Summer at the Lake (16 page)

But now, sitting in the drawing room with a glass of port and the gas fire gently hissing an accompaniment to carols from Christ Church College playing on the CD player, and with Euridice at her feet, it was finally time.

She took a sip of her port, then reached for the first of the two nicely wrapped gifts: the one from Adam, which was bookshaped. The red and gold wrapping paper dispensed with, she nodded with approval. ‘What a perfectly thoughtful present from your new best friend,’ she said, showing Euridice what it was –
The Times
Cryptic Crossword Puzzle Book.

Having removed the wrapping paper with great care and folded it with equal care, Esme placed it on the table beside her ready to be put away in her may-come-in-handy-one-day drawer. Then taking another sip of her port, she reached for Floriana’s present.

‘Now what do you suppose this is?’ she asked the cat, at the same time giving the soft bulky package an experimental squeeze. ‘No clues there,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Euridice: for heaven’s sake, you foolish old woman, get on and open it!’

As silly as it was, Esme wanted to savour the moment, for once she had opened this present, the fun would be over. She had been the same as a child, eking out the pleasure and anticipation of present-opening, particularly if it was something from her father. And it didn’t matter how much she loved what she had been given, there would always be a feeling of anticlimax when there was nothing else left to open. It was a natural form of greed, of course, and one that her mother had been only too quick to stamp on, prohibiting any extravagant gifts, or the quantity given. There were times when Esme had feared her mother would put a stop to Christmas and birthdays altogether, and as a consequence the fear had only endorsed her desire to draw out the process even longer.

She didn’t doubt that there would be those who would say her father had been a weak and ineffectual man, he certainly didn’t have the bullish temperament that her mother had inherited from her own father. Yet his strength lay not in his ability to stand up to his wife, but more – for Esme’s sake – in his resilience to withstand marriage to a woman who openly despised and ridiculed him, never letting him forget that she was the one with all the money, wielding the power it gave her over him with a vindictive zeal that was unreasonably cruel and would have had a lesser man walking away from the situation, no matter how much he loved his only child.

Esme returned her attention to the package on her lap. She pulled on the bow of the silky red ribbon Floriana had used to tie the present and with the same care she’d used for Adam’s wrapping paper, she removed it along with a layer of bubble wrap. She smiled delightedly at what Floriana had given her – a bone china chinoiserie teacup and saucer, prettily decorated with flowers, butterflies and a kingfisher. A card with its edges cut with pinking shears was attached to the handle of the cup and the writing on it was so small in order to fit, she had to put on her reading glasses.

Happy Christmas, Esme – it has been decreed that this cup and saucer must be brought with you when you next visit me.

Nestled inside the cup was a small grey knitted mouse with a length of string for its tail. There was another note, its edges also cut with pinking shears:
Happy Christmas, Euridice!
On the reverse side of the label was written:
Hand-made by Floriana.

Esme was deeply touched that two people whom she had known for so little time had gone to such trouble for her. Her throat tight with emotion, she acknowledged that their kindness served to emphasise how insidiously the loneliness of old age had crept up on her, and what a barren state it was.

She held the mouse aloft for Euridice to see, realising then that there was a small bell inside the toy.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘this is for you from Floriana. From now on, I want you to stop ignoring her; do you hear me?’ She waved the knitted mouse at Euridice and the sound of the tinkling bell made the cat stretch up on her hind legs to investigate. Holding the knitted mouse by its tail, Esme dangled it in front of her and the cat batted it with one of her paws. Dropping it to the floor, Euridice instantly pounced on it. She then picked it up and carried it in her mouth over to the hearthrug where she patted the mouse about, turning it round as if inspecting it.

‘Well,’ said Esme, holding the teacup up to the light and admiring it, ‘what lovely generous new friends we’ve acquired.’

There was just one more thing to open. It was the card Floriana had called round with yesterday. Esme could have opened it right away, but she had wanted to save it for today – something else to savour. Assuming it was a Christmas card, she was surprised to see that it was an invitation and written in what she now recognised as Floriana’s hand, the style forthright and fluid and very expressive, just as the girl herself.

Written on the back of the card was Floriana’s telephone number. After removing her spectacles and taking another sip of her port, Esme wondered when she had last enjoyed a Christmas Day as much as this one.

Some time later, and succumbing to a pleasing torpor, she placed her now empty port glass on the table beside her and closed her eyes.

It was the last week of May when they took the train from Venice to Milan and where they stayed for just the one night.

Post-war Italy was rife with shocking stories of what the country had endured during the war, and though it was irrational, neither Esme nor her father felt inclined to linger in a city where, only five years before, in the Piazza Loreto, the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress had been gruesomely strung up with piano wire and their corpses spat upon and shot at. So after a tour of the
duomo
and with the help of a porter on the crowded station, they boarded the train to Como and with their tickets purchased on the waterfront they then took their seats on the steamer boat. Signora Bassani had offered for someone to meet them in Como, but Esme’s father had sent a telegram saying they would be happy to make their own arrangements.

They had been travelling now for more than seven weeks, varying the length of time they spent in each place depending on their level of interest and the weather. They had commenced their tour in Pisa, followed by Siena, the Amalfi coast, Rome, Florence and Venice, and while every day had brought them plenty of new experiences to explore and enjoy, Esme was looking forward to the months ahead when they would be stopping at the lake for the rest of the summer. It would be a time to unwind after all the weeks of sightseeing.

The ghost of her childhood left far behind in Nottingham, this was the adventure her father had wanted to take her on, their very own version of the Grand Tour. Some might say they were heartless to be so happy, when her mother had been dead only a year, but the way Esme saw it, they were finally free and she for one was going to make the most of this wonderful opportunity. Occasionally she would catch herself wondering what her mother would think of them travelling round Italy like a couple of carefree gypsies, but the thought was fleeting, soon lost in the heady pell-mell of sights to see, trains to catch and people to meet.

Everywhere they went they met somebody new and interesting. In Siena a delightful Belgian couple had befriended them with their extraordinarily well-behaved children and in Rome there had been a widowed English woman – Elizabeth St John – who had seemed quite the jolly eccentric aristocrat, until she had let on that she was no such thing.

‘Not even a minor-ranking member of the aristocracy,’ she had whispered to them over a game of cards one afternoon when a heavy downpour of rain had put paid to their excursion to Tivoli and the gardens at Villa d’Este. It was all an act, she had explained, a way to impress and appeal to the proprietor of the small hotel where they were staying. ‘It goes down frightfully well,’ she confided, ‘by hinting that I’m a “
somebody
” travelling incognito but I don’t want any fuss, it ensures that I always get the best service. The American tourists love it, too. In exchange for a gin fizz, I’ll tell them my fascinating tales of when I met Edward and Wallis Simpson, oh, they just love it!’

‘And did you meet them?’ Esme had asked eagerly and with instant and regrettable naivety.

‘I should say not!’

Esme had felt quite sad to say goodbye to her when she and her father moved on to Florence. But not, Esme suspected, as sad as Elizabeth St John was to see William depart. ‘A lucky escape there, I think,’ her father had said later when he’d recovered from Elizabeth’s farewell embrace; an embrace that had necessitated his being clutched tightly to her mighty bosom. Moments before they had left, and while her father was preoccupied with their luggage and checking their train tickets, Elizabeth had given Esme two pieces of advice: ‘Firstly,’ she had whispered to her, ‘you must be brave and throw yourself into as many new experiences as possible while you’re here in Italy. And secondly, and this is the best advice I can give you, you must fall in love! You are not to go home until you have had at least one grand passion!’

In Florence they had stayed in a charming hotel just off the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. La Residenza Santa Maria was ideally placed to visit the main sites – the Uffizi Gallery, Giotto’s bell tower, the Ponte Vecchio and, of course, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Church of Santa Maria.

They soon slipped into an agreeable routine of spending the morning sightseeing together, then after lunch her father would devote the afternoon to sketching or painting the city from its many vantage points, leaving Esme to further her Italian language studies, and then when she’d had enough of grammar and verbs, she would go for a walk.

Enthralled with everything she saw, and not surprisingly, since she was reading E.M. Forster’s
A Room With a View
, she readily surrendered herself to Elizabeth’s advice that she must fall in love and fancied herself in the role of Lucy Honeychurch.

Or if not love itself, she conceded, then to be romanced.

How perfect it would be to experience her first kiss here, she thought with a happy thrill one afternoon as she paused in front of the
duomo
where a handsome young couple strolled by arm in arm and looking impossibly glamorous – the girl in a navyblue dress cinched in at the waist with a white belt and the man in grey trousers with a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a jacket slung over a shoulder.

But there was no romance for her that day, only an interesting conversation with Professor Banes – a retired American professor of history who she recognised as a fellow guest from La Residenza Santa Maria. She had spotted him during dinner on their first night at the hotel, a plump, pink-faced man who had occupied a table the other side of the dining room.

Seeing her admiring the doors to the Baptistery, he tipped his hat and came over to say hello and to enquire after her father. ‘Then since you are alone, permit me to be your guide for the rest of the day,’ he said, dabbing his glistening pink face with a neatly folded handkerchief. ‘Now what do you know about these splendid fellows?’ he demanded, pointing at the doors with his silver-topped walking cane.

She told him what she’d learnt from her guidebook, that they were by Ghiberti and Pisano and had been removed for safekeeping part-way through the war and were later returned in 1946.

‘Yes indeed, you are perfectly correct,’ the professor replied. ‘But these particular doors, facing east, are by Ghiberti. Michelangelo said they were worthy to be the gates to paradise.’ The professor then went on to explain how when it was deemed safe to bring the doors back to Florence, it was decided to give them a polish; only then was it realised that the doors were not made of bronze, but of gold. ‘Imagine their surprise,’ he declared. He held out his arm. ‘Shall we venture inside
paradise
and investigate further?’

Professor Banes introduced Esme and her father to a wide circle of his associates in Florence. He jokingly referred to them as relics of the British colony, who, like Ghiberti’s gates, had returned to this great city once the war was over and were now replicating their glory days of life before the war. They spoke about Florence with a critical and proprietorial fondness, as though the city were a wayward child in need of their steadying hand.

‘You see,’ said an opinionated man with a lamentable habit of dominating any conversation and waving his pipe at Esme in a way she didn’t much care for, ‘this is the trouble with Italy, and with Florence in particular. Beauty and history have been commandeered by these damned communists – they know a honey pot when they see one and have no qualms in abusing wealthy foreigners like us.’

While certainly not siding with the communists, Esme could however understand the basis of their ideology. But more importantly, she didn’t like this self-satisfied man pontificating at her and, unable to let his lecture go unchallenged, she said, ‘But isn’t it more a case of the tourist trade dropping off in cities like Florence that has caused greater numbers to be unemployed and thereby given communism its appeal?’