The Old Wine Shades Read Free Page B

table were elbowing in on your conversation. Harry Johnson was obviously a long-standing diner here for the maitre d’ knew him by name and treated him as a valued customer.
    They had ordered, or, rather, Harry had suggested the waiter order for them, just as he had told the sommelier to choose the wine.
    ‘‘Something’?’
    Harry shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what I mean. Melodramatic. An old man was passing in the road as we left the drive, a villager I supposed. We stopped to ask about the Swan, the nearby pub, and he told us it was down the road, then offered a bit of advice at the same time. His name was Jessup, he said, and he lived around there. He gave us a warning about ‘that house’ and said we should avoid the woods. If you can imagine.’ Harry laughed.
    ‘Did you find anything dire in the woods?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What about the owner? What did he have to say?’
    ‘He lives in San Gimignano, one of those little hill towns in Tuscany, one of the casa torre. It’s full of towers.’
    ‘You’ve seen the town, then?’
    ‘Yes. Well, we were looking for any clue at all. Hugh clearly wasn’t up to it and so I undertook to go. The man wouldn’t come to England–why should he? He’d put the house in the hands of an agent, so let her dammed well deal with it.’
    ‘But couldn’t this have been handled by telephone? Going to Italy seems a little extreme.’
    ‘Is going to Italy ever really extreme? And I’d never been there.’
    Jury laughed. ‘I see what you mean. Go on.’
    ‘The thing, the interesting thing is, regarding your point about the telephone is that he didn’t want to discuss it over the phone. If I wanted to come to him, I was welcome.’
    The waiter was there with their salads, mostly new and trendy greens and Stilton cheese and walnuts in a citrusy dressing.
    Harry went on. ‘Two days later I turned up on his doorstep. We had drinks, we had dinner at a little trattoria. I’d never eaten a cappesante like that before.’
    ‘I’ve never eaten it at all. Go on.’
    Harry smiled. ‘His story–and, incidentally, he didn’t know my reason for wanting to hear it; all he knew was that I was interested in the house and wanted to know its history, as the estate agent knew sod-all about it. She didn’t know much, Ben Torres told me, because he hadn’t told her much; it didn’t strike him as necessary to do so. But if I wanted to know before I leased the property, he was happy to tell me. I was presenting myself, of course, as a prospective tenant, or, rather, not presenting myself as anything else. I think he enjoyed the fact that I’d come all the way to Italy just to talk about this house. Torres’s father was Italian; mother, British.’
    ‘He was raised in England and lived there until he was in his twenties. Hated it–so drab, wet and cold, and the people not especially warmhearted.’
    ‘His parents were divorced, his father in Italy, and that meant excursions to Italy a number of times to see his father, who lived in Siena. Winterhaus, the one that Glynnis Gauh went to see, was in his mother’s family.’
    ‘The last time he said he’d been at this property in Surrey was when he gave the listing to an agency two years before. Ben Torres said to me, ‘Let me tell you a story. The place belonged to my mother’s family. My mother died when she was barely forty, in London. It was completely unexpected. She hadn’t been at all ill. I was sixteen. My father was living here at the time. They were divorced, had been for years. It surprised me they’d ever come together-they were so different. Sometimes I think that’s what marriage is: a reconciliation of differences, and sometimes it succeeds. Not a grand vision, is it?’
    ‘‘At any rate, my mother–her name was Nina–had always liked that house in Surrey; she’d been a child there and found it mysterious. But then most children find mystery in things adults wouldn’t give a toss for. More than once someone had made