The Truth About You

by Susan Lewis

  He frowned. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be easy in Tuoro,’ he lamented, ‘or certainly not amongst the older generation. We are not a major tourist destination, you see, so the locals have not found the need to speak your language.’

  Lainey grimaced her disappointment. ‘Perhaps you can recommend a translator?’ she suggested.

  His frown disappeared. ‘But I will be very happy to help you,’ he declared, as though the matter had already been decided. ‘My sister-in-law would like to help too, and my brother. We are all very intrigued.’

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ Lainey responded, not knowing what else to say. ‘I’d be extremely grateful if you could, but I don’t want to take up your time. I understand how busy you are . . .’

  Behind him Stacy was drawing a frantic zip across her mouth.

  ‘It is August,’ he reminded her. ‘There is less for us to do during this month, so we are pleased to be of assistance. In fact, Adriana has already contacted our grandmother because she spends many years growing up in the village. She lives in Firenze now, but she tells Adriana that she knows the name of Melvina Clementi.’

  Lainey’s eyes widened. ‘Do you think it might be the same Melvina Clementi?’ she asked.

  He grimaced an apology. ‘I am not sure,’ he confessed. ‘I will need to give our grandmother more information, but she has already told Adriana who we can to speak to in the village who possibly knows – or knew – Melvina and Aldo Clementi.’

  Lainey’s eyes were bright as she turned to Stacy. She’d never even dreamt she might get off to such a promising start.

  ‘Tuoro is not a big community,’ Marco explained. ‘Of course it is bigger now than when my grandmother was young, but she still has a few friends here of her generation.’ He pulled a mischievous face. ‘She calls them dei vecchi – the oldies – but she will be ninety-one next month. She is like a woman half her age.’

  Loving the sound of her, Lainey turned as Zav and Alfie came trudging up from the pool. ‘My son and his friend,’ she explained to Marco, and realised that he probably considered them a pair of heathens, since Adriana had rung earlier offering to take them to church along with her own little brood. Lainey had felt obliged to forgo the kindness, since neither Zav nor Alfie were very familiar with the house of God or what was expected of them inside.

  After high-fiving with the boys and telling them they must meet his son, Benito, who was ten apparently, and spoke very good English, Marco excused himself to take a phone call. As he wandered back to the car Lainey stifled a laugh as Stacy murmured, ‘Please hand me a Kleenex if I’m drooling.’

  Tugging her into the villa behind Zav and Alfie, Lainey said, ‘All that and he seems a really nice bloke too.’

  ‘Some women have all the luck,’ Stacy complained, reminding them both of the wife. ‘I wonder what she’s like.’

  ‘Probably just as stunning.’

  Stacy sighed dejectedly. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Makes me wish I was a Catholic.’

  ‘What?’ Lainey cried with a laugh.

  ‘Well, God definitely didn’t hold back when it came to giving out looks to you Italians, did he, and most of you are Catholic, so I’m figuring it’s divine reward for your unquestioning faith, apart from in your case, of course, but you’ve still got the genes.’

  With a wry roll of her eyes Lainey went to make sure Zav and Alfie were all right, and by the time she came back Stacy was on her way down to Max’s apartment with Marco to sort out the Wi-Fi.

  Half an hour later, appearing flushed with triumph and oddly bleary-eyed, Stacy returned to declare that Marco had gone off to get his son and would meet them down at the main piazza in an hour.

  Lainey blinked her astonishment.

  Stacy shrugged. ‘I was going to ask about his wife,’ she said, ‘but as he didn’t mention her I thought I wouldn’t bother either.’

  Though Lainey broke into a laugh, her eyes were regarding Stacy carefully. ‘Promise me you won’t go falling for him,’ she said seriously. ‘The last thing you need is a complication with a married man . . .’

  Stacy’s hands flew up defensively. ‘I was just being friendly,’ she protested. ‘Anyway, meeting up was his suggestion, not mine, and I thought, as it’s Sunday, and our first full day here, I ought to forget about work and start in earnest tomorrow. Is that OK with you?’

  Lainey smiled. ‘Of course. I just don’t want you ending up getting hurt again, that’s all.’

  Coming to cup her hands round Lainey’s face, Stacy said, ‘Will you please stop worrying? Sure he’s to die for, but even if he were my type, which actually he isn’t, my priority right now is very definitely my job. While yours, my gorgeous Italian amica, is finding your family, and since he’s offering to help I think we should pack ourselves into our little Fiat Bravo and be on our way down the hill, don’t you?’

  Having no argument with that, Lainey called for the boys, scooped up her keys and led the way outside. By the end of the day, she was thinking to herself as she locked the villa door, she might actually have spoken to someone who knew, or used to know, her grandparents, or even to her grandparents themselves! The thought of that caused a ripple of excitement mixed with trepidation to run through her. She’d better start deciding how she was going to handle it if they refused to see her, because if they did, given the fragile state of mind she was in, the rejection would be doubly hard to bear.

  On the other hand, they might welcome her with open arms and even rejoice in being able to introduce her to her father.

  And if you believe that, she told herself grimly as she got into the car, you’ll believe Tom’s on his way here and Kirsten Bonner was only ever a figment of a cruel imagination.

  Leaving the car in a shady spot at the edge of the village, Lainey and Stacy wandered up a wide flight of steps into a cobbled street lined with quaint old stone houses and flower-filled pots. The boys, seeming not to feel the heat, charged on ahead, eager to find food, drinks and any kind of entertainment there was to be had.

  ‘It’s so pretty,’ Stacy said, gazing up at the tightly shuttered windows and old-fashioned lamplights. ‘I wonder if your mother ever walked along this street. I guess she must have if she grew up here.’

  Finding it surprisingly easy to imagine, Lainey continued to look around as they strolled into a tiny piazza with a fishmonger’s tucked into one corner and washing-covered balconies angled across another. There was no one around, nor any sounds coming from inside the dwellings, just a lazy ginger cat watching from a shadowy doorway and the occasional flutter of birds in the eaves. Sauntering on, they arrived at what turned out to be the main street, though it was barely wide enough for one car to pass along its cobbles. There were more people around here, bustling in and out of the food shops where fruit, veg, pasta and all manner of homewares were spilling out of boxes and barrows. It was far from crowded, however, and everyone was speaking Italian, making Lainey realise how many English voices they’d always heard during their travels through France and Spain.

  They paused in front of a butcher’s shop where every conceivable type of sausage was arranged in slices over trays in the window, or hanging in oily, garlic-stuffed glory from hooks in the ceiling. The smell of roasting chicken wafting out of the door set Lainey’s taste buds stinging.

  ‘The piazza’s down here,’ Zav informed them, as he and Alfie came running back towards them.

  ‘Is Marco there yet?’ Stacy asked, catching Zav’s arms as he aeroplaned into her.

  ‘Didn’t see him. Mum, are we going to have some lunch now? I’m starving.’

  ‘Look!’ Alfie cried, pointing. ‘That shop’s called Speede-bene,’ and howling with laughter they zoomed off back to the piazza.

  Spotting an old lady lumbering slowly towards them, weighed down by heavy bags and probably a lifetime of woes, Lainey gave her a smile. ‘Buon giorno, signora,’ she said warmly.

  Whatever the old lady said in response was lengthy and mellifluous and seemed very friendly.
She even put a bag down to pat Lainey’s cheek before moving on.

  ‘She could have been your granny,’ Stacy teased as they continued on to the piazza.

  ‘You can mock,’ Lainey responded airily, ‘but how lovely if you were right. She was adorable.’

  ‘She certainly seemed to think you were. I wonder if you reminded her of your mother.’

  Lainey’s eyebrows rose as she slanted her a look.

  ‘Well, you might have,’ Stacy shrugged. ‘You definitely remind me of her sometimes.’

  ‘I’m going to take that as a compliment,’ Lainey decided, and spotting a panetteria on the edge of the piazza she took off for a browse – and came away with a greasy slab of herb-crusted focaccia, two still warm filones, a panbrioche, and half a dozen sticky sweet pastries. ‘Well, we do have five children to feed,’ she pointed out as Stacy gaped at the size of the bag. ‘Anyway, we’re on holiday, so no time to be thinking about diets.’

  ‘Unless you’re about to have lunch with an Adonis,’ Stacy reminded her.

  Lainey paused, turned around and pushed the bag into Stacy’s hands.

  Laughing, Stacy followed her on to the small piazza where a central fountain was sparkling in the midday sun, and a rather grand limestone-fronted municipio was flying a collection of stately flags over a temporary bandstand. The café tables, spaced out like small islands below a cluster of white parasols and strings of bunting, were starting to fill up. Marco was already there with his son, Benito, who was busily showing some sort of electronic device to Zav and Alfie.

  ‘Adriana and my brother, Lorenzo, will join us soon with their children,’ he informed them as he got up to greet them, ‘so we shall be quite a large party. I hope this is all right with you.’

  ‘Of course,’ Lainey assured him, sinking into the chair he was holding out.

  ‘Thank you,’ Stacy smiled, as he quickly moved to offer her a seat too.

  ‘Elenora? What will you have to drink?’ he offered, as a waiter arrived.

  Liking his use of her real name, Lainey eyed his beer and said, ‘I think I’ll have one of those.’

  ‘Mm, me too,’ Stacy responded to his glance her way.

  ‘Due birra,’ he told the waiter, ‘e due coca. This is OK with you,’ he said quickly to Lainey, ‘for the boys to have coca, the same as Benito?’

  ‘They’ll be in seventh heaven,’ she assured him, smiling at Benito, who had very definitely inherited his father’s looks, though his eyes, she noticed, were a startlingly violet shade of blue. What an impact he was going to have on the girls when he got older.

  Moments after the waiter vanished Adriana and her family turned up, greeting Lainey and Stacy almost as old friends, in spite of the fact that this was the first time they’d ever set eyes on Lorenzo. Though he appeared much older than both Adriana and Marco, and was nowhere near as striking as his brother, he oozed as much charm as good humour and was clearly a favourite with the kids.

  ‘Adriana tells me you are Italian by birth,’ he declared, cutting straight to the heart of matters as he pulled up a chair, ‘but you do not yet speak the language?’

  ‘I’m going to learn,’ Lainey promised. ‘I meant to take lessons before coming, and I would have if I’d managed to find the time.’

  ‘Is no problem for us,’ he assured her, ‘we in this family must speak English for our business, but I think for you, if you are Italian, it would be very good to learn.’

  ‘Stop bullying her,’ Adriana chided, ‘and please order us some drinks. Giana, Nico, Coca-Cola for you?’

  ‘Si, si,’ they cried in unison, their eagerness showing how rare a treat this was. Since neither could be any older than seven, Lainey wasn’t surprised by that; certainly she hadn’t allowed her own children to drink Coke before they were ten, and even now she tried to limit Zav to one, at the most two, a day.

  It was amusingly comforting to find they shared the same values.

  ‘. . . e lui a pagere il conto,’ Lorenzo was telling the waiter, after adding his order to Marco’s.

  The waiter laughed, while Marco rolled his eyes. ‘My brother has said that I will pay the bill,’ he explained to Lainey and Stacy. ‘He is a very good comedian. We think he will perform as a clown at the Ferragosto Toreggiano.’

  ‘This is festival we have every year in the village,’ Adriana explained, ‘to celebrate Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans, which happen here at Tuoro . . . I think two hundred years BC?’ She looked at Marco.

  He pulled a face. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, making everyone laugh. ‘Some of the villagers will dress like soldiers of that time and walk through the streets,’ he continued, ‘and there is a party at La Ronde, which is another piazza at the end of Via Garibaldi.’

  ‘That’s over there,’ Benito cried, pointing in the direction of a narrow side street that started out between an optician’s and a lavanderia. ‘Papa, can we take Zav and Alfie to show them?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Of course,’ Marco replied, putting a hand on his son’s springy dark hair. ‘There is no traffic in this direction,’ he assured Lainey. ‘They will be perfectly safe. Ah, here are our drinks,’ and clearing his phone from the table he whispered something in Benito’s ear as the waiter set down his tray.

  Smiling at the way Benito flushed with pleasure as he looked up at his father, Lainey took her beer and called to Zav and Alfie to come and get their Cokes.

  ‘I praise Benito for speaking English,’ Marco confided to Lainey as the children carried their drinks to the next table. ‘He can be self-conscious about it sometimes, but today he is doing very well.’

  ‘He seems almost as bilingual as you,’ Lainey commented, taking a much-needed sip of her beer.

  ‘He has an English mother,’ Marco explained, a light of irony in his eyes.

  Surprised, though not sure why, Lainey replied, ‘Ah, well, that would certainly help.’ She wondered if it would be rude to ask where his wife was today. Deciding it probably would, she simply said, ‘Not that having an Italian mother helped my bilingual skills. She wouldn’t allow a single word of the language to be spoken in her hearing, and if anyone as much as suggested coming here on holiday they usually ended up sorry.’

  ‘She was a very passionate woman,’ Stacy put in drolly. ‘A bit like Elenora, really.’

  As everyone enjoyed the moment, Lainey allowed her eyes to flutter closed and felt the heat of the day mingling with the very real pleasure of being here. What would her mother say if she could see her? Probably best not to think about that when she was on a mission to exhume whatever skeletons Alessandra had buried. Feeling a knot tightening in her heart as she wondered what Tom might be doing now, she looked around again and the tension slowly passed.

  ‘So tell us what you know about your family?’ Lorenzo prompted, after they’d made their menu choices and the children had disappeared off to La Ronde. ‘You were born here, I think, and your parents too?’

  ‘My mother was,’ she confirmed, ‘but I don’t know about my father. His name isn’t on my birth certificate and my mother would never tell me anything about him.’

  Lorenzo’s eyebrows rose with intrigue. ‘Aha, I think we have a case for Inspector Poirot,’ he declared, rubbing his hands together as though casting himself in the role.

  ‘He was not an inspector,’ Adriana reminded him.

  Lorenzo batted it away. ‘Detective, inspector, what I am saying is we have a big mystery that we must solve, and I think Isabella, our grandmother, is going to be important in this. She has very good memory for woman her age, and she knows everyone in Tuoro.’

  ‘She used to,’ Marco reminded him. ‘It’s been a long time since she lived in the village, and many new people have come since then.’

  ‘But we only want the old ones,’ Lorenzo pointed out, ‘and there is nothing to be afraid of, because most of them have lost their teeth so they cannot bite.’

  Adriana groaned. ‘Not funny,’ she told him, though the others were laughing.


  ‘I think it’s quite likely,’ Lainey said, ‘that my father, if he’s still alive, won’t want to know me, but that’s all right. It’ll just be good to know who he is, or was, and to find out why my mother never came back to Tuoro again after she left. She didn’t even stay in touch with her own mother, or not that I know of, and I haven’t been able to find out anything about my grandfather either. Apart from his name.’

  ‘Aldo Clementi,’ Stacy supplied, in case anyone had forgotten. ‘And Melvina, his wife.’

  ‘Grandmama reminded us to look at the records in the town hall,’ Adriana informed them. ‘If your parents were married in Tuoro there will be a record of it here, in the municipio. Do you think they were married?’

  Lainey shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, but somehow I doubt it.’

  ‘It is definitely worth a look,’ Marco put in. ‘I can do this tomorrow when I am here for a meeting with the segretario comunale.’

  Grateful for how quickly he was getting on to this, Lainey was about to thank him when Stacy asked Adriana, ‘Did your grandmother say whether she knew Alessandra, Lainey’s mother?’

  Adriana shook her head. ‘But I ask only if she knows Melvina and Aldo, and she says she know them a little, but not well. She says Melvina was a very strong – carattere?’

  ‘Character,’ Marco provided.

  ‘Si, character, and she feels sure that a lot of people will remember her because she was molto molto bella.’

  Understanding that to be extremely beautiful, Lainey said, ‘Did your grandmother know if she still lives in Tuoro, if she’s even still alive?’

  ‘What she said was that there were rumours about Melvina and Aldo before they leave Tuoro, so it is not likely that they are still here. She did not want to discuss what were the rumours, because she has no idea if they are true. She will speak to you about them, she says, if you do not find anyone who can tell you what they know. You understand, she is not confident that her information is good, so she would prefer you to speak to older people in the village first. But,’ she continued, ‘she advise us to go gently, because it could be we wake up ghosts that many of the older people will wish to stay dead.’