‘So,’ he said. ‘I am a bad husband, working and working and never a rose, never a song, never a dance in the moonlight for my lovely wife. Not since her birthday, February, have we danced together in an empty room.’ I took in my stride this hint about the home life of the Aldos and its distance and different nature from my own. ‘And someone saw her, her beautiful black hair and her eyes like rubies. Ah! No – sapphires. And her cheeks like peaches in the evening. I can’t tell you in English how beautiful is my wife. If you spoke my language…’ He decided, apparently, to try it anyway and spent the next minute regaling us about the many wondrous charms of his wife in swooping, elated Italian of which we understood nothing except – in my case – the oft-repeated ‘-issima’s, which gave one the distinct impression that he really meant it.
‘And you’re sure it’s someone in the town?’ said Alec when Joe finally stopped talking.
‘She never get letters I don’t see. She never leave the village. It must be someone she met here.’
‘But you don’t know who?’ said Alec. ‘You weren’t able to think of anyone?’
‘Most of the time she see only ladies. Washing, see?’ He pointed out of the window at the waggling rope of laundry. ‘Rosa can wash the lace as fine as web of a spider. She can wash wool as soft as the day the lamb is born.’ I looked askance at the washing outside, just beyond the reach (I hoped) of the oily smoke from Joe’s cooking pan. It looked to be plain yellow cotton shirts and white calico underclothes to me, and I wondered if Rosa’s beauty and prowess in laundry were to be believed. But then, the pastries had been as delicious as their advance press, so perhaps I was being unfair to him.
‘She must see some men,’ said Alec.
‘She see postman, milkman, grocer boy, farmer on top of the hill. He kill a lamb for us and butcher it just how we like it, Rosa and me. I fry fish for my living, bella signora, but my wife Rosa she is the cook. She make a two-day pot of lamb and tomato would raise the dead from their graves. A pollo con funghi could cure a plague.’ He turned back to Alec again. ‘But it could be anyone. Bank manager, fisherman, pub landlord, anyone who ever see her face or hear her voice. I not angry. How he help it, this man, whoever he is? But she has to come home. She will come home. And before Sabbatina even knows she is gone.’
‘Sabbatina?’ I said.
‘It would break her heart. And so also mine. Sabbatina is our daughter. A beautiful child and a genius, una prodigia, a student of the arts and the sciences. Rosa and me so very proud of our girl.’
‘Ah,’ I said, nodding out of the window. I had thought there was a preponderance of yellow amongst the family wash and it was a shade of yellow, very buttery, that had seemed familiar to me. Now I understood: Sabbatina Aldo went to school at the top of the hill.
‘Yes, signora,’ said Joe. ‘Sabbatina is a student at St Columba’s College for the Young Ladies! Can you believe? Hah? Hah? Can you?’
Frankly, I could not. And I was sure that Basil and Candide Rowe-Issing could not possibly know that young Stella was at school with the child of a fish fryer and a washerwoman.
‘A scholarship, I presume?’ I murmured.
‘A scholar of such promise and so very young,’ said her father, perhaps misunderstanding or perhaps unable to resist another chance, however tiny, to brag. I would not know. Poor dear Donald has never given Hugh or me anything to brag about, being dimwitted, gawky, and shy amongst strangers. It is too soon to tell with Teddy, or at least I dearly hope so.
‘But how can you hope to hide the fact that her mother is missing?’ said Alec.
‘She is full scholar, see?’ said Joe. ‘Sleep up there, eat with the girls, that terrible food. Study in her evenings in the common room of the girls. She will visit tomorrow for dinner with her family – cena in famiglia – unless I stop her. Today I will send note to say Rosa is ill, very catching cold, and Sabbatina must stay away.’
‘Giving me a week to find her and persuade her home,’ Alec said.
‘And if you like,’ I offered, ‘I’ll take the note. Sabbatina might know something.’ Joe rumbled a little and I fell over myself to reassure him. ‘I’ll be very subtle, Mr Aldo. I won’t arouse any suspicions.’
‘She love her mother so very very much and I love both of them so very very very-’
‘I’ll be careful,’ I said. I had not heard such sustained protestations of love and affection since my Pereford summer and it was beginning to grate upon my nerves.
Back up at St Columba’s twenty minutes later, I marched right in at the front door like the welcome guest I evidently was (though the reason for my welcome was a continuing mystery to me) and collared a passing twelve-year-old.
‘Where would I find Sabbatina Aldo at this moment, child?’ I said. The little girl encouraged her spectacles back up her nose by means of a most unattractive screwing up of her face and pouting out of her lips before she answered.
‘Who?’
‘Sabbatina,’ I said, slower. Surely there could not be more than one.
‘What form’s she in?’ said the girl. She was sidling away as she spoke, clearly bent on getting to wherever she had been headed when I stopped her.
‘Stand still when I’m addressing you, please,’ I said. ‘I’m Miss Gilver, the new French mistress. Now, take your hands out of your tunic pockets and show me the way to Miss Shanks’s study.’
‘Oh, Miss!’ said the child, instantly woebegone. ‘I’ve got thirty-five minutes of tennis before I have to start horrid Latin with old Plumface and the big girls said last night you were nice. Please?’
‘Don’t say Plumface,’ I said, even though my lips were twitching.
‘Goody Gilver, Eileen Rendall said.’ The little minx was practically batting her eyelids at me now and I am afraid to say that I succumbed to it.
‘Oh, go on then. Point me in the right direction and then run along.’
I had to raise my voice towards the end of it, because at the first hint of relenting she was running already.
‘West stairs,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘First floor. The one with all the chairs!’ And she was gone.
A child after Hugh’s heart, I thought bitterly, turning around on the spot and trying to deduce which way west might lie. I closed my eyes. The sun set over the sea, beyond the far harbour wall, and the school faced the harbour mouth and since it was May and the sun was setting to the north-west, that meant that the west stair was probably… I set off rather uncertainly towards the farthest corner of the building from the carriage entrance and climbed a set of broad oak stairs I found there.
The first floor – the drawing-room floor in the heyday of the house, one supposed – was quite a good bit grander than the labyrinth of corridors upstairs where Fleur had her little bolthole and had suffered less in the metamorphosis from manor house to boarding school than had the ground floor with its noticeboards and clattering canteen of a dining room. Here was a wide corridor with Palladian over-lintels to its doors – or perhaps Palladian-style would be more accurate, Palladian-esque, even Palladian-ish (for it seemed that the architect had been more entranced by ornament than he had been constrained by authenticity), plasterwork niches so highly decorated they were almost grottoes punctuating its walls, and pelmets above its windows encrusted with bosses and curlicues like a barnacled wreck on the bed of the sea.
With that weight of unavoidable decoration, the thin school carpet and drab school curtains did little to reduce the overall splendour and also there was no need for occasional furniture to break up the yawning blankness as one sometimes sees in plainer houses, where the corridors become a slalom of tables, long-case clocks and even suits of armour. Here it was easy to tell that I had arrived at Miss Shanks’s room, from – as the tennis-bound child had shouted to me – all the chairs. A row of mismatched dining chairs stood along the wall on either side of her door, awaiting, one would surmise, the bottoms of miscreants sent to be dealt with and left simmering so that the prospect of punishment delayed might be half the punishment all on its own.