She thought he was joking for a moment, but his pout suggested otherwise.
‘This… isn’t a thistle?’
‘No, this is bardana – and it’s delicious fried, boiled or in a stew.’ He pulled on a pair of worn gloves and squatted near the spiny plant.
Choosing a younger plant without any flowers, he coaxed it slowly out of the hard ground. She would have thought it took no effort at all, except that the veins in his forearms stood out against the tensed muscle.
When the soil gave way, a narrow, rough-skinned root emerged, like a long, thin parsnip.
‘You take those,’ he instructed, pointing to a small cluster of weeds. ‘There are more gloves in the bag.’
‘This is a lot like weeding my garden,’ she commented as she tugged at the plants, losing one when the top snapped off instead of coming up cleanly. ‘I can never stay on top of it.’
‘No matter how hard you try, life keeps on going.’
Toni paused, wishing his words, so lightly spoken, weren’t quite so profound. She didn’t want to be profound today. She wanted to tease him and kiss him and dive into bed when they got back.
‘Did you learn floristry here on the island?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘I took some workshops here and then enrolled in a vocational course. I needed something…’ He didn’t finish the sentence. She suspected he didn’t know how.
‘What did you do before? In Milan?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘That’s a relationship status, not a job,’ she quipped, hoping her light tone would coax an answer from him.
He laughed in a way that convinced her he didn’t find her joke funny. Without looking up from his careful inspection of the bushes, he explained, ‘I am a pure mathematician with a PhD, but most recently, I was working on algorithms for software used to optimise interconnected electricity grids.’
Thatwascomplicated – and not at all what she’d expected. With his hands deep in the soil, he didn’t look like a mathematician.
‘Wow, a PhD. Software algorithms in Milan to foraging and floristry on Elba.’ She said it more to get things straight in her own mind, rather than expecting a response.
‘A surprise? The PhD or the job?’
‘Um, both,’ she answered. ‘I should have expected you have an advanced degree. Your English is amazing.’
‘A language is just practice and I had a lot of that,’ he said with a shrug.
‘I suppose I just can’t picture you doing something you can’t see or touch. You have your feet firmly on the ground.’ Miro had had his head in the clouds. She couldn’t bear the comparison, but it came anyway.
‘I do now,’ he said. ‘We should look for a different place to find more bardana. I don’t want to take too much from here and affect the root system. But we’ll take some twigs too.’
His words seemed designed to shut down the conversation and Toni reluctantly let it happen. She hadn’t quite got to the heart of him yet. Perhaps she shouldn’t.
He produced a small folding knife from his pocket and clipped off a few leaves at the stem.
She thought of Miro’s hands, overgrown from climbing and a strong as the horn of a mountain goat. But even they hadn’t been able to save him. When Gabri stood, the comparisons kept running. She was struck again by his broad, tough build, so different to Miro’s wiry frame. She rather liked that she could look him in the eye when they were standing – an observation she allowed herself, since this thing between them was only a few days out of time.
Gabri continued speaking, oblivious to her busy thoughts. ‘Burdock. That’s what you call this in English. I just remembered. You can eat the young leaves too, but I prefer the root and this stick.’ He snipped off the leaf, leaving a fleshy green stalk that Toni was astonished to realise looked appetising.
‘Oh, you mean “stalk”.’
He looked up. ‘Isn’t that the bird that brings the babies?’
She laughed, all the more tickled because he wasn’t joking. ‘Why, Gabri, I thought you’d know all about the birds and the bees by now.’ She extended a hand to help him up, but he batted it away and hauled himself to his feet. ‘It’s different spelling,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry English is so confusing.’
Her words were cut off with a squeak as he curled an arm around her waist and hauled her against him.
