Kissing in Italian (6 page)

“I keep hoping she’ll lower the price,” Paige says, “because they’re all here week after week, but it’s still forty-nine euros.…”

“
Way
too much,” Kelly says, turning away with a sigh.

“I need to talk to you,” I hiss at her. “Let’s hit the library now.”

“Are we going to the rotisserie chicken stall?” Paige asks. “I’m getting hungry.”

“Why don’t you and Kendra go and get lunch,” Kelly says, coming over all organized, “and then join us in the park with the benches in half an hour? Opposite the cinema? Violet and I want to go to the library.”

“Okay!” Paige says happily. I fumble for some euros to give her, but she waves me away. “I got this,” she says cheerfully. “You can treat next week.”

“Get lots of the fried veggies,” I say. “I love those.”

“And the polenta,” Kelly says eagerly.

I hesitate for a moment, wondering if I should tell Paige to keep Kendra away from the art stall and Luigi, but then I realize that’s impossible and silly. It would be for nothing, anyway; we’ll see Luigi this afternoon, for our art lesson. My plastic bag of art supplies swinging from my wrist, I follow Kelly through the crowds.

We turn under the stone colonnades that run around the sides of the piazza. In front of the bars are casual wrought-iron tables and benches, and chic dark-brown woven chairs and tables covered in cream cloths outside Nerbone, the smart restaurant. I always look with envy at the people lunching or dining in Nerbone; the food smells delicious, the tinkle of glasses and cutlery is enticing, the clientele is so smart.

And then I see Luca and Elisa, Catia’s daughter, our implacable enemy, having lunch at a table beside the hedge that wraps around Nerbone’s dining area. They look—perfect. Elisa is, as always, chic, wearing a slightly transparent shirt over a miniskirt that shows off her long, thin, tanned legs. Luca is in a white linen shirt and jeans. They’re each holding a glass of straw-colored white wine, talking and laughing
without a care in the world. It’s as if he and I hadn’t had that dark, deep, passionate moment in the river yesterday, as if he could dismiss me, completely, from his mind.…

Kelly hasn’t seen them, I think. I turn my head so he won’t catch my stare; I believe we have a bond, which means he’ll sense I’m looking at him. And I couldn’t bear to see Luca raise his glass at me mockingly, saying with a glint in his dark-blue eyes,
You ran away from me last night, so why shouldn’t I go out with Elisa? I’m free to see whoever I like, aren’t I
?

He is free. Of course he is. I scurry away as fast as if the cobblestones were burning my feet, around the corner of the piazza, past the big stall that sells plants and herbs and flowers set out in pots and vases all over the pavement. We shoot across the traffic lights, crossing the little bridge over the Greve River, quacking ducks below calling to one another as they float on the shallow water. We pass the huge iron sculpture of a black rooster, the symbol of Chianti and its wines, turn left before the cinema, and walk down the path to the village library. Kelly discovered it first—in part, I think, as somewhere to hang out when the rest of us were wandering around the shops or sitting in the piazza having coffees and debating purchases. She has very little cash, and saying she wanted to go to the library was a clever way to avoid spending money while simultaneously looking good.

That’s Kelly in a nutshell. She thinks things over, works out solutions, plots and plans, uses her considerable brainpower to her best advantage. Of course, I would have bought her coffees, as many as she wanted, but she’s too proud for that. She’d see it as charity. And I admire her for her pride too, this clever new friend I’ve made in Italy.

“Did you see Luca?” she asks as we trot down the path.

“Yes,” I say shortly, flinching at the pain that every mention of Luca’s name gives me. “And I saw Elisa, too.”

Luca’s father is a
principe
, which means “prince”; Luca will inherit the title, and the castle, so Elisa is utterly focused on snagging him. Ditto Catia, who’s very ambitious for her daughter. We’ve all seen Catia working her friendship with Luca’s mother, the principessa, to maneuver their children together; we’re all regularly snubbed by Elisa, who called us pigs the first time she saw us; and we all, in consequence, hate her guts.

Kelly comments obliquely:

“That’s why we need to find out about you.”

I nod. The chink in Elisa’s armor is the attention that Luca pays me, the genuine feelings he has for me. It annoys her tremendously, and though of course that’s not the reason I’m so keen on Luca, I can’t help admitting that it’s an extra bonus, the icing on the cake. If somehow we can prove that he and I aren’t closely related, if we can be free to see each other, apart from making me ecstatic, it will drive Elisa crazy.

“I’m emailing my mum as soon as we get back to the villa,” I say. “I’ve already got it mostly written in my head.”

“Good,” Kelly says, turning to give me a very direct gaze, her hazel eyes clear. “And now we’ll start on the research side of things.”

She reaches out and squeezes my hand. We walk together the last part of the way still holding hands, something I’d never do in England, where it’s for little girls only; but in Italy, people are much more openly affectionate. They kiss
each other’s cheeks on greeting; they embrace when they feel affectionate; grown men walk down the street with their arms around each other.

“Ciao, Kellee,”
says the librarian, smiling at us as we come in.
“Buon giorno.”

“Buon giorno, Sandra,”
Kelly says.
“Questa è mia amica Violetta. Abbiamo bisogno di aiuto.”

“We need help,” she’s saying. I nod and smile. I hatched this idea yesterday, on the drive home from Siena, but since Kelly’s Italian is better than mine, she launches into the words that explain what we’re after: I make out the words “Castello di Vesperi,” Luca’s home. The librarian’s nodding, standing up, leading us over to a section of books against the far wall, and I follow Kelly as we sit down where she indicates. We look at each other excitedly as the librarian pulls a large coffee-table book from the shelves, opens it, and places it triumphantly in front of us.

It’s called
Castelli di Chianti
, Chianti Castles. We’re looking at a beautiful, glossy photograph of the Castello di Vesperi high on a hill, with its vineyards and olive groves below, and the cypress-lined drive curving up to it.

“Grazie,”
I say to Sandra, beaming as we turn the pages and realize that there’s tons of history about the castello here. Exactly what I’m after.

And then I gasp, and nudge Kelly so hard she tips on her plastic chair.

“Look!”
I hiss.

In a black-and-white thumbnail photograph, in a cluster of other reproduced family portraits, is a head-and-shoulders picture of the girl I saw in the painting in London. She’s
very like the other members of the di Vesperi family: as the principessa said when she saw me, the family features are distinctive.

I know it’s the same girl. I pull out my phone, call up the photo I took in London of the portrait, and hold it against the picture in the book. The hair is subtly different, and so is the neckline of her dress; it’s not the same portrait. But it’s definitely the same person.

Kelly points wordlessly to the footnotes at the bottom of the page, which give details of all the pictures.
Fiammetta di Vesperi
, we read.
Nata 1732, morta 1754, della febbre tifoide
.

“The typhoid fever,” I say sadly, puzzling out the words. “She was so young!”

I can’t even imagine having only a few more years to live. It feels like my life has barely begun; I’ve got so much I want to do, so many places I want to go. To have that all closed down so fast, to feel an end coming so soon, is unimaginable.

Did Fiammetta have any idea of her impending death when this portrait was painted? I stare down at the picture of Fiammetta di Vesperi, who was, more than likely, a distant ancestor of mine. Her dark eyes look back at me, their gaze steady and determined; her forehead is smooth, unworried, and her lips are set together firmly.

I take courage from that look of hers. She’s a girl on a mission, like me. I sense that even in her short life, she knew what she wanted and pushed to get it, made every moment count.

I resolve to do the same.

I sketch in a summary of the events at the Castello di Vesperi. I don’t just describe the principessa being struck by the resemblance between me and her husband’s family, but also my likeness to so many portraits in the gallery, how many times my face appeared there, in different historical periods, different dresses, different hair arrangements—yet still my face. The di Vesperi female face.

I say that I’ve always known I didn’t look like my tall, skinny Scottish father and Scandinavian mother, with their long freckled pale limbs and their blond (Mum) or sandy (Dad) hair, their pale blue eyes; that it never bothered me (which is a lie), but that I suddenly started thinking about it after the visit to the castello (another lie). That I love her, will always love her just the same whatever she tells me (the truth, the absolute truth), but that I want to know if there’s any remote reason she could possibly think of to explain this weird resemblance.…

I wish she weren’t alone. My parents divorced years ago, and my dad lives in Hong Kong now with the horrible girlfriend he left my mum for, a Danish woman called Sif who hates me, resents how much Dad loves me, and tries out of jealousy to pretend I don’t exist. (I console myself with the reflection that her name sounds almost exactly like a brand of loo cleaner.) But although he doesn’t notice awful Sif doing her best to snub me when I visit them, he’s still, thank goodness, an amazing dad.

He isn’t with Mum anymore, and I’ve accepted that. Mum isn’t seeing anyone, though. She’s on her own. I brighten up, remembering that her sister, my aunt Lissie,
was going to come to London and visit her while I was away; Aunt Lissie used to model too, like my mum, and she’s a stylist now, traveling all over the world for magazines. Hopefully Aunt Lissie’s there now, when this email arrives.

Mum usually talks everything over with me. This, I realize, will be the first time she can’t.

I knew that Mum and I were maybe a bit too close. That coming away to Italy might not be the worst thing for either of us. But this is truly bringing it home to me.

I swallow as I read through the email again.

Before I can think it over, I hit Send. It’s gone. I watch the blue line at the bottom of the screen grow, stretching from left to right as the message is in transit, a heartbeat in which, conceivably, I could—shut the laptop? Jam my finger on the off button? Throw it against the wall?

I don’t know if any of that would work: whether, as soon as you send an email, it shoots up into the cloud like a puff of air. And anyway, it happens so fast; it’s gone in a split second. Before I could even try to stop it, the possibility has vanished.

This had to happen
, I tell myself.
You didn’t have a choice. You had to ask her. And it was better to email her, to give her time to think this over and decide how to handle it, not to put her on the spot in person by ringing her, or waiting till you see her again
.

I could never have been brave enough to ask her to her face if I was adopted—or if Dad wasn’t my real father.…

I jump up, slam the laptop shut, and dash out of the bedroom I share with Kelly as if I were being chased by a pack of wild dogs. I can’t think about this any longer. I tear down the stairs, my bare feet slapping on the stone, through the hallway, out the front door, and around the house to the swimming pool. Pulling off my cover-up, chucking it on the stone flags, I dive in, the shock of the cool water on my overheated skin exactly what I need to stop me thinking. I do a length underwater as fast as I can, and when I come up, gasping and shaking my head, I realize that everyone’s staring at me.

“Wow,” Evan says, looking over his guitar, which is propped on his lap as he sits cross-legged on a towel. “You in a race with the Invisible Man?”

I giggle at this image.

“Violet,”
he sings, strumming a chord.
“Running a race with a serious face—so did you win? Or was it him? Don’t forget, Vio
-let—
Dive in!”

He ends on a high falsetto note, grinning at me.

“That doesn’t make much sense,” he adds. “But hey, at least I rhymed your name.”

“Violet’s pretty easy,” I say, propping my arms on the edge of the pool and smiling back at him. “Regret, forget, net, jet, yet, set, bet—”

“Try Evan,” he suggests. “Apart from numbers and heaven, which gets old
very
quickly, there’s practically nothing.”

“Numbers? Oh! Eleven … seven …” I furrow my brow.

“Devon,” Kelly calls over. “That’s a county in England.”

“Leaven,” I add. “You do it to bread.”