Summer at the Lake (37 page)

He smiled. ‘I already have several interested parties. The location is exceptional.’

‘I hope you sell it to the right person, somebody who will love and treasure it.’

‘That, I’m afraid, I cannot guarantee.’

‘Wow!’ Floriana exclaimed as she and Adam entered the room. ‘This is amazing! Signor Zazzaroni, I think I might just make an offer after all.’

‘Please,’ he said, his eyes once more raking her from top to toe, ‘call me Giovanni.’ He then stole a quick glance at his watch.

Taking his hint, Esme said, ‘There’s just one more room I’d like to see and then if I could have a last look around the garden, we’ll be on our way.’

Upstairs, and while the others returned to the landing to admire a chandelier – it was a particularly fine copy, so Giovanni explained, of a traditional eighteenth-century Rezzonico chandelier with hand-cut Murano flowers and ornaments in white and clear glass – Esme remained alone in the bedroom where she had slept.

The cream and sunny-yellow decor and antique furniture was of no interest to her, she gave it and the canopied four-poster bed with its lace and frills no more than a cursory glance through eyes grown watery. It was the past, saturated with heartbreaking poignancy, that was more tangible to her than the furnishings, and all at once the memory of something buried deep inside her broke free and she was overcome with the painful ache and longing for what she had lost.

Her child.

The child she had never held.

The child she had never had the chance to cherish.

The child she and Marco had created in this very room and whose life, cut short so abruptly, had never been given the chance to blossom.

She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory. Not for a long, long time had she experienced the pain so acutely of what she had so nearly had within her grasp. That dreadful dream she’d had this morning had left her feeling unbearably shaken and upset. She used to dream all the time of her poor dead baby, but as time went by she was haunted less frequently by the dreams, until almost never at all.

She had learnt to live with her loss – a double loss, first Marco, then the baby – and had sworn she would never let regret and the emptiness of her heart consume her. For the most part she had succeeded in not letting the bottomless pit of grief claim her and had come to terms in accepting their romance had no real foundations in reality, that it had existed for so short a time, it really was no more than a dream. Again and again she had convinced herself that if reality had been allowed to creep in, love might not have flourished into something everlasting.

But the child had been real. The child should have been everlasting and with her still.

A light touch on her elbow made her jump.

It was Floriana. ‘I’m sorry,’ the girl said softly, ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Are you all right?’

Esme swallowed and blinked hard, tears threatening to spill over. ‘Forgive a foolish old woman for—’ The words were so tightly bunched up in her throat it was a struggle to get them out. She tried again. ‘For letting her emotions get the better of her.’

Floriana pressed her arm gently. ‘Oh, Esme, there’s nothing foolish about you.’

Tears welled in her eyes and she took several attempts to swallow. She mustn’t cry. Not now. Not after all this time. Opening her handbag, she took out a handkerchief. ‘We should leave now,’ she said briskly, after she’d blown her nose and pulled herself together, ‘we’ve taken up far too much of Signor Zazzaroni’s time.’

Her expression tight with concern, Floriana said, ‘Don’t you want to look round the garden?’

Esme shook her head. ‘I don’t think we should give Signor Zazzaroni the opportunity to ogle you any more, my dear, the saucy fellow’s done quite enough of that already. Another chance to undress you with his hungry eyes and I’d be surprised if Adam doesn’t punch him on the nose.’

Floriana laughed. ‘Really? I hadn’t noticed him looking at me.’

Tutting at the absurd innocence of her, Esme said, ‘That’s your problem, young lady, you have no idea how others regard you.’ Then linking her arm through Floriana’s, she took her over to the window for one last look at the garden. In the distance, a
traghetto
was negotiating its way across the lake. When it was out of sight on the other side of the promontory, Esme turned to face Floriana.

‘Now whether you want it or not,’ she said, ‘I’m going to give you some important advice. Don’t let your life be full of regret, whatever chances come your way, grab them with both hands. And if you learn nothing else from this week, it must be that you don’t make the same mistake with Adam as you made with your friend Seb.’

A look of startled shock on her face, Floriana opened her mouth to speak, but Esme hurried on, determined, once and for all, to open the girl’s eyes. ‘I want you to think very carefully why Adam is here with us. You surely can’t be naive enough to believe he’s here purely for my benefit.’

That night Esme went to bed early saying she was tired. She
was
tired, she was
very
tired, but she couldn’t sleep, she was too restless, just as their villa seemed to be – the wooden bones of its old construction relaxing and creaking in the cooling darkness after the torpid heat of the day.

Try as she might, she couldn’t settle; her mind was racing, full of what she’d shared with Adam and Floriana over dinner. Adam had booked the restaurant, a beautiful place in Brienno directly overlooking the lake, but really it would have been better if they had gone on their own and enjoyed the romantic atmosphere just the two of them. She had suggested she stay behind, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

So now they knew the full story, that when she had last seen Hotel Margherita she had left the lake pregnant, although she hadn’t known it at the time. Later, back in Nottingham when a doctor confirmed her suspicions, the only other person to know her secret had been her father. Secrecy had been a matter of survival, a way to get through the shock and sadness.

It never failed to annoy her when she heard the voice of middle England rise up onto its haughty we-know-better haunches and condemn the many unfortunate young girls who found themselves pregnant. Always the poor girls were portrayed as ignorant and wilfully careless. Well, she too had been wilfully careless. So had Marco. They would have been classed as precisely the kind of people to know better. Nonetheless, they had been stupidly reckless, and not just once, but several times, tossing aside all reasoned thought in the pursuit of expressing their love for each other. Once could be justified as merely losing themselves in the moment, but after that first time Marco had returned to her room late that night when everyone was asleep. The following night also. And then he had left the lake to return to Venice and she never saw him again.

At the end of August, Esme and her father returned to England, and as time passed she began to suspect she was pregnant. In the brooding claustrophobic gloom of Hillside and planning their move to Oxford where she was due to take up her place to read English at St Hilda’s, Esme confided in her father that she believed she was carrying Marco’s child. He was bitterly upset, blamed not just Marco but himself for not doing a better job at keeping her safe – he regretted allowing her so much freedom, he thought he should have spent less time selfishly painting and more time with her. ‘It’s no one’s fault but my own,’ she told him. His anger and guilt persisted and he was all for writing to Giulia Bassani and informing her of the situation, making it clear that her nephew had a responsibility to do the right thing.

Esme begged her father not to write the letter, arguing that Marco’s life was set on a particular course and she had no intention of forcing him to give up something he felt destined to pursue. ‘But what about your life?’ her father pleaded with her. ‘Your future has been destroyed because of him.’

‘Altered,’ she maintained, reiterating her decision to keep the baby and forego her place at St Hilda’s, ‘not destroyed.’

Her father gave in and the planned move, now deferred until the following year, took on a greater importance. They would time the move to Oxford immediately after the baby was born and start afresh. Meanwhile, and with his help, Esme would have to hold her head up high and brave whatever malicious gossip circulated in the village where they lived.

In December of that year they received a Christmas card from Elizabeth in London saying that she was planning a return visit to Hotel Margherita in the spring, but before then she would love to visit them, would February be convenient? As fond as they were of Elizabeth, they couldn’t agree to her visit; she would take one look at Esme and put two and two together, and being the incurable gossip she was, who knew who she would tell when she was back at the lake in the spring? They put her off with the excuse that they were in a state of chaos preparing to move house. For whatever reason, and perhaps fortuitously, they never heard from her again.

Four weeks before the baby was due Esme was rushed to hospital and underwent an emergency Caesarean. When she came round from the anaesthetic she was given the news that she would never truly get over, that due to a prolapsed umbilical cord her baby – a girl – had been stillborn. Cruelly, she never saw her daughter, not so much as a glimpse. She didn’t even know what happened to the body. Twenty-four hours later and following a massive haemorrhage, she had to have yet more emergency surgery and when she woke up she was given more devastating news – she would never be able to have a child of her own.

Still grieving for her baby daughter, who she secretly named Grace, Esme and her father left Hillside and moved into Norham Gardens in North Oxford on a warm summer’s day. They settled into their new life with determination and knowing that the best way to recover from her loss was to be busy, Esme threw herself into making their new house a proper home in the way that Hillside never was.

Her father could have led a life of gentlemanly leisure, living off the money his wife had left him, but an opportunity arose for him to join a firm of solicitors in St Aldate’s and he took it. He continued with his painting, turning part of the top floor of the house into an art studio. He even started to exhibit his paintings, but it wasn’t in his nature to show off his artwork and he didn’t pursue selling his work as he could have done.

The following year when the secretarial college opened in St Giles, Esme embarked on a course and twelve months later she started work at Wadham College in the bursar’s office.

In time their lives became enriched with new friends and new opportunities. There were young men too; men with whom Esme was happy to go to the theatre or have dinner, but she couldn’t bring herself to get close to them; she now had a fear of intimacy.

In her late twenties, she met Charles Penstow, an American professor of Economics who was at the university on a sabbatical year. Twelve years her senior and deemed a catch by her small circle of friends, he surprised her one evening over dinner by asking her to be his wife and return with him to his home in Boston. ‘But we hardly know each other,’ she’d said, astounded.

‘I know all I need to know,’ he’d replied, tapping the table with his forefinger. ‘You’re an eminently sensible and down-to-earth woman, there’s never any fuss with you. What’s more, you can do
The Times
crossword faster than anyone I know and you have impeccable manners and a stylish dress sense.’

He insisted that she didn’t give her answer straight away; she was to give his proposal her full consideration while he was on a speaking tour in Australia promoting a weighty tome he’d recently had published. Somewhat bemused, she was pondering his extraordinary proposal when disaster struck: her father suffered a debilitating stroke. By the time Charles was back in Oxford, and based on the medical advice she’d been given, Esme had reached the only conclusion she could: her father would need constant care for the rest of his life and it was down to her to be the one to provide it. Charles took her rejection with the kind of equanimity that implied he was far from heartbroken. Which she wasn’t either, not when she felt she had been damned with faint praise – being described as ‘sensible’ and ‘down-to-earth’ were hardly the romantic endearments a girl likes to hear from a prospective husband. They certainly didn’t compare to the things Marco had said to her.

Her father spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, and to add insult to injury, his eyesight began to fail. Many a day he wished he was dead, that he wasn’t the burden he had become. ‘I’ve imprisoned us both,’ he would mumble through his brutally distorted mouth. She lovingly cared for him right up until he died, by which time she was in her early forties and the idea of marriage was no longer of interest to her; she was too set in her ways. Instead, she embraced life as a spinster and studied for the degree she had intended to do more than twenty years previously, and when she graduated, she joined the librarian staff in the magnificent library at Queen’s College. Five years later the chance to work at the Bodleian came up and she took it. It was when she was approaching retirement that she decided to sell the house in Norham Gardens and buy something smaller and more manageable; that was when she moved to Trinity House.

On the whole she would say she’d had a life of comparative ease and privilege. Financially she had never had to worry, her work life had been absorbing and fulfilling, and she had been loved by a good father and had known, albeit briefly, love at its most poignant. She had no right to wallow in this pathetic self-pity to which she had surrendered. Plenty of women lost a child. Plenty also were never able to be a mother.

Tomorrow, for the sake of her two dear friends, she had to pull herself together and make the most of her time here. There would be no more tears from her. But even as she silently articulated the words, her heart ached for the baby girl she had so very nearly known. And for the man who had helped create her.

It was nearly midnight and Floriana and Adam were in the garden, sitting on the wooden swing seat, gently rocking to and fro. It was a beautiful night, still surprisingly warm and unnaturally still. Beneath them in the distance, the lake shimmered along the path of silvery light cast from the moon, and on the other side of the stretch of water clusters of lights twinkled like stars in the darkness.