Flirting in Italian (5 page)

I glance sideways at Paige’s fingernails, perfect beige ovals tipped with white; they put my scabby scraped ones to shame. I curl my fingers into my palms to avoid the comparison. And she smells lovely—like bubble gum and apples. Her hair, caught back in a silk scarf tied at the nape of her neck, is thick and smooth. She has a huge pink pashmina wrapped around her throat, which she adjusts tighter because of the air-conditioning, stretching out her jean-clad legs, humming away.

Everything she’s wearing is new and shiny, or looks it. And Kendra’s even smarter; diamonds gleam in the lobes of her ears as she turns to look out the window, and her hair, clubbed into a short ponytail, is perfectly smooth, pulled tight to show the elegant shape of her head.

I realize what’s taken me aback: the American girls must be the same age as us, but with their poise, their grooming, they seem so much older. They make me feel like a snotty-nosed, scruffy, immature fourteen-year-old, looking up to
the sixth-formers at school in awe because they seem so grown up, so trendy. It’s
not
a sensation I enjoy. I wonder if Kelly feels the same.…

The jeep makes a right-hand turn, rolling me into Paige’s side; she yelps in shock, an annoying little yipping noise, like a startled Chihuahua. We’ve been on the motorway for quite a while, but now we’re coming off, onto a slip road, through a series of villages with beautiful names: San Vincenzo a Torri, Cerbiano, Macario a Monti. Almost immediately, the road starts to wind back and forth in tight curves, and we have to hold on tight in the back not to bump into each other constantly. And the jeep starts climbing, the road gets steeper, as we travel up into the Chianti hills; Catia is changing down gears, the old jeep clanking as it adjusts to a sharp incline.

I’m mesmerized by the views. It’s like the color of the Adriatic Sea; you don’t believe that anything could be that amazing aquamarine in real life, not till you see it with your own eyes. The Chianti landscape is just as extraordinary. It’s like a whole series of postcards brought to life. Perfect stone farmhouses built on steep hillsides, with olive groves and vineyards laid out in equally perfect rows, cascading down green slopes in a patchwork of delicate colors: rich green grass, the darker emerald of the vine leaves, fluffy gray-green puffball-topped olive trees, gray stone buildings. Tiny cars, bright flashes of color, wind their way up narrow little roads lined with cypress trees, clouds of white dust trailing in their wake like jet streams behind airplanes. Occasionally, there’s a vivid chemical flash of blue, a perfect rectangle of tiled swimming pool.

My fingers are itching to pick up a pencil, crayons, a stick of charcoal, and start sketching. My friend Milly is really into photography, but that’s never been my thing; I’ve always liked to see the picture I’m making grow slowly on the sketch pad or canvas even though I don’t have much experience in art.

But now, my eyes wide as I take in one spectacular panorama after another, I wish, with all my heart, that I’d been to a school that maybe did proper art O- and A-levels, not just a few art classes. Because the small drawing ability that I have is not going to be able to do justice to the amazing views that I’m dying to get on paper.

“I feel sick!” Paige whines beside me, snapping me out of my reverie. “I’m getting totally carsick! These roads are
way
too bendy!”

“Open the window and put your head out,” Catia snaps, driving, if anything, even faster.

“Ugh! My hair’ll get all messed up!” Grumpily, Paige buzzes down the window and pokes her nose out, holding her hair flat with both hands clamped to the sides of her head. She gulps in deep breaths of air as the vehicle lurches along.

“She looks like a dog,” Kelly mutters to me. “You know, when they stick their heads out of car windows?”

“A golden Labrador,” I mumble back. “Big and shiny, but no brains at all.”

Paige is definitely built on a large scale; she’s not at all fat, just big-boned, sturdy, like a lacrosse player, which she probably is; she glows with health, and her golden tan is
enviable. The more I think about the Labrador comparison, the better it is.

“Any better?” Kendra twists around in her seat to look at Paige. “Do you want to swap places?”

Now, Kendra
, I think,
is a greyhound. Lean and elegant, not a hair out of place
.

“We’re nearly there,” Catia snaps as the jeep turns sharply onto a side road, jouncing and bumping on the dirt surface. Paige sensibly ducks back in before her head gets severed by a particularly enthusiastic bounce. We’re traveling up a steep avenue lined with cypresses, as so many of the roads seem to be; the pale dust from the road surface has already coated the bases of the trees and the tangle of undergrowth on either side. The road drops away, to oohs and aahs from all of us as we see the valley below, a village in a bowl of green to our left, rows of vines flowing in straight lines down the hillside on our right. I notice bunches of tiny dark purple grapes growing on the vines, half hidden by the clustering leaves; and bright red roses planted along the edges, climbing up the stakes, twining around them lovingly.

It’s so beautiful. I’ve seen wonderful landscapes before; my mum likes to travel, and of course we go to Norway every year. I’ve seen Scottish mountains, French chateaux, even the Sydney Harbor Bridge when we went to Australia two years ago. But there’s something about Tuscany that stirs up my heart like nowhere else. I want to paint every inch of it. I can’t wait to start the art lessons.

It feels like coming home.

All the girls are squealing now as the jeep crunches
over ruts and potholes, throwing us against our seat belts. We’re turning through high gateposts, down an even narrower road, almost a track; and then white gleams through the trees and Catia is swinging the jeep to a halt, wheels crunching on gravel, in front of a wide cream-stuccoed villa, pale mauve wisteria climbing up its sides and softening its square lines.

“Welcome to Villa Barbiano, your home for the next eight weeks,” Catia says shortly as she unclips her seat belt and swings herself deftly to the ground. “It is eighteenth century, built as a country home for my husband’s family, the Cerbonis. Their main palazzo was in Florence, but that has now been sold. We make our own wine and olive oil, and also some goat cheese, which is very popular.”

“Goats! Eww! Smelly!” Paige mutters, not quietly enough; Catia shoots her an evil stare.

“I will show you to your rooms,” she says coldly, “and then you may unpack and maybe have a swim in the pool before dinner.”

We all perk up at the mention of the pool, dragging our cases out of the jeep and following Catia through the big double doors of the villa. Inside it’s immediately cool, the terra-cotta tiles of the floor and the white-plastered walls cutting the outside temperature. The house is half in shade, shutters at most of the windows, stripes of bright sunlight stippling the rust-colored floor and the stone staircase we climb. The walls are hung with elegant little watercolors of fruit and flowers, and each hallway we pass has an inlaid occasional table placed against the wall, one of those half-moon
shapes with a perfect flower arrangement in a vase on top, like you get in five-star hotels.

I’m amused to see that we have to climb right to the top of the house, under the sloping roof. Catia has put us in the old servants’ quarters.

“
Ecco!
Here are your rooms,” Catia says as we arrive, panting because of the weight of our cases, at the top of the stairs. She’s standing in a wide, stone-floored anteroom with a roof sloping away on either side to long low windows, her arms wide, like an air hostess indicating emergency exits. “There are two beds in each one, and each room has its own bathroom,” she informs us. “The beds are made up, and you will find your own towels on them. Every week you will be responsible for taking your sheets and towels downstairs to the laundry. Please do not use fake tan, as it stains the towels and we have to bleach them, which is not good for the environment. There are beach towels by the swimming pool. Do not take your house towels out to the pool. And please do not put sanitary napkins down the toilet, as you will make a blockage.”

She drops her arms, turns on her heel, and heads for the top of the stairs, picking her way past Kendra’s gigantic suitcase.

“The pool is at the back of the villa,” she adds. “Dinner is served at eight-thirty in the dining room. We dress for dinner. No shorts, please. And no skirts so short we can see what you are wearing underneath. This is a course for young ladies, not ragamuffins.”

We’re all so freaked out by this speech, delivered with
the weariness of a woman who’s trotted it out hundreds of times before, that we’re frozen in utter silence as Catia’s heels click down the stone stair treads, one flight, two flights, and eventually recede into the depths of Villa Barbiano. It’s our first bonding moment as a foursome, and it’s over in a flash: a swift, panicky glance exchanged by all of us, the realization that we’re stuck, for the next eight weeks, in a house with a woman who seems to actively dislike teenage girls.

“You and me?” Kelly says to me as Kendra jerks her chin at Paige and heads across the antechamber to the door closest to her.
It’s Brits versus Americans
, I think, rolling my case in the opposite direction.
Scruffs versus glamour girls. Blue nail varnish versus French manicures
 …

But all comparisons trail off as I enter the bedroom and goggle in shock. It’s like a suite, with the bathroom leading off one side, and it’s huge. There’s a single bed on either side of the room, a hooked cotton rug and white-painted night-stand beside each one. A big white cupboard and chest of drawers match the rest of the furniture, and a few black-and-white prints hang on the walls. It’s a blank canvas, simple and elegant, the roof sloping sharply to the right, exposed wooden beams with terra-cotta tiles lining the spaces between them.

But the real star, for me, is the window between the beds. Long and low, beneath the eaves, it frames a view of blue skies, olive groves, and oak trees in the valley below, as beautiful as a painting. Sunlight gleams through it in a long refracted ray, bounced off the eaves, hanging in the air, tiny dust mites suspended in its golden glow, glittering like dots of mica. I run over to the window seat and sink onto
the stone embrasure, staring out at the panorama, for the first time really understanding what the expression “feast your eyes” means.

“Oh
wow
!” Kelly echoes my feelings as she thuds into the room. Her case tips to the floor with a crash. “Piece of rubbish,” she mutters, kicking it. “Didn’t even last one blooming trip.” She clears her throat. “Um, d’you care which bed you have?” she asks politely, as screams of:

“Mine!”

“No, I saw it first!”

“I put my bag on it!” shrill from across the anteroom.

“My money’s on Kendra,” I say, grinning at Kelly. “And no, I don’t care which bed I have. Do you?”

Kelly looks as if she doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Slowly, she walks across the room and sinks onto the far bed.

“At home,” she says eventually, “I share with my two little sisters. They’ve got a bunk bed and I’ve got one of those sofa-cube things that I unfold every night. We’ve only got a little council house, and there’s six of us. This room”—she gestures around her—“is the size of our entire ground floor. Kitchen, lounge, everything.” She swallows hard. “So, no, I don’t care which bed I have either.”

“You know something funny?” I ask. “I’ll bet these are the old servants’ quarters. Right at the top of the house, under the roof.”

She’s thunderstruck.

“You’re having me on,” she breathes, looking around the huge bedroom in wonder.

I shake my head. “Of course, there’d have been a lot
more people in here, all piled in, lots of beds in rows. And there wouldn’t have been a—”

More screams resound from the other side of the top floor.

“Omi
god
!” Paige howls. “The bathroom’s like
huge
, and it’s all
marble
!”

Kelly and I race across the room to look at our own en suite bathroom; luckily the doorway’s wide enough to let us both through. We gasp at the sight of the room, which is just as big as our bedroom: at the marble bath, the marble-walled open shower—there isn’t even a curtain, it’s so big it doesn’t need one—and the twin sinks set in a long white marble slab in front of a huge mirror.

“Those aren’t real gold taps, are they?” Kelly says in a hushed voice, as if she’s in church.

I’m trying not to smile.

“No,” I say.

“I might tell my sisters they are,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief as she looks around the room. “They’ll believe it.” Kelly sinks slowly to a squat, her head in her hands. “Flipping, bleeding hell,” she mutters slowly. “Buggering, bloody, sodding hell. Sorry. But if you
knew
where I started out this morning … what my home looks like … This is like—” She draws in a long breath. “Like waking up in
The Princess Diaries
or something.”

I have no idea what to say to Kelly. I’m feeling very spoiled and privileged and undeserving when Paige bursts into the bathroom. She’s changed into a whirl of white lace cover-up over pink bikini over full-body tan, flip-flops slapping on the tiles.

“Hey! Isn’t it cool!” she sings out. “Though I can’t
believe
we’ve only got single beds! I’m gonna keep falling right off it when I turn over! Anyway, we’re going down to the pool. You coming? Come on down! Jeez, I sound like a game show!”

She swirls out again, leaving the dust mites whirling in her wake.

We charge back into our enormous bedroom to tear open our suitcases. I realize that looming up before us is one of the major holiday hurdles that any group of girls has to face: the first time they all decide to go swimming together.

I
hate
this bit. It’s the Swimsuit Beauty Parade.

The parade is brutal, but it’s over relatively quickly. There’s a flurry of movement as we spread out our towels, settle on the loungers, dart quick looks around us to see if anyone else is watching, and peel off our outer layers. Paige has effortlessly won the Best Pool Outfit competition; her white lace cover-up is gorgeous, and I totally covet it. These American girls are much chicer than me and Kelly: like all my friends, I just wear a strappy top and a little pareo-thingy over my swimming things when I go to the beach or the pool, while Kelly doesn’t even have that—she’s just pulled the T-shirt and mini she was wearing before over her swimsuit.

But these girls have actual pool-lounging outfits. Paige’s pink bikini is coordinated to her pink diamante-studded
flip-flops, and her cowboy hat looks really cool with the white lace of the cover-up. You could laugh at her, call her too matchy-matchy, or say she’s trying too hard, but to be honest, I think both Kelly and I envy how smart she looks. Kendra has tossed off her own yellow wrap and dived in to swim lengths, her slim, dark shape cutting through the water like a pair of designer scissors, arms and legs long and lean. Kelly and I join Paige in a chorus of oohs and aahs about how beautiful the pool is.

“I mean, I saw it in the photos online,” Paige is saying, picking up one in a long series of suncreams, double-checking it’s the right factor, and then applying it to her shoulders. “And it looked stunning. But in real life, it’s, like,
amazing
. I’m gonna take a ton of photos and make everyone back home jealous.”

The pool’s at the side of Villa Barbiano, set in a wide green lawn bordered with fragrant lavender and rosemary bushes: the swimming pool comes right up to the border of the lawn, and that side drops away with the slope of the hill with what I think is called an infinity edge. It means that when you’re actually in the water, you can float and look at the landscape with nothing to obstruct the view. I find myself wondering what a painting would look like if you did it as if you were in the pool: glittering water below, distant hills in the center, blue skies above, the concrete surround of the pool just visible at the far edges of the frame.

And then I shake my head in confusion.
Tuscany definitely does something weird to me. I’ve never had this impulse to paint everything I see before.…

I fold my top and pareo and put them on the little dark
green table next to my lounger. Then I start applying sunscreen. Kelly’s doing the same thing, and we’re glancing over at each other, checking out what I really don’t want to think of as competition, but it’s so hard not to. With the film posters and ads showing pictures of perfect bikini bodies, the magazines that pick apart celebrities, rating their good and bad bits, it’s almost impossible not to do the same. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I feel really mean to be relieved that Paige, though not at all fat, is bigger than me, taller and wider, with solid thighs and arms, while Kelly is pale, plump, and clearly miserable in a green one-piece that makes her white skin look almost putrid. I’m very grateful that I’ve been fake tanning for a couple of months; my naturally sallow skin looks nicely pale brown, and my black polka-dot bikini, with little frills around the legs and bosom, is structured enough that it makes the most of my shape.

Or rather, it does when I look at myself in the mirror, tummy sucked in. Sitting up, walking around—those are very different activities, and I know I’d loathe seeing a photo of myself snapped at those moments.

Whereas Kendra, rising from the swimming pool, pulling herself up to stand on the side with one athletic push from her toned arms, has nothing to fear from anyone’s camera phone. We all stare openly at her in her tiny white bikini, the kind that’s just a few triangles of material that fasten with a few ties at hips and neck and back. The kind that only models with small, perky, high bosoms and tiny bums can wear. Hello, Swimsuit Beauty Parade? We have a winner.

I think for a moment of my mum in a bikini, long and slim and elegant as Kendra, though she does wear a slightly
more mum-suitable two-piece, thank goodness. I certainly didn’t get my figure from her side of the family: she, Aunt Lissie, and Mormor are all tall and lean, with long waists that give them totally flat tummies. I look gloomily down at my squidgy one, as I’ve often done in their company, but this time with the added force of wondering whether I have such a different figure because I’m not actually related to them at all.

I swallow, hard. I texted Mum to say I’d arrived safe and sound and of course got a second flood of relieved texts back: the first, naturally, had already arrived as soon as I switched my phone back on, apologies for breaking down at the airport, best wishes for the trip, pleas to let her know as soon as the plane touched down in Italy. She thinks texts are like letters: she always starts “Darling Violet,” writes lengthy paragraphs, and finishes “Love, Mum.” The phone has to break them down into multiple messages. It’s a bit exhausting, frankly, but I know it means she loves me, so I try not to get too irritated.

You’d better not
, I think.
You’re going to get lots and lots of text-letters from her in the next eight weeks
.

“That pool’s really small,” Kendra says dismissively, walking over to her lounger, where she picks up a towel and wipes her face dry. She wraps the towel around her head like a turban and stretches out on the chair, looking like a carved mahogany sculpture of a Somalian supermodel. “I’m going to have to do a hundred lengths a day, instead of fifty,” she complains. “It’s like I’m bouncing off a wall every five strokes.”

Fifty lengths a day? No wonder she has that figure!
I think, wincing at my own laziness. I glance at Kelly, who’s putting
up the umbrella to get some shade; she grimaces back at me, clearly having exactly the same thought.

“You work out really hard!” Paige exclaims, looking down at her own stomach and prodding it gloomily. “You make me feel like a lazy slob!”

I have to give Paige credit: she may spill out everything that pops into her head without thinking first, but she’s pretty honest. She laughed at my mum’s drama-queen meltdown at Heathrow, but at least she’s pointing out her own defects too.

“I do a hundred sit-ups every morning,” Kendra says, reaching for her white-framed sunglasses. “You can join in if you want.”

“Oh my God!” Paige wails. “A
hundred
? I can barely do
three
!”

She grabs a handful of stomach and wobbles it. I am increasingly, reluctantly, impressed with Paige: it takes real courage to wobble your tummy in public.

She looks over at me and Kelly with a friendly smile.

“This place is awesome,” she says cheerfully. “I mean, it’s smaller than it looks on the website, but everything’s smaller in Europe, right? London was really cool. We stayed there last night, with friends of Kendra’s mom. My mom and dad thought we should have a rest before we came over to the mainland.”

Kelly has lain down on her tummy on the lounger, face on her arms, but now she lifts her head, squinting in the sun, and stares incredulously at Paige.

“When you came over to the
mainland
?” she asks. “You
do know that the United Kingdom is a completely different country from Italy, right?”

Paige’s blond eyebrows knit in confusion.

“But it’s all part of Europe?” she says, looking at Kendra for help. “I mean, England’s like an island, off the mainland of Europe.”

“We’re a
separate country
,” Kelly says coldly. “It would be like saying that Greenland’s an island off the mainland of the United States.”

“Isn’t it?” Paige says, giggling helplessly. “I was never very good at geography.”

“Kelly’s right,” Kendra drawls. “Some of us Americans do have half an idea where other countries in the world are located.”

“Are you two friends?” I ask, because I can see that Kelly’s still seething.

“Our parents know each other from the country club,” Paige says, not a whit upset by being effectively called an idiot by Kendra. “Our moms play tennis together on Saturdays.”

“And our dads golf together,” Kendra says, self-mockingly now. “It’s all
super
-cozy. I wanted to come to Italy for the summer, and I found this course online—”

“But
her
mom didn’t want her to go on her own, and she told
my
mom, and
my
mom thought it would be a great learning experience for me—” Paige bursts in enthusiastically.

“And teach you where some other flipping countries are besides your own,” Kelly mutters sotto voce.

“—so they thought we’d make a great team,” Kendra
concludes, with enough sarcasm in her voice to indicate that she has decidedly mixed feelings about having Paige as her sidekick.

“You hadn’t met before?” I ask. I’m always curious about people: Mum says I shouldn’t ask so many questions, but I can’t help it.

“Oh, we knew each other from the club,” Kendra says. “But we don’t have the same friends. Or,” she adds rather pointedly, “go to the same school.”

“Oh no! Kendra goes to the really brainy high school in Jacksonburg,” Paige says with devastating candor. “Her friends are all, like, super-smart.” She giggles. “Mine just like to party. Hey!” She sits up, leans forward, and shoves her own sunglasses up to the crown of her head. “Talking about partying, I didn’t come to Italy for the summer just to hang out with a bunch of girls! No offense, but there had better be some cute boys around here! If not, we’ll just have to go out and find them, right? Hunt them down like dogs!”

I can see that Paige has a real gift for saying what everyone else is thinking but is too proud to admit. Of course I’ve been speculating about Italian boys, lots and lots, but I wasn’t going to say it out loud.…

“Do you two have boyfriends?” she asks us.

Kelly shakes her head and I shake mine, a little embarrassed at being put on the spot.

“Cool!” she continues, to my surprise. “Kendra doesn’t either. And I just broke up with someone. Or he sort of broke up with me. I think. We had a fight and it was all kinda messed up. Anyway, who cares?” She throws her arms wide, smiling so happily I can see almost every one of her big
white perfect teeth. “It’s summer! You should never have a boyfriend in the summer. You get a boyfriend in the autumn, so you have someone over Christmas! And then you break up with
him
in the spring so you can party in the summer again!”

Kelly and I stare at her, eyes wide. There’s a mad kind of logic to this, I suppose.

“That isn’t how we
all
roll in the States,” Kendra informs us with an ironic twist of her mouth. “Paige just thinks the way she does stuff is—well, how everyone does it.”

I’m getting really warm now; even though it’s late afternoon, the sun low in the sky above the far hills, the heat of the day has soaked into the concrete surround of the pool and baked the earth dry, and that heat is still shimmering all around us, the air heavy with it. Sucking in my tummy, hoping my thighs don’t wobble too much, I sit up, quickly swing my legs to the ground, and walk over to the pool, diving in before anyone has too much of a chance to see me in motion. The water’s deliciously cool against my overheated skin, and I swim a whole length underwater because it feels so good. I wish I had the willpower to make myself swim a hundred lengths a day, like Kendra’s planning to do; it would definitely slim me down a bit.

And yet, being totally honest with myself, I know I won’t. I sigh as my head breaks water at the far end. How is it that some people have amazing self-discipline, and others just don’t?

I’m at the infinity edge, and I hold on to the side, the smooth rounded concrete lapped over with water, which trickles gently over it and down into a little trough a foot
below, there to catch the overflow. From here I have a great view of the ornamental gardens below, planted with hedges in a complicated geometrical pattern, small flower beds shaped like shields set between them at intervals. The grass of the lawns, seen from above, is drying out, the earth below baked hard and brown by the sun; the grass is withering in the scorching heat. Back in England the lawns would still be lush and richly green; but the Mediterranean climate is harsher, with much longer summers, and—here, at any rate—rockier, stonier soil. Plants that grow here have to be tough to survive. Like the vines, and the olives, and the rosemary …

From my elevated perspective, I’m the first to see a bright blue convertible winding its way up the hill with two people in it.
Girls
, I realize as the car nears the house, and I feel my heart sinking:
We have enough girls in this house already. We need some testosterone!
The car passes below me and pulls in to a parking area behind a stand of pine trees; moments later, the engine turns off, the doors slam, and Italian voices, high and piercing, ring out in the still, heavy afternoon air, light footsteps running up a concealed flight of stone steps until the girls emerge on the far side of the swimming pool.

We all turn to look at them. I swing around, my arms wide to either side of the pool surround, and as soon as I catch sight of them I’m really grateful that most of my body is concealed by the water.

Because they’re really thin, and really stunning. And they’re looking down their prominent Italian noses at us as if we’re nasty stains on the upholstery of the pool loungers.

I can’t tell if they’re the same age as us; maybe they’re
a bit older. They’re both wearing armfuls of narrow gold bracelets and dangling earrings. Their thick dark hair is cut short, pushed back from their faces, and they’re wearing as much makeup as Kendra and Paige, but in a considerably more obvious style. They make Kendra—slim athletic Kendra—look plus-size. Their legs, in their skinny jeans, are like toothpicks. Their heels are three-inch-high studded wooden sandals, and their tight white tops fit their narrow torsos like gloves, lifting over their low-rise jeans to reveal glimpses of near-concave stomachs. They’re carrying shopping bags and studded handbags that match their sandals, and they’re tanned to the color of caramel toffee.