The Place We Met Read online

  ‘How about we both spoil each other?’ I ask him now, twisting one of his curls around my finger.

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’ Pete kisses the top of my head. ‘Now come here, you.’

  I begin to relax in his arms. I know I can get past this stupid anxiety and pointless jealousy. The girl in those photos is just a memory, a face from Pete’s past. It’s not as if we’re going to bump into her in the street, is it?

  I wait under a blanket on the sofa as Pete dims the lights and fiddles around with the DVD player, and by the time the epic opening credits of Game of Thrones are playing and his hand is resting snugly in my own, all I’m feeling is silly for ever getting myself so worked up in the first place.

  9

  Taggie

  ‘I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.’

  Shelley pouts at me from under her pink bobble hat.

  ‘You’re having fun, admit it!’

  ‘I am not,’ I counter. ‘Falling over fifteen times in the space of ten minutes is not my idea of fun.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s been sixteen,’ she replies, and only just skates out of the way in time to avoid my fist. We’re at the ice rink in Piazza Cavour, which has been set up temporarily as part of Como’s festive celebrations, along with the Christmas Market and array of lights and decorations. The lake is sitting just across the road, inky black in the darkness, and the sharp, cold air is ripe with the scent of vin brulé and roasted chestnuts. Shelley lured me down here with the promise of hot chocolate and pizza, but so far all I’ve got is a bruised bottom and frozen cheeks.

  ‘You have to let go of the side,’ she calls out now. ‘It’s much easier when you let go.’

  Is she insane?

  ‘I’m fine here,’ I reply, my teeth chattering as a particularly fiendish gust of wind rushes up from the icy floor. What I don’t add is that I’ve now got a serious cramp in my left foot, which is doing nothing to cheer me along, and that my wet gloves are turning my hands blue with cold. It’s a common misconception that small people, such as myself, are automatically nimble and athletic. I am neither of those things – and nowhere has that felt more obvious to me than right here, inside this slippery enclosure of misery.

  Shelley, who has just skated backwards – backwards! – past me at speed, is enjoying herself far too much for my liking. If she’d bothered to confess the fact that she was clearly an Olympic figure skater in a previous life, then I never would have agreed to put myself through this ordeal in the first place. How can it be so hard? It’s just skating, after all. When I was a teenager, I barely took my roller skates off. Ice skates surely can’t be so different?

  Momentarily emboldened by the memory of myself hurtling around the youth club roller disco to the buoyant lyrics of the Spice Girls, I finally let go of the side and lurch awkwardly towards the centre of the rink.

  ‘Attento!’

  I’m aware of a very hard shove in the small of my back, and then I’m face down on the ice. This time, however, it wasn’t my fault.

  ‘Who the bloody hell di— Oh.’

  Marco the rescuer and lothario waiter is peering down at me, a gloved hand on each of his bent knees and a look of bemused concern on his face. He’s covered his jet-black hair with a red hat and has zipped his leather jacket right up over his chin, and I gawp at him as he reaches down towards me.

  ‘Take my hand,’ he instructs. ‘I will help you up.’

  ‘It’s your fault I’m down here,’ I grumble, but I let him pull me to my feet for the second time since we met. It’s not as if I have much choice in the matter.

  ‘I couldn’t help it,’ he explains. ‘One second you were over there.’ He points towards the edge of the rink. ‘Then the next second, you were here, right in front of me. I didn’t have time to stop.’

  He speaks English so well, and looks so annoyingly handsome with his cheeks flushed and his hat askew, that I find myself thawing a bit, despite the new pains I now have on my front, as well as my back.

  ‘I’m terrible at skating,’ I admit, letting him lead me slowly back to the infinitely safer edge. ‘I honestly had no idea how terrible until tonight.’

  He shrugs, finally relinquishing my hands, and folds his arms across his chest.

  ‘You cannot be good at everything,’ he says, which is an accurate but weird thing to say, and I hesitate, wondering how the hell to reply.

  ‘What are you good at?’ he asks, leaning casually against the very same makeshift wall that I’m clinging on to like a limpet.

  ‘Falling over,’ I quip. ‘I’m very good at that.’

  He frowns at me.

  ‘But what are your passions?’

  ‘My passions?’

  He looks back at me and nods, his demeanour deadly serious.

  ‘What is it with Italians and passion?’ I ask, trying to make light of his question.

  He shrugs again, glancing away towards the lake.

  ‘Do you not think it is important to have passion in your life?’

  I consider this for a moment.

  ‘As long as it’s for the right reason,’ I tell him. ‘I think passion can sometimes lead to people taking advantage of you.’

  I cast my mind back to the beginning of the month, and the girl Shelley and I saw at Marco’s restaurant the night I met him. She had clearly felt passionately about her relationship with him, and that had not worked out well for her at all.

  ‘Do you not want to feel as if you are on fire?’ he declares, pushing himself away from the side and skating around in a small arc until he’s facing me. I get the sense that he would have grasped my hands in his if he could, but both of mine are still gripping the wooden edge of the rink.

  ‘Right now, I would,’ I joke, doing my best to avoid his strangely hypnotic green eyes. ‘It’s bloody freezing!’

  ‘You are making fun of me,’ he states, sliding backwards a fraction and almost colliding with a sprightly old man in the process. It never fails to amaze me just how fit and lithe the over-sixties are in Italy. All that olive oil, cured meat and cheese must be working wonders.

  ‘I’m not,’ I argue, but my delivery is feeble. The truth is, I don’t find it that easy to talk to Marco. The way he looks at me is too familiar, and it makes me feel on edge. Usually I’m confident with new people and even with total strangers, but in this case, I’m quite the opposite. It’s as if Marco, with his heroics at the lake and now here at the rink, has found the one single chink in my stoic armour and wriggled his little finger under the gap.

  Just as I’m casting around desperately for something else to say, Shelley skates across to join us, a look of smug satisfaction on her cherubic face.

  ‘Ciao, Marco,’ she says sweetly, kissing him on either cheek without even so much as a tremble in her skates. ‘I thought it was you from all the way over there.’

  ‘He picked me up,’ I blurt, realising a second too late that the words I’d chosen could carry more than just their literal meaning. ‘I mean, I fell over. Well, he knocked me over. But it wasn’t his fault, you see. It was— Oh, never mind.’

  They’re both looking at me now, Shelley in blatant amusement and Marco in what looks like wry confusion. It must be hard for him to understand what the hell I’m saying when I can barely seem to string a coherent sentence together.

  I fall into an embarrassed silence as the two of them begin chatting about their Christmases, mutually bemoaning the fact that they both had to work. Not for the first time that day, I think how strange it is to be here, ice-skating by an Italian lake on Boxing Day rather than sitting under a blanket on my parents’ sofa, mainlining wedges of Terry’s Chocolate Orange. I feel horribly guilty about the fact that I’ve left the two of them alone this year, but I just couldn’t face the idea of going back to England. Not yet, not even to the family house. Besides, I don’t want to be anywhere that I can be easily found.

  ‘I’m sure we’d love to come for a drink,’ Shelley is saying now, and I whip
my head around to find her and Marco staring at me expectantly.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, carefully letting go of the side only to veer off sideways into the path of several American tourists. The sooner I get off this slippery death trap, the better.

  Once I’ve thankfully handed over the skates and got my poor, cramped and frozen feet back inside the fur-lined haven of my boots, Marco leads Shelley and me away from Piazza Cavour and across the road, before turning right and heading along the paved stretch of the Lungo Lario Trieste, which runs beside the lake. Trees line either side of the path, and their unruly roots are poking up through cracks in the cobbles. It’s as if they’re lying deliberately in wait, ready to trip up any unsuspecting tourist whose attention has been diverted by the mass of blue fairy lights tangled amongst the branches above.

  The air is still but feels heavy with cold, the lake barely dappling, and the orange glow of lit windows on the hillside ahead of us flickers like merry embers in the gloom. I had assumed Como town would be quiet on Boxing Day, but we encounter a steady stream of both locals and visitors as we make our way towards Marco’s friend’s bar. I think longingly of my cosy bedroom in Bellagio, and of the small and comforting weight of Bruno asleep on my feet. Perhaps I should have stayed with Elsie for another night, but I’d already made a promise to spend the evening with Shelley. Besides, I have to go back to work in the morning anyway. There’s a group of artists arriving first thing who have booked a series of excursions, and I’m excited to get my tour guide cap back on and show off the local area.

  We reach a wide junction and come to a halt by the crossing, Marco consulting his phone as a text message flashes up.

  ‘That your friend?’ Shelley wants to know, but he shakes his head.

  ‘It’s nobody.’

  Funny name for a girl, I think, but don’t say.

  It takes us another few minutes to cross through the Piazza de Orchi and reach the Vista Lago bar on the far side, by which time Marco has ignored two more messages and a call. Why he doesn’t simply switch off his phone, or at least put it on silent, I have no idea. The bitter side of me assumes it’s because he enjoys the attention, but I must allow for the fact that he simply doesn’t care. For all his talk of passion, Marco can be incredibly nonchalant.

  As soon as we’re over the threshold, he hurries off to greet his friend, leaving Shelley and me to peel off our many outer layers and settle down at a table towards the back. It’s dingy and warm in here. The dark-wood furniture has been arranged haphazardly and a series of lamps are casting moon-shaped crescents of golden light over the walls and floorboards. I glance at a framed photo as I drape my coat over a chair – it’s of the port here in Como, but taken many years ago, and spots of age have appeared at its edges.

  ‘Wine?’ Shelley asks, but I shake my head.

  ‘I might just stick to soft drinks tonight.’

  She pulls a predictable face. ‘But it’s Christmas!’

  I pick up the thin, leather-bound menu to have a look at what’s on offer, but before I’ve even found the page listing non-alcoholic beverages, Marco has joined us again, and he’s brought a bottle of wine and three glasses with him.

  ‘You read my mind,’ Shelley declares, grinning at me with obvious glee. Trust Marco to have taken it upon himself to order for us, without even checking what we wanted. Is it the waiter in him, or the arrogance?

  I stand up.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Marco asks, his hand instinctively reaching out towards me.

  ‘To the bar,’ I say, gesturing to the bottle. ‘I don’t want wine tonight.’

  He considers this for a moment.

  ‘You must,’ he says. ‘It is Christmas.’

  Lord, give me strength.

  ‘Fine.’ I sit down again, studiously avoiding Shelley’s eye while Marco decants red wine into each glass in turn. I notice that he fills the one closest to me first.

  ‘What shall we toast?’ Shelley asks, holding her own glass up above the table.

  ‘Dry January?’ I suggest hopefully, and again I feel Marco’s green eyes flicker over me.

  ‘I think we should drink to passion,’ he says, without a trace of irony, and Shelley beams at him.

  ‘To passion.’

  I reluctantly tap my glass against theirs and take a tentative sip. The wine is delicious, of course, but I don’t want to let on to Marco just how much I like it. I cannot bear people making my decisions for me, and as I think again of that poor girl he so easily dismissed, and of the one who is no doubt trying to get hold of him on the phone tonight, my resolve hardens. So many men think they can get away with treating women like crap. I may have lost the last battle of this type that I fought, but I don’t intend to ever lose another, and it seems to me that Marco is extremely used to getting whatever he wants when it comes to members of the opposite sex. OK, so he’s fiercely attractive and unflappably cool, but he’s not a god. Underneath all the swagger and charm, he’s only another human being, just like the rest of us.

  As I have discovered to my detriment in the past, putting a man up on a pedestal only ever ends up with a disastrous topple from grace, and being the person standing on the ground looking up means that you’re directly in line to get yourself crushed when the inevitable happens. I suppose I’m being unfair to judge Marco so harshly, but then I don’t have the energy to be any other way at the moment. I have an inkling that he may at the very least be intrigued by me – it’s clear from the way he keeps glancing over at me while he’s talking to Shelley – but I imagine it’s purely because I’m one of the few women he’s ever encountered who hasn’t immediately fallen in lustful awe at his feet. That, and the fact that he’s now had to rescue me twice, and so probably sees me as some sort of damsel in distress from a bloody fairy tale. If things were different, if I wasn’t still feeling so bruised internally, then maybe I would have been more open to his charms – but I’d put good money on the fact that if I had shown an interest, my light would soon have dimmed for him. He wants the thrill of the chase, not the reality of a relationship.

  I shouldn’t let my mind stray into this territory, though, not when I’m still so fragile. My random fits of crying are showing no signs of abating, and with every sip of this wine, I can feel my emotions welling up behind my eyes. It’s not just sorrow, either; it’s rage.

  I start as Marco brushes the back of my hand with a finger.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks, quietly enough that Shelley, who is scrolling through her phone looking for a photo to show him, doesn’t hear.

  I glance up and look at him, at those bewildering eyes, and all I detect is genuine concern. Pity, however, is one thing I am not prepared to put up with – not even for a second.

  ‘I should go.’ I stand up abruptly, my half-full glass of wine wobbling as my handbag bashes against the edge of the table.

  ‘What? Why?’ Shelley looks put out.

  ‘I have to read up on Villa Olmo, you know, for the tour tomorrow. I’ve just remembered. I don’t know it that well.’

  She makes the same grimace she always does whenever I mention work.

  ‘Yes, you do. You know it better than anyone.’

  ‘Well, it can’t hurt to swot up a bit more.’

  She sighs in defeat. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No!’ I say, with far more gusto than is strictly necessary.

  I start to pull my coat back on, remembering too late that I need to wind my scarf around my neck first, and then swearing as I’m forced to take it off again, almost sending everything on the table tumbling over as I do so. Marco watches me in silence, his brow knotted and his fingers tapping the stem of his wine glass.

  ‘Thanks for the drink,’ I say hastily, then hurry towards the door without a backwards glance and head out into the cold night.

  10

  Lucy

  When I chose Lake Como as the destination for my first romantic trip away with Pete, I pictured the sun setting over the water, his
face when he took in the view of the mountains for the first time, and droplets of condensation dribbling down the sides of our Prosecco glasses as we toasted one another on the balcony overlooking the old town. Like the squirrel-brained fool that I am, however, I had forgotten that in order to reach this veritable utopia, you must first run the gauntlet of Milano Centrale railway station.

  We’re on the second of three long escalators, which we’ve ridden from the Metro platform all the way up to the concourse, and high above us the glass-domed roof of the aged building gleams white against the winter sunlight. The last time I was here, my dad was in charge of tickets and timetables, and while I can remember trailing up endless flights of stairs after him and my mum – Julia loudly complaining by my side, of course – I don’t have any recollection of where the Como train leaves from.

  ‘We need to find the one going to Bellizona,’ I tell Pete as we reach the top floor, pointing behind his head to where a vast departure board is hanging up on the ornate stone wall.

  ‘I think I see it,’ he says, squinting. ‘What’s the name of our stop again?’

  ‘Como San Giovanni,’ I reply, consulting the printed e-ticket that I booked while we were still in London.

  ‘Platform three.’ He raises his arm and I follow the direction of his outstretched finger. ‘But not for forty minutes or so. Shall we get a beer?’

  Our flight this morning was very early, and it’s only just gone ten now, but I nod along in agreement. I want Pete to be happy for every single second of this holiday, and if daytime drinking is what he wants to do, then I’m content to go along with it.

  ‘Happy?’ I ask, when the cold bottles of Peroni are in our hands and a dish of mixed nuts has been placed on the table between us.