Page 2 of A Place in the Sun
‘Up there, Mum. I think we have to go up there,’ says Luca, peering at the photos on the iPad and pointing towards the narrow lane.
‘I can’t get the car up there,’ I say, straining to see what’s ahead over the steering wheel.
‘Well, maybe we have to walk,’ says my ever-sensible son.
He’s right. We’ve exhausted the options by car. I pull into a passing point, a clearing in the hedge, and try, without luck, to push open the car door.
‘I’ll have to get out your side,’ I say to Luca, who is on the road, stretching, the iPad in his hand. I lift my leg over the handbrake and, with his help, haul myself out, as a stray sweet wrapper and a McDonald’s bag fly past me. We chase after them, pick them up, throw them back into the footwell and shut the door. I’ll deal with them later. I look around. It seems as good a place as any to park the car. But it has all our worldly belongings in it – I don’t want to leave it for long.
We grab a few things from the boot and I lock up.I hold my face to the Tuscan sun, which makes my cheeks tingle. It feels good to be out of the car.
But in no time at all I’m keen to be out of the bright sunlight and in the shade.
‘Come on, let’s see if we can find it up here,’ I say to Aimee.
‘I can’t. Mr Fluffy still needs a wee,’ she says. ‘And he’s too tired to walk.’
‘Come on, Aimee, it’ll be fun,’ says Luca, and again my heart swells with pride as he helps jolly his sister along. ‘Come on, let’s sing. And we’ll find Mr Fluffy a loo soon.’
The three of us hold hands, like Dorothy on the yellow brick road, and begin to sing the Italian lessons we’ve listened to all the way down.
‘Piacere.’
‘Piacere.’
‘It’s nice to meet you.’
‘Piacere mio.’
‘It’s nice to meet you too!’ we sing, and swing our arms with Aimee, walking in the shade up a steep hill, the midday heat bouncing off the walls along narrow cobbled streets and neglected buildings.
‘Hey!’ I hear someone shout, as we pass a row of rundown but typically Tuscan terraced houses, with a dining chair outside the front door and washing hanging from the upstairs balcony. ‘No! No, no, no!’
‘Signora!Madam!Cosa fai?What are you doing?’
My Italian is rusty but I understand what’s been said. For a moment I wonder if the voice is speaking to us. I glance around, then up.
A large-chested woman is leaning out of her balcony with a stick, flicking it at some sheets hanging on the line there.
There’s another shout from a second woman. ‘Hey! Stop! That is my clean washing!’
‘And it is on my side of the boundary. Keep your washing to yourself!’
There is another shout: ‘Please keep the noise down. I can hardly hear my television,’ says a third woman.
‘Madam, do not touch my washing with your stick!’
‘Don’t let it flap in my window. I don’t want to be disturbed by your sheets while I’m trying to rest.’
‘And shut your window when you’re cooking. The smell puts me off my dinner.’
‘Yours makes my washing smell bad so I have to do it again.’
‘Perhaps this time it’ll turn out clean.’
I hurry the children along. They’re fascinated by the altercation, their heads turned back the way we came to watch the women, who are still berating each other from the balconies of their stone houses.
Eventually I spot it. I recognize it straight away from the pictures. The house with peeling paintwork on the door is Casa Luna. I take the iPad from Luca and hold it up, secretly hoping the photo will show somethinga little less tired and neglected further up the street, but this is definitely the right one. It’s barely changed since the snap was taken. Maybe the shutters are a little more weatherworn, and even more weeds are growing around the front door between the cracks in the paving stones. I take a big loin-girding breath.
