The Villa (23 page)

‘Diving?’ She shrugged. Nice to see you again too, she thought. That moment in Segesta, that almost-kiss, it seemed suddenly like years ago.

‘Alone?’ He was practically breathing fire.

Tess took an exaggerated look around the bay. There was a couple sitting on the wall a little way away, watching the confrontation with some curiosity, and an older man on the rocks over the other side. But she didn’t seem to be with anyone that she could see. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I’m not going very far.’ Yes, she knew that one of the rules of diving was that you didn’t dive alone. You didn’t dive alone in case you got into difficulties. If you got into difficulties you might need a buddy to help you out. But of course Tess wouldn’t do anything foolish or take any risks. She knew what she was doing, damn it. But she wanted to explore and where was she supposed to get a diving buddy from, for crying out loud?

‘It does not matter.’ He glared at her, hands on hips. He was wearing the black shorts again and a blue T-shirt the colour of the Sicilian sea. His skin seemed even browner than before, his eyes darker. ‘It can be dangerous. You should never dive alone.’

Tess rose to her full height though she had to admit she felt a tad self-conscious in her close-fitting wetsuit. You had to buy a size too small because it stretched out in the water in order to fit you like a second skin. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I am a qualified diver.’ And why did everyone keep trying to tell her what to do around here? She didn’t need anyone to control her life – she could do it for herself – probably.

‘Then you should know better,’ he snarled.

Tess’s eyes widened. She had been very, very wrong about this man. She should have listened to Giovanni Sciarra. Tonino was getting this way out of proportion. She remembered how angry he’d been about the fishermen’s nets. Perhaps he was some sort of maniac – creative but seriously deranged?

‘Is it any of your business, do you think?’ She adjusted her mask and made all the final checks. As she dangled a foot into the water, it frilled tantalisingly around her toes. She pulled on her fins. She hadn’t bothered with diving gloves; it wasn’t cold. This was just an initial exploratory, for God’s sake.

Once again, he folded his arms. ‘It is irresponsible. It is not good practice.’ And he didn’t walk away.

So … What? Was he going to stand there at the water’s edge until she got back? And, she realised, he seemed to
know a lot about diving regulations. She turned back to him. ‘Do you dive?’ she asked.

For a moment it seemed as if he wasn’t going to reply. Then, ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not any more.’

Not any more … Nothing, Tess felt, could stop her diving. It was her passion. ‘If you’re that worried about it,’ she threw back at him, ‘come with me.’

Very slowly, he shook his head.

Tess shrugged. ‘OK, then, I’m going in.’ She put in the mouthpiece and waved a hand.

He gave her a long, hard look, turned and walked away.

What, she wondered, was his problem?

Once the waves passed her knees, Tess bent and slid into the water on her belly. It got deep very quickly and she felt the coolness slip into her wetsuit where it would warm from her body heat and keep her from growing chilly. She ducked her head under for a moment. The seabed was rock and gravelly sand with a coarse stubble of seagrass. There were no jellyfish in evidence, but she did identify a shoal of pale and stripy salps. What a bunch of smoothies they were – cool, elegant, almost iridescent.

She swam towards the double-headed rock; she could see its reflection in the water ahead – rippled and broken by the tide. The past weeks, the in-between weeks, that strange conversation with her mother, the ongoing battle with Ginny (I don’t understand teenagers, she thought), the split up with Robin, all seemed to pale into insignificance now that she was back here in Cetaria.

Under the surface, sunlight was filtering in strands through the water, the colour of which moved from the palest blue to a bright peacock green and all the shades in between. She moved slowly, getting into a relaxed, gliding rhythm.

What was she hoping to achieve by coming back here?
What was she looking for? Was it something to do with the villa, Cetaria itself – its bay and
baglio
, or maybe the two men that she’d met here? Or was it her mother’s past that she was searching for? Maybe all these things were intertwined … Maybe she just had to look a little harder to find that elusive something …

She dived down deeper as she reached the first big rock formation, running her hand along its rough, cratered edges. This was rock that had been eaten and eroded by the sea for centuries, creating a unique overhang. Bubbles of carbon dioxide left her respirator and floated like mercury mushrooms up to the surface. The rock might seem immovable, she thought, and yet she could see already that these rock islands had deep fissures and cracks underwater as well as above the surface where the sea swallows nested and cacti grew. Different sections of the rock came from different places and had been here for different lengths of time.

Closer to the seabed, spiky pink sea urchins and layers of thin bright-orange sponge rested among the mauve rock weeds. Tess wasn’t a geologist, but she knew a bit about the earth, stone and erosion. This rock formation was in fact a living and moving thing. Sicily of course, was prone to volcanoes and earthquakes – the earth did literally move. And now that she could get the underwater picture, she saw that there was a whole host of rock islands here with carved inlets and tiny sea caves. Lots and lots to explore.

She swam slowly around the boulders. Like here. Two pillars of grey rock and a similar one acting as a lintel just
behind the second tower that peaked from the water. Maybe it had been another underwater cave – once. She floated in closer. A different, darker, less eroded and pitted rock was wedged between the pillars. A thread of iron ran through it. She played her fingers along its edges. Almost as if some great godlike Neptune figure had rolled it into place. Or perhaps there had been a fall. The fissures between it and the original rock were quite deep and wide in places; in others they had moulded almost into one.

Placing one hand on top of the other, she dropped further, right down to the gravelly seabed. She was out of her depth, of course, but not exactly in dangerous waters. So what was Tonino’s problem? She had intended to try to find out more about these feuding Sicilian families, but now she wasn’t sure she even wanted to talk to the man. So much then for Segesta and the taste of ripe figs … Some girls, she told herself sternly, just never learn.

Under the small boulders on the seabed she uncovered a dark-red starfish, flapping swiftly into another rocky fissure, and a regally decorated scorpion fish who swam sedately away. She plucked a shell from the sand; inside, it was perfect mother-of-pearl, and she tucked it into her zip pocket. The ferns – yellow and red gorgonie – were waving their downy foliage in tune with an underwater current that was becoming part of Tess’s own rhythm, the longer she stayed down here. She swam on to the next monolithic rock tower.

She would also have to use this time in Sicily to think about how she was going to make a living now that she was
no longer working at the water company. Perhaps she’d make a list of possibilities when she got back to the villa. And she’d get hold of Giovanni, she decided, talk to him about builders. Try to see Santina too – she wasn’t going to forget about that part of her mission. She’d get organised. Never mind Tonino. She didn’t need
him
.

The second rock was deeply mossed and was older and paler than the first. She examined it with interest and then drifted over boulders and thick seagrass to get to the rock cluster on the other side. Here she spotted some yellow sea daisies and a large sad-faced conger eel. One part of her mind continued to record what she saw, another part was mulling over recent events. You had to concentrate when you were diving. Focus was the thing. Lucky she was female and good at multi-tasking … Because this, for Tess, was still one of the pleasures of diving. Uninterrupted thinking time.

A shoal of anchovies hovered around her as, twenty minutes later, she eventually rose up to the surface by the jetty in the bay. She waded in to shore and took off her mask and fins.

Tonino was working outside the studio and she had to pass him to get to the steps up to the villa. She intended to walk straight on by, but something about the way he sat, something about the set of his jaw as he glanced up at her and nodded, made her pause.

She looked down at the mosaic he was putting together. ‘What are you working on now?’

He took an age to reply. ‘Have you heard the legend of
Cola Pesce?’ he asked at last.

Tess shook her head. It sounded random, but then he was a random sort of guy.

Tonino picked up a piece of green stone – malachite perhaps – and held it up to the sun. ‘Cola Pesce spent days underwater exploring the seabed,’ he said. ‘He reported that Sicily was supported by three huge pillars, but there was a problem.’

‘Which was?’ Already Tess was fascinated. It wasn’t what he said. It was his voice. His stillness.

‘One of the pillars was broken,’ Tonino said solemnly.

She waited. What did that mean? That Sicily had some fatal flaw in its very foundations?

‘But the king wasn’t interested. He just wanted to know how deep Cola Pesce could dive. So he asked him to bring up a cannonball shot from the lighthouse.’

‘And did he?’

His voice was hypnotic, he used the stones as he spoke, passing them from hand to hand, polishing, holding them to the light, making a selection.

‘He tried.’ Tonino paused. He wasn’t afraid of silences. ‘But when he reached the cannonball, he looked up, and the sea above him was hard and still and closed like marble.’ Tonino’s eyes snapped shut, then open again like a lizard’s.

‘So what did he do?’

‘Nothing. He was trapped there for ever.’ Tonino clicked his fingers and abruptly the spell was broken.

‘Oh.’ Tess flinched. What was that supposed to mean?
Don’t go further than you know you can? Your passion can be the death of you? The danger of high expectations …? What? She had the feeling that he wasn’t going to tell her.

‘Why did you mind so much?’ she asked him. ‘About the diving?’

He looked beyond her, out to sea. ‘The ocean is beautiful,’ he said. ‘But also, she is cruel.’

Tess towelled her hair and slung the towel over her shoulders. He hadn’t really answered her question. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t taking any risks. I just went to have a closer look at the rocks.’

‘What are you searching for when you dive?’ he asked, not looking up.

‘Oh, you know, the usual …. Marine life. Plants and corals.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe a pearl.’

‘A pearl … ’ He inserted a piece into his mosaic. ‘I had a friend,’ he said, ‘a close friend. Another scuba diver. We dived together for sport and one day we began to dive the wrecks. Also looking for pearls, you might say.’

‘The wrecks?’ He helped her off with her air tank and Tess sat down on the wall beside him.

‘Salvage.’ He returned to his mosaic pieces, sifting and sorting. ‘A diver can earn good money from salvage – brass, silverware, who knows what.’

Tess nodded. She had already learnt that in this country you had to earn money where you could. She unzipped the top of her wetsuit; she was beginning to feel a bit clammy.

‘There is a wreck out to the west, completely submerged.
We arranged to dive together. I had … ’ He seemed embarrassed. ‘A prior engagement. He did not wait.’ He paused. ‘My friend, he died out there.’

Tess stared at him. God. Death and destruction. Darkness. Sicily seemed positively ingrained with it. ‘When?’ she whispered.

‘Two years ago.’

Despite the heat of the sun, Tess shivered. ‘What happened?’

‘It seems almost certain that he got caught up in some old fishermen’s nets. He was found with some netting still tangled around his wetsuit.’ His eyes were darker than ever. He wouldn’t look at her. ‘What else could have happened? He was an experienced diver and the fishermen – they throw their nets into the sea sometimes when they are torn. They do not care.’

‘And you think that he couldn’t break free?’ she asked him.

Tonino shook his head. ‘He must have untangled himself enough to get to the surface eventually, but not enough air was left, I guess. There would have been no time for decompressing. He must have died in the boat alone.’

Tess was silent. She knew what he was saying. Decompression sickness. The bends. It could happen when the gases in your blood had not had enough time to adjust to the change in pressure and bubbles formed. That was why when you dived more deeply you had to organise your time to allow for decompression stops on the way back to the surface.

Fishermen’s nets. Divers scuba-diving alone. Now she understood his anger with the fishermen that morning. And
she understood his guilt – for not being there for his buddy the only time that it mattered.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

‘I had the knife that would have cut him free – just like that.’ He made the gesture of a knife slicing through the air.

‘But you can’t blame yourself,’ Tess said quickly. ‘It was his decision to go alone.’ She was about to add that these things happened. But it would sound trite and anyway, he wouldn’t agree.

He looked at her and shook his head. ‘They say it is a bad place.’

‘Cetaria?’ She gazed around her. Her mother had said much the same and yet to Tess it seemed like paradise. The ancient stone
baglio
with its piazza, stone fountain and gnarled and silvery eucalyptus tree. The turquoise bay with
il faraglione
– the rock tower crags jutting from the sea. The maze of narrow streets and pastel stuccoed houses. Villa Sirena. The underwater grotto of the natural reserve. Not to mention the sunshine. How could it be a bad place? Bad things could happen anywhere.

He nodded. ‘It is lovely, yes,’ he said. ‘But it is not always a happy place.’

‘No.’ She felt that. There was some sorrow – almost secreted in the very stone. She looked up towards his studio. ‘And what about the serpent?’ she asked.