I devoured my bread, drank my good hot coffee, and promptly fell asleep with my head on Jeremy’s shoulder, where I dozed until his snoring woke me up. His cheek was on the top of my head.The morning sun streamed through the windshield, mellow, golden, warming. As soon as I stirred, Jeremy woke, saying,“What? What?” as if ready to take off at high speed.
Jeremy’s phone rang and we both nearly jumped out of our seats. “Hello?” he said guardedly. Then he relaxed. “Yes, how’s Denby?” he asked, and he mouthed to me that it was Denby’s wife on the phone. “Good, good,” Jeremy said.Then all of a sudden he shut up.“Where is it?” he asked rather sharply.Then he was silent again.Then he said, “I see.Tell him thanks. Hope he’s feeling better tomorrow. Good-bye.”
He turned to me.“Denby made his wife call us right away, because he remembered something he meant to tell us. While he was working on the car, a girl from the village stopped by. She did chores for Aunt Penelope when she was in town, and she was there the day Aunt Penelope died. Aunt Pen had given her money to buy food—and a letter to send by registered mail to my law firm that day. But when Aunt Pen fell ill, the girl went to fetch the doctor, and she forgot to take the letter to the post office. She left it in that little porch beside the kitchen. Denby said there’s a bench with a lift-up seat for storage underneath, where the girl kept her grocery bags and lists. Denby saw the address on it, and told her he’d be seeing us soon, and he says he locked the letter in the glove compartment of my car just before his accident.You’d better have a look, Penny. He said it was addressed to both of us.”
“Us?” I echoed. He handed me the key to unlock it. And there it was, an envelope from her linen stationery, written in Aunt Penelope’s familiar handwriting, to two names,
Penelope Nichols and Jeremy Laidley,
addressed in care of his London firm. I thought of the photos of Jeremy and me, in the writing box on her bed, and I got goose-bumps. I opened the envelope.
My dearest Penelope and Jeremy,
I tried to reach you by telephone, Jeremy darling, but you were unavailable today. I have managed, all this time, to look after you without interfering in your life; and I’ve always respected your parents’ wishes, but I do believe that, in the end, a person has the right to know who he truly is, how beloved he was by both his families, and what his own legacy is really all about. I do so hope, Jeremy, that you will love the villa as much as I and your great-grandfather did. Accept it as a token of my love for him, and for you. His name was Giulio Principe, and I cherished him more than any other creature on earth.You, Jeremy, are the real gift he left me, and watching you grow into the fine man of our family has been the sweetest joy of my life. I hope you will forgive me for being cowardly and not telling you all this directly. So many times, gazing at your face, I longed to. As for all the rest about your father, you must ask your mother all about it.
Now Penny dear, no one knows better than I that a girl ought to have a start in life—and a car of her own to drive to the ball. Otherwise she may find herself at the mercy of men, fate and history, as I did for a time. I have been thinking a great deal about life, how dear it is, how fragile we all are, and how history can shake up your entire little world and throw you some unexpected turns. Penny, with your bright, inquisitive mind and your caring heart, I feel that you will know how to tend to something else that I hold dear. Inside the door on the passenger side of your little car is a hiding place with a painting that Jeremy’s great-grandfather gave me. He made over a bill of sale to me (which I enclose) so that if the situation arose, I could legally prove ownership. I kept the painting in my library for a time, but recently decided that it was safer back in its original hiding place. It may be very valuable, and I’m afraid that it’s caught the eye of Rollo Jr., who would surely mishandle it. I always meant to sell it to a museum one day, but I thought it brought me luck and I was reluctant to part with it. However, when you own something too valuable, and you have to hide it, then you may never get a chance to look at it anymore.You always think that you’ll have more time to enjoy what you’ve got.
But darlings, I believe I’m running out of time. What’s the point of surviving history, if one can’t pass on some hard-learned wisdom along with one’s earthly possessions? All I can tell you both is that you must live every day as if it counts, which means to love all of it. Never let a single one go by without noting the color of the sky, the song of the bird, the face of the one you love best. And don’t let yourself get talked out of the things you really care about, don’t put off what you want to be. Don’t be bitter, Jeremy. People are fallible, but if you aren’t too quick to judge them, they can surprise you. Penny, there’s no storybook on earth more exciting than being alive yourself. So go forward without fear, and do be kind to each other, no matter where life leads you. I know that I can trust the two of you to do the right thing with that which I leave in your hands.
Love to you both,
Aunt Penelope
I read it aloud, haltingly, trying to make out Aunt Penelope’s handwriting. It had her usual hurried, dashing quality, except that the letters were larger, and at the end, a little jagged, as if she were rushed, tired.The village girl had witnessed it by signing at the bottom. By the time I got to the end, I had tears in my eyes.
Jeremy looked touched but bewildered. “Did she go barmy or something? What is all this?” he asked.
Of course none of it made sense to him. But I said excitedly,“She was superstitious about it. She didn’t want to think about revealing the painting, until finally she had to,” I said. “Then she needed to move fast, and was frantic to tell you all about it, without Rollo finding out. Remember, you said she tried to telephone you the day she died. Now you know why.”
I looked at the smaller page enclosed with the letter, a delicate tissue-thin kind of parchment. “It
is
a bill of sale. June 30th, 1940, signed by one Giulio Principe to Penelope Laidley! I bet it was Giulio who put it in the car door in the first place. He told her what to do, so she could get it—and his son—out of Italy if he or his parents died. See, he wanted the painting out so that the Nazi army couldn’t steal it.”
Jeremy was staring at me as if trying to decide if I’d taken complete leave of my senses. He said,“What are you
on
about? What the hell did she mean about ‘my great-grandfather’ and ‘ask your mother’? Is she talking about Mum’s father? Or Grandfather Nigel?”
He picked up the letter and the bill of sale and looked at them. “Who the bloody hell is Giulio Principe, and ‘little Domenico’?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about this all along, but I wanted to check with your mother first to see if what I heard was absolutely true.”
His blue eyes darkened as if he didn’t know exactly what I was talking about, but some instinct was telling him the general direction already.Yet his voice was cool when he said, “Does this have something to do with me personally?”
“Yes,” I said, deciding that the only way to do it was to blurt it out. “I looked up a man who was Aunt Penelope’s singing partner in those cabaret duos they performed back in the twenties and thirties. He told me all about Aunt Penelope, and a man she loved very much . . .”
Once I started, the words just came pouring out. I told it to him as directly as it had been told to me.The whole time, from beginning to end, Jeremy never said a word. Which was completely unlike him. Never interrupted once, never fired off a question. Sat there in silence, looking straight ahead, his profile never changing. So I just kept talking, telling it to him as gently as I could, but leaving nothing out.
“You see, I wanted to tell you, but I also wanted to make sure it wasn’t just some geezer gossiping,” I concluded. I had reached the end and I had run out of breath.
Then Jeremy got out of the car. I know I was supposed to stay put, to give him a chance to think and all that, but I got out with him anyway. The soft golden sun had been sneaking up higher in the sky for some time, but it wasn’t until now that, yawning and stretching, it was really raising its face above the morning fog, which was slowly dissolving, so that the effect was like a curtain rising to reveal the stunning view of the Mediterranean. And, like a fairy-tale city emerging from the mists, there was the beautiful old city of Genoa, with its ancient cluster of forts and castles and turrets and hidden secrets.
I don’t suppose Jeremy was really seeing it, of course. But he gazed broodingly out at the spectacular world spread there before us, and after a rather long silence, he spoke.
“So—now I’m to believe that Aunt Pen convinced my father—sorry, stepfather, to marry my mother so that she could keep me—all in the family, so to speak?” he said, shocked. “That I am actually the great-grandson of her
driver
?” He paused, then said, “Her servant?”
This irritated me back into my old voluble self.“Oh, don’t be such a jerk,” I said.“He wasn’t really a servant. I told you, that was just cover, socially. He was the only man she ever really loved—”
“And that makes it all better,” he said with sudden sarcastic vehemence. “You women are all alike.You think if you say, ‘I loved him’ that makes it okay. Well, it doesn’t. Do you have the first idea what it’s like to have people keep pulling the chair out from under your ass? Can you imagine thinking you’re one sort of person and finding out that, no, you’re not anymore, you’re another sort, and you came from a bunch of foreigners you’ve never met in your life and never will?”
“If you’d listened to me, you wouldn’t feel like they were a bunch of foreigners, as you so snobbily put it,” I retorted. I suppose I could have been a bit more sympathetic to the pure shock value of what I was telling him, but I was tired of being growled at no matter how carefully I approached him.
“As for your lineage, well, relax, because Giulio, your great-grandfather, was from a good aristocratic family in Italy,” I said. “And his son, Domenico—your grandfather—was a brave little boy who got shunted around during the war and ended up in America, but was smart and successful and married the girl he loved and had your father, Tony, a kid who loved music as intensely as you do. And
he
came to England and fell passionately in love with your mother, who loved him so much that even now she runs that soldiers’ home in his memory, just to keep him alive for her. You’re the only one in this crowd who’s a snotty sourpuss. Maybe love doesn’t count in the social register, or whatever it is you Brits call it—”
“Debrett’s,” he said automatically, absently.
“But you had all this love in your lineage, you idiot,” I continued, undaunted, “and love is more rare than rubies. It’s in your soul, whether you want to admit it or not. It’s probably, when you think of it, the best news you’ve ever had.”
“No it’s not,” he said, suddenly and unexpectedly.
He faced me with what I can only describe as a bucked-up courageous look, as if what he was about to tell me required more guts than anything else he’d ever had to say to me. There we were, all dusty, rumpled and bedraggled, since we’d been driving all night and morning, fueled simply by the adrenaline of the chase. In short, we’d reached that odd, fearless euphoric stage when you just don’t have the need to keep up your usual defenses against your feelings and the ridicule of others.
“The best news I’ve ever had,” he said slowly,“you pain-in-the-ass, impossible, stubborn, thickheaded woman—”
“Stubborn and thickheaded are the same thing,” I pointed out automatically, not able to stop myself. Because if he needed courage to say something to me, I just might be too terrified to hear it.
“There, you see?” he said triumphantly. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
“What’s the best news you’ve ever had?” I said, half in dread, half fascinated now.
“The best news I’ve ever had is that you are no longer my cousin,” he said.“I no longer have to look out for you. I no longer have to put up with you. I no longer have to worry that somebody is about to kidnap you, or swindle you, or seduce you for your money . . .”
It was his tone that got to me. I could hardly believe I was hearing it right, but I knew that I was, because of the way it felt. That roller-coaster surge again; only now, having already made that plunge down a steep drop, we were right back on the upswing before I could even catch my breath, climbing higher and higher into the blue sky.
“And most of all,” he concluded, “I no longer have to protect you from
me
. You wretched girl, you made me care about you from the first time I saw you being chased by that bee at the beach, but then you just vanished for years and years and never looked back, so I told myself I was glad to be rid of you. But then, in your usual irresponsible way, you waltzed right back into my life, heedless of the consequences and leaving it all up to me to behave properly.Well, now I don’t need to feel guilty for all the heretofore primal feelings I’ve been having about you ever since you showed up in London at the hotel looking so beautiful, and you made me wonder if you were doing it on purpose just to torture me or if you simply couldn’t control your own heretofore primal feelings—Are you listening to me? Have you grasped precisely what it is that I’m trying to tell you?”
“Yes,” I said in a small voice. “Heretofore, as you put it, you have had, for quite some time now—the hots for me.”
“And?” he prompted. “Go on.”
I couldn’t help it. I widened my eyes and said, “What?”
“ ‘What’ indeed!” he said ferociously, and grabbed me and pulled me close and started kissing me hungrily, again and again, and saying in between, “Well? Are you going to say it, or are you going to make me make you say it?” And then he’d kiss me again and demand, “Well?” and honestly for a minute there I couldn’t catch my breath to speak.