The Last Letters from Villa Clara

by Sarah Steele

Genres: World War II; Women's Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

'They've taken her. And you know the worst of it? They don't even know what they've stolen.'

CAN THE SEARCH FOR A WARTIME SECRET UNLOCK HER FUTURE?

1938. In the turmoil of pre-war Italy, a painting is carefully stowed in the false bottom of a suitcase, ready to be carried across the border. But as the train draws to a violent halt and armed officers lead the passengers onto the platform, the suitcase is taken and the painting never seen again.

1963. London is on the cusp of change in the swinging 60s. Nightclubs and exclusive parties are in their heyday, as are the art thieves of the East End underworld. But when a lowly boarding-house mistress attempts to take on the upper-crust establishment, and is accused of spying for the Russians, she can save only one thing - her reputation, or the love of her life.

1985. Phoebe Cato is on the verge of losing everything: the struggling Cato Museum of Artifice, housing her beloved uncle's finely crafted collection of reproductions, and more importantly, with only weeks to live, her uncle Bruce himself. Phoebe may not be able to save his life, but little does she know that Bruce had planned on saving hers all along. Following one last trail of clues hidden in a series of paintings, Phoebe embarks on a journey to uncover long-held family secrets, and a love story that persisted across the decades . . .

The moving and captivating new novel from the USA Today bestselling author of The Schoolteacher of Saint Michel sweeps us from an Italy simmering on the brink of war through to 1960s London at a time of shadows and Russian spies, taking us on an extraordinary journey of love, courage and betrayal. Perfect for fans of Natasha Lester, Fiona Valpy and Santa Montefiore.

Release date: December 5, 2024

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 400

Sample

As the taxi crawled towards the Royal Courts of Justice, Leonora Birch savoured the last moments of calm before she was devoured by the press pack and spat out as tomorrow’s newspaper headline. She turned to her companion, wondering whether they would be making the return journey together later that day. If he were nervous too, Bruce Cato hid it well, the expression behind his untrimmed beard as relaxed as the shabby cream linen suit that had seen better days.

She examined the palm of his bear-like hand, ingrained with decades of paint, tracing the love line that had known they would find one another again. ‘What do you think will happen?’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘The judge refused my bribe, so he’ll probably throw us both in prison.’

She cuffed his arm. ‘How can you joke about it?’

‘My darling Leonora, I joke about everything. As you well know.’

‘But this isn’t one of your games, Bruce. This is real.’ As the traffic slowed, she spotted a newspaper vendor hawking the morning edition. ‘Judgement due in the Battle of Bond Street’, screamed its headline above a photograph of Leonora looking all of her sixty-one years as she was accosted on her doorstep the previous evening.

Why hadn’t she just put a stop to this? Apologised and coughed up the costs, then got out of London to begin her new life with Bruce in Italy? Instead, she had upheld her claims about Sir Edwin Viner, the man who had nearly destroyed her twenty-five years earlier, and now commanded a ferocious legal attack from his prestigious Mayfair art gallery.

The taxi growled onwards until she could make out the cathedral-like façade of the courts, the crowds below waiting for their quarry as photographers perched on stepladders for the best shot.

‘Let’s get the driver to drop us around the back,’ Bruce said.

‘Why should I creep in? It’s Edwin who should be hiding,’ she said as faces pressed against the cab window, a shout going around as she was recognised.

Bruce snorted. ‘Fat chance. Look who’s pulled up in front of us.’

A chauffeur opened the door of the sleek grey Bentley, and a roar of support went up for Sir Edwin Viner and his wife, dressed in a cream suit with matching feathered hat, every inch the debutante model Edwin had plucked from the conveyor belt. How dare a frumpy Pimlico landlady challenge such people?

The cabbie pointed to his meter. ‘That’ll be five shillings. Call it eight, including the valet job my paintwork’s going to need now this lot have had their sticky paws all over it.’ He must have sensed her distress, however, and as she held the money out to him, he shook his head. ‘Second thoughts, you’ve got a tough enough day ahead. Have this one on me.’

Tears pricking her eyes at this small act of kindness, she turned to Bruce. ‘This is it, then. Are you ready?’

‘Ready to get it over with so we can finally carry on with our lives,’ he said, then frowned, stroking her hand. ‘You’re really sure you want to see this through?’

‘As sure as I ever have been about anything.’ She took a deep breath, steadying herself as Bruce leapt out to open her door, hellish chaos breaking noisily into the privacy of the cab.

‘Good luck, Leonora Birch,’ the cabbie shouted as she stepped out on to the pavement. ‘Don’t you let him get away with it.’

The sound of the baying crowd was deafening against the machine-gun click of camera shutters as a galaxy of popping flashbulbs blinded her, reporters pressed so close that she could smell the pints they had drunk the night before, the washing powder their wives used. She glanced once more at Bruce and smiled. ‘Let’s get him.’

Phoebe stepped off the aircraft steps and on to the sticky black tarmac, cheeks burning and nostrils stinging as the distant terminal shimmered through the heat haze. Beyond lay rolling hills dense with ripening vines and ancient villages, their bell towers ringing out the daily rhythm of this timeless, sleepy region, cradle of the Renaissance and her second home.

Tuscany.

As she walked away from the roar of the cooling engines, she felt London slip from her, shed as a skin from another life. She pulled off her blazer, longing to swap her neat jeans for one of the summer dresses packed in her luggage. Even through the acrid cloud of aviation fuel, she could already smell the tinder-dry grass surrounding her uncle Bruce’s hilltop villa with its medieval watchtower, the mellow oil produced in the Villa Clara olive groves.

It still saddened her that she had only been permitted to get to know Bruce properly when, at the age of eleven, she was deemed old enough to be despatched alone to Italy for school holidays – every school holiday, she noted. Life in the former Hampstead family home had been fraught with the ever-present danger of fierce rows between her parents in the chaotic Edwardian villa until her father’s death three years ago and her mother’s subsequent relocation to Cornwall. Of course Phoebe missed them both, but in truth Bruce Cato had been her primary parent for most of her life, and she the daughter he never had.

She hurried through to the arrivals hall, scanning the crowd for her old friend Stefano, whom she spotted lounging against a pillar in chinos and a linen shirt, floppy dark hair pushed back from his eyes and looking as though he had come from the pool rather than his desk at the law office in Florence. For once Bruce wouldn’t be collecting her from the airport, but she could hardly contain her delight at seeing the housekeeper’s son there in his stead, and ran across to greet him.

‘Hey, Topolino!’ he said, tussling her into a playful hug.

She sighed. ‘Vero?’ Even though she pretended to be irritated at the nickname he had given her when they were children, its familiarity was a kind of homecoming.

‘You were such a little mouse when you first arrived at Villa Clara,’ he went on, slipping into Italian, as they always did when they were alone. ‘How was I to know you would be so bossy?’ And it was true: once Phoebe had settled into life at Villa Clara, picking up Italian as quickly as she picked up a suntan, she had forced Stefano to play anything from wildlife explorer to medieval knights. ‘Nice hair, by the way. I like it shorter.’

‘Really?’ Phoebe said, suddenly embarrassed. The previous week, she had paid a fortune she didn’t have, in order for her long blonde hair to be lopped into a stylish bob, encouraged by her friend and colleague Tilly, on whose sofa she had been sleeping for the last week. After the recent dramas in Phoebe’s romantic life, she had needed a change, and she certainly felt better for it.

‘Reminds me of when you made me cut it off when we were twelve. Boy, I got a hiding from Mamma for that. So, no boyfriend with you this time?’ Stefano asked lightly, taking her suitcase and heading towards the car park.

‘No boyfriend ever,’ she replied. ‘Seems you and everyone else was right about James.’

‘I’m glad,’ he said, pausing to push his long, dark fringe from his eyes. ‘I mean glad he’s gone. He wasn’t good enough for you.’

‘And is Jocelyn good enough for you?’ Phoebe would never be best of friends with Stefano’s latest girlfriend, a shiny London lawyer he had met at a conference, but she could at least show an interest.

He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe for now?’ Stefano’s inability to make relationships last was legendary.

‘I don’t know. But I’m sorry that pidocchio hurt you.’

‘I think you’re being unfair on the common louse.’ Phoebe pulled out her sunglasses. ‘Now, can we please go to Villa Clara? I’m in dire need of a glass of Bruce’s hideous house white and Angelina’s excellent lasagne.’

‘Mamma’s recipe is legendary, for sure,’ he said, leading her towards a silver Lancia parked nearby and opening the passenger door. ‘I can’t stay for lunch, but maybe after dinner I can take you into the village? There’s a fiesta all weekend. We can dance your worries away.’

If only it were that easy. She waited whilst he climbed in beside her, then turned to him. ‘Stefano?’

‘Si?’

‘Is everything OK at Villa Clara? Bruce wrote that he’d been undergoing a few medical tests.’ ‘Nothing to worry about’ had been Bruce’s throwaway comment, but the fact that he’d even mentioned his health led Phoebe to believe there was everything to worry about.

Stefano’s green eyes clouded over briefly. ‘I don’t know for sure.’

‘I sense a but?’

He hesitated. ‘He asked me to update his will.’

‘Really?’

Stefano pressed his tanned hand over hers. ‘Probably just doing his housekeeping – he is in his eighties, after all. I wish more of my clients would. Try not to worry.’

‘Easier said than done. On all fronts.’

‘I’m sorry. You said things weren’t great at the museum when we spoke last week?’

‘They’re really not,’ she said. The idea for the Cato Museum of Artifice had been born five years earlier at Villa Clara, one evening when too much wine had inspired Phoebe and Bruce to imagine a museum of their own. Bruce had been serious, it seemed, signing the lease three months later on a quirky four-storey London townhouse to showcase some of his finely crafted reproductions of Old Masters and a few curiosities he had collected over the years. And yet now Phoebe was coming to realise that the numbers would never add up. The building had recently been sold to an American management consultancy, along with those on either side, and with the rent about to double unless she accepted their offer to buy her out of the lease, the museum’s future seemed uncertain.

‘Need to talk it through?’

‘Only if you can tell me there’s a crock of gold sitting somewhere in Bruce’s estate.’ She watched as he shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Right. Then let’s forget it until I’ve had a chance to talk to Bruce, if that’s OK?’

‘Of course. So, shall we go?’

She nodded. ‘Andiamo.’

He crunched the car into gear and headed out to the trunk road that would take them south to the tiny village of Monteleone and the old villa at the end of a rutted track.

Bruce Cato was in animated discussion with Stefano’s father Marco about where to plant some new lavender bushes when Phoebe appeared beneath the vine-covered pergola. Stefano’s parents had arrived at Villa Clara not long before Phoebe herself began to visit in the early seventies, and while Angelina ran a tight ship looking after the house, Marco cared for the terraced garden that was Bruce’s pride and joy.

An Italianate formal space that defied the blistering heat and provided shady reading corners amongst the gravel paths and low hedges of scented herbs, the garden was where Phoebe had spent long childhood hours whilst Bruce tried to pass on his mastery of watercolour techniques, finally admitting that his ability to create art, if not his love of it, had bypassed her entirely. Beyond the wide bed of dahlias that Bruce insisted on tending himself each summer, until they burst into a blaze of autumnal colours, stood the solid mass of the ancient watchtower, which for six hundred years had warned of intruders, and now housed his art studio.

Angelina had laid two places at the table, where a large green garden salad sat in a wooden bowl beside ruby-red tomatoes and creamy buffalo mozzarella, a cold roast chicken and a condensation-frosted carafe of almost colourless white wine.

‘Sit, sit,’ Bruce said to Phoebe, lowering himself into his seat with the help of a walking stick. Although the once-black hair and beard were now snowy white, his tanned, freckled arms were strong and dark eyes still roguish. ‘Tell me your news,’ he said.

She started with the easy stuff: a few pieces she was considering for the museum, in the unlikely event that she could find the funding; how she was moving back into the Notting Hill flat soon, now James had moved out; how her mother had managed to fall out with half the village over a postcard-sized scrap of land.

‘Your mother could fall out with herself,’ Bruce said, ripping off a chunk of rosemary-flecked focaccia. There was no love lost between Bruce and Phoebe’s parents, which saddened her. Bruce had played a small part in some court case in the sixties, in which his word stood against that of Sir Edwin Viner, acquaintance of her parents and pillar of the London art world. Phoebe’s parents had picked their side, and in the way that only siblings can, the brothers had nursed an ice-cold grudge for over a quarter of a century, leaving Phoebe stranded in the middle. ‘Why do you think I’ve always stayed out of the way here?’ he added.

‘Because you wouldn’t live anywhere else?’

‘Exactly. The world comes to me, and I don’t have to endure any more wet English summers.’

Phoebe looked at him, noticing the slight catch in his breath. ‘But you’ll be back in London to visit the museum? I need your help with that empty room we’ve not curated yet,’ she said, trying to sound positive about their joint project, even though the truth was far from positive.

He shook his head. ‘My travelling days are over.’

He was tired, she could see, his lightly imparted news perhaps more serious than he was letting on so far. ‘Because of the tests you mentioned in your letter?’

‘Maybe. But you don’t need me at the museum. Trust yourself, Phoebe. Besides, I’m done with London.’ Phoebe watched as a twinge of sadness crossed his face. ‘Too many memories.’

‘What sort of memories?’ Phoebe asked gently, pouncing on a rare moment of candidness.

‘We thought we could change the world back then,’ he said, staring out across the gardens.

‘When?’

‘The sixties. Was there any other time? We tried to turn the Establishment on its head with our miniskirts and pop music, our marches and protests, but nothing has changed. Strikes everywhere you look, and nothing gets through Parliament without a bunch of landed gentry in long red dresses saying so.’

‘Still the revolutionary?’ Phoebe asked, smiling.

He sat back, wincing slightly. ‘Only in spirit. If you want to make a dent in the Establishment, you need a very sharp stick and a very thick skin.’

This was a Bruce she had not seen before: deflated, tired, a smaller version of himself, and Phoebe knew she really did have to worry about him. ‘Like when you challenged Edwin Viner?’ she asked, hoping to re-energise her uncle by poking at the hornets’ nest she had never quite been able to reach. There was an injunction in place, she knew, but surely it didn’t extend to his closest relative?

‘Viner?’ he spluttered, topping up his wine. ‘Even if I were allowed to, I’m not wasting our time together talking about that crook. I want to focus on things that bring me joy rather than peptic ulcers. And speaking of peptic ulcers, tell me what happened with Shameless.’

Phoebe rolled her eyes at the nickname Tilly and Bruce had given James during a recent visit to Villa Clara. She’d protested at the time, but she had to admit, he’d lived up to his name. Phoebe had met James at her first job as an apprentice curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. James had done various internships at auction houses where his parents knew the board, but there was always a reason it hadn’t worked out: he wanted to experience the art market from the bottom up; he wanted to be an artist himself; he wanted to go travelling. Or the truth: that he was killing time until he got his inheritance. ‘It didn’t work out,’ she said, wincing at the understatement. ‘Same old story,’ she explained to Bruce. ‘Girl falls in love with boy, boy moves in with girl, who discovers he is sleeping around . . .’

‘I’m sorry. Want me to set my London gangster friends on him?’

‘You don’t have any gangster friends,’ she laughed.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you sure?’

‘With you, I’m never sure about anything.’ And it was true: for all his joking, Phoebe would not be surprised to discover Bruce had known the Kray twins.

‘Get yourself a chap who’s not afraid to earn his own living next time. Or better still, find yourself an Italian who knows how to treat a woman.’ He smiled. ‘You might not even need to look that far.’

Bruce had long hinted that she and Stefano should be together, but she brushed his comment aside. ‘I think I might take a break, to be honest,’ she said instead. ‘It was exhausting keeping up with James and his awful friends. They actually pitied me because I work for a living. Good riddance.’

Bruce laughed. ‘I met a few of those back in the day. Called themselves hedonists in the twenties, bohemians in the thirties, and now they’re just plain old spoiled brats. Well, at least you have the museum. So tell me, did you manage to chase up that fake Fabergé egg? I heard that instead of a portrait of the Tsarina hidden inside, there’s a rather terrifying Russian clown with a striking resemblance to Rasputin. I was thinking it could go in the Bloomsbury Room.’

She hesitated. This was her moment to explain about the books that didn’t add up, the falling footfall and rising rent, the American management consultants; to tell him she’d had enough. ‘Maybe,’ she said instead.

He looked deflated. ‘Well, you decide where it goes. Your museum, after all.’

‘Bruce . . .’

He frowned. ‘I don’t like the sound of that tone. Are you about to spoil this lovely lunch?’

‘I don’t want to, but I need to talk to you. The museum is struggling,’ she said, deciding to simply come out with it. ‘Really struggling.’

‘I can help with that. Who do you think will get this money-gobbling place and my enormous debts when I go?’

‘I don’t know. Who?’ There were parts of her uncle’s life she knew nothing of, other than a brief, disastrous marriage in the fifties to a woman with a temper equal if not superior to his own. She looked at him now, still raffishly handsome but with no obvious love interest, other than the professed infatuation with Angelina, whom Marco offered to exchange for the Alfa Spider. Where did he disappear off to on his long, solitary drives every day or so? What, or who, was running through his mind when he sat alone with a cigar on the terrace late at night after everyone had gone to bed?

‘You will get the villa, you silly woman,’ he said. ‘And if I could give it to you now, I would. All I want is for you to be happy. But you’re clearly not. You walked in here like a wet Sunday afternoon in February.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She looked up at him. ‘I’ve had an offer for the lease on Bedford Court.’

‘An offer?’

‘The Americans who bought the building want to redevelop it.’

‘But we can’t let them. We must fight.’

‘Not we. Me. I’m the one at the coal face every day. I’m the one supplementing the coffers with—’ She stopped suddenly – he didn’t need to know she had begun dipping into her savings to pay Tilly. ‘I just know I’ve done as much as I can.’

He sighed. ‘And the collection?’

‘I’d have to sell it.’

‘Even the not-Vermeer?’ He suddenly slammed his glass down on the table. ‘No, that is yours, Phoebe. I painted it for you, not the museum. You are never to let that work go. Promise me.’

‘Of course. I promise.’

‘And Tilly? I hate to think of her talent going to waste. She’s been a huge asset to the museum.’

‘She would find something else – as you say, she’s brilliant.’ And it was true: Tilly was not only Phoebe’s best friend in London, but a fearsomely capable second-in-command at the museum. ‘It might not come to that. Miracles do happen.’ Phoebe leaned across and took his hand. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘And I didn’t mean to snap. I haven’t . . . well, I haven’t been myself of late. Speaking of which . . .’ He felt in the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small bottle of tablets, knocking back two with the rest of his wine. Even beneath his deep suntan, she could see his colouring was a little sallow.

‘Bruce, please tell me what’s wrong.’

He stood, pushing his chair aside. ‘Come. It’s a beautiful afternoon. Let’s take a walk. I want to show you the vines – there should be a bumper crop this year. Then let’s have a drink in the studio, where Angelina can’t badger us and we can talk frankly.’

Phoebe followed him inside the squat tower that sat across from the gardens, unable to shift the sense that Bruce wanted to show her everything one last time. She glanced around at the stacks of paintings, scruffy chests of drawers containing pigments and brushes, the desk with his neatly stacked blue notebooks. ‘I’ve always loved it in here,’ she said.

‘As have I,’ Bruce replied, gesturing for her to sit beside him on a dusty velvet sofa.

As she sat, she spotted the ladder and trapdoor that led to the next floor. ‘What is up there?’ she asked now. ‘You’ve never let me see.’

‘On the first floor?’ He shook his head. ‘Mainly rubbish. Old canvases, that sort of thing. And,’ he added, ‘rats. Why do you think I’ve always stopped you going up there?’

‘I was never frightened of rats.’

‘You think your mother would have let you come here again if you caught bubonic plague on my watch? Or died from rat poison?’

‘If only rats go up there, what’s that for?’ she said, pointing to a dusty bell hanging from a chain next to the hatch.

‘So I can call Angelina for my evening gin,’ he said a little sharply, then sighed. ‘Since today seems to be about honesty, you’re right, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

She wanted to tell him to stop, that she didn’t want to hear it, but instead she nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘Phoebe, I am unwell. Very unwell, as it turns out.’

‘Please, don’t . . .’

‘But I must. I can’t pretend.’ He smiled. ‘I’m very proud of you, you know?’

‘I’m proud of you too.’

‘Despite what they say about me?’

‘No one says anything about you.’

‘Then it really is over. The cancer may as well take me.’

‘Cancer?’ She felt tears prick at her eyes. It was worse than she had feared. ‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’d have come out here and helped.’

He waved a hand dismissively. ‘Exactly why I didn’t. You know I hate a fuss. Besides, it’s untreatable. I broke my lungs, and now I’m paying the price. I don’t regret a single cigar, however,’ he said, taking one now from a drawer and lighting it, his eyes closed as he released a stream of bittersweet smoke.

‘Dare I ask how long?’

‘Six months, maybe more, but I’m not interested in outliving my useful life. Once I can’t paint, I’m done.’

‘Surely there are things that can help?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m eighty-six. I’m not interested in chemotherapy.’

‘Bruce, I don’t know what to say.’

‘There’s nothing to say. I’ve had a good life, with only one regret.’

Phoebe looked at him. ‘What?’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘I’d be breaking the law if I talked about it.’

‘Even to me?’ she asked, wondering whether he might finally explain what had happened in a London court over two decades ago, which he refused to divulge in case even one word got back to her parents’ London circle.

‘Restricted information, even now. Get yourself a court transcript in twenty years’ time.’

She smiled. ‘You are incorrigible.’

‘You can put that on my gravestone: “An incorrigible old fart who smoked too many cigars.”’ His gaze drifted suddenly. ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I met Churchill? A weekend house party, back in the twenties. Full of artists. He was trying to tout his shabby watercolours. One of the Sitwells was there. Can’t remember which. And a rather extraordinary woman who’d married old Roland Penrose, great friends with Picasso. Now what was her name?’

Phoebe sat up straight. ‘You met Lee Miller? The war photographer? Sometimes I feel I don’t know you at all.’

‘I am just a man who has loved and been loved. I’ve been lucky.’ He glanced towards his desk, his eye alighting briefly on a black and white photograph of a woman. Phoebe had noticed it many times over the years, yet never really looked at it.

‘Who did you love?’ she asked, but a fit of coughing overtook him before he could answer.

‘Get me a brandy, would you?’ he said eventually.

Phoebe shook her head. ‘I’m glad I’m not your doctor.’

‘My doctor also wishes she weren’t.’ He reached for the tortoiseshell glasses he kept in his shirt pocket, so spattered with paint that they could barely be of any use. ‘Come, let’s play the old game, shall we?’

‘A treasure hunt?’ Phoebe said, recalling the elaborate trails he would leave around Villa Clara and its grounds, using works of art to punctuate the clues. She and Stefano had lost entire days deciphering cryptic messages, checking behind paintings and statues, in order to find Easter eggs, Roman coins, even a kitten once.

‘Not quite. I’ve got a new acquisition to show you. Want to test your eye?’

She had spent hours in the studio over the years, poring over art books while Bruce trained her never to trust the evidence of her eyes, to question the provenance of a piece, until she was almost good enough to pick a Bruce Cato reproduction out of a line-up – only ever almost, for he was unquestionably a master. ‘If I get it right, do I keep it?’ she asked.

He laughed. ‘You might as well, my dear. You might as well.’

Phoebe gradually came to realise that her visit was as much about helping Bruce put his affairs in order as it was about spending time together. It was a difficult time, and she was grateful to Stefano for taking her into Siena for dinner one evening when Bruce had gone for one of his regular drives. It was good to talk to someone who understood what it was to love and to lose Bruce Cato. Stefano let her laugh and cry, often joining in himself. There had been a difficult conversation as Stefano prepared the ground for what might have to happen if Bruce needed palliative care. The Villa Clara finances were not in great shape, but they decided to cross that bridge when they came to it. These few days felt too precious to be loaded with more worry.

The next day Phoebe helped Bruce crate up a Leonardo da Vinci replica he had made for the Cinecittà studios in Rome, the perfect excuse, he said, for a trip to the post office in Siena in the old red Alfa Spider. During that perilously fast drive along the tiny lanes, Bruce had looked across at Phoebe, protected from the dust and wind by large sunglasses and a scarf tied Grace Kelly-style over her hair. He had suddenly slowed down, pulling on to the verge at the edge of the road.

‘What is it?’ she’d asked.

‘You just reminded me of someone, sitting there like that.’

And that had been it: a tiny glimpse into the secret world of Bruce Cato, before his foot hit the accelerator and off they shot again.

The week passed too quickly, and Phoebe hated the thought that she was helping her uncle clear the decks. ‘Think of it as a spring clean,’ he told her cheerfully as they went through the house, sorting old paperbacks and throwing away ancient correspondence.

‘Bin or bonfire?’ she said, sitting on the study floor one afternoon and holding up a manila envelope full of newspaper clippings, airmail letters, postcards and other correspondence.

‘You needn’t think that’s going in your black bin bag, young lady,’ he said, snatching it from her.

‘I’m beginning to think nothing is.’ She shook her head. ‘If I do give up the museum, I could have a full-time job here, just sorting you out.’

‘Promise me you’ll give it another six months, and I’ll let you throw everything away next time you’re here.’ He was joking, but she knew that next time she was here, at best he would be a little less himself. At worst . . . maybe he was right. Keeping busy was the only way.

They’d arranged she would return in six weeks, but already that felt like a lifetime away as she said her goodbyes in the early morning sunshine on the gravel driveway, Stefano waiting nearby at the wheel of his Lancia. The tickle of Bruce’s beard on her forehead as she hugged him was the same as ever, the whisper of linseed oil and white spirit, but within her arms he felt smaller, and his breathing was laboured as Phoebe closed her eyes, memorising the hum of crickets warming up for the new day, the whickering of horses in a nearby field and the rhythmic swish of Angelina’s broom. And then it was time to go.

‘Look after her,’ Bruce called out to Stefano as the car pulled away.

‘What did he mean?’ she asked Stefano, his eyes firmly fixed on the road ahead.

‘He wants me to drive you safely, I suppose.’ The forced lightness of his tone kidded neither of them, however, and it was a difficult, silent journey before he dropped her at the airport.

Phoebe was still half-asleep as she emerged from the Underground a few days later, a bicycle courier yelling as he swerved to avoid her. Her reactions were dulled after a night on Tilly’s sofa and rather m. . .