Love Falls (5 page)

‘Is everything all right?’ Caroline asked her, and she saw that she was being watched.

‘Yes,’ she said and, treacherous, she cut into the steak.

The taste of the meat exploded in her mouth. Chewy and tender and oozing with herbs. This doesn’t count, she told herself, eating meat in Italy. It would be rude not to, after Ginny’s worked so hard, and she looked up to tell her it was delicious. But Ginny wasn’t sitting down with them. She was in the kitchen, preoccupied, subdued, and Lara didn’t know if there was praise that should be kept in check.

‘That was awfully good,’ Caroline said finally when Ginny came to clear, and Lara almost knocked over her glass in her relief at being able to agree.

‘Thank you.’ Ginny lifted her plate.

Paralysed with indecision, Lara wondered if she was allowed, or possibly expected, to help. In the end the suspense was more than she could bear, and she got up just in time to bring in the oil and vinegar decanters in their silver holders and place them on the side.

‘They go there,’ Ginny told her, indicating the larder, and although Lara could tell by her tone she wasn’t pleased, she had no way of knowing how she was at fault.

That night Caroline and Lambert sat up exchanging news. They mentioned a long succession of people of whom Lara had never heard and occasionally, she was sure, Caroline glanced at her doubtfully, as if maybe she was there under false pretences, maybe she wasn’t Lambert’s daughter at all.

‘How do you two know each other?’ Lara edged her way in.

Caroline laughed and glanced quickly at Lambert. ‘We’ve known each other for ever, haven’t we, darling? My mother was a cousin of Anne Holt. We met when we were children. Well, I, apparently, was never a child’ – she winked at Lambert – ‘but your father was a mere boy.’

‘Nothing mere about me,’ he smiled dutifully.

Caroline, her eyes lit up, leant forward. ‘You remember that awful Peregrine? Well, I don’t know why, but I was thinking about him the other day and I suddenly remembered that night when he caught us, arriving back from Paris – about a year after the war – with the most ridiculous amount of shopping. All the bags seemed to say things like
Champs-Elysées
and
Boutique Parisien
but very politely he asked how it had been, my week in Wiltshire, at my mother’s.’ She began to laugh. ‘What were we thinking of, sneaking off right under his nose like that? God, after you’d gone, there was the most awful row.’

‘I do remember.’ Lambert looked at her affectionately. ‘We stayed at the Crillon.’

‘So we did.’ She sighed. ‘If only he’d known how innocent it was,’ and they sat for a while in silence.

Lara excused herself and went up to her room. She took out the book she was meant to be reading for college on the French Revolution and lay down with it, but before she’d even raised her arm to turn the first page she found that she was whirling, sinking, spinning until with a jolt she heard the book fall to the floor and in the split second that followed she was asleep.

By the time Lara came down the next morning breakfast was over and cleared away.

‘Where are the others?’ Lara asked, and Ginny told her they had driven into Siena.

‘They left early before the heat becomes unbearable, but they’ll be back,’ she said, ‘by lunch.’ Ginny was already cooking, cutting vegetables, making pastry, stewing a pan of clementines for a cake.

‘Did you swim?’ Lara poured milk on to cornflakes, and Ginny said that yes, she’d done a hundred lengths.

She set her mixing bowl down on the table and as she stirred she began to talk, about her garden in the Cotswolds, her mother who was insistent on living alone at eighty-seven, her admiration for Lady Diana Spencer. How beautiful she was. And pure.

‘You can tell she’s a virgin.’ Ginny looked at Lara as if she was used to being contradicted. ‘Even my mother agrees and she’s beady as a hawk.’

‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Lara had never given it a moment’s thought, so instead she told her about her own mother, how they were such good friends, how they’d gone to India together on the Budget Bus from London to Delhi for £50.

‘Return?’ Ginny asked and Lara laughed because people always asked her this.

‘One way.’ It wasn’t just the idea of the bargain being any greater than it was, but the idea of any of the people travelling on that bus to India knowing when, if ever, they were likely to come back.

She remembered the Welsh miners, sprawled across the back seats, swapping their clothes, even their jeans and jackets, in Afghanistan for opium and hash. By the time they arrived in Delhi they owned nothing more than their underpants and T-shirts, and their rucksacks when they hoiked them on were light as air. Were they still out there, she wondered, five years later, roaming semi-naked through the streets?

‘Our driver on the Budget Bus was called John,’ she told Ginny. ‘He was like our dad. He found the best places to camp, always near a market, with somewhere to wash, and when the van broke down he could always mend it. Even if once it took three days.’

Lara had kept a diary with felt-tip illustrations of butterflies and birds, tents and veiled women, and carefully written accounts of her travels to make up for missing school.

‘When we arrived in Delhi, we were all so attached to our dad no one could bring themselves to leave the bus. We hovered around, making excuses to get back on, even the miners, looking for things they might have lost. All day we sat there, until he had to shoo us away.’

Lara had a sudden memory of her mother, white-faced, setting off through the city, gripping on to her arm, with people all around them thrusting out their hands, calling, smiling, teeth stained red. They climbed into a rickshaw and trotted out into the traffic, but every time they stopped they were surrounded again, the same thin hands pushed against their laps. Cathy was frightened, so frightened in fact that she abandoned her search for the friends of friends they were hoping to stay with and booked into a hotel. It was a small hotel, only half built, but the room was clean and the door had a lock, and in the morning they were brought a tray with tea and a banana. Bananas were in fact the one thing they dared to eat, sealed safely as they were inside their skin.

‘How did you get back?’ Ginny was leaping forward in her concern, and so Lara told her about the very different driver they had a year later, who stopped the bus only where it suited him, in back streets and corrugated yards.

‘He was smuggling or dealing, and if anyone said anything, like maybe we could stop near a
hammam
, you know, to wash, he just shouted at them. In fact, the journey was so awful that once we got to Germany we got off the bus and hitched.’

‘Hitched?’ Ginny looked alarmed, and so Lara explained about their house on the hill in Scotland and how they would hitch lifts up and down to London every summer.

‘Sometimes,’ she said, although it probably wasn’t true, ‘we made it faster than the train.’

She told Ginny about the goat they kept for milk, the yaks the Tibetans imported, and how when they moved to London Cathy missed her goats so much she decided to keep bees. They already had a cat, but she wanted something that gave produce, so now they had two bee hives on the flat roof above the bathroom that made enough honey to last most of the year. When the bees swarmed they hovered in a great black ball of buzzing in the fork of the lilac tree at the end of the garden and someone from the Inner London Beekeeping Association would drive round and, dressed in a white suit with a hat and a veil, would knock them into a sack.

It was easy sitting there, enveloped by the smells of food, the sweetness of the onion softening and the bitter peel of the fruit. She could tell Ginny about Clive. She thought about it, but found she couldn’t focus on him here. Dusty, he seemed in his donkey jacket, and far away.

Outside the day was heating up, the air growing denser as it neared noon. Lara changed into her bikini and went down to the pool. She practised her new streamlined swimming, gliding through the water with barely a splash, and when she’d done enough lengths to feel bored, she got out and lay on a towel in the full glare of the sun. She could feel it prickle her, seal heat into her body, and when she was baked through she rolled over to feed the scorching rays into her back.

‘Oh my dear!’ Caroline said at lunch. ‘You have caught the sun!’ And it was true, there was a red stripe along the bridge of Lara’s nose, and under each eye, a sweep of pink.

‘Where did you go?’ she asked to divert attention.

Caroline told her that they’d driven into Siena to talk to a man about a horse. ‘I’m hoping my horse will be chosen to run in the Palio. It was chosen once, three years ago, but since then it’s been overlooked.’

Lara looked round. ‘You have a horse?’

‘Not here.’ Caroline raised her eyebrows in a flicker of amusement. ‘It’s a racehorse. My husband used to own several and I keep one, in his memory. It was his greatest wish’ – she looked wistful – ‘that it win the Palio.’

‘The Palio,’ Lambert told her, ‘is a horse race that takes place in July and again in August in the main square in Siena.’

‘A horse race! It’s much more than a horse race!’ Caroline broke in. ‘It’s a way of life! It’s the most important event in this area; people prepare for it for the whole year. There is probably never a time when the local people aren’t thinking about it. Aren’t stewing over who won it last year, hoping to be the winners this time round.’

‘It’s been a tradition in this town since the thirteenth century,’ Lambert said knowledgeably. ‘It’s a race between the different districts of the city. The
contrade
. There are seventeen of them and each
contrada
has a symbol, the Panther or the Snail, the Tower, the Shell, each with their own colours, and whoever wins the Palio is the King of Siena for that year.’

‘The jockeys all come from Sardinia.’ Caroline was flushed. ‘They ride bareback round the square at the most incredible speed. Three times they go. Some fall, horses are destroyed, the people go wild. It’s the most intense ninety seconds – there’s nothing like it – and when it’s over, you need a stiff drink.’

‘Isn’t it a bit . . .’ Lara shivered. ‘A bit cruel?’

Caroline looked fierce. ‘No more so,’ she said, ‘than the Grand National. And the horse that wins, well, that horse is a hero. It’s taken into the cathedral, blessed, and revered for all time.’

‘The riders are hurt too,’ Lambert said.

Lara couldn’t resist, she told him what he knew. ‘But no one makes the riders do it!’ She looked down at her salad then, but not quickly enough to miss the amused look that passed between Caroline and Lambert, eyeing each other as if to say, ‘She’ll grow out of it! She’s young.’

I won’t, she seethed, remembering a book of photographs she’d once seen of a bullfight, the crowd jeering and bloodthirsty, the toreador taunting the poor bleeding animal with his spear. I’m so glad, she’d thought, that I’m a vegetarian, and she remembered the steak and felt a stab of guilt.

‘When is the Palio anyway?’ Lambert was asking, and Caroline told him it was a few weeks away, on August the 16th.

‘Lara.’ He leant towards her. ‘You’re saved. Our tickets are booked for the day before.’

‘Oh, but change them.’ Caroline gripped his hand. ‘You have to change them. You can’t miss the Palio. I’ll look into it for you. Or we could ask Ginny. Ginny might even be driving into Pisa later this week. She won’t mind stopping off at the train station and changing the tickets for you.’

Lambert smiled. ‘I’ll see,’ he said, but Lara couldn’t imagine he’d stay a moment longer than he’d planned.

Caroline turned to her. ‘Try and persuade him.’

‘Really?’ Lara was too flattered to object. ‘I’ll try,’ and she raised her eyebrows enquiringly at Lambert, who looked down at his plate.

That afternoon she and Lambert attempted a walk. They wandered out of the drive and up the lane, and then, unsure which way to go when it forked, turned left, and found themselves stumbling along beside a field, dust from the earth whitening the ends of their shoes. Each time they stopped, squinting into the distance, checking to see if they were moving towards anything of interest, they heard the rustling of salamanders, not expecting to be disturbed at this siesta hour. It was nice having Lambert to herself again, falling into their accustomed silence, broken occasionally by Lara’s questions and his thoughtful replies.

The fields around were planted with olive groves, their lines, as they sloped uphill, straight as the teeth of a comb, and then as they passed them, looking back from another angle, seeming to fall into ragged disarray. With each step the sun beat down more fiercely until sweat was standing out on Lara’s forehead.

‘Mad dogs and Englishmen,’ Lambert muttered, ‘go out in the midday sun,’ and when Lara opened her mouth to join in she found the air was scorching the back of her throat.

‘What do you think?’ Lambert glanced back along the way they’d come.

‘Shall we?’ she said, shuffling to a stop, and with renewed energy they turned and hurried towards the cool retreat of the house.