Three Days in Florence

by Chrissie Manby

  The terminal was where it could all go wrong. Mindful of past airport traumas, Kathy corralled Neil’s children while Neil gave the minicab driver a piece of his mind through the dark tinted glass of the driver’s window.

  ‘I’ll report you for that too!’ Neil informed him. ‘This glass is illegal. You’re supposed to be able to see the driver of any vehicle.’

  Kathy wasn’t sure that was true but she stayed out of it. She looked at her watch. They still had two hours before the flight took off. That should be long enough to get through security with minimum stress. She scanned the horizon for signs that would lead them to the departures lounge. She speed-read a board full of flight numbers and had a route straight to the check-in desk worked out before Neil took the steering bar of the luggage trolley.

  Kathy led her group through the terminal with the determination and expertise of a soldier ant, steering them past potential dangers such as slow-moving pensioners.

  ‘Shouldn’t be allowed to travel!’ Neil tutted.

  Or fast-moving toddlers.

  ‘Ought to be on a lead.’

  At security, Kathy made a lightning calculation as to which was the fastest-moving queue. She yanked Oscar into it before he blundered into a retractable barrier. His eyes were still on his phone. When Sophie went into a small meltdown over the prospect of verrucae, having been told to take off her enormous clunky trainers, Kathy handed over her own sandals so that she didn’t have to walk barefoot over the sticky mat under the security arch.

  ‘Have you got a verruca?’ Sophie asked, in lieu of saying ‘thank you’.

  Then, when Amelie set off the X-ray machine with a belly-button piercing that her father didn’t yet know about, Kathy told Neil, ‘It’s probably her bra,’ and quickly ushered him forwards so that he couldn’t see Amelie flashing her tum for the guards.

  Over the next hour and a half in the departures lounge, while Neil scrolled through work emails (and watched reruns of great Fulham FC goals), Kathy dropped eighty pounds in Ted Baker and Accessorize. Not for herself but on Sophie and Amelie, who both insisted that the clothes they were wearing smelt of Oscar’s puke. Oscar didn’t seem to mind wearing his own puke-scented hoodie, thank goodness.

  Then both the girls claimed to have forgotten their make-up.

  ‘We need to get some here,’ they told Kathy. ‘We don’t know what they’ll have in Italy. It’ll be the wrong colour.’

  As far as Kathy could tell, Amelie and Sophie were always wearing the wrong make-up colours, but she couldn’t be bothered to disagree. That was another forty quid down.

  Then they started arguing about which of them actually owned the ridiculously expensive primer of which there had been just one tube left in the store.

  ‘Can’t you share it?’ Kathy suggested.

  They looked at her aghast.

  Meanwhile, Oscar and Neil kept their eyes on their phones.

  By the time Kathy heard the boarding announcement, she was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t try to sneak onto the flight to Málaga that was boarding from the adjacent gate.

  ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ said a little voice in her mind.

  She shook her head, which caused Sophie and Amelie to share one of their patent she’s-gone-cuckoo looks. Ignoring them, Kathy promised herself this was the last time she would find herself in this situation. When they got back from Italy, she was going to address what had happened and make a plan for the future that took her feelings and dreams into account. For now, though, she had a wedding to attend.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Neil asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she lied. ‘And you?’

  Chapter Three

  The flight went reasonably well. Providence put them near the front of the plane so the chances of Neil being upset by someone taking too long to put something in an overhead locker were considerably reduced. The three children sat in one row. Neil and Kathy were across the aisle. Neil took the window seat while Kathy sat in the middle. Neil hated to have to sit next to someone he didn’t know. He took one of Kathy’s armrests. A portly male stranger took the other. Kathy kept herself small and concentrated on her book. It was only a short-haul flight, after all.

  She had picked up The Magic of Jasmine back in March, when the thought of this trip still filled her with excitement. The paperback’s summery cover seemed to embody everything she’d hoped for back then. Warmth, relaxation, romance. It was about a woman called Jane, who had given up her important job in finance to become a simple farmer in Tuscany.

  ‘Nothing is impossible,’ the book enthused. ‘If you want something enough, you can make it happen. You can live your dream.’

  Hmm, thought Kathy. If you don’t give a toss about anyone else. Perhaps Jane the-financier-turned-farmer didn’t have a mother, widowed for the past twenty years, who needed her within an hour’s drive. Or a partner with an important job and three children firmly tying him to London. Kathy snuck a glance at Neil’s profile. He was enjoying the view of southern England in the sunshine as they took off.

  The flight landed on time and disembarked promptly. The Italian border guards waved Neil, Kathy and the twins through with a smile, though they lingered on Sophie’s passport for far longer than necessary, Neil thought. Kathy assured him that it was random and not lecherous before he picked a fight.

  Melanie had arranged for a fancy car to pick them up at the airport in Florence, of course. The only problem was that she had not told the taxi firm she needed a car big enough for five and the driver would only take four.

  After much outrage on Neil’s part – which did not increase the size of the vehicle – it was decided that Kathy should follow in an ordinary taxi. She didn’t mind. The trip wasn’t long and she relished having a moment to herself, without the girls fighting, Neil griping and Oscar moping. She needed a moment to prepare herself for walking into the Palazzo Boldrini, for acting suitably pleased for Shelley and Dave, for seeing Neil’s mother … She was pleased for Shelley and Dave but she definitely needed time to prepare for meeting Neil’s mum, whose past opening gambits had included such gems as ‘You’re looking tired’ and ‘I feel like I’ve seen that coat a few times now.’

  In the back of the taxi, with no air-con, Kathy could relax. She wound down the window and enjoyed the warmth. If only she could ask the driver to stop at a bar where she might get a cold beer and listen to Italian rock music for half an hour. She knew, however, that Neil would be checking every couple of minutes that the taxi was still behind the air-conditioned limo he was sharing with his kids. If she stopped, he would notice and come back for her.

  He sent her a text message: Are you safe?

  It was a little late for that. Kathy was tempted to text back, I’m being abducted. Instead she typed, I’m safe. Still right behind you. See you at the hotel. It wouldn’t have been fair to tease when he was showing concern.

  In the late afternoon the mini convoy arrived at the Renaissance palazzo turned hotel that Dave and Shelley had chosen for their wedding. As Kathy’s driver swung his car between two huge stone gateposts topped with lions rampant, he announced their arrival: ‘Welcome to the Palazzo Boldrini.’

  Kathy gasped with delight at her first glimpse of the vast white building with crenellated towers, which was to be home for the next three nights. A flag, featuring lions to match the beasts on the gateposts, fluttered from one of the turrets. A slightly smaller flag, with the initials of the bride and groom, fluttered from another.

  Neil and his children piled out of their car. Amelie looked as though she had been crying. Sophie was jabbing angrily at her phone. Oscar clearly hadn’t looked up from his. He tumbled from the car and staggered straight to a flowerbed to throw up again. Neil went on ahead into the palazzo.

  Leaving Neil’s teens to bicker and puke – thinking, Not my circus, not my monkeys – Kathy walked from her taxi to the edge of the driveway, wanting to savour the view. The palazzo was right at the top of a hill. Below, the Tuscan countryside un
rolled like a patchwork blanket of peaceful olive greens and lavender blues, embroidered here and there with imperial cypresses and umbrella pines. It was so perfect, so much like a photo on a postcard, that Kathy wanted to clap with delight.

  ‘My village,’ said the taxi driver, drawing Kathy’s attention to a cluster of honey-coloured houses nestled in the valley, turning golden in the last of the sun.

  ‘What a beautiful place to live.’ Kathy sighed.

  The driver beamed with pride.

  When he left her alone again, Kathy gave herself a quick pep talk. ‘I’m here for Shelley. I’m going to enjoy myself. I’m not even going to think about last week until I’m back in London. I’m just not.’

  Having taken in the view and sucked in a lungful of clean Tuscan air, Kathy joined Neil and the children at Reception. He was leaning against the desk, tapping his foot on the polished tiled floor, while a young woman took their passport details. The children were given keys to their rooms in the modern annex. Sophie and Amelie would be sharing.

  ‘How does that work?’ Sophie complained. She jabbed a finger at Oscar. ‘He’s her twin.’

  ‘You have a room in the old building,’ the receptionist said to Kathy and Neil.

  ‘I hope it’s got decent plumbing,’ said Neil. He tapped his foot a little faster while the woman searched out their key, which was a real old-fashioned key, not one of the modern cards she’d handed to the children. It had an enormous wooden fob to boot.

  ‘You’ll have to carry this,’ said Neil, passing it straight to Kathy.

  Kathy hoped that once they were inside the room Neil might finally begin to relax. In his professional life, he was renowned for being cool, calm and collected. Out of the office, when his perfectionist tendencies met with the incompetence – as he saw it – of the general public, he could be a pain in the arse. After five years, Kathy was used to it but she wished that, just for once, Neil could be a little more chilled out about travelling.

  A porter carried their cases upstairs to the first floor – the piano nobile – where the palazzo’s grandest rooms were situated. Hand-painted signs pointed to a library, a music room and two guest suites. Their bedroom was called the Dante Suite.

  Kathy was thrilled by the suite, which had floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the valley to the back of the building. It was one of the bedrooms she had admired on the website. One of the best in the place. Dave must really love his big brother to have allocated him such a good room.

  ‘Look at the view,’ she said. In the formal garden directly below, the roses were in full bloom. She couldn’t wait to go outside and walk among them. She would have flung the windows wide, but they were a little stiff and took some effort to budge. And when she did manage it, Neil said, ‘Don’t open them now, Chicken Licken. This is exactly the time of day when mosquitoes come out. The last thing I want is to get bitten.’

  Kathy agreed that would be ‘sub-optimal’, as Neil liked to say, so she wrestled the windows shut again, contenting herself with looking out through the glass, which was wavy and uneven with age.

  Neil lay down on the neatly made bed, still wearing his shoes and tapping on his phone. Kathy kicked off hers to lie down beside him.

  ‘Isn’t this lovely?’ she said. ‘It’s exactly as I imagined it would be. Look. There are swallows painted on the ceiling.’

  Neil glanced up but then something else caught his eye. Something floating in the air between the painted ceiling and his face. He pulled off one of his shoes and made a swipe at it, almost rolling off the bed in the process.

  ‘See? What did I tell you, Chicken? There’s a mosquito in here already. For crying out loud!’

  He got the Jungle Formula from his overnight bag and sprayed it so liberally that Kathy thought she might choke to death. The mosquito kept flying regardless.

  Chapter Four

  Within half an hour of arriving, Kathy, Neil and the children were expected on the palazzo’s pool terrace for the first formal event of the wedding.

  The pool was gorgeous. Long enough for proper laps and illuminated for the evening with underwater lights that changed colour to the music on the terrace speakers, it could not have looked more inviting.

  While Neil scanned the crowd for his close relatives, Kathy took a glass of Prosecco from a silver tray. As she sipped, London seemed satisfactorily far away. Shame that the same couldn’t have been said for Neil’s mother. Kathy spotted Margaret on the other side of the pool, holding court from a sun lounger, regarding the comings and goings as though she’d smelt something bad.

  ‘This is all a bit fancy, isn’t it?’ Neil said, as he rejoined Kathy at the pool’s edge.

  It really was. The terrace was decorated like a spread in a travel magazine. Shelley and Dave had hired a wedding planner who’d organised a roster of events worthy of a corporate retreat, let alone a small family marriage.

  Kathy knew something of the timetable, having spoken to Shelley often over the past few months with regard to Sophie and Amelie’s bridesmaid duties. Kathy had been cast in the role of de facto mother since Caroline, Neil’s ex, and his brother Dave did not speak. Caroline would not have lifted a manicured finger to help her ex-brother-in-law’s wedding run smoothly.

  It was Kathy who had had to drive the girls to and from various rendezvous at Bluewater, where Shelley cajoled them through a number of miserable trying-on sessions in various shops and department stores. Both Sophie and Amelie had very strong ideas about what they were willing to wear. It had to be from Pretty Little Thing. It had to be skin tight. And it had to be in ‘nude pink’ – a colour more like sticking plaster – which flattered no one unless they were perma-tanned. Fortunately, both Sophie and Amelie, though they were redheads with skin that was naturally the colour of milk, were fake-tanned to a shade of American walnut varnish at all times.

  Poor Shelley had planned for her colour scheme to incorporate all the colours of a Tuscan spring, which would have looked lovely had the girls agreed to the flattering shade of pale green Shelley wanted them to wear. Their dogged insistence on dressing as though they were ballroom dancers who’d forgotten to put dresses over their body stockings had changed the plan somewhat.

  On that first evening, Sophie and Amelie came down to the poolside dressed like … well …

  ‘Hookers!’ was the first thing Neil’s ancient uncle Tony said upon seeing them. ‘I thought Dave was supposed to have got that out of the way on his stag do.’

  ‘These are your great-nieces, Uncle Tony,’ Neil reminded him.

  Uncle Tony’s dementia had robbed him of his ability to be appropriate, though Kathy suspected he’d never been all that appropriate to begin with. While Amelia and Sophie scowled and huffed, and Oscar kept his eyes on his phone, Kathy sought out the bride.

  Shelley was crouching between Neil’s mum and her own, on their sun loungers.

  ‘Did you have a good journey?’ Shelley asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kathy said, before Neil could begin his litany of all the reasons why they hadn’t. ‘This place is beautiful,’ she continued.

  ‘I’m glad you think so.’

  ‘It’s like something out of a fairy tale. Thank you so much for inviting us.’

  ‘I’ve been bitten,’ Margaret announced, apropos nothing.

  ‘It’s a matter of time before I am,’ said Neil.

  Kathy greeted her. ‘Hello, Margaret. How lovely to see you.’

  ‘When did you buy that dress?’ Margaret asked. ‘Not recently by the look of things.’

  Kathy was suddenly conscious that it was a little tight over the hips.

  ‘It’s a beautiful dress,’ said Shelley’s mother, Elaine.

  ‘For someone younger, perhaps,’ said Margaret, as though Kathy wasn’t there.

  Fortunately, before Margaret could say anything else, they were distracted by the sound of feedback from a microphone. Shelley joined her fiancé on a little stage to greet their guests officially. Dave wasn’t used to pub
lic speaking and Margaret rolled her eyes at her younger son’s ineptitude as he struggled to get the microphone to work. In the end, he gave up.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ he asked his audience.

  Margaret shook her head and said, ‘No,’ although Kathy thought Dave was doing perfectly well. Margaret should turn up her hearing aid.

  ‘On behalf of myself and my future wife …’ Shelley beamed ‘… we’d like to thank you for coming all the way to Italy to celebrate our wedding.’

  ‘I’ve been bitten again,’ Margaret muttered close to Kathy’s ear. ‘I don’t know what Shelley was thinking. A foreign wedding … Insects, strange food. I bet we’re miles away from the nearest hospital if somebody’s allergic … I know this wasn’t my David’s idea.’

  ‘It means a great deal to us both to have all of you here together,’ Dave continued on stage. ‘All our favourite people in one place. We look forward to making some happy memories with you.’

  Then he stepped back.

  ‘Was that it?’ Neil asked. ‘Was that the whole speech?’

  ‘I expect he’s saving himself for the wedding day,’ said Kathy.

  ‘I hope he does better than that.’

  Kathy smiled faintly. As an only child, she didn’t always understand why Neil and Dave were such bitter rivals. She suspected that Margaret had played them off against each other since they were small. She certainly did now. Every Mother’s Day, birthday and Christmas turned into a bitter competition. Which of her boys had sent the better card or the bigger bouquet? Although Margaret had expressed nothing but disapproval of this Italian wedding, Kathy knew that, once everyone was back in the UK, its extravagance would be held up as evidence of how well Dave – a tech geek, who developed trading software for financial institutions – was doing in comparison to Neil, plodding along as a partner at his medium-sized City law firm.

  Now that the speech was over, waiting staff began to circle with canapés. Neil was soon deep in conversation with his mother. Kathy reintroduced herself to a couple of Neil’s cousins, who called her by his ex’s name. Caroline had studied to be a lawyer – she and Neil met when they were training – but had given up her career to have her children. When the children started school, she had retrained as an image consultant. Her skill at combining colours and fabrics was spoken of in terms of awe.