Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper. India Grey

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      Sarah opened her eyes, dragging herself ruthlessly back from the edge of that tempting abyss.

      ‘Come on, Lottie. It’s time you were in bed.’

      At the mention of her name Lottie struggled sleepily upright, reluctant as ever to leave a party. ‘I’m not, Mummy,’ she protested. ‘Really…’

      ‘Uh-uh.’ Lottie had the persuasive powers of a politician, and usually Sarah’s resistance in the face of her killer combination of sweetness and logic was pitifully low. But not tonight. A mixture of exhaustion and an odd, restless feeling of dissatisfaction sharpened her tone. ‘Bed. Now.’

      Lottie blinked up at the sky over Sarah’s shoulder. Her forehead was creased up with worry. ‘There’s no moon,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t they have the moon in Italy?’

      In an instant Sarah’s edgy frustration melted away. The moon was Lottie’s touchstone, her security blanket. ‘Yes, they do,’ she said softly, ‘but tonight it must be tucked up safely behind all the clouds. Look, there are no stars either.’

      Lottie’s frown eased a little. ‘If there are clouds, does that mean it’s going to rain?’

      ‘Oh, gosh, don’t say that,’ laughed Angelica, getting up and coming over to give Lottie a goodnight kiss. ‘It better not. The whole point of having the wedding here was the weather. It never rains in Tuscany!’

      It was going to rain.

      Standing at the open window of the study, Lorenzo breathed in the scent of dry earth and looked up into a sky of starless black. Down here the night was hot and heavy, but a sudden breeze stirred the tops of the cypress trees along the drive, making them shiver and whisper that a change was on the way.

      Grazie a Dio. The dry spell had lasted for months now, and the ground was cracking and turning to dust. In the garden Alfredo had almost used up his barrels of hoarded rainwater, laboriously filling watering cans to douse the plants wilting in the limonaia, and in daylight the view of the hillside below Palazzo Castellaccio was as uniformally brown as a faded sepia print.

      Suddenly from behind him in the room there came a low gasp of sensual pleasure, and Lorenzo turned round just in time to see his ex-wife’s lover bend over her naked body, circling her rosy nipple with his tongue.

      Expertly done, he thought acidly as the huge plasma screen above the fireplace was filled with a close shot of Tia’s parted lips. Ricardo Marcello was about as good at acting as your average plank of wood but he certainly came to life in the sex scenes, with the result that the completed film—a big-budget blockbuster about the early life of the sixteenth-century Italian scientist Galileo—contained rather more of them than Lorenzo had originally planned. Audiences across the world were likely to leave the cinema with little notion of Galileo as the father of modern science but with a lingering impression of him as a three-times-a-night man who was prodigiously gifted in a Kama Sutra of sexual positions.

      With an exhalation of disgust Lorenzo reached for the remote control and hit ‘pause’ just as the camera was making yet another of its epic journeys over the honeyed contours of Tia’s flatteringly lit, cosmetically enhanced body. Circling the Sun was guaranteed box-office gold, but it marked the moment of total creative bankruptcy in his own career; the point at which he had officially sold out, traded in his integrity and his vision for money he didn’t need and fame he didn’t want.

      He’d done it for Tia. Because she’d begged him to. Because he could. And because he had wanted, somehow, to try to make up for what he couldn’t give her.

      He had ended up losing everything, he thought bitterly.

      As if sensing his mood the dog that had been sleeping curled up in one corner of the leather sofa lifted his head and jumped down, coming over and pressing his long nose into Lorenzo’s hand. Lupo was part-lurcher, part-wolfhound, part-mystery, but though his pedigree was dubious his loyalty to Lorenzo wasn’t. Stroking the dog’s silky ears, Lorenzo felt his anger dissolve again. That film might have cost him his wife, his selfrespect and very nearly his creative vision, but it was also the brick wall he had needed to hit in order to turn his life around.

      Francis Tate’s book lay on the desk beside him and he picked it up, stroking the cover with the palm of his hand. It was soft and worn with age, creased to fit the contours of his body from many years of being carried in his pocket and read on planes and during breaks on film sets. He’d found it by chance in a secondhand bookshop in Bloomsbury on his first trip to England. He had been nineteen, working as a lowly runner on a film job in London. Broke and homesick, and the word Cypress on the creased spine of the book had called to him like a warm, thyme-scented whisper from home.

      Idly now he flicked through the yellow-edged pages, his eyes skimming over familiar passages and filling his head with images that hadn’t lost their freshness in the twenty years since he’d first read them. For a second he felt almost light-headed with longing. It might not be commercial, it might just end up costing him more than it earned but, Dio, he wanted to make this film.

      Involuntarily, his mind replayed the image of the girl from The Rose and Crown—Sarah—walking through the field of wheat; the light on her bare brown arms, her treacle-coloured hair. It had become a sort of beacon in his head, that image; the essence of the film he wanted to create. Something subtle and quiet and honest.

      He wanted it more than anything he had wanted for a long time.

      A piece of paper slipped out from beneath the cover of the book and fluttered to the floor. It was the letter from Tate’s publisher:

      Thank you for your interest, but Ms Halliday’s position on the film option for her father’s book The Oak and the Cypress is unchanged at present. We will, of course, inform you should Ms Halliday reconsider her decision in the future.

      Grimly he tossed the book down onto the clutter on the low coffee table and went back over to the open window. He could feel a faint breeze now, just enough to lift the corners of the papers on the desk and make the planets in the mechanical model of the solar system on the windowsill rotate a little on their brass axes.

      Change was definitely in the air.

      He just hoped that, whoever and wherever this Ms Halliday was, she felt it too.

      CHAPTER THREE

      SARAH woke with a start and sat up, her heart hammering.

      Over the last few weeks she had got quite familiar with the sensation of waking up to a pillow wet with tears, but this was more than that. The duvet that she had kicked off was soaked and the cotton shirt she was sleeping in—one of the striped city shirts that Rupert had left at her flat—was damp against her skin. It was dark. Too dark. The glow of light from the landing had gone out and, blinking into the blackness, Sarah heard the sound of cascading water. It was raining.

      Hard.

      Inside.

      A fat drop of water landed on her shoulder and ran down the front of her shirt. Jumping up from the low camp-bed, she groped for the light switch and flicked it. Nothing happened. It was too dark to see anything but instinctively she tilted her face up to try to look at the ceiling, and another drop of water hit her squarely between the eyes. She swore quietly and succinctly.

      ‘Mummy,’ Lottie СКАЧАТЬ