Chapter 6
And instead of a laughing woman she could talk to all night, the driver was… this Gabri, with his hairy arms and unexpectedly intense blue eyes.
Only the view of the sea was exactly what she’d hoped for, flashing glimpses through the trees as the car weaved along the coast in the direction of Marciana Marina, half an hour away.
The road seemed to float by the water, with a steep drop on one side, down to the hidden coves.
On the other side was a hillside, sometimes rocky and sometimes lush with trees and bushes.
Her phone vibrated and she fetched it out to see a message from her mum, asking if she’d arrived safely. Sending back a quick affirmative, she was about to stow her phone again, when her mum replied:
And how is Gabri? Just as you expected?
That was a question she could not answer truthfully.
Exactly x
She shoved it back into her bag to ignore the lie.
The quality of the evening light, the shades of green and ochre and the parched, red earth were so unlike the golden coastline of Weymouth.
It wasn’t a bad place to put down roots, but noticing the different varieties of trees, the taste of herbs in the air, made her realise how much good it would do her to see something different.
Imagine showing Cillian all this.
He wouldn’t appreciate the trees and the soil, but he would store some impressions from this place in his childhood memories and she was looking forward to watching him. By the time he arrived, she would hopefully have got to know the area enough to pass something on to him.
She would get to know what Gabri showed her of his island.
He was such a mystery, sitting next to her in the driver’s seat, whistling out of tune.
She suspected he didn’t realise he was doing it.
Instead of the breezy single woman Toni had pictured, here was a divorced and wary man.
It now seemed obvious that, rather than simply omitting the topic of romance, they’d both actively avoided it over the period of their online acquaintance.
He navigated the route through the back streets of Marciana Marina to the forested hill on the other side, with the crowns of enormous pines rising in front of glowing silver cliffs.
‘These are the first slopes of Monte Capanne, the highest mountain on the island. It is mostly a nature reserve and if you come in October, we are all very busy collecting chestnuts. Although half of the people on the island in summer are tourists, there are never too many in this part.’
‘You told me about the hikes here,’ she commented as the road climbed and narrowed to little more than a concrete track.
There were dwellings hidden among the trees on the hillside, marked only by small gates with house numbers tucked between the long tongues of succulents, the silver of olive trees and rhododendrons with isolated blooms, long after the flowering season.
She could understand why someone who loved plants would live in a place like this.
She’d assumed Gabri had always been a florist, but he’d made a comment about his mother judging his new job and now she had so many questions.
‘Did I… How did I describe my house again?’ he asked, a faintly self-deprecating smile on his lips.
‘I think your exact words were, “It’s not the Hilton”.’
‘Allora, you’ll see what I meant. Perhaps I would have gone to some more effort for a woman—’ He cut himself off.
‘You don’t need to make an effort for a friend,’ she pointed out.
He made an unconvinced grunt. ‘My mother would disown me.’
‘It sounds like you have a complicated relationship with your mother.’
‘You have no idea.’
Although the town was only five minutes behind them, signs of civilisation were already sparse.
The trees twisted into a tunnel over the road, interrupted only by the occasional trailhead and a handful of driveways.
They were a world away from the beachside hotel where the wedding was due to take place next week, even though it was on the same island.
The way Gabri sat back in the driver’s seat with a sigh made her suspect he was happier out here in the wilderness than anywhere else.
He wrangled the car around a hairpin curve.
She had no idea how other vehicles could pass and hoped it was rarely necessary.
The road surface deteriorated, the car juddering over cracks.
They were heading back downhill now and the forest thinned out ahead.
Toni saw brush and shrubs – and when they emerged into the slanting evening sun, the turquoise and silver Tyrrhenian Sea.
‘Oh my God.’ She couldn’t help saying it.
‘Is the view from your house anything like this?’ They were still high above the water.
A wisp of cloud clung to the hillside in the distance, but otherwise, the wide view was vivid blues and greens.
She couldn’t see a single building, although a lonely electricity wire was strung above them, which hinted at habitation somewhere nearby.
A moment later, Gabri pulled the car to the side of the road and set the brake, shooting her a grin. ‘This is the view from my house.’
Still unable to see anything except wild nature and the open sea, Toni watched him doubtfully as he got out of the car and fetched her suitcase. Apparently, this really was their destination. There were two other cars parked, as well as a pair of motorini, and ahead, the road just stopped.
He hefted her heavy suitcase and set off into the trees as Toni scrambled to follow.
‘What do you have in this thing?’ he asked lightly, shifting the suitcase to his other hand as he navigated what turned out to be a stony path across the steep hillside.
‘If I’d known we had to trek out to your house, I would have brought a different bag.’
His whole body seemed lighter as the path crunched under his trainers.
Toni caught a glimpse of a wrought-iron gate ahead, a rendered wall, steps lined with flowerpots in a riot of colours.
A copse of pines rose behind. The air was scented with salt and herbs and the tang of geraniums and for the first time, she felt some alignment between the person she’d met online and the man hurrying home.
He stopped at the gate, his face alive with a smile, putting her suitcase down to gesture expansively.
Up the hill were terraced gardens with olive trees, lemons, flower bushes buzzing with insects and all manner of scented plants.
There were even a few prickly pears. She saw a table and chairs set under a pergola and a small building, pale orange with wooden shutters.
But the real highlight was to her right.
Not only could she see the water, now golden in the last rays of the sun, but also the coves and cliffs of the island, the coastline, carved over millennia with grooves and fingers of rock plunging straight into the sea.
A small bay to the east caught her eye, the shallow water aqua and turquoise.
She loved to walk the length of Chesil Beach on a fine day, Cillian’s hand in hers, when he allowed it, but that cove promised a secret moment, a plunge into warm water under baking sunshine – something different and new.
‘I can’t believe this is where you live.’
His smile grew lopsided and infectious. ‘I’m sure I told you I had a sea view.’
‘Perhaps you did, but this is more than a view. We’re in the picture.
’ She flung an arm out so wildly that her foot slipped on a loose stone and before she knew what had happened, Gabri was steadying her, his fist clutched in her dress.
Her hands fell for a moment to his shoulders and that was enough to send her heart leaping uncomfortably and she pulled away, trying to shake off the lingering sense of the warm pressure of his hands at her waist and the scent of citrus and herbs on his skin.
‘Come and see the house,’ he said, his voice soft.
He nabbed a watering can from the bottom step, filling it from a tank concealed behind wooden slats. As they made their way up the cracked concrete steps, he paused by each pot to water the flowers.
‘I recognise geraniums, but that’s a lot of flowers,’ she commented.
‘Did you expect anything less?’
Her own chest felt lighter as she shared his smile. For all the shocks, this was Gabri – in person and not somewhere on the Internet. ‘Different – yes. But less – no. I did imagine that you lived surrounded by flowers, but not… such wild ones.’
‘Only wild things keep their magic.’
The statement hung in her thoughts as she followed him up the stairs into a paradise of bushes and blooms and sunshine.
A grapevine with wide leaves and budding bunches grew twisted up and over the pergola.
The tang of thyme and sage rose from the plants growing amongst the rocks on the far side.
The rosemary was blooming, covered in tiny flowers of pale purplish blue.
The house itself was just as wild, with the render cracking, leaving some sections of stone exposed. The wooden shutters were warped, the paint chipped.
Looking out of place to one side was a toolbox bursting with cables, some stripped down and others still in their plastic casings, as well as several different kinds of pliers. Protected by a plastic box in one corner was a futuristic battery, gleaming white, a glowing green LED on the front.
‘It’s become another hobby,’ Gabri explained with a shrug when he saw where she was looking. ‘This place was only used as a holiday home, but I live here all year, so I decided to implement some electricity solutions for the heating.’
‘Yourself?’
He gave a sideways nod. ‘I know about this stuff from my other life.’
Apparently, that was all the explanation she was going to get for now, because he opened the door – it hadn’t been locked – swept aside the curtain of mosquito netting and gestured her inside before him.
‘Truly, keep your expectations low. No one had renovated here in decades when I bought it and I’m only making slow progress.’
He needn’t have warned her. She was instantly charmed by the terracotta flagstones in a herringbone pattern, the high ceiling with exposed beams. They entered directly into the kitchen-diner, with a small cooking area in one corner and a heavy wooden table.
There was a day bed with cushions and a wicker chair in the opposite corner and as Toni glanced all around the room, remembering the modest exterior dimensions of the house, she realised this might be the lounge room as well as the kitchen-diner.
The snorkelling equipment he’d mentioned in an earlier email – as well as walking poles, a beat-up rucksack and several hats – was piled in another corner.
Decoration was sparse, but quirky: a piece of driftwood sat on the tiled mantlepiece of the old fireplace.
Painted pots held trailing plants, one that meandered along the wall, held up with a few nails, and dangled over the kitchenette.
An enormous monstera dominated the final corner, in a big, blue-glazed pot.
It didn’t escape her that he had no art, no photos on the walls.
The contrast with her house, cluttered with Lego and picture books, a pile of shoes now too small for not-so-little feet, a child’s art projects and family photos, struck her.
‘This is the bedroom,’ he said, opening a door near the monstera.
She must have misheard. He hadn’t said ‘the bedroom’. He must have meant the guest room, but when she followed him into the room, she noticed several coats hanging from hooks by the French doors, and a hint of folded clothes in the wardrobe with the door ajar.
‘Um, this is your room,’ she blurted out dumbly, trying to tamp down those tingles at her hairline at the thought of their dilemma.
If he’d thought she was a man, he wouldn’t have invited her to sleep in his bed anyway, but now the bed was right there, filling her vision, it was difficult not to imagine sharing it. Her mouth was dry.
‘I mentioned I have a sofa bed? I’ll sleep there.’
‘I thought I’d be sleeping on the sofa bed.’
‘No, no. It’s in the other room. You stay here. I’ve already got a bag of clothes out. You’ll have more privacy here.’
‘The “other” room? This place only has two rooms?’
The stain on his cheeks was enough to make her laugh – a little hysterically. ‘Plus a bathroom. But you make it your home this week,’ he insisted, his light – very light – accent coming across a bit more strongly. ‘I will be comfortable out there. I sleep very deeply – like the mouse, as we say.’
The image that rose in her mind was another unhelpful one – not a mouse, but a half-dressed man with warm, tanned skin and an inviting shadow of stubble. ‘The mouse?’ she repeated as she tried to clear the fog from her brain.
‘Not exactly a mouse. I don’t know the word in English. The ghiro, we say in Italian – a little sleepy mouse. I hope it doesn’t have a silly name like “nipplewort” in English.’
Toni tried to muster a smile at the reminder of another of their messaging exchanges, when Gabri had told her about the groups of English-speaking tourists he’d guided on foraging trips.
She’d been so amused at the time, but with his mouth actually forming the word and her lingering embarrassment and this inconvenient awareness of how attractive he was, she didn’t manage much.
‘I didn’t realise I’d be such an inconvenience when I said I’d stay,’ she blurted out.
His response was a wince. ‘Perhaps that’s why I didn’t tell you about the two rooms.’
‘I assumed I wouldn’t be any trouble.’ Just as she’d assumed Gabri was a vivacious woman and not a mysterious man.
He drew up, biting on his lip as he regarded her thoughtfully – too thoughtfully. ‘It isn’t much trouble, but even if there is a little inconvenience, it’s a small price to pay.’
‘For what?’ she asked. ‘Why did you invite me to stay?’