Looking back on that morning later, it seemed to Justine that she should have known that everything was about to change; it was in the air. Even as she lay cocooned in sleep, far off to the west the great swirl of an autumn depression was beginning to gather over central France. Mists were settling in the deep valleys of Provence and Liguria and further up a soft light rain had begun to fall on the parched stalks of sunflowers, stubbled fields and the ripening vineyards of the Rhone. In the Maremma an early morning wind blew thistledown across the pasture and in her sleep Justine turned over and pulled the quilt up to her shoulder.
So early that she thought she must have been dreaming, the sky barely silver through the open window, drowsily Justine registered the sound of a car starting up outside. She felt a shifting of weight in the bed as Lucien rolled over and pushed up her T-shirt, his warm hand on her hip in the half-darkness. She closed her eyes, wanting to forget who she was, to be someone else, somewhere else.
When Justine woke again the room was flooded with light and the bed was empty beside her. For a while she lay and looked at the beams above her head, the rough red tiles orderly between them, at the brilliant blue of the sky against the ridge of black trees through the window. For a time everything seemed perfectly clear; the walnut chest of drawers gleaming in the sun, her new red linen dress folded on a chair, even the sound of the birds in the tree outside and the faint acrid smell of woodsmoke in the air, all sharp and perfectly defined. Home seemed like a distant dream to her already; she tried to remember it, as though she’d been bereaved and was trying to reconstruct the face of someone dead. She tried to picture the kitchen, the junkyard elegance of their drawing room, the view she loved through the long French windows into the London street. But she couldn’t give it substance. It was here that was real, the grazing cows, the silent, sweet-smelling woods, the beams over her head; the rest of it seemed dark, pointlessly oppressive.
Then from below she heard a wail rising up through the window, and Louisa’s voice, sharp with anger. The door opened, and Lucien came in with a cup of tea. Justine turned her head on the pillow; he smiled conspiratorially and rolled his eyes at the sound from downstairs.
‘A bit of a domestic, I think,’ he said, and as she heard the note of determined cheerfulness in his voice Justine remembered the night before, foreboding settling on her shoulders like a weight. With a sigh she raised herself on the pillows and took the cup from him.
‘Oh yes?’ Justine said cautiously, hoping against hope that the scene in the restaurant had been forgotten by everyone else, if not by her.
‘I think the children are getting on Louisa’s nerves,’ Lucien went on. ‘Tom’s gone.’ He sat down on the bed beside her and the cup chinked in its saucer, spilling a little.
‘What do you mean?’ Justine said, more sharply than she intended.
‘Didn’t you hear the car?’ Lucien said. ‘This morning?’ He looked at her with the ghost of a smile, knowing.
Justine nodded absently, thinking as she raised her tea to her lips. It tasted faintly sour, and she wondered if it was the foreign water, or the milk going off in the ancient fridge.
‘So where’s he gone? You don’t mean he’s really gone?’
Lucien looked away from her, out of the window. The voices from below had fallen silent now.
‘Gone to Grosseto,’ he said. ‘To look at a restaurant and an organic farm. That’s what Louisa said anyway.’ His face was still turned away; she could only see the plane of his cheek gleaming in the sun and his fine straight nose, but she thought he was frowning. Something came back to her from last night, and carefully she set the cup down on the marble of the side table.
‘You don’t think it’s true?’ she asked. Lucien turned back towards her, the light from the window behind him putting his face in shadow.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he sounded impatient for a moment. ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’
‘You’d gone,’ said Justine slowly, ‘hadn’t you? When Penny Montgomery said – about Evie –’
Lucien turned towards her, frowning. ‘Said what? Jesus, that woman. She didn’t know Evie.’ His face was dark, and suddenly he sounded furious. Justine felt warmed by his indignation, his defence at last of Evie.
‘Oh,’ said Justine vaguely, suddenly unwilling to repeat the words, ‘just, something about – just gossip. Something about Evie and men, the effect she had on men, or something. About making Martin jealous. You don’t think– do you think Evie was unfaithful? She never said anything. I always thought they were so happy.’ She was lost in the thought, wondering how she could have missed all this.
Lucien shrugged, and when he spoke he sounded fed up. ‘How could you have known? It’s not something people talk about, is it? We hardly saw them.’ And with a sudden movement he sat on the bed and put his arms around her, his face against the hollow of her throat. Instinctively she put her arms around him too, feeling the warm weight of his torso against her, the tensed muscles in his back.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘about last night.’ His voice was muffled, and Justine wasn’t sure what he meant.
‘What are you sorry for?’ she said. This was not like Lucien.
‘Oh, you know. Letting Tom get to me. Making a scene.’
‘Well,’ she said reasonably, ‘it was hardly your fault.’
Lucien sighed, sitting up and away from her. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, his face slightly averted. ‘Going out to work? What Tom said about your supporting me. You know if you asked me to, I’d go and find something. I always thought you enjoyed it. But if you thought – that was the right way to – manage our lives, I’d get a job. I could do it tomorrow – well, perhaps not quite tomorrow, but when we get back.’ He turned and looked at her, eyes wide open and innocent.
Justine hesitated. This was what she had wanted him to say – for how long? – but there was something about the way it was phrased that made it more complicated than she had thought to accept. She thought of getting back to England suddenly, and her little cubicle, the piles of typescripts, the authors fretting about spelling and sequencing and historical accuracy, the coloured pens and checklists in her neat, careful writing. Of course the prospect did not make her happy or eager as it once had, but it did not fill her with despair, either, did it? She thought of Lucien in an office, and she knew it wouldn’t work.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, with only a little resignation. ‘It’s fine. I mean, you know it’s fine. It’s just –’
Lucien looked at her and she saw a tiny flicker of relief behind his careful smile. Then he said it.
‘I know, it’s just – the baby thing. Well, maybe we could. You know. Have a baby’ He looked at her cautiously, his eyes narrowed, waiting.
A breeze blew the thin curtains at the window and Justine felt the hairs on her bare arm rise; she hadn’t thought it would happen like this. She knew she should take it slowly, but in fact she found she had little desire to jump up and down, to start planning. Is this what I want? The question leapt at her, unbidden, out of the air. She leaned her head against Lucien’s shoulder and said, ‘Thanks.’ Thanks? she thought, aghast. ‘I mean, if you think it’s OK.’ And together they leaned back on the pillows and looked out of the window at the late summer sky, still a clear, pale unclouded blue. They didn’t look at each other, perhaps for fear of finding out what the other was really thinking, or giving themselves away.
Leaving Lucien in the shower, which drummed and hissed above her as she descended the wooden steps, Justine passed the boys sitting mute and chastened at the breakfast table downstairs, swinging their legs and staring at spilt bowls of cereal. She stood irresolute in the doorway, the sun on her face. Outside on the grass she could see Martin walking to and fro, talking into his mobile, head down.
‘Yes,’ he was saying, encouraging, ‘a long avenue of cypresses, it’s at the top. He’s waiting for you.’ He glimpsed Justine in the doorway out of the corner of his eye, straightened and lifted his hand absently before turning to look across the pasture, his back to her now and his voice indistinct. Justine turned back inside.
She found Louisa in the dim undersea light of the bedroom downstairs, sorting savagely through clothes, a pile of dirty children’s things at her feet. Justine felt a qualm, thinking that this was what motherhood seemed mostly to be about; putting clothes in piles, and shouting.
‘Are you OK?’ she said, unsuspecting, and as though the words had set a fuse Louisa blew. Her hands flew up in the air then down again, she sat down on the bed violently, her jaw set, and brought her hands, clenched now into fists, down to her knees. Then she put her face down between them and her shoulders shook silently.
Justine sat beside her, the sense she had had earlier of a delicate equilibrium established in the house evaporating. It’s all falling apart, she thought, helplessly. Every time I try to put it back together. She put an arm around Louisa’s narrow shoulders.
‘Whats happened?’ she asked. ‘Lucien said Tom’s gone to look at an organic farm?’
Louisa looked at her, shaking her head helplessly, her cheeks damp and rough, with crying, or tiredness. Justine hadn’t seen her like this before; she was barely recognizable.
‘I suppose it might be true,’ she said. ‘It’s what he told me.’
Justine frowned. ‘Why wouldn’t it be true?’ she asked.
Louisa gave a long, tired sigh, shuddering a little like a child who has cried herself out.
‘Because he’s not going to write it up, is he? He’s lost the column. They’re sacking him.’
‘What? Why?’Justine was staggered. Tom was one of the leaders in his profession; he had been, once at least, a trailblazing journalist. A household name. Even if he was falling off a bit, that name alone had always been worth tens of thousands of readers.
Louisa looked at her, despairing. ‘This last year,’ she said, ‘he’s been – something’s wrong with him. Drinking, yes, he’s always been a drinker. But now he drinks so much he can’t taste the food, he’s been thrown out of two restaurants, he had a stand-up row, in front of customers, with one chef She sighed. ‘I knew all this.’ She stopped for a moment.
‘And?’
‘This morning, Tom told me. I don’t know why, something to do with last night; he had a heart-to-heart with Martin, after we’d gone to bed. Maybe Martin said – maybe he thought he had to explain why he lost it with Lucien. But he told me that last week, when we were getting ready to come here – I was packing, I suppose I wasn’t paying much attention – his editor called.’
Louisa looked lost for a moment, contemplating her culpability. ‘Anyway someone – a big name, a chef, phoned the editor, said he watched Tom in the restaurant car park when he’d said he’d get a taxi, paralytic, they watched him get in the car and drive himself home. Of course Tom – when he told me – he said he wasn’t that drunk. But if I’m honest, he probably was. I should have seen it coming.’
‘Did – did the police –’ Justine, horrified, couldn’t finish the sentence. Louisa looked at her, hopelessly.
‘No. It didn’t go that far. But Tom said – there were -threats; you know what people in the restaurant business are like. Well, maybe you don’t know.’ She sighed. ‘The word goes around. Sometimes I wonder if – if there’s something else he’s not telling me. Something important.’
Louisa stopped and looked down at her hands, her shoulders sagging. ‘I wonder if – I wonder if he’s not well.’ Her voice was dull, hopeless. Justine had never known her like this.
‘You said – you said, he’d been like this, since last year?’ Justine said slowly, thinking. Louisa looked up.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Since – since Evie died.’ For the first time, it seemed, Louisa looked at her directly, and Justine could see that there was something Louisa had to tell her.
Up before Anna, Paolo worked in the garden for two hours, clearing rampant weeds from the vegetable patch, the fence and around the olive trees, untangling the olive nets in preparation for their modest harvest. When at ten thirty the sun was high in the pale sky, Paolo had drained his second cup of coffee and walked back inside into the warm kitchen to find that his mother was still not down, he decided to investigate.
He found her upstairs in her bedroom, standing in her dressing gown in front of the heavy country wardrobe, a massive piece of furniture that had since either of them could remember stood in the same place, beside the window in the farmhouse’s marital bedroom.
It had been used by his grandmother, and by his great-grandparents before her and it was huge: dark seamed oak inlaid with marquetry stars of elm wood and standing on great balls for feet. He had often wondered, as a boy, how it ever came up the stairs. His grandmother had not had more than three or four pieces of clothing she considered worth hanging up at all, and even they were sober, dark garments. A woollen dress, he remembered, with a white starched collar. For the most part, he thought, she had used it to store the good linen. The cupboard smelled of cedar inside, balls of the rarer wood hanging up along its rail to keep moths away.
Now the wardrobe stood open to reveal the neat ranks of red and dark mossy green and damson and grey, dresses and suits and shirts, wool and silk and cotton all pressed and clean and waiting for their season. But his mother was just standing there, irresolute, frowning as though uncertain of why she was there at all. He was taken aback; this was not like his mother. Anna was decisive in her habits of dressing even more than in any other aspect of her life; she always knew what the right thing was to wear, for every day of every month and for all weathers.
Anna was not vain, she never fussed in front of the mirror, never took things out and put them back, never had the need of a chair on which to throw discarded garments. But clothes were significant to her all the same, and in a particular way. Anna had made every one of her garments herself, to her own exacting specifications; she had selected her materials, cut her patterns, everything lined and fitted and hemmed, as if to say that she, and no one else, made her the woman she was. The one thing she was not, ever, was irresolute, as Paolo now saw her, and what might have been perfectly ordinary hesitation in another woman made his heart sink when he observed it in his mother.
‘Mamma?’ he asked.
She turned towards him.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said.
Anna sighed. ‘I don’t know what to wear,’ she said, fretfully. She looked at Paolo’s worried face, and tried to laugh. ‘It’s the weather,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s the weather.’ And she looked through the window at the faint cool hint of grey on the horizon.
Paolo nodded slowly. ‘It’s getting cooler,’ he said.
‘And we’re walking down to Il Vignacce today. To the river,’ Anna said, just a little more firmly, trying to reassert herself.
At least it’s not her memory going, thought Paolo with relief, and he nodded. His mother looked at him, smiling a little, and he could see animation returning to her expression. He took her arm, and suddenly she was her old self; he could feel her galvanizing herself into decision beneath his hand. She reached into the back of the wardrobe and brought something long and white, it came out slowly, pale and heavy it slithered out between the wool suits and the winter coats. Anna reached up and hung it on the cornice of the wardrobe, where it hung right down as far as the red cotto of the floor. It was a wedding dress.