One Summer in Italy

by Sue Moorcroft

  She was pretty sure he’d be watching her behind though.

  Chapter Nine

  By the time Sunday rolled around Levi was reaching the point where he had to either ask to extend his booking at Casa Felice – which he’d already done once – or go home.

  He’d chosen to paint in the lavender garden again. It gave him a slightly different perspective on the aching beauty of the valley vista than from the terrace, but he got fewer people watching over his shoulder, a practice he found conducive to neither painting nor thinking. The latter was taking precedence this afternoon and he was conscious of staring at the view with his brush drying in his hand.

  Part of him wanted to go home. He had a strong urge to pick up the reins of his business and try to get a better grasp of what was happening with Wes and Octavia and whether he was spooking at shadows.

  But before doing that, he needed to MAKE THE DECISION. That’s how he thought of it, hanging in his mind in capital letters, probably bright scarlet and impatient because it was so unlike Levi to dither. He’d wanted to talk to Wes about it last time they’d spoken, but Wes had been in a hurry to get off the phone.

  The consequences of making the wrong decision frightened him in a way nothing else ever had.

  Added to that, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sofia. He dipped his brush into his water jar and touched it to a misty green he’d mixed on his palette, then shook his head, dropped his brush in the jar and dragged his phone out of the pocket of his shorts. What was wrong with him? ‘Focus!’ he muttered as he pulled up his contacts and tapped the name Freya Webber.

  Freya answered the call quickly. ‘How’s it going?’

  Recognising the strain in her voice and all too aware that they were only in contact again by circumstance, he wasted no more time on pleasantries than she had. ‘No change since I sent you the last lot of photos. I thought I’d just touch base with you to talk about what comes next.’ As he spoke, he flipped the pages on his pad to the painting of Il Giardino. It was a shame he’d been interrupted halfway through. From his amateur perspective it was amongst his best work. At least he had the record shots on his phone and would be able to go back to it.

  Freya’s voice flattened, tinged with disappointment. Probably she’d hoped he was ringing to tell her he’d completed his mission and her daughter would soon be restored to her. ‘I’m so worried that if you explain what you’re doing there she’ll just run off somewhere else and we won’t know where she is.’

  ‘Me, too.’ He’d hoped she might have more insight to offer by now but it was hope more than expectation.

  Stay. Go.

  Speak. Remain silent.

  He stared at his painting as if it could give him the advice Freya was clearly hesitating over.

  ‘I know you can’t stay there for ever,’ she conceded.

  ‘That’s about as far as I’d got in my thought process too.’ Then, wanting to give Freya something positive, ‘Amy’s a lovely girl. I love her already.’

  Freya gave a laugh that was half sob. ‘Then I suppose you’ll make the right decision.’

  So it was all up to him. Levi said goodbye and ended the call, blowing out his lips on a great sigh.

  A voice came from behind him, making him swing round on his chair, dropping his pad onto the grass, still open at the painting of Il Giardino. Sofia was gazing at him with a strange expression. Disappointment? Suspicion? Maybe a touch of compassion.

  ‘I think it would probably be better if you threw that particular painting away,’ she said levelly. ‘And delete all those photos you took of Amy too. You’re getting on the wrong side of appropriate.’

  Levi picked up the pad and gazed at his watercolour ruefully, the cream parasols over tables full of diners, the figure with tray poised. Amy. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions,’ he tried, noticing the way Sofia played with the end of her plait, passing it through her fingers over and over. It was much like the way he smoothed a dry paintbrush.

  A frown grew above her brown eyes. ‘She is lovely, Levi. I’m sure a man would have to be blind not to notice and blondes are always eye-catching. But she’s eighteen.’

  He felt his cheek flush with guilty heat. ‘I know how old she is. She was eighteen on the twenty-third of April.’

  If there had been a hint of compassion in Sofia’s eyes it vanished. He sensed her withdrawal, her suspicion growing into condemnation. ‘That you even know that is disturbing.’ She paused, obviously selecting her words, the sun shooting amber threads through her dark hair. ‘I know it’s legal to have a thing about a girl of eighteen but it does you no credit. She could be your daughter.’

  With that, she turned and walked quickly away, up the garden and veering left to where he knew she’d vanish under the rampaging vine outside the staff accommodation.

  He sighed, tipping back his head and closing his eyes against the sun, too stretched and worn out by the pretence to keep it up any more. He leaped up and raced after Sofia’s stiffly retreating back, catching up with her just as she put her hand on the gate to the staff area. Reaching around her, he held the gate closed. ‘She is my daughter,’ he whispered, fully alive to the fact that Amy could be in her room and within earshot if he spoke at normal volume.

  Sofia turned slowly, wearing an expression of ludicrous astonishment, her mouth half open and her eyebrows arched almost into her hair.

  ‘I’ve only just found out,’ he whispered on grimly. ‘And Amy doesn’t know,’ he added, to be crystal clear. ‘I came here to protect her, but I don’t know whether or when to tell her who I am. She made it abundantly plain to her mother that if anybody comes after her she’ll move on and cut contact.’ He made himself take a calming breath. ‘Now I know her a little and she seems to trust me as a friend – or, ironically, a father figure – I also feel I can’t tell her in case it makes her hate me. Somewhat to my surprise, I find the idea of her hating me gut-wrenchingly terrifying.’

  Sofia had managed to close her mouth but still looked dumbfounded.

  He removed his hand from the gate. ‘Can we go somewhere we’re less likely to be overheard? Have you finished your shift, or are you just going on?’ He checked his watch. He was nearly as familiar with the server shifts as they were themselves.

  ‘Finished.’ She blinked as if coming out of a dream. ‘Um. How about I get changed and we meet up at the country park? Turn left out of the hotel and follow the road uphill for about a kilometre and you’ll see the sign on the left.’ She gave him her phone number in case they somehow missed each other.

  ‘See you there,’ he agreed gruffly, and strode back down the garden to pack up his pad and paints. His heart was drumming against his ribs, making him feel giddy. Was it because telling Sofia the truth had made it more real?

  He was Amy’s father. He was a dad, he who’d never seriously thought of having children, probably because he’d never met a woman with whom he’d plan to create a child.

  It was half an hour before he met Sofia again. He waited just inside the country park on a bench made from split trunks, where trees met overhead to create cool green light and the path was paved with old leaves and pine needles, their peppery smell rising on the summer air. As he listened to children laughing somewhere deeper into the trees, Sofia appeared at the park entrance in a bright summer dress, its primary colours suiting her dark hair and golden skin. He rose to meet her and by tacit agreement they took the smallest trail. The whippy lower growth of trees jostled right up to the path, making it unlikely they’d be seen together by anyone who might tell her employer.

  It was the hottest part of the day but they found a breeze at a sort of lookout point over the valley, higher than Casa Felice. The Umbrian Apennine Mountains could be seen rising in one majestic rank behind another. The road leading down from Montelibertà into the valley looked no more than a carelessly strewn thread. He dropped down onto the dry grass and leaned his back on a smooth rock. Sofia let herself down to sit beside him, her gaze on the view. She le
ft a good two feet of air between them, he noticed.

  ‘What do you want to tell me?’ she asked quietly. At least the censure had left her voice.

  Marshalling his thoughts, he began the story that he’d so far shared only with Wes. ‘I met Amy’s mother, Freya, when I was seventeen. It was August and my eighteenth birthday was coming up at the end of the month. A few weeks after that I’d be off to university. Freya was twenty-seven.’ He glanced sidelong at Sofia as she made a tiny exclamation. ‘Yes, I know. She was nearly ten years older and twenty-seven-year-old women generally couple up with men nearer their age.’ He sighed. ‘I was a bit smitten and didn’t stop to question her motives. She was in Bettsbrough for the hen weekend of a friend who lived in the town and the theme of their nightclub evening was slutty cowgirls. The bride wore a white satin bandit mask with a veil and there were a lot of toy guns and spurs around. Freya looked so hot she glowed in a fringed miniskirt and boots. I knew a couple of the girls in the party so got caught up on the edges of it. I suppose I looked a bit older than I was but I couldn’t believe my luck when Freya started to flirt with me. It turned out she and the bride, and several other guests, were flight attendants. She had her own hotel room! Could life get any more glamorous and sophisticated?’ He laughed at his naïve younger self. ‘We spent the rest of the weekend together. I was still so young that I lied to my parents and said I was staying with a mate.’

  Sofia let out a breath. ‘Wow. And you got her pregnant?’

  ‘Apparently. But I’ve only just found out.’ He turned to face her and though touched by the memories of those heady days of calf love he retained sufficient grip on the present to be glad that she wasn’t looking disappointed in him any more. ‘Freya said she was on the pill and I was immature enough not to use condoms as backup. On Sunday afternoon, she said she wasn’t coming back to Bettsbrough for the wedding because of her duty roster, packed her stylish flight attendant rolling luggage and kissed me goodbye. She jumped into her hot hatchback to drive out of my life. A whole lot more experienced than at the beginning of the weekend, I wafted home on a cloud of joy.’

  ‘Do you think she got pregnant on purpose?’ Sofia’s voice jumped up an octave in shock.

  He shook his head. ‘On the contrary. It was a particularly disastrous contraception failure for her because a detail she’d failed to share with me was that she was engaged to someone else – the husband she’s still with, Stephen. I suppose I was her final fling.’

  ‘Holy crap,’ Sofia exclaimed softly.

  ‘Yeah.’ He picked a sprig off a tiny blue flower growing nearby and rolled the stem between finger and thumb, releasing its acrid scent. ‘I think I carried a torch for her for a couple of months, but then I went off to uni and had other things to think about, other fun to have. Other girls to meet.’

  ‘So how on earth did she get in touch with you after so long?’ Sofia had turned towards him now, her shoulder against the wall and her knees drawn up to support her arms.

  He screwed up his eyes against the afternoon sun. ‘Through my family’s business. The night we met, someone was laughing about having a run-in with my dad. Gunn’s Motors stands on a corner of the road leading to Market Square in the town centre and he’s always been known as “Bullet” Gunn because if kids dared to take a shortcut over the forecourt he would shoot out and tell them to stick to the path. As we walked to her hotel we passed the garage and she stepped on the forecourt to see if Bullet Gunn would appear. As it was three in the morning he didn’t, obviously, but the name of the garage must have stuck in her mind. She got the phone number from the website and rang, terming herself “an old friend trying to get in contact with Levi”. Someone gave her the name of my website so she went there and filled in the contact form, asking me to get in touch.’

  ‘You remembered her?’ A big iridescent green bug fluttered around Sofia’s head. Impatiently, she wafted it away.

  It seemed typical of her not to squeal or squawk just because a buzzy thing came to take a look at her. ‘Of course. For the few years after our encounter the girls I met were students. Students don’t have much money for nicely appointed hotel rooms and Freya’s glossy grooming was a contrast to their dressed-by-Oxfam look. She lived on in my fantasies for ages.’ He felt bashful at this illumination of a more youthful Levi.

  ‘So what did you think when you got her message?’

  ‘Initially I just noticed her first name and smiled at the memory of the “sophisticated older woman” I’d once had a weekend thing with. Her married surname, Webber, didn’t mean anything to me so I was astonished when I realised that it really was the same Freya. I replied from my private email address and she asked for a phone number as she felt we “ought to speak directly”. The penny still didn’t drop.’ He pulled up a couple of blades of dry grass and let them loose on the breeze. ‘Then came the phone call. Man! Talk about a bolt from the blue! She was crying, which made it even harder for me to grasp what was going on but eventually I realised that she was giving me the news that she’d realised she was pregnant a couple of months after our time together and had gambled on Amy being Stephen’s. The truth came out through something so commonplace that it completely caught her on the hop.’

  He paused to wipe his forehead, reliving the shock and turmoil, his sense of surrealism. ‘Amy and her friends developed social consciences and decided that as they were now eighteen, they’d give blood. Amy was the last because she barely reached the weight requirement, but when she received her donor card it gave her blood type as A-positive. Stephen’s a medical guy, working in research, and he took one look and said, “How can two O-positive parents have an A-positive child?” Freya couldn’t think of an answer. She realised what it must mean, but she’d been ignoring the possibility for over eighteen years. Amy—’ he blew out suddenly, feeling winded anew at the memory of Freya’s half-hysterical words and the painful visions they conjured up ‘—Amy was there. Witnessed the horror, the anger, the screaming, the tears. Had the dad she’d loved all her life ripped from her family tree. It’s no wonder the poor girl reacted by running off.’

  Sofia covered his hand with hers. It was hot, like the sunlight pouring down. ‘Poor Stephen. Poor Amy. Poor you.’

  ‘Poor them, yes. Not poor me. I don’t have a significant other to upset or other children to shock. And now that I know Amy … how could I feel sorry for myself that I helped make her?’ Levi took a deep breath before he carried on. ‘Freya said it was both a catastrophe and a relief to have everything out in the open, not to occasionally worry why her eldest child’s blonde when she and Stephen are dark.’

  ‘But she wasn’t really prepared for the fallout when the truth came out?’

  ‘I’m not sure how you would prepare for that. Stephen was distraught and demanded every detail. She had to confess about taking off her engagement ring for the hen weekend. As Freya was from out of town only the bride knew the truth – and she was notorious for likening relationships to a chocolate box and saying every woman liked variety. By the time Freya realised she was pregnant it was only a few weeks to her own wedding and the odds were that the baby belonged to Stephen. They later had two more children, both boys, and moved to Germany with Stephen’s job in a lab in Munich. Everything was rosy until May, when it all unravelled.’

  ‘Wow.’ Sofia’s eyes were soft with sympathy. ‘I can only imagine.’

  He nodded sombrely. Distantly he could hear the sound of church bells from Montelibertà signalling a Sunday afternoon mass. A hot breeze blew up from the valley, lifting his hair out of his eyes. ‘Freya was under attack. Stephen was gutted and betrayed. Unfortunately, while they were focused on their own disaster, Amy was making plans. She packed her bags and left, leaving a note that began, “Dear Mum and Stephen” – which was horrible for him – explaining she was coming here and threatening to cut them off if anyone followed.’

  He swallowed, wishing he’d thought to bring a bottle of water to ease his constricted throat. ‘St
ephen’s feeling horribly remorseful because he should have reassured Amy that his love for her was unchanged despite his own pain. Freya’s drowning in guilt. Relations between them are icy but their boys are twelve and sixteen so they’re letting things settle down before deciding where to go next.’

  Sofia squeezed his hand. ‘Was it your idea to come here?’

  He laughed shortly. ‘Freya’s. That’s why she got in touch, to enlist me to come here and make sure Amy was OK. I fell in with it because despite not knowing which way was up I could understand her desperation that someone be on the spot to provide help if Amy needed it. And, although I feel as if I’m in a dream, I am her father.’

  ‘Wow.’ Sofia’s eyes crinkled in a smile, catching the sunlight, the pupils contracting. ‘That’s a bit of a sudden responsibility.’

  He rubbed his face. ‘No kidding. I’ve always enjoyed being single and haven’t really had a yen to settle down and be a family man. Other than being an uncle, anyway. That’s quite fun.’ He paused to picture his two mischievous nieces and the way his brother Tyrone’s face always lit up when they were around. ‘Wes and I have ridden around Europe quite a bit on holiday so I jumped on my motorbike and headed for Munich to talk through Freya’s plan. She and Stephen were so distraught and scared, so emphatic that Amy isn’t a particularly mature eighteen-year-old, that I didn’t take much persuading to carry on to Montelibertà. And—’ his voice cracked and he had to swallow again ‘—and how could I not want to see my daughter for the first time?’

  ‘And you arrived just as she was about to be sacked,’ Sofia supplied.