by Penny Feeny
‘You are hungry,’ insisted her hostess. ‘I do not wish you to return to England and say we are not generous here with our portions, non é vero?’ The others nodded in approval, declaring how refreshing it was to see a young woman with a good appetite. There were too many girls these days whose limbs were like sticks, who lived on air and leaves. Cristina’s capacious hips swayed as if in assent and she added a haystack of green beans. Allie reckoned she was being tested, or bullied, or both, but she would hold her own: she would polish her plate to an empty shine. As a result she spent the second night in her bridal bed suffering acute indigestion.
In the morning she was sluggish, in no rush to get up; she’d no desire for breakfast and only yesterday’s clothes to wear. She waited in her room until the hum of activity subsided: the clatter of crockery, the squabbles of children, the exodus of cars. When all was quiet she would start her voyage of exploration – even though her mission was hazy, her evidence negligible, and she didn’t know what she was looking for. Was she expecting to find a whole heap of ransom notes hidden somewhere? A cache of bones from another kidnap that had gone wrong? A signed confession sealed and buried in an old tobacco tin? But Liddy’s reaction had alerted her: something was not quite right. Cristina had driven Mimmo away from the beach, allegedly by accident, and taken two days to return him. No one else had questioned the time lapse once the boy had re-emerged; Helena was the only person directly affected.
Allie began by undertaking a circuit of the farmhouse. She shuffled across terrace and courtyard, peeping over walls and behind potted plants. She learned nothing. She could see Enzo’s back and shoulders at the computer in the private office. Even if he left his post she could hardly sneak in and rummage through papers. She headed for the outbuildings, a complex of barns used for storage and as a garage. This was quite possibly where Cristina would have parked when she’d come back from the beach. Surveying the barn’s position on the estate, Allie did not believe a child could have remained trapped in a boot without someone hearing his cries.
The barn doors were open, beckoning her inside; as she entered she heard a rustle and felt a stab of panic. Stop it, she told herself, there’s no reason to get spooked. When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom she saw the rustling came from a chicken nesting in the corner. A range of old-fashioned farming implements, oiled and sharpened, were suspended from a row of hooks. On the one hand, these indicated the loving attention to detail that characterized Enzo and Cristina’s hospitality; on the other, they were strangely menacing: what might they be used for? She was reaching to touch the shining blade of a long-handled scythe when a shot rang out. At the edge of her vision a heap of hessian unfurled into a human shape. Allie screamed. ‘Che sta facendo qui?’ Enrico seemed as startled as she was.
She crossed her arms over her thumping chest in relief. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’
‘I ask what you do here.’
‘Oh . . . nothing.’ She indicated her bandage. ‘I can’t go very far till this gets better. There aren’t any buses and I can’t afford a taxi to take me anywhere, so I guess I’m stuck really, just wandering about. That noise gave me a fright.’
‘Ah – la macchina.’ He laid a hand on its high wheel arch and she could see now that it was a quad bike. ‘There was problem,’ he said proudly, ‘but I have fixed it.’
‘You must be a good mechanic.’ Flatter him, she thought, win his confidence.
‘Ottimo,’ he agreed, leaping into the driving seat. He pumped the accelerator until the tools shook on the walls and the hen flapped outside to safety. Over this noise he yelled at Allie. ‘You want to ride?’
‘Oh yes please.’ He let the roar diminish as she clambered beside him. ‘Where will we go? I’d love to see the whole estate. Is that possible?’
‘You want I will be your guide?’
He didn’t give her time to answer but careered through the doorway into the blinding sunlight and bowled down the broad track that bisected the vineyard. A fine chalky powder sprang up in their wake. The trunks of the stubby vines were gnarled and weathered but the leaves were a soft fresh green and the grapes were embryonic, bunched in hard, tight clusters. Wild fennel flourished between the rows and, as Enrico sped past, traces of aniseed pursued them.
‘First we see the pigs,’ he bellowed. ‘We keep far from house for the smell.’
He slowed to a halt by their pen and described how in the autumn they’d be fattened with chestnuts from the family’s woodland, how the nuts gave the meat a sweet, mellow flavour and buttery texture. ‘Dopo,’ he said with his eyes sparkling. ‘Il coltello.’ He drew his hand in a slicing gesture across his throat. ‘The salami you have for breakfast, the pancetta in the pasta – this comes from last year’s pigs.’
‘Who kills them?’
His voice was tinged with regret. ‘The butcher from the village. Before he died, was always my grandfather. He have the farm for many years. Even when the harvest is bad, when the animals sick, when there is no money, he will not give up. He was hard man, very strong.’
‘Can we go into the woods?’
‘Certo.’ He stamped on the accelerator, rising to a standing position as if he were navigating a motor launch, spinning the wheel through his hands as the vehicle lurched up a twisting gradient. He swerved past an outcrop of rock, screeched through two more switchback bends and stopped within inches of a five-barred gate, where he cut the engine and leapt from the driver’s seat. He wiped his palm on his trousers and held it out to help her descend. ‘In the wood we must walk,’ he said. ‘I am sorry.’
But Allie wasn’t thinking about her limp. ‘Tell me more about your grandfather. He was very strong, you said.’
‘He frighten everybody,’ said Enrico simply. He picked up a fallen stick and snapped it across his knee. ‘He can break a chair like this if he is angry.’
‘Did he often get angry?’
‘Boh!’ The boy was puzzled. ‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because things have changed so much,’ said Allie. ‘You’ve given me this picture of someone who’s very determined. I was wondering how he felt about the farm being turned into an agri-whatever, when he’d struggled to keep it going for so long.’
‘It is after Nonno die we open. Tourists make good money for us.’
He unhooked the gate and led her through it. Dead leaves and the husks of last year’s chestnut crop crackled underfoot; the shade was deep and cool. ‘Oh this is marvellous,’ she said, drinking in the sweetness of sap and nectar.
‘In autumn,’ he said, ‘we are very busy here, to harvest the castagne and the funghi. When I was little I used to come with Nonno and he show me the funghi that are safe to eat. I learn well and I never make mistake.’
The lad was a curious combination, Allie thought, of naïvety and bravado. Impatient to demonstrate that he had adult interests, adult skills, yet still impressionable. He treated her as if she were part honoured guest, part clueless visitor and part potential girlfriend. It was tough being a teenager; she wouldn’t want to be back there herself – in that soup of confusion, yearning for independence but needing protection. Cristina must have been caught up in it too – taking her father’s car to the beach as an act of defiance but not looking ahead to the consequences. She doubted the old man had been the hero Enrico depicted; wasn’t it possible he was more of a tyrant? Terrorizing his family by battering the furniture? Maybe that wasn’t all he battered.
‘He must have taught you a lot of things. Was he very strict? I mean, like a disciplinarian?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If you got something wrong, did he hit you?’
‘No.’ The boy shook his head. ‘This is the job of father, not grandfather.’
‘Oh . . . right.’
‘Come now. I have something I think you will like to see. Your foot is not problem for walking?’
‘I’ll be okay if you don’t go too fast.’
He kept forgetting, char
ging on ahead through the trees and having to hang back to wait for her. Although they hadn’t covered much ground, they were soon immersed in the velvety chamber of the forest; the distant trails down the mountainside, the gate and the quad bike were out of sight. There were no clearly trodden paths, but twining lengths of honeysuckle and arched whips of brambles stretched like tripwires. Allie started to recall childhood fairy tales. This was a place in which you could easily become lost; if Enrico decided to abandon her she’d never find her way out.
Along the route she thought he had taken she could see only piercing shafts of sunlight, discrete as spots on a stage set. ‘Enrico!’ she called. ‘Where are you?’ She half expected him to emerge from behind a tree with hairy legs and horns poking through his scalp, transformed into a satyr. ‘I can’t keep up.’
His words floated some fifty yards ahead. ‘We are nearly arrived.’
Arrived where? Then for a few moments she thought she must be hallucinating because she could see it ahead in a clearing: a gingerbread house.
‘Is cool, no?’ said Enrico.
Her eyes adjusted themselves, quelling the antics of her brain. Where she had seen gingerbread there was mud and thatch, rotten wood instead of slabs of chocolate, fungus instead of marshmallow; she was looking at a tumbledown goatherd’s hut. He led her inside. The floor was beaten earth and smelled of mould, not sugar and spice. A bench ran along one wall with a shelf above it. In the corner lay a heap of ash and charcoal.
‘Does anyone ever use this?’ she asked.
‘Many years ago when we have cinghiali in the woods and goats on the mountain. And sometimes I come with Nonno for la caccia.’ He cocked his hand into a pistol and picked off imaginary vermin.
‘What did you shoot?’
‘Small animals. I do not know name.’
‘Squirrels? Weasels? Rabbits?’
‘Also birds.’ He mimed impaling a creature on a spit and poked the ashes with his toe. ‘We roast in flames. Delicious.’
Boy’s Own stuff, thought Allie. Charging about with ammunition, killing things. The type of activity you could do nowadays on a games console without leaving your warm sitting room, without getting dirt or blood on your hands. Nature’s small and vulnerable creatures might enjoy a longer life.
‘So nobody comes here any more?’
‘Nobody know this place. And I have not enough time. Peccato.’ He broke off a piece of door frame, which crumbled in his fingers like cake. ‘But I have idea. First we have to build swimming pool, I know this is important. Is priority. But for next project I want that we restore this house for barbecue and picnic, even for la caccia. You think is good idea?’
What Allie was actually thinking was that if you were frightened of getting into trouble for something you shouldn’t have done, and you wanted to hide someone for a day or two, a hut like this (in better condition naturally) would be as good a place as any. Especially if that person was so traumatized they’d lost their speech. And who, in any case, would expect a three-year-old to have a sense of time or location?
Enrico repeated his question.
‘Oh yes,’ said Allie. ‘Excellent. A brainwave.’
‘You will tell my father?’
‘What?’
‘Is good idea for development. Swimming in summer. Hunting in winter. No?’
‘Yes, absolutely. I’ll tell him with pleasure.’
As it happened, Enzo was waiting as the quad bike rattled into the courtyard. He looked disconcerted to see the two of them together. He barked at Enrico, who answered in sulky monosyllables. To Allie, he said, ‘You have telephone message. If you will come to office, please.’
‘A message?’
She followed Enzo through the entrance lobby and into his private cubicle. She didn’t recognize the number he handed her, written on a post-it note in looping cursive, but she saw it lacked an international prefix. A delicious light flutter inside her drove away the nagging remnants of her indigestion. Max. It couldn’t be anyone else. This was what happened when you felt a strong kinship with another person: you did not lose touch. Your brother did not want to let you go.
‘Is it okay to ring him back?’
Enzo pushed a pile of folders to one side and indicated both the phone and a swivel chair for her to sit on. Created from the cubbyhole beneath the stairs, the room was too small for two people. A fan spun in a corner; it moved the air but didn’t replenish it. If only he would leave, if only she could think of some errand to distract him. She didn’t want him listening to her conversation. He settled himself again at his computer screen. She punched in the number.
‘Pronto.’
Allie put on an accent to make her English harder for Enzo to follow. She broadened her vowels and swallowed her consonants. ‘Max? Hi. I’m returning your call like you said, only I’m ringing from the office so I can’t take too long.’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s me, Allie.’
‘Must be a bad line. How’s the injury?’
‘Bit better, thanks.’
‘Did you get around much?’
‘Enrico gave me a ride on his bike, showed me the pigs. And the woods and stuff.’ She was watching the dome of Enzo’s bowed head, but it didn’t jerk forward in alarm or display any other emotion. ‘I have a theory, Max.’
He was in the street. She could hear the hooting of stalled traffic, the wheezing doors of a bus, the cry of a child. She imagined a place crammed with noise and people and urgency – the very opposite of this isolated retreat – and wished she could be there.
‘I didn’t catch that, what kind of a theory?’
‘Later. Tell me why you’re calling first.’
‘To check you’re okay I guess and to say that when you leave, if you’re passing through Roma . . .’ There came the rattle of a metal canister across cobbles, a medley of hooting, then the heavy clunk of a latch and a moment’s silence before his footsteps echoed on a marble staircase.
‘Rome? Is that where you are now?’
‘Yeah, I’m working here, remember? Anyhow, like I said, if you’re passing we could get together, grab dinner or a drink someplace . . .’
‘And talk?’
‘Well, sure we can talk. What is this? You don’t trust me not to jump you?’
‘It’s not that. Max, I really want to see you. There’s so much –’ No, this was going too far. This could make her sound flaky or plain unhinged. She discarded her failing, indeterminate northern accent and said with careful formality, ‘I could come tomorrow if it suits you.’
‘Great. If you have time to call before you catch the train I’ll try to make the station. Otherwise let me know when you get in and I’ll figure out a place to meet. Have you been here before?’
‘Actually I was born in Rome.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding.’
‘So was I!’ She imagined him balancing against the banister on the way up to the office as other people passed by, shaking his head. ‘You never said before.’
‘I suppose it didn’t come up.’
Enzo shifted in his seat, clicked several times on his computer mouse.
‘I have to go,’ said Allie. ‘I’m using the office phone here. I’ll ring you again tomorrow when I’m on my way.’
‘You won’t get cold feet or chicken out like last time?’
‘No, I promise.’
‘It’s a date?’
‘It’s a date,’ she agreed, replacing the receiver in its cradle. She scooted backwards on her chair and thumped into Enzo’s. ‘I expect you’ve understood,’ she said, ‘that I’m travelling on to Rome tomorrow. Is it all right if I stay one more night?’
‘We shall be most happy,’ he said, although his eyes continued to look mournful, ‘to accommodate you. What hour do you wish to leave? I can order a taxi.’
‘Well, after breakfast, I should think.’
‘Ah, breakfast. Today you do not eat.’
‘I . .
. I couldn’t.’ She pressed her right hand to her abdomen. ‘I was so full after yesterday’s dinner. In England, you know, we have pasta or we have meat and two veg. We don’t have one after the other. Both together. I’m not used to it.’
‘We want you to have good experience,’ said Enzo. ‘This is important to us.’
She wasn’t clear where the emphasis of his words lay. Was it you or good? Important or us? ‘I think your wife,’ she began. And then stopped. What on earth could she say? And what would Enzo understand anyway? What could he possibly know of events that had happened probably way before he’d even met Cristina, let alone married her? ‘I’m afraid she thinks I’m a nuisance,’ she finished lamely.
‘Assolutamente no!’
‘Oh . . . right . . . Well, I meant, you know, having to find me painkillers and bandages. And now she’s taken all my stuff to wash and I’m not even sure I can pay for it.’
‘There will be no charge.’
‘Look here, I don’t want special treatment. I mean –’
Enzo chewed his pen. She glimpsed for the first time the depression of a dimple at the side of his mouth. Damp patches of sweat discoloured the cloth of his shirt. ‘We know who you are,’ he said.
Allie blinked. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You look much like your mother.’
‘You knew my mother?’
‘A little,’ he conceded. ‘Comunque, the circumstances were . . . complicated.’ What on earth was he trying to say? ‘Ash-a-bourne,’ he continued. ‘I have good memory for names and faces, is all. Is useful in my work.’
‘Your wife knew her too, didn’t she?’
‘È vero. In a manner of speaking she has brought us together. And for this we are grateful.’
Allie didn’t know what to make of this. Was he referring to the search for Max? She took a gamble. ‘Your son’s also been very kind, showing me around. I loved the little goatherd’s hut, but it’s very remote isn’t it? Gosh, if you had an ankle like mine, you could be stuck there for days and no one would find you.’
