‘I…’ He started to speak, then closed his eyes as if the idea of asking for help was excruciating. ‘I need help to get to Termini and then find an ATM so I can pay you for a cab. But I also need help to walk,’ he said, the words bitter.
‘Do you think it’s wise to get on the train again today? It takes a couple of hours or so to get from Rome to Florence, doesn’t it? Train stations are crowded and tiring, in my experience. Is there anyone who could pick you up from the station at the other end? Do you have some family, a neighbour, a friend…?’
‘No one,’ he said, haltingly, as though only just realising the true difficulty that lay ahead of him, having to manage on his own. His words hung in the air.
No one.
Sadness washed over her. She had no knowledge of his life, of course, of how or why he’d ended up so alone, and certainly no idea why he would come to Rome for nothing more than to throw away his wedding ring. But here he was, a vulnerable man who needed help, certainly, but also one with fierce determination to get on with his life, no matter how challenging it might be. She respected that. She wanted to help him get home again. It was just that right now, she was a stranger in a strange land. She had no idea how to catch a train here, let alone drive on Italian roads. She had no connections here. No home of her own. No food in the house. No plan.
But she looked at Samuel, at the tremor in his legs as they fought to hold him up. She remembered him throwing his ring into the Trevi Fountain and wondered what awful thing had happened to make him do that.
‘I’ll drive you,’ she said, allowing the words to tumble out of her mouth before she could think too much about them.
He looked at her again, decades of pride still fighting with the greater need to accept help. Even he must have known he was reaching his limits for the day.
‘I could hire a car, um, I suppose. I’ve got nothing else to do, really, no plans or anything. I haven’t even unpacked yet. Not that I need to, as I organised myself into a carry-on bag only. I’d hoped to see more of Italy and head up to Tuscany anyway,’ she went on, nervous but determined to help. ‘I could start my sightseeing today.’ She smiled, encouraging him to accept her motives.
Samuel looked back down and nodded once. ‘I’ll pay you, of course, for your time, the petrol—’
‘No. Definitely not. Consider it my good deed for the day.’ She wiggled her shoulders in some sort of attempt at jolliness, whether for his benefit or hers she wasn’t sure.
Samuel gave a small shrug.
Lara manoeuvred the chair closer to him still. ‘It will take me a bit of time to organise a car and finish up here, so rest your legs while you’re waiting, if you like.’
She was relieved when Samuel lowered himself heavily into the chair. She pulled her phone from her pocket to google rental cars in Rome. Samuel would know the way, she assumed, but she’d better get a satellite navigation system to help. And she’d need more coffee before getting behind the wheel to tackle Italian roads. As well as the challenge of driving on the opposite side of the road, during her few short hours in the city she’d witnessed the loose observation of traffic rules.
Oh dear. Lara tried to conjure up Sunny’s capable, practical nature and fearless attitude to life. Or even her mother’s organisational skills and steady calm under pressure. Any of those qualities would be welcome right now.
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, counted to five on the inhale, six on the exhale. Then she gave herself a rousing internal speech. She could do it. She had to. This man was depending on her. She was his lifeline! She was practically a hero, for goodness’ sake, the one thing standing between him and…
‘Wait, what is at home that you need to get back to, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘Goats.’ He smiled for the first time since she’d met him. ‘I need to get home to milk my goats.’
Goats!
She was driving the scariest roads she’d been on in her life, Fiats whizzing past her at sickening speed, buses and trucks overtaking her with rude hand gestures, all for goats with huge udders waiting to be milked. Sitting beside her, Samuel had refused to put on his seatbelt, claiming it wasn’t the done thing in Italy.
She was on her own in a foreign country, making it up as she went along, Samuel sitting tensely and mostly silently beside her in the passenger seat, occasionally arguing with the prissy navigation system, which called itself Liesel. According to Samuel, Liesel was intent on taking them through industrial estates and traffic congestion on roads that any local with half a brain knew you should avoid.
They made it out of Rome proper and onto the motorway, where hopefully they could stay all the way to Chianti. They settled into an easier rhythm and Lara even managed to peek occasionally at the scenery sweeping by, blue-grey mountain ranges and endless fields of crops broken up by rows of cypress trees. They climbed the winding mountain roads towards Chianti as the day stretched into late afternoon. At last they arrived at a steel automatic gate and Samuel gave her the numbers for the keypad so they could turn into the driveway.
Lara’s heart rate slowed and she loosened her white-knuckled grip on the wheel as they crunched slowly over the gravel and pulled up next to his seventeenth-century stone villa and parked under the trees.
‘Oh, wow,’ she murmured, admiring the tall peach-washed walls and the red geraniums spilling out of terracotta urns.
Samuel struggled with the car door.
‘Here, let me help you,’ she said, unclipping her seatbelt and jumping out, rushing around to his side.
‘I can do it,’ he snapped, stabbing at the ground with his cane.
‘I’m sure you can, but let me help anyway,’ she said, reaching under his armpit and helping him to his feet. ‘You must be tired.’
Once he was steady, she stepped back, but not too far, smiling at him. In truth, she felt like a freaking champion right now, a tiny girl who’d conquered a mountain.
He looked at her. She looked at him, waiting for something, anything from him to acknowledge her tremendous achievement. But nothing came.
‘Well,’ she said, squirming inside. She wanted to make sure he got into the house okay; also she very much wanted an invitation to take a look inside the two-storey villa and at the grounds, and maybe even to meet his goats. She also needed to visit the bathroom after all those coffees.
Hell, an invitation to stay for dinner wouldn’t be too much to ask, would it? After all, she’d just dropped everything to bring him here. Her adrenaline was falling fast, and suddenly she was exhausted.
She reprimanded herself silently for thinking he owed her anything. She’d come here willingly—in fact, she’d practically bullied him into letting her help him. She’d given her help with no strings attached.
It was just that the view from this villa—the strict rows of grapevines, the lines of cypress trees spearing into the sky, the grove of olive trees nearby, the blue mountains and the hazy sky—was exactly like every movie about Tuscany Lara had ever seen. She was dying to stay a bit longer.
‘Are you going to stand there all day?’ Samuel asked.
‘Oh, right, of course.’ She stepped to the side and automatically reached for him as he began to walk.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, shrugging off her hand.
She shut the car door behind him with a click. Just then, she heard some cranky bleating.
‘I’m coming,’ Samuel called, shuffling across the grass and heading around the back of the villa towards the noisy goats. Some irritated banging on the stable gate came in reply. They sounded stroppy, rather like their owner.
‘Can I come and meet your goats?’ Lara asked, excited now to see them. After all, they were the reason she was here.
Samuel didn’t answer her. Lara trotted behind him, her travelling boots steady on the ground. She could see the animals, two brown bodies with straight horns, standing up on their hind legs with their front hooves all the way over the top of the wonky wooden gate. Their barn was
a homemade job for sure, with odd angles and gaps between boards, and a rusty metal roof.
As Samuel arrived at the barn, the goats’ insulted bleating reduced to mellow grumbling. Lara was instantly seduced by their sweet faces.
‘Oh, look at them!’ They stretched out their soft noses and lips to inspect her hands. Their yellow eyes with horizontal pupils were inquisitive. Their coats were the colour of maple syrup, with black legs and faces. She looked down and could see their full udders waiting to be milked; that didn’t look comfortable at all.
Samuel struggled with the wooden slide bolt. ‘Blast!’
‘Here,’ Lara said, jumping in to help. This time, Samuel didn’t argue. She was pleased to see he had a lot more colour in his face now that he was back home.
The wooden slide snagged, then released, and the gate swung open. The goats cheered and made a dash for freedom, shouldering Lara out of the way.
She squealed. ‘No, no, no, come back,’ she pleaded helplessly as they skipped away, tails in the air. One of them lifted her head, sniffed, then let out a loud snort.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she began, but Samuel entered the barn, leaving his cane at the gate, and lurched around collecting buckets and a three-legged milking stool.
‘They’ll come back,’ he said. ‘Leave them.’
The goats were happily stationed under an olive tree, plucking at its green-grey leaves, wagging their tails with glee.
It was evening now and the light was falling, but not quickly. It was a beautiful soft light, making everything appear muted and romantic.
‘Here.’ Samuel thrust a metal bucket at her. ‘Rattle that. They’ll come running.’
She took the bucket and watched as he set himself up on the stool near a squarish wooden structure set out from the wall with an odd shape cut from the middle. It was some sort of vice, she realised, something to clamp around the goat’s neck and keep her still while she was milked.
‘What are their names?’ she asked, reaching into the bucket and scooping up cylindrical pellets of food.
‘Meg and Willow,’ he said.
She turned around and shook the bucket, the pellets rattling against the metal sides. ‘Meg! Willow! Come for dinner!’
She didn’t need to ask twice. Both goats galloped back, their pendulous ears flapping as their hooves drummed across the earth. The one with the pink collar got through the gate first and shoved her head into the bucket, nearly knocking it out of Lara’s hands. The other goat, this one with a blue collar, wasn’t far behind and rammed her body against the first goat so she could get to the pellets too.
‘Over here,’ Samuel said, pointing to a small trough on the other side of the wooden vice.
Lara wrestled the bucket away from the goats—with more difficulty than she would have liked to admit—and poured some pellets into the trough. Both goats followed and tried to get their heads through the vice.
Samuel tutted at them. ‘Only one goat in the crush,’ he said, drawing the blue-collared one away. The first goat calmed and ate from the trough in peace. Samuel pulled a metal lever and the crush closed loosely around the animal’s neck. The other settled into eating from the bucket beside Lara’s legs. She ran her fingers through the animal’s hair.
‘Gosh, they love their food,’ she mused.
‘They’re Italian.’
Lara laughed out loud at Samuel’s dry humour. ‘Which Italian mamma is this?’ she asked.
‘Willow,’ Samuel said.
‘Hi, Willow,’ Lara said, scratching her neck. To her delight, the goat murmured back as if saying hello.
Lara looked up, beaming, to see Samuel watching her.
‘She likes you,’ he said, a note of surprise in his voice.
‘I like her,’ she said, running the flat of her hand down Willow’s spine. Willow wagged her tail and let out a noise that was almost a purr—a big, creaky goat purr.
‘Did you hear that?’ Lara said, amazed.
Samuel sniffed and turned back to Meg, placing a bucket under her udder. ‘The chickens need feeding too,’ he said.
Lara shook her head at the audacity of this old man. He had his back to her now, his hands working rhythmically and expertly under the goat to send needles of milk spitting into the bucket at his feet. He rested his head heavily against Meg’s side, using her for support and working by feel, not sight.
Lara opened her mouth to say something, to get him to acknowledge she’d just made a huge effort to save his backside, but stopped. Instead, she inhaled the smell of the grassy hay at the back of the stable, wood smoke somewhere in the air, and the distinctive but not unpleasant aroma of goat.
‘Fine,’ she said, with a touch of petulance, and left the stable in search of the chickens. She couldn’t imagine they’d be hard to find. And sure enough, as she walked down the hill, passing the house, there was a large chicken coop, partially built into the hillside, with its roof the same height as the top of the hill. She could hear them as she got closer, murmuring and clucking, settling themselves for the night. The coop door was in the same rustic, handmade style as the goat barn, and stood wide open.
She assumed the door needed to be shut to protect them from foxes and roaming dogs, and dragged it closed behind her. It dragged over the ground. She could fix that, she realised; she’d just need a shovel to dig out some earth to give it room to swing.
A few chickens of varying colours strutted out from their roost, clucking with interest to meet the new person, their feet making swishy noises through the straw.
‘Dinner’s coming.’
She looked around for where the feed might be and saw a toolshed nearby, also built into the slope of the hill. She wandered down to it, simultaneously aware of her need for a bathroom and in complete awe of the view, and stepped inside. She paused in the dimness, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She could make out various shapes of tools and hardware, a shovel and two metal drums. Bingo.
Inside the first drum she found a bag of mixed grain. It was heavy, but she pulled it up as high as she could to check the packaging. She noted the Italian word for chicken, pollo, and a picture of a rooster. She worked a metal scoop into the grain, then straightened and turned.
There, standing in the doorway, was a man.
Lara jumped, one hand flying to her chest, and spilled some chicken feed on the concrete floor.
The man held up a silhouetted hand in apology.
Lara recovered herself, embarrassed. ‘It’s okay, you just startled me—too much coffee.’ Regaining her wits, she quickly assessed the man as best she could in the low light. He was a bit taller than her, with curly hair pulled up loosely in a man bun at the back and soft facial hair. He was possibly mid-thirties, a few years older than her, though the beard made it tricky to tell. He was dressed in a holey old green t-shirt and shorts, with blue socks and rubber shoes.
‘You sp-sp-sp—’ he paused, his eyes blinking and his head bobbing, lost in a moment of rigid stuttering, ‘—speak English?’
‘Sì,’ she said. She’d dropped her eyes while he struggled with his words, but now raised her gaze to meet his dark eyes.
‘Matteo,’ he said.
‘Lara,’ she said, and held out her free hand. ‘Ciao.’
‘Ciao.’ He took her hand in his. It was warm and strong but not too strong, and roughened, but not too rough.
‘I am looking f-f-for Samuel,’ he said.
‘He’s with the goats.’ Lara gestured up the hill.
‘Are you the n-n-n-new badante?’ Matteo asked.
‘Badante?’ She had no idea what that was. ‘No, I just…’ God, how could she explain the day? ‘I gave him a lift home.’
Matteo tilted his head as though not sure what she was saying.
‘I drove him home. In the car.’
‘Ah, sì’ He didn’t seem in any hurry to finish this conversation and she was trapped here, by virtue of the fact that he was blocking the doorway. She glanced down at the scoop of chicken feed
she was holding, wishing he would move out of the way. She was wrung out and stiff from driving and still had to feed the chickens before she could find a loo.
But since he wasn’t moving, she asked, ‘How do you know Samuel?’
‘He is my great-uncle.’
‘Uncle? But he told me he had no family,’ she said, suspicious now, on edge.
Matteo lifted his shoulders defensively.
She returned the motion, feeling spontaneously proprietorial towards Samuel. She’d only known him for half a day but she felt like she’d rescued him—from a thief, dehydration, falls in the street, perhaps further robbery or even assault, hunger—when no one else was there to do it. He’d been defenceless. What sort of family left their elderly relatives to travel across the country with unscrupulous carers?
‘Do you know he was in Rome today, all alone?’
Matteo frowned.
‘He was robbed. I had to drive him back.’
Matteo lifted his chin, considering her. Then, as her unexpected surge of self-righteousness fell away and she realised he was likely in no way at fault, she felt starkly vulnerable.
No one knows where I am.
A cold sweat beaded on her neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, wanting to take back her words, unoffend this man—this man who had her trapped in a dim shed halfway around the world from anyone she knew.
Stupid, stupid Lara. You should know better.
Matteo opened his mouth as if to respond, but just then there was a crash from up the hill, bleating from the goats, and a yell of pain from Samuel.
Matteo turned and ran up the hill. Lara dropped the chicken feed and followed suit.
Inside the barn, Samuel lay on the ground, the buckets of milk spilt over the straw bedding. He was on his back, holding his wrist, his face screwed up in anguish.
3
Sunny
Sunny Foxleigh—or ‘Foxy’, as more than one boyfriend had tagged her, thinking he was the first genius to come up with it—lay awake in her bed, her two young children asleep in the room next door. She could hear Hudson’s snoring through the wall. It clearly didn’t bother Daisy. Her daughter could sleep through an earthquake, her earnest, busy mind probably just as busy during sleep, with no time for distractions.
Three Gold Coins Page 2