Three Days in Florence

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to fork out for a takeaway,’ Neil concluded. ‘Which will be another out-of-pocket expense, thanks to your flight cock-up.’

  I didn’t book the flights, Kathy silently reminded him. Out loud, she said, ‘I could try to arrange an Ocado drop-off from here. I’ll ask if I can borrow a computer.’

  She waited for Neil to say it would be quicker and easier to go to Waitrose himself. He didn’t. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Text me a list of the things you and the children want.’

  ‘That’s too much faff,’ Neil decided.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Kathy, with relief. ‘I doubt I’d be able to get a delivery slot before Tuesday now anyway. I forgot to mention, I did tell Mum about the proposal. Before I lost my phone.’

  ‘And what did she have to say?’

  ‘She was pleased.’

  ‘Of course she was. She’s offloaded you at last,’ Neil chuckled.

  ‘She sends her love. She hopes we can visit soon.’

  ‘With my workload? Not likely. I’ve already lost three days’ holiday. Look I’ve got to go,’ he said then. ‘This call must be costing a fortune from the landline. Call me when you’ve found a proper hotel.’

  ‘Neil,’ said Kathy, ‘before you go …’ She needed to know what he wanted her to do next, with regard to getting home. Did Melanie’s failure to get her on a flight that evening mean that Kathy really would have to stay in Italy until Monday?

  ‘I suppose it does mean that,’ said Neil, annoyance prickling his voice.

  ‘Well, just let me know if anything changes …’

  ‘Nothing is going to change unless I make it happen, obviously, now that Melanie has left the office for the weekend. I’ve got to go. Someone has to feed the children.’

  ‘Have a good evening,’ Kathy told the dead air.

  Kathy was glad she hadn’t told him about the ring. She really didn’t feel like dealing with that just yet. After five years with Neil, Kathy knew there were some things that had to be approached delicately. He could overreact from time to time.

  But he was a good man. The robbery had shaken Kathy and, having been angry with Neil for the past week, Kathy found that now all she wanted was to be close to him again. He was dependable. He was her rock. He was always there for her. He did what he said he was going to do. Sometimes he was brusque but that was only because he was too intelligent to suffer fools lightly. He could occasionally be tactless, too, but, really, what man couldn’t? What did it matter if he didn’t notice a new haircut but always seemed to notice an extra couple of pounds? Neil looked out for Kathy’s welfare in everything. Her physical and fiscal health. If he got frustrated it was only ever because she was letting herself down.

  And now they were getting married, which must mean he had taken something of Kathy’s wishes on board since the dreadful day that Kathy didn’t want to think about. When she next spoke to him on the phone, she was sure he would be warmer. When he wasn’t feeling so tired, when he wasn’t hungry, when the children weren’t complaining about something or other, Neil would be kinder. He’d just had a very long day.

  As had Kathy, and perhaps she was seeing the glass half empty again as a result. Wasn’t that what Neil had told her before? When he sang ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ and told her not to be such a baby. Her life was good. Their life was good.

  Deep breath, Kathy.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Once she’d finished talking to Neil, Kathy showered quickly in the bathroom closest to the attic room. Since she didn’t have any toiletries with her – she hadn’t bothered to bring shampoo or shower gel on the trip, knowing they would be provided at the palazzo, and her make-up had been inside the stolen bag – she had to use a little of what was there. There were two bottles in the shower. She poured a tiny dollop of the shampoo into her hand and held it up to her nose. It had a masculine smell. Quite familiar. Very nice. She checked the bottle. Sandalo from Santa Maria Novella, the famous Florentine perfumery. That was one of the places she’d hoped to visit, back when she’d planned her fantasy Florence day trip.

  As she was towel-drying her hair back in the attic room, Manu came to the bottom of the stairs and gleefully rang a bell to announce that dinner was served. No hotel residents were dining that night, Roberta had already explained, because she had a deal with a local restaurant to send them all over there for dinner on a Friday. Fridays were for family, as they had always been in the Innocenti household, and Kathy was the family’s guest. Kathy quickly pulled on the white dress, which seemed to look more like a rag than ever, and hurried downstairs.

  Carla and Roberta were already in the sitting room, waiting with aperitivi. Manu was teaching the dog a new trick. Faustino was playing the situation for maximum prosciutto points, acting far dumber than he looked to encourage more encouragement.

  ‘Were you able to speak to your fiancé?’ Roberta asked, as Kathy sat down. ‘He must be very worried about you. I hope you put his mind at rest.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Kathy.

  ‘It must be very hard for you for this to have happened so early in your engagement. You just want to be together at such an exciting time for you both. But I hope you’ll be able to relax at last.’ Roberta pressed a glass of wine into Kathy’s hand. ‘Here’s to your stay at the Casa Innocenti.’

  Kathy toasted her hosts in return.

  Roberta had claimed that supper would be a ‘simple’ affair but to Kathy it was anything but. Unless by ‘simple’ Roberta had meant that everyone would be eating the same thing. Even Manu. Back at home, when Kathy was cooking for the whole gang, she was used to having to provide several options to accommodate that week’s dietary preferences. One memorable Friday night, Kathy had made dinner to accommodate a vegan, a gluten-free vegan and a raw food diet, only to have everyone decide at the last minute that they were going to eat the meat-laden lasagne she’d made for Neil. It looked nicer.

  Manu helped his mother carry the food out from the kitchen to the dining room. He did so with the ease of someone who had been waiting tables since he was old enough to walk, which, as it turned out, was pretty much the case. Roberta proudly told Kathy how her grandson helped in the hotel restaurant during peak times.

  As they ate, Roberta asked Kathy about the places in Essex she remembered from her youth. ‘I haven’t been back in a long time,’ she said, ‘but it sounds as though I’m about your mother’s age. I wonder if I’d recognise her.’

  Then she told Kathy some more about the house she would be staying in. She confirmed Carla’s explanation that the house, which seemed grand enough to Kathy, was just the gatehouse of a far larger palazzo that lay beyond the line of trees in the garden.

  ‘The Palazzo Innocenti is enormous,’ Roberta said. ‘When I first saw it, I thought it was like Blenheim Palace.’

  ‘It’s not quite that big,’ said Carla.

  ‘Well, I was just a young girl from Essex back then. It looked pretty impressive to me.’

  Roberta gave Kathy a potted history of the family home. The first Innocenti to live on the land was Carlo – a lowly foot soldier – who saved the life of a great general on a battlefield. ‘Carlo didn’t know he was helping a general,’ Roberta explained. ‘He thought he was just another infantryman. And that was why the general was so impressed. That Carlo would have risked his life for someone who couldn’t obviously help him in return seemed to speak of great goodness so he gave him this land as a reward.’

  Back then it was just farmland, which lay outside the city. Two generations later, Carlo’s grandson Aurelio had the ear of the pope and a fortune to match. He had built the palazzo, basing the plans for the house on Tiberius’s palace on Capri. ‘His wife reined in some of the wilder excesses,’ said Roberta.

  She gestured to the portrait that hung above the impressive marble mantelpiece. It was hard to believe that that mantelpiece was built above the fire at which stable-hands and grooms had warmed themselves, but Roberta
insisted it was true. ‘In the main house, all the wooden carving was covered with gold, and the paintings you see on the ceilings here are clearly the work of apprentices let loose with a paintbrush for the first time.’

  Kathy had already spotted another cat-faced elephant on the ceiling.

  ‘The paintings on the ceiling in the palazzo, ah, they’re something else.’ Roberta went back to the portrait above the fireplace, which depicted a rather dour-looking woman, hair severely scraped back from her face and hidden beneath a bejewelled wimple arrangement. ‘That painting used to hang in the main house. It’s Francesca Innocenti,’ said Roberta. ‘She was considered a great beauty in her time. There are some who believe she may have been the model for La Gioconda.’

  ‘Mona Lisa?’ asked Kathy.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I can see it about the eyes,’ Kathy said. But the smile. The smile was definitely not quite the same. Whereas La Gioconda looks as though she is suppressing the urge to laugh, Francesca Innocenti looked as though she had never laughed. Perhaps she didn’t have much reason to, with her husband being such a big fan of Caligula.

  ‘She scares me,’ said Manu. ‘When I was little, I used to have bad dreams about her.’

  I can see that, Kathy thought.

  But it turned out that while Francesca Innocenti looked as hard as nails, she was a woman of true heart, treating the servants of her household with great benevolence. She also created an orphanage in the family’s name, establishing the family’s reputation for kindness as well as opulence. And that was where it all began.

  ‘The Casa Innocenti has a long history of providing refuge,’ said Roberta. ‘The Innocenti Orphanage endured through centuries. The family employed the children who grew up there in the house and on their farms. It was such a good arrangement that some desperate parents left their children outside the orphanage on purpose, in the hope that they would get to live here. It carried on like that for years. During the Second World War, when the Fascists were all over Florence, my husband’s parents hid a Jewish couple and their child in the secret room at the top of the campanile.’

  ‘On a dark night you can hear them wailing,’ said Manu.

  Roberta frowned at him. ‘You cannot hear anybody wailing. Kathy, they survived the war and moved to New York. Members of their family still visit from time to time. In fact, the couple’s great-grandson will be coming to Florence next month to see where his great-grandparents and grandfather hid.’

  ‘What a lovely thing to be able to do.’

  ‘We have eight rooms in the hotel,’ Roberta continued, ‘but only six are ever available to paying guests. The other two are used by people who need somewhere to stay. One of those rooms, alas, is unusable at the moment, thanks to a small flood from the bathroom above it, or you would be in there. In the other we have Mr Caligari, who was my husband’s schoolfriend. After his wife died, he really couldn’t look after himself. Ugo would visit him at home and come back to tell me what a terrible state the poor man was in. He had no family of his own. Of course we took him in and he’s welcome for as long as he needs to be here. It’s as my husband wanted it to be.’

  ‘And when one waif moves out, another moves in,’ said Carla.

  ‘There’s never any shortage of people who need help,’ said Roberta, in an admonishing tone. ‘And that is why we stick by the Innocenti motto.’

  Carla and Manu, who had obviously heard this speech several times before, laid down their cutlery, put their right hands over their hearts and chanted in unison, ‘Deus ope, manus mea.’ They finished with a conspiratorial giggle.

  ‘That means “God’s help by my hands”,’ said Manu, for Kathy’s benefit.

  Roberta beamed at him proudly.

  ‘A lovely motto to live by,’ Kathy agreed. ‘How lucky I am to have met Carla and now the pair of you, and to have benefited from that wisdom.’

  ‘We love it when we can live by the motto. We actually have a scoreboard in the kitchen to show which of us has been the kindest this week,’ Carla joked. ‘I’m winning. More wine?’

  After dinner, Roberta insisted that Kathy would not be helping with the washing-up.

  ‘After the day you’ve had? Not a chance, dear. Sit and enjoy your coffee outside.’

  A terrace ran all the way along the back of the house, over the top of the loggia. The family had reserved a piece of it for themselves, separated from part of the terrace the hotel guests used by a trellis thickly covered with jasmine.

  Faustino and Manu accompanied Kathy out into the evening air. Manu had Faustino demonstrate his best tricks. Inevitably, the dog would respond to the command before the one he was given. So he stood there, tongue lolling and tail wagging when Manu asked him to sit. Then he sat when Manu asked him to lie down. When Manu asked Faustino to shake a paw, Faustino lay down on his belly and refused to let Manu get anywhere near his doggy feet.

  ‘He needs some practice,’ said Manu.

  ‘I had a dog when I was your age,’ said Kathy. ‘And he wouldn’t do any tricks at all unless he was bribed. Though he did know how to open the back gate and was always escaping.’

  ‘Have you got a dog now? In London?’

  ‘No,’ said Kathy.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s hard to have a dog in the city.’

  ‘This is a city.’

  ‘Then I don’t know why I don’t have a dog.’

  But she did know why. It was because Neil didn’t want one. Too messy. Too much of a responsibility. They’d never be able to go on holiday again without having to find a dog-sitter. They were all sound reasons. Still, Kathy would have loved to have a dog. Having established that Kathy was welcome in his family home, Faustino was utterly charming. If a little smelly, as Carla had warned. The one trick Faustino could seem to do was fart to order.

  ‘Nonna sometimes calls him Foulstino,’ Manu explained. ‘But it isn’t always his fault. Sometimes Ernesto, the chef, drops a silent but deadly and blames it on the dog.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Carla, who had come to join them.

  ‘You know he does it. Sometimes you do it too.’

  Not too long after that, it was time for Manu to go to bed.

  ‘Without your tablet,’ Carla insisted. ‘Come on.’

  Roberta was the last to say goodnight.

  ‘I hope you’ll be comfortable in the attic,’ she told Kathy. ‘It’s a long way up but my son has always loved the room. It was his when he was a teenager and he insisted on taking it again when he came back from New York three years ago.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable,’ said Kathy. ‘Thank you. Thank you to you and to Carla and Manu for taking such good care of me today. I don’t know what I did to deserve to meet such lovely people. I’m quite overwhelmed.’

  ‘I know you’ll pass it on, dear.’ Roberta patted Kathy gently on the cheek. ‘I can tell.’

  Leaving Faustino alone in the sitting room to stand guard over his sleeping clan, and repel intruders with the occasional burst of toxic gas, Kathy climbed the stairs to the attic room and pushed open the creaky door. This time she remembered to duck. The warm golden light was gone now but in the glow of a single lamp the room looked cosy and the bed was inviting. She sat down on the edge of the white-sheet-covered mattress and slipped off her sandals. The terracotta floor tiles were cool beneath her feet, which rejoiced at being bare and free again.

  Outside, the bells of the city tolled eleven. Just one day had passed since she and Neil had become engaged. Only twelve hours had passed since she’d stood in the shadow of the Duomo’s campanile. But how much had changed in such a short time!

  I could be happy here. The thought came to Kathy unbidden. I could be really happy here.

  As a teenager, Kathy had dreamed of moving overseas. France, Italy, America, she wasn’t fussy where she ended up so long as it wasn’t Essex. Or even London. She just knew that she wanted her life to be bigger and better than the lif
e her parents lived. They were content, so far as she could tell, to live in the town where they had both grown up but Kathy couldn’t wait to get away. She wanted to experience everything the world had to offer. She wanted to go to university, then set off on a lifelong adventure. She pictured herself with a Frenchwoman’s chic, an Italian’s passion, an American’s can-do attitude … She was going places.

  When she left school, everything was on track. She had a place at university. Moving to Sussex for her studies, she was able to leave behind Cross-eyed Kathy at last, and reinvent herself as the confident young woman her dad Eddie had always told her she should be. Then, during Kathy’s first year, Eddie was diagnosed with cancer and then he died and then everything changed.

  Kathy finished her degree and moved back home. Her mother needed her. It would have been wrong to push ahead with her dreams when Clare was in pieces. Kathy thought it would be for a few months, a year at most, but the second year without her dad seemed worse than the first. The third year was worse than the second. And the fourth. And so on. Clare’s grief never seemed to ease. At the same time, she grew increasingly fearful of losing Kathy, too. Her fear was infectious somehow. Kathy downgraded her plans. Even moving to London felt like an enormous step as the world with which her mum seemed willing to engage shrank ever more.

  Soon Kathy resigned herself to letting go of her plans. She got herself a boring job, a little flat, settled into a smaller life. It was OK, she told herself. It was better than nothing.

  But that night in Florence, it was the old Kathy who looked out of the bedroom window and felt her heart briefly soar again.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Kathy slept more deeply than she had done in a long while. Possibly because of the delicious red wine with which Carla and Roberta had plied her at dinner. Possibly because she didn’t have to listen to the squeaks and whirs of an unfamiliar air-conditioning unit or keep getting up to look for imaginary mosquitoes. If Roberta’s son, Carla’s brother, had come into the house late, she hadn’t heard him.