Dolci di Love (12 page)

L
ily woke up at dawn with the Fiat emblem from the middle of the steering wheel engraved on to her cheek and a crick in her neck no osteopath in Christendom would be able to fix without removing her head from her shoulders, one of which was frozen in a hunch up by her ear.

Her bladder was so full it hurt. The inside of her mouth felt like a tenement doormat that had never been shaken, let alone cleaned. Even her hair hurt.

These were her current physical problems, but they were not, in the cold light of day, her biggest.

That honour would go to the fact she had drunk so much she had argued with a custard dessert and started a relationship with her GPS.

She felt so ashamed she could not imagine feeling any more so, until she heard the
rat-a-tat-tat
of someone knocking on her window and looked up to see with abject horror that it was once more Alessandro, the linen-shirted Italian of whenever it was she had arrived in horrible, hideous, hateful Tuscany.

Instinctively she ripped Dermott's power source out of the dash to keep him quiet and at least managed to get the window down without incident.

‘So, you never did find Montevedova,' Alessandro said with a smile. ‘Perhaps you should have followed me after all.'

Lily opened her mouth to speak but her tongue was stuck to the roof of it.

‘Perhaps I can be of some assistance now?' Alessandro offered.

Her tongue stayed where it was as her brain tried to shuffle her options.

She could once more assert her independence and drive off, leaving Alessandro in a cloud of exhaust. He was a stranger, after all, and she had her dignity to consider.

A small but boisterous burp escaped her.

She closed her eyes and felt the world spin.

Her dignity, she had to admit, was currently beyond consideration.

She had no plan, a bird's nest for a hairdo, and her formerly cool exterior was now decidedly hot and sticky. She gave up. This handsome Italian was offering assistance and the easiest thing to do was accept it.

She opened her eyes again and looked into his, seeing this time what that intensity was she'd had trouble putting her finger on when she first met him. Sadness. Buried deep under the smooth surface of his olive skin, but as obvious to her at that moment as if it were a sheepskin coat.

‘I did find it, as it happens, Montevedova that is,' she croaked, managing a woeful smile. ‘But I'm afraid I seem to have lost it again. A case of too much vino and not enough pecorino, I fear.'

‘Aha, well then, Alessandro D'Agnello, at your service,' Alessandro said again, with a deferential nod of his head.

‘Lily, Lillian, in need of it,' Lily said and held her hand through the window for him to shake. At some point in the night she had tried to take off her bra underneath her long-sleeved T-shirt, and it was poking out of her sleeve, bunched at her wrist.

They both looked at it, she with horror, he with amusement.

But Alessandro was nothing if not impeccably mannered.

‘We're not far from my villa,' he said, shifting his eyes to hers and keeping them there. ‘Would you care to join me for coffee? I brew an excellent cup and I'm in need of one. I've been on something of a goose chase this morning.'

‘A wild goose chase,' Lily suggested.

‘A strange goose anyway,' Alessandro agreed. ‘I had a call very early this morning to meet a courier driver, I think she said, at an address in this street, but there's no one here. No one but you,' he said, and smiled at her.

She smiled back, wanly.

‘So, can I convince you to join me for an early morning espresso on your way back to Montevedova?'

‘Actually, yes, you can,' she said. ‘That would be lovely.'

‘Excellent,' said Alessandro. ‘Just follow me. And if you get lost, pull over and I will find you again. I seem to have a knack for it.'

‘Don't you say a word,' Lily said to Dermott as she pulled out into the road behind the black Range Rover. ‘Not a word.'

Back nearer to Montevedova, Alessandro's villa sat nestled into a copse of trees at the end of a white stone-chip driveway.

‘I like your place,' Lily told him when she extracted herself from the car. ‘Been here long?'

‘About five hundred and seventy-six years,' Alessandro answered, guiding her toward the front door. ‘The house that is, not me. It belonged to my father's family but was lost some time in the nineteenth century, and I bought it back a few years ago and have been restoring it.'

‘It was lost?' Lily asked as they made their way into the grand entrance, then through to a surprisingly welcoming kitchen at the rear. It had state-of-the-art appliances glistening wherever she looked, yet the countertops were full of bowls of fruit, vegetables,
and herbs, and there was a tart of some sort on a stand, freshly dusted with confectioner's sugar. It was a space that looked well-used and much appreciated.

‘Yes, my great-great-great-grandfather got in a fight with a villainous neighbour over a horse,' Alessandro answered her, ‘and in the ensuing vendetta, lost his house, two of his daughters, and, eventually, his mind.'

Lily laughed. Villainous? Now that was a word she didn't hear very often. Her laughter petered out, however, when she saw the look on Alessandro's face.

‘I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude. It just sounds so dramatic—villains, vendettas, madness. Like a Shakespearean play. No disrespect to your ancestors.'

Alessandro raised an eyebrow and nodded, but remained silent as he busied himself in the kitchen, so Lily asked if she could look around and walked through the dining area into a sunny living room. This whole rear section of the house faced out on to an enormous swimming pool surrounded by yew trees in oversize terracotta pots. Behind it, the undulating grounds stretched for miles, populated haphazardly with gnarled stands of ancient, arthritic-looking olive trees.

It was yet another preposterously beautiful view.

‘Actually, I think it more likely that Puccini would write an opera about it, my family history,' Alessandro said, coming up behind her, his good humour restored. ‘A tragedy, I think, for that's what it is.'

‘But you have the house back again now and that was all so long ago. Shouldn't the family feud be laid to rest?'

‘You have not been in Italy long,' he said, smiling, ‘so you may not be aware that we treasure our past here much more than you Americans—and with it our feuds and tragedies. We do not find it as easy as you do to extricate them from the present, for some reason. It is difficult.'

She was about to challenge him, but then she thought of Rose, her only sister, whom she adored but had been feuding with for what felt like hundreds of years.

She looked across at Alessandro as he gazed out across his property and it struck her again, his deep, silent sadness. She wondered what other tragedies from his past he was treasuring and thought it an odd concept, that these rivalries would be cherished, but hadn't the heart to argue any further. She was on the back foot, after all, in his house, clearly the worse for wear and desperate for coffee.

‘Espresso?' he suggested, right on queue. ‘Machiatto?'

‘Is a machiatto the small one with just a splash of milk?'

‘It is, yes.'

‘Then I will have one of those, thank you,' she said, following him back to the kitchen. ‘I don't suppose you have soy milk?'

‘I don't suppose anyone has soy milk,' Alessandro agreed. ‘We're surrounded by cows.'

‘Yes, but are they organic? I get the impression organic has yet to take off over here.'

‘We don't have the modern obsession with it, that's true,' Alessandro said. ‘But then in Italy we don't eat as much nonorganic food, if that's the right word, in the first place. The milk I have in my refrigerator, for example, comes from cows that live two valleys away from here. You can see them from the corner of the pool by the loggia. I grow my own vegetables, some fruit, get nuts sent up from a friend in Puglia, and have oil made from my own olives. Signora Benedicti, my housekeeper, makes my bread from flour milled near Lucca and I get my meat or chicken from the butcher in San Quirico where my family has been going for hundreds of years, in good times and bad. I know where everything I eat comes from, and to me, this is better than organic, and this is how we have always done it in Italy. True,
that's changing, but it is how it has always been done up until now.'

‘Well, I come from a city of more than one-and-a-half million people covering an area about the size of your farm,' Lily said, ‘so you'll have to forgive me if I don't grow my own olives. I'm lucky there's room to stand up.'

‘You live in Manhattan?'

She nodded.

‘I've been there. Yes, New York, a magnificent city. Expensive, for me anyway, but still, magnificent. So you would like a machiatto with ordinary fresh cow's milk?'

She nodded again.

‘And you must have a slice of this tart,' he said, cutting a large wedge out of the pie on the counter. It had a pastry base and a berry jam in the middle, just the sort of thing in which Lily had absolutely no interest.

‘Not for me, thank you,' she said, holding up her hand, but Alessandro would not take no for an answer.

‘Signora Benedicti is famous for her
crostata di more
,' he insisted. ‘I ask her to make it all the time but usually she ignores me. Today, though, here it is!'

He pushed a slice of the dark, toffee-smelling pie across the breakfast counter to Lily and to her surprise, her mouth watered at the sight of it.

‘I'm sorry but I don't really do desserts,' she said.

‘But it's breakfast!'

‘Well, I especially don't do desserts for breakfast'

‘Lily, if you are going to stay in Italy, you need to appreciate that we eat desserts all day long.'

‘Well, I can appreciate that without eating it,' she laughed.

‘But why wouldn't you?' Alessandro was genuinely perplexed. ‘Signora Benedicti has made it, for once, and there it is right in
front of you. Half the population of Montevedova would give their right eye to be in your situation.'

‘All right, all right.' Lily could see he was not going to let it lie, so she carved off the end of her piece of tart with a fork and plopped it in her mouth. The sweet blackberry jam combined with the tart fresh berries piled on top of it exploded on her tongue.

‘Mmmm, delicious,' she said, then helped herself to another mouthful.

Alessandro laughed.

‘You are not the first person to find Signora Benedicti's
crostata di more
irresistible,' he said.

‘Irresistible? It's practically addictive. Maybe she laces it with cocaine,' Lily joked.

‘Well, she's just your average little old Italian widow,' Alessandro shrugged, ‘so I would be surprised, but you never know.'

Lily watched Alessandro polish off the rest of his slice of tart, then another one, and finally what remained of hers. It was obvious how he acquired his girth, but he held himself well, regardless of the extra pounds, she thought, as he covered the remainder of the tart in layer upon layer of plastic wrap to keep himself, he told her, from finishing the whole thing off before lunchtime.

It seemed a strangely intimate thing to do, watch a man tidy his own kitchen.

‘You live here alone?' she asked.

‘Since my wife died,' he answered, and she could see the tension hike up his shoulders as he spoke.

‘I'm sorry, Alessandro, I don't mean to pry.'

‘You do not pry. It is just…difficult.'

So here, then, was the root of his sadness. It was raw; no wonder he still wore it on the surface. Lily smoothly excused herself to freshen up and restore her bra to its rightful position then, when she came back, asked to see the rest of his property.

Outside in the vegetable garden she developed a thumping headache but still did a good job of feigning interest in how he got his tomatoes to grow so well and his beans so straight. He grew apples too, he told her, and grapes, from which he had a neighbour make his own wine, and there were the olives of course, much better than the Spanish and far superior to the even worse Greek ones, which according to him made oil that tasted like aviation fuel.

Inside his barn though, her hangover was momentarily chased away when he pulled open the doors and there, like a huge whale carcass, spanning almost the length of the building, sat a gondola.

It was unfinished, but even someone who has never been to Venice knows a gondola when she sees one. And even someone who has never been to Venice knows that the reason gondolas are so popular there is that there is a lot of water and no roads.

Tuscany, on the other hand, had no water and a lot of roads. Steep ones. Even if the whole place flooded, a gondola would be of absolutely no use whatsoever. None.

‘Alessandro, it's…well, it's…'

‘Incredible, no? I am building it from scratch in the traditional style, not that there is much of a tradition anymore; gondola building is a dying art, like just about everything else.'

He picked up a hand planer and started smoothing the sides of the incomplete vessel. The sun was streaming in through the open barn doors, casting a golden light on the boat and Alessandro, whose handsome brow was furrowed in concentration.

Lily looked out across the miles and miles of lush dry land, and then back at Alessandro, working carefully on his boat.

‘I know I don't have the best navigational skills in the world,' she said, ‘but aren't we a long way from Venice?'

He stopped, rested his arm on the side of the boat, wiped his forehead.

‘No one cares for tradition anymore,' he said, and he seemed sad about that too. ‘No one cares that the gondola builders are dying and no one is replacing them and one day there will be no more traditional gondolas.'