Chapter Thirty-Five #3
Leo said nothing. Then he said, ‘I’m not sure I am in love with her.’
‘Oh, fabulous!’ She threw her arms up in the air again. ‘This gets better and better. When’s the wedding?’ she asked.
‘At the end of next month.’
‘And you’re not sure if you’re in love with her?’
‘No.’ He ran a hand through his hair.
‘Then what sort of a coward are you?’ He was about to speak, but she held her hand up to him. ‘Don’t say any more,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to hear it! I want to get out of here. I want to go. You need to drive me to the nearest railway station.’
‘If you want me to,’ Leo muttered, but he didn’t take his eyes from hers. ‘But I don’t want you to go.’
‘Why? Because Caroline and Isaac would know something was up if I flounced off in a squeal of tyres after finding out you’re engaged? That they might think there was something more to this? Me pitching up here with you?’
But there wasn’t, was there? There was nothing more. They had only been ‘friends’ this trip, apart from one sunlit kiss and one fervent embrace in a back street, and that night when he’d honourably restrained himself in her room . . .
‘And it’s a really important night for Isaac,’ Leo said quietly, and she laughed bitterly.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She shook her head at him ruefully.
‘I tell you what we’ll do,’ she said. ‘So Isaac’s not upset, and your mother, I’ll stay and play nice,’ she said.
‘I’ll stay and be friends with you, as that’s all we’ve ever been, really.
If that.’ She was walking back to the door of the farmhouse now.
She was kicking herself for saying she had been getting feelings for him, as her only feelings now were those of rage and disappointment.
‘And then you can take me to the station at midnight like fucking Cinderella.’
In the kitchen, Olivia immediately approached Caroline, who was helping Magdalena top and tail some green beans.
‘Leo hadn’t told me about Cressie,’ Olivia said sweetly.
‘What a lovely surprise to find out they are together. We really are here just as author friends and old friends, Caroline.’ She was speaking like someone in a play.
‘There’s nothing else going on.’ And there wouldn’t be, she thought.
Not ever again. ‘It’s really nice to see you both,’ she lied.
‘And I hope the evening is a big success. Is there anything I can do to help?’
Caroline eyed her, still a little sceptically. ‘You can help me set the table,’ she said.
They worked together, laying the long trestle table, arranging little glass vases of wildflowers, and folding napkins. Polishing knives on their skirts. Setting up the chairs. There was minimum conversation, maximum discomfort.
At 6 p.m., there was the throaty sound of a luxury sports car pulling up at the front of the farmhouse.
Then another. The clack of high heels, and the slock of designer flip-flops on the polished tiles of the sitting room.
British and Italian voices, a moneyed symphony through the now pitched-open stable doors; handkerchief-hem dresses, swanky leather loafers, expensive handbags, slicked-back hair, bare shoulders and made-up faces.
And Balth, dressed in jeans frayed at the bottom and a pink paisley shirt, swaggering across the lawn with a large bottle of whiskey dangling from his hand.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Leo. He was standing behind Olivia, but she had been ignoring him. ‘I hoped he’d forget to come.’
Balth didn’t seem to find it unusual, or to care, that Olivia was there.
He shook hands absent-mindedly with Leo.
‘Hello, there,’ he said, after she was introduced, giving her a kiss on both cheeks and a pat on the waist, before leaning back to ruffle at his golden mop of hair, shifting it this way and that.
‘I remember you. How are you?’ he asked, rather mechanically.
He was shit-faced, she decided. Whiskey breath. Totally unfazed.
Isaac stood in the double doorway like a battleship, his fleet of rich guests behind him.
‘Time to take our places!’ he announced.
Olivia and Caroline stood back and let the guests spill out on to the lawn, find their place cards – for Caroline had provided them, uncharacteristically – and sit down, Magdalena among them, changed from her chef’s gear into a pea-green maxi dress.
There wasn’t a card for Olivia, but Caroline told her a seat had been reserved for her next to Leo.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked her, as he dropped into his chair.
‘Never better.’ She flashed him a pleasant smile.
He looked at her. ‘A wall’s gone up,’ he whispered, leaning his face a little too close to hers. ‘A big one. I’m worried I won’t be able to scale it.’
‘Damn right.’ She tried to avoid his eyes, those eyes that could undo her. ‘And this is not a wall, it’s a war.’
What he’d done could not be excused. Her bricks had thrown themselves up and sandwiched themselves in place so fast the Trojans wouldn’t get through it, let alone Leo Greene.
She turned to Magdalena, sitting the other side of her and applying lipstick using the back of a knife as a mirror.
‘I’ve been excused,’ she explained to Olivia. ‘Isaac wants to take all the glory at this stage.’
‘Oh? Who will help him serve?’
‘He’s got a busload of teenagers turning up from the catering college at Lucca.’ She checked her slender wristwatch. ‘They’re cutting it pretty fine.’
Indeed, a yellow school bus could be seen trundling slowly up the track to the farmhouse.
It stopped with a belch, just short of a silver Aston Martin, and its doors opened to release a band of excitable teenagers – boys and girls – in black trousers of various lengths and white t-shirts, who were at the table within five minutes, pouring champagne ingratiatingly into flutes.
‘Not for me.’ Magdalena placed her hand over her glass. ‘I’m driving back to Pisa at ten,’ she told Olivia.
The young servers brought out the first plates: crostini with chicken liver paté, capers and sage.
As the guests ate, Isaac travelled up and down the table, taking questions and appreciation, both rumbunctious and needy.
Then there was panzanella, followed by pappa al pomodoro – a hearty tomato and bread soup with garlic, basil and olive oil.
Pici cacio e pepe – hand-rolled thick pasta with a rich sauce of pecorino cheese and black pepper.
Course after course they came, each dish more delicious than the last.
Olivia kept her body turned from Leo’s and talked to Magdalena and everyone in her left-hand orbit.
She heard about Magdalena’s sister, who lived in France and ran an artisan craft shop.
She chatted with a man across from her who was a sommelier in Rome.
She deflected nonsense from Balth, who was at the wrong end of the table for her to escape, droning on about the South of France, about his plane, his playboy lifestyle.
‘And then, when I got to Biarritz, I had to land the plane on the bloody roof,’ he droned, as the sun set amber and golden over the lavender fields behind them.
‘Which was not what I expected, but, hey ho, magnificent men in their flying machines, and all that, ha ha. What are you actually doing here, Lydia?’ he asked her, across the table.
She froze in her seat.
‘It’s Olivia, and I’m just passing through,’ she told Balth sweetly. ‘I’m here on a research trip.’ For heartbreak, she thought. Thorough research.
‘You’re not banging Leo, then?’ He said this far too loudly.
‘Of course not!’ she dished back, raising her glass to him sarcastically. ‘I’m not a total idiot.’
But she had been, she had been the biggest kind of idiot of all. She had slipped back on to the road with Leo.
After course number nine – a lamb cutlet with a frilly cap and green beans in peppered butter – Isaac changed into a really loud shirt, white with big green leaves on it, and placed both palms face-up on the table to receive his benedictions, of which there were many.
The sun was on its final descent, blinds up, trays stowed for landing.
The waiting dusk was thick and sweet. The candles were lit by the teenagers.
After dessert – the zabaglione cake she remembered from the dinner party at Foxes – Isaac made everyone change places and, somehow, he decided to plonk himself next to Olivia, a meaty lump.
He was drunk, his face red and ruddy. His solid frame backlit by the setting sun on its very last slip now, ripe and golden, a hazy yolk melting into the horizon.
‘Alright?’ he demanded of her.
‘Perfectly,’ she lied. She had done her duty, eaten the food, talked to the people, and now she just wanted to get to Venice to see her godmother.
‘Balth, change places!’
Their short exchange had obviously been quite enough. Isaac slumped into Balth’s chair and Balth dropped nimbly into Isaac’s – the blue-eyed golden boy. He leaned in towards her, his breath alcohol-ripe.
‘Be careful with Leo,’ he whispered, his arm buttressing the underside of the table, his hand and its brush of blond hairs too close to her knee. ‘The thing with Leo you need to understand is that he tends to go for what’s right in front of him. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘It’s no business of mine,’ she said, but her brain was sparking, the neurons pinging against each other.
‘Yeah,’ he repeated. ‘He’s always been the same. Otherwise,’ he shrugged innocently, eyes glazed, ‘not a second thought.’ He took a finger and pressed it to her clavicle to make his point. ‘So if he tells you he’s missed you, don’t believe him.’
‘Thank you for the tip,’ she said. She silently removed his finger. He narrowed his eyes at her, concertinaing some of his freckles.
‘Leo told me something about you once.’
‘Did he?’ She squeezed out a smile.
‘It was a long time ago, after you came to something at Foxes, I think. He said you were a challenge, and he liked that.’
She raised her glass and took a sip from it. ‘Did he? That’s lovely. And I was there, I guess, so there was that. Excuse me.’