The Villa (40 page)

And then, when she’d been there for almost a year, Bea made the proposal that would change her life and give her a new passion – something to live for and something to work for.

She had much, Flavia reflected now, to thank Bea Westerman for.

* * *

Sicily – an island surrounded by sea. Living in Cetaria there was always the smell of the sea and always the taste of the fish that came from it. Fishermen like Alberto Amato who went out to sea every day in all weathers and who rarely returned empty-handed. They would take a cart round the village to sell their catch.

Flavia remembered the fish market in Trapani, the grizzled fishermen, the fish – so many varieties – laid out on slabs, some already filleted, shiny and gleaming, their scales a rainbow of colour and light. Tuna, sardines, anchovies … Scorpion fish, eel, mackerel and squid. Clams, cuttlefish, red mullet, swordfish.
Each fish has its time. The question you ask at the market is not how much, but how fresh …?

So much had changed in the fishing industry. More fishing, fewer fish – it made sense. Drift nets taking too much from the sea; the bloody drama of the
mattanza
…

There were many recipes to include. Anchovies, for example – small, but big in flavour.
Pasta con le acciughe. Heat gently
, she wrote,
for they can easily become bitter
. Tuna cooked sweet and sour with vinegar,
a sfinciuni
with anchovy and onion, or stewed with garlic, mint and cloves.
Sarde a beccafico
: the most famous recipe using sardines, a speciality of Palermo.
The name comes from the small bird
– beccafico –
with the tail feathers which stick up in the air. Use pine nuts, breadcrumbs and parsley to stuff. The sardines are rolled from top to tail, packed tightly and presented so that the bay leaf stalks and the sardine tails point up like the tail of the
beccaficio. That would make her daughter smile …

A taste of the sea. Of lightness and movement and liquid and sun.

Sicilian food is playful and above all, it is given respect. Sicilians understand what it is to be hungry. They always have.

Ginny still struggled with calling him ‘Dad’, though since his appearance in her life she had seen him most days. (‘We’re bonding,’ she had said to Becca, ‘but it’s more Pritt Stick than superglue.’) They quite often went off somewhere in the VW – stopping for a pub lunch or coffee and having Philosophical Discussions.

‘Whatever you plan to do in life,’ he said, ‘just remember that you can change your mind.’

Which sounded a bit wishy-washy to Ginny. She could just see Nonna picking up an ovenglove and saying, ‘Lack of drive, my dear’, in her clear, firm, accented English.

‘Yeah?’ she said doubtfully.

‘It’s called going with the flow,’ he said.

The Ball had insinuated more than once that her father’s philosophy was one of cowardly self-interest, but Ginny had to admit that it had some appeal.

‘What if you disappoint other people?’ she’d asked.

‘It’s your life.’

‘What if you regret it later?’

He shrugged. ‘It was your choice.’

‘But how do you know?’ she said. ‘If it’s the right thing at
the right time, or the right thing at the wrong time or the wrong at the right or whatever?’

He blinked. ‘You don’t.’

‘Oh.’ Ginny wasn’t used to the notion of uncertainty. She wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad. Although in her father’s philosophy, she supposed, it wouldn’t be either. It would just be.

‘The thing is,’ he explained, ‘when we make ourselves do something we don’t want to do, or someone else makes us do what we don’t want to do, it makes us feel bad.’

Too true. Ginny knew the Ball wouldn’t question that one. It was a parasite. It fed off such things.

‘So the simplest answer,’ he said, ‘is not to do it.’

‘The easiest option,’ murmured Ginny.

‘Not necessarily.’ He met her gaze and the expression in his eyes told her that he was thinking of the time he went to Australia and refused to be a dad. ‘It may be the most honest and it’s the only way to be true to yourself. But it’s not easy.’

Ginny considered this. It was true that if she refused to go to uni – which was academic, as she wouldn’t get a place anyway – then it wouldn’t be easy. She would upset people – her mother and Nonna especially – but at least she would be true to herself. And when she came to think about it, she realised that no one could or would make her go. Oh, her mother might have a lost opportunities rant, but in the end she couldn’t do jumping jellyfish about it. And she wouldn’t. At the end of the day, her mother wanted her to be happy.

‘I love my mum,’ she said to this man who had also loved her mum and had also let her down.

He nodded. ‘Sure you do.’

‘But I need to get away from her for a while,’ she said. ‘She keeps me too safe.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s good to be safe.’

‘Yeah.’ And she laughed, because this was about the first normal parental thing he’d said to her. ‘But I need to … ’ It sounded stupid.

‘Discover yourself?’ he said.

‘Well, yeah. Sort of.’ Find me, she was going to say. Find a different sort of me. The sort of me who can live without a mother looking after me the whole time, the sort of me who can vanquish a Ball.

‘I know how you feel,’ her father said. ‘You don’t have to hold it in.’ And he reached over and touched her arm, and she believed him. And she felt its grip relax, like a loose tentacle, as if the Ball had been expecting something else, as if it were disappointed, for the first time in Its life.

Flavia had to concentrate hard to remember the order of events. It seemed important. She wanted to make her account as accurate as possible for Tess. But it was easier to recall the emotions than the facts. Perhaps that was always the way.

A few months after she’d seen Peter in Exeter, Flavia received a letter from the young man in the tea shop who had taken her home to stay with him and his mother that night.

‘I’m coming to London,’ he wrote. ‘Could we meet?’

Flavia wasn’t sure; she didn’t want any reminders of the night in Exeter, but Bea persuaded her that it was only common courtesy. ‘And think,’ she said. ‘What would you have done that night without him, my dear?’

This was true. So Flavia met him and he bought her fish and chips from a cafe in Shepherds Bush and a half pint of Guinness in the Royal Crown. It was a foggy winter’s night at the end of February and hard to imagine that spring might be around the corner. In England, she guessed, spring would be a long time coming. And the fog … Smog, they called it, in London. Flavia saw it as a mysterious cloak – a shroud – that covered the city while cars and buses crept and grumbled by and silent trolley buses glided through the grainy
yellow light. She knew it caused health problems, but still – there was something she liked about its strange and heavy silence.

‘It will pass when the weather warms up,’ Bea Westerman had told her. ‘It’s pollution – from the coal smoke.’ Flavia could believe this. It was like trying to breathe through a thick layer of muslin and it made everyone look pinched and grey. Not him though. He looked red-faced, healthy and smiling. Like a breath of fresh air.

He didn’t refer to what had happened in Exeter, but he asked Flavia how she was liking life in London.

‘It is different,’ she confessed. She looked around the pub; this too was a revelation to her. Its beery smell, its dinginess, the big mirrors advertising the ales, the posters about the latest election campaign, the stained carpet, the men in suits standing at the bar – it was nothing like the bars of her homeland.

Part of her longed for the warmth of Sicily. And yet … Here she was so free. She had begun to explore the city. She had visited the market of Petticoat Lane and the Bengali shops in Brick Lane with their dusky spices, bright silks and Indian sweetmeats. She had bought flowers and vegetables from Covent Garden. She had found an Italian quarter around Holborn with a church – St Peter’s – at its heart, and she came here every Sunday to think and to pray. Her God had not given her what she wanted most in the world … And she wasn’t entirely sure that she even believed in Him anymore. But the sense of God was a comfort to her; it seemed to give her strength.

She discovered Soho too – a maze of narrow streets in which she felt strangely at home; perhaps because the area was such a mish-mash of European and African street life, cafes and jazz clubs. She was not
stupid – she knew about the more dubious nightclubs and sex trade, but in the daytime there was a vibrancy about this area that drew her. She even found an Italian coffee bar – with an espresso machine, arty decor and a jukebox – and she stayed there for an hour on her day off, drinking espresso, soaking up the atmosphere and wondering … What would she do next?

‘So,’ he said, ‘what will you do next?’

Precisely. ‘I do not know,’ she confessed. She couldn’t envisage working for Bea Westerman for ever. What she wanted more than anything was to open her own restaurant – she had seen what passed for restaurants in England, and she knew she could do better – if she could only find produce of sufficient quality to cook with. There were Italian restaurants in London – though some of them were rather seedy. And she had walked past an Italian trattoria on Gerrard Street which looked a lot more promising. She knew now that others like her had come – not only from India, Jamaica and Pakistan – but also from Sicily to England to make a living. They were willing to work hard and they often worked in nurseries and restaurants – because who knew more than the Sicilians about food? And it was becoming easier all the time to procure ingredients such as balsamic vinegar
, parmagiano
and good olive oil. But … she still wasn’t sure that England was ready for what she had to offer.

She told him this.

‘Then do it,’ he said. ‘Make them ready for it. Give them what they don’t even know they want.’

‘But how can I?’ She spread her hands. ‘To start a business you need money. I know this. And I have so little saved.’

‘Nothing’s impossible.’ He seemed very serious. ‘I’d like to run my
own cafe too. I will one day.’ He hesitated for just a second. ‘Maybe we should join forces.’

Flavia laughed. But somehow she knew even then that he meant what he said.

After that meeting, he wrote to her regularly and she wrote back. Their letters were polite to begin with and Flavia knew hers were stilted and awkward – her English was improving, but sometimes it felt like one step forwards and two steps backwards, as the English might say.

But gradually, she loosened up and he got braver, and letters streaked back and forth between them – letters packed full with their lives, their sadnesses, their hopes and their dreams. He was three years younger than Flavia; at times he sounded like a man, at other times a boy. Perhaps, she thought, she had grown old before her time.

‘Will you ever go back to Sicily?’ he asked her.

‘No.’ Flavia didn’t have to think about it. England might be cold and damp, but this was where her new life was. England was still recovering after the hard war years, there was much reconstruction. But more than that – there was that feeling of hope in the air. And Flavia needed that. She still wrote to Santina, but she hadn’t answered any of her parents’ letters. There was no going back.

Every so often he travelled by train to London to see her, and she came to look forward to his visits. He was never pushy – she couldn’t have stood that – but he was kind and he was good company too. He became a friend.

It was in September that year that Bea Westerman took Flavia to the Dome of Discovery, whose exhibition was part of the Festival of
Britain. The banks of the Thames had become a haunt of Flavia’s during the summer – Tower Beach was the nearest London got to the seaside, and on warm days the sandy banks were full of people sitting in stripy deckchairs and children paddling in the river. It was a far cry from Cetaria – but Flavia liked to sit and watch these English families, though there was a part of her that couldn’t help but recall that other family, in Exeter …

According to Bea, the South Bank had been an area of shabby warehouses and near-derelict housing, but this had been cleared and developed to create a site for the 1951 Festival of Britain and the Royal Festival Hall. Just the outside of the Dome and the needle-like Skylon building standing next to it was mesmerising for Flavia – and she could have stared at this vision of modernity for hours. But Bea was a woman with a mission. ‘Six million pounds,’ she murmured. ‘A million bricks.’

‘Truly?’ Flavia followed her in.

Bea was philosophical. ‘It is meant to raise the nation’s spirits, my dear,’ she said. ‘After this war we’ve lived through, something has to, you know.’

They were carried in with the rest of the crowds by an escalator, the interior of the building concealed until their moment of entry. Then
… Da-daa!
All was revealed – the magnificent tiers of galleries, the massive curving roof, latticed with rafters. There were gasps of wonder. ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahh’, and ‘I say!’

Flavia too was entranced. This was, she had heard, the largest Dome in the whole world. And she was walking through it. They began with the land of Britain – how Britain’s natural wealth had come into being – and ploughed on, through landscape and wildlife,
agriculture and minerals, shipbuilding and transport … The list of Britain’s achievements was endless, thought Flavia, as they moved on to sea, sky and space. It was a world power such as she had never dreamed of. Compared to Britain, Sicily was a poor relation indeed. She stood straighter – proud that she, Flavia Farro, was here in London, witness to such a grand sight.

Bea was not impressed by the television exhibition. She had never seen the need, she muttered. And this, frankly, was almost beyond Flavia’s imagination. And then there were the British people … symbolised by the Lion and the Unicorn, the strength and the imagination. She cast surreptitious glances at those around her. These qualities were not altogether in evidence. But still … There had been men – explorers like Captain Cook and great scientists like Charles Darwin – who had such qualities in abundance.