The landscapes sliding past the smeared windows of the hard-seated Italian railway carriages conquered even Julia’s impatience with long journeys. She watched entranced as the world changed from white to brown, and from brown to rich, succulent green. South of Rome there were silvery olive groves and vines that had put out fresh leaves, men working in the fields and wild flowers scrambling over the banks beside the track. After the hard white Alps the fecundity made Julia feel drunk. The train slowed beside a country road, and there was an old woman in a black dress trudging beside a donkey, its wicker panniers full of yellow flowers.
‘Look.’ Julia pointed, her eyes shining.
Josh took her hand. ‘I like travelling with you. Everything hits you square in the face.’
‘It’s because I’ve never seen anything before,’ Julia told him. She wanted to fix everything inside her head, so that she could remember it when it was all gone. They reached Naples, and found a crumbling hotel to stay in. Julia made Josh buy a guidebook, and led him through tiny, teeming streets into musty churches, down rancid alleyways into food markets, up steps and round corners into blind turnings. The smells and the crowds and the colour and sudden violence of street-life fascinated her. She was alternately shocked by the poverty and charged by the pure vitality of the people. Josh was less drawn to it all. He had an American distaste for their insanitary hotel, and a positive mania about the Neapolitan ingenuity at relieving him of his money.
‘Damn cities,’ he grumbled. ‘I didn’t come to see places like this, and one old church is pretty much the same as the next one. Let’s get out of here and find a country place.’
They went on southwards to Salerno, and from Salerno they rode on country buses through wide green fields dotted with herds of slow-moving buffalo. The sea glittered at the end of empty roads, bluer than the postcard cliché that Julia had envisaged. In the end it was Julia who saw the perfect stopping place. A steep hill reared out of the coastal plain, and thick stone walls and a skirt of houses clung to the top of it, looking down over a blanket of scrubby trees and bare outcrops of rock to the Gulf of Policastro at its foot.
She only knew three words of Italian, but somehow she made the bus driver understand what she wanted. ‘Questo è Montebellate,’ he told her.
Obligingly, he stopped to let them off. They climbed down with their heavy suitcases and stood blinking in the sunshine, much too hot in their thick clothes. The bus trundled away and left Julia and Josh staring at the tortuously steep road that led up to Montebellate.
They were lucky. A dusty pick-up truck driven by a nut-faced man stopped, and they climbed into the back. They wound upwards, the ancient engine labouring, and slowly the Campania countryside and the shimmering sea spread out beneath them. Julia saw that the rough grass between the rocks was starred with wild flowers, flowers that looked like English harebells and ladies’ smock, but bigger and brighter. The pungent scent of herbs was everywhere, reminding her sharply of Felix, cooking at home.
‘Italy,’ Julia murmured voluptuously.
If only Felix could see this. In the square, in London, it was mid-March and the bare plane trees would be shiny-black with rain.
When they reached the little houses clinging under the shelter of the stone walls, their driver shouted a torrent of Italian and stopped with a jerk outside a little pink-washed house. The door was painted the same blue as the harebells, and above it was a hand-painted sign, Pensione Flora.
‘Can we stay here?’ Julia breathed.
Josh hauled cheerfully at the luggage. ‘Why not?’
A woman in an apron came out of the pensione and stared at them. Josh opened the phrase-book they had bought in Naples and began to ask.
Julia couldn’t bear to listen in case the woman said no. She crossed the road and folded her arms on the top of the warm stone wall. The hill rolled precipitously from its foot. Below her was the sea, fringed with white and gold, and the ochre and spring-green and amber squares of the land.
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