Recently, Lucia’s dreams were filled with childhood memories. One hot summer day, when dragonflies skimmed the spangled, shimmering surface of the weir where the children played on Sundays, she’d driven the dozen sheep down to the riverbank and while they chomped on the grass, their teeth tearing at the lush green shoots, Lucia had stripped down to her underwear and blouse. Hanging her long skirt from a willow, she had jumped in by the waterfall, loving the shock of cool on her body, her blouse riding up around her like jellyfish tentacles. She kept her eyes open and floated on the water while watching a frog spring from the rocks. When the boys joined her, she hid for a while beneath the surface, holding her breath until her lungs might burst, wanting to surprise them and nip at their bare toes. Afterwards, she’d rested on the bank under the sun, her long hair draped over the grass behind her head, and when she noticed Massimo staring, she stuck out her tongue and jumped back into the water.
‘You look like a mermaid,’ he had shouted when she resurfaced, treading water so her budding nipples were concealed.
‘Turn around,’ she ordered, warning him not to peep. Then she had climbed from the river, picked up her skirt and gone to dry off in the meadow with the sheep.
Her dream tonight was of past Christmas Eves, sitting by her parents and brother, watching flames dance around the yule log that Father had dragged home from the woods. The fire looped and licked at the whorls and twists of the trunk he had chosen, and everyone beat it with their sticks, crying out, ‘Cacca, ceppo, give up your gifts…’ The scent of roasting chestnuts, the anticipation of the next day’s feast, simple gifts and shrieks of laughter filled her senses.
When she opened her eyes, she realised it was no longer a dream. The shrieks were real terror. Her parents were calling to her to get out quickly, the flames and acrid stench of burning filling her nostrils. Instinctively, she grabbed her brother’s coat from the back of the door where it waited for his return that would never come, and slipped her feet into the stout boots under her bed. They had planned what to do if soldiers came. Each one of them had their own escape route. Hers was out through the small window that opened on to the back of the house, then a leap onto the roof tiles of the pigsty carved from the hill, from where the drop to the ground was only one metre. Within a minute she was out of the house and racing through the woods. The sound of her footsteps as she crashed through the undergrowth was drowned by hysterical yelling from villagers as they gathered around the flames. From behind the vast trunk of a beech, she watched their silhouettes as they passed buckets to each other. Hearing gunshots, she ran like a deer up the track.
The noise of her laboured breathing echoed around the cave when she staggered in. It was pitch-black inside, and she felt along the dank stone walls until she was at the furthest point of the cavern. Something soft clung to her forehead as she inched along and she stifled a shriek, before realising it was only a cobweb. She sat on her haunches, leaning against the rock, willing her heart to stop its crazy thumping. The kindling and matches were in a box stowed in a crevice, but she was too afraid to light a fire in case she’d been followed. Eventually she dozed, waking when the thin light of dawn crept through the opening.
Birdsong and the lazy buzzing of a bee filtered into her hiding place like a normal start to the day. From far away she heard a cockerel crow. Normally it would be the signal to roll out of bed, pull on her clothes and start her morning chores. But nothing in her life was routine any more. Tears spilled down her cheeks, splashing onto her brother’s coat. She put her head in her hands, the stubbly growth on her scalp bringing back more awful memories. It would have been better if she’d burned in the house fire. She sobbed, rocking back and forth, not caring now if her crying gave her away. There was no point to life.
And then, she felt a fluttering in her belly, like a butterfly grazing its wings against her insides. She placed her hands beneath her clothing and, spreading her fingers over her abdomen as if to protect the butterfly from escaping, she waited. Until she felt it again, and then she stopped crying.
She opened the door to a police constable standing on the landing outside the flat. ‘Alba Starnucci?’ the woman asked, the expression on her young face troubled. When Alba nodded, she heard the next dreaded question. ‘Is there anybody who can be with you? I’m afraid I have bad news.’
Alba concentrated on the stained-glass window above the altar where the wicker coffin rested on its stand, white lilies drooping down the sides. If she kept her eyes fixed on the colourful images of trees and mountains and away from what was going on below, she could control her tears.
James’s father was standing next to where his dead son lay. His words about James’s bright future curtailed at too young an age, his voice breaking with emotion as he described an event from childhood that Alba had never heard before, told of a young man she didn’t recognise. Irrationally, she worried that his free spirit would feel claustrophobic inside the woven tomb.
Alba’s father squeezed her hand. He and her stepmother, Anna, had come straight from Tuscany as soon as she’d phoned with the tragic news. They sat on each side of her, propping her like bookends. James’s parents hadn’t acknowledged her once. When she’d arrived at the church, his mother stared over her head at the mourners behind her, waiting to pay their respects, and her husband simply turned away and ignored her. But she didn’t blame them. It was her fault James was dead.
The hours that followed were a complete blank. Much later that evening, her parents described how, emerging from the church service to leave for the crematorium, she had turned to them in bewilderment and said, ‘Why are we here?’
They’d rushed her to hospital, believing she had suffered a stroke when she continued to make no sense. She plucked at the cotton NHS nightgown, asking the doctor over and over what had happened. Then, four hours later, sitting in the taxi with her parents on the way back to the flat that she and James had shared, she felt the past slowly trickle back. Sitting at home, she scanned the leaflets she’d been given. Transient global amnesia, a benign attack. And the possible causes: sex, immersion in cold water, a blow to the head, alcohol, drugs or stress.
The weather had been warm for the beginning of December. In the park where she had walked beside James as he pushed his bike, a couple of gardeners were busy hoeing between shrubs of pruned roses. Two women overtook them on the path, chatting as they jogged. It was an ordinary morning.
‘Let’s sit outside,’ James had said. ‘It’s warm enough.’
Afterwards, Alba wondered if the sunshine was the real reason or if he’d known what her reaction to his bombshell was going to be and wanted them to be alone, without an audience.
While he was placing their order inside the Pavilion, she’d pulled out brochures for the new warehouse development. She’d wanted to show them to him for a while, but lately there had never seemed to be a suitable moment. She flicked through the glossy pages, imagining how they could arrange a double mattress in the mezzanine area; how it would flood with light from an expanse of glass round the top of the warehouse space. She held the page up to James as he rejoined her.
‘Look at this,’ she’d said. ‘It’s described as an urban space. Live-work accommodation…’ She broke off as he pulled the brochure from her hands, closed the page and laid it flat between them on the table.
‘Alba… I can’t,’ he said.
‘Why can’t you? You never want to talk about anything these days.’
He took her hands in his. ‘This is so hard…’
She snatched them away. ‘What?’
‘I can’t do this any more…’
‘This?’ She knew she was repeating everything he said. Maybe it was a way of stopping him from saying more.
‘It’s over.’
She frowned, shook her head. ‘What do you talk about, James? What do you mean?’ Her voice was raised, she couldn’t think in English properly, suddenly her brain seemed to find it necessary to translate from her native Italian into English and it was coming out wrong. She imagined him telling her any moment now that she was being dramatic, a typical Latin woman, as he often called her in her fiery moments. But that was usually when they were tangled together in bed. Not at ten o’clock in the morning in a park in central London.
‘What the fuck are you trying to tell me? Stop talking in clichés,’ she’d shouted, pulling the brochure to her chest and standing up. A woman walking her miniature poodle on the path nearby tutted and pulled her pet away.
James had stood up too. ‘If you won’t listen to me, then what’s the point of talking to you?’ he shouted back. Before she could reply, he jumped on his bike and cycled off, his sturdy legs pumping up and down in fury.
It was the last time she saw him. The police constable had explained how these accidents happened all too frequently. He must have pedalled up to the traffic lights to turn left, alongside a lorry also turning left. He was crushed; he had died instantly. The young officer had taken hold of her hand and said how sorry she was.
But how could she be sorry? Alba had thought. It was her fault. Completely her fault. James had cycled away in a temper and his temper had been caused by her. She was the one who was sorry, not the police constable.
She was grateful not to return to the flat on her own. Her father and stepmother guided her through the door and took over, insisting she rested while they sorted a meal and tidied up. When she awoke from a dreamless sleep, she heard her parents talking in the next room and, pulling on her dressing gown, she went to join them.
‘Darling girl,’ Anna said, pulling her stepdaughter into her arms.
‘I don’t want to cry,’ Alba said.
‘Cry if you want,’ Anna said.
‘Come back with us to Tuscany, tesoro,’ Francesco said.
‘How can I?’ Alba said. ‘What about my job at the gallery?’
‘Marcus will understand. We spoke to him and André already at the funeral.’
‘I’m not a child, Babbo. I can look after myself.’
She ignored the look that passed between her parents and sat down on the sofa. ‘I’ll be fine.’
After three days, her parents had reluctantly left, and Alba returned to work. Marcus bustled about the art gallery preparing for the new exhibition, trying to be kind to her, rearranging canvases and tweaking flower arrangements. He was counting on huge sales for his latest find: an emerging artist from Cornwall who specialised in seascapes.
‘These roses are all wrong, Alba,’ he said, lifting the bouquet she’d left on her desk. ‘Far too suburban garden. We need something wilder, something to pick up the colours of the sea: eryngium, sea holly, gypsophila maybe. What do you think, darling?’
Alba couldn’t think. Her mind was a blank. ‘I’ll see what I can find in my lunch break,’ she said.
He pulled a twenty-pound note from the till. ‘Treat yourself to a decent snack, sweetheart. You look peaky.’
It was a relief to be away from his fussing. She was usually on her own in the gallery, but today the press from a couple of national papers was invited, and he wanted everything just so.
She bought half a dozen blue agapanthus from Betty’s florist, and when she explained what they were for, she was loaned some spider conch shells to add to the display. ‘Not particularly West Country,’ Betty said, ‘but nobody will know they’re from the Pacific.’
Alba badly needed a coffee; her head was pounding. She’d tossed and turned the previous night, the bed seeming twice its usual size without James, the sheets cold. A double shot of espresso might do the trick.
When she returned to the gallery, she realised she’d left the flowers in the coffee shop, and in despair, Marcus went to fetch them himself. ‘Go home, Alba. You shouldn’t be back at work so soon,’ he said as he pulled on his tweed jacket.
On the bus, she cried silently, oblivious to the stares from other passengers. Back in the empty flat, she climbed into bed and willed sleep to come.
She ignored her phone and let the battery run down. Sleep seemed the only way to cope, even if James sometimes appeared cruelly in her dreams, his mat of blond hair blowing in the wind as he smiled and shouted something she couldn’t catch, his arms outstretched for a hug. On the third day, she staggered to her fridge. Sour milk, half a shrivelled carrot in the salad drawer. Just as she was trying to face the prospect of going out, there was a pounding at the door. When she opened it, André and Marcus stood there, half hidden behind a large bunch of carnations.
‘Oh my God, you two,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Your parents have asked us to sort you out and take you to the airport tomorrow. Your ticket to Italy is booked.’
‘Eat some more of this soup at least, Alba,’ Anna said, ‘and then you can sleep.’
Alba swallowed half the bowl of chicken broth to please her parents and then climbed the stairs to her room in the converted stable, known as La Stalla. It was much the same as when she’d left home; a couple of dog-eared posters of Italian bands still hung from her wall and her teddy, one eye missing, sat on her pillow. Anna had been using her desk as a sewing table and a colourful patchwork cushion cover lay half-finished by the side of an old treadle sewing machine. Alba’s life in London seemed a million miles away, and her heart ached for James. She stared at the view of the mountains dusted with snow. The river beneath her window, where willows waved silvery-green in the afternoon sunshine, was fuller than during the summer months. Normally she would be out there, sitting on the bench by the water or walking up the footpath, breathing in the clean air. But she was exhausted, as if she’d been drugged and, once again, she fell into a deep sleep. It was the only pattern she could live with at the moment.
Downstairs, her father and stepmother talked in half-whispers, although Alba’s bedroom was on a mezzanine above the second floor, thick walls in between. ‘I wish I could bear her pain,’ Francesco said. ‘She’s so young. It’s so cruel.’
‘Give her a few days, tesoro. She needs time.’
‘I’m worried she’ll revert to how she reacted when her mother died.’
‘She was only eight then.’
‘I know… but she refused to speak for six whole months.’
‘That was years ago. Come on, let her be for a couple of days and then I’ll try and get through to her. Let her settle.’
A couple of mornings later, Alba was staring through the little round window at the first flakes of snow when Anna came into her room, carrying a breakfast tray. ‘Freshly baked rolls and coffee. I’ve brought mine up to eat with you,’ she said. ‘We have the house to ourselves – Babbo’s gone to Bologna until Wednesday.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Don’t believe you. What have you eaten since arriving? Not enough to feed even a lizard.’
‘I can’t keep anything down.’
‘Shall I make you hot water with lemon?’
‘Thank you.’
Alba sank back into the pillows, full of love for this woman who’d arrived in her life when she was eight, and going through a difficult period after the death of her birth mother. Anna had been there for her ever since, treating her exactly the same as her younger stepbrother and twin sisters.
When Anna returned, they sat together in silence for a couple of minutes, Alba taking a nibble from a roll, sipping her hot lemon.
‘This is good, Anna. Thanks.’
‘Look, I know you don’t want to talk, but it would do you good, darling.’
Silence.
‘Would it help just to let me listen? I know you can’t believe anybody can understand what’s going on inside you, but… it would help to try and put it into words.’
With a sigh, Alba said, ‘I thought we were going to get married.’ She started to cry again, wondering where all these tears were coming from. ‘I thought everything was good.’
Anna let her talk, without responding. At last, her stepdaughter was starting to open up.
Alba looked at her, speaking in a little voice. ‘I’m trying to snap out of it, honestly I am. I feel like a spoiled brat, everybody tiptoeing around me, being so kind. But…’ Her tears spilled again. Anna stayed where she was on the side of the bed, not touching her stepdaughter, waiting for Alba to be ready.
‘Half my heart is gone. And knowing James was going to break up with me before he died… it’s like the five years spent with him mean nothing.’ Alba pulled a tissue from the box on her bedside table and blew her nose.
‘You think it’s been a waste of time at the moment,’ Anna said, ‘but – and I know you’re going to think this is just an old lady spouting wisdom – it will eventually have served its purpose in making you into the person you’ll become. You’ll learn about yourself from this.’
‘Sorry, Anna, but yes – you are sounding like you’re spouting wisdom.’
‘I’ve never told you much about before I met your lovely dad, have I?’ Anna said, ignoring her and pouring Alba more hot lemon.
‘I had a few boyfriends. I was no nun. But the man I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with told me, in a note pushed under my door, that he couldn’t go through with the huge wedding we’d planned. We were only days away and I had to cancel flowers, guests, venue… it was so humiliating. And at the time, I believed I would never get over it.’
‘Oh my God… that’s so awful. What a prick.’
‘Mm. But best to find that out beforehand.’
Alba fiddled with her sheet, twisting it round her fingers. ‘We hadn’t got as far as that. I mean, I was certain he was going to ask me any day, but he never proposed… and it’s my fault he died, Anna. He was fed up with me and went off in a huff. I shouldn’t have nagged him.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Anna said, folding Alba in her arms. ‘Of course it’s not your fault. All couples argue from time to time. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident. A truly dreadful accident.’ She kissed the top of the young woman’s head, wishing she could bear some of her sadness. ‘Now, what I suggest is that you get up for a while. I’ll wash your hair for you, and we’re going to go for a walk in the snow.’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘Tough! I do, and I want you to keep me company. And besides, Davide and the twins will be home in a couple of weeks for Christmas, and I’ve a million things you can help me with.’
Anna washed Alba’s hair at the bathroom sink, massaging conditioner into her scalp. Then she dried her hair thoroughly, gently brushing out her tangles.
‘Thanks, Ma,’ Alba said, pulling her stepmother down into a hug, and Anna was the one to blink back tears now. She’d never heard Alba call her ‘Ma’ before, and her heart melted.
Outside, a sprinkling of snow had left a white film on the meadows. Red hips on wild roses were frosted silver, and as they walked along the riverbank, Anna pointed out icicles hanging from willow twigs.
‘It’s a perfect Christmas scene,’ Anna said, snapping away on her mobile phone. ‘I might print some of these, instead of buying cards this year.’
‘The shops in England have been full of Christmas stuff since October. It’s good to get away from it.’
Anna pulled at some strands of old man’s beard entwined around a tree. ‘I have an idea for this, too. Saw it in a magazine. We’ll wind it round a ball of wire and then thread through little Christmas lights.’
Alba wondered if she’d ever have half Anna’s flair, imagination and enthusiasm for anything.
‘Can we go back now, Anna? I’m cold,’ Alba said, gazing at the icicles hanging from the waterfall where holiday guests usually sunbathed.
‘Sure. But maybe you can help me bake for the freezer. And I need to make the Christmas cake too.’
‘Maybe tomorrow?’ Alba knew she was disappointing Anna, who was doing her best with her home-style therapy, but all she wanted to do was sleep. Maybe if she hibernated for a week, she would wake up and everything would feel normal again.
But over the next few days she did make an effort. Her father had been sterner than Anna, coming up to her room and telling her that unless she got up to do something – even a short walk on her own – he would call the doctor. Pulling her into his arms, he’d told her he was missing his daughter, the one with the spirit, who had always been such a great example to her step-siblings, who were coming home in a couple of days. They had both cried, and Alba knew he was being cruel to be kind. As the landscape outside froze over, she began to thaw inside.
Alba walked along the river to a spot near the big waterfall where she used to swim each summer. Ice shapes hung like enormous chandeliers, dripping as they melted a little in the lukewarm midday sun. A birch tree stood stark and still in the frozen air, and Alba’s breath created mist like cigarette smoke. She remembered how she’d pretended as a child to puff on twigs; how one year the pool further down the river had iced over and Babbo had arranged an impromptu skating party, and cooked spicy sausages afterwards over a fire for her school friends. She thought of how she’d planned to repeat all these things one day when she and James had babies, even though he hadn’t been keen on starting a family. He’d told her the planet was overpopulated and not in a fit state to introduce more children. But she’d been sure she could change his mind. Anyway, he was gone now. It was best to banish such thoughts, she told herself.
She pulled out her sketchbook and spent half an hour drawing the view of the mill, the waterfall in the background, snow-laden clouds in the sky. She blew on her fingers to restore feeling and when she’d finished, she returned to the converted stable where the family lived. Their home stood metres away from the mill, which was now closed up for winter. They only let it out for summer guests.
Inside the house, a pine tree stood in the centre of the living room, waiting to be decorated by the whole family the following day, when her brother and sisters were to come home for the Christmas vacation. The house was full of the aroma of cinnamon and spices from the cake she’d helped Anna bake earlier.
‘I think I might go for a longer walk tomorrow morning,’ Alba said. ‘Before the others get home. I’d like to take a picnic with me and go up to the Mountain of the Moon.’
She chose to ignore the looks of relief that passed between her parents.
‘Shall I come with you?’ Francesco asked. ‘It’ll be really cold up there.’
‘I’ll be fine, Babbo. I’ll wrap up warm. I know the way like the back of my hand.’
‘And she can take her mobile with her, Francesco,’ said Anna.
Alba didn’t feel like explaining her need to be alone. How she felt the walk would be good for her, because it would give her space to sort out her thoughts. And once the house was packed with family, with their noise and energy, there would be no more time to think. It would give her a chance to hold a kind of personal wake for James.
Her rucksack was stuffed with a flask of hot soup, sandwiches, fruit, chocolate, thick spare socks and gloves, as well as her sketch pad and pencils. Francesco and Anna had fussed over her, making sure she pointed out the exact route on the map she’d been urged to take, despite her protests about having downloaded a walking map on her phone. They asked her to check, for the umpteenth time, that her mobile was completely charged.
‘Anybody would think I was going away for three months on a polar expedition,’ she complained.
‘Well, you almost are. It’s over one thousand metres up there, and you’re bound to find snow,’ Francesco said. ‘Promise me you’ll turn back if it’s too icy.’
Kissing them goodbye and telling them not to stand on the doorstep too long, as they’d let all the warmth out, she set off, feeling a sense of freedom at being truly alone.
Hoar frost painted every surface with sparkle. The trees were fish bones outlined against the clean light of the sky, and above, a line of pines straggled like a bad haircut along the ridge she was making for. In the distance she heard church bells from the village chime the quarter-hour.
She climbed steadily for thirty minutes, crossing an expanse of meadow that once would have been used for grazing cattle, but was now studded with frosted juniper bushes that bore black berries on their upper branches. They looked like miniature Christmas trees. Anna had in fact cut a couple from the forest to place on either side of the door to the stable, adding festive red bows and baubles. The berries were used for making gin, and her stepmother added them to stews for flavour. Just as Alba was reasoning that the berries were most likely missing from the lower branches because they’d been eaten by wild animals, a pair of roe deer bounded across the path above her, making her jump and drop one of her alpine sticks. She was too slow to take a photo on her phone as the animals disappeared behind rocks, the white around their rear ends seeming like a cruel hunter’s target to Alba.
She stopped at midday to drink her soup and eat her rye bread with cheese and rocket leaves, feeling hungry for the first time in days. Anna had included a couple of home-made shortbread biscuits and an orange to her picnic, and she decided to keep those to celebrate her arrival at her destination. Across the valley from where she perched on a moss-covered boulder, beneath which nestled a huge Carlina thistle, known as the poor man’s artichoke, she watched the flight of a goshawk, its shadow playing in the sunshine on the sandstone cliffs like a mate. Eventually it disappeared into one of many crannies.
When she was a little girl of nine or so, she had walked these hills with her step-grandfather, Danilo, and been entranced by his stories of wartime. He had fought as a partisan against the Nazis and fascist militia up here during the Second World War. He’d pointed out remnants of the defensive Gothic Line as they passed by, and places where the Germans, the Tedeschi, had used caves to store ammunition. He’d shown her trenches on the ridge where they had set machine guns to fire on planes overhead. He’d taken her to a few places where resistance fighters had hidden as they plotted assaults on the invading Germans. They weren’t stories, he had corrected her, they were real events. But the way he recounted them to her, a child, had turned them into adventures from a storybook. Since then, she’d done research of her own, reading any documents she could find. And she understood the brutality of what had taken place in this beautiful corner of Tuscany: the massacres, sacrifices and hardships that ordinary people had endured. Babbo had a complete shelf of history books in his study and personal accounts written post-war, and she’d devoured them all. Modern history would have been her second choice after art, if she’d gone to university.
At about two o’clock, Alba reached the ruins of a house, not much more than a pile of stones scattered beneath the ridge of the Mountain of the Moon. A wooden sign had been erected since the last time she had ventured up here. She read the name of the place: SECCARONI.
The silence here was almost noisy. In London, where she’d lived on and off for the last eight years, there was never this sense of quiet and she wasn’t used to it. It was normal to hear neighbours arguing, trains rumbling by or sirens from police cars. Here, at over one thousand metres, where the jagged peak of the Mountain of the Moon soared above her, not even a blade of grass moved. She knew the weather could change dramatically. She and Nonno Danilo had been caught out often enough, but her grandfather always knew where there was a hollow, a shepherd’s hut or a cave to shelter in while the worst of the storm raged.
The ruins of Seccaron. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
