Season of Storms

  I’d got partway up before I missed my tissue-paper parcel.

  “Damn.” I had set it on the table at the restaurant, with my handbag, I remembered, but I didn’t have it now. I must have forgotten it. Wheeling in my tracks, I started down again, cursing my lack of attention. I wasn’t going to have much time to look around the grotto, I realized, not after all this. I had already spent all that time eating my sandwich and walking up here, and now here I was doubling back.

  Luckily, the waiter hadn’t got round to clearing my table. I picked up the tissue-wrapped necklace and tucked it safely away in my handbag.

  In my absence, a large white passenger hydrofoil had docked at the lake end of the open square, discharging a new flood of daytrippers into the already congested streets. The man in the bright red shirt was back, standing now at the end of the dock, lounging against the rail like a wolf on the make, watching the women pass by. In my eagerness to slip away before he noticed me, I turned too fast, colliding with another man just passing by the restaurant.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, excuse me,” I said, and he nodded, preoccupied, stepping round me without stopping.

  He had, I thought, one of those faces that I felt I ought to remember—sharp-featured, brooding, rather hawk-like . . . Then I did remember. He was the same man I’d seen going in to have a word with Alex in the Veranda della Diana on our first day of rehearsals. One of the workmen, I’d assumed, only seeing him here it seemed rather more likely that he was a business associate, or something. He might have even been the person Alex had come here to meet.

  Only that would have meant that their meeting was over. Forgetting the hawk-faced man, I hurried back to join the pilgrims’ procession up the via Catullo so I could at least reach the grotto before Alex came looking for me.

  I had made it as far as the level gathering-place at the top of the road, with the iron grille of the entry gate in sight, when a pair of running children heading downhill knocked my arm by accident, throwing me slightly off balance and sending my handbag flying. Their mother murmured something that I took for an apology as she brushed past me in the children’s wake, her eyes distracted, but she didn’t stop to help. With a sigh, I turned and bent to gather up the rolling items that had tumbled from my handbag when it hit the pavement—scattered coins, both Italian and British, a couple of Biros, a lipstick, the little seashell necklace in its tissue-paper parcel . . .

  “Let me help.” A second pair of hands joined mine in the retrieval effort as Alex crouched down to my level. Stuffing a few things back into my handbag, he righted it on the pavement and looked round. “Is that everything?”

  “Yes, I think so. Thanks.”

  He straightened with me, watched me brush my arm and readjust the strap against my shoulder. But when I raised my head he looked away, his gaze travelling uphill and back as he tucked his hands deep in his pockets. “So you’re done with your tour of the grotto, I see,” he said. “What did you think?”

  I could have told him the truth, I suppose, and confessed that I hadn’t yet been, that I’d wasted the past hour in eating and running about, but it seemed easier to simply reply, “It was lovely. But crowded,” I hastened to add. “That’s why I came out here.” I waved a hand around me at the low stone walls surrounding the large open gathering-place near the entry gate, high on its cliff overlooking the lake. “I thought I’d have a seat on the wall, you know, enjoy the view and wait for you. Make it easier for you to find me.”

  He looked at me intently for a moment, saying nothing . . . so intently that I thought he maybe knew that I was lying. The blood rose pounding, guilty, in my ears, so loud I nearly didn’t hear him.

  “There are better views,” he said. “Come, let me show you.”

  viii

  I hadn’t seen the signpost on my way up the via Catullo, nor the footpath leading off from it, and even if I had I doubted I would have been moved to investigate, because the word on the sign—Lido—was at least a word I knew, and I would have expected a bathing beach, even this early in the season, to be crawling with people.

  It wasn’t. There were tourists here, to be sure, but fewer of them and they seemed a different breed than those I’d been among before. These ones were quieter, more leisurely. They strolled.

  The beach was a long strip of golden white sand, with a long wooden pier stretching into the water and a blue-roofed restaurant baking in the sunlight at the shore end of the pier. From the sand’s edge a garden of olive trees rose in grass-covered terraces, sleepy and serene, its neatly trimmed pathways and benches sheltered by a stone retaining wall above which I could see the peaceful steeple of a little church.

  We hadn’t come too far from where we’d been—the tall pale cliffs on which the Grotto of Catullus ruins sat curved off immediately to the north, and to the south, beyond a stand of cypresses, I saw the tall stone tower of the Scagliera castle in the town. And yet it felt like we had gone a million miles from Sirmione.

  I looked at Alex, keeping pace beside me as we passed the restaurant’s umbrella-dotted patio and headed for the pier. He was being, I thought, quieter than usual, if such a thing were possible, as though he were still working over some detail of the business meeting in his mind. Whatever the reason, he was clearly preoccupied. I had visions of him stepping off the pier into the water without knowing it.

  The water here, at least, was very shallow, perhaps only a metre or so deep, and a perfect pale peridot green, crystal clear to the slabs of flat rock growing algae at the bottom. Two ducks dozed alongside us, bobbing along to the motion of the water, and near them a lizard lay sunning himself on the pier. Further on, in imitation of the lizard, a young boy had stretched out flat on his stomach, absorbed in watching schools of tiny minnows darting in among the rocks. Stepping over the boy’s legs, I continued on towards the long pier’s end, enjoying the spring of the wood underfoot and the lapping of water below and the freshening bite of the breeze on my neck with the warming sun full on my back.

  To be safe, though, I stopped several feet short of the end and, turning to Alex, said, “You’re right, it is a lovely view.”

  That roused him, as I’d hoped it would, from his distracted mood. He stopped walking. Looked up, at the water around us, the sun on the cliffs, the deep violet blue of the opposite shore with the long ridge of snow-covered mountains behind. “Yes, I’ve always thought so. It’s sort of a blend of the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean.”

  I’d never seen either place, except in photographs, but to admit that would have spoiled the sophisticated image I was trying to present, so I only gave a knowing kind of nod and levelled my gaze on the jewel-like green water that deepened to blue farther out off the end of the pier.

  “Over there,” said Alex, pointing straight out where I was looking, “is the Fonte Boiola, the hot spring that has fed the thermal baths of Sirmione since the Romans came.”

  I couldn’t actually see it, of course, but I nodded again. “Yes, Den said that there were spas here.”

  “Yes, well, Sirmione’s waters are supposedly useful in the treating of arthritis, and complaints of age. That’s likely why he knows about them.”

  I gave a laugh, half-turning. “I don’t think Den’s that ancient.”

  “No? I assumed he was roughly the same age as Rupert.”

  “A few years younger, I should say.”

  He glanced at me. “I gather Den’s been married?”

  Which struck me as rather an odd question for him to ask, but I couldn’t see the harm in answering. “Yes, he’s divorced.”

  “Ah. And he’s only had the one wife, has he?”

  Looking at him sideways, I replied that I had no idea. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered. He strikes me as the type of man who might have three or four wives in the cupboard.”

  “Den? A Bluebeard?” I smiled at the image. “Oh, I wouldn’t think it likely. I’m sure he has hordes of old girlfriends, but wives? No, it isn’t his style. Like he
said himself, he isn’t any good at being married.”

  “He told you that?”

  “The first day we met him in Venice,” I said with a nod. “In fact, I believe it was one of the first things he did say. Mind you, he might be softening his views a little, now.”

  I felt Alex turn to look down at me. “Might he?”

  I bit my lip to stop myself from being indiscreet, and saying more about the way that Den was getting on with Madeleine. Not only would our play’s producer not be overjoyed to learn that there might be a romantic triangle developing between his SM and two of his actors, but it was only speculation, after all. Bryan always said it only got one into trouble, spreading gossip.

  Instead I deflected his question with one of my own, shielding my eyes with one hand as I looked at him. “That sun’s awfully strong, isn’t it?”

  “We can sit in the shade, if you’d rather.”

  We had to leave the pier and climb the olive grove to find an empty bench among the trees. From up here the beach appeared even more lovely, more secluded, and the people on it even more remote and insignificant. Above our heads the olive leaves rustled ever so slightly as the breeze blew by, and by my feet a scattering of tiny white-and-yellow daisies nestled in the grass. I’d expected Alex to lapse back into silence, but he surprised me by asking, “So, how are the rehearsals going?”

  “Very well. I really should thank you for giving me this part—it’s been a dream of mine, you know, to work with Madeleine. She’s wonderful.”

  “And Nicholas? How is he to work with?”

  “Pass.”

  “Pardon?”

  I shook my head. “Bryan says that if you can’t say something nice about a person, you should keep your mouth shut.”

  Alex smiled. “I see.”

  “Besides, I can think what I like, but the man is a tremendous talent, really, and successful, whereas I’m still doing walk-ons.” I caught myself. “That is,” I amended, aware that I’d just shot my sophisticated image all to pieces, “I was doing walk-ons . . .”

  A moment passed. A tiny grey-brown lizard had come out to bask upon the tree trunk nearest me, and I focussed my attention on it, envying its stillness.

  Alex said, “You didn’t have a walk-on part in the play that I saw. You had lines.”

  My head came round so quickly that I startled the lizard—it shot down the tree trunk and into the grass like a bullet. Not that I paid the poor creature much notice. Staring at Alex, I asked him rather stupidly, “You saw me in a play?”

  “Last autumn. Last October, actually. In Happenstance.”

  An awful farce. I’d had four lines. I’d been onstage so briefly that my own friends might have missed me. “You’ll be one of the rare few who actually saw that play, then. It got horrid reviews. It only ran a week before it folded.”

  “Yes, I know. I must have caught you on your final night. I went back to see it again, but the theatre was closed.” He fixed his gaze idly on the lake, watching the wake of a small boat, far out on the water. “I did manage to locate your agent, through Equity, but the same day I did that I also met Rupert for lunch—our first meeting—and he said he knew a young actress who’d be perfect for the widow’s role, and that her name was Celia Sands, and wouldn’t that be good for our publicity. And then he pulled out his wallet and showed me a photograph.” He paused, and his gaze slid back to me. “And I told him yes, he was right. You were just what I wanted.”

  Time stopped, and my heart did a curious flip in my chest, and I didn’t know quite what to say. So I said nothing, and after a moment I felt his gaze leave me and swing out again to the water.

  The lizard, encouraged by the silence, crept warily out of the grass again and up the gnarled tree trunk till it reached the spot where it had been before. I said, “But hang on . . . in the programme for Happenstance, I wouldn’t have been billed as Celia Sands. I used my stage name: Celia Sullivan.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “So you had no idea I was Celia Sands until you talked to Rupert?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you made it a condition of your offer, that I use my real name.”

  He gave a small shrug. “Because Rupert was right, it was good for publicity. You can’t buy a publicity angle like that; it would have been foolish to waste it.”

  It seemed an improbable chain of coincidences, really—that he’d seen me at all in that horrible play, and that the director he hired should turn out to have such close connections to me, and that I should turn out to be named for the actress who’d starred in the play he himself was reviving. But when I pointed this out to Alex, he only smiled.

  “My grandmother would argue that there are no coincidences.”

  He turned the smile on me, then, and I suddenly felt like I’d stepped off the long pier myself into water well over my head.

  “Shall we go find a place to have lunch?” Alex asked.

  I didn’t remember, afterwards, too many of the details of what followed: where we ate, or what, exactly . . . only that the restaurant was a small one, tucked discreetly down a narrow street, and that the waiter glided like a ghost, and that our table had a vase of fresh-cut daisies in its centre. We drank wine and ate and drank more wine and talked through the meal about nothing and everything—theatre and books and, of all things, astronomy, though I was never too sure how that subject came up. And later, full from the meal and languid from the wine, I walked with Alex through the back streets, trying to absorb the sights he showed me, though the only ones that truly made an impact were a quiet church with pillars and a marble porch of chequered red and white, a blue plaque mounted on an alley wall in memory of an English woman writer who had died at Sirmione, and a little unexpected garden fronting on the lake—a sort of gated courtyard with a small well at its centre, gay geraniums and, facing one another, carved stone statues of an older man and woman in medieval dress.

  Alex told me who they were, but I’d forgotten by the time we reached the harbour and the boat, and then it hardly seemed to matter because all my attention was claimed by the sun in my eyes and the spray of the lake water cold on my face and the exhilarating feeling of speed.

  It seemed a much quicker trip back, but that might have been partly the fault of the wine, and the fact I was lost in my thoughts half the time watching Alex’s shoulders in front of me. By the time we arrived at the boathouse of Il Piacere I knew I was not only over my head but beyond hope of rescue. I’d fallen, and hard, for this man who was turning to help me up out of my seat.

  I wasn’t sure how it had happened, or when, but it had. I was stuck with it.

  And now, I thought, I was no better than my mother. She, too, would have smiled at Alex as he handed her onto the dock, and looked at him with eyes that showed exactly how she felt, and let him kiss her on the cheek. A short kiss, friendly, just a glancing brush along my cheekbone, but it tingled through my system like a jolt of electricity.

  I stepped back quickly, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and stammered something incoherent about needing to find Rupert. “Thank you for a lovely day,” I told him, and with that I turned and made a coward’s dash out of the boathouse and began the uphill climb along the path towards the house.

  ix

  I came up the terrace steps frowning, and was halfway across before I realized I was not alone.

  Daniela, elegant in black and wearing sunglasses, uncurled herself like a cat from the chair she’d been lounging in, shifting to face me. “You’re back,” she said simply, and yet something in her tone made me feel for an instant like a teenager caught coming home past curfew. I halted in my tracks a little guiltily.

  She smiled. “Did you have a good time?”

  So she knew. “Yes, I did, thank you.” I didn’t know exactly how to handle this—whether I ought to explain, or apologize, or what. As I tried to decide, Daniela leaned back in her chair, assessing me, I thought, the way a careful politician might assess the opposition. r />
  The sunglasses threw me off a bit—it was always harder to read someone’s expression when you couldn’t see their eyes. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was decidedly neutral. “When I was young,” she said, “there was a neighbour’s dog that liked to come onto our property, chasing our goats, so my mother put out poisoned meat. The dog died, and our neighbour he was angry, but he could do nothing. My mother had a right to do the thing she did, because the dog was trespassing.” She paused, and lit a cigarette, holding it between her perfectly manicured fingers as she added pleasantly, “You understand what I am saying?”

  I’d have had to be an idiot, I thought, to miss the threat, but as threats went it seemed so unlikely and over the top that I found myself quite at a loss for a reply. I’d probably have laughed if I wasn’t so taken aback. I could feel my face starting to flush as it frequently did when I faced an unjust accusation. Carefully, I said, “I think you’re telling me that Alex is a goat.”

  Her lips compressed, a tiny sign that I’d succeeded in annoying her. “You know he’s taken.”

  I was getting annoyed, myself. Which explained why I forgot my guilty conscience long enough to snap, “You’d best tell him that, then.” And deciding that would make as good an exit line as any, I turned and started walking off.

  Daniela’s voice followed me, cutting. “I’ve heard this is a habit for the women of your family, stealing men.”

  I stopped. My flush became a burn that spread not only up my face but through my veins as well, blurring my reason and leaving me frustratingly unable to defend myself with words. And in the midst of this I heard approaching footsteps, heard Daniela greeting Alex in Italian in a voice as smooth as honey, heard him say to her in English, “Yes, a good day.” Then a pause, and I could feel his eyes on me. “Is everything all right?”

  “Of course.” I kept my back to him—I knew my cheeks would still be flaming, and I didn’t want to let him see that, didn’t want to give Daniela any cause to feel triumphant. “Of course it is,” I said again. And straightening my shoulders I excused myself and left them with a calm, unhurried walk that plainly said I wasn’t bothered.