Chapter 7
CHAPTER 7
CASALTA, 14 APRIL 1985
LUCREZIA
Bianca and I made our way into the hills, under a gentle spring sun. We took our high-heeled shoes off and advanced barefoot, like we’d done so many times as children.
Since I’d stepped back in this house and seen my sisters, time had turned into an accordion, expanding and narrowing and expanding again, flowing and halting and restarting, so that past and present were woven together and I kept going back and forth between reality and memories. I threw my head back and took in the blue sky, and the smell of grass and herbs, and the distant song of some brave cicadas that were opening the season so early.
Home, home, home.
‘When I called Madame Aubert to find your number, she said you were a secretary. A chef’s secretary,’ Bianca said.
‘Well, yes. An assistant, more like. A secretary sounds like an office job, but we travel around a lot. He’s very successful, he’s on TV, he works non-stop.’
‘It sounds glamorous!’
‘It sounds more glamorous than it is. Mainly I keep his diary and I tell people off on his behalf if the parsley is not fresh, or if a pan isn’t the right size.’ I laughed.
‘Why did you choose it?’
‘It fell in my lap. When I finished boarding school…’ A pause.
When I finished boarding school, I wanted to come home and see you, see my sisters . But I was angry, and afraid.
‘Madame Aubert knew someone who knew Sophie, Claude’s manager. They were looking for an assistant, and I got the job. I didn’t really have time to think; I needed to find something to support myself quickly. What about you?’
Bianca shrugged. ‘I wanted to study art. But I’m not clever enough, of course…’
‘Of course you are! What are you talking about? Who said that…? Oh.’
‘Yes, well, Father always said you got the brains, and he was right. I was never good in school; I was always preoccupied with what was going on at home… Also, I didn’t want to go to university and leave Nora and Mia, just in case. You know…’
I didn’t know. But I could guess.
‘So, I stayed home to run the house and, with a bit of time on my hands, I started helping people in the village, you know, elderly people, or people who were sick or disabled. I did simple things, getting their groceries, taking them to hospital, cooking and cleaning for them, whatever their needs were. Even just lending a listening ear. I ended up founding a co-op with a friend, Renata, remember her? She was at school with us.’
‘Oh, yes. That sounds wonderful, Bianca.’
‘Ah, it’s small stuff. But it’s so good when you see people getting out of ruts, with a little hand. There’s a few of us now, two are nurses, so we can do a little more.’
‘Sounds very you. And it suits you. You look happy! ’
‘ You look lovely! ’
We’d spoken at the same time. It was hearing the same person speak twice, simultaneously. Something shifted between us. I saw her aura shimmer silver.
We came to the top of the hill, and from there we could see the expanse of vineyards on one side and the olive groves on the other. The stables were there, a cluster of stone buildings where the Falconeri horses were kept, and from where the soft sound of neighing could be heard. And beyond them, beyond our grounds, in a small, secluded valley between Casalta and the Orafi estate, was the hazelnut tree where Vanni and I used to meet…
All of a sudden, it all came crashing down on me: this bittersweet return, this volatile mixture that was bound to explode, sooner rather than later. A flood of emotion left me shaking.
I grabbed Bianca’s hand to make her stop, and she did.
My twin and I stood in front of each other.
‘Why did you not fight for me, Bianca?’
‘ Fight for you? I was twelve . I was a child . What did you expect me to do?’
‘You wanted me to stay away. I know it. I could feel it. At the beginning you wanted me to return, but then…’
‘Oh, Lulu. There’s so much you don’t know…’
‘This, again? There might be a lot I don’t know, but there’s also a lot I do know! And you kept sending me those letters about everything you did, and how everyone was doing, and you wanted me to answer as if we were pen pals! You have no idea what I went through.’
My outburst was followed by another bout of neighing coming from somewhere behind us, this time louder.
‘Because you never told me! You never answered my letters! It was guesswork, for me, for us…’
‘I did! I answered all your letters, you ignored everything I said…’
Bianca froze. ‘You wrote to me?’
It began to dawn on me. On us.
‘You never received my letters, did you?’ I said.
Bianca shook her head slowly, disbelieving.
I should have known. We should have known! ‘ He intercepted them. And either hid them, or destroyed them!’
‘Sit down!’ Bianca whispered suddenly, the kind of whisper that sounds more powerful and intimidating than a shout. I was taken aback.
‘What?’
‘I said, sit down.’
‘Oh. You’re ordering me about, now? Not like you.’
‘Very funny. How do you know what’s like me and what’s not like me? We haven’t seen each other for twelve years. And now, sit down. Please, I’ll tell you everything.’
I obeyed, and let myself fall on the grass, suddenly drained. I bent my legs beneath me, and dried tears that refused to stop. My chest was rising and falling fast.
The grass was warm, and in front of us were the sweet, sweet view of vines covering the hills, and the bluest of skies. In the distance, far away, were crests of cypresses and the silhouette of more hills melting into each other under the sun – and, beyond those hills, the Florence skyline. The light of this Tuscan afternoon was so golden, so warm, that I raised my face and closed my eyes to soak it all in. Everything was still complicated, and emotional, and the mixture of joy and guilt and regret I carried around my sisters made my thoughts tangle in twisted threads – but deep down, almost at a cellular level, my body and soul knew that I was home . This was the light of home, the food of home, the first sky I ever had above my head and the first air I ever breathed. I felt a little like Ulysses returning to the island of Ithaca, except there were no greedy pretenders to spoil my return: the agent of chaos and upset was gone.
Tears kept flowing out of my eyes of their own accord. I’d kept them in check for too long to rein them in. Beside me, Bianca was crying too. I wondered what Claude and the people in our circle would say, seeing me in the middle of all this drama, barefoot and puffy-eyed. Me, his ice queen.
‘What happened to you? You never used to order anyone about. It’s like hearing a hamster roaring,’ I muttered.
‘Try living with Fosco Falconeri, with a little sister who needs looking after like an eternal child, another sister who believes we all wronged our father and should make amends, and a twin who’s disappeared. Believe me, you’ll develop some character as well.’
More neighing in the distance. One of the horses had been spooked, probably.
‘But you got to stay home! All this time, I was alone…’ I exclaimed, but stopped abruptly. The neighing was joined by the din of someone, something, panting, snorting, displacing the grass around us.
‘Get up!’ Bianca bellowed.
‘Sit down, stand up! Stop telling me what to—’ My sentence ended in a scream. An enormous horse was careering towards us, charging us. It was such a surreal scene that I was frozen. My whole body was rigid, and I was wide-eyed, staring at the galloping beast.
‘ Get. Up! ’ Bianca yelled again, dragging me to my feet. The horse was now so close, I could almost feel its hooves on my body. I threw myself on Bianca and we rolled together down the slope. When we finally stopped I opened my eyes, thinking I’d see the animal stand upon us, poised to squash us under its weight; but it wasn’t there.
Instead of the horse, standing above us was a young woman, straw in her hair and mud on her boots, her expression somewhere between concerned and amused. ‘You overreacted,’ she stated, and didn’t bother hiding a smile.
‘ Nora! ’ Bianca took the hand that Nora was extending to her. ‘That beast was charging us!’
‘He wouldn’t have trampled you. He would have avoided you instinctively. He was just a little spooked.’ She shrugged. ‘He just moved here; he’s acclimatising. Bianca, when will you stop coming out on the hills in a dress? You look like you’re going to church…’
Then she saw me, and stiffened. Her eyes moved from me to Bianca and back.
‘ Lucrezia? ’ she half-declared, half-asked. Her beauty struck me once again, even more than it had when I saw her picture: she could have walked out of a film or a magazine, with her amber skin and freckles, moss-green eyes and slender, colt-like figure. She wore riding trousers and a long shirt, and her hair was short, with a mop of dark curls on top. A single earring, shaped like a feather, played hide and seek in her hair.
I was still too shaken to be able to speak, so I just nodded. She was quiet, but the way she studied my face, the way she stared at me, betrayed the intensity of her surprise, beyond the silence. And then the stare turned into something else – a glare, a look of plain hostility that passed on her face like clouds on a hill, and disappeared. But the cold vapour of her aura, a dark, acid green, betrayed her. I felt Bianca almost squirming beside me. She was uneasy.
I searched for words to defuse the moment, but none came. Bianca and Mia had made it easy for me, but not Nora. I couldn’t blame her, but I wasn’t ready to make it easy either.
‘He was charging us,’ I ended up muttering.
To my irritation, Nora laughed, a fearless, forthright laugh, as direct and devoid of embarrassment as her gaze was.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘You were in his path, that’s all. Ettore is incapable of deliberate aggression. He’s as sweet as they come; you just don’t know him.’
‘Where is he?’ Bianca whipped her head around.
‘I have him!’ a dark-haired man called from behind us: I turned around, and his eyes widened slightly when he recognised me – it wasn’t difficult, I supposed, given that I was identical to Bianca. ‘Signorina Falconeri.’
I tried to say hello, but bits of dry grass in my throat made me cough instead.
‘I’m Matteo, the stable manager. It’s nice to meet you.’
No point in trying to be dignified, sweaty and dishevelled as I was. ‘It’s nice to meet you too,’ I croaked.
Matteo had slung reins on the horse and was holding them, all the while stroking its muzzle. He was awfully close to its teeth, I thought, but both he and my sister seemed unfazed. Had I not been so scared I would have appreciated the beauty of the animal, its shiny brown coat and the white diamond on its forehead, and those liquid, liquid eyes. But I wasn’t familiar with horses, and my knees were still having to work to keep me standing. I plucked out some more grass from my hair.
‘How come your horse-whispering didn’t work this time, Nora?’ Bianca said good-naturedly. ‘That’s her gift,’ she explained to me. I supposed that simply mentioning a gift was vague enough not to make Matteo wonder.
‘I don’t have any gifts,’ Nora stated simply, and her eyes were dark for a moment. ‘Ettore is a Maremmano horse. They’re an independent breed and want to be almost completely free. I say almost because they still like having their fresh water and somewhere warm and dry to come home to at night. We have to work together, so they understand the boundaries. They’re wild at heart, but we still need to co-exist.’
‘You’re the same breed then, cara ,’ Bianca said with a smile, and the look of admiration she was giving Nora nullified her attempt at sarcasm. It was clear to see that Bianca doted on Nora, just as much as she doted on Mia.
‘And you’re Marie the little white cat in The Aristocats ,’ Nora retorted without malice, and she turned to me. ‘It’s almost like meeting you for the first time,’ she said, her moss-green eyes studying me.
While both Bianca and Mia had come close at once, Nora kept her distance. The awkwardness I felt was such that my ice-maiden persona returned to me. Nora seemed unfazed.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ she said simply and walked away with Matteo, Ettore the horse in between them, snorting. Ettore had a swagger about him, like a little boy who’d misbehaved and was quite satisfied with himself.
‘Nora is wild,’ Bianca commented. ‘She doesn’t like having four walls around her and almost lives at the stables.’
‘Where were we?’ I said, still fishing grass out of my hair. My dress was ruined. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Bianca started laughing.
‘What?’
‘Your expression. You look so… outraged .’
‘You can say that again! That horse owes me one.’
And just as unexpectedly, I started laughing too, and we laughed and laughed until the laughter mixed with tears and we fell into each other’s arms.