SARA ALEXANDER attended Hampstead School, went on to graduate from the University of Bristol, with a BA hons in Theatre, Film & TV. She followed on to complete her postgraduate diploma in acting from Drama Studio London. She has worked extensively in the theatre, film and television industries, including roles in much loved productions such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Doctor Who, and Franco Zeffirelli’s Sparrow. She is based in London.

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Sara Alexander 2018

Sara Alexander asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008273699

To Stefan, for planting the seed

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

POSITANO AMALFI COAST ITALY: 2005

1949

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

1976

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

POSITANO: 2005

READING GROUP GUIDE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Publisher

POSITANO AMALFI COAST ITALY

2005

I ought to be glad I can afford home help. The lady in question takes to my dishes with an Eastern European verve that never fails to convince me that, to her, cooking is punishment. What those blessed vegetables, reared by our own hands, might have done to her is beyond me. Her impatience is tangible, even from here on the upper terrazzo beyond the kitchen. I can smell it in the bitter aroma of parsley crushed with too heavy a hand and the acidic odor of almost singed garlic hitting the back of my throat. I’ve lost count of how many times I have pleaded with her to not massacre the pasta, that to feed a Neapolitan woman wet mush will find her in the dock for manslaughter. Bad food kills. It’s loneliness on a plate; dishes made without love are venom. I will not hear otherwise. She’s arguing with the pot now, the water is boiling too fast. It’s overflowed. At the three-minute mark as usual.

Not that my neighbors don’t jump at the chance to come and take tea of an afternoon – every day in fact, since I decided to terminate my treatment. They sit beside me, each one believing that they are my true confidante, the sole keeper of my darkest secrets. They think I don’t notice the way they take in the high ceilings above my terraces or the green mist that wafts across them as they survey the riches bestowed to me, Santina Guida, no more than a peasant from the hills. They think I don’t see them wonder how a street urchin ended her life in this palace. They picture their lives in this place after I’ve gone; I see it in the way their eyes linger on my lower garden terrazzo, in the masked longing as they drink in the view of the coast framed by the columns supporting the terraces above. The way their hands linger just a little too long upon the waxed furniture. There are those with complicated families, more worthy than I of this vast home, those who have struggled their entire lives just to place bread upon the table, the ones who have been there for me as I trawled through the endless paperwork after the Major died. Each and every one of them is worthy of this home – perhaps this is a truth. But whose truth? They think I’m tired because cancer is winning. But I am tired of doing what is right, just, expected – so very tired of that.

She and I eat the wallpaper paste disguised as linguine con zucchini. She didn’t drain the zucchini with salt then wring out the excess water beforehand and thinks I don’t notice. On the contrary, I simply choose not to point it out for the hundredth time. Even old women get sick of their own voices.

After coffee – I use the term with trepidation, I know few people partial to boiled water with the memory of flavor – she clears up and helps me get dressed. I’m wearing the dress the Major had made for me. It still fits. The pleasure of this simple thing has not evaporated. A little vanity is not wasted on the dying. I can see my skin is powder white. I still don’t recognize the whisper of a person in the mirror. I know that if I live only another few days or weeks or months, this afternoon will be the most important hours of my final days.

My lawyer Antonino is waiting for me. He’ll try to convince me to abandon my decision. He’ll blame the treatment, or lack of it, on my apparent sudden change of heart. He won’t know it is a decision I have not had the strength to make for years, a decision that has been eating away at my heart since it all began.

‘You’re quite sure, Signora Guida?’ Antonino asks, looking at me with condescending compassion over the rim of his glasses.

I flash him a winning smile. His eyes, even more patronizing, crinkle as if sunk into parchment.

‘Antonino, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for showing such an interest in my affairs.’ My sarcasm is so well disguised he will mistake it for genuine politeness; men like him always do. ‘But I assure you that I have not taken this decision lightly.’

He nods. He doesn’t believe me, that much is clear. I care little for his opinion, but I need to make sure that what he says he’s writing down is my request, not his. He turns the page around to me and hands me a heavy fountain pen – I can see where his greedy fees are spent. I sign below my name, trying to ignore the wash of memories swirling through my mind like droplets of black ink in water. He passes the document to my Eastern European nurse, who, as my witness, lays down her own scrawl. It is done.

We walk home slowly. I refuse a taxi. I’d like to stifle the presentiment that this is my last climb of those four hundred and forty steps back up to the villa from the shore. We stop beneath the Virgin Mary statue placed inside a carved-out arch in the rock, a little way past the string of boutiques off Via Cristoforo Colombo. Both the votive candle’s flame and I dance the precarious flicker between light and dark. Svetlana grips my arm a little tighter. She can feel my legs ever more unsteady. I nod when I’ve found my last reserves of strength.

Time was I sprinted these stone steps two at a time, like all respectable Positanese. I have no memory of breaking a sweat even, not like these camera-laden Americans who come to commit my town to over-exposed memory. Now I am old indeed, with memories charging back of my fishing village, a huddle of homes sparse along the shingle. The fishermen keeping us all afloat until the brutal winters would leave us cut off from neighboring towns. That world almost feels imagined now: the laundry house churning through washing with the water gushing down the streets to the sea, the mill in the center of town cranking the flour. The sea was the brutal legend of invaders, the undulating history of all those rampant Greek creatures who haunt the tiny islands off our coast. Capri was the ancient seat of cantankerous Roman emperors, not lined with expensive retreats and starlets. Yes, I really am very old now.

We reach the villa and I rest upon the large wicker chairs beneath the bloom of my beloved succulents. Here on my lower terrace I can view all my terracotta urns in each corner, with the fuchsia spray of geraniums above the trailing flora cascading down almost to the hand-painted tiles. I can admire the canopy of vines the Major and I tended with such care. I can entertain the folly of imagining crushing those grapes for one last vendemmia.

But the page urges me to conclude the business at hand. I sit at the Major’s desk in the library, surrounded by his beloved books, those unexpected swirling paths to other worlds, where he bade me follow. The memories of him poring over them each evening float to mind, windswept leaves on the cusp of winter. The hours he spent with me, leading me through these histories of great thinkers, explorers, artists, unfurling my mind like a succulent’s petals at sunset, basking in the nourishing glow of discovery, is the most precious gift he gave.

This will be the last note I write, all the others are already sealed.

By the time you read this I will be gone. I don’t write this to cast a morose or sentimental light upon my life. It is a fact like any other. You may feel sadness. You may not. You are entitled to feel whatsoever your heart dictates. Then again, I know you won’t need me to remind you of that.

Your new situation will come as a shock to you. I owe an explanation, at the very least – but a woman from the Amalfitani hills could never say it in one sentence alone, however hard she may try. We’re volcanic people first and foremost. Prepared for catastrophe at any moment, with a well of fervour ready to explode and annihilate those in its wake. Of this I am deeply proud, and I hope, some day, you will be too. I, sadly, am not a scribe, but I will tell the truth. And the person I need to know that truth, more than anyone, is you.

Your

Santina

1949

CHAPTER 1

Some days etch your soul. They leave scrawled scars of marrow-altering memory. Those days where you are tossed like a babe at sea, sensing the power and pull of that daunting watery mass threatening to obliterate. And despite the danger and the choking terror, you manage to wrench yourself towards the troubled sky and steal what little air you need to survive.

Tuesday, 15 November of 1949 was to be a good day. Winter had been kind to us so far. The snows hadn’t left us marooned. We had weathered the Germans and the Allies. We’d felt hunger and skimmed squalor by the meager amount my mother, brother and I could gain from our truffle-hunting up in the damp crevices of the Amalfi coast’s mountains.

Those mountain forests were my home. My mother was a goat; she leapt from stone to stone, fearless, focused and precise. I never once saw her slip, neither lose balance nor plant any seed of fear into my brother or I. We followed her lead, limber and lithe, racing against one another to see who might discover the most. My brother and I were cradled by the scent of damp moss since I can remember. That deep green under-foot carpeted our adventures. We took the view of our dramatic coastline for granted. From up here on our hills, we could see the lower mountains sharpen up and out of the cove of Positano with its viridian water. The tiny Sirenuse islands floated just beyond, haunted by those heartless sirens luring ancient Greek adventurers to their watery deaths. Further in the distance lay Capri, a tiny mound rising up from the water, like the scale of an under-water dragon.

Sometimes we would pass an intrepid party of travellers walking our narrow Path of the Gods, stopping to admire the view as the mountain range snaked into the hazy distance towards the Bay of Naples. Sometimes we might come across them sat upon the occasional grass clearing, a light picnic laid before them. The salty smell of prosciutto and fresh bread made our mouths water. Mother would mutter through gritted teeth to not stare like stray dogs.

We dodged the sharp crags that jutted through the living forest floor, competing to see who could be the fastest. Mother would let us stop and drink the icy mountain water as it cascaded down toward the coast. Whilst we knelt, numbing our hands and washing our faces, she taught us which mushrooms would kill us – I can’t shake the feeling that it was her peculiar way of imparting self-defense. Perhaps one day a venomous fungus would save me from a predator after all? Up in the Amalfi mountains the danger lurking in the dark was tangible to us hill folk. Its name was Hunger.

My father drank most of what we earned. I helped Ma with her laundry runs, watching her knuckles callus against the stone washer troughs in town. After the washing was done and delivered we would climb over a thousand steps back up from the fishing town of Positano to Nocelle, weaving our cobbled journey through Amalfitani woods toward the small fraction nestled in the hilly periphery, and from there begin our scramble to our tiny house. Arriving home we’d either find my brother huddled in a corner by a dying fire with my father nowhere to be seen, or the latter tight with drink. I knew I would be damned for thinking it, but I hated that man. I hated the scars he left my mother with. The heavy hand my brother and I were dealt for the smallest trifle. But most of all for the way my courageous mother, who spoke her mind to all the gossips by the well, who was first to put any man in his place who so much as dared look at her, was reduced to a quiver when my father was in one of his thunders. I ought to have brewed a fatal fungi broth for him and be done with it. Too late now.

That Tuesday – martedì – the sky was full of rancor, like the planet Mars it’s named after. The wind whipped from the sea and blew in a thick fog. Within minutes my mother was a grey silhouette. She slowed her pace a little, ahead of me. My shoes scuffed the damp boulders, dew seeping in through the tiny holes on the worn sole. Several times I lost my footing. Mother called back to us, ‘Santina! Marco! Stay where you are! It’s not safe today – we’ll turn back.’ We stopped, my little brother Marco a few paces behind me. I heard her footsteps approach, tip tapping with familiar confidence. Then there was a ricochet of small rocks. A cry. Marco and I froze to the sound of more rocks tumbling just beyond where I could see. We called out. I heard my mother call back to us.

The silence that followed drained the blood from my face. My heart pounded. I called again. Marco started to cry. I couldn’t hear my mother answer beyond his wails. I screamed at him to stop but it just made him worse. I had little strength to stifle my panic. My brother took a step toward me. He slipped and fell, hitting his elbow hard on the sharp edge of a rock. His blood oozed crimson onto the moss. I yanked him up and wrapped my headscarf around his elbow. ‘We’ll go home now,’ I began, trying to swallow my hot tears of terror. ‘I’ll come back for Mamma when the sun is out, si?’ He nodded back at me, both of us choosing to believe my promise, fat tears rolling down his little cheeks.

We never saw our mother again.

Father’s mourning consisted more of fretting about what to do with the incumbent children he had to feed, than grieving the loss of the fine woman who had fallen to her death. One day he declared that I was to go and live down by the shore in Positano with Signora Cavaldi, the widow now running her late husband’s produce store. In return for lodging and food I was to assist her. I felt torn; delirious with the prospect of escape from the misery of life on the mountainside with this man for a father, and terror at what life would now entail for Marco. The next day, an uncle from Nocelle climbed up to speak with my father. Marco would be needed to tend to his farm. The deal was sealed. We were dispatched to new parents. I try to forget the expression on Marco’s face as he was led away from me. He walked downhill, his reluctant hand in my uncle’s, ripping a piece out of me with each step. I patched over the gaping hole and the fresh wound of my mother’s death with brittle bravado. My father would not see me cry. I wished that would have been the last time I ever saw him too.

Signora Cavaldi’s shop was a cavern carved into the stubborn rock that enveloped the cove of Positano. She held a prime position between the mill and the laundry, minimizing competition. I now wonder whether that had more to do with her careful management of the town’s politics and politicians, or her not so secret connection with the men who protected the trade and tradesmen. I wouldn’t like to guess whom she paid or how much, or indeed how much others paid her, but my instinct tells me her tentacles stretched far and wide. I arrived wearing the only dress I owned, a smock of doleful grey, which matched my mood. She gave me the once-over and pieced together an opinion as deftly as she would calculate someone’s shopping bill. The woman was a wizard with numbers, that took me no time to figure out, but she loathed children.

‘You’re twelve now, Santina, si?’

‘Si, signora,’ I answered, trying to stop my left leg from shaking. It was an embarrassing habit since I had succumbed to polio as a younger child, and my withered calf always revealed too much about what I was feeling at any given time.

‘You’re here to work, yes? I’ll give you two days to learn what we do, and I expect to never repeat myself, capisce?’

‘Si, I understand, signora.’

She set me to work immediately, sorting the produce, laying out chestnuts in baskets, polishing the scales that grew dirty again with the weighing of earth-dusted mushrooms. I cleaned the vats of oil, swept and scrubbed the floor. As the sun dipped she called out for me to light the stove in the kitchen of the apartment upstairs and brew a broth for dinner. At first it struck me as a little out of my remit – I had been told that I would be served food in return for working, and I will admit the idea of having regular meals was exhilarating. However, my own cooking skills were not well honed – Mother and I permitted ourselves a full meal maybe once a week, and meat was scarce. I stood, hesitant, before the stove, in a strange kitchen, not knowing where anything might be kept. I was loath to search amongst her things. I went downstairs. She scolded me for lacking initiative: ‘Look around you, mountain girl! We have a shop, the best grocer’s in the town. I have a clean kitchen, which you will keep pristine, and I want, thanks be to God, for very little. Don’t let me see you down here until dinner is served.’ And with that she turned back toward the broccoli rabe, placing them in neat lines inside wooden crates ready for the following day.

I fought with several pans, finely chopped as many of the vegetables I could find that would not be good for selling the following day, dropped in a fist of barley, lentils and parsley, and, eventually, there was a broth that would fill our stomachs. A little thin perhaps, and lacking in salt, as Signora Cavaldi was so quick to point out, but it was hot and reminded me that I was not on the mountains any longer.

I slept in a thin cot placed in the short hallway between Signora’s room and her son Paolino’s. It was draughty but nothing like the limp damp of our stone mountain hut. I didn’t hear my father’s drunken snores – that was a degree toward comfort. Nor could I hear the soft breath of my mother, or feel Marco’s fidgety feet scrambling against mine through his dreams. Silent tears trickled down my face. I felt the droplets inside my ears. I let the wetness dry there, hoping my prayers and love would reach Marco up in Nocelle, a thin line of golden thread. After a time I must have given in to sleep because the next thing I remember is Cavaldi blowing down her nose at me with strips of sun fighting into the hallway from her room.

The days merged into one, each as laborious as the day before. I was sent on deliveries, some as heavy as would warrant a porter and his donkey, but Cavaldi would not hear of it; if I had been sent down for her to look after then it was my duty to earn my keep. I built quite a reputation amongst the porters in town, who ferried supplies up and down the steep alleys around the village. They called me Kid, alluding to my climbing skills as well as my age. It made me think of my mother. I was growing, at long last, and I noticed my muscles becoming more defined and strong. Sometimes the young boys would laugh at me for doing men’s jobs. The local women were not so kind. The Positanese knew mountain people when they saw them. We had the outside about us, the air of the wild, a fearlessness which I’m sure was disconcerting. We lived closer to death than they.

When I turned sixteen, Paolino, who till then had paid me as much attention and courtesy as one might their own shadow, began speaking to me. It started in the spring, as we placed the first harvest of citrus in the crates. I liked to arrange them in an attractive pile, but Cavaldi always admonished me for trying to make art not money. I had a large cedro in each hand, what Americans always mistook for grapefruit. He called out to me, ‘Watch how you hold those fruits, eh, Santina? You make a boy have bad thoughts!’ I looked at him, appalled, more for the fact that he had spoken directly to me than the inappropriate remark. I couldn’t find an answer. I longed for my mother right then, to whisper a fiery return, but none came. I was mute. I had been silenced for the past four years. The sudden realization stung. I considered lobbing the fruits at him but channelled a pretence of calm. My cheeks reddened, which I know he mistook for paltry modesty, or worse, encouragement, then I fled back into the shop.

I don’t know whether it was my nightly prayers, the incessant daydreams of life elsewhere, the relentless beckoning of my sea and its daily promise of potential escape, or the simple hand of fate, but three years later, on the afternoon of Friday, 25 May – venerdi, named after Venus, harbinger of love and tranquillity – two gentlemen entered my life and altered its course.

Mr Benn and Mr George were art dealers from London. They wore linen shirts in pastel shades, hid their eyes behind sunglasses and spoke without moving their mouths very much. Mr Benn was the smaller of the two and always held his head at a marginal incline, as if he were trying to hear a song passing on the breeze or decipher messages from the shape-shifting clouds above. Mr George was very tall and looked like he would do well to eat more pasta. His movements were slow and deliberate, his voice full of air. They admired the dancing shimmer of our emerald sea, the yellow of the mimosa tree outside Cavaldi’s store, and knew that cedro fruits were for making exquisite mostarda, a thick jelly sliced thin to accompany cheese. I was easily impressed in those days.

During their stay in Positano, they made daily trips to the store, and I was happy to serve them because they always stopped to stitch together a frayed conversation in their limited Italian. They tried to tell me a little about life in London, whilst touching every cherry before judging which ought to be included in their half kilo’s worth. Their words spun another world before me, crisp, colorful pictures of a life I craved. I listened as Mr Benn offered a steady commentary on what Mr George was well advised to buy. It was a wondrous thing for me to witness lives that could afford a month’s stay in a tiny Italian town. All sorts of fantasies seared my over-used imagination when I served them, underscored with a restlessness that pounded louder for each day I remained within Cavaldi’s prison-like walls.

Every morning they would stop by and ask what they ought to cook with the fresh zucchini, whether the flowers were better in risotto or fried? How long I’d char an eggplant for, and which olive oil would be best for sofritto – finely cut celery, onion and carrot – and which best for drizzling over finely chopped radicchio? I began to look forward to their visits, a beacon of beauty amidst the relentless purgatory of life with Cavaldi. The obvious pleasure they took in enjoying our food made me feel proud. Their enthusiasm about our tomatoes made me wonder whether us locals appreciated the miracle of our bounty, as well as what on earth London art dealers must eat throughout the year to make our simple groceries so compelling?

As we approached the end of June, I had shared most of the recipes I knew, and sometimes, part for folly, part for necessity – as my repertoire was running thin – I’d invent ideas on the spot, improvising appropriate vegetable pairings, hoping they might work in real life too. I remember them arriving at the store, and I prepared myself for a tour of the day’s deliveries. I’d been hatching a few ideas for light summery lunches that I had an inkling they’d enjoy, when they asked me something unrelated to anything we’d spoken about before: would I consider working for them in London in return for papers to America?

I will never forget that day. The way the sun bleached their white faces and lit up their pale yellow collars – they often wore the same shade. Their smiling faces are etched in my mind. Behind them, the ever-increasing surge of tourism strolled past the shop. I remember watching the crowd smudge into a sun-kissed blur, the feel of the cold, dark shop behind me, and that compelling stone path out of this town, away from this miserable life and the battleaxe for whom I would never be any more than a mountain-girl lackey. They must have known I would say yes before they’d even finished the invitation. Perhaps I ought to have asked more questions, known what would have been truly expected of me, but the craving for freedom, for air, was too powerful. I think if I’d been even bolder I might have thrown off my apron there and then and walked with them straight onto their ship from the Bay of Naples with nothing but my smock.

As it turned out, that was not so far from the truth. On 1 July 1956 I became part of the Neapolitan throng shuffling along the streets of London in search of gold.

CHAPTER 2

It took six weeks of the purgatorial British drizzle before I surrendered to my first bout of homesickness. At first, the terrifying otherness was the exhilaration of a splash of spring water on a hot day; the sounds of murmured clipped vowels; the way people’s hands stayed by their sides when they spoke. Young girls seemed to talk out the sides of their mouths, a string of incomprehensible sentences, each word looping onto the next, whirring out of what sounded like chewing gum-filled mouths. I wanted to be them. I wanted my hair pinned, curled and set. I wanted to walk down the street with my arm linked in my best friend’s, surefooted, heels that knew they belonged and where they were headed. But after just over a month of this giddy daydream, the stream of possible lives blurring before me offering heady futures just beyond my reach, reality hit. I had no one.

Mr Benn and Mr George had lost the laid-back sunshine swagger of their holiday. Back in North West London they had become different people. Or, rather, they had settled back into the lives they had paused. The gentlemen owned a large Georgian terraced home set a little way back from the main Heath Street that led into Hampstead. The bohemian suburb attracted a vibrant palette of artists, many of whom came to call at our house, each more peculiar than the previous. Mr Benn and Mr George ran an art gallery on one of the back streets behind Piccadilly. I navigated my way there on my first day off. I stood upon the wooden slats of the tube carriage of the Bakerloo line, turning in a pitiful performance of confidence. Truth was, I could barely read the map in time to work out which stop was mine, so thick was the tiny carriage of others’ cigarette smoke. It reminded me of my father.

When I did arrive I was too embarrassed to step inside. I remained on the pavement, ignoring the rain. I stared at the painting in the window. Giant swirls of yellow with flecks of turquoise stuck to the canvas in stubborn blobs. Angry spurts of red protested across the central spiral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Nothing before me could, in my opinion, be judged as art, yet the image was intimidating in the compelling way it hooked my gaze. The artist and frame had had a fight, and I couldn’t decide who had won.

I left the stalemate and found a tiny booth in the sweaty New Piccadilly Café, sandwiched between the Piccadilly Theatre and a number of salubrious shop fronts. It was hard to decipher the goods on offer, but I had a hunch it had a lot to do with the young women huddled nearby.

It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I had understood every word of what the proprietor had said to the waitress. Before I congratulated myself on my progress in English it dawned on me that the dialect I had tuned in to was Neapolitan.

‘Signori – you from the old country, si?’

I looked up at the man, unsure of what my answer ought to be. ‘Positano.’

‘I know a Napoletana when I see one!’

He scooted around the counter, leaving the blaze of short order cooks whipping up omelettes behind him.

‘You’re not long here, am I right, signorina?’

I had an inkling to suggest that I’d never met a Neapolitan man who ever thought he wasn’t right about anything, but thought better of it.

‘You working? Lavori?’

‘Yes,’ I began, realizing how much I’d cherished my anonymity until this interrogation, how the incessant Positanese prying was very much part of my past not present, ‘for two gentlemen. In Hampstead.’

His eyebrows raised and his head tilted.

‘Hey, Carla!’ he yelled over to the waitress zipping between tables with egg-smeared plates balanced just the right side of equilibrium. ‘This signorina is up with the Hampstead crowd! Not one gentleman! Two! Not bad for a fishing village girl, no?’

I was back on my narrow streets, gossip climbing cobbles. I took a breath to speak without knowing what I wanted to say. He quashed my indecision before I could. ‘Listen, if it doesn’t work out with the Lords up there, you call me, si? Wait – two men you say? Together in one house? Brothers?’

I shook my head. His eyebrows furrowed. I wasn’t convinced that he didn’t mutter something to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

‘I always have work for a paesan.’ I didn’t want to be a paesan. I wanted to be a Londoner. ‘This Soho,’ he continued, twiddling his fingers in the air like someone sprinkling Parmigiano, ‘this patch belongs to us Italiani. Out there we’re immigrants. But in Soho we help each other – capisce?’

I nodded, but I didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to.

I tried to let go of the vague sense that his approach was more of an offensive than a welcome. Wisdom, and scrawled number on limp paper imparted, he turned and walked across the café, waving sing-song arms at an English couple who were sat at another Formica booth, dipping their rectangular strips of toast into soft-boiled eggs. I took a final sip and left, all remnants of homesickness hanging in the sweaty tea-smudged air of that café.

My attic room is etched in my memory. It was clean and simple. My routine was described to me in great detail and it didn’t take me long to adjust to the gentlemen’s habits, which, it would seem, never altered independent of the day. To her credit, Signora Cavaldi’s terse grip had stood me in fine stead for London life.

I hadn’t meant to, nor planned to, but on my sixth visit to the police station the first cracks appeared. Small but prominent fissures. I was the tenth in line to have my Certificate of Registration stamped. I held it in my hand, trying to not let my nerves crease it too much. At the top was my number: 096818. And below the words: ALIENS ORDER 1956. Every other visit, I had felt like it would only be a matter of time until I would no longer be alien; I would belong, click into the puzzle, be that final missing piece. But that day, as the drizzle left a damp trail on my hair like half-dried tears, I felt the sting of being the outsider. It was the first time I’d noticed the sideways glances of the people going about their regular days. Or perhaps they had always looked at us like that. I was used to being alone, I told myself. Life here was a world better than the one I’d left behind. I almost convinced myself.

Autumn and winter trundled by, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Mr Benn and Mr George were not impressed by my work. There was nothing major I could pinpoint about the shift in our day to day lives. A wave of frustration drew in, a little snatched remark here, an almost imperceptible roll of the eye; the toast being over-done, under-done, too early, not early enough. The minutiae of small failures tripped into an impressive collection, the way insignificant disappointments ferment into resentment between lovers till they can no longer bear to be together but cannot define exactly what pressure has pushed them apart. All three of us knew that I would not be working there much longer.

One morning in early May, the bell rang of a Saturday afternoon, a surprising sun casting boastful rays across the black and white tiles of the wide hallway, as if it too had joined in to celebrate my imminent termination of employment. I knew it would be my final weekend here, and I would, against my better judgement, give the owner of New Piccadilly Café a call after all. I turned the latch and opened the door.

Upon the step stood a man and a woman. She had a mane of strawberry blonde locks cascading in defiant curls past her shoulders. They bounced over the deep purple of her full-length woollen cardigan. Her long red chiffon slip beneath danced on the spring breeze by her bare feet, slipped into simple roman sandals. His beard was a thing to behold, waves of thick blond tuft with streaks of red. A wide-brimmed leather hat perched on his head at an angle. His heavy leather boots stamped a few times upon the mat, scraping off imaginary snow or the memory of yet another wet day. At once they reminded me of the painting in the window. Only this splash of color and verve came with its very own halo surround, courtesy of the bitter white sun.

I noticed I was staring just before they did, and stepped aside to let them in. The woman flashed me a wide smile, flicked the hair off her face and removed her shoes, before floating into the front room where Mr Benn had insisted I light a fire. She wrapped her arms around him, and I pretended not to notice when she kissed him on the lips and sat on his knee. So did the gentleman who accompanied her. He, rather, shook Mr George’s hand, who then nodded for me to open the wine.

I filled four glasses with prosecco and handed them out. Mr Benn and Mr George carried on talking. The man and the woman thanked me. I returned to the tray and lifted the small bowl of nuts Mr Benn had asked me to prepare. As I placed them upon the low table before the fire the woman reached out her hand. ‘Santina, aren’t you?’

I nodded, wanting to avoid conversation.

‘Henry,’ she began, turning to the man who had accompanied her, ‘this is Santina, darling. Oh she’s a pip. You’re like a Mediterranean stroll in the sun – you know you’ve found a beauty, don’t you, boys?’

Mr Benn and Mr George smiled, one lip each.

‘Santina, it’s a pleasure,’ she continued, whilst I squirmed. ‘We’ve heard a great deal about you. How exquisite to have a slice of Positano right here in North West London. Henry, darling, it fills me with a great deal of hope. It’s like a ray of sun through the fog.’

‘That’ll be the morning sun actually doing what it’s compelled to do,’ he answered, ‘quite naturally.’

The woman rolled her eyes and jumped up from Mr Benn’s lap.

‘Quite right – I’m not thinking straight at all – thank God for that! Who’d live a life through logic’s narrow lens, for crying out loud?’

‘I’ll drink to that!’ cried Mr George, and the four of them stood and clinked.

‘Go easy with the wine, Adeline,’ replied Henry, who I assumed was her husband. Though in this house, when guests appeared, it wasn’t always clear who belonged to whom. The boundaries I had become accustomed to back home were the suffused haze after a spring shower.

The woman’s hand slipped down to her abdomen. ‘Good heavens, I almost forgot! Yes, we’ve got some marvellous news, haven’t we?’

‘Indeed,’ Henry replied, catching my eye as he did so.

‘I shall be creating more than paintings this year, gentlemen!’ she cried, flinging her arms up at such a speed that she almost lost half the contents of her glass onto the Persian rug under-foot. ‘I am now producing humans also!’

It was hard to follow the conversation with accuracy, especially since I hadn’t been allowed into or out of it. I could understand that the willowy figure before me was pregnant. As she stood up it became so obvious that I wondered how I hadn’t noticed before.

‘Congratulations, Mr and Mrs Crabtree!’ cried Mr George.

‘That’ll be all, Santina,’ Mr Benn said, with an unnecessary hand wave, adding to all the other spoken and unspoken gestures tracing my paper-cut scars.

I shut the door behind me and went upstairs to pack.

The next morning Mr Benn and Mr George called me to the back parlor. I found Mr Benn by his grand piano, looking out toward the glass doors that led to their garden. He was puffing on a thin cigar. The smoke reached me in sorrowful swirls.

‘Santina, my dear. It will come as somewhat of a surprise, to me more than anyone, that we can no longer offer you employment.’

I gave a mute nod, unsure whether to express regret or surprise. Neither surfaced as it happened.

‘However, there are others in our circle who are more than willing to welcome you into their home and have you offer the tireless support you have given us, up till now.’

I glanced over at Mr George, but he was looking off toward an invisible horizon behind me.

‘Mr and Mrs Crabtree are keen for you to start with them right away. The Major, for that is how you must address him from now on, has assured me that he will, like us, arrange your papers for America after your first year.’

He left a pause here, which I knew he expected me to fill with grateful acceptance. I was happy that we were parting company with relative grace. Or, if not grace, at the very least that smooth veneer of some such, which I had intuited was an impeccable British habit. That evening they walked me down the hill toward the heart of Hampstead village to my new home.

Adeline and the Major’s house snuck into a slice of land between larger old brick homes at the convergence of two narrow lanes. Its layout was more warren than house, with low-ceilinged rooms leading onto one another in a maze of unexpected connections. Tudor beams hung crooked with age. Persian rugs overlapped one another in most of the rooms. A huge hearth stood in the main living room flanked by two sofas of different shades of velveteen violet. There were masks upon the wall, Indian gods and goddesses forever mid-chase, flaunting their half-clothed bodies or leering at the spectator. I’m ashamed to admit that I avoided looking at the one which hung by my bedroom door, so full were its wooden carved eyes of malice. Its pupils were painted red and black, and hair hung in sad curls, almost touching the wooden floorboards below.

At the far end of the house, squeezed in along one length of the courtyard garden, was Adeline’s studio. Small glass panes lined the upper section along the entirety of one side, letting in shafts of light from over the garden wall, which backed onto Christchurch Hill. The roof was formed of skylights, bathing the anarchic space in a wash of light. Several easels flanked the space, with unfinished canvases upon them, bright with moments of intense inspiration or drying paint. The floor was speckled with memories of Adeline’s expressive explosions. Even in her condition, she would hide away for days at a time, refusing food and rest. It frustrated the Major a great deal, but I suspected that her artistic endeavors overtook both their lives with a ferocity neither could tame nor understand, both succumbing to its seduction with varying degrees of resistance.

Adeline acquiesced to her imagination with abandon. I caught her once, as I headed to the Major in his study with a laden tray, through the gap between the open door and the frame. She was barefoot, which was not surprising; her feet reacted to any covering as an affront to their liberty. Her white smock hung creased about her, the growing roundness of abdomen catching the light as she swayed, a plump moon. Her fingers were splattered and quick, letting the brush lead them in muscular strokes. But it was her face that captured my attention. Her eyes were bright, the auburn flecks crisscrossing the blue even more visible in this light; shards of intense concentration. Her head was cocked to the side. If I didn’t know better, I would have said she were listening to something, music perhaps, a voice even. I was spying on an intimate conversation. My eyes drifted to the canvas. I would have recognized that spiral anywhere. This was the artist whose work had captured my attention all those months ago in Mr Benn’s gallery. It was beautiful. Bristles of guilt iced up my arm. I headed on to the study.

The Major’s hideaway smelled like the rest of the house, a compost of dusty books, sandalwood incense and fresh flowers. He tamed the roses in their garden with intricate care and took cuttings most mornings when they were in full scent. A huge grandfather clock etched us toward the future in somber swings. His desk faced the large sash window, each framed pane offering a concise version of his beloved garden. Books lined the walls on heavy carved mahogany shelves. Stacks mushroomed in each corner, a literary metropolis. Upon the tired green leather top was a correspondence organizer which never seemed to empty, and beside this, his pot of ink, into which he dipped between sentences as his pen scratched along his fine paper. I had gleaned that his time in the army had come to an enforced end and his hours spent in his room related to investment work of some sort. Adeline had rambled through their brief history, but she skated details and my English didn’t equip me to understand all I needed to. She also painted her own background with broad brushstrokes, a snipe at the end of sentences about her estranged family whose aristocratic wealth and abundance stood in stark contrast to the contempt they held for the artistic life she had chosen, even if the Major was able to almost keep her in the manner they expected.

I stood for a moment before the clatter of the tray made him turn to me.

‘Sorry, Major – I do not disturb you? Here’s your four o’clock tea as you asked.’

‘Ah yes, grazie, Santina.’

He whipped straight back to his writing. The smoky steam swirled up from the narrow silver spout.

‘Lapsang souchong, yes? You remembered?’ he asked without taking his eyes off his letter.

‘Yes,’ I answered, wondering how he could drink something that smelled like a bonfire.

‘That’ll be all.’

I left and closed the heavy squat door behind me.

The remaining months of Adeline’s pregnancy ripened throughout the summer. As the days lengthened so did her energy. Several times I’d walk past the studio door, finishing up my chores of the evening, only to notice the lights still on and the soft smudge of a brush dipping into paint and caressing the canvas. I’d listen to the quickening strokes, wondering whether this infinite burst of energy was healthy. The next morning – I think she can’t have slept more than a handful of hours – she declared that we were to visit the ladies pond in the heath. I almost dropped her egg as she did so. Then I caught the Major’s eyebrow rise up and lower over the top of the newspaper.

‘Henry, don’t be tiresome. Now is the time to listen to my body. I’m listening. You’d do well to do the same. It needs water. A great deal of it. This morning.’

He let out a sigh. The corner of his paper flickered on the last whispered trace of it. I placed a silver rack of fresh toast at the center of their breakfast table and, as usual, pretended not to hear very much at all.

‘Adeline – you’re the size of a modest whale. What on earth do you hope to achieve by thrashing around in freezing waters in this condition?’

I scooped another spoon of marmalade into a small ramekin and set it beside the toast, spreading the sounds of their conversation into a distant periphery.

As I reached the door I heard my name and spun back toward them.

‘That’s settled then, yes, Santina?’

‘Pardon, Major?’

‘What I just said.’

He hated to repeat himself. I hated asking him to.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.’

Another sigh. Deeper this time. He flopped his napkin beside his plate.

‘After breakfast you’re to accompany my bride to the pond. If she will not be convinced to avoid the icy bathing, then so be it. If you are there you may offer assistance should she need it.’

I skipped through most of the key words as he spoke, but the thought of me standing at the water’s edge in charge of a heavily pregnant artist, who, to my mind, had never done a thing that anyone had ever insisted of her, sent cold trickles of fear down my neck.

I nodded, of course.

Adeline charged through the forest with long strides, ducking under low hanging branches, swinging her long limbs over stony patches. Her leather satchel lifted with each step, her towel draped over one shoulder, percussing her steps with a nonchalant swing. Meanwhile, I rambled behind her, walking eight steps to her three, tripping over unexpected stones, holes, muddy patches. I hated the feeling of being a stranger amongst this lush green. It reminded me of trekking light-footed amongst the mountainous wilderness of home. That was another life now. A twang of sorrow tugged. I ripped my attention away from the memories, feeling the prick of their thorns but tearing away, just as Adeline did with every bramble catch of her towel. The paths inched in again and led to a wooden gate. Adeline creaked it open and we followed the stony ridge. I could make out a jetty just beyond several oaks. As we turned, the glassy water opened up before us, shafts of morning light streaking through the branches of the trees that surrounded it. The bottle-green water lay still, save for tiny ripples left from itinerant dragonflies. The reflections of the surrounding leaves dappled the surface with forest greens, ochre, sienna and emerald, all crafted with exquisite perfection as in the hands of a skilled oil painter. I noticed I couldn’t move.

‘Yes, Santina – it is simply breathtaking. My very happy place. Come on!’

And with that, she reached down to the bottom of her shift and with one lithe movement lifted it clear off her body. She placed her hands on her naked hips. I wished my eyes weren’t settling on her breasts, paper-thin porcelain streaked with threads of blue, ready to nourish. In the last few days I had noticed her pregnant belly drop toward her pelvis. I knew her time was soon. Spidery thin pink lines streaked out from her belly button.

‘Have you ever seen a naked pregnant woman, Santina?’

I shook my head, feeling the heat of embarrassment color my cheeks.

‘Isn’t it wonderful and ghastly?’

I wished some words would come to my rescue rather than this mute stupidity.

‘That’s why I must simply come here today. If I feel any heavier I may never walk again. It is a horrid feeling. And amazing of course. Henry felt it kick last night. The little monster churned across my entire belly. I saw an elbow, I think.’

She spun toward the water, reached the end of the jetty, stepped off and disappeared. I’d like to think I didn’t hold my breath. I looked around for other bathers but none were to be found. I counted the seconds till she resurfaced, my chest tightening. Then her head rose with a spray of water. I sat down upon the jetty and watched her head bob over and under the green ripples, pretending that it didn’t look like the perfect thing I should like to be doing at this very moment.

A week later the baby came: small, pink and loud. Perhaps I was the only one who noticed Adeline not sleeping for those first three days. No one else seemed to pay any mind to her manic delight. The Major was transfixed with the babe. The midwife was cool and brusque. Adeline was a woman possessed with a frantic happiness. It made me feel uneasy. I watched her hold the tiny baby to her bare breast, sometimes not noticing when her nipple fell out of the babe’s mouth, or the wails as she flailed to re-attach. I heard the cries through the night. I wasn’t convinced they were those of a mother adjusting to her new reality.

On the fourth day we awoke to an almighty crash. I ran to my window. Down in the garden I saw that the roof of the Major’s beloved greenhouse had collapsed. Jagged panes were strewn around a body.

It was Adeline’s.

CHAPTER 3

I watched the Major follow the ambulance crew out of the house. He shot me a fleeting glance as he left. I mustered a nod that I hoped would reassure him Elizabeth was in good hands. New End Hospital emergency department was only a few streets away, and that was some comfort. The door closed behind him. I held the screeching baby closer to my chest. I’d never felt quite so alone.

Elizabeth wailed into my ear as I carried her down the darkened hallway toward the nursery. I found several glass bottles in a neat line upon the wooden dresser, left by the midwife earlier. I cared little for that woman, but now her disinfected approach to infants was the one thing that would carry me through the night with the child.

I laid Elizabeth into her cot. She protested, jerking her limbs with deepening cries, leaving intermittent gaps between wails where her breath filled those tiny lungs before the next blast for survival. I filled a glass bottle with the contents of one of the prepared cans, picked her up and looked at her tiny red face, contorted with anguish. I sat upon the nursing chair by the window and cradled her. She clamped her lips around the bottle’s teat and her cries gave way to the brittle silence of the house.

I tried to focus on the peace that washed over her tiny face, the dewy hair covering her cheeks that reminded me of the ripe peaches of my Amalfitani summers. For a moment the terror of the past hour faded. She gave into a milky sleep. I sat there for some time feeling the flutter of her heart gallop against my belly. I didn’t notice I was crying at first. Then I saw the itinerant droplets blot the muslin cloth covering her with little damp circles. I stood up and placed the bundle back into her cot. She stirred as she left the warmth of my arms but slipped back into her quiet as my hand smoothed away from under her. I watched her chest rise and fall, fitful and erratic. I’m not sure how long I stood there, making sure she was breathing, even if I knew my gaze alone would never ensure her survival. The brief escape from the image of Adeline’s crumpled face floating back into my mind was short-lived.

The minutes after her fall were already a blur. A flurry of panic, glass, blood. When we first reached her I was sure she was already dead. As the Major touched her, though, she let out a groan, her eyes rolling in her head. I couldn’t have hoped to sail through the shock as he did. I followed his every instruction, holding Adeline’s hand and doing my best to keep her conscious whilst he called for help.

Now, in the disquiet, my mind churned, longing for yesterday. Wishing there would have been some way to prevent this. Berating myself for not having the courage to alert the Major or midwife to Adeline’s erratic behavior. It was not my place. Now everything felt unsure. I was stood on floating ice watching small pieces break off around me.

I pulled the nursing chair close to the cot. Stripes of moonlight cut through the square panes. Shadows crept through the house as it creaked into the night. Every woody sound pierced my fretful sleep. Each time Elizabeth took in several snatched breaths in a row, I awoke. I wrapped her tiny fingers in mine. That night I dreamed of my mother. The newborn and I both woke up crying.

The next few weeks snaked on between shards of silence. The Major left promptly every morning after breakfast to visit Adeline, returned for a light lunch, retired to his study, then bedroom soon after.

One morning he stayed at the breakfast table longer than usual. I cleared his plate. When I closed the door behind me I heard him cry for the first time. I stood with my back against the old wood, listening for longer than I needed to. I waited, not knowing why. He did not call me, of course. I cleaned the deep ceramic sink more than I needed. I took a moment to polish the window ledge above it and take in the garden, the roofless glasshouse and its bare skeletal rusting frame. Below, the Major’s beloved tomatoes hung plump with fruit, oblivious to the tragedy that had crashed around them. I returned to the dining room to clear the rest of the dishes.

‘Santina?’ His voice was thin.

‘Yes, Major?’

He looked me in the eye. I don’t think he’d done so since that night.

‘I’m very grateful for your help at this time.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘This is a temporary arrangement, of course. You understand. Adeline will be returning home in a few nights.’

‘Yes, Major.’

‘I will require your extra assistance during the transition. I will, of course, reimburse you fairly.’

My brow furrowed before I could stop it.

‘I need more help from you,’ he clarified. ‘More than your usual jobs.’

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘of course.’

‘Thank you.’

He took a deeper breath. I felt like he wanted to say something more.

‘That is all for now.’

I returned to the kitchen. He disappeared back into his solitary world.

Adeline returned a translucent shell. Her eyes were misty grey pools. I pretended not to notice the way her feet searched the floor, unsteady, someone trying to balance upon a moving ship. Her skin hung from her cheekbones like a fading memory. The Major wrapped his arm around her and led her to the guest bedroom, which he had overseen the nurses set up for hours before she came home, until it resembled a hospital room. A metal trolley stood by the window lined with paper and a small drugstore of medicinal vials and bottles. Crisp linen towels towered upon the dresser.

A regular stream of doctors passed through the house for the next week. It was impossible to not overhear their conversations with the Major because each ended in the same heated manner, with the latter crying out for the medical men to leave. The strain spread over the Major’s face like a drought. One morning, the more patient of the doctors sat beside him at the breakfast table.

‘Henry, you must listen to our advice. Adeline will not improve. Not for a very long time. If at all. This is not an episode of hysteria. She is experiencing the trauma of postpartum psychosis. You can’t just brush this off. The way you’re behaving, it’s like Adeline’s broken her leg and you’re hoping a sticking plaster will do the trick.’

The Major took a long breath.

‘What you’re doing is cruel,’ the doctor added.

‘What I’m doing is commonly known as a basic respect for humanity! This is the woman I love! You will not experiment on her, do you hear me?’ the Major yelled. ‘How can I possibly expect any of you to understand that? We have been through this again and again—’

‘And each blessed time I pray to God you’ll heed my advice. You have a peculiar respect and contempt for my professional opinion.’

The Major wiped his mouth and flung his napkin onto the table.

‘Henry,’ the doctor began, in a familiar tone, which made me think this was more than a professional relationship, ‘if you insist on caring for her yourself, then at the very least take her somewhere she can find peace. Somewhere with a temperate climate. Sea air perhaps? Somewhere she can live housebound but with some semblance of tranquillity – which, in my learned opinion, would be with us in an institution in Epsom, especially equipped for women suffering from bad nerves. You are not able to deal with this alone. You and I know this more than anyone else.’

‘James, I’ve listened to what you have to say. My wife will not be committed. She is sick, yes, but she need not be incarcerated. She’s my wife, for heaven’s sake!’ The Major rose to his feet, slamming the table as he did so.

The doctor rose to meet him. ‘We both want what’s best. I will do everything I can to support you, Henry, but it will not be easy.’

The Major nodded. His gaze bore into his hands.

‘I’ll give you a few days to think – then you’ll tell me what you’ve decided.’

I opened the door for the doctor. ‘That’s quite all right, I’ll see myself out, thank you.’

I heard the door close as I scraped the last few crumbs off the tablecloth. Adeline cried out. The Major reached the stairs before I.

‘I’ll go, Santina, you finish here.’

The next few nights bent into a fragile routine. The Major rose with Adeline, calmed her out of her night terrors, soothed the screams that tore me out of my own restless sleep, whilst I cradled her mewling baby, watching her mold into my arms as I fed her, then lulling her to sleep with swaying. Each feed bought me time to gaze at that tiny face, noticing the minuscule changes to the small pink mounds of her cheeks, an extra tuft of downy hair along her hairline, a second or two more of keeping her shiny slate eyes open. This temporary peace softened the house, till the next bout of unsettled cries of mother or daughter reverberated, all the louder for the deafening quiet that encased us. Sometimes Elizabeth would rip Adeline out of her rest and make her shake with panic. Other nights Adeline wouldn’t sleep at all, but insist on wandering the halls, or walk up and down the stairs in continuous motion.

The final night before the doctor returned to hear of Henry’s decision we found Adeline scrawling all over the walls. The pencil raced across the plaster, scrambling outpourings. The next day, as I tried my best to wash all the markings off, I read her stream of panic. She wrote about loving Elizabeth, of wanting to love her, of not being mad. The writing was jagged, void of punctuation. Reading her words in the cold light of day was more terrifying than watching the Major try to tear her away from it in the dead of night, as she screeched at him to not set one finger upon her body or she would kill him. When the doctor arrived, the Major was still asleep. I led him to the front room to wait.

‘How was the night, Santina?’ the doctor asked, catching me a little off guard.

‘I’m not sure,’ I lied, trying not to think about the red circles around Adeline’s eyes, or the withering panic the Major tried to bury from me as he wrestled her back to bed.

‘How is Elizabeth?’

‘Hungry mostly,’ I replied. My mind spun down the hall to the warmth of the kitchen where she slept in her rattan basket. I could sense she would wake soon to be fed. I would sit by the fire and the world would slip away, replaced by Elizabeth’s rhythmic suckling and an imperceptible smile I thought I could read in the peaceful slant of her closed eyes; the rise and fall of her swallows like wordless thanks.

The doctor smiled. I nodded and left the room.

After a while the Major came down. I placed a tray of tea between them and poured, wishing the uncertainty of the household would swirl up into thin air like the Earl Grey steam.

‘And that’s your final decision then, Henry?’

‘I don’t change my mind, James, you know me better than that.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’

‘Thank you, Santina – that will be all.’

I left the men, feeling like my life in London was once again an unchartered course, headed for the rocks.

That afternoon, whilst Adeline was sleeping, the Major called me into his study. Something about the usual considered chaos felt jagged today. A few more books left half opened, reams of abandoned words searching for their lost reader. Time had frayed since that night, forever an unfinished paragraph.

‘Santina, I must tell you something.’

My stomach tightened.

‘I have decided my family must move away.’

Memories of the New Piccadilly Café flickered before me, darker and sweatier than I remembered it. I nodded, furious about the tears clamping my throat.

‘I would dearly like you to come with us,’ he said, straightening.

Some hope after all, perhaps.

‘It is a big move. A different country in fact.’

My body refused to offer any reaction. I stood mute, looking as stupid as I felt.

‘Italy. I intend to return to the one town that has left the deepest impression on me since I first set foot there.’

I held the expectant silence.

‘Positano.’

He read my face quicker than I could recover my expression.

‘Yes, it is most likely a ridiculous shock to you, and I would understand entirely if it was the very place you would have no interest in returning to.’

Any town on the globe but my own. He was rolling back the carpet to his city, hooking me back into the place I’d longed to leave like no other. My heart curled into a tight fist.

‘I am under no illusion that the very reason you came to this city was as a gateway to America. Now, whilst I’m in no position to influence you, I must express that your help has been invaluable the last month. I should like to extend your time with us by one year, and, whatever the situation at that point, I will, of course, honor my promise to arrange your papers for America. As planned. I don’t need an answer today, of course. Tomorrow will be fine.’

He turned back to his desk. I nodded and left.

The click of the lock felt like I was shutting much more than a door behind me.

I tied a scarf around my head and left the house. My legs began marching downhill along Willow Road. I stormed past The White Bear, giving a perfunctory nod to the locals resting upon the wooden benches outside. I didn’t take the time to enjoy the Edwardian terraces this time, or the cluster of powdery colored homes, or the line stretching a little way down Flask Walk from the public baths where the poor families from the cottages on Streatley Place would take their weekly cleanse. Thoughts ricocheted in my mind, colliding for attention and answers. How on earth could I return home? It would be like an unfinished adventure, fleeing the dream that had brought me this far. I had become the third strand in the plait of this family’s drama. Perhaps it was the broken nights, the constant strain of having to cope with Adeline’s reliving of terrors only she could see, but I felt a sudden wave of claustrophobia followed by a great weight of tiredness, the like I hadn’t felt since my mother died.

I crossed East Heath Road and found Adeline’s muddy path toward the ponds. The mixed pond was in view now, intrepid swimmers gliding through the glassy green sending ripples across the surface. I was that net of duck weed, feeling the involuntary undulations rock me this way and that. The trees grew thicker and the trail wound deeper into the trees, narrowing through elder and yew. The trodden leafy paths were still cooked with summer, only the yellowing tinge to the tips of occasional leaves hinting at the relentless promise of autumn. What was the sense in defying the inevitable change? Would starting a new London life alone be surrendering to the diverted path or resisting it? Was this the freedom I’d been charmed by? An unknown world, unencumbered by family dramas, a newborn’s demands? Now might be the very crossroads I needed to find the courage to start again.

I bent down under a low-lying branch and sank onto a fallen trunk. For a moment my mind drew a misty silence. I heard the birds celebrate high up in the trees above me. Straws of light shafted onto my feet. I let the damp sunny air cocoon my restless mind. Could I admit to myself that I had fallen in love with someone else’s child? That in the month-long care of this helpless human I had been consumed by the desire that she survive? That the first time her eyes focused on mine I was filled with the thrill of being the first human she had connected with? That the helplessness I felt in the face of Adeline’s catastrophic decline was ploughed into making sure this motherless child was cared for? That I loved her on behalf of the Major, who I could see found it all too painful to express his feelings toward the tiny babe? Selfish perhaps, this decadent desire to save.

I was no one’s savior.

I was the help.

A month or two of going beyond my remit of service would not make me part of their family. And yet, if I could keep my head down for another year then true freedom would be mine. Giving a little more of myself to this tiny child would be a small sacrifice for what I would receive in return. I could survive one more year of gazing into those tiny eyes, each day opening wider, each day seeing the world smudge toward focus. Would I deny myself that unquestioning delight as when our eyes locked for the first time? For the mere second or two whilst it lasted, she saw me. Not Santina Guida, the help. Not someone’s abandoned daughter. The flicker of infinity that sparkled there moved me. A bright silence ignited that fleeting but unflinching gaze, a promise of renewal – where one dream dies, another, by necessity, is born.

What was a year in Positano compared to a lifetime in the New World?

CHAPTER 4

On 2 October 1957 I accompanied the Crabtrees upon the Blue Star Line ship on a return to the Bay of Naples. I was a month shy of my twentieth birthday. The crystalline turquoise of my coast was not the salve I longed for after the relentless sea voyage. The water drew me back to the place I’d fought to escape for so much of my life; I was a hapless swimmer defeated by the undertow.

The Major and I had shared pitiful snatched sleep between us. Adeline received tranquilizing medication throughout the crossing from southern France, administered with precision by the Major, which, to our relief, appeared to have more effect than in London. It kept her frenetic outbursts at bay and dipped her into the waking sleep to which she had become accustomed. At least in this state the Major was able to keep her relaxed, or some appearance of such. He even managed to bring her out onto deck a couple of times for fresh air, though it wasn’t long before the amount of people unsettled her, and the Major was quick to retire back to their cabin before the situation grew out of hand.

My job was to stay with Elizabeth at all times. It would be an understatement to say I was nervous at the prospect. I had no experience of looking after a small child, let alone at sea, where the unpredictability of travel felt all the more dangerous. I tried to reassure myself that there were always doctors on board, and, most likely, experienced mothers who might help should I need it. I worked myself into such a silent state of panic that when Elizabeth was relaxed and slept the best she had since birth, it came as a great wave of relief. She adored the fresh air on deck, the hundreds of strange faces. Her tiny head twisted this way and that, trying to gather the details of everything around her, the different smells, sounds, and the musical soup of languages.

Some people passed me and flashed sympathetic smiles, thinking I was her mother perhaps. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling a prickle of pride as they did so. And though she was not my own, each time I lifted her close to me, and described in detail all the things around us, the girl became ever more a part of me, in spite of the sting of defeat that curdled in my stomach as we approached land.

The Blue Star Line ship eased into the wide bay. Shipping offices crowded the port. From the deck on this bright day I could see far into the bustling city, a mystical warren that was still a foreign land to me, and to the right, rising ancient and proud, the purple silhouette of Vesuvius. The wind caught the new tufts of Elizabeth’s strawberry blonde hair, her eyes blinked away the tears left by the sea breeze. My eyes glistened too as I pretended I didn’t feel like I was sinking back into my old life, retreating toward a familiar town at once unknown. Positano with an unpredictable Adeline would not be the town I left. Working for a family that might terminate my contract sooner than planned, like Mr Benn and Mr George had, would leave me more vulnerable than when I’d first fled. I wiped away my tears and with it smudged my roiling thoughts into silence.

The Major helped Adeline down the gangway, a patient arm hooked around hers, following her tentative lead. If she began to tense, he would stop, take her hand in his and kiss it gently, murmuring something in her ear that always seemed to soothe. I thought about all those nights I’d heard him with her. Once, I had been feeding Elizabeth in the nursery, and could hear him read poetry to Adeline until she relinquished to sleep. Those nights it seemed that his care was having great effect, for a day or two afterwards she would show small flickers of her old self, but then night would fall and the wakings and railings would flare up again. The doctors had repeated their insistent requests to place Adeline in an institution, to reinstate shock therapy, to treat her psychotic episode with the internment it required. He would hear none of it. One doctor had even suggested that the Major put up Elizabeth for adoption in the circumstances. That night I had seen the extent of the Major’s temper. I hoped I never would again.

All the images of the past fitful months floated into my periphery with each step along the sun-dipped gangway. After we shuffled through customs with the throng we were at long last welcomed by our taxi. The Major insisted I sit in the front seat with Elizabeth so that he could stay beside Adeline in the back. I saw her turn to him. A whisper of a smile skimmed her lips. His hand squeezed hers a little tighter.

Our road snaked through the cacophony of the port, the sea of visitors embarking on their voyages. We were at a convergence of conflicting shoals swimming toward new lives, some fleeing, others, like me, returning. How many of them felt like their homeland was a strange new world? Little by little the crowds gave way to the hills I hadn’t admitted I’d missed. We climbed toward the southern tip, curving in and out of the landscape till Sorrento opened up below us, clusters of pink, pale yellow and spring blue homes rising from the grey stony cliffs, the Tyrrhenian turquoise limpid in the fattening midday sun.

Onward we drove, a sleepy Elizabeth lulled into dreams by the engine, as we began the climb toward the narrowing coastal road. The vineyards plump with purple fruit crawled up and down the hillsides beside us, the lemon trees stretched out their branches to the sun, each fruit a burst of yellow in the golden light. Another sharp turn and the coast opened up to us, defiant rocks to our left rising from deep in the cerulean water beneath. The view of my mountains unfolded like a concertina picture book with each new bend, till the entire range was in view, each further grand cliff edge painted a lighter shade of grey in the blanching sun, and beside it a mineral-green sea. Here we were circling its edge, tiny people in a metal box, carving through, inconsequential, at its mercy. My home hadn’t missed me.

The driver took a final bend. The cluster of Positano revealed itself. The houses were more colorful than I had remembered, clutching the cliff face like a scatter of shells left by the lingua di mare as we called it, the tongue of the sea, which sometimes even reached the stradone, our main street, especially during the winter storms. My mind raced up my hills: perhaps my brother was somewhere amongst them still? Perhaps returning offered me more than the failure of my new life? Perhaps recoiling into this past was a chance to find some peace within it?

The car pulled to a standstill at the foot of the Via Guglielmo Marconi. The ascent to our new home would be on foot up the staggered steps and narrow walkways. Several porters poised at the start of the stairs, two of them with donkeys saddled with empty baskets ready to carry our luggage. When Adeline saw the animals she reached out her hand, but the Major slipped his in hers before she could touch any of them. We climbed, silenced by our weariness and anticipation. The Major’s steps were assured. It felt like he had been living here some time already.

The alley narrowed, and a tired Elizabeth began a hungry rouse. We passed on behind several large villas, bougainvillea trailing down toward the cobbles, a smattering of twisted paper garlands of purple and fuchsia meeting the sandy stone below, snaking succulents twisting along the boundary garden walls toward the light, gnarled wisteria branches creeping along the backs of the houses. The dusty air was toasted from the warmth of the day, stony and infused with the whisper of drying pine. The alley dipped now and passed under an archway, curved round toward more steps and a second relentless incline. Our footsteps ricocheted against those thick back walls of the neighboring villas flanking the cobbles. At last we reached the final dozen steps, uneven with age and passage. At the top loomed the cathedral doors of the Crabtrees’ new home. The Major wrapped an arm around Adeline as her eyes widened to the sea view spreading out beneath us, blotting into the hazy horizon beyond Capri. Even Elizabeth quietened her hungry wails for a brief moment. We stood still, we four weary travellers, the sounds of the donkeys carrying our loads approaching with steady clops along the stony incline behind us.

The Major rang the bell. We waited. One of the two enormous doors opened.

‘Buon giorno, signore,’ said a woman, stepping back to welcome us.

‘Grazie,’ he replied, hooking his arm into Adeline’s and ushering her inside without hurry. A long terrace stretched out before us. At the far end there was a stone well, by the looks of it an original feature of the house. At no stage of the preparations had the Major described the majesty of the home he had chosen, and I certainly had no intention of prying. Now I found myself within the walls of the baroque merchant villa that I had admired from the shore as I daydreamed my life beyond Positano. When I had escaped the beady eyes of Signora Cavaldi, just long enough to take a moment along the screaming shore of fishermen, hard at work sorting their catch, dyeing their nets, the air heavy with pine bark as they dipped their loads into the vats to color them, this was the pink house I had looked up at. I’d filled in the gaps of its fairytale history, played out unlikely endings of its inhabitants now lost to our shipwrecked history as a kingdom when Amalfi was bright with mercantile riches.

I felt my leg shake a little. I walked toward the well, noticing the huge terracotta urns in each corner of the terrace. I pointed up to the heavy wooden-beamed ceiling above, but Elizabeth was intent on being fed. I think we all were.

‘Santina, please take Elizabeth into one of the rooms. I will deal with the porters.’

I nodded as I did so, catching sight of Adeline resting in one of the lounge chairs facing the sea. The columns on either side of the lookout framed the deepening blue of the sea like a painting. The water was serene and from that view it felt as if you could trace your fingers along it just beyond the stone balustrade.

The cool dark of the rooms inside silenced Elizabeth for a moment. I looked around and saw a divan in one corner where I could lay her down whilst I prepared a bottle. She stretched her small body, creased with travel. I wondered if she could see the magnificent Rococo painted decoration above her, great swirls of red, yellow and blue upon the wooden beams. Bottle in hand I raised her onto my lap and she suckled with eagerness. It was stony quiet but for the soft swallows of the child.

A large wooden dining table was at one end of the room, surrounded by six high-backed green velvet upholstered chairs. A heavy mahogany dresser was beside it. The wooden shutters were closed against the heat and we sat in the wide shaft of light from the terrace. It felt like the home had been empty for some time. It smelled like a forgotten place, a locked-up palace whose tiles had not been stepped across for some time. I imagined the woman who had let us in must have been paid to prepare it for our arrival, yet the sensation of a place awakening without hurry was palpable. No sooner had I thought about her than her face appeared around the doorway.

‘Salve, I’m Rosalia,’ she said, offering a hand, which I struggled to shake.

‘Piacere – Santina,’ I replied.

‘Yes! I thought I recognized you – aren’t you the Cavaldi girl?’

Her question made me bristle. I was no more the Cavaldi girl than she was my mother.

‘I worked there for a while, yes,’ I replied.

‘You work with the English now?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s wrong with the lady?’

‘She’s just had a baby.’

The young woman waited for me to elaborate, her little black eyes twinkling with anticipation. We both realized I wouldn’t.

‘Well, Santina,’ she began, breaking my silence, ‘if you need anything please just ask – I live just down the way, Via Stefano Andres, number eight.’

‘Thank you, Rosalia.’

She flashed me a wide grin. I mirrored her, intrigued by her clumsy curiosity in spite of myself.

*

Elizabeth had drifted into a brief afternoon nap, which afforded me time to unpack the little we had brought with us. The Major led me up the wide stone steps that wove through the core of the house to the two upper floors. When we reached the top he showed me to Adeline’s room.

‘I will take care of the initial arrangements over the next week or so. There will be daily deliveries which I’ve coordinated in such a manner as I deem most beneficial to all of us.’

He read my furrowed brow.

‘And I assure you that your education, besides the matters at hand, is high on my list of priorities. I have little care to look at your creased confusion any more than you must do feeling it.’

I creased a little more.

‘You will learn English. Properly. Starting tomorrow. I want you to understand everything I have to say. You understand?’

That I did. I would have sighed out loud with relief but I was too proud.

‘Today you will get basic provisions. Cook a light dinner and organize your room on the floor below, and Elizabeth’s beside you, as you see fit. I will sleep in this room here,’ he pointed across the hallway to a darkened room on the other side of the stairwell, ‘so I can be sure to be near Adeline. That is all for now.’

I left without asking any more questions, though I could have sat upon that bed and gazed up at the deep red squares painted on the wood above, palatial trompe-l’oeil within each panel, a fanfare of bold golds, maroons and deep blues. Adeline would be sleeping in a cathedral.

When Elizabeth awoke I changed her, fed her a little before we left the house, stuffed the huge key in the pocket of my skirt, and pretended I wasn’t nervous at the prospect of my first excursion with a baby in tow. It was five o’clock now, the shops beginning to open their doors to customers after siesta. Each tap of my shoe percussed the jagged memories fighting for attention. It wasn’t nostalgia; the town that opened up underfoot as I wound down the steps toward the center felt like one I had known in the final fitful moments of a bad dream.

The streets appeared the same but there had been a subtle shift. The colors were different. A little more care was taken over the window boxes. Some homes had been painted pastel shades. The town was rousing from a slumber. Of course it was still the fishing village I had always known, but there seemed to be more people now, a more resolute swagger to the Positanese.

A voice drew me round. ‘Well, well – if it isn’t the mountain girl! I see you didn’t waste any time over in the city by the looks of things.’ Signora Cavaldi raised an eyebrow at the strawberry blonde bundle in my arms and traced me with a glare I hadn’t missed.

‘Buon giorno, signora. This is the little girl I look after.’

‘Yes, I can see that. You’ve come back after all. Dreams a little too big for a mountain kid?’

I smiled so I didn’t say anything rude.

‘You should see what Paolino has done to our modest shop.’ She swept her arm through the air to the unrecognizable store behind her. I had left it a darkened cave of fresh produce; now it was framed by flowering window boxes of vermillion geraniums, beautiful wicker baskets laden with lemons and fat peaches. Tall terracotta urns stood with pots of fresh herbs growing inside them. The plain wooden door had been replaced with glass, held open by slabs of granite beckoning you into the display of fresh legs of prosciutto and glass bowls filled with white clouds of fresh mozzarella. Behind the counter, upon the slanted wooden shelves, the last of the day’s fresh loaves beckoned, all the ingredients for a light dinner. I stepped inside.

‘We’ve become quite the talk of the town,’ she resumed, her chest puffing out. ‘Something all the new foreigners are seduced by, of course – so many of them coming now. All a little strange if I do say so, but money’s money, whatever your hair color, no?’

I wasn’t sure what answer to offer.

‘You’ll be wanting something for dinner, no? I’ll call Paolino.’ She walked back to the skinny stairwell I had dreaded climbing each night, and yelled.

She turned, heaving with heavy steps up to her burgeoning empire. I stood still, watching till she’d disappeared around the corner.

I breathed in the salty prosciutto, realizing that it had been hours since I’d eaten. My mind took a bite of the fresh figs in the basket upon the counter, and I imagined the smooth mozzarella softening upon a hunk of the fresh bread. The sound of steps drew me out of my imaginings. Someone stood before me, with the air of familiarity but a face I couldn’t place. Only when he spoke did I realize the awkward Paolino I had fled had been replaced by a relaxed young man, proud purveyor of the beautiful creation around him.

‘Bet you don’t recognize it, Santina?’

I smiled without thinking, wondering how to reconcile that gawky, rude teenager with the man who had chosen baskets for fruit, or laid out these terracotta bowls of charred eggplant floating in luscious green olive oil beside tall jars of green olives, scenting the shop with a herby air I could almost resist.

‘It’s beautiful, Paolino!’

‘I know. I can hardly believe it myself. These new people coming now, Santina. They like these things. We sell double what we used to. Artist types. They look strange. Act strange. But they spend on the good things, you know?’

‘I suppose, yes.’

‘But enough about me. You look…’

I braced myself for one of his cutting remarks, hating myself for being lured in here in the first place. Now I’d be constrained to buy. It was only polite.

‘…English!’

I laughed at that. Out of relief if nothing else.

‘And who is this?’

‘Elizabeth. I look after her.’

‘Really? You hold her like she’s your own – I thought you’d found some British prince already.’

I smiled, feeling a twitch of disappointment prick the corner of my lips. I tried to ignore the surfacing memories: my last conversation with Mr Benn, the confusion of Adeline’s fall, the whisper of failure. All these things Elizabeth made me forget.

‘I’d like to buy some things for dinner,’ I said, focusing on the task at hand.

‘I didn’t think you’d come just to visit me!’

His face cracked into a wide grin. I had remembered his eyes a hard brown, glassy with pompous adolescence; now they were warm, full of humor. I watched him wrap the bread in wax paper with deft hands, and fill a crate with other provisions I saw fit: a crisp head of bright romaine, a handful of red tomatoes clinging to their vine, several scoops of olives and charred eggplant and an etto or two of prosciutto, pancetta and coppa, wrapped between thin layers of paper. My stomach rumbled in anticipation.

‘Don’t worry, Santina, I’ll send this to your house with Gennaro – you remember him, no?’

I’d tried to forget that toothless porter; he’d never been kind about mountain folk.

‘Where are you living now?’

‘Villa San Vito,’ I replied, watching his eyebrows rise in astonishment.

‘No prince you say?’

‘I know the Major and his wife will be wanting to dine early – is Gennaro free now?’

‘I’ll send him right away.’

I set the small table on the terrace just outside the stone-walled kitchen and tried to keep Elizabeth occupied, bouncing her on my hip, hoping her cot was due to arrive with the first of the furniture shipment from London the following day.

The heavy bell at the front door clanged. I jumped. I reached the door and heaved it open. Paolino stood before me. I looked down at the crate. It was loaded with several things I hadn’t ordered.

‘A welcome home, Santina.’

I didn’t want it to feel that way. This year was my detour, nothing more.

‘Few things on the house.’

I smiled, baffled by his kindness, then noticed his racing eyes dart past me, gathering information.

‘Grazie, Paolino – I’d better be getting on.’

‘Yes. No rest for the wicked.’

I sighed a faint laugh; the travel day was beginning to wear me down.

‘Or donkeys,’ he added.

The Major’s voice rattled down from the stairwell. I reached for the crate but Paolino shook his head. ‘Don’t be a crazy English girl. Let me.’ Before I could close the door, he strode across the terrace. My heart raced.

‘It’s fine, Paolino, really, I can manage,’ I insisted, breaking into a skipped walk to keep up with him.

‘I’m no barbarian,’ he replied, pushing on toward the furthest end of the terrace where the garden began. The Major met us there. Paolino stopped.

‘You are?’ he asked, looking down his nose at Paolino, his eyes flashing an icy blue.

‘Delivery from the grocery,’ I said, interrupting.

‘Very well. Do hand me the crate. Per piacere.’

I watched Paolino take in the Major’s fiery red hair, the spray of freckles upon his cheeks, and wither a little under his sharp stare. I realized the Major no longer made me feel I was being interrogated. He reached for the box and walked to the far end of the terrace where double doors led to the kitchen, ‘He may go,’ he called back to us as he disappeared inside.

‘No prince, no,’ Paolino muttered, shuffling back toward the door. ‘They all like that in London?’

I felt a familiar irritation rise and heaved the door open. Paolino turned before he began his descent down the first dozen steps toward the alley, flashing me a knowing smile. Then his footsteps tip-tapped down into the dusk along the rose glow of the sunset cobbles.

CHAPTER 5

I awoke the next morning with a start. Adeline was screaming. I heard the Major’s heavy footsteps above, thudding staccato feet across my ceiling. I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and ran upstairs.

The stench hit me before I turned the corner at the top of the stairs. An acrid smell snubbed the air. I knocked on Adeline’s door before opening.

‘Santina, I would welcome some assistance, yes!’ the Major called from within.

The tiles were splattered with vomit. Adeline was crunched into a ball at the corner of her bed. She rocked. The Major’s pyjama sleeves were rolled up past his elbows. He was on his hands and knees using towels to clean up the mess.

‘Please, Major, let me, you see to Adeline.’

It was the proper thing to do, but my stomach twisted at the sight of it all. He left to wash his hands in the attached bathroom. I swabbed the pools. No sooner had I started than Elizabeth cried out. The Major stepped back inside the bedroom.

‘All the women in my life have the devil in them this morning. That will be all, Santina, go to the child.’

I left, no doubt with too much eagerness.

The Major always to referred to Elizabeth as The Child. With each day that passed, that small bundle of life was becoming more a part of me. Each time he flicked this title at her, it was as if he pressed a fresh bruise of mine. I could count the times I had seen him hold her. He looked without seeing. A perfunctory glance now and then, someone cross-checking an inventory. It wasn’t hard to understand why, but it smarted nonetheless. This child had broken his wife. The devotion he bored into Adeline consumed all his passion. How could there be anything left for this needy babe? That was what I was there for. He paid me to love her for him. And I did.

Elizabeth’s lament was soon lost to milky nourishment. We sat in the corner of my room, on the chair I had prepared for night feeds. I always opened the shutters for her first feed of the morning, letting the light stream in through the tall glass double doors. The October sun was reluctant to acquiesce to autumn. How different from my first October in London, where the damp air already furled the decaying tips of bronzed leaves. Here, grapes swelled to picking, the mountain air was sweet with chestnuts. I watched the shadows of a passing cloud dance across the tiles. This morning’s sun was proud, radiating with the pretense of summer, mocking the promise of autumn. Perhaps Adeline’s recovery would stay a hope lost to the past too?

When Elizabeth had finished I sat her up on my lap, noticing how her back strengthened each day. I could lose myself in this small human. She absorbed my restlessness, distracted me from the gnawing sadness for having been dragged back to Positano, away from the life I’d planned. It was impossible for me to sink into those thoughts whilst I rubbed my palm in circles around her middle till she let out several belches and looked pleased with herself. The pull of this girl was both a balm and unsettling. This time the following year I would have to leave her; allowing myself to become attached would cause me nothing but more unnecessary heartache. I lay her down in her cot to stretch out for a little so I could return to the Major.

The door was open. I stepped in.

I found him curled around his wife. His hand locked into hers. Her hair was matted with nightmares and sweat. Their breaths rose and fell together. I stood, trespassing. My eye caught sight of the dirty towels. I decided to finish the job at hand, regardless of the imposition. I heaved the pungent pile and caught a bitter whiff.

‘Santina?’ I heard him call.

I turned, feeling even more the intruder.

‘Thank you.’

I always hesitated after he thanked me. It would be rude to say that he was welcome because that would insinuate we were equals, which of course we weren’t. It was rude to say nothing too, of course. Awkwardness puffed through me like a snake of smoke despite, or maybe because of, my best efforts to smother it.

‘I’ll take breakfast at my usual time, then we will begin your first lesson,’ said the Major.

I swallowed a stammer. ‘Will you not rest, sir?’

‘I will take breakfast at the usual hour. You will not shirk your commitments.’ I turned and left. If I had been nervous about my first lesson before, now I was on the precipice of panic.

He ate on the terrace just beyond the kitchen: two eggs, cooked for three and a half minutes once the water reached a rolling boil, two slices of toast, light brown on one side, one spoon of marmalade, two cups of tea from a pot. I added a fig on a small saucer as well. It needed to be eaten that morning; it would be jam by the afternoon otherwise. He peeled the papery purple skin, sliced it into four wedges, chewed each piece several times and wiped his mouth clean afterwards. I cleared the table and wished Elizabeth would call out for me, but the warm breeze seemed to lull her into a nap in the Moses basket upon the kitchen table. I liked her close to me. It helped me intuit every nuance and, with enough concentration, nip hysteria before fear of famine took hold and that round face of hers creased into the kind of fury you’d expect from a spurned woman intent on everyone knowing so.

‘Let us begin,’ he said.

I placed the last of the dishes into the ceramic sink.

‘You may finish your house duties afterwards,’ he announced.

I think he expected me to do something other than stand mute in the doorway.

‘Good heavens, Santina, am I really all that terrifying?’

It was one of those lingering questions that pierce the air, leaving a small, unanswered tear.

‘Sit here.’

He gestured at the chair beside him where Adeline had managed to eat a light supper yesterday evening. That had filled us both with a tentative hope – nothing that this morning wouldn’t have dashed, no doubt. He was a fixer. I suspected that what he couldn’t immediately fix with Adeline, or Elizabeth for that matter, he’d make up for with me and my tentative English.

I sat down, trying to unclasp my hands and failing.

‘You speak fairly well,’ he began.

My lips rose into an unsure smile.

‘Enough to understand instructions, yes. But if I allowed you to sail to America as promised, without a true grasp of English, I would be failing on my word. That is to say, what is English to you, Santina?’

‘What is it, sir?’

‘That’s what I asked.’

‘A language. To talk.’

He took a deep breath now, and as he let it out again, his gaze drifted toward the sea. It was a deeper blue than yesterday at this time, but still clear enough to see the watercolor patches of algae swirling toward Capri. His eyes snapped back to me. I noticed the tiny licks of darker blue that cut across the aqua, framed by thick blond-copper eyelashes.

‘It is not only to talk, Santina. We do that already. I will educate you in a cohesive manner. I will not ask how to buy cheese and bread. Any donkey can do that. I will teach you English – in all its startling, crisp beauty.’

He had lost me several sentences ago.

I watched him open a small book, marked by a slim leather bookmark that looked well loved. He straightened. ‘Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.’

He stopped and looked at me.

‘Keats, a poet, wrote that, in 1817.’

‘Is that all of it?’

‘You want to know the rest?’

I nodded. I hadn’t understood everything, but I liked the way his voice changed when he recited it. He twisted the book to face me.

‘There.’ He pointed toward the bottom of the page.

I looked at the jumble of letters. I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes to meet his.

‘You see? You carry on where I left off.’

I swallowed.

‘Don’t worry about mistakes, Santina, there’s no one here to laugh at you.’

My ears became attuned to the minutiae of sounds around me, a twitch of a leaf as a grasshopper skimmed its surface, the breeze lifting the sprinkle of crumbs he hadn’t allowed me to sweep away yet. I realized he was calling my name.

‘Santina,’ he said, his voice softer now; it was his Adeline voice, the one he used when her speech began to corkscrew toward ramblings, ‘you can’t read, can you?’

I felt furious that he had cornered me like this. What needed I for poetry? How on earth was that going to help me survive America? Here I was, dragged back to the tiny town that had smothered my childhood, following a man and his sick wife, caring for his daughter night and day, a responsibility I had never sought, and his repayment was a promise and a poem!

He wasn’t afraid of the bristling silence. He let it hang, unhurried, like a dank February morning in London where the clouds merge into one purgatorial white canopy.

His hand smoothed his beard.

‘Would you like me to help you, Santina?’

A sigh escaped before I could stop it, then a solitary tear, which I hated myself for. I brushed it off my cheek, but we both knew it had been there.

‘Please say you’ll consider my offer?’ he asked.

I hadn’t invited these blurred lines; he was my employer, not a teacher. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to work, survive a year here in exchange for my escape from this town, this place that had never taught me to read, or think about poetry, or hope to live off course from the mountain girl. I was prepared to commit to this time with his daughter and do the job as best I could but my eyes were set on a horizon far from here. Now I sat, within one of my town’s palaces, feeling more imprisoned than when I first left. His face relaxed into something close to a smile.

‘I think I can offer you more than just money, Santina.’ His voice lowered to a syrupy murmur, his expression softened. ‘In return for everything you are doing for my family and me.’

I lifted my eyes. His offer came from a genuine place. He was no more trying to imprison me than I was. I took a breath to answer, but a metallic clatter cut through my pause, followed by a bucket cascading down from the terrace above, crashing into the lemon trees below, tumbling down the brush toward the wall at the end of the garden. We ran upstairs. Adeline was stood before the balustrade that ran the length of her terrace. She was closer to it than made me feel safe. I stopped by the doorway. The Major walked through the bedroom toward the terrace, his feet soundless, as if he were wading through water.

I watched him coax her back inside. When she returned to bed, he crushed a pill into a spoon. He leaned in to give it to her. She spat in his face.

‘I’ll hold her and you give it to her, Santina.’

I took the spoon. She jerked in his grip.

‘Now, Santina!’

I placed it in her mouth. He closed her lips around it. After a few seconds he released his grip. She crawled to the top of her bed, grabbed the sheet and cocooned herself inside.

Her breathing began to even. The crease of bed linen eased down onto the mattress.

‘I will take lunch at the usual time, Santina. That will be all for now.’

I left. My footsteps echoed down the stone stairwell.

It was clear then, that the more unpredictable Adeline became, the more rigid his own routine would be. My lessons would be inescapable after all.

After breakfast the next day, the Major strode into the kitchen and laid a notebook and a wooden box inlaid with geometric patterns of mother-of-pearl upon the kitchen table. His height made the kitchen feel all the smaller. Unlike me, his head reached a foot or so from the ceiling, which arched over us, like a cellar. The walls were painted a brushed pink, and behind the marble counter that stretched the length of one wall there were a dozen lines of decorated tiles of geometric designs in yellow, emerald and turquoise, hopeful swirls of pomp. A wider squat arch graced the space where the hearth stood. A wooden table, dipping in the center with age, stretched halfway across the room.

‘I have decided, Santina, that I was quite in the wrong yesterday.’

I looked at him.

‘I will be grateful if you’d forget my clumsy start, yes?’

It was my turn to let a question evaporate, answerless.

‘Today,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to teach you how to cook one of the dishes I brought home with me to England after my years in India.’

‘Cook?’

His face brightened. I knew he had spent several years in India working for the British army, Adeline had told me that much. She’d intimated that his role was shrouded in secrecy, but I’d never paid it too much mind because Adeline had a wonderful way of painting stories with a brush of mystery, whatever the subject. For the first time I allowed myself to miss her. The eccentric little talks she might indulge me in after breakfast before she began her day in the studio. The way she’d shown off her heath in Hampstead to me; her paintings, bright with freedom and questions and passion. Now I understood. He needed the lessons more than I. It was impossible to shirk the sense that they were as much about the Major having another to converse with as opening my mind up to the poetry he loved best.

‘Cook, yes, Santina, and afterward you will write the recipe into this little book here.’ He picked it up and gave it an optimistic waggle. The cover was black leather, and the center of the front panel featured a tiny painted rose.

We spent the next hour trawling through the details of the dish. First, he asked me to dice an onion. He stood beside me whilst directing me on how to soften it in a pan with olive oil. It was something I did almost every day, but that didn’t stop him inspecting my timing. As the pieces began to sweat, he placed the box next to the stove and opened it. Inside were five jars filled with different colored powders; a palette of deep browns, golden yellow and fiery red.

‘This box goes with me whenever I travel. I knew we wouldn’t be able to source these spices here so I arranged for them to be sent to me in London before we came.’

He lifted one of the jars, unscrewed its lid and handed it to me: ‘Smell.’

I dipped my nose close to the opening, trying not to worry about the onions that were starting to caramelize. A pungent flowery scent powdered up into the back of my cheeks. I couldn’t place it.

‘This is ground coriander, Santina. Next growing season I shall be planting it in my garden and you will help me.’

He handed me each of the jars in turn: aromatic cumin with its sweet and smoky herbal scent that brought church incense to mind, the barky smell of golden turmeric and the provocative punch of ground chilli – my eyes watered in an instant. The final jar contained a fine deep brown powder. This was the most complex smell of all of them. There was smoke, fire, citrus and a muddy tang to it. My eyebrows creased.

‘This is curry powder. Ground in the hills of Jaipur, Santina, by an elderly lady I came to know well. I watched her large wooden pestle and mortar create this pot of wonder. She taught me everything I know about how to use it too.’

His eyes twinkled with the pleasurable memory. I wondered how long it had been since he had been able to talk to someone about this. I knew him as a solitary man, but it was clear that the loneliness stirred by the incessant care of Adeline needed remedy. These five little jars contained just that. He held each of them as if it was a precious jewel, presenting me in turn with reverence and a bottled excitement I’d never noticed before.

Next he gave me specific measurements for each of them. As I sprinkled a spoonful of turmeric, coriander and curry powder over the translucent onions, the small stone kitchen filled with a potent earthy steam. Next we stirred in two fistfuls of rice until each grain was coated with the sticky yellow mixture. The Major poured over almost half a litre of water, put the lid on, simmered it for ten minutes, then took it off the heat, but left the lid on to let the steam finish the job. Meanwhile he instructed me to boil six eggs, this time for four and a half minutes. I rinsed them under cold water, peeled them and cut them into wedges, as directed. Finally, we brought a little milk in a frying pan to a gentle simmer and placed two bay leaves inside. He opened up a paper package with two fillets of fish and slipped them into the warm milk.

‘This ought to be haddock of course, Santina, but I’m using what I could find yesterday afternoon at the fishmonger’s, which was very little I might add, because I made the mistake of waiting till the afternoon to get it. Foolish.’

He removed the fish pan from the heat and let it continue to poach whilst he instructed me to lift the lid on the rice. It was fluffy and golden; the fragrant ribbons of steam that lifted up from it made my mouth water. I watched him stir in the egg wedges, then flake the fish and fold it into the rice. He lifted the pan and put it on top of an iron potholder in the center of the table. He handed me a fork and gestured for me to taste. The caramel of the onion gave way to a woody perfume, a musky taste balanced by the creamy yolk and the tender aromatic fish flesh. My eyes gave away my delight.

‘First poetry lesson complete.’

My head tilted.

‘Now I help you write it. Title: Kedgeree.’

The rest of the morning he sat next to me, a fastidious but patient teacher, as I wrote the list of the ingredients. My scrawl was tentative and messy. He wouldn’t let me leave the table until I had finished. In between hesitations, whirring doubts ricocheted about my mind as I tried to understand how any of this would serve me in my new life.

‘Tomorrow, we will write the method. That is all for now. I will take lunch at midday. You may take an hour to take a stroll with Elizabeth perhaps? I will rest a while.’

He turned and left, leaving the scent of another world suffusing the air.

CHAPTER 6

The following May, the Major and Adeline’s belongings at last found their appropriate places in the villa. New packages had arrived throughout the frigid winter and temperamental spring, then were sorted with care. By mid-summer, the Major’s library, up a few steps behind the kitchen, was complete, his sanctuary at the opposite side of the house from the large dining room. Oil-painted landscapes graced the walls. After my final chores of the evening I’d linger over the depictions of the humid mountainous coffee plantations above the Malabar coast in India, or the city of Jodhpur with its square blue houses clustering the valley, the stone alleys reminding me of an exotic version of Positano. It was clear to me that he’d always been drawn to these landscapes. The Major loved the mountains as much as I. His early morning walks, before the now hordes of tourists began their jaunts, often took him high above our town, into the mossy depths of my childhood. I was relieved, however, that those grotesque carved masks from the London hallways remained in his library.

Although the Major refused to entrust Elizabeth to anyone but me, we had come to an arrangement that I could leave the house for an extended time on Sunday afternoons and take her with me. Rosalia, who had strong-armed her way into my heart, huffed and puffed that this did not, in fact, constitute anything close to a day off. She wouldn’t believe me, but Sundays spent at her home were just that. They forced me to relax, to forget my inconclusive search for my brother who had run away from our uncle’s farm and all but disappeared in Naples not long after I left for London.

Elizabeth and I took our time climbing the narrow alleys that ran behind the neighboring villas. Her hair was a fluff of bright red waves that made the Positanese reach out and touch it out of instinct, so different was she from the dark-haired toddlers discovering gravity along the cobbles. She loved these Sundays as much as I. Rosalia’s sisters and sisters-in-law took turns to hold her and coo into her bright little blue eyes, teasing me that I’d left town only to kidnap a foreigner’s daughter.

One morning in late summer, we negotiated the steep steps down toward Rosalia’s gate and pushed it open. A fragrant canopy of kiwi and lemon trees entwined a high bamboo frame above. The excited chipper of birds greeted us. Along the slim walkway toward the main door, five cages hung with yellow and pale blue budgerigars twittering to each other and out toward the coast.

The door flung open. ‘Just in time!’ Rosalia said, greeting me with a kiss on each cheek, wrenching Elizabeth out of my arms and into hers. ‘You’ve been a good girl, yes? You eat all my food today, yes? No sorbetto if you don’t eat your lunch, young lady!’

I followed her into the kitchen. A huge oak table dominated the squat room. At the far end was her wooden oven, etched into the wall where the mountain rock was varnished but still craggy. This was a room wedged into the stone. Upon the stove in a heavy iron skillet, fresh anchovies melted into warm oil, softening several crushed cloves of garlic. The smell of artichokes followed soon after from a larger pan, their lustrous purple doused with fresh parsley. A simmering stockpot of linguini raced to al dente. Rosalia’s sisters busied themselves with the final fixings on the table, yelling for the men to join us. I could hear the rumble of their husbands and brothers coming down from the terrace above, following the scent toward lunch. In a few minutes the small room ricocheted with too many voices and conversations colliding at once. It was my weekly dose of cacophony, the perfect antidote to the church-like silence at the villa.

Rosalia balanced Elizabeth on one hip, scooping linguini out of the pan with the other.

‘Please, let me take her,’ I offered, reaching out my hands, which she shooed off with the back of the wooden spoon. One of her sisters swooped in and took over by the stove for the final hungry minute before the pasta was cooked.

The door swung open. In strolled Paolino, a basket in his hands laden with fresh romanesco cauliflowers, zucchini, cedri and a pile of sfogliatelle, small crisp pastries stuffed with a rich lemon crème. As he walked by me their vanilla scent powdered the air.

Rosalia had decided several months ago that he and I ought to be the perfect pairing. I loved her for many things, but this was not one of them.

‘You see, Santi,’ she began, bouncing Elizabeth beside me, ‘the man bakes too now.’

This meddling in other’s personal affairs was a pernicious local habit I longed to escape; it made my scheduled sailing to America toward the latter part of this autumn feel like part of a very distant future.

‘You already love him more than I ever could,’ I whispered to her cackle that followed.

‘What you witches plotting over there? You mind it doesn’t spoil our food now,’ Paolino called out from the far end of the table, where Rosalia’s brothers poured him their home-made wine.

‘You just wait, Paoli,’ Rosalia called out to him, ‘you get under our spell and there’ll be no helping you!’

Everyone laughed. The sun syruped through the windows. I took Elizabeth onto my lap and watched her eye the strands of oily linguini Rosalia lifted up with an over-sized fork, swirls of garlic steam wafting across the plates. I cut her portion into small pieces. She dove in with two hands. All meals at Rosalia’s ended with a salty smear of lunch across her happy face. The sisters would pinch her rosy cheeks in praise of her appetite. Paolino teased me that I wasn’t feeding the child enough and perhaps we ought to raise our weekly orders from him. He caught the roll of my eyes.

‘Oh come on, Santina – it’s a little joke between friends.’

I had no memory of friendship.

‘Well, you’d better get used to it. Men around here don’t just sit around and let beauty slip between their fingers like water, no? You’ve been around the British too long.’

I returned a forced smile, thankful Rosalia’s family’s laughter drowned my silence.

‘You’ve changed,’ he continued, mistaking my silence as an invitation for conversation. ‘You left a polio-struck orphan with a tatty dress and a half-hearted smile. Now you look . . .’

His hands waved in the air, as if they might pluck the word out from it somehow. I worried about the gesture that might follow.

‘Eat your food and save us all from this drivel!’ Rosalia’s grandmother piped up from the opposite end of the table, her wrinkled skin creasing into even more tiny folds.

‘Salud to that!’ the men cried, as the rest of the lunch simmered through the afternoon.

After the men left to sip limoncello outside on the small concrete terrace, and Rosalia, myself and the rest of the women had cleared the kitchen, it was time for me to return. Rosalia walked me to the gate, running a proud hand over her lemon trees overhead as she did so.

‘I know a joke from the truth, Santi.’

I turned to her, feeling Elizabeth’s weight pull on my back.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she replied off my look, ‘you know perfectly well what I’m on about.’

‘I don’t.’

‘It’s that mountain air in your lungs. Too near the sky to see what’s on the ground in front of you.’

Rosalia talked in riddles.

‘Paolino, Santina. You think it’s all singsong. I can tell it’s more than that.’

‘Aren’t you tired of weaving stories where there aren’t any?’

Her eyebrows did a little dance and her dimples deepened.

‘See you next week, Rosali. Thank you.’

‘Don’t ever say thank you. You’re family now. You say thank you it’s like I’m just a neighbor.’ She flicked a playful slap on my arm.

I went on my way, jogging home to prepare a light late lunch for the Major, Elizabeth bobbing up and down, delighted with the insane pace of her guardian.

I would have liked to remember keeping a calm hand upon the plates whilst setting the table after I returned home. I would have liked to forget the way I dropped not one but two plates upon the unforgiving tiles, blaming myself for rushing, knowing it had more to do with the memory of Paolino’s claustrophobia-inducing grin across Rosalia’s loud lunch, the way his eyes managed to connect with mine every time I looked toward his end of the table. Now my fingers quarrelled with one another whilst my mind chased silence. The Major strode through the kitchen just as I placed a few leaves of romaine into a bowl with the last of the tomatoes.

‘Whatever have these plates done to you, Santina?’ he asked, looking down at the heap of shards swept out of the way in haste.

‘I’m so sorry.’ I was starting to gabble. The appearance of Adeline in the doorway plunged us both into silence.

‘I smell kedgeree,’ she said, flat.

I looked at the Major. His eyes were alight.

‘Yes. I made it this morning,’ I said, filling the silence, hoping that if I spoke close to normalcy it might uphold her spell of sanity. Throughout the spring and summer we had seen a marked improvement in Adeline. On occasion she even held Elizabeth for snatched moments.

‘So you did,’ she replied, ‘it got me out of bed. I fell in love with Henry after I ate the first forkful he ever gave me.’

She looked at him. There was a simmer of a smile beyond her exhaustion. The spark was still there, the snap of a match as it ignites against sandpaper even if the flame fails into smoke. He took her hand and walked her out onto the terrace. They sat in silence for a moment. He cradled her fingers in his.

They shared an apple after their food, then Adeline returned upstairs. The Major did not retire to the library as usual. He sat looking out toward the sea whilst I cleared around him. Elizabeth refused to stay in her wooden chair I’d set in the kitchen. She fretted until I released her, so I delayed my tidying till she took her nap. I walked with her down the steps that led into the garden and sat her down on the last one, beside me. She crawled a little way down the hill, paused, squatted, then heaved herself up to standing. I’d seen her do this many times but she’d never held herself upright for so long. The breeze lifted her curls. Her nose scrunched. Then one foot lifted. She waivered but didn’t fall. A step. Then another. Then another. Several more determined paces followed, before she collapsed again onto the grass. I ran to her, wrapped my arms around her and swung her around.

‘You’re walking, ciccia! You’re doing it! Brava!’

She giggled into my ear as I squeezed her. I saw the Major over her shoulder. He was laughing. I’d never seen his expression so relaxed.

That afternoon Elizabeth took the longest nap of her life. I returned to the kitchen to finish clearing up and found a large bowl of oranges and lemons upon the table.

‘There you are, Santina. I’ve been waiting.’

The Major’s buoyant mood caught me off guard. Adeline must be sleeping too.

‘I took a short stroll to the end of the garden this morning as the sun rose,’ he said. ‘I gathered another load of oranges and lemons. Glorious.’

‘Are you ready for tea, sir?’

‘Not just now. I thought as the women in my life are finally sleeping, and it’s a little cooler, we would prepare a British breakfast staple.’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘This afternoon, your English lesson is marmalade.’

We never had lessons on a Sunday.

‘This is not to be rushed,’ he began. ‘You may relinquish your dinner duties; Adeline and I can fix something for ourselves tonight. Once we start we have to keep a close eye on the proceedings.’

I gave a feeble nod, imagining how good my bed would feel at this very moment.

‘Where is your notebook, Santina?’

I lifted it out of my pocket, where I kept it.

‘Excellent. Now, whilst the marmalade is cooking we will write up the method. No time will be left idle. There is much to do.’

I had made some jams in the past but this process was a different beast. He stood over me, marshalling the way I dropped the ten scrubbed oranges and four lemons into a large stock pot, covering them with water and describing in more detail than was necessary how we would let it reach a boil, and then simmer for the next three hours, clamping the lid down to stop valuable vapors escaping. ‘A perfect poach is required, not an exacerbated boil, you understand?’ Though his words were clipped and could be mistaken for a military pace, there was a boyish skit to his lilt when he and I worked in the kitchen. He was in his late thirties, but when he spoke of food or poetry the years fell away, lifting veils through which I could spy the Major as a much younger man.

Whilst the room filled with the uplifting citrus smell, we set to work on my handwriting. It wasn’t the scrawl of last autumn, but there was still hesitation. He wrote a sentence and I copied. Any mistakes were noted and required me to repeat the word in question. The afternoon should have felt interminable, but I loved the intimate focus of these moments: the sound of the dish of the day brewing behind us, the soft scratch of my pencil upon the paper. The quiet way he would speak, directing my hand with gentle instructions, wooing my pencil to do the right thing.

Finally we removed the pot from the heat and set it aside to cool.

‘I shall take tea now. Please call Adeline to join me.’

He left.

I stood in the empty kitchen, steamy with the fresh, hopeful scent.

I could hear Elizabeth beginning to stir but decided to leave her a while longer whilst I fetched her mother. I ran up two stairs at a time. Adeline’s door was shut. I tapped softly, then a little louder. Still no answer. I eased the door open and peeked inside. Adeline was at the far side, crouched down. She had a pencil in her hand and was tracing intricate patterns across the length of the wall where the floor tiles met the plaster. I’d noticed the Major had set a sketchbook upon the table. I didn’t think he’d had scrawling on the antique walls in mind when he had done so.

‘Madam?’

No answer. The artist was lost in her work.

I coughed. She stopped, then froze me with an icy glare. My mouth opened a little but no sound came out. She returned to her creation.

‘Madam, the Major has asked you to join him for tea.’

The speed of her pencil accelerated. Elizabeth’s cries reached us from the kitchen two floors down. These stone walls were unforgiving; thick but live, amplifying every sound.

Adeline began to weep. I went toward her.

‘Stay where you are!’ she yelled without looking at me. ‘Stop that Godawful screeching.’ She whipped round to me. I could see her eyes were bloodshot, spidered with anguish. ‘Now!’

She rose to her feet and lunged toward me, sending me flying out of the room toward the stairwell. The Major was at the table now, oblivious to the protests of his daughter.

I prepared a bottle, lifted Elizabeth, and before I returned to the dining room to feed her I told the Major about Adeline’s current mood.

He gave a stiff nod. I felt like a student who had displeased her teacher.

He stood up from the table, walked through the kitchen and placed a hand on the lower side of the cooling pot. ‘Forty-five minutes more and we will continue,’ he announced, then left. I heard the library door close behind him.

I returned to a Major tetchy with impatience. ‘You’re three minutes late.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘This is alchemy, Santina. It requires precision. I expect deeper understanding from you.’

Together we lifted the oranges out of the cooled liquid, sliced them open and scooped out the pulp and pits into a smaller pan, reserving the peel. To the pulp we added a jug of water and set it on a medium heat for about ten minutes. I held a colander whilst the Major lined it with cheesecloth, placing the cooked pulp into it.

Whilst it cooled in the cloth, dripping into a bowl underneath, we sat at the table and cut the orange peel into thin strips, his eyes darting over my work to make sure each piece was the same length and width. I followed his instructions to gather the corners of the cheesecloth, squeezing the pulpy contents into a tight ball. My hands were sticky with the juice. He handed me a towel to blot them dry and then a large wooden spoon, so I could stir these juices back into the original poaching liquid. He tipped in the peel and placed the lid back on top. As soon as I became aware of the comforting quiet in which we worked, it hardened into an awkward silence, like a tray of boiled sugar crisping into brittle.

‘This, we leave overnight,’ he said.

My eyebrows raised before I could stop them.

‘You had no idea about the importance of time in this process, did you?’

I couldn’t tell whether he was about to castigate or educate. The lines between the two were random, dirty twists of floured dough upon a tired wooden counter.

He took a breath, his eyes softened. ‘O Time! who know’st a lenient hand to lay, softest on sorrow’s wound, and slowly thence, Lulling to sad repose the weary sense, The faint pang stealest unperceived away.’

This time I was tired enough to let my confusion float around me and hover, lost and soothed in the tone of incomprehensible words.

‘William Lisle Bowles wrote that, Santina. Why do you think we started the process of marmalade?’

We returned to exhausting questions: short, sharp arrows whizzing by my ear.

‘I will tell you why. Because the process is long but finite. It requires attention, stamina and precision. And so does educating oneself in another language. I do not tire easily, and I expect you to be collaborative with your attention. When you returned from your luncheon elsewhere, you were skittish, forgetful, and a little frantic, dare I say it. In this vein you will learn absolutely nothing. Now, I could have chosen a different dish, something we may have eaten right away, like the kedgeree, when we began your education back in the spring, but I didn’t. Language, education, must be savored and labored. But it is a joyful thing. Smell this room, Santina,’ his hand swept through the air, ‘smell the optimistic spray of citrus grown in this very garden beyond the terrace. How can it fail to touch you?’

His words caressed and taunted me. I could tell that he was full of something more than facts alone, but my mind prodded with uncertainty. I offered a tentative smile.

‘Look outside, Santina.’ He placed stiff hands upon my shoulders and twisted me round toward the open wooden doors. The last hands I’d had upon me were my father’s. The memory prickled down my spine to a sting. I felt the weight of his hands upon me, noticing the tips of his thumbs pressing into my shoulder blades. The garden rolled down a steep incline and the trees stretched out their branches in greedy gnarls toward the early autumn rays. Beyond, the sea had begun its descent into dusky purple, Capri’s tip golden in the dipping sun. I wanted to move but daren’t, hating myself for it.

His voice fell toward a whisper; I could feel the breath skim the top of my ear. ‘Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.’

My body softened out of trained fear to the lull of his voice.

‘That is what Aristotle said, and I’m inclined to agree.’ He straightened. ‘Tomorrow,’ he went on, removing his hands, his voice once again crisp, ‘we will heat sugar in the oven upon a tray for ten minutes. Then we will reheat the preserving liquid and add the warmed sugar. When it has all dissolved in the liquid, and not before, we will turn up the heat. We will allow it to reach a rolling boil. We will remove the pan from the burner, allow to cool for thirty minutes, and finally pour into sterilized jars. Then what?’

Another prickle of a question, which required no remedy.

‘Then, Santina, you, Adeline and I may taste the glorious marmalade throughout the winter. And when the fog rolls in once again, and the tiresome visitors have abandoned the streets at last, we will sit and savor the memory of my trees once plump with bounty. Is that clear?’

Of course it wasn’t. He turned on his heels and closed the door behind him.

I breathed in the aroma, the citrus deepening toward a warm caramel now. The setting sun streaked in from behind me, burnishing the tiny kitchen with russet rays. Only a month remained before I left for America. I couldn’t shake the sense that the lessons that remained, like the marmalade of this afternoon, would be nothing besides bittersweet.

The mid-morning sun cast hopeful arcs of light upon the curve of the cobbles as I walked Elizabeth up the hill on her new-found legs. We’d stop every now and again, for me to catch my breath if nothing else, whilst I held her facing out to the sea, which spread out in a turquoise sheen toward the grey cliffs. Onward we climbed, as the path narrowed. To my right, beyond a squat wall, was a jagged drop to the water below. I walked without any particular aim, the smell of citrus and caramelized sugar still clinging to my hair from the previous afternoon, floating into focus every now and then on the breeze.

The path ended by the entrance to the cemetery. The dead had the best view in town. There was a small bench just outside. We sat for a moment to rest before returning home. I longed to lay flowers for my mother. I envied those little tombs, perched upon the uneven hill, goat-like, defying gravity with stubborn marble. At least all these people could find rest. Their loved ones could sit by them, remember them, whilst the wide expanse of the sea and mountains comforted them with awe and tranquillity, the landscape assuring them that their grief was all part of the natural fabric of the world, no more, no less. But I had none of this. There was a gaping hole where my mother should be, and another wherever my brother roamed; love without the freedom to be expressed.

The sound of footsteps drew me round. A figure stood by the gated entrance, fiddling with a heavy chain. I rose to my feet. It must be getting close to lunchtime if the gates were already being shut. I turned to begin my descent but something about the man playing with his lethargic lock spiked a memory. I turned back to take a closer look. I didn’t know this man, but there was something about the shape of his round face, the gentle slant of his almond eyes that stirred me. His hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while, it clung to his scalp in sweaty strands. He looked up at me for a brief glance. My heart twisted with sorrow and joy.

It was my little brother.

CHAPTER 7

‘Marco?’ I called out, my mouth so dry the word almost stuck to it.

He turned, nonchalant. ‘Si?’

We looked at one another. I fought seeping doubt. Perhaps my memory was playing a cruel trick on me? But there was no mistaking the pointed arch of his eyebrows, just like Mother’s, or the tiny mole on his left temple.

‘The cemetery opens again at five o’clock,’ he said, as if I was just another visitor muted by grief, which of course I was.

‘It’s me. Santina.’

His face marbled into stillness. I noticed my breath change. I watched his expression shift through a painful spectrum, much like the sea behind me rippling with light and shade beneath the moving clouds. I ran, wrapped my one free arm around him, grasping Elizabeth in the other. After a moment I felt his arm around us. I looked up at him, wiped his cheek and kissed the tear streaks twice each, knowing that a lifetime of kisses could never make up for the way I’d abandoned him.

‘I’m so so sorry, my Marco,’ I stuttered through snatched breaths.

He shook his head and took my hand in his then kissed it. That’s when I noticed how very thin he was. That’s when I took in his uncertain pallor, a grey day that hovers, expectant of a forgotten sun. His nails were chewed and his cuticles an aching pink with nervous strands of skin pulling away from them.

‘Is it really you, Santina?’ he whispered at last, looking at my face like someone determined to put the parts of a puzzle together, rearranging my features into the picture he remembered.

‘It’s really me.’

‘And this? Tua bambina?’

‘No – I look after her. I’m living just down the hill, Marco. I’m home again!’

The words honeyed my mouth. It was the first time I had used the term.

He turned away from me, as if unsure. ‘I have to go now. You’ll come back and see me?’

Through the neglected hair falling down over his face, and the tension scarring his nails, I saw a glimmer of the child walking down the mountainside only weeks after we lost our mother. ‘Of course.’

His face creased into a bleak frown.

‘You must believe me, Marco – I’m here now, working for a family at Villa San Vito.’

His eyes widened. The words felt an accidental betrayal. To this moment I’d been counting the days till my departure.

‘I’d have you come back with me right away, only I have this little one to feed and her mother and father are very particular about when they eat and—’

A yell from another young man further up the steps leading toward Nocelle interrupted my excited blabbering. Marco gave him a perfunctory glance, before looking back at me. His features hardened.

‘I have to go now, Santina. Come back tomorrow?’

I nodded, wondering if I could bear to watch him leave.

He turned and climbed the steps to the man. I watched his shadow lengthen before him, zig-zagging up the stones. The vice around my middle tightened. I wiped away the pictures of my father that bludgeoned my mind. Marco disappeared around the corner. I turned back toward the sea. The wind tussled gentle waves toward the shore. Do people, like water, always reach their natural level?

I made several feeble attempts to stay calm on my return to the villa. I simmered a small pan of water, infusing it with a fistful of chamomile flowers. I tried to allow the earthy steam of porcini mushrooms wilting with garlic and parsley to ground me in the kitchen and the tasks at hand. I stirred the tagliatelle around the tall pot of boiling water but, hard as I tried, my thoughts tumbled across one another like those fierce salty bubbles racing to evaporation. Elizabeth banged her spoon on the counter of her wooden high chair. The sound irritated the Major but usually left me unruffled. Today it percussed my noisy thoughts with increasing irritation. I grabbed the spoon from her and she burst into tears. The Major walked in.

‘Is the child not getting her own way once again? Or is this some personal vendetta that’s escaped me?’

His sarcasm smarted. Off my look he retracted. It wasn’t something I was accustomed to witnessing. The turn toward genuine concern caught me off guard. For a moment I thought I might let myself cry.

‘Sorry, sir. I was impatient. It’s been an unusual morning.’

‘Indeed,’ he said, running a hand over Elizabeth’s head. The small act of tenderness caught both of us by surprise. ‘ . . . the buttercups, the little children’s dower, Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower.’ He looked between the two of us, left muted by his poetic interruption.

‘What on earth did Robert Browning understand about the great beauty of Italy, Elizabeth?’ he asked, running a finger under her chin. ‘Fancy comparing a melon flower, full of the promise of delicious fruit, to the blasted buttercup!’

My heart raced. Was the Major careening toward the same kind of breakdown as his wife? His behavior was peculiar, even for him. Any doubts about leaving disappeared in an instant. The sooner I left, the better. Elizabeth fell silent.

‘Lunch is almost ready, sir. Am I to call Adeline?’

‘But of course, Santina. You will find her in agreeable spirits this afternoon. Have you not noticed the marked changes in her? Her energy is returning little by little, a sapling of herself. Owed in a huge part to your tender care. Of the both of us.’

The expression in his eyes made me feel uncomfortable. There was an unfamiliar streak of sorrow, different from when he spoke of Adeline. I turned to leave.

‘Santina?’

I looked back at the Major. The sunlight streamed in behind him like a halo.

‘Take this note, please.’

I reached out for the small vanilla envelope, expecting him to bark out instructions for delivery, though in the past ten months I could count on one hand the number of people he’d conversed with in town. If he carried on in this manner the gossips would have a field day concocting elaborate fictions about him and the wife imprisoned on the third floor of this merchant’s palace.

I looked at the addressee. It was my name.

‘It is rather unorthodox perhaps, but it struck me that writing my thoughts to you would allow you the space and privacy to consider my proposition in the most honest way you can. I’m loath to put you on the spot. Goodness knows I’ve had a lifetime of that from my seniors. It’s excruciating. In every way.’

I still hadn’t learnt how to mask my frown.

‘Excruciating: painful, embarrassing.’

A pause. Elizabeth looked from me to him and back again.

‘So there we are. That is all. You’re to read this tonight. Sleep on it. I would hate it to ruffle your day any more than is necessary. You’ve obviously been challenged enough already. That much is clear.’

His thoughts were rambling again. He lifted Elizabeth out of her seat and took her outside with him. Had he fallen in love with his child at last? I could see the feeling terrified him. That’s why he tripped over the words. Where was the man who used the vast spectrum of language with such confidence, throwing descriptions into the air like puffs of Adeline’s vibrant paint powders?

This was a man who had been grieving for his disappearing wife. As her life force made a quiet return, he allowed Elizabeth in. Before today, he would have rather cut himself off than risk the pain of losing another woman. He’d have said something to the effect that the very existence of children reminds us of our own fleeting fragment of time . . . That the new person entrusted to us to love must leave . . . How this is the very nature of nurture, the truest test of love.

Such was his poetry I had learned.

I watched him place her down and take her chubby hand in his. They walked toward the steps into the garden. Perhaps she would feel the tender attention of her father after all. The thought uncorked a deluge of silenced memories. What pain must my father have been in to inflict so much on us? The tiny flame of compassion flickered but faded at the picture of my mother’s bruised face. Marco replaced that painful recollection. I left the kitchen in case the Major should turn back and see my tears.

Rosalia rang the bell just after lunch. She knew better than to do so; the Major had told me several times that any visitors, business or otherwise, were to call mid-morning or not at all. Trying to impart this stringent guideline to the local fishmonger, butcher and woodsman elicited nothing short of sighed laughter, a nod at best, terse irritation at worst.

‘You’re incorrigible, Rosali – be quick and go,’ I said, poking my head round the side of the door. ‘He’s in a strange mood today as it is.’

‘What’s new?’

‘I’m serious.’

‘My sisters and I are going up to Nocelle for a spuntino later this afternoon. It’s our youngest one’s saint’s day. I want you to come.’

I grew suspicious.

‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Santina, it’s just for some fresh air, why the look?’

‘You’re meddling, and I can’t put my finger on what.’

She straightened her blouse over her middle, revealing a little more cleavage. I loved how at home she felt in her skin. Perhaps I envied it a little. Her hair waved down her back, lifted away from her face in bold quiffs.

‘And also,’ she carried on, ‘the new folks who moved in two houses down are looking for occasional help. They’ll be doing lots of entertaining, they said, over this coming year. Two sisters. German, I think. I told them I could gather a list of some girls. Thought you’d like some extra money before you leave?’

‘And Elizabeth?’

‘I can look after her.’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’ The thought of floating the suggestion to the Major made me uneasy.

‘Suit yourself, Santi, I’ll call for you in a couple of hours.’

Before I could reply she sauntered up the steps toward the alley that ran the length of the back of the villa leading to her house.

Nocelle was Positano’s sister: smaller, older, remote. The one thousand steps that led us up to it were unrelenting, passing through the gorge of the valley. Deep green rose on either side of us, as the stairs wound in and around ragged rocks, undulating through the ancient pines, till we reached the outskirts of the small village. Here the stone steps took us in between homes, bright red geranium blooms cascading from terracotta pots balanced on a prayer along uneven walls, palms offering regal salutes, cacti in the warm glow, their fruits ripening in the sun.

Rosalia’s sister’s home was modest, perched along the precipice of the cliff. She had a small terrace and two rooms. The table was laid with sfogliatelle and a large cake. The linen tablecloth lifted on the breeze. We took our seats upon the wooden benches and heaved a sigh of collected delight when she brought out a jug of home-made limonata. My legs were accustomed to walking these inclines but even I welcomed the respite. Elizabeth guzzled her drink. Rosalia lifted her up from me and sat her upon her lap, then gave her the reins to an imaginary horse so she could jiggle her into the infectious laughter of a toddler.

We toasted Rosalia’s sister. Then one of their brothers brought out a huge box. From inside he lifted an enormous record player to squeals of delight. He placed it upon the table and wound it up. Marino Marini began to tinkle his latest hit, ‘Piccolissima Serenata’. Everybody rose to their feet. Rosalia danced with Elizabeth upon her hip. Her sister held her husband. I turned toward the feeling of a tap at my elbow.

‘Shall we?’ Paolino asked. I hadn’t noticed him slip into the party. I could have avoided this had I done so. ‘Just one dance. Then I’ll leave you in peace.’

Perhaps it was the atmosphere, the folks about me caring little about their troubles for a short pause. They had neither the comfort nor security of wealth, nor regular work, but were full of celebration. I longed to know what that felt like. So long had I been fixed on my next voyage that I failed to enjoy these moments passing by. I watched the family around me, my mind filled with Marco. How long would I have to knit our pasts together before I departed again?

Without thinking I let my hand slip into Paolino’s. It was square and strong, a little rough along the tips of the fingers. He held mine with more grace than I would have expected and kept a polite distance, much to my relief. I felt a sudden awareness of my calf as we spun, then admonished my vanity. No one here cared whether it was half the size of my other one. I wasn’t here to impress anybody – least of all my dance partner.

‘You think they dance under the sun in America, Santina?’ he whispered in my ear.

I stiffened.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his face relaxing into an expression close to genuine embarrassment. We swayed for a few beats. Rosalia’s family filled in the quiet gaps of our own dwindling conversation.

He stopped dancing but didn’t let go of my hands. ‘Can we talk somewhere?’

I noticed Mr Marini had moved onto ‘Perdoname’, his lament begging for forgiveness from his lover. Paolino led me out of the terrace and sat upon the wall surrounding the house. I felt for the donkey grappling the stairs as it passed by us, loaded with lemons in deep baskets hanging either side of his body, an unrelenting porter behind jeering him on.

‘Santina, I need to say these things. If I wait I’ll never forgive myself.’

I looked at my hands for a moment. Where was my mother’s fire to spit some wise retort at him, just enough to steer the conversation away from where I intuited it was headed?

‘You won’t believe me, for whatever reason. But truly, you are the most beautiful woman in this town.’

I took a breath, but should have known he would misunderstand it as a signal of studied feminine modesty.

‘You’re different,’ he added, ‘you’re not like the others. You’ve got your sights set on a bigger, brighter future than this little fishing village. I know that. I love that.’

‘Paolino, please,’ I interrupted at last, ‘stop before you say something you’ll be embarrassed about later.’

‘Nothing I want to tell you can embarrass me. I’m not scared of the truth. You shouldn’t be either.’

I stood up.

‘But you are,’ he said.

I hovered, angry that he was using his words to prod uncertainty out of me. His charm was as clumsy as I would have expected it to be after all.

‘I don’t think you’d know what the truth was if it slapped you round the face, Paolino. You know nothing about me.’

‘I know you’re compelling. You’re not like those girls who strut around town plastered with makeup to grab the attention of the foreigners. And you’ve survived living with my mother – that’s a small victory in itself!’

My involuntary laughter annoyed me. His smile changed his face. If I squinted I might even catch the bud of humility there.

‘Santina, I know nothing about you, it’s true. And I want to know everything.’

His eyes turned a deeper chestnut. I’d never noticed how thick his eyelashes were.

‘I’ve said too much. Sorry, Santina. You must have a lot on your mind. This is my final act of selfishness.’ He shrugged.

I said nothing.

He took my hand and kissed it.

My stomach tightened.

‘Come on, Rosalia’s tongue will be wagging!’ He smiled, changing trajectory with surprising ease.

We walked back onto the terrace. The sun had begun its descent.

‘I’ll be heading home now, Rosalia,’ I said, lifting Elizabeth out of her arms.

Her eyes twinkled with a familiar mischief. At last her plan unfurled.

‘And before you say what you’re thinking: No.’

‘No what?’

‘No to whatever scheme or romantic plan you’ve been salivating over. Paolino likes to say things he doesn’t mean. Or understand. You of all people can see that, surely?’

‘I see a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.’

I turned before she could tease me any further, kissed her sister on both cheeks and hiked downhill through the valley.

The house was quiet as we stepped back inside, the dusky pink plaster deepening in the final rays. Elizabeth, full of fresh air and exercise, gave in to sleep just as the stars twinkled in the midnight blue of early evening. I took my chair out onto the terrace outside my room. It was a warm evening that mocked the onset of autumn, whose creep over the valley felt a long way off even though it was almost October. The moon was full tonight, casting watery beams upon the glassy sea surrounding the tiny islands of Li Galli. There was a lot of talk in town of the Russian choreographer and the open air theater he had built there for dance recitals. I imagined ballerinas twirling in the moonlight, their limbs long and lean, allowing every expression to ripple through them. What must that feel like?

I unfolded the Major’s letter.

28 September 1958

Villa San Vito

Positano

Dear Santina,

Ahead of your imminent preparations to leave our family, I felt it only proper to express our deepest gratitude. If I were to do this in person, I have no doubt that your face would crease into the embarrassment I have come to see all too often, especially during my intensive approach to teaching. I put you very much on the spot, and I know this. But I did it for good reason.

When you arrive on those new shores there will be scores of people hoping to catch the same dreams as you. No one will care too much about who you are or want to be. You will have to prove yourself. The reserves of inner strength and determination I have observed in you over the past few months reassures me you will find your place wherever you decide to settle.

Furthermore, I have come to understand over the past difficult year what Wordsworth described as ‘The Child is father of the Man’. Elizabeth has taught me more than I care to admit. Her birth heralded the start of the hardest year of our lives. My darling wife is a shadow of the woman I married. Her recovery is slower than I hoped. Yet in spite of this, Elizabeth is a sunbeam. And this is all down to you.

I knew you were a special young woman the moment I met you that afternoon in London, the way your eyes lit up with an insatiable curiosity, something so similar to my own. What I couldn’t have known is how you would shower my daughter with a care that only a mother can give. I can offer her a fraction of what you can, or indeed what Adeline may, one day, if ever. Only time will tell.

I have decided the best course of action is to send Elizabeth to boarding school after she turns five. To send her before then seems brutal somehow, though in all likelihood it probably would be the best thing for her. I want to keep her with us until she reaches the age where her mother’s condition might start to weigh upon her in any way.

If there was any part of you that might even for a moment consider remaining here as her caregiver until she returns to Great Britain, I would do everything in my power to make it worthwhile. It goes without saying that I would offer you a reasonable raise in wages, and, I think only fair, one day off a week where I can schedule additional help.

If you have reached this part of the letter and have understood everything, I congratulate you on all the hard work you have invested in learning this new language. I hope, one day, I might be able to speak Italian as well as you do English. I gave up hope of cooking linguini with fresh clams and garlic as well as you do long ago. Perhaps you might teach me before you leave? In Italian of course.

Whatever your decision I will honor it. The choice is entirely yours. I hope the sun has set by the time you read this. In my experience, sleeping upon a decision delivers the truest answer.

Sincerely yours,

Henry Crabtree

I let the letter fall to my lap. The sky was onyx. The air was still. I could hear the faint sound of the sea beckoning to the shore. Which way was the tide pulling?

CHAPTER 8

The next morning the clouds darkened. Claps of thunder shook the house. The sea churned grey, and the whole of Positano retreated into their homes whilst the rain lashed the narrow alleys into scurries of water chasing over the cobbles down to the sea. The Major watched, sat at the table on the terrace outside the kitchen. As the wind whipped and flashes of light blanched the leaden sky, he sat in perfect stillness, the eye of the storm.

I should have liked to imitate his poise. My thoughts raced, clanging against one another like the copper pans I hung back on the wall in a vain attempt to coerce clear thinking. There was another fury of thunder. Elizabeth ran under the table and burst into tears. I threw the tea towel I used to dry the pans over my shoulder and crouched down till my face was level with hers. Her cheeks were crimson with terror. Tears streaked the sides of her face. I took her hand in mine. I tried to sit with her terror rather than brush it away. The latter approach I had found to be a pointless task, serving only to fill me with the same frustration as her own, which did nothing to expel it, and more often than not exacerbated it. I smoothed the back of her hand with my thumb and kissed her forehead. For a flicker I considered how liberating it was to be a child and let each of these emotions ripple through without boundary. Perhaps she was crying for my benefit? She shed the tears of confusion and fear I couldn’t. What would happen, if, for a moment, I surrendered to the conflicting emotions swirling inside me? Would it be so very disastrous? What if I acknowledged, with unabridged simplicity, that the idea of sailing away to a place where I knew no one, and nothing of the English spoken upon the American streets, abandoning my friends and Marco, filled me with palpable sadness?

I had been running all my life. My earliest memories were chasing behind my mother in search of something, food to sell, riches to dig up, laundry to deliver. We ran from my suffocating father and the dread of hunger. After my mother died I ran away from the memory of her.

As the shutters clattered against the wind, I wrapped Elizabeth in my arms and allowed my American daydream to ebb. I wanted to feel comforted by the realization that it was nothing but that – an ephemeral wish, another wisp of a life. Yet it smarted. It was so much easier to chase. Perhaps that way I might never get what I wanted and risk the chance of losing it?

I watched the Major take another sip of his tea, thin ribbons of steam lifting up into the furious air beyond the balustrade. Elizabeth grew heavy in my arms, her breath slowed. I didn’t realize I’d been rocking, soothing the both of us. She had fallen asleep. I walked through the dining room and up the stairwell to lay her down in the bed I still kept close to mine.

As I retraced my steps back to the kitchen, a draught curled up behind me. I knew I’d shut all the windows at the first darkening promise of a storm. I checked the Major’s – they were still closed.

I knocked on Adeline’s door. No answer. My stomach tightened. I hoped she was sleeping. I creaked the door open a little. The damp air blew on my face. The tall shutter door swung against the frame in the draught. Upon the roofless terrace stood Adeline. Her arms were outstretched. Rain pelted down her nightdress. Hair clung to her scalp, matted to the back of it. I fought the instinct to rush to her. I knew from experience that it would jar her into defensiveness, if not aggression. I ought to call the Major, but something stopped me. He seemed so peaceful down below on the kitchen terrace. This time I could handle Adeline. I stepped inside the room.

Perhaps I envied her abandon. She never did anything without entire commitment, to the detriment of herself. And yet, watching this woman, making tiny steps toward healing, standing fearless in the storm, filled me with an awkward admiration. All until I snapped back into myself and ran to gather towels so she might not catch her death. I stood in the doorway to the terrace, holding them. The water cut across the space between us, diagonal flights of tiny arrows.

‘Signora Adeline!’ I called out.

She turned toward me. Her face spread into a warm smile.

‘Please, come inside!’

I reached out a hand. She placed hers in mine. Her fingers were strong, still callused from her work. I didn’t want to pull her, but my forearm was already drenched. I began to regret my decision to take on the challenge of bringing her inside. Her grip tightened. She pulled. I took a step outside.

‘Come,’ she beckoned.

I didn’t want to fight. The sea shimmered silver as a vein of electricity splintered down from above. I didn’t want to be struck by lightning either.

She took my other hand and pulled. I stood opposite her. My face was drenched. The worn soles of my shoes blotted with rainwater seeping in at the edges.

‘Isn’t it glorious, Santina?!’ she yelled over the din.

I had no answer.

‘Do you remember when you came swimming with me?’

I nodded.

‘You’re so very good to me, Santina. You come from these mountains. It’s a blessing. Such power, don’t you think? Listen to the mountains roar!’

I was cold. I cared little to listen to silent mountains. The lightning and thunder were loud enough.

‘That rage! Pure energy. That’s all it is. That’s what we all are. I love you, Santina!’

Now her blue eyes deepened. For a moment I caught a flash of that woman jumping into the pond water in London. For a second she was there, in all her fiery glory. It made my heart hope and ache.

‘Signora Adeline – please let me wrap this around you now.’

‘I don’t need looking after, Santina. I need the water. I always have to be in water. Henry knew that. That’s why he brought me here.’

I tried to smile whilst easing a towel around her.

‘That’s how you tell if someone really loves you, Santina. If they give you what they know you need, whether or not they need it too. Do you understand that, Santina?’

I wanted to. I also wanted to be inside.

‘Stop pulling me, Santina!’ She flung off the towel and held my face with both her hands. ‘Look up! I mean really look!’

She lifted my face toward the sky. I half expected a shot of lightning to strike through me. Perhaps I would crisp in her arms.

‘How many colors?’ she asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘How many colors?’

Perhaps the Major would hear this outburst and rescue the both of us.

‘Grey?’

‘No – look closer. See the tinge of yellow? Can you see the hint of light green around the edge of that cloud just about the house? See how many greys there are, Santina – so many. Grey isn’t in between, it’s not simply neither white nor black. It’s not indecision, Santina. It’s full of blues and greens and browns and purples. So full. We only see the surface.’

And then she laughed. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me into her wet dress.

‘There’s no storm, Santina! We are it.’

Her laughter peeled into soft tears, ebbing and flowing between the two. She softened, so much so that I could actually lead her inside. I peeled her wet clothes off and wrapped another towel around her. She had grown thinner these past few months. I noticed the protrusion of her bones, the way the skin around it hung, a mournful ivory.

As I turned for another dry towel she walked away from me. I wasn’t quick enough to stop her. She stepped back out onto the wet terracotta tiles of the terrace, raised her arms up to the heavens, naked, stretching out her body, uncovered breasts for anyone to see. I was thankful that most Positanese would be shut away inside. I ran downstairs for the Major. No sooner had we returned than he stepped out into the storm to Adeline without a moment’s hesitation. I collected the wet towels.

As I turned to close the door behind me, my eyes were drawn back to the terrace. I’d expected him to lose his temper somehow, interrupted as he was from his meditative tea. Instead, he placed both his hands around Adeline’s face. He pulled her in close and placed his lips upon hers. She leaned back. Rain cascaded down her cheeks like tears. His mouth moved down her neck. I caught the tip of his tongue trace its brittle line. I closed the door, pretending I hadn’t seen his hands ease down her naked back. I pressed the door closed, wishing the feeling pulsing in my chest was closer to embarrassment.

Like a Neapolitan temper, the storm was swallowed out to sea as swift as it had erupted. Thankful that the rumbles of thunder had been nothing but that, and not prescient to an earthquake, the town resurrected to business with renewed gratitude. We had survived, once again. I pretended not to have noticed how long the Major stayed with Adeline before he returned to his abandoned tea and ordered a second pot. As I laid it down he looked up and caught my gaze.

‘I expect you are wondering when will be the appropriate time to discuss my letter?’

I straightened, trying my best to not allow his unexpected question leaving me hanging for a studied answer. I decided not to give in to mute embarrassment.

‘When would you like to discuss it, sir?’

‘This moment. I’m sure you’ve arrived at a decision. We always arrive at these sorts of decisions far quicker than we’d like to admit. It takes our stubborn brains longer to articulate it. Indecision is only the marker of resistance to our first impulse.’ He cleared his throat. If I didn’t know better, I would have sensed a sting of nerves. ‘No time like the present.’

I noticed he hadn’t done up the top two buttons of his shirt. Usually he only kept the top one undone.

‘I think,’ I began, trying with every fiber to not allow the quiver in my voice to take over, ‘I think that I am happy to stay in my hometown a little longer.’ This wasn’t the answer that had pounded my brain all night. I chose to ignore the other versions of my reply fighting to get out. The ones where I spoke of the family, of feeling flattered that they had thought my work good, of how much of a bond I felt with someone else’s daughter. I chose to make him think that it was Positano only that kept me here. I don’t think I’d realized it was far more than that. Or maybe I did, and that’s why I said nothing to that effect. I couldn’t articulate the way his lessons had changed me in this short time. I loved the way they worked a tangible magic upon my mind and way of seeing – the idea of stopping now was not an option.

‘Then it is settled?’

‘Yes, sir. I will remain until Elizabeth leaves for England.’

I didn’t think it appropriate to gush, or thank him. This was a business conversation. He creased his paper back up to cover his eyes.

‘This afternoon we must plant some of the newer tomato plants, Santina.’

I stood still.

‘It’s high time you and I instil some order to this garden. We are somewhat askew this year, but you can rest assured it will not happen again. Next growing season we must work quickly, we will avoid a dreadful glut of zucchini. Even with your culinary prowess I’m sure you’ll struggle to handle an endless supply of the blasted things. One can’t ever have enough tomatoes, though. I shall be glad of some jarred sunshine come November.’

He closed the conversation. There was nothing left for me to do but unpack the clothes I’d already packed in my mind, and be sure to reach Marco before he closed the gates for the evening.

*

I wasn’t sure whether it was my state of mind, or whether the tumult of a storm made the blue skies that followed all the brighter. The cemetery looked luminous that afternoon: the bright white of the tombs crisper than usual, any leafy debris washed away by the rains to reveal the delicate veins within the marble. Elizabeth and I wove in between the high tombs, sometimes stopping as she looked up at the towering angels above the richer dead, or insisting we take a moment by the tomb that marked the picturesque spot where a Muslim prince lay, his headscarf carved atop an engraved obelisk.

We followed the narrow walkway onwards, which curved back into the rock where two wide stone benches were sculpted into the indentation. Elizabeth sat down upon the hot cement, happy to perform careful re-examinations of a handful of stones and a couple of pine cones we’d found along the way. I waited for Marco, holding a warm roll I’d just baked stuffed with prosciutto and thin slices of eggplant, wrapped in a tea towel. In my other hand I’d filled a small cloth bag with oranges from the garden. I turned toward oncoming footsteps. I stood up and wrapped my arms around Marco.

‘Calma, Santina, you make me feel like you’re saying goodbye!’

I didn’t let go.

‘Something smells good!’

I handed him the warm tea towel. He sat and attacked the contents. I wondered when he had last eaten.

I let him enjoy several mouthfuls in silence. ‘Things will be different now. I will have every Sunday off. We can be together.’

He straightened and swallowed. His eyes creased toward the sea. It was a deep turquoise this afternoon. I followed his gaze. I thought about Adeline and squinted to see how many other colors I could see within the blue.

‘I would like that, Santina. Can I come to you? My house . . .’

He trailed off.

I filled in the gaps. ‘Let me speak with the Major – that’s what we call him, he was in the British army, India – I’m sure we can work something out. Perhaps a picnic up in our mountains?’

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