“Ever since I came back, I think.”
“Have you discussed this with your parents?”
“Only Margo. I want you to come with me.”
He shook his head and stared out of the window. “My life is here, Alba.” He felt a nasty sense of déjà vu.
“But couldn’t you write a book?” she said, kneeling behind him, winding her arms around his shoulders.
“I’m an agent, not a writer.”
“You’ve never tried.” She pressed her cheek, damp with tears, to his.
He frowned. “Don’t you love me?” he asked and his voice cracked.
“Yes, I do,” she exclaimed, desperate to alleviate the sorrow in his soft brown eyes. “I love you so much. We’re meant to be together. Oh Fitz!” she sighed. “What are we going to do?”
He drew her into his arms and held her tightly. “You can’t live here and I can’t live there.”
The butterfly was spreading her wings, ready to fly away again. This time, he didn’t know whether he’d ever get her back.
“I have to go, Fitz. Cosima needs me. I belong there.” She nuzzled her face into his neck. “Don’t say you won’t come. Don’t say it’s over. I couldn’t bear it. Let’s just see. If you change your mind, I’ll be waiting for you. I’ll be waiting and hoping and ready to welcome you with open arms. My love won’t grow cold, not in Italy.”
Epilogue
Italy 1972
A lba’s heart was full. Spring in Incantellaria was the most beautiful spring in the world. Small birds hopped on the tables and chairs outside the trattoria and the sun bathed the sea below it in the gentle, translucent light of morning. Alba wiped her hands on her apron. She wore a simple wraparound dress imprinted with blue flowers, and flip-flops. She had painted her toenails with pink varnish she and Cosima had bought at the dwarfs’ shop. She had painted Cosima’s too, which had taken far longer than it should have, thanks to her moving her toes and giggling. Alba ran a hand across her forehead. It was hot there in the trattoria and she worked hard, buying supplies, setting tables, serving customers. She had even learned how to cook. She had never believed herself capable of preparing delicious meals. Even Immacolata was impressed. Beata congratulated her in her quiet, dignified manner, telling her that cooking was in her blood, that she’d carry on the Fiorelli tradition and its good name long after they had all passed on.
She put a hand in the pocket of her apron and pulled out a used tissue and a white card. She turned the card over and looked at Gabriele’s name engraved on it. She stared at it for a moment, there by the window, overlooking the beach. After a while she put it back. Her hair had grown a little. It was now long enough to tie into a short ponytail. It wasn’t that she wanted to grow it, simply that she couldn’t be bothered to cut it. She lifted her hands and drew it back into a ribbon. As she did so, she heard the distant motor of a boat. She raised her eyes to the wall, by the door.
There were three sketches in simple wooden frames. The first was of a woman’s face. It was gentle, innocent, with a smile full of secrets and an indefinable sadness behind the eyes. The second was a mother and child. The expression of love on the mother’s face was naked and unguarded, free of all secrets, save those of a mother’s desires for her child. The third was a reclining nude. In this final portrait Valentina was flushed and sensual and wanton, embodying all the vices of earthly pleasure and always as mysterious as the sea. Yet no one but Alba noticed those portraits anymore. They blended with the walls of the trattoria like the hanging onions and garlic, ornamental plates, and religious iconography. Often she walked past them without a sideways glance.
The sound of the motorboat grew louder. It rattled into the silence of the sleepy cove, disturbing the air, sending the birds into the sky. The sense of excitement quivered in the atmosphere like a pebble thrown into a smooth pond, sending ripples far and wide. She walked outside to stand beneath the awning, a wicker basket of apples hanging on her arm. A wave of anticipation began to expand in her heart, slowly at first and then with increasing speed, until she was hurrying across the sand, carried along by the swell of it. The ribbon fell out of her hair, leaving it to fly about her face and shoulders like threads of fine silk. Then she stood breathing heavily so that her breasts rose and fell, accentuated by the low décolletage of her dress. Her face was clear and perfect, like the night sky when one is in the middle of the ocean. She smiled, not the broad, bovine smile of the townsfolk who now emerged from their homes to see who had come, but a gentle curling of the lips that reached her eyes and caused them to narrow slightly. A mere whisper of a smile. So subtle that it made her beauty almost hard to swallow. The boat drew up and a young man descended. His eyes met the strange pale eyes of the woman with the basket. She stood in the crowd yet seemed to have a space of her very own, as if she remained a little apart. Her loveliness was such that her image seemed more pronounced than the rest. It was then that he lost his heart. There on the quayside of the small fishing town of Incantellaria he let it go willingly. He didn’t know then that it was gone forever, that he would never get it back.
Touchstone Reading Group Guide
Last Voyage of the Valentina
Introduction
Alba Arbuckle always feels like an outsider. She hardly knew her Italian mother, Valentina, and her English father acts as if Valentina never existed. Alba despises country life almost as much as she despises her stepmother and stepsisters. On board the London houseboat named after her dead mother, Alba’s life is little more than a selfish search for fun and pleasure.
But the discovery of her mother’s portrait sends Alba back to Italy to find her family—and the truth about Valentina. Amid the olive groves of the Amalfi coast, she discovers a tale of deception and betrayal revealing a secret web of partisans and Nazis, peasants and counts, and ultimately a forbidden truth. What Alba finds in the past is heartrending, but it’s the gateway to her own future.
Discussion Questions
The book opens with a gruesome murder in the prologue, and yet the central action of the story is of love and self-realization. How does this killing frame your reading of the story? When did you realize the identities of the killers?
Chapter 1 begins with Fitz and Viv watching Alba. Later Cook watches Alba rummage through her father’s desk. Discuss the point of view of the narrator in the story and how the author uses various vantage points to tell the story. What role does spying play in revealing secrets to the reader throughout the story?
Lavender Arbuckle says, “A woman is nothing without a man by her side. Nothing without children.” With all that Alba has learned, gained, and lost by the end of the story, would she agree?
Discuss the similarities and differences between Lavender Arbuckle and Immacolata. What does each one offer Alba? Who do you think is the better grandmother?
Although Alba “only attended church to irritate the Buffalo in her short skirt and to show off her ‘boyfriend,’” as the service continued Alba “didn’t think about sex. She didn’t dwell on Fitz’s kiss. For once in her life, Alba Arbuckle thought about God.” What role does religion play in the story? How does attending church affect Alba’s decision making?
The story is divided into three portraits. What is the relation of the segmented form of the story to its content? What do each one of these drawings by Thomas Arbuckle reveal about Valentina? Do they also reveal something about Alba or about women in general?
What does Alba see in Fitz that allows her to fall so hard and so fast for him? Unlike her other boyfriends he does not send her flowers after they have a spat, so what does he add to her life that her other boyfriends did not?
After Alba cuts her hair Falco asks her, “Who are you running from, Alba?” Why does Alba make such a drastic change to her appearance? What does this change in her symbolize? Does this change accomplish what she wants it to?
Although Alba had never been back to Italy after she left it as a baby, Immacolata says that “Alba is home” wh
en she is in Incantellaria. At the end of the story Alba’s physical home, the Valentina, is scuttled. Where do you think home is for Alba?
Valentina says that “War reduces men to animals and turns women into shameful creatures.” To what extent is the war to blame for the tragedy that befell Valentina? To what extent is human nature at fault?
Alba begins the story living on the water and ends up living on dry land, yet far away from where she spent most of her life. What do water and land each represent in the story?
What were your feelings about Alba’s decision to leave Fitz and return to Incantellaria at the end of the story? What does Alba’s choice say about the strength of family bonds versus the strength of love? Do you agree with her decision?
Enhance Your Book Club
To see photos of the Italian coast described in the book, check out from your local library Amalfi: Italy’s Divine Coast by Assunta Cuozzo and Rosario Bonavoglia or Hidden Naples and the Amalfi Coast by Cesare Cunaccia.
Buy or rent Italian folk music to play at your group meeting when you discuss the book. Some popular choices include: Mandolins from Italy: 24 Most Popular Melodies by Joel Perri and Italian Treasury: Folk Music & Song of Italy by Alan Lomax.
Cook an Italian meal for your book group. Some excellent Italian cookbooks from Simon & Schuster include The Italian Country Table: Home Cooking from Italy’s Farmhouse Kitchens by Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Williams-Sonoma Collection: Italian by Pamela Sheldon Johns.
A Conversation with Santa Montefiore
When did you begin writing? How did you know you wanted to become a professional writer?
I started writing children’s books when I was about ten. Before then I had always written as a hobby and drawn pictures to go with the mini books I made. At school from the age of about fifteen I tried many times to write a proper romantic book, but because I had no experience in love, all the books were rejected. Quite rightly! I always dreamed of being a professional writer, but never in my wildest ones did I really believe it would happen. It wasn’t until I was nineteen that I lived in Argentina for a year and found my first big love story. I loved it so much that leaving was heartbreaking. I returned to Argentina a year later to find, to my horror, that I didn’t fit in anymore. The young people I had hung out with on this beautiful farm on the pampa had dispersed to study in the United States and other places. I was a tourist where once I had belonged, and I couldn’t bring back that magical year however hard I tried. I didn’t write the story, which was an allegory of my love affair with Argentina, until I was twenty-five. It came out in 2001, when I was thirty-one.
What sparked the idea for this novel?
This is my fifth novel, so I wanted to do something different. Having done four family sagas based in Argentina and Chile, I decided to move to Italy and write a murder mystery love story with a dramatic twist. The idea came from my aunt who, during London’s swinging sixties, lived on a houseboat that had been a motor torpedo boat in the Second World War. I immediately seized upon the idea of having a boat with a tragic history going back to 1945 on the Amalfi coast.
Can you tell us about your inspiration for Alba? Do you see yourself as Viv, the writer in the story? Are your friends’ stories inspiration for your writing?
I am not either Alba or Viv. I wanted my heroine to have a spiritual journey—a hedonistic girl who, through her search for her mother and the various heartaches that search involves, finds herself and the true meaning of happiness. My sister is very fiery and complicated, so knowing her was a help! I always have a Viv character in my books. I love writing those cameo rolls of larger-than-life people; they also add humor to my books, which are obviously sad. They give the books balance. I take inspiration from everyone I see! I am a sum of my experience—everything goes into the melting pot out of which I draw ingredients for my characters.
Your writing gives your readers a very beautiful and clear picture of the Italian countryside. Do you have a personal relationship with the Amalfi coast that allowed you to write about it so intimately? Did you visit the coast during the course of your writing?
I studied Italian and Spanish at Exeter University and spent a year in Italy. I spent a lot of time on the Amalfi coast, and once you’ve been there, it never leaves you!
Last Voyage of the Valentina seems to encompass many genres and could be described as both a murder mystery and a romance. How did you accomplish this so well?
I would never describe myself as a crime writer; the book is about love and the crimes committed in its name are a minor part of it. That said, I had never written about murder so I really had to plan it out very carefully, as when you’re revealing truths in the second half of the book, the seeds for those truths have to be sown in the first half and then you have to decide who reveals what and when. Timing is important and how truths are revealed. It was great fun to do, having never written a book in this way before, and an enormous challenge. I hope the mystery aspect gives the book more depth and keeps you turning those pages!
Do you think it’s fair to say that there is an old-fashioned sensibility to your writing?
Definitely. I am an old-fashioned kind of girl! I’m incredibly nostalgic for the past—my own past and history. Love over the photocopier doesn’t do it for me! I like a great big canvas of both past and present and characters whose lives I can draw in their entirety. I love beautiful places you can smell, heartbreaking love stories, and cuddly eccentric characters that stay with you after you’ve finished reading the book. I write the sort of books I love to read and I know my limitations and what I’m good at.
There is a strong element of religious superstition in your novel, as tragedy befalls Valentina after the statue does not bleed. What research did you do in writing of the religious implications of this?
I didn’t have to do any research because I studied Italian literature at university; also, having lived in Argentina, which is mostly made up of Italians, and Italy, superstition is all around you. I’m also a great fan of Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. I have seen spirits since I was small and have a strong, unwavering belief in spirit life after death.
Who are your favorite writers?
I adore Fanny Flagg—Fried Green Tomatoes is one of my all-time favorites—Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits. I’ve just read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which I adored; and all Mary Wesley’s books are touching and funny. I’m rereading Corelli’s Mandolin because I admire the way Louis de Bernières writes. Anita Shreve is good, and of course Jodi Picoult is amazing. I cry and cry in her books, but she writes with such a light touch there’s no heaviness there, just beauty. Nicholas Sparks is a good storyteller. Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County was so powerful—that story has never left me. I love to read the classics: Anna Karenina by Tolstoy and The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas are two of the best books I have ever read.
What is the best piece of advice about writing you have ever received? And what advice would you give to a young writer starting out?
Write about what you know. Don’t think about how other people will judge you—just write from the heart without inhibition. Be brave and extravagant with your writing. You have to find your voice, and however well you write, your voice will always be unique. Write sensually—think smell and sound to evoke a sense of place—and remember when drawing characters that we don’t love people for their perfections but for their imperfections that make them different from everyone else in the world. Never give up: it will happen. However many rejections you receive, remember, you only need one agent and one publisher. Starting a book is the most difficult part; once you’ve invented your world, don’t leave it until the book is finished. Oh and one more piece of advice my husband told me: don’t get it right, get it written—that is, wait until you’ve finished it before you start to polish it or you’ll never leave chapter 1.
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Santa Montefiore, Last Voyage of the Valentina
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