I crouched down to give the dog some more attention. He was a little bit slobbery but he wasn’t smelly in the slightest.
‘Come, ladies!’ encouraged Gino, striding off towards a pretty house. ‘Let us go and drink wine.’
He introduced us to Maurizio, a ruddy-cheeked, smiley Italian who had a lovely aura about him. Not that I entirely understood what auras were, and whether they were an actual thing, but I knew when somebody had a good one.
I glanced over at Aidan, who was pumping Maurizio’s hand and attempting to talk in pigeon Italian. At least he was having a go. He had a nice aura, I thought. At least, I’d thought he had when I first met him in Scotland. Then I looked at Rosamund. Not so much.
Just as Maurizio led us down into his beautiful, sloping garden and began to point out the land that was his and explain why he’d chosen that particular area to set up his business (the forest gave the wine a distinct flavour, apparently), Nick and Daisy arrived. Of course, they couldn’t do anything quietly and Nick completely ignored Maurizio and Gino and swooped straight in with the over-the-top airkisses and the booming voice which seemed to be getting louder the more time he spent with his family. Maurizio looked bemused by these new, noisy arrivals. I refused to let myself think about what Aidan must think. Nope, I was not going to go there.
‘Sorry, everyone!’ trilled Nick.
‘Better late than never,’ said Rosamund, wagging her finger at him as though he was a naughty child.
‘Hey,’ I said to Daisy as she skulked up next to me.
‘Hey,’ she grunted back, as though talking took extreme effort.
‘How’s it been, darling?’ asked Nick, who, having done the rounds with everyone else, was finally acknowledging me.
‘I’ve had several glasses of wine and about half a pint of olive oil, so all good,’ I told him.
There was no point having a go at him, not least because I didn’t want to give Sophia and Rosamund the satisfaction of doing it in front them. I bet they’d just love it if we started bickering, so reassuring themselves that their first impressions had been right and Idefinitelywas not right for Nick.
‘You’re not mad at me, then?’ asked Nick, wincing as though I was about to launch into an angry tirade at him.
I shrugged. I wasn’t mad, exactly. Just resigned to the fact that his priority was and always would be Daisy. That’s what happened when you had kids and that was how it should be. Their happiness mattered above all else (not that my parents had got the memo). Although I didn’t think that that meant you couldn’t say no to them occasionally.
I turned back to Maurizio, who was telling us enthusiastically about the different varieties of grape he grew. Nick hadn’t seemed to cotton on to the fact that some of us actually wanted to listen to Maurizio rather than hearing him banging on about his ‘dreadful’ journey.
‘Can you believe it, we had a—’
‘Sssshh,’ I hissed at him. ‘I want to listen to this.’
Nick wasn’t acting like himself, which bothered me. Was he really so heavily influenced by his family, who seemed to bring out a side of him I wasn’t finding particularly appealing? He was coming across as a boisterous city boy today, the type of guy I knew that Aidan perennially couldn’t stand and therefore would never in a million years be envious of.
I pinched the top of my nose. God, what was I thinking? It didn’t matter what Aidan thought, did it?
I tried to concentrate on Maurizio, who had the sort of warm, kind face that centred you if you focused on it hard enough.
‘I grow four different grapes here,’ he was saying, his eyes lighting up as he explained. ‘Sauvignon from France, Sangiovese – a red grape from Italy, Shiraz which is Eastern and Merlot from France.’
‘Can you eat the grapes?’ asked Aidan, who seemed as genuinely interested as I was. ‘Do they taste good?’
‘You can,’ replied Maurizio. ‘Some grapes you can eat. But they taste very different from the grapes you would buy, let’s say, at the supermarket.’
I glanced over my shoulder at Nick, who was – quite rudely, I thought – whispering into Sophia’s ear. Daisy was equally disinterested and was taking selfies against a backdrop of fields and trees. At least she was appreciating the countryside, I supposed.
‘Come, let us see where the wine is made,’ said Maurizio, leading us back up the path towards the winery.
Once we’d seen his impressive set-up of huge vats housing four to six thousand bottles of wine each, Maurizio led us to a long, wooden table under a pergoda, where we had panoramic views of the vineyards stretching as far as the eye couldsee. I was grateful for the shade the roof allowed us and the temperature was perfect – warm but not sticky-hot. I ended up sitting with Nick to one side of me and Daisy the other. Aidan was, perhaps worryingly, opposite Nick, who made a big show of introducing himself. I was going to have to tell Nick about Aidan at some point, but there never seemed to be a good time and I didn’t want to make Nick feel uncomfortable. Which anyone would be, wouldn’t they, if they found themselves sitting opposite their fiancée’s ex-boyfriend? Then again, he’d never even been my ‘boyfriend’. We’d been seeing each other, that was all, and just because I’d felt myself falling for him, more and more with every passing day, didn’t mean he’d felt the same. He clearly hadn’t, in fact.
‘Hello, mate. I’m Nick,’ he said, shaking Aidan’s hand vigorously.
‘Aidan. Glad you could make it in the end,’ he replied with a smile.
‘Ha! And now I am going to more than make up for it,’ said Nick.
He grabbed the glass of wine that Maurizio had just poured him and downed it in one. Maurizio, good-natured as he was, laughed.