the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves)
I woke with the soft pink light of dawn filtering into the room, rolled over in bed, and reached for my watch on the nightstand. It was early still, the usual time I’d be waking to check my emails. There weren’t any. Damn signal.
Rubbing my eyes, I rose and moved to open the French doors, letting in a warm rush of air. The doors opened onto a narrow, wrought iron balcony. Leaning on the railing, I looked out over the valley, at the cross-hatched patterns of the fields of vines.
The morning air was still cool, and without the sun’s heat to draw out the usual heavy fragrance of the garden, the air smelled clean and fresh. The dawn sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and to the south, where the blue hills met the paler blue of the sky, I could just make out the russet and ochre rooftops of a village, catching the early morning light as a thin mist burned away. Across the valley, the nearest hills were furred with the dark green of forest, dipping down into the brighter green of rows and rows of vines in full leaf. The public road that served the farms snaked through this valley and away into the next, striped by the early morning light falling between the double row of dark cypresses marking its path.
Closer, among the rows of vines washed green and gold by the early morning sun, a red tractor chugged, kicking up white dust. I shaded my eyes against the sun. It might have been Tommaso, but I couldn’t tell from this distance.
I breathed in another lungful of warm, heavy air, enjoying this strange sensation of being in a foreign place. After a childhood of constant movement and change, I wasn’t a frequent traveller, preferring to enjoy my own back yard, but looking out at this view I could almost understand the allure travel held for Geraldine. There was something about being in a new place, in strange surroundings, that gave the illusion of sweeping away one’s troubles. I turned my back to the view. The one thing Geraldine hadn’t learnt was that you couldn’t run away from your troubles. They would still be waiting at home when you returned.
Having learnt from my experience the day before, I pulled on a lightweight silk dressing gown over my sleep shorts and camisole, and headed downstairs for coffee and breakfast. The gown was one of the last gifts Kevin gave me. Jade to match your eyes, he’d said, unexpectedly poetic for a statistician. Then he’d stripped it off me to kiss his way down my body. Barely a week later he’d been kissing down someone’s else’s body … I shut down that thought so quickly my head spun.
To keep both my hands and my thoughts occupied, I catalogued the contents of the restocked pantry. Flour, sugar, eggs, milk, olive oil, and the oranges I’d bought on a whim at the co-op because they looked so fresh and appealing. Out of practice as I was, I hadn’t thought to buy yeast or baking powder, but there was baking soda and I’d seen lemons on the tree in the back yard…
It might be rather pleasant to try my hand at baking again. Like riding a bike, right?
Squeezing out a couple of lemons, I made a paste with the baking soda, then mixed in the flour, sugar and oil, grated in the orange zest and juice, and finally beat in the eggs. There was something so satisfying, so deliciously primal, about being elbow deep in a bowl, with dough squelching between my fingers. It was every bit as satisfying as I remembered.
Once I’d beaten the mix into a smooth consistency, I spooned it into a rectangular baking dish, then covered it with a checkered tea towel.
Now what? I had the perfect batter for schiacciata alla Fiorentina, the traditional Florentine orange flat-cake Nonna had taught me to bake, but no way to bake it except in the terrifying wood oven. It might be clean and gleaming now, but I didn’t have the faintest clue how to even get the wretched thing started.
How hard could it be to start a fire and get it warm enough to bake the cake? What was the worst that could happen – that the oven would either heat too fast or not enough? I might end up with a cake that was either burnt or undercooked, but so what? Who would know but me that for once in my life I’d created something less than perfect?
There was a wood pile in the back yard. I hefted a few of the smaller logs into the kitchen and piled them inside the stove’s firebox, then set them alight with the gas lighter I found in the pantry. Instead of bursting into the kind of merry blaze Nonna used to make, the wood began to smoke. Perhaps there was too much air?
I hurriedly shut the firebox door, but that only made the smoke billow thicker. It oozed around the edges of the door, slowly filling the room with an eye-burning fog.
So I opened the door again. Oh no. That was even worse. Now, clouds of smoke pumped back into the kitchen. I choked on the smoke, covering my nose and mouth with the crook of my arm. My eyes watered from the burn as I ran for the half-full electric kettle, grabbed it off its heating pad, and returned to the oven. Hastily pouring the water from the kettle over the meagre flames, I stood back, throat burning, eyes burning. The logs sizzled, belching out even more acrid smoke, and the fire inside the stove died.
That didn’t stop the smoke, though. It poured down still from the chimney. Oh heavens – had I somehow set the chimney on fire? I had no clue how chimneys worked.
Half-blinded and coughing, I was doubled up, and struggling for breath. The kitchen, vast as it had seemed before, was now so filled with smoke I could barely see a foot around me. Only the brighter patch of the door was visible, so I stumbled towards it, and straight into a wall of human. Hard, male human.
Strong arms gathered me up, sweeping me off my feet, and I was carried out into blinding sunlight. While my eyes still streamed, he sat, cradling me in his lap, one large hand rubbing soothing circles on my back while with the other he wiped away the stinging tears from my eyes.
‘There’s no point burning the house down,’ Tommaso said. ‘It’s way under-insured.’
His voice was hard and unsympathetic, completely at odds with the gentle hand stroking circles on my back.
‘I wasn’t trying to burn the house down!’ The protest was weak, my voice scratchy and still choked from the smoke.
Now that my eyes had stopped streaming, I could see we sat on the low stone wall edging Nonna’s herb garden, and he’d used the hem of his T-shirt to mop my eyes. Where the shirt lifted, tanned hard muscle was visible. A six-pack. An honest-to-goodness six-pack. I’d never been within groping distance of one of those before.
I swallowed. The arms that had held me and carried me were well muscled too, and the chest I leaned against…
I should get out of his lap. I really should.
Yet somehow my body refused to obey.
‘I wanted to bake,’ I said weakly, ending on a hiccoughing cough.
‘The stove hasn’t been used in years. It needs a good cleaning.’ His face wasn’t any more sympathetic than before, but his voice was a little gentler.
‘I cleaned it out yesterday.’
‘The chimney too?’
That was a real thing?
‘If there’s a build-up of creosote inside the chimney, you could have started a serious chimney fire. What wood did you use?’
I glanced towards the sheltered wood pile stacked up against the yard wall.
‘That figures! That’s the wood I’m seasoning for winter. It’s still very green, which means it creates more smoke than fire.
