One Summer in Italy

by Sue Moorcroft

  ‘And poor Wes,’ Levi pointed out dryly.

  Again, Octavia shrugged off Wes’s plight. ‘It’s not my fault if he misread.’

  For a long, long silent moment, Levi contemplated the tall woman who somehow looked childish, standing before him, twisting her fingers while she waited to see what he’d do.

  Abruptly, he stepped aside and opened the door. ‘Get out.’

  Relief flashing across her face, Octavia swung her bag onto her shoulder and got.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  After Octavia had gone – after shuddering at the memory of Octavia flipping up her top to look at her bare stomach as if personal space and privacy were not issues – Sofia made instant coffee. Levi’s office was all set up with cardboard cups and sachets of milk and sugar. Meanwhile, Levi talked earnestly with Amy. ‘I hope you don’t hate this too much – but I have to ring your mum and talk to her. Octavia’s behaviour shouldn’t just be brushed off, and I feel I deserve an explanation from your mother too.’

  Amy heaved a long-suffering sigh. Levi’s gaze didn’t waver so, begrudgingly, she snorted, ‘Oh, go on then.’

  Sofia hesitated in her task, then put back one of the cups, poured water into the other two and stirred. It gave her a really odd sensation in her stomach to hear Levi say into the phone, ‘Freya? Why the hell did you send that bloody lunatic Octavia to spy on me? I don’t care if she is the only person you know in Bettsbrough,’ he went on cuttingly. ‘I understand from Amy that you know full well she can act unacceptably. Do you know how much trouble she’s caused?’

  Moving quietly, Sofia put the full coffee cups down in front of Levi and Amy.

  Levi gave her a quick smile but then returned his attention to his conversation. ‘Hang on.’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone to talk to Amy. ‘Your mum says asking Octavia to be a pair of eyes on the ground didn’t come from a bad motivation. She wanted some idea of how I’d be affected before she spilled the beans so feels she was trying to save me trouble rather than cause it. I can accept that.’

  Amy was a bit pale but at least she seemed to have fallen back into her old easy way with Levi. ‘I feel weird Mum was talking to Auntie Octavia behind my back though.’

  Levi gave her a reassuring smile. ‘But you’d taken off and were refusing to talk to her, weren’t you? Maybe now’s the perfect time to change that because she’s asking to talk to you. What do you think? You’ve probably got to do it some time.’

  After several seconds of fulminating silence, Amy heaved a sigh. ‘OK.’

  Levi held out the phone. ‘I think you’ll feel better.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Amy squared her shoulders and took the phone. She looked at it without moving.

  Sofia drifted towards the door. ‘I’ll go off for a walk for a bit. Give you privacy.’

  For once Amy didn’t demand she stay. Sofia ran lightly downstairs, glad that Val wasn’t at her desk and so she could get out into the fresh air without feeling obliged to chat.

  She felt so strange.

  It was great to see Levi and Amy redefining their relationship but it left her role in things so high up in the air she felt giddy.

  Once outside, instead of taking the road to the market square she chose the one at right angles to it, passing bus shelters arranged in a neat line. Walking briskly, she passed the local college, a pub and a furniture shop. The road took her downhill and curved right. Within five minutes she was at the pedestrian zone, which meant she could walk through it and be back at Gunn’s Motors in no time. Not feeling a sufficient period had elapsed for Amy to have what promised to be a difficult conversation or, for that matter, for Sofia to sort through her own jumbled feelings, she turned left into the indoor shopping area. And went right around it in ten minutes.

  Bettsbrough was the original ‘small town’.

  Moving more slowly now, she stepped back outside again and, with a small wave in Matt’s direction, sat down on a bench to try and absorb all that had happened in a handful of days. It seemed amazing that she’d missed only a few shifts on Casa Felice’s reception in the hated suit, because she felt a long way from Montelibertà.

  Next time, she’d get a job with plenty of access to the outdoors.

  Whatever ‘next time’ proved to mean. Maybe Amy would go home to Germany now. Maybe Sofia should return to Italy? Had she been too quick to dismiss the idea of working at Hotel Alba?

  Gianni and Chiara, and even Mia, were the only family she had.

  Going back to Italy would mean leaving Levi, because he was so obviously part of Bettsbrough. His home was here. His family, his business. His life. She thought about that for a long time, letting the July sunshine bathe her as she watched the people of his town go about their Monday business, hurrying, laughing, talking, shopping or making phone calls.

  With slow steps she returned the Gunn’s Motors building half an hour later, passing Val with a smile but heading straight for the stairs. Levi and Amy were sitting together at the desk, their coffee cups empty now. Amy’s eyes were red but she smiled tremulously and got up to give Sofia a hug. ‘Mum and I have made up.’

  Sofia felt her own eyes burn. ‘That’s so great!’ She hugged the slight figure hard, concentrating on what a wonderful thing this was for her friend and trying not to wonder what it meant for Sofia herself.

  ‘And,’ Amy went on after they’d disentangled themselves, ‘Mum’s really cross at Auntie Octavia. She’s going to call her and make sure she’s got the message to butt out of Levi’s life. She thinks Octavia might need help because she’s been so weird.’

  ‘You’ve missed out an important detail,’ Levi prompted. He looked more relaxed now.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Amy opened her eyes wide. ‘Octavia was the bride! You know, when Mum and Levi … it was a hen weekend? It was Octavia’s. Mum and her were at flight attendant school together and so Levi met Octavia then but he didn’t remember.’

  ‘Being expected to remember some girl you met eighteen years ago for a few minutes in a club when she was dressed in cowboy gear, a Lone Ranger mask and a net curtain veil is a big ask,’ Levi remarked dryly.

  Amy giggled. ‘Anyway, Mum’s going to sort Octavia out.’

  Levi pretended to mop his brow, making Amy giggle again. Sofia grinned.

  ‘So what now?’ Levi looked at Sofia and Amy expectantly. ‘Shall I drive you to the Travelodge and grab your stuff to take back to my place?’

  Sofia’s heart tossed itself like a pancake. It would be sensible to say no. Her head was screaming, ‘Don’t! The more involved you get with him the harder it will be when you leave.’ But her heart and her libido were bellowing, ‘Go for it! Have a few lovely days with him before you have to go back to your own life!’

  Amy got in before Sofia could decide which part of her to answer with. ‘Can that wait a bit?’ The youngster’s gaze had become solemn. She looked at Levi. ‘I want to talk to you about something important.’ She took such a deep breath that her shoulders hunched. Then blurted out, ‘Please will you give Matt a job?’

  Levi sighed, a small frown pleating his brow. ‘I’m not sure—’

  ‘No, listen,’ Amy broke in. Her voice trembled. ‘It’s really hard to get a job when you don’t have a place to live. He can use his mates’ address but he’s got no phone number to arrange interviews. He’s got no degree, and no work record because he’s only just finished sixth form.’

  She had to clear her throat before she could go on. ‘I know the homeless seem scary to some people. They think they’re all addicts but Matt’s not. He just needs to eat and somewhere to sleep.’

  Levi didn’t speak. Sofia, seeing the brightness of his eyes, suspected that he was suffering a lump in his throat as Amy pinned him with her earnest gaze, her hands clenched on the desk in front of her.

  And she hadn’t finished tugging at his heartstrings yet. ‘I’m asking you to do it for me. You can train him for something, can’t you? He’s a good person. He didn’t wake up one day and
think, “I know, I’ll live in a doorway.” It happened because he didn’t know what to do when his stepdad chucked him out and he’s only just finding out about benefits and things, but it’s all taking so long. And there are these boys who used to bully him at school and they drive past and laugh at him and call him Doormat.’ Her voice broke, a tiny sob escaping into the still air of the office.

  ‘All right,’ Levi said gruffly. ‘Go get him and I’ll talk to him and see what his IT skills are like. There will be some routine jobs I can give him, I expect, if he seems all right.’

  ‘Yes!’ Amy leaped off her chair, punching the air, beaming smiles chasing away her tears. ‘Thank you! Thank you! I’ll go find him. We can move in with you later. Thanks. Oh, thank you!’ Amy threw her arms around Levi and hugged him tight, then released him and ran out through the door.

  Sofia gazed at Levi, who looked as stunned as if a summer nymph had just appeared and granted his dearest wish. She tried to joke but her voice came out all wobbly. ‘Congratulations. I think you just became a father.’

  He laughed shakily. ‘I was incapable of saying no to her. It was like she was drawing my guts out when she cried. Is it always going to be like that?’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  Levi shook his head and rubbed his palms over his face. Then his eyes appeared above his hands and fixed on Sofia. He leaped up, strode around the desk and yanked her into his arms, making her say ‘Oof!’ at the suddenness. He crushed her against him so she could hardly breathe, ribs hard against hers, her cheekbone mashed against his collarbone. They stood, entwined, bodies silently communicating.

  It was one of the best hugs she’d ever had.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he murmured. ‘Even though we’ve been together today I still missed you because it wasn’t the right time to do this.’ He slackened his hold just enough to allow him to dip his head and touch his mouth to hers, softly questing, his tongue stroking its way into her mouth, making her close her eyes to savour the sensation, the heat.

  And a voice said, ‘Oops! Sorry, I should have coughed or something.’ Amy stood in the doorway, eyes like saucers.

  Sofia tried to spring away but Levi kept his arm around her. ‘It’s all right, come in.’

  Amy hunched her shoulders, shooting Sofia a look of amused disbelief as if to say, I can’t leave you alone for a minute. ‘There’s another thing,’ she said to Levi. Matt doesn’t have anywhere to live and it’s not just the rent people need, is it? They need to pay a deposit and for their electricity and everything. Did you say your house is quite big?’

  ‘Quite,’ Levi said faintly.

  ‘OK, good.’ Amy swung back out of the room again.

  Sofia began to shake with laughter. ‘Did you just get a lodger?’

  He groaned and shut his eyes. ‘I’m going to have to go into training for this parenthood thing. I need courses on “Learning how to say no” and “How not to fall into traps that are only obvious once you’ve crashed to the bottom of the hole.”’

  Sofia, though laughing, hugged him to her more tightly than ever.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The next fortnight was the most bittersweet of Sofia’s life.

  Levi took Matt on under the title of ‘trainee’. Trainee what, he didn’t seem too sure, but Matt had taken an A level in Computer Science and IT so, although he wouldn’t get his results for several weeks, there was a foundation to build on.

  Sofia knew Levi had been secretly impressed that when Amy told Matt he had a chance of a job he’d insisted on running all the way to his mates’ place to beg a shower and borrow a clean shirt before running on to Gunn’s Motors and presenting himself, panting, for his interview.

  Levi hadn’t gone so far as to give him a room in his own house but accompanied him to his mother and stepfather’s place and suggested coldly that they help towards a deposit. The stepfather scowled every time Levi turned his baleful gaze on him but Matt’s mother, with a noticeable unwillingness to meet Matt’s eye, gave him two hundred pounds she’d just taken out from a cash machine. Shocked that Matt’s parents were pretty middle-class so you couldn’t even excuse their behaviour on the grounds of being hard up, Levi contacted an estate agent he knew – probably someone he’d been to school with: he seemed to have an entire portfolio of useful contacts from that source – and got Matt a room in a house of multiple occupancy, putting up the rest of the deposit himself and standing as guarantor for the rent, telling Matt he’d better work hard so he could pay his living expenses. Matt hadn’t been able to speak and had to bite his lips hard as he wrung Levi’s hand in inarticulate gratitude.

  Amy got to know her grandparents, her Uncle Tyrone, Aunt Beth and two toddler cousins Grace and Serena over family meals and even a family day out to a park. Sofia resolutely excused herself from these events, no matter how many times Levi invited or even cajoled.

  Instead, she hung around Levi’s house to surf the net, looking through the dwindling summer jobs in Europe and beginning to think that she might as well go straight to the Canary Islands … if she didn’t return to Montelibertà. She’d telephoned Hotel Alba on Gianni and Mia’s wedding anniversary to offer congratulations. She’d got Mia first, who’d seemed first touched and then pleased at Sofia’s good wishes. Gianni had come on the line and told Sofia once again that there was a job waiting for her. When Sofia, encouraged by the slight thaw in Mia, tentatively mentioned Amy he’d sighed apologetically, that, although something might come up, he didn’t presently have anything to offer someone so young and inexperienced.

  Sofia still hadn’t discussed onward plans with Amy properly because there always seemed to be something Amy wanted to sort out first, like deferring her conditional university place, talking to her family in Germany and thrashing out painfully thorny questions such as whether she could continue to address Stephen Webber as ‘Dad’ now she knew he hadn’t been there at the conception.

  It was Levi who’d clarified that for her, slinging an arm across her shoulders as he said, ‘Think how gutted he’ll be if you start calling him “Stephen”. Things have been bad enough for him, haven’t they?’

  Amy pulled a face of anguish and said, ‘I know, right?’ And that was another matter sorted.

  More in the ‘bitter’ column than the ‘sweet’, on a Friday when Levi was at work and Amy spending time with Grace and Serena, who’d really taken to having an older cousin, Sofia set off for her once home town of Bedford. A time-consuming mixture of bus and train journeys took her eventually to Norse Road Cemetery. She stood before the pale grey marble headstone where now the name of Aldo Agnello Bianchi was inscribed below that of Dawn Bianchi née Hill. Echoing her actions in Montelibertà a couple of months ago, she crouched on the grass and arranged fresh flowers in the vase – jolly red Sweet Williams this time. Then she laid a hand on the cold marble and murmured, ‘I’ve managed most of the promises, Dad. Montelibertà is a wonderful place and I’m sure I’ll visit again. The happiness thing’s a bit more complicated.’ After a few minutes thinking about her parents, she walked back to the station, though it took an hour, feeling unsettlingly in limbo, unable to imagine herself living once again in Bedford but not knowing exactly what place was in her immediate future.

  The sweetness of her stay in Bettsbrough was mainly centred around the nights, when Sofia shared Levi’s room at the top of the house. His bed sometimes felt like the centre of her world, where he sank into her body every night. She’d wind her arms around him and pull him harder and deeper, as if that way she could keep him.

  Because with every passing day something seemed to hook Levi and bind him to Bettsbrough and his life without her. Wes requested a couple of months’ sabbatical before making a decision about The Moron Forum so there was only Levi to manage the remote workers, fix problems and train Matt, even without any innovation or development of the site. Amy came to Levi for advice. His family was all over him, involving him, enjoying having him home.

  When Sofia broa
ched the subject of researching jobs with Levi before raising it with Amy, he kissed her and said, ‘Can you wait a few days before talking to Amy? I think my family would be gutted if she left right away.’ Sofia was happy not to have to end her visit yet so she kissed him back and decided to live in the moment for a few days longer.

  When she brought it up the next time he pulled her close and murmured, ‘I still think Amy needs more time.’ Sofia didn’t disagree as she met his kisses with some of her own, but she was becoming more and more aware that the longer she stayed with Levi the harder it was going to be to say goodbye.

  It was at the end of the two weeks that Sofia approached Levi the third time. They were together in his bed, cotton sheets cool against their naked skin, Sofia’s head on Levi’s chest and his heartbeat steady and strong in her ear. ‘July will soon be over. If Amy and I are going to move on then I think it’s got to be soon.’ She said it experimentally, making it an opportunity for Levi to suggest Sofia didn’t leave at all.

  He didn’t take the opportunity.

  He stroked her hair, threading his fingers through until he reached the skin on her back and sighed. ‘I think,’ he said, sounding as if he were choosing his words carefully, ‘that Amy might be getting around to asking me if she can stay here, at least for now.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sofia processed this. ‘I suppose she hasn’t said anything to me because we sort of had an arrangement and so she feels awkward – she’s still not a big fan of difficult conversations.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  Sofia became aware of a sinking sensation in her chest. ‘If I’m not waiting for Amy then I could leave any time. I could talk to my uncle about doing a spell in Hotel Alba.’