Dolci di Love (6 page)

In the window bearing the
FOR RENT
sign, a lonely wrought-iron chair sat neatly waiting beside a tiny round table. The tiled floor beneath her kitten heels was a slightly crazed mosaic in faded burnt orange, dull turquoise, and grey.

She stepped forward and saw that the bowls were full of what looked like biscotti; the Italian cookies she never ate when they
came with coffee or the check at Babbo or 'Cesca.

Her mouth watered. It had been a long time since she had eaten anything.

Behind the counter, against the back wall, stood a set of shelves, on which sat a dusty collection of spice jars and faded cookie boxes. They looked old-fashioned to Lily, as though they had been sitting there for many, many years.

In fact, it looked like the whole store had been sitting there for many, many years. If it was a store. It certainly wasn't the sort of place with which Heigelmann's would trifle. There was no room for more than five customers, tops, and there didn't seem to be a cash register. Or anyone working there.

The biscotti, upon further inspection, differed from the similar cookies Lily turned down at Babbo or 'Cesca, which were oval shaped and smooth. These ones were slightly unconventional: their shapes uneven and the surfaces a little craggy.

Also, unless she was mistaken—and there was that enchanting light shimmering about the room giving everything a slightly ethereal glow, so her eyes could have been playing tricks on her—there was a fine layer of dust over the cookies.

Maybe it wasn't a shop but a museum of some sort. Either way, this room was obviously not for rent, but that didn't mean there wasn't another one that was, and she hardly had any other options.

She stepped out of the puddle she had made on the floor. ‘Hello!' she called out. ‘Anyone here?'

T
he widow Ercolani waited until Lily had left the tourist office and slowly dialled the widow Ciacci's number.

‘She was booked into Prato,' she duly reported, ‘so I've flushed her up to Adesso to get her closer to you, but I really can't see what all the fuss is about.'

The widow Ercolani did not like Grace Kelly in
Rear Window
. She was more of a Sophia Loren fan.

‘Never mind what all the fuss is about,' the widow Ciacci said briskly. It was common knowledge that the widow Ercolani had her granddaughter Adriana earmarked for Alessandro, but a good man was wasted on that hussy. ‘What else can you tell us about her?'

‘She's tall and American.'

‘American? Oh! And what else?'

‘Hmm?'

‘I said what else? She's tall and American and…?'

‘And that's not enough? I thought we'd be giving her a miss in the circumstances. Besides, she was too thin for someone that height and not dressed for the weather or the climb.' The widow Ercolani did not have to pretend to be crotchety. It came to her quite naturally.

‘Well, it's Alessandro's heart we're mending, isn't it?' the widow Ciacci reminded her. ‘And it's not up to us how that gets done or who does it. It's up to Violetta.'

The widow Ercolani harrumphed. Her crotchetiness extended as far as Violetta. And beyond.

‘Well, it's not like we're getting the results we used to, these days,' she sniffed. ‘The last three cases we've worked on have been nothing short of disastrous.'

It was true. There had been a bad run. First they'd tried to fix the baker's son up with a woman who had a rare allergy to flour; then they'd tried to reunite the draper with her high school sweetheart, unaware of his newly formed gambling problem; and most recently they pushed the curvaceous mayor's secretary into the arms of a man who turned out to have a boyfriend in Cortona. These disasters had been a long time in the planning and execution and the dreadful results had hit the widows hard.

Times were tough and getting tougher, that much was obvious, but the widow Ciacci didn't want to get into that right now. She had a sore tooth and didn't feel like squeezing details out of the widow Ercolani like pips out of a lemon.

‘The problem is that we're falling down on our intelligence gathering,' she said rather pointedly. ‘Which, might I remind you, it is your job to help provide.'

‘That is not the problem,' the widow Ercolani argued. ‘The problem is that Violetta's getting too old and crumbly to work her magic.' The widow Ercolani was feeling pretty old and crumbly herself. Her ears rang, her hips ached, and she had spent her pension on chocolate so could not afford any painkillers.

‘I'll look forward to hearing you discussing that directly with Violetta at the meeting later today, shall I?' the widow Ciacci suggested.

‘I'm sorry. What was that?'

‘Oh, never mind. I need to get on to the plumbing at the Hotel Adesso.'

‘Whatever you say,' grumbled the widow Ercolani. ‘I've done my bit.'

Up the hill, Violetta got such a fright when she heard Lily call from the
pasticceria
that she spat out a mouthful of coffee clear across the table, only missing her sister by the merest of smidgeons.

‘She's here already,' Luciana said, unfazed. ‘That was quick.'

‘That stupid doorbell!' spluttered Violetta.

Where had the time gone? It seemed like she'd only just issued her instructions and gone to the WC—an almost full-time occupation at her stage—and now this Lily woman was on the other side of the door calling out for them.

On top of not having an itchy nose or smelling orange blossom and being bulldozed by her usually placid younger sister into accepting the irritating and unsuitable Fiorella Fiorucci into the League, she felt wrong-footed, to say the least.

She took another sip of her coffee. She could barely taste it. Never mind a sixth sense, she was now back down to five, if not four. This, on top of everything, catapulted her into the filthiest of moods.

‘What are you looking at me like that for?' she snapped at her sister. ‘I'm allowed to sit down for five minutes and enjoy my coffee without you mooning at me across the table like an old heifer, aren't I?'

‘If I'm an old heifer, you're an even older one,' pointed out Luciana. ‘And anyway, what's got your giblets in a pickle?'

‘My giblets are not in a pickle,' Violetta said. ‘I'm just devising the rest of the plan.'

‘I thought we already had the plan,' Luciana said, her chair scraping against the floor as she slowly stood up. ‘You take Grace Kelly upstairs and pump her for information while Ciacci and I
meet with Benedicti and the others to start devising our strategy for Alessandro, then we—'

‘Yes, yes, I do know how it works, Luciana. I am the director of this league, you might recall.'

‘And this is you
not
in a pickle?' Luciana lifted her sagging eyelids to have a really good look at her sister. She was right, she was old. She'd been old for a long time and she looked especially old today. Luciana felt a tiny tremor of something down near her still-throbbing toe that had nothing to do with a broken heart other than, possibly, her own.

‘Are you all right, Violetta?' she asked quietly.

This was met with what she thought was a snort, although it could have come from any part of her aged sibling. ‘I'm always all right,' Violetta said as she stiffly rose from the table. ‘As usual, I'll do the talking. Now step to it.'

L
ily heard muffled grumblings, the scraping of chairs, and the soft scuff of shuffling feet before the door in the rear corner of the bakeshop creaked open and out hobbled two almost identical old women, both dressed in black, both with thin grey hair scraped into wispy buns, both so wrinkled their faces looked like dried autumn leaves.

They stood hip to hip behind the counter, and after a moment or two of looking her up and down, one of them started a breathless monologue of which Lily understood not a syllable, while the other looked on, nodding shakily in agreement.

‘I'm sorry, please—I'm not following, I don't speak Italian,' Lily said, attempting to staunch the flow. ‘I'm here about the place to rent.'

The chattering old woman just kept chattering and the nodding one nodding.

‘The place to rent?' Lily said, louder. ‘Is it a room? An apartment?' She moved over to the window and tapped at the sign. ‘
Apartamento? Rento?
'

The nodding woman then said something to the chattering one. They both stopped and looked her up and down again, then the nodding one left the shop.

This took quite a long time. She moved very slowly.

‘So about this room,' Lily said when the nodding old lady had made her way out the door. ‘If there's anything you can tell me…It's just that I'm slightly desperate.'

The remaining old woman clasped both hands beneath her chin and squinted so hard that her wrinkles surfed over each other to the edges of her face like ripples in a pond. Her small dark eyes gleamed beneath layers of drooping lid. Finally, she hobbled around the counter and over to Lily, grasping one of her hands. Her fingers were swollen and bent, but they were surprisingly soft and warm.

She stood about as tall as Lily's chest. Lily could see the hair thinning around her centre part, could pick out the worn patches on the collar of her black cotton dress. She smelled of daphne. It was not what Lily had expected from the look of her. In Lily's experience, which was admittedly limited, people this old did not generally smell this good.

She felt a lump rise in her throat, an inexplicable surge of misplaced affection. She was tired, jet-lagged, out of her comfort zone.

‘No speako Italiano,' she told the old woman, feeling hopelessly unsophisticated. Years before, Daniel had suggested they take lessons, but she hadn't seen the point.

The old woman squeezed her hand tighter, then, with a robust tug, started to pull her around the tiny store, leaning on her slightly as she knocked at the glass bowls, tapped at the floor, pointed to the sign in the window, all the while continuing to chatter happily away in Italian.

Lily smiled and nodded because she was still dripping wet, bone-shatteringly tired and didn't know what else to do. Taking this as a sign of acquiescence, the old woman let go of her hand and rather spryly grabbed at the handle of her suitcase. For
someone so crippled, she managed to pull it remarkably swiftly behind the counter and through the door she and her sister had come out of.

Lily waited a moment until she realised the woman wasn't coming back, and followed. The back room had the same dim lighting and a similar intoxicating smell but was even warmer than the shop and was dominated by a large refectory-style table, used so often its top was no longer level but dipped and rose in a smooth landscape of curves and hollows. Two chairs sat at each end, and there was a single bed piled high with quilts pushed against the far wall. Behind the table was a kitchen of sorts with curtained shelves and a tiny television on top of a freestanding box on legs that Lily assumed was in lieu of a refrigerator.

‘This is the apartment?' she asked. She needed to lie down and it was toasty warm and, despite its simplicity, strangely inviting. But the bed in the corner didn't even look long enough for her.

‘I'm sorry, but you know, I don't think it's quite what I'm looking for,' she told the old woman, who merely blew her a sort of raspberry and pointed to the ceiling. It was painted pale yellow, or nicotine colour, and bore another unlikely chandelier.

‘Yes, it's lovely, but still,' Lily said and reached for her bag. But the little old lady clung to it, shaking her head, a steely glint in those small black eyes as she opened another door that Lily had assumed was a cupboard and disappeared into it.

‘Oh, for Pete's sake,' she grumbled but again followed. It wasn't a cupboard at all, but a narrow stairwell that led up to another room, infinitely bigger and brighter, with a double bed, a bigger chandelier, an enormous television, and that same strangely spicy sweet scent.

The bed looked so appealing that Lily wanted nothing more than to just lie down on the spongy covers and drift away into glorious nothingness.

The ceiling in this room had been painted, fresco style, between the weathered beams in a pale blue-and-yellow delicate floral pattern with curlicues of mauve and green at each end. It reminded Lily of something; she didn't quite know what, but it was something good.

The old Italian woman stood in the middle of the room mumbling incoherently, but as Lily looked around and weighed up the prospect of staying put, it occurred to her that it wasn't mumbling at all but a repetition of the same sequence of words.

‘
Mi chiamo
Violetta,' the old woman was saying. ‘
Mi chiamo Violetta
.' She tapped at the hollow chest where her bosoms had once been (they now sagged jauntily below, one significantly higher than the other). ‘Violetta,' she said again. ‘
Capita?
Violetta. Violetta.'

‘Oh, of course!' Lily answered, as it seeped in that the woman was introducing herself. She acknowledged this by giving a silly little bow of her upper body that probably wasn't the custom in everyday Italy unless you were meeting the Pope. ‘Violetta,' she repeated. ‘Pleased to meet you. I'm Lily.
Mi chiamo
Lily? Is that how you say it?'

Violetta raised the sparse hedges of her eyebrows. ‘Lee-lee,' she tried the word out, shrugging her shoulders. ‘Lee-lee. OK.' Then she hobbled to the faded floral curtains behind her, throwing them open to reveal a large picture window facing out to the valley that rolled down the hill from the town.

Lily took a step forward.

In the time she had been inside, the rain had stopped, and although the mist still clung to pockets of undulating land and wafted greedily around huddled clumps of trees, enough of the foreign landscape was emerging in front of her eyes to take her breath away.

‘Oh my goodness!' she said moving closer, a throbbing blister, hunger, and her anxiety retreating.

The view was astonishing. Suddenly she definitely could see the long lunches and the youthful sexual athletics.

What's more, as she watched, the dreary mist continued to rise, revealing a rolling carpet of different vibrant greens stretching away from Montevedova toward the horizon. Trails of pencil pines meandered down distant ridges, neat stands of olives crisscrossed emerald fields, rows of grapes marched up and down gentle hillsides. Tiny orange-hued villas appeared before her eyes, tucked in between little explosions of foliage.

A pigeon—such ugly creatures at home—flapped gracefully over the terracotta tiled roof just below her, drawing her eye as it departed to another little hilltop town floating above a recalcitrant band of mist like a beheaded cardinal's hat in the distance.

‘It's beautiful,' she breathed. ‘Just beautiful.'

‘
Sí, molto bello
,' Violetta agreed, without much emotion. ‘
Molto bello
.'

‘
Molto bello
,' Lily repeated, opening the window and leaning out. How could this astonishing vista, this extraordinary landscape, have been hiding behind all that rain and dreary mire as she drove here?

Down below her, to the left, something large and round was trying to emerge but kept being snatched away by a rogue cloud of fog. When it finally reappeared for good, it brought its whole coppered dome and bell tower with it, revealing itself to be Madonna di San Biagio—the church in the photo in Daniel's shoe.

With that, the mist seemed to disappear altogether and Lily saw everything very clearly. She was in this place for a reason and it did not leave room for awe.

Stony-faced, she turned away and let Violetta show her the tiny bathroom, with its minute shower stall, a child-size lavatory, and not so much as a single cabinet for storage.

The room wasn't what Lily would have chosen, but it was spotlessly clean and dry and she was wet and exhausted.

‘You know what? I think I'll take it,' she told Violetta. ‘For a few nights at least. Is that OK?'

‘
Sí, sí
, OK, OK,' the old woman said, patting the cover on the bed.

Lily's body ached to lie down on it. If she could just catch a few hours sleep, a few minutes even, she would be able to think more clearly.

She took 500 euro out of her wallet and was surprised when Violetta grabbed it all but was too worn out to attempt further conversation. Instead, she held a finger to her lips in what she hoped was the international language of ‘let's keep this whole thing our little secret' and waited until the old woman reciprocated, which she did, following this up with another long string of something undecipherable and a dismissive wave goodbye.

As soon as she was gone, Lily slipped off her kitten heels, peeled off her sodden clothes, lay back on the bed, and almost immediately drifted off into blissful oblivion.