Alessandro had a daughter?
She had never asked him if he had children, she hated the question so much herself, yet this kid looked so much like him there was really no doubting it. Had she died too? It was so strange he had never mentioned her.
He was thinner in the picture and his hair was shorter, but mostly what struck her was the lightness about him. He stood taller, somehow, and his shoulders did not bear the weight of his current grief. His eyes, his smile, even the way he held his head radiated happiness, contentment.
They were a happy family, she thought, comparing the photo with the one in Daniel’s shoe.
Daniel.
She sank into the sofa, the photo falling from her hand onto the seat next to her, her head thrown back on the cushions as she gazed blankly at the ceiling.
Her husband and Alessandro were opposites in every way. Daniel was fair where Alessandro was dark, chiselled where Alessandro was soft, reserved where Alessandro was impassioned. She could not see Daniel getting wound up about some ancient enemy stealing the family seat a thousand years ago. He forgave his own parents far worse crimes.
Daniel did not hold grudges. He preferred smoothing the waters to making waves. Shouting at her in the alley was as angry as she’d ever seen him.
What had happened to the husband she knew so well? She had thought he looked the same as always when she first saw him in the piazza, but in the alley with his harsh voice, his hooded eyes, and his obvious fury, he seemed a different man. Older. Older?
Today was Saturday. It was Daniel’s birthday.
Lily closed her eyes and felt a tear trickle down her face toward her ear.
A lifetime ago she had planned to spend this afternoon with her husband having lunch at the Museum of Modern Art and meandering around the collections.
Instead she had spent it betraying him in the same way he had betrayed her.
Alessandro, having finally extracted himself from his sickly housekeeper, swept back into the room.
‘Please forgive me,’ he said. ‘But I think Signora Benedicti is recovered now. At least she says she can start cleaning again, although I have instructed her to take a rest for an hour or two.’
He stopped when he saw her tears.
‘You are upset, I am sorry,’ he said, coming to her.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said.
He looked at the photo in her hands.
‘Ah,’ was all he said.
‘You have a daughter,’ she said, holding up the photo.
‘Yes.’
‘You never told me about her.’
‘There is not much to say.’
‘Well, how old is she? Where does she live?’
He seemed angry and she thought for a moment he was going to storm out of the room. The romance was gone, that was clear. Still, he sighed and sat down beside her, picking up the photo.
‘She is twenty-one and she lives in Pienza.’
‘How often do you see her?’
‘I do not see her.’ He paused. ‘Sofia.’
‘That’s a beautiful name, Alessandro. For a beautiful girl.’
‘She is lost to me,’ he said.
‘I can’t believe that.’
‘It is true. She has been lost to me for some time. Remember when I told you of the family that cheated us out of this house? She married one of them.’
‘But that was hundreds of years ago!’
‘The same cheating poison still runs in the Mangiavacchi blood,’ Alessandro said. ‘This is no secret and she knows it yet still she marries him.’
‘Well, that is what we call cutting off your nose to spite your face where I come from,’ Lily said. ‘She’s your daughter, Alessandro. And she has lost her mother. She must miss you so much and surely you must miss her.’
She could tell from the set of his jaw that he was about to fight for his position, to defend himself, but in the end he didn’t. He slumped back farther into the sofa and sighed again.
‘Yes, I miss her,’ he said. ‘Of course I do. And now she has a son, my grandson, but…I have never met him.’
‘Alessandro, that’s so sad. Not just for her but for you, and for that little boy. Can’t you kiss and make up?’
‘I am waiting,’ he said. ‘I am waiting until I am no longer so angry with her.’
‘And how long do you think that will take?’
‘I don’t know how long it will take, Lily. I did not think it would take this long.’
‘You have to find a way to forgive her, Alessandro.’
‘I know this, Lily. I know this. Please, can we talk about something else. What of you? Is your face also missing a nose?’
‘Not quite,’ said Lily. ‘But I do have a husband.’
‘I see.’ He didn’t seem that surprised.
‘He has a girlfriend and two children and I only just found out about them, so I came here to find him.’
This he was surprised by. ‘In Toscana?’
‘In Montevedova.’
‘And have you found him?’
‘Well, he’s there,’ she said. ‘I saw him today.’
‘Ah,’ Alessandro said. ‘And then you saw me.’
Lily supposed it really was that shamefully obvious. ‘You must think I am a terrible person,’ she said.
‘I think you are beautiful and I think you are sad,’ Alessandro said. ‘I have thought that since the moment I saw you.’
She managed a smile. ‘That’s funny. I thought the same thing about you.’
‘We are a good pair for this reason, perhaps?’ suggested Alessandro.
‘I think that we are not a pair,’ she said. ‘I think that what happened just now, between us, was a mistake. A very nice mistake. But still a mistake.’
Alessandro fixed her with his baleful brown eyes. ‘You still love your husband, no?’
He did not know the Lily who had built a fortress around her heart’s darkest chambers, so she let him in.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I loved him before I found out he was cheating on me, even if, like you and Elisabeta, we never really talked about it. But now I can’t tell if I love him or not.’
‘I think if you didn’t love him, you would be able to tell that,’ Alessandro said.
‘Why?’
‘You are hurt, Lily. I know this, but I also know that a man cheating on his wife does not always have something to do with how much he loves her. We’re men,’ Alessandro said as she tried to protest. ‘Don’t give us too much credit. We mean our promises when we make them, but we are simpletons when it comes to temptation, you must know this. Us cheating on you is not the same as you cheating on us.’
‘Well, I just cheated on him so I guess we are in the same boat.’
‘And how do you feel?’
‘I feel like I have done something that can never be undone. How do you feel?’
‘I feel we made the most of a good opportunity.’
‘Well, you certainly sound like you know what you are talking about.’
‘I’m Italian. Of course I know what I am talking about.’
‘You had an affair when you were married to Elisabeta?’
‘More than one.’
‘And she knew?’
‘She found out about the last one, and until she did I had no idea how much I was hurting her.’
‘But she forgave you.’
‘There was one month at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and a very expensive fur coat and a watch, but yes, she forgave me.’
‘But it’s different for me. My husband has had children, the children I could never have myself, with another woman. Could he be any more deceitful?’
‘Excuse me if what I say is not what you want to hear, Lily, but the deceit is the same, whether there is a child involved or not. Would you feel better if you knew of the affair but not the child?’
Oh, but Lily loved the child.
‘It’s complicated,’ she said. ‘Too complicated. I might still love him bu
t I don’t know if I can forgive him.’
‘Yes, I know this. It is the same with my daughter. I love her, of course, she is my flesh and blood, but I don’t always feel this love. There is so much else that I feel so strongly in the way.’
English as a second language and still he had encapsulated the knotted core of Lily’s predicament. She could not know if she still loved Daniel because there were so many other obstacles in the way. And she wasn’t sure if she was capable of showing him enough mercy to remove the obstacles.
‘I think forgiveness is beyond me,’ she said.
‘I am the same,’ Alessandro agreed. ‘You see, we do make a good pair.’
They sat in companionable silence for a minute or two, then Lily got to her feet.
‘I need to go,’ she said. The sun was setting, the greens of the hills rolling away from Alessandro’s villa now morphing into smoky pinks and purples.
‘You could stay,’ Alessandro said. ‘You could stay and I could take care of you.’
It was tempting, in a floating-through-the-blue-Tuscan-sky sort of way.
She stepped forward to kiss him a chaste goodbye and he held her for a moment, long enough for her to catch a comforting whiff of passion fruit and sweat and coffee. She caught a glimpse then of what it would be like to stay in his arms, to melt into the bits of him she could see were strong and safe and loving.
But although he had told her he was happy, there was a weight still resting on his shoulders that all the sweet talk and lying naked in her arms would never shift.
This was a man who could build a useless boat in memory of a wife he could not let go yet pushed away a daughter who was right there and surely needed him.
Alessandro was a mistake. A very nice mistake. But still a mistake.
‘I feel good,’ Signora Benedicti announced, sweeping back into the room. ‘But now I will go home and I will take this lady friend with me.’
This lady friend agreed and meekly followed the housekeeper out of the villa and into her rusty Renault.
Chapter 41
‘All praise to Santa Ana di Chisa,’ the widow Benedicti breathed, dialling the widow Ciacci’s number into her cell phone after she’d dropped Lily off at the parking lot by the tourist office.
‘She’s on her way back up the Corso now,’ she reported.
‘Was disaster averted?’ the widow Ciacci wanted to know.
‘It’s hard to say,’ the widow Benedicti reported. ‘Partially, perhaps.’
‘Is partially enough?’ the widow Ciacci asked doubtfully. ‘I can’t remember how it works.’
‘Don’t ask me, it’s nearly thirty years. And even then we only did it at night in the dark on a Thursday.’
‘Oh, I miss it though, Benedicti, don’t you?’
‘Thursdays have never quite been the same,’ her friend admitted. ‘Although I often make a crostata di more on a Thursday now, so that gives me something to look forward to.’
‘So what shall I tell Violetta?’
‘Tell her that the new calzino and old calzino were found in a state of partial undress in the living room, not the bedroom, and that upon being surprised by myself, became fully dressed, talked for quite a while—about what I’m not sure—and then parted.’
‘Was the parting romantic?’ the widow Ciacci wanted to know.
‘She was in his arms but there didn’t seem to be anything too spicy going on. It was more…companionable, I suppose you could say.’
‘No harm in being companionable,’ the widow Ciacci said. ‘We’ll see you back at HQ? There’s a lot to be organised.’
Chapter 42
As she climbed the hill from the parking lot to the pasticceria, Lily further considered what Alessandro had said about not feeling the love because so many other things were in the way. The truth, if she was honest with herself, was that these obstacles to how she felt about Daniel were not recent additions. They’d been around a while and they weren’t pebbles, either, they were boulders. They’d grown moss and sheltered smaller rocks now. She didn’t know if they could ever be moved.
And even if they could, this new Daniel, the one who said he loved her but had a family here, the one who had carved out a different life for himself across the world from her, might no longer want her. Whether she loved him or not could well be immaterial.
The gap between them was so wide that she didn’t know how a little bit of forgiveness could close it. It could just as likely plummet to the bottom of the crevasse and make no difference at all.
And anyway, did she really need to know if Daniel didn’t want her anymore? Would it not be better to assume that he did and leave him before he got the chance to leave her first? Any more than he already had?
She couldn’t imagine the humiliation of forgiving Daniel only to have him thank her politely and marry Eugenia.
In fact, she couldn’t imagine the humiliation of forgiving him, period. The actual act of forgiveness she could almost come to grips with, but it was a private agreement with herself, not a face-to-face arrangement with him. The very thought of talking to him about it, dissecting his betrayal and her suffering, made her want to throw up.
Until that point she had never understood why some people got divorced so quickly. She could think of at least three couples who’d seemed perfectly happy one day and perfectly separated the next.
Now she knew why: who wanted in on the postmortem? If it was dead, it was dead. Why drag the entrails out into the open and poke at them with a stick? That would surely only cause more pain, especially to the injured party.
No, she had come to Tuscany, she’d basked in its beauty, she’d found out exactly what was going on with her husband, she’d revived her relationship with her sister, she’d learned to make cantucci, and she had spent an afternoon making love to a handsome Italian man—something she planned to never tell anyone else about as long as she lived. She would write the whole trip off in her mind as a sort of secret adventure. And she would stay true to her promise to make sure that Daniel did the right thing by Francesca; she meant that, even if it hurt her bank account. But she would do it from her apartment on West Seventy-second Street.
It was time, truly, to go home.
‘Continue straight ahead,’ as Dermott would say. Continue straight ahead. It was a relief, she told herself, to decide that her marriage was over, because once again she was a woman with a plan. This i was about to be dotted.
It was dark by the time she opened the door to the pasticceria as slowly as possible so the bell gave only the tiniest tinkle. She stopped for a moment just to take in the strange little place one more time. How did it manage to always smell of roses even when there weren’t any? The faint glow of the street lantern outside filtered through the window, illuminating the green glass bowl in which Lily and Francesca had arranged their cantucci earlier in the day. Then it had looked like a bouquet of biscotti hearts. Now there was nothing in it but a few lonely crumbs.
How peculiar, Lily thought. Maybe Violetta had come home and thrown the cookies out.
Creeping as quietly as she could, she pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen and slipped through it, only to find Violetta sitting patiently at the table waiting for her. Luciana was propped up in the bed looking as fit as a fiddle, hands clasped neatly on top of her quilts and blankets.
‘Oh, goodness,’ Lily said politely. She had been planning on slipping away quietly, perhaps leaving a note, but maybe it was better to be upfront. ‘Actually, no, this is great,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. The thing is that I am leaving, Violetta. Tonight. I’m just going to pack my bags and head back to Rome. Stay near the airport, get the first flight home to New York.’
Violetta looked shiftily from side to side.
‘Mmm, no,’ she said. She had quite a loud voice for a very small, old person. ‘No, I don’t think so. No, no, no.’
Lily was taken aback, but not for long. ‘Well, yes,’ she replied, firmly. ‘Sí. Sí, sí, sí.??
?
‘But you agree to stay for one month,’ Violetta said. ‘This is a verbal contract.’
‘Verbal contract? What the—? And about this whole speaking English thing. When exactly were you going to tell me about that?’
‘When exactly were you going to ask?’
‘Buonosera,’ Luciana called out from the bed with a chirpy wave.
‘Oh, Luciana, welcome home. How are you feeling?’
‘Sí. Grazie,’ she said.
‘She doesn’t speak inglese,’ Violetta said. ‘Just me. Lily, is time for us to have a talk.’
‘All those things I told you,’ Lily said, remembering the rants she had gone on while the sisters bungled their baking. ‘All those things! You understood and you never said a word.’
‘I did not understand,’ Violetta said. ‘Why you put your cashmere in the oven? Does not make sense.’
‘I thought I was talking to a stone! Why would you do that?’
‘We want to know more about you,’ Violetta said with an unconcerned shrug.
‘But why? Why did you want to know more about me? And why do it in such an underhand way? Why not just ask?’
Luciana interjected in Italian, which seemed to make Violetta mad, and they argued like baby birds over a single worm until Luciana blew a raspberry and they both fell silent.
‘Sorry, what is your question?’ Violetta asked.
‘You know what the question was! Why did you trick me?’
‘Because we want to know how long you would be here so we can get you to pay the rent on our store,’ Violetta answered.
Lily threw up her hands.
‘If you think I’m going to believe that, you are a fool,’ she said. ‘And you don’t strike me as being foolish. Quite the opposite. What’s this all about, Violetta?’
Luciana burbled a short, sharp something to her sister.
‘She says to tell you is because we are two stupid old women with nothing better to do than poke our noses in where they are not wanted and meddle,’ Violetta said.