Love Falls (13 page)

‘What are you doing?' Kip was staring at her.

‘You've got to look at this.' The courtyard was half covered by a frescoed ceiling, pale-blue sky, cherubs reclining against clouds. There were olive trees in pots, the undersides of their leaves silver, and ahead of them in an unexpected gap between buildings, hung a perfectly round moon. The music swooped and wept from the room above as Kip came towards her. Oh my God, Lara thought, as he took hold of her shoulders, he's going to kiss me. In this magical place. She took a quick breath and held it.

‘This is so corny.' Kip frowned. ‘I feel like I'm in a bad musical.'

‘Yes.' Lara gave a high, forced laugh, and she watched him back out through the courtyard and into the street.

‘Come on,' he called. ‘Or they'll go without us.'

‘OK.' Lara took her shoes off. ‘I'm coming,' and she raced after him, scooting up the slowly curving lanes, catching him up, so that they arrived breathless and together at the waiting car.

Lulu made a space for Kip on the jeep's hard bench and as soon as he was settled she leant her head against his shoulder and let her hand trail the length of his leg.

‘Oh for God's sake, Lulu,' May murmured. ‘Leave him alone. Don't you know it's illegal to marry your stepbrother?'

‘Of course it's not,' Roland shouted from the front. ‘And anyway, it's not everyone who's obsessed with marriage. Your father doesn't think it necessary to marry all the women he goes to bed with. He doesn't even think it necessary to marry the old P.'

‘Only because he's married to Mummy!' May hissed back.

And Lulu swung one long leg over Kip's knees and nuzzled her mouth against his ear. ‘Marry me, Lord Willoughby,' she crooned.

‘Honestly!' May rolled her eyes, but everybody else, even Lara, laughed.

 

 

Lara woke to find her joints were made of tin, the hollows in her body full of smoke. Slowly, painfully she got out of bed, and saw through the half-shuttered window that the day was overcast. Kip's jumper was still lying on a chair. She pulled it on and went down to sit with Ginny over breakfast. But Ginny was out. The breakfast was cleared away, so instead she poured herself some juice and went out to the terrace where her father was already working, scribbling furiously, scratching down notes, flipping over the pages of books, reeling off sentences that seemed to flow, comma-less, line after line.

Lara pulled up a chair and, careful that the glass shouldn't risk touching even a corner of one page, she waited for him to look up. She waited for some time, coughing very slightly, shuffling a little, even traipsing inside to peel and eat a fig, the steamy richness of its flesh making her look round, self-conscious. But it was worth it – the gritty pulpiness that tasted of its smell, and fortified with it, she went back out and brushing against Lambert's shoulder she asked him how he was.

‘I thought we'd go to Florence.' He looked up, as if he'd been waiting all morning to give her this news.

‘Florence?' It had never occurred to Lara that they'd go anywhere else. She'd imagined that her father had used up all his zest for travelling by coming here.

‘Just for a few days. It seems a shame not to see the Pitti Palace. We can catch a mid-morning train from Siena and we'll arrive in time for lunch. I thought we might try Harry's Bar.'

There was a Harry's Bar in London, and now she thought of it, of course, despite its name, it
was
Italian. They had a dish, a spaghetti, fine as noodles, covered in a cheese cream sauce, which although Lara knew was far too rich for her, she'd once eaten so much of it she'd actually been sick.

‘Have you been before? I mean to Florence?'

‘Yes.' Lambert stretched as if this were the most normal question she could ask. ‘I spent a summer once travelling through Italy. I stayed in a wonderful hotel, by the Ponte Vecchio, but according to Caroline it's no longer there.'

‘A whole summer  . . .'

She wanted to ask him where else he'd been. When, and how, and who with. And why he had stopped travelling. But, as if guessing her thoughts, he picked up his pen again and began to read through what he'd just written, his eyes flicking over the words as if he were only now understanding what they said.

 

 

When Lara returned from India she imagined she'd tell Lambert every detail of her year away. She'd tell him about the pilgrimage they'd made to the temple at Bodhgaya where the Buddha had found enlightenment. She imagined she'd tell him how they'd travelled there by train from Delhi, relieved to be moving again after their one night in a hotel – safe in a compartment, watching the countryside stretch out around them, thinking they'd never get over the sadness and relief of being off that bus. They spent a night in a room with two benches to sleep on, a wooden table with a chair where Lara wrote, conscientious, in her diary, and the next morning they found a rickshaw to take them to the temple.

The temple was beautiful, with a gold Buddha at the front, and inside, on the walls, the story, in pictures, of the Buddha's life. It surprised Lara to learn the Buddha had had a life. She'd thought until then that he was a god, like Krishna or Shiva, but here she learnt that he'd been born a prince, five hundred years before Christ, out of his mother's side, in a beautiful palace, in beautiful grounds.

‘His parents loved him so much that they never wanted him to know sorrow,' Cathy told her, as they looked at each painting, ‘and so they kept him in the palace, constantly entertained, served with the most delicious food and the sweetest drinks, surrounded by the dearest friends until he was in his twenties.'

By then the Buddha was growing restless. The palace was beautiful. The gardens were scented and full of birds, but what he wanted was to see outside the palace walls. His parents pleaded with him not to venture out, begged him to be satisfied with what they could provide for him, but in the end they could not keep him a prisoner and eventually it was decided that he could leave the grounds, but only if he went in a procession. On the wall of the temple there was a picture of this procession. Silk-patterned saris, elephants and canopies, servants waving banana-leaf fans.

Once he was outside the first thing the Buddha saw was someone very old. ‘What has happened?' He was greatly shocked. It was explained to him that this was what life was. People grew old. Their skin wrinkled, their backs bent. Then a little further on the Buddha saw someone who was ill. He was outraged. How could this be? Is this what life is? Then by the side of the road he saw a bier on which a dead body lay, surrounded by grief-stricken relatives. What does life mean, he asked, that it contains so much suffering? He returned to the palace and for a long time he sat and thought.

By now the Buddha had a wife and a baby, but all the same, after much thought, he decided to leave again. He took nothing with him, and for many months he stayed with a group of poor ascetics in a forest. They ate almost nothing and thought a great deal, and there were many pictures in the temple of a starving Buddha, dressed in rags, impossible to recognise without the cheerful round of his belly.

He left the forest and walked as far as Bodhgaya, where he stopped and rested. He ate and slept and regained his strength, and then he found a Bodi tree of great beauty and sat under it. For three days and nights he sat there, tormented by every mental anguish, until on the third day as the dawn broke all became clear. He was enlightened. With no one to tell his revelation to, he touched the ground to mark the moment of his enlightenment.

On the wall of the temple there was a large picture of the Buddha, a trickle of earth running through his fingers, a serene look on his already serene face. In the garden of the temple, at the exact spot where the Buddha had sat and touched the earth, there was a monument. Pigeons perched on it, but Cathy was doubtful that the tree that grew close by was the original Bodi tree that had been there two thousand years before. All the same, they settled under it and ate their lunch.

‘Many people came to talk to the Buddha about his enlightenment,' Cathy told Lara. “Please teach us,” they begged, but the Buddha replied, “It is too near. It is too simple. It is too unbelievable to be taught.” But eventually he relented and what he taught them were the four noble truths. Suffering. The causes of suffering. The path of suffering. The cessation of suffering.'

Lara and Cathy spent the whole day at the temple. They threw crumbs for the parrots and peacocks who roamed the gardens, and bought two bangles and a little carved-stone Buddha from a woman by the gate.

‘Did he ever go back and see his baby?' Lara asked. ‘You know, Buddha, once he found enlightenment?'

‘Hmm.' Cathy thought for a while, but she had to admit that she didn't know.

 

 

Lara had tried to talk to Lambert about her travels, even gave him a demonstration of the dancing that she'd learnt in Bangalore, her knees bent wide, her feet slapping down against the floor, her wrists circling, her neck long, her eyes making their own dance from side to side, but it seemed incongruous and boastful to talk of palaces and temples, of bright colours and tinkling bells, camels and family bicycles while he'd spent every day of every week of every year in the small close confines of his Kensington flat.

‘Dad?' She tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked up from his page. ‘When were you thinking we should go?'

‘Sorry?' Lambert was lost somewhere in the century. ‘Oh,' he remembered, ‘Florence. Tomorrow. We'll catch the morning train.' And with a frown of determination he went back to his work.

Lara wandered down to the pool and sat on the edge, her feet in the cool water, the soft wool of Kip's jumper collecting heat as the sky began to clear. Her head was throbbing, mildly at first, but soon so painfully that she had to go up to the house, rummage through the kitchen, and then trailing out again into the garden down to the half-hidden door to Ginny's room. But Ginny still wasn't there. She checked the drive and saw her car was gone. Caroline's car too, and so there was no one to ask for aspirin except Lambert, and from the tilt of his back, his shoulders, the tautness of his neck, she knew he was not to be disturbed. Instead she put on her bikini and went for a swim. It hurt. The cold water forcing the pain up through her body, cracking as it reached her head.

Will Kip miss me? she asked herself, safe under the water. Will he notice that I've gone? And then with a smile that threatened to let in water she remembered the feel of his fingers as he'd pressed them against hers in the club. Lara came up, her headache forgotten, and reached for the jumper, drops of water falling on to it, rolling like mercury across the wool. She patted herself dry with it, held it up to her nose, breathed in the smell of him still collected in its mesh.

And then Ginny was leaning over the terrace railings, a finger to her lips, reminding her Lambert was still working, before she waved. Lara pulled the jumper on over her bikini and ran up to where Ginny was already unpacking shopping, piling apricots into a bowl, rinsing nectarines in a colander.

‘How was it?' Ginny asked, her whole face bright with anticipation. ‘Tell me every detail.' She set a pan of water on to boil. ‘Tell me about the dress.'

‘Oh . . . oh yes.'

The wedding seemed so long ago, and to make up for having nearly forgotten, she re-created for Ginny the spectacle of Diana stepping down from the carriage, walking up the steps and into the cathedral, her ridiculously long train gathered up by bridesmaids of every size. Ginny listened intently, dropping tomatoes into the boiled water, letting them sweat there, before she pulled them out to be peeled. She cut basil, a great sheaf of it, the smell, so sweet, filling the room, its whiff of cat's piss only a breath behind.

Lara told Ginny about the inside of the cathedral, the candles and the flowers, the hats, the faces, the echoes and the music, told her more, really, than she'd noticed at the time. Ginny broke eggs into a bowl of flour, mixed in water and a pinch of salt, and then when it was moulded rolled out a sheet of dough. She cut it into squares with a metal cutter, the edges frilled, and as Lara talked she filled each square with a pulp of ricotta and then sealed the edges with a lick of egg and the pressure of her thumb. Lara recited the vows for her, stumbling, just as Diana had, on the list of Charles's names, and Ginny, her face paling, looked up sharply, to show that she was not amused.

‘He was so serious,' she explained in defence of herself and Diana. ‘The Archbishop. He never once smiled.'

‘Yes,' Ginny nodded. ‘But marriage is a serious thing.'

By the time Charles and Diana were in their golden coach, alone together finally, waving dutifully at thousands upon thousands of people, Ginny had a pile of ravioli parcels and a pan of bubbling tomato sauce.

‘That's it,' Lara said, as Ginny dropped each parcel into the wide pan and together they watched the steam rise up as the ravioli sank, swelled and then floated to the top.

Caroline arrived home with a bunch of flowers and a newspaper, a silver rain of fireworks, the night before the wedding, showering down over the front page. Ginny looked longingly at it, but Lambert, having cleared away his work, opened it hurriedly, going first to the obituary pages, and then flipping backwards until he'd reached the front. Ginny waited, they all did, for the pages to flutter shut, and then she served the food. As well as the ravioli there was salad and a plate of cold meat, and instead of pudding the dish of apricots, almost too beautiful to disturb in their green bowl.