She stopped drying herself and looked at that body: the gap between the top of her firm thighs, her sharp hips, her ribs, her small but manageably pert breasts, her collarbone, square shoulders.
It was slender, her body. She had made it slender. She kept it slender. The size of her body Lily could control and did, with a dedication matched only by professional athletes and actresses.
This had become more and more important to her as time went by because with every babyless year that passed, Lily was reminded that this wretched collection of flesh and bone had a mind of its own when it came to the thing she, the heart and soul of Lily, most wanted.
No specialist could tell her exactly why she could not carry a baby to full term.
She’d been to all the conventional experts, obviously, even a psychiatrist in case there was some secret emotional issue sabotaging her plans for motherhood, but no, in the circumstances, she’d passed that test with flying colours. She’d been to naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists, herbal gurus, reflexologists, reiki practitioners, iridologists; she’d even had her hair tested—by a strange-smelling man with a beard down to his navel—to see if it perhaps held some hideous secret. It didn’t.
She’d done everything she possibly could to prepare her body for the treasured role of motherhood. She gave up alcohol, coffee, soda, seafood, and cheese. She upped her fatty acids, her omega-3s, her dietary fibre, and took folic acid, selenium, and zinc supplements. But her body had let her down, so now, to pay it back, she punished it by keeping it at a size two. All that dedication and she’d ended up a clothes hanger.
Still, she had good clothes, she had to admit, as she pulled on white Capri pants and a soft pink boatneck top, then made her way downstairs, contemplating the foolishness of renting an apartment that required her to walk through someone else’s to get outside. There would no doubt be many an awkward encounter with Violetta and her funny little doppelganger.
Indeed, she heard the two sisters chirruping to each other as she came down the stairs, although they hushed up upon seeing her in the kitchen—but only briefly.
‘Mia sorella, Luciana,’ Violetta said, thrusting her sister out toward their guest. ‘Luciana. Luciana. Luciana.’
‘Luciana? Oh, good morning,’ Lily said. ‘And good morning to you, Violetta.’
The refectory table and much of the kitchen floor was covered in flour. In fact, if Lily hadn’t known what a beautiful day it was outside she might have thought it had been snowing. Inside. Violetta had so much flour on her face she looked like a wisened old geisha and Luciana’s black smock was now almost completely white.
At first, Lily tried to sidestep them both and scoot out of their way, but it soon became obvious that they had other plans. Before she knew what was happening, she had been herded to one end of the floury refectory table and pushed into a chair while one old woman thrust some sort of a croissant into one hand and the other old woman forced a strong cup of coffee into the other.
‘Actually, I thought I would go out for breakfast,’ Lily said, starting to get up, but Violetta—or was it Luciana, she had trouble telling one from the other—forced her back down into her seat.
‘I couldn’t,’ Lily protested, looking at the croissant, pushing it away. ‘Honestly, pastry doesn’t…I don’t…I thought they were French…I’m more of a…’
The two sisters stared at her, blinking uncomprehendingly. They were really quite intimidating for little old ladies.
‘Well, just a little bite perhaps,’ Lily said, to be polite, and took a nibble. It tasted pretty good, actually, although she could feel the buttery fat settle on the roof of her mouth. It was not a feeling she was used to. She gulped the coffee and, by way of diverting attention from the pastry, pointed out the old ladies’ side window that looked out on to a bland building opposite.
‘A lovely day, I see,’ she said, nonetheless. ‘I thought I would try a little sightseeing or a walk in the countryside.’
One of the sisters then shuffled over to the curtained shelves and emerged with a large enamel container of flour, while the other reached in for a similar container of sugar.
To Lily’s great surprise, Violetta (she thought) emptied most of the flour on to the table in front of her with a clumsy flourish. It billowed up like an atom-bomb cloud, explaining the snowy sensation in the room.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Lily said, pushing her chair back, assuming it was a mistake.
But Luciana then moved in and proceeded to dump a pile of sugar on top of the flour.
The two old women looked at her and made twin twiddling gestures in front of their faces. Their hands were like the knotted branch ends of twisted old trees.
With matching smiles, they plunged those gnarled digits into the pile of flour and sugar on the table and started to mix it.
It flew everywhere, up in the air, on to the floor, all over them. The dry ingredients danced like a well-stoked fire.
‘You know, I’m pretty sure there has been an amazing invention that might help you with this,’ Lily said. ‘It’s called a bowl. Maybe I could get you one?’
The sisters chirruped between each other again, then one of them pushed the half-eaten pastry closer to Lily. She picked it up and took another nibble.
They watched her curiously for a moment, then Violetta shuffled to the refrigerator and came back with a dozen eggs, some of which she proceeded to break into the mixture right there on the table while Luciana, with her arthritic fingers, attempted to mix this now-much-wetter combination.
‘And spoons,’ Lily said, unable to drag her eyes away from the strange sight. ‘You should try using mixing spoons. I’m sure it would make all the difference.’
Luciana winced and stood back from the table. Violetta moved in and took over.
‘I should help you, I can see that,’ Lily said, ‘but it’s just that I’m not really a kitchen person.’
Luciana then brought a small saucepan of melted butter to the table and poured it onto the mixture, which had turned into a lumpy yellow dough. Violetta stepped away and straightened her back as much as she could, which wasn’t much, and Luciana took over.
It was clear to Lily now why their cookies were crooked. These little old ladies were past their use-by date when it came to making them and it was painful to watch them try. But it was also slightly wonderful: like modern ballet. They were doing it anyway, no matter how pleasing the results.
And the smell, now that the warm butter had hit the sugar, was making her dizzy. It was just so…well, she didn’t know what it was but it brought an unexpected lump to her throat.
‘There are also machines for this these days, you know,’ she said, a catch in her voice. ‘There are mixers and food processors and wands and all sorts of things.’
Violetta and Luciana kept swapping places, lifting buttery, floury, curled, clawlike hands in the air as they stepped back and forth, perfectly in tune with each other.
Lily felt an inexplicable tear roll down her cheek as one of them hobbled away to get a bowl of hazelnuts, which were then worked clumsily into the dough before Violetta clawed it into two large chunks. Luciana halved the chunks again and rolled them into four uneven logs on a baking pan, which Violetta put in the oven.
‘I keep cashmere sweaters in my oven,’ Lily told the sisters, wiping her eyes as they dumped more flour and sugar on the messy table and started all over again. How on earth did those misshapen logs ever turn into biscotti?
‘Although I have a sister too—Rose,’ she continued. ‘And she cooked a Thanksgiving turkey in it once. In my oven, that is.’
Out came the eggs, splat, into the mixture.
‘It was after the second miscarriage, I think,’ Lily continued. ‘I didn’t think I had a thing in the world to give thanks for, but Rose would not be put off coming. She just arrived with her baby and a bottle of champagne. And Al, of course, carrying a hamper heaving with a huge turkey, his mother’s secret stuffing recipe and pecan pie, which, by the
way, I can’t bear.’
Violetta added more melted butter to the second cantucci mixture.
Lily could remember emptying more than one bottle of champagne that Thanksgiving.
Actually, she thought it might have been after the third miscarriage. And she’d thought there was nothing to give thanks for then! Little had she known that five precious incomplete angels in all would be snatched away from her before she ever got to know them.
‘And then there was Grace,’ she said, so dreamily it was almost a whisper. ‘Baby Grace.’
Also snatched away, but not before Lily got to know her.
‘She, I actually got to hold in my arms for six whole days. I swear, I must have kissed that little head a thousand times.’ If she closed her eyes she could still feel the silky touch of Grace’s downy golden hair on her lips, her cheek: a sensation like no other.
‘Sometimes I catch a whiff of talcum powder on someone else’s baby and it’s like I’m back in Tennessee with her in my arms and everything I ever wanted in the whole wide world nestled right there in one tiny bundle.’
Then, poof, just as quickly, that would be gone and she’d be swallowed up again by what she didn’t have.
‘Grace,’ Lily repeated softly. ‘It’s so long since I’ve said it out loud.’
At that, a plume of smoke erupted rudely out of the ancient oven and the elderly sisters both flew at it with flapping aprons, great clouds of flour mushrooming in front of them. Lily shook herself as if waking from a trance and the image of all those little pink all-in-ones that would never be worn flew off into the corners of the smoky room. She could not imagine why she had been burbling on like that. Just as well the old women couldn’t understand a word of it.
‘Unless you need me to call the fire brigade,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll be on my way.’ And while Luciana and Violetta were sidetracked trying to rescue their burning cookie logs, she slipped out of the room.
Chapter 15
‘What was she saying?’ Luciana asked, waving smoke away from her face after Lily left the room.
‘There’s trouble with bambino,’ Violetta told her. ‘Not having them, that is. I don’t know what happened but it’s not ideal.’
‘So, she’s been married before. Big deal. So has Alessandro. Better that way I always think. And speaking of thinking, it didn’t occur to you to mention to Lily that you are perfectly fluent in her own language?’
‘Perfectly fluent? I don’t think so.’ Violetta had learned to speak a number of foreign languages in the early forties, but as no one expected her to, she often didn’t let on that she could, and the sisters gathered some of their best information this way.
But in this instance, Luciana was possibly right. Violetta should have told Lily she understood what she was saying, but there hadn’t been the opportunity to stop her. Or if there was, Violetta had missed it. Just another awkward misstep to put her off her stride! And Lily spilling her beans had made her even more confused than she already was.
‘Something is not right here,’ she said, poking one of the burnt cookie trumpets with a finger. ‘Something is seriously not right.’
Luciana gave a little cough.
‘Something has seriously not been right for a while,’ she agreed, poking at a second one. ‘And I’m glad you brought it up because I know you find it difficult, but we most certainly can’t keep up this pretence. We can’t ignore it any longer, Violetta. Fiorella is right about our teeth.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘Fiorella? Teeth? What on earth are you talking about?’ Violetta asked.
‘I’m talking about the cantucci,’ Luciana said. ‘Violetta, I think it’s time. We can’t keep pretending we’re managing it.’
‘Ferrettis have been making cantucci in Montevedova since 1898,’ Violetta insisted, shaking her head. ‘It’s the best in Tuscany, everybody says so. Even the Pope. Three popes.’
‘Yes, everybody says it’s the best but everybody buys the Borsolinis’. We need money, Violetta. We need to go to the doctor. You’re getting greyer in the face with every passing day, my hips are killing me, and everyone we know needs dentures.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ Violetta said, that tightness in her chest turning something inexplicable inside her again. ‘And I’m not talking about the cantucci. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m talking about the match, our calzino. There’s something not right with this match. Alessandro is too much of a lost soul to end up with another lost soul and I think that’s what this woman, this Lily, is. It’s a worry to me.’
‘Never mind that.’
‘How can you say that, Luciana? We must mind it! The world needs love and lovers now more than it ever has. We’re trying to do Santa Ana di Chisa’s work with dwindling resources and—’
‘Violetta, you need to think of yourself, and of me. I’m talking about us. We need pills for our arthritis. My hands hurt all the time. We have no money.’
‘We have five hundred euros for the room.’
‘I know the League is your vocation but the cantucci provides us with a living, and we have to face the fact that it’s getting too hard for us to turn it out. All we have left is our reputation and if we’re not careful we’re going to lose that too.’
At that moment, the widow Ciacci put her head in the side window—something she could only do by standing on her own kitchen chair out in the alleyway that led off the Corso.
‘I think it’s time you got a smoke alarm,’ she said, coughing. ‘Or an apprentice. Really, you’ll burn to a crisp and then where will we be?’
‘In the safe hands of Fiorella Fiorucci no doubt,’ Violetta said. ‘I’m surprised she isn’t in here taking over our kitchen already. Too aggressive by far, if you ask me.’
‘Oh, but did you taste her torta della nonna?’ the widow Ciacci enthused. ‘She mixes ricotta with the custard, I believe. And perhaps there’s a bit of booze in there somewhere as well. And she can still bend enough to play baci! There’s no one else left in the League who can do that.’
This was the last thing Violetta wanted to hear. ‘The reason for this unscheduled stopover?’ she inquired.
‘Two things: one, the widow Benedicti has faxed through Alessandro’s schedule for the week so we can orchestrate some connections and the other, there’s a kid in your pasticceria talking to Grace Kelly. It’s that strange little girl from the other side of the piazza who’s always getting in fights and breaking things.’
Chapter 16
After her escape from the kitchen, Lily took a moment in the bakeshop to collect herself, leaning on the marble counter and considering the contents of the closest cantucci bowl.
Those poor old women. What were they thinking? That the two of them had ever produced enough cookies to operate a business was astounding. That they were still trying to do so was something else.
She picked a piece of cantucci out of the bowl, blew off the dust and held it up to the golden light filtering through from the Corso. The cookie was still hard, no matter what its age, and would look tantalising enough, she thought, to a person of a sweet-toothed persuasion. The hazelnuts seemed robust and there was even a slight gloss to them. She sniffed the cookie and was surprised by a fresh scent, a bit like the seashore but with a lingering spiciness. She turned it again in the light. For a confection that was well past its best, it was holding up remarkably well.
Outside, the sleepy morning quiet was rudely interrupted by a disturbance that grew louder as its vortex neared the store. Through the dirty window Lily saw a blur of bright colours whiz by, a whirling collection of arms, legs, shrieks, and mirth. The door flew open, the bell clanged, the cacophony filled the tiny room, the door closed, the shrill young voices dissolved, and through the backlit dust that spun in a frenzy before falling like a glittering gold show curtain to the floor, emerged a small dark angel.
The dust settled. The cantucci fell from Lily’s fingers back into the bowl with a solid clack. br />
The small dark angel was the little girl from the photo in Daniel’s golf shoe.
She was a year or two older, perhaps, and wearing a set of costume party wings on her back, but otherwise she looked exactly the same.
Lily had known the moment she saw the photo that the children were Daniel’s, but to see this child in the flesh? She even had his legs, long and slim but splaying out slightly from the hips. Her chin was his, her open face. Daniel had been a good-looking kid and this girl, his daughter, had inherited his looks, although she was dark where he was fair. Her eyes were green though, just like Daniel’s. She wasn’t cute, not in the childish adorable sense, but she was truly arresting in a way that would last forever, unlike cute, which came and went.
The wings were made of pale yellow gauze fitted around wire frames and strapped to her shoulders like a backpack. She was puffing as if she had been running.
She did not turn back to see if the cyclone of arms and legs was coming into the store with her. She stood her ground, looking at Lily.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, in very good English. Her beautiful face was alive and inquisitive. She had confidence in herself. Confidence and beauty: the perfect combination.
Oh, I want one, Lily’s biological clock chimed ineptly. I want one, I want one, I want one.
She opened her mouth to speak, but her longing choked her as it occurred that the child might be aware of her, might know that her father had a wife called Lily—some ugly evil creature ruining his life on the other side of the world.
Something not unlike the flickering embers of someone else’s anger licked at her then. Would the Daniel she knew and loved paint her this way? Was it possible he actually saw her like that?
‘I’m Lillian Watson,’ she said, pulling the name she was born with out of her pocket like a crumpled sunhat, surprised that her voice sounded so solid when the rest of her felt like it could disappear into a whorl of golden dust. ‘And who might you be?’