but I’d been looking forward to that bit – the summer ball, graduation … Those were some of my best memories of my time at Oaklands, yet I’ve skipped straight over them.
I peer at myself in the little mirror attached to the inside of the cupboard door. The awful fringe is longer, but not quite long enough to tuck behind my ears, which leaves me looking like an old English sheepdog. I think about the blonde’s effortless honey waves and wonder I can learn enough Italian to get myself a haircut.
We cast off less than half an hour later. By perusing some navigational maps left on a tiny desk to the side of the stairs that lead up to the cockpit, I manage to work out we’re on Lake Garda. I have a vague idea of this being somewhere in the north of Italy, but I’m not exactly sure where. When I get up into the cockpit and sit down on the moulded bench next to Jude, who is confidently manning the tiller, I check out the position of the sun and decide we’re heading south. I refer to the mental snapshot I made of the map and decide we must have been moored somewhere near either Riva or Torbole and are now heading down to where the lake broadens and the mountains become less rugged.
It takes longer than I expect to travel the distance. Hours. But then the only experience I have of boats is the kind with pedals that you can rent by the half hour on a pond in the middle of a park. The sun is right overhead by the time we spot the tiny island Cameron was talking about.
Cameron Lombard, that’s right. I’ve worked out who he is now, and this is indeed his boat. Well, his dad’s boat, to be more precise. Cam is the son of a sporting-goods tycoon and, from what I gather, he’s enjoying an extended gap year after finishing uni two summers ago and has spent most of it bumming round Europe. If I have to admit it, I’m slightly intimidated by Cameron. He’s got that kind of confidence that makes him seem invincible, makes every decision seem like the best plan ever rather than a whim of the moment.
Thankfully, his girlfriend, Isabelle, or Issie – I’m not sure of her surname yet – is much less terrifying, if no less confident. She’s laid back and friendly and talks to me as if we’ve known each other for years.
From the conversation that ensues between barking sailing instructions and having to run around the boat pulling ropes and tying things to kleats (in which I am, yet again, the butt of the communal joke: ‘Watch the boom, Meg! After your dunking last week, I’d have thought you’d learned that lesson!’), I glean that Jude and I bumped into the other couple in Cannes about three weeks earlier, and after a week full of lounging around on pine-fringed beaches and bar crawling, we – well, let’s face it, it was probably ‘they’ – decided it would be a jolly good jape to nip over the alps into Italy and pick up Cam’s daddy’s boat, Vita Perfetta, from Malcesine.
They seem a nice enough couple, I suppose, but I find it awkward trying to relate to them as if I know them, as if we’ve shared close quarters for more than a fortnight now. So, as we sail the last part of our journey, I sit in the cockpit with them, cradling an open bottle of beer, but not actually drinking it, and I let the conversation flow around me like I’m a rock in a stream. I am in the middle of it but I am not part of it.
I try to dip my toe in when the facts are safe and neutral, to capture any bits of relevant information, but when they all start talking about the street entertainer in Riva’s town square the night before, or the amazing moules they had in that little cafe near San Malo, I have to shut up and the river of words rushes around me again, making me feel separate. Apart.
To be honest, it’s not just the missing chunk of time that’s the problem. It’s them. The life they lead. I should count Jude in with me, because we come from very similar backgrounds, but somehow he seems more like Cam and Issie. He talks like them, knows what to wear and what to say to seem effortlessly sophisticated. He fits right in. That, and the fact that I can’t remember the last six weeks of my life, means I can’t help feeling as if I’m an alien that’s been teleported in.
As we near the island, Cam and Jude drop the sails and tie them up – the big one at the back against the big swingy thing, which I now know is the boom, and the front one onto the railings and posts at the front of the boat. The motor putt-putts away as we drift across water that’s the colour of a cloudy emerald. I stand on the deck, one arm wrapped around the mast for stability, and shield my eyes from the sun with my hand. As we get closer to the long strip of rock in the middle of the lake, I let out only one word: ‘Wow!’
Jude comes to stand beside me. He doesn’t need to hold on to anything, just relies on his natural grace and balance. ‘It’s pretty amazing, huh? I can see why you wanted to get a closer look.’
The boat moves past the rounded tip of the island where the palazzo stands. It takes my breath away. It’s all pink and white, like one of the fondant fancies my nan used to serve up when we went round for tea, but there is nothing frou-frou about its architecture. There are bold arches that remind me of Venetian palaces on the Grand Canal, and the house stands majestically amongst the manicured gardens that cover the small lump of rock, proudly facing the lake to catch the rays of the midday sun.
None of us say anything as we motor past a small private dock, to where another boat has dropped anchor off a gently curving beach no more than a few metres wide. ‘Bloody great idea, Meg,’ Issie says from the cockpit. ‘Well done, you.’
For the first time since I jumped into this time, this place, I feel as if I have managed to get something right. Even if it was the ‘other’ me that did it.
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