‘She started the book when she was pregnant with my mum – she wanted to pass on her love of cooking to her daughter. Not that she knew Mum was going to be a girl, or that my mother couldn’t have turned out to be less interested in cooking if she’d tried. Maybe she hoped for a girl who would be interested in cooking like her – I never actually asked her.’
‘And no reason why she couldn’t have passed cookery skills on to a boy, either,’ Tad said, his fingers tracing a path over the handwritten entry. ‘Leave the mixture somewhere cool overnight. Cook in beef dripping. Your nanna knew her stuff, didn’t she?’
His interest in the book was interrupted by another arrival – this time the driver tasked with taking Billie to the airport.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ Amy said, leaving him and heading upstairs to help Billie bring her suitcase down, Gianna on hand for the formal checking-out process.
‘I won’t see you when you get back tomorrow,’ Billie said as they walked to the car. ‘I’ll already be enroute to see Kelly.’
‘I hope it all goes well,’ Amy said.
Billie’s eyebrows arched. ‘He’s promised to meet with me, and I think that’s an excellent start. He’s not serious about that actress – I’m convinced about it.’
Amy wasn’t anything like as confident as her boss, but she bit at the edge of her lip and stayed quiet as Billie climbed into the transfer vehicle.
‘I’ll let you know my plans once I know them,’ Billie said, her window sliding closed as the car pulled away from Casa del Cibo.
Maybe with her focus on Kelly, and once she was away from Italy, perhaps Billie would lose the vitriol with which she’d viewed the cookery school and she’d settle down, allow Amy and the copywriter to give Casa del Cibo the write-up it deserved.
Back in Casa’s kitchen, Amy retook her seat and pulled closer her plate of buttered bread.
‘She’s gone.’
Tad paused, his hand on a page holding instructions on baking Auntie AT’s cookies.
‘You’re definitely staying until tomorrow, then?’
‘Yes.’
Tad frowned, his gaze fixed on her, the warmth of it far more than Amy deserved.
‘Why the hell do you work for her?’
The edge to his voice was inescapable, and Amy didn’t blame him. Billie had gone from teasing him with a possible cooking series on TV, or his own London restaurant, all the way through to promising to wreck his career.
Amy pulled in a deep breath, but Tad didn’t give her time to reply.
‘I mean, I know it’s none of my business – you’ve made it clear we’re nothing more than ships passing in the night; I get that. But, Amy, you’re worth so much more than this. You’re resourceful and bright and funny. You have the patience of an absolute saint, and I don’t think you realise how talented you are in the kitchen, either. I’m betting there are loads of other things you’re brilliant at, too – and yet you allow yourself to be belittled daily by that woman.’
Tad swallowed hard, flicking through a few more of the pages of Nanna Gold’s book. Amy took a bite of jammy, buttery bread as he did so. It worked, allowed her to regain her crumbling composure.
She sat quietly while Tad leafed his way through recipes for blackberry jam, pastry, tiffin, a honey and date custard tart, which Amy’d had a go at once and completely messed up. It seemed they both needed a few moments of quiet and she watched him as he studied the recipes, eventually settling on the page holding details for a chocolate mousse cake.
‘Nanna had a sweet tooth, like me,’ Amy said.
‘Aye, I can tell.’ He grinned, then his expression became serious as he fixed his gaze on her. ‘Are you going to answer my question?’
‘Yes, but I want to try to explain it all, if you’ll let me.’
30
Amy took a deep breath; she wanted to get this right. ‘I know Billie is a difficult character, but I’ve always been aware how lucky I was to land this job, too. Billie’s always reminding me how there are coachloads of people waiting to step into my shoes. And she’s right.
‘But this week has made me begin to wonder about my future, about what I want it to look like. And I was beginning to realise that the constant moving around, the way Billie changes her plans at the drop of a hat, the frenetic nature of it all, the way she treats people… I began to see I didn’t want it; more than that I’m not sure I can tolerate it much longer. And when you walked into my life, I started to seriously imagine an alternative.’
Tad’s forehead crinkled into a frown. ‘So why did you change your mind? I really thought we were at the start of something special too, but then…’
‘But then… Billie happened. She told me it couldn’t ever work with you. That our lifestyles aren’t compatible, and that she valued me enough to…’ Amy paused, unsure how to phrase the rest of it. She shook her head, the final decision made. ‘She told me she would ruin your career if I said I was going to leave her. That she needed me more than I needed you. That you and I were nothing more than a holiday fling, and you wouldn’t want me anyway if I caused you problems with your employers.’
