Modern technology helped plug the gaps to a certain extent. As soon as the tingling and throbbing and perfuming took place, Luciana would wave a scarf out their bedroom window, catching the attention of the widow Ciacci who lived across the lane and had a cell phone. She was then in charge of informing the other widows who still had appropriate use of eyes and fingers that a special meeting was to take place right away. This saved ageing bodies from scuttling up and down the steep streets of Montevedova knocking on doors and hissing at windows, which had once been the way it was done. With the League’s average age hovering somewhere perilously close to ninety-two, this was no longer feasible.
On this occasion, most of the widows were already gathered by the time the sisters arrived, having entered through the other secret door to the side of the baptismal font in the church behind the pasticceria. Eight were sitting up in straight-backed wooden chairs in their favoured semicircle, while the ninth—the widow Rossellini—slept peacefully, drooling slightly from the half smile she had been wearing when she had nodded off.
‘Buongiorno!’ the ones who were awake called when the sisters shuffled in.
‘Where’s the widow Del Grasso?’ Violetta asked. Experience had taught her that complications arose when instructions were issued while a League member was absent. Only half the ears in the League worked at the best of times, two-thirds of the eyes were faulty, and it could not be said that remembering things was anybody’s strongest point. They achieved their best results when they were all together and could ask the widow next to them what had just been said and what they should do about it.
‘I definitely texted her,’ the widow Ciacci said.
‘Widow Mazzetti, can you be in charge of filling her in later on?’ Violetta asked. The widow Mazzetti nodded vigorously. She was something of a Goody Two–Shoes and loved a chore.
‘As for the rest of you, today is the day so those of you who can see, keep your eyes open, those of you who can hear, keep your ears open, and those of you who are asleep, stay as you are.’
They all looked at the snoozing widow Rossellini, who obliged.
‘Any activity leading to the identification of a likely calzino candidate should be reported to either Widow Ciacci up here or—Widow Ercolani, are you on duty at the tourist office downtown?’ asked Violetta. ‘You are? Good. Or to Widow Ercolani down there. Widow Pacini will be stationed in the doorway of her alimentare between the two. Everyone else, everywhere else, please maintain your usual spots in your own doorways and let’s pray to Santa Ana di Chisa that the day goes smoothly.’
At this, there was a furtive knocking at the door and someone sprang up, not as speedy a process as it sounds, and pulled it open.
It was the twelfth widow, the widow Del Grasso. And she was not alone.
Chapter 5
Fear fluttering in her chest, Lily flew to the home office she and Daniel shared in the room that they had once called the Nursery but which they now referred to as the Library.
The computer was on. An empty wine bottle and a glass sat next to it along with a yellow legal pad covered in scrawled times and destinations. The empty wine bottle was a worry because there was another one in the kitchen.
Oh, no, Lily pleaded silently. Oh, please, please, no.
She sat down and clicked on the first unread message in her e-mail Inbox.
It was an itinerary that had her flying out of JFK at 5:15 P.M. that evening for Rome. Business Class. Non-refundable.
Worse, the second unread message was from a rental car company, confirming her rental of a car—a stick shift!—from Fiumicino airport.
The third unread message was from the Hotel Prato confirming her stay for a week in Montevedova.
Montevedova? Is that where she thought Daniel was? But why? Surely he could be anywhere in Tuscany. She didn’t know where he stayed when he was away. She assumed he travelled around visiting vineyards, meeting winemakers, tasting wine.
She noticed then that her Web browser window was still open, and not without trepidation, she clicked on the history bar. Down dropped a lengthy menu of Internet sites she had trolled the previous night, many of them featuring searches for Tuscan red wines and, subsequently, churches.
Using her sober morning powers of deduction, she checked the last website before she had obviously moved on to making her airline booking and was barely surprised to find the church in the golf shoe.
‘The church of the Madonna di San Biagio is found on the slopes of the hill of Montevedova,’ the website revealed, ‘at the bottom of a picturesque avenue flanked by towering cypresses.’
It was one of the most famous churches—a shepherdess having witnessed a miracle there, of course—in a part of Tuscany renowned for its wine, which was why, even under the influence of two bottles of the stuff, she’d appeared to have had no trouble finding it.
But finding it was one thing, deciding to go there quite another. It was beyond impulsive and Lily had little time for impulse.
Mind you, she’d bought an exercise bike on the Internet once, late at night, and forgotten she’d done so. She’d similarly put herself (for all of twelve hours) on Facebook. There was a hidden supply of makeup advertised by Cindy Crawford currently stashed in their basement that arrived one morning to her great surprise. She’d thought that an excellent idea at midnight after a few glasses of wine. But wanting to look like Cindy Crawford made a lot more sense than this. Daniel was coming back in a couple of days anyway, and by then she would have worked out a plan to deal with the situation. She didn’t understand why, pinot grigio aside, she’d wanted to speed up the whole process before she was properly equipped to handle it.
Then she clicked back on her e-mail program and noticed the message below the Alitalia flight confirmation. She hadn’t spotted it before because it wasn’t in bold; it had already been opened and she must have read it. It was from Daniel.
This in itself was odd. He rarely contacted her in the weeks he was away. He was only gone for seven or eight days and nothing urgent ever cropped up. She had a number for him somewhere, or Pearl did, because he used a different cell phone in Italy to save money on expensive roaming fees, but she’d never had to use it.
Had Daniel been lying particularly low when he was out of the country? This had never occurred to her before, but there was no reason why it should. She had nothing to be suspicious about. Until yesterday she’d been under the impression he was the perfect husband.
It was such a strange new world, this realm of the cheated-on wife. It was like turning a different coloured light on an old familiar scene: All the same things were still in all the same places, yet it now seemed unrecognisable.
This was Daniel she was talking about. Daniel.
She clicked on his e-mail.
‘Lily darling,’ he wrote. ‘So sorry to drop this on you but something’s come up over here and I need to deal with it right away or face possible financial ruin and you know how much I’d like that. Turns out there’s another American distributor trying to lure my suppliers away from me and I need to do some serious fast-talking to avert disaster. I know you had plans for my birthday Saturday but I’m sorry I don’t think I’ll be home till next week. I’ll make it up to you when I get back, I promise. And could you be a darling and let Jordie know I won’t make it to golf on Sunday? I don’t have his details with me. Amore, Daniel.’
Well, that certainly helped put together the events of the previous night. She must have gone to check her e-mail for some reason, perhaps after the first bottle, found this from Daniel, opened a second bottle, surfed the Net, weighed up her options and…
And come up with the perfectly rational plan of going straight over to God-knew-where to confront her husband and his laminated love-family.
She may as well have ordered a boatload of Viagra and a penis extension.
It was utterly absurd. But it was probably what any deranged drunk person fiddling on the Internet would do under the circumstances.
Still, Lily was not deranged or drunk now. She was a little queasy, her potassium levels perilously low thanks to the pinot grigio. And she was ashamed that she couldn’t remember doing what she had done. She wanted to put it behind her. Or underneath.
Rose didn’t know what she was talking about—there was nothing wrong with sweeping things under the carpet. That’s what carpets were for. Without them, the world would be full of plain old floorboards, covered in dust and riddled with termites. No one wanted to see that.
Life was about solutions. That’s what everyone wanted and that was what Lily was known for delivering. If sweeping something under the carpet was the most effective way to deal with a problem, Lily would sweep. She never swept more than she had to, never less. She was simply as good with a broom as any other corporate executive with a commensurate CV. It was just one course of action she could take in a given set of circumstances. An option.
And in this current set of circumstances, a good one. On balance, her preference.
Women like Lily just did not go dashing off to Italy to chase their cheating husbands, she thought, casting her eye once more over her wine-soused alter ego’s itinerary. She had other commitments. Her job, for instance. The one she should have been at an hour ago.
She snatched up the evidence of her drinking spree and was carrying it into the kitchen when the phone rang, giving her such a fright she dropped the bottle, which glanced painfully off the side of her foot and rolled under the table.
The home phone rang so rarely, it occurred to her, as she hopped over to answer it. Was that just when Daniel was away? Or was it all the time?
It was Pearl on the line, wondering where she was. Lily felt a spasm of irritation at this because Pearl started work at 8:30 and it was currently 8:31. Her assistant had given her all of one minute before sending out the search party.
‘Well, seven years and I’ve never walked into an empty office before,’ Pearl pointed out. ‘I thought you might have been kidnapped or beat up or hit by a bus or something.’
It was true, Lily was a stickler for punctuality. Pearl would be expecting a pretty good excuse. But seeing the dropped wine bottle under the table, Lily couldn’t quite come up with one.
‘Has the data on the Eastern Seaboard retrenchments come in yet?’ she asked instead.
‘What retrenchments?’ Pearl asked. ‘I don’t know anything about any retrenchments.’
‘Oh, perhaps the ball is still in Bob Hayward’s court,’ Lily said, knowing that Bob’s assistant Meredith was Pearl’s sworn enemy and it would drive her crazy to think Meredith was in on something she wasn’t. ‘We might just have to hang fire on that. Can you remind me what we have on this morning?’
She crouched to reach for the bottle and was conjuring up the explicit details for a fictional bout of food poisoning when she saw Rose’s shawl poured like spilt milk on the floor beneath a chair. She reached for it, bunched it up, and held it against her face as Pearl itemised the day’s heaving schedule.
The pashmina was soft and pink, like Rose herself, and smelled vaguely of Paris, a fragrance Lily had picked out for her years before and which suited her so much, Lily couldn’t imagine her ever smelling of anything else.
Lily used to know her sister so well. She used to know Daniel too. And now look at her. Look at all of them. The empty pinot grigio bottle rocked slightly on the bare floor.
‘So, you have Todd and his offsider from R and D coming in at ten,’ Pearl was saying, ‘but I could shift them to this afternoon because we have a window at 2:15. And Finance wants you to present your quarterly projections at eleven today, not tomorrow. I saw the spreadsheet on your computer, and it looks like you have it nailed already so are you OK with that?’
I don’t know what I am OK with, Lily thought. Am I OK with flying to Italy to stalk my straying husband? Is that what I am doing? Who in their right mind does that?
But then again, the ghost of Paris-smelling Rose seemed to whisper from her pashmina, who ignores it?
Against the steady staccato of Pearl’s further suggestions, Lily once more pressed her sister’s shawl into her face and breathed in. She didn’t want to be a cold, lonely person like their mother. She didn’t want to be anything like their mother.
She wanted to be the woman she started out as, or turned into before disappointment got her all tangled up and frozen. She wanted Daniel. She wanted his warm body pressed against hers while the rain danced on the roof above them. She wanted to be in love. Maybe then she could get back some of what was missing, recapture some of the lost whatever-it-was these last difficult years had stolen from her.
Out of nowhere she remembered a picnic in Central Park with her husband and Rose and Al—before they had kids. Al had mocked her for bringing organic apples—it was pre–Whole Foods days when organic still meant ugly—and no one would eat the fruit after Al said his looked like Richard Nixon.
So Lily snatched the apples up and juggled with them.
She’d taken juggling classes at college, she told them, mainly because she had a thing for the teacher who left halfway through the semester to join, not that surprisingly, the circus.
She wasn’t making it up. It wasn’t a dream. A long time ago, she used to juggle. She used to be fun.
Still crouched beside the kitchen table, Lily realised that she couldn’t summon up her usual concern for the quarterly projections.
This was a first. Usually she cared about them so much she had no room left to care about anything else. But not today.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she interrupted Pearl, who was still talking about them, and Meredith’s chances of delivering Bob’s on time, which in Pearl’s opinion were next to nil, what with all the time she wasted yakking around the water cooler and flirting with Desmond in Accounts Payable who was married with three small children and also apparently cheating with Alyssa, the scrawny redhead in Payroll.
Lily stood up straight and borrowed directly from Daniel’s e-mail. ‘It’s just that something’s come up and I need to deal with it right away. I’m so sorry, Pearl, but I won’t be coming in and I can only apologise for not letting you know sooner. Do you think you can cope without me?’ She could feel the shock of responsibility and opportunity straighten Pearl’s ringlets through the phone line. Pearl would have a fine time coping without her, she knew that for a fact.
‘Well, sure, I can, if that’s what you want,’ Pearl said. ‘You don’t need me to come by and help with whatever’s come up?’
Pearl, despite her best attempts, had never gotten farther than the lobby of Lily’s apartment building, which was just the way Lily liked it.
‘Thanks, Pearl, but I’ll take care of it myself.’
‘Well, see you tomorrow then, I guess,’ her assistant said, miffed.
‘Actually, I may be away for a little longer,’ Lily told her and despite never having taken a sick day in more than a decade of being VP, Logistics, Eastern Distribution, for Heigelmann’s; despite knowing her husband had betrayed her and was possibly continuing to do so even as she spoke; and despite the hangover that lurched from one temple to the other inside her aching head, Lily felt a tremor of determination in her belly.
She put down the phone, wrapped Rose’s pashmina around her shoulders, and went in search of her suitcase.
Chapter 6
‘This is Fiorella Fiorucci,’ the widow Del Grasso announced to the League. ‘She was sitting outside on my doorstep this morning when I went to water my geraniums.’
The other widows all looked to Violetta. Membership was at an all-time low, but that didn’t mean just anyone could join. It was secret, after all. New widows were generally already known to the group before their loved one was lost and usually there was a gentle approach made from someone who had a particular connection once the difficult year-long mourning period was over.
No one could recall seeing Fiorella Fiorucci ever before and what’s more, she was wearing a bright orange shift with big pink flowers on it when the
rest of them were in head-to-toe black.
‘My no-good son-of-a-so-and-so husband has finally gone and bought the big one,’ Fiorella Fiorucci told the group. ‘So I want in.’
The widows, still speechless, all looked to Violetta again.
‘You want in?’ Violetta repeated.
‘Are you deaf? Yes, I want in. I’m a widow now. I qualify.’
‘We know each other, apparently, from meeting at the library, but to be honest…’ the widow Del Grasso started, clearly embarrassed. Her memory had been a little unreliable of late so she supposed it was quite possible she did know Fiorella but had forgotten. This was thoroughly vexing but, she supposed, nowhere near as vexing as forgetting to take the rollers out of her hair before going to Mass or forgetting to put her shoes on to go to the market. In fact, in comparison, it was hardly vexing at all. ‘To be honest,’ she continued more brightly, ‘I didn’t know she was even married.’
‘Why would you?’ Fiorella shrugged. ‘Why would anyone? My husband ran off with my sister in 1977 and has been living in Naples ever since, may God spit on his soul once he’s finished dragging it out through the sorry wretch’s intestines.’ She pushed her thick spectacles back up on to her nose and wrinkled it.
If toads wore thick spectacles and gaudy shifts, she could almost have been mistaken for one.
‘Erm, we’re sorry for your loss,’ Violetta said, somewhat unconvincingly to break the ensuing awkward silence. ‘But I’m not quite sure that you’re what we’re looking for.’ The true love of a good man certainly did not seem to be a feature of this interloper’s recent past, and the true love of a good man was the number one requirement for entry into the League. ‘And anyway, there isn’t an opening.’
‘Oh, and you can afford to be so fussy? I can darn four socks so well in a single hour that you’d never even know they once had holes in them,’ Fiorella said. ‘My cousin Enzo sells them at the market in San Quirico as new. Gets two euro a pair.’