Dolci di Love (5 page)

Alessandro climbed into his Range Rover and turned up the unpaved
strada bianca
toward his villa. She hadn't liked it when he called her a damsel in distress, but that didn't mean she wasn't one. And regardless of her flustered state, she retained a sort of elegance he found very attractive. She had a long neck, he'd noticed, her collar bones ending in delicate points at the base of her throat, leaving the perfect space for a single diamond to sit on a tiny gold chain.

Her blue-and-white striped top did not show any extra flesh the way so many women chose to, just that tantalising bit of throat and her slim wrists, smooth hands, and long fingers.

She'd not been wearing a wedding ring, he had of course noticed that. But he had also noticed the trouble brewing behind her wide blue eyes. She was a damsel in distress, if ever there was one, even if she didn't know it herself.

Alessandro didn't normally go down that particular track. It was too soon for that. It was too soon to even be thinking too soon. It made him feel guilty, a little, but mostly, as usual, just downhearted.

Still, the mysterious blonde stayed with him as he threw open the doors of his villa, turned up his favourite Bellini aria, and put the coffeepot on for his late-morning espresso.

‘I'm not lost, just resting,' he said to himself, then to the cat, then to his housekeeper, the widow Benedicti, who bustled in the door not long after him and whose chipmunk cheeks looked even pinker and shinier than usual.

D
aniel sat outside a pleasantly crowded café just off the piazza around the corner from his hotel, emptying a carafe of wine as he smoked his fourth cigarette in a row.

In Italy, Daniel smoked.

In Italy, Daniel was a different person.

In Italy he didn't go jogging in the mornings or play golf at the weekends. He didn't wave away the sommelier at lunch, he didn't scrimp on the olive oil, he didn't pass on dessert. In Italy he didn't do any of the things he usually did. It was like being on vacation but not from his job because it was his job that brought him here. It was like being on vacation from his usual self.

He exhaled slowly and watched through the smoke as a tall blonde woman slid her way between two tables nearby. She sat down, pushed her sunglasses up on her head, and flicked him a smile as she met his gaze.

She looked like Lily. Not as slim or as beautiful but she had that same sort of casual chic that Lily had. It was one of the first things he'd noticed about her, the woman who would become his wife: the way she moved with an almost accidental grace, like satin sliding off a marble tabletop.

He'd known from the first glimpse of her that he wanted to marry her, yet he hadn't even believed that things like that really happened until then. He'd thought it was just something foolish that lovestruck couples said after the fact to make each other feel like it was meant to be.

But the truth was, the second he saw Lily across the restaurant Jordie dragged him to after some sweaty squash game all those years ago, he knew. He just knew. Well, he didn't know that he was going to marry her. But he knew that he wanted to. Just like that.
Kapow.

Turned out Lily was a friend of Jordie's date—they never did find out if it was a set up or not, but if either of them suspected it at the time, they hadn't shown it. Afterward, they never cared how they met, only that they did.

Daniel just watched her, mostly, that first night; the way she ate so delicately, spoke freely, laughed easily, and had no idea how many eyes in the room lingered on her delectable neck, her tiny ear lobes, her perfect mouth.

He'd been smitten. So smitten, in fact, that he realised all the other love or lust affairs he'd had before then had been ridiculous, hardly more than schoolboy flirtations in comparison.

Loving Lily had been an ache from the very beginning, an ache so deep he couldn't tell where it started and where it finished, what shape it was, an ache that consumed him till he won her heart and consumed him still.

He'd never feel like that about anyone else, ever, even if he lived to be a hundred, which he hoped he wouldn't because living to be forty-five he'd made so many mistakes he didn't know how to even begin fixing them.

Sometimes, when he was shaving, Daniel met his own eyes in the mirror and was astonished to see the same person he once was looking back at him. How could that be? He still appeared so clean
cut on the outside. So dependable, so ordinary, so the same as ever. But those tidy good looks, that impassive exterior belied the secrets and private shames that scurried around inside him, searching for places to hide.

It got so that he started shaving in the shower, no mirror, never mind the odd nick.

The blonde woman sitting alone at the table was chatting on her cell phone now. Actually, she had big earlobes, a shorter neck. She wasn't so much like Lily after all, Daniel thought, lighting another cigarette. She had her own style and she looked happy, this blonde woman. Uncomplicated. And happy.

If it had been Lily sitting at that table and someone else's husband smoking cigarettes and looking at her, he doubted
happy
would have been the word that sprang to mind. He'd admire the beauty, this other husband, he may even find himself briefly enamoured. But he'd quickly sense the darkness lurking behind that exquisite face and would find his eyes roving to a less thorny rose, someone not as good to look at, perhaps, but with a twinkle in her eye.

Lily's sadness had stolen her twinkle. The blonde sitting two tables away from him still had hers.

Daniel poured himself another glass of wine. The thought of Lily's sadness was something he did not want to further contemplate. He'd contemplated it enough already, knew that there was little if anything he could do to alleviate it. In New York he was the useless husband of an unhappy wife, but here he didn't have to be, or at least he didn't have to see the unhappiness. This too was a sort of vacation. Not that he begrudged his wife her grief, her sorrow. It was his too, after all. To begin with, they shared it, the same way they shared all the good things in life, the greatness, the laughter.

But Lily's sadness had gradually overtaken everything else about her. He wondered, often, when the tipping point had been. He knew
when it had started, and when it had gotten worse, but he couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when it consumed her completely.

He was disappointed about the first miscarriage, of course, but not overwhelmingly so, fatherhood being an island he knew he wanted to visit, but wasn't sure he wanted to stay on.

Every failed attempt after that hurt him more and more, but that was nothing compared to what it did to Lily. Each tragedy seemed to chip away at her until she was like a statue remodelled over the centuries: the same piece of stone that had always stood there but an entirely different image. Smaller. Sharper. It wasn't as though she cried all the time, or became suicidal, or resorted to hysterics, although he thought he might have preferred that, ill-equipped as he was to deal with that sort of behavior. Instead, she just retreated, the lights went off, and it took him too long to realise he was sitting in the dark. Alone.

By then, he had screwed up too badly to do anything much about it.

His own cell phone rang then and when he looked at who was calling, his heart sank. Still, he picked it up and waited for the voice on the other end to start where she had left off half an hour ago.

‘I told you, it's just a few days,' he said, tiredly, when he finally got a word in. ‘I know, and I'm sorry, but I'll figure something out. I promise. I just need a bit of time.'

He listened for a while longer, then gently took the phone from his ear, laid it on his thigh, and turned it off.

A waiter approached, a man who looked old enough to be Daniel's father and who wore a similar look of something bordering on contempt but not quite.

He ordered another litre of wine and slid his old self into his back pocket along with his phone. Then the blonde woman asked if she could join him.

She wasn't Lily, but she was close.

T
he widow Benedicti was usually so particular about her cleaning that spiders quivered in their webs merely at the sound of her rusty Renault rattling up Alessandro's drive.

On this particular occasion, however, the spiders were safe to stay where they were, eating flies and looking creepy, because cleaning was the last thing on her mind.

She whizzed around the villa halfheartedly dislodging dirt from one spot to another and monitoring her employer's whereabouts should she get the chance to use his phone.

The widow Benedicti loved Alessandro. All the widows did. All the women of Montevedova did, as it happened. He was kind, handsome, and rich.

More important than that, even, he was also a man known to lift an elderly woman over a puddle or a child out of a high chair, or to stop and help attach a problematic exhaust pipe to a worn-down clunker of a car.

He was a good and decent man, in other words. Plus, his heart had been broken.

Various members of the League had put him forward as a likely candidate for their attention several times over the past couple of
years, but for one reason or another the right woman had never turned up to be helped into his arms.

Until now. The widow Benedicti had just seen Alessandro with her very own eyes stopped on the side of the road talking to a glamorous blonde who looked just like Grace Kelly in
Rear Window.

The widow Benedicti loved Grace Kelly in
Rear Window
.

Unfortunately, she had been playing Patience on her cell phone during the night so when she went to report this all-important sighting of a romantic possibility for one of their favourite possibilities to Widow Ciacci, its battery was as flat as a frittata. As soon as she was able, she got on Alessandro's landline and alerted the widow Ciacci to the fact that it seemed like Alessandro's time had finally come.

She gave a quick description of the glamorous blonde but was then startled by Alessandro coming into the kitchen and asking why his pillowcases had been turned inside out, not laundered, so she had to hang up.

‘You young things expect everything to be just so,' she grumbled as she hid her embarrassment at being caught doing such a sloppy job. ‘In my day we didn't even have pillowcases. We didn't even have pillows. We didn't have a bed. Just straw.'

‘I'm sorry for your hardship,' Alessandro said with real sympathy. ‘And if that's still the situation, I would very happily buy you a new bed and all the linen you require, but in the meantime, I do indeed like my pillowcases to be just so.'

‘T
his hotel you ask for is closed down for renovations,' a wrinkled old woman in a voluminous black smock told Lily when she asked at the tourist office for directions.

‘But I only booked it yesterday,' Lily disputed.

‘Yes, it close suddenly for very urgent repair,' the old woman said.

‘Hotel Prato is closed?' the pretty young girl also working in the office interrupted. ‘I thought—'

‘I take care of this!' the old woman snapped. ‘Shoo!' She turned to Lily. ‘Is no problem. You have booking now at only other hotel in Montevedova. Hotel Adesso. Very nice.'

‘Is it also four star?' Lily wanted to know.

‘Is no star. But Hotel Prato also is no star, just say so on Internet. Hotel Adesso very nice.'

Lily considered arguing, but this woman did not look the type to meddle with. ‘Well, is it far?' she asked instead.

‘Yes,' the old woman said. ‘And road is steep.' She peered over the counter at Lily's kitten heels and out through the doors of the office to the pouring rain. ‘And is very wet.'

Indeed, by the time Lily got to the medieval arched gate at the entrance of the old town, about fifty yards behind the tourist office, she was already saturated.

She stopped briefly, sheltered by the town's ancient portal. Montevedova as far as she could see consisted of a single stupidly steep curving cobbled lane, the Via del Corso. Crooked rows of two-or three-storey buildings loomed in from either side, their shuttered windows like inquisitive eyes peering down at those who scuttled below.

On a nice day, it might have had some charm, but not today. Today it was, just as the old woman said, steep and wet.

Lily stepped back out into the rain, her wheeled suitcase skittering over the slippery cobbles and quickly developing something of a noisy limp, drawing extra attention.

Two young men sitting in the open window of a busy café stopped talking and stared as she passed; a group of workmen huddled behind the plastic sheeting covering a scaffolded church front laughed as one of them blew smoke rings in her direction; an old woman eyed her carefully from the doorway of a tiny grocery store as she fiddled with a cell phone in her apron pocket.

Still it poured. Still Lily climbed. Finally, the lane flattened out a little and forked—albeit even more steeply—in opposite directions. At the T of this junction, on the flat bit, was an open foyer beneath a grander building. Gratefully, Lily again sought respite from the rain.

She heaved her bag up on to the raised parapet and with frozen fingers pulled off Rose's pashmina, which she had wrapped around her head, then unscrunched her soggy map. It looked as though she had just as far to go again to make it to her hotel and the moment she realised this, the rain started to fall even harder. Water flowed from either side of the Corso into the middle and gushed down the hill like a river.

A gangly black dog joined her on her dry parapet, shaking itself and spraying her from head to foot before shooting her a coy look and mooching off. That women her age should dream of coming to
places like this for long lunches, golden vistas, and the thrill of hot sex with young, well-built men seemed preposterous.

Suddenly though, above the solid
plink-plink
of the rain, she realised that someone nearby was playing the violin. It was a gentle piece not at all in keeping with the torrid weather and she strained to hear more. The noisy downpour was actually providing a sort of rhythmic timpani, the overall effect being quite orchestral. The violin swelled up and Lily closed her eyes. The long lunches and golden vistas suddenly seemed a little more likely. But this brief flirtation with the romance of Tuscany was crushed almost immediately by the sound of a howling baby.

Lily had heard somewhere that mothers had a special radar allowing them to pick out their own baby's cries from a sea of similar cries, hormones jumping for joy as they did. Obviously, she had no experience of this, but what she knew to be absolutely true was that women who would never be mothers were sensitive to babies crying too, the difference being that women who would never be mothers picked up the sound of every child. And their hormones didn't jump for joy, they ran around like chickens with their heads cut off.

In the same way a certain Eagles song could take Lily back to drinking beer on Fire Island with Rose one sultry August when they were teenagers, down to feeling the sunburn on her neck and the sand beneath her toes, the sound of a baby crying could plummet her into the depths of her childlessness.

She seemed to feel it right down in her empty womb, where some useless attachment tightened and pulled at her insides. She felt it then as she stood listening to the violin music dancing the light fantastic to the drumbeat of the fat raindrops hitting the Via del Corso.

This particular crying infant was beneath an enormous red umbrella moving up the middle of the steep lane toward the
parapet. Water sprayed out beneath the wheels of an ancient pram and as it got closer she saw the umbrella was attached to its handle so that the even more ancient man pushing it could use both hands to do so. And he needed both. Montevedova and baby carriages were not an ideal combination in any weather.

Lily willed the old man to keep pushing the crying baby up one of the steep lanes to either side of her, but he didn't, instead approaching her sanctuary and battling unsuccessfully to get the pram over the lip of the parapet and out of the rain. She knew she should go and help as he pushed and pulled, releasing what sounded to her, in any language, like a string of curses as he struggled, but she was frozen to her spot.

The crying got louder and the old man stopped his swearing and instead leaned in toward the baby and made soothing noises.

Lily turned away, dry eyes prickling, but turned back when she heard the sound of a nearby door slamming. A young man, no more than twenty or so, appeared in the entrance of a shop diagonally across from them. He shot Lily a quick, appreciative look, scrunched his face up into the rain, then hunched his shoulders and dashed across the lane.

He babbled a greeting to the older man and together they hoisted the pram into the dry recess. The old man shook himself off while the younger man reached in and fetched out the child.

It occurred to Lily at that point that the baby he was pulling out into the cool wet air could possibly be Daniel's but the infant who emerged was a girl: a fact heralded by the pink ribbon tied around her otherwise unisex fat bald head. Upon being picked up, the baby girl roared in fury, her chubby thighs kicking angrily beneath a frilly white dress. She threw her head furiously from side to side, face crumpled like a big red raisin, and howled. But the young man had only to jiggle her in the air a handful of times, make a few cooing noises, and the wailing stopped, the plump fists that had
been banging the air suddenly stretched happily out to her sides. Within moments she was gurgling and laughing as he lifted her up and down and spoke to her in a singsong voice.

Lily couldn't look away. If she did, she thought, she would crumble into a mountain of wet pebbles and be swept down the drain with the water from the torrential downpour. Why had she been denied one of these precious creatures? What had she done wrong? Where was the justice?

The two men shared a joke and the younger planted a kiss on the baby's forehead, which made her squeal—this time with delight.

He had turned her despair into joy so effortlessly. She wondered if he knew what a gift that was.

Daniel, on the other hand, had always been awkward with other people's children. He held them at funny angles and didn't know what to do or say. It was strange, really, because he'd always insisted he wanted children as much as she did and she'd assumed he'd be different with their own, but in the six days and seventeen hours they'd had Baby Grace—she allowed herself to just think that precious name—he'd still seemed not reluctant, exactly, not even uncertain. Overawed, perhaps. She wondered what her husband was like with his Italian children, if he'd ever got the hang of it, if it now came naturally to him, this thing she herself had been given less than a week to display a flair for.

She closed her mind to the subject, the thoughts she didn't want to have stiffening her already-brittle bones.

Across the parapet, the baby was being put back in her pram, the umbrella was reattached, and after the young man helped lift the carriage back onto the lane, her perilous journey continued farther up the hill in the opposite direction to which Lily's hotel was marked on her map.

The younger man looked after them for a while, peeking out from underneath the shelter, then moved his gaze to Lily.

‘
Buongiorno, signora!
' he called, nodding in the direction of the rain. ‘
Piove a catinelle,
no?'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I don't speak Italian.'

‘Ah, sorry.
Turista?
'

‘No,' said Lily. ‘I mean, yes.
Sí. Turista
.' The violin music was gone. She was cold, desperate for a shower and dry clothes. The rain wasn't going away. She would have to brave it to get to her hotel. She started collecting her things.

‘Alberto,' the young man said, walking toward her, holding out his hand for her to shake. ‘You would like to come for some wine at my shop, perhaps?'

He had short, spiky, dark hair, Alberto, and a sort of boyish charm that had its appeal, as did the glass of wine, but the tugging at her insides that had arrived with the baby's cries tautened further within her. She wanted to be alone, somewhere dark and quiet.

‘Maybe some other time.' She smiled politely.

‘Are you sure? This rain look like to stay for some time…I am just sitting down to my lunch. I have bread and prosciutto and tomatoes from my grandmother's garden—she bring them to me just now and said I should share them with the first pretty blonde woman I see, then I look out the window and here you are. Seems like fate, no?'

‘Not to me, it doesn't,' Lily said more forcefully than she meant to. ‘I'm sorry, but I'm tired and would just like to get to my hotel.'

Alberto held up his hands.

‘OK, OK,' he said, but his smile was still warm. ‘I understand. No problem. Welcome to Montevedova anyway, no?'

‘
Sí
.' She smiled. ‘Thank you.'

‘
Ciao, ciao
,' he said, and, collar up, he took off.

By the time Lily reached the torn and tattered canopy of the Hotel Adesso she had pulled a calf muscle, wrenched her
shoulder, and decided that whatever small, dry luxuries no-star accommodation could offer, she would gratefully accept.

She stopped under the canopy, dripping, and rubbed her palm where the handle of her bag had cut off the circulation just as a foul stench hit her square in the face.

Every door in the hotel opened and a rumble of mutual disgust and anger billowed through the three-storey building, ending with a shriek as a uniformed housemaid came running down the hallway, hand over her nose.

‘What's going on?' Lily asked, as the maid gulped for fresh air and rubbed her stomach, grimacing.

‘The drains,' she said. ‘There is big problem.'

‘With all of them?'

‘They are flowing over. In the bathroom.'

‘But I'm supposed to stay here!'

‘I think not today,' the housemaid said. ‘Try Hotel Prato. Is four stars.'

The lobby at the end of the hallway was filling with angry guests demanding information from the lone, harried receptionist, and Lily's dream of no-star refuge drained away like nothing else was apparently managing.

‘I can't believe this,' she said. ‘Hotel Prato is closed for renovations. I don't suppose you know of anywhere else?'

‘Hotel Prato closed? Are you—' But the rest of the housemaid's response was swallowed by an almighty holler coming from a diminutive grey-haired woman who appeared in the lobby and continued to make an enthusiastically vocal fuss. ‘
Scusi
,' the housemaid said, then covered her face with a handkerchief and dashed back down the hall.

The raindrops bounced furiously off the cobbles in front of her as Lily contemplated the Corso once again. But the stench was not getting any sweeter, the lobby any emptier. She lurched back out
into the lane, body pitched against the weather, and headed uphill, but she had gone barely a dozen steps when she came to a tiny ivy-covered building on the opposite side with a
FOR RENT
sign written in wobbly letters in its darkened window.

Without stopping to think further, Lily pitched in the door, her bag listing sideways as she hauled it in behind her, her purse slipping from her grasp and sliding across the floor, a large unseemly looking puddle forming beneath her.

The space was cozily dark, but she didn't need to see much to figure out it was no ordinary house. It was some sort of shop, she thought, as her eyes adjusted. A bakeshop. It was tiny, barely larger than her beloved closet at home, but infinitely better-smelling. Facing her was an
L
-shaped marble counter set out galley-style from the walls. On this counter sat a dozen or so enormous fluted glass bowls, some on raised plinths so they sat at different heights, in a palette of dark reds and blues and greens. The way the scant light reflected through the dusty air—bouncing off a chandelier, of all things, then striking the bowls and shimmering around the outside of the room—gave Lily the impression of being in the middle of a stained-glass window.

A scent she couldn't quite place seemed to leach out of the walls. At first she thought it was cinnamon, then vanilla, then something more floral, like lavender. It was oddly comforting, like being wrapped in a satin-lined coat. Indeed, she could no longer hear the rain beating down, and with the heat in the room and the spiciness in the air, her bones loosened, her blood warmed, her colour started to return.