Chapter 19
Lily was hurrying past the Hotel Adesso when the little gray-haired woman she had seen hollering down the hall the day before scurried out of the doorway and grabbed at her arm.
“You want stay in lovely four-star hotel?” the old woman asked her.
“I tried to yesterday,” Lily said, gently extracting her arm from the vicelike grip. “But there was a problem with the plumbing.”
“Problem? There is no problem.”
“The drains were blocked. There was a huge fuss.”
“Oh, that,” the woman said. “False alarm.”
“False alarm? I could smell the drains from here in the doorway.”
“There is no problem,” the woman insisted, tugging at her arm. “I promise. You stay here. Is very nice. Four stars.”
“The lady at the tourist office said it had no stars,” Lily informed her.
“Lady at tourist office is like to drink too much.”
Lily looked up at the hotel. It did look nice, and the awful smell had gone completely, but she’d already paid 500 euro to stay with Violetta, and anyway she didn’t want to think about this now. She didn’t want to think about anything.
“Thank you, but I’m fine where I am,” she said, and after something of a tussle, she pulled away, continuing down the hill, cursing the cheerful ivy that draped elegantly over a garden wall, the faded turquoise of a shuttered building, the rustic charm of an ageing street lantern. Yes, Montevedova was beautiful. She got that. But what did she need with beauty?
She was almost back at her dry parapet when progress was halted by a slow-moving group of old women who all but blocked her path. So many old women! Where were they keeping the young ones?
No matter which way Lily stepped to overtake the shuffling group, they seemed to form a clump right in front of her, but just before she lost her patience and demanded that they either get out of her way or hurry up, they stopped, more or less delivering her like a pea down a slippery chute to the open door of Poliziano, a charming old-fashioned café with views out across the valley.
A grizzled old man was leaning on the counter sipping a glass of wine and Lily needed no further encouragement. She went in, crossing to a tiny Juliet balcony overlooking the view. It had room for just one table and so she sat down, ordered a coffee, and, after a pretence at hesitation, upon seeing it was almost eleven o’clock, a glass of prosecco. The coffee was good, but the prosecco better. Its tiny bubbles seemed to smooth away the enormous wrinkle that Francesca had made in her morning.
It wasn’t the child’s fault; she was—well, Lily didn’t want to think about what she was. She was perfect. There it was. Plain as a pickle. Perfect. But why wasn’t her hair being brushed? Why did her wings have holes in them? Who was taking care or, rather, not taking care of this tatty little Tinker Bell? Lily’s missing certainty popped in for a brief visit as she sipped her drink. If Daniel walked through the door right then, she was certain what she would do. She would shoot him. In the heart. And then the head, and then the balls. And then she would feed what was left of him to the pigs.
She ordered a second prosecco.
This soothed her wounded heart a little more.
The balcony she was sitting on had a similarly splendid view to the one in her room, and, on reflection, Lily couldn’t think why she had chosen it—it was a table for two: a hopelessly romantic spot to stare into a lover’s eyes and be swept away in the magnificence of the surroundings.
Did Daniel bring his lover here, she wondered? Had they sat at this very table and gazed at each other while Francesca and her baby brother stayed at home taking care of themselves? Who was this man she had known so well for so long? A liar, a cheat, not even a good father.
She put her glass back on the table. She’d come to Tuscany because she wanted her husband, wanted to reclaim the love they once shared, wanted to get back what she’d lost. But now she saw what a fool’s errand that was.
It was one thing to look at a photo and to rationalize a situation, even in a drunken my-husband-has-another-family-and-I-must-go-and-do-something-about-it way. But to see the results of that with her own eyes? To feel that little body pressed into hers? There was no going back from this.
She looked across to the grandfather clock in the corner. It was still not midday, but taking the time difference, jet lag, and her stewing emotions into account, Lily considered a third glass of prosecco. It was only low alcohol after all. Practically lemonade. Hardly worth counting.
But something about the way the waitress (finally, someone under thirty) looked at her when she came to collect her drained glass made her change her mind.
She paid the bill, leaving a generous tip, and, fueled by what little alcohol there was in those Italian bubbles, she decided to find an Internet café or a telephone to check in with Pearl.
The thought of work hinged her back to her old self a little. She knew where she was when it came to Heigelmann’s—nothing had changed there—but she had taken only a couple of steps outside the café when she heard someone calling out to her.
“Signora! Signora Turista!”
She turned to find Alberto waving at her from outside his shop.
“Again,” he called, “I am about to sit down to lunch! Bread, prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella, more tomatoes freshly delivered from my grandmother with instructions about a pretty blonde.”
She laughed but shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Alberto, I’m just—”
But as she spoke an argument erupted from the doorway she had just passed. It was another bakeshop, more tacky than the Ferrettis’, this window stuffed full of cantucci in a myriad of flavors and a brassy rainbow of fancy wrappings.
A curvy woman in a wraparound dress backed out of the store, almost bumping right into Lily. She was shouting in Italian at someone inside and came so close Lily could smell her. She was slightly lemony and very angry, her long dark hair flicking wildly from side to side like a horse tail swatting flies.
Lily could have reached out and pulled it. It was Daniel’s lover, of course.
“Eh, Carlotta! Causing trouble again!” called a handsome young man from the gelateria opposite, and Daniel’s lover spun around and unleashed a tongue-lashing on him as well.
“Carlotta, Carlotta,” he repeated, shaking his head and backing into the ice cream store.
Carlotta! How dare she have such a turbulent, exotic name and cheeks aflame with such passion?
Another angry woman emerged from the tacky cantucci shop waving her fist at Carlotta, who started backing in Lily’s direction. Desperate to avoid either winding up underneath her feet or face to face with her, Lily spun on her heels and hurried toward Alberto who was still standing outside his shop watching the commotion.
“You change your mind, no?” Alberto grinned. “My grandmother’s tomatoes do this every time.”
Lily stepped inside his little wine shop but again refused his offer of lunch although it looked appetizing enough set out on a white platter on his desk: the cheese pulled into chunks and tossed with chopped fresh tomato and torn basil leaves, a crusty loaf of sliced ciabatta next to it. But distress curdled in her stomach. Her head pounded. Carlotta!
“So what’s the story with the woman in the street?” she asked.
“Crazy,” Alberto answered with a disinterested shrug. “Nice girl, good girl, but crazy. Whole family is crazy. She gets fired from the Borsolini brothers once a week. But they crazy too. You would like a glass of wine?”
She couldn’t bring herself to ask any more, to ask if he knew of Daniel, or Francesca, or that fat baby boy. For a start, she didn’t want to make a big deal of her interest, but also she was afraid that if she started asking questions, she might never stop. Did Carlotta know that Daniel had a wife? That her daughter’s dress was dirty? That you could be as crazy and as nice as you wanted but that it wasn’t right to steal someone’s husband, someone’s future, someone’s dreams, someone’s daughter?
If Alberto noticed she was distracted, he didn’t let on, keeping up a steady stream of chatter about his wines, the recent rain, the local food, the bar he was going to later in the day to meet with his friends, in case she was interested.
She wasn’t, but she did get him to tell her a little about the town and if there was much more to it than she had already seen. The news was disheartening. Montevedova, Alberto told her, really only had two streets, the Corso and the lane that forked in the opposite direction at the parapet. In any case, the two of them joined up again at the piazza grande at the top of the village, where he was meeting his friends if she changed her mind.
There were back alleys and hidden pathways between the two main lanes, he explained, but pretty much what Lily had seen was what there was.
“Everybody must know everybody here,” she suggested. “You must bump into each other all the time.”
“You would think so,” Alberto agreed, “but some like to keep to themselves. And the good thing about a small town is that you always know where everyone else is so you can not go there, you can go somewhere else.”
This was a very good point.
Lily already knew where Francesca and Carlotta were and could only assume Daniel was not far away.
Inferring that she had already enjoyed all the sights Montevedova had to offer, she asked Alberto what she could explore farther afield. He suggested she head to one or another of the nearby towns, none of them as beautiful as Montevedova but all worth a look anyway. He then took her down to his basement and showed her out the back door, which was close to the bookstore. She bought a guidebook and headed to her car.