Learning by Heart (27 page)

‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled gently at him. ‘But Richard should tell me.’

He patted her knee. A minute or two later, Richard appeared, the food was brought out and, in the mêlée of eating and drinking and conversation, the subject was lost.

She found herself with Alex on one side and Pietro on the other. Richard was sitting a little way down, next to Giulio, whose wife ladled food on to his plate.

A moment later, a plate was passed to her.

‘This is straight from the sea,’ Alex murmured. ‘Spaghetti with sea-urchins, a little garlic, a little oil. Wonderful.’

She had never eaten anything like it in her life.

‘I have fished for sea-urchin,’ Pietro said.

‘You caught these?’ she asked.

‘Oh, no. Not these. But I had a friend with a boat, and we fished for urchin and oyster.’

‘You dived for them?’

He smiled his brilliant smile. ‘I was young,’ he told her. A board with a slab of Parmesan came down the table; he took it. ‘You would like some?’ he asked.

She nodded. He cut a piece, and placed it on the edge of her plate.

‘Thank you.’

‘
Prego
.’ His arm brushed hers as he held out the plate for Alex. She was certain that the pressure was intentional; then, as he turned away, she thought herself very stupid. He was no more than a boy; it had been politeness. She couldn’t understand her reaction. She was not the sort of woman who speculated about men. And she tried to listen objectively as, across the table, he began to tell Richard about the summers he had spent, and the colours of the ocean.

She tried the spaghetti, a little at a time.

‘There’s something else you find here,’ Alex said, as the wine was passed back and forth. ‘
Panelle
. Cheap food, you know. Chick-pea flour fried in slices, cut up and sold at the door of anyone’s house. I used to know a place at the Vuccira in Palermo.’

‘The Vuccira?’

‘A market. Not the same now as it once was.’ He smiled. ‘When I came back to Sicily, I was very poor. I could only afford a house when my own father died, and he died late in life. Until then, I lived here on
panelle
and bread. I would walk round the Vuccira and look at the fish on the stalls: mackerel and sardines, tuna and swordfish. There was all sorts of meat too. Things I had never seen in England – would never see there now. Horseflesh, goat, and live chickens.’ He pushed back his plate and looked sentimental. ‘I came back with someone,’ he told her, ‘and we had no money. We stood in the Vuccira and stared at all the food.’ He shook his head. ‘There was still rationing in London, and most of Sicily was poor, but that place …’ He raised both hands expressively. ‘Like a door opening into heaven.’

‘When did you buy your house?’ she asked.

‘In 1960,’ he said. ‘We lived in a cold-water flat until then, further down the coast, in Catania.’

‘And this person?’ She didn’t know how to phrase the question, or if he would be offended.

‘We couldn’t live in England. Here it was quite different.’

‘Where is he now?’ she asked.

‘He died three years ago.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He looked directly at her. ‘Never be sorry for being in love,’ he said.

It was almost midnight when the party came to an end. Giulio and his wife walked Richard back to the car in formal ceremony, Pietro behind them; Alex and Cora followed.

‘An unusual family,’ Alex whispered. ‘Academics, builders and a priest among them. Pietro is studying in Rome. The girls are beautiful, and all called after goddesses. They are goddesses, too. Beautiful women in Italy. Beautiful people.’

She could tell that he was more than a little drunk.

Well, she thought, trying to place her own feet steadily one in front of the other along the rocky path, he had a right to be. They all had a right to be drunk on the evening – the fire and the food. Perhaps Richard had a right to be fêted like this; perhaps, after tonight, he would tell her the secret that lay somewhere between him and the man who was shaking his hand again. She saw Pietro turn away from the little group and come towards her. ‘My father and Mr Ward are going to No to the day after tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Cora responded, ‘I don’t know where Noto is.’

‘A place south of here,’ he said. He paused. ‘The place.’

Alex was looking at the ground.

Pietro made her a deferential bow. ‘Perhaps I may come to keep you company,’ he said. ‘My father has asked if you would like to see Syracusa.’

‘With you?’ she asked.

‘If it would please you.’

She looked at Richard, at his back, his downturned face as he listened to Pietro’s father speaking quickly, in a fast, rhythmic voice, at his shoulder. She strained to hear the conversation, but couldn’t catch a word. A mixture of smoke, drifting downhill, and mist, rising upwards, moved in the space between them, at their feet, in the darkness, like saturated veils.

She looked back at the boy. ‘All right,’ she said. She smiled at his obvious anxiety to entertain her. Her heart beat slowly, heavily. She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘If that’s what they have suggested. Thank you.’

Sixteen

Two days later they drove down from Taormina to Syracusa, and went straight to Ortigia.

Pietro was waiting beside his car close to the Umbertino bridge. He looked, Cora thought, as they pulled in to park close to him, as if he had posed himself directly opposite the terracotta frontage of the first buildings, so that he was dead centre of what already looked like a stage set: the white bridge, the red waterfront houses, the blue of the deep-water channel where tour boats were already drawn up alongside private yachts.

He seemed nervous, Cora noticed, as she got out of the car. When he saw them, he brushed down the sleeves of his jacket. She hid a smile. For a moment he had looked like the kind of man Englishmen mistrusted: any kind of man who was good with women, charming. She pitied Pietro: he had to entertain the wife of one of his father’s friends for an interminable day. She wondered what he would prefer to be doing.

‘Your guide is already here,’ Richard commented.

‘Poor chap,’ she murmured. ‘He looks as if he’s waiting for his own execution.’

Richard smiled as he closed the car door.

He had been a little brighter this morning – too bright, even. He had complimented her on her dress, kissed her hand over breakfast. Unlike himself, in so many minor details. He was talking far too much, she realized, as she followed him and Alex to the car. Richard never talked at length. She listened to him, to the inflection of his words, and her mood changed from pleased surprise to apprehension. He was not relaxed, he was the opposite; the talk and brightness were a screen. She had sat in the back of the car and watched the coast go by, seen Etna slip past the windows, and felt rebuffed and excluded.

Richard strode forward now and shook Pietro’s hand. ‘This is very kind of you,’ he said.

‘It is my pleasure,’ Pietro replied.

The three men talked for a little while about the beauty of the day, the loveliness of the harbour, the island, the town. Cora hung back, grasping her handbag with both hands, feeling awkward, embarrassed.

At last, Richard turned to her. ‘We’ll be back by six,’ he said. ‘We’ll meet you in the Piazza Duomo, in front of the cathedral.’

‘All right,’ she said.

‘Do you have some money?’

‘Yes,’ she told him.

‘I’ve given Pietro enough for lunch,’ he said.

She blushed. She was like a child being looked after for the day – so much a dependant that her guardian had to be given money to feed and entertain her. Richard missed the look of disappointment and embarrassment she gave him. He went back to the car and, together, she and Pietro watched the dark blue Bentley thread its way through the traffic to the Via Elorina.

She turned to the boy alongside her. ‘I would like to say something,’ she told him. ‘I would like to say that you’re not obliged to stay with me.’

Pietro frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘You don’t have to look after me,’ she said, ‘if you would rather not. I will understand. I will be perfectly all right.’

He raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘You don’t want to be with me?’

‘It’s not that,’ she said. She felt hot with the awkwardness of it. And she was afraid of herself. ‘It’s just that I shall be quite happy if you would rather do something else.’

‘But I wouldn’t rather do something else,’ he said. ‘My father asked me to do this and I will.’

There was a long pause. She knew that she had offended him. She didn’t know where to look or what else to say to him. I must stop this, she told herself. It’s pitiable.

‘Is there anything you would like to see?’ he asked formally.

‘I don’t know the island at all.’

‘Well, perhaps the Temple of Apollo? It’s not far away.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

They walked side by side for a minute or two, then crossed the road.

‘You’ve been to Sicily before?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

Another long silence. Beside them, the traffic hooted and swerved. Warmth prickled the back of Cora’s neck; the sun was blazing between the buildings.

‘Alex told me that you’re at the university in Rome,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘La Sapienza.’

‘What are you studying?’

‘Business. Accounting.’

They had come to a road junction. Cora stopped. ‘Accounting?’

‘Is it surprising?’

‘You don’t strike me as the type,’ she said.

‘What type is this?’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Like a bank manager. That kind of person.’

‘I study so that I can help run my father’s business,’ Pietro said. ‘It is his wish.’

They crossed the road and walked to the railings of a green park. Over the barrier, the temple ruins were in surprisingly good order, with one wall still standing and the bases of vast, fluted columns running on two sides.

‘It was discovered in 1860,’ Pietro said. ‘The temple was built six centuries before Christ. The base is fifty-eight metres by twenty-four.’ He still wore a wounded expression.

‘Have you learned all this for me?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It is something I know.’

‘All the facts and figures?’

‘It is something I remember.’

‘Oh, of course,’ she murmured. ‘Business and accounting.’

She walked round the side of the site, examining the stones. Pietro followed her. ‘Excuse me,’ he said suddenly, ‘but why am I not the correct person to study business?’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re perfectly capable.’

‘But that is not what you think I should do?’

‘It’s hardly for me to say.’ She smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think, surely.’

‘You think I should study something else?’ he persisted.

She appraised him. ‘If I had been asked to guess …’ she said. ‘Perhaps art.’

‘Art? Why, art?’

‘Or literature. Perhaps, even, something very practical.’

‘Business is not practical?’

‘I meant something creative.’

‘I look to you like an artist?’ He was staring at her intently.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I would have guessed an artist.’ She thought of the way he had run down the slope towards them, arms open. ‘I can’t imagine you in an office,’ she said, ‘in a suit and tie.’

He fell silent. Wondering if she had upset him again, she tried to explain. ‘And it was something you said the other night,’ she said, ‘about diving, sailing.’

‘I seem to you like a fisherman, perhaps?’

She smiled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was the way you described it. I heard you explaining to Richard. The colour of the sea.’

‘Ah,’ he murmured. ‘Yes.’

‘And you seem …’

He glanced at her, eyebrow raised. ‘Yes?’

She didn’t reply. She thought she had already said too much to this boy, who seemed to want to please everyone.

‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked. ‘An espresso?’

They walked down the Corso Giacomo and through another piazza; there were plenty of tourists on the streets, she noticed, even though it was only the beginning of the season. ‘It must be full of people here during the summer,’ she observed.

‘In the summer it is too hot,’ he replied, ‘even for the beaches, sometimes.’

‘Do you come back from Rome during the holidays?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Always home.’

‘To be with your family.’

‘It is impossible not to,’ he said. ‘I am my mother’s only son. I have to come home.’

‘To help with the company?’

‘To help with everything.’

They had reached the Piazza Duomo; he took her to a café opposite the cathedral, and they sat down, admiring the elaborate façade: the double height columns, the wide steps. It seemed to glow white in the sun. Pietro ordered the coffee, and indicated the cathedral with a nod. ‘You like this?’

‘It’s wonderful,’ she said. ‘Don’t you have any facts to tell me?’

He looked hard at her, then laughed. ‘Now, you are making a joke.’

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I’m sorry.’

He grinned sheepishly. ‘I tell you a secret now,’ he said. ‘I learned those things for you about the temple.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m flattered that you should take such trouble.’

‘I didn’t know them myself,’ he said. ‘What man knows anything about how many stones there are, how wide they may be? He knows only that they are there.’

‘I was right,’ she declared. ‘I knew you weren’t really an accountant.’

He sat back, gazing at her with renewed interest.

The coffee arrived, aromatic and dark, in tiny cups, with an accompanying glass of water, and a plate of almond biscuits.

‘So,’ Pietro said, after a minute or two, ‘Mr Ward has gone back to Noto’

‘Apparently so.’

‘This is a good journey for him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He seemed nervous.’

‘That is understandable.’

She stirred her coffee, found grains of sugar in the bottom and lifted the spoon to her lips. ‘Oh,’ she said, stopping herself, ‘Alex told me that one should never do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Taste the sugar at the bottom of the cup,’ she said. ‘Every night at the house he has given me lectures on Italian customs.’