Читать книгу Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper - India Grey - Страница 8

THREE weeks later.

Sarah’s head throbbed and tiredness dragged at her body, but as she closed her eyes and took a deep inhalation of warm night air she felt her battered spirits lift a little.

Tuscany.

You could smell it; a resiny, slightly astringent combination of rosemary and cedar and the tang of sun-baked earth that was a million miles from the diesel smog that hung over London’s airless streets at the moment. Britain had been having an extended spell of hot weather that had made the headlines night after night for weeks, but here the heat felt different. It had an elemental quality that stole into your bones and almost forced you to relax.

‘You look shattered, darling.’

Across the table her mother’s eyes met hers over her glass of Chianti. Sarah smothered a yawn and smiled quickly.

‘It’s the travelling. I’m not used to it. But it’s great to be here.’

She was surprised, as she said the words, to realise how true they were. She’d got so used to dreading Angelica’s wedding with all its leaden implications of her own conspicuous failure in so many departments—most notably the ‘finding a lifelong partner’ one—that she had neglected to take into account how wonderful it would be to come to Italy. The fulfilment of a lifelong dream, from way back when she could afford to have dreams.

‘It’s great that you’re here.’ Martha’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘I think you needed to get away from things because frankly, my darling, you’re not looking in great shape.’

‘I know, I know…’ Aware of her straining waistband, Sarah squirmed uncomfortably. The bonus of having a broken heart was supposed to be that you lost your appetite and the weight fell off, but she was still waiting for that phase to kick in. At the moment she was stuck in the ‘bitterness-and-comfort-eating’ stage. ‘I am on a diet, but it’s been tough, what with Rupert and work and worrying about money and everything—’

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Martha said gently. ‘I meant mentally. But if money is difficult, darling, you know Guy and I will help.’

‘No!’ Sarah’s response was instant. ‘Really, it’s fine. Something will come up.’ Her thoughts strayed to the letter she’d had a couple of weeks ago from her father’s publishers, the latest in a long line of requests she’d received for film options on The Oak and the Cypress in the eleven years since she’d inherited the rights. In the beginning she’d actually taken several of these offers seriously, until bitter experience had taught her that Francis Tate seemed to attract penniless film students with a tendency to bizarre, obsessive psychological disorders. Now, for the sake of her sanity and her burdensome sense of responsibility to her father’s memory, she simply refused permission outright.

‘How’s Lottie doing?’ Martha asked now.

Sarah glanced uneasily across at Lottie, who was sitting on Angelica’s knee. ‘Fine,’ she said, hating the defensive note that crept into her voice. ‘She hasn’t even noticed that Rupert isn’t around any more, which makes me realise just what a terrible father he’s been. I can’t remember the last time he spent time with her.’ Latterly most of Rupert’s visits to the flat in Shepherd’s Bush had been for hasty and singularly unsatisfactory sex in his lunch hour when Lottie was at school. Sarah shuddered now when she thought of his clumsy, careless touch, and his easy excuses about problems at the office and the pressure of work for the evenings and weekends he no longer spent with her. She wondered how long he would have carried on the deceit if she hadn’t found him out so spectacularly.

‘You’re better off without him,’ Martha said, as if she’d read Sarah’s thoughts. Sarah sincerely hoped she hadn’t.

‘I know.’ She sighed and got to her feet, starting to gather up the plates. ‘Really. I know. I don’t need a man.’

‘That’s not what I said.’ Martha stood up too, reaching across for the wine, holding the bottle up to the light of the candle and squinting at it to see if there was any left. ‘I said without him, not without a man in general.’

‘I’m happy on my own,’ Sarah said stubbornly. It wasn’t exactly a lie; she was happy enough. But she only had to think back to the dark, compelling Italian who had kissed her at Angelica’s hen party to know that she was also only half-alive. Briskly she moved around the table, stacking crockery, keeping her hands busy. ‘You’re just missing Guy. You always get ridiculously sentimental when he’s not here.’

Guy and Hugh and all his friends weren’t arriving until tomorrow, so tonight it was just ‘the girls’, as Angelica called them. Martha shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I’m just an old romantic. But I don’t want you to miss your chance at love because you’re determined to look the other way, that’s all.’

Fat chance of that, thought Sarah, carrying the plates back to the kitchen. Her love life was a vast, deserted plain. If anything ever did chance to appear on the horizon she’d be certain to see it. Whether it would stop or not was another matter altogether.

Looming ahead of her through the Tuscan night, the farmhouse was a jumble of uneven buildings and gently sloping roofs. The kitchen was at one end, a low-ceilinged single-storey addition that Angelica said had once been a dairy. Sarah went in and switched the light on, tiredly setting down the pile of plates on the un-rustic shiny marble countertop. Despite being utterly uninterested in cooking, Angelica and Hugh had spared no expense in the creation of the kitchen, and Sarah couldn’t quite stamp out a hot little flare of envy as she looked around, mentally comparing it with the tiny, grim galley kitchen in her flat in London.

Crossly she turned on the cold tap and let the water run over her wrists. Heat, tiredness and a glass of Chianti had lowered her defences tonight, making it harder than usual to hold back all kinds of forbidden thoughts. She turned off the tap and went back out into the humid evening, pressing her cool, damp hands against her hot neck, beneath her hair. As she returned to the table Angelica was running through the catalogue of disasters that had beset the renovations.

‘…it seems he’s absolutely fanatical about having everything as natural and authentic as possible. He confronted our architect with this obscure bit of Tuscan planning law that meant we weren’t allowed to put a glass roof on the kitchen, but had to reuse the old tiles. Something to do with maintaining the original character of the building.’

Fenella rolled her eyes. ‘That’s all very well for him to say, since he lives in a sixteenth-century palazzo. Does he expect you to live like peasants just because you bought a farmhouse?’

Martha looked up with a smile as Sarah sat down again. ‘Hugh and Angelica have fallen foul of the local aristocracy,’ she explained. ‘From Palazzo Castellaccio, further up the lane.’

‘Aristocracy?’ Angelica snorted. ‘I wouldn’t mind if he was, but he’s definitely new money. A film director. Lorenzo Cavalleri, he’s called. He’s married to that stunning Italian actress, Tia de Luca.’

Fenella was visibly excited. Dropping a celebrity name in front of her had roughly the same effect as dropping a biscuit in front of a dog. ‘Tia de Luca? Not any more apparently.’ She sat up straighter, practically pricking up her ears and panting. ‘There’s an interview with her in that magazine I bought at the airport yesterday. Apparently she left her husband for Ricardo Marcello, and she’s pregnant.’

‘Ooh, how exciting,’ said Angelica avidly. ‘Ricardo Marcello’s gorgeous. Is the baby his, then?’

You’d think they were talking about intimate acquaintances, thought Sarah, stifling another yawn. She knew who Tia de Luca was, of course—everyone did—but couldn’t get excited about the complicated love life of someone she would never meet and with whom she had nothing in common. Fenella was clearly untroubled by such details.

‘Not sure—from what she said, I think the baby might be the husband’s, you know, Lorenzo Whatshisname.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Have you met him?’

Across the table, Lottie was lolling on her grandmother’s knee, her thumb in her mouth. She was obviously exhausted, and Sarah’s own eyelids felt as if they had lead weights attached to them; leaning back in her chair, she tipped up her head and allowed herself the momentary luxury of closing them while the conversation ebbed around her.

‘No,’ Angelica said. ‘Hugh has. Says he’s difficult. Typical Italian alpha male, all arrogant and stand-offish and superior. We have to keep on the right side of him though, because the church where we’re getting married is actually on part of his land.’

‘Mmm…’ Fenella’s voice was warm and throaty. ‘He sounds delish. I wouldn’t mind getting on the right side of an Italian alpha male…’

Sarah opened her eyes, dragging herself ruthlessly back from the edge of that tempting abyss.

‘Come on, Lottie. It’s time you were in bed.’

At the mention of her name Lottie struggled sleepily upright, reluctant as ever to leave a party. ‘I’m not, Mummy,’ she protested. ‘Really…’

‘Uh-uh.’ Lottie had the persuasive powers of a politician, and usually Sarah’s resistance in the face of her killer combination of sweetness and logic was pitifully low. But not tonight. A mixture of exhaustion and an odd, restless feeling of dissatisfaction sharpened her tone. ‘Bed. Now.’

Lottie blinked up at the sky over Sarah’s shoulder. Her forehead was creased up with worry. ‘There’s no moon,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t they have the moon in Italy?’

In an instant Sarah’s edgy frustration melted away. The moon was Lottie’s touchstone, her security blanket. ‘Yes, they do,’ she said softly, ‘but tonight it must be tucked up safely behind all the clouds. Look, there are no stars either.’

Lottie’s frown eased a little. ‘If there are clouds, does that mean it’s going to rain?’

‘Oh, gosh, don’t say that,’ laughed Angelica, getting up and coming over to give Lottie a goodnight kiss. ‘It better not. The whole point of having the wedding here was the weather. It never rains in Tuscany!’

It was going to rain.

Standing at the open window of the study, Lorenzo breathed in the scent of dry earth and looked up into a sky of starless black. Down here the night was hot and heavy, but a sudden breeze stirred the tops of the cypress trees along the drive, making them shiver and whisper that a change was on the way.

Grazie a Dio. The dry spell had lasted for months now, and the ground was cracking and turning to dust. In the garden Alfredo had almost used up his barrels of hoarded rainwater, laboriously filling watering cans to douse the plants wilting in the limonaia, and in daylight the view of the hillside below Palazzo Castellaccio was as uniformally brown as a faded sepia print.

Suddenly from behind him in the room there came a low gasp of sensual pleasure, and Lorenzo turned round just in time to see his ex-wife’s lover bend over her naked body, circling her rosy nipple with his tongue.

Expertly done, he thought acidly as the huge plasma screen above the fireplace was filled with a close shot of Tia’s parted lips. Ricardo Marcello was about as good at acting as your average plank of wood but he certainly came to life in the sex scenes, with the result that the completed film—a big-budget blockbuster about the early life of the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Galileo—contained rather more of them than Lorenzo had originally planned. Audiences across the world were likely to leave the cinema with little notion of Galileo as the father of modern science but with a lingering impression of him as a three-times-a-night man who was prodigiously gifted in a Kama Sutra of sexual positions.

With an exhalation of disgust Lorenzo reached for the remote control and hit ‘pause’ just as the camera was making yet another of its epic journeys over the honeyed contours of Tia’s flatteringly lit, cosmetically enhanced body. Circling the Sun was guaranteed box-office gold, but it marked the moment of total creative bankruptcy in his own career; the point at which he had officially sold out, traded in his integrity and his vision for money he didn’t need and fame he didn’t want.

He’d done it for Tia. Because she’d begged him to. Because he could. And because he had wanted, somehow, to try to make up for what he couldn’t give her.

He had ended up losing everything, he thought bitterly.

As if sensing his mood the dog that had been sleeping curled up in one corner of the leather sofa lifted his head and jumped down, coming over and pressing his long nose into Lorenzo’s hand. Lupo was part-lurcher, part-wolfhound, part-mystery, but though his pedigree was dubious his loyalty to Lorenzo wasn’t. Stroking the dog’s silky ears, Lorenzo felt his anger dissolve again. That film might have cost him his wife, his selfrespect and very nearly his creative vision, but it was also the brick wall he had needed to hit in order to turn his life around.

Francis Tate’s book lay on the desk beside him and he picked it up, stroking the cover with the palm of his hand. It was soft and worn with age, creased to fit the contours of his body from many years of being carried in his pocket and read on planes and during breaks on film sets. He’d found it by chance in a secondhand bookshop in Bloomsbury on his first trip to England. He had been nineteen, working as a lowly runner on a film job in London. Broke and homesick, and the word Cypress on the creased spine of the book had called to him like a warm, thyme-scented whisper from home.

Idly now he flicked through the yellow-edged pages, his eyes skimming over familiar passages and filling his head with images that hadn’t lost their freshness in the twenty years since he’d first read them. For a second he felt almost light-headed with longing. It might not be commercial, it might just end up costing him more than it earned but, Dio, he wanted to make this film.

Involuntarily, his mind replayed the image of the girl from The Rose and Crown—Sarah—walking through the field of wheat; the light on her bare brown arms, her treacle-coloured hair. It had become a sort of beacon in his head, that image; the essence of the film he wanted to create. Something subtle and quiet and honest.

He wanted it more than anything he had wanted for a long time.

A piece of paper slipped out from beneath the cover of the book and fluttered to the floor. It was the letter from Tate’s publisher:

Thank you for your interest, but Ms Halliday’s position on the film option for her father’s book The Oak and the Cypress is unchanged at present. We will, of course, inform you should Ms Halliday reconsider her decision in the future.

Grimly he tossed the book down onto the clutter on the low coffee table and went back over to the open window. He could feel a faint breeze now, just enough to lift the corners of the papers on the desk and make the planets in the mechanical model of the solar system on the windowsill rotate a little on their brass axes.

Change was definitely in the air.

He just hoped that, whoever and wherever this Ms Halliday was, she felt it too.