Chapter Eight
The sun peeped through the trees into the lush depths of Villa Panorama’s peaceful garden.
On the shady terrace of Villetta Nascosta, Leo was spending his Saturday afternoon happily scraping building detritus from the stones.
The air was threaded with birdsong and little interrupted his thoughts but the drone of insects around the pink oleander – until his phone vibrated.
He frowned to see Teddy on the screen. ‘Yes?’ he answered discouragingly.
‘Were you thinking of coming back to help Isabella over this trouble with car thefts? It’s all over the local press and Facebook, of course, and the various insurance companies keep demanding information and ignoring the existence of the Park at your own risk signs.
’ Teddy sounded as if he thought Leo was spending an afternoon off in the Norfolk countryside rather than licking his wounds in Italy.
Leo tensed as if someone was pulling all the sinews in his body at once. His frustrations and bafflement burst out in a hail of verbal bullets. ‘You screwed up my relationship and shoved me out of the business, and now you expect me to support Isabella?’
Teddy made a protesting noise. ‘I didn’t say that. I thought she might have suggested it, as I’ll be returning to South Africa this time next week. And if your relationship had been any good, I couldn’t have affected it. Isabella would have sided with you and put me in my place,’ he added.
Processing this inconvenient truth, Leo felt some of the tautness fade. ‘I’m not involved in Isabella’s problems.’ Wearily, he dropped to his backside to the dusty ground beside the terrace and rested his back on a post.
Teddy bulldozed on. ‘Did the police call you? I thought they might demand your return.’
Leo watched a palm frond dancing with the sunlight.
‘I’m not a diamond smuggler wanted for a billion-pound heist. When the nice police officer called me, the only interest she had in my location was where I’d been on the night those cars disappeared.
’ Smacking at an insect threatening to crawl up the leg of his shorts, he went on the offensive.
‘Why are you returning to South Africa?’
Another snort. ‘I don’t see how that’s any of your business.’
The ideal opportunity to end the call. ‘Then we’ve nothing to talk about. Bye.’
Leo returned to loosening speckles of plaster and paint from the stones with a narrow scraper, pausing for occasional gulps of water and wondering if Isabella would be next to call.
However, the phone remained silent while he finished scraping, swept the terrace and then rinsed it with buckets of water.
He could do no more until it dried, so he reached for his drink, returned to his dusty seat on the ground and called his mum. ‘Is your cold going?’ he asked.
Sheenagh coughed. ‘Slowly. Damned thing.’ Her Scottish accent was still husky from her illness.
Her dry tone made him smile. ‘And Papà?’
‘Napping on the balcony. We’ve at least got dressed today,’ she added, as if he might be envisaging Ferdinando’s hairy nakedness on display. Before he could check whether they needed anything, Sheenagh asked, ‘Have you heard from Jade?’
An immediate vision of Jade Beretta’s hair blowing in the breeze invaded his mind. ‘Not since the middle of the week.’
Sheenagh coughed again. ‘I feel bad about that wee girl. Mairead asked me to help her where I could, but this rotten bug has stopped me from being around for her when her sisters turned up.’
Leo grinned, imagining how Jade would take to being called ‘that wee girl’ as if she were fifteen.
She’d been lanky and straight up and down at fifteen.
Now . . . well, she’d lost no height, obviously, but her curves .
. . ‘I suppose her sisters must be here. Did Mairead ever tell you about them?’ he asked curiously.
‘She did not.’ Sheenagh sounded faintly shocked that she might have had advance knowledge that such a blow was coming to Jade.
Leo watched a couple in their thirties approach the gate to the winding path up to Villetta Nascosta, espy the keypad, then turn and stroll towards a shady bench in the lower garden, chatting desultorily.
The man’s hand rested comfortably on the woman’s rounded rear.
‘Shall I text Jade to see how she’s doing?
Massi’s busy and Sofi’s not close to Jade, is she? ’
‘Not really. Bless your heart.’ Sheenagh exploded into a paroxysm of coughing and emerged noticeably croakier. ‘But I could text her myself. Why don’t you call round to see her? Don’t make a big deal of it. See how she’s doing and if she needs to talk or anything.’
Leo wondered how Jade would feel about him turning up uninvited a second time.
Then, when Sheenagh had another coughing fit, he sighed.
‘OK.’ The terrace had dried while they’d been chatting, but, after the call ended, he decided, despite his mum’s instructions, to at least open communications with Jade via a message.
Are you OK? Did your sisters arrive? Must be weird.
Then he set to applying a protective sealant to the paving.
It was a pleasantly mechanical, if malodorous job.
While he worked, he listened to an audiobook set in Umbria.
The British author hadn’t done a bad job of capturing the green heart of Italy where the mountains were the Apennines rather than the Alps.
It wasn’t until he’d completed his work and let himself back into the villetta by crabbing along the railing before jumping into the open doorway to avoid spoiling his work before it dried, that he saw Jade had replied.
Yes, they came. Definitely weird. Had dinner last night. They’re only here till Monday so I’m seeing them again tonight because I should get to know them. But it’s tense/intense.
Leo dumped his clothes directly into the washing machine and walked naked to the shower, catching sight of himself in the mirror and noticing how much his face, arms and neck had tanned even further with exposure to the Italian sun, as if his Italian self was pushing his UK self into the background.
In the capacious glass shower cubicle, he enjoyed the sensation of the water sluicing down his body, thinking about how nice it was to be waking almost every morning to sunshine.
Nice, for a while, anyway. His mind strayed back to his search for a new business.
Once dried and dressed, he again checked the rate of the pound against the euro.
Hmm. Not much variation. With a big chunk of money to convert, he’d hoped for a weakening of the pound.
He’d asked agents for additional information about properties that had caught his eye, both in the UK and in Italy, and now would be a good time to study it.
But first, he texted Jade again.
Do you remember Bar Rita?
He smiled as he typed. Bar Rita had been the young person’s hangout when they were new adults and had run around Como hand in hand.
It stood on Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, a street of balconies, bars, restaurants and shops.
Squashed in between larger establishments, narrow Bar Rita looked like a skinny relative in a bigger-built family.
Of course.
Leo typed back.
Massi and I are going there for aperitivo tonight. Unless you want to be private with your sisters, why don’t you join us? Might dilute the intensity.
He immersed himself in the reams of figures he’d been sent, using his phone’s calculator to compute percentages and making notes on his pad, much of which was now covered with his slanting handwriting, crossings out, asterisks and arrows.
He finished before six-thirty as he’d arranged to walk to Bar Rita with Massimo, who didn’t have many evenings free with a newly pregnant wife and a responsible job including shiftwork to consider – none of which applied to Leo.
They met in Massi’s office, then chatted as they strolled beside the lake, which looked silvery under a sky covered with thin, smoky cloud hanging on the mountain tops.
A host of bars and restaurants were already busy with groups of chatting people, the rows of tables only broken by potted palms. They crossed the busy road and then Piazza Cavour, where Three Sisters stood on one corner, pink and pretty.
It was only as they reached Via Garibaldi a few minutes later that his phone buzzed with Jade’s reply.
Thanks. Will do.
Leo explained the message to Massimo and his brother lifted his eyebrows. ‘If it’ll help her out, I’m all for Jade’s new sisters joining us. It must be strange for her, but I’d like to meet them.’
Leo agreed, thinking how nice his family was to offer quiet support.
Of course, while he’d been away, they’d been strengthening their bonds with Jade.
Once, he’d been the one to know her best, but after he’d chosen England, she’d become as remote from him as one of the mountain tops further along the lake.
Bar Rita hadn’t changed much, except its faded red canopy blind was slightly ripped and the R of the tarnished golden sign above the door dangled a broken leg.
If Leo had happened on the place anywhere but Como, he would have walked past it, and all the other affordable bars filling the air with thumping music, in search of somewhere smarter.
But affection for Bar Rita was rooted in the first half-dozen years of adulthood, when nobody had worried about scuffed black paint or cracked floor tiles.
They’d cared about being with their friends, and drinking beer or vino della casa with aperitivi of bruschetta and olives, nuts and crackers.
Bar Rita had been the hang-out after they’d left school.
Even those who – like Leo – had left Como, had headed for Bar Rita in time off from university or first jobs.