Summer at the Lake (30 page)

Esme had been ill for nearly a fortnight now, but today Floriana was convinced there was a definite improvement in her; there was a little more colour in the old lady’s face.

It had been Adam who had been the first to realise just how poorly Esme was. He had called round one morning, not got a response from the door, and noting there were no lights on that evening when he’d tried again when he was back from work, he’d resorted to ringing her. Only then when she answered the phone by the side of her bed did she let on that she wasn’t feeling very well. Which proved to be a massive understatement.

That was when Operation Esme had swung into gear and Floriana and Adam took it upon themselves to ring the health centre on the Woodstock Road for a home visit. It had been touch and go whether Esme would have to be admitted to hospital, but to her very great relief the doctor had said she could stay at home on the condition she would be well taken care of.

Carrying the tray upstairs, Floriana thought of the first time she had entered Esme’s bedroom two weeks ago. Once she had recovered from the shock of seeing her elderly friend looking so frail and ill, she had then noticed the paintings on the walls, one in particular, directly opposite the bed, a portrait of a young man sitting in the shade of a tree on a white wicker chair with a book in his lap – it had to be none other than Marco Bassani.

Every day she visited Esme, Floriana tried not to look at the painting too overtly. Or at least not do so when Esme was awake. A couple of times when the old lady had drifted off to sleep, Floriana had seized her opportunity and studied the painting in depth, desperately wanting to know what had happened next to Esme and Marco at the lake all those years ago. Not another word on the subject had Esme since uttered and certainly while she was so ill, Floriana had no intention of referring to it.

But each time she set eyes on the portrait she had the same reaction:
Where are you now, Signor Marco Bassani?

She was at the top of the stairs when she heard ringing coming from her mobile which was in her bag in Esme’s room; she quickened her step to answer it.

With her head tilted to one side and her eyes closed, it looked as if Esme had fallen asleep. Setting the tray down on the chest of drawers, Floriana grabbed her bag inside which her mobile continued to ring.

‘Hello,’ she said cautiously, not recognising the number that showed on the screen.

‘Is that you, Floriana? It’s me, Seb. Is it a good time to chat?’

Seb, no time is good to chat to you
, she thought with a rush of pulsating nervous energy. ‘Not really,’ she said turning round to look at Esme, who she assumed would have woken by now. But the old lady hadn’t stirred.

Suddenly concerned, and thinking she looked alarmingly still, Floriana said, ‘Esme?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you, Seb. Look, this isn’t a good time, can I call you back later?’

‘Tell me when would be better and I’ll call you then.’

‘Better if I ring you.’

There was a pause. ‘But will you?’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly.

She cut him off without another word and approached the bed.

‘Esme?’ she repeated.

The moment was too reminiscent of that awful day when, home for a weekend, Mum had given Floriana a cup of tea to take in to Nanna Betsy who, since suffering a stroke, had been living with Mum and Dad. But when Floriana had gone into her grandmother’s bedroom, she had been unable to wake her. She was dead.

Swallowing back the rising panic within her, Floriana bent over Esme’s bed.

‘Time for lunch,’ she said, her voice unnervingly loud in the quiet room. Please don’t let her be dead, she urged whatever unearthly power would listen to her.

At the sound of her name being called, Esme woke with a start. Disorientated by the fug of a profoundly deep sleep, it took her a moment to work out not just where she was, but who was looking at her with such an anxious expression on her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said woozily, sitting up straight and rubbing her eyes whilst trying to gather her wits, ‘I must have dropped off.’

‘That’s all right,’ Floriana said brightly, the concern now gone from her face. ‘I’ve got your lunch ready here for you.’

‘Lunch, is it really that time? Has Krysta been?’

‘Been
and
gone,’ Floriana said.

‘Really?’ Puzzled, Esme turned to look at the clock on the bedside table, but was distracted by the sight of an unfamiliar object on the bedcover. She picked it up, and slowly it came to her – Floriana had given the mobile phone to her. She then remembered their previous conversation, as well as Krysta’s visit, and with her mind now clear and working properly, she suddenly felt very foolish. ‘Oh dear, you’re probably thinking I’m turning into a dotty old lady who can’t remember what day of the week it is.’

‘That couldn’t be further from my thoughts,’ Floriana replied, carefully placing the tray on her lap. ‘There’s nothing wrong in dozing off when you’re unwell. Perhaps I should have let you sleep on.’

‘Goodness no, not when you’ve gone to the trouble to make me something to eat. Besides, I can sleep when you’ve gone. Mmm . . . this soup smells delicious. Thank you so much for doing this for me.’

‘It’s no trouble,’ Floriana said, settling herself in her chair again. ‘Don’t forget to take your antibiotics, I think they may have rolled under the plate.’

Having located the tablets Dr Death had prescribed for her, Esme swallowed them down with some orange juice, briefly closing her eyes as she did so. At once she felt the pull of the dream in which she had been so deeply immersed – she had been with her father at Christ Church for Evensong and they had reached the part in the service that always moved her: the Magnificat. She opened her eyes and, stirring the bowl of soup in front of her, she reflected that since she had been stuck in bed, the past was constantly insinuating its way into her head, reminding her, like a reverberating echo, of all that she had lost.

Being ill had made her maudlin; it was not a trait she usually suffered from. Yet repeatedly she was being made to believe that the scales of life measured everything in terms of loss and gain. She had never thought that way before, she had always been happily of the pragmatic belief that one came into this world with nothing and when one no longer had the gift of tomorrow one exited the same way, with nothing.

Looking up from the bowl, she met Marco’s gaze staring down at her from the painting on the wall opposite the bed – the painting that had been both a comfort and a torment.

‘Don’t let your soup go cold,’ Floriana said quietly.

Esme smiled fondly at her young friend, amused how studiously the dear girl tried not to stare at the portrait. ‘For one so curiously inclined,’ she said, ‘I’m surprised you’ve never asked me about that painting.’

Without being told which picture Esme was referring to, Floriana’s gaze slid towards it. ‘I was tactfully waiting for you to tell me about it. Is it the portrait your father painted of Marco?’

‘It is.’

‘He was a bit gorgeous, wasn’t he?’

With a small laugh that made her chest rattle, Esme said, ‘Yes, he was rather.’

‘Do you have any photos of him?’

‘I’m afraid not. Some years ago the roof leaked and all the boxes of things I’d stored up there were ruined.’

‘Oh, what a shame! So this painting is all you have?’

‘And all the memories,’ Esme said. ‘Now then, and to prove I’m quite with it, and that you don’t need to worry that I’m going senile, I clearly recall you saying that you have a group of youngsters to educate and inspire this afternoon.’

Floriana looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got another ten minutes before I need to leave. Just time to make you a cup of tea and get some more water for you. I’ll call in on my way home later this afternoon.’

‘Do you have your key?’

‘Yes, so no worrying about opening the door to me.’

‘You’re an angel, you really are. When I’m better, I’m going to have to find a way to repay your kindness. You and Adam.’

Pedalling hard, knowing that she was cutting it fine, Floriana passed Keble College and because of its association with Seb, she remembered his phone call. There was no time now to ring him, she would do it later. Doubtless his purpose for ringing was to try and give her arm another twisting and persuade her to go to his wedding. He had phoned her last week, saying he wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer. ‘You’re not scared to come, are you?’ he’d asked her. As blunderingly close to the truth as the question was, it had been his jokey way to make her rise to the challenge and claim defiantly that she wasn’t scared of anything.

‘Of course I’m scared,’ she’d joked back at him. ‘I’m terrified of seeing you done up in a top hat looking like a top prat.’

‘You’ve seen me in a far worse state,’ he’d said.

How true that was.

It would be easy to say that it had all gone wrong for Seb during their last year as undergraduates, in particular those weeks in the run-up to finals, though really his problems had been going on for years. But the pressure of finals was what brought matters to a head.

True to her procrastinating nature, Floriana could put work off to the last minute with the best of them, but she was a rank amateur compared to Seb whose casual attitude towards attending lectures and handing in essays took brinkmanship to a whole new level. ‘No sweat,’ he’d say, ‘I can knock that essay out in my sleep.’ It became a sport for him to see just how far he could push the tutors. Although perhaps it was more of a sport to see how far he could push himself. But then Floriana realised it was no longer a game for him and what he was putting himself through had pushed him perilously close to the edge.

These days there was a lot of talk of so-called ‘smart drugs’, such as Modafinil and Ritalin used by students to get them through an essay crisis. There was also mkat which, apparently, was absurdly easy to get hold of online and was considered perfectly safe by many students who claimed it was nowhere near as strong as cocaine and ecstasy. Back then, Seb was using speed to keep him awake for as long as it took to complete an eleventh-hour essay. There was nothing wrong in what he was doing, he asserted when Floriana accidentally knocked over a cup of coffee in his room and, in the process of cleaning the mess up, found a small packet of pills. ‘What are these?’ she’d asked.

‘Antihistamine,’ he’d said, casually taking the packet from her and slipping it into his pocket.

A long silence jam-packed with tension followed. It was broken by Floriana: ‘What are you allergic to, Seb, the truth?’

‘Don’t look at me like that. I’m just a little off my game, that’s all. If I needed something to help me sleep you’d be cool with that, all I’m doing is the reverse.’

Furious, she’d called him an idiot. ‘I honestly thought you were smarter than that.’

‘Hey, we can’t all be like you, effortlessly brilliant! Some of us have to slog our guts out. And come to think of it, you must be the only student here in Oxford not taking something to take the edge off things.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right, that old safety in numbers thing – everyone’s doing it so that makes it OK. What else are you taking?’

‘None of your business!’

‘You’re my best friend, Seb, so that makes you, and what you get up to, very much my business.’

‘Get off my case, will you?’ he’d shouted – something he’d never done to her before. ‘You’re sounding like a poor imitation of my waste of a space useless mother!’

Out of all the insults he could have thrown at her, and knowing how much he despised his mother, to be likened to her was too much and Floriana had walked out of his room, quietly closing the door after her; no way was he going to fling that one at her: that just like his mother she had stormed out in a pique of door-slamming when she was losing the argument. Not that she was losing the argument, there was no argument: she was right, he was wrong. End of. Certain things in life had no fuzzy grey edges for her. As far as drugs were concerned, it was very much a black and white landscape.

She didn’t see him again until a week later when he lay in wait for her at the porter’s lodge of her college. The sun had not yet risen and she was on her way for the annual May Day celebrations on Magdalen Bridge.

‘You surely weren’t thinking of going without me, were you?’ he said, pushing himself away from the wall when he saw her. Before they’d argued, they’d planned to go together, just as they had the previous two years. This time she had nominally agreed to go with a group from St Anne’s.

Not another word exchanged, Seb linked arms with her and they turned out of the gate onto the Woodstock Road. Following the way he’d just come, they cut through St Giles’ Church, crossed over the Banbury Road and were passing the back of Keble College Chapel when he spoke. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Please don’t be cross with me any more. You’re all I have.’

‘I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have lectured you. It’s just that drugs scare me. It’s my default setting. You know how boringly provincial I am.’

‘I know. That’s why I didn’t tell you. But it’s no biggie, I just need something to keep me going. I only do it when I’m up against it. I’m not like you; I don’t have your conscientiousness. Or your brains. If I was blessed with a near photographic memory like yours, I wouldn’t need the extra help.’

‘I’ve told you before,’ she’d said, ‘having a good memory just means I regurgitate what I’ve read. There’s nothing clever in that.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t knock it because right now I’d be more than happy to settle for that ability.’

They walked on in silence. Up ahead of them, a lively group of May Day revellers were giving a boisterous rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which owed more to
Wayne’s World
than Queen. After a bit, Floriana said, ‘Seb, will you promise me something?’

‘If it’s within my power, sure.’

‘You won’t let things get out of hand, will you? Whatever it is you’re taking, promise me it’s only for now, that it’s a short-term measure.’

‘Course it is. Come on, let’s not talk about it any more. I’m sick of the thought of exams and essays. I’d give anything to wake up tomorrow morning and find it’s all over.’