Italiano parlante

It has to be said, Mr Fred Simpson shocked his circle when he announced he’d decided to live in Italy.
“But you’re so settled here,” Miss Williams protested over bridge.
“Do you even speak the language?” his doctor asked as he inspected the backs of Mr Simpson’s hands with a magnifying glass.
“Dad, it’s so far away. And what if you get sick?” Vanessa asked on the phone that night.
“You won’t like it. Messy, disorganised place. Not your kind of thing,” his former secretary advised over tea the next day.
“We’ll miss you,” was all the woman from Meals on Wheels said at lunchtime. He could never remember her name.
But he stood firm. The wife and the cat were both in their graves; if there was ever a time to make a break, this was it.
“I’ve never been away from here, not once, not properly,” he told Miss Williams.
He said to the doctor’s shiny pate: “No, but I can learn.”
“I’ll get good insurance, and you can visit any time you like,” he promised his daughter.
He told his secretary it couldn’t possibly be that bad. “After all, Marion, they did invent the aqueduct. And those Roman roads! So straight! Besides, I’m sure things have improved since you were there. It’s the 21st century now. They’ll have modernised.”
He bought a bunch of violets for the Meals on Wheels woman but she was off sick on the last Friday he got the service, so he stuck them in his wife’s favourite crystal vase instead. No point wasting them on a ring-in; especially one who gave him sloppy grey chicken for the third time that week.
After lunch, he sat down and wrote a list of his reasons:
Warmer Weather
Italian Food (esp. osso bucco)
Art
Change of Scenery
Sophia Loren
Improving my Painting
The Challenge
Meeting new People
Satisfied he really was doing the right thing, Mr Simpson leaned back in his wife’s wing-backed brocade armchair and gazed at the afternoon light scattering in pieces from the sharp edges of the crystal vase. The scent of violets filled his head and he smiled.

He stayed in touch, of course. Vanessa received regular postcards showing masterpieces by Italian artists and idyllic country scenes. Sometimes the cards were home-made, photographs Mr Simpson had taken himself of the morning mist over yellowing rows of ancient grapevines, or particularly interesting and colourful mosaics he found on his walks around local streets.
He wrote that he was comfortable; had set himself up with a nice aspect and had thrown away all but one of his jumpers “for the impossibility of a chilly evening.” The house had been shabby, but he’d given it a coating of orange stucco (“sounds tacky, but it’s right for the light here”), the garden faced the sun, and he was doing well.
“I’m cultivating olives,” he wrote “and you should taste my minestrone. The Italians only eat it in winter – to use up all the dried beans and pasta.”
In summer he wrote of eating overripe tomatoes dressed with basil fresh from the herb garden, and of seeing Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes for the first time: “Vanessa, I had to sit down, it was so magnificent.” He began ending his notes with a cheery “Ciao!” and in their infrequent phone calls – no less often than before the move, though – she noticed odd grammatical slips, as though her Dad was forgetting his English. She hoped it was only that, at least.
What he didn’t mention to his daughter was his new companion, Maria. Vanessa didn’t need to know that her old Dad had taken up with a nut-coloured, chocolate-eyed, well-cushioned widow only ten years older than his daughter. It was Maria who showed him how to roll a perfect ball of gnocchi between the palms of his hands, to bite the tip off a strand of spaghetti to check if it was cooked (oh, those white teeth!). Maria would waddle down to the baker and the store each morning and come home with fresh crusty bread and a bottle of vino while Mr Simpson brewed the strong dark coffee Maria loved to drink all day.
Sometimes they’d dine out at the local restaurant, where Mr Simpson ordered calves’ liver and rabbit stews in his limited but ever-improving Italian, and Maria indulged in tiramisu and a glass of marsala.
She had a temper, his Italian lover, but he could almost enjoy her sudden rages and hot-blooded flounces and pouts; such a change after 40 years of Elizabeth’s cool, composed, near-invisible company.
In the evenings they’d play scratchy Mario Lanza, Vivaldi, Verdi and Puccini on the record player that had come with the house, sit on the terrace under the grapevines he’d planted the day he’d moved to Italy and savour the evening breeze as the Southern Cross twinkled overhead.
“Maria?”
“Si, Federico?”
“What do you think about moving to France next year? I hear the gallery’s having the Monets, and I’ve always wanted to learn to bake a soufflé. We could go truffle hunting in the woods together, drink Dom Perignon every night, feast on cheeses and learn the language of lovers. Will you come with me?”
“Oui, mon cherie.”