Summer Fever, page 22
They sit on the ends of two loungers next to the pool, both of them facing the view.
There’s silence between them for a while and then, after a long sigh, Nick begins to speak.
‘You loved this place immediately. You fell in love with it. We were both pissed off with driving around getting lost and you looked so exhausted. I was worried about you and the …’
‘The pregnancy.’ Not a baby.
‘Yes. Then we got here and you lit up. You looked like your old self. And I remembered that, after the pregnancy didn’t work out, and you found … the messages, I thought, At least I can make sure she gets the villa. That’s in my control. I felt like I owed you that, after all you’d been through – all I’d put you through.’
She considers reaching out to him, telling him that he didn’t owe her, that they’d made a joint decision about the IVF, that his near-miss with the woman at work is almost forgiven, but she doesn’t move. Instead her gaze stays fixed on the view: her beloved view. It’s almost entirely in shadow now, taking on its mysterious night-time guise. Only a small area on the uppermost slopes is still bathed in golden light.
‘Is this even ours?’ she says.
His head snaps round. ‘What do you mean?’
‘This. The view. Luna Rossa. Could it be taken away?’ She thinks again about those Spanish retirement dreams, the bulldozers and the wrecking balls.
‘Of course it’s ours. What do you mean by that?’ Irritation has crept back into his voice, but again she knows that it’s not quite what it seems – that his impatience is masking panic.
‘You’re scared, Nick. And I don’t really know why so I suppose my mind is going to worst-case scenarios. You know I hate to be surprised. Please will you just tell me properly about Angelo? None of what you’ve said quite adds up. It makes me think about all those times you went off to see the notaio and told me to stay behind because you knew I found the legal stuff stressful.’
‘Look, none of this is to do with that. The Angelo stuff is completely separate. Luna Rossa is ours. I’ve got all the paperwork. Legally it all had to be translated into English because my Italian wasn’t up to it. Do you remember?’
She nods. ‘OK. So, Angelo, then.’
He lets out a long sigh. ‘I did meet Angelo in a bar, like I said. He seemed to know who I was, but I guess not many Brits buy houses round here. We’re not in Tuscany. He started off friendly, said he knew Luna Rossa well, that he’d played up here as a boy because his uncle, or maybe it was great-uncle, lived here, had a farm round here.’
‘Where?’
‘I’m not quite sure. He wasn’t clear. The point is, the farmhouse has gone. It collapsed in an earthquake in the seventies. Or it was so badly damaged it had to be pulled down. I couldn’t quite understand but I think there was a landslide so maybe it was unstable. Anyway, he also said the boundaries were different then – that Giuseppe’s House and the store behind it belonged to the uncle. We were sitting up at the bar, I remember it really clearly, and I could hardly hear him over the football commentary and the espresso machine going and everyone shouting at each other, you know how they do.
‘He took my beer glass and his coffee cup and made this map. My glass for Luna Rossa, his cup for Giuseppe’s House. Then he drew this wobbly line in sugar with his finger for the boundary. It didn’t make any logical sense. The olive grove was Luna Rossa’s, for instance, but the buildings by it were not. The thing is, the uncle or whoever he was had a son. Angelo referred to him as his cousin. Cugino. This was Nico.’
‘But surely this must have come up when the purchase was going through. If it didn’t, then Angelo is lying, or he’s wrong. The lawyer or the notaio would have flagged it.’ She sounds surer than she feels.
Nick runs his hands through his hair. ‘It was flagged.’
‘What?’
‘It came up, towards the end. I didn’t tell you because, well, because of what I said before. I didn’t think you needed to know unless it was going to be a big problem, like a deal-breaking kind of problem. And it wasn’t. There were loads of little complications that had to be ironed out. I didn’t tell you about all of them, because I didn’t see the point in worrying you. I wanted to take that off you.’
‘But this doesn’t sound like a little complication.’
‘Well, that’s how they made it seem.’
‘So are the buildings ours or not?’
‘They’re as good as ours. They will be.’
‘Will be? Nick, I don’t understand.’ She feels sick and dizzy, the paving stones shifting, like plates deep in the earth.
‘There’s a ten-year rule here. Nico inherited the land from his father. The main house had gone by then but he lived for a while in what we call Giuseppe’s House. Then he left town, the house stood abandoned, and forty-plus years later, we turned up wanting to buy. It was assumed, I honestly think in good faith by the agent, that the buildings belonged to Luna Rossa. The previous owner never did anything with them but it sounds as though she let Signor Ricci assume they were hers. Maybe she thought they were. And because there was no other house up here, it made sense.’
‘But they weren’t hers?’
‘No. Or probably not. The thing is, Nico is almost certainly dead. He was well into his thirties when he left and hasn’t been heard of since. Even Angelo assumes he’s dead. Either from some ancient vendetta thing Angelo probably made up, or of old age. And if he isn’t dead, he’s stayed away for nearly half a century. Why would he come back now?
‘Anyway, to get round the ownership thing, there’s a law here – that’s the ten-year thing. If Nico doesn’t claim his part of the land in ten years – nine and a half now – then it’s definitely ours. But to all intents and purposes it is anyway. He’s not coming back.’
She makes herself breathe out slowly. Perhaps it isn’t so bad. ‘Right, so let me get this straight. The worst case is that, by some miracle, he shows up, moves back into Giuseppe’s House and we can’t convert it into guest accommodation. Is that right? Because that would be really annoying but it wouldn’t affect Luna Rossa. We’d still have all this.’ She gestures around at the view, the cloud-canopied pine, the brand-new pool.
Nick pauses. ‘Well, strictly speaking, no. But it won’t come to that. It just won’t.’
She studies his face. It’s taken on a waxen cast now that the sun has dropped below the horizon. Just as the garden has been drained of colour as night creeps over it, so has Nick.
‘Everyone kept going on about the outbuildings as though that was all that mattered. Like you just have, I assumed this contested boundary was down by them somewhere. It wasn’t until Angelo drew that map on the counter that I got really worried. So I went back to the notaio – this must have been in late April. It was all there in the documents, an actual map with a red line showing what belonged to whom, but no one had shown me before. When I said this, he said I never asked. I dunno, maybe they made it all about the buildings because land is cheap here, and because it’s too rocky to farm. They’re used to the views – they don’t see them as we do.’ He finishes his beer and puts the bottle down clumsily. It rolls under the lounger.
‘So where’s the line?’
He twists round, grimly determined now, and points to the place they eat dinner every night. ‘It goes right through the middle of the pergola. From there back to the house is Luna Rossa’s. So are the drive and the olives either side of it. Everything between the house and the road, basically.’
‘But this side?’ Her hands are clammy. ‘Right here, where we’re sitting?’
He shakes his head. ‘We’d still have an acre or so. I mean, it’s not going to happen anyway, but we would.’
‘By the road? Or if we dig up a load of eight-hundred-year-old olive trees? I don’t think we’d even be allowed to do that, would we? So basically we have a house and a drive and that’s it. And presumably if Nico did decide to come back, we’ve built him a lovely pool for free.’
She thinks about getting angry with Nick for keeping all this back from her, but she hasn’t got the headspace for it. Or the energy. They sit on in silence, her mind reeling. A small part of her brain wonders vaguely what Madison and Bastian are doing, if they’ve been down to the kitchen and found dinner half prepared but the place deserted, like the Mary Celeste. Her thought processes are sluggish but slowly, slowly, something else comes into grim focus.
‘If Nico is dead, doesn’t his property go to his family? Can’t they claim instead?’
‘Maybe, if he was definitely dead. But there has to be proof. And there isn’t. He’s assumed to be alive unless there’s evidence saying otherwise.’
‘But we have to worry about him either turning up, or turning up dead, for the next ten years.’
He looks like he might refute this but then hangs his head. ‘Yeah, basically.’ He goes to reach for her hand, but doesn’t quite have the nerve. ‘And that’s where Angelo came in. He says his family have been looking for Nico all this time, that his loss has been a terrible thing for the family because they can’t grieve for him properly. He hinted at the bar that they were getting close to finding out what happened to him. He said something about Sicily, about going there himself to talk to people who might have known Nico.’
Everything grinds into place with a shriek. ‘And he said that if you sacked Massimo and gave him all our building work he’d maybe let the boundary thing go.’
‘Something like that.’
‘But there’s a possibility that he won’t let it go, and we will have given him thousands of euros to convert a house, dig a pool and a brand-new well, all of which he can then take ownership of. He’s a fucking genius.’
‘He seemed like a good guy. I think he probably still is, really. We talked about a quid pro quo and we were laughing about it because it was Latin and …’ He catches her look. ‘It was just going to be the pool and maybe the conversion, much further down the line. But then they came back and said about the well, and the earthquake regulations stuff.’ He puts his head into his hands.
A movement off to the side makes them jump. It’s Madison, wobbling slightly on high heels in the gloom as she makes her way across the garden. Laura hadn’t noticed how much the dark has thickened around them. The lit pool glows out of it, like a slab of blue ice. Beyond it, the valley is now a black void.
‘We’ll talk more later,’ she says grimly, as she rises to greet their guest.
Day 11
Laura wakes from a dreamless sleep to find Nick gone from the bed. One of the shutters is half open, admitting a bar of sunlight that has warmed the sheet where his indentation is still visible. Her phone tells her it’s after eight so he must have let her sleep in. She feels the usual stab of irritable guilt until she remembers the conversation from last night. Adrenalin surges through her at the thought of losing half of their land. And not just the land but the pool, the outbuildings and the view – which could be built in front of.
She dresses quickly, not bothering to check her reflection, Bastian’s desire not a concern today. At the window, she sees that Angelo’s men are already here. As well as the cherry-red flat bed and the scruffy white van there is a larger black one she hasn’t seen before. It squats menacingly in the drive. How many more men are in Angelo’s employ? They seem to be multiplying.
She rushes out into the hallway and almost collides with Bastian.
‘Hey, slow down,’ he says, his hands coming up to grip her shoulders. They feel hot. ‘What’s the rush?’
She glances behind him towards the open door of his and Madison’s bedroom.
‘She’s outside doing sun salutations.’ He smiles at her with a raised eyebrow, encouraging complicity, but she has zero inclination today to make fun of Madison’s regimes.
His smile twists into something sulkier. He runs one finger down the bare inside of her arm and though it feels good – so good that she briefly closes her eyes – she makes herself step away.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ He closes the gap between them again.
‘The builders are back.’
He shrugs. ‘That a problem?’
She does not want to tell Bastian about this. She remembers those breezy emails about the extent of their land and what they were going to do with it, and nausea sloshes in her stomach.
‘I just don’t want them here.’ It comes out curtly. She thinks to soften it by making a joke about him, her guest, not being inconvenienced, but she’s too afraid of being asked for a refund. The numbers in her and Nick’s bank account are sobering. Shaming, too.
He pauses, and she realizes he’s deciding how to react. He’s planning his next few moves. She’d forgotten he did this, like so much else she’s chosen not to remember. He takes hold of her hands and, in her strange state of detachment, she thinks, Oh, so charm it is. It might have been coldness or petulance. She has experienced both from him in the past. Internally, she curses Lou for making her think like this.
He laces his fingers through hers and backs her into the wall. She lets him kiss her, but he must sense her detachment because he stops. He doesn’t move away, though, and she feels pinioned against the cold white plaster. It emphasizes the great heat of him.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let me take your mind off it.’
Nick could come up at any minute. Feasibly he could even be in one of the other bedrooms, watching them right now through a crack in the door. She still hasn’t worked out who caught them, or almost caught them, on the night of the dinner party. Her eyes dart around the hall.
Bastian is kissing her again, his tongue in her mouth. It feels large and muscular and she has to resist the urge to turn away her face. This instinct not to offend an aroused man, where does it come from? Is it to protect their feelings or yourself from their fury if you reject them? She has no idea.
His hands move to her waist, then up and under her vest top. He strokes her sides before going up, as she knew he would, to her breasts. He kneads them in the way men do, and that’s never really done anything for her. His breathing changes, and she shuts her eyes, passive. One of his hands moves down, palm flat against her belly, knuckles catching on the waistband of her shorts and then he’s past it and cupping her, his fingers pressing against the cotton of her underwear, and finally she starts to feel something, a slow pulse that speeds and sharpens at the thought of those fingers pushing into her.
He stops so suddenly that she sways where she stands, just like in the olive grove, only this time with her legs awkwardly splayed.
‘Forget it, then,’ he says, expression shuttered. ‘If you’re not into it.’
It’s so ingrained in her to soothe his feelings that she puts a hand to his cheek, ready to apologize and kiss him. That’s all it would take – all he wants – to get back to where they were. She still feels hot at the core of herself: she does want him. But the numbers spin again in her head and she lets her hand drop.
He pulls his phone out, makes a show of checking something. ‘I’m going outside to swim,’ he says, without looking up from the screen. ‘So the room’s free.’
He’s halfway down the stairs when she works out what he means. The room is free for her to tidy it. Temper and humiliation flare, twin flames spreading through her, even as another part of her wants to chase after him and make it all right between them.
In the kitchen, dirty breakfast plates are piled next to the sink. The three-hundred-euro copper tap she bought in a fit of madness has been dismantled, its parts laid out on the work surface, like a dissection kit. Next to it is a garish plastic bottle of what must be limescale remover. Something else broken.
She goes to the fridge and takes out a glass bottle of fizzy mineral water, drinking straight from it, a tiny act of rebellion against what or who she’s not sure. Outside, sounds of industry are slicing into the still morning. From the shade of the pergola where she can’t easily be seen, she watches Bastian and Madison by the pool. He is sitting between her legs so she can apply suntan lotion to his back. His tattoo winds down between his shoulder-blades, black and sinuous. She’s not sure whether she thinks it’s sexy or tacky – he didn’t have it back then. No boy she knew then had a tattoo. Now everyone seems to have one.
His head snaps up at the shriek of a drill and Madison begins to massage the place where his neck meets muscle, pushing her thumbs hard into it. Quickly, not wanting them to see her, she crosses the grass and ducks into the cool interior of the olive grove.
When she reaches the outbuildings she hangs back to count the men. There are eight today. Of the three who must have come in the black van, two are the men who cemented the paving around the pool. She saw one last time, but now the other is here too. If it hadn’t been for Nick’s confession, she would have assumed that both once worked for Massimo but were now employed by Angelo. In fact, they had obviously worked for Angelo all along. They’re a little older than the rest and she finds this oddly reassuring. Still, when they turn at her approach and she nods a greeting, there is no obvious recognition on their part, though she had taken them drinks and complimented their work for three days in May. They simply stare back at her. The third man, whom she has never seen, looks like a more grizzled version of Angelo. Another relation, then.
Nick is among them, looking like a different species. He is the tallest there but somehow the least substantial, his rounded shoulders apologetic. The sweat darkening his T-shirt seems to convey not manliness but fear. She suspects the men despise him and he’s aware of this. He hasn’t noticed her yet, too deep in conversation with Tommaso. She watches her husband nodding earnestly, one hand ruffling his hair, like an actor’s hammy interpretation of anxiety. He’s obviously been doing this for some time because it’s sticking up all over his head. It gives him the look of a helpless boy again: one who’s just been woken from a bad dream.
When he spots her, he looks so relieved that a concentrated bolt of fear strikes her. He’s kept all this from her so carefully for months, presumably because he thought he could handle it. If her presence is now a comfort he must know he’s entirely lost control.
