‘Lady at tourist office is like to drink too much.’
Lily looked up at the hotel. It did look nice, and the awful smell had gone completely, but she’d already paid 500 euro to stay with Violetta, and anyway she didn’t want to think about this now. She didn’t want to think about anything.
‘Thank you, but I’m fine where I am,’ she said, and after something of a tussle, she pulled away, continuing down the hill, cursing the cheerful ivy that draped elegantly over a garden wall, the faded turquoise of a shuttered building, the rustic charm of an ageing street lantern. Yes, Montevedova was beautiful. She got that. But what did she need with beauty?
She was almost back at her dry parapet when progress was halted by a slow-moving group of old women who all but blocked her path. So many old women! Where were they keeping the young ones?
No matter which way Lily stepped to overtake the shuffling group, they seemed to form a clump right in front of her, but just before she lost her patience and demanded that they either get out of her way or hurry up, they stopped, more or less delivering her like a pea down a slippery chute to the open door of Poliziano, a charming old-fashioned café with views out across the valley.
A grizzled old man was leaning on the counter sipping a glass of wine and Lily needed no further encouragement. She went in, crossing to a tiny Juliet balcony overlooking the view. It had room for just one table and so she sat down, ordered a coffee, and, after a pretence at hesitation, upon seeing it was almost eleven o’clock, a glass of prosecco. The coffee was good, but the prosecco better. Its tiny bubbles seemed to smooth away the enormous wrinkle that Francesca had made in her morning.
It wasn’t the child’s fault; she was—well, Lily didn’t want to think about what she was. She was perfect. There it was. Plain as a pickle. Perfect. But why wasn’t her hair being brushed? Why did her wings have holes in them? Who was taking care or, rather, not taking care of this tatty little Tinker Bell? Lily’s missing certainty popped in for a brief visit as she sipped her drink. If Daniel walked through the door right then, she was certain what she would do. She would shoot him. In the heart. And then the head, and then the balls. And then she would feed what was left of him to the pigs.
She ordered a second prosecco.
This soothed her wounded heart a little more.
The balcony she was sitting on had a similarly splendid view to the one in her room, but, on reflection, Lily couldn’t think why she had chosen it—it was a table for two: a hopelessly romantic spot to stare into a lover’s eyes and be swept away in the magnificence of the surroundings.
Did Daniel bring his lover here, she wondered? Had they sat at this very table and gazed at each other while Francesca and her baby brother stayed at home taking care of themselves? Who was this man she had known so well for so long? A liar, a cheat, not even a good father.
She put her glass back on the table. She’d come to Tuscany because she wanted her husband, wanted to reclaim the love they once shared, wanted to get back what she’d lost. But now she saw what a fool’s errand that was.
It was one thing to look at a photo and to rationalise a situation, even in a drunken my-husband-has-another-family-and-I-must-go-and-do-something-about-it way. But to see the results of that with her own eyes? To feel that little body pressed into hers? There was no going back from this.
She looked across to the grandfather clock in the corner. It was still not midday, but taking the time difference, jet lag, and her stewing emotions into account, Lily considered a third glass of prosecco. It was only low alcohol after all. Practically lemonade. Hardly worth counting.
But something about the way the waitress (finally, someone under thirty) looked at her when she came to collect her drained glass made her change her mind.
She paid the bill, leaving a generous tip, and, fuelled by what little alcohol there was in those Italian bubbles, she decided to find an Internet café or a telephone to check in with Pearl.
The thought of work hinged her back to her old self a little. She knew where she was when it came to Heigelmann’s—nothing had changed there—but she had taken only a couple of steps outside the café when she heard someone calling out to her.
‘Signora! Signora Turista!’
She turned to find Alberto waving at her from outside his shop.
‘Again,’ he called, ‘I am about to sit down to lunch! Bread, prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella, more tomatoes freshly delivered from my grandmother with instructions about a pretty blonde.’
She laughed but shook her head.
‘I’m sorry, Alberto, I’m just—’
But as she spoke an argument erupted from the doorway she had just passed. It was another bakeshop, more tacky than the Ferrettis’, this window stuffed full of cantucci in a myriad of flavours and a brassy rainbow of fancy wrappings.
A curvy woman in a wraparound dress backed out of the store, almost bumping right into Lily. She was shouting in Italian at someone inside and came so close Lily could smell her. She was slightly lemony and very angry, her long dark hair flicking wildly from side to side like a horse tail swatting flies.
Lily could have reached out and pulled it. It was Daniel’s lover, of course.
‘Eh, Carlotta! Causing trouble again!’ called a handsome young man from the gelateria opposite, and Daniel’s lover spun around and unleashed a tongue-lashing on him as well.
‘Carlotta, Carlotta,’ he repeated, shaking his head and backing into the ice cream store.
Carlotta! How dare she have such a turbulent, exotic name and cheeks aflame with such passion?
Another angry woman emerged from the tacky cantucci shop waving her fist at Carlotta, who started backing in Lily’s direction. Desperate to avoid either winding up underneath her feet or face to face with her, Lily spun on her heels and hurried toward Alberto who was still standing outside his shop watching the commotion.
‘You change your mind, no?’ Alberto grinned. ‘My grandmother’s tomatoes do this every time.’
Lily stepped inside his little wine shop but again refused his offer of lunch although it looked appetising enough set out on a white platter on his desk: the cheese pulled into chunks and tossed with chopped fresh tomato and torn basil leaves, a crusty loaf of sliced ciabatta next to it. But distress curdled in her stomach. Her head pounded. Carlotta!
‘So what’s the story with the woman in the street?’ she asked.
‘Crazy,’ Alberto answered with a disinterested shrug. ‘Nice girl, good girl, but crazy. Whole family is crazy. She gets fired from the Borsolini brothers once a week. But they crazy too. You would like a glass of wine?’
She couldn’t bring herself to ask any more, to ask if he knew of Daniel, or Francesca, or that fat baby boy. For a start, she didn’t want to make a big deal of her interest, but also she was afraid that if she started asking questions, she might never stop. Did Carlotta know that Daniel had a wife? That her daughter’s dress was dirty? That you could be as crazy and as nice as you wanted but that it wasn’t right to steal someone’s husband, someone’s future, someone’s dreams, someone’s daughter?
If Alberto noticed she was distracted, he didn’t let on, keeping up a steady stream of chatter about his wines, the recent rain, the local food, the bar he was going to later in the day to meet with his friends, in case she was interested.
She wasn’t, but she did get him to tell her a little about the town and if there was much more to it than she had already seen. The news was disheartening. Montevedova, Alberto told her, really only had two streets, the Corso and the lane that forked in the opposite direction at the parapet. In any case, the two of them joined up again at the piazza grande at the top of the village, where he was meeting his friends if she changed her mind.
There were back alleys and hidden pathways between the two main lanes, he explained, but pretty much what Lily had seen was what there was.
‘Everybody must know everybody else here,’ she suggested. ‘You must bump into each other all the t
ime.’
‘You would think so,’ Alberto agreed, ‘but some like to keep to themselves. And the good thing about a small town is that you do always know where everyone else is so you can not go there, you can go somewhere else.’
This was a very good point.
Lily already knew where Francesca and Carlotta were and could only assume Daniel was not far away.
Inferring that she had already enjoyed all the sights Montevedova had to offer, she asked Alberto what she could explore farther afield. He suggested she head to one or another of the nearby towns, none of them as beautiful as Montevedova but all worth a look anyway. He then took her down to his basement and showed her out the back door, which was close to the bookstore. She bought a guidebook and headed to her car.
Chapter 20
All the widows dressed in head-to-toe black, as was expected of them, but as Fiorella pointed out in the League HQ while they waited for Violetta, in the height of summer it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.
‘Although it certainly should help with all the sour expressions and the bad hair,’ she said. ‘As for the sweating that must go on! It’s all right for me, I get a discount on deodorant at the pharmacy but for the rest of you—why stick with black, that’s what I want to know?’
‘It’s slimming,’ the widow Ercolani pointed out although it didn’t really work that way for her personally.
‘It’s the proper thing to do,’ announced someone else.
‘It’s what widows have always done.’
‘That’s true,’ agreed the widow Ciacci, ‘although I have a little secret to tell you.’ With all the speed of a Sicilian stripper, she then whipped off her amorphous black smock to reveal a hot pink slip, clinging and quite low cut, with a fetching lace bodice. ‘It’s La Perla,’ she said.
The other widows stared, slack-jawed.
‘The colour’s called fuchsia,’ she added.
‘Well, I wear witches britches,’ blurted out another widow. She undid her skirt, which fell to the floor with a thunk, such was the heft of its weave, and there she stood, in a pair of pale blue knickerbockers sagging at the crotch and not quite right with her flesh-coloured kneesocks, but still, a riot of unexpected underwear.
‘My brassiere is actually white,’ yet another widow admitted. ‘All my underthings are.’
‘I don’t see why you should have to wear black at all,’ Fiorella said boldly. ‘I think you should wear florals and checks and polka dots and sequins. Who makes all these stupid rules anyway?’
‘Actually that rule was also me,’ Violetta said. Only the widow Mazzetti had heard her knock on the door and had quietly let her in. ‘Our widowed mothers wore black, as did their mothers before them, and their mothers too. It’s what we like to call respecting tradition, Fiorella, although I don’t imagine you know much about that.’
‘We made it official in nineteen forty-nine,’ the widow Mazzetti said. ‘April the twelfth, I believe.’
‘We are a secret league, Fiorella,’ Violetta continued, ‘our purpose known to no one outside our ranks. As a group of silent black-clad individuals mourning our loved ones the way it has always been done in this country, we can disappear into the background in a way that would not work if we wore red stilettos and feather boas. If that’s your preference, please feel free to do so, but not under our auspices.’
Fiorella Fiorucci actually had a pair of red stilettos—her slut of a sister had sent them as a ‘sorry for stealing your husband’ gift—but she sensed this was not the time to bring that up.
And actually, she had worn them for a week both at the pharmacy and as she sat quietly in her own doorway staring at people, but nobody had noticed.
‘Old dames like us disappear into the background no matter what we wear,’ she said. ‘I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to live it up a little.’
‘This is a serious business,’ Violetta snapped. ‘We are trying to do something good here, so if you would all please get dressed and—where is the widow Del Grasso? She’s supposed to be reporting on Lily.’
‘On Lily? Why? I thought Alessandro was the calzino rotto,’ Fiorella said.
Luciana reached for Violetta to stop her from clocking the widow Fiorucci upside the head.
‘We know where Alessandro is,’ Violetta said between gritted teeth. ‘We have his schedule. We need to find Lily and place her in his way to orchestrate any progress. Without doing so, their paths may never cross and we will have another disaster on our hands.’
Fiorella opened her mouth to say something, but the widow Mazzetti ran her finger across the base of her throat in the universal sign of ‘If you want to retain a body to go with that purple paisley dress, zip it now.’
What she had been going to say was that she knew for a fact Alessandro did not keep to his schedule on Wednesdays, but piping up now was probably breaking some sort of rule, so she did as she was bid and zipped it.
Chapter 21
Pienza was one of the villages Alberto had recommended: an insanely compact and pretty town perched like another medieval crown on a hilltop half an hour away.
Looking at it was one thing but trying to get into it another; Lily circumnavigated the whole place what felt like a dozen times trying to find a parking lot and almost came to blows with Dermott over a certain nonexistent roundabout before eventually parking down a residential back street beneath the leafy canopy of an enormous tree.
The town was famous for having been the home of a fifteenth-century pope who basically invented the makeover, she gathered from the guidebook. This pope had not only spruced up the Pienza town square but built a stunning cathedral plus, while he was at it, his own lavish papal palace, which Lily paid ten euro to tour.
He knew what he was doing. The palace had a view over the surrounding countryside that was hard to beat, and he’d even thought to install a hanging garden through which to marvel at it.
Anything else Lily wanted to know about the pope and his leanings she gleaned from a pimpled teenager who was also on the tour, which would have been even more enlightening had it not been in German. She had missed the English tour, Rolf the spotty boy explained to her, but he could help her: to his mother’s obvious consternation.
Each time Rolf translated anything for Lily’s benefit, Rolf’s mother shot her the filthiest of looks, and when he explained with enthusiasm about the little cupboard where the pope kept his lovers, Lily thought the woman might just explode.
She was interested in Rolf, but not in the way his mother assumed. Lily had imagined her own teenage boys looming over her ever since she’d first dreamed of having a family—initially with John Travolta, her poster boy in junior high. She thought she would have those sons by now. She thought one would be about Rolf’s age. And she’d be a better mother to Rolf than this dour creature with her sour looks and disapproving guttural noises. Who called a kid Rolf, anyway? Hadn’t the woman seen The Sound of Music?
But then Rolf’s mother bade her goodbye with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and such a compassionate smile that Lily crumpled afterward on the steps of the cathedral in the town’s made-over piazza. Could she tell that Lily ached to have a pimpled son of her own? Was her desperation so obvious?
It was desperation of a different sort that eventually drove her from the sun-soaked steps of the duomo. The guidebook said that Pienza was known for pecorino—a local cheese made from sheep’s milk—so Lily headed for one of the recommended restaurants tucked in a little square behind the piazza and ordered grilled pecorino with walnuts and honey.
She didn’t, as a rule, eat cheese, so she proceeded to push the pecorino around the plate while she finished a half bottle of wine. But the pain that the prosecco bubbles had danced away so happily earlier on in the day showed no signs of subsiding quite as easily with the riesling.
As the moments ticked by in the little trattoria, thoughts of Francesca and Rolf and Baby Grace bounced in her mind like fat raindrops off the cobbled Corso. She kept tryin
g to flush them away but no sooner had she gotten rid of one than another splashed in its place.
She shouldn’t have taken the photo out of the shoe. She shouldn’t have drunk-dialled Rose. She shouldn’t have fallen foul of Tipsy Tourism. She shouldn’t sit there and plough through another half bottle. If she’d not ploughed through the ones at home, she might still be meeting with Finance trying to decide who they could afford to let go and who they could afford to keep, where they could cut costs in the red-lit states of Maryland and Delaware, instead of sitting there wrangling walnuts and trying not to order more wine.
In the end, she decided to go somewhere else to do that, meandering across the other side of the main piazza until she found another trattoria that had an outdoor terrace showcasing yet another sumptuous slice of the Tuscan countryside. Through the soldier-straight trees that grew at the edge of the terrace, she could see sloping grassy pastures tumbling down to a patchwork of perfectly mown hayfields, their giant rolls of hay sitting evenly spaced and proud between the green of the neighbouring grapes and olives.
Across the valley she could spot at least three other hilltop towns, their church spires and palazzos casually interrupting the horizon as though medieval fortresses and bell towers were perfectly normal, which, she supposed, they were. Did Tuscany ever get sick of being so ridiculously gorgeous?
She ordered more pecorino with walnuts and honey and more riesling. It would help her make her plan, which she now needed more than ever and that she promised herself she would have all done and dusted by the time the bottle was empty.
Obviously, when she found Daniel, she wasn’t really going to shoot him. So what was she going to do? Without much experience in histronics, it was hard to picture the scene. It would be unpleasant, that was hard to avoid, but it would not be loud. She would quietly demand a divorce, she supposed. Divorce. She hadn’t honestly considered that up until now. Not honestly. But sitting here now, having met Francesca and not been a mother to Rolf, it seemed inevitable.
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