My landlady kept to herself and didn’t express affront in me doing the same. Anonymity was mine at last. After a few weeks, the family at Morelli’s, the prized Italian gelateria along the promenade, learnt of the new Napoletana in town and were quick to offer me work should I need it. I stepped into the foreign cliché, joining the large team of ice cream scoopers, letting the stereotype flit over me like a veil. I cared little for what the locals thought of me and soon was accepted as the older server who longed to be alone. I knew their little minds might be darting around my possible history, why I was unmarried, why I had no children, why I had started this solo life in a seaside town where I knew no one. Their fictions skimmed my surface and left no trace. I found the simplicity I craved.
In the evenings, I revisited the Dickens books the Major and I had pored over. I lingered over those words, knowing that this was the very town in which the writer had been inspired to craft several of them. That this sea was the one he too had gazed at whilst composing, bringing his family to reside here for their summers.
After a year, my tiny room heaved with books, stacked by author. My literary cloister and the sea air was what I needed, and a fresh new life blew through me, the stony memories of the villa crumbling with each day, in its place the silence of my solicitude and the great passion of someone else’s stories and characters I’d lost myself to.
I scooped ice cream through a second summer season. I watched the sea darken through the autumn. I found great pleasure in those barren trees of the narrow streets, their spindling silhouettes mourning summer, reaching up to the greying skies of late November. The sea roiled, ashen.
The rain pounded the glass panes of the tiny tea shop where I liked to sit after an early morning stroll along the seashore, or on the days where my feet urged me north to Botany Bay, the chalky cliffs breaking up the cove, several rocks rising from the water, their deep green tips damp with years of rain. I adored these shades of this English coast, which sometimes leaned toward my childhood in the mountains but reassured me I was far from the Positanese world I’d fled.
I cupped the warmth of the tea in my palm and watched the water slide down the panes. Beyond, the grey sea blackened with winter.
That’s when his silhouette approached, his hair plastered to his head with the pounding rain. A raincoat’s collar flicked up over his neck. At first I resisted my instinct to step out. I knew my memory was playing bitter tricks. Then my cup dropped to my saucer. I was outside, the rain streaking my face as it did his.
‘I couldn’t keep away from you any longer,’ Henry murmured, his voice floating above the beating drips around us bouncing up from the glistening cobbles.
‘How on earth did you find me?’
I could hear my voice crack. I could feel the ground melt beneath me, shifting sands as the tide pulls out.
‘Can we go somewhere? I’d like to talk,’ he replied.
I looked back at the steamy windows of the café, then turned and led him toward my lodgings instead. All the while my heart pounded in my chest, refusing to believe that any of this was happening. We left drip marks up the stairs. I heard the landlady unlock her dining room door that led onto the hallway just as we reached my room. I’d never had a visitor before.
I took off my sodden coat and shook it, hanging it behind my door, and reached out my hands to him to do the same. He did. Our movements were sharp lines in the space, stilted, awkward, trying to puzzle our way through it without colliding. I gestured for him to sit at the small table by my window. I set a kettle to boil upon my stove. I took a seat whilst it heated.
We both took a breath and spoke at the same time.
‘Please, Santina, do go ahead. I didn’t come all this way to speak over you.’
‘What are you doing here?’
His eyes were more penetrating than I’d let myself remember. He looked toward the sea through my net curtains, wiped his hair off his face and turned back to me.
‘The past year has been a living hell, Santina.’ He paused. ‘I did everything I could to forget you. I travelled the length of Italy. I’m embarrassed to say I followed you at one point to Rome, and when I saw how settled you were, I knew it would be unforgiveable to barge in.’
That haunting shadow rose into view. It hadn’t been my brother after all.
‘I returned to Positano, determined to sell the villa, determined to set up an anonymous trust for Elizabeth, Maddalena and you. But when I sat in the lawyer’s office, my pen hovering over that page, your brother rubbing his hands with excitement, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it because it was the very last thing I had in my possession to remind me of you. If I sold that place I would relinquish my final tie to you.’
His words flickered like flames. His handsome face, creasing with emotion whilst he tried to make sure every syllable was formed and delivered with grace, broke me.
‘I’ve spent all these months growing my own life,’ I began through the ripple in my voice, ‘out of your shadow. Training myself to not want to hear these words. I don’t know if what you’re saying is beautiful or cruel.’
‘I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I promised myself I just needed to tell you how I feel, without it being a vice around you.’ His words trailed off then. A tear skimmed his cheek.
He reached his hand across the table. I slipped mine into it, feeling that familiar warmth send a flight of birds soaring from my chest. He kissed my fingers. He turned my wrist and kissed the softness of my creases there. Our lips met, tender and searching. Everything I’d cocooned myself inside slipped away. We were light in the grey. I could no longer sense where I ended and he began. My bed rose up to meet me and we tipped onto the eiderdown. We tumbled inside one another.
The kettle’s whistle cut across the sound of our love.
We awoke several hours later, knotted together in my small bed, a scrunch of sheets and crumpled clothes. I felt his breath on my neck.
‘I have dreamed of this, Santina.’
‘You have a filthy mind.’
‘Small mercy.’
I could hear the grin in his voice. I reached my arm underneath his and stroked his fingers with mine.
‘What on earth is happening, Henry?’
‘We’ve waited long enough, Santina.’
He lifted his hand and pushed up onto his elbow, resting his cheek on his palm. I turned to let his gaze glow over me. The time for fleeing was over. I let him see me.
‘I love you, Santina. I’m not terrified of you seeing through to the very heart of me any longer.’
‘I think you’re the most beautiful person I know.’
‘So come and be with me, Santina. Let’s make the villa our home. Together. As equals. As lovers.’
‘If I let my life here slip away after one afternoon of lovemaking, I’m not sure that makes me an equal.’
‘I’m not here to abduct you. I want to love you. I want to grow with you.’
He tipped his head down and kissed me. His tongue etched my lips, wound inside and danced around mine, unhurried. I rose up to meet him. He fell onto his back and lifted me on top of him. I arched, straddling him, feeling the softness of the stretched skin of my belly fall in creases, my breasts hanging a little lower than the first time we’d played this game. This was the body I honored for all its crags, the beginnings of age plotting a course like an unfinished map. I looked down at him, bare. I felt the white cold sensation of vulnerability score through me, brutal and fortifying.
‘Santina, you will always be the most beautiful person I know. I didn’t fall for a young woman who would kowtow to her employer. I fell into the woman I saw refract like thousands of shafts of light.’
I eased him inside me then. I abandoned everything I thought I ought to be. Until I caught sight of the clock, which struck panic, spiked pinpricks over my entire body. I lifted myself up from him, threw on my work uniform, begged him to be discreet and stay there till the end of my shift. Then I ran down the stairs, fussing my
hair back into some version of order, braved more rain and took up my position behind the counter for the afternoon. There was a surprising amount of customers, for which I was glad, though as I served each one of them, my mind was somewhere beneath my sheets, beside my lover.
I returned home to find the room strewn with candles and the delectable scent of a feast. How Henry had whittled it out with only two gas rings and a couple of pans was a marvel. He’d even borrowed two wine glasses from my landlady. I daren’t ask what he had explained to her. Now two plates stood with a steak upon each, drizzled with a tempting peppercorn jus, surrounded by wilted spinach and chard.
‘This is beautiful, Henry.’
‘I’m glad you like it. It’s not bribery. It’s not seduction either. It’s a celebration.’
He gestured for me to sit down. He reached for an opened bottle of wine and poured me a glass.
‘You’ve been planning this evening for some time,’ I smiled, ‘or were you trying to get me to believe you just spontaneously threw it all together?’
His laughter lifted through a sigh. ‘If after tonight you tell me your life is better without me in it, I promise I will never haunt you again. But if you tell me you will consider my offer and live with me in our villa, I will make that happen. Right away.’
I looked into his eyes, the flickering candlelight dancing across the irresistible dapples of darker blue. There was no place I would rather be.
CHAPTER 32
The following six months at the villa were luminous. Winter offered us a privacy we longed for. We retreated into both a new and familiar rhythm. Time was our ally. We made love during the day. Fed one another without hurry. Retraced our steps through the books we had shared. As spring budded through the grey we took long, unhurried walks most mornings. Henry enjoyed the challenge of the bracing cold of the spring sea, something I only permitted myself once we had eked toward the warmth of May. That’s when we took a steady descent to the shore without the crowds. We swam as far as our hearts could take us, and as I began to tire we’d float back toward the shore, gazing up at the cloudless blue.
One warm morning, after sipping a coffee and pastry on the shore, our hair still dripping, we embarked on our daily climb back to the house. We passed the first warren of boutiques and the start of the morning’s shopping flow. Our route led us a sharp turn back toward the rock along the alley where the artists had set up a row of stalls selling their paintings and jewellery beneath a thick canopy of wisteria that the tourists gawked at, romanced into purchasing the beauty around them. We crossed Via Cristoforo Colombo and took the staircase up toward the road above. That day, for some reason, the final steps of the four hundred and forty that led us from the water’s edge to our home loomed as a daring vertical before us. I turned back toward Henry. He had one hand upon the rock that flanked our ascent, just below the lit votive upon a stone shelf where a statue of the Madonna looked down at him with pity.
I called down to him. ‘Are you all right, tesoro?’
I didn’t like his expression as he caught my eye. I ran down the steps.
‘Good heavens, don’t worry, Santina. Look,’ he pointed up above his head to the statue, ‘she only wanted me to pause a while, has some important message apparently. Can’t understand the woman, though, my Aramaic isn’t as good as I thought it was after all.’
I joined his laughter, wishing the pallor of his skin was a little more pink than grey. Onward we climbed. When we were under the final covered archway near the villa, he slipped his hand in mine and turned me into him.
‘We’re pretending to be teenagers now?’ I smiled, as he wound his arm around the back of me.
‘Absolutely.’
His salty lips met mine. A droplet of seawater fell off his hair and traced my face. We heard footsteps and pulled away. I let the giddy sensations trickle through me. We reached the villa and he stormed into the kitchen.
‘I shan’t be inside today, my Santina – my legs need to walk some more! Take me to your hills! That’s an order!’
‘Perhaps I’ll take a shower first, pack some food?’
‘No need. I like it when your lips taste of the sea, and I’ve already prepared some treats.’ He ducked into the kitchen, hooked a basket on his arm, slipped his hand around my face and planted his lips on mine. I let my hands trace his back. I heard the basket reach the floor. I let him lift me up. I cackled like a schoolgirl as he descended the steps. We didn’t lose ourselves into silence until we reclined beneath our trees. Until I felt the sun on my bare legs and the entire weight of him rise up and inside me. We lay there after our lovemaking, feeling the sweat smudge between us, the wetness crease down our legs. He rose up onto his elbows.
‘It is quite wonderful to be children, don’t you agree?’
‘The most delicious state I can think of, my love.’
‘I try not to think about how much time we denied ourselves. All I want to enjoy is the beauty of this soul lying with me now, parched grass staining her skirt, earth powdering her arms.’
‘Henry. I’m happy.’
He leaned down and kissed me with soft, warm lips. I held his face in my hands, feeling the width of his jaw, the smoothness of his skin between my fingers.
We spent that afternoon high above the Path of the Gods, watching tourists in our periphery way below us, tracing the beaten path from our hidden perch amongst the carob trees. No one could see us making love up there. No one could hear our laughter, watch us feed one another, watch him trace his lips on my bare breasts. We lay upon a large blanket, gazing up at the carob leaves dappling shadows over our naked bodies, trodden with age, warmed with love.
Our fingers interlocked. Our breath rose and fell in unison.
‘So much simpler to be the carob, Henry.’
‘Quite.’
‘I mean to say each bud is both male and female. There’s no need for pollination. It is self-sufficient.’
‘From now on I shall call you Carob.’
I flicked my elbow into his ribcage.
‘I’m completely serious,’ I said. ‘And as usual, you’re finding any reason to resist listening to my wisdom.’
‘Therein lies ruin, don’t you know, listening to wisdom.’
I turned my head to his laughing eyes.
‘That’s why they used it as currency,’ I continued. ‘The carob. Without this marvellous tree, life would have been quite different for a lot of people.’
‘You’re incredibly attractive when you talk trees.’
His lips pressed against mine, his tongue gave them a little flick.
I pulled away and looked above us again. ‘Then demonstrate a little more respect for my knowledge, sir. We’re literally under the tree that saved the Amalfitani, and their cattle, from hunger and invaders. They traded it, ate it, used it as currency.’
He rose up onto his elbow. ‘Once you’ve finished your sermon, I would be much obliged if we experimented in further activity of the partner orientation.’
‘Must the Brits be so wordy when asking to make love, Henry? I think it undercuts the intent.’
‘You adore my wordy foreplay more than you’d like to admit.’
‘I think twenty years of it is quite enough, no?’
He smiled down at me. I felt the earth rise up beneath me, smelled the shaded parched ground. A solitary carob leaf fell onto my forehead. He picked it away.
‘I love you, Santina.’
We eased inside each other, our lips dancing, our limbs knotted.
Several weeks later, as the spring blossoms burst open, our bell clanged to life. I opened it. Our daughter stared back at me. A miniature version of herself stood beside her, clasping her hand, a mane of dark hair falling down in waves over both arms.
The telegram Maddalena told me she sent never reached me. My dearest friend Rosalia had died, and her daughter longed to return to the town she’d fallen in love with.
‘Come on in, tesoro, please.’ I showed them through t
o the far end of the terrace, aware that I was still shuffling around in my dressing gown, even though it was edging toward mid-morning. Maddalena retraced the last days of her mother’s life. We cried together. She clasped my hands. I noticed the strength of them.
‘This is Bianca, my daughter. I took a lot more away from here than I had bargained for.’ Her face wrinkled into a watery smile. ‘She’s my Positano. Salvatore doesn’t know, of course.’ Her hand traced her daughter’s face and she planted a soft kiss on her cheek. The little girl looked up at me, expectant. I realized she and I had the same shape face, and her eyes were deep brown, with a glint of mischief, inherited from her grandfather Paolino, no doubt. It didn’t take but a moment for me to fall in love with her.
Henry stepped out onto the terrace to see who had come to call. His face registered the same shock as mine. Two weeks later, when Maddalena was due to return to America, she broke down in tears. ‘Santina, I don’t want to go home. There’s nothing for me there. I feel alive right here. I’m a different person here. This is where I want to become the artist I long to be.’ She wiped her face with angry hands. ‘Sorry I’m such a blob. Look at me! It’s ridiculous, I know. Mamma’s sisters are all I have left now. I don’t feel I can ask them if we can stay. They’re not really interested in a single mother, even if I’m their niece.’
‘Stay here,’ I blurted, without thinking to ask Henry first.
Her face lit up. ‘Are you sure? I will pay you. I don’t want charity. I just need a little time to find our feet. Are you serious? You’re about to make me dance with joy and that’s not a sight you might like, I warn you!’ Her voice fizzed into laughter, and our arms were wound around one another, and her daughter clasped my legs, and I wondered if time had at last agreed to knit us all together?
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