An elderly lady was making her way towards the counter, clutching a set of boxed light bulbs in one hand, her stick in the other. Instead of the colourful smocks sported by other elderly village folk she wore a frilly collared blouse nearly tucked into a sunray pleated skirt that fell to her ankles. A gold cross dangled from a length of black beads double looped around her wrinkled neck. Despite her painfully slow gait, she held her head high, almost as though she were defying anyone who might suggest she was old and frail. The quiff of white hair above her high forehead made Stella think of a proudly hoisted flag.
‘Buongiorno!’ Stella said.
The woman responded with a nod.
It was now that Stella focused on the woman’s face and the beady eyes that, despite her age, had no need of glasses. Those eyes! Stella recognised them at once: lake-water green, searching Stella’s for some evil rooted deep in her soul. The eyes of Fernanda, Gino’s mamma.
Fernanda placed her purchase on the counter. ‘Where’s Domenico?’ She twisted her head as though he might have sneaked up behind her. A bone in her neck creaked. Stella winced.
‘He had a fall, he’s at the hospital.’
‘I’m surprised I hadn’t heard. But then I don’t get out as much as I used to… Wait a moment, I know you. It’s Stella, isn’t it?’ she said sharply.
‘You remember me?’ Stella tried to sound casual, even though her heart was racing faster than the time Carol had dragged her along to her Wednesday night spin class. She rang up the cost of the bulbs.
Fernanda gave a brief nod. ‘You remember me too, I see, though you were just a young girl when you left.’
‘Of course I remember.’ Stella watched the old lady’s face but Fernanda didn’t react, merely counted out the exact change from her plum-coloured pigskin purse, dropping the coins onto the counter with a clatter so Stella had to scoop them up.
Fernanda placed her shopping in her brown cloth bag. ‘Give Domenico my best wishes.’ And with that, she turned and left.
Stella clutched the edge of the countertop, her heart still thumping. When she arrived in the village, it hadn’t crossed her mind that she’d see Fernanda again, imagining she’d be long in her grave. Even as a teenager, Gino’s mamma had seemed ancient, her stern looks and mutterings about sin something from another era. But now here she was, large as life. The woman who’d set off the chain of events that had upended Stella’s life.
17
The church bells were chiming. Half past twelve. As a teenager, Stella had been frustrated by the way the village shut down for hours in the middle of the day. Her younger brother and sister had been content to rest, do their schoolwork or play cards after lunch but Stella had railed against the enforced downtime, longing to slip out and make the long walk to the abandonedrusticowhere there were no adults and no rules, just two teenagers in love. The only comfort had been knowing Gino was similarly confined, ploughing his way through an English-language novel, a giant dictionary by his elbow. Now, totting up the morning’s takings and tidying the counter, Stella could appreciate how beneficial it was to take a break and for those working amongst the olives, in the vineyards and labouring at the goat farm to escape the hottest part of the day.
Today, she didn’t want to go back to Domenico’s house for her siesta, knowing that even if she was resting her body, her mind would be far from calm. She’d be constantly churning over what had happened with Joe, leaping up at any notification on her phone, hoping he would get in contact.
Stella glanced up at Mirtillo’s cage. The little bird seemed happy enough pecking at his seed bell under the shade of the shop awning. She locked the shop door and walked down the street, passing the drawn shutters of the other shops, towards the bar. The dread of bumping into her old neighbours had evaporated. A steady stream of the villagers had dropped past Domenico’s shop that morning, some in genuine need of an obscure household item but most driven by the desire to learn the latest news about the old man’s health or to catch a glimpse of Stella, news of her arrival having spread faster than a cut-price deal at the village pizzeria. To her surprise, no one had seemed hostile. Over forty years had passed, her father Arturo’s death was old news. Decades of births and deaths, betrothals and betrayals had supplanted her own tragic tale. But she knew it wasn’t forgotten. This was a place that held its past close, where alliances and feuds could endure for generations. Like the bitterness between her family and Gino’s.
The bar was quiet, just the odd tourist passing through, eating their lunch at the outside tables. She ordered a panino filled with salami and cheese, tearing at the chewy bread with her teeth, trying not to miss the butter she would have slathered on back home.
A quick espresso to finish and she was done. She paid inside at the counter and walked slowly back to the shop. The heat of the sun was made bearable by the light breeze but it was still a lot warmer than the English summers she’d become used to and though she was glad of the relative cool of the shop, she rather wished Domenico had had the resources to install some air conditioning. She set her handbag on the counter and descended to the cooler cantina, a spiralbound notepad and pen in hand.
The basement was quiet, no hoot from a passing car, no dog barking. There was no better time to concentrate on the job in hand. If she was going to continue to look after the shop, even for a few days, she needed to familiarise herself with her uncle’s stock. She’d been too worried about him to notice much about the basement on the day of Domenico’s accident but now she could focus on the extraordinarily packed space. The floor was so cluttered she was surprised he’d found room to set up his ladder. And it was a miracle he’d landed on the pile of outdoor cushions and picnic blankets that had cushioned his fall instead of on the box of sharp-edged secateurs or the crate of crockery just nearby. It might be fanciful to imagine Papà had been looking down on his younger brother but someone up there had decided it wasn’t Domenico’s time to go.
She started to jot down the contents of the nearest boxes, soon realising the task she’d set herself was as great as attempting an inventory of Aladdin’s cave. Except here there was no tree of glittering jewels or genie’s lamp but box after brown box. Some were labelled in the handwriting she recognised from Domenico’s notices behind the till but most were unmarked and could hold just about anything; the task was overwhelming. She sank down onto one of the crates.
Come on, Stella, you can do this. She’d managed a whole supermarket branch in the years before Lauren was born and afterwards she’d juggled working behind the till in another branch with bringing up a lively toddler and coping with Ricky’s chaos. The only way Stella had managed was to tackle one chiller cabinet, one display stand, one toy box or one pile of washing at a time.
She decided to start with the smaller area behind the pillars that marked what was once the division between her family’s shop and the one next door. Although upstairs the wall between the two had been completely knocked through, down here part of the wall that had once stood between their place and the old milliner’s shop remained.
Stella knew from comments her parents had made in the past that Fernanda’s older sister, Violetta, had run the shop successfully until her death towards the end of the war. Who could afford to buy hats during those lean times was a mystery. The villagers had become more impoverished with every passing year. Crops were requisitioned by Mussolini’s troops, rations reduced, stocks of stewed fruits, bottled tomatoes and olive oil all run down to nothing. Her parents rarely mentioned their hungry childhoods, but her mamma had told Stella about her own mother grinding acorns to make a rudimentary coffee and her childish fear – neither confirmed nor denied by her parents – that the homeless cat she’d made friends with had ended up in the stew. Those had been years of patching and repatching old clothes, of lining leaking shoes with cardboard. Who had the money for the fancy new titfers Violetta made and sold?
Stella looked around the small space. Her eye caught boxes of fairy lights, Easter decorations, artificial Christmas trees. This area was clearly used to store out-of-season goods. There was nothing here she was likely to sell in the next few days but curiosity got the better of her.
Investigating a corner cupboard half hanging from the wall, she uncovered stacks of brown boxes, their lids secured with butterscotch-coloured sticky tape, split and peeling. She ran a finger across one, tracing a line through a layer of pale grey dust, thick and soft as rabbit’s fur. Knowing Domenico wouldn’t mind, she ripped off the sticky tape, revealing bundles of feathers, brown and mottled, grey and white, not much use to anyone. She picked up the next box, it nearly fell apart in her hands. Inside were ribbons in every shade, neatly coiled. A scrap of yellowed paper lay amongst them: a receipt, the ink faded but still readable: an amount in Italian lire, the date 1942. This must be part of Violetta’s old stock, untouched for decades. The task of sorting through it all put off year after year.
Sifting through the rainbow of ribbons brought up images of neat fitted suits, peekaboo veiling and cute cocktail hats dipped flirtatiously over one eye. Stella picked up a wooden dome, not far off the size of her own head. Had Fernanda’s sister used this to mould the shape of the hats or to show them off to good effect? There were other blocks of wood in the cupboard too but whilst retrieving them, her fingers brushed against something soft, a hat fashioned from leaf-green felt, flattened almost beyond recognition. She blew on it softly, immediately regretting the puff of dust that made her sneeze. This had been a pretty thing once, decorated with a delicate spray of silk violets, the centre of each fashioned from a tiny jewel. She turned the hat over, revealing a lining of patterned silk. It didn’t seem right to put such a carefully made object back to languish for goodness knows how many more years. Perhaps she could restore it and try to return it to its former glory.
A bell jangled. Stella must have forgotten to relock the door. Picking up the hat, she hurried up the stairs. A young woman – late teens, early twenties perhaps – stood just inside the door.
‘Buongiorno,’ Stella said, installing herself behind the counter and popping the hat beside the till.
‘Buongiorno,’ the girl replied. Her accent marked her out as English, as did her milky white skin and light reddish hair. ‘I wasn’t sure if it was okay to come in. The sign said closed but then I saw your handbag on the counter and realised the door was unlocked.’
‘I am supposed to be closed but I’m happy to help you.’ Stella switched to English, to the girl’s obvious relief.
