Justine took a bus to Siena. For a city on a hill, it seemed curiously basin-like, scooped like a crater out of the hilltop; she walked for miles down a straight, empty, red-brick street hung with heraldic insignia; dragons and tortoises and flames. It was just after midday, and the clatter of pans and cooking smells were drifting down from every first floor window she passed; everywhere she heard women calling children and grandchildren to eat, and their cries enfolded her in the effortless embrace of an extended family. Justine found a restaurant, and sat down to eat yellow courgette flowers crispy in translucent batter, and something called pici, which turned out to be thick, hand-rolled spaghetti swimming in a hot scarlet sauce. When she paid, using her credit card, she did wonder what she was going to do for money, when what she had ran out.
Walking off her lunch up and down the quiet, flag-hung streets, Justine passed an estate agency, then another. Idly she stopped to look in the second window, filled with handwritten cards describing properties for sale or rent. They looked surprisingly reasonable, at least compared with London, and the Italian descriptions were seductive, with their coffered ceilings, terraces and kitchen corners; Justine felt the lure of a place of her own, of domesticity. She went inside, and gathered a sheaf of property descriptions and telephone numbers; when she went on with her walk she looked up and through the open windows of the tall, red-brick palazzi that lined the streets with a newly proprietorial eye. She saw exquisitely faded shutters and frescoes, window boxes, deep eaves and views of the city’s striped cathedral, and she began to wonder whether this might not, after all, be possible, if she wanted it badly enough.
On her way back to the bus station by a roundabout, backstreet route, she passed the sign for a little language school with a ridiculously grandiose name; the Oxford Academy of English Language and Literature, or something like it. On impulse she went in, and asked whether they had vacancies for native tongue teachers; she left her name, and her English mobile number. And then, while she was waiting for her ride back to Montequercio beneath an exotic tree that overhung the bus stop, she made up her mind. She really wasn’t going back. To her surprise, the thought of all the explanations and apologies that would involve did not fill her with dread; rather, she felt lighter already, ready to begin.
The bus stopped halfway between Monticiano and the road down to Il Vignacce; Justine got off, thanked the driver, and walked until she came to a clearing just before the road plunged down into the woods, still a little way from Anna’s house. There was a view of the village where she had had lunch with Paolo, glittering on the ridge far away. She took out her mobile.
Work first, she thought, dialling the familiar number, feeling no sense of it being anything to do with her, any more, the little office space, the rolodex filled with authors’ details.
‘Roberta?’ she said, to her shared personal assistant, looking down at her dusty feet on the path. ‘Hello,’ said Roberta, without much enthusiasm. ‘Are you back? Did you have a wonderful time? This is a very bad line.’ Down the line Justine could hear, in the background, the languid chatter of the terminally bored at the end of the working day; she could almost see the blinking strip-lighting overhead.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m still here. In Italy’
‘Oh, really?’ said Roberta, still sounding bored. ‘You’ll be in on Monday, though? Well, Kate Butler called, she wants to go over her last chapter with you as soon as you’re back. She’s still –’
‘No,’ said Justine again, ‘I – Roberta, you’d better let me have Kate Butler’s number. I don’t think – I won’t be coming back.’ She felt her resolve stiffen. ‘I’m handing in my resignation, it’ll be in the post tomorrow. I just thought I’d better let you know first. For when – when it all hits the fan.’
‘Ooh,’ said Roberta with horrified delight, giving Justine her full attention for the first time, ‘but you can’t do that. Can you?’
Justine laughed. I can,’ she said, and it dawned on her that she really could. ‘Now, maybe you should give me that number. I’d better call her next. I’ll get a computer and an email address, I’m not in the outback. I’m sure there are plenty of things I can finish off from here, and for the rest, I’ll come back and tie things up.’ She made an effort to sound as though she’d thought it all through, and even as she spoke she knew none of this was going to stop her. It might take a little while, but none of it was important enough to stop her.
‘I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got somewhere permanent, you can send stuff on, if you have to.’ Roberta took down the number, her voice politely neutral now, but Justine could tell she couldn’t wait to put the phone down and broadcast Justine Elliott’s mid-life crisis, or holiday fling, or marriage breakdown, across the whole open-plan floor. Justine dialled her boss’s number.
‘Now, Justine,’ David said, all fatherly, ‘aren’t you rushing this a bit? Is it – a personal thing? Just have a bit more time off, I’m sure we can manage that.’ Justine turned as businesslike as she could manage, and laid out a rough plan for dealing with her authors for him. David stopped sounding paternal and became angry, then tried desperation.
‘Look, you’ll really be leaving us in the lurch,’ he said. Because it wasn’t a matter of money Justine said nothing, but she did wonder why she’d been paid so little for so many years if she was so indispensable.
‘I am sorry, David,’ was all she said. ‘I’ll make sure all the loose ends are tied up. If any of the authors really object to my leaving after that – and I can’t see that they will – I can always work with them as a freelance. From out here.’
That did it; David obviously didn’t want to negotiate freelance rates with her on top of everything else.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘let me think about that. Send me that letter, then.’ He hung up. Without hesitation Justine dialled Kate Butler’s number. Then that’s it, she thought as she heard it ring. That’ll do for now. She had to try very hard to keep the euphoria from her voice as she told her most difficult author the news.
*
Montale came by to collect the rubbish; he frowned in puzzlement as he lifted one solitary plastic carrier from the little metal cage; hardly worth the trip. He nodded to Justine, who was reading in a deckchair. ‘Not much longer, eh?’ he said. ‘Out by ten, Saturday?’ She nodded, and smiled, then went back to her book.
But by the time Paolo did return, the yellowing headlights of his little car bumping down the track straight from the hospital late on Friday night, Justine’s life was in order. A taxi in the morning, an attic studio in a Sienese backstreet she could move into whenever she wanted, the promise of two days a week teaching from October. So she didn’t need Paolo, strictly speaking, but when he got out of the car, pushing one of the cows aside to open the gate, she found herself so glad to see him that she couldn’t speak. And when he asked her if she’d come back to Rome with him, she didn’t need to think about how to answer him. Siena could wait, for a week or so.
Anna waved them off from her terrace on Sunday evening, a hand shading her eyes from the sinking sun. She stood there for some time after Paolo’s little car had disappeared into the trees, long enough for the trees to grow dark around her and for the bright doorway into her kitchen to become the only point of light in all the wide forest. Then Anna turned and went inside.