There is a particular sound that means summer to me, and it is not birdsong or church bells but the low, patient burble of a wooden Riva easing out of its boathouse while the water is still the colour of pewter. I have known that sound since before I could swim. This morning I heard it again, and for a moment I was five years old.
My father brought me to Lake Como when I was small, too small to understand why a grown man would go quiet whenever a Riva slid past. He loved those boats the way other men love a horse or a piece of music. The mahogany polished until you could see the sky in it, the chrome, the way the hull sits low and certain in the water and asks the lake for nothing. He would name them as they went by, the way other fathers name birds. By the time I was ten I could name them too. I still can.
So, on the third morning here, I did the only thing that felt right. I took the Riva out, the one that was his and is somehow still his even now. Just me, a scarf knotted beneath my chin, the old leather wheel warm beneath my hands the way it had been beneath his, and the whole lake opening ahead as though it were being unwrapped. Bellagio on its green headland, the villas stepping down to the water, the mountains still holding a little of the night in their folds. I did not go anywhere in particular. That was the point. My father never did either. He said the lake was not something you crossed, it was something you sat inside, and you let it show you what it wanted to.
By midday I was hungry and a little sun-drunk, so I tied up and wandered into town. This is the part of Como I love that never makes the postcards: the ordinary magic of a lakeside village going about its afternoon. Boats knocking gently against their moorings, a waiter laying tables in the shade, the smell of somebody’s lunch drifting down a narrow lane. I had no list and no plan. I simply walked and let the cobbles decide, stopping for a coffee I did not need simply because the chairs were exactly the right kind of worn.
And then, because you cannot spend a day on this lake without being drawn back to it, I went to the villa. You will know the one. The honey-coloured terraces stepping down to the water, the umbrella-clipped trees, the loggia looking out in three directions. Anyone who has seen Casino Royale has seen it, though the villa was old and famous long before Bond ever recovered on its terrace. I wandered the gardens as the light softened, past the statues and clipped hedges and great stone urns spilling red geraniums, and I understood again why my father used to fall silent. Some places do not ask for your opinion. They simply are, and have been, and will be long after all of us, and the only sensible response is to be quiet with them.
I stayed too long, of course. I always do. There was a moment near the water’s edge, the stone still holding the day’s warmth beneath my bare feet, the lake going from silver to slate to something almost black, when I thought: this is the whole reason. Not the boats or the villas or the dresses. This. The pause. The quiet collecting of a moment you already know you will reach for in February, in some grey city, when you need proof that this kind of light exists.
The evening asked something different of me. There was a dinner, the good kind, the kind that begins with candlelight on a terrace and champagne somehow always exactly cold enough, with people talking in four languages and nobody in a hurry. I did my face by lamplight beforehand, the window turning blue behind me, a little red on my lips because my mother always said a woman should own one shade that makes her braver. I wore the pale blue, the one that moves. Then I stood by the pool with a glass in my hand and the candelabra throwing gold over everyone, and let myself be exactly where I was, which is harder than it sounds and perhaps the only thing worth practising.
Someone asked me over dinner whether I plan my days or simply wander into them. I have been asked that my whole life and I still do not have a tidy answer. The truth is I plan enough to find somewhere beautiful and then refuse to plan a single thing beyond that. My father taught me that on this lake, at the wheel of this same boat, going nowhere on purpose. It remains the best advice I have ever been given.
Tomorrow I will probably do it all again. Tomorrow, too, when I hear that engine cough and settle across the water, I will be five years old for a second, and glad of it.
V.
The Day in Pictures
More from this trip: Day One, in Bellagio, Day Two, in Varenna, and my complete guide to Lake Como.
