Dread curdles in my guts. “And how much is it all going to cost?”
“I pay for the materials,” Giuseppe says. “It is not very much and it is my fault they are damaged.”
“No, I can’t have you being out of pocket,” I insist. “I’ll pay. But what about the extra jobs?”
He tilts his head as he does a rough calculation—and then lets me know. I feel all the heat leave my body.
He gives me a kindly smile. “But remember you pay me for extra work at the end of the job.”
“Yeah, thanks.” But even then I still have no idea how I’m going to get the money.
“Do not worry about the patio,” Giuseppe offers. “We plan to lay new tiles anyway, but we plan to do this at the end of the job so we do not damage them. Next we must push back the land behind the chapel and build the retaining wall.”
I just about manage a weak smile. “OK. And what about the electricity? How do I fix that?”
Giuseppe runs his hand over his freshly shaved scalp. “I take care of this. It is the least I can do. First we need to find out what is the problem, then I call the company.”
He dismisses himself and steps back to issue instructions to his men.
“This evening, you must come and eat at our house,” says Luisa.
I raise an eyebrow. “What, all of us?”
“Yes, you, Theo and the kids.”
I wipe my palms on my shorts. “That’s nice of you, but I’m not sure about the kids. They’re not behaving too well at the moment and I wouldn’t want them spoiling things.”
Luisa gives me a warm smile. “Don’t you worry, I have just the thing to … how do you say in English? ‘Soften them up’?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“But whatever it is,” I want to add, “I doubt it’ll work.”
We’re coming to the end of an incredible meal, the best I’ve had so far in Italy.
We started with a pasta dish—as is the custom, explained Luisa and Stefano—ofpappardellewith porcini mushrooms. The mushrooms were picked by Stefano on his own land, and bursting with even more flavor than those Theo and I had on our first night in Lucca. This was followed by a main course of roast lamb with garlic and rosemary, which was heavenly. I was relieved when Luisa served the kids meat from the ends of the joint so it wasn’t too bloody and Callum didn’t complain about the rosemary but discreetly scraped it off onto the side of his plate. Midway through our main course, I received a text from Giuseppe—who was working late to fix the electricity, re-erecting a pole that had come down and liaising with an engineer to reset the circuit—letting me know that we were reconnected. At which point Theo and I relaxed and enjoyed the meal even more.
“Very often in Italy we eat fruit for dessert,” Luisa explains, as she passes around a big bowl of delightfully chubby cherries and perfectly round peaches.
“I’ve noticed that,” says Theo, cutting up Archie’s peach and taking out the stone.
“I like it,” I comment, doing the same with his cherries. “It’s unfussy and refreshing.”
The tension between Theo and me has eased, possibly because we’ve been dealing with storm damage all day. The force of nature somehow made everything else seem less important.
We’re sitting under an awning on the Fiores’ patio, which is at the back of their house. This has been concreted—rather than paved—and is more functional than ours, with several items of farm machinery lying around, plus a bright pink mop and bucket. Then again, it’s decorated with pots and hanging baskets containing well-tended shrubs and pretty flowers. Opposite the driveway—and across the little road that leads to my olive grove—is a small, corrugated iron garage, which is packed with tractors, other items of farm machinery, implements and tools. To the right ofthat, and across the road that leads up the hill, is the first of Stefano’s fields, the slope of which is lined with vines, the flat section at the bottom tomato plants. Bordering this is a shack housing several hens and one cockerel—probably the one that wakes me up in the morning—surrounded by a wire fence to keep out foxes.
Stefano tops up our glasses with red wine made from the grapes from my vineyard. I’ve cooked with the oil from my olive grove before—he gave us a vat, which I’ve decanted into several bottles—but this is the first time I’ve tasted the wine. It’s sweet, not very strong and possibly not the most sophisticated wine, but that’s more than made up for by the knowledge that it came from my land.
Theo asks Luisa for more information on the castle, which she’s happy to give. “It may seem small by today’s standards but we know that the nobility of Montemagno lived in a luxurious palace at the top. The castle also housed the military quarters and, for the residents of the village, it was a refuge in times of siege.”
Archie’s face lights up, his mouth and fingertips stained red by the cherries. “So did they have battles?”
“No question,” says Luisa, slicing into her peach. “Lots of battles!”
“Who were the baddies?” asks Archie. He has a smudge of cherry on his glasses and I lift them off his nose to clean them.
“I don’t know if you children realize,” she says, “but it’s only in the last two hundred years that Italy became one country. Before that it was made up of lots of separate city-states. They often fought against each other.”
