Summer Fever Read online

  Kate Riordan

  * * *

  SUMMER FEVER

  Contents

  Day 12

  PART ONE The Previous October

  The Following May

  1999

  Day 1

  Day 2

  1999

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 5

  Day 6

  Day 7

  PART TWO Day 8

  Last Year

  Day 9

  Day 10

  Day 11

  1999

  Day 11 continued

  Day 12

  1999

  Day 12 continued

  Day 13

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Kate Riordan is a writer and journalist. She is an avid reader of Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie, both of whom have influenced her writing. She lives in the Cotswolds, where she writes full-time. Her previous novels include The Girl In The Photograph, The Shadow Hour, The Stranger and The Heatwave, which was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick. Summer Fever is her fifth novel.

  For all the excellent women in my life

  Day 12

  When it’s over, you pick yourself up, ears ringing, and look around. You shed dust as you do, like you’re made of it. To your surprise, the world is still there. Behind you, the outbuildings remain standing, more or less. As the earth settles and the moonlight begins to filter through again, their silhouettes still approximate buildings, though one is lost, reduced to rubble.

  ‘Come on,’ you say, putting out your hand. ‘Get up. It’s over.’

  The two of you stumble uphill towards the villa. You expect to see it collapsed, or at least mortally wounded: a foot-wide crack fissuring straight through the stucco. There is fallen masonry and the line of the roof looks wrong, like an old mouth without its false teeth, but it’s basically OK. Luna Rossa is still standing.

  Part One

  The Previous October

  They have been searching for two tense hours. Laura blames Nick for this. He probably blames her. She has lost count of their false turns: wild tracks of pale rubble that narrow to nothing. She has a headache from squinting at the map that bears no relation to the landscape around them.

  The afternoon is overcast. Bottom-heavy clouds bear down on them as they skirt the hills in their little rented Fiat. It’s late October and the night swoops down fast here in autumn. Tomorrow they fly home, back to London.

  She’s worried that none of this augurs well for their grand plan, that this house they’re trying to find – which the agent has assured them is molto bella, The One, a rare treasure no one else has even seen yet – will be another disappointment: either dark and forbidding, without floors or running water, or becoming wildly expensive as soon as they register any proper interest. Signor Ricci’s manner, languid as a Sunday afternoon, has begun to grate. She doubts he has the English to comprehend it, and she certainly doesn’t have the Italian, but she wants to say to him, Do you know how important this is? We’re not looking for a holiday home. We need a new life.

  They turn off the road and start bumping down yet another strada bianca. It’s crowded with misshapen olive trees, whose arthritic fingers reach out to scratch the Fiat’s paintwork. That they’re probably a thousand years old, that the rough road beneath the wheels was probably laid down before the birth of Christ, no longer feels romantic.

  She rests a hand on her stomach and Nick, glancing over, slows down slightly. It’s flat but it would be, at eight weeks. That’s the thing about IVF. One of the many things. You know virtually from the second you’re pregnant. Last night, at the guesthouse they’re staying in, run by a smiling octogenarian who insists they call her Nonna, she had been kept awake by strange stretching pains in her abdomen. Was this good? A sign of healthy growth? Or would it herald her third miscarriage? In the dark room, she picked up her phone.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Nick mumbled, still half asleep, as the screen lit up. ‘Don’t go in those chatrooms.’

  Then he’d pulled her in to his warm body and she had let the phone drop silently onto the soft rug beside the bed.

  The lane goes on and she’s just about to say they should give up when the trees abruptly part. They are in a clearing that ends in a tumbled wall, beyond which is a sheer drop to a valley, vast and green-swathed. Nick brakes so hard that the car shunts them forward in their seat belts. His arm goes out to hold her back. The whole thing is so unexpected that it feels like a bribe, offered up just as they were losing patience. As if Italy herself had spoken: Aspettate, Signore!, Signora! Wait!

  They get out, blinking. While they’ve been driving, eyes sore from looking out for fallen signposts and speeding drivers on the wrong side of the road, the sun has broken through, sinking low enough to light the undersides of the clouds, burnishing them gold in a way that looks celestial.

  ‘Jesus,’ says Nick, ‘it’s like a bloody fresco. All we’re missing is a couple of angels.’

  ‘Do you think someone went over that?’ She points to the ruined wall, the car’s-width gap in the stones.

  ‘Some capo getting whacked for turning informer, probably,’ says Nick. ‘Had his brake cables cut.’ He scissors his fingers and she laughs.

  The house is just visible beyond a large cypress at the far edge of the clearing. The land falls away so steeply beneath it that the front façade appears to float over the valley. As they approach, the house’s stucco blushes rose-gold. In places it has cracked and fallen, revealing the stone beneath, but this decay only contrives to make the place lovelier. Black iron balconies curl and twist beneath the upstairs windows. The largest pair, centrally placed, must lead to the master bedroom, or perhaps even a suite. She imagines a claw-foot bath from which she could watch summer showers move across the valley, shadowing the green velvet draped so artfully over ancient rock. At that moment, a hilltop village in the distance is spot-lit by the sun, grey walls and terracotta roofs dialled up to ochre and carmine.

  For years, she had browsed Italian property online, sending Nick links, fantasizing about a new life in a new country; a rambling old house of a size they could never afford in England made beautiful and rented out to guests. But it had been little more than a game until the second miscarriage. After that, relocating became Laura’s alternative, an actual plan B. She knew Nick wasn’t sure, but they struck a deal: if the third round of IVF didn’t work, he would seriously consider it.

  Her heart has begun to beat fast. She feels a sort of desperation that Nick won’t see what she’s seeing, that he won’t get that this place is it. I’ll die if I lose this house as well, she thinks, in all seriousness. As well. She already feels certain she will miscarry again. It’s just a matter of when. She glances at her husband, who is already at the front door, fitting the enormous iron key Ricci gave them into the lock.

  You owe me this, Nick, she thinks, one of those hard little thoughts that come unbidden now, but then the door swings in and he turns back to her with a smile. She can see her own excitement reflected in his face. It’s still a beloved face. Softening, she goes towards him, and towards Villa Luna Rossa.

  The Following May

  Luna Rossa is theirs. They live here in Italy now. Whenever Laura thinks about this fact, she gets a jolt, a tiny electric shock that they have so thoroughly abandoned their old lives for this new one. The audacity of it makes her like herself more than she has in years. Perhaps ever.

  It was two weeks after finding the villa that a sonographer told her the pregnancy had failed. There hadn’t been any bleeding: it was a missed miscarriage. In its eagerness to prepare for pregnancy, her body had failed to realize that the embryo had stopped developing. Distracted by the h
um of its own industry, it hadn’t noticed the tiny heart slowing and finally stopping.

  She has thought a lot about that last beat. Judging by the measurements, the heart had stopped when they were in Italy. Probably it was just in the night, when she was fathoms deep in sleep, but maybe it was as she climbed the metal steps to board the plane at Ancona airport, nervous because she never liked flying but pleasantly taken up by thoughts of the villa which had already entranced her.

  She had expected the pregnancy to go wrong, like the others. Of course she had. Simultaneously, she had also believed this one would stick. Partly because she’d felt more nauseous and exhausted than the other times, but also – absurdly – because third time lucky. Instead, and because she hadn’t miscarried in the proper way – the kind Nonna’s beautiful white sheets spared – she would have to take pills to make her uterus contract so hard that what the nurses called the pregnancy material would come away. Such tidy euphemisms. It was either the pills or a D&C under general anaesthetic and she’d decided she’d rather be at home.

  ‘Do you want a picture?’ the sonographer said after that final scan, while Laura got dressed. ‘Some do. But you don’t have to.’

  She had never said yes before. She only nodded this time because it was the end of the road. The sonographer pressed a button and a glossy monochrome square, like a Polaroid, was spat out. There, in the dark and strange terrain of her womb, was something small and white. She couldn’t remember when an embryo officially became a foetus. Whatever it was called, it wasn’t a baby, not yet. Lots of women thought of it like that, of course, and she totally got it. She just couldn’t do it herself. The heartbeats, though. They were difficult to get past. The associations with a beating heart and life, a stopped heart and death, were very difficult to sever.

  As she tucked the photograph into the inside pocket of her bag, it occurred to her that she alone knew she wouldn’t be a mother – she and this kind sonographer whose badge said Mila. No one else in the world.

  ‘Your name,’ she’d said vaguely, as she zipped up her boots and reached for her coat. ‘It’s pretty.’ And Mila had smiled sadly.

  Nick knew soon enough, of course. She’d rung him once she left the windowless room of pale plastic and scuffed walls. But even then her body hadn’t known, not as she got into an Uber and was taken home by a blessedly silent driver, and not when she discovered what was on Nick’s iPad while she waited for him to come back from work. And perhaps that was the strangest thing of all. She felt obscurely sorry for her body as it continued to prepare for the pregnancy: the hormones ramping up, the uterus walls thickening. That all of it was continuing, entirely pointlessly, seemed pathetic in the gentler sense of the word no one really used any more: to be pitied.

  She and Nick haven’t talked about any of this since they took possession of Luna Rossa. In truth, she doesn’t even allow herself to think about it, or at least not in the house. She goes outside, if she needs to: there’s a quiet corner by the linden trees, which you can’t see from the villa. Sometimes, she takes the scan picture with her, only bringing it out when she’s sure she’s not being observed.

  A superstitious little voice in her head likes to tell her that falling in love with the idea of another life abroad made it happen – that her and Nick’s deal somehow signalled to the gods that she wanted Italy more than she wanted a child. She’s getting better and better at silencing it, though. As the days get hotter, the awful winter before they left London more distant, she hardly lets it speak at all.

  It’s her favourite time of day now, mellow, soul-soothing dusk, the garden cooling fast because it’s still chilly once the sun has gone. This is when the voice is quietest, and also when she and Nick get on best: the never-ending list of jobs that need doing on the villa abandoned, a bottle of wine opened, plans for dinner vaguely coming together. She tucks the picture into the back pocket of her shorts and sets off towards the kitchen.

  Tonight they can’t be bothered to cook properly. Laura rubs garlic into long slices of toasted ciabatta and douses them in the olive oil they buy down the road, in big tins like petrol canisters. Even the precious first press, a delicate pale green but tasting of peppered sunshine, is a ridiculous bargain here in the Marche region. Squeezed between the knobbled spine of the Apennines and the Adriatic, no one at home had ever heard of it. ‘It’s east of Tuscany but cheaper,’ she’d ended up saying, as shorthand. She piles the burnt-edged bread with tomatoes chopped up with tiny black olives, anchovies and basil. Her shoulder muscles ache from decorating the smallest guest room, but in a good way.

  They sit at the inherited kitchen table, too big to remove, the wood pale and silken from decades of scrubbing, and remind each other of what they would be doing if they were still in London – what their friends are still doing in this very instant, trapped on the tube in the tunnels beneath the city, breathing in the stale heat of strangers, teeth gritted against wheel-shriek on the bends. What she would be doing: sitting through an overrunning staff meeting, maybe, or wading through a pile of year-ten essays on Macbeth.

  Laura doesn’t miss much about their old life, but it’s at the end of a day of physical work on the villa – cleaning paintbrushes, switching off the sewing-machine – when she feels most exultant, most certain they’ve done the right thing. These enchanted hours are when it’s possible to banish all her doubts, even if it’s just for a little while.

  ‘We’re buying a villa!’ they’d said to friends invited round for dinner at their poky Balham maisonette, as the purchase inched painfully through Italy’s predictably arcane system. It wasn’t all showing-off. Both of them had been half fearful, half hopeful the other would bottle it; repeating it aloud in public was a kind of test. ‘Four hundred grand,’ Nick could never help adding, though Laura thought it was a bit crass. ‘Seven acres, outbuildings and a bloody olive grove, and it was less than our two-bed. We’ve basically bought a hamlet.’

  None of their friends, to their eternal credit, asked if they were going to keep trying for a baby. They must have gathered that three failed rounds of IVF were enough for anyone. Still, she had wanted to make clear that Italy wasn’t about running away. Laura viewed it as the very opposite, actually: a massive fuck-you to the whole fertility ‘journey’. No, we can’t have kids but look what we get to do instead.

  ‘That little store at the back of Giuseppe’s House is full of scorpions,’ Nick is saying now, mouth full of bruschetta. ‘I just smack them, these days. I couldn’t give a shit. Remember the first one?’

  She laughs. They don’t mention the scorpions in their email updates to family. She hadn’t even known Italy had scorpions. They don’t mention the earth tremors either, though they’ve experienced a few small ones now. The region is prone to them. They knew this before they bought. In 2016, the town of Amatrice – just over an hour to the south-west – was more or less flattened. They’d seen the footage on the news in London when moving to Italy was still an idle dream: medieval rubble and survivors being pulled out from under it. The mayor said, ‘The town no longer exists,’ and was quoted everywhere. Laura tells herself she’ll eventually get used to the idea that this could happen again, anytime.

  Giuseppe’s House is a one-up, one-down that is part of their parcel of property. ‘Part of the estate,’ says Nick, only half joking. Unlike the two dwellings adjacent to it, which are missing their roofs, Giuseppe’s is in surprisingly good condition.

  Giuseppe isn’t a real person. Laura invented him when they opened the door and discovered a 1970s time capsule, as though someone had simply walked out forty-odd years earlier without a backward glance. It was all Formica, deeply varnished wood and swirly wallpaper in yellow and brown. Even the crucifix above the bed was a lurid burnt-orange. There were rusting tins of plum tomatoes in the cupboards, and a cutthroat razor on the bathroom sink, tiny black hairs still clinging to the blade, like iron filings. She pictured Giuseppe shaving there in the morning light, white vest stretching over a paunch an
d braces holding up his trousers.

  ‘Maybe Giuseppe broke the Mafia code of silence,’ Nick had said, pulling his fingers across his throat. ‘You know … What’s it called?’ He taps his head, frustrated, before his face clears. ‘Omertà.’

  Now, she watches as he takes another enormous bite of ciabatta, garlicky oil running down his chin. He’s hunched over his plate with both elbows on the table.

  ‘You eat like a peasant these days,’ she says.

  ‘I am a bloody peasant, that’s why.’ He holds up his free hand, which is calloused and paint-flecked. Two of the knuckles are freshly skinned. ‘All this hard labour makes me starving.’

  ‘Well, you’re not the only worker. I finished the Nun’s Cell. The ceiling is deep blue now, like Heaven. I’m going to paint some gold stars on it.’

  They have names for all six bedrooms. That they are so numerous they need to distinguish between them still seems incredible. In London it was just the main bedroom, the box-room they used as a study and the loft conversion they had never managed to finish.

  They’re in bed by ten, the lazy supper eaten and night draped softly around the house. She’s propped up with the iPad, while he’s lying on his back looking at the ceiling, apparently stupefied by tiredness.

  ‘Oh my God, I’ve found her Instagram account.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Madison, obviously.’

  Last week they’d had their first booking since getting the keys to the villa. Madison is the name of the American woman who wants to come with her husband to stay in their most expensive room. The relief of it is profound. Within twenty-four hours of receiving the email enquiry, Laura felt as though she’d lost two stone off her shoulders.