiting to hear the low rumble of Bastian’s voice, reassuring and comforting, telling Madison to stop. But there was nothing and it was so hard not to imagine the American woman in there by herself that Laura had to fight the instinct to go to her.
Eventually, the weeping stopped, or became too muted for her to hear, and she crept back to bed. For a long time, she lay wide-eyed but unseeing in the dark room. She wasn’t just thinking about Madison. In fact, she was thinking about herself, her past. A memory of something similar had come to her from nowhere: crying without being given comfort, the settling around her of a terrible bleakness made so much worse by night. She’d left that out of her university diary. She’d checked as soon as Nick got into the shower that morning.
‘So, what do you guys say? Are you in?’ Madison smiles her thousand-watt smile. She hasn’t eaten anything yet.
Laura has a hundred jobs to be getting on with today, the most important of which is to ring Massimo. She knows Nick won’t. But she finds herself nodding, wanting to help the woman whose husband has still not looked at or spoken to her today at all, as far as Laura can tell. Also as penance for the shaming surge of victory last night, when Madison had fallen unceremoniously to the ground.
‘Why not?’ she says. ‘We’ve only been to Urbino once, haven’t we?’ She raises her eyebrows at Nick, who is looking mystified by her enthusiasm. ‘It was gorgeous, even in the rain. But today, in this light, it’ll look spectacular. Shall we go?’
Nick shrugs and smiles. ‘You’re the boss. I’ve got a list of jobs you said I had to do but if I can have a holiday-day, I’m all over it.’
She laughs. She and Nick are easier with each other in the face of the other couple’s obvious tension. Because of it, probably.
‘When we moved here,’ she says to Madison, ‘we promised ourselves we’d have holiday-days – you know, where we did proper tourist stuff. So it never just became about work. How many have we had, do you think?’ She looks at Nick.
‘Two?’ he says. ‘Maybe three? In how many months?’
‘Great!’ Madison is twisting a long lock of her hair round and round. A single strand gets tangled in her ring and she tugs it away, breaking it. It must be a nervous tic, the twirling: she’s been doing it all morning. ‘Let’s all go together then. It’ll be fun, won’t it, Bast?’
It’s a risk putting him on the spot like this and they all know it. The moment stretches and Laura feels a disproportionate horror that he’s going to blank her. But then he smiles, briefly at Nick and then, more lingeringly, at Laura.
‘It’d be great if you came,’ he says. ‘A holiday-day.’
‘This is so exciting!’ cries Madison. ‘I thought I’d have to do so much persuading to get y’all to say yes. Let’s go in our car. There’s no point taking both and it’ll be fun to talk on the way. What is it – an hour from here?’
‘I’m happy to drive,’ says Nick. ‘I know the roads – we’ve been that way a few times.’
‘You sure?’ says Bastian. ‘More room in ours.’
‘It’s fine,’ says Nick, standing. ‘I’ll get more coffee.’ He’s gone before Bastian can say anything else.
When he returns, Laura and Madison are looking slightly nervously from one man to the other, ready to head off any horn-locking over the cars, but Bastian has apparently decided to let it go. All the energy women expend to make sure men’s egos are not ruffled, Laura thinks. Always smoothing, smoothing.
When the Americans have gone inside to get ready, Nick off to do something to the pool chemicals, she stacks their breakfast plates onto a tray. Her mind goes again to the strange disturbance in the night. She replays it a couple more times until she’s almost sure that what she heard was more than a voice. Something was thrown or dropped first, she’s sure of it.
As she straightens up, Bastian is suddenly there, his fingertip pressing into her spine at the small of her back. He does it so fleetingly she might have imagined it, only she hasn’t. She knows instantly that it’s designed to remind her of the party. She starts to turn towards him but he moves so he’s behind her and she’s pinned between him and the table. His hands come down over hers on the handles of the tray and, flustered, she grips it harder. He peels her fingers off, one by one. His breath moves her hair.
‘What time are we heading off, then?’ It’s Nick calling as he approaches from the pool, the vines that twist around the pergola only partially shielding her and Bastian. She freezes but he’s already moved away, the space behind her abruptly cool without him in it.
‘Let me take that,’ he’s saying, and the tray is borne away, so easily. She looks over at Nick, who has stepped back to let Bastian pass. She watches her husband watch Bastian as he walks towards and then into the villa, their villa, without looking back.
They’re on the road by eleven, Nick driving, though there’d been another debate about that before they set off. It was her doing: some devilment making her suggest the hire car might be better because it so obviously was, and it was only Nick’s irritating pride that was inconveniencing all of them. She was also embarrassed by how filthy their car was. She insisted on going through it, collecting sweet wrappers and old receipts, napkins from the gelateria, before letting anyone get in.
A contrary part of her wants to remain cross but as the journey gets under way it’s impossible, her irritation simply falling away. Every time she leaves the house she thinks she should do it more, but then she forgets, or the jobs in the house become too pressing. Besides, Luna Rossa is her dream home and there’s only a certain amount of dissension towards this notion she can allow, even from herself.
Today, the sense of liberation is joined by excitement. Bastian sits behind her, Madison insisting Laura go in the front next to Nick, and she can sense his eyes on her. She piles her hair on top of her head and secures it with a clip. She knows her neck is visible through the gap between the seat and the headrest.
It’s a perfect day, hot without being oppressive, the sky above the road a brilliant, startling blue. There’s no air-conditioning – another embarrassment – and, as usual, Nick has wound down his window all the way. Madison, behind him, is getting the full effects. As they accelerate up to the speed limit on the fast road, Madison has to hold her hair back so it doesn’t whip her cheeks.
