The Lemon Tree Hotel

by Rosanna Ley

  ‘Yes, I married Alonzo.’ She placed her glass carefully on the table. What else could she have done? Her one and only love, the man she had thought to be her destiny, had travelled many miles away to another country – she’d had to try to forget him.

  ‘Just as your parents wished you to.’

  Chiara gave a little shrug. He was making it sound as if she’d taken an easy option – but that showed how little he knew. ‘It meant so much to Papà,’ she said. ‘Alonzo’s father was very special to him. He was bullied at school you know, and Papà stuck up for him. Their friendship lasted their whole lives.’ Her hand trembled as she reached for her drink. Too much wine on a near-empty stomach perhaps? Or the effect of this warm night combined with the unexpected presence of the man by her side? She realised that it was important for her to make him understand. ‘Alonzo’s family had money. They helped out with the hotel in the early days. Papà could not have done it without them. And so . . .’ And so, it was felt the debt must be repaid. All four parents were keen for Alonzo and Chiara to marry, to cement the bond of friendship, to reinforce the security of the hotel and the livelihood it could provide for generations to come.

  ‘It also left a burden of repayment,’ Dante remarked. ‘Your father must have felt bound to offer his daughter to his friend’s son.’

  Chiara frowned. ‘What do you mean?’ He made it sound as if she was just part of a bargain.

  ‘I mean, what sort of friendship is that?’

  ‘He didn’t feel bound exactly.’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘It was something they wanted, that’s all.’

  But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘What age are we living in, Chiara? The 1940s, the 50s maybe? For God’s sake, this is the twenty-first century.’

  For a moment Chiara was taken aback. But of course, Dante had always had this spikiness in his character. ‘It was a long time ago, Dante,’ she reminded him rather tartly. ‘It was the twentieth century if you recall.’ She couldn’t decide if she were more annoyed or flattered by his outburst. ‘We are talking about 1968, remember?’ Which was dangerous territory indeed.

  Dante shot her a probing look. It reminded her of that last night in the olive grove, and she shivered – although she was not cold, not in the least. ‘You married him in 1968?’

  All of a sudden, the years seemed to have dissolved and the past was as raw as if it were yesterday. ‘Of course not.’ Chiara took another sip of her drink and once again fought for composure. She was determined to bring a pause to this conversation. It was getting out of hand. ‘I married Alonzo in 1970.’

  ‘Pah!’ There was so much feeling in this one exclamation that Chiara almost laughed. Except that it wasn’t funny. And she understood his frustration, even after all these years.

  And so, this time it was Chiara’s turn to put a hand on his. ‘I waited for you, Dante,’ she said. ‘I waited two years.’ And two years was a long time when you were sixteen and your parents were so eager for you to marry another man.

  His expression softened. ‘I apologise once more,’ he said. ‘When I met with you tonight, I intended to be so cool, so collected . . .’

  She smiled. ‘Me too.’

  He leaned closer. ‘And you should know that I understand your decision, my dear Chiara,’ he said, ‘much more than I understood it back then. I was headstrong, crazily in love with you—’

  Inside, she let out a low, deep sigh. Crazily in love with her . . . She closed her eyes – just for a moment – to let this reckless thought sink in.

  ‘All I could think was that you didn’t love me as I loved you.’ He took her hand in his, and all of a sudden she was oblivious to the few other guests around them in the courtyard, to the fact that Elene or Isabella or even Alonzo could walk out here at any moment. ‘But now I see how it was – your sense of duty and obligation to your parents, to this place . . .’ He flung a hand towards the hotel that she loved in a gesture that was far from affectionate.

  Chiara nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘And did you love him?’ His voice was soft as butter. It seemed to slide into her, this question that was really the only question about the past that mattered. ‘Do you love him still?’

  When she had been getting ready earlier, Chiara had guessed this moment might come. It had been part of the thrill, the excitement, the pure blind terror. Maybe it was even part of why she’d chosen the red lipstick, as if she were going to war. She couldn’t guess though, how she might respond to the question.

  She turned to him and realised that his face, although older, had remained just as dear. Somewhere, somehow, a piece of this man had stayed in her heart. Then she thought of Elene and Isabella and her beautiful hotel, and she knew what she must say. ‘Alonzo and me, we get along fine.’ Her voice had a breezy lilt to it that she hated.

  And Dante obviously hated it too because he let go of her hand as fast as if it had burned him. ‘I am pleased to hear it,’ he said. ‘It is a relief to know that everything has turned out for the best after all.’

  Chiara said nothing more. But she heard the politeness in his voice, and her spirits sank. She got to her feet. She couldn’t stay here with him any longer. This was a magical night, but it wasn’t their magical night – there was far too much at stake.

  ‘You are leaving?’ There was a note of acceptance in Dante’s voice.

  She nodded. ‘I have things I must see to, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘But it has been . . .’ she hesitated ‘. . . lovely to talk to you.’

  Dante rose from the bench. ‘It has, Chiara.’ He bent towards her, and his lips barely brushed her cheek. Once, twice, three times.

  Chiara stepped away. Dante was her past. Her family and her hotel – these were her future.

  CHAPTER 8

  Chiara

  ‘So, Mamma,’ Elene asked her at breakfast, ‘who was that you were with last night?’

  Chiara had been expecting this. ‘Just an old friend,’ she said with a studied casualness she was far from feeling. Last night, she had stayed awake for hours replaying their conversation, the touch of his hand, his kiss on her cheek – rather like the teenager she had once been. ‘He used to live in Corniglia. He left forty years ago and went to England.’ Chiara decided not to mention the ice cream. She plucked a cornetto from the plateful on the table and helped herself to coffee.

  ‘You seemed very . . .’ Elene was clearly choosing her words carefully ‘. . . close.’

  Close. But despite what she’d witnessed, at least Elene seemed in a better mood this morning. Chiara bit into the soft, sweet crema, giving herself time to answer. French croissants with their buttery, flaky layers of pastry were also delicious, but personally she preferred the denser, richer Italian version. The dough was sweeter and more perfumed. And the crema was the final touch of sweetness on the tongue.

  ‘We were good friends.’ But this was a conversation she didn’t want to prolong. She pulled her phone from her bag and checked for messages. Nothing from Alonzo. Nothing from anyone. Her entire life suddenly seemed awfully empty.

  ‘He was practically holding your hand.’ Better mood or not, Elene clearly was not going to let it rest.

  ‘We were talking about our parents. It got a bit emotional, you know how it is.’

  ‘Poor Nonna.’ Isabella touched Chiara’s shoulder as she went by.

  The back door opened. ‘Any coffee for the workers?’ Silvio pulled off his boots and came inside.

  Grateful for the diversion, Chiara rose to her feet. ‘I’ll get it.’ She refilled the scoop and slotted it into the espresso machine. ‘I’ll be out between three and five by the way.’ She directed this at Isabella – it would be a pragmatic change of subject. ‘Va bene, my dear?’ She needed to get away from the hotel – for a couple of hours at least, and the rota pinned to the office door had informed her that she had no particular duties to attend to this afternoon.

  But her granddaughter blinked as if she were lost in thought and
not here with them at all.

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, yes, of course, Nonna.’

  Chiara shot her a curious look. She put Silvio’s coffee in front of him on the table. ‘I’ll be going into the village if anyone wants anything? And I’ll look in on Aunt Giovanna on the way.’

  She was glad that they had thrown Giovanna a birthday celebration. Although all the family – bar Alonzo – worked here in the hotel, there were few occasions that they all – bar Alonzo again – managed to be in the same place at the same time for a family celebration. Giovanna was special. She had been Chiara’s mother’s closest friend; it was only fitting that when the order of Vernazza nuns dissolved, Giovanna had stayed – in her small cottage beyond the olive grove – close enough for the family to keep an eye on her. Or, as Chiara often thought, close enough for her to keep an eye on them.

  *

  Later, armed with an offering for Giovanna and her swimsuit and a towel, Chiara followed the winding path through the grove, trying not to think about Dante Rossi standing here amongst the silvery olive trees. He had come back – to observe, he had said. He had stood in the olive grove and remembered. He had told her that he had not been able to forget her . . .

  Giovanna would be able to heat up Elene’s trofie de pesto for her supper. Her aunt was fiercely independent; she used to make all her own pasta as well as tend the chickens and her orto, a small allotment, which had originally supplied all the fruit and vegetables for the hotel. These days, Giovanna was too old to do much gardening, and Silvio had taken over the orto, and even expanded it, though Chiara’s aunt still cultivated tomatoes that Chiara considered the reddest and most flavoursome in all Liguria – Elene bottled them when there was a glut in late summer to use for pasta sauce in winter. And Giovanna still cared for the chickens – her ‘girls’, as she called them.

  ‘Chiara, my dear.’ Giovanna was still waving away her last visitor, Siena Gianelli, a retired nurse who lived in Monterosso and who was a frequent visitor and good friend. She kissed Chiara and accepted the bowl of pasta with a wrinkled smile. ‘How kind of you. Please thank Elene. Come through. Shall we have some fresh lemonade?’

  ‘Thank you, Aunt.’ Chiara knew that many of her aunt’s visitors brought small gifts of fruit or a dish they had baked the night before, making an extra portion for the woman of the Cinque Terre who had spent her life trying to help others.

  It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and so they settled themselves on the terrace on Giovanna’s wooden bench, surrounded by terracotta pots of scarlet geraniums. As usual, the hens were wandering around the cobbles, clucking and pecking at grain, out of the coop that kept them safe at night. They were on the outskirts of the olive grove here, but through the twisty branches, Chiara could see snatches of blue and for a moment she longed to be down there already, ducking her head underwater, swimming in the ocean, feeling free.

  ‘What is wrong, cara?’ Giovanna had poured the lemonade and was regarding her fondly.

  ‘Does something have to be wrong?’ Chiara smiled. Perhaps she should visit her aunt more often. But Giovanna understood more than most how busy they were at the hotel. She had always been around, she had watched the place grow.

  ‘It does not have to be, no.’ Giovanna wrinkled her nose. ‘But you are frowning, my dear.’ She reached out to smooth Chiara’s brow with bent and arthritic fingers. ‘And there is in your eyes, a distraction. I saw it the other night too, although of course I would not mention it in front of the others.’

  A distraction. ‘Thank you, Aunt.’ She was grateful for that. Dante was indeed a distraction. Amazing though it seemed, Chiara had never entirely stopped thinking about him – though sometimes she wondered if it was some idealised version of the man that she kept in her head as a reaction to a marriage that had never become what she had hoped. And yet forty years was a long time and, after the first rush of grief when she’d heard that he had left her and gone to England, after the hollowness of regret that had lasted for days, months, longer perhaps . . . life had gone on. It had had to.

  Except that when he’d stood beside her in the foyer yesterday afternoon, when she’d sat with him in the courtyard at dusk, when he’d put his hand on hers . . . she had felt something dormant in her come alive again. Ridiculous to say it, ridiculous to think it – but it was true.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she told her aunt. ‘I’m just not feeling quite myself.’ Which was accurate enough. She was someone else. She was that sixteen-year-old girl kissing Dante Rossi in the olive grove – kissing him as if her very life depended on it.

  ‘Very well.’ Giovanna bent her head to sip her drink. Her hair was fine and white as cotton thread. She looked entirely unconvinced.

  Chiara remembered what her aunt had said at the family dinner about how things had changed and how she was glad she wouldn’t live long enough to see things change still further. ‘Does it make you feel sad, Aunt Giovanna?’ she asked. ‘Seeing The Lemon Tree Hotel as it is now and remembering what the place once was?’

  Her aunt’s milky eyes clouded. ‘Things move on, do they not, my dear?’ she murmured. ‘Vernazza is a very different place these days. And you and I – we live in a very different world.’

  Chiara nodded. True enough. ‘But what was it like?’ she asked. ‘Before?’ She had asked this question many times – both of her aunt and her parents too. Her father had fought for the anti-Fascist Resistance when Mussolini was still in power, although he rarely spoke of those difficult times.

  ‘It was not even our war.’ He would gesticulate angrily when he said this. ‘We were only drawn in because of Hitler’s admiration for Mussolini. That’s what led to them forming an alliance.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Chiara had asked. She wanted to know more about something that had affected her beloved papà so deeply.

  ‘It was an uneasy alliance at best,’ he told her. ‘Many Italians were resentful. Let me tell you – we didn’t want to be in that war.’

  Who would want to fight in a war? Chiara was only young – but she could imagine the fear and the horror. ‘Is that why Italy had to surrender?’ she asked.

  ‘Something like that, cara. The ill-feeling grew, and eventually Il Duce was forced to resign. We didn’t surrender though until September 1943. I remember that day well.’

  ‘Was it a good day, Papà?’ Chiara couldn’t imagine her father surrendering over anything. But then again, he hadn’t surrendered himself to fight.

  ‘Ah, sì.’ He sighed. ‘We thought that after that day our part in the war would be over.’

  ‘But it wasn’t?’

  ‘No, cara. Still, our country was ripped apart.’ He looked so sad that Chiara ran to him, wanting to hold him close, to help him forget. ‘We were all ripped apart, even as Germany retreated and the Allies forced the Liberation. Poverty, looting, the cutting of our electricity lines, the bombing of our bridges. Some liberation, my dearest . . .’

  And Chiara knew, as surely as she could feel his heart beating through his linen shirt and see the dazed look in his eyes, that he would never forget. She already knew the story – from her mother, from school, from people in the village. She knew of the terrors and the deprivation, she even knew that it was Allied bombs that had destroyed Castello Doria, Vernazza’s castle, even if it was the Nazis who had been in occupation and the British had only been trying to get them out. It was still destruction. It had taken a long time for the German army to be forced back through Italy.

  ‘L’Attico Convento was always a spiritual place.’ Her aunt’s voice was soft and low. She gave it the name it had been given when all the nuns had left, when the building stood isolated, rundown and empty, before Chiara’s parents had got the money together to buy it. ‘A place that saw more than its share of suffering, as you are aware, my dear. But it also saw love.’

  Chiara nodded. ‘And the nuns?’ She liked to think of them drifting around the convent in their black-and-white robes, kneeling to pray, tending their
kitchen garden and their precious olives, making their soap and lemonade from the lemons on the tree that still stood in the courtyard by the ancient well. She liked to think that there was something left of the nuns in The Lemon Tree Hotel, some tranquil vibration from their prayers and their chanting perhaps that had been absorbed into the very walls.

  ‘Even before the war there were not many nuns left at the convent.’ Giovanna gave a sad smile. ‘Life was simple. I was only a girl, don’t forget. I first came to L’Attico Convento with Mamma’s bread to exchange for olive oil.’ Her eyes grew misty with the memory. ‘During the war, it was even harder to get food than usual, you see. I still remember the taste of that chicory coffee.’ She pulled a face of disgust. ‘Mamma and I used to walk to Pignone to buy potatoes, flour and corn – it was too dangerous on the train.’

  ‘Mamma mia . . .’ That was ten kilometres or more.

  ‘We stretched out the flour with ground chestnuts to make it last that bit longer.’

  ‘That was enterprising of you, darling Aunt.’

  ‘We had to be. You learn quickly when you’re hungry.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Chiara could only be grateful that she had not had to live through such hardship herself.

  ‘And the planes . . .’ Giovanna stared up at the blue sky as if they might suddenly appear once more. ‘We were terrified. They were so loud, so dark and forbidding.’ She shuddered.

  ‘Bombers?’ Chiara whispered.

  ‘Ah, sì. Some of us sheltered in the convent, but many of the villagers ran all the way to the sanctuary.’ She closed her eyes. ‘We could hear them screaming. “Our Lady of Reggio, help us”,’ she whispered. ‘That was the worst year.’