Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, didn’t mean to offend,’ Fiorella said, pushing her glasses up on her nose and sniffing. ‘Boy, sure smells musty down here,’ she added, by way of a diversion.

  ‘She can still smell?’ whispered one widow to another.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, it is musty,’ agreed a third.

  ‘We should buy some of those air fresheners that girl with the thick legs and the moustache sells,’ the widow Ciacci said. ‘You know the one. She and her mother and grandmother still have all their husbands and that tiny little boutique the English people go crazy for just behind here. Make everything themselves.’

  ‘Please, ladies!’ cried the widow Benedicti. ‘Enough! What of Alessandro?’

  ‘Yes, quite,’ agreed Fiorella. ‘Lily wasn’t talking to him on the phone.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked the widow Del Grasso.

  ‘I speak English,’ answered Fiorella. ‘I learned it on the Internet. German too.’

  ‘So who was she talking to?’ asked the widow Benedicti.

  ‘Her sister in America,’ Fiorella reported. ‘I think they have had some sort of a bust-up, although it’s not like the sister ran away to Naples with her husband or anything, but there seems to have been a rapprochement. That’s French, by the way. I speak un peu of that too.’

  ‘She is a pain,’ the widow Ercolani mouthed to the widow Pacini, pointing at Fiorella.

  ‘I heard that,’ said Fiorella, although in fact she had seen it reflected in the screen on the League’s long-defunct TV screen.

  The widow Ercolani buttoned her lips.

  ‘So, she was talking to her sister in America,’ the widow Benedicti interceded. ‘What does that have to do with Alessandro?’

  Having clearly heard Lily speak of a cheating husband and his Italian daughter, Fiorella was putting two and two together regarding Lily and Alessandro, but she knew enough to know that now was not the time to elaborate.

  ‘She was talking about baking cookies,’ she said. ‘That’s what Americans call biscotti. It’s English. Maybe she’s going to help out the Ferrettis while they’re indisposed.’

  ‘Indisposed?’ scoffed the widow Ercolani. ‘Being disposed of, more likely.’

  One lot of tongue-holding was enough for Fiorella. ‘You know, you’ve got it all wrong about that hospital,’ she said. ‘I had my hip done last year and look at me.’

  She did a little waltz around the room, ending with a jaunty kick ball change. ‘And you know something else? The food in there was delicious. Three meals a day brought to you in your bed and every single one squisito.’

  ‘You were in the hospital?’ the widow Ciacci asked. ‘And you came out again?’

  ‘It’s like a four-star hotel,’ insisted Fiorella. ‘I wanted to stay longer but they made me go home.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ the widow Ercolani said. ‘She’s trying to get rid of us all.’

  ‘Well, I can imagine wanting to get rid of you,’ said Fiorella, ‘but I kinda like the rest of them.’

  Before this could develop into anything more vocal, the widow Benedicti stepped into the middle of the group and held up her hands. ‘Never mind all that,’ she said. ‘Our thoughts and prayers—take pity on us Santa Ana di Chisa—are obviously with the Ferrettis right now, but we must not forget Alessandro. We need to get him and Lily together again as soon as possible. It’s what we are here for. It’s what Violetta would want.’

  ‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Fiorella said, but the widow Mazzetti made her ‘zip it’ gesture, the widow Ercolani balled her sizable hands into fists at her side, and the widow Ciacci made the sign of the cross and put her face back in her hands.

  ‘I can get Alessandro into the village for a couple of hours tomorrow around, say, midday,’ the widow Benedicti said. ‘All I need to do is send him to Alberto’s to get some nonexistent liqueur for my crostata. So if a couple of you tail him, and a couple more tail Lily, we should be able to herd them together and let nature—and true love—take its course.’

  Benedicti looked pleased with herself. It wasn’t so hard what Violetta did after all. But the other widows looked doubtfully at each other.

  Who among them could last long tailing anyone these days?

  Chapter 34

  Oatmeal, it seemed, or more specifically, rolled oats, had never made it as far as the hilltop towns of Tuscany. Nobody in Montevedova knew what Lily was talking about, or could find an Italian word to help her seek it further, and she was inept when it came to miming what an oat was. For a start, she didn’t really know what an oat was.

  Finally, a charmless supermarket in an industrial strip mall outside a neighbouring village coughed up the requisite bowls, measuring devices, and most of the remaining ingredients but still, no rolled oats.

  At least there she bumped into an English woman who said she had lived in Italy for the better part of twenty years and had never found anything resembling them.

  ‘So what do you use instead?’ Lily asked.

  ‘When in Rome…’ laughed the English woman. ‘I used to have oatmeal for breakfast and now I have a pastry like everyone else.’

  Lily pondered this until she came to a quirky little collection of discounted bits and pieces piled in a torn carton between the cheese graters and the oven mitts.

  She was in Rome herself, wasn’t she, she thought, as she picked through the box, finding something that brought a smile as wide as Francesca’s to her own face. She would make Italian cookies—with an American twist.

  Back at the bakeshop there had been no sign of Violetta since she had gone to the hospital, but Lily could not imagine her having an objection to the kitchen being used. She busied herself getting the ingredients ready and at eleven on the dot heard the bell above the pasticceria door ring.

  When she emerged into the store, a fierce-looking Carlotta was standing there clutching Francesca’s hand. The little girl still had her tatty wings on, but her hair had been brushed and she was wearing a different dress, a little too big for her, but clean.

  Lily smiled but she was nervous, not so much about the baking—although she had every reason to be—but at putting herself in the firing range of Daniel’s lover’s sister.

  ‘Hello, sweetie pie,’ she said to Francesca, her smooth corporate charm kicking in as she thanked Carlotta for bringing her.

  Carlotta chewed her lip, then said something to Francesca, who shrugged and looked up at Lily.

  ‘She says she knows who you are.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Lily was unsure whether this meant she knew from Mario that she was the cookie maker or knew some other way that she was Daniel’s wife. ‘Non capito?’

  Carlotta spoke again to Francesca who impatiently translated: ‘She says she knows who you are and that my mamma is very sick and she doesn’t want any trouble.’

  The two women locked eyes and it occurred to Lily that what she had initially taken for aggression in Carlotta could actually be something less threatening. She had brought Francesca to her, after all.

  ‘Tell her I don’t want any trouble either,’ Lily said. ‘Tell her we are just going to have some fun and make some cookies, and we won’t be bothering your mamma at all.’

  Francesca repeated this as Carlotta and Lily continued to hold each other’s gaze.

  She is just worried about her sister, thought Lily. She is doing whatever she can to help her even if it means leaving Francesca with me. It could just as easily be Rose fighting for Lily. This fiery Carlotta was not fierce, she was frightened.

  Lily smiled and a secret sort of understanding passed between the two women.

  Carlotta bent down to say something to Francesca and gave her a kiss.

  ‘She says could you bring me to her place when we are finished,’ the little girl repeated, wriggling out of her grasp and skipping behind the counter with Lily. ‘I’ll show you the way.’

  ‘But the baby,’ Lily asked Francesca, thinking suddenly of those fat striped legs
at home with Eugenia. ‘Can you ask her what’s happening with the baby?’

  ‘He’s not a baby,’ Francesca said, sulkily. ‘He’s nearly three.’

  ‘Well, could you ask for me anyway,’ Lily urged and she duly did so, reporting back that Ernesto was none of her concern.

  ‘None of my concern?’ Lily repeated, looking at Carlotta, whose brown eyes stayed just as troubled as she shook her head and repeated: ‘Non è il suo interesse.’

  ‘You should be glad,’ Francesca said. ‘He cries almost as much as Mamma. And he smells.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lily said, but Carlotta just repeated what she had said, then, with a toss of that wild head of hair, bustled out the door and up the Corso.

  Lily had set everything up in the kitchen just the way Rose had recommended to make it easy in case she got flustered or anything went wrong, which was what she fully expected. The old Italian sisters might just pull things out of the pantry and plunk them on the table, but Lily was not going to go quite so alle naturale.

  At first she tried mixing the flour and sugar together with a handy little wand-like electric gadget, but the dry mixture flew out of the new bowl with alarming ferocity, making Francesca shriek and spreading flour as far as the walls. Next time, they mixed it the old-fashioned way, with a spoon.

  ‘Now, we add the uova,’ Lily announced with more confidence than she felt.

  Her first attempt at breaking an egg ended up with most of the shell in the mixture and at least half the egg on the table. Her second one was not much better. The third time, she handed the chore over to Francesca, who at first refused to have anything to do with it, then reluctantly tapped the egg with exaggerated care on the side of the bowl, only for the whole thing to smash and explode across the table and slither toward the edge, an evil yellow alien. At this point Francesca pounced on it to stop its progress but knocked the rest of the carton of eggs onto the floor as well. Eight of them landed upside down and splattered on the stone and the ninth plopped rudely onto one of Lily’s shoes and oozed across her toes into a brilliant yellow puddle.

  Francesca leapt away from the table, her hands held aloft, and Lily would have laughed but immediately saw that this was not a comic turn. It was not mischief in those pale green eyes; it was something else altogether, something that struck a chord in her own long-lost seven-year-old self.

  Francesca was looking at her with dread. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she whispered, on the verge of tears. ‘I didn’t mean to. I’m very sorry, Lillian.’

  Lily’s heart sank to the tips of her egg-dipped loafers.

  In that instant, she understood something monumental. Not about herself or Daniel, or their marriage, or his girlfriend or her mother or her own hidden fears and buried secrets. Not, in fact, about anything in the past, hers or anyone else’s. What she understood was about the future—that the future could be changed if only someone knew that it had to be. ‘You only need one person who will walk on hot coals for you,’ her wise, warm, precious baby sister had only just told her. Just one person.

  ‘Oh, these pesky uova,’ she said to Francesca, picking up a fresh egg from a new carton. ‘Don’t you just hate it when they do that? You know, it’s almost like they do it on purpose because they know we are beginners, but we can show them a thing or two. Oh, yes. We can show them who’s boss, that’s what I think. Do you know, when I was younger I used to be able to juggle?’

  ‘Juggle?’

  ‘Yes, you know, like a clown.’

  ‘With great big shoes and a red nose?’

  ‘Oh, I can manage the red nose every now and then, but mostly I just do it like this.’

  With that she picked three eggs up and threw the first in the air, followed by the second and the third, but instead of catching them in her other hand, she just let them fall—splat, splat, splat—on to the floor.

  ‘There! Take that, you wicked eggs,’ Lily berated the mess. ‘I’ll only catch you if I feel like it and don’t you forget it.’

  Francesca stared at her in wide-eyed disbelief.

  ‘Wanna try?’ Lily asked, holding a fresh egg out to her. ‘We have plenty more. And it feels really good.’

  Gingerly, Francesca took an egg, then another, and threw them both in the air at the same time. Then she stood back and hid her face, screeching when they exploded at her feet.

  Nearly two dozen eggs later, Lily’s old hand-eye coordination skills were all coming back to her while Francesca had given up tossing the eggs in the air and was working out how to gently crack them against the side of a smaller bowl and extract the contents neatly from the shells.

  The kitchen looked like an omelette festival gone horribly wrong, but the atmosphere was otherwise one of contained triumph.

  ‘You know what, I think we have shown them a thing or two, don’t you?’ Lily stood back, trying not to beam too proudly, as Francesca neatly broke another egg into the bowl.

  The little girl nodded, a modest smile tweaking the corners of her mouth.

  Having mastered the art of egg-breaking, they moved on to mixing in the hazelnuts and rolling the dough into neat, even logs, rounder and fatter than the ones the sisters had been attempting—but this was for a reason that would become clear later on, Lily explained.

  When the tray of logs was finally in the oven, they turned to the mess around them and started to clean.

  They were both under the table sweeping up the broken bits of shell and scraping away the drying yolks when, protected by the dim light and the forest of wooden legs, Francesca’s sweeping came to a halt, her dustpan dropping to the floor.

  She knelt there, perfectly still, her wing tips brushing the underside of the table.

  ‘She doesn’t mean it,’ she said, not looking up. ‘She only does it because she is sad.’

  Lily’s heart was thumping. This was me, she thought. This was me!

  ‘I understand,’ she said softly. ‘Your mamma is not well. But just so you know, it’s not right. And I don’t know exactly how just yet, but I will try and help. OK?’

  The dustpan stayed still a moment longer, then Francesca gave a quick nod and started sweeping again. Lily longed to hold that child her in arms and never let go. The sight of that little backbone bent over beneath those bedraggled wings made her want to weep. She could help Francesca and she would, but not all wrongs were hers to right. She had to be careful what she promised.

  ‘It smells so good,’ Francesca said, climbing out from under the table, back to her old self. ‘Come on, Lillian, let’s see what we have done.’

  When Lily took the cantucci out of the oven, the logs looked as good as they smelled: golden brown and glorious—not undercooked or overcooked or flattened or exploded or any of the things she had expected to go wrong.

  When they had cooled, she took out the sharp knife as she had seen Luciana do and sliced the logs into thin discs, laying them flat on another pan and only then pulling out the cookie cutter she had found in the bargain bin at the market.

  Under Francesca’s watchful gaze, she pressed the cutter into the first disc to make a perfect heart shape.

  She held the cookie up and the radiant smile on the little girl’s face when she saw what it was, in that moment, almost made her own heartbreak worthwhile.

  Francesca took the cookie cutter and pressed out dozens of heart shapes, her smile never fading, which then went back into the oven for their second baking.

  ‘What will we do with the outsides of the hearts?’ Francesca asked, gathering the remaining bits of half-baked cookie in a pile and nibbling at them. ‘They taste just as good even though they don’t look like anything.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll think of something.’ Lily said and the two of them started to mix up a second batch of cantucci, this time with lemon and, in the absence of cranberries, dried cherries.

  Finally, when the hazelnut cookies were baked a second time and cooled enough to eat, the two of them sat on either side of Violetta’s table, took one h
eart each, and at the same time, on the count of three, took a bite.

  ‘Francesca, you make really out-of-this-world divine cookies,’ Lily said.

  ‘Yes,’ Francesca grinned, eyes glistening. ‘Out-of-this-world divine.’

  Chapter 35

  Luciana woke up after a night in hospital to find that she was almost her old self, except with a few extra cricks and creaks. But really, what were a few extra cricks and creaks at her stage in the proceedings?

  The painkillers she had been issued for her badly sprained ankle had given her a more restful sleep than she’d had in years, helped no doubt by a mild concussion, so she was in good humour, and had colour in her cheeks for the first time that year.

  Violetta, on the other hand, looked like she’d just been unearthed from the ruins of Pompeii. She’d not changed her clothes nor slept a wink since Luciana had tumbled down those stairs.

  ‘Looks like we should swap places,’ Luciana said, when she saw her sister sitting there, slumped in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair like a pile of secondhand coats.

  ‘I have something to tell you,’ Violetta said.

  ‘Am I missing a limb?’ Luciana asked, feeling for her arms, her legs, her nose.

  ‘No, I’ve hardly let them near you,’ Violetta said. ‘It’s not about you, it’s about me. It’s about the League. It’s about this match.’

  ‘I won’t mind if it’s my spleen, you can live without a spleen,’ Luciana said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever even used my spleen.’