Lake Como – How You Leave a Place You Love

The last morning of anywhere has a particular light to it, and Como saved its best for me.

I woke before the house did and did not get up. I lay across the bed with the shutters half open and the lake throwing its first pale light onto the ceiling, and I wrote for a while in the notebook I have carried since I was nineteen and have never once filled, because I only ever write in it in places I do not want to forget. I put down the ordinary things. The smell of the water in the morning. The particular green the hills become just after dawn. The way the house ticks and settles as it warms. You think you will remember all of it, and you never do, so I write it down and leave it for a later version of myself to find.

Breakfast came slowly out on the terrace, and I was not alone for it. A friend had stayed the last night, and we sat over coffee and fruit and good bread long past the point of being hungry, the villa gold across the water and the lake doing its bright impossible thing, and we talked about nothing I could repeat and everything that matters. That is the real luxury of a place like this. Not the linen or the view, but the hours it gives you to be unhurried with someone.

Then I gave myself to the whole day, deliberately, the way you do the last of anything. I went down into the garden while it was still cool and let myself wander in it for an hour, the box hedges clipped into their patient shapes and the roses gone slightly wild in the heat, and I tucked one behind my ear like a girl in an old photograph and did not care that there was no one to see it.

There was tennis, because there is always tennis here, on the little clay court that seems to hang above the water as though someone had dared it to.

I played one last set that I lost with great dignity, the red dust getting into everything the way it always does, and afterwards I wandered down along the waterfront into the village with a straw hat pulled low and a dress the colour of the lake in the middle of the day. I was expected nowhere. I let the shopkeepers say hello. I let the afternoon light do what it does to the old plaster, giving back all the warmth it had gathered through the morning, and I sat with a single cold glass by the water, watching the boats come and go and feeling entirely, uncomplicatedly happy.

I even took a long bath before dinner, which I mention only because I have reached the age where a bath can be an occasion, and this one was, all the windows open and the sound of the lake drifting up through them while the last of the sun turned the water into something you could never photograph properly.

And then it was evening, and the day put on its good clothes. I wore the long silver one, the slip that moves like water, and walked up through the garden in the blue hour with the cypresses turning black against the sky and the whole place smelling of jasmine and warm stone. There was a table set at the very edge of the lake, candles already lit and flickering in the small wind off the water, and I sat down to my last dinner in this house with that particular tenderness you only ever feel for a place because you are about to leave it.

I did not eat much. I looked a great deal. I watched the candles and the black water and the far lights coming on one by one across the lake, and I thought, as I always do on the last night, that none of this is really mine to keep. The house, the garden, the court, the boat asleep in its boathouse. I borrow them for a season and hand them back, the way my father did before me and someone will after me. But for one more slow, sunlit day they belonged to me completely, and I paid attention to every hour of it.

In the morning I go north, to Maggiore, to a different water and a different light and a house I do not know yet. I am ready to be somewhere new. That is the strange grace of leaving a place you love. You can adore it completely and still want the next place, and both of those things are true at once, and neither is a betrayal.

The lake will keep the house. It always does. I will be back before the snow, and it will be exactly as I left it, and so, I hope, will I.