Secrets in Sicily

by Penny Feeny

  ‘I know. Me too.’

  ‘Nothing is going to threaten us,’ he said. And then stopped speaking because he had to concentrate on his balance, on staying upright and staying inside her. There were moments when they were in danger of sliding apart, but he held on and she gripped more tightly with her knees. She rose and bucked and their bodies rocked together in a taut, exhilarating rhythm.

  After he set her down, her legs felt wobbly and uncertain like a new foal’s and she pattered giddily into the bedroom to find something to wear. She picked a shift made of cotton lawn, fine as gossamer, but its lightness was not an advantage: humidity soon reduced it to the texture of a dishcloth. Alex stayed in the bathroom to shave. Jess twisted her wet hair onto the top of her head and stuck in a pin. She leaned against the door jamb watching him lather his chin in the mirror over the sink.

  ‘We’ve always been open,’ she said. ‘To the idea that someone might show up from Lily’s past…’

  ‘Nothing will threaten us,’ he repeated.

  ‘But there’s a difference, isn’t there, between an abstract prospect that may never happen and an actual breathing living person? Because of what you told me about Lily and the wrong grandparents, I expected we might track down somebody from a different generation. Or distant in some other way. But, Christ, I wouldn’t be surprised if Carlotta was younger than me!’

  He raised an eyebrow, turned to look at her. ‘Are you wearing underwear?’

  ‘God, no, too hot.’ The dishrag was already clinging to her nipples.

  ‘Dolly’s going to disapprove.’

  ‘Dolly? I wonder what’s up with her. Did you see how she reacted to the photos?’

  Alex pulled his skin tight and drew a path through the shaving foam with his razor. ‘Och, she’s a drama queen.’

  ‘She wouldn’t keep the truth from us, though, would she, if she knew something for certain?’

  ‘No one in this country knows anything for certain. Even if they did, they’d be in the habit of keeping quiet for fear of reprisals. People aren’t going to risk speaking out of turn. I told you, Jess, there’s no point speculating. We have to wait and see what happens next.’

  ‘If Carlotta Galetti shows up, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  5

  The telephone lived in the hallway of Villa Ercole, with a second instrument in Gerald’s study. The McKenzies gave out the number warily, only to be used in emergencies. When Jess, sunning herself on the terrace, heard its long insistent ring, she didn’t expect the call to be for either of them.

  Dolly answered and poked her head outside. ‘Alex, dov’è?’

  ‘Do you know who wants him?’

  Dolly pursed her lips and Jess felt a surge of apprehension.

  Alex loped to the phone. Jess hovered nearby, re-buckling her sandal, toying with her hair in the hall mirror. She caught some words and phrases, the gist of a meeting. She knew he’d tell her the details; they were always open and frank with each other. He replaced the receiver and said without turning around, ‘Carlotta wants to meet me.’

  ‘Just you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor Lily?’

  ‘She wants to talk to me about my part in… what happened.’

  ‘After the earthquake? Couldn’t I come and listen? I won’t interrupt. I don’t think you should exclude me.’

  ‘It’s a preliminary meeting,’ he said. ‘There’ll probably be others.’

  ‘What are you going to tell her?’

  ‘What d’you mean? The truth, of course, as far as I know it.’

  ‘The business with the family who rejected Lily?’

  ‘Look, I won’t make anything up.’

  She stepped closer, prodded him in the ribs. ‘Never believe a journalist who says they don’t make anything up.’

  ‘Jess…’ He caught her hand and held it. ‘This is too important…’

  ‘I know. That’s what I’m scared of. When did you agree to see her?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning in the Jolly Bar.’

  The Jolly Bar had a flashing pinball machine and well-used table football, with the blue and red paint flaking off the figures, but it wasn’t the one they frequented because Lily and Harry preferred the ice-cream flavours in the Caffe Centrale opposite. That was presumably why Alex had nominated it.

  ‘What will I do?’

  ‘What we always do, Jess. Take the kids to the beach. As far as they’re concerned I’m staying behind to work with Gerald. They won’t be bothered.’

  ‘You will tell me everything,’ she said.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m being paranoid.’ She buried her face in his neck for the comforting scent of him, a tangible reassurance.

  Alex was right: the children asked no questions. As soon as they arrived at the beach they were subsumed into the gang of friends they’d made. Jess watched them scarper to the shore and splash in the shallows with a large inflatable beach ball. Against the dazzling reflection of the sea, the group was a blur. The only things that stood out were the vivid stripes of the ball and Harry’s white-blond head. He refused to wear a hat. Lily had blended in, indistinguishable from the rest.

  Over the past two summers she’d become close friends with a boy her own age called Marcello Campione. They liked to go exploring together, heading for the untamed scrubby area beyond the sand, where the river Belice flowed into the sea. Here they’d created a den out of an old upturned dinghy. Harmless enough, Jess had thought when she learned of it, but now any hiding place was suspect. She fixed her gaze on the group, determined not to let Lily out of her sight.

  She knew she was overreacting: there was no shortage of supervision. Mammas all over the beach were springing up and dusting down their offspring, rescuing them from mishaps, bestowing oodles of affection. Children were considered a shared delight. The McKenzies were good at sharing too, often offering a meal or a mattress to someone in need. They weren’t possessive. At least, Jess hadn’t thought of herself as possessive until two days ago.

  It hadn’t been easy, transplanting Lily to their London flat. The bedwetting had been a trial – the twin-tub churning with sheets as well as terry-towelling nappies and fabrics for tie-dying – and the home-schooling an effort, but they had coped. And she’d taken root, hadn’t she? She was their beautiful contented quirky daughter, unimaginable in any other family but their own.

  Lily was running towards her, droplets of water sparkling on her skin like glitter, her eyes lustrous, her perfect mouth grinning, exposing her muddle of teeth, old and new. ‘I’m hungry!’

  ‘What’s new, darling? You’re always hungry!’

  ‘So’s Marcello.’ The two of them, chatting in a mixture of English, Italian and Sicilian dialect, delved into Dolly’s basket. ‘We can have a picnic in our den.’

  ‘No!’

  Lily jerked her hand back in surprise. Jess never shouted, never forbade anything on a whim. She knew Lily couldn’t possibly be at risk from the attentions of Carlotta when the woman was with Alex in the Jolly Bar. But she couldn’t explain her anxieties, her worst imaginings. Her mind kept flitting to the scene: the pinball machine juddering and squealing in the background, the cigarette stubs mounting in the ashtray with the imprint of red lipstick on the filters.

  ‘You don’t want to spoil your appetite, darling,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go up to the villa and see what Dolly’s making us for lunch?’

  Getting back early wasn’t helpful. Alex was still absent and the children sat around the table on the terrace impatiently kicking its legs.

  Dolly wasn’t pleased either. Time in Sicily might be infinitely elastic, but food was sacred. She’d brought the meal forward but there was no Alex to eat it so they all had to wait. When he finally arrived, panting, she greeted him with an emphatic, ‘At last!’ and set down the tureen of maccheroni with a thump of annoyance.

  Gerald, in co
ntrast, was in an affable mood. ‘Bit of a breakthrough this morning,’ he observed.

  Alex looked startled. Don’t do this now, Jess was about to beg. Not in front of the children.

  ‘Second stanza,’ said Gerald. ‘Third line. Finally got the scansion spot on.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alex, in some relief. ‘Stesichorus.’

  ‘Stegosaurus?’ said Harry, alerted. ‘Where?’

  ‘Not a dinosaur, old chap! The Greek lyric poet. What do you think your father and I have been working on since you got here?’

  Harry’s face was blank. ‘Dunno.’ He siphoned up more pasta.

  Gerald ruffled his hair. ‘Well, you’ve got some learning to do. And you can’t start too young. I realise Greek translation is rather an arcane pursuit, but scholarship is as much a calling, you know, as religion. Over two thousand years later, the man still speaks to us.’

  ‘The stegosaurus,’ said Harry, unimpressed, ‘is hundreds of millions of years old.’

  ‘Didn’t write many poems though, did it?’

  Jess surreptitiously slid some of her maccheroni onto Lily’s plate; she didn’t have much appetite. She was grateful for the diversion, for the giggling over dinosaur literacy; nevertheless, the lunch felt like the longest she had ever endured.

  Afterwards, Gerald reclined on his sun lounger, smoking one of his gold-tipped Russian Sobranies, bought on the black market, while the children scurried obediently to their bedroom for their siesta. Jess helped Alex to stack the dirty dishes and carry them into the kitchen. Dolly was preparing coffee. When it was ready, she sat them both down and took her place at the head of the table like a presiding magistrate. ‘Drink!’ she chided them.

  ‘Please, Alex,’ Jess said. ‘Don’t make me wait any longer.’ She glanced at Dolly. There was no point in trying to have a discussion in private. ‘Tell us what happened.’

  He flicked back his hair, cleared his throat. ‘Well, it went okay, the meeting. She was charming, sensitive, and so forth, but, Christ, her story was grim. Not that I expected anything different.’

  ‘But who is she? Did she explain?’

  ‘According to Carlotta, the Galettis were bakers. She had married into the family and they lived above the shop. When the earthquake struck they were sleeping – it was the middle of the night. Her husband yelled that they should run and he seized their baby daughter. She couldn’t keep up and was hit by falling masonry.’ His voice was tense, but matter-of-fact. ‘Because she’d been knocked unconscious she was in hospital for some time. She didn’t find out what had happened until afterwards and she missed the burial. Not surprisingly, she was pretty traumatised.’

  ‘Whose burial?’

  ‘All of them. Her in-laws were killed too.’

  Jess gulped. ‘Oh, my God, how awful!’

  Dolly said in a low ghoulish voice, ‘There were many problems to bury the dead. In the winter the ground was very hard. Also the bodies were not always complete.’

  ‘Because they were crushed, you mean?’ It was a horrible vision, limbs splintered into fragments, skulls shattered and unrecognisable.

  The shutters were closed so the light fell in narrow bars across the room. Alex sought Jess’s gaze in the gloom and held it. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But there were also wild boar who came out of the woods on the hillside and scavenged among the corpses – which added to the urgency – and many were mutilated. In fact, there wasn’t a final death toll, only an estimate. Some bodies were never recovered.’

  ‘Oh, my God! So how could she even be certain…?’ Her question trailed away, the answer too unpalatable.

  ‘Anyhow, the upshot of all this…’ he picked up the espresso that had been cooling in front of him ‘… is that when Carlotta came out of her coma and discovered she was a widow, her own mother arranged for them to stay with relatives on the mainland. In a sense she was one of the lucky ones.’

  ‘How do you mean, lucky?’

  ‘There was total bedlam afterwards. The comune couldn’t provide housing for all the survivors or afford to replace what they’d lost. The government’s solution was to dole out passports and train tickets so people could batten on family members elsewhere. Paperwork, when you’re overstaffed with bureaucrats, doesn’t cost much. It may have been unprecedented, but I reckon it was the easy way out. Like printing money. For Carlotta, among others, it was an escape route.’

  Dolly was leaning forward to make sure she caught every word. ‘Donna fugata,’ she said.

  ‘Running away isn’t a crime, Doll,’ he protested. ‘The crimes came afterwards when the funding was misappropriated. Anyone would be desperate to flee a situation like that.’

  Jess felt wrung out, her guts knotted and twisted at a tragedy of such proportions. She tried to speak calmly. ‘So what did she want from you?’

  ‘To hear about my part in the rescue operation. She was out of it, remember, and she’d suffered memory loss. All she has to go on are piecemeal bits of information from a load of different sources. I could give her another angle.’

  ‘So you told her how you found Lily?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Jess pictured Lily and Harry snoozing on their twin beds. In this heat their limbs would be flung at all angles, though Lily had a habit of burying her face in her pillow so all you could see was the curl of eyelashes on her cheek. ‘And she thinks there might be a connection because she’d lost a baby girl herself in the disaster. Is that right? Did she have any other children?’

  ‘She’d not been married long. She was eighteen when her daughter was born.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘March, the year before.’

  Jess said in triumph, ‘Lily’s birthday is the middle of April!’

  ‘Sweetheart, we don’t know when Lily’s birthday is, all we know is the one the nuns gave her.’

  ‘But if she believed her baby was dead, what made her change her mind? And what about the first family, the ones who thought Lily belonged to them? Was their baby ever found?’ Dolly was shaking her head and dabbing her eyes. Jess continued, ‘Lily was in that orphanage for nearly three years. There was plenty of time for someone to come along and claim her if they really wanted to, if they thought she might be theirs. Carlotta has no proof, does she? No proof of anything!’

  Alex said, ‘Apparently she was in the States for a while. This is only her second visit to the area since she left. She’d heard about the blond foreign family with the little dark-haired girl, because we stick out, don’t we? Everybody round here knows who we are. She says she didn’t mean to disturb us. She saw Lily on the beach with Harry and she was curious… she couldn’t help herself. She took the photos because it was the best way she could think of to mull things over and get them straight in her head without upsetting us.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind, but it’s plausible.’

  Jess said, ‘It doesn’t matter how many photos anyone takes. There’s no way we can ever find out for sure who Lily’s parents were.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Not for sure.’

  ‘So why has she suddenly materialised like this? What does she expect us to do?’

  ‘I suppose she wants to believe her daughter didn’t die. Wouldn’t you? It’s certainly a challenge, but we’re in this together Jessa-mine, are we not? We can’t ignore the woman now she’s appeared.’

  ‘We could actually,’ said Jess.

  ‘But would it be fair to Lily?’

  ‘It might be better for Lily. This could throw her completely off-keel.’ But she knew Alex’s curiosity was piqued; he would have to follow the story, wherever it led.

  Dolly gathered the coffee cups and took them to the sink. She said, ‘I can ask if is possible someone in Santa Margherita can help you.’

  ‘Really, do you think so? Who?’

  ‘I have a friend… I will make telephone call.’

  Doing nothing was not going to be an option.

  6

&
nbsp; Lily could walk on her hands. Not very far and not for very long but it was a skill she was proud of and one she was trying to perfect. On the beach other children tried to join in, but only her friend Marcello was successful. She’d encouraged him by holding onto his ankles until he learned the knack of keeping his back and legs straight. Even so, she intended to stay the champion. She took to practising up at the villa, close to the wall so she could use it for balance. That was how she heard her parents’ voices floating through the open window. They seemed to be arguing, which surprised her for they rarely argued with each other.

  ‘I’m not sure whether the kids should come. We don’t know what the old woman is going to tell us. She’s probably the town gossip.’

  ‘You can’t decide you don’t want to hear the answers because you might not like them.’

  ‘What answers? Do you suppose we’re going to get anywhere near the truth? And if it is painful, how do we handle it then? I think you’re being insensitive.’

  ‘And you’re being overprotective. I was there, Jess. You can’t bury your head in the sand about this. At least we’ll be in control if we’re together.’

  ‘In control, Alex? Do you really think so?’

  Lily’s feet wavered in the air and dropped quietly to the ground. She didn’t know what they were talking about but she didn’t like the idea of being left behind so she searched for Harry and told him their parents were plotting to abandon them. Harry ran directly to Jess and sat on her knee and tugged at her hair, which was loosely braided, and said, ‘Can we go on a trip? Will you take us fishing?’

  ‘Maybe another time.’

  ‘That’s what you always say!’

  Jess sighed. ‘Okay, your dad will have a chat with the fishermen down at the harbour, won’t you, Alex?’

  Harry said, ‘Do you promise? I mean, really promise?’

  Lily said, ‘Will you take us to Mozia instead, then? We haven’t been there for ages.’

  The island of Mozia was one of her favourite excursions, not so much for the excavations where Toby had worked, as for the dinky windmills on the salt pans and the causeway that was barely below the surface of the sea. From the shore you could look as though you were magic, like Jesus walking on the water.