Chapter 22
Amy went shopping on Saturday in readiness for her dinner party the next day and when she returned, she was met by an apologetic-looking Signora Grande with Max at her side.
‘Good morning, Amy, I don’t suppose you could do me another big favour, could you? My sister’s been taken back into hospital and I’m really worried for her. Could you possibly take Max for today and tomorrow, maybe even until Monday? I really need to stay over to be with her and the rest of the family.’
‘Of course, I’d be happy to. He and I get on really well.’
After wishing Signora Grande’s sister a speedy recovery, she carried her shopping bags into the house and prepared a quick sandwich for herself while the dog sat beside her feigning starvation. Used to his ways by now she gave him a big bone-shaped biscuit from a packet she had bought specially for him this morning and decided she had better go shopping again in the afternoon for more dog food. After that, she intended playing around with the new oven and hob until she felt confident enough to cook for her guests the next day.
The afternoon passed quickly and her efforts in the kitchen were reasonably successful, once she had burnt away the new oven smell. At the end of the afternoon, she took Max out for a walk and when she got back to the house, she met Danny and Pierpaolo coming in through the gates, and Danny had news.
‘Ciao, Amy, Adam’s just called me from Florida. He’s flown into Miami from Manaus and he’s booked on a flight to Rome arriving tomorrow morning. He should be back here mid-afternoon.’
Pierpaolo gave her a cheeky smile. ‘And he asked about you.’
‘He did?’ She could feel her cheeks colouring as if she were a teenage girl, and she hastily ushered the two men into the house, but Pierpaolo hadn’t finished.
‘I told Danny to tell Adam you missed him, but he didn’t want to say anything.’ He looked positively mischievous.
Amy shot Danny a grateful look. ‘Thanks, Danny, I would prefer it if you boys try not to do any matchmaking. All right, Pierpaolo?’ Danny grinned and Pierpaolo gave her a reluctant nod of the head.
She grabbed a bottle of wine and three glasses and they all sat down around the kitchen table. This was her father’s old table that the builders had sanded down and waxed and it fitted perfectly into this old environment. After bringing out the batch of chocolate brownies she had made that afternoon, she asked if Adam had said anything else – not about her, she hastened to clarify, but about him and what had happened in Brazil. Danny nodded.
‘We didn’t talk for long, but apparently their boat hit an underwater obstruction when they were miles up a little-known tributary of the Amazon and it started to sink. They managed to get to the shore before it did, but there was no way they could fix it. They had no signal so had a seven-day march through the jungle to get back to some sort of civilisation. He didn’t give any details, but it sounded pretty daunting.’
‘Your brother’s so brave, isn’t he, Danny?’ Pierpaolo had a dreamy look in his eyes.
Danny rolled his eyes. ‘I know Adam all too well. Knowing they were going to have to chop their way through virgin jungle, what do you think he did? He and Sammy the cameraman filmed the whole journey, and he told me he’s going to turn it into a half-hour piece, of course. We’ll probably be able to see it for ourselves before too long.’
The chocolate brownies met with immediate approval and Amy had to admit that they tasted pretty good. The Labrador stationed himself at her side and fixed her with an imploring stare until she looked down and tapped his nose gently with her finger. ‘Chocolate’s bad for dogs, Max. Even I know that.’ Taking pity on him, she got up and dug out another of his big biscuits and he subsided onto the floor with it and for the next few minutes there were sinister crunching noises at their feet.
‘Have you decided to come and live here full-time, Amy?’
Danny’s question came out of the blue, but at least she had had time the previous evening with Domenica to come up with a non-committal reply. ‘I’m still trying to work that out. What worries me is that if I give up the job in London, I’m going to get very bored over here. I need to find something else to do if I’m to stay here, but what can I do?’
Pierpaolo gave her a cheeky wink. ‘You could have babies for Adam. Danny and I would love to be the naughty uncles.’
Amy’s cheeks flushed again but Danny came to her aid. ‘Leave the girl alone, Pierpaolo. You’re embarrassing her, don’t be a pest.’
Grudgingly, Pierpaolo nodded. ‘All right, I promise I won’t mention babies again – although we really would be great uncles – but if not that, then you could always try pottery, though you’d need to up your game.’
Danny was quick to intervene again. ‘Amy’s dishes look lovely now they’re glazed, and as a first attempt they’re impressive.’ He returned his attention to her. ‘By the way, I meant to bring them today but with the excitement of Adam’s call, I forgot. As far as an occupation for you is concerned, have you thought about getting some chickens and maybe creating your own vegetable garden? After all, you have lots of land sitting here doing nothing.’
‘That’s a great idea,’ Pierpaolo interjected enthusiastically. ‘Or you could get some horses and set up a riding stables. There isn’t one around here.’
Amy shook her head. ‘I’m a city girl, don’t forget. No, I don’t think I could make a go of it as a farmer. I need something that occupies my brain, rather than my arm muscles.’
‘You’ll think of something,’ Danny said with conviction, but Amy wasn’t so sure.
They chatted some more and the subject turned to wine, with Amy soon realising she could use these two to solve a practical problem for her. At her request, one of the last things the builders had done before going off had been to bring up one of Signor Montalcino’s containers of wine. This huge, bulbous glass container in a wicker basket, that probably weighed as much as she did, was now sitting in the corner of the kitchen and she couldn’t even lift it. She knew she needed to syphon the wine into bottles but she didn’t have much idea about how to do it. Apart from anything else, although she had spotted a lot of empty bottles down in the cellar, she wasn’t keen on venturing down there if she could help it, so she asked Danny and Pierpaolo if they felt like going down to bring a whole load of bottles upstairs.
They were happy to oblige and managed to bring a dozen cases of empty bottles up from the cellar without discovering any unwelcome reptilian squatters down there. Pierpaolo also located a length of plastic tubing that had presumably been used by her father for this very same purpose. To cap it off, Pierpaolo, the local boy, spotted a big bottle of what the label described as oenological oil. He explained to her that the locals around here added a half inch of this clear, tasteless and odourless oil on top of the wine in all the bottles once these had been filled. He assured her that a cork simply pushed partway in by hand to keep out the dust afterwards was all the seal that was necessary to keep the oxygen from the wine. In that way the bottled wine would keep for many months without the need for a proper corking machine.
He then went back to scour the cellar and returned with a couple of sturdy brown paper bags, one containing little cone-shaped corks and one what looked like coarse brown cotton wool. He told her that this was in fact natural hemp. The locals called it stoppa and he demonstrated how she should dip this into a bottle to remove the oil before starting to drink the wine. The stoppa magically absorbed the oil but not the wine and removed any trace of this simple method of conservation.
Amy was fascinated to learn about such a traditional way of doing things and vowed to get onto the task of decanting all fifty-three litres into bottles, but not until after her dinner party the following night. She had decided to make it an English meal, rather than trying to compete with Italian cuisine. Her plan was to give them cottage pie with cauliflower cheese, and to follow it up with summer pudding. She would have a go at bottling the wine on Monday and it occurred to her that there would then be the question of whether she was going to be here to drink any of it or whether she would find herself a thousand kilometres away in London. One thing was for sure: she wasn’t going to be able to take any with her on the aircraft.
Danny and Pierpaolo left a bit later on and she had time to complete most of what she wanted to do before the next day. Although she was keen to see if her menu turned out all right, most of her thoughts were on the adventurer’s return. By the time she went to bed, after settling Max on the rug by the empty fireplace downstairs, she felt sure she would dream about him but, as it turned out, she had other things to contend with. She fell asleep almost immediately but awoke several hours later feeling terribly hot.
Here inside the thick stone walls of the house the temperature on the previous nights had been quite bearable, but tonight she felt as though she was on fire. For one horrible moment the thought struck her that maybe she was having a delayed reaction to what she had believed to be porcini that she had eaten over twenty-four hours before – and which had been very tasty – but then the true reason for all the warmth revealed itself.
She felt movement and then a waft of far from aromatic dog breath hit her as a very happy Labrador stretched his whole body against her and gave a satisfied grunt. Amy slipped sideways until she could climb out of the far side of the bed. She walked around to where he was still lying sprawled on the bed like a femme fatale in a cheesy movie, his eyes glowing green in the moonlight as he stared up at her. Even in the shadows she could see a broad canine smile on his face.
‘Max! You shouldn’t be upstairs and you certainly shouldn’t be on the bed. Now scoot!’ He stretched luxuriously again and the end of his tail wagged lazily, but she knew she had to put her foot down. ‘I said get off! Come on, dog, you need to get off.’
Heaving a deep and heartfelt sigh, Max got up, stretched again and then let her guide him back to the floor where he promptly slumped down on the rug by the bed, clearly far too tired to consider using the stairs to return to the ground floor. Amy stood there helplessly for a few moments, debating whether to get tough or not, before finally deciding – in the words of the proverb – to let sleeping dogs lie. She crouched down beside him and, as she did so, a big black paw reached up towards her. She caught hold of it and looked him square in the eye. ‘Not on the bed, capito?’
Whether it was the linguistic cocktail or not, when she woke up next morning she was mildly surprised to find him still lying on the rug. As he saw her get out of bed, his tail started thumping on the wooden floor. She smiled down at him.
‘Ciao, bello, did you sleep well?’
He got to his feet and came over to nuzzle her knees. She ruffled his ears before pulling on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. After a quick visit to the new bathroom, she took Max out for his morning walk up through the fields. It was a delightful day and she knew she was really going to miss this place – and her canine companion. She had grown very fond of the big black dog over the past weeks and she would miss him if she took the decision to return to London. On a morning like this, the idea seemed crazy, but she tried to imagine how it would be in the depths of winter if she were to wake up to an empty house and the prospect of a day of doing nothing. She knew she had a low threshold of boredom and the idea of being stuck here, twiddling her thumbs, didn’t appeal in the slightest. As she walked up the hill she turned over and over again in her mind all manner of possible jobs from trying to emulate her father’s success as an author to growing vegetables and selling them at the local market. Needless to say, by the time she reached the top of the field, she was no closer to a decision.
She had a busy day getting ready for her guests, much of it spent in the kitchen. Partway through the morning she opened the French windows onto the garden and let Max wander outside. She kept an eye on him from time to time in case he should take it into his head to run off, but he stuck around and spent most of the day sleeping in the shade of the bushes. At the end of the afternoon she went upstairs and took a tepid shower to cool off and changed into one of the dresses she had brought over from England, reflecting that Lucy wouldn’t have approved of how little naked skin she was exposing. Still, when she surveyed herself in the mirror she had to admit that she looked pretty good. What effect – if any – this might have on Adam remained to be seen.