Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea Read online

  “Let us begin,” he said.

  I placed the last of the dishes into the ceramic sink.

  “You may finish your house duties afterward,” he announced.

  I think he expected me to do something other than stand mute in the doorway.

  “Good heavens, Santina, am I really all that terrifying?”

  It was one of those lingering questions that pierce the air, leaving a small, unanswered tear.

  “Sit here.”

  He gestured at the chair beside him where Adeline had managed to eat a light supper yesterday evening. That had filled us both with a tentative hope—nothing that this morning wouldn’t have dashed, no doubt. He was a fixer. I suspected that what he couldn’t immediately fix with Adeline, nor Elizabeth for that matter, he’d make up for with me, and my tentative English.

  I sat down, trying to unclasp my hands and failing.

  “You speak fairly well,” he began.

  My lips rose into an unsure smile.

  “Enough to understand instructions, yes. But if I allowed you to sail to America as promised, without a true grasp of English, I would be failing on my word. That is to say, what is English to you, Santina?”

  “What is it, sir?”

  “That’s what I asked.”

  “A language. To talk.”

  He took a deep breath now, and as he let it out again, his gaze drifted toward the sea. It was a deeper blue than yesterday at this time, but still clear enough to see the watercolor patches of algae swirling toward Capri. His eyes snapped back to me. I noticed the tiny licks of darker blue that cut across the aqua, framed by thick blond-copper eyelashes.

  “It is not only to talk, Santina. We do that already. I will educate you in a cohesive manner. I will not ask how to buy cheese and bread. Any donkey can do that. I will teach you English—in all its startling, crisp beauty.”

  He had lost me several sentences ago.

  I watched him open a small book, marked by a slim leather bookmark that looked well loved. He straightened. “‘Oh ye! Who have your eye-balls vexed and tired, Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea.’”

  He stopped and looked at me.

  “Keats, a poet, wrote that, in 1817.”

  “Is that all of it?”

  “You want to know the rest?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t understood everything, but I liked the way his voice changed when he recited it. He twisted the book to face me.

  “There.” He pointed toward the bottom of the page.

  I looked at the jumble of letters on the page. I couldn’t bear to raise my eyes to meet his.

  “You see? You carry on where I left off—”

  I swallowed.

  “Don’t worry about mistakes, Santina, there’s no one here to laugh at you.”

  My ears became attuned to the minutiae of sounds around me, a twitch of a leaf as a grasshopper skimmed its surface, the breeze lifting the sprinkle of crumbs he hadn’t allowed me to sweep away yet. I realized he was calling my name.

  “Santina,” he said, his voice softer now—it was his Adeline voice, the one he used when her speech began to corkscrew toward ramblings—“you can’t read, can you?”

  I felt furious that he had cornered me like this. What need had I for poetry? How on earth was that going to help me survive America? Here I was, dragged back to the tiny town that had smothered my childhood, following a man and his sick wife, caring for his daughter night and day, a responsibility I had never sought, and his repayment was a promise and a poem!

  He wasn’t afraid of the bristling silence. He let it hang, unhurried, like a dank February morning in London where the clouds merge into one purgatorial white canopy.

  His hand smoothed his beard.

  “Would you like me to help you, Santina?”

  A sigh escaped before I could stop it, then a solitary tear, which I hated myself for. I brushed it off my cheek, but we both knew it had been there.

  “Please say you’ll consider my offer?” he asked.

  I hadn’t invited these blurred lines; he was my employer, not a teacher. I didn’t want to be helped. I wanted to work, survive a year here in exchange for my escape from this town; this place that had never taught me to read, or think about poetry, or hope to live off course from the mountain girl. I was prepared to commit to this time with his daughter and do the job as best I could, but my eyes were set on a horizon far from here. Now I sat, within one of my town’s palaces, feeling more imprisoned than when I first left. His face relaxed into something close to a smile.

  “I think I can offer you more than just money, Santina.” His voice lowered to a syrupy murmur, his expression softened. “In return for everything you are doing for my family and me.”

  I lifted my eyes. His offer came from a genuine place. He was no more trying to imprison me than I was. I took a breath to answer, but a metallic clatter cut through my pause, followed by a bucket cascading down from the terrace above, crashing into the lemon trees below, tumbling down the brush toward the wall at the end of the garden. We ran upstairs. Adeline was stood before the balustrade that ran the length of her terrace. She was closer to it than made me feel safe. I stopped by the doorway. The major walked through the bedroom toward the terrace, his feet soundless, as if he were wading through water.

  I watched him coax her back inside. When she returned to bed, he crushed a pill into a spoon. He leaned in to give it to her. She spat in his face.

  “I’ll hold her and you give it to her, Santina.”

  I took the spoon. She jerked in his grip.

  “Now, Santina!”

  I placed it in her mouth. He closed her lips around it. After a few seconds, he released his grip. She crawled to the top of her bed, grabbed the sheet, and cocooned herself inside.

  Her breathing began to even. The crease of bed linen eased down onto the mattress.

  “I will take lunch at the usual time, Santina. That will be all for now.”

  I left. My footsteps echoed down the stone stairwell.

  It was clear then, that the more unpredictable Adeline became, the more rigid his own routine would be. My lessons would be inescapable after all.

  * * *

  After breakfast the next day, the major strode into the kitchen and laid a notebook and a wooden box inlaid with geometric patterns of mother-of-pearl upon the kitchen table. His height made the kitchen feel all the smaller. Unlike me, his head reached a foot or so from the ceiling, which arched over us, like a cellar. The walls were painted a brushed pink and behind the marble counter that stretched the length of one wall there were a dozen lines of decorated tiles of geometric designs in yellow, emerald, and turquoise, hopeful swirls of pomp. A wider squat arch graced the space where the hearth stood. A wooden table, dipping in the center with age, stretched halfway across the room.

  “I have decided, Santina, that I was quite in the wrong yesterday.”

  I looked at him.

  “I will be grateful if you’d forget my clumsy start, yes?”

  It was my turn to let a question evaporate, answerless.

  “Today,” he resumed, “I am going to teach you how to cook one of the dishes I brought home with me to England after my years in India.”

  “Cook?”

  His face brightened. I knew he had spent several years in India working for the British Army, Adeline had told me that much. She’d intimated that his role was shrouded in secrecy, but I’d never paid it too much mind because Adeline had a wonderful way of painting stories with a brush of mystery, whatever the subject. For the first time, I allowed myself to miss her. The eccentric little talks she might indulge me in after breakfast before she began her day in the studio. The way she’d shown off her Heath in Hampstead to me, her paintings, bright with freedom and questions and passion. Now I understood. He needed the lessons more than I. It was impossible to shirk the sense that they were as much about the major having another to converse with as opening my mind up to the poetry he loved best.
/>   “Cook, yes, Santina, and afterward you will write the recipe into this little book here.” He picked it up and gave it an optimistic waggle. The cover was black leather, and the center of the front panel featured a tiny painted rose.

  We spent the next hour trawling through the details of the dish. First, he asked me to dice an onion. He stood beside me while directing me on how to soften it in a pan with olive oil. It was something I did almost every day, but that didn’t stop him inspecting my timing. As the pieces began to sweat, he placed the box next to the stove and opened it. Inside were five jars filled with different-colored powders: a palette of deep browns, golden yellows, and fiery reds.

  “This box goes with me whenever I travel. I knew we wouldn’t be able to source these spices here, so I arranged for them to be sent to me in London before we came.”

  He lifted one of the jars, unscrewed its lid, and handed it to me: “Smell.”

  I dipped my nose close toward the opening, trying not to worry about the onions that were starting to caramelize. A pungent flowery scent powdered up into the back of my cheeks. I couldn’t place it.

  “This is ground coriander, Santina. Next growing season, I shall be planting it in my garden and you will help me.”

  He handed me each of the jars in turn: aromatic cumin with its sweet and smoky herbal scent that brought church incense to mind, the barky smell of golden turmeric, and the provocative punch of ground chili—my eyes watered in an instant. The final jar contained a fine deep brown powder. This was the most complex smell of all of them. There was smoke, fire, citrus, and a muddy tang to it. My eyebrows creased.

  “This is curry powder. Ground in the hills of Jaipur, Santina, by an elderly lady I came to know well. I watched her large wooden pestle and mortar create this pot of wonder. She taught me everything I know about how to use it too.”

  His eyes twinkled with the pleasurable memory. I wondered how long it had been since he had been able to talk to someone about this. I knew him as a solitary man, but it was clear that the loneliness stirred by the incessant care of Adeline needed remedy. These five little jars contained just that. He held each of them as if it was a precious jewel, presenting me in turn with reverence and a bottled excitement I’d never noticed before.

  Next he gave me specific measurements for each of them. As I sprinkled a spoonful of turmeric, coriander, and curry powder over the translucent onions the small stone kitchen filled with a potent earthy steam. Next, we stirred in two fistfuls of rice until each grain was coated with the sticky yellow mixture. The major poured in almost half a liter of water, put the lid on, simmered it for ten minutes, then took it off the heat, but left the lid on to let the steam finish the job. Meanwhile, he instructed me to boil six eggs, this time for four and a half minutes. I rinsed them under cold water, peeled them, and cut them into wedges, as directed. Finally, we brought a little milk in a frying pan to a gentle simmer and placed two bay leaves inside. He opened up a paper package with two fillets of fish and slipped them in the warm milk.

  “This ought to be haddock of course, Santina, but I’m using what I could find yesterday afternoon at the fishmongers, which was very little, I might add, because I made the mistake of waiting till the afternoon to get it. Foolish.”

  He removed the fish pan from the heat and let it continue to poach while he instructed me to lift the lid on the rice. It was fluffy and golden; the fragrant ribbons of steam that lifted up from it made my mouth water. I watched him stir in the egg wedges, then flake the fish and fold it into the rice. He lifted the pan and put it on top of an iron potholder in the center of the table. He handed me a fork and gestured for me to taste. The caramel of the onion gave way to a woody perfume, a musky taste balanced by the creamy yolk and the tender aromatic fish flesh. My eyes gave away my delight.

  “First poetry lesson complete.”

  My head tilted.

  “Now I help you write it. Title: Kedgeree.”

  The rest of the morning he sat next to me, a fastidious but patient teacher, as I wrote the list of the ingredients. My scrawl was tentative and messy. He wouldn’t let me leave the table until I had finished. In between hesitations, whirring doubts ricocheted about my mind as I tried to understand how any of this would serve me in my new life.

  “Tomorrow, we will write the method. That is all for now. I will take lunch at midday. You may take an hour to take a stroll with Elizabeth perhaps? I will rest awhile.”

  He turned and left, leaving the scent of another world suffusing the air.

  Chapter 6

  The following May, the major and Adeline’s belongings at last found their appropriate places in the villa. New packages arrived throughout the frigid winter and temperamental spring, then were sorted with care. By midsummer, the major’s library, up a few steps behind the kitchen, was complete, his sanctuary at the opposite side of the house from the large dining room. Oil-painted landscapes graced the walls. After my final chores of the evening, I’d linger over the depictions of the humid mountainous coffee plantations above the Malabar coast in India, or the city of Jodhpur with its square blue houses clustering the valley, the stone alleys reminding me of an exotic version of Positano. It was clear to me that he’d always been drawn to these landscapes. The major loved the mountains as much as I. His early morning walks, before the now hordes of tourists began their jaunts, often took him high above our town, into the mossy depths of my childhood. I was relieved, however, that those grotesque carved masks from the London hallways remained in his library.

  Although the major refused to entrust Elizabeth to anyone but me, we had come to an arrangement that I could leave the house for an extended time on Sunday afternoons and take her with me. Rosalia, who had strong-armed her way into my heart, huffed and puffed that this did not, in fact, constitute anything close to a day off. She wouldn’t believe me, but Sundays spent at her home were just that. They forced me to relax, to forget my inconclusive search for my brother who had run away from our uncle’s farm and all but disappeared in Naples not long after I left for London.

  Elizabeth and I took our time climbing the narrow alleys that ran behind the neighboring villas. Her hair was a fluff of bright red waves that made the Positanese reach out and touch it out of instinct, so different was she from the dark-haired toddlers discovering gravity along the cobbles. She loved these Sundays as much as I. Rosalia’s sisters and sisters-in-law took turns to hold her and coo into her bright little blue eyes, teasing me that I’d left town only to kidnap a foreigner’s daughter.

  One morning in late summer, we negotiated the steep steps down toward Rosalia’s gate and pushed it open. A fragrant canopy of kiwi and lemon trees entwined a high bamboo frame above. The excited chirps of birds greeted us. Along the slim walkway toward the main door, five cages hung with yellow and pale blue budgerigars twittering to each other and out toward the coast.

  The door flung open. “Just in time!” Rosalia said, greeting me with a kiss on each cheek, wrenching Elizabeth out of my arms and into hers. “You’ve been a good girl, yes? You eat all my food today, yes? No sorbetto if you don’t eat your lunch, young lady!”

  I followed her into the kitchen. A huge oak table dominated the squat room. At the far end was her wooden oven, etched into the wall where the mountain rock was varnished but still craggy. This was a room wedged into the stone. Upon the stove in a heavy iron skillet, fresh anchovies melted into warm oil, softening several crushed cloves of garlic. The smell of artichokes followed soon after from a larger pan, their lustrous purple doused with fresh parsley. A simmering stockpot of linguine raced to al dente. Rosalia’s sisters busied themselves with the final fixings on the table, yelling for the men to join us. I could hear the rumble of their husbands and brothers coming down from the terrace above following the scent toward lunch. In a few minutes the small room ricocheted with too many voices and conversations colliding at once. It was my weekly dose of cacophony, the perfect antidote to the church-like silence at the villa.


  Rosalia balanced Elizabeth on one hip, scooping linguine out of the pan with the other.

  “Please, let me take her,” I offered, reaching out my hands, which she shooed off with the back of the wooden spoon. One of her sisters swooped in and took over by the stove for the final hungry minute before the pasta was cooked.

  The door swung open. In strolled Paolino, a basket in his hands laden with fresh Romanesco cauliflowers, zucchini, cedri, and a pile of sfogliatelle, small crisp pastries stuffed with a rich lemon crème. As he walked by me, their vanilla scent powdered the air.

  Rosalia had decided several months ago that he and I ought to be the perfect pairing. I loved her for many things but this was not one of them.

  “You see, Santi’,” she began, bouncing Elizabeth beside me, “the man bakes too now.”

  This meddling in others’ personal affairs was a pernicious local habit I longed to escape; it made my scheduled sailing to America, toward the latter part of this autumn, feel like part of a very distant future.

  “You already love him more than I ever could,” I whispered to her cackle that followed.

  “What are you witches plotting over there? You mind it doesn’t spoil our food now,” Paolino called out from the far end of the table, where Rosalia’s brothers poured him their homemade wine.

  “You just wait, Paoli’,” Rosalia called out to him, “you get under our spell and there’ll be no helping you!”

  Everyone laughed. The late September sun syruped through the windows. I took Elizabeth onto my lap and watched her eye the strands of oily linguine Rosalia lifted up with an oversized fork, swirls of garlic steam wafting across the plates. I cut her portion into small pieces. She dove in with two hands. All meals at Rosalia’s ended with a salty smear of lunch across her happy face. The sisters would pinch her rosy cheeks in praise of her appetite. Paolino teased me that I wasn’t feeding the child enough and perhaps we ought to raise our weekly orders from him. He caught the roll of my eyes.