‘Unless you’re about to have lunch with an Adonis,’ Stacy reminded her.
Lainey paused, turned around and pushed the bag into Stacy’s hands.
Laughing, Stacy followed her on to the small piazza where a central fountain was sparkling in the midday sun, and a rather grand limestone-fronted
municipio
was flying a collection of stately flags over a temporary bandstand. The café tables, spaced out like small islands below a cluster of white parasols and strings of bunting, were starting to fill up. Marco was already there with his son, Benito, who was busily showing some sort of electronic device to Zav and Alfie.
‘Adriana and my brother, Lorenzo, will join us soon with their children,’ he informed them as he got up to greet them, ‘so we shall be quite a large party. I hope this is all right with you.’
‘Of course,’ Lainey assured him, sinking into the chair he was holding out.
‘Thank you,’ Stacy smiled, as he quickly moved to offer her a seat too.
‘Elenora? What will you have to drink?’ he offered, as a waiter arrived.
Liking his use of her real name, Lainey eyed his beer and said, ‘I think I’ll have one of those.’
‘Mm, me too,’ Stacy responded to his glance her way.
‘
Due birra,’
he told the waiter, ‘
e due coca.
This is OK with you,’ he said quickly to Lainey, ‘for the boys to have coca, the same as Benito?’
‘They’ll be in seventh heaven,’ she assured him, smiling at Benito, who had very definitely inherited his father’s looks, though his eyes, she noticed, were a startlingly violet shade of blue. What an impact he was going to have on the girls when he got older.
Moments after the waiter vanished Adriana and her family turned up, greeting Lainey and Stacy almost as old friends, in spite of the fact that this was the first time they’d ever set eyes on Lorenzo. Though he appeared much older than both Adriana and Marco, and was nowhere near as striking as his brother, he oozed as much charm as good humour and was clearly a favourite with the kids.
‘Adriana tells me you are Italian by birth,’ he declared, cutting straight to the heart of matters as he pulled up a chair, ‘but you do not yet speak the language?’
‘I’m going to learn,’ Lainey promised. ‘I meant to take lessons before coming, and I would have if I’d managed to find the time.’
‘Is no problem for us,’ he assured her, ‘we in this family must speak English for our business, but I think for you, if you are Italian, it would be very good to learn.’
‘Stop bullying her,’ Adriana chided, ‘and please order us some drinks. Giana, Nico, Coca-Cola for you?’
‘
Si, si,
’ they cried in unison, their eagerness showing how rare a treat this was. Since neither could be any older than seven, Lainey wasn’t surprised by that; certainly she hadn’t allowed her own children to drink Coke before they were ten, and even now she tried to limit Zav to one, at the most two, a day.
It was amusingly comforting to find they shared the same values.
‘. . . e lui a pagere il conto
,’ Lorenzo was telling the waiter, after adding his order to Marco’s.
The waiter laughed, while Marco rolled his eyes. ‘My brother has said that I will pay the bill,’ he explained to Lainey and Stacy. ‘He is a very good comedian. We think he will perform as a clown at the Ferragosto Toreggiano
.
’
‘This is festival we have every year in the village,’ Adriana explained, ‘to celebrate Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans, which happen here at Tuoro . . . I think two hundred years
BC
?’ She looked at Marco.
He pulled a face. ‘A long time ago,’ he said, making everyone laugh. ‘Some of the villagers will dress like soldiers of that time and walk through the streets,’ he continued, ‘and there is a party at La Ronde, which is another piazza at the end of Via Garibaldi.’
‘That’s over there,’ Benito cried, pointing in the direction of a narrow side street that started out between an optician’s and a
lavanderia
. ‘Papa, can we take Zav and Alfie to show them?’ he asked eagerly.
‘Of course,’ Marco replied, putting a hand on his son’s springy dark hair. ‘There is no traffic in this direction,’ he assured Lainey. ‘They will be perfectly safe. Ah, here are our drinks,’ and clearing his phone from the table he whispered something in Benito’s ear as the waiter set down his tray.
Smiling at the way Benito flushed with pleasure as he looked up at his father, Lainey took her beer and called to Zav and Alfie to come and get their Cokes.
‘I praise Benito for speaking English,’ Marco confided to Lainey as the children carried their drinks to the next table. ‘He can be self-conscious about it sometimes, but today he is doing very well.’
‘He seems almost as bilingual as you,’ Lainey commented, taking a much-needed sip of her beer.
‘He has an English mother,’ Marco explained, a light of irony in his eyes.
Surprised, though not sure why, Lainey replied, ‘Ah, well, that would certainly help.’ She wondered if it would be rude to ask where his wife was today. Deciding it probably would, she simply said, ‘Not that having an Italian mother helped my bilingual skills. She wouldn’t allow a single word of the language to be spoken in her hearing, and if anyone as much as suggested coming here on holiday they usually ended up sorry.’
‘She was a very passionate woman,’ Stacy put in drolly. ‘A bit like Elenora, really.’
As everyone enjoyed the moment, Lainey allowed her eyes to flutter closed and felt the heat of the day mingling with the very real pleasure of being here. What would her mother say if she could see her? Probably best not to think about that when she was on a mission to exhume whatever skeletons Alessandra had buried. Feeling a knot tightening in her heart as she wondered what Tom might be doing now, she looked around again and the tension slowly passed.
‘So tell us what you know about your family?’ Lorenzo prompted, after they’d made their menu choices and the children had disappeared off to La Ronde. ‘You were born here, I think, and your parents too?’
‘My mother was,’ she confirmed, ‘but I don’t know about my father. His name isn’t on my birth certificate and my mother would never tell me anything about him.’
Lorenzo’s eyebrows rose with intrigue. ‘Aha, I think we have a case for Inspector Poirot,’ he declared, rubbing his hands together as though casting himself in the role.
‘He was not an inspector,’ Adriana reminded him.
Lorenzo batted it away. ‘Detective, inspector, what I am saying is we have a big mystery that we must solve, and I think Isabella, our grandmother, is going to be important in this. She has very good memory for woman her age, and she knows everyone in Tuoro.’
‘She used to,’ Marco reminded him. ‘It’s been a long time since she lived in the village, and many new people have come since then.’
‘But we only want the old ones,’ Lorenzo pointed out, ‘and there is nothing to be afraid of, because most of them have lost their teeth so they cannot bite.’
Adriana groaned. ‘Not funny,’ she told him, though the others were laughing.
‘I think it’s quite likely,’ Lainey said, ‘that my father, if he’s still alive, won’t want to know me, but that’s all right. It’ll just be good to know who he is, or was, and to find out why my mother never came back to Tuoro again after she left. She didn’t even stay in touch with her own mother, or not that I know of, and I haven’t been able to find out anything about my grandfather either. Apart from his name.’
‘Aldo Clementi,’ Stacy supplied, in case anyone had forgotten. ‘And Melvina, his wife.’
‘Grandmama reminded us to look at the records in the town hall,’ Adriana informed them. ‘If your parents were married in Tuoro there will be a record of it here, in the
municipio.
Do you think they were married?’
Lainey shook her head. ‘I’m not sure, but somehow I doubt it.’
‘It is definitely worth a look,’ Marco put in. ‘I can do this tomorrow when I am here for a meeting with the
segretario comunale
.’
Grateful for how quickly he was getting on to this, Lainey was about to thank him when Stacy asked Adriana, ‘Did your grandmother say whether she knew Alessandra, Lainey’s mother?’
Adriana shook her head. ‘But I ask only if she knows Melvina and Aldo, and she says she know them a little, but not well. She says Melvina was a very strong –
carattere
?’
‘Character,’ Marco provided.
‘
Si
, character, and she feels sure that a lot of people will remember her because she was
molto molto bella.
’
Understanding that to be extremely beautiful, Lainey said, ‘Did your grandmother know if she still lives in Tuoro, if she’s even still alive?’
‘What she said was that there were rumours about Melvina and Aldo before they leave Tuoro, so it is not likely that they are still here. She did not want to discuss what were the rumours, because she has no idea if they are true. She will speak to you about them, she says, if you do not find anyone who can tell you what they know. You understand, she is not confident that her information is good, so she would prefer you to speak to older people in the village first. But,’ she continued, ‘she advise us to go gently, because it could be we wake up ghosts that many of the older people will wish to stay dead.’
Lainey turned to Stacy, feeling almost as alarmed by that as intrigued.
‘Do you have the letter with you?’ Stacy prompted.
Lainey shook her head. ‘It’s at the villa, but I can remember most of it. There’s only one page,’ she explained to the others, ‘and I’ve no idea who wrote it, but whoever it was addressed my mother as
mia cara bambina
, so it must have been someone who was fond of her.’
‘We’ve wondered,’ Stacy added, ‘if it might have been Alessandra’s grandmother who wrote it, or a relative anyway.’
‘What does it say?’ Marco prompted.
‘Well, one of the oddest things about it,’ Lainey began, ‘is that my mother seems to have told the writer that she named me after her mother, Melvina, but obviously it isn’t true. Melvina isn’t even my middle name, because that’s Cristina. The writer then asks if she should tell Melvina that Alessandra has named her child after her, but she seems worried about how my grandmother might take it.’
Marco and Adriana were frowning in confusion.
‘Go on,’ Lorenzo encouraged
‘I can remember the last paragraph word for word,’ Lainey told them. ‘It says: “I was disturbed to hear that you find it hard to look at the child,” meaning me, “without thinking of what happened, but please remember that she is not to blame. I know in your heart you are still angry, and I understand that, but I pray every day for . . .” and then it stops. Obviously there were more pages, but I’ve never been able to find them.’
Adriana and Marco exchanged glances. ‘Well it certainly raises a lot of questions,’ Adriana commented, glancing at Lainey’s phone as it rang.
‘Tierney, my daughter,’ she informed them and clicked on. ‘Hi, darling, where are you?’
‘You mean where are
you
?’ came Tierney’s testy reply. ‘We’re at the villa, but no one’s here so we can’t get in.’
Rolling her eyes, Lainey said, ‘Didn’t you take any keys?’
‘Duh, no, or I wouldn’t be calling.’
‘OK, well, you’ll have to come and get them because we’re about to have lunch. We’re on the main piazza in the village. You won’t be able to miss us. Have you eaten? You can join us if you like.’
Going off the line to consult the others, Tierney came back saying, ‘Count us in, but there are five of us. Is that OK?’
‘Sure, if you don’t mind,’ she calculated quickly, ‘ten of us.’
‘
Ten!
Who’s with you? Oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve found your family already.’
Lainey smiled as she looked at Marco, Adriana and Lorenzo. ‘I wish I could say I had,’ she responded, thinking what a blessing it would be if her search could lead to them. ‘I’m sure we’ve still got a way to go on that,’ she continued. ‘Don’t be long, we’ve already ordered,’ and ringing off, she was about to finish her beer when the church bells started to ring.
Curious, she turned in search of a dome or a bell tower above the rooftops, but the piazza was too closed in to see beyond its walls. ‘Is that signalling the end of Mass?’ she asked.
Checking his watch, Marco said, ‘No, it’s too late for that. It must be a baptism, or maybe a special communion.’
As she continued to listen Lainey could feel herself being oddly drawn to the melodic chiming, as though it was calling to her, or at least trying to remind her a church was there. To Marco she said, ‘I think I should talk to the priest.’
‘By all means,’ he agreed. ‘He is a very amenable person, but he has not been here for more than ten years, so I am not sure what he can tell us.’
‘Ah, something I almost forget,’ Adriana suddenly cried, as Lorenzo went off to round up the children. ‘Grandmama tell me you should also go to Isola Maggiore – this is the biggest and closest of the three islands in the lake – because she is sure it is where your grandmother used to work with the lace.’
‘Lace?’ Stacy echoed.
‘
Si.
For many years the women of the island make most beautiful lace,’ Adriana explained. ‘Perhaps it is where your grandparents lived, I don’t know, but it is a very short boat ride to get there and you will see that some women, even today, are still making the beautiful linens.’
Lainey glanced at Stacy, as Marco said, ‘I can go with you in the afternoon tomorrow, if you would like me to help with the translation.’
Ignoring Stacy’s kick under the table, Lainey broke into a smile. ‘That would be lovely, thank you,’ she replied. ‘Just tell me what time to meet you and where, and I’ll make sure I’m there.’
Much later in the day Lainey and Stacy were stretched out on sunbeds beside the pool, soaking up the sun through a leafy bower, and half dozing as they listened to Max playing his guitar. He was nowhere in view, but the sound of his Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg renditions were carrying melodically over the hillside, as were the accompanying voices of his small audience comprising Tierney, Skye and the two new friends Max had hooked up with at last night’s
discoteca
, as they were now calling it. They seemed pleasant enough boys – or young men, since they were around Max’s age – and being English, from Cheshire, there was no problem with the language. Apparently there were plans to hit the
discoteca
again tonight, and Lainey had found herself agreeing to Tierney and Skye going with them.