‘They’re going in the honeymoon suite,’ Roberta whispered, as she walked with Kathy to the terrace doors and told her what to do.
Outside on the terrace, a young couple – perhaps in their mid-twenties – were sitting at the table furthest from the doors. They were holding hands across the table and had eyes only for each other, despite the beautiful palazzo gardens and the crooked campanile that provided the day’s backdrop to their love.
‘Aren’t they sweet?’ Roberta said. ‘As soon as I saw them, I knew I had to upgrade them to the best room in the place.’
The guests who had actually booked the best suite, arriving later that day, would have to be mollified with free Prosecco and a discount on the rate they had already paid. Henry was right that his mother ran her hotel in a very unconventional way.
‘But I have a sense about them,’ said Roberta. ‘As well as being a refuge for the down-on-their-luck, the Casa Innocenti is famed for its romantic atmosphere. We’ve had a lot of proposals here,’ she whispered. ‘I’d put money on these two.’ She seemed pleased with the thought.
Kathy took two plates and two sets of cutlery out to the table, forcing the two lovers to lift their hands so she could set their places, though they did not actually let go of each other for a second. They were in that stage of love where they couldn’t believe how lucky they were to have found each other.
‘This is our first time in Italy,’ the young woman said.
Kathy was amused they might think it was otherwise for her. Less than a week ago, she’d never been to Italy either. The idea that she appeared to be a fixture at the Casa Innocenti was gratifying. She didn’t seem out of place. Arriving at the house the previous evening, Kathy had worried that she would be in the way, but Carla had been right. She was already singing for her supper and she was grateful for the chance to do it. It was good to feel useful. It was good to have something to do other than dwell on her future sister-in-law’s pregnancy.
‘Italy is a very special country,’ she said. ‘And Florence, well, you’ll love it.’ What Kathy knew of it so far – with the exception of the bag snatch – was pretty good.
As Kathy brought out food and wine, she and the couple shared more snatches of conversation. They were from Bristol. They were called Jenny and Kyle. They’d been together for five years. They were celebrating Jenny’s twenty-seventh birthday. They were planning to walk over the Ponte Vecchio that afternoon.
‘Full of bloggers taking pictures,’ Kathy warned them.
‘We are bloggers,’ Jenny said.
Once the new guests had eaten their lunch and were safely installed in the honeymoon suite, Kathy sat down for hers in the kitchen with Roberta and Manu. Faustino settled beneath the table, equidistant from all three of them, maximising the possibility of catching anything that might be dropped. He was lucky. Manu dropped a whole slice of mortadella. Actually, Kathy wasn’t sure it was entirely an accident. Seeing that Kathy had spotted his sleight of hand, Manu gave her a shy smile.
‘Manu taught me some Italian this morning,’ said Kathy, to change the subject as Roberta was berating the waste of food.
‘What did he teach you?’ she asked.
Manu interrupted, waving his hands in Kathy’s face. ‘No. Don’t say it, Kathy, please. She’s not ready yet, Nonna! I still have to work on her accent.’
‘Very good.’ Roberta nodded at her grandson. ‘The accent is important. I’ve never managed to get mine right. I’ve been here for more than forty years but I could never pass as a local. Unlike Henry and Carla.’
Just then Carla slammed her way into the house, throwing her bag down in the hallway like a teenager.
‘Uh-oh,’ said Manu, registering his mother’s mood.
Carla sat down at the kitchen table. Roberta pushed the bread basket in front of her. Carla grabbed a piece of focaccia and stuffed it into her mouth. Her expression grew a little less ‘hangry’ as she ate but not by much.
‘What happened?’ Roberta asked. ‘Is it Nico again?’
‘He won’t listen to me. The shop is failing and he says he’s going to have to cut my hours but he refuses to stock anything anyone actually wants to wear. The window display is a mess. He’s stuck in a time warp. People come in looking for something and go out laughing without buying so much as a hair clip. Still, he doesn’t want to update his stock. He won’t even look at my stuff.’
Carla explained to Kathy: ‘I’ve designed some dresses that I think look good on every woman and I’ve been trying to persuade Nico to let me sell them through his shop since for ever. He keeps saying, “Next season, next season.” All I want is a chance. I took in a suitcase of my new designs this morning and he hasn’t even looked at them. Says he’s too busy. Really I know it’s that he doesn’t want to have to change his vision. Which is to make every woman who comes into his boutique leave looking like she’s just walked out of the nineteen nineties. A nineteen nineties’ brothel at that.’
‘What’s a brothel?’ Manu asked.
‘I’ll tell you when you’re nine,’ Roberta promised, obviously hoping that Manu would have forgotten he’d asked long before then.
Manu started calculating the wait on his fingers.
‘My stuff is different,’ Carla continued. ‘It’s modern. It’s what women want. He just doesn’t get it.’
‘What Nico needs is to see the clothes on real people,’ said Roberta.
‘He sees them on me,’ said Carla.
‘But perhaps because he sees them on you, he thinks of them only as your personal style,’ Kathy observed.
Roberta and Carla peered at Kathy with furrowed brows as the truth of what she’d said sank in.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Carla. ‘He needs to see them on other people. Not women he knows. But …’
‘I’m not wearing them,’ said Manu, looking worried.
‘You won’t have to,’ Carla assured him.
It was Roberta who said it. ‘Kathy, you should go to the shop and pretend to be a customer.’
‘What?’
‘When I worked in a boutique as a young girl we did it all the time. Whenever a customer seemed to be wavering about whether or not they liked something, one of the other sales girls would wander by – pretending to be a customer – and casually say, “That looks nice.” It always worked. You could give Carla that extra validation by going into the shop and choosing something she designed.’
‘But I don’t speak Italian.’
‘I could teach you some more words,’ said Manu.
‘You don’t need to speak Italian,’ said Carla. ‘Nobody spending any money in the shops on that street is a local any more. They’re all geared for the tourist market. It’s just that Nico no longer knows the tourist market. Or any market this century. He doesn’t even really know any women except his mother and me. And he won’t listen to me.’
‘Kathy will help you.’ Roberta was decided. ‘She’ll come in and you can dress her up.’
‘Kathy, will you?’ Carla asked.
How could she refuse? More singing for her supper.
It was all agreed by the time Carla’s lunch break was over. Kathy was to drop by the shop at around four o’clock, when Nico should be there. She would pretend she was looking for something for a party that evening. Carla would suggest one of her dresses, which she would bring out from behind the counter. Kathy would say she loved it and buy it – using petty cash borrowed from the hotel – e voilà! Nico would be convinced at least to display one in the window.
While the women were putting together a plan, Henry appeared. Having fixed the dripping tap in room six – ‘which took far longer than I expected’ – he was now dressed for the rest of his day. He wore a clean white shirt and black trousers, the outfit he’d been wearing when Kathy saw him on stage at the Palazzo Boldrini. This time, he also had a red tie draped around his neck.
When he saw Kathy, he gave her a small smile. A wary sort of smile. If that morning’s chat in t
he corridor had been meant to clear the air between them and put her at ease, it hadn’t worked. She felt immediately shy in his presence. She wondered if he felt the same.
‘Let me sort out that tie,’ said Roberta.
‘I don’t always dress like this,’ Henry explained, for Kathy’s benefit. ‘I’m playing at a wedding this afternoon. The bride wants the band to match the floral displays. I hate playing at weddings.’
‘My son, the romantic.’ Roberta had adjusted his tie so that it sat more neatly against his collar. When she wasn’t looking, Henry pulled it slightly loose again.
‘You played very well at the wedding on Thursday,’ Kathy said.
Henry shrugged. ‘You know what I think? The bigger the wedding, the more likely the marriage is to fail. The more ostentatious the declaration of love, the more likely it is to be hollow. Don’t you agree?’
Was he having a dig about Neil’s proposal? When Roberta was out of the way for a moment, Kathy asked him, ‘Are you sure you don’t mind me staying in your room tonight? It’s not too late for me to get a room elsewhere.’
‘And if you do, my mother will go nuts. And I’ll get another lecture on the Code of the Innocenti. Deus ope, manus mea.’ Henry imbued the words with great drama. ‘You stay here. I’ll sleep on the couch. Apparently, it’s good for my back. And it’s definitely good for my soul.’
‘I’m going to make sure Neil transfers some money, regardless,’ Kathy insisted.
‘There is no need,’ Henry said.
‘I know there’s no need but I … I want to make things proper,’ Kathy said, making it clear that she did not expect favours, or even friendship.
Henry winced.
Kathy decided to try to thaw the atmosphere between them by appealing to Henry’s pride in his music. ‘Whatever you think about weddings, I’m sure the bride and groom will love having you play,’ she said.
‘So long as nobody asks for “Yellow”,’ Henry said.
This time it was Kathy’s turn to wince. ‘I don’t know how anyone could do such a terrible thing,’ she said.
Henry nodded. ‘See you later.’
On his way out of the house, Henry scooped up his nephew and whirled him around, to Manu’s squealing delight. Faustino jumped at Henry’s knees, desperate to join in. Henry looked at Manu with the kindness she’d seen in him on the afternoon when they’d sat together at the Bösendorfer. He glanced back towards Kathy as he put Manu down and she thought she felt just a little of that warmth in the definite flicker of a smile he sent her.
Chapter Twenty-nine
At four o’clock, as agreed, Kathy retraced the route she and Manu had taken that morning to find the shop where Carla worked. This time, Carla wasn’t alone. She was standing at the counter with a man who might have been any age from mid-forties to late sixties. He was heavily Botoxed and perma-tanned. His remarkably thick white hair was brushed into a high quiff and he wore his tight pink linen shirt open to show equally well-groomed chest hair. As Kathy walked into the shop, a bell ringing to announce her arrival, Carla and her boss both looked up. He gave Kathy a blinding grin. He had the sort of veneers so white that they look like old-fashioned dentures.
‘How can we help you?’ the man – who had to be Nico – asked.
‘Oh, I’m just browsing,’ said Kathy. She and Roberta had rehearsed that she shouldn’t go straight into her speech about that evening’s party. She had to make it look natural.
Kathy went to the rack closest to the door and started sorting through it. She knew at once what Carla meant about the stock. The dresses Nico favoured were for an altogether different type of woman from Kathy. They might have gone down well with the Love Island crowd – and Sophie and Amelie – but while they were bright and brief they were also very, very expensive. Kathy flinched as she saw the price tag on something that resembled two net grocery bags stitched together with shoelaces. She got an electric shock of static from another garment that would probably burst into flames if someone stared at it for long enough. Hot in all the wrong ways.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, on the rail that Kathy could imagine wearing. Not even if she lost three stone and her hair suddenly sprouted from her head like the luxuriant waves of the Girls’ World toy she’d had as a child, rather than from her chin – as Sophie and Amelie liked to point out. (How was it that a chin hair could get as long as an eyelash without being noticed by the person sporting it?) Yet Kathy had to pretend she thought Nico – and Carla – might be able to help.
‘Actually, I’m looking for something in particular,’ she said. ‘I have a party to go to this evening but the airline lost my suitcase and I’ve got absolutely nothing to wear. It’s an emergency.’
‘We can help you,’ said Nico, stepping out from behind the desk, his hands clasped in a gesture of delight. ‘Let me look at you properly. Your size … let me see. An Italian forty-four?’
Nico plucked the grocery-bag dress from the rack and held it against Kathy’s back.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘It looks very different when you wear it.’
‘The event I’m going to will be rather formal.’
‘This is formal,’ said Nico, clearly slightly affronted.
‘Then a little longer?’ Kathy suggested. ‘I don’t like my knees.’
Nico looked at Kathy’s knees. His expression suggested, disappointingly, that he wasn’t about to persuade her that she’d overlooked their beauty. ‘Then this?’ He went back to the rail and pulled out a dress in shimmering black lamé. It would cover Kathy’s knees but she couldn’t see how the top half could possibly contain anything other than the flattest chest. It might have worked for Liz Hurley at a nineties’ premiere. Kathy blanched but Nico would not take no for an answer.
‘You have to try it on,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t tell if you don’t try it on.’
Which was Carla’s point exactly. Behind Nico’s back, Carla gave Kathy an extravagant eye-roll.
Nico ushered Kathy into a changing room, and while she struggled into the lamé tube, he handed accessories through the curtain. A pair of toeless suede stiletto boots that screamed, ‘Twisted ankle!’ A set of bangles that looked like standard police-issue handcuffs. They could be joined together by a glittering chain, Nico explained, as he passed that through the curtain too.
‘You’ll need a handbag as well,’ Nico decided. The handbag he passed to Kathy was the size and shape of a large cooking apple studded with crystals.
‘For the temptation. Like Eve,’ he explained.
Kathy stared at her reflection. As she’d feared, the dress left very little to the imagination, and with the addition of each accessory, the whole ensemble somehow looked a little cheaper, though the price of the outfit had increased by several hundred euros. The end effect was less Project Runway than Project Run-the-hell-away.
‘Come out and show me, bellissima signorina,’ said Nico.
When Kathy emerged from the curtained cubicle, Nico was already leaning against the counter with a ‘job done’ look on his face.
He kissed the tips of his fingers. ‘Perfetto.’
Carla grimaced.
‘It’s not quite what I had in mind,’ Kathy said at last. It was hard not to burst out laughing.
‘No. No!’ Nico wouldn’t have it. He set about trying to make the dress look a better fit, pulling it in at the waist so that the front popped dangerously, revealing the best of M & S’s lingerie.
Meanwhile, Carla was subtly preparing the next part of the charade. She had her case of samples on the counter now and was going through them as though simply folding them up to put them away. Kathy turned towards the counter and said, ‘That looks interesting,’ as Carla shook out a gunmetal grey dress with a fluttering hem.
‘That?’ Nico couldn’t hide his disdain.
‘Yes. May I try it?’
‘It’s not very formal,’ Nico complained.
Carla seized the moment. ‘Th
e dress comes in only one size,’ she said. ‘But it is designed to be worn in several different ways according to the wearer’s body. I think you should try it first with the deep V at the back.’
Kathy was only too pleased to hobble back into the fitting room and discard the excruciating shoes.
While she struggled out of the lamé dress, which was even more difficult to take off than it had been to put on, Kathy could hear Carla and Nico in discussion. She couldn’t follow the conversation but she could tell from the tone that they were in disagreement. And she knew from the moment she held it in her hands that Carla’s dress was a much better fit for her style, or the style she wanted, than the second-skin lamé extravaganza. The fabric was so beautiful. As Kathy slipped the dress over her head, she knew that it would fall in a flattering but not clinging fashion. This was a dress made by someone who understood other women.
She stepped out onto the shop floor. This time Nico grimaced. Carla ignored him. ‘How do you feel?’ she asked Kathy.
‘It’s very comfortable,’ Kathy said.
‘Comfortable!’ Nico echoed the word as though it were a curse.
‘Comfortable is good. You could define the waist with a belt,’ said Carla, wrapping a red one around her. ‘And, of course, you need some slightly higher shoes. Though only slightly higher.’
Nico affected a swoon of disgust.
Carla calmly handed Kathy a pair of sandals in a red to match the belt. ‘And add a little fun with your bag.’
Carla passed Kathy the glittering apple again, with a sly glance at Nico to see his reaction. He was pretending not to be paying attention but this gesture definitely caught his eye. ‘A special piece such as this one needs a plain background so that it can truly shine.’
‘Yes,’ said Kathy. ‘I see what you mean. It is a lovely bag.’
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