Chapter 17 #2
‘Here, this rosemary can be foraged all over the island, but I have enough at home. It’s an invasive species,’ he said, running his hand over the fragrant bush, not flowering as much as the plant by his terrace.
‘That one’s borage – the cucumber plant.
It’s delicious in ravioli, or even fresh in salads.
We can take a plant or two – not too much, when you’re in the wild. ’
He pulled up two stubby plants with heads of star-shaped blue wild flowers and fleshy leaves at the base. The tangy scent reached her nose as he dropped them into the mesh bag she held out for him.
Farther along the path, he tracked into the undergrowth to a cluster of bushes with plump, dark berries.
‘Blackcurrants. I prefer redcurrants, but these are good when cooked.’
‘There’s so much choice, you can be a picky eater like my son?
’ she teased as she followed his lead, gently detaching the small bunches of berries and dropping them into the bag with everything else.
‘Although he’d like your garden. I call him a potatotarian, since that’s the only vegetable he willingly eats. ’
The pause before Gabri’s next question was long enough to remind Toni that he didn’t like children.
‘Is he looking forward to coming here?’
‘He loves the water, so yes, but I don’t think he really understands how different this will be from our usual holidays – especially because I’ll be working,’ she said with a grimace.
‘I’m glad to have this new challenge, but it does pull me in a few different directions.
Two weeks away would have been too long – for me, I mean. Cilli would probably be fine.’
‘You can take him to collect pine cones,’ Gabri commented, obviously not knowing what else to say about the conflicts of motherhood and career.
‘Usually, I’m frustrated by the mouldy conkers and Cilli’s moss samples,’ she replied. Perhaps she talked about him too often, but Gabri would have to live with that – only for the next few days. ‘He has a whole box of treasures under his bed that he’ll never let me throw away.’
‘Yes,’ Gabri replied after a moment. ‘As satisfying as it is to collect things, it’s never easy to let them go.’
She doubted he was obliquely referring to his ex-wife and his old life, but his comment made her wonder about it anyway. ‘Is that some of the wisdom you learned from the island? Where did you live before?’ she asked as they walked on.
‘Absolutely. I lived in Milano. A big contrast.’
‘I suppose you can’t go foraging in Milan – or there, it would be called “shopping”.’
He responded only with a quick smile as he moved slowly, his gaze darting from one side of the path to the other, into the undergrowth of ferns and bushes that Toni couldn’t hope to identify.
‘The only thing I’ve ever foraged at home is brambles from beside the football field,’ she commented.
‘Many of these plants I think also grow in England, but you need to know what to look for and how to prepare it,’ he murmured, his eyes still alert. ‘Look,’ he said, his voice kept carefully soft as he pointed to a flash of colour to her right.
He was still – unimaginably still – and in a flutter of delicate yellow, a creature perched on his sleeve, the wings making delicate movements.
‘A Cleopatra butterfly,’ he said under his breath. ‘This is why we’re here.’
‘On this earth?’ she asked, studying tones of yellow and the two tiny, orange dots on the lower wings.
He chuckled and the elegant butterfly took flight again, lost in the many greens of the surrounding foliage almost instantly. ‘No, although perhaps a philosopher would agree with you. I meant this area has an abundance of butterflies and I thought we might see some.’
They continued on with slow steps.
‘Aha,’ Gabri said a moment later, heading off into the brush and gesturing wildly for her to follow. ‘This is exactly what I was hoping to find.’
Toni peered at the ground, but didn’t see anything she’d like to touch, much less eat: thick, woody groundcover, ferns, dry grass and a large thistle that reached Gabri’s thigh.
It took her a moment to realise he meant the thistle.
It had huge, leathery leaves, the ones near the ground longer than Gabri’s feet in his scuffed boots, and clusters of spiny, round flowers, some of them with tufts of pink petals on top like the hair of a cartoon character.
‘You’re going to make another bouquet?’
‘This isn’t the same flower I used in the bouquet. That was a thistle.’
She thought he was joking for a moment, but his pout suggested otherwise.
‘This… isn’t a thistle?’
‘No, this is bardana – and it’s delicious fried, boiled or in a stew.’ He pulled on a pair of worn gloves and squatted near the spiny plant.
Choosing a younger plant without any flowers, he coaxed it slowly out of the hard ground. She would have thought it took no effort at all, except that the veins in his forearms stood out against the tensed muscle.
When the soil gave way, a narrow, rough-skinned root emerged, like a long, thin parsnip.
‘You take those,’ he instructed, pointing to a small cluster of weeds. ‘There are more gloves in the bag.’
‘This is a lot like weeding my garden,’ she commented as she tugged at the plants, losing one when the top snapped off instead of coming up cleanly. ‘I can never stay on top of it.’
‘No matter how hard you try, life keeps on going.’
Toni paused, wishing his words, so lightly spoken, weren’t quite so profound. She didn’t want to be profound today. She wanted to tease him and kiss him and dive into bed when they got back.
‘Did you learn floristry here on the island?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘I took some workshops here and then enrolled in a vocational course. I needed something…’ He didn’t finish the sentence. She suspected he didn’t know how.
‘What did you do before? In Milan?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘That’s a relationship status, not a job,’ she quipped, hoping her light tone would coax an answer from him.
He laughed in a way that convinced her he didn’t find her joke funny. Without looking up from his careful inspection of the bushes, he explained, ‘I am a pure mathematician with a PhD, but most recently, I was working on algorithms for software used to optimise interconnected electricity grids.’
That was complicated – and not at all what she’d expected. With his hands deep in the soil, he didn’t look like a mathematician.
‘Wow, a PhD. Software algorithms in Milan to foraging and floristry on Elba.’ She said it more to get things straight in her own mind, rather than expecting a response.
‘A surprise? The PhD or the job?’
‘Um, both,’ she answered. ‘I should have expected you have an advanced degree. Your English is amazing.’
‘A language is just practice and I had a lot of that,’ he said with a shrug.
‘I suppose I just can’t picture you doing something you can’t see or touch. You have your feet firmly on the ground.’ Miro had had his head in the clouds. She couldn’t bear the comparison, but it came anyway.
‘I do now,’ he said. ‘We should look for a different place to find more bardana. I don’t want to take too much from here and affect the root system. But we’ll take some twigs too.’
His words seemed designed to shut down the conversation and Toni reluctantly let it happen. She hadn’t quite got to the heart of him yet. Perhaps she shouldn’t.
He produced a small folding knife from his pocket and clipped off a few leaves at the stem.
She thought of Miro’s hands, overgrown from climbing and a strong as the horn of a mountain goat.
But even they hadn’t been able to save him.
When Gabri stood, the comparisons kept running.
She was struck again by his broad, tough build, so different to Miro’s wiry frame.
She rather liked that she could look him in the eye when they were standing – an observation she allowed herself, since this thing between them was only a few days out of time.
Gabri continued speaking, oblivious to her busy thoughts.
‘Burdock. That’s what you call this in English.
I just remembered. You can eat the young leaves too, but I prefer the root and this stick.
’ He snipped off the leaf, leaving a fleshy green stalk that Toni was astonished to realise looked appetising.
‘Oh, you mean “stalk”.’
He looked up. ‘Isn’t that the bird that brings the babies?’
She laughed, all the more tickled because he wasn’t joking.
‘Why, Gabri, I thought you’d know all about the birds and the bees by now.
’ She extended a hand to help him up, but he batted it away and hauled himself to his feet.
‘It’s different spelling,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry English is so confusing. ’
Her words were cut off with a squeak as he curled an arm around her waist and hauled her against him.
His hand drifted up her back, the touch unbearably light at first and then growing firmer, sending endorphins firing through her blood.
God, he felt good.
‘We say, “the bees and the flowers” in Italian,’ he said, his voice deep and smooth and thick, like honey. ‘I know all about flowers.’
She hadn’t noticed her eyelids falling shut until she needed to open them again, finding him grinning at her indulgently, his chin with that inviting cleft angled up. She waited for the kiss, enjoying her absurd heartbeat. He wanted to kiss her – she was certain – but he let her go instead.
He hadn’t kissed her, but he did take her hand as they walked on, as though he couldn’t help it.
He scanned the plant life intently while Toni’s brain was in a pleasant fog.
Possibly she shouldn’t have teased him, but she’d enjoyed that raised chin – just as she enjoyed the helpless, wary expression in his gaze as she tugged him to a stop and drew close.
Filling her lungs with air holding the scent of pine and herbs – rosemary, sage and mint – she allowed the soft smile to play on her lips as she pressed a lingering kiss to his bristly cheek.
She was sick of ‘shouldn’t’. This was her week off and she wanted to spend it teasing Gabri Orzati into gruffly touching her some more.