Chapter Thirty-Four Tuscany Thursday 6 August 2015
Chapter Thirty-Four
Tuscany
The charmingly cracked, burgundy leather seats of the Spider were low. The retro radio in its black-and-cream dashboard crackled and cut out constantly. The car smelled beautifully of lemony furniture polish, old oil and aged rubber.
‘You need leather driving gloves and some sort of cap,’ remarked Olivia, as she and Leo purred down the winding valley lane from Villa Margo, intense yellow wheatfields to their left, green rolling hills to their right.
Cicadas were humming in the hedgerows. A church bell was tolling from some distant village.
‘Not in this heat,’ Leo said with a smile, going straight over at a fragrant little junction.
It was scorching. The sun was behind them, a jolly friend.
They picked up speed and soared through dreamlike Tuscan roads that wound through gold and green countryside studded with tall, thin cypress trees watching them like soldiers, past raked-straight lines of vineyards, under the fulsome bright blue of the sky.
Olivia’s hair was buffeting everywhere. She gave up on scooping it up with her hand and pulling it into a makeshift ponytail, and let it fly free.
‘Are you hungover?’ Leo asked her.
‘Not now.’
‘Do you want to find something else on the radio?’
She nodded, twiddling with the old-fashioned knobs until she came to a pop music station, and who should be playing but Phil Collins, fizzing and fading in and out with ‘Two Hearts’.
They grinned at each other.
‘Someone is always playing Phil Collins somewhere,’ Leo said. ‘Even in Italy.’
‘I don’t mind a bit of Phil now,’ Olivia admitted. ‘The older I get, the more he grows on me.’
‘Quality will always be recognised eventually . . .’ said Leo, looking pleased. ‘Would you like a mint?’ He was opening the glovebox, reaching for a green-and-white striped packet.
‘Oh, they’re spearmint,’ she said, taking it out for him. ‘I don’t trust spearmint.’
‘Try one, they’re nice.’ She shook her head and he grinned. ‘Suit yourself. Get one out for me, though, please.’
She peeled off the silver paper at the end, eased out a green disc and placed it between Leo’s lips, letting her fingers linger there for a couple of seconds, knowing she was crossing that line again, but there was something about Italy, something about Leo, that continued to stir things up for her.
Continued to make her wonder if she was ready to fall.
Not for a friend, not for someone from a different world, but for her equal, her lost chance, Leo Greene.
They streamed along, driving leisurely. Sometimes, Olivia grew drowsy and nodded off to the symphony of the engine and the cicadas.
Sometimes, she stretched her arm beyond the window and fluttered her fingers in the rushing air.
But not once did she question what she was doing here on this adventure.
She was living in the moment – this moment – for as long as it lasted.
The car, the sunshine, the radio, the being with him. A small slice of heaven.
Leo slowed the Spider and pulled into a small, stony lay-by, where the plummet of a green valley rolled out before them. He switched off the engine.
‘Thought I’d stop. What a view!’
‘Isn’t it just? I feel like we’re in a painting, it’s so gorgeous. I bet you loved writing your scenes set in Tuscany.’
‘I did.’ The way he was looking at her set her heart off racing.
‘And I’d like to write another one, right here with you, if that’s alright.
’ And with her heart thumping in her chest, and with the Italian sun basking over the bonnet and that gorgeous view spread before them like a picnic blanket in an EM Forster novel, Leo kissed her through her half-closed eyes, until Olivia spied a butterfly had landed on the steering wheel, making them both laugh, before it skittered off again.
‘That was a surprise,’ she said. ‘You ran away from me last night.’
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry. But I had to.
I had to run away from you last night, and I had to kiss you now.
I’m sorry,’ he repeated, and Olivia wondered why.
‘We should be in Siena by twelve,’ he added.
‘And then tonight – would you like to drive to Bologna? It’s a bit out of the way, but we can go via Pistoia, which is wonderful, and there’s a little place in the city I know where we can stay tonight.
An old townhouse, views of the piazza. And tomorrow afternoon, I’ll drive you to Venice. ’
‘Sounds lovely.’ She wondered, did he mean they would share a room?
Why would they not? He had just kissed her, last night they had been close – so close – so surely he didn’t mean to be only friends?
Her question and his answer did not help her.
‘What are we doing here? You and me?’ she asked him.
She couldn’t help but ask; the words simply escaped her. ‘What is this thing? This road trip?’
He started up the engine. ‘I’d just like this opportunity to be with you,’ he said, ‘as long as you want that, too? Shouldn’t we just seize it? Seize the moment?’
She nodded. She was already storing everything about this moment that she would cherish in memory. The stationary car overlooking the lush vineyard, its engine ticking and popping under the bonnet. The warm sunlight dappling through the trees of the valley. Leo’s lips.
They pulled out of the lay-by, a frown of concentration on Leo’s face, leaving that view in the rear mirror, but there were plenty more.
A tiny church on a hillside, flanked by a nestle of cypress trees.
A bird soaring through the stretch of a lacey, pulled-apart cloud.
A lane winding to the distance like in a child’s story book.
As they drove past a field of tall, nodding sunflowers, she asked him, ‘What sort of scene is it? The film?’ She had decided to move on to safer ground, for both of them.
His eyes remained on the road. ‘It’s a fight scene between Ben Midnight and the man he suspects of killing a woman in North London, but he doesn’t have any proof.
He tracks him down to Monteriggioni and confronts him in the piazza and they start brawling.
That’s the scene. We should be there in about twenty minutes, and you’ll see it for yourself. ’
‘Monteriggioni? The walled town? I thought we were going to Siena?’
‘Little surprise.’ Leo smiled.
‘Oh, fascinating!’
She’d seen it in a travel programme, but in real life it was even better.
Atop a hill, Monteriggioni was an ancient medieval village encircled by a stone wall with fourteen imposing watchtowers and was the kind of enchanting place that made a curious author, arriving by road in a vintage sports car, gasp when it was first glimpsed, and sigh when it was driven into.
They parked in a small cobblestoned alleyway just behind Piazza Roma, and walked past Santa Maria Assunta church to a cordoned-off area of the square where there was a flurry of activity: people wearing headsets, people fussing around two actors – one with a prosthetic gash in his cheek, the other she knew to be a notorious womaniser.
Leo was commandeered immediately; Olivia was gestured to a low wall overlooking the piazza where she could observe.
She watched Leo take a canvas director-style chair and a big pair of headphones.
She watched him leaning forward, engaged in the action as part of the scene was set up and shot.
She watched as he concentrated – a frown, a laugh – take after take.
He sat back in his chair while a shot was being blocked and caught her eye.
He gave her a happy wave, and she was happy, too.
Happy enough. To be in Italy with him, without direction.
Afterwards, they drank sparkling water and ate a lunch of figs, parma ham and goat’s cheese in a trattoria at the edge of the square.
They wandered the city in the sunshine, talking no more of past lovers, but of great loves – food and movies and books.
They stopped again, for sodas and ice cream.
They discussed Scorsese, Coppola, Fellini and Capra; they talked about La Dolce Vita and It’s a Wonderful Life.
At 5 p.m., they returned to the Spider and set off for Bologna, arriving just before seven.
Leo parked outside a tall, stone townhouse that looked like it had been some kind of fortress in a former life: battlement windows, latticed and grilled; red bricks sooted by time; an imposing, panelled wooden door.
Inside, at reception, Leo booked two rooms, and Olivia said nothing. But on the stone stairs, going up to their rooms, she asked him, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Meet downstairs at nine?’
And at 9 p.m., as church bells tolled from Piazza Maggiore, they met in the lobby, showered and dressed for dinner.
‘I’m taking you to the best undiscovered restaurant in the city,’ Leo told Olivia. ‘I like the dress. Very Roman Holiday.’
She was wearing something straight out of the wardrobe of Audrey Hepburn: a white short-sleeved blouse tucked into a belted full skirt, and kitten heels.
‘You need to lint-roller your trousers,’ she replied. ‘They have fluff on them.’
She immediately pulled a roller out of her bag and handed it to him. Doing it herself seemed too intimate, and she didn’t know where they stood on that.
‘Can you do my shoulders?’ he asked her, after the trousers were done.
He handed the roller back to her. She quickly did each shoulder of his shirt for him, not that they needed it, trying not to look at his lovely face, smiling at her.
‘See. This is why I need you in my life,’ Leo said, but she wasn’t sure if that was true. Still, he took her hand as they left the hotel. Olivia didn’t know what she wanted long-term, but tonight she only wanted Italian food, the night sky and Leo Greene, at whatever level he wanted her.