It was the palazzo gardens that took possession of Julia.
At the beginning, she only walked along the terraces when she had finished her day’s work with the children, or sat on a step or balustrade to look down at the point where the sea met the land. Then slowly she explored the four corners, and traced the grand design under the dereliction.
Her favourite place became a little space enclosed against the west wall of the palazzo. It was walled, but roofless, and the walls were pierced with arched windows to frame the view. There were stone seats against the walls, set in twisted arbours of leafless roses and wisteria. Even on a cold day it was safely sheltered, and when the thin, wintry sun shone into it it caught the warmth and generously amplified it.
Sister Agnes told Julia that it was the palazzo’s giardino segreto, the secret garden. It was very old, the nun thought. Much older than the rest of the gardens, and perhaps constructed at the same time as the palazzo itself. It would have been an outdoor room, where the ladies sat with their work or took their exercise by walking between the intricate beds. Julia used to sit on the mossed stone of one of the benches and imagine them, until she could almost hear their murmuring voices and the rustle of their silk skirts over the raked gravel.
When the spring came, Julia watched the green fronds of the wisteria unfurl like feathers, and the bronze leaves of the roses unwrapping themselves in the sunlight. She began to pull up the weeds that sprouted through the gravel paths. At the four corners of the garden there were big stone pots, heavy with stone garlands of flowers and fruit. Julia had never looked closely at the gnarled and shapeless trees that grew in the pots, but now they budded and the buds swelled and burst into white flowers flushed with red. The strengthening sunshine distilled their fragrant scent, and Julia realised that they were lemon trees.
She saw that the secret garden was beginning to divulge its secrets, and she let herself be drawn into it, forgetting her imaginings of the settecento ladies.
She turned her attention to the beds that formed the heart of the garden. They had been laid out in the intricate, geometric shapes of diamonds, circles and lozenges, the lines marked by low box hedges and narrow, intersecting paths. Julia remembered, although she had no idea how she had first come by the information, that the formal arrangement of beds was called a parterre. But the once crisp outlines were sadly blurred. The lines that should have been dark and straight had become hummocks that grew together into ungainly mounds, and the plants in the beds sprang out of their circles and squares to choke the paths.
Julia remembered from her first visit that the sad gardens had disturbed her. But then she had only been a visitor, and she had only seen October fade into November. Now she saw the sharp spears of narcissi trying to break through the sheaves of smothering ivy, and a single scarlet tulip standing in a nettle patch, where there must once have been a blazing crescent filled with them.
One evening she went to Sister Maria and asked if any of the palazzo’s shadowy storerooms might yield some gardening tools.
‘The garden has always taken care of itself,’ Sister Maria said. ‘The children like to look after the plants in the courtyard, but there is no time to do any more.’
‘I have time,’ Julia said.
The nun looked at her steadily. ‘Even after what you already do?’
Julia smiled at her. ‘Even after that. It isn’t very much. I wish it could be more. If I was a nurse, or a teacher …’
She felt her inadequacy sharply, but Sister Maria cut her short. ‘All hands are valuable. Come with me, and I will see what I can find for you.’
In a windowless room filled with the lumber of decades, they uncovered some ancient implements. There was a hoe and a rake, and a huge, heavy spade. Julia struggled out to her garden with them.
She spent a few moments raking the gravel of one of the paths. The detritus of broken twigs and clods of earth grew into a mound, and the weeds came away with it. The raked lines swirled behind her, and Julias blood sang with the pleasure of it.
But there were dozens of tiny paths, and after a few minutes she picked up the spade instead. She thrust at it with all her strength, but the edge wouldn’t even bite into the baked earth under the matted vegetation. She let it fall with a clatter, and dropped to her knees beside one of the box mounds. She grasped a handful of the coarse grass that smothered the bed, and pulled it up by the roots. At once she smelt a hot, pungent and familiar scent. She leaned forward, groping amongst the grass, and found the source of it. It was a clump of thyme. The hoary green leaves gave up their scent as soon as her fingers brushed them.
Of course some of the beds would have been planted with herbs, Julia remembered. There would have been medicinal and pot herbs here, interplanted with other varieties grown simply for their scent or for their beauty. She explored a little further, frowning with concentration, but she could recognise only feverfew, and the grey branches of lavender. The scent of it brought back the memory of Betty’s tidy cupboards, the shelves lined with folded paper and perfumed with lavender sachets from the old-fashioned chemist’s in the High Street.
Julia sat back on her heels, twisting a lavender sprig in her fingers. The tiny, unlooked-for link between the secret garden and Fairmile Road was oddly pleasing. And the scent of the thyme made her think of Felix’s cooking, long ago, when she had watched him, overawed, in the kitchen over the square.
The forgotten herbs were suddenly important, uniting her with home as well as belonging here, in the walled garden. She bent down again, and worked busily at the weeds.
The thought came to her that she could cultivate the plants once more. If they had been useful once, they could be so again. She went on, digging bare-handed, until her back ached and her fingernails were clogged with the reddish earth. The task reminded her of the herbs that she had grown in the corner of the Ladyhill garden.
The strands of recollection spread outwards and then returned again, anchoring her in her place. It was a comforting sensation, to be pinned to the fertile soil. When she straightened up again, pressing her hands into the small of her back to ease the ache, Julia frowned critically at the little patch she had cleared. It was one corner of one of the geometric beds, and even so she wasn’t sure that she had uprooted weeds rather than precious plants.
She would have to get Nicolo’s help.
Julia and Nicolo Galli had resumed their friendship as if there had been no two-year interruption. When she first met him, after her return, she was relieved to see that he was exactly the same. He held himself just as straight, and moved with the same looseness. He had taken her hand, holding it in his own lean, brown one and smiling at her.
‘So, you are back again?’
‘I am. I’m going to stay and work at the palazzo, if the sisters will have me.’
‘I’m happy to see you, Julia.’
He had asked her about Lily, and she had told him the story. Nicolo nodded. ‘You are wise to let her do as she wishes. It will be better for you both, at last.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Julia resumed her evening visits to Nicolo’s house. As the weather grew warmer they took to sitting in the courtyard behind it. Nicolo grew a few kitchen herbs in pots, and a vine scrambled up a trellis and hung its serrated leaves over their heads.
On the next visit after her efforts in the secret garden, Julia asked him if he would teach her to cultivate a plot at the palazzo.
‘It’s different from gardening in England,’ she said. The fierce heat and the summer’s drought contradicted the little she had learned in the lush greenery of Ladyhill.
Nicolo laughed at her. ‘I make buildings, not gardens. I know nothing.’
‘At least come up to the palazzo and look at the garden with me,’ she begged him. Nicolo took his straw hat off its peg and strolled up the hill with her.
The nuns stopped to greet him as they crossed the courtyard, and the visitors in the wheelchairs followed him with their eyes. Nicolo was well loved in the community. In the secret garden he walked for a long time between the ruined beds, and then sat on one of the seats under the purple hanging banners of the wisteria.
‘It is a long time since I came out here,’ he said, at last. ‘I had forgotten it is so beautiful.’
Eagerly, Julia told him, ‘I could clear the parterres, couldn’t I? If I could learn what to plant, I could grow vegetables for the kitchen. That would bring the garden alive again, and it would be useful too.’
‘If you are interested in the history, it would not be quite accurate to grow vegetables here. There would have been some herbs, yes, but mostly flowers for the ladies to enjoy.’
‘I don’t think the families who onced owned the palazzo would mind the nuns being here now. I’m sure they approve of the work they do. Perhaps they won’t mind if I adapt their garden too, just a little?’
‘Perhaps you are right.’
They left the secret garden and walked around the walls to the main part of the gardens. They caught the spicy scent of the cedars that spread on the lowest terrace, and Julia sighed. ‘I wish I could have seen it all. Before the last owners went away and left it.’
‘This part is not so very old,’ Nicolo said. ‘Perhaps only the same age as me, although I do not remember how it was then. But it was made as a copy of the great gardens of our Renaissance. If you are interested in those, I have a book. But it is in Italian.’
‘I can puzzle it out,’ Julia said.
‘Perhaps this garden is lucky to have been left just as it is,’ Nicolo went on. ‘At just the time that it was made, many of the old gardens were being destroyed. To make way for a new fashion. The English style.’
Julia thought of the sweet, damp profusion of an English border wilting under the eye of the Italian sun, and shook her head.
‘And, Julia, if you wish to learn how to grow for food, I will take you to meet Vito.’
‘Vito?’
‘Vito is a gardener, but he will not thank you for pretty flowers.’
Nicolo took her down to the lowest point on the skirt of Montebellate, where the last houses of the hill village clung above sheer rocks. Vito was a very old man with a wrinkled nut for a face. The last few teeth left in his gums were as brown as his skin, and his hand as Julia shook it felt like a paw. He looked as if he had sprung from his own earth. When he led them out to the back of his house, muttering in Italian of which Julia could decipher one word in ten, she gasped in astonishment. Vito’s garden seemed no more than a series of tiny lips chiselled out of the hillside. But above and below the house, in their precarious lines, fat, bursting vegetables sprang and sprouted. There were early tomatoes ripening below the scarlet flowers of bean rows, tiny crisp lettuces, and swelling marrows nested in straw, little knobby cucumbers and strawberry plants and other glossy leaves and urgent shoots that Julia didn’t even recognise. There were espaliered peach trees against a wall of rock, and on a tiny plateau a fig tree and a walnut tree reached upwards, with dusty brown hens scratching at their feet. There were tangles of canes, shelters constructed of flapping polythene, and snaking coils of hosepipe underfoot. It was makeshift, without a single ornamental concession, but it was one of the best gardens Julia had ever seen.
She put her hand out to the earth in one of the beds. It crumbled in her fingers. It was dark, and rich, and seamed with straw. It couldn’t have been less like the unyielding crust of her parterres.
Her nursery Italian was hopelessly inadequate, but she tried to explain what she wanted. Vito listened, and then said something to Nicolo. It sounded to Julia like a series of snorts and whistles.
‘What does he say?’
Nicolo was trying not to laugh. ‘He says, approximately, that he can’t teach you. The only way you’ll learn is by watching. And if you must watch him, you’d better not get in the way.’
Julia beamed at them both. ‘Molto grazie,’ she said, and meant it.
From then on, Julia divided her spare time between the secret garden and Vito’s vertical wonderland. She sat on an upturned bucket beneath the fig tree and watched as he dug and pruned and irrigated. Occasionally, and then more often, he would grunt over his shoulder in her direction. She learned the Italian words for all the vegetables, and began to understand what he was telling her. She sampled the first tomatoes, and tiny sweet strawberries hot with the sun.
One day she went with Nicolo to the market in Agropoli. From a stall clanking with agricultural tools she bought two shiny spades and a pair of shears, and some trowels and hand forks and a big coil of hosepipe. They hurried home again, armed with her trophies.
In the evenings, when it was cool, she clipped the box edgings of one section of the parterre. It was hypnotically fascinating to see the crisp shapes emerge. Julia felt as close to the intricate pattern as if she had drawn it and planted it herself. She worked on and on, promising herself that she would just get to the next corner, but then the curve beyond that enticed her, and the satisfaction of the complete shape that the next angle led to. It was pitch dark when she finally gave in, but the new black lines were sharply etched against the colourless gravel. In the morning she could hardly straighten her back, and there were oozing blisters in the palms of her hands. She was impatient to continue the work, but it would have to wait a little. She opened the history of the gardens that Nicolo had lent her.
She gazed in fascination at the illustrations of the Villa Lente and Isola Bella. The formal magnificence of stone and statuary and massed plants clipped and trained into architectural discipline was unlike anything she had ever seen, only guessed at under the wilderness that had engulfed Montebellate. She turned to the descriptions, but with constant references to her dictionary it took her half an hour to read a single paragraph of the scholarly text.
Sadly, she realised that she needed an English book if she was to make any headway. She wondered how far she would have to go to find one – to Naples, or all the way to Rome? It would probably be easier to order one from England.
It was then that Julia thought of China.
China had sold her flat in Cheyne Walk, claiming that she was too old for London, and bought a cottage in Wiltshire. Julia had seen little of her in the last years. It was Alexander who took Lily to visit Granny Bliss now. He had told Julia once that China spent her time in her flower garden, and Julia had pictured her small, straight-backed figure moving between the blue delphinium spires. But it was also China who had revived the Ladyhill gardens years ago, and during Julia’s brief regime the old man who came in to work on the grounds used to talk with uncharacteristic enthusiasm of China’s knowledge and expertise.
Julia sat down in her little room one evening and wrote a long letter to China, describing the secret garden and the rest of the wilderness. To her surprise, almost by return of post, a letter came back. It was followed by a package of books that seemed to offer Julia more information than she could ever hope to absorb. She read everything eagerly, and wrote back to China with a dozen questions that she had been unable to ask Vito. China replied, and they began a correspondence.
They wrote only about gardening, and the problems that Julia faced at Montebellate in undoing the neglect. There were just two lines in one letter, when China asked if Julia remembered a particular corner of the Ladyhill garden, that were painful to read. They touched a memory, as clear as a photograph. Julia remembered Alexander, with Lily as a baby in his arms, sitting in the same corner. He had settled the brim of the baby’s sunhat to keep the sun off her face. There was an expression of mystified pride in his face that made Julia jealous. I was always jealous then, she thought. I’m not, any more. I wish I could show them that. She felt her isolation at Montebellate, thinking of them.
She folded the letter over so that she couldn’t see the particular words, and focused her attention on China’s instructions for preparing a bed for planting.
The work began, very slowly.
Julia enlisted the help of two of the palazzo’s longer-term residents. One of them was mentally handicapped, but he was a big man with brawny arms and shoulders. Julia showed him how to dig, and he seized her spade and began to work. He tossed the clods of earth, matted with weeds, into a big heap behind him. His big, loose smile showed that he was enjoying himself.
Her other helper took longer to interest himself in the project, but once he did he became more enthusiastic than Julia herself. Tomaso was fourteen, the oldest of the children. He wasn’t ill or handicapped, but like her original lieutenant Raimundo he had nowhere else to go. Sister Maria told Julia that he had come from Naples, where he had lived with an ailing grandmother. Tomaso had got into trouble with the police, and his grandmother had been unable to control him. He had been removed by the authorities and at last he had ended up at Montebellate, under the care of the nuns.
He was a difficult resident. At the palazzo he was bored and unruly, and he was disruptive at school. But he attached himself to Julia as Raimundo had done, and through Julia he had found his way out into the gardens. At first he was dismissive of her efforts, but before long he was unable to conceal his fascination. He had a natural feel for plants that surprised Julia. He seemed to know more by instinct than she did after all her poring over China’s books.
She told him that he had green fingers, translating the expression literally, and he stared at his fingers and then back at her with an expression of bafflement that made Julia laugh. Tomaso looked angry for a moment, then began to laugh too.
Tomaso would have worked in the garden all night, if she had let him. He was particularly good with the willing, clumsy Guido, directing his onslaughts to the right place, and away from the beds that had already been cleared and planted.
Julia gratefully took whatever plants and seeds and cuttings Vito was prepared to offer her, and tomatoes began to ripen against the wall of the palazzo. It was a proud moment for her and Tomaso when they took the first small crop of tomatoes with some strawberries and fresh basil leaves to the kitchens. The nuns and the women who worked there accepted the tiny offering with grave congratulations.
Julia had pruned the roses, following the instructions in her books, and now the pink and white damasks and albas and fragrant centifolias bloomed in great drifts against the old walls. By contrast the earth in the parterres, although it had been cleared and then manured and lightened with straw just like Vito’s, looked barren and reproachful. Julia had managed to save very little of the original growth from Guido’s enthusiasm, and her precious vegetables filled only a fraction of the geometric pattern. The freshly clipped box edgings and smooth paths seemed only to emphasise the emptiness.
She began to dream of the flowers of the original design. Her books showed her geraniums and marigolds and petunias in carpets of colour. Nicolo gave her geraniums from his own plot, but the space of the secret garden swallowed them up.
Next year, she told herself, I will have planted my own seeds. I’ll take cuttings and propagate them, somehow, and I’ll have enough of everything to fill the beds. But what can I do now?
China had warned her that every novice gardener made the mistake of wanting rewards at once, and she smiled to recognise the failing in herself. But the recognition didn’t stop her from pursuing what she wanted.
She overcame her diffidence, and her mistrust of her Italian, and began to ask around the village. ‘Can you spare some plants, signora, for the nuns’ gardens?’
The wheedling and persuading reminded her of the beginnings of Garlic & Sapphires. She found that the small victories in Montebellate gave her even more satisfaction. At first she was greeted with shrugs, or blank stares, but Julia was careful always to call it the nuns’ garden, and the sisters were deeply respected in Montebellate. And the villagers were interested in what the peculiar Englishwoman was doing behind the palazzo walls. Slowly, bearing straggling greenery and lumps of earth, they began to wander up to the palazzo. They peered into the secret garden, warily at first and then more confidently. They met one another, and gestured with admiring surprise at the roses and the parterres. The residents followed them, and the walled garden suddenly became a social focus. The nuns nodded and smiled, and Julia and Tomaso and Guido found themselves welcoming visitors with gifts of plants at all hours.
Julia accepted everything that was offered, and put it in the beds. The empty circles and diamonds filled up under her care and Tomaso’s watering, sprouting a blanket of random colours and scents that should have been hideous, but was unexpectedly vivid and satisfying.
Next year, the year after, there would be time to make a white bed, another of misty blue, and the circle that formed the eye of the design would be a great splash of solid scarlet.
Julia realised that her plans would take a long time to bring to reality. She looked forward to it calmly. If her life in Montebellate lacked the intimacy of real happiness, it had its own different satisfactions, and a kind of richness that she had never known before.
By the time the summer came, she felt that she was woven into the life of the palazzo. If the garden occupied her thoughts, most of her time was still spent with the children. The fitter ones followed her as if she was the Pied Piper. They sat in the secret garden while the shade of the morning still lay on it, and Julia taught them songs and clapping games. Another parcel came from China. It contained dominoes and draughts and snakes and ladders. For your Italian children, China said. The thoughtfulness of the gesture touched Julia, and made her wonder why she had never made friends with China before. At the palazzo, the acts of friendship seemed simple. She wrote back at once, a warm letter that described her days in the children’s wing, and enclosed some of their drawings done as thanks. The games became a craze, and Tomaso proved to be so good at draughts that not even Nicolo could beat him. Nicolo taught him to play chess, and in the evenings they solemnly faced each other in one of the rose arbours while Julia weeded and watered her beds.
The children who could walk and play games were the lucky ones. There were others, who had to be pushed in their cumbersome chairs, and whose lolling heads didn’t lift to look at the bright splash of the flowers. Julia took them close to the beds, hoping that the rich scents, at least, would find their way to them.
There were other children, too. Julia saw less of these, because the nuns nursed the chronically sick ones. But sometimes she went into the two small wards to read stories, or to help with bathing or changing beds, or to walk a few shuffling steps, taking the weight of a seemingly weightless little body. Julia had learned to accept the suffering that she saw in the adult wings. When an old woman died, sitting in her chair under the arches of the courtyard, she watched the nuns’ faces as they lifted her up. There was no pain in them. Julia couldn’t share their faith, but she tried to find some of their serenity. But the sight of the children filled her with pity and anger.
When she bathed a little girl whose ribs were like sharp fingers and whose head barely turned as warm water dripped from Julia’s sponge on to her skin, there was no calm in her. She thought of Lily, and her round, firm arms and legs, with a mixture of terror and need and love.
Pia was seven or eight years old. Her body was covered with the oozing scabs and patches of eczema, and her fingers raked constantly at the inflamed skin. Julia used to cut and clean her fingernails, and bathe the red flesh with cool water to soothe it. Pia always wanted to hear the same story. Julia read a version of Rapunzel to her over and over again. The little girl was fascinated by the idea of Rapunzel’s long ropes of golden hair. She would pull at her own, the stiff dark spikes parting to show the blotched scalp, as if tugging at it and wishing hard enough would make it change colour and grow.
Julia tried to interest her in Cinderella, but she only ever wanted Rapunzel.
Pia suffered from asthma, too. One evening, when Julia went into the ward to say goodnight the curtain was drawn at the side of her bed. Pia was having an attack. Julia stood for a moment, listening to the pitiful struggle for each breath, her fists clenched at her sides. She turned away again and walked slowly out of the ward. Sister Maria was with Pia; Julia had heard her voice.
Julia was carrying the Rapunzel book. She looked at the faded cover, then slipped it into her pocket.
She had reached the foot of the stone stairs and passed out into the evening light when she heard running footsteps behind her. It was Sister Maria, with the white folds of her headdress billowing. It was the only time Julia ever saw one of the sisters run. Sister Maria reached the door of the rooms where the palazzo’s doctor lived. A moment later the two women were running back again.
Julia sat down heavily on a bench under one of the arches. She watched the shadows lengthen on the stone flags, listened to the sounds from the open windows overhead. When she looked up again, she saw the priest crossing the courtyard with his bag. He was a young man with spectacles and a pale, serious face. He was a friend of Nicolo Galli’s. Julia waited without moving. It seemed a long time before Sister Maria reappeared in the doorway that led up to the children’s wards. She didn’t see Julia. She stood with her head bowed, then lifted her face to the light. The sky overhead had faded from blue to pearl.
Julia felt like an intruder, but she couldn’t sit motionless any longer. She walked across the courtyard and touched the sister’s arm.
‘Pia is dead,’ was the answer.
Pia’s mother lived in an inland village a dozen kilometres away. Her daughter had died before she could reach her.
Julia shook her head. She could hardly take in the words, even though she had known what must be happening. ‘Why?’ she asked stupidly. ‘She was well yesterday. I read Rapunzel to her.’
Sister Maria looked at her. The nun’s oval face was smooth and her eyes were clear. ‘It is God’s will,’ she said.
Seeing nothing, her eyes hot, Julia went out into the secret garden. Guido was brushing petals from the paving. He saw her, and his face split into his empty, happy smile. There was no sign of Tomaso. He must be playing chess at Nicolo’s house, Julia thought mechanically. She would have welcomed his company. She went back through the stone doorway and out into the main part of the garden. She walked faster, then began to run. She ran down the steps of the terraces, her feet catching in the brambles. The prickles tore at her bare ankles. She was thinking of Pia, the beads of blood that her scratching brought welling out of her skin, and the rending gasps for breath that were now silenced. The pity for her short life brought grief and anger welling up in Julia, bringing with them all the other angers and grief that she had known.
The world turned black, and hostile.
She was sobbing when she reached the last terrace that hung out over the smooth sea. She wanted to lash out against the amorphous weight of injustice. As if her efforts could affect the disposition of justice in Pia’s favour, in favour of any of the others, she began to pull at a mass of bindweed and thistle that grew at her shoulder. Something was hidden beneath it. With her bare hands she went on tearing at the weeds until she caught a glimpse of greenish marble. The tears dried on her face as she worked.
At last, the forgotten statue was revealed again. It was a boy, with plump limbs and a sly, secretive face. Julia smoothed her hands over the cold marble, wondering if he was Mercury, or Pan, or Cupid. He stood like a wicked sentinel, guarding the terraces from the sea. She looked upwards, over the cracked stones and the laced fingers of green, invading shoots.
It is God’s will.
She had none of Sister Maria’s faith. She would have to search for her own answers to the enormity of a child’s gasping death.
And as she stood there, a kind of calm possessed her. She listened to the sea, and spread her fingers out over the stone wall. The earth under her feet was warm, and she could hear the faint rustle of the spreading leaves. She could almost have believed that if she listened hard enough, she would hear the blind roots burrowing beneath her feet, and the music of the earth turning.
There was a solace in that. The turn of the seasons was lovely, and immutable. The cycle renewed itself beyond human reach. Beyond Pia. Beyond herself.
Julia stood up straight. She was convinced, as she went on looking upwards, that it was not enough to play in her walled garden with a boy and simple Guido to help her. Nothing less than a complete restoration of the whole garden would be enough. She would make it live again. That would be her challenge, and her offering.
Julia stayed out in the garden until it was completely dark. Then she went back up the ruined terraces to the black bulk of the palazzo against the midnight sky. She let herself silently into the chapel. There was a nimbus of candlelight glowing around the Blessed Family. She knelt down in front of it and said her own kind of prayer for Pia.
Before she went to bed in her bare room, she put the Rapunzel book away in George Tressider’s marquetry box. She didn’t want to read the story to anyone else.
Julia went to see the Mother Superior, and they talked about the ruined gardens.
‘It will be a very great job,’ the Mother observed. ‘It will need men, experts as well as workers. And money.’
‘I’m not an expert,’ Julia said slowly. An idea was beginning to take shape. ‘But experts can always be found, and workers too. It only takes money.’ She went on quickly, the idea already more than an idea. She was convinced of what she must do. ‘If I could find enough to pay for everything, all the work, should it be spent on the garden? Or would it be better given to the ospedale, to assist the work that you do here?’
The nun considered, then she smiled, a surprisingly worldly smile. ‘I think that our ospedale will continue in any case. And perhaps if some generous person were to give us money for it, we would lose our little assistance from the authorities. But a benefactor for the gardens, that could affect nothing, could it?’
‘No, of course not,’ Julia said gravely.
‘Do you have all this money, Julia? You do not have the look of a rich woman.’ There was no surprise, or curiosity even. Only the calmness that Julia loved.
‘I have a business, in England. Some shops. I gave many years to them, perhaps too many. I think that now the time has come to sell. If I did sell, Mother, I would like to use my money to pay for the gardens.’
More than like, Julia thought. It would give me more happiness than almost anything else I could imagine.
She said, ‘The work would take a year, perhaps. We could employ local men, and Signor Galli might advise us where to turn for expert assistance. And once the restoration is complete, I think that the gardens could be maintained by two, perhaps three workers. Maybe one man with help from some of the residents here, like Guido and Tomaso. And myself, of course.’
The plans came to her mind ready-formed, as if her subconscious had established every detail.
The Mother Superior looked at Julia. ‘Do you intend to make our gardens your life’s work?’
Julia thought of the simplicity of life in the palazzo, the friends that she was beginning to make inside its walls and in the houses that clung around them, and then of the sweep of the terraces overlooking the sea. She remembered her empty flat in Camden Town, and the dull, busy streets. There was nowhere she wanted to be except Montebellate.
Only Ladyhill, and that was impossible.
‘If you will let me,’ she answered.
The nun smiled again. It was agreed that Julia and Nicolo could begin to plan the restoration of the entire garden.
The sale of Garlic & Sapphires was less easy. The business was doing better than it had ever done, since the very beginning. For Julia, in her isolation at Montebellate, it had been both reassuring and saddening to read the reports and balance sheets that were forwarded to her, and to realise that she was no longer needed. It would be a relief, in a way, to cut herself off altogether. But Julia still cared enough about her business to want to find the right buyer. It had taken enough years of her own life, and too much of Lily’s childhood, to be worth less than that.
The sale took weeks of long-distance calls, while independent valuations took place, then more talks, and finally haggling between solicitors. Julia made two brief trips to London, seeing no one while she was there and feeling each time as though she was visiting a foreign city. At last, at the beginning of the summer, a deal was struck. Julia’s shops would be owned by an astute, cold-eyed young businessman and his warmer, vaguer, artist wife. Julia thought that they would do well together. At least her creation would not be swallowed up and obliterated by a bigger chain.
The contract was signed, and a very large sum of money was credited to Julia’s Italian bank account. It arrived none too soon. The money left over from the sale of the house by the canal had already been poured into the gardens. Julia flew back to Italy, with the sense that she was going home for good.
Then it was July, and Lily’s summer holiday. To Julia, it seemed a painfully long time since she had seen her, and yet the months had gone so quickly that she had had no time to look for the village house that she had intended to make into a home for herself and Lily. Julia went to see the Mother Superior again.
‘I could ask Signor Galli if Lily might stay in his house …’
‘But you would like to have your daughter with you here, of course. There are other guest rooms. We have no shortage of space for our friends, Julia.’
‘Thank you,’ Julia said.
She borrowed Nicolo’s car, and drove to Naples to meet Lily’s plane.
Lily came out in a press of other travellers, but Julia saw her immediately. They ran to each other, and as she hugged her Julia felt Lily’s new height, and her adult shape emerging from the childish roundness.
‘You’ve grown,’ she said.
‘And you’re thin, Mum. And you’re so brown.’
‘I’ve been working very hard. Look at my hands.’ Julia held them up. The fingers were ingrained with earth and the nails were cracked and split. Lily looked at them, amazed. In the car park, beside Nicolo’s rusty Fiat, Lily asked, ‘Is this your car?’
Julia laughed. ‘It’s a special occasion, I borrowed it. I haven’t got a car. I haven’t got a house, either. You’re coming to stay at the palazzo.’
In her letters, Julia had described everything. She had telephoned Lily too, and told her about the sale of Garlic & Sapphires. To her surprise, Lily had received the news as if she had been expecting it.
‘You didn’t care so much about the shops any more, did you?’ she said. ‘Not like the way you used to when I was little. I thought you loved them more than me.’
‘I didn’t. I was doing it for you.’
‘I know that now.’ Lily had laughed, the laughter sounding close at hand, for all the miles that separated Ladyhill from Montebellate.
Now Lily was in the car beside her, peering between the hurtling airport buses at the press of Neapolitan traffic. At Julia’s words she turned round in dismay. ‘We’re staying in the palazzo? With the funny people?’
‘They’re not funny, Lily. They’re ill, or damaged, or old. Otherwise just the same as you.’ Julia had spoken sharply. It was an inauspicious beginning. ‘Never mind,’ she said quickly. ‘You haven’t said about you. Tell me everything you’ve been doing.’
Lily’s letters had already told most of it. With amusement, Julia noticed fewer references to Marco Polo, many more to Lily’s friend Elizabeth and their doings together. It made her think of Mattie and herself, at Blick Road Grammar School.
‘Have you seen Mattie?’
‘Yes, she came with Mitch. He’s nice. Mattie’s got a Jaguar, a white one.’
‘Mattie has? Can she drive it?’
Lily laughed a lot. ‘Not very well.’
Julia had written to Mattie, but Mattie had never been a great correspondent. Her notes in return were superficial, sometimes illegible. The veil that had descended between them showed no signs of lifting.
Lily chattered on as they drove. When they came to the coast she leaned forward in her seat. ‘Look at the sea. Isn’t it blue?’
Julia pointed at the conical hill rearing ahead, with Montebellate crowning it. As they began to wind up the hairpin bends, with the scents of wild thyme and curryplant drifting through the open windows of the car, Lily’s talk died away. She looked nervous, peering upwards. She asked abruptly, ‘Mummy? Are you all right?’
Julia touched her hand. ‘Everything is all right.’
But the first days of the visit were not a success.
Lily stood in the doorway of Julia’s room. She looked at the narrow bed and the single chair drawn up to a table spread with gardening books and plans.
‘Is this all there is?’
‘Yes, because it’s all I need. Not everyone lives in nice houses in London, or in manor houses in Dorset.’
‘I know that,’ Lily said mulishly.
‘Do you?’
At the refectory supper she sat in silence, hardly touching her food.
Julia had her work to do, and she went calmly on with it. During the day Lily shadowed her, or else she sat apart in the secret garden. Julia knew that she was sulking, felt angry with her, and then relented. It was Lily’s holiday, after all.
‘I’ll take you down to the beach this afternoon,’ she offered. ‘We can take some of the little ones, too.’
‘I don’t want to go anywhere with all those kids. People will stare at us. You’re my mother.’
‘And you’re my daughter. But we don’t own each other, do we? You have proved that for us both.’
Lily tried to outstare her. ‘I don’t like it here. All these old people, and sick kids, and nuns. It’s creepy. I can’t eat my food with them slobbering and grunting all round me. I thought I’d be coming to your house. Like it used to be.’
Julia’s expression didn’t change. ‘I’m sorry, Lily. I can’t remove the people. They belong here, and we don’t. And you are twelve years old. You can face a little uncomfortable reality, can’t you?’
‘Not if it’s drool and prayers and snotty kids,’ Lily muttered darkly.
It was Tomaso who saved the day.
Julia had noticed him watching Lily. He eyed her pale skin and her pretty clothes, and then turned away scowling when anyone caught him at it. Lily pretended not to notice him at all.
Lily had been at the palazzo for ten days when Julia, driven to snapping point by her sulks, sent her out into the secret garden to do some work. She gave her the shears, and told her to clip some of the hedges. It was an easy, if laborious job. It should keep Lily usefully occupied for an hour or so. It was much later when Julia finally finished what she was doing and went in search of her. She wasn’t in the walled garden, although the shears were lying in the middle of the parterre. Some of the box had been clipped, surprisingly well. Julia went out on to the highest terrace and looked down. The sea was the pale opal of early evening, and the sky above an infinitesimal shade paler. Lily and Tomaso were leaning against the wall at the bottom, looking out over it.
Julia turned aside, and went back up the steps to the palazzo.
Later, she said, ‘I’m glad you’ve made friends with Tomaso.’
‘He clipped the hedges for me, that’s all.’ Lily tried to be dismissive, but her need to talk overcame her. If Elizabeth was here, Julia thought, hiding her smile, I’d never hear about anything. Casually, Lily added, ‘He’s okay looking, don’t you think? For an Italian?’
Tomaso had black curly hair, and limpid brown eyes. He had a broken tooth that made his smile rakishly appealing.
‘Oh, for an Italian,’ Julia agreed.
After that, Lily’s mood changed dramatically. She devised an ingenious hiding and chasing game for the stronger children that led them up and down the garden terraces. And at one refectory supper she took a place beside Guido and talked to him while he crumbled his food into his awkward mouth. And she and Tomaso pretended to bump into each other everywhere, and then glanced quickly away, blushing.
‘How do you talk?’ Julia asked. Lily knew no Italian, and Tomaso didn’t have a word of English.
Lily looked surprised. ‘We manage fine.’
After some thought, Julia agreed to let Tomaso take Lily down to the sea on the old blue bus that left the Montebellate square twice daily. And after the first time, the expedition was regularly repeated.
‘Does Alexander let you go out with boys?’ Julia asked. ‘Be sensible, won’t you?’
Lily looked levelly back at her. ‘I know what you mean. And I’m not silly.’
Not half as silly as I was, Julia thought.
She wrote a letter to Josh. She didn’t have to describe Montebellate to him, nor the view that spread beneath her open shutters. Josh did reply to the letter, many months later. He told her that he had been working in Argentina, and then had travelled back very slowly, through Peru and Colombia. Josh had no more ties than he had ever had.
There was the inevitable evening when Lily came home with her red mouth swollen and her eyes starry.
Julia sat with Nicolo with the planting plans and designs from the experts in Rome spread out in front of them. She told him about Lily and Tomaso.
‘What do you feel about it?’ he asked.
Julia put her hands over her face, rubbing under her eyes. ‘Old,’ she answered. ‘I’m thirty-three.’
Nicolo put his hand on her bare shoulder. His touch was dry and light, like a falling leaf. ‘How old do you think it makes me feel, to hear you say that?’
Julia took his hand between her own. ‘You’ll never be old.’
‘I am quite ancient,’ Nicolo said cheerfully. ‘Too old, sadly, for anything except friendship.’
‘Friendship is enough.’
Nicolo sighed. ‘Try to tell that to Lily and her Tomaso.’
Lily spent six weeks at the palazzo. By the end of the time she was as brown as Julia, and she seemed to have grown up again. To Julia, she seemed to be on the very heartbreaking edge of the divide between girl and woman.
On the morning of her departure, everyone who could came out into the courtyard to say goodbye to her. Tomaso waited at the edge of the crowd, hanging back to the very last moment. Then, when Lily looked around for him, he edged forward. He kissed her, very formally, on both cheeks and then stepped back again. Lily hesitated, and then nodded. Her smile had turned shy again. She held her head up and walked quickly after Julia. In the car, on the way down the hill, she cried a little, very quietly. Then she dried her eyes and watched the sea receding.
‘I can’t wait to see Elizabeth,’ she announced at last.
At the airport, on the point of saying goodbye, Lily asked suddenly, ‘Can I come back another time?’
‘Of course you can. Whenever you want. Next time, I’ll have a house for us. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to spend your holidays in a hospital.’
Lily beamed at her. ‘I’m glad you did.’
After she had gone it occurred to Julia that they had, all unexpectedly, come close to friendship.
All through the summer and on into the autumn the consultations with experts and the garden planning went on. Nicolo had found a garden historian in Rome, and he came and spent a week amongst the palazzo papers researching the original plantings. Through his discoveries the Montebellate gardens were linked back to the classic gardens of Northern Italy on which they had been modelled.
Designers and horticulturalists came, bringing with them stonemasons and marble masons who examined the cracked pillars and urns, and began the exhumation of the classical statues from their crypts of weeds.
When the summer season was over, the workmen moved in to begin the job of clearing the ground. Fredo, Vito’s nephew, who closed down his beach pizza bar in mid-October every year, came to lead the gang of labourers. Rotavators were towed in, and trucks loaded with topsoil and fertiliser and fresh gravel ground their slow way up the hill to the village.
Julia and Nicolo and the nuns watched with childlike excitement as the magnificent bones of the garden were raked bare. And as the work of clearing went on, plans for the restored planting arrived. In the late evenings, under Nicolo’s red-shaded lamps, they pored over the lists of santolinas and lavenders and helichrysums, cistuses and helianthemums and hundreds of bulbs.
Julia paid the huge bills, signing the cheques with a flourish of satisfaction.
At the end of the autumn, the first batches of plants arrived from the nurseries. These, and the spring bulbs, would be planted out while there was still some warmth in the ground. The rest would wait until the end of the short winter. She walked out in the sharp early mornings, with the thin mist wrapping around her ankles and the white sea like flat metal under the colourless sky. Fredo and his Uncle Vito knelt to unwrap the earthy balls of plant roots, and pressed them gently into the planting holes. Julia worked beside them, firming the moist earth around the neck of each plant, touching the crowns of cropped shoots as if to bless them. Fredo smiled at her as she sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead with earth-blackened hands.
In the first summer after the planting the garden lay fresh and raw, with the statues standing blindly in the haze of new green. Julia watched with fierce pleasure as each new shoot uncurled. She walked the terraces, up and down, seeing the hard lines of the long walls and wide steps soften with foliage, and the grey and white of stone and marble fade by contrast with the brilliance of blossom.
Under the hot sun, she felt the garden’s vitality inside herself as well as all around her. She felt an erotic charge that made her lift her head and straighten her back, aware of the pressures and recesses of her body under her faded cotton dress.
Fredo came up from his beach bar in the evenings, to help with carrying the tubs of dirty water from the palazzo for siphoning on to the beds. He watched her all the time, smiled at her more often.
One evening, when the late darkness was falling, he caught her alone on the lowest terrace just within the sound of the sea. She was working not far from the point where she had first seen Lily and Tomaso together. She stood up as soon as she heard him approach, but he was already close and they almost bumped together.
‘Sera,’ Fredo murmured. She twisted her head away, then looked back at him, feeling the heat in her cheeks. Fredo had muscular, thick shoulders and damp black hair showed at the neck of his shirt. The hair tangled with a gold chain on which hung a crucifix. She had often seen it dangle while he worked, before he tucked it away again in his shirt front. There was a white, crescent-shaped scar in the brown skin at his jawline. She had never noticed that before. He was so close that she thought she could see the blood pulsing beneath it. She could smell his clean sweat, and see the sheen of it in the hollow of his throat.
Dizzily, she thought, I could put my mouth there. Taste the salt. And she thought of the other things, too.
Her heart thumped in her chest, and her head swam. It would have been easy to let her head fall forward, by slow, slow degrees, and let it rest against him. The heat of their skins would flash and burn.
Fredo moved the one half-step that brought their bodies into contact. He put his hand at the small of her back, heavy and hot, moving her hips against his. He put the fingers of his other hand on her breast. Julia almost screamed. Fredo’s white teeth showed as his mouth opened.
Fredo had a wife and several children, down on the coast. Julia put her hand up, closed her fingers round his wrist and lifted his hand away. She stepped back, into coolness, into safety. She nodded at Fredo. Not angrily, not dismissively. A neutral, concluding gesture. Then she turned away and managed to walk up a flight of stone steps. Another and another, and up to the palazzo. She reached her room and closed the door. There was no lock so she leaned against it, the palms of her hands pressed to the panels. She realised that she was panting, like a dog. After a long time, she crept across to her bed and lay down. She lay on her back, stretched out, staring up at the white roof. She ran her fingers over the taut skin inside her thighs, touched herself.
Julia was grateful to Fredo.
It was a long time, longer than she could remember, since she had felt the imperative, unspecific ache of physical need. It made her feel young, after she had decided that she was old. She was regenerated, like her Italian garden. Julia thought, with amusement, of the sap flowing again.
After that, she was careful not to be alone near Fredo. Not because she was afraid of him, but because she didn’t trust herself.
Before Lily’s summer holiday that year, Nicolo found Julia a house. It was a little way down the cobbled street from his own, a small white building full of awkward angles sheltering in the corner between two higher walls. It belonged to an old woman who was moving inland to live with her daughter. Nicolo helped Julia with the legal formalities involved in the purchase, and Julia sold her Camden Town flat to pay for it. When the house became hers she repainted it with fresh white paint, and put small iron bedsteads in the two bedrooms. She left the primitive kitchen just as it was, and left the walls bare because she had forgotten how to make magpie collections of things to adorn them. But she did paint the front door the harebell-blue that she remembered from the Pensione Flora.
She wrote another letter to Josh, and after a long time he wrote back.
Julia never wrote to Alexander. Sometimes he sent her short, formal notes, enclosing Lily’s school reports or other evidence of her progress. She always read his letters very carefully over and over, but they never yielded more than the bare words.
Julia thought that it was as if they had both retired behind their own ramparts, herself to the remoteness of Montebellate, and Alexander deeper into the old stronghold of Ladyhill. He never mentioned Clare, but Julia imagined her as a newer fortification.
Clare wrote too, sometimes. Clare evidently thought that it was her duty to keep Julia informed about Lily’s elocution lessons, the date of her first period, her first dance dress. Clare’s handwriting was as unformed as Lily’s own, her spelling even more erratic.
Lily herself came out for her second summer, and her friendship with Tomaso renewed itself. He used to come down from the palazzo to visit them in the little house. By the next year in the gardens the thin shoots had swelled into branches, and the flowers lay along the terraces in hot, shimmering sheets of colour. Marigold, peony, pinks. Julia moved amongst them, sometimes half dazed by the abundance.
Against one wall of the palazzo, a functional glasshouse was built. Julia and Tomaso learned to strike cuttings, to propagate seeds. Tomaso was much better at it, but Julia loved the fecundity of the seed trays and earthenware pots.
She was happy; a passive, unfocused happiness.
Another year. Julia sometimes lost track of days, even of weeks. Her calendar became the seasons, measured out by the demands of the gardens. They were reaching their full, forgotten glory now. They began to attract visitors, and an entrance fee was charged for the benefit of the ospedale. Julia and Tomaso worked full-time on the terraces and parterres. Tomaso was paid a wage, by Julia. For herself, she lived very frugally. She ate in the convent refectory, burned wood in winter in the stove in her little house. Tomaso moved out of the palazzo into a room across the square. He acquired a moped. That was the summer that Lily was fifteen.
At first Julia forbade her to ride with Tomaso on the moped. Then she saw that the other girls rode behind the boys, and she relented. The boys and girls used to gather in the evenings, in the square beyond the palazzo gates. They stood in the shade of the plane tree, where Julia had first seen the old woman and her tethered goat, laughing and talking and listening to pop on tinny transistor radios. The mopeds coughed and whined round and round the square. Julia saw Lily absorbed into the crowd. She was proud of Lily; of her ease amongst the Italian girls and boys, of her natural good spirits, of her beauty. She liked to see her with Tomaso and the others, enjoying the evening and the summer’s richness.
Julia would wave, and walk on down to her little house. Sometimes Nicolo would come to have dinner with her. He looked older now, and his joints had lost some of their elasticity, but he was as acute as he had ever been. Julia loved his company. Without him, for all her friendships with the nuns and the patients and the villagers, she would have felt her isolation.
It was during the moped summer that a letter came for Julia. The stamp was Italian and the print on the back flap read Hotel Garibaldi, Rome, so at first she didn’t register the handwriting on the envelope front. Then she looked more closely, and saw that it was indeed from China.
China announced that since she was, as she put it, getting so horribly old, she had decided to take one last continental holiday. Travelling alone, she had been to Paris and Florence and Siena. She had visited old friends, and been to the Louvre and the Uffizi, had looked for the last time at Brunelleschi’s dome. She was now in Rome, and would Julia be willing to show her the famous gardens if she came to Montebellate for a night or two? She would put up in an hotel, of course. And at the same time she could see Lily, and Julia herself, if that would not be an inconvenience.
From Nicolo’s house, because she still didn’t have a telephone of her own, Julia rang the hotel at once. She told China that she must come to stay in her house, and that it would give her more pleasure to show the gardens to her than to anyone else in the world.
Two days later, Julia and Lily drove to Naples to meet her.
China was in her seventies, but she still held herself erect, with her head up. She commanded the same speculative glances, too. She was immaculate after the short journey. Her grey-blonde hair had turned silver, but she kept it in the neat chignon. She was wearing an uncreased cream suit, with crocodile shoes. Her ankles were still trim, in fine, pale stockings. She made Julia feel, acutely, her own complete lack of grooming. But China kissed her cheek and murmured, ‘You look well, Julia.’
Lily’s bedroom in the village house was little more than a cupboard, so Julia gave up her bedroom to China and slept downstairs. China demurred, but she was clearly touched by Julia’s hospitality.
Julia smiled at her. ‘There are no proper hotels in Montebellate.’
‘Thank heaven,’ Lily said. ‘Otherwise the place would be full of tourists, wouldn’t it?’
The three of them laughed, and sat down to eat the meal that Julia had prepared.
Afterwards, when Lily had gone off with Tomaso and the others, China and Lily walked slowly up the hill to the palazzo. They made a slow, complete circuit of the gardens. Julia was proud to show them off, and China was a knowledgeable observer. She knew the plants, and their histories, and the formal discipline of the Italian gardens. The bridge that their letters had established between them held firm, strengthened by Julia’s pleasure in her achievement, and China’s admiration of it.
At the end of their exploration they stood on the top terrace again, looking at the symmetry spreading below them. China said, ‘And this was really a wilderness before you came?’
‘The skeleton was here, covered in decay. I only put the flesh back. With much help from everyone. From you, China.’
China inclined her head in acknowledgement. I like her stateliness, Julia thought. I assumed it was coldness before, but it isn’t. She is uncompromising, that’s all. When I first knew her I couldn’t even see clearly that people exist as themselves, and not just in relation to myself. That’s why I never understood her.
‘How long have you been here?’ China asked.
‘Four and a half years.’
China thought for a moment, then inclined her head again. ‘I congratulate you on your achievement. It is magnificent. And unusually generous.’
Julia knew that she meant what she said. She felt a fierce flush of pride. ‘Thank you.’
They passed the arches that looked inward into the secret garden, and the concentrated scents drifted out to them. They went on, back to the courtyard, and Julia took China to meet the different children who still played with her presents of draughts and snakes and ladders.
Nicolo Galli entertained them to dinner, with great success. They dined in the refectory, the next night, with China sitting straight-backed next to the Mother Superior. But Julia and Lily were unable to persuade China to stay in Montebellate for longer than three nights.
‘I’m keeping you from your bed,’ China said firmly. ‘And it is time I went back to my own garden.’
Julia understood that.
On the third evening, after their refectory supper, Julia and China sat on one of the stone seats in the secret garden. The last of the summer’s great flush of roses hung raggedly over their heads. Behind them, the chapel bell tolled. As always, the warm air muffled the peals. Lily had gone with Tomaso, down to the coast to see a film at the open-air cinema.
‘Are you happy here?’ China asked.
‘As happy as I need to be.’
Julia had the sense, as she had done all through the three days, that China was observing her.
‘Is that a riddle?’
Julia laughed briefly. ‘I didn’t intend it to be. It’s just that the necessity for happiness – my own happiness, I suppose – seems diminished here. Through seeing the nuns and what they do, and the lives of the people who come to the ospedale. And in watching the gardens. Perhaps I’ve learned to be a little bit, a very little bit unselfish.’ She laughed again, trying to dispel the seriousness. ‘Not before time, you might say.’
‘When will you come home?’
‘Home? There’s nothing to come home for.’
‘And if there were?’
Julia was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I can’t imagine what it would be.’
‘Alexander, perhaps.’
The words were spoken lightly but Julia had the sudden, vertiginous conviction that all China’s visit had been leading up to them. Had she come from Rome to suggest as much? From Paris? All the way from her green Wiltshire garden? Julia’s heart lurched, and the blood buzzed in her ears.
She managed to say, ‘Alexander and I have been divorced for a long time.’
‘Yes. Do you know, Julia, that one of the realities of old age is that one’s perspectives change? The problems of other people begin to look very simple, because one’s own are over. One begins to imagine that one can solve them. The arrogance of that.’
Listening to her, Julia was trying to remember. What was it that China had said, long ago, at Ladyhill? On Lily’s first birthday. My husband was a difficult man. Yours is not. Alexander was not simple. None of the knots that he and I have created, Julia thought sadly, can be easily unravelled.
She waited for China to go on, but there was nothing. China was not arrogant, of course. Nor would she interfere.
Julia began to wonder if she had made more of the few words than China had intended her to. There was no message from Alexander in them. Alexander would send his own message, if he wanted to.
They began to talk about other things, and then they stood up and made a last slow circuit of the secret garden. In the arched doorway, looking back, China said musingly, ‘I think you used to be jealous of me, all that time ago. Perhaps we can be friends now? I have enjoyed being here with you and Lily.’
Julia took her hand and held it. ‘I’d like that. I was jealous of you and Alexander. I was jealous of everything, once. But I’m not, any more. I don’t think I’m even jealous of Clare.’
China’s profile was immobile. But she said, ‘I don’t think you need to be jealous of Clare.’
They walked back through the dusk to the little house. When they reached it, China said she was very tired, and went straight up to her bed. Julia sat up, pretending to read, waiting for Lily to come home. The significance of China’s words flickered and faded.
There was nothing to go home for. This was home.
When it had been dark for a long time, and she was just beginning to worry, Julia heard Tomaso’s moped bumping over the cobbles at the corner.
Lily had followed Tomaso, walking in his footsteps over the sand although she knew the way as well as he did. The sea lay directly behind them, and the moon made a silver streak over it that pointed at their backs.
They were heading for their special place. The sand was soft underfoot now, and they scrambled up the lip of a sand dune, with coarse grass brushing their bare ankles. The canopy of pine trees closed over their heads, and Lily breathed in the resinous scent. A few yards ahead there was a hollow, enclosed by the pines. Tomaso jumped lightly down, and held up his arms to Lily. He took her hands and swung her down beside him. They looked around, into the dim emptiness, and then laughed, a little shakily. Then, very slowly, they knelt down facing each other.
‘I love you,’ Tomaso said, in English.
Lily answered him, in Italian.
Tomaso took off his jacket and spread it out for her. Lily lay down. Her fingers brushed the sand. The evening air had cooled the surface, but as she burrowed downwards she found the stored warmth of the sun. Further down it was cool again, and damp. She turned her head a little.
They had come here, to the hollow in the pines, often before. They had kissed each other in the sand, licking the salt of the day’s swimming off each other’s cheeks like warm animals.
Tonight was different. They had decided it. Tomaso had brought a packet of things, in the pocket of his jeans. Lily didn’t ask where he had got them from.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ he had asked. ‘With me?’ But his face had split into the disbelieving, delighted smile that Lily loved.
‘I do,’ Lily had said, seriously.
It was the truth, Lily loved Tomaso, but even though she would have denied it fiercely, she knew that she wouldn’t go on coming back here to him, every summer for ever. It was partly because of her sense of the fragility, the impermanence, that she wanted to seal something between them. The first time would always be there.
They had come to the sand hollow by mutual, silent agreement. Romantic Lily wanted the place to be right, and there was no righter place than here, with the black pines meeting over their heads and the sound of the sea cutting them off, from Montebellate on its hill, from the world.
Seeing her mother and her father’s mother together had given Lily a sharp sense of time, of years beginning to click past all of them like the beads on the nuns’ rosaries. There was no always, Lily realised. Not even at Ladyhill. Especially at Ladyhill. In the last few months there had been another change. Clare had gone, stayed away, then come back again. Lily had begun to see that Clare and her father didn’t make one another happy. The recognition had come with a chilly, adult awareness. She had folded it away, never mentioning it to anyone. Here in Montebellate, sharing the little house with her closest female relatives, Lily had understood what shaped her and linked her to the two older women, and because of it she had felt the imperative need to separate herself, and make her own individual claims to experience and memories. She felt hungry, and jubilant, and melancholy, all at the same time. Granny Bliss looked frail and Julia herself had acquired a sort of unexpectant patience that made Lily unaccountably sad. And at the same time, she felt inside herself the bursting knot of her own strength and eagerness. Fiercely she whispered, ‘Tomaso, I love you.’
It lasted barely a minute. Tomaso was helpless, and when he came his head reared up and he shouted her name. Lily held him, his weight on top of her, feeling the pressure seeping away inside her. She had felt almost nothing, after the first urgency and then the brief shock of pain, but she didn’t care about that. Her fingers fluttered over Tomaso’s back. Sweat had gathered in the indentation of his spine, trapped by the developed muscles. She had a sudden memory of Tomaso working, shirtless, in the palazzo gardens. The muscles contracted as he bent and straightened. Julia was there too, her sunhat shading her face. They both stopped what they had been doing and turned to look at her as she came down the steps. The vision seemed very precious, clear-edged and significant. Lily screwed her eyes more tightly shut, to store the memory, guessing presciently that it was the one that would come back to her, not this sandy clearing, when she thought of Tomaso.
When she was Julia’s age. When she was China’s age.
Lily found that she could easily imagine it, now, the way in which the years would click past. She had lost the careless, childish expectations of eternity. I have grown up, Lily thought portentously, and half smiled at the obviousness of the occasion.
She opened her eyes. The stars were faint points of light between the lacings of the pine branches. She realised that she felt happy, lying there, with Tomaso still inside her. She was glad it was Tomaso. She was glad it had been as she had imagined it. Lily was romantic, but she was also a child of her generation. She had never expected pulsing tides and soaring violins. She and Tomaso had done it together, sealed it between themselves, for ever. That was what mattered. There would be other times, other sensations. Other men, Lily was sure of that. But only this first time.
Tomaso stirred, lifted his weight. They separated, very carefully, looking down at themselves. Tomaso tied a knot in the rubber and buried it in the sand.
‘We should make a stone, to mark the spot.’
‘We’ll remember anyway,’ Lily said.
Tomaso took her hand, as if they had only just met, as if she was a princess released from a tower. He thought she looked like the signora. Tomaso always thought of her as the signora, never as Julia.
‘Thank you, Lily,’ he said.
‘Thank you, Tomaso,’ she repeated.
The seriousness burst like a bubble. They laughed, a little wildly, looking at each other’s nakedness in the sand. Tomaso brushed the crusting of it from Lily’s cheek and stomach.
‘Hey. Ouch,’ she shouted at him. When they had stopped laughing Tomaso seized her by the wrist, hauled her to her feet.
‘Swim?’ he asked her.
‘Race,’ Lily answered.
They scrambled over the lip of the hollow and ran, over the soft sand, down the beach. The black water was laced with silver foam. They plunged into it, whooping, and the coldness took Lily’s breath away. She swam, fierce strokes, then rolled over on to her back and felt the salt wash scouring her. She dived, slick as an eel, and touched the rippled sand. When she burst to the surface again, with Tomaso splashing beside her, she trod water with the cold drift of the sea between her legs. She felt sharp, and clean, and exultant.
After their swim, they dried each other with Tomaso’s T-shirt. Then, with Tomaso bare-chested, they straddled the moped. Sheltered by Tomaso’s warm back, Lily breathed in the hot, vegetable scents of the south as they rode up to Montebellate where she knew that Julia would be waiting for her.
‘Good film?’ Julia asked, putting aside her book and smothering a yawn.
‘Yes, really good,’ Lily answered composedly.
‘Where’s Tomaso?’
‘He’s gone straight home.’ Lily went to her, put her arms around her mother’s neck. ‘I love you, you know.’
Julia smiled, to Lily’s opened eyes suddenly seeming almost shy. ‘That’s good. That’s very important. I love you too. You’re a good girl, Lily.’
Lily looked over her head, out at the darkness pressing against the uncurtained window.
‘I hope so,’ Lily said, wondering.