Authors: Roberta Latow
The tears were fast flowing from her eyes now, he caressed her hair and kissed her again and told her, ‘I love you, Eliza. All the feelings I have ever had in my life were to make me ready for you, they begin and end with you. Loving you is like nothing else I have ever known. All the women I have had in my life were for my own selfish needs except for you. For you, right from when we were children, it was an unselfish love that came from the heart. What I have always felt for you was a grown-up passion and love, absolute and thrilling. Leave you at the altar? I have waited several lifetimes for you to come back to me, to love me as I have always loved you. These last years with you by my side have been the happiest of my life. There has
not been a morning when I have awakened you with a kiss that I have not asked myself: “Today, will it be today that we know we are ready to make that final vow?” Leave you at the altar? I would sooner die.’
They were married five days later in the lovely hill town of Barga, at the very top of the town in its celebrated cathedral. The view from the cathedral terrace with its panoramic vista of roof tops and the surrounding hills clad in bright green velvet and bare mountains raked with white marble seemed to Eliza and Vittorio to epitomise the Tuscany they were born in and loved beyond measure. That was why they had chosen to be married there.
The blond stone exterior of the cathedral with its square façade discreetly decorated with a shallow pattern of charming reliefs and two leering lions on the side of the campanile that was incorporated into the church, glistened with an aura of ancient Tuscany under the bright morning sun on the day they were married. Eliza and Vittorio, wanting to keep their wedding a happy and very personal affair, had been extraordinarily casual about announcing it. But like all happy and surprising events, word spread like wildfire. When they had arrived together in one of the family’s vintage Rolls-Royces driven by Pietro Portinari whom Eliza had chosen to give her away, the terrace was filled with a varied group of friends and associates they had never expected to see.
Eliza actually found it overwhelming. She’d never dreamed that people would want to be there to see them wed. Invitations, mostly by telephone, had been issued to say that Eliza and Vittorio would be having open
house, and for people to spread the word that everyone was welcome to come that day for a celebration at the villa, but they had mentioned to only a few the place and the time of the wedding. Most of the five days between their decision to marry and the actual day of the ceremony had been spent organising their wedding feast: long trestle tables, chairs, musicians and paper lanterns had to be procured. Room had not been a problem, it was to be held in the gardens, the weather posing no threat to their plans, and the Villa Montecatini staff were masters at conducting open-ended parties and casual arrangements.
The wedding of the farmer and the magistrate was a far greater event, and to many a curiosity, than either the bridegroom or the bride had imagined it would be. So many people, for so many years in the background of their lives, wanted to be in on the celebration and to wish them well. It was a measure of respect they had never expected. After the initial shock of seeing the crowd on the terrace in front of the cathedral, an even greater enthusiasm and gratitude than they were already feeling for their wedding day took over and they rose to the grand occasion that friends and even strangers made out of it.
All of Vittorio’s family was there, including his two sons; most of Eliza’s Italian branch of the family who had played with her and Vittorio when they were children appeared, but none of her children or her sisters. They had been told about the event but Eliza had said that it was going to be a small, very private affair, to be celebrated at a later date each time any of them arrived for a visit to the villa.
Eliza and Vittorio married in grand style in the
cathedral with its red marble pillars, each one supported by a carved dwarf and a pairs of lions grinning over a conquered dragon, its polychrome wood statue of St Christopher and the glorious oval window. They took their vows among the friends, acquaintances, and many strangers who admired them for conquering all for love, in an ancient church heavily scented with incense. A choir sang Gregorian chants. Eliza, dressed in a clinging 1920s cream-coloured silk crêpe-de-chine dress with a two-foot-long train, and wearing a very sheer veil, just long enough to cover her eyes, and embroidered with a fine almost invisible lace pattern that covered her hair, which had been dressed high on her head with twists to form a crown, walked to the altar on the arm of Pietro Portinari, feeling in her heart like the young girl in love with Vittorio she had always been.
Everything except the stockings that she wore had been found packed away in trunks and cupboards in the villa. She wore her grandmother’s wedding dress, her mother’s veil, Vittorio wed her with a diamond band that her great-grandfather had once given her great-grandmother. Even her shoes, cream-coloured satin embroidered with rose buds, had belonged to a great-aunt. She was wed in the sight of her ancestors and when she walked away from the altar as Vittorio Carducci’s wife, she sensed their approval. They could rest secure in her happiness and the knowledge that the villa was safe and in the family for many generations to come. She was carrying one more secret: a love child.
It was several weeks after Eliza married Vittorio that Amanda Dix saw her again. She was sitting alone in the piazza of the same village that had the Wednesday market, drinking a glass of wine. The sun was playing on her blonde hair and she looked incredibly pretty and at ease with the world. The two women greeted one other and Eliza asked Amanda to join her. They talked about the weather, and how limited the shopping was in the village, and Eliza confessed she bought very little in the shops here or anywhere because they were self-sufficient by way of the farm, even curing their own meat. The two women enjoyed themselves and Amanda suggested that if they were going to be in the village the following week on market day, they should have lunch together. They did.
It was nearly a year before the two women were to meet again and that was by chance in Barga. Once again they chatted amiably. Eliza went home and told Vittorio that she liked Amanda Dix, but probably they got on because they were so very different from one another and could never be real friends. Another time Amanda and Eliza met by chance at the hog-backed bridge. They walked into the village together and did their shopping. Both women began to look forward to
these meetings, and the more they saw each other, the more interested they became in each other’s lives. They were almost voyeuristic about them. Eliza realised that Amanda never mentioned Vittorio, or the fact that they now had a son, though Eliza always asked after Philip. A friendship developed between them: one that can happen between women who meet over cups of coffee or a drink in the village café, who walk through the open market on market day but never infringe on personal lives or relationships.
Amanda finally came to understand that it was their Englishness that they had in common, that they liked each other as human beings, but because they had chosen such very different lives for themselves, they could never be more than casual friends. She never again seemed able to equate the pale rider with Eliza once they began having their meetings. Soon after these meetings began she stopping watching her on her morning rides on the white stallion. They were a reminder of another Eliza, set apart from the woman she chatted with.
The more Amanda grew to know and like Eliza, the more she resented her wasting her life on a dull farmer. But when Vittorio came, as he always had, to cut the meadow, Amanda found it very nearly impossible to tear herself away from the window. She watched him, stripped to the waist, handsome, muscular, erotic as hell. She was never quite sure if it was sexual fascination because of the women he had had or if she really wanted to be fucked by him. All she was certain of was that when he left the meadow, she was voraciously hungry for sex, as wild and thrilling as she could get it with Philip.
Amanda and he were aware of her bizarre love-hate feelings, for both Eliza and Vittorio, over the few years since they had met. They caused a dissatisfaction that had never been evident before. Philip did not like it, Amanda too disapproved of this blemish on their perfect world.
One day, apropos of nothing, she said, ‘Philip, I cannot make sense of Eliza’s choosing Vittorio. How can they be happy together, how can they be so content with their lives? She’s constantly having to step down to his level, I find it degrading, pathetic, that she should be so weak.’
‘Maybe she has never been above his level, maybe circumstances dragged her up the hill and she never wanted to be there? Vittorio is a more than a nice guy. He looks to be a passionate man, probably a terrific lover, and for Eliza, if maybe not you, Amanda, that’s enough.’
‘But she’s laying down her life for him, Philip.’
‘Maybe that’s how it works for them. Maybe he is laying down his life every minute of every day for her, Amanda. It does happen, you know, love for love’s sake and nothing more. One partner happily sacrificing all for another. Not for the likes of you and I, Amanda, but possibly for them.’
‘They’re interfering with our life, Philip!’
‘No, Amanda, just showing us up for what we are and are not to each other. They’re a painful reminder of something we can never have. But don’t despair. I am sure we are an equally painful reminder to Eliza of a life she could never succeed in.’
‘Now what does
that
mean?’
Philip recognised real anguish in Amanda’s voice.
He did not often see the vulnerable side of her, she hid it very well. He went to her and raised her by her arms from the chair where she was sitting. He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. ‘A life where security, success, fame and fortune, style and beauty, are equally as important as love and sex. A life that is tempered, organised for survival of the fittest, not simple-minded farmers and sweet passionate dreamers like your friend Eliza.’
Amanda kissed Philip on the mouth. Her lips were trembling with real passion and love for him. He was always there for her in those moments when she really needed him. And she
had
needed him. She was envious of Eliza and what she had, how much she could give. Only in the night was she Eliza’s equal and she had almost forgotten that. Only in the night, in the throes of glorious sexual bliss, could she abandon herself and her careful, well-organised life, submit totally to the god Eros and her lover. Only in the night could she die for love of Philip.
In the months since Amanda and Eliza had been seeing each other, a sincere affection crept into Amanda’s feelings for Eliza and Vittorio, whom she barely knew and rarely saw, each of them had learned bits and pieces of the other’s life. But the more they learned, the more it set them poles apart. They had a strong but strange friendship that demanded of them respect and indifference. Amanda imagined that it was a friendship that would last all their lives and never change. But she was wrong in that.
The beginning of the end came when the two women stepped outside the boundaries they had drawn in
their relationship: Amanda’s decision never to become involved by actually seeing with her own eyes the life Eliza lived with Vittorio, Eliza’s never to see her friend socially except during their quiet meetings for coffee, lunch or a drink, in a public place, after which each would wend their own way home.
There was a chance meeting between Eliza and Amanda, this time in Siena quite far from where they lived. Amanda and Philip were sitting out at a café table in the piazza facing the Palazzo Pubblico. They were with four friends, their house guests, talking about the Palio – the painted prize for which ten riders gallop bareback around the great Campo of Siena where they were at that moment sitting. They were all laughing at Philip and Amanda’s description of the crowds and the air of hysteria, fun and danger that accompanies the race that is all over in ninety seconds, when Eliza and two young men, very tall and very handsome, came into view weaving in and out of the tables, looking for an empty one. Philip and Eliza saw each other just at the same time. He rose from his chair and all eyes at the table followed his gaze. Amanda was at first surprised and then both pleased and not so pleased to see her. Her not-so-pleased feelings were only because she found it disconcerting to see Eliza outside the little world where they were able to be friends.
Eliza looked very attractive, flanked by the two young men. She appeared to be more sensuous, more exciting than usual, dressed in a flesh-coloured silk blouse with dropped shoulders and balloon sleeves that buttoned tight to her wrists. A skirt cut on the bias hung in voluptuous folds down to her ankles.
Made of flesh-coloured suede, it was belted by a three-inch-deep coral-coloured patent leather belt. Her long hair fell in a tumble of soft waves around her face. Amanda rose from her chair and the two women greeted each other. Amanda quickly introduced her friends to Eliza who was then obliged to introduce her companions.
‘Boys, these are neighbours of ours, Amanda Dix and Philip Markham. Amanda, Philip, I would like you to meet Hervé and Michel le Donneur, Vittorio’s sons.’
Here was another part of Eliza’s life being played out in front of them. Quite suddenly Philip could understand from where Amanda’s anxiety about Eliza and Vittorio derived. She was something very quietly special with a soft, sensuous, submissiveness about her that intrigued a man. The handsome young men in their early-twenties were identical twins and the absolute image of their father, only more polished, very French.
As Eliza walked away from Amanda and Philip’s table she was aware that they thought of her as an oddity, someone who should have stayed home with her farmer husband, who should not have two such handsome and cultivated sons. For shame, Amanda. For shame, Philip, she thought. Several times she looked over at them and their friends, the sort of people she had known when married to John and Robert, the sort of people her sisters had for friends. She marvelled at how easy it had been to give them up in favour of being in love and married to Vittorio. She had a sense that a miracle must have taken place to have delivered her from the life that Amanda and
Philip thrived on to the place and the man she loved above all else.
The following day, after their return from Siena, Hervé and Michel arrived in time for dinner at the Villa Montecatini. There were several of the farm workers there talking local politics with Vittorio, the usual Montecatini house staff, and two pretty young girls from the village who were Dulcima’s godchildren. An aroma of roast veal, and a
pancetta
and asparagus cream sauce in the massive bowl of fettucine being passed around the table, hung like a strong kitchen perfume in the air. There was laughter and good wine being drunk – this was the atmosphere that had always prevailed in the Montecatini kitchen for as long as Eliza could remember. She took considerable pride in the fact that since her arrival as the new mistress of the villa nothing had changed in the running of the house, nor had it when she had married Vittorio. It was the same casual, generous hospitality that was offered to every guest.
Eliza looked down the table at Vittorio who was sitting between his two boys. It was a wonderful sight to see. Hervé and Michel were still getting used to Vittorio as their father, Eliza as their step-mother, and to Tuscany. Vittorio took his sons and their family predicament in his stride: that was, calmly, looking for the positive, happy side of it, and choosing not to deal with the poison and pain their mother had so ruthlessly dealt him by never speaking ill of her. Eliza could see them, every week they were with their father, slowly and surely falling that little bit more in love with him. Strangely these two boys who had never had an understanding of Italy, nor a love of country life
or the land, discovered once they took over Janine’s house that they had a natural affinity with farming, husbandry, and a respect for the father who was less educated, cultured and ambitious than they.
How Eliza loved her husband. And as she watched him at table, laughing and chatting with his sons, she realised why she loved him so very much, why he had been the only true love of her life. He was a man who never tore her down. He had always made her feel confident, more than she was. Vittorio had always made her feel more, rather than less, of everything and he was the only man that had ever done that.
More people dropped in just as they were beginning dinner: Pietro Portinari and several of his house guests, friends from Rome and Madrid who wanted to go to the barn to see the cars. But the aroma of the Montecatini kitchen seduced them to the table and they too stayed to dine. For generations, the charm of visiting the villa had always been the same: a cross-section of people from all walks of life, an unstructured household enjoying themselves. After dinner most people did go to the barns, and from there they drifted back into the house. Slowly the villa came to life as lamps in the hall, library, dining room, drawing room, and the small sitting room that had always been called the morning room, were switched on and people drifted through them. In the music room, a small oval apartment behind the hall, Hervé played the piano – Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern – and Michel sang the show tunes in French and charmed everyone. It was too late for the two girls from the village to go home so they slept over in one of the many guest rooms. It was a happy
evening and everyone left much too drunk and much too late.
Finally alone, Eliza and Vittorio walked through the house, turning off lights, closing windows. The last stop was the kitchen there they found Francesca the cook and Paolo the gardener sitting at the kitchen table, he playing the accordion very softly, she singing a Tuscan folk song while she shelled a huge basket of bean pods. Eliza was about to step forward into the room to demand that she stop working and go to bed when Vittorio stopped her first with a hand on her shoulder, then a nod of his head, and took her silently away from the kitchen door.
‘They’re enjoying themselves,’ was all he said.
They went arm-in-arm upstairs, first to check on their son Julian, which they did every night before they went to bed. A cousin of Vittorio’s, a plump and very pretty girl who’d needed a home, had been taken in by Eliza and Vittorio to be nanny to their unborn child. Weeks before Julian was born Beatrice had proved to be a happy addition to the household. There she was, asleep in her bed in the large room that had for generations served as the nursery. Eliza tiptoed first to Beatrice, to cover her, she always kicked her bedcovers off, and then walked across the room to stand next to Vittorio who was bending over the crib doing the same for his son. As usual Julian was sound asleep. Mother and father kissed their son, and as silently as possible left the nursery.
At last they undressed and went to bed. Naked, lying on their sides and in each other’s arms, they kissed and caressed each other. Vittorio said, ‘To have courage to live is everything, Eliza. Look what it has brought us.
Our children, all six of them, and you and I are to be the custodians of the place we love the most in the world for the rest of our lives. How blessed we are. Tonight was such a good time. You were, as you always are, marvellous, a great hostess, all charm and beauty, the light in a sometimes dark world. Thank you, my heart, my life.’