One can but admire her bravery in taking on such an obviously ruinous project on her own. I was in half a mind to have a little chat with her, and tell her what she's in for, if only to save her all that trouble! But I have found in life that people do have to learn by their own mistakes. She doesn't really look the part either. There's a touch of the skinny city dweller about her! Oh, well, I'm sure Giovanna's pasta will soon plump her up. Talking of which …
CHAPTER FOUR
elinda has not slept very well at all. She comes downstairs contemplating the idea of updating her house-rules page on the computer, but decides she doesn't have the stomach for it. House rules require a rather vindictive concentration, and she is rather short of that at the moment.
Instead she paces around her kitchen and fills jam jars with water for her Sunday-morning watercoloring session. She is not sure whether it was the three glasses of steadying grappa that she had on her return from the Casa Padronale, or the Lauren encounter itself that disturbed her. Either way, she tossed and turned all night, and ended up with the sheets wrapped around her legs in some complicated yachting knot when she awoke.
Now, puffy-faced in her blue artist's smock, she slams cupboards and exhales unneccessarily as she searches for her brushes and paper. Fortunately, her Belgian surgeons are halfway to Siena, or there is no telling the lack of people skills they might have encountered.
It's Lauren's smile that replays most in her mind. Neat, tight, and barely lifting the corners of her mouth, it never showed any intention of reaching her eyes. It is a smile that Belinda employs often herself, so she understands its full, ghastly meaning only too well. It is pleasant and patronizing. It implies that the person you are talking to is stupid, and dull beyond belief. It also disguises superior mirth. It says that the other person is tiresome but her lack of grace and general witlessness has to be borne for the social cohesiveness of the rest the valley. Belinda knows that smile: she utilizes it all the time when she is with Barbara and Derek, and sometimes very occasionally the famous writer Howard Oxford. But maybe she imagined it. Maybe it's just the way the woman smiles. Maybe it's an American thing. Or, maybe, it was quite understandably directed at Mary.
“Mum, what are you muttering about?” asks Mary, as she clears away the breakfast trays from the terrace.
“What?” says Belinda, her face puckering with surprise.
“You're muttering, Mum, it sounded a bit strange.”
“I was?”
“Yes,” says Mary, putting down the heavy tray of condiments.
Bright and breezy, Mary appears unperturbed by her Lauren encounter. In fact, last night, while her mother downed grappa, Mary announced that she thought Lauren's arrival in the valley was a good thing, something that should be celebrated: it was always nice to have other women around. Needless to say, Belinda didn't entertain her daughter's point of view and reminded her, once again, on which side her bread was buttered.
“I don't know why you bother to do this,” Mary announces, picking up a jam jar.
“Do what?” says Belinda, hands on her hips.
“You know, steaming the labels off the jars and putting handwritten ones on them.” She is holding some Bonne Maman raspberry jam up to the light. “No one's fooled.”
“I'm not trying to fool people,” asserts Belinda. “It's just what they expect.”
“They expect homemade jam.”
“It's homemade,” retorts Belinda, “just not in my home.”
“So you're fooling them.”
“No, I'm not. I can't help what people think,” says Belinda, with a tight smile. “Anyway, isn't it time you went and made the beds? I've got some painting to fit in before lunch.”
Belinda picks up her red box of paints from the kitchen table, with the jar of water and a pad of paper, then sets off for the farthest end of her garden and the view of the Casa Padronale.
Truth be known, of all the vistas Belinda could have painted on a Sunday morning, this is quite possibly the least attractive— too many terraced fields, too few cypresses, and rather too much white-tracked road. But then again, it probably doesn't matter much: when it comes to admiring Belinda's paintings it is often hard to tell exactly which image she has captured. Detail is not one of her strengths. Having subscribed to Watercolourists Monthly, ostensibly to receive the free paints and the artist's smock, she canceled her order as soon as they started to charge her for European postage and packing, which was at around the same time that the journal was moving from backgrounds to foregrounds and landscape details. An expert with her blue-sky wash and green hills, Belinda tends to become a little too creatively exhausted when it comes to putting the finishing touches to her views. Fortunately, foreground fatigue usually surfaces just before one o'clock and Sunday lunch at Giovanna's.
Buttocks clenched on a tussock, Belinda rests her pad across her knees as she sits on the side of the hill, painting. Her brush is poised, her brows concentrated, and her mind on the action below.
The blue Jeep has been back and forth all morning, swinging past Casa Mia like some teenage girl on a night out. Belinda has already grown to hate the cut of its jaunty jib as it glides up and down the hill with four-wheel-drive confidence.
Meanwhile, in the valley below, the clean white shirt of Lauren is very much in evidence, as she darts around the corners of her estate engaging with the workers and laborers who have appeared overnight. There seem to be hundreds of them, swarming like maggots over a rotting carcass. They are clearing the overgrown gardens, chopping down old trees, and piling all the loose stone into a yellow skip. Their jovial, good-natured chattering trips up the valley. Belinda swears she can hear Lauren's nasal vowels and the odd brash volley of laughter she shares with the man in the baseball cap. This is all happening rather too quickly for her liking.
She swirls her paintbrush vigorously in the jar, tapping the sides like a best man announcing a speech. She dips her thick wet brush into her paintbox, but such is her concentration on the action below that she does not check her palette too closely. As she wipes her paint-laden brush in big, broad strokes across the sky, gobs of black paint mix with the pale blue and cloud her view.
“Shit,” she says, as she looks down at the impending storm she has just painted. The black paint bleeds into the blue sky, engulfing it, taking it over and destroying the green valley below. “That's all I bloody need.” She tears the paper off the pad and screws it into a ball. “Surely it's time for lunch?” she mutters. She gets to her feet and throws her glass of cloudy water over the hillside. “I'll deal with her later.”
elinda and Mary are half an hour early for lunch at Gio-vanna's, but no one seems to mind, least of all Giovanna, who bustles up, a broad smile on her small, pink, lined face, which has spent slightly too many hours near the scorching confines of her pizza oven.
“Ciao, Belinda! Ciao, la bella Maria!” she says. Her tight black poodle curls nod in agreement as her bony hands grip each of their shoulders in turn, she greets them with a long-lost chamois-leather kiss.
The antithesis to her roly-poly husband, Giovanna is nothing but skin, bone, and facial hair. A ball of nervous energy, she cooks like a dervish, flits from table to table in the dining room, and talks nonstop in such a thick Tuscan accent that almost no one, except her husband, can understand. Together they make an extraordinary pair. Some people joke about how opposites attract. Everyone else murmurs about how he must drown her during sex—he's so big and fat and heavy. How does she manage to breathe? Some tourists in the valley even, erroneously, doubt that they have ever managed to do it at all. But Giovanna is the proud mother of six sons, whom she produced in quick succession, each spring for the first six years of their marriage. They have all since left the nest for various towns and cities all over Italy, from Milan to Florence. But when they return, the whole valley hears the song and dance.
Giovanna rushes around organizing Belinda's carafe of cold white wine and Mary's bottle of fizzy water, while they take their
places at the long table in the middle of the restaurant. Laid for six with paper napkins and a pale pink linen tablecloth, Sunday lunch has a more formal feel to it than any of the other meals served in the restaurant. The Campari umbrellas have been grouped together to provide shade for the entire table. Another long table, for ten, is set up in the shade of the vine, while a couple is tucked away in the corner by the wall. Belinda settles down in the middle of the central table and starts to tear small pieces off a slice of bread from a brown plastic basket.
“Looks like the Bianchis have booked for lunch,” she says, nodding toward the large table of ten under the vine. “I wonder who the two is?” she asks, chewing on a crust.
“Probably some tourists,”suggests Mary, taking a sip of water. Her eyes fill up slightly as the bubbles go up the back of her nose.
“Mmm,” agrees her mother. She takes a sip of wine. “Every-thing all right this morning? No horrors in the bedroom?”
“Not that I noticed,” says Mary.
“It always amazes me who the revolting ones are.” Belinda dunks her bread in some olive oil she's poured into the ashtray. “It's often the most refined general who skids the sheets.”
“Mum!” says Mary, shoulders hunched in embarrassment.
“Doesn't bother me, darling.” Belinda smiles. “You're the one dealing with it.”
“Do we have to talk about these things?”
“I was only saying—and anyway,” Belinda sniffs, “no one here speaks English.”
“But that's not the point.”
“Oh, do shut up.” Belinda yawns, and turns to face the entrance. “Oh, buongiorno Howard. Buongiorno! ” she exclaims loudly, with a coo-ee wave and a smile, getting out of her seat as she does so. “How are you? Come va? ” she asks, her face all screwed up, waiting to be embraced.
“I'm very much the same as when you last saw me,” says Howard, leaning over to place two rather wet red kisses on Be-linda's cheeks. “I've been up since seven trying to get my character out of bed,” he says, nodding to Mary as he sits down. “The bottle of wine I had at ten thirty made not a blind bit of difference.”
“Never mind, never mind,” says Belinda, pouring him a glass of white wine from the carafe. “Well, I've got some gossip that will surely get you unblocked.”
“Really?” says Howard, leaning across and picking up the carafe, he fills his glass to the top. “Sounds intriguing,” he says, opening his Burgundy-colored lips and pouring wine down his evidently dry throat.
“Well,” says Belinda, her shoulders around her ears in her enthusiasm, “I've met the americano who bought the Casa Padronale and … she is, in fact, an americana! ”
“Oh, right,” says Howard, leaning back into his chair. “That's nice.”
It's not quite the reaction Belinda was after. But before she can release her furious inner child, Derek and Barbara amble in with welcoming smiles on their inert faces.
“All right there, Contessa?” says Derek, running his thumbs around the waist of his beige slacks as he approaches.
“Yes, Derek, just fabulous.” Belinda smiles, cheering up. “Brimming with gossip.”
“Ooh, gossip!” enthuses Barbara, rubbing together her long, frosted-pink nails. “That sounds interesting.”
“It is,” says Belinda, standing up again and pouring them a glass of white wine. “The person who owns the Casa Pardonale is a woman!” she announces triumphantly, then sits down.
“A woman!” Derek repeats.
“Yes, a woman,” confirms Belinda, folding her arms under her breasts to demonstrate her certainty.
“How amazing,” says Barbara, her lined lips hanging open. “Who'd have guessed it?”
“Mary and I went around last night to meet her,” says Belinda, her trump card gleaming in her eyes for all to see.
“You never?” says Barbara, her scoop-neck breasts spreading across the table as she leans forward.
“Yup.” Belinda nods.
“You never?” says Barbara again, directing her question and her expanding chest toward Mary.
“We did,” confirms Mary. “To check her out.”
“To welcome her to the valley,” insists Belinda.
“A bit of both.” Barbara's frosted nails make a seesaw gesture.
“And?” asks Derek. His neck muscles exhausted after the conversational tennis match he has just supported.
Belinda inhales. “Well,” she says. Her buttocks twist in her seat. Everyone leans in. And Belinda is off, holding forth from a unique position of knowledge, which is just how she likes it. She starts out pleasantly enough. She has learned from past experience that it doesn't do to be too negative about people right from the very beginning. If one is too unpleasant and too derogatory, it serves only to make one's audience empathize with the obvious underdog. So she starts out being positive about the amount of work Lauren appears to have got done in such a short space of time. She continues that if she had heard two people outside her house so late at night, she doubts she would have been brave enough to open the door. But once the door is open, Belinda starts to let little things slip. Lauren's amazing svelteness is directed straight at Barbara, who tends to dislike people thinner than her. The fact that Lauren probably works hard to maintain this svelteness is directed at Howard, who finds anything gym-related so vacuously banal and ghastly that he instantly drains his glass in disgust. So, with two of the three members of her audience already slightly uncomfortable at Lauren's arrival, Belinda delivers her final killer blow with the subtlest fanfare.
“The one thing she said that I did find a little odd … though …” she says, with affected hesitation.
“Yes?” says Derek.
“Well, perhaps it was a communication thing,”continues Belinda, nodding at her understanding and general kindness. “Divided by a common language, you know, that sort of thing …”
“What did the skinny Yank say?” asks Barbara.
“Well, it was something along the lines of wanting to make Tuscany work for her.” Belinda repeats, with a couple of little quotation marks drawn by her own fat hand.
“Oh, I say!” says Derek, evidently not enjoying the idea of someone else making money or possibly being richer than him. “Did she really say that?”
“Yes.” Belinda's tone is a little sad.
“Really?” asks Howard, who seems to be trying to work out which is the more appalling: the fact that the woman works out or that she is planning to sell the romance of Tuscany downriver. “Really? That Tuscany should work for her?” he asks again, this time looking to Mary for affirmation.
“Yes,” Mary says, “well, I'm sure it was meant—”
“Ssssh!” says Belinda suddenly, slapping Howard's arm so hard that he hits his front tooth on his glass. “There she is!” Belinda indicates with the back of her head, while gripping Derek and Howard by the forearms. “There! In the doorway! With the young man in the baseball cap!” she whispers, with all the finesse and subtlety of a stage drunk.
The whole table falls silent, and, very slowly, they turn their heads toward the door and stare. Engaged in conversation with the rotund Roberto, Lauren stands in her jeans and white shirt, flicking her blonde hair and casually laughing. She is oblivious of her audience. It is only when she turns to take her table that she notices the five pairs of gawping eyes, like a row of meerkats on lookout.
“Oh,” she says, taking a quick, shocked step backward. “Oh, hello.” She smiles, standing very much to attention.
“Lauren, hello there!” says Belinda, chin in the air, looking down her short retroussé nose. She gives her American neighbor a little English wave. “Come and meet the rest of my—the valley!”
“Oh, great.” Lauren ignores the little English wave. “That's so nice of you … um, Betina, isn't it?”
“Belinda,” says Belinda, with a light laugh. “It's quite complicated to remember,” she confirms. “It's a very old, very English name.”
“How quaint to be calle
d something so out-of-date.”Lauren smiles as she strides over on her long legs in her slim-fit jeans. The man in the baseball cap follows.
“Yes, well, some of us would regard that as culture and tradition,” mutters Belinda, quickly and rather ineffectually. “Anyway,” she says, gathering herself and flaring her nostrils, “everyone, this is Lauren. Lauren, this is everyone in the valley. And,” she chuckles, “I really do mean everyone in the valley. ”
“Oh.” Lauren feigns a little surprise. “I thought there was an Italian farming family here.”
“There is,” says Belinda, “but none of us … you know, with them …”
“I'm Derek,” says Derek, standing up and attempting to help Belinda out of her increasingly large hole. “This is my wife, Barbara.”
“Hello.” Barbara's plump buttocks keep contact with her seat.
“Hi,” says Lauren. “And this is my son, Kyle.”
“Your son?” says Barbara. “But you look far too young—”
“No, God! I wish! I'm forty-eight.” Lauren smiles.
“That's the same age as you, isn't it, Belinda?” says Howard, over the top of his glass.
“Yes, well …” mutters Belinda, suddenly looking for something over her shoulder.
The group looks from one to the other, and no one says anything.
“Hello, everyone,” says Kyle. He takes off his baseball cap to reveal a shock of thick dark hair, and a broad, generous smile. He has tanned skin, large dark eyes, a straight nose, and a square jaw; he is very handsome. His voice is deep and male. Mary stares at the floor, and starts to shred her paper napkin.
“I'm Howard,” says Howard, getting to shake hands formally.
“Howard's a famous novelist,” says Belinda, like he's her own son. “He wrote The Sun Shone on Her Face. You may have heard of it?”
“Um … ?” Lauren pauses. “No.”
“It wasn't published in America,” admits Howard, getting back to his wine.
“It wasn't?” says Belinda. “Oh, how unfortunate for you.”
Tuscany for Beginners Page 8
