Chapter Thirty-Four Tuscany Thursday 6 August 2015 #2
They walked along narrow streets, sallow moonlight peeking through gaps in the ancient buildings.
There were a lot of people about: evening strollers, early diners who had already dined, babies in pushchairs kicking pudgy feet into the warm air as the wheels rumbled over the cobbles.
Olivia tried not to stare into the pushchairs; she tried not to smile too much at the babies as they trundled past. For some time she had known she was ready, at last, to have a child, but time and fate was rolling on by, too fast, too transient, to stop and notice.
They found themselves on a short bridge over dark water.
‘A canal?’ Olivia stopped and looked into the glistening channel of water.
‘I think so,’ said Leo. ‘The only one remaining here, and only glimpsed in places.’ He nudged her onwards to a short, cobbled passageway, where an open door and a warm welcome was waiting for them.
Casa Angelo was a tiny wood-and-stone bar and restaurant full of dark mahogany tables, mallard-green ladder-back chairs, horizontal bottles of wine strapped to the walls on iron brackets and the background music of Vivaldi.
The portly ma?tre d’ was charming and effusive and insisted they try the best pizza, pasta and burrata in the city.
‘This place is wonderful.’ Olivia set down the menu; she had chosen. ‘How do you know about it?’
‘Robert Defrey,’ Leo said, unblinking. ‘It’s a restaurant he always bangs on about, whenever anyone mentions Italy.’
‘Robert . . .’ She remembered that name. Cressie, his daughter, at Foxes, and her doe eyes. ‘Did he invest in Isaac in the end?’
‘Close to,’ Leo said. ‘There’s a deal in the works at the moment. What wine would you like?’ He passed her the drinks menu.
‘That was a long time coming. I thought it was going to happen years ago.’
‘It didn’t. The stars never aligned for it, but Isaac’s latest incarnation of Confit has failed.
It’s been kept out of the press, but he’s proved too flaky to get an investment with another bank, and his TV work has dried up as he’s too volatile and difficult to work with.
He’s on the verge of bankruptcy but refuses to sell the house.
Everything is resting on Robert lending him some cash and it’s hopefully happening now. ’
She was going to ask about Cressie, but she stopped herself. Why bring that ghost to the table? She conjured up a memory of her in the London Library, in the queue to get Leo’s book signed, the look on her pale heart-shaped face.
‘Balth never made his great fortune, then?’ she asked Leo instead. Another spectre at the feast. ‘What’s he up to now?’
Leo pulled a face. ‘He’s coming tomorrow night to Isaac’s meal at the farmhouse,’ he said. ‘Jetting up from the South of France where he’s been running a bar. Which wine shall we go for? The Chianti or the Bolgheri?’
They ordered a bottle of Chianti and two courses. They talked to the waiter about where the burrata was made and how the pizzas were hand-stretched. The starters were brought to the table – as well as a burrata to share; they had both gone for the creamy garlic prawns. Olivia was hungry.
‘Isaac makes something like this,’ Leo said, forking up another prawn. ‘Except he wraps each prawn in pastry and flambés it.’
‘It’s delicious.’ Olivia tried another mouthful, stole another glance. ‘Are you looking forward to seeing him tomorrow?’
‘His Italian show meal? As much as I ever am.’
‘Are things better now between you?’
‘Better? How do you mean?’
‘Well, is he nicer?’ A member of the waiting staff swapped Vivaldi for Enrique Iglesias on the stereo.
He laughed. ‘I don’t think Isaac could ever be “nice”.’
‘No, I suppose not. It certainly wasn’t when I knew him. I just wondered if he’d mellowed.’
‘Mellowed?’ Leo smiled carefully. ‘Absolutely not. Did you hate him?’ he asked seriously, staring at her curiously over his raised fork. ‘When you met him?’
‘No, I just didn’t get him. I thought he was quite cruel to you.’
For the first time in a long time, she thought about it. She thought about what she had overheard that time, years ago, at Foxes. What Isaac had said about Leo. Isaac was cruel. Isaac didn’t see Leo as his son, only Balth. Isaac was tolerating Leo for Caroline’s sake.
‘Cruel?’ Leo’s gaze narrowed a little.
‘Or you could see it as character building . . .’
‘Do you not like my character?’ Leo was smiling, but something in his eyes told her he was combative, on the defence. He seemed angry.
‘Yes, of course I do.’
They finished their starters. Drank more wine. A waiter arrived with a tray he set up on a stand, and started setting out plates of bistecca alla Fiorentina, sautéed cabbage, and anchovies in garlic and olive oil.
The steak was tender, the anchovies salty and tart, the wine rich and delicious.
The doors were flung open to the hot and sweet night air; a car horn blared and a gaggle of teenagers walked past – boys in shorts and t-shirts, pulled-up white socks and sliders.
One leaped forward and grabbed another by the shoulders, making him jump, then they dissolved into laughter.
Leo watched the group as they disappeared. He seemed on edge. Disjointed. Quiet. He picked up his phone. Checked it. Set it down again.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked him.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. There was a beat. Then, suddenly, he launched into something. Words she wasn’t expecting. ‘Isaac used to like to scare me,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid.’
‘Oh? Did he? What do you mean?’ Olivia set her fork down on her plate.
Leo’s hazel eyes were intense on hers. ‘Well, it was stupid things, like he would jump out on me when I came out of the bathroom.’ He smiled ruefully.
‘Or he would trip me up, stick his foot out as we were walking. Knock on my bedroom door but not be there when I opened it. Just stupid stuff. I would screech, then he would laugh and ruffle my hair. Tell me to “man up”.’
‘You’ve never mentioned this before.’ She looked at him carefully, his beautiful hazel eyes reflecting the candlelight.
‘No. He once did something at a canal,’ Leo said, staring out of the open doors as though the canal they had crossed was in danger of rising up and crawling along the cobbles into the restaurant. ‘It was ridiculous, really . . .’
‘Tell me.’
He looked back at her.
‘We were out on the canals, a barge holiday. In Wiltshire. The Avon and Kennet Canal, going through one of the locks. Isaac had just opened the lower lock and the water was starting to run out and the boat go down. I’d never experienced it before, and I didn’t know what was happening.
He grabbed me and started shouting, “We’re going down!
We’re going down!”, pretending it was never going to stop, and I was terrified because you believe an adult, don’t you?
– especially when you’re seven – and I was crying and clinging on to him but of course we did stop eventually, and the gates were opened and we went through the lock and he started really laughing, proper belly laughing, as though it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.
So, I laughed, too, you know.’ Leo’s smile returned.
‘He toughened me up, I suppose. Stopped me being a sensitive little drip. You might say it was cruel, but I don’t. ’
‘Then why are you telling me?’ she asked gently.
Leo’s expression was blank. ‘I really don’t know. I’ve never told anybody else this. Nobody’s ever really challenged me on Isaac before.’
‘Is there anything else?’ she asked him tenderly, her heart softened towards him. He looked boyish, unshielded. ‘Anything else you want to say?’
Leo’s face changed. His reply was snappy. ‘What are you, my therapist suddenly?’ he asked her.
‘Do you have one?’
‘Of course not! Don’t believe in them! What, you think I need one?’
‘You tell me.’
She couldn’t read him. There had been many times on this trip so far when she couldn’t read him. There was something behind the merry chat and the sunshine and the kisses. And if it was because of Isaac, she wanted to know.
‘Well, how about this?’ Leo said sullenly, and the words just fell out of him, like rocks tumbling down a well.
‘He packed me off to boarding school and never wanted me to come back in the holidays. He put a lock on the fridge so I couldn’t access anything between meals.
He never said hello to me when I entered a room.
He bought me lots of books so I would shut myself in my room, or the bathroom, and not bother him.
But maybe that’s just what busy dads do,’ he added, with a terse smile.
‘I think you’re making excuses for him.’
‘No.’ He took a slug of his wine, tapped his fingers at the corner of the menu. ‘So, what are you thinking for dessert?’ His voice was now full of levity. He was smiling again, one eye creasing into a soft wink. He’d mentally moved on.
‘Something chocolatey,’ she said. But then she asked him, ‘And your mother? Do you feel she never stood up for you enough?’
‘Something chocolatey,’ Leo repeated briskly, and he ordered them both chocolate gelato with an amaretti biscuit.
She ordered a mini hot chocolate to go with it.
He ordered a beer. They had returned to safer ground.
They had climbed out of the ravine and they were now standing in the sun, blinking at the world around them.
Yet she continued to watch him very carefully.
His face remained bright, open, and he never answered her question, but he had confessed something really important to her.
He had shown his vulnerability and it had moved her.
She knew she was falling, falling for him.
For the man with the boy still inside him.
For the writer she shared equal footing with.
For the Leo Greene she had known for a long time.
‘So? Venice tomorrow,’ he said. ‘What are you and godmother going to do together?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Olivia replied. ‘She seems tremendously busy.’
‘I’m sure she’ll find time for you.’
‘I hope so.’
‘You’re great to spend time with, you know.’ His eyes were fixed on her, but in them were reflected the candlelight and her uncertainty.
‘Am I?’
‘You still have the same effect on me. I wish you didn’t, but you do.’
He leaned across the table and he kissed her.
She welcomed it. She thought she would drown in it.
She hoped it would last forever. But the waiter arrived with the ice cream.
They pulled away from each other reluctantly.
They ate the ice cream slowly, letting it melt in their mouths, savouring each bite.
They hardly took their eyes off each other.
Leo paid the bill. They moved outside into the dark streets.
He took her in his arms so quickly, she gasped.
His lips were greedy now, searching, devouring.
He pressed her up against a brick wall by the canal, and she loved it, the damp bricks at her back and Leo’s hot mouth on hers.
She clutched him closer to her. Drank him in.
If their kiss in the car this morning had been a sweet, sunny interlude, and the kiss at the table had been a prelude, this was a black, hot night, intoxicating and sweet and dangerous.
She never wanted to let him go. She wanted to gorge on him.
Keep him hers forever. But forever can sometimes only last a moment.
And even before they were interrupted by another laughing group of teenage boys in t-shirts and shorts, passing them by the canal, heckling them in Italian, and they broke away from each other, she knew that moment was gone.