Summer Fever, page 15
‘What was all that about, this afternoon? Before Ivan came back.’ She forces herself to look him in the eye.
He shrugs again. ‘Just Madison being Madison.’
‘I found it … It was like a performance.’
‘Yeah.’ He sighs. ‘It’s part of her schtick. She likes to be the outrageous one. It makes things uncomfortable sometimes. It’s not really me. I guess I’m more … I don’t know, like, romantic or something.’ He smiles and looks away, embarrassed.
‘I didn’t know if I was being boring.’
He shakes his head. ‘It’s all the fake stuff that gets boring.’
And then he is even closer, his mouth three inches from hers, and most of that is not distance but the difference in height. She knows her chin would fit perfectly into the crook of his neck. Time stretches and she swallows, bites her lip, resists the contradictory urges, which come upon her simultaneously – to step away or to fall into the kiss that is surely coming – to initiate one or the other because not doing anything is suddenly unbearable.
But he moves away, and she is left swaying. In that moment, she despises him. But then she sees Madison, just beyond the trees, hair up in a towel turban and squinting in full sunshine as she searches for something. Bastian, presumably. She hasn’t noticed them yet, hidden in the watery gloom of the olive grove. Laura meets his eye, silently giving him permission to go. She is braver now they can’t do anything, brave enough to give him the sort of smile that she knows he’ll take as a promise.
She hears Madison greet him, the relief in her voice just to have found him, and she hates herself profoundly. That she’s a woman’s woman is one of the few parts of her identity she’s never questioned. And yet she knows she’ll do it again. I can’t resist him, she thinks, but it’s not true. There’s always a choice. She could resist him. She just won’t.
Day 6
Nick is out when Angelo’s men turn up the next day. He’s not in the house, though the car’s still there. He’s probably pottering in his bloody workshop, she thinks. She hurries across the terrace, doing her best to smile at Madison, who has been lying next to the pool since breakfast.
‘Hey, are you looking for Nick?’
She stops dead. ‘Have you seen him? Angelo’s men have shown up again and it’s his thing so he should be the one to deal with them.’ She rolls her eyes, so it’s more silly Nick than how she really feels.
‘Yeah, he went past about twenty minutes ago. He was going for a hike.’
‘A hike?’
‘He had a little backpack and a bottle of water.’ Madison shrugs. ‘He was headed for the path.’
Laura inspects Madison surreptitiously through her sunglasses. Her skin is glistening with her coconut-scented oil. It’s turning a shade of brick-brown so deep against the highlighted ends of her hair that it looks fake, like those girls on reality shows with their lip fillers and inch-long lashes. She thinks back to what happened at Ivan’s and it makes her skin heat. Madison, though, seems completely normal.
‘He didn’t say anything to me about going for a walk. Typical. Thanks, though.’
She retraces her steps through the villa, bashing her hip on the sharp corner of the table because she’s rushing. She’s left the men out the front, on the drive, and is conscious of keeping them waiting even though she doesn’t want them there.
When she left to look for Nick, there were three of them. They’d arrived in the cherry-red flatbed, Tommaso driving and two others squashed in next to him. There was no sign of Angelo. Now another van has pulled up: grubby white with rust on the wheel arches. Its two occupants have opened the back doors and are smoking in their shade. As she approaches, they turn and, for a horrible moment, she thinks one of them is the mechanic. She raises her hand against the sun: its almost-midday glare is suddenly angled right in her eyes. It’s not him, thank God, but is surely a relation. He has the same arrangement of features, though in this man they’re sketched in more crudely, and the same blue eyes, livid against his dark skin.
Her relief that it’s not him is short-lived. Slowly, deliberately, so she can’t miss it, he nudges the man next to him, whom she realizes she knows, from the work done on the pool. He must be employed by Angelo now. Something is muttered, which makes them laugh. The first flicks away his cigarette and, though it’s still lit, he doesn’t bother to stamp it out.
‘Signora.’ Tommaso comes forward. ‘Your husband is not here?’
‘No, he’s not.’ She doesn’t smile. ‘You’ll have to deal with me.’
She’s furious with Nick, and with these strangers who have littered her drive, this obnoxious son of Angelo’s, who thinks he has the right to look at her the way he is. He’s smiling indulgently at her now, as though her obvious animosity is just a novel way of flirting with him. All this makes her assertive.
‘Can I have a word?’ she says, and walks backs towards the shade of the front door, assuming he’ll follow.
‘I don’t know what Nick said to you when you were here before with your father, or yesterday, but we don’t need another well.’ She’s speaking fast, not bothering to think of simple words to aid his comprehension.
‘Signora, we know this land.’ He smiles again, though it cools as she stares stonily back. ‘My father, he understands it. His cousin owns the next property. The boundary there …’ He waggles his hand, like a boat in choppy water.
‘The boundary? What’s that got to do with digging a new well?’ Anxiety clutches at her. She’d hated the legal stuff from the outset: the meetings in rat-tat-tat Italian, the sense that nothing was entirely official and kosher. It always reminded her of those documentaries about people who sank all their savings into a Spanish villa only to find out the land was never theirs, that the government was going to bulldoze their retirement dream into the ground.
Tommaso blows out his breath, shrugs. ‘It moves, yes? His land, your land, it’s not sure. But he is family so …’
She swallows, mouth dry.
‘It’s not problem, signora. We are here now.’
‘But Massimo –’
‘Massimo is old. He forgets that English, German, they always want pool. As we say before, it’s different with pool. So much water. Water is precious here, in summer. Like gold.’ He rubs his fingers together, and she wants to go inside and shut the door in his face.
‘So,’ she says, forcing herself to speak calmly. ‘What is this today then? Are you planning to start digging? Because I’m really not sure …’
He is already shaking his head and making soothing noises, his hands raised as though she’s a skittish horse about to bolt.
‘No, no, not today. For the well, we only look. Maybe we dig a little, to find the best place, but only a little. No, today we continue on the house. Giuseppe House, you say?’
‘Hang on, you continue work? You haven’t given us a quote yet.’
He starts to smile and stops when he sees her face. ‘Nick and I, we agree everything. He doesn’t tell you this? He doesn’t tell you about the regulations? For the terre … For the earthquakes?’
‘He … Look, I don’t know what he’s said to you, but we don’t … We can’t spend …’
He hushes her again and she wishes she had the nerve to slap down his hands. ‘No more money today. The deposit is paid. Nick has done this. Don’t worry, signora, there’s nothing for you to do now. You can swim in your pool, have a drink, have a siesta. You don’t worry about us. We do everything. We make safe. You don’t know we’re here.’
Before she can say anything else, he turns back to his men and barks an instruction, voice abruptly cold and flinty.
He looks back at her. ‘Your car.’ He gestures dismissively at it. It looks so shabby with its broken wing mirror. ‘Is English.’
‘Yes,’ she says impatiently. ‘We brought it over with us.’
He waggles his finger at her. ‘You make Italian, si. You break the law here too.’
‘What?’ Panic grips her again.
He draws a rectangular box in the air. ‘You have only sixty days to get changed or they can take it.’
He means the registration plates, she suddenly realizes. ‘Is that true? We need Italian plates?’
His eyes narrow. ‘Of course is true. And I think you are here longer. You should go to the questura soon, before someone tells.’
She knows that word. It’s what the police headquarters for each district is called.
‘Are you going to tell, then?’ She’s trying to be brave but the tremor in her voice is obvious.
He barks out a laugh, then places a finger over his lips. ‘Not me, signora. But someone. Now, we look at the land?’
‘You can come round the side.’ She can’t think what else to say. ‘Follow me.’
As she leads them around the house, even as her anxious thoughts are trampling over each other, she’s also conscious of her hips swinging, and the stretchy material of her sundress, the way it clings to her legs with static, which she always forgets until she wears it. It’s a strange kind of relief to see Madison still lying prone by the pool, one oiled leg bent, the other stretched out, hipbones jutting sharply above her bikini briefs.
She lifts her head slightly as the men file past but she doesn’t sit up and draw herself in to hide her almost naked body, as Laura knows she herself would have done. The men look down at Madison, of course, one of them – the mechanic’s brother or cousin or whatever he is – smirking quite openly. Madison stares him out, one eyebrow raised, until he looks away, and Laura wants to hug her for it.
‘I suppose you know where …?’ she begins, and Tommaso nods.
‘We know this place,’ he says again, and it makes her want to scream. ‘We will be there when your husband comes back. You stay here, signora, with your friend. Is better like this.’
She lets them go and sits down heavily on the lounger next to Madison’s.
‘I thought you said you didn’t need this damn well,’ she says. She holds out her glass to Laura, who takes it clumsily, the ice cubes rattling.
‘I’ll fetch you another.’ She starts to get to her feet.
Madison reaches out and pulls her down. ‘No, silly. It’s for you. You look hot, so drink, please. Tell me what’s going on with those creeps. Something is. I get really bad vibes off them.’
‘Oh, I don’t bloody know. It’s Nick. Like I said at Ivan’s, he can’t say no to things like this, to men like them. It’s so typical that he’s not here.’
‘Do you want me to ask Bast to go talk to them, tell them to leave? He’s inside working but I can get him. If Nick’s agreed to anything he’s not telling you about, it’s better to get the full story. It’s your place too.’
‘No, it’s fine. But thank you.’ Something stops her confiding that Nick has already agreed to work being done on Giuseppe’s House and apparently has handed over money for a deposit already. Embarrassment, she supposes, for admitting to not knowing anything about it. ‘Besides, I want Nick to deal with it when he gets back from his walk. It’s his problem, not mine, and certainly not yours.’
‘Well, if Bastian can help with speaking Italian, let me know. We’re your friends now, you know. Not just guests.’ She squeezes Laura’s hand. ‘It’s so weird but I kind of feel like I’ve known you for years.’ She laughs. ‘It’s only been a week.’
Laura can’t think what to say. She’s afraid she might cry. Guilt in the face of Madison’s kindness mixes queasily with her attraction to Bastian, and her fear of giving herself away. She bows her head, exhaustion coming over her like a wave. She’d slept only fitfully, drifting in and out of scenarios her conscious mind kept playing out: Madison half naked in the pool; the huge wheels of the lorry veering towards them; her and Bastian left undisturbed in the olive grove, how far they might have gone, what she would have let him do.
‘Honey, you look like you need a nap.’ Madison tucks a loose strand of Laura’s hair behind her ear, and it’s so like what Bastian had done the day before that she twists awkwardly away, standing and backing off until she makes herself stop, water slopping out of the glass she’s still clutching.
Madison frowns. ‘Hey, what’s wrong? Are you sick?’
‘I can’t deal with all this,’ she says, her voice breaking.
Madison gets to her feet in one easy movement and takes Laura’s free hand, which she strokes. ‘Those guys have really got to you. Go lie down. You’ll feel better when you’ve had some sleep.’
‘I can’t leave you with them.’ But she’s only being polite now. In her mind, she’s already lying prone in her bedroom, shutters closed. It will be cool and dim at this time of day.
‘You can,’ Madison is saying. ‘Go. I’ll make sure they don’t do anything drastic.’
She does feel better after she’s slept, which she does, deeply and dreamlessly. The jittery guilt has dissipated and seems almost alien to her now. Nothing even happened with him yet, she thinks, over and over as she showers, and puts on a clean dress. And yet. She regards herself in the full-length mirror, enjoying how the pale green dress that was a little bit tight only a month ago now moves easily over the swell of her hips and the jut of her ribcage, but still nips in to make her waist look neat and narrow. Her eyes have lost their shadows and she appears flushed and well: pretty.
She’s been upstairs only a couple of hours but the nap has also pushed the earlier part of the day – Tommaso and his men, Madison by the pool – thoroughly into the past. To her, it feels like yesterday so it seems absurd that the builders might still be here. And yet they are: when she goes to the window she can see their vans parked on the drive. She heads for the other side of the house, for the Nun’s Cell, so she can see out over the garden more easily, towards the pool and beyond to the outbuildings.
The lounger where Madison had been lying is now obscured by an open parasol. She notices Nick then, on the far side of the pool where, behind the balustrade, the land falls away. He’s on his knees, leaning out precipitously over the water to reach for something: a bee or a butterfly, probably. She sees him smile and his lips move, and she realizes that Madison must still be there, for once in the shade. The little rucksack, emblazoned with the name of his old gym in London, is abandoned on the ground and his grey T-shirt is patched darkly with sweat. He’s probably just got back. Time feels odd, elastic, as though she’d drifted into the future, but has now been tugged back for some significant reason.
A tiny noise or perhaps it’s just a soundless shift in the air makes her swing round. It’s Bastian. He stands framed in the doorway of the Spartan little room. Spartan except for her ceiling, gold-starred and Virgin Mary blue. His dark eyes scan round it, taking in the rickety rattan chair in the corner, the single bed, the plain wooden cross above the headboard – a relic she’d thought would somehow bring bad luck to remove.
Finally, he looks back at her. His gaze goes up and down and over her, quite unhurriedly. She lets him look, her heart speeding. He turns to close the door softly, silently. For a quite big man – not especially tall but well-built, his shoulders muscled to the degree that he’s slightly top-heavy – he is light on his feet. Everything is done carefully, deliberately. It’s impossible to imagine him stepping on a plug or stubbing his toe. A bubble of hysteria swells inside her at the thought but she makes herself breathe slowly until it subsides.
It feels different now to how it did among the olive trees, and in the bookshop. There’s a palpable sense of purpose. As he moves towards her, she braces, gripping the windowsill behind her and feeling the same give in the old wood that she felt that first day in the master bedroom, when the Americans had just arrived. She had looked down on him as he looked up, those black eyes of his hidden by sunglasses, and she hadn’t sensed anything. But had something undefined in her already known that this would happen, even then? Maybe.
She opens her mouth to say, as she did in the olive grove, that they shouldn’t do this. It’s not that she really thinks this – or, rather, she does think it, morally; she just knows that it won’t make any difference. The reason she’s about to say it is because she’s so nervous she can’t keep silent another second. But before she can, his mouth is on hers, and she has to stop herself smiling inside the kiss.
‘I’ve missed you,’ he says, breathing the words into her ear, sending arrows of heat through her. ‘I’ve thought about nothing else all day.’
She thinks about what she could say – should say – about Nick and Madison, about trust and betrayal, but now he’s touching her, fingers brushing her cheek and down her neck to her collarbone, then pushing into her hair at the back, bunching it in his hand and pulling it, not hard so it hurts, not quite, but so she has no choice except to look up at him.
He begins to kiss her again, and she tries to stay in her body and out of her head but the sensation of difference is so overwhelming that she can’t help it. Everything is so other to what she’s known for twenty years.
She has never cheated on Nick. Bastian’s mouth is somehow wetter and hotter than his. And the concentrated strength of him, which is now pushing her so hard against the windowsill that the lowest two inches of her spine bloom with pain – that’s completely different too.
Even as she’s telling herself to be in the moment, she’s up and out of herself and seeing them through the window as someone looking up from the garden might: Bastian’s head bent to hers, their dark hair mingling and indistinguishable from that distance, her arms at her sides, braced to keep herself upright, palms splayed on the sill.
Ironically, it’s this thought, the notion that someone (and who but Madison or Nick?) might be watching, that tips her into a place where she’s feeling more than thinking. She shifts her position and it’s only a slight movement but it opens herself up to him more. He senses it immediately, his hands moving out of her hair to grip her hips. His breathing changes. Low down inside her a beat quickens, everything around it loosening and falling away. He lifts her onto the shallow lip of the sill and her legs go round him. And then he stops.
