Love Falls (3 page)

Before leaving their carriage they stowed their bags carefully, nodding to the woman who had just eaten the entire contents of one basket, hoping she understood this meant she was to guard their seats with her life.

Out in the corridor, all along the train, there were people standing, leaning up against the windows, smoking, eating, talking, stretching their legs. ‘Excuse me,
excusez-moi
.’ They sidled past, enjoying this journey, the warmth of the evening light slanting in, the shudder of the wheels below. There was something strangely pleasant about the way the train threw you from wall to wall, gently enough to rattle you, but not enough to hurt. But after four or five carriages it occurred to Lara there was no smell of food.

‘Excuse me,’ Lambert asked a man coming the other way. ‘
Il y a un restaurant
?’

The man put his head to one side and paused to think. ‘
Non
,’ he said, making the word hop, ‘
non
,’ and smiling he went on his way.

At first it seemed easier to disbelieve him, so they pushed on, the thud of the rails less pleasant now, jolting up through their feet, throwing them off balance, until it became clear the man was right. There was no restaurant car. No buffet. Not even a trolley serving tea. They turned around and wove their way back towards their carriage, learning to leap when the train swerved and to use their fingers to press themselves out from the windows and the walls.

Eventually they reached their carriage and, relieved to see their seats, already as familiar as home, they sank down. Lara picked up the Perrier and took a swig. It was warm and flat. She held it out to Lambert. ‘No thanks.’ He shook his head. She peered into her bag. There was one apple left. She took it out and offered it. But again he shook his head. Preserving rations! she thought. Lambert had taken up his newspaper and folding it over so that she was faced by a full-page photograph of Lady Diana Spencer, with only one week left before she became wife to Prince Charles, he began to read.

Lara drew her legs up and examined the photo. It was Diana’s hair, she decided, that made it so difficult to like her. Her hair, all feathery and hanging down over one eye. She was twenty. Three years older than Lara, and she wondered what Cathy, or even Lambert, would say if she was about to marry a man just entering middle age. But then again, Lambert had been forty-one when she was born, and Cathy only nineteen. But it was different. She couldn’t really explain it, but Lambert was ageless with his Old-World accent and his store of knowledge, and her mother had proved just by having her that she was free and reckless and fierce.

The train slowed to a halt. It was starting to get dark, and the station, lit up, threw the dusk into relief. Doors swung open, people shouted and then along the platform Lara saw a man with a trolley.

‘Look.’ She pointed, her face pressed to the window, and even as they watched, a scrum of people gathered round, thrusting money, helping themselves, emerging with huge sandwiches, packets of biscuits, cans of drink. ‘What do you think?’

Lambert began searching through his wallet for the foreign money he’d exchanged, but even as he did so a whistle blew, people scattered, and the train began to move.

Next time, Lara promised herself, but the next time, although she stood on the steps, waiting for her moment, clutching a large franc note, she found she was too terrified in case the moment she stepped off the train it would start up and she would have to run the length of the platform, like Omar Sharif in
Doctor Zhivago
when he was travelling to a small town in the far east of Russia, not knowing that the woman he really loved, Lara (after whom she’d been named), would be living there too. Doctor Zhivago had been pulled back on to the train by a carriageful of people, all reaching out to him from a wide-open door, whereas she’d be relying on the arms of her father, who might not even know that she’d been left behind.

Around midnight, her stomach contracting now with hunger, she plucked up enough courage to get off the train, get as far as the trolley, point to a roll, the slice of cheese, the frill of lettuce visible between the soft rounds of the bread, but just then the whistle blew, and even though it turned out to be for another train, Lara ran so fast back to the steps of their carriage she thought her lungs might burst.

‘Shall I try?’ Lambert suggested, but the thought of his nonchalance, his slow ruminations as he counted out change, made her so anxious it took her appetite away.

‘Please don’t,’ she implored him. ‘I mean, really, I’m not hungry,’ and pressing her face into the corner of the window as if it were a pillow, she closed her eyes and pretended to sleep.

Through the black of her eyelids she conjured up the train platforms in India, crowded with men selling baskets of samosas, puri, dosas, bags of dried chickpeas and nuts. If you didn’t want to get out you could thrust your arm through the window, or even order a train meal from the comfort of your carriage. The meal was delivered at the next station, served on a tray divided into sections, each one filled with rice, dhal and vegetable curry, with little pots of yoghurt and chutney on the side. The food was comfortingly familiar. It was almost identical to the food they served at Samye Ling, the Tibetan centre in Scotland, although the yoghurt on the train was thinner and the chutney when she tried it burnt her tongue.

Lara was four when she and Cathy moved to Scotland. They’d lived, until then, in a flat not far from Lambert at the top of Ladbroke Grove. They’d moved after Cathy had a letter from a friend telling her he’d found the answer, and that as soon as possible she must come to study Tibetan Buddhism with His Holiness who was living in a camp for refugees in the foothills of the Himalayas. If she could get herself there she could benefit from his teachings and all her misery would disappear.

‘What misery?’ Lara asked when Cathy told this story, but Cathy always looked at her as if she was missing the point.

‘Anyway,’ she continued, when people asked what had brought her to this valley in Scotland, so heavily planted with Christmas trees it seemed always on the verge of growing dark, ‘I couldn’t get myself to India – not then, anyway, and so instead we came to live here.’

They found a house to rent on the top of a hill, and a year later Lara started school. The school was in the village, just beyond the Buddhist centre, Samye Ling, and all the children regarded her with as much curiosity as if she was from Tibet herself. They’d circled her and prodded her and sniffed at her clothes. They’d stared in disgust at the food she unwrapped for her lunch – crumbling home-made brown-bread sandwiches filled with lettuce and Marmite – and the sight of her mother, having walked the two miles from their cottage, waiting in wellington boots at the gate.

But Lara didn’t really care. Her mother was happier. The long hours of meditation left her light and calm, and most holidays they had visitors, guests they could see from the upstairs windows of their cottage, toiling along the valley road beside the stream. And once a year they hitchhiked to London. They walked with their bags out of the village towards Lockerbie and then they’d get a lift at least as far as the motorway, where they’d pride themselves on reaching London before the end of the day.

When Lara woke it was morning and her father’s legs were stretched across the gap between their seats. She could feel his toes as they pressed into the flesh of her thigh, see the pale skin of his legs where his trousers had ridden up, the fine black hairs, the ridge of bone along his shin. Very, very carefully she inched herself away. Lambert stirred, looked as if he was about to wake, and so seizing her chance and yawning as if it was involuntary, she shifted along the seat until she was free. But Lambert continued to sleep, his head resting against the window, his mouth a little open as he breathed. Lara glanced back at his feet. They looked so harmless now, unprotected even, falling outwards into the gap she’d left, but she didn’t move back.

The train began to rattle and the outposts of a station came into view. Signs flashed by, names she couldn’t catch. Bin . . . Binar . . . ‘Where are we?’

Lambert was awake, stiffly taking back his legs, lowering them down into his shoes. ‘Binario. I think.’

They looked at each other. They were definitely in Italy. Just a few more hours and they’d be there. In celebration Lara took out the Perrier and sipped a few drops, handing it over for Lambert to tip the last gulp into his mouth. She took out the apple and, using a trick she’d learnt at school, twisted it until it snapped in half. She ate her half slowly, the juices, sharp and sweet, stinging the inside of her mouth, and she looked admiringly at her father as he discarded his core, slinging it out of the window with at least three mouthfuls left. Lara devoured hers down to the stalk until there was nothing but the shimmery husk of the core where three pips hung exposed. Afterwards she felt hungrier even than before, her stomach twisting and contracting, remembering and regretting all the meals she’d ever left, half-eaten, on her plate.

Just then they reached another station. Bin . . . Binar . . . Binario. They were there again. Or maybe she’d been so taken up with her apple that she hadn’t noticed they’d not moved. She leaned over to look at her father’s watch. It was eight o’clock now and they were due to arrive at two. She looked out on to the platform. There was no sign of a kiosk or a trolley, even if she’d had the courage to get off.

Lara got up and stretched, and then to pass the time she wandered the length of the train, peering into carriages, trying not to gaze too longingly at the people, so well prepared, unpacking their breakfasts, pouring themselves hot cups of coffee, tearing off hunks of white bread. She felt thinner already, lighter, her clothes looser on her, after just two missed meals, and she thought of the diet she had subjected herself to at the end of the autumn term, one day of nothing, three days of fruit, and as a reward, a small portion of cottage cheese, which had tasted as delicious as anything she’d ever tried. And it had worked. She’d been slinky and beautiful for the college Christmas party, if not a little pale, but what had been the point, when she’d been too freezing cold to take off her coat and still too cowardly to talk to Clive.

When Lara got back to her carriage they were at Binario again. Lambert looked at her and shrugged, and laughing, hoping suddenly that they’d never arrive, they shared out the pages of the newspaper and settled down to wait.

They were met at Pisa station by Ginny, Caroline’s cook. She had been watching out for them on the platform (or
binario
– as they’d finally understood it to be called), and when she saw them she swooped down and took hold of their bags. Ginny was an English woman who had driven out from her village in the Cotswolds, and was very kindly stopping en route to pick them up. She was a large woman, the colour of hay, with gold flecks in her hair, and freckles on her arms and face that ran together in lion-coloured dots. Her clothes, which were abundantly flowered, made her look even larger, but her voice when she introduced herself was small and high.

‘What fun!’ she squeaked. ‘A summer in Italy!’ and it occurred to Lara it would be just the four of them – Caroline, Lambert, Ginny and her. ‘Shall we head straight off?’ Ginny said cheerily. ‘The car’s not too far away, but parked rather precariously,’ and Lara shot a quick look at Lambert to see what he would say.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, not mentioning they were ravenous. ‘Of course.’ And obediently they followed Ginny out of the station.

The car was a 2CV, bright-yellow, and heady with trapped heat. Lara climbed into the back with both their bags and, as they sped out of Pisa, Ginny began to tell them in great detail how dangerous the roads in Italy were. Crashes, pile-ups, accidents by the day. She chattered happily, but Lara found it was hard to adjust to the idea of being squashed flat by a lorry when her main concern was that she was about to die from lack of food. Would it be . . . could we? And then by the side of the road she saw a stall piled high with fruit.

‘STOP!’ She was unable to contain herself, and although Ginny became flustered, forced to veer over on to the wrong side of the road, she did manage to stop.

Lambert got out and Lara scrambled after him. Together they stared at the sweet hard oranges, the grapes and outsized apples, the trays of figs, deciding eventually on a kilo of peaches, felted and sweet-smelling.

‘Food,’ Lara sighed as she bit into the first one, leaning over to let the juice splash on to the ground, and Lambert took one himself and devoured it in three quick mouthfuls.

‘Come on then,’ and he held the door for Lara.

She sat in the back of the car with the brown paper bag of peaches on her lap and ate another, then another.

Lambert glanced round. ‘I wouldn’t eat too many more,’ he warned, and from his look she assumed it could be dangerous.

‘All right.’ She folded the bag, turning the soft paper over and over, thinking how strange it was that this was the first piece of advice her father had given her, and although she knew she was being overly dramatic, she couldn’t get out of her mind the story of the woman who, on being liberated from Auschwitz, was given a sausage by a well-meaning soldier, and on devouring it had rolled over and died.

Everywhere Lara looked they were surrounded by hills. There were large blue hills in the distance, and others, smaller and more barren, sloping away on each side of the road. The hills, however steep, were divided into fields, some planted with lines of olives and all without exception home to a house or a cluster of houses at their very top, as if every available opportunity must be taken to reach for cooler air. The houses were beautiful, the colour of the earth, terracotta, ochre, the dust-pink of cement. They were decorated with vines and jade-green shutters, each one more beautiful than the last. Lara gasped and pointed to the first six or seven, and then seeing she might go on for ever gave up and simply noted them, letting them pass.