Summer at the Lake (34 page)

‘You were never jealous here in Oxford.’

‘Says who?’

‘But you can’t have been, you never once gave any indication that was how you felt.’

‘I—’ A ringing sound coming from Seb stopped him from continuing.

‘It’s Imogen,’ he said, slipping his arm out from hers as he looked at the screen on his mobile. ‘I’d better speak to her. Do you mind?’

‘Of course not,’ Floriana said, walking on ahead to give him space to talk in relative privacy.

‘Hi, Imo,’ he said brightly – too brightly to Floriana’s thinking – ‘how’s it going? Having a good time?’

Not wanting to hear any more, Floriana quickened her step as Seb slowed his, presumably to give his wife-to-be his full attention.

When he came off the phone, he caught Floriana up outside the restaurant. A thought occurred to her. ‘Does Imogen know you’re here in Oxford?’ she asked.

His face said it all. ‘No, she doesn’t.’

‘And your thinking behind that is, what, exactly?’

‘I don’t want to give her anything else to worry about.’

‘So you’ve lied to her?’

‘Only by omission.’

Floriana shook her head and pushed open the door. ‘That doesn’t seem like a good way to run a relationship, Seb.’

‘Don’t spoil it,’ he said, resting a hand on her arm. ‘I’m enjoying being here with you. It’s giving me perspective.’

Perspective of what precisely? wondered Floriana, her stomach queasy with the fear of what Imogen would say or do if she ever knew of his visit to see her.

So far so good. Another thirty minutes and they should be at Villa Sofia.

Surprised and relieved at how easily the journey had gone, Adam concentrated on the narrow winding road that lay parallel with the lake. In the back of their hire car, her hands folded on her lap, Esme was looking thoughtfully out of the open window at the view, and next to him in the front Floriana also had her gazed fixed intently on the smooth flat water to the right of them. Their earlier exuberance during the flight to Milan now gone, they had both fallen quiet at the same time, each, he imagined, mulling over their feelings about coming here.

When Esme asked for his and Floriana’s help to bring her here, his initial reaction had been to reject the idea out of hand. Politely, of course. He had thought the idea would be no more than a passing whim and would soon be dismissed as merely a pleasant dalliance with a daydream. He’d been sure also, knowing how unapologetically proud and independent Floriana could be about money, that lack of her own funds would be a contributing factor to putting a stop to the plan. But instead of vociferously refusing Esme’s offer to finance the enterprise, and after checking she could take a week off during the peak tourist season, Floriana had executed a complete U-turn and leapt to support Esme in her desire to go on a trip down memory lane. Moreover, she had then badgered him into dispensing with his common sense. ‘Oh, Adam,’ she’d said, ‘you’re Mr Fixer, you have to agree to help, no one makes things happen like you! Do say you’ll do it. Pretty please.’

He should have known this would be Floriana’s reaction, having seen her frequently veer from a state of acute procrastination to wholehearted impetuosity. She might be guilty of putting things off but, boy, when she put her mind to something, she was one of the most determined people he knew. What was more dangerous was that her impulsive behaviour was infectious and before he knew it, he was caught up in her enthusiasm and looking forward to a week away in the sun.

A lot of Floriana’s enthusiasm was based on the hopelessly idealistic notion that they would somehow stumble across Esme’s first great love and the two of them would be reunited sixty years later.

‘But what if we could make that happen?’ Floriana had argued when he’d voiced his doubts of that coming to pass. ‘Come on, Adam,’ she’d pressed, ‘I know how analytical you are, but even to a romantically challenged man like you, you can surely see how wonderful it would be for Esme and Marco to meet up again after all this time.’

Romantically challenged?
It had stung, and still did, that Floriana viewed him so poorly.

He flicked his eyes to the rear-view mirror again to check on Esme. She looked exactly the same as before, her hands motionless and folded in her lap like a well-behaved child waiting for the party to begin.

He had severely misjudged Esme’s character when they’d first met and he was forced to acknowledge he’d got it wrong again in underestimating the old lady’s resolve to see something through. With an uncrushable will of iron, she was adamant that every last cost of the trip would be met by her. ‘I won’t hear a word from either of you two about money,’ she’d said. ‘In exchange for your help, you’ll both be my guests throughout the duration of the trip. No, Adam, that’s my final word!’

The first important decision they’d had to make was where to stay. A quick hunt on the internet established that Hotel Margherita was no longer in existence, which further endorsed Adam’s pessimistic view on them somehow stumbling across the Bassani family. They were just considering other hotels, when, as luck would have it, Adam’s brother came up trumps with friends who owned a villa at the lake and who would give them matesrates for a week-long stay.

‘Mr Fixer strikes again!’ Floriana had laughed. ‘Is there anything you can’t arrange through people you know?’

‘Hush, child,’ Esme had said, giving Floriana a stern look of reprimand. ‘Adam, we’re very grateful to you that you know so many helpful people.’

Flights were then booked and in a flurry of paperwork, a new passport had to be organised for Esme – her last one having run out more than a decade ago. Travel insurance, which Adam insisted upon for Esme, proved somewhat problematic given her age, and the fact she’d been ill recently, but they got there in the end.

Next they had to find somebody to take care of Euridice. Buddy and Joe immediately stepped in and promised to call in twice a day to Trinity House to see that the cat was fed and watered.

The nuts and bolts of the trip arranged, Adam had left Esme and Floriana to fret over the mystical work of what to wear for the trip. Privately he was hoping for the reappearance of the silvery-grey silk dress Floriana had worn the evening of Esme’s Lake Como announcement.

He’d been in a quandary ever since that evening, torn between feeling increasingly differently towards Floriana, alarmingly so at times, and trying to resist the attraction he felt. He cautioned himself that it was too soon after splitting with Jesse to consider a new relationship; his emotions couldn’t be trusted.

There was also the small and worrying matter that he genuinely had no idea how Floriana would react if he so much as hinted at them being more than friends. From what he could tell, she didn’t exactly view him as potential boyfriend material. Romantically challenged, she’d described him. Analytical as well. These were attributes that supported his belief that while she liked him as a friend – a good friend – she considered him too dull to be anything more.

He’d never considered the possibility before that he might be thought of as boring and it worried him. What worried him more, however, was doing anything that might jeopardise his friendship with Floriana. He would hate to lose that, especially as it had played such a vital part in helping to establish his newfound happiness following his split with Jesse.

Since the Night of the Silk Dress, as he now thought of it, he had begun to notice all sorts of things about Floriana he’d never seen before, like the telltale way the corners of her mouth would twitch when she was about to tease him over something. And then there was the way her eyes widened ever so slightly before she laughed. She had a great laugh, natural and unforced, it seemed to wrap itself around him. He also liked the way she treated Esme, respectful yet never patronising. Would Jesse have been so quick to befriend an old lady and give up her limited holiday time to accompany her to Italy?

Wrong!
He mustn’t ever compare Floriana to Jesse. There was no comparison; they couldn’t be more different. Maybe that was part of the attraction, that Floriana was quirkily individual and followed no one’s trend but her own.

But putting all that to one side, there was the colossal elephant in the room to consider – how did Floriana feel about Seb? No way was he going to play second fiddle to someone with whom she might still be in love. He could be wrong, of course, and her feelings for Seb could now be a thing of the past, but because she seldom spoke about him in any detail, Adam couldn’t be sure what the true picture was.

He was well aware that the fact he was reasoning everything out this way only went to confirm Floriana’s opinion of him: that he was overly analytical and about as impulsive as an exhausted sloth.

True to his exacting nature, he’d studied the map during the flight and now, recognising the names of the villages they had so far driven through – Cernobbio, Moltrasio, Laglio, Brienno, Argegno – he spotted a sign for Colonno, which meant that according to the satnav they were now only fifteen minutes from Villa Sofia. Forced to slow his speed for a car in front towing a caravan with a Dutch number plate, he glanced in the rear-view mirror. ‘Anything familiar to you, Esme?’ he asked.

She smiled back at him. ‘In some ways, yes. But it’s much more built up than I remember.’

‘That’s inevitable, I suppose, but the property development that’s gone on doesn’t look too badly done.’

Breaking her silence, Floriana laughed. ‘You wait, Esme, Adam will have sniffed out a property deal by the end of the week!’

‘Hadn’t crossed my mind,’ he said innocently. Although, of course, it had; he’d spent a fair bit of time looking at Lake Como property online in the last few weeks. No harm in looking, was his motto.

‘Oh, this I recognise!’ Esme suddenly exclaimed, pointing out of the window, her hair fluttering in the wind. ‘It’s Isola Comacina. My father and I took a boat there for lunch one day. It was a wonderful restaurant; it hadn’t been open for very long. The owner was an extraordinarily mercurial gentleman.’

That was something else Adam had read about online. ‘It’s much the same today,’ he said. ‘What’s more, the menu hasn’t changed since it first opened, it’s one of the things they pride themselves on.’

‘Perhaps we could go there?’ Floriana said eagerly. ‘If it’s not too expensive,’ she added.

This last comment was met with a formidable tut from the back of the car.

Still following behind the Dutch caravan, Adam slowed his speed again at the sight of a German tour bus coming towards them on the other side of the particularly narrow road. There didn’t seem to be enough space and despite pulling over as far as he could, the bus came so close to the car Adam instinctively breathed in as though making space for it. Driving on, the road widened and after another bend, Esme let out a cry.

‘That’s it! That’s Hotel Margherita! Down there on the promontory.’

But a fleeting glimpse was all they got as the road steered them sharply away from an impressive gated entrance and a discreet sign with the words
Villa Margherita
. It confirmed what they had discovered online, that sometime in the 1970s the hotel had closed and the villa had been restored to use as a private residence, just as it had been before the Bassani family had run into money problems.

For the last leg of the journey, Floriana was in charge of reading the directions they’d been given – they’d been advised to ignore any satnav instructions at this stage as they petered out somewhat unhelpfully. Having turned off from the main road at the junction where there was a small supermarket and a bar, they were now climbing steadily up the hill on the lookout for an easy-to-miss turning to the right.

‘There!’ Floriana exclaimed excitedly, pointing towards a narrow opening in a bushy hedge that was marked with a small concrete post.

The cobbled road led them to an open gateway and a dusty potholed track that ran along the edge of an area of olive trees.

And finally, there in the brilliant sunshine, nestled amongst a cluster of other stone-built buildings, Villa Sofia stood before them. Three storeys high, its dusky-rose façade was topped with a low-pitched terracotta roof and two sturdy chimneys. On the upper floors each window had its own balcony with decorative wrought-iron railings. The ground floor was partially hidden beneath an extensive pergola that was covered with a vigorous vine. In front of the villa was a rectangular swimming pool with sun loungers grouped enticingly at one end of it.

Staring up at the sleep-shrouded villa with its closed peacock blue shutters, Floriana felt a happy thrill of anticipation as she pushed open the car door and stepped into the heat of the afternoon. Greeted by the sound of cicadas chirping noisily, she thought everything about the villa looked perfect, even better than it had in the photographs the owners had sent Adam.

Opening the rear passenger door, she helped Esme out. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Will it do?’

‘I think it will do splendidly,’ Esme replied, looking up at their home for the next week. ‘Adam, you have quite excelled yourself. Bravo!’

‘Let’s hope the interior matches the exterior,’ he said. ‘Do you need a hand up the steps?’

‘No, no, I can manage, thank you.’

Eager to explore, they left the luggage till later and went to look for the key they’d been told would be placed under a pot of scarlet geraniums on the terrace. They found it easily enough but were distracted from rushing to unlock the door by realising that from their elevated position, they had a spectacular panoramic view of the lake. As far as the eye could see, it lay there as peaceful as a sleeping cat in the dazzling sunshine, and beyond it mountains, lush and green, rose majestically out of the water.

‘It couldn’t be more perfect,’ Esme murmured with a wistful gaze. ‘It’s as enchanting as I remember it. Thank you both so much for making this possible for me.’

Hearing the catch of emotion in Esme’s voice Floriana put an arm around her. She was about to say something herself when a stocky, elderly woman appeared from round the side of the villa. Wearing a flowery dress and with a head of luxuriantly black hair – for the woman’s age it couldn’t be anything but dyed – she greeted them with a warm and very welcoming smile.