by Maeve Haran
‘But you liked him. And he liked you. Whatever’s happened to Mousy Monica from Great Missenden?’
Claire got ready to visit Beatrice’s nephew’s lemon groves and tried not to feel that it was all a bit of a nonsense. She could just pick a lemon or two for her tart and it would be far more straightforward. Monica had been talking about a trip to Pompeii, and she’d much rather do that.
She’d seen little golf buggies in Lerini advertising Luca’s Lemon Tours and, frankly, it all felt rather like a tourist trap.
Still, she consulted her bus timetable and tried not to feel she was becoming Martin. You had to depend on bus timetables here if you wanted to avoid death by taxi or being driven by Giovanni. The thought of Martin made her feel guilty. He had been surprisingly quiet recently. Maybe he and Evan and Belinda had come to an accord and life was running smoothly. She certainly hoped so.
The lemon groves were steeply ranged up the next valley, another white-knuckle bus ride on from Lerini. Claire was finding, to her surprise, that she was getting to rather enjoy these rides, hair-raising though they might be. The local bus drivers seemed to know every tight corner and terrifying hairpin bend as if it were tattooed on their memories. She was beginning to know when they would hoot just before every blind corner and didn’t even have to cling on the whole way any more.
The bus stopped on the seafront in Maggiore, the next town along the coast, and Claire walked for ten minutes, the whole length of the town, until she arrived at the address Beatrice had given her.
She pushed open a big wooden door and found herself in a shop selling limoncello, the strong lemon liqueur so common around here, in every different kind of bottle you could think of. A young woman stepped forward. ‘Are you the friend of Beatrice? From Le Sirenuse?’
Claire nodded and smiled.
‘I am Fabiella, a cousin of Luca.’
‘Everyone is a cousin of someone, or a nephew.’ Claire smiled, hoping that didn’t sound rude.
‘Family is very important in Italy, and in business also – more, I think, than in England, especially this family. They have grown lemons for five generations. Now they have big problem. Luca will tell you.’
And all I wanted was some lemons to make a tart, Claire thought, but the girl was already leading her into a dark side room full of old photographs and ancient artefacts about the lemon-growing trade.
A faded photograph, probably from the thirties, caught her eye. It was of women carrying enormous baskets full of lemons down to a boat.
‘Each basket is fifty-seven kilos,’ Fabiella enlightened her, ‘they carry on their backs, and are paid by the number of trips they make in a day.’
Claire looked at the huge baskets, clearly the same as the ones that were in the photo, that were piled up in the room. Her eye was caught by one which had an extra little extension.
‘To carry the bambino,’ Fabiella explained.
Claire studied it in amazement. And women thought they had it hard now!
‘Every morning they had their nails inspected in case they could scratch the lemons – the skin of the lemon is very important. If the boss could smell lemon they were all in big trouble! Now we go and see how they grow.’
She opened a door into bright sunshine and the overpowering aroma of lemon blossom. But what really surprised Claire was that the lemon groves rose almost vertically up the mountain in narrow strips, so steeply that she wondered how they could be reached by anything but a mountain goat.
‘Everything is done by hand.’ Fabiella pointed and breathed in the powerful scent. ‘La zagara, they say when you smell lemon blossom, it is a sign of summer.’
Claire stood underneath a lemon tree, amazed that the tree was full of lemons but also with blossom, all on the same tree.
‘The flowers will become the fruit.’ Fabiella leaned forward and breathed in the scent of the tiny white flowers. ‘We are only organic here, no pesticides, only natural manure, but it make it hard to compete against the producers who don’t care. Big problems for us.’
‘Ciao, Fabiella, la signora just come for lemons, not to hear such a sad story!’
Claire turned to see two men approaching. One was old, perhaps even eighty, weather-beaten and tanned by a life outside, with a humorous glint in his eye. It was hard to tell the age of the other; despite his labourer’s clothes, he had an unexpected charm and polish, yet he must have been near enough to Claire’s own age, she decided.
It had been the younger man who spoke. Now he held out his hand. ‘I am Luca, the nephew of Beatrice. Welcome to our lemon gardens. They are always called gardens here, not groves, as you English call them.’
‘E anche paradisi,’ added the old man. ‘And also paradises.’
‘The Arabs who first planted them sometimes called them paradises, because they were away from the noise of the world.’
Claire looked around, still breathing in the sharp scent of the lemons. ‘I can see what they meant.’
‘We wondered if you would join us for a refreshment?’
‘Thank you, that would be lovely.’
She followed Luca down the steep slope, and would have fallen at one point if it had not been for his steadying hand.
‘I can’t believe how high up you grow your lemons,’ she said, to cover her slight embarrassment.
‘Every inch is needed,’ he replied with a grudging smile, as if he was making light of something he knew to be serious.
She was offered coffee on a fragrant terrace with a small kitchen attached overlooking the groves, or gardens, as she must learn to call them, shaded by wisteria and lemon blossom.
‘This is where we offer cooking lessons to the guests on the tours who wish to have them.’
‘And how many tours do you do a day?’
She wondered if perhaps such a question was intrusive; she had only come to buy lemons, but oddly, perhaps because of Fabiella’s candour and Luca’s polish, which she sensed covered up his worry, somehow she felt they wouldn’t resent her interest.
‘One, perhaps two occasionally.’
Rather than ask him how much people paid she decided she would quietly grab a leaflet as she left.
Fabiella arrived with coffees and the most delicious lemon cake she had ever eaten. The sponge was warm and the lemon melting, like the most intense lemon drizzle cake straight from the oven.
‘My aunt Beatrice says you are a cook too.’
Claire smiled modestly. ‘I am what we call a caterer, I cook for other people’s parties.’
‘Do you like doing this?’
‘Most of the time. As long as the customer is not difficult.’ For the first moment in what seemed like weeks she thought of Brook Street and the horrible young man she’d drenched in coffee.
‘And you?’ she asked, realizing that perhaps this was a dangerous question. ‘Do you enjoy what you do?’
‘È la mia passione! It is a passion for me. Until last year I was a lawyer, I travelled all round the world, I live in a big house, I go on expensive holidays. And then my father come to me and say, “The family business is going to die unless you come and save it”.’
‘That must have been a very difficult decision for you.’
Luca shook his head without speaking for a moment. ‘For my wife, yes. And for my children. Not for me.’
Claire felt an odd jolt of disappointment at the mention of his wife. How ridiculous.
‘How did you resolve it?’
‘I was at that moment when you realize you are not young, maybe you are not old, but you wonder what you have achieved, what is life worth, is it the money you make for yourself and for other people, or is it something bigger?’ He leaned across the table towards her. ‘Have you ever felt that, Chiara?’
She realized he had slipped into the Italian pronunciation of her name and she felt it was because he was taking her into his confidence.
‘Not as you have, perhaps because I haven’t had a decision to make, like yours. But I have fe
lt a dissatisfaction, wondering if that is all there is, I suppose, to use a cliché.’ She thought of Martin and her irritation with Evan and Belinda and looked away, aware of the intensity of his scrutiny, and the blue of his eyes, surely unusual in an Italian. ‘I suppose, in a way, that’s why I’m here.’
‘You are escaping your life?’
She hadn’t seen it like that. The thought was disturbing.
‘So you chose lemons,’ Claire said gently.
‘Yes, I chose lemons. And my wife chose another rich businessman. My children went with her. I could not blame them; in my new life I could not pay for expensive schools and the kind of holidays they were used to. But I still see my daughter.’
Claire knew from his clipped and unemotional voice how deep his hurt really was and wished she could do something to help. ‘So what are your plans for saving the business? Or is that private? Do just tell me if I am asking too many questions.’
‘It is good that you are interested. We have three sources of revenue – the lemons, which are difficult, as we are so organic we cannot compete on price, only on our quality; the lemon tours, and selling our limoncello.’
Claire was no hard-headed businesswoman but it sounded a slender plan to save a business and to provide a living for Luca’s father and a future for the whole family.
Fortunately, she wasn’t called on to comment because Luca’s father arrived with his arm round an extremely pretty young girl.
‘Ecco Bianca!’ He made Claire think of a very jolly garden gnome.
Luca jumped up. ‘Bianca! Carissima! You didn’t tell me you were coming.’ His whole demeanour changed with the arrival of his daughter. He turned to Claire. ‘My daughter, Bianca. This is Chiara, she is staying up at the Villa Le Sirenuse and she is interested in lemons.’
The young girl gave Claire a quick assessing glance. Obviously, she didn’t see Claire, with her unstylish appearance and slightly messy hair, as a likely object of interest to her father.
‘I must go,’ announced Claire and she smiled at Luca. She stopped for a moment to buy some limoncello on the way out and was standing in the street working out the best route to the bus stop when Luca suddenly appeared. He was carrying a brown paper bag.
‘I thought Aunt Beatrice said you were coming to get some lemons.’
In her fascination with listening to Luca she had completely forgotten why she had come.
‘Yes, of course,’ she managed faintly. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘For the lemons?’ She could tell even without looking at Luca how much he was enjoying the moment. He pointed upwards. They were standing under a large tree bursting with lemons. ‘The business may be less than flourishing but I think we can afford to let you have a few free. I will ask one small thing in return. I would like to show you my lemon gardens the other side of the valley. It is very special there and then you will come and have lunch with me.’
Claire headed for the bus stop on the seafront clutching her lemons in a daze. The locals shopped and sat in cafes drinking their espressos, the children ran up and down begging their mothers for ice creams, the old ladies in black gossiped and hung out the washing from their balconies, the young men rolled down their car windows to let their music blast out into the morning sunshine and impress the pretty girls who pretended not to notice. Claire waited for the bus, oblivious to it all.
Luca wanted to show her his special lemon gardens and to have lunch with her. No one had invited her to have lunch alone since she’d been married to Martin, let alone a dazzlingly attractive Italian man.
And he hadn’t, she realized, in all their revelations, even asked her if she was married.
The question was, knowing that she was definitely attracted to him, ought she to go?
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Claire!’ she told herself sternly. The Italians were famous flirts, everyone knew that. Stop treating a lunch invitation as if it were something serious!
Eight
Angela armed herself with a notebook and her iPhone for her tour of Lanzarella’s hotels. To her surprise there were more than twenty listed on Booking.com, far more than she’d suspected could be dotted around the maze of back streets, but most were small and not grand enough to rival the villa.
She started with a simple but charming ex-convent. It had about ten rooms, some of which faced the bay, all organized round a small fountain. It was the kind of hotel the well-informed budget customer would stay in. She moved down the small cobbled street to the next one on her list. This one boasted a swimming pool, an attraction since Lanzarella was above the coast with spectacular views of the sea but not actually on it. Yet when Angela asked to see the pool she had to hide a laugh. It was hardly long enough to swim five strokes before you had to turn round. The rooms were simple and clean, but again this was budget territory.
The next two hotels had simple entrances that masked hidden grandeur within, but it was a chilly grandeur – vast flower arrangements, universal pale cream marble floors and sometimes walls as well, which might be cooling in high summer, but were discouraging earlier in the season. Also they had that terrible over-staffed feeling. Angela suspected that at these establishments your wine glass would be continually filled in the restaurant, and you would be asked every two minutes if everything was all right. So many hotels, it struck her, were obsessed with the idea of ‘service’, i.e. staff constantly bothering you, rather than with comfort.
After visiting ten hotels, none of which she had the slightest desire to stay in, Angela made for the final one on her list, the Grand Hotel degli Dei. The Hotel of the Gods. She hoped it lived up to its name.
It was certainly in an amazing position, suspended high above the bay, with large gardens and a glorious pool. Angela made straight for the bar, the initial way she judged any hotel. This at least ought to feel welcoming, even if the reception area was a little over-formal.
As she sat down Angela wanted to scream. It was all white again, white sofas, white curtains, white floors. She longed to drop a glass of red wine on the upholstery or, at the very least, unleash Sylvie on the décor. She had begun to think that though Sylvie’s ‘opera house meets bordello’ style wasn’t her own, a hotel that featured it might do very well just by contrast to all these arctic wastes.
‘Can I offer you a drink, madame?’ asked the waiter in that creepy five-star hotel way. Angela longed to say, ‘Why, are you paying?’ but made herself behave. ‘A glass of champagne, please.’
She noted with interest, when he brought her drink, that he wasn’t even Italian. ‘Do you mind if I wander around while I drink it? I’m looking for venues for a wedding.’
‘By all means, madame. Perhaps you’d like to look at our wedding book?’ He fetched an enormous weddings tome from behind the bar.
‘Thank you so much. I’ll look at it out by the pool.’
She wandered out into the dazzling midday sun, noting that the entire terrace and pool area was empty. She sat down with the book open on a table in front of her, remembering what her taxi driver had told her: anyone sunbathing in Italy before the end of May was bound to be a foreigner. But there weren’t even any foreigners. There was one advantage to that. It meant that Angela could happily take lots of photographs of the place and also the contents of the wedding book.
The hotel certainly pulled out all the stops where weddings were concerned. In one photograph the whole garden had been filled with huge urns of white hydrangeas, and dotted with candles and white fairy lights. In another the pool area had been lit like a Disney movie. She had to admit it would be a lot of brides’ dreams. She must remember to check out the costs.
Usefully, there was a scale of charges at the end of the book, beginning with the most staggering sum. Given that this would be simply for the wedding itself and you would have to add drinks parties the night before and maybe brunch on the day after, you would need to be Donald Trump to afford it.
It was a ten-minute walk back to the Villa Le Sirenuse. The weat
her was utterly perfect. The sun was hot without being burning. Below, the sea dazzled with the tiniest hint of mist.
All around her birds sang.
Almost accidentally she noticed two figures leaning against a wall half hidden by a tumble of purple wisteria, locked in a passionate embrace. To her shame, something made her slow her footsteps and watch, mesmerized, as the young man’s hand disappeared under her skirt. The girl closed her eyes and leaned against the wall pushing her body against him until her back arched and she cried out. As they pulled apart she saw that the man was Giovanni.
Angela hurried on, feeling ashamed and yet also aroused. It had all been so surprising yet so powerful. She suddenly thought of Stephen and how, both innocent at the start, they had learned to explore sex together. For her especially it had been a revelation that making love could be so glorious and uninhibited. Having to give up Stephen and the lovemaking had been the worst thing that had ever happened to her.
Of course she had had many encounters over the years but sex had become a functional thing for her, as it had been in her brief relationship with Drew, separate from emotion. But somehow, here, she was remembering the connection and it struck her as very sad.
As she reached the gates of the villa, she rather hoped that there was a time when you were too old to feel stirred. Yet clearly she hadn’t reached it.
She passed through the kitchen on her way to her room, to find it full of happy clamour. Claire, wearing a navy-blue pinny covered in flour, was showing Immaculata, so tiny that she was standing on a block so that she could see, how to make her famous lemon tart. Immaculata declared herself shocked that no ricotta or mascarpone was involved. And positively scandalized that the pastry was to be baked blind. But the thing that most amazed the old lady was that Claire was accessing the recipe on her iPad.
‘Is like watching television!’ Immaculata declared, charmed.
Claire measured out the ingredients on the digital scales she carried everywhere with her. Immaculata inspected these with the intense amazement that must have greeted Galileo’s first telescope.