Garden of Stars (33 page)

“It's gorgeous. How did you know I love amber?”

He shrugged and smiled. “I didn't. It was a lucky guess.”

“I don't deserve so many presents.”

“Probably not.” He took the chain, smiling teasingly, put it round her neck and did up the clasp. “But you might as well have it anyway, seeing as the place I got it doesn't do returns.”

His kiss, which began as he released his hands from the necklace and put his arms around her, was purposeful, powerful. After many minutes, Sarah broke off, inhaled deeply and lowered her lips to the curve of his neck and his collar bone, her hands pulling open his shirt so that she could press her face into the dip of his shoulder blade, filling her nostrils with the smell of him, rubbing the feel of his skin into her lips and fingertips. She sensed his body tensing as he felt for her breasts through her thin summer dress. There was no going back now. She was about to have sex with someone who wasn't her husband.

I haven't slept with anyone else in over a dozen years. I'm twenty years older than I was when I last had sex with him, I've had two children… Do men notice those things, does it make a difference?

She realised that she had no idea, and then, almost immediately, that she didn't care.

The view from the poolside was expansive, the valley stretching away on all sides, acres of vineyard interspersed with pockets of wild scrub, olive and almond trees. Here and there the lights of villages and
quintas
glowed faintly in the darkness. Sarah and Scott sat together on one of the aubergine-coloured sun loungers, and he held her hand as they sipped more champagne.

No one knows that we're not a couple, that we shouldn't be here together.

Scott lay back on the lounger and looked up at the stars. When he spoke, his voice was soft.

“Maybe some dreams do come true.”

Sarah's breath caught in her throat. Then the waiter was next to them, telling them their table for dinner was ready, and the moment was lost.

From then on, she tried so hard to commit every moment to memory. She wanted to remember everything but in the early mornings, when she woke beside him and tried to replay the events of the day before, she felt that parts were escaping, that she couldn't quite recall what had started a conversation or what had made them laugh so loud. To capture the perfection seemed impossible. Maybe it was all just a dream.

Thoughts of anything and everything beyond her and Scott receded into the distance the more they sank into complete immersion in each other. But the article had to be written and one of its most important elements was the grape-picking excursion. So after breakfast one morning, hats and water bottles in hand, lizards slithering across the path in front of them, they made their way to where the hotel car was waiting to take them to the vines.

“I'm not sure how long we're going to last at this,” admitted Sarah. “I think that picking grapes is pretty hard work. Backbreaking. Boring. Hot.”

“You sure are doing a good job of selling it to me,” laughed Scott.

“We don't have to stay all day,” she added, hastily. “At least you don't, anyway. I have to get enough material for the article but you can go back to the hotel when you've had enough, you mustn't feel you have to stay just because I do. I'll be perfectly fine on my own.”

“Feisty Sarah, who doesn't need anyone, who can do it all alone.” He eyes crinkled up as he looked down at her and squeezed her hand. “Don't worry. I could really do with some slave labour today. It was absolutely the first thing I wished for when I woke up this morning, the only thing I could think about.”

Sarah screwed her face up in contemplation for a moment. She ran her hand along his fingers, so strong, so deft. “No it wasn't.” She looked at him sideways, challengingly. “No, that definitely wasn't your first thought at all,” she said, as the car jerked to a halt beside a couple of aged and battered pick-up trucks.

Scott caught her eyes with his, raising his eyebrows as his mouth curved into a slow, one-sided smile. “Don't make me blush.”

The driver was at her door and opening it. As Sarah climbed out of the car, a rush of blood to the head made her dizzy and disoriented. She stood for a moment, steadying herself, focusing on the distant horizon, that today looked so clear, so solid and real. She wondered how it could be so definite when the whole world felt as if it were upside down, inside out.

A young woman wearing huge caramel-coloured sunglasses and bright red lipstick extracted herself from a group of men loudly remonstrating with each other and strode towards them. She introduced herself as Carmen, the hotel's representative for the Grape Harvest Experience.

“Come with me,” she said, shaking their hands vigorously, “and I'll show you what we do.”

An army of workers was moving slowly along the paths between the vines, men and women, mostly middle-aged, some wearing gloves, all carrying sharp secateurs. Most of the women were much shorter than Sarah, well-padded all over and with what Sarah thought would be described as ample bosoms. They wore faded and patched aprons and tough leather shoes, and their faces were lined and worn to match their clothes.

Carmen took them to one of the women, bent double over a vine, stripping it with lightning speed, bunches of dusty purple grapes dropping into the bucket at her feet. As they got closer, the woman stood up, smiling and nodding but studying Scott and Sarah carefully with narrowed eyes, as if assessing their ability to do the job.

“This is Barbara – she's been picking with us here for over thirty years. She'll show you the ropes,” explained Carmen. “The harvest is finely tuned to the weather and when the grapes are at their very best, so it's very important that when we start picking, we do it as quickly as possible.”

Sarah nodded, scribbling notes in her pad and thinking of the next question that she needed to ask. When she had enough information from Carmen, she walked over to where Barbara and Scott were hard at work, Scott stooping over the vines and releasing handfuls of grapes of perfect ripeness to the accompaniment of a constant volley of instruction and exhortation from Barbara. Sarah watched as she showed Scott where to clip, dismissing impatiently his attempts to remove stalks but going over his bucketload with an eagle eye and picking out any leaves, however small, with a flurry of admonition.

Sarah joined in with them, observing and trying to copy the way Barbara's secateurs seemed to glide along the vines in an uninterrupted symphony of snipping and clipping, up and down, right and left. The voices and chatter all around gradually died down as every worker became lost in their task, in the urgency of gathering in the precious harvest whilst it remained at peak perfection.

Finishing a row at the same time as Scott, they both stood upright for a moment, stretching out their backs and flexing hands stiff from being clamped around the secateur handles. A slight breeze rippled up the hillside, blowing a strand of hair across Sarah's face. Scott stepped towards her and brushed it away, so tenderly, with hands that were sticky and stained with juice and sap. He bent forward and kissed her lightly on the lips, then turned away, back to work under Barbara's solicitous guidance.

Sarah snapped a stem of grapes off the vine and placed it carefully in her bucket, bending down so that the angle of her face and the brim of her hat hid her eyes. It was suddenly too much, too overwhelming; the strain of betrayal, heartache and uncertainty. The strain of loving the wrong man. She thought of Hugo who seemed to have no idea of the depth of her unhappiness, nor the tools to deal with it. She thought of her children, playing with grandma, welcoming daddy home from work, waiting patiently for her to return as they knew she would, and her heart ached and throbbed like a fingertip after a blow from a hammer. She filled her bucket and emptied it into the crate at the end of the row, stepping quickly backwards as a swarm of tiny fruit flies wafted upwards in a great grey cloud.

Reaching a break in the row she was working, where a wall jutted out around a corner, Sarah perched on the edge of the rough, grass-strewn stone steps that led to the terrace above and took a long swig from her water bottle.

When the man approached her, she jumped violently.

“Desculpe! I'm sorry!” he exclaimed. He looked at least seventy, his face lined and leathery from a lifetime in these hills where the sun burnt so fiercely. He had a wine carrier in one hand, made of plastic but designed to look like wicker, stained red where the contents had leaked out as it bounced around the terraces with him. In his other hand he held a small dented tin cup. He put it down on the wall, pulled the battered, stained cork from the bottle, and filled the cup with wine.

“Have some. It's from my own vines, it's good.” He seemed eager to share what he had with the blonde stranger who was resting already, after only an hour's work.

Sarah smiled. “That's so kind. Thank you.”

“It's my pleasure. Drink! Grape picking is thirsty work.”

Sarah took the cup, drank the wine. When she had finished, the man refilled the cup and drained it himself, leaving red stains at the corners of his mouth and on his grey moustache. Sarah closed her eyes as the warm liquid infused her veins, feeling the sun warm on her arms and legs. She tried to fix the scene inside her mind, the steep hillsides hazy in the heat, the blue sky, the smell of the grapes and the wine and the dusty, sandy earth beneath her feet.

Whatever happens, I have had this moment. No one can take it from me now.

She heard footsteps, and hastily opened her eyes.

“Enjoying yourself?” Scott came and sat down beside her, letting out a long exhalation of breath. “Oh, my-old-creaking-bones. At least you've found some relief from this toil!”

“I didn't ask, I was offered,” Sarah protested, laughing and gesturing towards her new friend and the tin cup. “It would have been rude to refuse,” she added in English.

The old man laughed too, sharing a joke that he didn't understand. He poured another great glug of wine and handed it to Scott.

“Drink,” he said again.

Scott took the cup as it was proffered enthusiastically towards him, drank the wine down in one go, then handed the cup back with a flourish. He flexed his muscles in a mock display of manliness. “That'll put hairs on my chest!”

The old man made a gesture that indicated bulging biceps. “Your husband is very strong.”

Sarah opened her mouth to speak, to explain that Scott was not her husband, that he was her…her what? What should she say to this man she didn't know, had never met before and would never see again?

“Yes, very strong,” she eventually replied, with a forced smile. “Like your wine.”

The man gave another hearty laugh, and took a long draft straight from the bottle. He burped, put the cork back in, picked up his secateurs and headed back up to his row of vines.

“Bye, bye,” he called in English as he went, making both Scott and Sarah laugh again.

Back at work, Sarah contemplated all the years that had passed, and all the years that stretched ahead, snaking through time like the rows of vines along the terrace walls, the twists and turns making it impossible to see either the beginning or the end. Stopping briefly to readjust her hat, she looked down and saw, in the valley far below, the river drifting slowly towards the sea. On its other side, on the opposite hillside, she could faintly make out tiny figures moving through the vines just as they were.

At lunchtime, they ate with the pickers, who told them that most of them needed two jobs to survive, even in this relatively prosperous part of Portugal. They didn't seem to be at all curious about why a couple of tourists would want to spend their day in such a back-breaking occupation, for free, when they could be relaxing by the pool at a luxury hotel. When they had finished the meal, Carmen came back to collect them and take them to a wine-tasting at a nearby
quinta
. Sarah watched as cork after cork was pulled, and thought of João's montado and Amoral's factory and wondered if they had come from there, and of how much more each cork represented to her now than just a way to close a bottle, how many livelihoods depended on its present and its future. How much it was intertwined with Inês's past, how her father's abandoned plans for the new cork oak forest represented all her devastated dreams.

“I've never been to a wine tasting before,” she confessed to Scott, as the different varieties were discussed and sampled.

“And you're the authority that the newspaper chose to write about the subject?” Scott raised his eyebrows at the same time as his glass.

“Yes!” exclaimed Sarah, indignantly. Then she grinned too, in recognition of the fact that she knew he was winding her up. “Because, as you know, the whole point of this particular holiday is that it's aimed at complete beginners, it's about the experience not the expertise.”

Scott ran his hand down the side of her face, her hair between his fingers and his thumb on her cheekbone. “And what if one has more than a casual interest in the story. In the journalist who's writing it? Does that require experience, or expertise, or both?”

Sarah leant her forehead against his chest. “Both. Neither. Just keep doing what you're doing and we'll be fine.”

The tasting over, they went back to the hotel and straight to their room for a siesta.

In the still, quiet heat of the afternoon, Scott laid her down on the bed and undid the buttons of her dress, one by one, his eyes focused on his task, narrowed in concentration. As he pulled the dress off, he lowered his mouth to her breasts, and gently teased her nipples with his teeth through the thin black lace of her bra. She arched her back and moaned, reaching out to him to pull him closer, to feel his weight upon her, to move in time with him.

“If that's your idea of an afternoon nap, I better make sure I get my beauty sleep some other time,” she murmured afterwards, her face tucked in close to the curve of his neck, her chin resting against his shoulder.