“Ciao!”chirrups Archie.
Vito greets us all in his excellent English. As he does, I notice how handsome he is, how thick his dark brown hair, how positive his energy. I hope Dom’s let him down gently. To be on the safe side, I avoid the subject.
“What are you up to?” I ask. “Do you live around here?”
He smiles. “Yes, I do. I am on my way to the museum. But I am not officially working: I have come to examine the ceramic Luisa found at the castle.”
I grin back at him. “Yeah, that’s really exciting. I can’t wait to hear what you think.”
“You will.” Vito gestures to the barber’s. “Are you here for a haircut?”
“Yeah!” cheeps Archie. “I’m having wax in mine!”
Vito smiles. “Wonderful! I’m sure you will look very handsome.”
“Actually, I was just thinking, I don’t know if this place is quite right,” I say, scrunching up my nose. “It seems a bit … I don’t know … laddy.”
Vito looks confused.“Laddy?”
I shake my head. “Sorry—very macho, very male.” I lower my voice. “Very heterosexual.”
Vito’s eyes swell. “Ah, I understand. But Marco is very nice. He is my friend. And his mother is a lesbian!”
Theo and I quirk an eyebrow. We look around to check no one’s listening, but everyone seems to be getting on with their own business.
Vito shouts Marco’s name and a striking young man in a black string vest puts down his clippers and jogs over. When he’s standing before us, I notice that his short black hair has bolts of lightning shaved into the sides. Vito speaks to him in Italian but Irecognize the wordsfamiglia,castelloandzio—which Luisa taught us meansuncle—and Marco nods in acknowledgment. He shakes all of our hands and tells us in decent English that we’re very welcome.
“Dad!” interrupts Archie, and I can guess what’s coming: “Can I have my hair like his?”
“We’ll see, squirt,” says Theo. Then he nudges me in the ribs and says under his breath, “We can hardly back out now, can we?”
But, as we step inside, I realize I wouldn’t want to. And I regret ever thinking that just because a handful of old men were homophobic, the whole town must be.
“What do you think about that?”
I’m in the olive grove, where I’ve come for a bit of privacy as the kids help Theo assemble the furniture we’ve bought for the master bedroom in the new family suite. It’s finally time for my phone call with Auntie Julie and I’ve just told her what I’ve learned about Wilf—that he didn’t come here to be with an Italian woman at all, but an Italian man. And his family cut him off when they found out.
“Well, you could knock me down with a feather,” Julie answers. It sounds like she’s propping herself up with cushions, no doubt in her favorite armchair. “But now that I think about it, it does make sense. My dad was homophobic. And I remember my granddad making comments, too.”
“Well, both of them made plenty of comments to Wilf—it’s all in the letters. And when he got here, he had to put up with a load more.” I relay some of the detail Angelika gave me.
“That’s awful,” says Julie. “They must have felt like it was the two of them against the world.”
“I expect they probably did.”
I’m leaning against a tree, but a knobble on the trunk is digging into my back. I wriggle around to make myself comfortable. I notice that the olives hanging from the branches have grown but are still some way off the size they need to be before they’re harvested. And just a few weeks ago, the grass was the color of golden sand but now it’s almost white, bleached by the sun.
“There’s something else,” I venture, warily.
“What’s that?”
I pull up a few strands of grass and toss them down the slope. “This friend of Wilf’s told me he’d been in touch with Mum.”
There’s a silence I can’t read.
After a few seconds, Julie speaks. “Yeah, I think she did write to him.”
I feel the choke of betrayal. “But why didn’t you say?”
