Unlocking the Italian Doc's Heart

by Kate Hardy

  ‘Yes, but I’ve already done that this morning.’

  ‘Then we could meet at the tube station at, say, twelve,’ he said.

  ‘Twelve it is,’ she said. ‘See you there.’

  And she ended the call before she could change her mind and make a fool of herself.

  * * *

  At twelve—after changing her mind half a dozen times about what she was going to wear, going from pretty dress to smart trousers to jeans and back again—Jenna met Lorenzo at the tube station. And her heart actually skipped a beat when she saw him in the distance and he smiled and raised his hand to tell her he’d seen her.

  This could be really dangerous to her peace of mind. She hadn’t reacted to anyone like this since Danny. But she knew she needed to put the past behind her. This was the first step.

  ‘How was your dog-walk?’ Lorenzo asked when she reached him.

  ‘Half of it was playing ball in the park, so Charlie—that’s the dog—did most of the work, running to fetch it and bring it back to me,’ she said with a smile. ‘But I think I’ve worn him out for Evelyn—my neighbour—so he’ll sleep for most of the afternoon now.’

  ‘It’s nice of you to walk him for her.’

  ‘It’s not just me. I have a rota with four of my neighbours,’ she explained. ‘I do weekends, because I don’t have children or any urgent calls on my time if I’m not at work, and the others do either the morning or evening walks during the week. We’re all really happy to do it, because it means Evelyn doesn’t have to give up her dog now her arthritis has made her too frail to walk him properly herself—that would’ve broken her heart. Plus we all get to enjoy having a part-time dog without worrying or feeling guilty about having to leave him alone at home all day while we’re at work. And it’s a really good excuse for us to be able to keep an eye on Evelyn and make sure she’s all right, without stripping her of her dignity or her independence.’

  ‘It sounds like a nice community.’

  ‘It is,’ she agreed. Everyone had kept an eye out for her, too, when she’d been pregnant with Ava. Not that she was ready to tell Lorenzo about that. Not just yet.

  ‘So what made you change your mind?’ he asked.

  ‘About lunch? I was hungry.’

  He simply looked at her, and she grimaced. ‘OK. What you said last night—when you said there was something about me...’ She stumbled over the words. ‘Maybe there’s something about you that draws me, too. But I have to be honest. This whole thing scares me. I wasn’t looking for a relationship.’

  ‘You’re not alone,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t looking for a relationship, either. And this scares me as much as I think it scares you.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’m guessing someone hurt you. And I’m not going to push you to talk about it.’

  He nodded. ‘I’m guessing someone hurt you, too. And I’m also guessing that what you just said means you don’t want to talk about it, either.’

  ‘Correct.’ She wasn’t ready to tell him about Ava, but she could tell him about Danny. ‘Bare bones—I picked the wrong guy and he gave me an ultimatum. It was an easy choice. But I was pretty shocked he’d taken that attitude. He wasn’t the man I thought I’d fallen in love with, so I don’t trust my judgement any more.’

  * * *

  Ultimatum. Maybe he’d got it wrong about her possibly taking a sabbatical for a pregnancy and then losing a baby, Lorenzo thought. But what kind of man would give an ultimatum to a woman like Jenna? OK, so he didn’t know her that well, and she could have a massive character flaw—but he didn’t think so. Her ex sounded like a control freak.

  To reassure her, Lorenzo said, ‘Just so you know, I don’t do ultimatums.’ And, because she’d shared a confidence, he felt he ought to do the same. Not the whole messy story, but enough for her to know that he too had picked the wrong one for him. ‘My ex-wife,’ he said, ‘left me for the love of her life.’ Which he’d thought was him. How wrong he’d been. He didn’t want to tell Jenna the rest of it—he didn’t want to face the kind of pity that had soured his shifts at the London Victoria—but maybe this way she wouldn’t feel so alone.

  And it felt strangely healing to say it out loud: that Georgia had left him for the man she really loved. That she’d married him without really meaning her vows. That she hadn’t loved him as much as he’d loved her.

  ‘So we’ve both made mistakes,’ she said. ‘And learned from them.’ She looked at him, her eyes very blue. ‘So. No pity.’

  ‘No pity,’ he agreed.

  ‘And we’ll see how things go,’ she said. ‘No promises.’

  ‘That sounds good to me. Where would you like to go for lunch?’

  ‘That depends. I was thinking,’ she said, ‘maybe we could do something after lunch, too.’

  He smiled. ‘I’d like that. Do you have something particular in mind?’

  ‘Yes. But I need to ask you first—seeing as your dad’s an architect, does that mean you love buildings or they bore you to tears?’ she asked.

  ‘I love them,’ he said.

  She looked pleased. ‘I was hoping you’d say that. How would you like to go and visit the ruins of a Roman bath house that are usually hidden from view?’

  He blinked at her. ‘A Roman bath house? Hang on. My family’s Italian, and I’ve spent most of my life in London. How come I’ve never heard of this Roman bath house before?’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s in the basement of a building, and I don’t think it’s had very much publicity. But they do tours. I could see if I can book us tickets for this afternoon, if you like.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  She grabbed her phone and found the website, then went through to the ticket-booking section. ‘We’re in luck—they have spaces in the two o’clock tour today, which means we have time for lunch first. Monument’s our nearest Tube station, though we’re getting in at Moorgate and it’s only a few minutes’ walk from there.’

  ‘Walking sounds fine,’ he said, and she booked the tickets.

  ‘How much do I owe you for my ticket?’ he asked. ‘Or can I buy us both lunch on the grounds that you bought the tickets?’

  ‘Lunch would be nice,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea where, though. Do you happen to know that bit of the city very well?’

  ‘Not really. I know South Bank better, and obviously Victoria because I worked there for years,’ he said. ‘So either we need to look up a few reviews while we’re on the train, or we have a wander round when we get there and find somewhere with a menu we like the look of.’

  ‘My vote’s for wandering round,’ she said promptly.

  ‘Mine, too.’

  It was too noisy on the train to chat much on the way in, but once they’d got to Moorgate and were walking through the city, it was easy to talk.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ he said, gesturing up to the enormous white column looming above the streets in front of them. ‘I know it’s daft, considering how famous it is, but I’ve never actually seen the Monument for myself. I had no idea it was that tall or the gold urn at the top was so bright.’

  ‘I’ve been this close to it before, but never actually climbed it,’ Jenna admitted. ‘The views from the platform at the top are meant to be amazing.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘we could do that some time.’

  ‘We could make a list of the touristy things we’d like to do in London but we’ve never actually done because we live here and take it all for granted,’ she suggested.

  ‘Great idea. Let’s start the list over lunch,’ he said.

  They wandered round the streets, looking at the menus in the windows of all the restaurants.

  ‘This one looks good,’ he said.

  Jenna checked the dessert menu, and smiled with pleasure. ‘Salted caramel profiteroles—my favourite. Oh, yes. I agree. Let’s go here.’ />
  ‘Do you always read menus backwards?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup. If I love all the puddings, then I’ll choose a restrained main course. If I’m not that fussed about the puddings, then I’ll have a larger main instead,’ she said.

  ‘That works for me, too,’ he said.

  Once they were settled at their table, Jenna ordered smoked salmon fishcakes with a green salad, and Lorenzo chose ale-glazed chicken with mashed potato, green beans and heirloom tomatoes. And both of them ordered profiteroles.

  The food was good, but the salted caramel profiteroles were outstanding.

  ‘Utterly gorgeous,’ Jenna said after her last mouthful. ‘This was an excellent idea.’

  * * *

  After Florence had been born, Georgia had become really fussy about food, convinced that she needed to lose weight when she was perfectly fine as she was. It was a really nice change to have lunch with someone who enjoyed what they ate, Lorenzo thought. True, Jenna had asked the waitress to swap the sweet potato fries for a green salad, but her order had been made with the profiteroles in mind. For her it was about balance rather than self-sacrifice.

  With Georgia, after Florence’s birth, nothing had seemed to be right. He’d tried to be patient, and he’d talked in confidence to an obstetrician friend about the possibility of postnatal depression and how to help her. And all the time he’d had no idea what was wrong. She wouldn’t tell him, and he hadn’t been able to reassure her that whatever it was he would be there and they could work it out together.

  When she’d finally told him about Scott, everything had fallen into place.

  He’d felt so betrayed. She’d cheated on him and she’d married him without really loving him. It had taken him quite a while to come to terms with that.

  Finding out that Florence wasn’t his daughter had been hard, but he could’ve dealt with that. He’d fallen in love with the baby the second that he’d first held her. Even if he’d had a rough day at work, going home would make things all right in his world because he knew she’d beam at him the moment he walked in the door, holding her chubby arms up to him in a demand to be picked up. ‘Dada’ had even been her first word. He’d adored her, and she’d loved him all the way back. Finding out that he wasn’t actually her biological father had made no difference to his feelings about Florence. She was still his daughter, in his eyes.

  And losing her had made him feel as if he’d been dropped down a deep, dark well.

  He’d tried to tell himself that Georgia was doing the right thing, making a family with Scott—her ex and Florence’s natural father. And of course there could be no room for Lorenzo in that family. It would be way too confusing for the little girl, not knowing who to call ‘daddy’: the man who’d brought her up for the first eighteen months of her life, or the man who was her biological father and now lived with her mother. Plus Georgia and Scott had moved to Birmingham, too far for Lorenzo to drop in to see Florence after work on a weekday.

  Lorenzo just hoped that Scott really had changed. That he wasn’t going to drift back into his old ways and end up back in prison. That he’d be a proper father to Florence, loving her and protecting her from any hurt, splashing about in a swimming pool with her and telling her bedtime stories—the kind of father Lorenzo had been to her.

  His parents, too, had been desperately hurt at losing one of their three grandchildren. But Georgia had insisted on a clean break. A break that had left Lorenzo with nothing. No closure.

  There had been no chance for him to fight Georgia for custody, because the DNA test proved that Florence wasn’t his. Plus his name wasn’t on the birth certificate: Georgia had said she’d get it changed once they were married, but she hadn’t got round to it. Probably because she’d always guessed that he wasn’t Florence’s father—Florence had Scott’s grey eyes and red hair rather than Lorenzo’s dark eyes and hair—and Lorenzo had tried to tell himself that at least Georgia had been honest in that respect and hadn’t lied on the birth certificate.

  But, oh, how he missed his little girl. How he missed being a dad. How he missed the closeness of living with a family.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Jenna asked as they reached Billingsgate.

  He forced himself to smile. The wreckage of his life wasn’t Jenna’s fault, and he didn’t want to dump his feelings on her. ‘Sure. I was just wool-gathering. Sorry.’

  ‘No problem. We’re meant to meet the tour guide just here,’ she said, indicating a very plain and modern-looking building.

  Once the group was gathered together, the guide led them inside the building and down a flight of steps to the basement. And there in the centre of the floor was the base of a Roman bath house, with a hypocaust system and arches showing where the furnaces once were.

  The guide talked them through the different areas of the bath house.

  ‘So the caldarium was the bit like a modern sauna, the tepidarium was the largest room where they had all the treatments in a nice warm area, including having hairs plucked out, and the frigidarium was the bit where they closed their pores in a freezing bath—well, in this case, there wasn’t room to build a plunge pool, so the bathers dipped into the water tank at the end of the frigidarium,’ Jenna said.

  ‘All that oil being scraped off with strigils, and bits of hair everywhere—can you imagine how vile the floor of the tepidarium would be at the end of the day?’ Lorenzo asked with a grin.

  ‘Ah, but as the rich young man who was being scraped off and depilated, you wouldn’t care—because you wouldn’t be the one to clean it up,’ she retorted, laughing.

  ‘It’s strange. In Italy, you’re used to the ancient buildings being scattered around the city on full view,’ Lorenzo said. ‘You’ve got the Arena in Verona, then all the buildings of the Forum and the Colosseum in Rome. I thought in London all that was left of the Roman settlement was a bit of the old boundary wall.’

  ‘There are quite a few more bits of wall left than you’d think there are; it’s just that a lot of them are hidden away underneath or inside newer buildings,’ Jenna said. ‘The Roman settlement here was totally deserted after the Romans left, and everything just collapsed in on itself. It wasn’t rediscovered for years—or, rather, it was just ignored until the ground was cleared and new footings were dug and then the remains were rediscovered. There’s an amphitheatre under the Guildhall, there’s a temple of Mithras that ended up being moved so people could see the ruins properly, and there’s a Roman ditch and pavement in the crypt at St Bride’s church, just off Fleet Street. Oh, and there’s another Roman pavement in the crypt at All Hallows, next to the Tower of London.’

  Lorenzo was impressed by her knowledge. ‘How do you know all this stuff, Jenna?’

  ‘That’s the thing about having a nerdy history professor for a brother-in-law,’ she said with a smile. ‘Will’s specialist subject is Roman Britain, and he does quite a few field trips with his students. Before he plans a new field trip, Lucy and I get to do a trial run with him. So I’ve been to every fort on Hadrian’s Wall and walked quite a lot of the route, too. And I’m pretty sure Will’s actually worked out a walk so you can see every bit of the old Roman wall here in London. I can ask him, if you’d like to do that.’

  ‘So you’ve obviously been here before?’

  ‘With Will and Lucy,’ she confirmed. ‘So I know the floor here has tesserae but it wasn’t an actual mosaic floor—say, like the amazing ones at the palace in Fishbourne—and archaeologists are never really going to be able to prove whether this was a private house or an inn, because what we can see of the ruins is bounded by the Thames on one side and the roadway on another and there isn’t quite enough evidence to say either way.’

  ‘Fair point,’ he said. ‘So you bonded with your brother-in-law over history?’

  She nodded. ‘I really thought about becoming a forensic archaeologist, when I was in my teens. But then I did work experie
nce on a dig in Northumbria, the summer I was waiting for my exam results, and I realised that as an archaeologist I was going to spend a lot of my working life kneeling in mud under a leaking tarpaulin in the rain. That wasn’t what I wanted. So I switched to living patients rather than dead ones.’ She smiled. ‘But whenever I go on a city break, the first place I check out is the museum. Luckily Lu feels the same way that I do about history—that’s how she met Will.’

  ‘In a museum?’

  ‘Planning a trip on Roman London for her Year Six class,’ Jenna explained. ‘A friend of a friend suggested that she talked to Will. So they met at the British Museum one Saturday morning for an hour’s chat, and they were still there at closing time. Six months later, I was walking down the aisle behind her, carrying Lu’s train and holding her bouquet at the aisle while she and Will plighted their troth.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Lorenzo said, meaning it. His own siblings were happily married, and it was good to hear of relationships that had worked. Not everyone’s was a failure, the way his had been.

  ‘Everyone likes Will. He’s a sweetie. Though he does like doing the vague professor thing, which drives me crazy.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Lu has to tell him they’re meeting friends an hour before they really are meeting up, otherwise they’d always be late.’

  ‘Is your twin like you?’ Lorenzo asked.

  ‘Organised and a hustler? Put it this way, she’s the deputy head at her primary school. So among other things she needs to be incredibly organised, juggle budgets and support the PTA in fundraising.’ Jenna wrinkled her nose. ‘But I think she’s nicer than I am—plus she can cook.’

  Cooking was optional, in Lorenzo’s view. As for nice: the more he talked to Jenna, the more he liked her.

  Was she the one who could teach him to trust again?

  When their tour was over, they headed back out into the sunshine.

  ‘I happen to know somewhere else really nice just round the corner from here,’ Jenna said. ‘You said you didn’t know this bit of the city. Shall we do some exploring?’