Out on the terrace, the guests were having a wonderful time. Jenny and Kyle, the young couple who had arrived the previous afternoon, were busy taking selfies. They were so delighted in each other and in their surroundings that Kathy offered to take a photograph of them so they could both be properly in the frame. Though they were on opposite sides of the breakfast table, the two were constantly touching, their hands intertwined over the crumb-dusted cloth. As soon as they’d finished looking at Kathy for the photograph, they went back to gazing at each other. Every glance they had for each other said, ‘I can’t believe how lucky I am to have found you.’
‘There you are,’ said Kathy, handing back the phone. ‘I hope you have a lovely day.’
‘Oh, we will,’ said Jenny.
‘Every day is lovely with you,’ Kyle agreed. Jenny feigned embarrassment but Kathy knew she was thrilled.
‘Cute, huh?’ Carla observed, as they met by the buffet table. ‘Young love.’
It seemed that young love was infectious. An elderly couple at the hotel to celebrate the wife’s eightieth birthday also held hands as they left the terrace to begin their day. And not because they needed to hold each other up, as Henry suggested, while Carla was cooing over them too.
The sight of the older couple holding hands moved Kathy even more than the young lovers had. Young love is easy. Devotion after such a long time was of a different class.
‘How do you know they’ve been together for years?’ Henry asked, when Carla suggested that Kathy was right. ‘They probably got together on Tinder last Wednesday. I hear it’s full of old people after a final fling.’
Carla frowned at her brother. ‘You and your cynicism.’
After what Kathy had heard the previous evening, she thought perhaps he deserved to be cynical.
‘I like to see people in love,’ Carla said.
The young lovers got up and walked, as if in a dream, back to their room, with their arms wrapped so tightly around one another it was a miracle they didn’t fall over.
‘Ugh! Kissing!’ said Manu, when he saw them. He covered his eyes and mimed puking into a flowerpot.
‘That’s my boy,’ said Henry.
Back in the kitchen once breakfast was over, Roberta glanced at her watch. ‘We have half an hour to get changed and get to church.’
Manu flopped over a chair in a dramatic fashion. ‘Church! But we’ve already been working for hours.’
‘And that makes a difference because? Manu Innocenti, we’ve been working for hours already because you taught Kathy a bunch of insults when she thought you were being a good Italian host teaching her some polite and useful phrases. Get upstairs. Put your tie on.’
Manu mimed being choked by his collar.
‘Do you need to speak to your fiancé?’ Roberta asked Kathy then. ‘You must use the phone whenever you want to.’
‘He’ll be doing his run,’ said Kathy. When they’d first met, he’d told her, ‘I run ten kilometres every Sunday morning, rain or shine, unless I’ve got a beautiful reason to stay in bed.’ The implication being, of course, that she was a beautiful reason. He started running again two weeks after she’d spent her first Sunday morning at his place.
Now there was no interfering with his routine, which was to leap out of bed at six thirty, pulling the sheets off Kathy as he did so. She’d once suggested that he might be a little less energetic on a weekend morning, but he’d told her that she was welcome to go back to sleep while he was ‘making the most of the day’. The thing was, she could never really go back to sleep, but would just lie there waiting to hear him come through the front door, at which point she would jump out of bed and pretend she’d got up moments after he’d left for his jog. If Neil caught her still in bed, he wouldn’t ever say he was disappointed in her, but she could definitely feel it in his regard.
‘I’ll call him later,’ Kathy said. ‘Can I come to church with you too?’
‘I hoped you’d ask.’ Roberta beamed. ‘We’d be delighted to have you with us.’
Chapter Thirty-five
Before they left for the church, Roberta gathered a small bouquet of the pretty roses from the terrace and wrapped them in a curl of brown baking paper. The church was not far away as the crow flew – it had once been part of the Innocenti estate – but since Roberta and her family could no longer wander freely across the palazzo’s gardens, they had instead to walk right around the perimeter walls to get to their ancestors’ place of worship. With five minutes to go before the service started, a small crowd had gathered on the steps in the sunshine. Greetings and kisses were exchanged. Manu expertly dodged a crowd of nonnas eager to press their powdery faces to his pretty young cheeks. He then dodged a crowd of girls of his own age, keen to do the same.
‘Come inside.’ He dragged Kathy into the nave, using her as a sort of human shield. It was so dark in there compared to the day outside that it took a little while for Kathy’s eyes to adjust so that she could see. Manu took her to the family pew, which was very near the front. He went in first, wriggling so that he was right at the end of the bench and behind a pillar. ‘So that the priest won’t see me if I fall asleep,’ he explained.
‘What about me?’ Kathy whispered. ‘What if I need to fall asleep too?’
Manu was delighted at the idea.
Having greeted her friends at the door, Roberta joined them in the pew. ‘Manu is taking care of you. Good. These are the family pews,’ said Roberta. ‘Scratched with the names of generations of Innocenti children. Those are my husband’s initials.’
‘And Uncle Henry did that,’ said Manu, pointing out a very good picture of Bart Simpson carved into the back of the pew in front. ‘It must have taken him ages,’ he added, with admiration.
‘It took him as long as I had my eye off him, which wasn’t ever very long when he was your age. He was a terror. Still, he’s made up for it since.’ She smiled with fond pride.
Henry had gone on ahead because on Sundays he played the organ. He was already playing the congregation in with some perfectly holy-sounding stuff that he was in fact making up on the spot. Carla was not with them. She’d had to go into work.
‘On a Sunday.’ Roberta sighed. ‘But …’
Nico was keen to give the store an entire overhaul in light of the previous day’s sales successes. He was finally ready to let Carla try things her way and, understandably, she wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass her by.
As the congregation filed in, Kathy admired her surroundings. Though the church itself was fairly simple, the artwork on the walls was anything but.
‘That’s Francesca Innocenti again,’ said Roberta, noticing that Kathy was looking at one painting in particular, ‘as St Catherine being martyred on the wheel.’
It was gloomy subject, but this time Francesca’s slightly disappointed resting face fitted the painting well, Kathy thought. For once she was suitably pained.
‘That’s her over there as well. As St Fina, patron saint of spinners. St Fina was from San Gimignano – as was Francesca before her marriage.’ In this picture, Francesca was depicted lying prone on a board as rats danced around her feet.
‘Fina had a terrible life,’ said Roberta. ‘One story is that she had some sort of osteomyelitis that robbed her of the use of her limbs but she refused a sick bed and instead lived out her days on that table. Though why she would refuse a proper bed, I don’t know. Another story is that she strapped herself to the table to prove a point after being unlucky in love.’
‘Her body got stuck to the board with gunk and she was eaten by rats and worms,’ Manu added gleefully.
‘After she died,’ Roberta picked up the story, ‘violets sprang from where her body had lain. People who touched her remains were cured of all sorts of things.’
‘Have you ever touched a dead body?’ Manu asked Kathy, as if it were an entirely normal conversational gambit.
Roberta silenced him with a glare.
Next Roberta nodded to a man Kathy
recognised as Virgilio, the owner of the antiques store. He sat down a couple of pews away. ‘Terrible old crook,’ Roberta muttered. ‘Your hair would go white if I told you what goes on in the back of that dingy old shop of his. But this is God’s house and it’s not my place to judge anyone here.’
‘Since Grandpapa died, Virgilio keeps asking Nonna if he can marry her,’ said Manu. ‘He says he’ll save the house. He’s got lots of money.’
‘We don’t need that kind of money,’ said Roberta. ‘It’s not just dead people’s things that end up being sold through Virgilio’s shop.’ She turned to Kathy. ‘Where I come from, he’s what we used to call a fence. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Of course.’ Kathy was amused to hear such a thoroughly British term in a very Italian setting.
They both glanced round at Virgilio, who smiled and winked this time.
Then Henry upped the tempo to a processional and the priest and his attendants filed in. Roberta prompted Manu to stand up and stashed his tablet in her handbag. His silently mimed protest got no response. As they sat back down, Manu fished a safety pin out of his pocket. The devil makes work …
The service was in Italian and Latin and Kathy couldn’t follow much of it. So while Roberta mumbled along with the bits you were supposed to join in with and Manu scratched with the safety pin at the seat of the pew on the side of him Roberta couldn’t see, Kathy admired the Innocenti church. The painter with a penchant for cat-faced elephants had been at work in here too, she noted. He’d painted two of the unlikely pachyderms guarding the entrance to Heaven. Or was it Hell? Kathy wasn’t sure she ever wanted to meet a cat-faced elephant.
She took a longer look at Francesca Innocenti too. She thought perhaps she was beginning to know her a little better. Behind the pious exterior, there was something Kathy recognised. A need for approval. Those paintings of Francesca as various saints were surely the Renaissance equivalent of selfies.
How lovely it must be for Carla, Henry and Manu to have so much family history. At the same time, how sad, Kathy thought, to know what had once been. She didn’t know much about her own family beyond her grandfather’s generation. She sometimes thought she should write down what she did know but there was no one to pass it on to. No one who would care. Her ancestors were not Sophie, Oscar and Amelie’s ancestors. And now the chances of there ever being someone who would truly care about Kathy and her parents’ stories were … well, they were gone.
Kathy mind drifted to what Neil was doing that morning. Were the children still with him or had they already headed back to their mother’s house in search of something decent to eat? Often on a Saturday night they would stay with friends, coming home only to eat Sunday lunch before they were gone again. Neil complained that they treated the house like a hotel but he rarely pulled them up on it.
‘They went through a lot,’ he’d once explained, ‘with the divorce, so I want them to feel they can come here whenever they like and relax. If I tick them off too often, they won’t want to be here with me.’
Kathy understood Neil’s instinct to treat his children delicately in the wake of his split from their mother – and when they’d first got together she’d admired it – but she was beginning to wonder if they were taking advantage of him. It seemed there was no amount of thoughtless behaviour that couldn’t be excused by the effects of growing up in a broken home. She thought of Sophie pretending to faint when her father had proposed. They held Neil to ransom. Were they going to hold Kathy to ransom too?
Kathy gazed up at Francesca as St Fina, strapped to the board for love, while the rats chewed through her shoes. What good had her sacrifice done anyone? Was she saintly or plain daft?
Chapter Thirty-six
As soon as the service was over and people stood to leave, Virgilio made a beeline for Roberta. He snatched her hand and kissed it gallantly. ‘My dear Roberta,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for a few days. I was beginning to worry. Are you well?’
‘Quite well,’ said Roberta.
Even though Roberta claimed to have no time for Virgilio, there was the Innocenti magic again. Kathy could understand why Virgilio had set his cap at the English widow. Roberta asked solicitously after the old man’s health. He responded with a gesture that made Roberta blanch and Manu giggle.
‘I’ll translate for you later,’ Manu said.
‘Please don’t,’ Kathy whispered to her young friend. ‘But tell me, is this an appropriate moment for me to use my best phrase? Is he un grosso culo peloso?’
‘Definitely!’ Manu was delighted.
Kathy did not tell Virgilio he was an arse. Instead, she nodded along politely to the conversation she didn’t understand and could only hope Manu was translating semi-accurately.
‘I hope I will see you soon,’ Virgilio told Roberta. ‘Perhaps you would like to take a walk along by the river one evening.’
Roberta shook her head. ‘If only I had the time,’ she said. ‘You know what it’s like, running your own business.’
‘Oh, I do,’ said Virgilio. ‘But one must always make time for pleasure.’
‘Indeed.’
With that, Virgilio turned his attention to Kathy.
‘This is our new friend, Kathy Courage,’ said Roberta. ‘From England.’
‘An English rose.’
‘Who is very keen to see more of the church. If you’ll excuse us, I’d like her to have a closer look at Francesca Innocenti as St Catherine.’
Roberta pulled Kathy out of harm’s way.
‘You put him off very elegantly,’ Kathy said, as they looked up at Francesca on the wheel.
‘And it’s not working. I should probably try putting him off with the toe of a Ferragamo instead.’ Roberta linked her arm through Kathy’s. ‘Come along. It’s about time you met my darling husband.’
With Manu leading the way, they stepped outside. The sunlight seemed especially bright after the best part of an hour spent in the cool gloom. Roberta greeted more friends on the steps. Manu also found his pals and soon a gang of children of all ages and sizes was tearing around the church, filling the air with laughter and squeals of indignation or delight. The game mostly seemed to involve the girls chasing the boys with the threat of kisses if they were caught.
‘He’ll be happy playing for a while,’ said Roberta.
With Manu taken care of, Kathy followed Roberta to the churchyard. The back of the church was slightly less well cared for than the front. The churchyard was overgrown in places but for all that it was still quite beautiful. The pink, blue and white wild flowers that had colonised the cracked paths and abandoned graves buzzed with butterflies and bees.
‘The Innocenti family tomb is actually in the grounds of the palazzo,’ Roberta said. ‘But Henry rightly suggested it would be better to have his father here, so that we can visit whenever we want to. I’m glad that’s what we decided.’
The idea that the Innocenti family could no longer visit their forebears seemed sad but understandable, Kathy thought, given that the palazzo’s chatelaine was Henry’s ex-girlfriend.
Roberta and Kathy walked towards a part of the churchyard that seemed better tended, where the graves were newer and fresh flowers suggested that the dead who lived there were still fondly remembered. Roberta stopped to admire the abundance of flowers on the grave of someone only recently lost.
‘Chiara was a lovely woman,’ she commented. ‘She used to run the salumeria. Faustino absolutely adored her. We all did. She always had time for everyone.’
Roberta pulled a single flower from the bouquet she’d picked from the casa’s terrace and added it to Chiara’s tribute. Then she stood back and sighed at the thought of her old friend. ‘Oh, never get old, Kathy,’ she said. ‘Never get old.’
Roberta pulled Kathy a little closer for the rest of the walk to Ugo Innocenti’s grave.
Chapter Thirty-seven
‘Here he is.’
His memorial was a relatively modest stone. The white marble was d
ecorated with black lettering, giving his name and his dates, and also, to Kathy’s surprise, a black-and-white photograph in a gilt-edged frame that was set into the stone. Kathy was not used to seeing photographs on headstones but they were everywhere in the Italian graveyard. Some showed the dead as they were in old age. Others showed them as they had been in their prime. Kathy found it odd, but when she thought about it, she supposed it was really no stranger than keeping a photograph of a long-dead loved one on a mantelpiece.
Roberta touched her fingers to her lips, then pressed a kiss to the picture of her husband’s face. ‘That’s one of my favourite photographs of him,’ said Roberta. ‘Of course it was taken a long time before he died. I think he must have been nearly forty then. About the age Henry is now. It’s how I like to remember him. He was a very handsome man.’
‘He was,’ Kathy agreed.
‘It wasn’t just the way he looked,’ Roberta continued, as she tidied up the old flowers and replaced them with new. ‘It was the way he could make people feel. He was everybody’s friend. Everybody mattered to him. He even had time for Virgilio. They were at school together. Ugo said that Virgilio was horribly bullied on account of being so small and that was what had made him mean as an adult. So he did his best to bring Virgilio out of himself by offering him the friendship he didn’t have as a child. Ugo saw the best in everyone.’
Roberta’s eyes gazed softly into the distance, into the past. ‘I miss him so much,’ she said.
‘That’s understandable,’ said Kathy. Right then, Roberta reminded her of her own mother whenever she spoke about Kathy’s dad, Eddie. Grief came over her face, like a small cloud crossing the sun. The shadow was brief but you couldn’t miss it.
‘He was the centre of my life for so long. Of all our lives. He was the centre of the family. I remember the very first time I saw him. I was nineteen years old. I was caring for the children of a family who lived just up the hill from the Palazzo Innocenti. Ugo came to a party there in the middle of the summer. I can still picture him standing in the garden. He was wearing a pale blue suit. Flared trousers, which were very fashionable then. And a pink kipper tie with fishes on it. I still have that tie somewhere. I saved it for Henry. Or it might be fashionable again by the time Manu is old enough to wear it.
Three Days in Florence Page 18