Adam tried hard to get out of the holiday, but Anne wasn't taking no for an answer.
"We're still friends, aren't we?" she said. "Please don't tell me we're not friends now."
He knew what he had to say. "We're more than friends. We're family. I haven't forgotten that."
Even as he uttered the words Adam doubted them. They had been family, he and Anne: the fact of Tess had made them family. Now they were a widower and a grieving mother, and what held them together was the lack of her.
"So you'll come?"
"I don't know, Anne. I don't know about being back there."
"It will be relaxing. Just family. And September is the best time to go: the mountains freshening up for the autumn; leaves on the turn; the start of the mushroom season. Please."
He cleared his throat down the phone, wondering how to deliver the truth as painlessly as possible: it was still too soon. Any time might be too soon.
"There's something else," Anne said.
"What?"
"Some vandals broke into the garden. Maria went to clean this week and found used syringes lying around, and flowerpots thrown in the swimming pool."
"That's not nice."
"They shook the peach tree so hard to get at the fruit that they tore off one of the branches."
Adam felt sick. He and Tess had planted that tree. They'd seen it for sale outside a garden centre on the last day of their holiday five years before, and Tess had said to him that they should rescue it, because it looked sad sitting there in a bag of compost, and it would transform the garden. Adam said it would be a miracle if it grew in those two inches of flinty soil, and Tess said that he was being stupid, that there were fruit trees up and down the valley, and that if she didn't know better she would have thought he was just being tetchy about it because he didn't like peaches.
They bought the scrawny sapling and drove up to the house with it poking out of the boot of the hire car. When they arrived, Adam checked their boarding passes and found that they were late for their plane. But Tess insisted that they plant the tree before they left. In failing light they bickered and dug a shallow, unsatisfactory hole before dashing to the airport. They left it leaning at an odd, unhappy angle, and, thought Adam, patently doomed. He gunned the car engine as he told her that they were going to miss their flight for the sake of a dead twig, and said that he hoped she was happy now.
They did not miss their flight. When they returned the following year the tree had sprouted two tentative peaches. Two years after that, its branches had begun to form a canopy over the garden, and hung heavy with fruit.
Anne was still talking. "It will take ages to grow back properly. On top of everything else. I swear, it just feels like someone's got it in for us."
"The problem is that you never go there," he said. "Whoever did it had probably been gazing through the fence at all your unpicked peaches, and didn't like to see them rotting on the tree."
"Why did they have to break off the branch? And take drugs on the lawn? And smash my nice pots on the floor of the pool? It's awful."
"Who does Maria think it was?"
"There are Albanians camped out at the top of the village in one of the derelict barns. Migrant workers. Maria says it was bound to be them. At any rate she says there's no way it could have been Italians."
"How does she know that?"
"It stands to reason, Adam."
"Well, it's only a branch. It will grow back."
There was a silence on the end of the line. "God, you sound just like her," said Anne.
Adam heard Tess's voice, clear and perfect, chastising her mother for her lazy… was it snobbery, or xenophobia, or both? He remembered how Tess would mutter darkly about creeping middle-England prejudice in her family, and vow to stamp on it at all costs. It made him smile.
Anne was still talking. "I think it's mean of you not to come. It's important to me that we try and get everyone down there. It will be good for us to be together again, to cope together—"
"OK," he said. "I'll come."
***
Older Italians, of the generation that said salve by way of greeting instead of the more modern buongiorno, still lived in these mountains. Farmers tended herds of goats and cattle. The bright clanking of their bells formed a constant, babbling soundtrack to the surrounding pastures. In local restaurants it was still possible to eat whole meals whose ingredients had been killed, milked or picked in the adjacent fields and woods: wild boar; pecorino; funghi.
But two kinds of new were encroaching on the old. The first was incoming tourists, foreign and domestic, who wanted something authentic for their money. The second was the migrants, who cruised local building sites and factories looking for work, and squatted in the buildings not yet converted. In the end, the tourists would conquer every last dwelling, converting the migrants out of the place for good. But until then, the workers had the advantage. They were there all year round, and they had no swimming pools of their own to be defiled.
Adam was struggling with the new terms of his relationship with the family. He'd always got on better with Tess's mother than with her brother Rufus, or her father Michael. And now that there was no Tess, Adam could not shake the suspicion that the men no longer wanted him around—a suspicion that seemed to be confirmed when he arrived on the first day of the holiday to be told that he would be sleeping in the casita. This was an outbuilding that could accommodate extra guests, but also served as the pool maintenance area. Nets and filter sieves clustered against the walls by the door, and a whiff of chlorine hung in the air. There were also a drinks fridge and a chopping board for lemons, so you didn't have to traipse up the terraced garden to the house when you wanted refreshment at your sun-lounger. Adam was glad of the separation. He did not want to sleep in the house. This way he felt he was sleeping somewhere other than the past.
Rufus had brought along his seven-month-old baby, a girl named Teresa in honour of her late aunt—though Adam's Tess had never once referred to herself by her given name in the time he'd known her. Rufus was being strong. He was "getting on with it." He had the baby to prove it—a baby who was spoken of by her grandparents as "a blessing," and once, by Michael in Adam's company as "his little silver lining." Adam's silence after this remark had consigned such talk to a place out of his earshot from then on.
Rufus's wife was not present. She had only just returned to work after her maternity leave, and couldn't take the holiday. Adam had not been told in advance that she wouldn't be there, which he suspected was deliberate. If he'd known that the only other outsider had elected to stay away, it would have been the deciding factor, the final reason to steer clear of this grief-pit of a holiday.
On the first morning, Rufus and Adam were delegated to clear soil and plant-pot fragments from the swimming pool. Anne had already gone round the garden wearing rubber gloves, combing the flowerbeds for syringes and needles, but the pool damage had been left for the young men to contend with. They worked together in silence, using nets to draw loose soil from the water and diving to the bottom when the damaged remains were too big to be rescued from the side: jagged fragments of terracotta; clumps of rosemary and thyme turned sickly grey and brown, drowned in the chlorinated water. When an item of debris stubbornly refused to budge from the floor, Rufus would mutter under his breath about fucking gypsies, and how he had half a mind to go up to the derelict barns and ask them about it, and how if anyone so much as put a foot on the property while he was around, he'd fetch the scythe. When they'd got as much as they could from the pool, enough to turn the filtering system back on so that it would not choke on earth and roots, Adam turned his attention to the peach tree. He took a pair of shears to it, clipping and tidying the damage as he avoided looking at the raw wound in the bark where the primary branch had been ripped off and discarded.
That afternoon, their work done, Rufus came and stood over Adam as he lay in September sunshine trying to read.
"I think we've earned ourselves some beers," he said. "Can I get you one?"
Adam found himself refusing in as calm a voice as he could muster, then fleeing to the casita, not wanting his brother-in-law to see how much the offer had infuriated him. On the surface it was a kind gesture, but had Tess been around Rufus would never have made it—he would have assumed that if Adam wanted a drink he'd get one for himself. To Adam the offer signalled his relegation to the status of guest.
His anger embarrassed him. He wished he'd never agreed to come. He felt as awkward with the family as if they were total strangers, and that in turn made them uneasy—particularly his father-in-law. Before, Adam had found common ground with Michael in two main areas: the gentle teasing of Tess and her foibles, and the discussion of Test cricket. Now Michael's principal interaction with Adam was to spend every meal wordlessly topping up his glass of wine whenever he refilled his own, which was often.
The simple truth was that with Tess gone the family annoyed him. The tiny reminders of her in the way that Rufus laughed, in the flare of Anne's nostrils, in Michael's waspish sense of humour, caused him constant pain. And his shame at how poorly he managed to conceal this irritation was at its most crippling around the baby. Somehow, it disgusted him: its selfishness; its unremitting focus on what it lacked at any given moment. Now that there was no possibility that a baby might exist in the world that was half-Tess, it seemed that all babies were lacking in grace.
***
"You know," said Anne as they walked in the woods together after dinner on the first night, "If you have a girlfriend you can tell me. I shan't mind."
"I don't," said Adam.
"I just wanted you to know."
"I don't."
"You could even bring her here if you liked."
His teeth clenched, Adam said nothing and snatched at a low-hanging chestnut. It was a horrid suggestion, a blasphemy. The house belonged to Adam and Tess in all but name. She had brought him here only three weeks after their first kiss. They had done their falling in love in these woods, and at the house. He saw her in every room; heard her singing in the shower; caught flashes of her bikini as she dived into the pool.
"I know saying things like that is your way of telling yourself you are moving forward," he said. "But please don't say them to me."
***
It was a soft, warm day in May. Tess left home earlier than usual, to get to an all-day meeting. During the afternoon, she called him to talk about dinner plans. She whispered a risqué remark about what she wanted to do to him that evening, and then, giggling at how unsuitable it was for her open-plan office, she cut him off without saying goodbye. When her number flashed up again on his phone a few hours later he felt a spurt of lust as he answered that made him feel guilty for months afterwards. It was not her voice, but that of a bystander who had seen the van hit her, picked up the bloody telephone and dialled the last-called number.
"I'm sorry, I don't know how she is," the man said to Adam, sounding panicky, almost tearful. "But the lights and siren were off when the ambulance drove away. That must be a good sign."
It was not.
***
Sixteen months had passed. The new Teresa had arrived. Anne looked older, and Adam had put on weight. At the dinner table, he could feel Anne's eyes on the portions he took. Rufus and Adam were the only ones making inroads into the meals that Anne prepared, but Adam had a definite sense that his own appetite was deemed to be unhealthy, while Rufus's was justified thanks to his long morning runs in the woods. It was Rufus who kept the conversations going, providing boisterous chatter whatever the prevailing mood, between visits to an upstairs room whenever the baby monitor started shouting. Michael ate little and drank a lot. After the fourth or fifth glass his red eyes began to moisten.
Adam had been seeing a lot of Anne back home. She didn't allow herself to cry in front of Michael, so Adam had become her outlet, and she had been taking him out every couple of weeks since January. The meetings had taken on a repetitive quality that Adam dreaded, but he could see no way out of them. They would spend weekday afternoons drinking martinis in the deserted bars of expensive London hotels until the weeping came, and then she would plead with him, and ask him what she was supposed to do with her stockpile of maternal love.
"I can't just turn it off," she would say. "I still want to protect her, even though it's too late. I don't know what to do with it all."
During these harrowing sessions she would reminisce endlessly about Tess in a way that Adam hated: the same anecdotes over and over, like a prayer cycle, as if Anne were attempting to fix her daughter forever to stop her floating away. Adam wasn't ready to take that approach, and he didn't want to be. He didn't want piecemeal memories, in compartments. He wanted Tess to keep surprising him, for his memory to keep throwing up random fragments of her, not for her existence to be boiled down to episodes.
Of particular difficulty was Anne's insistence on asking him to describe exactly how the last day had been. All he could think about was how turned on he had been when his phone rang—not a detail he could reasonably supply to the grieving mother, however much she craved the specifics.
***
From the terrace at night you could look down the valley and see individual points of flickering yellow light through the trees. Adam knew it was a cemetery—more than once he had sat with Tess gazing down at it, enjoying the atmosphere created by the candles, of cosy devotion, of the bereaved staying acquainted with their dead. He pictured it as one of the walls of drawer-tombs you saw in all the other surrounding villages, but he realised that not once had they ever bothered to visit the place. On the afternoon of the second day Adam stole away to find it. He timed his arrival well, pushing open the gate just as the daylight was thinning. He imagined he would be perfectly placed to watch the mourners arrive for their nightly ritual. How did it work—was it a different person's turn to go round each night with the taper, or did some insist on being present every day?
He inspected the inscriptions. Many of the recent ones featured black and white photographs, encased in oval frames and stuck to black marble. Light glinting off a tooth; the gleam of orthodontistry in some younger mouths; hearing aids like plastic slugs in old ears: some of these photos were not all that fortunate. None of them was fit for forever. And after a few years they all took on a dated, weather-streaked look.
The sun had gone, leaving a cool September edge in the air, perfumed with wood-smoke. Adam was beginning to wonder when the mourners would come, whether there had been a mistake with the rota, when one by one the electric bulbs in the headstones flickered into life around him. He walked back up the hill slowly, dreading dinner, rubbing his hands with wild mint from the roadside and listening to the wax and wane of the cowbells.
Late on the third night, Adam heard splashing in the pool above him. For once, sleep had actually seemed within reach, and his half-dream of Tess coupled with the noise of the water conjured her, diving.
He got up and went outside without turning any lights on. If an animal had stumbled into the pool he'd have to get it out, but couldn't imagine how. The plant pots had been bad enough. He didn't feel like swimming in circles after a drowning wild boar piglet.
But the creature in the swimming pool was a man. In bright moonlight Adam watched as a head of thin hair emerged from the water at his feet, trailed by a gaunt, naked body. The man sniffed and looked up at Adam without concern, as if it were his pool to swim in. He wore a soaked, scraggy beard.
"You shouldn't be here," Adam said. "The owners of the house would be unhappy about it."
The man stared beyond Adam's ankles, resting his chin on the side. His spindly legs floated behind him in the inky water. Finally he boosted himself out of the water with self-assured strength.
The floodlights sprang into life and the water lit up, an electric blue sheet. The man made no attempt to duck into shadow or cover his naked body. He stood dripping, pinching his nose with his hand, pulling snot and water from his airways.
Anne's imperious voice sounded from the terrace. "Who's down there?"
"Only me," said Adam, stepping into view. "Sorry to wake you. I thought I might have a swim."
There was a pause while Anne took in the surface of the water, chaotically shifting; the wet patches on the poolside; Adam in his dry clothes with his dry hair and his shoes on. Miraculously she could not see the swimmer, who was hidden from the house by the poolside wall, and still following his absent-minded post-swim grooming routine.
"Oh." The sound shot down the spotlit garden. "Don't you want the lights on?"
"Thought I'd look at the stars. I didn't wake you, did I?"
"I was just off to bed. Swim away. There are pool-towels in the cupboard by your sink."
"Lovely."
"Good night." The lights went out, leaving a darker darkness than before.
When he was sure Anne had gone, Adam turned back to the man, who had been quietly dressing. He just had time to see him grabbing a peach from the tree, then vaulting the fence and disappearing.
***
When he heard splashing again on the fourth night, Adam went straight up to the pool. This time he did not issue a warning.
"Are you hungry?" he heard himself saying. "There's a fridgeful of leftovers up there."
When no reply came, Adam walked past the man as he did his smooth underwater lengths and went up to house, returning with an open bottle of red wine and a bowl of leftover risotto. They sat together in the dark.
The longer Adam stared at the sky the more stars there were. He saw a shooter fling itself across his vision in a tumbling streak of green, and told himself not to think it was her. If it had been the other way round, if she had been the one seeing that thread in the sky, he knew she would have taken it as a sign from him, and felt guilty that he hadn't leapt to that conclusion. The loss of her fantasy was the absence that hurt the most—his greatest deficit.
"Are you working round here? On a farm?"
The man said nothing and shovelled in cold risotto. He hadn't touched the wine so Adam poured himself a glass.
"I don't even know where you are from. Do you speak Italian? Da dove siete?"
"Puglia," said the man, between mouthfuls. "Grazie per l'alimento."
Tonight they shook hands, and the man looked Adam in the eye. His gratitude was piercing and serious, and forced Adam to adopt a stern expression in return. The transaction, it seemed, required formality. What had passed between them must be acknowledged.
Adam watched as the swimmer from Puglia climbed over the fence and was reclaimed by the darkness. He looked up at the house and just had time to see the curtain fall back into place at Rufus's window.
Sleep wasn't coming, so he finished the bottle of wine, then plundered the casita fridge for vodka and beer. He felt himself getting hungry but he couldn't approach the house after this much booze: he didn't trust himself not to stumble, and Rufus was probably still on his guard. Besides, in his new role as awkward guest he suspected he needed permission to help himself to food. Just having taken the risotto would probably raise an eyebrow or two in the morning.
The day before, he'd glimpsed a pile of greaseproof paper packets in the fridge over Anne's shoulder and felt a pang of hunger as he pictured the contents, neatly sliced and parcelled up: fennel salami; roasted suckling pig; herbed ham. Once, he and Tess had inhabited that kitchen freely; on more than one occasion they'd ended up screwing in there after meals. Now he did not even have the freedom to help himself to a snack, and was reduced to salivating helplessly in the doorway at the prospect of deli meats.
Adam sat on his bed, alternating between a beer and a bottle of vodka and thinking of Tess. He did not want the world to realign itself without her. Neither did Anne, in spite of her assurances to the contrary—which should have made him feel welcome. But it did not. An old distance had resurged. The compromises the family had made when he and Tess got together were quietly coming undone.
Before, on nights when she slept beside him and he allowed his mind to go there, Adam had sometimes let himself wonder what would happen if she died. Turning into the pillow, he would silently wish that if one of them went it should be him, because the idea of living without her was unthinkable. But now he realised that by spending all that time dreading it he'd armed himself against it, and was far more prepared for her absence than she would have been for his. She couldn't have lived with it—or so he couldn't help imagining. Adam hated himself for the fact that he could.
***
The next day at breakfast, he found Rufus sitting alone at the kitchen table, his baby asleep in a carrycot behind him. He was spooning in mushy cereal, playing with his wedding ring and reading the Herald Tribune. Adam had noticed that Rufus always seemed to play with his wedding ring when he was around.
"Good morning. Your folks not up?" said Adam.
"They've driven into the hills to pick mushrooms. I told them you probably wouldn't want to go after your late night."
"What late night?"
"I saw you. Down at the pool."
"Oh yes?"
"Creeping around with our wine and our food." He dropped his spoon in the bowl. "And I have to ask: what do you think you're doing harbouring that gypsy, inviting him on to our land?"
Adam shrugged. "I thought it's probably what Tess would have done."
"I don't think so. I don't think she'd have done any such thing. Those Albanians ripped down her peach tree, for one thing."
"Not that it matters, but actually that man is Italian. He's from Puglia."
"I don't give a shit." Rufus slammed a palm on the table. "You've got no right to encourage him. Who do you think you are?" The noise made the baby jump in her carrycot. She opened terrified eyes, paused for a heartbeat, and began to bawl.
"Now you've made me wake up the baby."
Adam watched as Rufus lifted his daughter out of the cot and began bobbing her up and down, not altogether comfortingly.
"I didn't mean to upset you," Adam said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
Not meeting the confrontation he had expected, Rufus was stalled. He began rocking the baby in a steadier, calmer way. Her screams abated. "You didn't upset me." he said. "I guess we're all still a bit on edge this year."
"I guess we are," said Adam. "And I admire you for how strong you've been."
"That's good of you to say. I'm lucky to have found it in myself. Listen, I'm sorry for coming on strong about the Albanian. I just know that my parents want to be alone at the moment, to grieve properly. I don't think it helps to start turning the place into a soup kitchen."
Adam sat at the table. "How old is Teresa now?"
"Seven-and-a-half months." Rufus looked down at the child in his arms, and smiled. "I can't believe how quickly she's grown. Why do you ask?"
He gulped at the coffee. It tasted good. "Seven-and-a-half months. That's quite something."
"Why's that?"
"Because it means by my calculations that you must have been capable of having sex within, at the most, a week of the sudden death of your sister."
Rufus stopped bobbing the baby up and down and looked at him. "What are you talking about, you sick fuck?"
"I just think it amounts to an impressive level of detachment. Thank God you found it in yourself, as you say."
Rufus's eyes widened as he prepared a stuttering volley of abuse.
"Whatever it is, you don't need to say it," Adam said. "I'm leaving. And I'll steer clear of these family holidays in the future."
***
Over the course of the morning, heavy showers clattered onto the terrace. Adam phoned the airport to move his flight, then watched from the casita as the rain subsided and the sky turned a menacing, brick-dust red, darker than any sunset. He couldn't remember ever seeing a colour like it in nature. When Anne and Michael returned from their mushroom hunt, Anne was outraged to hear that Adam had brought forward his departure.
"What is it?" she said. "Did something happen with Rufus? He was in a foul mood when we got back."
"It's not Rufus. I just don't want to be here anymore. I'm sorry. I said I would give it a try, and I have—but I can't stay. It's too much for me."
Anne sighed. "OK. Michael and I were about to go and have a look at the river. Won't you come with us, before you go?"
They walked down a steep pathway in the woods, towards the water. Several years running, Adam and Tess had come down here to swim in the deep pool that collected by a ruined mill. The mill had since been shored up and converted into a holiday home, and that area of water now seemed to be out of bounds to the public for swimming. In any case, an attempt to swim here today could be life-ending. The river was swollen with rainwater, and was the same red colour as the sky. The places where Adam and Tess had swum in limpid little pools now roared and surged and sucked.
"Why is everything red?" Adam shouted, over the crashing water. "The sky. The river. I've never seen anything like it."
"It's dust," said Michael. "From the Sahara. During the summer the wind kicks it right up into the atmosphere, and then it rains down here when autumn comes. Dante lived round here, you know. All that rivers of blood stuff wasn't just his imagination."
The three of them watched the foaming red water.
"Are you sure you won't stay for dinner? We've collected so many porcini, and I know you love them."
Anne held open a muslin bag of mushrooms under Adam's nose, and their smell floated up and engulfed him. That smell—it conjured nostalgia for a home you might never even have known. It was earth, minerals, smoke; the smell of a hobbit's hearth.
The last thing Adam did before saying his farewells was to take one more look at the peach tree. The night they planted it seemed so recent, though already it was five years past. He remembered the sound of the spade cutting into the earth as night fell. He remembered the ludicrous panic in his gut about missing the plane. Looking back now, he realised that Tess had been quite right when she said that the reason he was grumpy was that he didn't like peaches. Their smell had always slightly turned his stomach. Their furry skin set his teeth on edge. Adam was more at home with funghi; with their foggy September taste. It was what he was configured for.
