Season of Storms (8 page)

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THE
morning was clear and my view from the train stretched for miles. After we passed through Vicenza, some thirty minutes inland from Venice, the hills to either side grew more pronounced, ridged with dark green points of cypress trees above flat farmland rich with red-brown soil. In the distance now and then a turret or a steeple would appear against the cypresses—medieval-looking structures, tile roofs and ochre walls, and if I squinted as I looked at them the modern buildings in between us vanished and I saw the landscape as it might have looked to those who travelled in the time before the Renaissance, the days of holy pilgrims, roving merchants and Crusaders.

I’d been a little sorry to leave Venice, in the end, and my arms were still aching from hauling my suitcases from the hotel to the station, but it did feel exciting to be on the move again, following the route that Celia the First would have taken when she had left the stage to go with Galeazzo to his villa on Lake Garda.

I had to admit that geography wasn’t my strong point, and I hadn’t known exactly where Lake Garda was, in Italy. Before leaving London I’d made a point of consulting the antiquated atlas that held up one leg of a table in Roo and Bryan’s front room. Bryan had long threatened to bin both atlas and table—the latter because it was falling apart and the former because it was so out of date half the names of the countries no longer applied—whereupon Rupert had flipped to a page that showed all of the ‘new’ Balkan states set out in more or less the proper places: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina . . . “A few more wars and revolutions,” he’d predicted, “and this whole book will be right again.”

I wasn’t so sure. According to the atlas, half the world was still stained British red, and the Austrian Empire straddled the Alps with one foot firmly planted in Italy. Along this northern border, nestled snugly in the foothills of the Alps, lay the Italian lakes, a series of brilliant blue squiggles and dots on the map. Lake Garda, the largest of all and the one farthest east, had a shape like a pipe—long and narrow in the neck and bulbous at the bottom—and a marvellous location just below the snow-capped Dolomites, halfway along the rail line between Venice and Milan.

The rail line we were travelling this morning.

I’d intended to get lots of work done, of course, on the journey. I did have a heap of lines to learn. My copy of the script, in fact, lay open on my lap now, to the séance scene in which the medium summons the dead soldier’s ghost to appear to his widow.

That the medium would be able to do this at all—let alone bring the soldier back intact in body and smoking a cigarette—ought to have strained one’s credulity, but it didn’t, a credit to the playwright’s skill in crafting his characters.

I, of course, was the widow. And my husband, the unfortunate soldier, was to be played by Nicholas Rutherford, who’d made a big splash in the West End last summer by taking the lead in a daring new play that had revisited the legend of Masada. The critics had given mixed reviews of his performance, but the general consensus among my acting friends had been that, with a face like his, performance hardly mattered. “Besides,” one of them had said, “he’s not stupid. He’s latched on to Madeleine Hedrick, you know. He’ll be huge.”

I’d agreed. Since divorcing her unfaithful husband, Madeleine Hedrick had taken a series of young handsome actors in tow, and every one of them it seemed had gone on to success on stage or screen. Not that she approached my mother’s head count when it came to lovers, and Madeleine Hedrick’s relationships lasted a little bit longer—for years, in some cases. Certainly Nicholas Rutherford must have been with her for over a year, now.

Which left me as the odd one out, the one who had to prove herself. With renewed purpose I bent once again to my script, but the passing landscape proved too distracting. We flashed by a marbleyard, hard blocks of unpolished stone, stacked three deep, that gave way to a small grove of silver-tipped blossoming fruit trees, and vineyards carpeted with tiny yellow wildflowers. At Verona I pressed my face close to the window, hoping for a glimpse of the ancient, gracious city that had inspired Shakespeare to write the tales of his two gentlemen and Romeo and Juliet. I saw a lovely river and a bridge and rooftops peeking through the trees, but no sign of the Capulets’ balcony.

“Anyway,” Rupert was saying, beside me, “if everyone agrees I think we’ll start right in on Monday with the read-through. That is, if Nicholas and Madeleine arrive today as planned.”

Den checked his watch. “They should be there before us. D’Ascanio said they were flying to Milan and then renting a car. I gathered Nick was keen to take a crack at mountain driving.”

“He’s a better man than I am.” Rupert gave a feeling shudder with a look towards the jagged hills that smudged the long horizon to the north.

“And me,” said Den. “I’d rather drive blind on one of your English hedged lanes. But Nick likes to take risks.”

“Does he?” Rupert turned from the window. “I wouldn’t know, I’ve only met him once, and he was on his best behaviour.”

“Oh, well, brace yourself then,” Den advised him, grinning. “He’s wild.”

I’d heard rumours, myself, but I hadn’t paid too much attention. At the time, I’d thought the chances of my ever working with someone like Nicholas Rutherford were practically nil, so it hardly mattered what he got up to backstage. Now, though, I hoped that he wouldn’t be too hard to work with . . . it helped to have
some
sort of chemistry when you were playing a husband and wife.

Rupert said, “Not to worry. I’ve no doubt that Madeleine keeps him in line,” and directed my attention out the window. “There’s the lake.”

I didn’t look quickly enough. All I caught was the end of a long streak of blue like the mouth of a river before the land rose up again to hide it as the train tracks angled inland. Still, just to know we were running along the south shore of Lake Garda was excitement enough.

“Nearly there,” Den said. “Two more stops.”

My excitement held and grew when we stepped off the train at Desenzano Station, bumping our luggage down the steps from the platform and into the tight, narrow, glass-fronted space overlooking the circular drive and the bus shelters.

“Who’s meeting us?” I asked, peering eagerly out through the window.

Neither Rupert nor Den knew the answer to that. And as the minutes ticked on, it began to appear as though no one was meeting us.

I looked round, but apart from the ticket window and a tiny shop behind us there was nowhere anyone could have been standing where we might have missed them. “He did know which train we’d be on?” I asked Rupert.

“I should think so. He paid for the tickets.” But just to be sure he found a telephone and rang Il Piacere. “Couldn’t get through,” he told us, on returning. “The operator said the lines were down, or something. Still, whoever D’Ascanio sent to collect us is probably on his way here, not to worry.”

We had lunch, or at least as much of a lunch as one could assemble from what could be bought in the shop at the station—a sandwich and crisps and a bottle of juice. Then we waited what seemed like another full hour before I finally said, “I think we’ve been forgotten.” Through the window I could see a large bus pulling into the shelter out front, and I pointed to the sign on its front. “Look, it’s going to Mira del Garda. That’s where we’re headed, isn’t it?”

Rupert and Den seemed reluctant to just up and leave the station, but I managed to persuade them we wouldn’t be doing anything out of line, that no one could reasonably expect us to still be waiting here two hours after we’d arrived. And I, for one, was tired of waiting, eager to get on with it, to finally see the house that I had read about for all these years.

The bus was, I decided, every bit as comfortable as a car would have been—a modern, spacious vehicle with clean-smelling seats and a freshly cleaned windscreen that gave me a glass-bubble view from my seat in the front. And at long last, as we headed out of Desenzano, I got my first look at the lake.

It looked like a scene on a postcard from Switzerland—blue water held captive by mountains that rose to the north. Here at the bottom, where it was widest, the lake rippled out and across to a darker green shore flecked with pale specks of buildings that clustered in towns at the water’s edge, some of them rising behind in a scatter of rooftops to terrace the forested hills. Farther north, where the lake narrowed and the mountains began, the hills purpled and rose steeper still, wreathed in cloud. And far up on the opposite shore I could see one peak higher than all of them, capped with pure snow.

“Monte Baldo,” the bus driver gestured towards it with obvious pride. “It is in the winter a very good place to go skiing.” He spoke English well, and thanked me when I told him so. “I work many years in America,” he said. “New York.”

Which of course started Den off. He might have gone on talking forever, I thought, if Rupert hadn’t eventually leaned forward. “Our stop is the next one, I think.”

Den looked round. “We’re in Mira already? That was a quick trip.”

It had actually taken an hour, a fact confirmed by the stiffness of my legs as I scrambled down the steps onto the pavement, filled with anticipation.

The bus stop at Mira del Garda was a rather unassuming little lay-by at the side of a narrow hill road. Presumably we were still on the fringes of the town itself. Across from us a steep grassy bank angled up to support a three-storey block of modern flats, while to our backs a flight of steps led down another level to a strip of pavement lined by older buildings, closely shuttered and unwelcoming, their rooftops rising high enough to block my view beyond them to the lake. But the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and at the edge of the bus stop a rectangle marked out in yellow paint enclosed a familiar word:
TAXI
. We shunted our luggage towards it. . . and waited.

At length, after a few cars had whizzed past us, Rupert shaded his eyes from the sun with one hand and remarked, “I would have thought there’d be a taxi to meet every bus, just in case.”

Den suggested we might call for one.

“With what?” Rupert wanted to know. “There’s no telephone here.” Still shading his eyes, he tilted his head up to scan the balconies of the block of flats opposite. Spotting a middle-aged woman hanging her towels out over one rail, he waved an arm to attract her attention and shouted a question across in Italian.

“Ah,” he said, when she’d called back her answer.

“Hell,” said Den.

I frowned. “What is it?”

“Well,” said Rupert, “it appears there are no taxis.”

“None at all?”

“Not anymore, no. We’ll have to walk.”

I looked at my luggage and sagged. “Walk?”

Den, taking pity on me, slung the long strap of one of his own bags over his shoulder, freeing a hand so he could carry one of my suitcases. “Did I say D’Ascanio had things well-arranged?” he asked. “I take it back.”

I frowned. “And you’re positive, are you, that we were expected today?”

“Darling, of course we’re expected,” said Rupert. “Don’t worry. I’m sure when we get there we’ll find there’s a good explanation for why we weren’t met.”

Den said drily, “I can’t wait to hear it.” And then, as a bright yellow sports car came rocketing past, he leaped back. “Let’s cross over—it’s too dangerous here.”

On the other side of the road, a narrow pavement angled up the terraced hill, then flattened out six feet or so above street level, running along on the top of a pretty stone wall draped with vines that would soon be in flower. Walking here felt definitely safer.

If only, I thought as I struggled to manage the uneven stones, if only I’d had enough sense not to bring so much luggage. The single case I was carrying felt even heavier now than it had when we’d left our hotel that morning, and with every step the strap seemed to cut deeper into my shoulder and raise new raw welts in the palm of my hand. Rupert was similarly burdened, and Den, who appeared to have packed more economically than either of us, had my other suitcase now weighing him down.

He’d been gallant enough to take my larger case, the one with wheels, only it was so overstuffed and ungainly that it kept tipping over whenever the wheels caught the edge of a paving stone. It became a sort of pattern as we made our way along, the suitcase tipping and Den swearing while he righted it again with a decided thump, and then the rolling rumble of the wheels until he reached the next uneven spot. We must have made an entertaining sight to passing motorists.

There were surprisingly few cars that passed, but then I supposed it was still quite early in the season. This part of Lake Garda, south of the snow-covered mountains, probably wasn’t suitable for skiers—the weather was too mild—so the tourists likely wouldn’t start arriving here until late spring or summer, when they could enjoy the lake itself, the bathing beaches and the boats.

My own view of the water was still blocked by buildings and the pointed stands of cypress trees that rose between them, regally, like soldiers on parade. Now and then I caught a tantalizing flash of blue behind the darkness of the cypresses and the smooth plastered walls of the houses whose rich painted colours were lovely as flowers, in shades of deep gardenia pink and primrose yellow, marigold and soft leaf green.

I would have appreciated the beauty of my surroundings more if I hadn’t had to concentrate on where I put my feet, and if my muscles weren’t so trembly from the weight of what I carried, and if my shirt wasn’t sticking wetly to my back between my shoulderblades—if, in short, I hadn’t felt so beastly warm and sore and out of sorts.

I couldn’t help but have the sinking feeling that Sally’s tarot cards had been right—that I should have stayed at home.

“I need to rest a minute,” I announced. When I stopped walking Den and Rupert stopped too, without argument, dropping their suitcases.

Den, leaning against a metal signpost marking where a smaller road had tumbled down the hill to meet our own, massaged his shoulder. “I’d suggest we hijack a car, but I don’t have the energy.”