After leaving the jeweller’s and wandering around picturesque Portofino, exploring the narrow cobbled streets crammed with stylish boutiques, Grace had bought gifts for Larry, Betty and Jamie, before they had climbed the steep path up to Castello Brown on the hill. From there they had meandered along the botanical footpath, sheltered from the sun by trellises covered in delicately scented pink roses, while Grace wondered if Connie had ever walked this path too. Then, remembering the dried pink rose petals inside the envelope in the hatbox with Glorious day, Portofino – 1955 written on the outside, Grace was certain Connie had. So she carefully picked up some petals from the ground to have as a keepsake of a wonderful experience too. Inhaling the scent and hoping to remember it always before it faded just like Connie’s petals had.

Walking on, they were surrounded by olive trees, giving glimpses of the gorgeous gardens belonging to the villas nestled high in the hills. They had sat in stunned silence on reaching the lighthouse, and savoured the view stretching along the breadth of the Italian Riviera – from Punta Manara near Sestri Levante to Capo Noli beyond Genoa – as a man on the next table had pointed out to them while they enjoyed tall glasses of San Pellegrino on the terrace café under the shade of the olive trees.

Now, heading back to the main square, Ellis’s mobile rang.

‘Hi Tom,’ he answered, and then after a quick ‘yes, that’s great, thanks, we’ll see you there in ten’ conversation, he ended the call and turned to Grace. ‘Tom and Georgie are bringing Nonna Maria to the gelato café in the piazzetta. Apparently, the peach ice cream is her favourite and she remembers Connie and Giovanni very well. Connie was her friend and that’s the reason she bought the pink villa. Even though her memory is fading, she was able to tell him all about Connie in very vivid detail right back to when she first arrived in Santa Margherita.’

‘Oh, that’s fantastic,’ Grace said, excitement bubbling inside her. At last, she was going to find out about the real Connie from someone who actually knew her.

*

Nonna Maria didn’t look like a traditional Italian granny. And certainly not like the image Grace had held in her head since first hearing about her. Dressed head to toe in expensive-looking designer clothes, topped off with a jaunty Gucci logo silk scarf at her neck, lacquered jet-black big hair and enormous Versace shades, Nonna Maria was the epitome of glamorous chic from a golden era. She had an ageless face, which had clearly had many aesthetic treatments, giving her a near flawless complexion and tautness befitting a much younger woman. On the seat beside her was a soft tan leather tote nestling next to a white bichon frise sitting on a little fluffy cushion.

‘Hi Grace, Ellis,’ Georgie said, standing up to give them each a kiss on the cheek when they arrived.

‘Good to see you again,’ Tom smiled as he introduced them, in Italian, to Nonna Maria and then asked in English if they’d like some gelato. ‘It really is the best you’ll ever taste,’ he said persuasively, handing them each a menu.

‘Get the peach cup. Two scoops; they make it from peaches picked on the mountainside,’ Nonna Maria instructed in English, with a very breathy but regal-sounding Italian accent, as she reached a bony, diamond-jewelled hand out to clasp Grace’s forearm.

‘Oh, um … yes please. I’ll go for the peach cup in that case.’ She grinned up at Tom as she settled into a seat, not daring to disagree with the formidable-looking Nonna Maria.

‘Same for me too, please,’ Ellis nodded, taking the chair beside her.

‘I’ll organise the ice cream and leave you all to chat,’ Georgie offered, then dashed off inside the café.

‘So you want to know about Connie?’ Nonna Maria said, getting straight to the point.

‘Yes please,’ Grace replied, finding her phone inside her bag so she could make some notes.

‘Put that away,’ Nonna Maria ordered with such directness it made Grace’s face flush; she did as she was told to right away. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ellis, who was sitting on her left, surreptitiously slip his phone back inside his pocket to avoid a telling off too. ‘You young people with your phones stuck in your hands. No wonder the passion has gone from your lives. No wonder the beauty … you don’t see it. Pah,’ and Nonna Maria batted her hand in the air before giving her dog a reassuring pat on the head. ‘And no wonder you ruin my special rugs with your bacchanalian parties.’ And she gave Tom a withering look. ‘My dear friend, Connie’s rug, I should add. She chose it from a shop in Rome. Handmade. And your friends … they come and vandalise it.’ And Grace held her breath, poised to hear more about Connie.

‘Nonna, it was an accident,’ Tom soothed, pulling up a chair close to his grandmother. ‘And we’ve been over this many times – plus the rug is spotless now that it has been expertly cleaned.’

‘Nothing is ever an accident,’ she said slowly, lifting a shot glass to her crimson-coated lips containing a liquid (which looked very much like the grappa that Grace had struggled with at the pool party) and chugged it in one without so much as a flinch. Grace widened her eyes in awe. Nonna Maria was certainly some woman, and Grace hoped she had even half her panache when she reached old age.

‘Nonna, please tell us about Connie,’ Tom said to move Maria on from her angst over the rug.

‘Who?’ And she gave them all a blank stare. Grace smiled to stifle a sigh of disappointment.

‘Your friend,’ Tom prompted. ‘Connie and her husband, Giovanni.’

‘I have a picture, if that would help. But it’s on my phone.’ And Grace tentatively put a hand back inside her bag in the hope that Nonna Maria would agree to seeing it to help her fading memory return.

‘Let me look.’ Nonna Maria seemed to have no issue with the phone now. ‘Ah, darling Connie. That’s my friend. The English lady. Everyone knew her when she came to live in Santa Margherita. And they all want to be her friend. The new bride with a dashing American husband. A golden couple. The best socialites. You know …’ she paused to clasp Grace’s arm again, ‘they threw the best parties on board Gio’s yacht. Cocktails and caviar. And dancing. He was a marvellous raconteur and Connie with her fine English manners and gentle warmth … well, we all glowed in their company. Superb.’

‘Ooh, how wonderful that you were at the parties. I’ve read about them in Connie’s diary,’ Grace told her.

‘Does she mention me?’ Nonna Maria swiftly asked, ‘they used to call me, Cristal.’

‘Yes, she did!’ Grace suddenly remembered. ‘She wrote about her new friend … a beautiful, vivacious Italian woman called Cristal.’

‘Ah, that’s Connie, always with a compliment. But where did she go?’ Nonna Maria said vaguely, gently tracing an index finger over the screen. Silence followed. Grace wasn’t sure if this meant that Nonna Maria didn’t know her friend had died. She could feel them all looking at her.

‘I’m very sorry … she …’ Grace started, but faltered on seeing Tom quickly shake his head.

‘Nonna, you told me she went to London, remember?’ Tom intervened, and Grace inwardly sighed with relief, for it was true: Connie had gone to London … when she’d left Italy. Maybe Nonna Maria didn’t need to know that her friend had since moved on to a permanent place of rest.

‘Ah, yes. When Gio died,’ Nonna Maria sighed. ‘Such a handsome, charismatic man, so young at heart and so full of life. Practically a boy, but the heart, it stopped beating. Just like that!’ she tutted, clicking her fingers dramatically. ‘But he adored Connie … until those bastards took him from her.’

‘What do you mean, Nonna? Who took him?’ Tom prompted tactfully, as Nonna Maria pulled a packet of long, thin cigarettes from her bag and lit one up. After tilting her head, she puffed a regal smoke ring up into the air, turned to Grace and told her.

‘When Gio died, his relatives couldn’t wait to drag his body back to the family plot in their private cemetery in America. Connie had no say in the matter and I tried to get her to fight but she was far too broken with the grief. They had worn her down. They never liked her.’ Nonna Maria pulled a face of disgust.

‘Why was that?’ Ellis said.

‘Where is your ice cream?’ Nonna Maria replied, tapping the table in front of Grace. ‘Get the girl her ice cream,’ she added, just as Georgie returned carrying two cups and spoons.

‘Sorry about the wait.’ Georgie grinned amiably, before sitting down next to Nonna Maria. ‘It’s crammed in there, but so worth it … wait till you try this gelato.’ And she placed a cup in front of Grace that contained a gloriously peach-fragranced swirl of creamy loveliness.

‘Thank you,’ Grace said, unable to resist scooping a spoonful into her mouth right away. The taste was sensational, of fresh, juicy peaches with a hint of warm cinnamon and vanilla, reminiscent of a peach cobbler with custard. Grace could see why it was Nonna Maria’s favourite. Hers too now.

‘You’re a good girl, tesoro mio,’ Nonna Maria said to Georgie, ‘and you are my favourite,’ before shooting another look in Tom’s direction. He just shrugged and smiled, as if he was used to being continually chastised by his grandmother and took it all in his stride. ‘Take your pick of my rugs when I die! And don’t let the vultures beat you to it.’ And then Grace realised that Nonna Maria was actually tipsy; she was slurring her words and almost toppling over in her seat … and she didn’t give a damn.

‘Oh, Nonna, come on, less of that talk. I don’t want your rugs, not when I’d rather have you.’ And Georgie patted Nonna Maria’s arm affectionately.

‘Nonna, you were talking about Gio.’ Tom surreptitiously smiled at Grace as if to telepathically tell her they’d be here all day at this rate …

‘Yes. They took him away from Connie. To punish her.’

‘Why?’ Tom said.

‘Because Connie was a Jew and they were Catholics. But worse than that … she was the mother of a bastard child born out of wedlock. When Gio fell in love with Connie, his father, of the wealthy Donato dynasty, was running for office, to be a US senator, and the scandal of his son marrying a Jew with an illegitimate child would ruin his chances. This was the Forties. Everything was different then,’ she clarified, shaking her head. ‘Not like today when a woman can go to a clinic to pick a father for her baby and we are all happy for her. A baby is always a gift!’ she declared passionately, before leaving them all to ponder on this thought while she took a long drag of her cigarette and exhaled another smoke ring away from the table and up into the air above her head. ‘That’s why they come here, to Italia. Gio was banished with his new bride. And because he was an artist. Not a lawyer like his father wanted him to be. The pink villa was the sweetener, somewhere to hide them away like a dirty family secret.’

‘Sweetener?’ Grace ventured, feeling intimidated, but in awe too of Nonna Maria.

‘A wedding present, his father said, but I knew it was a bribe. Connie adored the pink villa and made it into an exquisite home, landscaping the gardens and filling the villa with the finest furnishings, full of beauty, style and class, much like the lady herself. That’s why I bought it when they forced her to sell it – something in the deeds, they said, a stipulation, that the family home was only hers to live in while she was married to a Donato. Nonsense! But like I said, Connie had no fight left in her by then. Or money to pay lawyers to fight the wealthy Donato family. She had no money or assets of her own, just the gifts from Gio. She lived on in the villa for a while but it was never the same … not without her darling Gio, and with only the memories of happier times to haunt her.’

Grace sat silently for a moment, trying to imagine the unbearable pain and hurt this must have caused Connie, to not only be cast aside by her own parents at such a young age, but then by her husband’s parents too. Banished in shame to a village called Tindledale when she was only seventeen years old, pregnant and alone and grieving for Jimmy, and then later banished to Italy so as not to shame the US senator of the wealthy Donato dynasty.

‘Oh poor Connie,’ Grace said quietly. ‘The more I find out about her life, the more my heart breaks for her. It was all so unfair.’

‘But you must not upset yourself, young lady. Connie wasn’t one for pity,’ Nonna Maria said. ‘No, she was stoic and always conducted herself with class and decorum. Not like us Italians with our fiery passion,’ and she did a deep, throaty laugh.

‘Did you know anything about Connie’s parents, or her child, Lara?’ Grace ventured, desperate to know anything at all more about Connie’s family, as it seemed they were running out of options to find a living relative, but Nonna Maria responded blankly.

‘Who?’ she said, the light seeming to have faded in her eyes.

‘Connie’s baby, she was called Lara,’ Ellis tried, but it didn’t help.

‘She was taken too. Everyone Connie loved was taken from her,’ was all Nonna Maria added.

‘Who took her, Nonna?’ Tom tried as well, but she carried on talking about Connie and Gio, leaving Grace to wonder if this meant that Lara never did come to Italy with Connie. Or did Nonna Maria mean that Lara had died too? But it still didn’t explain why Connie went to America with the necklace for a child and then presumably brought it back, only for it to be found in the jewellery box decades later? And from what Nonna Maria had managed to tell them about Giovanni’s family, it seemed highly unlikely that Connie would have been visiting them, let alone taking a Star of David necklace for another young girl’s bat mitzvah, when his family were Catholics and so opposed to Connie. So it must have been for Lara: who else could have it been for?

‘I don’t know,’ Nonna Maria said, bringing Grace back to the moment. ‘Connie didn’t have a baby when she came to Italia.’ Ah, so Grace’s suspicion was correct … Connie wasn’t allowed to bring her child. But how could her parents have prevented it? Connie would have been an adult by then. A married woman, too. Unless … and an awful, devastating chill ran right through Grace as she considered another possibility … did Lara die in the war? Is that why she didn’t come to Italy? Did Connie take her back to London before the war ended, when she was still a young child? Is that what Nonna Maria meant?

But this couldn’t be right, as Connie had been full of joy on VE Day at the end of the war, dancing and planning her future with Giovanni … and Lara. They were to be a family, together. So what had changed all that? Grace just couldn’t work it all out and vowed to speed-read through the rest of the papers from Connie’s unit that she had stored on her laptop. She had read most of the diary pages and ad hoc notes, but they had tailed off in the early Fifties, with just the odd words here and there on each page from then on – Glorious day. Sad. The warm sun lifts my spirit. Marvellous trip out. Party on the yacht, that kind of thing. Very bland compared to Connie’s emotionally descriptive earlier entries, and no mention of Lara, which in itself was very ominous … but people didn’t just disappear, Lara had to be somewhere, and Grace wasn’t about to give up now. Giovanni’s family behaving the way they had towards Connie just made Grace more determined to put right the wrongs that had been meted out to her.