'Yeah, she doesn't do it any more. She never has the time,' Owen said lightly and tossed his apple core in a high arc behind his head.
'Well, that's a shame. I'll have to help her find some more time, so that she can read to you again.'
'OK.' Owen smiled, ever chirpy. That was the cheering thing about Owen. Hardly anything got him down. He was altogether a much happier little soul than when Ed had first got to know him. When Ed had become his form teacher two years ago, Owen had been so excruciatingly shy that he had rarely spoken to anyone outside his immediate family and had spent the entire school day in silence.
He was really coming along now and Ed couldn't help feeling a little proud of his part in this. He rested back on his elbows.
Then, just below them, further down the hill, Ed thought he could hear something . . . voices?
'Can you hear someone talking?' Owen asked, getting to his feet and looking out into the distance with his hand shading his eyes from the bright glare of the sun.
There were definitely light, chattering women's voices heading up the hill in their direction.
'Are we going to be in trouble?' Owen worried. 'Are we trespassing?'
'No,' Ed reassured him, 'we're fine. We're not going to be in trouble for having a picnic. Different story if we were picking their olives, or trapping rabbits or something.'
The voices were drawing closer and then up over the ridge of the hill towards them came a dark-haired woman, hand in hand with a girl about the same age and size as Owen, with two ponytails and long, thin legs, made to look even more so by the baggy white shorts she was wearing.
'Buon giorno!' Ed called out and got to his feet as the pair approached.
'Buon giorno!' the woman called back with a broad smile which showed her straight white teeth.
She pushed her hair out of her face so she could take a better look at these strangers. Owen saw that she was carrying a big basket full of pears. She and the girl must have been picking from the trees he and Ed had visited earlier in the day.
'Sonos Inglese,' Ed warned her, before she went off in quick-fire Italian.
'Ah, Inglesi!' She gave him a sunny smile. 'La villa?' she pointed in the direction of the house they'd rented.
'Si,' Ed replied.
She turned to the little girl and let off a barrage of rapid Italian, with the result that the girl turned shyly to Owen and stumbled over the words: ''Ow you do? I Maria. This my mamma.'
Not to be outdone, Owen's response was, 'Buon giorno. Owen.'
'You like?' the woman asked them both and held out her basket to them.
'We've picked some already, I hope that's OK,' Ed confessed.
'Si, si,' the woman assured them, 'Nocciuola?' she asked next. 'You like nocciuola?'
Ed nodded enthusiastically, then turned to explain to Owen, 'I think she's going to show us where to pick nuts.'
'Yes, come,' the woman said with a smile.
* * *
Halfway down his third long peachy-tea drink, it began to dawn on Connor that he was well and truly tipsy.
He didn't blame himself: hadn't he tried to explain to the waiter at the start that he wanted a non-alcoholic drink? And he didn't blame the waiter, because the waiter had probably tried to explain to him . . . so there really was no reason to get upset.
And he couldn't imagine getting upset anyway. He felt far too good. He felt like a big, warm, lazy lion, sitting in the sun, watching the world go by.
'This is very nice,' Connor told Lana, putting his hands behind his head and stretching out his arms, 'so very, very nice.'
'Aha,' she told him. 'You do know you're drinking cocktails don't you, Connor?'
'Yeshhh,' he confirmed, 'but how did you know?'
'Hmmm . . . let me see,' she smiled, 'maybe it was when you started telling me you were "deshperate to get a shhcooter."'
On the table between them, her phone began to bleep. Tipsy or not, Connor made a lunge for it and got there first.
'Give it back!' Lana cried. 'That's personal.'
'Oh good! I should hope so too,' Connor told her and clicked on the message box: 'Going out tonight to see elephants. Chat later A kiss kiss,' he read out.
'OK, no need to guess who A kiss kiss is. But elephants? Please explain?'
'Oh, it's some people from school, they've formed this band . . .' Lana wasn't looking too happy now.
'Aha, so A is going out tonight . . .' Connor deduced, 'with all your school friends . . . with other girls, no doubt . . . and he's going to be having lots of fun without you?' Connor elaborated.
'Oh shut up!' Lana snapped.
'OK! No need to be so tetchy, baby-cheeks. Now look . . .' Connor leaned in to confide his words of dating wisdom to his favourite moody teenage girl, 'don't text him. D'you hear me? Not another word, OK? Not till Monday morning at the earliest. Nothing will drive him more wild and crazy about you than the thought of you
not
thinking about him every minute of the day. I promise you! This is how men are. So simple to understand.'
Before he could hear what Lana had to say about this, a tall, blondish surf dude kind of guy in an oversized T-shirt slouched up from the pavement and pulled up a chair at the table next to theirs.
'You English?' he asked with a heavy Italian accent.
'Yes,' Connor told him with his lazy lion grin.
'Cool,' was the guy's response. He turned his chair to face them, leaned forward and seemed to be ready for a nice long chat.
Although to Connor's dismay, this surfer dude was pretty obviously more interested in Lana than in him.
'Oh my God, I have died and gone to heaven!'
There was no containing Annie's enthusiasm when she hit the first of the factory outlet shops. This was it! This was unbelievable bargain central. She decided immediately that what she had to do was dig deeply into the borrowed money sitting in her bank account, buy a load of stuff here and somehow get it back to London to flog at a handsome mark-up to her eBay buyers.
'I am officially dead! No doubt about it,' she told Billie and Dinah as she tried not to skip with excitement around the shelves. 'Do you know what these are?!' She pointed to the rows and rows of leather moccasins in every colour lined up along one of the walls. 'These are Tod's driving shoes! Actual, genuine Tods. I'd recognize them anywhere, and in London they cost nearly three hundred pounds a pair. Here they are – a hundred euros?' Annie stared hard at the price tag, to convince herself that she was not in fact hallucinating.
Dinah picked up a shoe and scrutinized it carefully.
'It's nice,' she agreed, 'really nice leather. But Annie, they're seconds,' she reminded her over-enthusiastic sister, 'and you don't wear flats. You never, ever have done and you never, ever will.'
'I know!' Annie agreed, unfazed. 'But the faults are tiny and I know loads of people who wear flatties. Loads who will snap up a pair of these beauties for . . . let's say, a hundred and fifty pounds?'
Annie seemed to speed up, she began to flit about the shop spotting something even better than the last, desperately trying to hide her astonishment at the amazingly good prices from the shop owner.
The woman in charge managed to explain in a jumble of English and Italian that if Annie had her own business she could buy as much as she liked, but if she was a private client, there was a limit.
Never had Annie wanted to have her own business more.
'Then I could come over here all the time!' she told Dinah. 'Stock up with all this brilliant stuff and import it straight back to London.'
After ordering the maximum twenty pairs of Tods allowed for a private client and arranging for them to be shipped directly to her London address, Annie led them out of the first shop and straight into the second, then on to the third and fourth.
Each one they went to had its own special supply of goods and unique treasures. Annie racked up carrier bag after carrier bag of goodies and Dinah gave up trying to restrain her. Instead, she chose carefully for herself and her little family.
In honour of the tenth wedding anniversary, she bought Bryan a supple, luxurious, leather single buckled messenger bag. 'He's going to love this! Isn't Daddy going to love this bag?' she asked Billie, who fiddled with the fat brass buckle approvingly.
Billie snagged herself a pink cashmere wrap cardigan. Rose pink.
'Baby's first cashmere,' Dinah couldn't help smiling.
'No,' Annie disagreed, 'I think if you cast your mind back to when she was born, I gave her a cashmere cardigan, hat, gloves and matching bootees.' There was just the slightest hint of huffiness to this.
'Oh yes! How could I forget?' Dinah said quickly and bit her tongue as she wondered again how on earth Annie had imagined that a new mum would have time to hand-wash cashmere baby bits? The lovely pink things had been worn twice then languished in the hand-wash bag until tragically, they were totally outgrown.
For herself, Dinah had already bought a soft leather purse, a bright red tote bag and several of the velvet quilted headbands which Annie thought were hideously Italian Sloane but Dinah, being Dinah, having the eclectic, quirky fashion girl look that Topshop stylists would kill for, was obviously going to get away with.
Mario's car boot was filling up too quickly, Billie was looking dangerously pale and sleepy and although Dinah probably didn't want to say 'Let's not go into the last place', Annie knew she was thinking it.
'C'mon, I'll be really quick, honest,' Annie wheedled. 'I could even give Billie a carry if you like.'
She couldn't bear the thought of missing out on another treasure trove. Yes, she'd already spent about £2,000 on the Tods, some belts and some bags but she was so confident she'd be able to sell all these lovely things on with her eBay site in about ten minutes flat, that she wasn't even slightly nervous.
Well . . . yes, she was maybe slightly nervous of explaining this to Ed. Annie had still not had the big business talk with him; she still hadn't told him that she had gone ahead and borrowed the money . . . and she wasn't sure when or how she was going to be able to raise it. At the moment, she was forging ahead in the hope that it would all go really well, really quickly, and she could break good news to him a bit further down the line, without worrying him. He worried far too much about her anyway.
As soon as Annie pushed open the door of the last factory outlet shop, she could see that this was a very special shop.
Beneath her feet was the gleam of polished limestone flooring and at first glance she could tell that the lighting in here was bright and flattering, nothing like the glaring strip lights of all the other stores they'd visited. Already Annie's eyes had lighted on the handbags.
Shiny bags and matt bags; jewel greens, purples and reds; traditional tans and blacks; quilted bags and slouchy bags; the dainty, the chunky and everything in between; buckled bags, tasselled bags, bags trimmed with bronze, bags trimmed with chrome . . . every kind of bag anyone could ever want was here on these dark, wooden custom-built shelves.
But before Annie could rush over and begin a detailed inspection, she was greeted warmly by a man and woman who were standing, as if waiting for them, at the front counter.
'Buona sera, signoras,' the man spoke first.