Season of Storms

  “I am an adult.”

  “Only just. You’ve been getting my e-mails?”

  I assured him I had. “Only you mustn’t send so many of them. They come in on Alex’s business computer, you know, and he has to deliver them to me.”

  “Who’s Alex?”

  “D’Ascanio.”

  “Ah. Well, no worries,” he told me. “It probably brightens your Alex’s day, Angel, reading my jokes.” He laughed. I had missed that, too. “Anyway, how has your week been?”

  “Not bad. We did have some excitement on Monday.” I gave him an edited version of Edwina’s séance. “Kind of creepy, actually, and it frightened Madeleine’s daughter half to death—she’s still having nightmares about it, I think.” She’d been sleeping in Madeleine’s room since the night of the séance, and Madeleine, to ease Poppy’s mind, had removed all the pictures of Celia the First that had hung on her wall. “We wanted Edwina to hold a follow-up séance, to convince Poppy that the spirit had gone away, but Edwina wouldn’t do it. She took it very seriously—said that we ought to just let the past lie.”

  Bryan surprised me by asking, “And what do you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s real—”

  “No, I mean about letting the past lie,” he specified. “Do you agree?”

  I wasn’t sure why he was asking me, but Bryan rarely asked without a reason, so I gave the matter thought. “I don’t think I do, no. I think, if there really were something worth knowing, then I’d want to know it.”

  “I see.” Then he changed course completely, and moved on to talking about something else. “So, what’s Dennis O’Malley been up to?”

  I could have told him heaps of anecdotes, but I was very aware of Rupert standing close behind my shoulder, and I knew how much it bothered him whenever I talked about Den. “Nothing much,” I said. “Look, I really ought to let you talk to Roo, now. He’s been waiting very patiently, and like you said, it’s time I was in bed.”

  “All right, Angel.” Bryan’s cheerful voice was faintly puzzled. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too.” Reluctantly I passed the phone to Rupert, kissed his cheek and said goodnight and went upstairs, taking my borrowed book with me.

  iii

  IN bed, I reached first for the book of Galeazzo’s poems, to check a reference. Having seen the marble statuary heads in the dining room tonight, the ‘Jason’ and ‘Medea’ heads that had supposedly come out of Constantinople, it occurred to me that somewhere in The Season of Storms was a poem that mentioned Medea.

  Yes, here it was, in his twenty-ninth poem ‘To Celia,’ where after telling Celia for the twenty-ninth time how matchless she was, he then compared her to an unnamed woman—probably his wife, I thought—who wandered through a putrefying garden,

  . . . like Medea, with my children’s blood upon her hands, an evil breath upon her lips,

  Her rival’s flames around her head like some despoiled halo . . .

  “Ugh,” I said, and closed the book. I could understand why others thought that Galeazzo’s final play had been a plagiarism, though I didn’t agree with them. Most of these poems had, after all, been written in the years that had followed his affair with Celia. He’d written the play while they’d been together, and love, I knew, had inspired many an artist through the ages to great heights of achievement. Petrarch had had his Laura, Dante his Beatrice, and Galeazzo, for a few years anyway, had had his Celia. So I thought it wholly possible that Il Prezzo had burst from some unfettered recess of his writer’s mind, a final act of beauty like the singing of a swan about to die.

  The poems, though, as Rupert said, had come from somewhere else.

  I set them aside and instead took up A Study of Spirits, the book that I’d borrowed from Alex’s study, deciding that reading about hauntings and ghosts would be less gloomy and depressing. I was two chapters in before I realized that I’d made a big mistake. Rupert had been right—this book was not the sort of thing that I should read before I went to sleep. Already my imagination was creating goblins underneath the bed, and unseen watchers in the shadows.

  Even when I’d reluctantly set the book down I had trouble convincing myself I was really alone in the room. Every sound, every creak of a carpeted floorboard or knock of a pipe in the wall, took on a new sense of malevolence. As the curtains at my windows ruffled slightly in a draught I imagined that I saw Teresa’s stern face looking at me through the glass, and heard her voice. Is not a room for guests, she said. Things happen.

  Uncomfortably aware of the watching eyes of Celia the First’s portrait above my head, I burrowed deep beneath my sheets and closed my eyes.

  iv

  I woke from fitful sleeping to the early morning sunshine and the twittering of birds, the combined light and noise making any thought of drifting off again impossible. So much for enjoying a lie-in on my Sunday off, I thought, rubbing the grit from my eyes as I came down the stairs.

  No one was up yet, not even Teresa. The kitchen was quiet.

  “Damn,” I said. I was desperate for a cup of tea, but even if I’d known where Teresa kept the kettle I could not have braved that cooker. Just the look of it, a monster built of gleaming pipes and hobs and knobs, made me feel hopelessly incompetent. If I’d so much as touched it I’d have surely burnt the house down.

  Pushing up the sleeves of my jumper, I took a look round and decided to go with the microwave. It wouldn’t be good tea, I thought, but at this point I didn’t care. I found a mug easily enough in the cupboard, near where I’d seen Den get the glasses the night we’d drunk wine. Filling it with water, I popped it into the microwave to boil and started searching for the teabags.

  Head in the cupboards, I rummaged with growing frustration. “It shouldn’t be this difficult to find a bloody teabag.” I wasn’t complaining to anyone in particular, and given the whine of the microwave oven I wouldn’t have thought anyone would have heard me, but somebody did. From behind me a hand reached up, brushed past my shoulder, and took a tin box from the second shelf up, bringing it down till my own hands could grasp it.

  I jumped. Spun around, banged my head on the cupboard door, then dropped the tin with a whopping great crash, spilling teabags out over the hard tiled floor.

  “Careful,” said Alex, one hand outstretched in what might have been either an instinctive attempt to steady me or an equally involuntary effort to protect himself from my erratic movements. It apparently hadn’t occurred to him that his coming up on me like that, so close behind me, without warning, might have scared me half to death.

  I’d been holding my breath, and I let it out now in a long, controlled sigh. “I didn’t know that you were there.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be quiet,” he excused himself. “I thought you would have heard me.”

  “Well, I didn’t.” That came out a bit more peevishly than I’d intended, but I couldn’t help it. My heart, which I would have expected to slow in its pounding when I’d identified the person who’d surprised me, had instead speeded up at the sight of him, and to hide my consternation I was forced to bend and make a show of picking up the teabags, letting my hair fall forward to screen my reddening face.

  Alex, unaware of my confusion, knelt to help me. He didn’t have the dogs with him, which meant, I assumed, that he’d either been with Daniela or was on his way to see her. I tried to use that knowledge to restore my equilibrium. “I thought Teresa would be in here,” I said, seeking to justify my presence in the kitchen even though he hadn’t made an issue of it. “I only wanted a cup of tea.”

  “It’s Easter Sunday. I’ve given Teresa the morning and afternoon off, to spend time with her family in Mira.”

  The microwave finished, its hum abruptly ending in a bell that sounded rather like the ones that mark the end of fighting rounds. Alex gathered up the last few teabags, took the tin in hand and straightened, looking round the kitchen. “She said that she’d make up some baskets of bread and preserves for me to set out in the dining r
oom, so you could all just help yourselves to breakfast. I was going to make coffee,” he said, bringing his gaze back to me. “I suppose I could boil a kettle, as well, for your tea.”

  “That’s all right, I’ve got it taken care of.”

  Glancing at the microwave he said, “You can’t drink that.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “It’s not real tea,” he told me, very definite. “You need a teapot.” Brushing past, he opened the door of a cupboard beside me and drew out a plain silver teapot, setting it down on the worktop with such determination that I couldn’t help but smile, just a little.

  “That’s your English side showing,” I said.

  He looked up as though I’d surprised him, but his shrug was purposefully Latin. “Oh, I don’t know. We Italians have a thing for food and drink—we like things properly prepared.”

  “I see.” I watched him while he searched another cupboard for the kettle, found it, filled it at the sink. Head bent in concentration, he looked younger somehow, almost like a boy, and I found myself thinking of what Edwina had said about Alex not fitting in anywhere, not being wholly Italian nor wholly an Englishman, trapped in a kind of a cultural limbo.

  Perhaps that was why he was trying so hard now, I thought, as Edwina had said, to be accepted as Italian—why he was willing to give away his home to gain approval, with Daniela’s help . . .

  Thinking of Daniela and their relationship centred my thoughts again. As I looked away, yawning, Alex asked, “Didn’t you sleep well?”

  “Not particularly, no.” I didn’t tell him about my foolish imaginings and the bumps in the night, but instead shrugged it off with the comment—not a lie—that I’d been having trouble sleeping for a few nights, now. “Den thinks it’s because of the weather.”

  “Well, if Den says it, then it must be true.” I thought I detected a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but I couldn’t confirm it by looking at him since he’d bent his head again to watch the kettle. “He’s up early, as well. I saw him on my way up. He was heading, I believe, towards the theatre.”

  I registered only four words: “On your way up?” From the villa, I expected. From Daniela.

  Alex answered without turning. “Yes, from the boathouse. We’ve been doing repairs on a few of the boats and I went down to see what was fueled up and ready to go. I need to make a run to Sirmione later on.”

  “Sirmione.” The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t recall . . .

  “It’s a town,” he supplied, “at the southernmost end of the lake, on a peninsula. A very ancient town.”

  “Oh, right.” I remembered, now. We’d talked about it on our first day here. “The place with the hot springs. The Romans built a spa there, Den was saying.”

  Glancing up he said, “The Grotto of Catullus, yes.” The kettle boiled. He made the tea. The silence stretched between us.

  “Well, you’ve got a lovely day for it,” I said at last. “Your trip, I mean.” I gestured towards the window, where the morning sun angled in shallowly, strongly, and clear sky showed blue through the lace of the curtains.

  “Yes.” He set the teapot by me on the worktop. “You will need a cup.”

  “I have one in the microwave, actually. No, I’ll get it, that’s all right. I only need some milk, if you—”

  “Come with me,” he said suddenly.

  I turned from the microwave, mug in hand, staring. “I’m sorry?”

  “To Sirmione. I promised before that I’d show you the sights when you had a day off, and there’s a lot to see in Sirmione. We could have lunch there, and you could tour the grotto while I do my business.”

  “Oh. I—”

  “It is your day off?”

  “Yes.”

  “So come with me.” His tone was persuasive, but . . .

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I’d be no better than my mother, I thought, if I went on what amounted to a date with this man, when he was already involved. That said, he was still my employer, and I couldn’t just turn him down flat—I needed an excuse. “I mean, it’s kind of you to offer, but I can’t—I promised Rupert that I’d spend the day with him. In fact,” I compounded the lie with a glance at my watch, “he asked me to wake him early; his alarm clock isn’t working. You’ll excuse me, won’t you? Thank you for the tea.”

  And with that rather muddled exit speech I grabbed my mug and took off like a rabbit, leaving him to lay the breakfast baskets out alone.

  v

  I didn’t really need to wake Rupert, of course. Anyone who knew Rupert would have known that—he had an infallible internal alarm that went off without fail at about half past six. When he answered my knock at the door of his room he was fully dressed, shaved, with his bed neatly made and a book laid open on the table near the chair beside his window.

  He looked at the mug in my hand. “Is that for me?”

  Following his gaze I noticed for the first time that in my haste to get out of the kitchen I’d forgotten the milk for my tea, and I couldn’t drink tea without milk. Rupert, on the other hand, liked both his tea and coffee black. I thrust the mug toward him. “Yes. I thought you might like room service.”

  He smiled as he ushered me in. “And I thought you were fed up with serving people.”

  “Oh, well, I’ve got to keep in practice, haven’t I? I’ll likely be back waiting tables by Christmas.”

  “You never know,” said Rupert. Moving to the table, he closed the book he’d been reading.

  I peered at the cover. “Bulfinch’s Mythology?”

  “I found it on the shelves in Alex’s study last night. I haven’t read it in years.”

  “You’ve been busy,” I said, noting that he’d marked his place near the end of the book.

  “Yes, I’m into the legends of Charlemagne, now. Exciting reading. Though I still prefer the Greek myths overall.”

  “You and Galeazzo both. He keeps popping gods and heroes in on every third line of his poems—in the last one I read it was Medea.”

  “I’ve always had a soft spot for Medea,” Rupert said. “A much-maligned character. Madeleine played her, you know, years ago.”

  I hadn’t known that. Madeleine had starred in so many productions, and I’d been lucky enough to see most of them, but I’d missed her Medea. To be honest, I’d probably missed it on purpose. There was something about the idea of watching her play a woman being cast off by her husband, being abandoned along with her children so that he could go and marry someone else, that hit a little close to home. I don’t know that I could have watched it. Still, I knew if any actress could have made an audience feel sympathy for a character who killed her own children and poisoned her husband’s new lover, it would have been Madeleine.

  “You’d have been about two at the time,” Rupert went on, “a little young for me to take you, but it was a great performance. Your mother, of course, didn’t think so—she’d read for the part herself, you see, and thought she ought to have had it. That was what started it.”

  “Started what?” I felt myself frowning.

  He glanced at me over the rim of the mug as he sipped his tea, and I saw him censor himself. “Nothing. Sorry, I spoke out of turn.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ll owe Bryan a pound if I do,” he said, referring to their gentlemen’s agreement not to say anything negative about my mother in my presence.

  “Yes, well, you could buy a small country for what Bryan owes you on that count, and besides, I won’t tell him if you don’t. So, what are you talking about? Started what?”

  “The thing,” Rupert said, “between your mother and Madeleine.” And then, as I went on looking at him, uncomprehending, he asked, “You did know they were rivals?”

  “Well, obviously, yes, because of Mother’s affair with—”

  “Oh, no,” he corrected me, “it started years before that, years before. That was the end of it, not the beginning.”

  “It was?” I felt the way the first explorers must have felt wh
en offered proof the world was round, unable to let go of their belief the earth was finite, flat, with monsters at its edges.

  “Decidedly the end. A coup de grâce. Mind you,” he said, “your mother may have won the final battle, but the war ran fairly even up to then, as I recall. You ought to ask Madeleine, sometime. I’m sure she could tell you some stories.”

  “I’ve no doubt she could.” My voice sounded vague as I searched through my childhood memories for any remembrance of this war that he was speaking of, but I drew a total blank.

  I was still trying to absorb this minor bombshell when Rupert asked, “Have you been down for breakfast, yet?”

  “No, I . . .” I thought of Alex downstairs setting out the breakfast baskets on the sideboard, laying plates and making coffee, and the image made me remember why I’d come up here in the first place. “Actually, I came to ask a favour.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Alex asked me if I’d like to go to Sirmione with him, and—”

  “You see? Didn’t I say that the boy had his eye on you?”

  “Roo, I’m not going. I told him I’d already arranged to spend today with you, so I was rather hoping . . .”

  “. . . that I’d back you up in your lie?” He finished the thought for me, smiling.

  “Only until Alex leaves. We don’t have to do anything special, I’ll just tag along, if that’s OK.”

  He shrugged a noncommittal shrug and raised his mug of tea. “I was about to take my walk,” he said. “You’d better get your coat on.”

  vi

  I should have told Alex I’d made plans to spend the day with Madeleine, I thought, or Poppy—somebody more sedentary. I hadn’t been out of doors for fifteen minutes before I was perspiring, legs burning from the strain of keeping up to Rupert’s pace. Thankfully, here in the gardens the air was still cool, though the sunlight fell warm on my face, shining down from a sky that was robin’s-egg blue, fading down to a paler white-blue at the peaks of the mountains. A few innocent-looking puffs of small white cloud hung overhead, barely moving, and lighter clouds wrapped round the top of Mount Baldo like gauze, so transparent I could make out the folds of the mountain beneath.