Page 3 of Last Letter Home
The angry voices faded as Briony tugged shut the door of the Italian villa with the tiniest of clicks. Her sigh of relief sent the gecko in the porch darting into the eaves. A fellow escapee, she thought, watching it vanish but, unlike her, it wouldn’t feel guilty. How long did she have before the others stopped bickering and noticed she’d gone? Perhaps they’d think she’d retired to bed early and lock up. Well, she didn’t care. Three days into their holiday and she was already tired of their company. Of Mike and Zara, anyway. Aruna and Luke weren’t to blame. At least, they didn’t mean to make her feel the odd one out.
The evening was thick with the late July heat. Briony sniffed at the savoury smoke from their barbecue still hanging in the air as she set off over the rough ground between the olive trees to the gate. When she gained the leafy coolness of the lane, a fragrance of resin replaced the pungent smoke and she breathed it in gratefully.
Which way now? Downhill the road led back through the hamlet with its bar and shop, then across a bridge over a babbling river where light dazzled off the water, a beautiful spot where children paddled. That way meant other people, though, and she wanted to be by herself. So she struck out left, up the hill towards the dying sun. It was a direction she hadn’t taken before.
The going was easy despite the warmth and it wasn’t long before the lazy atmosphere of the Italian countryside and a pleasant stretch in her calves calmed her ruffled mood. She hated any form of conflict since the trolling, even when she wasn’t directly involved. It made her want to run and hide.
Soon, the gritty road crunching under her trainers became a soft grassy track that drew her up between terraces of fruit trees where the air smelled fresh with citrus. Minutes later she came to a bend in the path above a sharp drop. She stopped, then stepped out onto a rocky crag to stare at a sudden breathtaking vista of the valley. Up and beyond the encircling hills were the folds of other hills and other valleys, a view that lifted her mood, it was so beautiful.
Beneath the gold-streaked sky all was peaceful. The air was so still and the valley so deep that the smallest sounds echoed up. Briony narrowed her eyes and listened. Far away, a dog yapped a warning in canine Morse code. The strains of a car engine competed with the putter of a tiny plane passing overhead. Close by, a lone cicada tried a hesitant note like a violinist testing a string. Another, and then, as if at the drop of a baton, a whole orchestra of them started up around.
Briony’s gaze rested on the terracotta roofs of a small town clinging to the neck of the valley. Tuana. She recalled a fragment of conversation she’d had with her dad the week before. She’d rung him to let him know where she would be staying.
‘Tuana?’ Martin Wood had said. ‘That rings a bell. You know your mum’s dad, Grandpa Andrews, was stationed there during the war?’ The reminder was enough to send her online to look for pictures of the town, then to the college library for a couple of books about the Second World War in Italy that she’d brought with her. Her grandfather had died when she was ten, silent about his war experiences to the last.
They had stopped in Tuana for supplies on the day they arrived and found it a tranquil place with tight winding streets and a public square dreaming in the sun, but after they’d visited the little supermarket, Mike had been impatient to drive on to the villa and crack open the local vino he’d bought, so there’d been no time to poke around.
The valley was idyllic; well, it appeared to be. Just as Briony knew that the grey haze crowning the furthest hills must be the pollution of Naples’ industrial belt, and the distant twin peaks wreathed in smoke was Mount Vesuvius, so did the thought of Mike spoil her pleasure. She yanked a tendril of bindweed from a nearby bush. It snapped, flailed the air like a whip, then lay limp in her hand. She let it fall.
There must be something wrong with her to feel this way. Anyone else would consider themselves lucky. Two weeks’ summer holiday at a villa in the mountains of Italy! It was Aruna who’d asked her along. Lovely Aruna, who since they’d found themselves sharing a student flat together, years ago, had been her best friend.
Apart from Aruna, the holiday party were comparative strangers to Briony. Aruna’s colleague Zara and hospital doctor Mike were the couple in full spate of a row. Then there was Luke, a tall, gentle, laid-back man in his late thirties who was Aruna’s boyfriend of six months and whom Briony found considerate and easy to talk to.
Briony stepped down from the rock and continued along the narrow path around the shoulder of the hill, treading carefully; one wrong step could send her tumbling. When she next looked up it was to see an escarpment ahead. Among trees crowded against the hillside above, her sharp eyes could make out part of the roof and upper storey of a sizeable house. How did one get to that, especially by car? There must be a road from some other direction.
The footpath led more steeply uphill now, zigzagging between trees, but, curious about the house, Briony began to climb. She reached a ridge, hot and out of breath, to find that there was indeed a rutted earth road, snaking off right towards where she’d seen the house.
Someone must have come this way because there were tyre marks in the dust. The owner of the house, presumably. But who would live up here, in such a lonely spot?
She followed the car tracks for a couple of minutes before the road suddenly broadened out then ended abruptly at a pair of sagging wrought-iron gates bound by a rusty chain. A creeper with tiny red flowers twisted through them. It must have been a long time since they’d been opened. Of a car there was no sign, only soil thrown up on the road where the vehicle must have turned in impatient movements. Reaching the gates, Briony grasped the bars and stared, like an outcast, into the lush greenery beyond.
Because of one of those odd tricks of perspective, she could no longer see the house. Such an air of dereliction and loneliness lay over the place that she felt an answering melancholy. She yearned to slip between the gates or attempt to scale the crumbling wall that ran at head-height on either side, but she did not dare. Suppose the owner caught her and accused her of trespassing? Although she could read some Italian, she stumbled to speak it, and she’d have difficulty explaining herself. She smiled, imagining trying to charm some furious Mafioso type. The place appeared to be deserted, but the vehicle tracks told her she couldn’t be certain.
The sun was dipping behind the hills and the sky bloomed crimson. Soon it would be dusk. With reluctance, Briony turned from the gates. As she scrambled her way down the hillside, tiny bats teased the edges of her vision as they swooped for insects.
At the crag where she’d paused half an hour before, she was surprised to see someone else standing there, staring out across the valley. The sunset dazzled, but then she recognized that lanky figure, his hands in jeans pockets, that mane of nutbrown hair. It was Luke. ‘Hello,’ she called as she drew close.
The light glinted off dark glasses as he turned. ‘Hey.’ He smiled his quirky smile. ‘Isn’t this amazing? I was trying to orient myself.’ He pointed over the valley. ‘Do you suppose that’s the road we came in by, Saturday?’
Briony squinted at the silver ribbon winding down the hillside towards Tuana. ‘It must be.’
‘What did you find up there?’ Luke nodded in the direction she’d appeared from and she described the wild garden, and tried in vain to point out the roof of the old villa. Now, in the dying light, the trees appeared to be fused together in a dark slab.
‘Never mind. Perhaps another time.’
‘Yes.’ They stood quietly for a while watching a tiny train cross a distant hillside, then she asked, ‘Were you taking a walk, or did you come to find me?’
‘I saw you slip out earlier and . . . well, you were gone a long time. Aruna wondered if you were OK.’ Luke’s forehead wrinkled in a frown. ‘Are you?’
‘I’m fine. Just needed some peace and quiet.’
‘Ah. Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ He raised his sunglasses and looked rueful.
‘You weren’t, honest.’
‘Good. The lovebirds have made it up, by the way. It’s safe to go back in the water.’ This last he said in a stagey whisper with an ironic twist of his eyebrows, and she burst out laughing. As he led the way back down the narrow path towards the villa, she felt happy because someone understood.
‘Mike’s all right really,’ Luke remarked. ‘He enjoys upsetting people with those grisly hospital tales. It’s best not to rise to it, then he’ll shut up.’
