Late Night Shopping: (19 page)

For a five-year-old, Billie was already in possession of precocious dressing and mixing and matching talents. Annie had an eye on Billie as a future business partner, no doubt about it. Take Billie's Italian shopping outfit, picked out all by herself, without a word of advice from Dinah (not that Billie took much of Dinah's advice anyway). She was wearing a pink, green and blue flowery skirt, teamed with a pink and blue striped T-shirt which exactly matched her cornflower blue eyes and blush-pink cheeks.

Pink flip-flops and handbag completed the look, as well as the killer accessory: pink heart-shaped sunglasses.

You could get away with a lot when you were five though, Annie would be the first to admit. After thirty-five, it got a lot harder to look fabulous every day. That was when all the girls who'd looked effortlessly good throughout their teens and twenties went to pieces and all the natural-born groomers began to stand out from the crowd.

Ageing always hit the boho girls hardest, Annie knew.

She'd seen quite enough of them turning with confusion to her in the personal shopping suite. 'But I used to wear any old thing and look great. Now I look like I got dressed in the dark!'

Give Sienna Miller just a few more years and she'd join Helena Bonham Carter in looking like a bag lady. After thirty-five, a girl's gotta groom. Something the Italians seemed to understand instinctively Annie couldn't help thinking as they entered another bijou boutique and spotted the glamorous, coiffed to perfection mamma behind the counter. The arms of her spectacles exactly matched the caramel gold of her highlights, Annie noticed admiringly. Now that was good grooming.

'I am
so
bored,' Connor whispered to Annie as the boutique owner talked them leisurely through her inevitable collection of scarves, brooches, dangly gold earrings and pastel-coloured sweaters. 'Any moment now, she's going to go over to the wooden drawers and bring out her silky sock collection. I'm sorry,' he pouted, 'I am just not gay enough for silky socks and you know it.'

'Signora?' Annie put on her most charming smile, 'We want to go to the factories. Los fabbricos? Handbags and shoes? Borsettas e calzoleria. Dove?'

'Ah!' the woman smiled with understanding and nodded vigorously, setting her earrings a-jangle. 'El distrito fabricante? Mario!' she said to them and fished under the counter into a drawer.

She brought out a little business card and handed it to Annie. Then she went to the shop door and seemed to be giving directions.

'There's a driver? To the factory?' Annie asked, getting the gist of the instructions although they were delivered in rapid-fire Italian.

'Si, si! Mario,' the woman insisted.

Annie didn't need to be told twice. She gathered her party together and herded them out of the boutique and briskly down the pavement following the woman's directions. Around the corner was a broad and sunny cobbled street. A street lined with shady plane trees and café terraces spilling out onto the pavements, dotted with bright sun umbrellas. A skinny waiter in a white shirt and black waistcoat buzzed between the marble-topped tables. Over the exhaust fumes from the odd Vespa moped puttering through floated a tantalizing smell of coffee, lemon peel and Italian cologne.

Connor came to a standstill and drank in the scene.

'You know what?' he announced, 'I'm not coming to the factory to look at any more pink cashmere jumpers and silky socks. I'm staying right here. I'm going to find myself a little table over there, line up a row of espressos, then enjoy the sun and the view. I'm here to relax!' he insisted, 'and get a light bronzing. Not a tan, that would be too ageing, just a little colour. Anyone want to join me?'

'Yeah,' Lana, whose face had been set to bored rigid for some time now, answered with conviction, 'I do!'

'Aha, you've spotted the talent buzzing by on the Vespas, have you?' Connor asked her with a nudge.

'No! I'm just tired,' Lana insisted, 'we've been shopping for the whole day. I can't take any more.'

'We spent nearly an hour having lunch!' Annie argued. 'C'mon, you can't wimp out on me now. I bet there's a lovely café up at the factory.'

But Connor and Lana were already sidling towards a table and it didn't look as if there would be any stopping them now.

'Dinah!' Annie warned, just in case her sister, who was looking gorgeous, if a little wilted in a vibrant white and yellow summer dress, thought she was going to get out of the factories tour.

'I want to go to the factory with Aunty Annie!' Billie insisted.

'That's my girl,' Annie told her. 'OK, OK, you two can stay here.' She looked at Connor sharply. 'But behave. You have got your phone on you, haven't you, Lana?'

Lana nodded.

'OK, we'll be back for you by six. Right, c'mon Billie, let's go and find Mr Mario.'

Through a side street, up a flight of winding stairs above a bakery, they finally tracked Mario down to a tiny, chaotic taxi office, which somehow managed to function without a telephone, radio or any other visible means of communication.

Mario turned out to be a small, neatly dressed and charming man in his sixties. Maybe he was the uncle of the woman in the boutique who'd given them his card. Once they said hello and were all greeted in turn, including Billie, they explained to him where they wanted to go.

'Ah si, si, va bene,' Mario enthused, taking a little black peaked cap down from a shelf, slipping on a dusty grey jacket and then directing them out of his office, back down the stairs and out into a rear courtyard.

There he showed them his shiny silver Seat saloon, opened the doors for them and helped them into the back seat.

When he was buckled into the driver's seat, he turned to them and asked, 'La zona industrial?' with a smile.

'Molti, molti borsettas e calzoleria,' Annie checked.

He smiled and nodded, and she added, 'Forty euros?' which was the price scribbled across the back of the card.

'Si,' he assured her and then gabbled something which she understood to mean that he would wait for them and bring them back.

'Forty euros?' she repeated.

'Si, tutto,' he assured her with a wave of his hand.

They swept out of the courtyard and then slowly, with a very restrained amount of horn-honking for an Italian taxi driver, headed out of the town.

Billie, leaning back in her seat, seatbelt fastened tightly around her, pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and declared, 'This is cool.'

Back at the café, Connor and Lana had settled into chairs close beside each other, which gave them a ringside view of the road and the interesting passing scene.

'Person who spots the Vespa rider in the tightest T-shirt wins a prize,' Connor had suggested.

'Are you ever not looking?' Lana had to ask.

'Got to keep looking,' Connor told her, pulling his shades off and putting them down on the table so he could take her in properly, 'otherwise the good ones get away. I'd have thought your mother would have taught you that by now.'

The skinny waiter was soon at the table, pen at the ready, offering to take their drinks order.

'Hello there,' Connor gushed, 'so what does one drink on a beautiful, bella, bella, afternoon in this part of the world?'

The waiter seemed to understand and fired back something that sounded deliciously fruity.

'No alcohol?' Connor wanted to check.

'Not vay alcohol, no, rinfrescante,' the waiter assured him.

'Refreshing?' Connor repeated, 'yes! We want long, cold, refreshing drinks. Perfetto.'

'Si, si, pronto!' The waiter executed a theatrical turn on the heel of his shiny shoe and disappeared back into the café.

When he returned he was bearing a tray loaded with one small bowl of freshly roasted almonds, one small bowl of black and green olives and for Lana, an icy, freshly pressed lemonade garnished with slices of lemon, straws and a sprig of mint.

Then Connor was handed a tall tea-coloured drink, jangling with ice cubes and decorated this time with mint, straws and fresh slices of peach.

'Oh God, look at that beauty!' Connor declared. 'Is that not just what the doctor ordered?'

When Connor put his lips to the straws, he sucked up a good long mouthful. He could taste iced tea and sweet peachy syrup cut with the sharpness of lime juice. There was definitely something else though, something a little dusky and not entirely innocent.

He rolled the taste around his mouth and wondered for a moment what to do.

It had been months since he'd had a proper drink. He could spit this mouthful out and send the drink back . . . that was his first thought.

But how very long the past few months had been. How very, very long.

Connor swallowed the delicious mouthful: 'Oh Mama! That was good!' he told Lana, smacking his lips.

He could feel it travelling warmly down to his stomach. Yup, he was going to hoover this drink swiftly down and line up the next. Hang the consequences.

Holiday Ed:

Blue Aertex polo shirt (Boden sale c. 1996)
Combat shorts with extensive pockets (Gap sale c. 1999)
Black plimsolls (school lost property auction)
Total est. cost: £15

'Sonos Inglese'

'Ed, how old do you think these trees are?' Owen asked through a mouthful of the apple he was munching.

They'd spent an hour or so walking around the hillsides surrounding the villa and had now stopped for a picnic lunch. Although the grass was short here and slightly singed, they'd thrown themselves down on it and were busily working their way through cheese, bread and the handful of ripe apples and pears they'd picked as they roamed around.

Ed leaned on his elbow and took a look at the gnarled olive trees Owen was gazing up at.

'I don't know . . . apparently they can live for over three hundred years,' Ed replied, ever the schoolteacher. He added, 'Olive oil is one of Italy's most important products. People used to get paid in it.'

'In olive oil?' Owen asked, incredulously. 'But then how did they buy things in shops?'

'Swapped oil for them, I suppose. There was a time in the past when people didn't use to buy that much. They grew almost all the things they needed to eat, they kept animals, fished, made their own clothes and shoes . . . there was a time when you hardly ever went shopping at all.'

'It's a good thing Mum wasn't alive then,' Owen joked. 'She wouldn't have known what to do with herself.'

Ed just smiled at this and began to spread another piece of bread thickly with the creamy yellow cheese he'd brought along.

'So, if you don't like shopping much, what do you like to do with your mum?' Ed wondered, because it was something that worried him a little. He didn't think Annie spent enough time with her children, and when she was with them, he wasn't sure if she was quite on their wavelength, or in the moment with them.

'Ermmm . . . well . . .' Owen was considering the question carefully, 'she's not really into the violin . . .'

'No.'

'I used to like it when she read out my books to me,' Owen brightened up, remembering this, 'because she used to do lots of silly voices.'

'You used to like it?' Ed repeated.