Summer at the Lake (23 page)

The light diet was anathema to Elena the cook who was of the opinion that doctors knew nothing and what Marco needed was building up with hearty dishes of beans, polenta and pasta. With tears in her eyes and much crossing of herself and repeated exclamations of
Grazie al cielo!
she had told Esme in the herb garden yesterday that she had known Marco since he was a small boy and had seen him nearly die from whooping cough. Ever since then he had suffered with a weak chest and every day she had doubted the wisdom of his leaving the lake where the air was so much better than in Rome where he was in his first year in seminary. And as for doing pastoral work in the orphanage in Venice, where everybody knew the air was riddled with foulness, that was surely the last place on earth he should be! To further the cause of his recovery Elena was now attending church twice a day to pray and light candles for him.

An hour after Dottor Romano’s visit, clouds of smoky-grey amethyst lay thick and heavy in the sultry sky and then the first fat drops of rain began to fall. Alberto had warned them at breakfast that the lake would not be so
allegro
today. His prediction was that a cooling wind from Colico, in the north of the lake, would bring with it a change in the weather. For some reason Alberto blamed a lot of things on Colico.

Within no time of those first drops of rain falling, there was a distant roll of thunder and the heavens opened, sending guests scurrying inside for cover. In the drawing room and looking out of the rain-lashed window, the lake was the choppiest Esme had ever seen it; it was covered with racing white horses. The mountains were entirely hidden in the driving torrent.

Not heeding Alberto’s advice at breakfast, Esme’s father and Elizabeth, along with the Kelly-Webbs, had taken the steamer across to Bellagio for the day; Esme hoped they wouldn’t have too bad a journey back. She had planned to go with them but had woken this morning with a headache, another presage of the storm, she thought now.

Alone in the elegant drawing room with its ornate cornices, Venetian glass chandelier, faded rugs and large oil paintings of preceding generations of the Bassani family, Esme wondered what to do next. For the first time during their stay at Hotel Margherita she was at a loss how to occupy herself.

Hearing the hurried tap-tap of heels on the marble floor, she turned to see Giulia Bassani enter the room. It must have been a worrying few days for her. The first she had known of her nephew being ill was when she received a telephone call from the orphanage. She had then arranged with somebody there to accompany Marco on the train to Milan where she had met him and brought him home.

‘How is Marco?’ asked Esme.

His aunt shook her head. ‘No better, I’m afraid. Dottor Romano says it will be a long time before he is well enough to return to his duties. He also thinks the climate here at the lake is better for Marco. In summer, Venice can be so very hot and the air stagnant and particularly unhealthy for someone who has a chest as weak as his.’

Here at least was something Elena and the doctor agreed upon, thought Esme. ‘I don’t have any nursing experience,’ she said, ‘but is there anything I can do to help?’

Giulia smiled tiredly. ‘You’re very kind, but really there isn’t anything you—’ she broke off. Then, as if reconsidering, she said, ‘Perhaps you could be of help. But maybe you will think it inappropriate, especially with your father not here.’

‘Whatever it is, I’m sure my father won’t mind. He would rather I was useful, if I can be. What would you like me to do?’

‘Would you keep Marco company this afternoon? He’s complaining that he is bored and sadly I am too busy to sit with him, and there is no one else. Perhaps you could read to him.’

‘Of course I’ll do that,’ Esme said, pleased to have something constructive to do.

Sitting in the chair beside his bed, and just as his aunt had suggested, Esme was reading to Marco. She was doing so selfconsciously and a little nervously.

When she and her father had spent time with Marco in Venice, she had managed to quell the initial reaction she had experienced when she’d first met him, and had gone on to regard him purely as a friend. But the reaction she’d had the evening of his arrival here – that split second when their eyes had met – had been a denial of what she’d convinced herself to be true. To her very great consternation she was forced to admit that there lay within her heart feelings for Marco that were wholly at odds with how she should feel towards him, given the life he’d chosen for himself.

‘You have a beautiful clear voice,’ he murmured.

She looked up from the book she was reading to him –
A Room With a View
.

‘I think you’re feeling so ill you would enjoy a parrot squawking to you just as much.’

A faint smile passed across his harrowed face. ‘I don’t think so.’

She continued reading and when she paused to turn the page, he said, ‘Do you think we could leave Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett for now?’

‘Of course.’ She closed the book, disappointed that she had bored him so thoroughly and so quickly. ‘I’m sorry, was that too dull for you?’

‘No, no, it is I who am sorry, I see I have offended you.’

‘Not at all. I could try reading something Italian, if you want.’

‘I would prefer to talk with you if—’ Whatever he was about to say got stuck in his throat as his chest heaved and he coughed. His chest rattling audibly, he coughed again, then didn’t seem able to stop. His hand covering his mouth, and beads of sweat forming on his flushed face, his whole body shook and shuddered as he tried to catch his breath.

Alarmed, Esme jumped to her feet as though that in itself would somehow help him. She had never seen anyone so ill before and panic-stricken he might actually die right before her eyes, she blurted out, ‘I’ll go and find your aunt!’

With a grimace he shook his head and pointed to a pile of freshly laundered handkerchiefs on the bedside table. She hurriedly passed one to him, nearly knocking over his water glass as she did. Oh, what a terrible nurse she made!

Pressing the handkerchief to his mouth, he coughed violently several more times and then, as if finally spent, he lay back against the pillows exhausted, his face flushed and glistening. When his hand unfurled and released the handkerchief, Esme saw with shock that it was spotted with blood.

His body now completely inert, she stood watching the only part of him that moved – his eyes flickering restlessly beneath closed lids. Realising she was holding her breath, she breathed out slowly and sat down.

Hardly daring to move in case she disturbed him, she sat perfectly still for some minutes just listening to the rain hammering in time with her heartbeat at the window and the crashing of thunder overhead. All the while she watched him intently, taking in his face that at first glance bore a passing similarity to Angelo’s, but which was in fact quite different. It was like comparing a Caravaggio painting with a Raphael masterpiece.

In comparing the two cousins, Esme could see that Angelo’s attractiveness lay in the raw and petulant arrogance of his unpredictable manner. She had confided in Elizabeth, telling her all about Angelo and how he had kissed her. Elizabeth had at once declared him the sort of man she had met many times in her life. ‘I guarantee he knows all too well the effect he has on a pretty young girl such as yourself. My advice is to enjoy his flattery and if you must fall in love with him, do so in the knowledge that it will be temporary and entirely one-sided; it always is when the man is in love with his own reflection. And take it from me,’ she’d added with a voluble laugh, ‘most Italian men are!’

Esme could readily believe that of Angelo, but surely Marco was different?

Watching the laboured rise and fall of his chest as he slept, she wished she had her father’s talent for sketching and painting. She should have liked to capture how peaceful Marco looked. But to sketch a man when he was so desperately sick, what sort of an idea was that?

Easing herself forward, taking care not to make any sound that would waken him, Esme carefully removed the bloodstained handkerchief from his now open hand and, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, dropped it in a wicker basket under the bed where she could see other used handkerchiefs had been deposited.

To be on the safe side, she crept quietly from the room and went to the nearest bathroom to wash her hands. When she returned he was still fast asleep and resuming her seat she leant forward, close enough that she could practically count his long black eyelashes, thinking that he had such a gentle face. By rights he should be called Angelo, she thought with a smile.

She thought back to that first encounter with him in St Mark’s Square, remembering how embarrassed she had been to be caught acting so childishly. She remembered, too, her first reaction to him, how handsome she’d thought he was, and how blue his eyes were, and how instantly disappointed she had been when he’d said he was training to be a priest.

With a wistful sigh, she wondered how he could never want to fall in love and to marry and have children.

With the rain still falling, dinner was served in the dining room that evening, and as had now become the pattern for their evening meal, Elizabeth joined Esme and her father, along with the Kelly-Webbs.

‘And what does Alberto, our resident forecaster, predict for us tomorrow?’ Elizabeth asked Maria as the young girl placed bowls of ham and cannellini bean soup on the table.

At Maria’s confused expression, Esme said, ‘
Il tempo per domani, bello o brutto?
’

For answer the girl pulled a face and pointed at the dripping window. ‘Rain. More rain.’

‘Oh dear, that’s not at all what I wanted to hear,’ Elizabeth said when Maria hurried back to the kitchen – with all the guests opting to eat in tonight she and Elena were rushed off their feet.

‘I was rather hoping you’d accompany me to the Villa Carlotta tomorrow, William. I’m very anxious to see the
Amore e Psiche
sculpture, I hear it’s perfectly beautiful. Not to say exceedingly sensual.’

‘It is,’ Helene Kelly-Webb said, ‘although of course it’s not Canova’s original, that’s in the Louvre.’

‘I think, darling, you’ll find it’s the Hermitage in St Petersburg,’ her husband corrected her gently and with a look of great tenderness in his expression. He was such a gentle and adoring husband.

‘Yes, of course, it is,’ Helene said with a flutter of her hand. ‘What a goose I am. Just goes to show my brain can only absorb so much.’

‘That goes for us all,’ Esme’s father said diplomatically.

‘Lord, I’m the biggest goose of all!’ Elizabeth exclaimed with a volley of laughter that made her bosoms wobble and the other diners look towards their table. Unaware of their stares, or maybe undeterred by them, she said, ‘So what do you propose we do tomorrow to amuse ourselves, William?’

Stifling a giggle, Esme kept her head down and concentrated on her soup.

‘Something amusing you there in amongst the cannellini beans?’ her father asked.

‘No,’ she said, fixing her eyes on her spoon. She knew that if she met his gaze she would laugh out loud, which would be very rude and not for the world did she want to hurt Elizabeth’s feelings. But really it was so funny how tenaciously the woman had latched onto her father.

‘What about you, Esme?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘Will you be attending to the
signora
’s poorly nephew again tomorrow?’

Now Esme did look at her father. When he and the others had returned from Bellagio, soaked to the skin and in need of a hot bath, he had been surprisingly perturbed by the news that she had spent most of the afternoon alone with Marco in his bedroom. ‘I wonder at Giulia’s sense of propriety,’ he’d said.

Defending both herself and Giulia Bassani, Esme had said, ‘She was concerned whether or not you would approve and I said you’d prefer I was of use rather than being idle and doing nothing.’

‘It’s not what Marco would do,’ he’d replied. ‘I trust him completely – it’s what others will say that concerns me more.’

‘It’s 1950, not the 1900s!’ she’d said hotly. Then more calmly: ‘Besides, what do any of these people matter to us? When we leave here, we’ll never see them again. I thought we’d left all those boring old-fashioned mores behind us in England.’

‘So what do you think, Father?’ she said now, ‘will you let me?’

His soup finished, he picked up his wineglass and drank from it. ‘What if you become ill as a result of spending time with Marco?’

‘I’m fit and well, I doubt I’ll catch anything from him.’

‘Oh, do let her, William,’ urged Elizabeth. ‘Who knows, this might awaken a calling in her to train to be a nurse.’

‘Or a doctor,’ Esme piped up, glad to have somebody on her side.

‘We’ll see,’ her father said.

From across the table, Elizabeth winked at Esme. Esme could guess what she was thinking: with his daughter out of the way, William would be conveniently free to spend time with her.

Almost three weeks since Marco’s arrival, he was sitting in the garden for the first time and enjoying the warmth of the July sun on his pale face. Keeping him company was Esme and her father, along with Elizabeth and Angelo who had arrived home late last night from Milan.

Behind them, up on the terrace, Maria was clearing the lunch tables while being subjected to a severe scolding from Elena for breaking a plate. Esme had noticed the girl had come in for a lot of scolding from the woman recently and increasingly Maria’s pretty face was soured with a sullen expression. Though whenever Angelo was around the expression always brightened, Esme had also noted.

Making her way slowly down the steps from the terrace, Elena approached the group with a tray of drinks, muttering all the way about how Maria could not be trusted to do the simplest thing. Setting the tray on the table in front of them, she launched into one of her fussing sessions with Marco – was he warm enough? Was he too warm? Had he eaten enough at lunch? Was he sure he wasn’t overdoing it? When she had finished with him, she turned her attention to Esme.