by Maeve Haran
‘Well,’ Sylvie sipped happily, ‘that’s very broadminded. I thought they were going to throw us out.’
Monica arrived at Antonella’s Pizzeria, another restaurant that hung dramatically over the clifftop, at ten minutes to one but Constantine was already installed in the only part of the restaurant that didn’t share the view. He still wore his Russian hat and trench coat.
‘Is Spaghetti in your pocket?’
‘Ssh,’ Constantine tutted as a furry head peeped out, ‘Italians don’t approve of dogs in restaurants.’
Constantine poured them each a large glass of wine. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I have ordered the wine. There is only one that is drinkable and, anyway, you have to have red with pizza.’ He gestured to the other tables whose guests were also drinking the red, apart from one table of Americans who had Coke.
‘I will never understand Americans. Do you know, I was once in the Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence, one of the most famous restaurants in the world, and these Americans ordered Coke. The chef came out and begged them on bended knee not to drink Coke with his food. It was a travesty. Water, maybe, but Coke, no. Do you know that they did? Kept on drinking the Coke.’
‘I thought you were meant to be a famous recluse, not eating in La Colombe and Antonella’s Pizzeria.’
‘St Paul de Vence is full of painters, and at Antonella’s Pizzeria no one has an idea who Constantine O is so I can remain a famous recluse and still go out to lunch.’
Monica giggled and looked at the menu, her attention suddenly arrested, not by the margheritas and the capricciosas but by the flower arrangement on their table. This featured scented roses in a very distinctive shade of purple, which she had definitely seen before – in the villa’s gardens.
‘What is the matter with you, Monica who notices so much?’ Constantine was watching her with the bright eye of a small bird.
‘It’s the flowers.’
‘Are they so unusual?’
‘Let’s order and I’ll explain.’
She chose a four seasons and Constantine a calzone. The order placed, he refilled their glasses. ‘I always find wine clears the brain.’
Monica giggled. ‘In contrast to all medical evidence to the contrary.’
‘Doctors! What do they know? I have spent a lifetime avoiding them. Now tell me about the flowers.’
Monica sipped her wine. ‘None of the others believes me, but there’s something very fishy going on at the villa. The garden is full of flowers yet the ones in our bedrooms were brought all the way from Naples.’
‘Maybe they think garden flowers are just weeds. The Italians have some funny ideas about flowers. For instance never, ever give an Italian chrysanthemums.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘They signify death. Lilies. Gladioli. Big showy blooms. Those are what the Italians call flowers. Perhaps they wanted to impress you.’
‘Maybe. But I am pretty damn sure these roses come from the villa gardens. And we saw a chef in Lerini having an argument with Giovanni, the gardener, about the quality of a zucchini. I’m convinced there’s some kind of scam going on.’
‘And if there is?’ Constantine looked stunned at Monica’s naivety. ‘The owner lives miles away, he doesn’t seem to care what happens to the house, so naturally they do what they can. My dear Monica, this isn’t Brightling-by-the-Sea. This is Italy.’
‘But these are family retainers. Immaculata’s been there since before Stephen came.’
‘Then they have all the more right. Besides, they will all know by now that their esteemed proprietor has been talking to the silver-tongued Hugo Robertson.’
‘I’m not sure they do know. Who is he anyway?’
‘The owner of the Hotel Castello and the degli Dei, the two best hotels in Lanzarella.’
That would explain Beatrice’s sudden clumsiness, certainly.
‘Though perhaps they don’t know what he has been offered.’
‘But you do?’
He nodded.
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘I make it my business to know things that might affect me.’
‘All right, so if you know so much, what has Stephen been offered?’
The sum was so enormous that Monica put down her fork and stared.
‘Yes, indeed. Mr Robertson, it seems, has his reasons.’
Monica was so shocked that she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Constantine insisted on paying. ‘Do you think I should sign the tablecloth and get us both thrown out?’
‘But that would blow your cover as a famous recluse.’
‘Indeed it would, Monica, indeed it would. By the way, wise not to share that information with your fellow travellers. Not the most discreet of houseguests, from what I’ve heard. Would you like me to make some discreet enquiries about your zucchini scam?’
Monica hesitated. It seemed so awful. Reluctantly she nodded.
‘And perhaps one day soon you might like to visit my studio.’ It was a statement rather than a question.
‘You’ll have to watch it,’ Monica quizzed him, ‘or your reputation as a recluse will be in serious trouble.’
‘Surely even as a recluse I’m allowed to invite people I would like to pose for me.’
Monica stared at him and had to stop herself saying, ‘Me?’
‘There is something elusive about you I find interesting.’
She could hear Brian’s voice in her ear urging her to ‘Go for it!’ It drowned out her mother Mariella’s saying, ‘Are you sure there isn’t some mistake?’
‘I would be absolutely delighted,’ she replied.
Of course, when the time came, she might well have changed her mind.
Nine
As the others were busy, Claire found herself a shady spot underneath the wisteria-covered pergola and thought about home. Things must be all right because she hadn’t heard from either Martin or her son Evan. Maybe some miracle had happened and they were all living in harmony and sharing the cooking and washing-up. This scenario didn’t seem very convincing so she banished it from her mind. She was going to swim in a moment, take advantage of the empty pool.
There seemed to be no one about, so she put on her swimsuit and walked down through the gardens to the lowest level. The pool sparkled in the Mediterranean sun, blue and inviting as a Hockney painting, but without the bums. She sat on the top of the scalloped steps and got used to the tingle of the cold water, then gradually lowered herself in.
She turned over and stared up at the perfect blue sky. How on earth could Stephen own a place as beautiful as this yet hardly ever come here? Was making money from horrible modern developments so much more tempting? She laughed, imagining Satan taking Stephen to the top of a skyscraper in London and saying, ‘All this can be yours for the price of your soul.’ And now he was thinking of selling it or turning it into a hotel. Claire suddenly felt fiercely protective of it, of its seclusion in the middle of a busy coastline, its dramatic beauty, its strange timelessness, even its motley staff, no matter what Monica was suggesting.
She told herself not to be ridiculous. It was nothing to do with her and she hardly knew Stephen. He probably didn’t even remember taking her to a ball at all. It was up to the others who at least had more of a link to Stephen and ought to advise him. She climbed out of the pool and concentrated instead on the message she’d just found which must have been waiting on her signal-less phone. She wondered how he had got her number. From Beatrice, she assumed. They’d all given her their numbers so that she could keep in touch when they were out and about.
Luca wanted her to go and visit his lemon gardens and she felt as excited as a teenage girl on her first date. How ridiculous was that?
When she got back up to the terrace, she found Angela was sitting with a glass of pale wine, her eyes closed, drinking in the sunshine. She wondered if she dare tease Angela and decided she definitely could. ‘Glorious here, isn’t it? And great to see you fina
lly taking off your suit.’
Angela looked at her, perplexed. ‘But I’m wearing a suit.’ She gestured to her white linen.
‘I meant metaphorically.’
Angela laughed. ‘Now there’s a word I haven’t heard since university days.’
Emboldened, Claire dared to ask another question. ‘Did you know Stephen well at Oxford?’
A shutter came down. Angela visibly straightened in her chair. ‘Quite well,’ was the crisp answer.
At home Claire would have clammed up too, and spent the day feeling guilty for intruding. But things were different here. They were all escaping something in their different ways, Claire was sure of it.
‘What happened between you?’ she persisted.
Angela was clearly struggling with how to reply. Intimacy was obviously something she avoided, whether she meant to or not. She looked away. ‘Actually, we were in love. Or at least I was, then my mother had a breakdown and I had to leave. He was kind and understanding. He drove me home.’ She turned and looked Claire steadily in the eye. ‘And I never heard from him again.’
‘Angela, how awful!’
‘Yes. But he was twenty-one. I was a girl from a council estate. Oxford soon swallowed him up. Parties. Balls. Girls with brains and pedigrees to match.’
‘I met plenty of the ones with pedigrees at secretarial college. Not much evidence of brains. You must have been in love since?’ Claire was quite prepared to have her head bitten off.
‘Only with my business,’ Angela replied with a wry smile remembering Drew’s criticism. ‘Of course I had affairs. I’m not a nun. Not even the kind of nun who lived here.’
‘But you had independence. That’s the one thing I’ve never had.’
‘Funny old thing, life.’ Angela got up. ‘I might go and take off my metaphorical suit.’
‘By the way,’ Claire enquired, ‘how did it go with Sylvie and the grand hotel? Did she actually get there in those shoes?’
‘You missed a rare treat. Tony and Kimberley were staying there. They must have been moved from the Belvedere Grand.’
‘Oh my God, no!’
‘Kimberley was on an exercise bicycle next to the pool. Well, I mean, who could resist the temptation?’
‘She didn’t?’
‘She did. And the funny thing was Tony seemed more concerned with telling Sylvie he hadn’t known she was here than pulling the gym bunny out of the pool.’
‘Interesting.’
‘I thought so.’ They couldn’t say any more because Sylvie arrived and joined them. But Sylvie needed no such discretion. ‘Gossiping about me, girls?’
‘I could hardly leave Claire out of the drama, could I?’ Angela admitted. ‘The story’s too good to miss.’
‘Stupid cow. I hope she’s still at the bottom of that pretentious hotel’s pool.’
‘She probably is for all Tony seemed to care.’
Sylvie grinned delightedly. ‘Yes, but poor lamb, did you see how thin he’s got? I bet she put him on a diet.’
Angela and Claire couldn’t resist exchanging looks.
Beatrice arrived to announce that lunch was on the terrace. ‘And my nephew Luca say he showing Signora Chiara his other gardens tomorrow.’ She beamed fulsomely.
The Villa Le Sirenuse was clearly no place for secrets.
Luca came to collect Claire in a pickup truck, under the proprietorial eye of Giovanni, who stopped weeding and stared rudely until Beatrice asked him if he’d given up working because it was a saint’s day.
It was another set of death-defying hairpin bends over thousand-foot ravines, but Claire found she’d begun to find the stomach-clenching journeys rather enjoyable. Now that was a miracle.
They stopped at a little patisserie and had melting lemon cakes and espressos. ‘No one Italian drinks cappuccino,’ Luca asserted waving his hand at all the German, British and American tourists eagerly spooning the foam off their coffees. ‘You will have to learn to drink coffee black if you want to be an Italian!’
The look that accompanied this harmless statement seemed to be so loaded she had to look away. Was he implying that he wanted her to become an Italian?
‘And is everything around here connected to lemons?’ she asked eventually.
‘Everything,’ Luca asserted, smiling.
Back in the truck, they climbed up the other side of the mountain to a series of terraces clustered round a bell tower. ‘All ours, the campanile also.’ He pointed to the crumbling but still beautiful tower.
A lark soared above them and all was silence and peace, yet only ten minutes away from the busy coastline. What a place to live and work.
They watched as Luca’s pickers carried enormous plastic packs of lemons on their backs, their heads cushioned by different kinds of pillows, each individually fashioned by its carrier.
Luca shook his head sadly. ‘But it is very difficult to make a profit. Sicilian lemons are much cheaper but not organic like ours. To them it is only money; to us it is not just a product, but a way of life. These lemon gardens have been here for a thousand years.’
Claire looked around her in surprise.
‘That is why I will find a way of saving the family business.’ She could hear the passion and determination in his voice. He hesitated a moment. ‘Perhaps you would help me?’
‘I have no business experience,’ Claire replied, taken aback and wondering why he should ask her such a question.
‘Yet I think you are very wise.’
One of the helpers arrived with two cups of espresso. In each saucer was a slice of lemon, freshly picked.
‘Come, sit over here.’ He led her to a table and chairs in the shade of the campanile. The bell began to ring across the stillness of the valley. In the past it must have summoned people to their noonday sleeps in the shade of the lemon trees. ‘The tower is falling down but the bell still rings!’ He showed her how to squeeze the lemon into her coffee and it was delicious!
‘So tell me how the business works. Where do you make most money?’
‘From the lemon production, from the tours and the limoncello. Soon the limoncello will be best.’
Claire realized that she’d seen the pale yellow liqueur on sale everywhere from patisseries to cafes to dedicated shops.
‘But surely the trouble with that is that so many other people make limoncello,’ she suggested, not wanting to offend him, but trying to be realistic. ‘Even the waiter in the restaurant we were in the other day gave us some of the limoncello he made himself! Isn’t it just too easy to make?’
Luca looked anxious. ‘Only the best is allowed the special marque on the bottle, but you are right and of course the Sicilians, they cheat with their cheap lemons! Bastardi!’
Claire tried not to smile. Those thousand years of rivalry were obviously still very much alive.
‘Luca, your family history is so amazing! We have a lot of places to visit in England. It is a national pastime. We visit things called stately homes and there is a saying in the stately home business that you need three things to succeed: you must give people something to see, to eat, to buy. That is what you should be doing with your lemon gardens, build up your family history into a museum and add a proper cafe. If they have fun, people will buy the limoncello as a memory of a nice day out.’
Luca reached out and touched her face. Claire tried not to flush the unbecoming tomato red she often did when suddenly moved.
‘I knew you were wise. There is only one problem. I have no money since I gave up my job. I am already supporting the business, my father and brother, and also I give to my wife for the children, although now they are grown up. There is no money for investment.’
‘Would a bank not lend it to you?’
‘To a lemon grower? No.’
‘But surely there must be grants?’
‘Yes, there are grants. But the grants end up in the swimming pools of the politicians.’
‘But you’re not bitter?’
‘No, I
am not bitter. My life is a thousand times better than when I was a lawyer. Lawyers are not happy people. They do not look out at lemon blossom and lovely Englishwomen – well, perhaps they look at lovely Englishwomen but not the kind I am looking at, with a smile that lights up the sky like dawn on a spring morning.’
Claire laughed happily at the extravagant compliment. No one had compared her to a spring dawn in Twickenham. And the amazing thing was, she could tell he meant it. She thought about the fantasy she’d always had of running a restaurant with rooms in Italy and how she’d known it would never happen. But this – Luca’s lemon-growing business – this was real and solid. How much more satisfying would she find it to give her energy and commitment to something like this than cooking endless coronation chicken for fussy clients in London?
Slinging her rival in the swimming pool – though eminently satisfying – meant that Sylvie hadn’t had the chance to really look around the Grand Hotel degli Dei – the Grand Hotel of the Gods – only slightly pompous, as hotel names went. She would have to either go in disguise or satisfy herself with looking online. Fortunately, the hotel’s website was as pretentious as the place itself. It guided the potential guests around the gardens, the pool and the main rooms of the hotel, as well as one or two of the major suites – in 360-degree detail, all to the sound of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Mr Hugo Robertson’s taste in hotel décor was about as similar to her own as opera was to easy listening.
But what really took her breath away was the hotel’s charges. A thousand euros a night for a beige box with a white orchid thrown in to save on the flower bill. If Sylvie decorated a hotel, she would insist on fresh cut flowers – no matter how small the posy – in every room, along with free mineral water and sheets so comfortable you never wanted to get out of bed. And you could forget chocolates on the pillow for a start.
When she came down to dinner, Angela was slightly embarrassed to find Beatrice thrusting a large bouquet of white roses into her arms with a note from Hugo Robertson inviting her to lunch in Positano and a walk along the famous clifftop path – the Sentieri degli Dei, the Path of the Gods, after which the hotel had been named. ‘Sensible footwear advised.’
