Page 30 of Far from Home
The message was hardly a declaration of undying love.
Hi Amy. Hope you’re okay. Any idea where my blue shirt with the white collar is? I can’t find it anywhere.
Unsure whether to laugh or cry, she read it out to Lucy and saw her wince.
‘What’re you going to do? What about a reply suggesting he looks under the bed of his other girlfriend?’
Amy shook her head. ‘No, I won’t reference her until I can look him in the eye. When the builders come in on Monday I’ll check to see if it’s okay to take a day out. I don’t think there are too many big decisions still to be made, so I’ll hop on a flight one day next week and go and have it out with him. For now, I’ll just acknowledge the message.’ She sent him a reply in a similar style to his.
All well here. No idea about the shirt.
Their pizzas arrived barely five minutes later and Amy was glad she hadn’t opted for a starter first. The plate was big but the pizza was even bigger and actually spilled over almost onto the table cloth. It looked and smelt wonderful and she suddenly felt stirring at her feet and a big black nose landed on her thigh, nostrils flared.
‘No, Max! No food from the table.’
He was adopting an expression of desperate starvation, even though Signora Grande had told her he had eaten only a couple of hours previously. Forewarned that Labradors would happily eat until they explode, Amy was determined to harden her heart. However, as he had been remarkably well-behaved this evening – once they had got the walking on a lead thing sorted out – she compromised by opening a little packet of bread sticks and passing one down to him.
‘There, but that’s all. Is that clear?’ Of course it wasn’t, and by the end of the meal he had emptied the packet of grissini, but she couldn’t complain. She’d been worried he might start barking or try to emulate Coco and set off across the floor with the table in tow. Instead, he snoozed most of the time with his heavy head resting on her toes. It felt rather nice. There was a lot to be said for a dog as a companion rather than her current – albeit almost certainly not for much longer – boyfriend.
The meal was excellent and the conversation lightened. Soon she and Lucy were chatting happily about Volterra, the house and Sant’Antonio. Inevitably the subject then moved back to Gavin and how Amy saw her life panning out. She had been doing a lot of thinking about this over the past few days and she had almost managed to persuade herself that Gavin’s alleged infidelity might actually turn out to have been for the best. At least it had served to make her take stock and consider the doubts and reservations she had been having about him. That didn’t make the bitter pill of his presumed deceit much easier to swallow, but it helped. As for the future, she finally gave in and told Lucy about Adam.
‘The thing is, Luce, I’ve met a guy.’ Seeing her friend’s eyes light up, she held up her hand. ‘Nothing’s happened between us and it could well be that nothing will happen. Apart from anything else, there’s a question mark over his relationship with Danny that we met in Volterra today.’
‘What sort of question mark?’
‘It could be that they live together, maybe along with another guy called Pierpaolo.’
‘And when you say “live together”… I got the impression that Danny and his shopkeeper friend with the poodle are probably less interested in women and more interested in men. What about you?’ Seeing Amy nod, she continued. ‘So are you saying that your new man might be gay or bi as well?’
Her voice tailed off and Amy was quick to clarify. ‘Like I say, nothing’s happened between us, but it was just something that I heard.’
Lucy smiled at her over the rim of her beer glass. ‘You don’t want to believe everything you hear. Go with your heart.’ She took a mouthful and carried on. ‘Well, go on then, tell me all about him. What’s he look like? What does he do? How come I haven’t met him yet? Have you been hiding him from me?’
While Lucy finished her pizza, Amy gave her a brief description of Adam and told her about his job and his trip to Brazil. By the time she had finished, Lucy was looking convinced.
‘He sounds like the perfect man for you. It’s easy: you wait until he comes back from Brazil and then all you’ve got to do is to snog him and start tearing his clothes off. You’ll soon know one way or another whether he’s gay or not.’
Amy was in the middle of a mouthful of beer and this sparked her off in a coughing fit which resulted in her canine companion actually getting up and putting his head on her thigh and giving her a worried look. She collected herself and patted him on the head.
‘Thank you, Max, but I’m okay. Here, I’ve got a little piece of pizza crust left over. Want it?’
He did.
Chapter 17
They set off for Pisa quite early on Sunday morning so that Lucy could see the Leaning Tower before her flight home. Amy herself had only glimpsed it briefly on the day Lucy arrived so the two of them spent a couple of hours wandering around thecentro storicoand the incomparable Piazza dei Miracoli.This broad grassy space in the town centre was home not only to the tower but also the twelfth-century Duomo and the Baptistery, and even now in early June it was crawling with tourists. Neither Amy nor Lucy felt like climbing the tower, which really did lean quite frighteningly, and, instead, they went into the cathedral and admired the statues, paintings and architecture of this medieval gem, before heading into town for a quick snack lunch and then to the airport.
Amy felt quite emotional saying goodbye to her best friend but she promised to be in touch later in the week when she came over to have her showdown with Gavin. Lucy told her she planned on hitting the gym – or that might have been her male friend at the gym – pretty hard over the next few days after all the lovely Italian food and promised to send on any gossip or developments. By the time Amy got back to Sant’Antonio it was almost three o’clock, the time she had promised to go and see Danny’s pottery studio, so she drove straight there.
The first discovery she made was that the studio was about a hundred yards further along the road from Adam’s office so it looked less likely that they did in fact live together. In case that hadn’t been conclusive enough evidence, the first person she met when she knocked on the door of the studio was a slim, olive-skinned man probably around her age, with a mane of bleached blond hair and a diamond stud in his nose. As he saw Amy, his face lit up.
‘Ciao, sei Amy, vero? Benvenuta.’ And just to add to the greeting, he put his arms around her shoulders and air-kissed her spectacularly somewhere around the ears with a resounding smacking noise of the lips as he switched to excellent English. ‘Danny told me you were beautiful, but he didn’t say how beautiful!’ Reverting to Italian, he put the fingers of one left hand together, kissed them and then launched them in her direction in the traditional Italian expression of aesthetic appreciation. ‘Bellissima!’
He waved her in through the door and into a large room with a glazed archway looking out into the backyard, not dissimilar in style to Adam’s office. Here she found Danny, once more wearing his clay-splattered smock, and he gave her a cheerful wave.
‘Ciao, Amy, come in, come in. I’m just glazing some dishes and then I’ll talk you through the whole process.’ She saw him put a tray of his wall plates, all painted with an intricate pattern of grapevines and leaves, onto the last empty shelf inside a business-like industrial kiln. He closed the door, fiddled with a few knobs until an orange light lit up, and then turned towards her. He came over to greet her less theatrically than his partner. ‘Thanks for coming. You’ve met Pierpaolo, haven’t you? He’s the reason I’m here in Sant’Antonio.’ Just in case Amy still hadn’t got the message, he pulled up his sleeve and revealed a tattoo of what looked like a pair of cherubs on his upper arm, with the initials P and D intertwined below. ‘What did I tell you about my one true love?’
Amy shook his hand and smiled at both of the men. That settled one of the questions going through her head. She toyed with the idea of asking the other question and then decided to wait for the answer to emerge spontaneously in the course of the afternoon. She didn’t want to sound too interested in Adam. As promised, Danny then walked her through all the different stages leading up to the production of a completed piece of glazed pottery. She was fascinated to see the raw earth transformed into a malleable, plastic medium that he then worked skilfully with his hands, flattening, rounding and crimping.
