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‘Grazie.’ I lower myself into the seat and swing my legs in, ankles tight together, as Granny taught me. Then the heat of the interior hits me. ‘Fucking hell,’ I gasp.
‘Sorry about that. The nearest shade was miles away.’ Marco slides into the driver’s seat and rolls his window down and his sleeves up. His shirt is damp and crumpled where I cried all over it – thank God I didn’t bother with mascara today. ‘Where am I taking you?’
‘I, uh…’ My mind’s gone blank. ‘Where do you need to go?’
‘Nowhere. Well, somewhere, but I don’t care where that is as long as I get to take this one for a spin. Want to find someplace for lunch?’
‘Sounds good,’ I say. My sunglasses are bothering me – they’re caked with dried-on tears. I try to polish them on my top, but the salt just smears everywhere and makes the situation worse. I give up and shove them in my bag.
‘Are you starving right now, or shall we explore a bit first? We could go to San Damiano if you want,’ Marco says. ‘Plenty of nice places to eat there. And you probably want to see what that stretch of road is like, right?’
I shake my head. ‘I’ve had enough tragedy for today. Actually, do you know what I want? I want a break from the damn book.’
‘What, really?’
‘Yes, really,’ I say. ‘Thanks to Tim Swithin and his twin obsessions with fast cars and World War Two, I get to spend the next year and a half obsessing about Achille Infuriati. Let’s celebrate that by going somewhere that has nothing to do with him at all.’
Marco thinks for a moment. ‘We can be in Siena in half an hour.’
‘And that’s not too far?’
He smiles. ‘I’ve got nowhere to be today. In fact, I don’t have to be anywhere until tomorrow afternoon. We could party all night if we wanted.’
For an instant, the words hang there in the air between us. ‘I’ve never been to Siena,’ I say. ‘It would be nice to go.’
Marco switches on the engine. The car roars and then purrs.
‘Siena it is,’ he says.
*
‘I wonder who she was,’ I say. ‘The woman with the roses.’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ Marco says.
‘Huh?’
He laughs. ‘I make it fifteen minutes since you said you wanted a break from the damn book.’
‘Oh, well.’ I look out the window as the landscape goes by: trees, fields, houses, churches, groves and vineyards, over and over in an ever-varying pattern. I’m quite enjoying the scenic back roads but, after so much time spent contemplating Achille’s final moments, the winding bits make me nervous.
‘You’ve done pretty well,’ Marco says. ‘I actually thought you’d last five, if that. That was a very weird moment back there in the cemetery. I’d be thinking about it too.’
‘I keep replaying it in my mind. She must have been, what, eighty?’
‘At the very least,’ Marco says.
‘And there she was with her secateurs and her red roses. I wondered, actually…’
‘What?’
‘I wondered if she might be Achille’s sister Stella. Okay, she’d be ninety this year, but it’s not completely beyond the realms of possibility, is it? Little old Italian women are a force of nature.’
‘It’s true – they are.’
‘And she seemed, I don’t know, possessive of Achille,’ I say. ‘She obviously didn’t want us there. Besides, why would she be out there in the first place, deadheading plants in thirty-degree heat, if she wasn’t family?’
‘She could be an old ex of his – a really old ex. Or a fellow partisan.’
