Page 79 of The Dolce Vita Divas
‘They never do, he just let’s her get away with everything. You’re sure you don’t mind me staying?’
‘I’m absolutely delighted,’ I said, and we sat outside on the terrace in the warm evening air, while below us the lights from the garden glowed in the dusk.
‘It feels like the end of things,’ I said after a while. ‘People going home, and the gardens look less busy too. I know that the season is finishing. Isn’t this the time when you should be taking a break?’
He didn’t answer for a few moments as – having reassured himself that I was no longer on any medication – he opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and poured out two glassfuls.
I held my glass up to look at it.
Even the wine glasses here were things of beauty. Elegant narrow stems and lovely engraved bowls, not like the supermarket versions I was used to. Perhaps in future I would do things more stylishly. I had seen something similar in a local antique shop for a ridiculously low price, and I decided I would buy them if they were still there on my return. There was joy to be had in such things. There was nothing wrong with making life better in small ways.
I had already decided that from now on I would wear my new clothes and decent underwear instead of keeping them ‘for special occasions’, and at my age who knew when that would be? What if the opportunity to do so never came? I was determined to take pleasure in every day, not keep putting things off until the future.
‘I have had news from Stephanie,’ he said at last. ‘There is a new bid on the table from the hotel chain. They have increased their offer.’
‘An offer you can’t refuse?’ I said, taking a sip of my wine.
He gave a little laugh. ‘Quite possibly.’
‘So what will you do?’
He picked his cutlery up and then put it down again.
‘I think I will accept. It will be the end of an era; I can see that. But I told you, I don’t want to do this until the day I die. I need to do something else.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘And you’re sure?’
‘As sure as I can be,’ he said. ‘What is the alternative, after all? To hang on for more years, until one day I cannot carry on and the problem falls on my son to deal with?’
‘Have you told him? You really should, don’t you think?’
‘I have. I told him this morning, and my mother too. I’m sure she has something to say about it, but to be honest after she and my father split up she hardly lived here at all. She left me with my grandparents, and then Ellen and I brought the place up to date, made changes and improvements while she settled in Florence with Freddy.’
‘She’s a lucky woman, finding someone so compatible,’ I said.
‘She says it took her fifty years to do so, but it was worth the wait.’
‘You must have so many memories of this place. It might be more difficult to leave than you think.’
He sprinkled a little more parmesan onto his pasta and then looked across at me.
‘There are things I will miss,’ he agreed, ‘but a lot of things I won’t.’
He picked up his wine glass and held it out towards me.
‘A toast, to the future, to life and to us.’
He held out his wine glass towards me, and I suddenly couldn’t meet his gaze.
So this was it. He was talking about us.
Us.
Our lives had gone in such different directions. He had moved on and so had I. So many years had passed; neither of us were the same people we had been back then. He had been here in the land of sunshine and colour and warmth, with Ellen and his family, and their friends, while I had taught at little schools, and raised my own family in the damp English countryside.
The thought struck me, despite all those differences and all those years apart, that perhaps there were also still things we had in common. I knew when I was younger I had been stubborn and argumentative. And so had he. Perhaps that similarity was what had attracted us to each other back then, but maybe the decades that had passed had brought changes to both of us. If nothing else I knew now which battles were worth fighting and which weren’t. Maybe I had grown up after all.
I realised he was still waiting, and I clinked my glass against his.
