Dolci di Love Read online

  Daniel was wearing the Prada belt Lily had given him for an earlier birthday. (Always polo shirts indeed!) His thirty-fifth, maybe? She’d bought it herself, at Bergdorf Goodman, after a particularly promising OB-GYN appointment. She remembered floating through the store feeling as if she were sailing on a river of champagne. This time, she’d almost sung to herself, this time. The belt had cost her nearly $300, but she wouldn’t have cared if it was $3,000. And in the end, there was no this time.

  Daniel’s arms were not in the picture so she couldn’t tell if they were around the woman, but their hips were touching, hers slightly in front. Take away the fact that the children looked so much like Daniel, could these be the hips of two mere acquaintances? Lily looked closer, the whole photo was only the size of a playing card, and the hips were all in one triangular half. Still, the woman appeared to be pressing into her husband’s groin. She was quite curvy, or hippy, really, if you were going to be critical. She would have trouble finding jeans to fit properly, which was maybe why she went for the wraparound dress—a paisley pattern the green of Daniel’s eyes—that showed off her impressive cleavage and small waist, but made less of her bottom half.

  In the part of the photo that didn’t contain her husband and the woman and baby, a soft light was setting on distant golden hills dotted with pencil-like pine trees. Straight rows of cascading greenery, grapes no doubt, ran in stripes toward the plump weathered dome of a honey-coloured church with a bell tower tucked in behind it.

  She sucked back another whimper.

  She thought she knew where the photo had been taken. And knowing that made her even more certain that there was no mistake, that her life as she knew it was over.

  There certainly weren’t churches like that in New York or anywhere near it. The church looked like it was in Italy.

  Daniel was mad about Italy, always had been. When they’d first met, he’d told her about the elderly Italian neighbours who had adopted him as an honorary grandson when he was just a little boy and added him to their rough-and-tumble extended family. An only child whose own home life was far from a barrel of laughs, these neighbours—oh, why could she not think of their names?—had provided him with some sort of happy refuge when he most needed it.

  Daniel had wanted to go to Italy for their honeymoon, even, but Lily felt it was too far and too hard after the exhausting exercise of organising a wedding.

  They’d gone instead to a tiny romantic cottage in Maine where the weather had been abysmal but they hadn’t cared.

  When Lily had woken the first morning there, her new husband’s warm body pressed against her, snoring politely, the stress of the nuptials over and done with, she had experienced her first ever wave of complete and utter happiness. The sensation had overwhelmed her, brought gooseflesh to her skin, tears to her eyes, a contentment to her heart that she had not even dreamed was possible.

  Even sitting there all these years later, staring at the photo of Daniel’s love children, she could recall it as though it were yesterday. She remembered lying there, naked, as the rain danced on the roof above her, watching Daniel sleep and revelling in the promise of their wonderful future together.

  They’d been so in love then, so happy. She had thought they still were. Compared with many of their divorced or miserably still-married friends, Lily and Daniel were paragons of good old-fashioned stability despite the unspoken heartbreak that blossomed between them. Daniel never treated her with anything other than respect and devotion. He was kind, considerate, loving. And she was too. Or so she thought. Their commitment to each other was often remarked upon and, so she had been told, envied. She was proud of their marriage, of him, of herself.

  She stood up, still clutching the photo, and walked to their bedroom window, gazing out at the view. If she leaned against the right hand pane, she could see down West Seventy-second Street to Central Park. The trees this morning were shimmering in the gentle summer breeze. Normally she loved those trees. She loved the park. She loved her apartment, her life.

  She wondered how long it had been since she had actually considered whether she was truly still in love with Daniel. After sixteen years of marriage it just wasn’t something she thought about that often. There were so many other things to think about. She had a full schedule and an all-consuming job. Who had time to sit around and ponder the state of their marriage, especially when it showed all the vital signs of being perfectly secure?

  Lily looked at the church in the photo again.

  She had tolerated, if not entirely shared, Daniel’s passion for Italy, especially the food and wine, and supported him wholeheartedly when he worked out a way to manipulate his amateur enthusiasm into something resembling a career, chiselling out a niche for himself as a buyer of Italian wines, importing ballsy brunellos and rich vino nobiles for sommeliers to dispense at Manhattan’s favourite eating and drinking haunts.

  And she was busy at Heigelmann’s so it had never worried her that he spent one week out of every four in Tuscany. He had done it for the past ten years. He was there right now, quite possibly in the company of this exotic looking creature and her children.

  She felt a physical ache in her chest that she assumed was her heart in the process of breaking, but the surprising thing was the ache didn’t feel entirely new. In fact, it felt all too familiar. Perhaps a person could only take so much hurt and disappointment. Perhaps a person reached a point where anything else, anything worse, would just ricochet off without leaving a dent.

  What Lily mostly felt—give or take a quiver or two—was empty. How fitting. Tragic, but fitting. Empty!

  All these years she had tortured her body, her mind, and that poor aching heart—not to mention her bank account—trying for a baby. And failing. She wasn’t used to failure, she struggled to deal with it, but what had kept her going through the dark days had been her obvious success at work and her quiet assumption at home that Daniel loved her no matter what, that it was she who mattered most to him, not these wisps of the future that she couldn’t manage to conjure into being.

  But there he was, all this time, turning her wisps into flesh-and-blood reality on the other side of the world with someone else.

  Lily looked at her watch. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  She slipped the photo into the pocket of her silk robe, walked down the hallway into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator door. A bottle of crisp white pinot grigio stood there boldly, unopened. She’d been trying to cut down; wine played havoc with her waistline now her thirties had marched into history, and in the past few years she’d gotten in the habit of drinking alone when Daniel was away.

  She had never smoked, didn’t care for recreational drugs, and had long resisted the lure of chocolate. The odd glass of wine, she supposed, had become her chosen vice. And somewhere along the line one glass in the evening after work had perhaps turned into two, then three, until some nights she had been getting through a bottle.

  She loved the warm, floaty cushion of well-being that each mouthful brought with it, but did not appreciate the puffy eyes and dull head the next morning. And the calories!

  Daniel had been gone three days and she’d not touched a drop.

  She pulled out the cork and poured a generous helping into a tall crystal glass.

  Chapter 2

  Violetta awoke feeling her sister’s big toe prodding her armpit. She lifted her head up off the pillow and there at the opposite end of the rickety old bed was Luciana, her wisened snout twitching, her eyes twinkling, her wrinkled smile stretching across ancient lips to reveal a haphazard collection of jauntily crooked teeth.

  ‘It aches!’ Luciana crowed, pushing her toe into Violetta’s armpit again. ‘I’m sure of it, sister. Yes, all praise to Santa Ana di Chisa. It definitely aches!’

  Violetta rubbed at her own wisened snout.

  ‘And that tingles, doesn’t it?’ cried Luciana. ‘I know it does. It tingles! And I can smell it! Can you smell it? I can smell it!’
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br />   They both lifted their faces, mole-like, into the air and sniffed.

  ‘Orange blossom!’ trilled Luciana. ‘As clear as the age spots on your cheek, Violetta. Orange blossom!’

  Violetta nodded. For decades the heady aroma of out-of-season orange blossom had been the sisters’ one shared clue that the day was going to be one of their special ones. The separate clues were that Violetta would wake with an itchy nose and Luciana with an aching toe. Then the orange blossom would hit them, there’d be a flurry of excitement, and before they knew it, they’d be calling a meeting and hatching a plan.

  ‘Oh, I’m just in the mood too,’ Luciana said. ‘Or I will be when I can get this tired old body up and running. Could you give that toe a rub? It gets worse every time. How’s the tingling?’

  ‘Do you need to be quite so cheerful?’ Violetta asked. Her own ancient body felt like a lump of unmolded clay left abandoned in the summer heat; dry and misshapen, nothing now could ever give it back the promise of the past. ‘If you start the day in the best of moods it leaves you nowhere else to go.’

  Nonetheless she reached back under the bed covers with one hand to find her sister’s foot, using the other hand to draw back the flimsy curtain that was only just keeping out the first meek rays of the early morning sun.

  Outside, a gentle Tuscan mist clung juicily to the low-slung hills of the Val D’Orcia. Behind them, dark clouds lurked moodily across the horizon. No wonder the sun was meek this morning. It was going to rain.

  Violetta twitched her nose again. Usually she quite liked the tingling—it was exciting; like an infinitely more useful version of a sneeze. But today, not so much. Today something was different.

  She let go of Luciana’s toe, extricated herself creakily from the pile of quilts and blankets, and shuffled over to the lopsided dresser in the corner of the small, dark room.

  From the middle shelf she lifted a tarnished frame bearing a photo of a handsome young man in army uniform. She brought the picture up to her lips and planted a kiss on it, then let out a startled cry.

  ‘What in the devil’s name is he doing here?’ she asked, glaring at the photo.

  Luciana looked up and before the blunder could bloom into anything bigger, told her sister to bring the picture to her. ‘Don’t go making a fuss,’ she said, a warning tone in her voice. ‘It doesn’t mean a thing except your eyes are getting worse.’

  Shaking her head in disbelief at the prospect of something else about her person getting worse, Violetta delivered the photo as she was bid then shuffled back to another tarnished frame farther along the shelf with what appeared to be the same photo. This one she held at arm’s length first—her eyes, indeed, were heading downhill fast—and after establishing it was definitely the right one, plonked another kiss on it.

  ‘Good morning, Salvatore,’ she said. ‘I hope you slept well.’ A pain shot through her chest, almost winding her. She’d felt it before, she thought. Or was it a new ache to add to the list of complications confounding her?

  ‘And good morning to you, Silvio,’ Luciana said to her photo. ‘And you just watch where you put yourself or it’ll be back in the napkin drawer.’

  ‘I’ll put on the coffee,’ Violetta said, ignoring her. ‘It’s time to get up. We have a lot to do today even if most of it is only thinking.’

  Thinking did not require doing the splits or sprinting around the piazza grande, was Luciana’s opinion, so could actually be done while lying down. But Violetta was the boss. She was ten months older and in charge of all major decision-making, plus she had the all-important sixth sense when it came to matters of the heart, so Luciana, as always, was happy to follow orders.

  ‘I agree,’ she said. ‘And I’ve already started my thinking, have you?’

  ‘I’m thinking we are owed a happy ending or two right about now, so we’d better get off our behinds and do something about it.’

  ‘There is really no need to be so cranky,’ Luciana chided. ‘We got our happy ending with Enrico and the mechanic’s daughter, didn’t we? Although it did take her finding him underneath his motorcycle covered in cherry brandy. The look on her face when she realised it wasn’t blood! That was “the moment” as I recall.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Violetta, softening a smidgeon. ‘That was the moment.’ Even with worry nipping at her soul like a kitten at a ball of wool, she could still appreciate the moment.

  ‘I just love the moment,’ Luciana sighed. ‘Although it’s surprising how often a great big mess is involved.’

  ‘Well, love is a great big messy business,’ Violetta pointed out. ‘Now hop to it.’

  And so Luciana hopped. But as Violetta busied herself in the kitchen she felt a shiver wriggle up her curving spine and jump through her chest to join the ache that sat there like a watchful pigeon, looking for trouble—and finding it.

  It was her nose, her wrinkled nose: It hadn’t tingled at all. Not once. Not even for a second. Nor had it picked up, no matter how hard she sniffed, so much as the faintest suggestion of the sweet seductive scent of orange blossom.

  Chapter 3

  In the days when Lily and her sister Rose still spoke to each other, they’d had a term for having one too many margaritas and booking outlandish things on the Internet. They called it Tipsy Tourism.

  Tipsy Tourism was behind their going to Madison Square Garden to see Madonna perform live solely on the grounds that they’d heard someone say her underarm skin sagged just like a normal woman’s.

  ‘She doesn’t even like Madonna,’ Rose’s husband, Al, told Lily when he heard their plan. ‘Neither of you do.’

  He was even more aggrieved closer to the time when it transpired he would have to stay at home and look after Jack, their six-month-old baby, and played the guilt card so expertly that Rose tried to cancel.

  ‘I thought you wanted to see the woman wobble,’ Lily reminded her. ‘I mean really wobble.’

  They went, they took binoculars, they danced, they sang, they had a blast.

  A year later, they celebrated Lily’s new promotion with so much champagne that they went back to her apartment, lurched straight on to the Internet, and Tipsy Tourism got the better of them again. This time they booked a spa weekend in New Hampshire.

  The trip, when it rolled around, was exactly what they both needed. Lily was working fourteen-hour days and Rose was exhausted from the trials of mothering a precocious toddler.

  But by the afternoon of the first day it was clear to Lily that Rose was not her usual self.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ Lily asked, as they soaked in side-by-side mud baths, bodies slick with goo, sliced kiwi cooling their closed eyes.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ Rose said.

  ‘That’s fantastic news, you must be thrilled!’ Lily enthused as authentically as she could manage, but tears slid down the side of her face leaving sad, pale streaks in the mud.

  Worse, when Harry was born, it simply felt to Lily that he should have been hers. And he did seem to fit perfectly in her arms. It just wasn’t plausible she had to hand him back to someone else.

  Worse still, despite the fact she could talk to Rose for hours about a button falling off a shirt or a dust ball returning to the same place under the coffee table, she could not talk to her about this.

  In fact, she found herself unable to talk to Rose about anything, the unbearable beauty of Harry sticking in her throat so awkwardly that it was easier to avoid her all together.

  She used work as an excuse for not making the journey up to Connecticut for weekends and stopped asking her sister into the city for special occasions. Rose, guilty about her fertile body, plus hormonal and tired, obliged by increasingly taking offense.

  At one stage, four months passed without Lily laying eyes on her sister and nephews, and the next time they met it started badly and ended worse.

  ‘I’m pregnant again,’ Rose said as they surveyed the stilettos in Barneys. ‘Twins. I’m so sorry, Lily. Really, I don’t know what e
lse to say. Just, after everything you’ve been through, I’m sorry.’

  Lily smiled in a way that she did not then know she was already famous for at Heigelmann’s. ‘Nonsense. Congratulations!’ she said. ‘I’m delighted for you.’ Then she bustled Rose to the lingerie department and tried to make her accept a gift of a lacy bra and matching minuscule bikini briefs.

  Rose stood miserably in the changing room mirror, her post–baby fat glistening in the harsh fluorescent lighting.

  ‘I feel like a circus elephant stuffed into a tiny tutu,’ she said. ‘And I’m going to look like two circus elephants stuffed into a tiny tutu in a month’s time. If not three. Thank you but no, Lily. I feel gross. You’re very generous but I don’t want them. You get them.’

  ‘It’s a maternity bra,’ Lily said. ‘What am I going to do with one of those?’

  They parted on awful terms, Rose crying and Lily remaining aloof and unflinching. She could not help herself. It was that or collapse on the floor and never get up again. That Rose had been afraid to tell her about the new babies only made it worse. It made Lily’s desperation real. It turned the possibility she would never be a mother herself into such a bleak and definite prospect that she didn’t know what to do with it.

  The twins, Emily and Charlotte, duly arrived and Lily did go to see them, but only once, at their christening.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ Rose said, eyes shining, a baby in each arm as she met her sister on the steps of the church.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me,’ Lily answered stiffly, feeling Daniel’s hand on the small of her back as though he was scared she might fall backward.

  The sight of her sister and those four beautiful children gathered around the baptismal font with the Virgin Mary beaming beatifically down on them had almost done it.

  She managed to stay a polite hour at the lunch afterward but didn’t even have to ask Daniel to take her home. He knew. Toddler Harry, full of sugary party drinks, broke free of his older brother Jack and clutched dramatically at her leg, howling, as she tried to leave.