Summer Fever, page 12
‘Are you flagging?’ says Nick, laying his hand on her shoulder. His face has taken on a strange cast under the rich glow of the late-afternoon sunlight. It’s as though all the colours have been dialled up too high, turning them slightly sickly. Madison’s shocking-pink bag, which she’s already using, seems to pulse. ‘Let’s find the car. Is that OK with you two?’ He turns to the Americans.
‘Sure,’ says Bastian. Though Nick has spoken, he says it to her.
Nick leads the way and they soon find themselves in much quieter streets. Some of them are too narrow for cars, the balconies jutting out above them so close that they’re almost kissing. It’s scruffier off the tourist trail, the walls graffitied and stained with trails of rust. A moped rounds a corner at speed and scatters them, Nick swearing over the wasp-whine of the engine, his voice echoing and bouncing. High above, the narrow slice of sky visible between the roofs has darkened.
‘Surely it’s not going to rain, is it?’ she says. No one answers.
On the corner ahead there is a café in deep shade. There are no tables for foot-sore tourists outside. As they approach, three men exit the door, and there is a general impression of demonstrated wealth: sharp white shirts, expensive jeans, designer sunglasses. A car, black paintwork polished to a high shine, glides up to them.
‘Hey, isn’t that that Angelo guy?’ says Bastian.
Before Laura can properly focus, the men shake hands and disperse, two of them into the back seat of the car, the third swallowed by the dark café once again. The car disappears silently round a corner.
‘Are you sure?’ says Nick. ‘Why would he be out here?’
‘Bigger fish than he seemed, maybe.’ Bastian shrugs. ‘It was definitely him.’
They set off again. Nick, at the front, is tense now, and she knows he’s lost them in the warren of streets. He’s never had a very good sense of direction. She’s always made gentle fun of him for this, but she knows not to say anything now. Besides, she’s still thinking about that strange sighting of Angelo, so out of context. A dark blot marring a golden day.
‘I think we’re too far to the south,’ says Bastian. They’ve stopped by a church covered with scaffolding, probably damaged by an earthquake.
‘How do you even know what’s south?’ says Madison, laughing, her fingers entwining around his arm. She’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have noticed the change in mood.
Nick, face set, allows Bastian to lead them back towards the centre. They can only have been gone for twenty minutes but the atmosphere has shifted here, too. It’s only just past six but the bustling streets now feel overrun. Music, amplified and pseudo-medieval, is coming from somewhere, and the crowds have grown louder to compensate.
‘Let’s stay,’ says Madison, looking imploringly up at Bastian, ‘have some more wine.’ But he doesn’t answer her, and as they move into single file to get through a solid clump of people watching a street performer, Laura finds herself between the couple. Under the cover of the crowd, Bastian’s fingers finds hers, just for a moment, interlocking and then breaking apart again. Heat spreads through her.
When they finally turn into the street where the car is parked, Nick points it out as though he’s been the one to find it. ‘Here we are,’ he says, but then stops dead. The wing mirror on the street side has been knocked off and is dangling by its wires. The car, already caked in dust and missing one of its hubcaps, now looks humiliatingly shabby. He lifts it back into position and fiddles for a while but when he lets go it inevitably falls again, knocking and twisting against the door.
‘Great,’ she says unhelpfully. ‘I told you you should put them in.’
He rounds on her, suddenly fierce. ‘No, you bloody didn’t.’
Bastian lays a hand on his arm. ‘I’ll drive back, man. We can tape the mirror.’
Nick moves so Bastian’s hand drops. ‘No, I’ll drive. It’s my car.’
It takes ages to get out of the centre. Perhaps it’s rush-hour, or everyone is trying to get closer to whatever is happening in the town. Laura has the sense again that they never quite understand what’s going on, as though one hand is permanently tied behind their backs. They inch along streets nothing like the oldest lanes at the heart of the place, even the scruffy ones they’d ended up lost in. These are suburbs on the wrong side of the medieval gates, anonymously and generically modern: plate-glass shop fronts and purpose-built apartment blocks, all the lines hard and straight.
The sky breaks open as they join the autostrada. It’s dry and then it isn’t, rain suddenly pelting the windscreen. These abrupt about-turns in the weather always seem so Italian – dramatic and noisy – as though the people are forged of them. Inside the car it’s silent, the conversation having faltered somewhere around Urbino’s outskirts, the last bit of shine rubbed off the spell they’d all been under. The only sounds now are the frantic whirr of the wipers on the fastest setting and the roar of lorries as Nick overtakes.
Laura is sitting in the back behind Nick this time. Dread clutches her as he pulls out into the middle lane yet again. There are three enormous articulated lorries from the same haulage company in a row. Because they brought the car over from England and it’s right-hand drive, the tops of the lorries’ wheels are at eye-level on Laura’s side as they pass, mere inches away, the spray too much for the wipers to cope with.
Around them, obscured by water now, the land is flat, and a buffeting wind has got up. Through the gap between the door and Nick’s seat, she can see him having to grip the wheel tighter every time the wind shoves at the car. The high-sided lorries sway with it and, as they pass the second, some quirk of the air currents pushes at them even harder, making the car swerve towards the fast lane as if it’s been kicked.
Nick slows down a little, and though there is relief in that, the overtaking of the third lorry feels interminable. Carefully, so she doesn’t startle him, she reaches forward to touch his arm. It’s an old wordless signal between them that she is afraid, that she needs him to do something to help her: slow down, usually, but in this case get past this last lorry and then stop overtaking.
When they had first got together, she had tried not to criticize, knowing how men could take it as a judgement on their driving, which only infuriated and made things so much worse. She had learnt to keep quiet in the past, but there had been a night, driving down the M3 to visit Nick’s grandparents in Hampshire, when the combination of heavy rain and a hangover made her so anxious that she couldn’t catch her breath. He’d asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t speak and the thought of him being distracted by her when he was still driving made it even worse: the panic rose until she thought it might take her head off. She’d just pointed at the road and hoped he understood. He had, pulling off at the next services. They’d parked there for an hour. He’d gone to buy her tea, loaded with sugar, and had stroked her hair.
Years later, just before the wedding, she and Lou had gone on holiday – a last girls’ break before she tied the knot.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Lou had said one night, the only person who could have asked the question without Laura taking offence. ‘About Nick?’
And when she’d nodded, she’d thought of that service station, the empty car park, dark and shining with rain, and Nick’s hand on her hair.
Now, gently, she squeezes his arm. She has deliberately used her right arm so Bastian in the passenger seat won’t see.
‘What?’ he snaps, and his tone makes her let go instantly. ‘I’m trying to concentrate.’
She sits back in her seat and closes her eyes as they finally pass the double set of front wheels, but it’s worse blind, and as she opens them again, she sees for real what her mind has been imagining, the vast bulk of the lorry swaying into their path, huge tyres straying over the white lines towards them.
‘Nick!’ she shrieks, before she can stop herself and he pulls to the left. Next to her, Madison grips the seat and Bastian in the front braces against his window as they veer into the fast lane. From behind them, someone sounds their horn, not a quick warning blast but a long blare, which makes Madison scream. Nick pulls right and puts his foot down at the same time, to get out in front of the lorry, which seems to have speeded up. The car rocks with the sudden changes of direction and Laura waits for them to completely lose control, to spin out in front of the lorry and be crushed by it. But then they are clear, back in the slow lane and out in front of the lorry, the car straightening. The rain abruptly eases, and up ahead an exit appears out of the spray, a wonderful green and white sign pointing the way.
‘Pull off,’ she says. ‘Nick, pull off.’
He does, and in under a minute, like a miracle, they have come to a stop in the deserted car park of a builders’ merchant. The rain has moved to the east, sweeping greyly over the hills, and the sun comes out.
Laura leans against the car, slowing her breathing. The tarmac dries as she watches it. She doesn’t look at Nick and he doesn’t come to her. Madison, silent for once, goes to Bastian and lays her head against his chest.
When they’re ready to leave, the near-miss already retreating under the glowing benediction of the evening sun, Bastian gets in the driver’s side without a word.
The WhatsApp message arrives just after eight: Oi, we NEED to Skype and tonight! Stop bloody avoiding me.
She rises from the table in the kitchen, where she and Nick have eaten cold leftovers in silence. They haven’t talked through what happened on the autostrada. Bastian and Madison have gone out for a pizza and she’d thought that, once she and Nick were alone, they would go over it until it was just a story, an anecdote. But Nick has withdrawn into himself to the degree that she finds herself trying not to scrape her cutlery on the plate.
‘I’ve got to Skype Lou,’ she says. ‘I completely forgot, what with …’
He nods without looking up.
She closes the snug door carefully behind her, then decides to take the laptop upstairs. The stone floors downstairs don’t muffle sound.
Lou is eating cereal when she appears on the screen, her face in shadow because she’s sitting in front of the window. The English sky behind her is blank with white cloud and Laura has a strange urge to cry.
‘At fucking last,’ says Lou. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. You’ve replied to about a tenth of my texts and no emails at all.’ She stops, spoon hovering in mid-air, dripping milk. ‘Hey, what’s wrong, Chapman? Your little face looks all funny.’
Lou always uses Laura’s maiden name, just as she did at university, though it annoys Nick. Now it makes Laura want to weep, a welling in her chest that she doesn’t think she can swallow. Her eyes fill and she shakes her head.
‘Shall I tell you what happened at work today?’ Lou says, moving easily past Laura’s inability to speak. ‘That’ll make you feel better about yourself.’
Laura laughs, though it comes out like a sob. ‘It’s just that we nearly had a crash on the autostrada,’ she says. ‘It was fine, it was just a near-miss, but it’s shaken me.’
‘Oh, love. Was it about half five, half six your time? I went all cold. I texted my mum to check she was still breathing but it must have been you.’
Laura smiles shakily. It’s another of their old jokes, this, that Lou is vaguely psychic, though Laura knows that she secretly believes she is.
‘Nick kept overtaking these lorries in the rain – biblical rain that came out of nowhere with all this spray. I really thought at one point we were … Anyway,’ she shakes her head, unwilling to relive it after all, ‘it’s fine. Why are you eating cereal for dinner again?’
‘I need to go shopping.’
‘It was ever thus.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s all right for you in Italy, eating massive tomatoes from the market every day. Making your own pesto.’ She pauses. ‘Chapman, is it just what happened today? You seem a bit … wired. And I wasn’t exaggerating before – you’ve been ridiculously elusive. You’ve lost weight too, you bastard. I can see your cheekbones.’
She switches on a light next to her laptop. It’s out of shot but Laura knows exactly what it looks like: a squat plastic desk lamp that Lou stole from halls. A yearning to be in Lou’s flat, wine in the fridge, the telly on in the background because Lou can’t stand a quiet room, sweeps over her. ‘I can actually see you now,’ she says. ‘I miss you.’
‘Me too. But we’ll come to that in a minute. First, I want you to tell me about your guests. As we’ve established, you’ve said fuck-all about them on WhatsApp and I need details. Are they a nightmare?’ She gets up and shakes out another bowl of Coco Pops.
‘You literally haven’t changed since 1999,’ says Laura.
‘Stop avoiding my questions.’
‘I’m not. They were with us today actually.’
‘What – when you nearly snuffed it? How come?’ Lou waits, spoon aloft again.
‘We had a day out together in Urbino. Their idea.’
‘That’s weird. Isn’t it? You four hanging out together. Is that normal?’
‘They’re our first guests. I don’t know what normal is. Maybe it’s because it’s only us and them. If there were more people staying …’
‘So you must like them, then, if you’re double-dating. Tell me what she’s like. Madison.’ Lou adopts her Chandler voice. ‘Could that name be any more American? Is she massively high-maintenance? I bet she doesn’t eat Coco Pops.’
‘She’s … she’s not like I thought, actually. I like her. She is high-maintenance but she knows it so it’s not annoying, somehow. She’s really kind of frank and honest about it, about how she keeps herself thin to look good for men and stuff.’
Lou grimaces. ‘How enlightened.’
‘No, that’s not … I can’t explain. I thought she was really uptight. Actually, I thought she was going to be a total bitch who’d be straight on Tripadvisor moaning about thread counts. But she’s not. She’s fun. Kind of wild. We gatecrashed a party the other night. She made us go. We could hear this music in the valley, and we followed the sound until we found it and then just walked in and had a load of cocktails. She said that’s what they do in LA.’
‘How the hell did she persuade Nick into that?’ It’s a long-running assertion of Lou’s that Nick is hopelessly square.
‘He didn’t approve at first. He thought it would be odd for us to be tagging along with our guests, getting drunk.’
‘Well, it is odd.’
Laura shrugs. ‘Anyway, he said we shouldn’t but he was getting on my nerves doing his working-class shoulder-chip act so I said I was going and then he didn’t want to be left out. Plus he’d found this path that led to the house where we thought the party must be. He wanted to be the one to show us where it was.’
‘Was he being competitive with Mr Madison? “Allow me to lead the way, ladies!”’
Laura laughs, slightly guiltily, and eyes the gap under the door.
‘So, what’s the husband like then? You’ve said nothing about him at all. You said before that he’d probably be really Muscle Beach. All protein powder and monosyllables.’
‘Oh, he’s fine. Pretty quiet.’
Lou plonks down her spoon. ‘Christ, this is like getting blood out of a stone. You’re going to have to give me a bit more than that. Is he fit?’
Laura gets up with the laptop and pushes the window wider with her free hand. She turns the screen round. ‘Not being smug but look at that.’
The evening light is doing its celestial thing again. The rain has washed the sky clean, the entire valley clean, and the colours are brighter, richer than she’s seen them.
‘You’re allowed to be smug. It’s bloody glorious. God, I can’t wait.’
Laura turns the laptop back. ‘I was going to ask you about that. Have you booked your flights yet? You need to soon because the end of July, when the schools break up, gets really pricey.’
‘Actually, I booked them at lunchtime. This is why I needed to talk to you.’ She’s smiling now, dark eyes shining in the lamp’s glare.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I went on and the whole of July was ruinous but they had a couple of seats left for an earlier date. So I went for that.’
‘How much earlier?’
‘Friday.’ She pulls a face. ‘Don’t kill me.’
Laura stomach clutches. ‘This Friday?’
‘Oh God, you’re fuming. Is it because of your guests? I promise I’ll be as good as gold. I’ll charm them, you know I will. People love me because I give everything away. And I won’t swear if they’re Christians. Not that they sound like Christians.’
Laura can’t seem to arrange her face into a smile. ‘It’s just so … full-on with them here. I wasn’t expecting you to … I thought it would be nice if we could go off on our own, have a little holiday here, like the old days.’
Lou is crestfallen. ‘I didn’t think of that. I just wanted to see you so much. Check you’re really OK. It’s been months and you’ve been weird lately. Shall I cancel them?’
‘You can’t. It’s easyJet. They were probably forty quid.’ Her voice is sharp and she sees Lou’s face crumple slightly. ‘Shit, sorry. It’s been such a strange day. Of course I want you to come.’
Lou smiles tentatively. ‘Really? You forgive me? I fly back on Monday. I could only get a couple of days off but I just couldn’t resist. You need the practice anyway – you’ll be full soon. And I can help. I make a mean martini, as you well know.’
Laura smiles, despite the tension already knotting inside her. ‘Send me the details, then. I’ll pick you up from the airport.’
‘Yay! I’m so excited. And this way, I get to see the Yanks for myself, as you’re not saying much.’
After the call, Laura goes back downstairs to put the laptop on to charge in the snug. As she pushes in the plug, the socket – new only a month ago – shifts, loose in the wall. She peers closer and sees the plaster has crumbled so that the screws have nothing to grip. She can see the bright plastic of a rawl plug.
She straightens, scattering the fall of plaster dust with her bare foot because she can’t deal with that tonight. The socket is beneath the window, and because it’s getting dark now, the lights bumping down the drive are obvious. She thinks for a second it’s the Americans, returning from their pizza. But the headlights are wrong. There are four of them, two small round ones flanking the bigger ones.
