Her jaws crashing over the crust, Darcy could only nod.
"True luxury's nothing to do with spending, you see. It's not about showing the world you've got the flashest car or whatever…"
Christian's car flashed into Darcy's mind. Was this a criticism? She shot a sharp, defensive look at Marco, but he was still staring into space, musing.
"Real luxury's about"—Marco inhaled dreamily—"salad leaves with the dew still on them, a day like today, a walk in the woods, the singing birds, the light on the new leaves, the smell of the earth. You know?"
Darcy nodded. The bread and tomato was finished. She had eaten every mouthful.
"Well, you're a really great eater," Marco said appreciatively. "A true gastronome."
"You mean a great, guzzling pig," Darcy wailed, thinking of the weighing scales.
He rushed to reassure her. "No. It was obvious you appreciated every mouthful. You've got a great palate."
Darcy giggled. She'd been admired for many things. But this was the first time her palate had got a mention.
She settled back in her chair and closed her eyes. "I expect you always wanted to be a chef," she remarked enviously. Someone else, like Emma, who had a vocation.
Marco looked at her. "Not at all," he said unexpectedly.
Darcy, eyes closed, listened carefully as he explained that, while he had always eaten it with relish, the ingenuity and tradition of the cooking of his region, of his family, had for years just passed him by. He had not noticed or been interested in how his mother and grandmother could coax rich flavour and sumptuousness out of a few scrag ends, how the fact that nothing was wasted became a culinary art form in itself. The risotto that had not been eaten at dinner was formed into small balls in the palm, stuffed with ragu and fried as a snack which, eaten after school, tasted even more delicious than the original dish.
All this, however, Marco had taken for granted. His main interest in life, after football, had been natural history. He loved nothing more than to pack up a satchel with a lump of cheese and some rough-crusted, homemade bread and set off into the rough, hot, stony, herb-scented summer hills with his binoculars and magnifying glass to spy on the insects and birdlife.
And then, as a boy of eight, he had gone to Paris on a trip with his mother and aunt. And after that, his attitude to food was never the same. And all because of a biscuit.
"A biscuit!" Darcy smiled, almost asleep now.
"Yes, a biscuit!"
And because of his mother too, Marco explained. She had been ill for some time and had been sent to visit a special doctor in Paris. Woven in with the experience of visiting the beautiful city had been the suspicion—for the facts of her cancer had not then been explained to Marco—that something was terribly wrong.
"Cancer," Darcy groaned. Her eyes shut harder, remembering Anna, her beloved grandmother.
"Yes. Cancer." His voice was softer now. "I knew something was wrong in Paris, but I didn't know what it was then."
Nor did he know later, he told her, during that terrible time when they had returned and his mother was ill upstairs at home, when doctors with concerned faces and hushed footsteps padded softly up and down to see her. And afterwards, when she went to the hospital and never came back, those few happy days in the domed, gilded, triumphal-arched and wide-boulevarded city would seem to Marco almost a dream.
"Oh, Marco!" Darcy whispered through the lump in her throat. With her eyes closed, she could see it all so clearly; the intense, curlyhaired little boy, his dark eyes wide and puzzled, understanding nothing but the one central fact, the one thing that mattered, that his mother wasn't there anymore.
He said nothing for a few minutes, looking away so she could not quite see his expression. But then he seemed to shake himself and began talking about Paris again. For the days there, he said, had been happy; his mother, despite the reason for her visit, and very possibly because of it, was determined to enjoy herself in the city where, Marco now learnt for the first time, she had spent part of her youth.
His grandmother, who had died long since, had had ambitions in fashion and had worked for a time at one of the Parisian couture houses, meeting his Italian grandfather in a café in the city. They had returned to his native Tuscany when his mother was quite small, Marco now learnt, but not without planting in her the sweetest of memories.
Marco's voice was lifting now, as he explained excitedly how his mother had taken him and her sister Mara, Marco's aunt, to the rue Royale, where stood, she smilingly explained, one of her favourite shops in the world. Laduree, the home of the most wonderful macaroons. Marco had stared entranced at the polished, plate-glass window and the tiny pastel-coloured cream-filled biscuits, which seemed to fill the space behind it in a riot of pale yellow, rose pink, soft orange, pale coffee brown, darker chocolate brown, and delicate green.
Darcy's eyes snapped open in shocked delight. She sat up abruptly and stared at him with shining eyes. "Laduree! My grandmother was obsessed with their macaroons!" The coincidence was astounding. She felt quite winded with astonishment. "She decorated her whole apartment in macaroon colours."
"Great idea!" Marco laughed. "I'd love to have seen it."
"Well, maybe you will," Darcy assured him. "It still looks like that. It's my flat now, and I haven't changed a thing." She tried not to remember that Niall had wanted to and that he thought the décor anything but great.
"I'll hold you to that," Marco grinned. "Next time I'm in London."
"Do! Now carry on your story," Darcy urged.
"You're sure?" Marco raised a heavy dark eyebrow. "I'm not boring you?"
She shook her head with more energy than she had realised she had.
He went on to describe how he had stared and stared at the shop. He had never seen anything like these graceful fairy biscuits with their stripe of filling the exact same colour as their shells. The equivalent at home, the strongly flavoured amaretti with their scattering of sugar, were either hard and crunchy or soft and dry. They were delicious but had none of the delicacy of this pretty pastel riot of patisserie.
The macaroons seemed to him to be the essence of femininity; small wonder that he connected them, immediately and forever, with his beloved mother. The rose-pink one, anyway, was the exact colour of his mother's blouse that day. The chocolate brown, meanwhile, was like her hair.
"She sounds lovely," Darcy sighed.
"She was. But whose mother isn't?"
Darcy did not reply.
He had, Marco explained, watched his mother through the shop's plate-glass window, smiling and gesticulating at the assistants. Then she had come out, obviously delighted, with a large beribboned box of the precious macaroons. Giggling naughtily, the three of them went straightaway to sit on a bench and eat the whole lot at one wonderful, greedy sitting.
Listening to his mother and aunt excitedly exclaiming, watching them close their eyes with rapture as they bit into the biscuits, Marco felt something surge within him that was nothing to do with the almighty hit of sugar rioting round his system. He was seeing, as if the first time, the intense pleasure that food can give.
"These," his mother had smiled at him, holding a pink biscuit, "are about the most difficult things that a chef can make. They're almost impossible to do properly."
"That's what my grandmother always said," Darcy told him, wondering again at the coincidence.
Marco went on. For his mother, a consummate cook, to say such a thing made an impression on the eight-year-old boy. He liked the biscuits, and he liked a challenge. He also wanted to help his mother. Might the macaroons make her better?
And so the obsession began. Marco, now sitting in the sun over thirty years later, smiled ruefully as he described his eight-year-old self to Darcy, sieving and mixing with fierce concentration and then piping, breath held, on to a baking sheet. He could see himself, as clearly as if it were yesterday, bent over, bottom aloft, peering into the oven to see if the shells were rising.
Try as he might to follow the recipes—as many different ones as he could get his hands on; none seemed quite right, somehow—his macaroons were always too flat, too soggy, or too stiff and dry. They cracked; they stuck; they failed to rise and merged with the ones next to them in a flat, hard pool. Never once did they appear round and perfect with the shiny, shell-like dome on the top and the yielding softness beneath.
Darcy listened, touched beyond measure. Her eyes were closed even harder than before, so he couldn't see the tears that welled there.
Marco's voice was warm with laughter now. His family, he told Darcy, were amazed at his efforts. He had never shown the smallest interest in cooking before. Why now, all of a sudden, try to make the most difficult thing of all? But Marco took no notice. He was a boy on a mission. A child with a challenge.
The battle with the biscuits had begun to seize him; he was determined to get the better of them. It became an epic struggle made possible only by the fact that the family had hens laying plenty of eggs for him to endlessly separate and weigh, and almonds, which grew in the area, were also readily available and cheap, as was marscapone for the filling. But for months all Marco's pocket money, earned from paper rounds and odd jobs, went on food colouring and icing sugar.
And so, as his friends kicked balls about the park, working out their team formation, he worked out how to beat the eggs to perfection, how to sieve the almonds to fairy dust, how to make sure no air remained in the piping bag so a steady stream of glossy gloop emerged on to the baking tray.
"Good for you!" Darcy smiled, risking opening her eyes at last. She was just in time to see the remembered triumph in Marco's fade, to be replaced by a terrible sadness.
"Good for me," he said in a whisper. "But not good for Mama." The boy Marco, Darcy heard, now learnt that macaroons, however perfect, do not save lives. His mother had died.
But what a legacy she had left him, Marco explained, his voice strengthening. Nothing less than his restaurant. From experimenting with macaroons, he had gone on to develop an interest in cooking generally, and ultimately a pungent, earthy, full-tasting branch of his national cuisine that could not have been further removed from the insubstantial pastel confections in Laduree's window. "I don't know what Mama would think," Marco confessed, grinning.
Darcy did not care now that her eyes were red and full of tears. "I'm sure she would be enormously proud," she told him through the rock in her throat.
"You think so?" He smiled gently, a beautiful smile, Darcy noticed. She felt herself held in his gaze.
"Come by the restaurant again some time. Come by tomorrow. I've got some great new cheese I'd like you to taste."
Interest blazed in her eyes. "Cheese. I love cheese…" She seemed to check herself. "I have to go," she said hurriedly.
Then she walked away, down the hill. He watched her slight figure retreating until it passed round the next bend.
For the next few hours, after she had gone, Marco tasted, advised, planned, even tolerated the good-natured ribbing of his brigade— but had no idea he was doing any of it. His cooking senses were all present and correct, but every other part of his mind was somewhere else altogether. He replayed, up close, Darcy's passionate face—such a pretty name too—the way she had closed her eyes when tasting, her brows contracting as if it almost hurt.
That skin: soft and pink-flushed, with its dusting of faint freckles, like strawberry-infused cream with a scattering of chocolate powder. Those coffee bean–dark eyes. That hair, as black as liquorice from a few paces away, but up close, tumbled from its ponytail, not just black but with threads of brown and even gold and orange. Hints of carrot, cinnamon, Parmesan, saffron, and, glinting here and there, sheet of gold leaf.
Was he in love? Already? But why not? He was an expert judge of whether a dish was right, knew in an instant whether it looked right, was composed of the right things, had been made properly, whether its heart was right. So why should not be the same of a woman?
Chapter Fifty
Ken had enjoyed a late breakfast on his terrace and was now taking a gentle constitutional round the environs of Rocolo's church. The building amazed him; the ancient, round-arched door opened to a flight of descending steps as wide as the building, leading down into the body of the church. There was a notice as you went in: a camera with a line through it. No photographs. A joy to obey.
All was cool, dark, and quiet; the rows of chairs—no pews here—stretched away towards the gloomy, gaudy altar. You got the sense, Ken thought, of something very old, of people having worshipped here for century upon century. People must have married here knowing that they would have their funeral services here, had their children baptized here knowing that they, in turn, would have their weddings here. The certainty of it all astounded him.
He emerged like a mole, blinking in the light and warmth, and a surge of deep joy for the beauty of the day assailed him, as perhaps the designers of the church had meant it to. The sensation was powerful enough to drive away everything else in Ken's mind, including his sighting of celebrities, the very people he was fleeing, in the very place he had imagined he was safe from them.