Freya (36 page)

As the winding road climbed, the houses became fewer and farther between. When they reached the main piazza of Fiesole, Freya presented the note she had made of the address in the hope that the driver might direct them onwards. He seemed to recognise the name, and the volley of demonstrative Italian he shot at them was met by her with much nodding and
si
-
si
-ing.

‘What did he say?' asked Nancy, as the bus pulled away in a gritty cloud of fumes.

‘I have
no
idea,' she replied. It seemed respectful just to appear to understand. ‘Wait, I've got Diana's map somewhere.'

The directions to Villa Colombini were quite straightforward, though the final half-mile up a rutted cart track, the early-afternoon sun ablaze, caused a torment of sweating and swearing. Their stiff, exhausted smiles at the gardener (‘
Buongiorno, signorine!
') softened once they emerged onto a terrace, its walls overrun with dark green creepers. Freya whistled softly. A commanding panorama over the basin of Florence, with somnolent wooded hills at the rim, had stopped them in their tracks.

‘Golly,' murmured Nancy.

The gardener, or perhaps he was the major-domo, took charge of their slick-handled suitcases, and, before disappearing into the house, nodded them towards a trellised stairway around which roses straggled. It dropped down to a forecourt that led in turn to a swimming pool of brilliant blue. Nobody was about, and all that could be heard within the tranquil enclosure was the distant sawing of cicadas. The water's perfect glittering surface seemed to call Freya forward.

‘Hold this a sec, will you?' she said, taking off her wristwatch and handing it to Nancy. She kicked off her sandals and pulled off her sweat-soaked dress over her head. She thought about taking off her slip, too, but decorum checked her.

‘Erm, Freya …?' said Nancy, alarmed.

Freya rocked back a step, and then sprinted for the edge. Her dive broke the surface with a sharp crack. The shock of the water, colder than it looked, nearly tore the breath from her, and as she came up for air she gave a protesting shriek.

‘You madwoman,' shouted Nancy with a laugh.

She had just hauled herself gasping out of the pool when an elderly lady in a green sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat appeared from the shadows of the house. She gave a little whinny of surprise.

‘Hullo! You're
very
keen,' she said, frankly appraising Freya in her soaked underclothes. ‘Now which one of you is Freya?'

The lady introduced herself as Kay, Diana's aunt, and the owner of the house. She was firm-bodied, strong-jawed, with a penetrating ice-blue gaze. She spoke in the formidable clipped accent of her generation. But her manner was warmer than her appearance, and as they talked she became genial and confiding. She asked them about their journey, and grimaced at the account Freya gave of the pensione in Rome they had stopped in overnight.

‘Ye-e-e-ers, I can imagine the fleas. And then that footslog to get here – no wonder you wanted to cool orf!' She was staring again at Freya, who realised she was showing a lot of herself through the clingy dampness of her slip.

‘It's a wonderful place you have,' said Nancy, hand shading her eyes from the sun.

‘Thenk you. Been in the family for years. Perhaps you'd like to see around?'

They fell into step as Kay conducted them through the cool, shuttered rooms, some with the unstirred air of disuse, others festooned with the clutter of long acquaintance – a piano room, with piles of sheet music spilling out of the padded stool, and on the wide mantel a domestic shrine of silver-framed family photographs; a library, and a desk with a typewriter where Kay worked; upstairs led to a huge living room with a card table and plump old sofas swathed in blankets and paisley shawls. In a basket by the fireplace lay a careless pile of old magazines. She spotted a
Frame
among them. Then they filed down a corridor lined with prints and crossed another, smaller, living room to the kitchen. Here a short Italian woman was conversing with the major-domo, who smiled as if at old friends. Kay briskly introduced them as Tomas and Marina (‘she's our housekeeper') before getting down to business in rapid Italian. It seemed that lunch was to be prepared for them. Diana and Stephen were due back any moment from their trip into town.

‘I'll show you the bedrooms,' Kay was saying over her shoulder as they followed up another flight of stairs. On the landing she paused outside a bedroom, and looked at them with a sudden candid vigilance. ‘Do you wish to share a room?'

Freya and Nancy looked at one another, momentarily thrown. It seemed unlikely that space was at a premium. ‘We can share, if it's more convenient –'

‘Oh, no, we've heaps of rooms, it's no trouble …' Her bright manner seemed for a moment to suggest that sharing might be more ‘fun', but then thought better of it and allocated them rooms next door to one another. ‘Right, you get settled in – the bathroom is down the corridor. Lunch at half past one.'

She left them admiring the view out of the first bedroom. Nancy turned with a knitted brow of puzzlement to Freya and said, sotto voce, ‘Does she think we're …?'

‘I'm not quite sure,' whispered Freya.

‘Why would she presume …?'

‘Who knows?' said Freya, which concluded the matter. She pulled aside the mosquito net to open the window. ‘My God, Nance, is this the most –'

‘– beautiful place ever? Yes. We've only been here ten minutes and I'm dreading the moment we have to leave.'

Freya was up at eight the following morning to plough up and down the pool. Kay was already on her deckchair doing the
Times
crossword in the shade, occasionally peering over the paper to check the swimmer's progress. When Freya emerged dripping from the water, hair dark and sleek against her black swimming costume, she stretched herself out on the lounger, her chest still heaving from the exercise. Kay looked over at her.

‘My dear, you look like a marvellous
otter
. Shall I pour you some tea?'

They talked about the house. It had been left to Kay's grandmother by her first husband, whose family had made their money in a Midlands brewery; they had been part of an expat community in Florence and were friends with the Trollope family (there were signed first editions by Anthony in the library). Kay, the oldest of three sisters, used to holiday here in childhood, ‘when the place was very cut orf – no motor bus then'. Once their parents became too infirm to travel Kay, unmarried and footloose, decided to take over the maintenance herself. She had improved it a little at a time, installing electricity and paving the courtyard entrance. Then she had the swimming pool put in, tamed the garden (‘an awful mess') and planted the lemon trees in front of the terrace. She made her own oil from the olive grove below. Of course she depended on Tomas and his boys for the upkeep, fixing the roof, replacing the old tiles and what have you. There was always something that needed doing.

‘So you're on your own here?' asked Freya.

‘Well, there's Marina looking after the kitchen and the laundry – and I have a few neighbours hereabouts –'

‘You don't get lonely?'

Kay's good cheer was unyielding. ‘Do you know, I never have! Perhaps it's – well, I suppose I've never met anyone I could live with.' She paused, holding the thought. ‘Or, more accurately, I never met anyone I couldn't live without.'

She said it lightly, as she said almost everything, but Freya took it to heart. To have lived so long – how old was Kay? Sixty? Sixty-five? – without someone to bounce off, to share that knowledge of your time hurrying on … It was brave, but it was sad, too. She recognised something of that proud cussedness in herself, and it disquieted her. What if she ended up alone?

‘Good morning,' called Diana, strolling down from the terrace, a peach in her hand. ‘I saw you from upstairs – you seemed to be having a
very
grave discussion.'

‘Oh, I don't think it was so grave, do you?' Kay said. ‘Freya was just asking me if I minded awfully being on my own.'

Diana wore an emerald-coloured swimsuit that showed off her perky breasts and slim waist. She bit into the peach and said to Freya, ‘Aunt Kay's one of the most gregarious people I know. We used to go to her parties during the war, when she lived off Hyde Park Gardens. Drinking like there was no tomorrow! It was very fast set.'

Kay laughed. ‘I've slowed down a little since then. But I still like company – we'll have a full house next weekend.'

‘Really?' said Freya, trying to conceal her dismay. It seemed quite perfect just the way it was. ‘Who's coming?'

‘Oh, some friends of ours,' said Diana. ‘And an art-critic friend of Kay's – an American chap.'

‘Lambert Delavoy. Very eminent – in his field,' said Kay, with an ironic hint that he was unlikely to be eminent anywhere else. ‘I look forward to Stephen jousting with him.'

Her remark was prompted by the appearance of the latter, carrying a breakfast tray of coffee and fruit. Freya considered her father through narrowed eyes. He was still tall and lean, and the toffee-coloured hair he was vain about hadn't noticeably thinned. The creases around his eyes and mouth suited a face that in younger years was somewhat bland in its regularity. The only other suggestion of his entry into middle age was a stoop, the occupational hazard of a painter, forever craning forward to the canvas.

‘Who am I to joust with?' he asked pleasantly.

‘Delavoy. He and his wife are coming here for dinner on Friday,' replied Diana, who then explained to Freya, ‘He's written some frightful things about Stephen's work.'

‘The swine,' said Freya, feeling indignation on her father's behalf, since he rarely deigned to show it on his own.

Stephen shrugged. ‘Hardly surprising. I don't think he's really liked anything much since Poussin. Coffee?'

Freya secretly admired this nonchalance in her father, and wished she could master it herself. It was so different from her own defensiveness before criticism, even the well-intentioned sort; she thought of her recent prickliness with Joss. At the
Envoy
she was making an effort to be more accommodating, because she was still relatively new and accepted that her editors might know better. It was just that, by and large, they
didn't
know better, and the ‘improvements' they made on her copy only weakened it.

She had another swim before going off in search of Nancy. She found her lying across her bed writing her diary, her face and shoulders pink from the bath she had just had. Her long hair was turbaned in a white towel.

‘Here's some coffee,' she said, setting down a cup. ‘Sleep well?'

‘Yes, apart from a moment early this morning when I woke up and wondered where on earth I was. D'you have that?'

She nodded. ‘Strange-bed syndrome.'

Nancy capped her pen and closed the diary. Rising from the bed she peeked through the shuttered window.

‘It looks tremendously hot out there.' Her fair skin burnt quickly in the sun.

‘You might wear a hat. But we can keep to the shade.'

‘How should we get into town?'

Freya widened her eyes knowingly. ‘I've found just the thing.'

A quarter of an hour later they were whizzing down the hill road astride a Vespa, screaming with laughter at the speed and Freya's erratic steering. Riding pillion, Nancy had her arms wrapped tight around her waist. Having wheeled the vehicle (a fetching mint green) into the courtyard Tomas had offered them a quick driving lesson, which stretched their meagre Italian. The first time Freya tried it the bike shot out of her grasp and went careering into a flower bed. Tomas eventually climbed onto the thing himself and puttered twice around the courtyard. ‘
Ecco, e facile
,' he said, hopping off.

‘This beats the bus,' shouted Freya over the motorcycle's insistent wasp-drone. As the road levelled out the traffic began to thicken, and they were soon halting at junctions while workaday Florence hurried crosswise in dust clouds and bleating horns. Only once did they have a scare, when Freya momentarily confused the accelerator with the brake; she couldn't understand why they were speeding up at a crossroads when she was frantically trying to slow down. Nancy's shriek of surprise tore past her ear just as she swerved sideways over the cobbles and onto the pavement, juddering to a stop before a huddle of startled pensioners. ‘
Scusi
,
scusi
,' she gasped, her armpits on fire with sweating panic.

Her legs felt jellyish when she stepped off the bike and propped it against a shaded wall near the Piazza del Duomo. Nancy's auburn hair had blown up like candyfloss under the force of their rapid descent down the hill. On catching herself in the reflection of a shop window she groaned with dismay, and wouldn't take another step until she had hidden the damage under a headscarf. The city sweltered and cowered under the late-morning sun; the poster-caked streets and the dark entrances of churches were secretive, huddled around their own charged history, while the locals stood about and watched, faces worn to indifference. At the Uffizi the July tourists swarmed as thickly as ants, and with one look at each other they fled without entering. There was a refuge in the musty sequestered air of the Duomo, into whose candlelit gloom they seemed to slide like water. Something of Nancy's unselfconscious devotion had rubbed off on Freya over the years, and she wandered down the echoing nave in a trance. It wasn't that she believed in any of it – for her it was a mostly benign conspiracy – but she couldn't help swooning before the church's vast vaulted spaces, and the solemn endeavour of an age when building and carving and glazing constituted more than mere feats of design.

Doubling back down a side aisle she spied Nancy, head slightly bowed, at a shrine to the Virgin. From a distance she seemed to be examining the pocket of her dress, but was in fact searching for a coin; she dropped it into a slot in the wall. Then she fixed a slim white candle in the tiered brass tray, ghoulish with wax, and lit it with a taper. She stood still in contemplation for some moments, before taking a step away and crossing herself. Freya held back until Nancy had completed her devotions, and timed her approach to make it seem a natural coming-together. They ducked out of a side door as another gaggle of tourists were flooding through.