It was surely the most extraordinary wedding Palermo cathedral had ever seen. When it was time to give the bride away three tall, handsome young men stepped forward. And the tallest and handsomest by far, Helen thought, was Lorenzo.
Baptista’s elderly face glowed into beauty as she became the wife of her one true love. She had waited forty years for this. They had been full years, yet Helen had the strangest feeling that only in this moment had Baptista’s life really started. And the same was true of the man whose love for her had never abated in all the long time apart.
She looked up to find Lorenzo watching her. He was smiling, not with his mouth but with his eyes, and that smile seemed to reach out and encompass her, drawing her into his heart, into his life, forever. He was telling her that this was where she belonged, and her heart was singing that he was right.
Afterwards there was a small reception at the Residenza, with a cake that had nearly cost Baptista’s cook a nervous breakdown. There were toasts and speeches, including a brief one from Fede, who, as always, seemed a little shy. Afterwards Helen sought him out. From the start she had been drawn to the quiet, elderly man who said little but seemed to see everything.
‘I feel a little overwhelmed by the family,’ she said. ‘Although they are wonderful to me.’
‘And to me also,’ he confessed. ‘But I too sometimes feel overwhelmed.’
‘Won’t that make things a little difficult for you?’ she ventured, for it had been decided that Fede was to live in the Residenza. He had given up his little home in Palermo, and signed over his flower business to his children.
He gave his sweet smile. ‘I know what you mean. Of course I shall have a pension from my business. Even so, were I a much younger man I would not consent to such an arrangement. But at my age you find that the things that once seemed so important fall away. Only love is left. Only love has really mattered all the time.’
‘That’s very true,’ Lorenzo said from just behind Helen. He shook Fede’s hand. ‘We’re all glad to have you in the family.’
Fede thanked him, but not without a little smile at Lorenzo’s unconscious assumption that the bride’s family had absorbed the groom, rather than the other way around. Helen nodded, understanding his thoughts, but also understanding why these things weren’t of such vital importance. Only love mattered.
‘What is it?’ Lorenzo asked, taking her hand.
‘Nothing. This is all so nice.’
‘I thought you didn’t like families,’ he teased. ‘Especially this kind of family. Pity, because they’re over the moon about you.’
‘I feel the same way about them, it’s just-’
With that swift intuition that was one of the loveable things about him, he divined her thoughts. ‘You’ve got your job. You’ll still have everything you’ve worked for.’
‘You make it sound so easy,’ she murmured.
‘It is, if we love each other. I spent a lot of time pretending I wasn’t in love with you, but you weren’t fooled. Not really.’
‘Not really,’ she agreed.
‘You know what I want. Don’t you want it too?’
A bright carpet of flowers was spread before her, tempting, lovely. But it led out of sight, to a future she must take on trust. If only…
Then she became aware of the silence. Looking around, she saw that everyone was watching them, as though following each softly spoken word.
And then Lorenzo did the unforgivable thing, the thing that disarmed her, set her defences at nothing, and destroyed all her good resolutions. In the sight of them all he went down on one knee before her and said, ‘Elena, will you marry me?’
‘Get up,’ she said frantically.
‘Not until you promise to marry me.’
‘Then you’ll stay there for ever.’
‘OK, if I stay here forever will you marry me?’
And suddenly everyone was clapping and cheering and Lorenzo was on his feet, kissing her exuberantly and she seemed to have said yes, although she never recalled saying it. But you couldn’t reject a man who’d knelt before you in front of his whole family. Could you?
When Helen looked back on her first weeks in Sicily they seemed to be full of dramas with no time to breathe between them. After Baptista’s illness came her wedding. And while they were all celebrating the engagement of Helen and Lorenzo, Heather’s child was born.
It was an unexpectedly difficult birth that took far longer than it should have done. For a while everyone had a bad scare. and it took a long night of pacing hospital corridors fearing the worst before the clouds lifted. Helen’s chief memory of that night was of Renato, standing apart from the rest, his face like stone. There was no clue to how his wife’s danger affected him. No hint of love, or any kind of feeling.
It was Lorenzo who showed his emotion, holding onto Helen’s hand as they sat together. There were tears in his eyes, and when Renato was summoned in to be with his wife Lorenzo stared anxiously after him. An hour later Renato emerged to say that Heather had given birth to a healthy son, and was out of danger. The whole family erupted, but it was Lorenzo who jumped up to punch the air, and the next moment Helen was having the life squeezed out of her with a bear hug while he laughed with joy and the tears poured down his face.
She held onto him, laughing and crying too, and wondering how she could ever have pretended to herself that they didn’t love each other.
On the day Heather returned home they had a moment together, and Helen observed ruefully that she felt as though she was already a family member and always had been.
‘That’s true,’ Heather agreed. ‘The Martellis take possession of you from the first moment.’
But she said it with a happy smile and it was clear that she liked it this way. Heather’s experience had been the opposite of Helen’s, as she disclosed in a cosy chat. She had no brothers or sisters, had lost her parents early, and fallen happily into the Martellis’ open arms. Mostly she and Renato lived in Bella Rosaria, the estate that Baptista had given to her. But for the birth of her child she’d returned to the Residenza, and was totally happy sharing a roof with the mother-in-law who adored her.
For Helen, seeking to escape the suffocating embrace of family expectations, it was different. She envied Angie and Bernardo, living in their mountain retreat of Montedoro, where Angie was a doctor and very much her own woman.
To her relief Lorenzo instantly agreed that they should have a home of their own, and they spent happy hours hunting for a house small enough for two, yet large enough for a man who’d been reared in a the huge Residenza. They found a charming little villa in Palermo, near the harbour, and rented it at once, with an option to buy later.
‘They say we can buy the furniture too,’ Lorenzo murmured with a questioning eye on his bride-to-be.
‘Hmmm!’ she said cautiously.
‘Hmmm?’
‘Nah!’
‘Thank goodness,’ he said, with a sigh of relief. ‘We’ll get some of our own, but it’ll have to be later because Renato’s keeping me hard at it while he’s “got the use of me” as he puts it. In fact I have to make for the airport now.’
‘And I can’t even see you off to France. I’ve got a dozen people coming this afternoon and I can’t leave anything to my secretary.’
‘What about Axel?’
She chuckled. ‘Axel’s a dear, but his idea of hard work is to pat me on the head and say, “You do it your way, sweetie”.’
‘Hm! As long as that’s all he pats. Bye,
The Martelli clan had taken it for granted that the wedding would be as soon as possible.
‘While the weather is still good,’ Baptista had pointed out. ‘Soon it will be autumn.’
Helen, who’d thought perhaps she would take it slowly and get to know Lorenzo in his home background, had found herself conceding. She couldn’t have explained a delay in any terms they would have understood.
With so much to do in her job she had little time for wedding preparations, which suited her prospective in-laws
