Several months later
‘Stop it, Zara. You’re driving everyone crazy.’
‘Apologize then, Mike. Say you’re sorry.’
‘I’m not saying sorry for something I haven’t done . . .’
The angry voices faded as Briony tugged shut the door of the Italian villa with the tiniest of clicks. Her sigh of relief sent the gecko in the porch darting into the eaves. A fellow escapee, she thought, watching it vanish but, unlike her, it wouldn’t feel guilty. How long did she have before the others stopped bickering and noticed she’d gone? Perhaps they’d think she’d retired to bed early and lock up. Well, she didn’t care. Three days into their holiday and she was already tired of their company. Of Mike and Zara, anyway. Aruna and Luke weren’t to blame. At least, they didn’t mean to make her feel the odd one out.
The evening was thick with the late July heat. Briony sniffed at the savoury smoke from their barbecue still hanging in the air as she set off over the rough ground between the olive trees to the gate. When she gained the leafy coolness of the lane, a fragrance of resin replaced the pungent smoke and she breathed it in gratefully.
Which way now? Downhill the road led back through the hamlet with its bar and shop, then across a bridge over a babbling river where light dazzled off the water, a beautiful spot where children paddled. That way meant other people, though, and she wanted to be by herself. So she struck out left, up the hill towards the dying sun. It was a direction she hadn’t taken before.
The going was easy despite the warmth and it wasn’t long before the lazy atmosphere of the Italian countryside and a pleasant stretch in her calves calmed her ruffled mood. She hated any form of conflict since the trolling, even when she wasn’t directly involved. It made her want to run and hide.
Soon, the gritty road crunching under her trainers became a soft grassy track that drew her up between terraces of fruit trees where the air smelled fresh with citrus. Minutes later she came to a bend in the path above a sharp drop. She stopped, then stepped out onto a rocky crag to stare at a sudden breathtaking vista of the valley. Up and beyond the encircling hills were the folds of other hills and other valleys, a view that lifted her mood, it was so beautiful.
Beneath the gold-streaked sky all was peaceful. The air was so still and the valley so deep that the smallest sounds echoed up. Briony narrowed her eyes and listened. Far away, a dog yapped a warning in canine Morse code. The strains of a car engine competed with the putter of a tiny plane passing overhead. Close by, a lone cicada tried a hesitant note like a violinist testing a string. Another, and then, as if at the drop of a baton, a whole orchestra of them started up around.
Briony’s gaze rested on the terracotta roofs of a small town clinging to the neck of the valley. Tuana. She recalled a fragment of conversation she’d had with her dad the week before. She’d rung him to let him know where she would be staying.
‘Tuana?’ Martin Wood had said. ‘That rings a bell. You know your mum’s dad, Grandpa Andrews, was stationed there during the war?’ The reminder was enough to send her online to look for pictures of the town, then to the college library for a couple of books about the Second World War in Italy that she’d brought with her. Her grandfather had died when she was ten, silent about his war experiences to the last.
They had stopped in Tuana for supplies on the day they arrived and found it a tranquil place with tight winding streets and a public square dreaming in the sun, but after they’d visited the little supermarket, Mike had been impatient to drive on to the villa and crack open the local vino he’d bought, so there’d been no time to poke around.
The valley was idyllic; well, it appeared to be. Just as Briony knew that the grey haze crowning the furthest hills must be the pollution of Naples’ industrial belt, and the distant twin peaks wreathed in smoke was Mount Vesuvius, so did the thought of Mike spoil her pleasure. She yanked a tendril of bindweed from a nearby bush. It snapped, flailed the air like a whip, then lay limp in her hand. She let it fall.
There must be something wrong with her to feel this way. Anyone else would consider themselves lucky. Two weeks’ summer holiday at a villa in the mountains of Italy! It was Aruna who’d asked her along. Lovely Aruna, who since they’d found themselves sharing a student flat together, years ago, had been her best friend.
Apart from Aruna, the holiday party were comparative strangers to Briony. Aruna’s colleague Zara and hospital doctor Mike were the couple in full spate of a row. Then there was Luke, a tall, gentle, laid-back man in his late thirties who was Aruna’s boyfriend of six months and whom Briony found considerate and easy to talk to.
Briony stepped down from the rock and continued along the narrow path around the shoulder of the hill, treading carefully; one wrong step could send her tumbling. When she next looked up it was to see an escarpment ahead. Among trees crowded against the hillside above, her sharp eyes could make out part of the roof and upper storey of a sizeable house. How did one get to that, especially by car? There must be a road from some other direction.
The footpath led more steeply uphill now, zigzagging between trees, but, curious about the house, Briony began to climb. She reached a ridge, hot and out of breath, to find that there was indeed a rutted earth road, snaking off right towards where she’d seen the house.
Someone must have come this way because there were tyre marks in the dust. The owner of the house, presumably. But who would live up here, in such a lonely spot?
She followed the car tracks for a couple of minutes before the road suddenly broadened out then ended abruptly at a pair of sagging wrought-iron gates bound by a rusty chain. A creeper with tiny red flowers twisted through them. It must have been a long time since they’d been opened. Of a car there was no sign, only soil thrown up on the road where the vehicle must have turned in impatient movements. Reaching the gates, Briony grasped the bars and stared, like an outcast, into the lush greenery beyond.
Because of one of those odd tricks of perspective, she could no longer see the house. Such an air of dereliction and loneliness lay over the place that she felt an answering melancholy. She yearned to slip between the gates or attempt to scale the crumbling wall that ran at head-height on either side, but she did not dare. Suppose the owner caught her and accused her of trespassing? Although she could read some Italian, she stumbled to speak it, and she’d have difficulty explaining herself. She smiled, imagining trying to charm some furious Mafioso type. The place appeared to be deserted, but the vehicle tracks told her she couldn’t be certain.
The sun was dipping behind the hills and the sky bloomed crimson. Soon it would be dusk. With reluctance, Briony turned from the gates. As she scrambled her way down the hillside, tiny bats teased the edges of her vision as they swooped for insects.
At the crag where she’d paused half an hour before, she was surprised to see someone else standing there, staring out across the valley. The sunset dazzled, but then she recognized that lanky figure, his hands in jeans pockets, that mane of nutbrown hair. It was Luke. ‘Hello,’ she called as she drew close.
The light glinted off dark glasses as he turned. ‘Hey.’ He smiled his quirky smile. ‘Isn’t this amazing? I was trying to orient myself.’ He pointed over the valley. ‘Do you suppose that’s the road we came in by, Saturday?’
Briony squinted at the silver ribbon winding down the hillside towards Tuana. ‘It must be.’
‘What did you find up there?’ Luke nodded in the direction she’d appeared from and she described the wild garden, and tried in vain to point out the roof of the old villa. Now, in the dying light, the trees appeared to be fused together in a dark slab.
‘Never mind. Perhaps another time.’
‘Yes.’ They stood quietly for a while watching a tiny train cross a distant hillside, then she asked, ‘Were you taking a walk, or did you come to find me?’
‘I saw you slip out earlier and . . . well, you were gone a long time. Aruna wondered if you were OK.’ Luke’s forehead wrinkled in a frown. ‘Are you?’
‘I’m fine. Just needed some peace and quiet.’
‘Ah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ He raised his sunglasses and looked rueful.
‘You weren’t, honest.’
‘Good. The lovebirds have made it up, by the way. It’s safe to go back in the water.’ This last he said in a stagey whisper with an ironic twist of his eyebrows, and she burst out laughing. As he led the way back down the narrow path towards the villa, she felt happy because someone understood.
‘Mike’s all right really,’ Luke remarked. ‘He enjoys upsetting people with those grisly hospital tales. It’s best not to rise to it, then he’ll shut up.’
‘I think it’s horrible to talk like that about your patients.’ I do sound prim, Briony told herself, but to her relief, Luke nodded.
‘He’s an idiot. I don’t think Aruna realized exactly what she was taking on when she invited them. He was all right in London. Isn’t it strange when you see people out of their normal context? You notice new things about them.’
‘About how they really are?’
‘Different sides, perhaps. You still have to consider them as a whole.’
She envied Luke his laid-back attitude. ‘I suppose so.’ Mike was affable enough, she had to admit, and could be amusing company, but when he’d had a drink or two he became loud, boorish. And – she felt a flash of anger – it was their precious holiday he was spoiling.
‘So, what about me?’ she said lightly. The path had widened and they were walking side by side now. ‘Am I different out of my milieu?’
Luke didn’t answer for a moment. ‘Yes and no,’ he said finally, as though choosing the right words. ‘I think in London we instinctively act in a certain way; it’s a kind of armour, but here it’s easier to see behind that to the person beyond. A nice person in your instance, of course.’ He glanced at her with a grin.
‘That’s all right then. Sometimes I suspect the person inside me is a poor shrivelled thing.’
‘We all feel that about ourselves sometimes. I know I do. I suppose, since you asked, you seem a little . . . careworn. I’m sorry if I’m saying the wrong thing . . .’
‘You’re probably right,’ she admitted. ‘I’m still unwinding, I think.’
They trudged on in silence, Briony’s feeling of anxiety returning the closer they got to the villa. She was faintly alarmed now by the concerned glances Luke was throwing her. Perhaps she’d made a fool of herself by flouncing out and he thought her bonkers? But when they came to the door and he stood back to let her go first, their eyes met briefly. He did not smile, but his grey-blue eyes under the mop of springy hair danced with good-humoured complicity.
‘Thanks for coming to find me.’
‘No problemo,’ he said. ‘Aruna was worried.’
‘It is called the Villa Teresa,’ the stout barman of the tiny local tavern pronounced loftily the following day in answer to Briony’s question. He gave the round zinc table a deft wipe with a cloth and set before her a cappuccino and a glass of iced water. Then he glanced about the sunny terrace and lowered his voice. ‘No one lives there now, bella. There is, how you say, a difficulty.’ He spread his fingers to indicate a web of intrigue.
‘But who does it belong to?’ Beautiful, he’d called her. The way he’d spoken almost made her feel it. She lifted her sunglasses up onto her head and blinked up at him and ran a smoothing hand over her long hair, released from its usual neat chignon. The sun was lightening the pale brown to blonde, she’d noticed happily in the mirror that morning.
More customers arrived, distracting him. ‘I do not know, signorita, sorry.’ With a bow of his head he stepped over to serve a silver-haired American couple who were settling themselves at a table nearby, the woman fanning herself with a tourist pamphlet, and her husband calling impatiently for acqua minerale.
Briony sipped her coffee and flicked through the book she’d brought down with her. It was an illustrated account of the Allied forces’ liberation of Italy. Round here must have been quite a battleground, she realized as she examined the photographs, fought over by the Germans and the invading Allied forces. It was difficult to imagine now, sitting outside this pretty ochre-roofed café with its view of the arched bridge and the chattering river, though this terrace would have been the perfect lookout spot. ‘The Germans retreated, blowing up transport links as they went . . .’ she had begun to read, when—
‘Scusi, signorita.’ A soft female voice from the table behind, where previously there had been no one.
She twisted round to meet the almond-eyed gaze of a fine-boned, middle-aged Italian woman in a long-sleeved top of royal blue who was sitting in the shade over a coffee. It took a second for Briony to recognize her as Mariella, the maid for their villa. Only yesterday she and her shy grown-up daughter had driven up with piles of fresh sheets and snowy towels which they had stowed in a cupboard before restoring the kitchen to order with tactful efficiency.
‘Buongiorno, Mariella, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you before. Sono Briony.’
Mariella acknowledged this with a nod, but her eyes were on the book. ‘Per favore, Briony, the book?’
Briony showed her the cover, then when Mariella reached out a beckoning hand, passed the volume to her. She watched the woman turn to the pictures with her long fingers, and was struck by the passionate expression in her eyes.
‘You, you know about this here?’ Mariella said, tapping the book, and Briony caught her meaning.
‘I’m a historian,’ she explained. ‘What happened here is fascinating to me. I write about the Second World War,’ and she explained about Women Who Marched Away, while the woman listened, examining Briony’s face with calm eyes. ‘Also,’ Briony added, ‘my grandfather, mio nonno. He was a soldier here, a British soldier.’
At this Mariella stiffened and her stare intensified, leading Briony to wonder if she’d unwittingly given offence. The war might be history to some, but she knew that for others it had left wounds that would never heal, with repercussions that affected their children, of whom Mariella might be one. She was still troubled when Mariella returned the book with a simple, ‘Grazie.’ The cleaner switched subjects. ‘La casa? The house? You are happy?’
‘Oh, very happy,’ Briony hastened to say. ‘Everything’s lovely, thank you.’
‘Prego,’ the woman replied vaguely, glancing again at the book. Then, ‘Signor Marco,’ she called over her shoulder and the proprietor appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, drying his big hands on a towel, his bald pate shining under the electric light. She spoke several sentences of Italian to him, too fast for Briony to follow, but the words ‘Villa Teresa’ kept being mentioned. Signor Marco replied with the same rapidity and Briony looked from one to the other trying to make sense of it all. Finally he retreated to his kitchen and the woman arranged her cardigan around her shoulders, collected a black tote bag from the floor and stood up to go. ‘Ciao, signorita.’
‘Ciao. Good to see you,’ Briony mumbled, still wondering what the conversation with Signor Marco had been about, and she watched Mariella call goodbye to him and wander out into the sunlight.
There was something puzzling going on here, she reflected. Mariella, her slender frame bowed, walked slowly, deep in thought. Suddenly she paused, turned and stared back up at the café, a watchful expression on her face. Then she seemed to come to a decision, for with purposeful stride, she crossed the road and set off along a narrow footpath that vanished up the hill behind the village shop opposite. Briony stared after her, feeling considerably disturbed by the whole encounter. Had she unintentionally touched upon some secret trouble?