Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

Had they both thought that they would still be together? That they might however have traded the hungry, speechless thing they felt for each other as twenty-two year olds for something more easeful and certain and dull? That they might have come to know and understand each other more like brother and sister than lovers?

Sandro drew up under the dark, dripping eaves of the tall, shabby palazzo on whose second floor he and Luisa had slept side by side formore than thirty years, and let himself in. Brother and sister? He felt a smile spread across his face for the first time in months. Easeful?

He slipped beneath the covers and felt the warmth she had made there, smelled her skin. Lovers. She turned over in her sleep, murmuring something indistinct, and her hand felt for his and held it.

Sandro lay awake until the clock that had always stood on his side of the bed told him that it was 5.30. He slipped his hand out of Luisa’s.

‘Wake up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Time to go.’

They crested the hill to see the winter sun hovering on the far horizon, a wide vista of pale grey hills and leafless woodlands ahead and the dark ribbon of a river threading the valley floor below. The driver braked abruptly on the rise and a cloud of dust rose behind them, enveloping the big brute of a car. He turned towards his passenger and with a sweeping gesture bestowed upon him all that they surveyed.

‘Here,’ he said, in English so heavily accented that even that single syllable was barely recognizable. ‘Castello Orfeo. Welcome.’ And he smiled, a flat smile that didn’t reach his eyes, a glint of gold far back in his mouth.

Beside him the traveller looked down an avenue of dusty black cypresses that dipped and rose straight ahead of them, bisecting the landscape and ending in dark woods from which rose the grey stone flanks of a handsome fifteenth-century castle: steep, solid and unadorned. Not strictly speaking a fortress but a keep, even in the last rosy tint of a fading winter afternoon, the Castello Orfeo, uncompromising as it had always been, made no attempt to endear itself to its newest guest.

She was waiting for them, the massive fortified doorway in which she stood emphasizing the daintiness of her figure, her girl’s shoulders,her tiny ankles. The huge, luminous blue eyes gazing at him; the cloud of red-gold hair. She held out her delicate painter’s hands towards him, and the flicker of a satisfied smile settled on her lips.

‘Mr Fairhead,’ she said for the benefit of a small, impromptu reception committee. A tall girl in an apron stood at the back; she had long, black, centre-parted hair, and her face was the perfect, pale, melancholy oval of a country Madonna. And with her were the other guests, whose company Alec Fairhead completed: two men besides him, and two women. All present and correct. ‘We are so very honoured.’

Anyone looking at Alec Fairhead in the rapidly growing dusk might have been forgiven for thinking that all he wanted to do was to turn and climb back into the car and tell the driver with his gold tooth to get him out of there. But as everyone waited on the new arrival’s response to the Director’s greeting, darkness had fallen behind him across the wide, dusty landscape and it was too late.