‘She is nice,’ he said. ‘Thank you for helping her.’
‘It’s OK. How long is she staying?’
‘I don’t know. A few days, just until she’s better. You go to sleep, now.’
He turned off her top light, leaving the bedside light on so she could read for a while, and went back down to the kitchen.
Lydia was sitting there studying an English-Italian dictionary that Francesca must have lent her, and he poured two glasses of wine and sat down opposite her.
‘She’s a lovely girl.’
‘She is. She’s very like her mother. Kind. Generous.’
Lydia nodded. ‘I’m really sorry you lost her.’
He smiled, but said nothing. What was there to say? Nothing he hadn’t said before.
‘So, the harvest starts tomorrow,’ Lydia said after a moment.
‘Si. You should come down. Carlotta brings lunch for everyone at around twelve-thirty. Come with her, I’ll show you what we do.’
Massimo left before dawn the following morning, and she found Carlotta up to her eyes in the kitchen.
‘How many people are you feeding?’ she asked.
Carlotta’s face crunched up thoughtfully, and she said something in Italian which was meaningless, then held up her outspread hands and flashed them six times. Sixty. Sixty?
‘Wow! That’s a lot of work.’
‘Si. Is lot of work.’
She looked tired at the very thought, and Lydia frowned slightly and began to help without waiting to be asked. They loaded the food into a truck at twelve, and Roberto, Carlotta’s husband, drove them down to the centre of operations.
They followed the route she’d travelled with Massimo the day before, bumping along the gravelled road to a group of buildings. It was a hive of activity, small tractors and pickup trucks in convoy bringing in the grapes, a tractor and trailer with men and women crowded on the back laughing and joking, their spirits high.
Massimo met them there, and helped her down out of the truck with a smile. ‘Come, I’ll show you round,’ he said, and led her to the production line.
Around the tractors laden with baskets of grapes, the air was alive with the hum of bees. Everyone was covered in sticky purple grape juice, the air heavy with sweat and the sweet scent of freshly pressed grapes, and over the sound of excited voices she could hear the noise of the motors powering the pumps and the pressing machines.
‘It’s fascinating,’ she yelled, and he nodded.
‘It is. You can stay, if you like, see what we do with the grapes.’
‘Do you need me underfoot?’ she asked, and his mouth quirked.
‘I’m sure I’ll manage. You ask intelligent questions. I can live with that.’
His words made her oddly happy, and she smiled. ‘Thank you. They seem to be enjoying themselves,’ she added, gesturing to the laughing workers, and he grinned.
‘Why wouldn’t they be? We all love the harvest. And anyway, it’s lunchtime,’ he said pragmatically as the machines fell silent, and she laughed.
‘So it is. I’m starving.’
The lunch was just a cold spread of bread and cheese and ham and tomatoes, much like their impromptu supper in the middle of the first night, and the exhausted and hungry workers fell on it like locusts.
‘Carlotta told me there are about sixty people to feed. Does she do this every day?’
‘Yes—and an evening meal for everyone. It’s too much for her, but she won’t let anyone else take over, she insists on being in charge and she’s so fussy about who she’ll allow in her kitchen it’s not easy to get help that she’ll accept.’
She nodded. She could understand that. She’d learned the art of delegation, but you still had to have a handle on everything that was happening in the kitchen and that took energy and physical resources that Carlotta probably didn’t have any more.
‘How old is she?’
Massimo laughed. ‘It’s a state secret and more than my life’s worth to reveal it. Roberto’s eighty-two. She tells me it’s none of my business, which makes it difficult as she’s on the payroll, so I had to prise it out of Roberto. Let’s just say there’s not much between them.’
That made her chuckle, but it also made her think. Carlotta hadn’t minded her helping out in the kitchen this morning, or the other night—in fact, she’d almost seemed grateful. Maybe she’d see if she could help that afternoon. ‘I think I’ll head back with them,’ she told him. ‘It’s a bit hot out here for me now anyway, and I could do with putting my foot up for a while.’
It wasn’t a lie, none of it, but she had no intention of putting her foot up if Carlotta would let her help. And it would be a way to repay them for all the trouble she’d caused.
It was an amazing amount of work.
It would have been a lot for a team. For Carlotta, whose age was unknown but somewhere in the ballpark of eighty-plus, it was ridiculous. She had just the one helper, Maria, who sighed with relief when Lydia offered her assistance.
So did Carlotta.
Oh, she made a fuss, protested a little, but more on the lines of ‘Oh, you don’t really want to,’ rather than, ‘No, thank you, I don’t need your help.’
So she rolled up her sleeves and pitched in, peeling and chopping a huge pile of vegetables. Carlotta was in charge of browning the diced chicken, seasoning the tomato-based sauce, tasting.
That was fine. This was her show. Lydia was just going along for the ride, and making up for the disaster of her first evening here, but by the time they were finished and ready to serve it on trestle tables under the cherry trees, her ankle was paying for it.
She stood on one leg like a stork, her sore foot hooked round her other calf, wishing she could sit down and yet knowing she was needed as they dished up to the hungry hordes.
They still looked happy, she thought. Happy and dirty and smelly and as if they’d had a good day, and there was a good deal of teasing and flirting going on, some of it in her direction.
She smiled back, dished up and wondered where Massimo was. She found herself scanning the crowd for him, and told herself not to be silly. He’d be with the children, not here, not eating with the workers.
She was wrong. A few minutes later, when the queue was thinning out and she was at the end of her tether, she felt a light touch on her waist.
‘You should be resting. I’ll take over.’
And his firm hands eased her aside, took the ladle from her hand and carried on.
‘You don’t need to do that. You’ve been working all day.’
‘So have you, I gather, and you’re hurt. Have you eaten?’
‘No. I was waiting till we’d finished.’
He ladled sauce onto the last plate and turned to her. ‘We’re finished. Grab two plates, we’ll go and eat. And you can put your foot up. You told me you were going to do that and I hear you’ve been standing all day.’
They sat at the end of a trestle, so she was squashed between a young girl from one of the villages and her host, and the air was heady with the scent of sweat and grape juice and the rich tomato and basil sauce.