The widows coughed shiftily and scuffed their slippers on the floor.
‘The thing is,’ Violetta said carefully, ‘that darning socks is not entirely what the League is about.’
‘Oh, I know that,’ answered Fiorella. ‘I’ve seen the sad sacks that start out all mopey and blue, then get all miraculously jazzed up by you lot though they don’t even know it and next thing they’re all lovey-dovey, having the time of their lives. I’m on to you.’
It was a secret league. Despite more than two hundred and fifty happy endings being produced over the years, no one was supposed to be on to them.
‘What’s more,’ continued Fiorella, pushing those enormous spectacles back up her nose again, ‘I’m a part-time shelf stacker at the pharmacy on the way out of town. Not the one right in the middle where everyone goes for the boring stuff. Trust me, we get it all where I am. There’s not a condom or a pregnancy test or a happy pill that passes out of that place without me seeing who it’s headed for. I have my finger on the pulse, let me tell you. More than the pharmacist, that’s for sure. He’s hopped up on goofballs half the time. Doesn’t know his own name unless he checks his driver’s license.’
The stunned widows didn’t know where to look now. Information the likes of which came out of the pharmacy on the way out of town, they could definitely use, but it was clear that Fiorella Fiorucci was a handful.
The widow Mazzetti, who had memorised the League’s rule book and knew every clause and addendum going back as far as 1947, looked fit to burst a blood vessel. She was as much a stickler for the rules as Violetta, who narrowed her eyes, cleared her throat, and exhorted Fiorella to tell the group more about her late husband.
‘What’s to tell?’ said Fiorella. ‘Sixty-four years ago he came back from the war and told me that my childhood sweetheart, Eduardo, had died in his arms on the battlefield. A little while later, we got married. A little while after that Eduardo came home, minus a leg but otherwise still the man I loved with all my heart and soul, the man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with.’
The atmosphere in the room changed from being stunned to being sympathetic, which under the circumstances was quite a shift.
‘That must have been terrible,’ Luciana said, moving slightly in front of her sister.
‘Yes, well, in those days a girl did not leave her husband just because he was a lying, cheating bully who had tricked her out of eternal happiness.’
‘No, I suppose they didn’t,’ agreed several of the widows.
‘And what happened to Eduardo?’ Luciana wanted to know.
‘Oh, we met again, just the once, and he gave me a locket with a picture of the two of us in it. I have it still.’ She fished it out from beneath her gaudy shift and opened it, showing the room a faded sepia photo of her young self—same glasses—and an adoring boy soldier. ‘He said I should forgive myself because anyone would have fallen for Lorenzo’s trickery, he was known for it, and that I should try to be happy with him anyway. Then he went home and died. I think it was a broken heart, although others said septicaemia.’
‘A good man,’ one of the widows uttered to a chorus of ‘sí, sí.’
‘I’ve felt like a widow my entire married life, to be honest,’ said Fiorella. ‘Even though that overgrown gnocchi lived with me for thirty years and managed another thirty with my whining gasbag of a sister before doing the decent thing and falling under a truck.’
There was another awkward silence.
‘You seem a little crotchety,’ ventured Luciana.
‘We’re supposed to be, aren’t we?’ Fiorella said. ‘You all are.’
‘Yes, but we’re only pretending,’ pointed out Violetta.
‘Well, maybe so am I.’
‘If she is, she’s very good at it,’ the widow Benedicti muttered to no one in particular.
‘Look, I know what it’s like to be old and invisible,’ Fiorella said, fingering her locket as she looked around the room. ‘We can sit quietly in our darkened doorways feeling like we’re not worth the contents of your average chamber pot, not doing anything for anybody—Italy is full of women just like us. Every hilltop town in Tuscany has at least two dozen. It’s the curse of old age! But I’ve seen how you lot use your powers as scratchy old dames for good, not evil, and what can I say—I like it. So shoot me! My own happiness may have been snatched away from me by the giant sweaty hands of a complete and utter deadbeat, but if I can help someone else find happiness, I will. It’s what Eduardo would want.’
At this, the widow Rossellini woke herself up with a rumbling snore. ‘I don’t feel so well,’ she said.
‘Your colour’s not good,’ agreed the widow sitting next to her.
‘She’s not been feeling so great the last few weeks,’ chimed in another.
‘Her daughter’s been trying for months to get her to go to, you know, the microwave,’ whispered another.
‘The microwave?’ repeated Fiorella.
The widows fell silent. The microwave was their euphemism for the glistening hospital block that had been built just a few years before, a couple of miles south of the town. Rising out of the pristine landscape very much like a shiny modern kitchen appliance, once women their age went into it, they were likely to shrivel and, if not disappear altogether, emerge a shadow of their former selves—if they were lucky. The unlucky ones emerged a shadow of their former selves minus an arm, it was rumoured, a bosom, or an internal organ. Those even less fortunate never emerged at all.
Women their age would do anything to avoid going into the microwave.
‘She just needs a week or two in bed to get her colour back,’ said the widow sitting next to her. ‘I’ll take her home and sit with her a while.’
‘I’ll help,’ said someone else, as the widow Rossellini was indeed very unsteady on her feet.
‘Me too,’ piped up another.
‘Well, looks like there could be an opening after all,’ Fiorella said cheerfully as the room started to empty, and before Violetta could give her an old-fashioned tune-up for her rudeness and insensitivity, Luciana jumped in with uncustomary presumption.
‘Yes, at least temporarily, it seems there is,’ she said. ‘Fiorella Fiorucci, would you care to join our league?’
‘You bet,’ came the answer. ‘But do you have anything to eat other than this cantucci? I swiped some from over by the ginger supper and it’s horrible. What do you put in it? Cement? All the vin santo in Christendom isn’t going to help that, let me tell you.’
She moved off to help herself to the small amount of vin santo that was still available anyway, at which Violetta turned angrily to her sister.
‘What on earth were you thinking?’ she asked.
‘I was thinking she has a certain something,’ Luciana answered.
‘That she does,’ Violetta answered. ‘But it is the wrong sort of something.’
Chapter 7
The last-minute complications of deserting her life on such short notice required a lot more work than Lily had anticipated, her tightly packed schedule being almost as time-consuming to cancel as it was to keep.
Luckily Tipsy Tourism stretched to business class and she slept fitfully on the flight, with the help of more than her fair share of champagne, but arrived in rainy Rome feeling tired and aghast that one important aspect of coming to Italy she had overlooked was that everyone spoke Italian.
Not only could she not understand a word, she couldn’t even follow the gesticulations, which she was sure could be blamed for how she ended up in the world’s smallest rental car. It was a Fiat 500 but 500 of what? she asked. She had never seen a car so small. It was the size of a sneaker. Her baggage only just fit in the tiny trunk, and she had to put the seat back as far as it would go to accommodate her long legs.
She spent the first half hour driving around the airport parking lot trying to find the exit and then pressed the wrong button on her rented GPS so that it would only operate with a voice proclaiming to be Derm
ott in what she thought was an Irish accent.
She could make little sense of anything other than left and right, but in fact these two words turned out to be enough to direct her north on the A1 toward Firenze, which she worked out was Florence, which she was pretty sure was in Tuscany, so it was taking her in the right direction.
It was pouring and the Italians seemed to drive with a ferocity that suggested they were racing either away from raging flames licking at their rear fenders or toward loved ones taking their last gasps before the machines were turned off. At first Lily’s leg trembled on the accelerator as she carefully switched lanes in the poor visibility and did her best to avoid vehicles moving faster than hers, which was all of them.
Soon, however, she caught the rhythm of the autostrada and relaxed enough to consider her surroundings. The view from the A1 was not one likely to show up on postcards or romantic book covers.
To her left, she could see distant smokestacks and strange isolated collections of industrial buildings piled like children’s blocks on the gloomy skyline. If not for the roadside billboards in a foreign language, she could have been on a big highway almost anywhere. But to her right the impression was, she guessed, a little more Italian. Fields of something tall and slender stretched as far as she could see, swaying in the wind and rain, then fading away to a faraway spine of misty mountains.
Faraway spines of misty mountains did not usually crop up in Lily’s world on a Tuesday morning. What a normal Tuesday morning brought was a strenuous session with her personal trainer at the gym, followed by a shower, a chive and egg white omelette, a green tea, a fine-tooth combing of countless spreadsheets, and then the weekly statistics meeting with other Heigelmann’s HODs.
At the thought of her usual omelette, she felt a pang of hunger but could not quite stomach the thought of stopping at the giant roadside gas stations, which seemed to be the only option. Starving seemed imminently preferable to doing further battle with a foreign language over the presence of pesticides or preservatives in whatever fare was on offer, which she doubted would suit her particular palate anyway.
Eventually, Dermott directed her off the freeway toward the spine of misty mountains, where it became clear why most other people were also driving very small cars: They were on very small roads.
In some places they were not even wide enough for two sneakers to pass each other. On one corner, Lily found herself swerving off the road, jamming on the brakes and shutting her eyes as an ancient farmer in a three-wheeled contraption came hurtling toward her.
He missed, but only by the skin of his teeth.
She remembered then a similarly antique farmer blocking the road with his tractor and a motley herd of cows when she and Daniel were in Maine on their honeymoon.
The old man was puttering down the road without a care in the world, completely oblivious to the fact that Daniel and Lily were stuck behind him.
‘I should have boned up on my country horn-honking etiquette before we came away,’ Daniel had said. ‘I don’t suppose you did?’
When they did honk the horn, only one ornery cow took any notice. It stopped and glared at them in such an intimidating fashion that Daniel lost his nerve and said he thought the side of the road actually looked quite comfortable and perhaps they should stay there instead of going back to their cottage. Lily laughed so much she nearly peed her pants.
It seemed like a long time since she’d laughed like that. Now she and Daniel were both so seriously grown up and busy, what they mostly did was a lot of quiet, unemotional getting-on-with-it.
Maybe that’s what went on in all sixteen-year marriages. Maybe no one nearly peed their pants outside the first flush of love.
‘Continue straight ahead,’ Dermott said in his cheerful Irish accent, which confused her into taking her foot off the clutch and stalling the little car.
She turned the key in the ignition but found herself unable to pull back out onto the road, staying instead on the same tilted angle in the grass, the passenger window pressed up against a shimmering wet hedge of shiny green leaves and tiny purple flowers.
Unemotional getting-on-with-it certainly wasn’t what she thought the future held when she and Daniel were in bed drinking wine and eating cheese out of the wrapper without even getting up for a knife on their honeymoon. She’d wanted love, happiness, laughter, fun. All the things anyone wanted when they got married.
She’d wanted children, a family.
It had all seemed so perfectly within reach in the beginning. They had no money and a fifth-floor walk-up that smelled horribly of mould and mothballs, but they had all those wonderful dreams. That was their wealth in those days: their limitless hope, their electrifying potential.
It was the babies’ fault. Those smiling, pink-cheeked, plump, sweet-smelling babies with whom she had never been blessed. Their absence had just sapped the pant-peeing happiness right out of her. That’s where the laughter had gone.
The rain fell in glassy curtains across her windshield, the wipers sweeping them open and closed. Out the window a thick mist was rolling across the fields toward her. She realised she hadn’t even brought an umbrella. She could have been in Washington.
Tuscany? It was hard to know what all the fuss was about. And what did she think she was going to achieve in Montevedova anyway? If she found Daniel at this point she wasn’t quite sure what she would do with him. She could not begin to think how the conversation would start, let alone end. It was all so uncivilised.
She was out of her mind coming here without a plan.
Lily didn’t usually open an eyelid without a plan. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d liked to know what was around the corner. It had driven Rose mad for as long as she could remember. ‘Let’s just see what happens,’ Rose had said to her older sister more than once, more than a dozen times, possibly more than a hundred. ‘Try going with the flow, Lily.’
But Lily didn’t trust the flow. The flow took frightening turns and threatening twists. She assumed it was their mother’s fault. Something about never knowing from one day to the next what ‘mood’ Carmel would be in had unsettled Lily from an early age. As soon as she worked out that if she could control a situation, the results were more predictable, she started controlling the situation.
Nothing in Lily’s adult life had just casually cropped up. She’d orchestrated it all: Ivy League scholarship, Yale business degree, good job, handsome husband, great salary. Even the view from their apartment on Seventy-second Street was pretty much the one she’d always had in mind and just needed to find and acquire within her predestined time frame.
The only dream she hadn’t been able to make come true were her three beautiful children: Edward, after Daniel’s father; Rose, after Rose and then either Amelia or Angus, depending.
She’d persevered with this plan every bit as hard as she had for anything else, if not harder: She’d tried IVF treatments, egg donation, surrogate motherhood, and—finally—adoption. She bit her lip and shook away that memory. It didn’t matter because in the end it had all come to nothing.
The sharp rat-a-tat-tat of someone knocking at her window brought her smartly back to the present. Flustered, she scrambled to press the right button to open the window, first accidentally locking all the doors, then opening the passenger window before finally her own.
‘Continue straight ahead,’ chirruped Dermott, who had been maintaining a haughty silence until then. ‘Continue straight ahead.’
Rattled, Lily looked up to see an Italian man of about her own age bending in beneath a huge white umbrella to look at her. His hair was curly and shoulder length, his eyes brown and big and his eyelashes so thick and long they would not have looked out of place on a supermodel, but his face was otherwise craggy, slightly unshaven. He was good-looking but carried a little extra weight and he had an intense sort of seriousness about him.
‘I saw you stopped here,’ he said in heavily accented but perfectly understandable English. ‘Is anything the ma
tter?’
He was wearing a white linen shirt that was getting splattered by the rain bouncing off his umbrella, creating little splodges that clung to his skin.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Lily said, finding, to her embarrassment, that her voice was shaky. Those babies. Those wretched lost babies. ‘I’ve just driven from Rome and I’m not sure about these tiny narrow roads. I pulled over to…Well, there was a…Am I blocking you?’
She looked in her rearview mirror and saw his car—a black Range Rover—parked behind her, its hazard lights blinking. It wasn’t her fault he was driving such a vast machine that he couldn’t get past. But anyway, he was right, she needed to get going. She couldn’t stay there forever.
‘I’ll get going right away,’ she said, turning the car over again even though it was already idling, which made a horrible noise and confused her as much as the windows.
‘Continue straight ahead,’ Dermott repeated.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Lily said to the man. ‘Will you shut up!’ she snapped at Dermott. ‘I was going straight ahead anyway.’
The man laughed, and perhaps because she had just been lamenting the lack of laughter in her recent life, this grated.
‘Yes, very funny, but if you’ll excuse me I’ll be on my way,’ she said, taking her foot off the clutch and stalling the car again.
Dermott had the good sense to stay silent, but the long-haired Italian was not as attuned to Lily as her GPS was.
‘I think you are a damsel in distress and I must help you,’ he said.
‘Actually, there’s no such thing as damsels in distress where I come from,’ Lily said, smiling sweetly up at him. ‘Really, I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong. I’m not lost, I’m just resting, and anyway I have this Irish fellow here helping me. If this is the road to Montevedova, which I believe it is, I can’t really go wrong and all I have to do is drive right up to my hotel when I get there and I’m all set.’
Dolci di Love Page 5