Chapter Thirty-Five #4
She got up from the table, rising into the heady smell of sweet evening and lavender, tinged with lingering summer herbs.
She didn’t know where she wanted to go, but she walked down to a solitary cypress tree at the edge of the first lavender stripe.
She leaned against it, looking back to the table, and saw Leo chatting to a woman with a blonde chignon.
Leo Greene. Handsome, charismatic, casual.
Grabbing those just passing by, or at a loose end, or wanting to escape.
Looking around him all the time for another spontaneous encounter.
Marrying the girl who had been right there waiting, all along.
The understudy ready to take up the script and walk on stage, and all Leo had to do was to hold out his hand.
Olivia took a breath. Then another. She walked back up to the lawn and sat next to Magdalena. After a while, she got up again, approached Leo and tapped him on the arm.
‘I want to go,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to get a lift with Magdalena to the station.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ he said quickly. ‘There’s no way you’re running out on me.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Come and talk to me, please. Come down to the lavender fields.’
She shook her head.
‘Just five minutes.’ She stared at him. His chestnut waves, his hazel eyes, his full and delicious bottom lip. The space of skin between the two edges of his shirt. All of him that she had almost loved. ‘Please.’
‘Five minutes,’ she echoed, and they walked down one full stripe of soil between the lavender batons, far from earshot of the guests at the table and those milling on the lawn.
The lavender fields were a blur of purple Impressionism.
The soft flow of the skirt of her dress fell behind her and scuffed through the grass.
These were the brushstrokes she might think about tomorrow – when she was gone.
‘I don’t want to be here,’ she repeated, when they had reached the end of the line. ‘I need to go.’
‘I made a mistake.’ Leo tried to take her hand. ‘Not telling you about Cressie. I should have told you. You were right, I was a coward. But my desire to see you just overtook all that, I suppose. My need to—’
‘Your desire to see me, and make a complete fool of me, completely overrode the fact that you’re about to get married,’ she said coolly.
‘Yes, that’s great. You pulled me out of a writers’ retreat, and brought me on a merry dance that would end with me telling you I was catching feelings for you, like a heroine in one of my own goddamn books!
I think it’s totally selfish, actually.’
He looked contrite. ‘It was totally selfish. I’m sorry. But you’re not the only one who’s “caught” feelings,’ he said.
‘Don’t make air quotes at me. I hate them.’
His hands went down. ‘I’ve always had feelings for you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Yes, I have.’
She scoffed. ‘Right. And you’ve always missed me, too . . .’
‘You don’t believe me, but wasn’t I trying to take things to a different level when we were last in each other’s lives? Wasn’t I always hoping? Always asking you out on a date? Always accidentally touching your hand, trying to get a response? But you were resistant. You didn’t want it.’
‘The “designs”. You were an arse.’
‘I know. And then you went off with James.’
‘And you went off with Cressie. Eventually. Do you love her? You said you weren’t sure, so now I’m asking you outright. Do you love her?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re going to marry her?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know. I don’t know if I can hurt her like that.’
‘By marrying her or not marrying her?’
Leo didn’t answer.
‘Or is it just for the deal? You’ll marry her, without love, to please Isaac?’
Leo looked down at his shoes.
‘Alright, then. How about this? A challenge – I’ve been told you like those.
’ He looked up at her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to do this, but if he said he had feelings for her, she wanted him to think carefully about what they were.
She wanted him to know himself, when she felt she didn’t know him at all.
She was just going to say it. ‘You can’t marry Cressie,’ she said. ‘Because you love me.’
He stared at her. They were both breathing, that was all they were doing. Standing in the lavender fields, taking in the air and each other. She waited. She didn’t particularly believe what she had just said, but she wanted – needed – to know if he did. Leo opened his mouth to speak.
‘Leo!’ There was a bellow. Isaac had reared up to stand at the head of the table, red-faced and bullish. Leo immediately glanced up at Isaac, reactive, alert.
‘Don’t go running,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t go running to him.’ Leo looked torn. He hesitated in his spot. ‘That bully doesn’t deserve you. Please, please, don’t go running!’
‘It was for the deal,’ Leo protested. ‘Everything has been for the deal.’ He glanced back to a pacing Isaac again, and Olivia pulled him beyond the lavender to behind the scruff of a hedge, and exploded.
‘Leo, please! Why are you still trying to placate him, make him love you? He used to scare you, he made your childhood – and all the years since – horrible. You retreat to being a little boy in his presence, and now you’re a grown man you’re still trying to get his approval and I don’t know why!
You’ve even based your whole writing career around your main character being a chef and still he doesn’t give you the attention you crave.
Why are you still chasing him? I just don’t understand it! ’
‘Because he’s the only father I’ve ever known!’ Leo shouted, his eyes wild. ‘Because I want him to say once that he’s proud of me!’
‘He’s not your father . . .’
‘He is my father,’ Leo repeated, through clenched teeth. ‘You may not have one any more, but I do.’
She felt like she had been slapped. ‘No, you haven’t!
’ she roared. ‘Not if you knew what he says about you! I overheard him. I overheard, all those years ago, when you took me to Foxes. He was talking to some chinless wonder in the salon, and Isaac told him you weren’t his son, because Balth was, that he treats you the bare minimum, and only because of Caroline. That he only tolerates you, Leo!’
‘Is that right?’ Leo’s top lip tried to curl into a snarl while his bottom lip began to tremble.
‘Yes. He said you weren’t his son, Leo. You need to stop giving him respect as your father because there’s none coming from him to you! None whatsoever!’
The air chilled. Leo’s blazing hazel eyes turned a cool silver. He spoke slowly. ‘Thank you for telling me. That’s good to know. You know, we’ve had such fun here in Tuscany. We really have. And now, yes, I believe you should go.’
‘I shouldn’t have told you that,’ she said quickly, feeling sick and hollow. ‘I’d kept it inside me for a very long time and I shouldn’t have allowed it to come out.’ She had gone too far. She had blurted out an awful truth, and not for his own good, but because she wanted to hurt him.
All the heat went from her. All the fire. She was left with herself, and that was worth nothing. She didn’t deserve her own tears that sprung up now while she was furiously trying to defend herself from them. But she did deserve that look on Leo’s face as she turned away.
She walked past the hedge and back up the groove between the rows of lavender, stumbling on the earth in her sandals. As she approached the courtyard, Magdalena was putting her bag in the boot of her car, her keys under her chin. Olivia glanced at her watch; it was ten o’clock.
‘Are you ready?’ Magdalena asked.
‘Thank you, yes.’
Leo’s boot was unlocked. Olivia took out her suitcase and placed it in the little trunk of Magdalena’s Fiat 500, then she got into the passenger seat and closed the door.
How flat and irrevocable it was as they eased down the little track away from the farmhouse. How desolate it seemed when the Virgin Mary from the rearview mirror gently swung as they crunched along the gravel, and a bug on the inside of the windscreen struggled to be free.
Leo was framed in the farmhouse door, watching them go.
Olivia saw him, his face expressionless, from her side window, then in the wing mirror, getting smaller and smaller.
She knew it was right to leave. She knew the book needed to be closed.
Theirs was a story that should never have been written.
Theirs was a story that had ended too many times already, and it was finally time to set down the pen.