by Penny Feeny
SECRETS IN SICILY
Penny Feeny
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About Secrets in Sicily
Sicily, 1977
Ten-year-old Lily and family arrive for their annual summer holiday in Sicily. Adopted as a toddler, Lily’s childhood has been idyllic. But a chance encounter with a local woman on the beach changes everything…
10 years later…
Ever since that fateful summer Lily’s picture-perfect life, and that of her family, has been in turmoil. The secrrets of the baking hot shores of Sicily are calling her back, and Lily knows that the answers she has been so desperately seeking can only be found if she returns to her beloved island once more…
Contents
Welcome Page
About Secrets in Sicily
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
About Penny Feeny
Also by Penny Feeny
Become an Aria Addict
Copyright
For my family
Part One
1977
1
In Lily’s earliest memory of the villa there was no Harry; even her mother was shadowy. She was two, or maybe three. Her father had led her through rooms that seemed huge and dark and cluttered with fascinating curiosities. The pair of them had burst out onto the terrace and on the table, she remembered, lay a bowl of peaches, flushed and downy and warm from the sun. Her father had picked her up and whirled her around his head and then he had lowered her and stroked her cheek with his finger, saying her skin was as soft and silky as a peach. In another summer, baby Harry appeared and she began to dote on him. Six years later, though he could be irritating, she couldn’t imagine being without him.
He’d been dozing in the back of the hire car on the way from the airport and she’d had to push him off her shoulder more than once, but now he woke with a jolt to ask if they were nearly there. Lily’s insides were tight with anticipation. They were driving along country roads and the scenery enthralled her: silvery groves of olives, golden orchards of oranges and lemons, ranks of vines trooping uphill in formation like sturdy little armies, everything shimmering in a heat haze. The sky was so blue and the air so hot that the road ahead of them was wavy and out-of-focus.
She was excited, but nervous too, because there was always the chance that things would have changed. That they would turn into the bumpy drive that led to Villa Ercole and it wouldn’t be there anymore because it had caught fire. Or they wouldn’t be able to have their usual rooms because other people were staying. Or the sweet chestnut trees cradling the hammock would have been chopped down. Or the old clanking bicycles thrown out… Lily wanted everything to be exactly the same; she wanted to be able to run across the cool terracotta tiles and find familiar touchstones. This was important to her.
Even her parents were excited to be at the start of their holiday, their mood giddy. ‘Shall we have a bet,’ Alex said, ‘on what colour dress Dolly will be wearing?’
Lily and Harry giggled. Dolly, like many Sicilian women of her generation, would be wearing black, even though she hadn’t been widowed; black conferred dignity.
‘While Gerald,’ said Jess, ‘will be in white. Off-white, rather…’
‘And a big straw hat,’ said Lily.
‘Nicotine white,’ said Alex. ‘With splashes of Nero d’Avola.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a type of red wine.’
‘Nero means black in Italian.’
‘True,’ said Alex. ‘But the Italians describe grapes as either black or white, whereas we’d say red or green. D’you think they might be colour-blind?’
‘Grapes aren’t red actually,’ said Harry. ‘They’re purple.’
‘Oh, what heaven!’ said Jess. ‘Look at all those juicy melons.’
Ahead of them a donkey was trundling a cart laden with huge glossy watermelons. With a wave at the carter, Alex accelerated past it. ‘Even better,’ he said. ‘Look down there!’ And to their joy Roccamare came into view.
The fishing village huddled in a sheltered cove with a row of palm trees along the shoreline and a forest of boat masts in the harbour. Villa Ercole lay on a spur of land above the beach, screened by oleander bushes. Years ago it had been painted the same pink as the oleander but this had faded in the sun, and Gerald in his nicotine-white trousers and wine-splashed shirt wasn’t the sort to bother with redecoration.
Alex had to swerve to avoid the pot-holes and they could hear the suitcases sliding in the boot. They were coming for a month, as usual, but they didn’t bring a lot of possessions. Who needed toys when you were running about outside, or several different outfits when you spent all day in a swimsuit? Besides, Gerald had sets of backgammon and chess and packs of cards and old scratched gramophone records for dancing. Jess and Alex thought his record collection antiquated and the sound quality poor, but this was good for Lily and Harry because no one was worried about wrecking them. Villa Ercole was the sort of place where you could run completely wild without getting into trouble and Dolly was the best provider of sweetmeats and pastries that Lily had ever come across.
Harry wound down his window and shouted. Alex played a fanfare on the car horn. Dolly came rushing out in her black dress, though she wore an incongruous flowered overall on top of it, which Lily was pleased to see because it meant she’d been cooking. Jess unwound herself from the passenger seat and spread out her arms, towering over Dolly, who was closer to Lily’s height.
Dolly’s real name was Addolorata, after Our Lady – not the Madonna with the Christ child, but the grieving mother whose son had died on the cross. Alex had nicknamed her partly because she was small and chunky and full of treats like a bag of dolly mixtures and partly so that he could greet her with: ‘Well, hello, Dolly!’ as he did now.
‘Every year,’ she told them, planting kisses on their cheeks, ‘I hate it when you go and I think, can I wait until you come back? And here you are again and the year has passed quickly after all!’ She had been with Gerald for so long that her English was good, though her accent was strong.
‘It’s eleven months actually,’ said Harry and she laughed and chucked him under the chin.
Then Alex squeezed her in his bear hug so that her toes were barely touching the ground. ‘You smell delicious,’ he said.
‘Cinnamon cannoli,’ said Dolly, blushing because Alex always made her blush. It was a trick he had with people; they would open up to him like a rose unfurling its petals. That was partly why he’
d gone into journalism: he could tease out stories. ‘For the children,’ she added.
‘For us too, I hope. Only had a plastic mini-meal on the plane.’
Dolly clucked her tongue and prodded the hollow below his ribs. Both Jess and Alex had supple willowy frames; their clothes hung on them in loose folds. Jess’s skirt, made of a patchwork fabric in one of her own designs, drifted from her narrow hips. Lily was plump and sturdy and her stomach growled at the prospect of cannoli.
‘Gerald napping as usual?’ said Alex.
‘Tsk!’ exclaimed Dolly. ‘I tell him this is special day. Don’t have too much wine at lunch. Does he listen to me? Figurati!’
Gerald and Dolly were always criticising each other. She despaired because he wouldn’t look after himself properly and he complained that it wasn’t her job to boss him around. Why didn’t she just get on and cook his favourite dishes? And she would shout that he never appreciated her cooking anyway. When he’d been smaller Harry had sometimes been frightened by Gerald and Dolly’s quarrelling, but Jess had assured him it wasn’t because they didn’t like each other. Lily understood that in Sicily it was considered insulting not to join in an argument and give as good as you got. The performance was exhilarating. ‘Though you and Alex don’t yell,’ she’d pointed out and Jess had smiled serenely.
‘No? Well, we agree on a lot of things, I suppose. And that’s how come we enjoy doing stuff together, isn’t it?’
Lily’s parents were not like other people’s, and it wasn’t only because they preferred to be called by their first names. She and Harry weren’t parcelled away; they were consulted and included in adult activities. They were allowed to come on demonstrations and wave banners – they even had their photo in the paper supporting the miners. And once, for two whole terms, Lily didn’t have to go to school because Jess taught her at home.
Now, anyway, they were on holiday, and a month when you are ten is an eternity and the days stretched ahead: vibrant and scorching and infinite. The previous summer, there’d been a heatwave in England too. The ground became parched and the rivers dried up and the government appointed a ‘Minister for Rain’ – which Gerald and Dolly thought was a huge joke – but it wasn’t the same. It could never be as magical as coming to Roccamare.
Harry ran straight through the wide hallway of the villa, through the salone with its card table and record player and bits of ancient pottery. The walls were hung with engravings and mirrors freckled with spots so your reflection looked as though you’d come out in a rash. He ran through the open doors onto the terrace, which had statues in each corner and an amazing view of the sea. The statues hadn’t come with the villa, which was originally an old farmhouse. Gerald had bought them. He’d bought the farmhouse too, when it was nearly derelict, and with the help of an architect friend in Palermo he had recreated what he called his classical oasis. (That was why the villa was named after Hercules: fixing it up had been such a massive task.)
Gerald was outside, snoozing on a steamer chair, and the ends of his moustache were rising with each breath. His feet, sticking over the end of the chair, were in faded canvas espadrilles that could have dropped off at any moment. Harry scrambled onto his lap and lifted the brim of his straw hat. Gerald took off the hat and squashed it onto Harry so that it swallowed him up. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, sitting up straight. ‘The McKenzie contingent. So soon?’
Gerald’s eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, hooded and smudged, but they always brightened, Lily had noticed, at the sight of Harry and Alex. She felt, although she couldn’t explain why, that he looked at her in a different way, as if he didn’t quite trust her. Which was silly because Harry was far more likely to break one of his records or knock over his drink. Harry might appear to have the grace of an angel but he was awfully clumsy. As it happened, Gerald was already reaching for her, drawing her towards his knee. ‘We must measure you both against the post,’ he said.
This post, where once horses had been tethered, was notched with marks showing how much they had grown. It was how Lily knew she had visited the villa when she was two and three and four. There’d been a couple of years’ gap when Harry was very little, but then Lily’d had her period of home schooling and her parents had decided it was important for her to return. Important for Alex too: he’d been coming to Sicily ever since he was a student and he said the island got under his skin.
The measuring could wait. Lily followed her mother and Dolly into the kitchen. On the table stood a jug of lemonade and a tray of cannoli, brown and crunchy, sprinkled with sugar and filled with creamy ricotta. ‘I’ll make some tea too,’ said Jess. The only things Gerald missed were English breakfast tea and Oxford orange marmalade, which she’d brought in their luggage. She settled the big old kettle on the hob. That was also from England; Italians didn’t use kettles.
When it had boiled, Dolly seized the handles of the tray. ‘Vieni,’ she said. ‘We eat outside.’
Gerald hadn’t moved from his chair. Alex was sprawled on one nearby, his arms akimbo, his hands clasped behind his neck and his head thrown back. Gerald was flapping his hat and saying in his dry rasping voice, ‘There was a ceremony in Santa Margherita a few days ago. You just missed it.’
‘You went?’
‘No, but I heard about it. Ribbons cut, balloons fluttering heavenwards with prayers of thanksgiving attached. Some noisy fireworks. Interminable speeches, applause, the usual guff. Politicians taking credit for doing precisely nothing.’
‘You mean they’ve finished the rehousing programme?’ said Alex, dropping his hands to his knees and jerking forward. ‘The families finally have somewhere to live?’
‘Good Lord, no,’ said Gerald. ‘Long way to go yet. Plenty of people in the prefabs still, but the new town is definitely taking shape alongside the old and it’s as good an excuse as any for a celebration.’
‘It’s nine bloody years since the earthquake,’ said Alex. ‘Nine years and counting.’
Harry had been chasing after a lizard. He bounced up to the table and said, ‘Can I have a cannoli? Do you mean Lily’s earthquake?’
They all looked at her and she shuddered. She could feel her body twitch as if it were about to convulse – something that happened rarely these days. Jess came over and Lily buried her face in her patchwork skirt; the warmth of her thigh was comforting through the cotton. ‘Don’t cry, my precious,’ she crooned. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of now.’
2
Lily wanted to be first on the beach the following morning, but Dolly had delayed them, filling a hamper with what she insisted were essentials. By the time they arrived, several family groups had already formed their encampments and settled in for the day. Some had even brought Calor gas stoves so they wouldn’t miss out on spaghetti for lunch. A gang of youths in tiny luminous swimming trunks were showing off with a beach ball. An audience of teenage girls flickered their cats’ tongues over ice-cream cones. Nearly all these people stopped what they were doing and swivelled their heads as Jess in her sundress glided towards them.
Lily was used to this. People often stared at her parents because they were so tall and blond and ethereal like the gilded couples illustrated in her Andrew Lang fairy books. In Sicily they stood out more than ever, but Jess wasn’t self-conscious when people gazed at her. She smiled back and said buon giorno. After all, Roccamare was a small friendly place, and the McKenzies were known to be regular visitors.
They chose their patch and spread out the towels and Jess drove the stake of the umbrella deep so it wouldn’t topple. Then, abandoning all possessions, the three of them ran down to the sea. (Alex had stayed behind to help Gerald polish up a translation.) They frolicked like porpoises until they got thirsty and were tempted out of the water to see what nibbles Dolly had provided. As they wriggled and rummaged through the hamper, Jess rubbed sun lotion into their bodies. It didn’t take long for Lily’s skin to turn to toffee, but Harry always went through a pink shrimp phase first.
Lily was munching a pear, trying to stop its sweet juice dribbling down her chin, when Harry dived into the bottom of the basket. ‘Guess what I found!’
‘What?’
‘You have to guess.’
‘Is it something you can eat?’
He giggled. ‘Nope.’
‘Is it a toy?’
‘It might be.’
‘Is it yours?’
‘Nope.’
‘Is it mine, then?’
‘It might be.’ He kept his fist closed and looked sly, but his hand wasn’t big enough to hide the object completely and part of it poked out, pale and shiny.
‘I know!’ squealed Lily. ‘It’s my little statue I found last year. The one that went missing, Give it back.’
‘Shan’t,’ he teased.
She lunged towards him, but Harry was on his feet and running, threading a path through swimmers and sunbathers. He had to keep moving, the sand was so hot it would burn your soles if you lingered. Lily managed to catch up, because her legs were longer, and to bring him down. They tussled together in a heap, but when she prised open his hands they were empty.
‘What have you done with it?’ she shouted. ‘You’ve lost it!’
‘It was lost anyway, till I found it.’
‘That doesn’t stop it being mine. Where’s it gone? Did you drop it?’
Jess was standing over them, blocking out the sun. ‘What’s going on?’
‘It was a silly stone,’ said Harry.
‘No, it wasn’t. It was a precious bit of marble. It’s two thousand years old and very valuable.’
Jess crouched down. ‘Are you sure, darling?’ she said. ‘Is that what Gerald told you? Where did you get it from?’
‘I found it, when we went to visit the quarry. Don’t you remember?’
Jess’s memory was really rather poor, Lily felt, whereas she could remember absolutely everything. (Since the age of three, at any rate. Apparently you weren’t expected to remember anything much before that because your brain wasn’t ready. That was why she had no recollection of the earthquake and only faint images of the nuns floating about in their snowy wimples. And Villa Ercole. And Alex and the bowl of ripe peaches.)