The Italian man nodded, but in a way that did not particularly look as though he was agreeing with her.
‘Alessandro D’Agnello at your service,’ he said with a polite little bow, as though she had not just explained how much she didn’t need his service. ‘I think perhaps you have not been to Montevedova before.’
‘Oh, you do, do you? And why is that?’
‘Perhaps you can tell me the name of your hotel.’
He was getting quite wet now, nearly soaked through. The splodges had joined up. She could see how brown his smooth skin was beneath the linen.
‘Well, even if I could remember the name, which I can’t, I wouldn’t tell you,’ Lily said. ‘Look, I appreciate your concern, but, honestly, I really don’t need your service, so if you would just step back, I’ll be on my way.’
Alessandro smiled gently and stood back as asked. ‘Of course. I apologise. But just be aware that you cannot drive in Montevedova. Cars are not permitted.’
Lily took her foot off the accelerator again.
‘They’re not?’
‘They are not.’
‘Not even a car as small as this one?’
‘Not even.’
‘So how do I get to my hotel?’
‘This is why I ask you where it is. There are parking lots surrounding the town and depending where your hotel is, I can tell you which is closest.’
The information about her hotel was in her suitcase in the trunk and Lily did not feel like getting out to retrieve it.
‘Or perhaps you would like to follow me?’ Alessandro offered. ‘I can take you to the main parking lot near the tourist office and help you work it out from there.’
‘Continue straight ahead,’ Dermott interjected again, and Lily was sure he sounded more forceful, as though incensed that someone other than himself was offering navigational guidance.
‘No, really, thank you.’ She managed another smile at Alessandro. ‘You’re very kind but truly, I’m fine. Thanks for the tip about the tourist office though. I’ll head straight there.’
‘Well, OK, if you are sure,’ Alessandro said, with a polite shrug. ‘Buongiorno, signora, and I hope you enjoy your stay.’
He stood back and watched as she pulled cautiously out into the narrow lane and drove away. It was not every day he happened upon a beautiful blonde woman parked up on the road near his house. In fact, he couldn’t recall it ever happening before, although there was no shortage of beautiful blonde women in Montevedova and its surrounds if you were looking for them, not that he was interested, not in general.
This beautiful blonde though? She was different. An American, obviously, older than most of the backpackers who traipsed through the town in droves over the summer. What was she doing driving there alone—no husband, no children, no friend to keep her company?
Alessandro climbed into his Range Rover and turned up the unpaved strada bianca toward his villa. She hadn’t liked it when he called her a damsel in distress, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t one. And regardless of her flustered state, she retained a sort of elegance he found very attractive. She had a long neck, he’d noticed, her collar bones ending in delicate points at the base of her throat, leaving the perfect space for a single diamond to sit on a tiny gold chain.
Her blue-and-white striped top did not show any extra flesh the way so many women chose to, just that tantalising bit of throat and her slim wrists, smooth hands, and long fingers.
She’d not been wearing a wedding ring, he had of course noticed that. But he had also noticed the trouble brewing behind her wide blue eyes. She was a damsel in distress, if ever there was one, even if she didn’t know it herself.
Alessandro didn’t normally go down that particular track. It was too soon for that. It was too soon to even be thinking too soon. It made him feel guilty, a little, but mostly, as usual, just downhearted.
Still, the mysterious blonde stayed with him as he threw open the doors of his villa, turned up his favourite Bellini aria, and put the coffeepot on for his late-morning espresso.
‘I’m not lost, just resting,’ he said to himself, then to the cat, then to his housekeeper, the widow Benedicti, who bustled in the door not long after him and whose chipmunk cheeks looked even pinker and shinier than usual.
Chapter 8
Daniel sat outside a pleasantly crowded café just off the piazza around the corner from his hotel, emptying a carafe of wine as he smoked his fourth cigarette in a row.
In Italy, Daniel smoked.
In Italy, Daniel was a different person.
In Italy he didn’t go jogging in the mornings or play golf at the weekends. He didn’t wave away the sommelier at lunch, he didn’t scrimp on the olive oil, he didn’t pass on dessert. In Italy he didn’t do any of the things he usually did. It was like being on vacation but not from his job because it was his job that brought him here. It was like being on vacation from his usual self.
He exhaled slowly and watched through the smoke as a tall blonde woman slid her way between two tables nearby. She sat down, pushed her sunglasses up on her head, and flicked him a smile as she met his gaze.
She looked like Lily. Not as slim or as beautiful but she had that same sort of casual chic that Lily had. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her, the woman who would become his wife: the way she moved with an almost accidental grace, like satin sliding off a marble tabletop.
He’d known from the first glimpse of her that he wanted to marry her, yet he hadn’t even believed that things like that really happened until then. He’d thought it was just something foolish that lovestruck couples said after the fact to make each other feel like it was meant to be.
But the truth was, the second he saw Lily across the restaurant Jordie dragged him to after some sweaty squash game all those years ago, he knew. He just knew. Well, he didn’t know that he was going to marry her. But he knew that he wanted to. Just like that. Kapow.
Turned out Lily was a friend of Jordie’s date—they never did find out if it was a set up or not, but if either of them suspected it at the time, they hadn’t shown it. Afterward, they never cared how they met, only that they did.
Daniel just watched her, mostly, that first night; the way she ate so delicately, spoke freely, laughed easily, and had no idea how many eyes in the room lingered on her delectable neck, her tiny ear lobes, her perfect mouth.
He’d been smitten. So smitten, in fact, that he realised all the other love or lust affairs he’d had before then had been ridiculous, hardly more than schoolboy flirtations in comparison.
Loving Lily had been an ache from the very beginning, an ache so deep he couldn’t tell where it started and where it finished, what shape it was, an ache that consumed him till he won her heart and consumed him still.
He’d never feel like that about anyone else, ever, even if he lived to be a hundred, which he hoped he wouldn’t because living to be forty-five he’d made so many mistakes he didn’t know how to even begin fixing them.
Sometimes, when he was shaving, Daniel met his own eyes in the mirror and was astonished to see the same person he once was looking back at him. How could that be? He still appeared so clean cut on the outside. So dependable, so ordinary, so the same as ever. But those tidy good looks, that impassive exterior belied the secrets and private shames that scurried around inside him, searching for places to hide.
It got so that he started shaving in the shower, no mirror, never mind the odd nick.
The blonde woman sitting alone at the table was chatting on her cell phone now. Actually, she had big earlobes, a shorter neck. She wasn’t so much like Lily after all, Daniel thought, lighting another cigarette. She had her own style and she looked happy, this blonde woman. Uncomplicated. And happy.
If it had been Lily sitting at that table and someone else’s husband smoking cigarettes and looking at her, he doubted happy would have been the word that sprang to mind. He’d admire the beauty, this other husband, he may even find himself
briefly enamoured. But he’d quickly sense the darkness lurking behind that exquisite face and would find his eyes roving to a less thorny rose, someone not as good to look at, perhaps, but with a twinkle in her eye.
Lily’s sadness had stolen her twinkle. The blonde sitting two tables away from him still had hers.
Daniel poured himself another glass of wine. The thought of Lily’s sadness was something he did not want to further contemplate. He’d contemplated it enough already, knew that there was little if anything he could do to alleviate it. In New York he was the useless husband of an unhappy wife, but here he didn’t have to be, or at least he didn’t have to see the unhappiness. This too was a sort of vacation. Not that he begrudged his wife her grief, her sorrow. It was his too, after all. To begin with, they shared it, the same way they shared all the good things in life, the greatness, the laughter.
But Lily’s sadness had gradually overtaken everything else about her. He wondered, often, when the tipping point had been. He knew when it had started, and when it had gotten worse, but he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when it consumed her completely.
He was disappointed about the first miscarriage, of course, but not overwhelmingly so, fatherhood being an island he knew he wanted to visit, but wasn’t sure he wanted to stay on.
Every failed attempt after that hurt him more and more, but that was nothing compared to what it did to Lily. Each tragedy seemed to chip away at her until she was like a statue remodelled over the centuries: the same piece of stone that had always stood there but an entirely different image. Smaller. Sharper. It wasn’t as though she cried all the time, or became suicidal, or resorted to hysterics, although he thought he might have preferred that, ill-equipped as he was to deal with that sort of behavior. Instead, she just retreated, the lights went off, and it took him too long to realise he was sitting in the dark. Alone.
By then, he had screwed up too badly to do anything much about it.
His own cell phone rang then and when he looked at who was calling, his heart sank. Still, he picked it up and waited for the voice on the other end to start where she had left off half an hour ago.
‘I told you, it’s just a few days,’ he said, tiredly, when he finally got a word in. ‘I know, and I’m sorry, but I’ll figure something out. I promise. I just need a bit of time.’
He listened for a while longer, then gently took the phone from his ear, laid it on his thigh, and turned it off.
A waiter approached, a man who looked old enough to be Daniel’s father and who wore a similar look of something bordering on contempt but not quite.
He ordered another litre of wine and slid his old self into his back pocket along with his phone. Then the blonde woman asked if she could join him.
She wasn’t Lily, but she was close.
Chapter 9
The widow Benedicti was usually so particular about her cleaning that spiders quivered in their webs merely at the sound of her rusty Renault rattling up Alessandro’s drive.
On this particular occasion, however, the spiders were safe to stay where they were, eating flies and looking creepy, because cleaning was the last thing on her mind.
She whizzed around the villa halfheartedly dislodging dirt from one spot to another and monitoring her employer’s whereabouts should she get the chance to use his phone.
The widow Benedicti loved Alessandro. All the widows did. All the women of Montevedova did, as it happened. He was kind, handsome, and rich.
More important than that, even, he was also a man known to lift an elderly woman over a puddle or a child out of a high chair, or to stop and help attach a problematic exhaust pipe to a worn-down clunker of a car.
He was a good and decent man, in other words. Plus, his heart had been broken.
Various members of the League had put him forward as a likely candidate for their attention several times over the past couple of years, but for one reason or another the right woman had never turned up to be helped into his arms.
Until now. The widow Benedicti had just seen Alessandro with her very own eyes stopped on the side of the road talking to a glamorous blonde who looked just like Grace Kelly in Rear Window.
The widow Benedicti loved Grace Kelly in Rear Window.
Unfortunately, she had been playing Patience on her cell phone during the night so when she went to report this all-important sighting of a romantic possibility for one of their favourite possibilities to Widow Ciacci, its battery was as flat as a frittata. As soon as she was able, she got on Alessandro’s landline and alerted the widow Ciacci to the fact that it seemed like Alessandro’s time had finally come.
She gave a quick description of the glamorous blonde but was then startled by Alessandro coming into the kitchen and asking why his pillowcases had been turned inside out, not laundered, so she had to hang up.
‘You young things expect everything to be just so,’ she grumbled as she hid her embarrassment at being caught doing such a sloppy job. ‘In my day we didn’t even have pillowcases. We didn’t even have pillows. We didn’t have a bed. Just straw.’
‘I’m sorry for your hardship,’ Alessandro said with real sympathy. ‘And if that’s still the situation, I would very happily buy you a new bed and all the linen you require, but in the meantime, I do indeed like my pillowcases to be just so.’
Chapter 10
‘This hotel you ask for is closed down for renovations,’ a wrinkled old woman in a voluminous black smock told Lily when she asked at the tourist office for directions.
‘But I only booked it yesterday,’ Lily disputed.
‘Yes, it close suddenly for very urgent repair,’ the old woman said.
‘Hotel Prato is closed?’ the pretty young girl also working in the office interrupted. ‘I thought—’
‘I take care of this!’ the old woman snapped. ‘Shoo!’ She turned to Lily. ‘Is no problem. You have booking now at only other hotel in Montevedova. Hotel Adesso. Very nice.’
‘Is it also four star?’ Lily wanted to know.
‘Is no star. But Hotel Prato also is no star, just say so on Internet. Hotel Adesso very nice.’
Lily considered arguing, but this woman did not look the type to meddle with. ‘Well, is it far?’ she asked instead.
‘Yes,’ the old woman said. ‘And road is steep.’ She peered over the counter at Lily’s kitten heels and out through the doors of the office to the pouring rain. ‘And is very wet.’
Indeed, by the time Lily got to the medieval arched gate at the entrance of the old town, about fifty yards behind the tourist office, she was already saturated.
She stopped briefly, sheltered by the town’s ancient portal. Montevedova as far as she could see consisted of a single stupidly steep curving cobbled lane, the Via del Corso. Crooked rows of two-or three-storey buildings loomed in from either side, their shuttered windows like inquisitive eyes peering down at those who scuttled below.
On a nice day, it might have had some charm, but not today. Today it was, just as the old woman said, steep and wet.
Lily stepped back out into the rain, her wheeled suitcase skittering over the slippery cobbles and quickly developing something of a noisy limp, drawing extra attention.
Two young men sitting in the open window of a busy café stopped talking and stared as she passed; a group of workmen huddled behind the plastic sheeting covering a scaffolded church front laughed as one of them blew smoke rings in her direction; an old woman eyed her carefully from the doorway of a tiny grocery store as she fiddled with a cell phone in her apron pocket.
Still it poured. Still Lily climbed. Finally, the lane flattened out a little and forked—albeit even more steeply—in opposite directions. At the T of this junction, on the flat bit, was an open foyer beneath a grander building. Gratefully, Lily again sought respite from the rain.
She heaved her bag up on to the raised parapet and with frozen fingers pulled off Rose’s pashmina, which she had wrapped around her head, then unscrunched her soggy map. It look
ed as though she had just as far to go again to make it to her hotel and the moment she realised this, the rain started to fall even harder. Water flowed from either side of the Corso into the middle and gushed down the hill like a river.
A gangly black dog joined her on her dry parapet, shaking itself and spraying her from head to foot before shooting her a coy look and mooching off. That women her age should dream of coming to places like this for long lunches, golden vistas, and the thrill of hot sex with young, well-built men seemed preposterous.
Suddenly though, above the solid plink-plink of the rain, she realised that someone nearby was playing the violin. It was a gentle piece not at all in keeping with the torrid weather and she strained to hear more. The noisy downpour was actually providing a sort of rhythmic timpani, the overall effect being quite orchestral. The violin swelled up and Lily closed her eyes. The long lunches and golden vistas suddenly seemed a little more likely. But this brief flirtation with the romance of Tuscany was crushed almost immediately by the sound of a howling baby.
Lily had heard somewhere that mothers had a special radar allowing them to pick out their own baby’s cries from a sea of similar cries, hormones jumping for joy as they did. Obviously, she had no experience of this, but what she knew to be absolutely true was that women who would never be mothers were sensitive to babies crying too, the difference being that women who would never be mothers picked up the sound of every child. And their hormones didn’t jump for joy, they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off.
In the same way a certain Eagles song could take Lily back to drinking beer on Fire Island with Rose one sultry August when they were teenagers, down to feeling the sunburn on her neck and the sand beneath her toes, the sound of a baby crying could plummet her into the depths of her childlessness.
She seemed to feel it right down in her empty womb, where some useless attachment tightened and pulled at her insides. She felt it then as she stood listening to the violin music dancing the light fantastic to the drumbeat of the fat raindrops hitting the Via del Corso.