Dolci di Love (15 page)

W
ith every step Violetta took across the
pasticceria
in the direction of the next meeting of the Secret League of Widowed Darners she felt her confidence drain and collect at her swollen ankles like wrinkles in her stockings.

The League had given her so much to live for over the past decades; all those broken hearts patched up and sent on their way. So many futures! So much hope! And now, this spectacular failure with Alessandro was going to bring her to her knees—the very ones currently clicking and clattering like the useless giant knuckle bones they were.

Lily was not the one for Alessandro, that was now painfully plain as day. Violetta should have confessed when Luciana's toe first throbbed that her itch was nowhere to be found. She should have admitted there was no orange blossom.

Then Alessandro would have talked to Lily at the side of the road without the slightest thing being made of it, and this poor wretched woman could have proceeded to find her cheating husband and sort out whatever mess she was in.

Instead, Violetta's foolish pride had placed Lily in the way of the widows' favourite prospect, and when they found out, they would skin Violetta alive and make garter belts out of her for it would
look to them as though she herself had broken Alessandro's heart all over again.

‘You have the face of a fish that's been passed up on market day,' Luciana said as they approached the secret shelf and worked together to push it aside.

‘Will you shut up and leave me alone!' exploded Violetta. ‘You have no idea how much I have to worry about right now. There's Alessandro, there's the
cantucci
, there's your bones and my chest and everyone's ears and eyes and Santa Ana di Chisa knows what else! You're all very happy to leave everything up to me, but when there's a problem I'm on my own and I'm sick of it. I'm thoroughly sick of it.'

With this, the shelf slid open and she stepped into the darkened recess, shaking with rage and fear.

Luciana, startled at her sister's outburst, was slow to follow, so Violetta grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled at her, but on stepping over the threshold Luciana stumbled, her foot twisted sideways on the narrow top step, and her weak wrist did not have the strength to hold on to the slippery handrail or keep her upright against the wall.

In front of Violetta's eyes she toppled silently like a sack full of soft potatoes to the landing six steps beneath them.

‘No, no, no!' cried Violetta, scrabbling down as quickly as she was able behind her. ‘Oh, no, no, no!'

Luciana lay in a still heap. She looked so small. They were disappearing, the two of them, but Violetta wasn't ready to disappear yet, and she was even less ready for Luciana to.

She creakily lowered herself to the landing floor, sat beside her crumpled sister, and with trembling fingers, turned her face. Luciana's eyes were closed, her face motionless. It was impossible to tell if she was breathing.

‘Please don't die, Lulu,' she begged, stroking the papery skin on her face. ‘Please don't shut up and leave me alone. I can't do it without you. I just can't.'

Her sister lay unmoving, no rising of her lumpy little chest, no flicker in her wrinkled eyelids.

‘We're in this together, Lulu,' Violetta said, taking Luciana's warm, limp hand. ‘We always have been. And we've lived through worse, my dear little sister. We've lived through much worse. We lived through our darlings being taken away from us. And before that we lived through me getting our darlings mixed up, which you let me fix, my little sweetheart, and which you forgave me for all those years ago. So many years ago! We decided then that sticking together was more important than anything else in the whole wide world and I'm sorry about the
cantucci
. I'm sorry if I've been stubborn. I'm sorry if I haven't been listening to you. I'm scared, that's all. I'm scared of what's happening to me, of what I'm losing, of the life that seems to be draining out of me with every breath I take. I'm scared of not being wanted, of not being useful, of not being here. But more than any of that, I'm scared of not having you, Lulu. Of not having you. So please, please, please wake up. Please.'

And Luciana, who even when she was unconscious really did just want to please her big sister, obligingly woke up.

‘We need help, Violetta,' she croaked. ‘We need help.'

D
espite the recent embarrassment in Pienza and the bowlful of triple chocolate gelato, the lure of Poliziano proved too strong. Lily slid into the light-filled café, avoiding the romantic table, and ordered a glass of prosecco.

Daniel, Eugenia, Francesca, Rose—the complications of her life sat around the table with her like ghosts, their backs to the green, fertile valley falling into the distance behind them.

She drained her drink so quickly, she barely tasted it. Baking cookies? What hat was she going to pull that out of? She blinked away her invisible unwanted guests and looked around.

The café was all but empty, just a couple of tourists sitting in a far corner looking through the photos on their camera and one fidgety old lady at the next table.

‘Another prosecco,
per favoure
,' Lily ordered when the waitress came to fill her water glass, but when she returned, it was not with a drink but, to Lily's horror, with a glass dish full of tiramisu.

Lily reared back from it. ‘No, no, no, this is not mine,' she said, pointing to the old woman sitting near her. ‘It must be hers.'

The waitress looked confused, then rattled off something in Italian to the old lady.

‘She says you can have it if you want it,' the waitress said, but Lily was on her feet already, moving toward the door.

‘No, thank you, I'm good,' she insisted, not waiting for her check but flinging money on the counter next to the cash register. ‘I'm good.'

Another tiramisu incident she did not need, so it was with some relief that she soon pushed open the door of the
pasticceria
and stopped for a moment in the quiet coolness of the dark sweet-smelling room.

The familiar bowls of old, silent
cantucci
sat on their thrones, soaking up the light through the store front window.

‘Eeeooooh,' the big blue bowl directly facing her said. ‘Eeeeeeooooh.'

Lily jumped back, heart thumping. She had only one glass of wine. How could this be happening again?

‘Eeeoooh,' she heard again. And again. And yet again. But that was it. No admonishment, nothing she recognised as a life instruction, just a distant call. She took a step closer to the bowl. The noise continued, but it wasn't coming from the
cantucci
itself, it was coming from behind the counter.

Gingerly, she stepped farther forward and peered over it. There was nothing there.

‘Eeeeeoooh,' she heard again, but now that she was closer, she realised it seemed to be coming from the dusty shelves against the back wall.

She slipped around the counter and inspected them more closely.

‘Eeeeeooooh! Eeeeeooooh!' It was coming from behind the dusty shelves.

Lily took stock: she had little time for hauntings or Hogwarts and it had only been one glass. There would be a logical explanation. She was not making this up. It was really happening. ‘Hello?' she called out. ‘Hello!'

‘Lily!' came the reply. It sounded like Violetta. Stuck behind the shelves?

‘Yes, it's Lily,' she shouted at the wall. ‘Where are you?'

‘Slide! Slide!'

‘Slide?' Lily repeated, wondering what that meant in English. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Slide! Slide the shelves. Across.'

Lily pushed her shoulder against the dusty shelves and with hardly any effort, sure enough they slid across and revealed a tiny dark stairway.

‘You speak English?' Lily asked as her eyes got used to the dark. ‘All this time you've been able to…'

Violetta was sitting on the landing below, gently patting what looked like a pile of rags.

‘She is hurt,' the old woman said. ‘Luciana is hurt.'

‘I'll call an ambulance,' Lily said, turning away.

‘No! We must lift her,' Violetta said. ‘Upstairs. To the bed.'

‘Seriously, you shouldn't move her. It could make her worse.'

‘She does not want ambulance. She wants the bed.'

‘I really think I should—'

‘Please! Help me,' Violetta pleaded. ‘Lift.'

There seemed no point in arguing further, and once she'd negotiated the awkward task of picking up the crumpled old woman in the tight space, it was easy to carry her up to the kitchen and put her carefully on the bed.

‘She weighs next to nothing,' Lily said. ‘I think I should call the ambulance now, Violetta, really.'

‘I will take care of her,' Violetta insisted.

‘You might not be enough. She needs expert help.'

‘I am enough!' Violetta argued angrily, but as she picked up Luciana's limp hand and rubbed it, tears fell down her crinkled
cheeks. ‘Please, please wake up, Lulu,' she said in Italian. ‘Please, please, wake up again.'

Lily did not need to understand what she was saying to get the picture. She put her hand on Violetta's small, shaking shoulder.

‘I can see you love your sister very much,' she said gently. ‘And I know you want what's best for her so I'm going to call an ambulance now.'

Violetta opened her mouth to protest—ambulances only went to the microwave and that was more often than not a one-way trip—but as she started to speak she felt Luciana squeeze her hand, feebly at first but then more firmly.

‘You promised me,' her sister croaked, eyes still closed. ‘You promised.'

Violetta looked up and nodded, at which Lily ran to the Hotel Adesso where she told the hotel receptionist what had happened and ensured that an ambulance was called.

When she returned to the sisters' kitchen, Violetta was still sitting on the side of the bed holding Luciana's hand, but her bedside manner had taken a turn for the worse. She was shouting at her sister in Italian.

‘Violetta, please!' Lily urged. ‘The poor woman's taken a terrible fall!'

‘She should watch where she is going! This is what I am telling her.'

Luciana opened her eyes then and limply muttered something, which her sister responded to with another robust chastisement.

‘Perhaps you could quarrel with her when she comes back from the hospital,' Lily suggested. ‘She's weak now. She's had a shock. She could be badly hurt. Now is not the time for arguing.'

Violetta narrowed her eyes. When she came back from the hospital? Hah! ‘At our age, there might not be another time,' she said, but still, her voice caught.

‘Isn't that all the more reason not to argue now?' Lily suggested.

‘But if we do not argue, how do we know what the other one is thinking?' Violetta asked. ‘We argue for nearly a hundred years and this is noisy, yes, but there is never confusion. She knows how I feel. I know how she feels.'

The rare sound of a motor vehicle approaching filled the room, and moments later two paramedics entered. Under Violetta's cantankerous supervision, they manoeuvred Luciana onto a stretcher and carried her out into the street—which looked to Lily only an inch wider than the ambulance.

Indeed the vehicle was so small that when Violetta tried to get in the back, the paramedics waved her away, saying there wasn't enough room for her and she should meet them at the hospital.

This did not go down at all well.

‘I'm sure they will take very good care of her there,' Lily said helpfully, moving closer to the little woman as the ambulance drove off down the hill at a perilous speed considering how close it was to the walls on either side.

‘Pah! Good care? This is not what our hospital is known for,' Violetta said, and although she sounded angry, her wrinkled cheeks were wet with fresh tears.

‘I am lost without her,' she said, and a sob escaped, although it sounded a bit like a teaspoon going down the garbage disposal. ‘I am lost.'

Her words echoed around Lily's tightly squeezed heart.

She took Violetta's hand and led her inside, sat her at the kitchen table, and got her a glass of water, unsure what to do next until a neighbour popped up at the kitchen window obviously wanting to know what was going on.

‘She will take me to see Luciana,' Violetta explained to Lily at the end of the conversation, her face smaller and paler with every word.

The elderly neighbour seemed happy to be in charge, and her landlady thus taken care of, Lily went upstairs and sat in her picture window, breathing in beautiful Tuscany, mulling over the chaotic events of the day and slowly letting the door in her memory open long and wide enough for her to see what lay behind it.

I
ngrid and Daniel meandered away from the river up the Via Tornabuoni.

It had moved her, almost unbearably, to hear him talk about the nightmare of returning his almost-adopted baby, but he himself seemed a little distanced from it. There was more to this sad story, she was sure.

‘So what happened?' she asked as they slowed down outside one of the designer shops for her to admire the window display. ‘Your wife fell out of love with you after she gave up on having children?'

‘She fell out of everything,' Daniel said. ‘I think I was just included in the package.'

‘You think she was depressed?'

‘No, I don't think so. She just got more involved in her work—she's a VP at Heigelmann's—started exercising a lot, being at home less. Keeping busy, I guess, until we seemed to be living almost separate lives. It's not as though we argued or anything. We just stopped being together.'

‘Were you trying?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you mean you don't know?'

‘It's complicated.'

‘Well, maybe it doesn't have to be. I mean do you still love her?'

‘Ingrid, I still love her so much I can hardly get out of bed in the mornings knowing how badly I've screwed it all up.'

Aha,
thought Ingrid.
Here it comes
.

‘Oh? And how did you manage that?' she asked lightly, dawdling in front of the next sumptuous window display.

‘I made a mistake.'

‘Well, you wouldn't be the first person to do that.'

‘It was a colossal mistake.'

‘How colossal?'

‘I met someone.'

‘Well, that's hardly—'

‘She fell pregnant. I have a six-year-old daughter and to all intents and purposes a two-year-old boy in Montevedova.'

This stopped Ingrid in her tracks.

‘You want to slap me, I know you do,' Daniel said when she turned to face him. ‘And I deserve it, but the truth is, it couldn't make me feel worse than I already do. It is the worst betrayal, the greatest deceit, the lowest of the low. I know all this. Trust me, I know.'

They stood there, looking at each other for a few frigid moments, then Ingrid raised her arm, but not to slap him. Instead she held a cool hand against his cheek. It burned as though she had struck it. He was perhaps the saddest man she'd ever met.

‘The woman in Montevedova,' she said.

‘It was nothing—a weak moment.'

‘But the children make it difficult.'

He nodded. ‘It's complicated, but I can't abandon their mother, and because of that, I can't be happy with my wife.'

‘Are you sure about that?'

‘I have everything that Lily wants only I have it with someone that precludes her from having anything to do with it. I've tossed
the options up in my head a thousand times, but I still don't know what to do.'

‘What's wrong with things the way they are?'

‘Eugenia is what's wrong with things the way they are. She's given me an ultimatum—shape up or ship out. I've wanted to ship out since the very beginning, but once Francesca came along…Eugenia has problems. She is not robust. She needs a lot of help.'

‘So what are you doing here in Florence?' Ingrid asked.

Daniel had nothing left to hide.

‘I'm running away,' he told her.

‘Now, I could slap you,' she said as the crowd rippled and flowed around them. ‘Running away never solved a problem for anyone, you know that. I think you know exactly what you have to do, you just need someone to agree with you.'

He thought then how lucky her three sons were to have her for a mother.

‘Come on,' Ingrid said. ‘Let's go get a drink and make a plan. You need to go back and sort your life out.'