1
Amy trailed behind her work colleagues as they strode towards the transfer van, doing her best to smile and pretend she was fine with the fact her luggage hadn’t made it to Verona airport alongside everyone else’s.
‘Oh well. It’s only stuff,’ Amy’s boss, Billie, commented – with her usual lack of subtlety and no sign of concern. ‘Although it’s just as well it wasn’t mine – I brought my favourite vintage Armani jacket and I’d be really cheesed off to lose that.’
Billie’s photographer, Malcolm, who completed the travel trio, remained upbeat as he related an anecdote about a suitcase he’d lost track of in Singapore.
‘They blew the damned thing up,’ he said. ‘It would have been seriously annoying, but they didn’t control the explosion very well and let’s just say, when you’ve seen your own stripy boxers adorning a sushi bar, shower gel dripping from girders, well – you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?’
Even Malcolm’s humour struggled to permeate Amy’s gloom. A week without any of her clothes wasn’t something Amy had on a ‘must-do’ list. Especially when they were headed to such a glamorous destination. Dressing for dinner with nothing but the jeans and baggy button-through shirt she was wearing could prove tricky. Not to mention the lack of her washbag, make-up, or the couple of paperbacks she’d been looking forward to dipping into…
She’d queued at the help desk, lodged her details and received a polite but well-rehearsed Italian brush-off. All she could do was hope that her belongings might eventually find their way to Lake Garda and catch up with her.
Shuffling up in her seat in the back of the transfer van, Amy did her best to appreciate the way the mountains were reflected in the water of the largest lake she’d ever seen. The water seemed endless – like an ocean, and if you looked carefully, the marine blue of the water mixed almost perfectly with the reflection of the flawless sky above. As though they could be flipped on their heads in this Mercedes SUV, and the view she was staring at wouldn’t change.
Seeing Lake Garda first-hand, in the bright sunshine of a late-June day should have been completely brilliant, but it seemed her boss’s prime vantage point in the front passenger seat of the transfer van was also wasted. Twisting in the seat to talk to Malcolm, Billie Forsythe-Rogers gave no sign of having noticed the lake at all. Billie was giving the cold shoulder to one of the best views Amy had ever seen.
As her companions’ conversation rattled on, Amy craned to see more of the scenery, trying to snap out of her gloom. She did her best not to listen to the lurid details of the story, some of which had made it into the public domain, some seemingly held in confidence by those ‘in the know’. The unfortunate bloke at the centre of the gossip had suffered a spectacular fall from grace via the socials.
Billie seemed more than happy to rip the guy to shreds, a daytime TV host by whom she’d once been interviewed, a man who was currently in disgrace due to an ill-judged comment about his plus-sized co-presenter. The words ‘huge’ and ‘walrus’ had been bandied around, making Amy cringe while Billie laughed about it all over again.
Amy wondered if it had ever dawned on Billie that there but for the grace of God they all walked. Being cancelled could happen to anyone, but someone as high-profile as Billie had to be aware of her own vulnerability. For Amy, being PA to a celebrity had given her as much of a close-up as she ever wanted. And this way she still got to visit superb locations, got to stare at the remarkable scenery, all under the cloak of complete anonymity.
‘I said it was annoying we had to wait so long at the airport… Amelia, are you even listening to me?’ Billie’s less-than-dulcet tones managed to break through Amy’s daydreaming.
‘I’m sorry, what?’ Amy frowned, dragging her gaze away from the view and refocusing on Billie.
‘Your luggage. The delay at the airport. It was inconvenient for us all to have had to wait so long for you to sort it out, wasn’t it?’
Billie had the most intense gaze, the innate confidence in her smile enough to have Amy nodding before she realised what she was agreeing with.
‘It was hardly Amy’s fault the airline lost her case, Billie,’ Malcolm said, turning to face Amy as he added, ‘Although that’s why I always keep my camera bag as hand luggage. There are way too many horror stories of rough baggage handling and stuff never arriving.’
‘Including cases being exploded,’ Billie said with a broad grin.
‘Not that that’s what’s going to happen to yours, Ames. I’m sure it will turn up,’ Malcolm said, hurriedly.
‘I suppose you can buy new clothes when we get to Riva. It’s not like we’ve gone to the moon, is it?’ Billie wasn’t one to dwell on the misfortunes of others, and her grin intensified as her thought process spiralled away. ‘Hey, Malc, there’s an idea. Foodies on the moon. Sampling haute cuisine as it floats about.’
‘Yeah, but you’d have to take your space helmet off to get at the food and I’m not sure how well that would end,’ Malcolm said, and the conversation spiralled away to the possibilities of holding a zero-gravity dinner party, leaving Amy to her thoughts again. Which was probably as well, because it wasn’t only her clothes and toiletries in the luggage that had failed to arrive at Verona airport.
In her suitcase was a special book. The hardback notebook that contained a handwritten, scrawly set of recipes perfected over many years by her nanna, complete with additions glued in, bits from magazine articles, a proper mishmash of a book, a complete one-off, held intact with a band of elastic – and the only tangible piece of a beloved and recently lost grandmother that Amy still possessed. A fresh wave of gloom flowed over her.
It seemed silly now, her desire to show the book to like-minded amateur cooks. Ridiculous that she should have risked her nanna’s book on the off chance that someone at the Casa del Cibo Cookery School might understand her deep pride in those recipes. The crowning punishment being her stupidity at packing such a precious item into her case, rather than carrying it as hand luggage.
The view through the window no longer felt so crisp and bright as the edges of Amy’s vision darkened. The vibrant blues and greens faded at the thought of never being reunited with her grandmother’s book. Amy frowned as the car took a series of turns, and they dropped through the narrow streets of Riva del Garda, lined on either side by the glorious, enthusiastic colours of the buildings. Eventually, the car drew to a halt in front of a stunning lemon-yellow building, the perfectly balanced proportions of its impressive size balanced by original shutters and window frames painted in deep mossy greens.
At ground level, the entrance to the building was shaded, set back deep within a series of stone arches punctuated with vibrant palms in enormous terracotta pots. Maybe the building was frowning, too. Or maybe that was nothing more than Amy projecting the downward spiral of her mood onto it.
‘Siamo arrivati– we are here.’ The driver doubled down on his explanation. For the benefit of the language-challenged Brits, Amy supposed. ‘Casa del Cibo.’
He was out of the driver’s seat seconds after he’d killed the engine, pulling open passenger doors with enthusiasm – no doubt keen to get on to his next fare, or to get away from Billie’s relentless chatter. Amy alighted on the cobbled street, and as she stretched and took a 360-degree turn, he was already pulling luggage from the rear of the vehicle, rattling cases up the low-profile edges of the pavement and into the shade of the arches.
‘I thought we’d have a view of the actual lake,’ Billie said, alighting beside Amy and shading her eyes with a hand. ‘I didn’t realise the place was down a backstreet. Reminds me of the story about a film director and an interesting trip to New York. He never did fully manage to explain how he found himself in that alley with an extremely inappropriately dressed young man and a pot of Vaseline.’
‘God alive, Billie. At least save the gutter chat until we’ve had a few Camparis, will you?’ Malcolm said, hoisting his camera bag onto a shoulder and claiming a small, wheeled suitcase.
‘Camparis, very funny,’ Billie said as she pulled a fan of cash from her bag for the driver. ‘And remarkably accurate, too, even though he still maintains he simply took a wrong turn off Fifth Avenue.Grazie e ciao,’ she said as she handed the tip to the driver.
