Summer Fever, page 26
She waits, afraid to speak, not only because of the trouble they might be in, but because she’s in danger of saying something irretrievable.
‘He’s furious. He said his son and the men had been insulted. He said that –’
‘Nick, stop.’ Something in her tone or her face makes him close his mouth. ‘The only person who was insulted was me.’ She battles to keep her voice low and level. ‘But you wouldn’t know that because you’d gone off and left me to fend for myself with a load of macho misogynists.’
Nick blanches. ‘Did they do something to you?’
‘Not really. They scared me, but nothing happened because –’
‘Because Bastian rode in on his white charger.’ The injured outrage is back.
‘Yes, because, of course, that’s the burning issue here.’
While Nick stands there so pale, her face is growing hotter. She puts her hands to her cheeks to cool them. She can’t believe he hasn’t guessed what happened between her and Bastian afterwards. Nick has known her for twenty years. They’ve been reading each other for half their lives. He hasn’t got it, though. She knows he hasn’t. Madison is a different matter.
‘Look, I was actually pretty terrified,’ she says. ‘They were being really unpleasant, saying things in Italian and laughing. They’d surrounded me. I don’t know if they would have actually done anything, but the point is, it felt like they could, and that if they did, I wouldn’t be able to stop it. Don’t you understand how that might be quite traumatic? All Bastian did was tell them to go and they absolutely deserved it.’
‘And what did Bastian deserve?’
‘What?’
‘Oh, forget it. I can’t deal with this now. I’ve got to make an egg-white fucking omelette for Madison. You know we’re going to Ivan’s before the festa?’
The medieval festival in Castelfranco. It starts tonight. She’d completely forgotten about it.
‘Madison must have bloody arranged it,’ says Nick, pulling open the door so forcefully that it bounces back at him. ‘We’re all going there for drinks apparently. Six sharp. So you’d better have your game-face on by then.’
Going down to breakfast she experiences something like stage-fright. Her hands are ice-cold and clammy and her mouth is dry. But when she forces out a strangled ‘Good morning,’ to Madison, who is eating alone under the pergola, the American looks up from her plate with the blinding full-wattage smile Laura hasn’t seen in a while.
‘Hey, hon. Have you seen the sky this morning? It’s like that damn storm never happened at all.’
Laura looks up and sees she’s right: the storm has washed it clean. Way off down the valley, where the shroud of rain hung yesterday, the Apennines are visible again.
She glances back at Madison and it’s just like when she looked at Bastian last night. There’s a split-second when the other woman’s expression is entirely blank and cold, her eyes navy blue and narrowed, but then it passes and the smile is back and Laura hopes her overwrought brain imagined it.
‘Bastian is sleeping in after a bad night,’ says Madison.
Laura watches her cut neatly into her omelette, load her fork, put the knife down, move the fork to her right hand. The whole laborious operation is strangely absorbing.
‘Oh dear,’ she says, when she realizes she’s supposed to say something.
‘Yeah, poor baby. He’s got a lot of work stress at the moment. Nothing’s going right for him.’
‘That’s such a shame, when you’re on holiday.’ It’s like they’re strangers, her voice weirdly robotic. She feels like she’s watching herself perform from above.
When Madison doesn’t say anything else, she casts around for a topic unrelated to him. Distantly, she registers that the vines and roses have survived the wind and rain, though they’ve lost many of their leaves.
‘Someone swept up here.’
‘Must have been your saintly husband first thing,’ says Madison, sweetly. ‘You look like you didn’t sleep too good either.’
She attempts a smile. ‘I’ll be all right. Nick said you’re going to Ivan’s for drinks tonight before the festival. Is that right?’
‘What’s all this you? We’re all going. Ivan asked specially after you when we spoke on the phone. Quite the little fan club you’ve got going here. What’s your secret, Laura?’
There’s a beat of silence.
‘So, can I get you anything else?’ She’s so desperate to leave the pergola that she’s fidgeting around like an awkward teen. She puts her hands behind her back so Madison can’t see them shaking.
‘Hey, hey.’ Madison pushes away her plate and stretches out her hand. ‘You’re as jumpy as a cricket this morning. Come here.’
Laura shuffles forward. Ashamed of how clammy it must be, she offers up one of her hands. Madison takes it, turns it over and strokes the palm. One of her nails is short and, without polish, down to the quick. Laura understands the rest are fake.
‘Such pretty little hands,’ says Madison. ‘Like a child’s. Now, look at me.’
Laura does. She manages to keep her gaze steady but she can’t help swallowing.
‘You need to go eat something,’ says Madison. Her face is a picture of concern. It looks real enough. ‘Go eat something and tell Nick this omelette is the best I’ve ever had. OK?’
Laura nods and walks away. It takes everything she has not to break into a run.
She stays inside for the rest of the day, dusting and scrubbing and polishing without stopping: a myriad of small punishments meted out to herself, one after another. It’s probably the most perfectly beautiful day they’ve had since moving to Italy, but she doesn’t deserve to be out in it.
By five, she’s ready to go to Ivan’s. Her expression in the dressing-table mirror is sombre, her outfit sober. She’s wearing a deep blue dress with a modest neckline and a full skirt she’s been meaning to chop three inches off. She’s glad she didn’t now. She wants the coverage.
The only jewellery she’s wearing is her wedding ring. While she waits to go downstairs, she works the plain platinum band up and down from the back with her thumb. It’s looser than it’s ever been. She must have lost more weight. The band of untanned skin beneath it is starkly white.
Finally Nick calls her name from downstairs. He must have got ready ages ago; she hasn’t seen him for hours, hasn’t seen any of them. The stage-fright feeling is back. As she stands, the room shunts down and up, her vision slipping like a faulty lift. She puts out a hand to the dressing-table to steady herself while the snow of low blood sugar makes her briefly blind, like the hail filling the pool the previous evening. Despite Madison’s instruction she’s eaten nothing all day but a couple of stale slices of ciabatta. She tells herself it’ll pass soon. Everything will pass soon.
They’re waiting for her in the hall. She takes the stairs slowly, mindful of more dizziness but also because she’s acutely self-consciousness. Halfway down, she dares to look at them and stops short. They’re all in medieval costume, Nick too. Madison is impossibly slender in a long belted dress the colour of wine. Her hair is gathered into a complicated plaited bun and crowned with a black velvet circlet wound round with gold brocade. Bastian, who is watching her intently, looks unnervingly Italian in a dark blue tunic, completely at home in the clothes of his ancestors. It’s like that costume ball scene in Rebecca turned on its head.
Only Nick looks awkward, his ochre costume clashing with his pink skin. He can’t meet her eye.
‘Where’s your costume, honey?’ Madison has surely contrived this and yet she seems genuinely perplexed.
Laura grips the banister rail, tears prickling behind her eyes. ‘I didn’t know we were dressing up.’
Madison looks at Nick, who shrugs. ‘I thought you were sorting yourself out,’ he says, glancing in Laura’s general direction, then away. It’s such an obvious lie that no one can think of anything to say. Madison goes to the bottom of the stairs. Her fingers go to her hair and start pulling out pins. She lifts off the circlet and holds it up.
‘Come here. You can have this.’
They stand together at the mirror in the hall, Madison’s hands on Laura’s shoulders. The surface of the old glass is wavery in the evening light that streams in through the open front door. It turns them soft-edged and faded, like a painting. A portrait of two sisters who look nothing alike. Behind her, Madison is half a head taller.
‘There,’ she says, when the circlet is secure on top of Laura’s head, her loose hair arranged in dark waves over her shoulders. ‘I doubt it’s historically accurate but it works. You look like a little Madonna.’
It’s not until Giulia is showing them out into Ivan’s garden that it occurs to Laura that Angelo might be here. She hangs back, letting the others go through the doors first, putting off any confirmation that he is. Bastian, misreading this, slows his step. He is darkly beautiful in his navy blue and silver tunic but she can’t bear to look at him.
‘Baby, what’s wrong?’ He breathes the words into her ear and her traitorous body responds. He smells of heat and summer. ‘I haven’t seen you all day. We need to talk, make plans.’
‘Not now,’ she says. ‘Please,’ she adds, because she’s not sure how up to resistance she is. She’d thought about the festa earlier this week; how they might lose the others in the crowd; the dark corners they might find to be alone in. But things have changed now. Madison knows something, maybe all of it. Nick knows who Bastian is. It’s all coming apart at the seams, just as Lou had feared.
At least Angelo is nowhere to be seen. Ivan rises to greet them, kissing Madison on both cheeks but pulling Laura into an embrace. She adores him but wishes he hadn’t. It’s only an acknowledgement of their shared confidences the other afternoon but it must look to Madison like favouritism and that’s the last thing Laura wants demonstrated by another man, even one who definitely doesn’t desire her.
They sit in a loose ring on the terrace while Giulia pours each of them a glass of champagne. Apart from the murmured grazies and pregos as she goes round, no one speaks. Ivan cocks his head to the side like an alert bird and Laura knows he’s picked up on the strained atmosphere. He catches her eye and shakes his head imperceptibly, asking her silently what’s going on, but she glances away, pretending not to have seen.
‘So, you must tell me how you found the storm,’ he says eventually. His tone is easy, betraying no sign that he’s noticed anything amiss. ‘I’m afraid I lost one of the garden sculptures to it. The wind knocked it over and it broke cleanly in two. It was one of Raoul’s favourites.’ His eyes sparkle and Laura smiles despite herself.
Madison laughs. ‘What a tragedy,’ she says. ‘I guess that’s saved you a job.’
Giulia tops up her glass, which is already half empty. Laura’s hardly touched hers and decides there and then not to have more than this single drink. It might be the only thing she can control tonight.
‘I have to tell you, guys, I’ve seen much worse back at home,’ Madison is saying. ‘Not LA, I mean home-home. The South. I remember as a kid, it would just get hotter and hotter until you felt like something heavy was pressing down on you. It made people crazy. We’d all be praying for it to just break already. But then, when it did, it really did. One minute it was silent, and I mean silent because the birds and insects always knew it was coming and they’d be waiting for it just like we were, and then the next, the sky just cracked open. That’s what it sounded like – like God had reached down and snapped the whole sky in two.’
Ivan is smiling. ‘I got caught in a storm in Louisiana once. I’ll never forget it. But I promise you, we got off lightly last night. They often do much more damage. In August, when the temperature is hotter to begin with, the thunderheads are huge. You see them coming down the valley from the mountains, like mountains themselves. Sometimes they ring the church bells as a warning and, like you say, everything else is silent. You can imagine how it sounds.’
‘Like the end of the world.’ Laura doesn’t mean to say the words aloud. They all turn to her.
Ivan smiles again. ‘Exactly like the end of the world.’ He holds out his arm for them to inspect. ‘See, even talking about it gives me the gooseflesh.’
Laura rubs at her own arms. Bastian is watching her, she knows. She always knows. She keeps her gaze trained on Ivan, or on her own hand gripping the champagne flute. She thinks how much she had relished Bastian’s eyes on her before, how she had preened in a hundred tiny ways – turning her face to its most flattering angle, tucking her hair behind her ear to show off her neck, playing with a chain around it so he imagined his mouth there. She thinks of what Madison said about her childlike hands and wonders if it’s a lucky guess – an unlucky guess – because Bastian had once said he loved how small and neat they were.
Ivan is addressing Bastian now, and Laura realizes he’s trying to help her, forcing Bastian to look at someone else.
‘And how are you enjoying Italy, Bastian?’ he’s saying. ‘You must have Italian blood, surely. You look like you’ve just stepped out of a Raphael in that costume.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ he says, his eyes flicking from Ivan and back to Laura. ‘Everything I could have hoped for.’
Her cheeks burn. She hates him a little in that moment.
Madison squeezes his knee, forcing him to look towards her. ‘Poor Bast has had a lot of work stuff to deal with, which is a shame. They won’t leave you alone, will they, baby?’ She holds her glass up to the hovering Giulia for more champagne.
Bastian’s jaw tightens. ‘It’s OK. I’ve closed on a couple of deals today.’
It sounds like a lie but Madison turns to him, eyes wide. ‘Oh, you didn’t tell me. That’s amazing, honey. Oh my God, I’m so relieved.’ She turns to Ivan. ‘I’m sure Bast won’t mind me saying that it’s been pretty rough lately. We weren’t sure we could even afford to come out here, you know.’
Bastian stills.
‘Yeah, I mean it’s always brutal in Hollywood.’ Madison shakes her head sorrowfully. ‘You clash with the wrong person and suddenly you’re out in the cold. And, you know, it’s an expensive place to live. We run a coupla cars, there’s gym memberships, club memberships, the spa, entertaining clients at the best places –’
‘They don’t need to hear all this,’ Bastian interrupts. ‘Why don’t you let someone else speak for a while?’
His tone is so cold and so final that Laura’s head snaps up in surprise when Madison continues.
‘Oh, baby, we’re among friends here. They don’t mind, do you, guys?’
Nick shakes his head. ‘Not at all. You can tell us anything.’ Though he’s trying to suppress it, he’s a whisker away from smiling.
‘Aw, thanks, Nick,’ says Madison, blowing him a kiss. ‘I feel like this is a safe space for us, and it’s just not healthy to bottle stuff up, you know? The thing is, it’s been real hard for Bast because he grew up so privileged. So I guess there’s, like, shame in him not having money any more. For me, it’s normal. Most of the time I was growing up, we never had a dime. My daddy was terrible with money. He drank or lost at poker everything he earned. If we needed shoes or whatever, my mom had to steal it off him when he was asleep. When he was killed at work she found out he’d let the life insurance lapse. You don’t forget a lesson like that, you know?’
Despite herself, despite the awfulness of everything, Laura can’t take her eyes off Madison now. Maybe it’s the drink – the American woman is on her fourth glass – but actually the alcohol seems to be sharpening, not blurring, her. Her accent is changing again, though, and Laura wonders what it means. A loss of inhibitions or something more deliberate? The cadences have altered, like they did in the storm, the vowels stretching out, like a cat on hot stone.
Laura understands in a lurching rush: it’s a trap, the languid Southern drawl employed to disguise the ferocity of the attack. Madison is limbering up. She’s going to take Bastian apart. Laura can only assume that she’ll be next.
The few tourists in Castelfranco without costumes stand out like emergency flares. It is they who are self-conscious, rather than those decked out like extras in their richly coloured tabards and hose and girdled gowns. Laura catches the eye of another outsider, a portly man in a Nike swoosh T-shirt. He shoots her a grimace of solidarity. This festa is not putting on a show for visitors, like some places do: it still belongs to the town. As the locals she passes openly stare, she has never felt more out of place. She even knows the Italian for this, having felt it from the start in one way or another: fuori posto.
Still, they are a sight to behold en masse: gorgeous in their scarlet, gold and green plumage. Of course, there are plenty of small incongruities once the eye is tuned in: nail varnish, wristwatches, sunglasses, the ubiquitous mobile phones and iPads held high over heads to capture the scene.
The air is full of the smells of meat and burnt sugar. Food stalls line one side of the piazza. None of them have eaten – it was too early before so they’d planned to get something here. But much of it, on closer inspection, is offal: brains and liver and sweetbreads. Nausea and hunger war inside Laura. Nick, who seems hyper and oddly elated, says he’s up for it and orders something dark and shining in a rough-textured bread roll. Madison squeals as he bites into it and the filling bulges out, a piece of it landing wetly near his feet. It looks like liver or maybe kidney. Laura’s stomach tips.
Ivan leads them towards one of the lanes that form the old town’s arteries. It’s much darker here. What felt like a Disney approximation of medieval in the last gilded spill of evening light is starting to feel real as the sun falls away below the roof lines. It’s only now that it’s truly possible to imagine they’ve hurtled back in time. The faces looming out of the shadowy lane are the same as those she’s seen in frescos, as though the surface of the gene pool has lain undisturbed for five hundred years.
She stops to watch a craftsman who is shaving down a buttery leather belt in long, graceful strokes. She can smell it, tar and tobacco and a tinge of rot. The movement is mesmerizing and she lingers. When she looks up, there’s no sign of the others. They’ve been absorbed into the throng. She stands on tiptoe but all she can see over the dark heads are the red tunics so many are wearing. It strikes her for the first time that no one is wearing bright blue like her, even though she thinks of it as such an Italian shade: azzurro, the same colour as the Adriatic waters to the east.
