by Rosanna Ley
‘The thing is,’ he explained, ‘when we make ourselves do something we don’t want to do, or someone else makes us do what we don’t want to do, it makes us feel bad.’
Too true. Ginny knew the Ball wouldn’t question that one. It was a parasite. It fed off such things.
‘So the simplest answer,’ he said, ‘is not to do it.’
‘The easiest option,’ murmured Ginny.
‘Not necessarily.’ He met her gaze and the expression in his eyes told her that he was thinking of the time he went to Australia and refused to be a dad. ‘It may be the most honest and it’s the only way to be true to yourself. But it’s not easy.’
Ginny considered this. It was true that if she refused to go to uni – which was academic, as she wouldn’t get a place anyway – then it wouldn’t be easy. She would upset people – her mother and Nonna especially – but at least she would be true to herself. And when she came to think about it, she realised that no one could or would make her go. Oh, her mother might have a lost opportunities rant, but in the end she couldn’t do jumping jellyfish about it. And she wouldn’t. At the end of the day, her mother wanted her to be happy.
‘I love my mum,’ she said to this man who had also loved her mum and had also let her down.
He nodded. ‘Sure you do.’
‘But I need to get away from her for a while,’ she said. ‘She keeps me too safe.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s good to be safe.’
‘Yeah.’ And she laughed, because this was about the first normal parental thing he’d said to her. ‘But I need to … ’ It sounded stupid.
‘Discover yourself?’ he said.
‘Well, yeah. Sort of.’ Find me, she was going to say. Find a different sort of me. The sort of me who can live without a mother looking after me the whole time, the sort of me who can vanquish a Ball.
‘I know how you feel,’ her father said. ‘You don’t have to hold it in.’ And he reached over and touched her arm, and she believed him. And she felt its grip relax, like a loose tentacle, as if the Ball had been expecting something else, as if it were disappointed, for the first time in Its life.
CHAPTER 54
Flavia had to concentrate hard to remember the order of events. It seemed important. She wanted to make her account as accurate as possible for Tess. But it was easier to recall the emotions than the facts. Perhaps that was always the way.
A few months after she’d seen Peter in Exeter, Flavia received a letter from the young man in the tea shop who had taken her home to stay with him and his mother that night.
‘I’m coming to London,’ he wrote. ‘Could we meet?’
Flavia wasn’t sure; she didn’t want any reminders of the night in Exeter, but Bea persuaded her that it was only common courtesy. ‘And think,’ she said. ‘What would you have done that night without him, my dear?’
This was true. So Flavia met him and he bought her fish and chips from a cafe in Shepherds Bush and a half pint of Guinness in the Royal Crown. It was a foggy winter’s night at the end of February and hard to imagine that spring might be around the corner. In England, she guessed, spring would be a long time coming. And the fog … Smog, they called it, in London. Flavia saw it as a mysterious cloak – a shroud – that covered the city while cars and buses crept and grumbled by and silent trolley buses glided through the grainy yellow light. She knew it caused health problems, but still – there was something she liked about its strange and heavy silence.
‘It will pass when the weather warms up,’ Bea Westerman had told her. ‘It’s pollution – from the coal smoke.’ Flavia could believe this. It was like trying to breathe through a thick layer of muslin and it made everyone look pinched and grey. Not him though. He looked red-faced, healthy and smiling. Like a breath of fresh air.
He didn’t refer to what had happened in Exeter, but he asked Flavia how she was liking life in London.
‘It is different,’ she confessed. She looked around the pub; this too was a revelation to her. Its beery smell, its dinginess, the big mirrors advertising the ales, the posters about the latest election campaign, the stained carpet, the men in suits standing at the bar – it was nothing like the bars of her homeland.
Part of her longed for the warmth of Sicily. And yet … Here she was so free. She had begun to explore the city. She had visited the market of Petticoat Lane and the Bengali shops in Brick Lane with their dusky spices, bright silks and Indian sweetmeats. She had bought flowers and vegetables from Covent Garden. She had found an Italian quarter around Holborn with a church – St Peter’s – at its heart, and she came here every Sunday to think and to pray. Her God had not given her what she wanted most in the world … And she wasn’t entirely sure that she even believed in Him anymore. But the sense of God was a comfort to her; it seemed to give her strength.
She discovered Soho too – a maze of narrow streets in which she felt strangely at home; perhaps because the area was such a mish-mash of European and African street life, cafes and jazz clubs. She was not stupid – she knew about the more dubious nightclubs and sex trade, but in the daytime there was a vibrancy about this area that drew her. She even found an Italian coffee bar – with an espresso machine, arty decor and a jukebox – and she stayed there for an hour on her day off, drinking espresso, soaking up the atmosphere and wondering … What would she do next?
‘So,’ he said, ‘what will you do next?’
Precisely. ‘I do not know,’ she confessed. She couldn’t envisage working for Bea Westerman for ever. What she wanted more than anything was to open her own restaurant – she had seen what passed for restaurants in England, and she knew she could do better – if she could only find produce of sufficient quality to cook with. There were Italian restaurants in London – though some of them were rather seedy. And she had walked past an Italian trattoria on Gerrard Street which looked a lot more promising. She knew now that others like her had come – not only from India, Jamaica and Pakistan – but also from Sicily to England to make a living. They were willing to work hard and they often worked in nurseries and restaurants – because who knew more than the Sicilians about food? And it was becoming easier all the time to procure ingredients such as balsamic vinegar, parmagiano and good olive oil. But … she still wasn’t sure that England was ready for what she had to offer.
She told him this.
‘Then do it,’ he said. ‘Make them ready for it. Give them what they don’t even know they want.’
‘But how can I?’ She spread her hands. ‘To start a business you need money. I know this. And I have so little saved.’
‘Nothing’s impossible.’ He seemed very serious. ‘I’d like to run my own cafe too. I will one day.’ He hesitated for just a second. ‘Maybe we should join forces.’
Flavia laughed. But somehow she knew even then that he meant what he said.
After that meeting, he wrote to her regularly and she wrote back. Their letters were polite to begin with and Flavia knew hers were stilted and awkward – her English was improving, but sometimes it felt like one step forwards and two steps backwards, as the English might say.
But gradually, she loosened up and he got braver, and letters streaked back and forth between them – letters packed full with their lives, their sadnesses, their hopes and their dreams. He was three years younger than Flavia; at times he sounded like a man, at other times a boy. Perhaps, she thought, she had grown old before her time.
‘Will you ever go back to Sicily?’ he asked her.
‘No.’ Flavia didn’t have to think about it. England might be cold and damp, but this was where her new life was. England was still recovering after the hard war years, there was much reconstruction. But more than that – there was that feeling of hope in the air. And Flavia needed that. She still wrote to Santina, but she hadn’t answered any of her parents’ letters. There was no going back.
Every so often he travelled by train to London to see her, and she came to look forward to his visits. He was
never pushy – she couldn’t have stood that – but he was kind and he was good company too. He became a friend.
It was in September that year that Bea Westerman took Flavia to the Dome of Discovery, whose exhibition was part of the Festival of Britain. The banks of the Thames had become a haunt of Flavia’s during the summer – Tower Beach was the nearest London got to the seaside, and on warm days the sandy banks were full of people sitting in stripy deckchairs and children paddling in the river. It was a far cry from Cetaria – but Flavia liked to sit and watch these English families, though there was a part of her that couldn’t help but recall that other family, in Exeter …
According to Bea, the South Bank had been an area of shabby warehouses and near-derelict housing, but this had been cleared and developed to create a site for the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Royal Festival Hall. Just the outside of the Dome and the needle-like Skylon building standing next to it was mesmerising for Flavia – and she could have stared at this vision of modernity for hours. But Bea was a woman with a mission. ‘Six million pounds,’ she murmured. ‘A million bricks.’
‘Truly?’ Flavia followed her in.
Bea was philosophical. ‘It is meant to raise the nation’s spirits, my dear,’ she said. ‘After this war we’ve lived through, something has to, you know.’
They were carried in with the rest of the crowds by an escalator, the interior of the building concealed until their moment of entry. Then … Da-daa! All was revealed – the magnificent tiers of galleries, the massive curving roof, latticed with rafters. There were gasps of wonder. ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’, and ‘I say!’
Flavia too was entranced. This was, she had heard, the largest Dome in the whole world. And she was walking through it. They began with the land of Britain – how Britain’s natural wealth had come into being – and ploughed on, through landscape and wildlife, agriculture and minerals, shipbuilding and transport … The list of Britain’s achievements was endless, thought Flavia, as they moved on to sea, sky and space. It was a world power such as she had never dreamed of. Compared to Britain, Sicily was a poor relation indeed. She stood straighter – proud that she, Flavia Farro, was here in London, witness to such a grand sight.
Bea was not impressed by the television exhibition. She had never seen the need, she muttered. And this, frankly, was almost beyond Flavia’s imagination. And then there were the British people … symbolised by the Lion and the Unicorn, the strength and the imagination. She cast surreptitious glances at those around her. These qualities were not altogether in evidence. But still … There had been men – explorers like Captain Cook and great scientists like Charles Darwin – who had such qualities in abundance.
At last they retired to a nearby tea room. ‘Did you enjoy it, my dear?’ asked Bea. ‘It’s supposed to be very educational.’
‘Oh yes!’ Flavia assured her. ‘You were so good to bring me.’
Bea’s expression softened. ‘I have grown very fond of you,’ she said. ‘And that is why …’
Flavia felt a sliver of foreboding.
And sure enough Bea took her hand. ‘I am leaving London, my dear,’ she said. ‘I’m going to live with a woman friend of mine. In Dorset.’
‘Dorset?’ Flavia frowned.
‘It’s a small house,’ Bea continued. ‘And I’m terribly sorry, my dear, but—’
‘I can’t come with you,’ Flavia said. ‘You don’t need me.’
Bea lowered her head in acknowledgement. ‘My friend is very independent,’ she said. ‘She likes to cook and clean for herself.’ She stayed Flavia’s hand and poured the tea with her own.
‘I understand,’ said Flavia. She watched the golden liquid stream into the porcelain cup. But what would she do now? What could she do without this woman who had been so kind to her?
‘Like me, Daphne has never married.’ Bea was still speaking. ‘She wants a lady companion.’ She stirred in milk and a small ration of sugar.
‘Yes, of course.’ Though Flavia did not want to hear any more about Daphne.
‘It will suit me very well,’ Bea said. ‘London, after all, is for the young.’
It was true that after Cetaria, London was crowded, noisy and frightening. But Flavia had grown accustomed to it. And now she would have to get a real job – it had only ever been a question of time.
‘However,’ Bea said, taking a delicate sip of her tea. ‘I have a proposal for you, my dear.’
The proposal turned out to be that Bea would put up a sum of money for a business. ‘I will have a reasonable sum to invest now that I’m moving out of London,’ she said. ‘And I rather like the idea of investing in you, my dear.’ They would purchase, she suggested, a cafe or a small restaurant in a place of Flavia’s choosing, and Bea would become what was called a sleeping partner. Flavia would be a partner too – a working partner – and as such would be manageress and get a share of the profits. And she could live in.
‘We would need more staff though,’ Bea said, pouring more tea.
Flavia stared at her. She could hardly believe what was happening. First the Dome of Discovery and now this. It was an extraordinary day indeed.
‘Perhaps even another partner,’ Bea said. ‘A man?’
Flavia realised at once from the glint in her eye that she’d been talking to a certain someone.
‘Do you imagine that he’d be interested?’ Bea asked, as if she didn’t already know.
‘I do,’ Flavia said.
And he was. After initial discussions, they decided to look for somewhere in Dorset – so that Bea could keep an eye on her investment and so that he wasn’t too far from his mother. ‘But not Devon,’ Flavia had stipulated.
‘Not Devon,’ the others agreed.
It had taken more than a year to move and set up, but in March 1953 they finally opened the cafe in Pridehaven. Flavia was cook, he was front of house and a young waitress helped wait at table.
To start off with they served English food peppered with a few Italian dishes, then gradually introduced more Sicilian specialities. People tried Flavia’s pasta and pizza and they came back for more. Flavia got more adventurous and she found good suppliers of vegetables, meat and fish. And so the cafe gradually grew its own identity, which had evolved over time. The Azzurro was born.
Right from the start, Flavia found it easy to work with Lenny. He took a room in Pridehaven but he was always at the Azzurro and willing to work just as hard as she did. That was hard.
Every Sunday they closed the cafe and took the day off, and that was when they went out – to the pictures, sometimes to a dance or even out for a meal. On the day of the Queen’s coronation they organised a street party, and when the day turned out cold and wet (‘As you would expect of England in June,’ Flavia muttered to Lenny) they opened their doors to the entire street and celebrated the Sicilian way with a spread fit for the Queen herself.
They seemed to move so seamlessly from being friends to being a couple, that, thinking about it now, Flavia couldn’t remember exactly when or how it had happened. He was younger than her, yes, but he possessed a quiet inner strength that calmed her.
And then on the first anniversary of the Azzurro’s opening, as they toasted each other with a glass of champagne after they’d finished for the evening (in those days they finished at eight, but later stayed open till midnight sometimes) Lenny literally dropped down on to one knee.
‘I know I’m not the one you’d have chosen,’ he said, looking up at her with those blue-violet eyes of his, ‘but I can tell you, Flavia, my darling, you’re the one for me.’
It was the only time he had ever referred to Peter, even by implication. She knew that he had seen them outside the tea shop in Exeter and that he probably even knew Peter and his wife as they lived so close to where he had worked. God knows what Lenny had thought that night … She didn’t tell him the whole story though. She didn’t want to relive it. And it was true – he was not the one she would have chosen. Santina alone knew what she felt fo
r Peter – what she would always feel. But Lenny was the man who loved her and who worked with her and who would lay down his life for her.
‘Is this a proposal?’ she asked him, putting her hands on her hips.
‘Yes, Flavia,’ he said solemnly. ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Of course I will, Lenny,’ she said.
She never wrote to Santina again. Her old friend was part of it, of Sicily and the past. Flavia only wanted the future now.
The seasons go by and the seasons cannot lie. In the Sicilian kitchen you use what is available. In spring there are almonds, asparagus and early peaches. In summer there are figs, melanzane and courgettes.
To the ancient Romans, the globe artichoke was believed to be an aphrodisiac. Protect by its outer leaves or the heart will wither and perish …
The season was from November till April. At festival time it was possible to go to a restaurant and eat artichoke with every course … The best artichokes were from her village and the countryside nearby. Everyone knew that Palermo wore the Artichoke Crown. Flushed pink and purple, long-stemmed, rough-leaved, their globes small and tender; Flavia remembered them being sold from barrows, piled high.
The dishes range from antipasto to risotto, from caponata to frittedda. Stewed, braised, roasted, barbequed, fried or grilled. Baby artichokes raw in salads. A light stuffing slipped between their petals. Simple is best.
There is an art to cooking the artichoke, Flavia wrote, imagining as always that she was addressing Tess. Like everything that is good, it requires patience … First, prepare. Cut off the stem; remove only the tough outer leaves, cut away any prickly collar, the stalk and the top. Take a cut lemon … Squeeze …
Of seasons that go by and seasons that cannot lie.
* * *
From her writing room, Flavia heard a shout from the garden.
She made her way outside. Lenny had apparently left his fork and his bucket on the lawn and appeared to have vaulted the dividing wall into Cathy and Jim’s garden. How else could he be running across their garden even now? Flavia’s stomach was churning. Lenny …
