2008 - Recipes for Cherubs (16 page)

Catching sight of Ella, Catrin came to a halt, bent double and clutched her ribs to ease the stitch.

“You seem very happy, Catrin. Good news, I presume?”

“Oh yes,” she spluttered.

“Get a grip on yourself, child. Whatever has brought all this on?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. It’s just the thought of my mother in a…” She trailed off again into laughter.

“Nothing can be that funny, surely?”

“Oh, but it can. I’m sorry, Aunt Ella, I’ll sit down and read what she says, if you like.”

Full of curiosity, Ella sat down on a bench and Catrin joined her.

“I’ll just get my breath back and then I’ll begin.”

Convent of Santa Lucia

Near Terrini

Italia

Dear Catrin,

I do hope you arrived at Shrimp’s without a hitch. I meant to say I hadn’t heard back from the Aunts, but I was sure it would be all right. Still, you’ll be safely there by now and I daresay having an absolute ball. Anyhow, enough of all that. Darling, I desperately need you to do something for me.

I have had the most terrible time since I arrived in Italy. I was meant to be meeting an old friend of mine at the railway station in Naples, but they didn’t turn up and to add to my troubles my handbag was stolen along with most of my money and traveller’s cheques. A priest came to my aid and kindly (or so I thought) offered to find me an inexpensive place to stay.

I didn’t expect a luxury hotel, of course, but neither did I expect to travel miles to this godforsaken place on the back of a bad-tempered donkey or to have to rely on the charity of some very peculiar nuns – 

“Nuns?” Ella interrupted. “It gets better,” Catrin said, barely able to hide her glee.

Honestly, you wouldn’t believe how horrid it is here and it’s jolly good you didn’t come with me. The plumbing is outrageously ancient – the original Roman, I shouldn’t be surprised. I haven’t had a decent wash in days. To get to the lavatory one has to fight through herds of chickens and spiteful geese. And the food is gruesome. If I have to endure another plate of mushy beans I shall die – 

“She always was fussy about her food,” Ella said. “This is the best bit.”

The room the nuns have given me is simply dreadful –  the bed, if you can call it a bed, has a mattress stuffed with straw. There’s no glass in the windows so I can hardly sleep for the noise of the village dogs barking and bats flapping about all over the place.

I can’t even bear to get close to the window to get some fresh air because the convent is halfway up a cliff and the drop to the river below is sheer.

There are bars on the window because one of the inmates once jumped out to their death. You can still see the bloody fingerprints on the wall! I’ve even seen vultures flying around – it’s positively prehistoric. As if the room wasn’t bad enough I have to share it with a crazy Italian woman and when I do manage to get to sleep I’m usually woken five minutes later because of the racket she makes singing and dancing about the place. I think it’s a sort of lunatic asylum-cum-convent.

The telephone doesn’t seem to have been invented here yet. I need you to telephone your godfather and ask him to arrange for some money to be sent to me here so that I can get home as quickly as possible. He has contacts in Italy, so should be able to help. Please be quick –  I cannot endure this a moment longer. Hope you are well, darling.

Love

Mummy x

“So you’ll telephone your godfather, he’ll send some money, and soon your mother will be home and your worries will be over?”

Catrin glanced at Ella, a look of determination on her face. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not going to ring my godfather.”

“But your mother’s asked you to – you can’t disobey her.”

“Oh, I can.”

“Catrin Grieve!”

“I think being in a convent with lunatics will be good for her. She sent me down here without even speaking to you, and she wasn’t worried one little bit as long as I was out of the way. Now that things have gone wrong for her she wants me to jump to attention, but I shan’t and no one can make me.”

Catrin looked at Ella defiantly, her eyes burning with passion.

Ella surveyed her, the spots of high colour on her cheeks, the mouth set in a stubborn line, and she wanted more than anything to laugh out loud, but keeping her face straight she said, “Good for you. I daresay it’s high time that someone refused to dance to Kizzy’s tune.”

“You do?”

Ella nodded enthusiastically. “I should imagine that time in this convent might do her good, make her think about things.”

“You see, Aunt Ella, I didn’t even know I had an aunt until a few weeks ago, and I didn’t know until Tony Agosti told me that my mother used to live here. There’s so much I don’t know about myself, about my family, because my mother chose not to tell me.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“She’ll cry a lot, give the nuns a hard time, stamp her feet and wait for her friend to rescue her. Once everything’s all right she probably won’t bother to write again.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I know her.”

“Are you two close?”

“No. I’m not the kind of daughter she wanted. I’m surprised that she bothered to have a child.”

Her defiance melted away and gave place to a frightened look, her bottom lip quivering.

Ella knew what it felt like to be ignored. Her own mother had had no time for her, and that meant constant anxiety and yearning for attention, then the anger born of a mother’s cruel indifference.

“What kind of daughter would be the right kind for her?”

“Someone who wants to put on make-up, go dancing, flirt with boys, who wants to be a model or a film star, all that kind of rubbish.”

“And you’re not that sort of girl?”

Catrin shook her head.

“Perhaps the Grieve girls not getting on with their mothers is hereditary.”

“Didn’t you get on with yours?”

“Definitely not – she disliked me intensely. My mother preferred boys and was quite open about it. She positively doted on my brothers.”

“And Alice? Did she love Aunt Alice?”

“Oh, she loved Alice in her own way. Everyone loved Alice. Alice was pretty and biddable whereas I was not. I was simply an enormous irritation to her.”

Catrin understood what she meant. Ella Grieve would not have been a prissy, quiet child; she would have been stubborn, lively and headstrong.

“And my mother didn’t get on with her mother?”

“Oh, my goodness, no she didn’t. This place used to resound with their constant catfights. They truly disliked each other. Mind you, Hester was, er, fiery, to say the least.”

“I never met her.”

“No, well, you didn’t miss much. She died before you were born.”

“And you didn’t like her?”

“You are a very perceptive child. No, I didn’t like her. The truth is, I couldn’t stand Hester. She was a selfish old cow.”

Catrin hugged herself, tried to hold back a rising giggle. She wasn’t used to grown-ups being direct with her; they usually hedged around the truth.

“It’s small wonder that your mother turned out the way she did. She didn’t have much of an example set her.”

“What sort of an example did she have?”

“Well, Hester was a proper flibbertigibbet, and that’s putting it mildly. Truth is, she was a tart. One man at a time wasn’t enough for her. She led my brother William a right old dance with her flirting and canoodling. She’d had a fling with most of the men in the village by the time she left.”

Catrin drew in her breath with a whistle. When the girls at school talked about their grannies, they described them as grey-haired, cake-baking sweeties, but her grandmother had been a bit of a trollop, by the sound of it.

“My grandfather was your brother, wasn’t he?”

Ella nodded, a faraway look in her eyes. “Yes. He was the eldest of the four of us and far too soft for the likes of Hester. He let her get away with too much, just to keep the peace.”

“He died, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he was killed in the war. Your mother was only young at the time and quite inconsolable after his death.”

“Was she? She’s never talked about him to me.”

“Sometimes people can’t talk about those they love and have lost. She spent even more time up at Shrimp’s after he died, as far from her mother as she could get. She was more like a daughter to Alice than a niece.”

“Until she did whatever awful thing it was that she did?” Ella turned her head away quickly. “That we won’t discuss. I think it’s time we thought about some lunch.” Catrin’s heart sank at the mention of food. Then she thought of her mother sitting down to a plate of beans in the company of nuns and lunatics and she brightened up and followed Ella into the castle.

C
atrin woke earlier than usual, took
Recipes for Cherubs
from its hiding place under her bed and opened it eagerly. Her spirits lifted as soon as she looked at the painting of Maria Paparella smiling broadly and holding out the loaf of
focaccia
as though it were a gift. She wondered if Maria baked the bread for the other people whose portraits were in the book.

Had Luca Roselli, the handsome boy with the dark curly hair and small scar on his cheek, sat down to eat this bread with the little dwarf, the silken-haired, green-eyed Bindo? Had the man with the funny name, Piero di Bardi, broken bread with Ismelda Bisotti, the girl with the infectious grin and sparkling eyes? Were they all friends, who had sat together laughing loudly as they shared a meal?

There were other paintings of people who looked like a load of old misery-guts, not the sort of people who would enjoy a good laugh.

There was the frosty-looking widow Zanelli, who reminded Catrin of Sister Lucy because they both looked as if they had a bad smell under their noses. There were two mealy-mouthed little girls, twins by the look of them, pretty as pictures with porcelain skin and their hair in ringlets. When you looked closely, though, you could see that they had hard eyes and mouths which would flit from a pout to a sulk in an instant. She didn’t like the snooty look of Signor Bisotti, who had a mouthful of bad teeth and shifty eyes. The scariest of them all was the hawklike priest, Father Rimaldi, who glared out from the page, a murderous glint in his narrow eyes. He wouldn’t be a barrel of laughs, that was for sure.

She wondered if Santa Rosa was a real place and whether all these people had been real people, too, or figments of the artist’s imagination. If they were real they would have gone to mass in the ugly old church, dipped their hands in the cool water of the cherub fountain or hurried across the cobbled piazza to pay their respects to the tiny saint in its niche on the convent wall.

She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what sort of lives they’d lived, whether they had been happy, rich, poor or sad. What had become of them all? They would all be long dead by now, but someone had wanted their memory to live on because they’d taken the trouble to preserve their faces in this peculiar book.

She replaced it under the bed, thought about washing, thought better of it, dressed and hurried out of the castle and across to the Café Romana to see Tony Agosti.

In the castle kitchen Catrin laid out the ingredients for focaccia on the table: a block of salt, a packet of yeast, a bag of flour and a bottle of olive oil. She’d never heard of anyone cooking with olive oil before. The infirmary sister at school doled it out as a medicine for earache, wedged in tight with a squeaky dab of cotton wool.

She’d blushed when Tony handed her the bottle of virgin olive oil. ‘Virgin’ was a rude word. Mary Donahue, who knew everything about everything, said her sister Bridget wasn’t a virgin and so no decent man would ever marry her.

You could tell girls who weren’t virgins because they walked with their feet splayed at ten to two and had a brazen look about them.

‘Virgin’ was something to do with having babies, and that meant doing S.E.X. She didn’t know much about that, either, except it was dirty and painful and made you get F.A.T.

Mary Donahue said that to do S.E.X. women had to buy pretty nightdresses and they had to lift them up for the men to have a good gander at what they’d got and then the man shook a packet of seeds that landed in the woman’s belly button and made a baby that came out of her B.U.M. – 
yuk
! It was all too horrible and made her feel sick to think about it.

She pushed the unpleasant thoughts from her mind and began to read the instructions for making the bread, and then set to work excitedly.

She mixed the yeast and the water, added the flour and salt, and mixed them all together. She began to knead the dough, softly at first, pushing her knuckles down tentatively into the mixture…

She imagined the mound of dough was her mother’s face, and bubbles of anger began to fizz in her belly. Small bubbles at first, growing bigger, filling her up until her ribs swelled and she felt as if she would burst, as if the air was being forced out of her body and she couldn’t breathe.

Katherine Isobel Grieve. Kizzy. Smiling at any man who passed.

She pinched the dough spitefully.

Kizzy bloody Grieve, who filed her nails and never looked at you when you spoke to her…

Slap.

Who made her lips into a bow and smoothed them with lipstick. Red lipstick. Thick and sticky as blood.

Pinch punch first of the month and no returns.

Pretty, pretty Kizzy twittering like a bird. Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly.

Slap slap slap.

Pretty Polly Kizzy who hadn’t even bothered to tell her about things.

Punch.

A smear of red on white cotton…

“Didn’t your mother tell you about the curse?” Sister Lucy had said with a scandalised voice.

No. No. No.

“Don’t go near boys or men. They’re only after one thing.”

And it wasn’t your sweets. Dolly mixtures. Jelly babies.

Slap pinch slap.

She squeezed, pinched, whacked and thumped the dough until her skinny arms ached and beads of sweat pinpricked her forehead.