The Villa Page 2

  One day there were no spare tables and he appeared at hers with a cappuccino, a panini and an apologetic grin. ‘Would you mind? I shan’t disturb you.’

  He had though. Pretty soon they were swapping work stories – he worked in the finance company two buildings away – and discussing whatever was in the news. He didn’t mention his wife – not then. But he did suggest another lunchtime meeting in the pub further down the street on the following Friday. Why not? Tess thought. She had enjoyed his company. And it was only lunch.

  After that, he’d suggested a drink one night after work and after the drink he’d kissed her. Sometime later, after she’d cooked him a meal – chicken with pistachios, she wasn’t her mother’s daughter for nothing – and he’d seduced her on the couch (Ginny was staying with a friend), he’d told her he was married.

  By then, she was already half in love with him. He had kind of crept up on her. And it was an old cliché, but she couldn’t turn back even if she wanted to.

  Tess watched the smokers throw down their cigarette butts and grind them underfoot. Still chatting, they disappeared through the glass swing doors. Tess brushed some water from a budding hydrangea with her fingertip. Earlier, it had rained, a sudden burst, a mad shower over almost before it had begun; a rinse of the sky, it seemed like. She checked her watch again. She should go in. But something told her this moment could be the one she’d been waiting for.

  ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I come to Sicily with you?’ he said again.

  Tess caught her breath.

  She was grinning like an idiot as she blasted her way into the building and leapt into the lift. It was really going to happen. She had been left a villa in Sicily. And she was going there. With Robin. Her smile faded as the lift went ping and the door started to slide open. Now she just had to break the news to Muma …

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Flavia sat down heavily. She had always had so much energy, but these days it sometimes swept away from under her without warning and she was scared by how weak she felt. She was getting old, of course. She was, in fact eighty-two, which was quite ridiculous. Because she didn’t feel old. She didn’t want to have to struggle to remember things. She wanted everything to be clear.

  She tried to order her thoughts, but with Tess looking at her in that probing way she had, it wasn’t easy. She steadied her breathing. So, Edward Westerman was dead. That in itself was not surprising. He must have been well into his nineties. He was the last. First Mama, then Papa, and then Maria, two years ago. She had lost touch with Santina; had no choice but to let her go. And now. Her last link with Sicily gone. She put her hand to her head. There were beads of sweat on her brow. The last link. She felt a wave of panic.

  ‘Are you all right, Muma?’ Suddenly Tess was all concern. She came over to where Flavia was sitting in the old wooden kitchen chair by the table, and bent forwards, a gentle hand on Flavia’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would upset you so much. Were the two of you close?’

  Flavia shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really.’ He had been an Englishman – her employer. She was a young Sicilian girl. And it was so long ago. Though there had been a bond … Edward had been the first man to speak to her in English and he had made it possible for her to come to this country when she was twenty-three. Like her, Edward had felt an outsider in his homeland and so he’d gone to live in Sicily – though it was years before she understood why. Puzzles were like that – you could have all the pieces in front of you and yet still not see the overall picture.

  ‘What then?’ Tess said.

  Flavia smoothed her apron with the palm of her hand. Iron out all the creases and all will be well … She couldn’t exactly say what had floored her. The mention of Edward perhaps, the memories, the fact of his death.

  Then she realised with a jolt what it was. ‘Why did they contact you about his death?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t understand. What does it have to do with you?’

  Tess stood next to her, all long legs and blonde-brown unruly hair, looking like the child she once was. ‘He’s left me his house, Muma.’

  Flavia blinked, frowned. ‘What?’ She struggled to get her bearings. ‘Why would he do such a thing? He, of all people … ’ He’d understood how it was for Flavia. He himself had broken with England, hadn’t he? Well, hadn’t he …?

  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea,’ Tess said. She hooked her thumb into the belt loop of her blue jeans. ‘But I thought you might.’

  Flavia rose slowly to her feet. There was supper to cook – a distraction. She was not too old to cook – never too old for that, though these days she stuck to the one course and the occasional dolce. She and Lenny now lived in a modern house on an English estate of identical houses, and it was very different from Sicily. But la cucina was still the most important room. Her kitchen, her food … That could always make everything safe again.

  ‘Well, now,’ she said. Every time in her life that she’d imagined herself free of Sicily, something from that place snapped at her heels. Now it was Edward and Villa Sirena, house of her childhood. Not that Flavia’s family had lived in the Grand Villa itself, of course, but … What could she say? ‘He had no children,’ Flavia began. ‘Perhaps he felt …’ What had he felt? Responsible? Had he left her daughter the villa to make up for some imagined wrongdoing? She shrugged, aware that this wouldn’t satisfy Tess. Tess had been born curious; she never let things go. Now this. It was as if Edward had known how Tess would be.

  Sure enough … ‘But he must have had relatives, Muma.’ That innocent blue-eyed gaze …

  ‘Maybe not.’ His sister Bea had died some years ago and she too had been childless. Thanks to Bea, Flavia and Lenny had run the Azzurro restaurant in Pridehaven; run it until they retired just over ten years ago. She missed the place – but everyone had to slow down sometime.

  ‘Or friends?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Flavia began to slice the aubergines, the knife cutting smoothly through the slick greasy skins and pulpy flesh. They needed time to de-gorge otherwise they would be bitter.

  Edward had – of course – had friends. Arty friends, but more especially, men friends. Sometime later she’d understood why, as a girl, she had felt at ease with Edward, even when alone with him. It was significant too, she realised, that she had been allowed to be alone with him. These days, naturally, his homosexuality would not mean so much, but then … In England, the activities he indulged in would have been illegal, but in Sicily, in a small village in a grand villa, it was easy to hide and be safe. Easy to have lots of house guests, lots of parties. English eccentricity was accepted, even while it was not understood. And Edward had inspired great loyalty in his staff by giving them a living and treating them well.

  ‘Perhaps he became a recluse,’ she said. Perhaps he had been lonely. She could imagine that. ‘It happens. Especially to artists and poets.’

  Tess – on her way to fill the kettle – shot her a disbelieving glance and flicked a tangled curl from her face. ‘What about the people who cared for him at the end?’ she said. ‘What about whoever took over from Aunt Maria?’

  Maria … The knife hovered above the purple skin. Her sister’s death had been sudden and shocking for Flavia. They had not been close and this made the loss even sadder. It was too late now. Maria had come to England only once in her lifetime when Tess was just eighteen, and the visit had not been easy. Their lives had been so different, she supposed; they had travelled in such opposite directions. Flavia had become anglicised long ago; she even thought in English now.

  Maria was timid – dark and vigilant as a rat. She was shocked at the way Flavia was bringing up her daughter … You allow her to go out alone? Dancing? She was distrustful of the relationship Flavia had with Lenny – their casual teasing, the way Flavia cheerfully left him to get on with the washing up after supper. And she found it hard to accept that Flavia had become a businesswoman – running her own small restaurant, managing her own ac
counts, her own staff.

  ‘England is different from Sicily,’ she said to Maria – over and over, it felt like. ‘If you stayed for longer you would find out. There is a freedom here that you have never dreamt of.’

  ‘Perhaps so, perhaps so.’ And poor Maria would sigh and frown and wring her hands. ‘But Signor Westerman is alone. He needs me.’ And Flavia suspected that, truth be told, Maria wouldn’t want such freedom. Her sister had not been blessed with children and she had lost her husband many years ago in a traffic accident in Monreale one night. ‘What was he doing there?’ she’d moaned to Flavia on more than one occasion during her visit to England. ‘I shall never know.’

  Perhaps, Flavia thought, it was better not to know. They were talking about Sicily, after all.

  ‘Our family looked after Edward for many years,’ Flavia said now, throwing the rounds of sliced aubergine into a colander for salting and keeping her voice level. First Mama, Papa and Flavia, then Maria and Leonardo. ‘This must be his way of showing appreciation.’ Was that how it was? Or had Edward Westerman known how it would tear at her? She suspected that he would.

  Tess dropped teabags into two cups, looking enquiringly at Flavia as she did so. ‘Muma?’

  ‘Please.’ Tea was an English taste that had taken Flavia twenty years to acquire. It would never get you going like an espresso, but it had its uses.

  ‘But why not leave the house to you?’ Tess persevered. ‘You knew him, at least. I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Pshaw.’ Flavia dismissed this notion. ‘I am an old lady. No doubt he thought I was dead.’

  ‘Muma!’

  Flavia shook her head. She didn’t want to be having this conversation. She had tried to put Sicily behind her. Since leaving for England she’d never gone back there. At first, because to go back would mean too much pain, too much compromise. And then … because she’d wanted to punish them, of course – her father whom she had never forgiven, her mother who in her eyes had betrayed her almost to the same degree and even poor Maria – because she was just like them, because she could never understand that the only way to make things different was to fight …

  ‘Muma?’ Tess’s arms were around her. Flavia could smell her daughter’s honeyed perfume and the faint orange-blossom scent of her hair. ‘You’re crying.’

  ‘It is the onions.’ Flavia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘You know they always get me that way.’

  ‘It’s not just the onions.’

  Such intensity she had, this daughter of hers. Flavia closed her eyes for a moment, the better to drink her in. Wild, beautiful Tess, who – like Flavia – had also been let down badly in matters of love. Who loved with too much passion, who always expected too much … And who had an irrepressible young daughter of her own. But not a man to share her life with. Flavia discounted Robin. She didn’t even want to think about him. When she thought about Robin she wanted to crush the life out of him with her bare hands.

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘It is not just the onions.’ It was the past, always the past. Sicily was a dark country. And when it was in your blood it never quite let you go.

  ‘Did you like Edward Westerman?’ Tess moved away, long-limbed and elegant even in jeans, to pour boiling water on the tea.

  Flavia went on chopping onions, garlic and chilli. She was making a tomato sauce for melanzane alla parmigiana, one of her granddaughter’s favourites. ‘Yes.’ She had liked him, yes, because he embraced the unconventional. And because he had shown her what was possible.

  ‘Only, you’ve never talked about him much.’ Tess’s sly look from behind a wisp of hair suggested that Flavia hadn’t talked much about any of them.

  This was also true. She had not told Tess why she had left Sicily in 1950, nor why she would never go back. She had not allowed the memories of her upbringing to surface and seep into her English life. She had been unable to forgive. Flavia held on to the counter top, just for a second, to rest.

  ‘Let me help you, Muma.’ Once again, Tess was at her side.

  ‘I am not yet totally decrepit,’ Flavia said, feeling her breathing get back to normal. She sprinkled oil into the pan. ‘There is still life in the old wolf, you know.’

  ‘Dog,’ murmured Tess, putting the mugs of tea on the table.

  ‘Dog, wolf, whatever,’ muttered Flavia, adding the garlic, onions and chilli. Her daughter was pedantic – it was the Englishness in her. Now she poured oil for the melanzane. She had her own methods, her own way of working. And there were – of course – some matters in which Sicily would always be triumphant. Olive oil, for example. In Sicily the best oil was pale and golden; here it was green and more refined. Here, people thought you odd if you used it to moisten bread or toast – they preferred to use animal fat. In this respect, Flavia had not adopted English traditions.

  Tess was watching her. She seemed restless, long fingers fidgeting first with the buttons on her shirt then with her teaspoon. ‘Can’t you tell me anything else about him?’ she complained. ‘This benefactor of mine?’

  Flavia clicked her tongue. The oil had reached the correct temperature and she lowered in the aubergines. Into the other pan she tossed the tomatoes she’d prepared earlier. What you did not know could not cause you harm. ‘Grate me some parmigiano, hmm?’ she said over her shoulder to Tess.

  ‘Muma?’

  Flavia sighed. But her daughter deserved to know something, she supposed. ‘He used to read to me,’ she said. ‘Poetry.’

  ‘His own poetry?’ Tess’s eagerness as she turned to face her was a reproach. Once again, Flavia felt the weariness engulf her.

  ‘And other poets. He liked Byron and D.H. Lawrence.’ She smiled. Edward Westerman had told her about these writers and the young Flavia had listened with wonder. Edward clearly approved of Byron’s lifestyle. Ah yes, he had introduced Flavia to a world that was a million miles away from her life in Sicily. She paused, about to throw some sweet-scented basil into the pan, hearing again Edward Westerman’s melodic voice, quite low, intoning the words, half of which she hadn’t been able to understand. But the music of the words – that, she had understood.

  ‘He sounds interesting.’ Tess had retrieved the cheese from Flavia’s larder – fridges were too cold for certain foods, something some English people never seemed to understand – and was grating it into a small white dish. ‘Enough?’

  ‘Enough.’

  Tess wrapped the Parmesan up again in its waxy paper and Flavia took the dish from her. She noted the dreamy look on her daughter’s face. ‘Well?’

  Tess sat down and cradled the mug of tea in her hands. ‘I can just see you as a girl, that’s all.’ She didn’t add – for the first time. But she put out a hand and Flavia felt her daughter’s soft touch on her arm. ‘It’s nice.’

  Yes, yes. She knew and Lenny was always telling her: It’s unfair not to talk to her about what happened. It’s your story, she’s your daughter. It’s all long past. Can’t you tell the story and let it go? But Flavia wasn’t sure that she ever could tell the story. And how could she let it go?

  Things became more complicated as you grew old. What was black and white acquired many shades of grey. She took a deep breath. ‘Edward helped me come to England,’ she said. ‘That may be why he has left you the house.’

  Tess frowned at the contradiction. ‘To encourage me to leave England?’

  Something inside Flavia dipped in panic as she took in the possibility. ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ She stared at her daughter.

  ‘No … oo.’ But Tess was looking out of the window into their small garden, complete with patio furniture and lawn, shrubs and annual planting that were all, Flavia had discovered a long time ago, prerequisites of an English garden. She didn’t mind – it was Lenny’s department; even now he was out there pottering around. The window was ajar and the breeze was fluttering the yellow curtain like a bird’s wing.

  Flavia recognised her daughter’s look and she did not like it. She was far away – ima
gining being somewhere else. Why? Was she so unhappy here?

  ‘But … ’

  ‘But …?’ The aubergines had caramelised and were seconds away from being overcooked. On autopilot, Flavia whipped round, lifted them from the oil. No, they were fine. She tipped them on to kitchen paper to drain and tasted the bubbling tomato sauce. Flavia made all her sauces with fresh tomatoes; until she retired she had mostly grown her own – in two huge greenhouses rented from a nearby farmer. The quality of the tomatoes depended on the soil and the climate. At least here they were by the sea; the salt in the soil brought out the sweetness. And Flavia only used her tomatoes when they were as ripe as the setting sun. Ah. Her mother had taught her that good cuisine depended on two things – simplicity and using the best, freshest ingredients. She had never lost sight of that. Still … ‘But?’ she said again.

  ‘But I’d like to see the place,’ Tess said. ‘Obviously. Especially now that I own it.’ She turned to face Flavia. ‘And I’d like to see where you grew up, Muma.’

  Furiously, Flavia stirred the sauce. The heat of it seemed to be on her face, in her blood. When she had been pregnant with Tess she had spent the morning before she went into labour making a huge pot of bolognese sauce. ‘Nesting instinct,’ the midwife had said, when she told her. Flavia didn’t know about that, but she thought that even when she died there would no doubt be a lump of dough wrapped on the side and waiting for rolling, some ripe tomatoes and basil halfway towards a pan …

  ‘I see.’ She tried not to sound clipped and brittle. As if her heart wasn’t twisting inside. Why shouldn’t Tess visit the villa? What was Flavia so afraid of? That Sicily would stretch out a gigantic claw and drag her daughter into its cruel ebony centre? She was a foolish old woman, she decided.

  ‘Anyway, I have to go,’ Tess said. She seemed unaware of the effect her words were having.