by Wendy Holden
He said nothing for a few minutes, looking away so she could not quite see his expression. But then he seemed to shake himself and began talking about Paris again. For the days there, he said, had been happy; his mother, despite the reason for her visit, and very possibly because of it, was determined to enjoy herself in the city where, Marco now learnt for the first time, she had spent part of her youth.
His grandmother, who had died long since, had had ambitions in fashion and had worked for a time at one of the Parisian couture houses, meeting his Italian grandfather in a café in the city. They had returned to his native Tuscany when his mother was quite small, Marco now learnt, but not without planting in her the sweetest of memories.
Marco's voice was lifting now, as he explained excitedly how his mother had taken him and her sister Mara, Marco's aunt, to the rue Royale, where stood, she smilingly explained, one of her favourite shops in the world. Laduree, the home of the most wonderful macaroons. Marco had stared entranced at the polished, plate-glass window and the tiny pastel-coloured cream-filled biscuits, which seemed to fill the space behind it in a riot of pale yellow, rose pink, soft orange, pale coffee brown, darker chocolate brown, and delicate green.
Darcy's eyes snapped open in shocked delight. She sat up abruptly and stared at him with shining eyes. "Laduree! My grandmother was obsessed with their macaroons!" The coincidence was astounding. She felt quite winded with astonishment. "She decorated her whole apartment in macaroon colours."
"Great idea!" Marco laughed. "I'd love to have seen it."
"Well, maybe you will," Darcy assured him. "It still looks like that. It's my flat now, and I haven't changed a thing." She tried not to remember that Niall had wanted to and that he thought the décor anything but great.
"I'll hold you to that," Marco grinned. "Next time I'm in London."
"Do! Now carry on your story," Darcy urged.
"You're sure?" Marco raised a heavy dark eyebrow. "I'm not boring you?"
She shook her head with more energy than she had realised she had.
He went on to describe how he had stared and stared at the shop. He had never seen anything like these graceful fairy biscuits with their stripe of filling the exact same colour as their shells. The equivalent at home, the strongly flavoured amaretti with their scattering of sugar, were either hard and crunchy or soft and dry. They were delicious but had none of the delicacy of this pretty pastel riot of patisserie.
The macaroons seemed to him to be the essence of femininity; small wonder that he connected them, immediately and forever, with his beloved mother. The rose-pink one, anyway, was the exact colour of his mother's blouse that day. The chocolate brown, meanwhile, was like her hair.
"She sounds lovely," Darcy sighed.
"She was. But whose mother isn't?"
Darcy did not reply.
He had, Marco explained, watched his mother through the shop's plate-glass window, smiling and gesticulating at the assistants. Then she had come out, obviously delighted, with a large beribboned box of the precious macaroons. Giggling naughtily, the three of them went straightaway to sit on a bench and eat the whole lot at one wonderful, greedy sitting.
Listening to his mother and aunt excitedly exclaiming, watching them close their eyes with rapture as they bit into the biscuits, Marco felt something surge within him that was nothing to do with the almighty hit of sugar rioting round his system. He was seeing, as if the first time, the intense pleasure that food can give.
"These," his mother had smiled at him, holding a pink biscuit, "are about the most difficult things that a chef can make. They're almost impossible to do properly."
"That's what my grandmother always said," Darcy told him, wondering again at the coincidence.
Marco went on. For his mother, a consummate cook, to say such a thing made an impression on the eight-year-old boy. He liked the biscuits, and he liked a challenge. He also wanted to help his mother. Might the macaroons make her better?
And so the obsession began. Marco, now sitting in the sun over thirty years later, smiled ruefully as he described his eight-year-old self to Darcy, sieving and mixing with fierce concentration and then piping, breath held, on to a baking sheet. He could see himself, as clearly as if it were yesterday, bent over, bottom aloft, peering into the oven to see if the shells were rising.
Try as he might to follow the recipes—as many different ones as he could get his hands on; none seemed quite right, somehow—his macaroons were always too flat, too soggy, or too stiff and dry. They cracked; they stuck; they failed to rise and merged with the ones next to them in a flat, hard pool. Never once did they appear round and perfect with the shiny, shell-like dome on the top and the yielding softness beneath.
Darcy listened, touched beyond measure. Her eyes were closed even harder than before, so he couldn't see the tears that welled there.
Marco's voice was warm with laughter now. His family, he told Darcy, were amazed at his efforts. He had never shown the smallest interest in cooking before. Why now, all of a sudden, try to make the most difficult thing of all? But Marco took no notice. He was a boy on a mission. A child with a challenge.
The battle with the biscuits had begun to seize him; he was determined to get the better of them. It became an epic struggle made possible only by the fact that the family had hens laying plenty of eggs for him to endlessly separate and weigh, and almonds, which grew in the area, were also readily available and cheap, as was marscapone for the filling. But for months all Marco's pocket money, earned from paper rounds and odd jobs, went on food colouring and icing sugar.
And so, as his friends kicked balls about the park, working out their team formation, he worked out how to beat the eggs to perfection, how to sieve the almonds to fairy dust, how to make sure no air remained in the piping bag so a steady stream of glossy gloop emerged on to the baking tray.
"Good for you!" Darcy smiled, risking opening her eyes at last. She was just in time to see the remembered triumph in Marco's fade, to be replaced by a terrible sadness.
"Good for me," he said in a whisper. "But not good for Mama." The boy Marco, Darcy heard, now learnt that macaroons, however perfect, do not save lives. His mother had died.
But what a legacy she had left him, Marco explained, his voice strengthening. Nothing less than his restaurant. From experimenting with macaroons, he had gone on to develop an interest in cooking generally, and ultimately a pungent, earthy, full-tasting branch of his national cuisine that could not have been further removed from the insubstantial pastel confections in Laduree's window. "I don't know what Mama would think," Marco confessed, grinning.
Darcy did not care now that her eyes were red and full of tears. "I'm sure she would be enormously proud," she told him through the rock in her throat.
"You think so?" He smiled gently, a beautiful smile, Darcy noticed. She felt herself held in his gaze.
"Come by the restaurant again some time. Come by tomorrow. I've got some great new cheese I'd like you to taste."
Interest blazed in her eyes. "Cheese. I love cheese…" She seemed to check herself. "I have to go," she said hurriedly.
Then she walked away, down the hill. He watched her slight figure retreating until it passed round the next bend.
For the next few hours, after she had gone, Marco tasted, advised, planned, even tolerated the good-natured ribbing of his brigade— but had no idea he was doing any of it. His cooking senses were all present and correct, but every other part of his mind was somewhere else altogether. He replayed, up close, Darcy's passionate face—such a pretty name too—the way she had closed her eyes when tasting, her brows contracting as if it almost hurt.
That skin: soft and pink-flushed, with its dusting of faint freckles, like strawberry-infused cream with a scattering of chocolate powder. Those coffee bean–dark eyes. That hair, as black as liquorice from a few paces away, but up close, tumbled from its ponytail, not just black but with threads of brown and even gold and orange. Hints of carrot, cinnamon,
Parmesan, saffron, and, glinting here and there, sheet of gold leaf.
Was he in love? Already? But why not? He was an expert judge of whether a dish was right, knew in an instant whether it looked right, was composed of the right things, had been made properly, whether its heart was right. So why should not be the same of a woman?
Chapter Fifty
Ken had enjoyed a late breakfast on his terrace and was now taking a gentle constitutional round the environs of Rocolo's church. The building amazed him; the ancient, round-arched door opened to a flight of descending steps as wide as the building, leading down into the body of the church. There was a notice as you went in: a camera with a line through it. No photographs. A joy to obey.
All was cool, dark, and quiet; the rows of chairs—no pews here—stretched away towards the gloomy, gaudy altar. You got the sense, Ken thought, of something very old, of people having worshipped here for century upon century. People must have married here knowing that they would have their funeral services here, had their children baptized here knowing that they, in turn, would have their weddings here. The certainty of it all astounded him.
He emerged like a mole, blinking in the light and warmth, and a surge of deep joy for the beauty of the day assailed him, as perhaps the designers of the church had meant it to. The sensation was powerful enough to drive away everything else in Ken's mind, including his sighting of celebrities, the very people he was fleeing, in the very place he had imagined he was safe from them.
Spotting Christian Harlow and Belle Murphy had only been the start of it too. Halfway through his appetizer, Ken had realised who the big, dark-haired man with the booming voice at the table opposite was and why he had looked familiar.
Politicians weren't Ken's usual beat, but Hugh Faugh was colourful, high profile, and self-publicising enough to stray into his patch from time to time. Were those two startlingly unpleasantlooking boys with big hair and huge teeth his sons? Bad enough to get one like that, Ken thought. But two?
And that vampire-like woman was Faugh's wife, presumably the boys' mother. Ken did not recognise the other man and woman, who looked harmless enough, if slightly crushed, or the other boy, who was quite amazingly good looking. Ken stared for a good few minutes. Was he a model? Ought to be if he wasn't. Film star, even. Oh, listen to me, Ken thought, half indulgent. You can take the boy away from the paparazzi, but you couldn't take the paparazzo out of the boy.
Leaving the church behind, Ken found himself opposite the entrance to the children's playground over which the balcony from his room looked.
Nice playground, Ken thought, with those cypresses all around it stretching up into the pure blue sky, a soft breeze ruffling the leaves and making them glitter in the light. He stood at the edge, outside the gate, watching for a while.
He had already gathered, from his balcony, that the playground was a rallying point for nannies in charge of holidaying British infants from miles around.
Now, between the plants and bushes that the playground was plentifully supplied with, he could see glimpses of the children. Yes, definitely British, definitely upmarket; he knew the look. He had, until recently, seen it several times a day with its wealthy parents disappearing through the revolving door of various five-star hotels.
The nannies, too, were of the typical smart-family kind: more or less alike with long, glossy hair all shades from blonde to black, vast sunglasses, and miniskirts exposing long thin brown legs and feet in glittery flip-flops. They were, Ken noticed, all standing together, smoking, talking, gesturing, shrieking with laughter, answering their mobiles. The children they were nominally in charge of seemed more or less forgotten, although from time to time one of them would turn round to yell at their charges in throaty upmarket voices. "Don't do that, Cosmo!" and "No, Hero! No!"
He recognised that voice, Ken thought as he turned away. The Rolodex in his head whirred. Where had he heard it before? Those names too. Hero and Cosmo. Somewhere very recently.
He turned back round, frowning. His eye caught a small blond boy and a white-blonde girl, about four and three respectively, charging about after each other. Of course. That boy from the airport. The one with the train. And, Ken remembered, the horrid nanny.
Yes, there she was. In the midst of the chattering nannies, that long-legged, heavily highlighted, thoroughly unpleasant blonde. What had the kids called her? Titty? Totty?
Ken lingered protectively, watching the children for some minutes. He felt strangely reluctant to leave them with her. Totty, Ken now noticed, seemed to be looking for someone. Not the kids though. They were walking up one of the slides now, a strategy certain to end in an accident of some sort. Totty was oblivious, however. She kept casting glances towards the gate, where he stood himself, as if someone was expected there. Not wishing to be seen by her, Ken slowly, reluctantly, moved away.
In doing so, he narrowly avoided bumping into two grubbylooking men in baseball caps and leather jackets who seemed to be heading for the playground. Fathers going for their children, Ken supposed. As they passed him, Ken felt the strong, hard pull of a scent he recognised tugging at his nose. Strong tobacco. A few minutes later, back in the square, he realised it was cannabis.
Darcy had gone to bed for the first time in days without her stomach feeling like a robbed bank. The bread and tomato at Marco's, topped with the grilled chicken fillet and broccoli reluctantly served by Mara, had kept her going all day.
Now, the next morning, she was starving again. The egg-white omelette Mara had banged down before her for breakfast had not even taken the edge off it.
But, of course, they could not continue, these little gastronomic stop-offs at Marco's. He had mentioned cheese, which would be death to her diet. Today she would have to scurry past and hope he didn't see her.
She must concentrate on other things, such as the text that had come late last night from Christian, a mere two sentences in which the actor explained that he was involved in a complicated scene at the moment but would see her soon.
Darcy, now heading towards the gate for her run, felt almost cheerful as walked past Emma and Morning on the terrace.
"I'll see you later," she called gaily.
She reached over to chuck Morning under the chin. He really was sweet. She had not, until now, realised babies could be such fun, so well-behaved and so responsive. Morning was also so appreciative of her every effort to entertain, from waggling her fingers over his face to tickling him. He always smelt delicious, powdery, warm, and with a slight milky undertone. Emma kept him wonderfully clean and happy.
Especially now, after talking to her, it seemed to Darcy more and more mysterious why such a woman worked for Belle. It couldn't be that she was dazzled by celebrity; Emma just did not seem the type. Belle, however, hadn't been back to the villa for days, nor had she even been in touch. Perhaps Emma just felt sorry for the child. But surely she could not put her life and career on hold because of someone else's selfishness. There would be other nannies for Morning.
"You know," said Darcy, watching Emma using the sugar lumps on the table to play a counting game with the baby, "you're really good. You could get a much better job. Why bother with the Evil One?"
Emma looked at her in alarm. "Evil One?"
"Belle's name in the film," Darcy assured her, smiling. "What all the good characters, like mine, call her. Belle's character is a beautiful but evil man-eating female monster who wants to destroy the universe. Typecasting or what?" She raised her eyebrows and snorted.
"You can't like working for her," Darcy pressed. Suddenly, she felt determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Emma looked down. She longed to unburden herself. She could imagine how she must seem in Darcy's eyes: Belle's slave and vassal, tolerating the routine contempt with which the actress treated almost everyone, when she bothered to notice them at all. But she could not possibly tell the actress the circumstances in which she had arrived in Belle's employment. Once made, such a confession could not be retra
cted and, if it got out, could be disastrous. Ending up penniless and unemployed in Italy was not something she could risk.
"But wouldn't you rather do something else? Like—I don't know—run your own place. Your own nursery. Be your own boss?"
As it happened, Emma had thought often since, and longingly, of the idea she had aired in the Florence square with Orlando.
"Former nanny to the stars," Darcy teased. "You could put that on your sign as well. Might as well get something out of your time slaving for the Evil One. You'll be turning people away."
Emma smiled.
"You could even have a Mediterranean menu," Darcy suggested excitedly. "Loads of pasta and olive oil. That'd get the aspirational parents beating down your door!"
Emma agreed that it would, indeed.
