Chapter Twenty-Nine #2
‘Royal Ben.’ Leo looked sheepish. ‘You know he and your agent get together for drinks once in a while. Essential agent knowledge sharing . . . and you know what gossips they both are. So, you’re no longer together?’
‘No. Not for a long time. My decision,’ she added, so Leo wouldn’t think she had been dumped.
The truth was James had proposed to her and she had said no.
She had been happy with him, for a while.
She had loved him but not enough. When it came down to it, she couldn’t see herself being married to him, or having babies, being with him for the rest of her life.
He wasn’t what she needed, although she still wasn’t sure what that was.
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘Thank you.’
She had heard nothing on the circuit about Leo – about his private life, rather, and she wasn’t going to ask him.
‘How did you end up on the writers’ retreat?’
‘Alice pretty much forced me,’ Olivia admitted. ‘She thought it might be good for me.’
‘Ah. You’re tolerating it, then?’
‘You could say that.’
‘You haven’t all been reading each other’s chapters, then, each evening?’ He smiled gently at her and she felt a bolt of pain for those happy days, when they were friends who read each other’s work.
‘No,’ she replied, and she wanted to say, ‘That was only with you,’ but she didn’t.
‘And you’re flying home on Friday?’ They were skirting round so much, she thought. There was so much they couldn’t say.
‘No, I’m going on to my godmother’s, in Venice.’
It was a visit Olivia had forced upon Gillian, to be honest. It was coming up to the eleventh anniversary of Charlie’s death, and she and Gillian had still not made a repair, fixed the tear in their relationship.
She wanted to see Gillian at her house on the Lido.
Olivia wanted to ask her, finally, how she could make things right.
He nodded. ‘Is she well?’
‘Yes, as far as I know.’
‘Funnily enough, Isaac is over here too,’ he said. ‘I’m meeting him near Pisa on Friday. But first I’m going to Siena to check on another day’s filming. A different scene,’ he explained happily. ‘A fight.’
‘A fight in Siena, wonderful.’ She grabbed another drink from a passing tray. ‘What’s Isaac up to in Italy?’
‘Cooking. A big night at a friend’s farmhouse.’
‘Your mum not with him?’
‘No, she’s at home with the dogs.’ He cocked his ear. ‘I think you like this one,’ he said. The band had struck up a strange, acoustic version of Oasis’s ‘Champagne Supernova’.
‘I do.’
He stared at her, his hazel eyes unblinking. ‘Shall we dance?’
‘God, no!’ she replied, but Leo laughed and playfully took her hand.
He swayed, he tried to engage her in a slow, comical jive.
She was reluctant, confused. They had spoken about nothing.
They had not addressed what had happened to them in London, but she giggled foolishly and tried to go with it, and not to love the electric shock of her hand in his.
‘I have two left feet,’ he whispered, ‘I don’t expect you know that about me.’
Suddenly, Clemmie and Sam and Henrietta were in their orbit, and Leo’s hand left hers, and they were all in a circle – laughing, shouting inconsequential things to each other over the music, calling for Martin to come join them.
He dance-walked over with a drink in his hand, and the group of writers danced on the terrace of the little hillside restaurant in Tuscany, to the band who became livelier with each song.
More cocktails came around. The buffet food all but disappeared.
At half past ten, they were all whooping it up to an Italian-accented version of George Harrison’s ‘Got My Mind Set on You’ and Olivia was twirling, rather drunkenly, in her fifties dress, but by the end of the song it was just her and Leo again.
The others had dispersed to another corner of the terrace, to the bathroom together, to who knew where.
All Olivia knew was that she was drunk, and Leo had hold of her hand again and she was feeling something she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Happiness. Not just book-success happiness or friends-happiness or that dull kind of contentment that gripped you on an autumn evening when you walked home through the park and scuffed at the leaves with the toes of your shoes, but giddy, light-headed happiness – that feeling you’re not only glad to be alive, but you’re participating.
A kind of happiness, despite everything, but a happiness she knew was fleeting and short-lived. A happiness that was tinged with regret and a familiar kind of longing.
‘Would you like to sit down?’
The song had finished; the band had announced a twenty-minute break. Leo was blowing air up into the waves of his hair to cool himself down.
‘Where?’ They both looked around them. There were a few seats around the edge of the terrace, but they were all taken.
‘Up there?’
There was a gap where the trellis ended and the back of the building began, and they looked up at the yellow stonework, now cast a honey-grey in the dusk, to spy three windows with green shutters, each with an ironwork balcony, Juliette style, and flowers in pots.
The middle window and its balcony were wider, and the balcony had two iron chairs and a small table.
Leo took her hand again and suddenly they were inside the empty restaurant, looking for the stairwell, and up those stairs, and stealing along the first floor, through a room with a dining table with a plastic floral cover and a television on a lacquered cabinet, to the window at the rear with gauzy curtains pulled back, and out on to the balcony.
They took to the chairs and grinned at each other with the thrill of making it up and out here, overlooking the pretty trellised roof of the terrace – and no one knew they were there, for no one else was looking up through the gap.
‘Well,’ said Leo, ‘this is nice. Hang on!’ He dashed back into the Italian living room and returned with a dusty bottle of screw-top red wine and two glasses.
‘Won’t we get in trouble?’
‘I’ll replace it tomorrow.’ He unscrewed the top and poured them both a glass. ‘You know, this is the equivalent of two characters sitting on one of those fire escapes on the outside of a tall building in New York,’ he said. ‘During a wild party.’
‘Those people are usually teenagers.’ She took a sip of her wine. ‘Smoking cigarettes and complaining that neither of them has hooked up with the person they wanted to.’
She was thirty-six. Leo was thirty-seven; they weren’t teenagers any more.
‘So, how about you?’ he asked her, his gaze focused completely on her. ‘Was there anyone here you wanted to hook up with?’
Her eyes fell to her glass.
‘Of course not. What about you?’
He answered with a soft look she didn’t dare read. They sat and sipped their wine. The chatter from the party smoked gently up to them. The dark of the mountains in the distance framed their horizon. The night air was warm and sweet.
‘Why are you happy to spend time with me?’ she finally ventured. ‘I walked away from you. I was jealous and insecure. Why are you OK with me?’
He kept soft eyes upon her. ‘Because a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. Because I was no angel, myself. You were right, I was arrogant, self-important, all those things. I made you my minion. Made you assist at all those events, not considering how you were feeling about your own book career. At the same time, I had designs on you, but no wonder you didn’t want to take me up on any of them. I was awful.’
‘I was worse,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m so sorry for how I was that day. I was so bitter.’
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘The publishing business is not for the faint-hearted. I understood how you felt. I get how you couldn’t be around me.
’ Although that wasn’t the only reason. Leo had his designs and she had her desires.
She had simply shut them away in a box, that was all.
Trapped them in her despair and her loathing of his success.
He tapped at the back of his hand. ‘I have to admit something.’
‘What?’
‘I knew you were going to be here at the writers’ retreat. Alice told Ben. Ben told me.’
‘Oh! Right . . .’ She tried unsuccessfully to hide her surprise.
‘So I decided to squeeze in coming to find you. I wanted to see you,’ he said simply. ‘I’ve missed you.’
And once again, the cocky charmer, Leo Greene, was almost replaced by a man with a soft voice and sincere heart. The version of a man she once thought she might love, if the circumstances were right.
‘Right,’ she repeated. She didn’t fully trust the version of that man. ‘You have designs again?’
He laughed. ‘I was curious about you. Is there anything wrong in that? Are you happy to see me?’
‘Happy is not quite the word . . .’
‘But you can bear it?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it.’ She thought for more than a second. ‘You know, you could have reached out to me in London,’ she said. ‘If you missed me.’ She didn’t believe that was true; she believed he was just saying it. ‘It would be quite easy to do.’
‘It was never the right time,’ he replied. ‘But Italy is perfect.’
‘Italy is perfect,’ she admitted. She had been lonely and he had sought her out.
He was able to forgive her transgressions at the London Library.
He had offered her the chance to forgive his.
Maybe they could be friends again. She looked out over the Tuscan skyline.
Felt the warmth of the sweet night on her arms and neck, the cool of the iron beneath her bare feet, the heady holiday escape of the night, this night.
And Leo, Leo Greene, sitting right next to her after all this time. Close enough to reach out and touch.
‘I like sitting here with you,’ he said.
‘Me, too.’ A confession. It just slipped out.
She looked at him, but now he was gazing out over the skyline, his handsome, unreadable face lit by the lights below and the glow of the moon. Her equal. Her sometime friend. Her one-time lover, Leo Greene, and she wondered what the rest of the night might hold.