Lucky Break by Esther Freud Page A

round a hilly bend. ‘Torri?’ they asked, and a woman jerked her thumb, back, the way they’d come. ‘Stop!’ they’d shouted, leaping up. ‘Please, per favore !’ and grabbing hold of their bags, they’d scrambled to the front of the bus, where, with a swish of rubber, they were let out on to the road.
    Jemma immediately burst into tears.
    â€˜For God’s sake,’ Dan hissed at her, ‘not here,’ and he waved cheerily at the driver as he cranked his vehicle into gear.
    â€˜Why not cry?’ Jemma shouted. ‘Why do we have to keep pretending it’s not all a stupid bloody disaster?’ And she sat down by the side of the road and sobbed into her hands. Dan looked left and right along the deserted road and wished he was anywhere but here. The lake stretched before him, as vast as a sea, and behind them, rising steeply, was an inhospitably rocky hill. Great, he thought, and whose idea was this? but he knew better than to say a word. Eventually even Jemma saw the pointlessness of crying and so they began the long walk back, arriving in the town so numb with tiredness they hardly noticed the sun beating down. The first shop they came to they went in, and Jemma surprised Dan by asking in Italian, her voice trilling up and down, for enough food for a picnic. They sat on the narrow strip of beach below the road and tore open the bread, stuffing it with curls of ham, wedges of salty cheese and small sweet tomatoes that squirted pips a metre high as they bit through the skin. In between mouthfuls they gulped warm peach juice, and when they were already full, forced in apricot biscuits, their centres melting into jam. Dan lay back against the pebbles, sunshine dappling his face, the water lapping at his toes, and flooded with contentment he told Jemma he was sorry, she was right, they should have both wailed and beaten their chests when they missed their stop. Jemma said she was sorry too. She was just so tired, and hungry. But it was funny, she started laughing, when Dan smiled so cheerily at the bus driver, and waved him on. ‘Don’t worry about us, we’ll be fine,’ she mimicked him, ‘we want to stop here, yes, just here, by the side of the road,’ and they lay on their backs and howled up at the blue sky until tears ran down the sides of their faces.
    They walked to the other end of the town where they found the campsite, and after several false starts they set up their tent and, more than three days after leaving London, they crawled inside, and with small shivers of laughter still rippling through their bodies, they held each other and slept.
    They stayed in Torri del Benaco for a week, the days lulling by, swimming, reading, playing cards, walking along the strip of restaurants, gazing in, deciding which one might be cheap enough to eat their evening meal in. They could have stayed there all summer, but they knew it would be cowardly – they’d set off with the idea of seeing as much as possible of Europe, and so reluctantly they packed up, and took the train to Venice, where they were directed to a campsite in a low-lying swamp where that first night Jemma was so badly bitten by mosquitoes she refused to come out of the tent.
    â€˜Listen . . .’ Dan coaxed her. ‘We’re in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, no one’s going to be looking at you.’ But when eventually she did crawl out into the open, one eye was swollen shut and her top lip was so distorted she looked like a cartoon. ‘But then again . . .’
    â€˜Come on,’ she snapped, ‘let’s get to St Marks Square, quick,’ and she stamped off towards the lagoon.
    Occasionally, as they sat outside cafés, or lay on their backs in the orange light of their canvas tent, Dan took out his New Penguin Shakespeare. ‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark’, it said on the first blank page, and these words