Sara Alexander - The Secret Legacy - The perfect summer read for fans of Santa Montefiore, Victoria Hislop and Dinah Jeffries

As we approached the end of June, I had shared most of the recipes I knew, and sometimes, part for folly, part for necessity – as my repertoire was running thin – I’d invent ideas on the spot, improvising appropriate vegetable pairings, hoping they might work in real life too. I remember them arriving at the store, and I prepared myself for a tour of the day’s deliveries. I’d been hatching a few ideas for light summery lunches that I had an inkling they’d enjoy, when they asked me something unrelated to anything we’d spoken about before: would I consider working for them in London in return for papers to America?

I will never forget that day. The way the sun bleached their white faces and lit up their pale yellow collars – they often wore the same shade. Their smiling faces are etched in my mind. Behind them, the ever-increasing surge of tourism strolled past the shop. I remember watching the crowd smudge into a sun-kissed blur, the feel of the cold, dark shop behind me, and that compelling stone path out of this town, away from this miserable life and the battleaxe for whom I would never be any more than a mountain-girl lackey. They must have known I would say yes before they’d even finished the invitation. Perhaps I ought to have asked more questions, known what would have been truly expected of me, but the craving for freedom, for air, was too powerful. I think if I’d been even bolder I might have thrown off my apron there and then and walked with them straight onto their ship from the Bay of Naples with nothing but my smock.

As it turned out, that was not so far from the truth. On 1 July 1956 I became part of the Neapolitan throng shuffling along the streets of London in search of gold.

CHAPTER 2

It took six weeks of the purgatorial British drizzle before I surrendered to my first bout of homesickness. At first, the terrifying otherness was the exhilaration of a splash of spring water on a hot day; the sounds of murmured clipped vowels; the way people’s hands stayed by their sides when they spoke. Young girls seemed to talk out the sides of their mouths, a string of incomprehensible sentences, each word looping onto the next, whirring out of what sounded like chewing gum-filled mouths. I wanted to be them. I wanted my hair pinned, curled and set. I wanted to walk down the street with my arm linked in my best friend’s, surefooted, heels that knew they belonged and where they were headed. But after just over a month of this giddy daydream, the stream of possible lives blurring before me offering heady futures just beyond my reach, reality hit. I had no one.

Mr Benn and Mr George had lost the laid-back sunshine swagger of their holiday. Back in North West London they had become different people. Or, rather, they had settled back into the lives they had paused. The gentlemen owned a large Georgian terraced home set a little way back from the main Heath Street that led into Hampstead. The bohemian suburb attracted a vibrant palette of artists, many of whom came to call at our house, each more peculiar than the previous. Mr Benn and Mr George ran an art gallery on one of the back streets behind Piccadilly. I navigated my way there on my first day off. I stood upon the wooden slats of the tube carriage of the Bakerloo line, turning in a pitiful performance of confidence. Truth was, I could barely read the map in time to work out which stop was mine, so thick was the tiny carriage of others’ cigarette smoke. It reminded me of my father.

When I did arrive I was too embarrassed to step inside. I remained on the pavement, ignoring the rain. I stared at the painting in the window. Giant swirls of yellow with flecks of turquoise stuck to the canvas in stubborn blobs. Angry spurts of red protested across the central spiral. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Nothing before me could, in my opinion, be judged as art, yet the image was intimidating in the compelling way it hooked my gaze. The artist and frame had had a fight, and I couldn’t decide who had won.

I left the stalemate and found a tiny booth in the sweaty New Piccadilly Café, sandwiched between the Piccadilly Theatre and a number of salubrious shop fronts. It was hard to decipher the goods on offer, but I had a hunch it had a lot to do with the young women huddled nearby.

It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I had understood every word of what the proprietor had said to the waitress. Before I congratulated myself on my progress in English it dawned on me that the dialect I had tuned in to was Neapolitan.

‘Signori – you from the old country, si ?’

I looked up at the man, unsure of what my answer ought to be. ‘Positano.’

‘I know a Napoletana when I see one!’

He scooted around the counter, leaving the blaze of short order cooks whipping up omelettes behind him.

‘You’re not long here, am I right, signorina?’

I had an inkling to suggest that I’d never met a Neapolitan man who ever thought he wasn’t right about anything, but thought better of it.

‘You working? Lavori ?’

‘Yes,’ I began, realizing how much I’d cherished my anonymity until this interrogation, how the incessant Positanese prying was very much part of my past not present, ‘for two gentlemen. In Hampstead.’

His eyebrows raised and his head tilted.

‘Hey, Carla!’ he yelled over to the waitress zipping between tables with egg-smeared plates balanced just the right side of equilibrium. ‘This signorina is up with the Hampstead crowd! Not one gentleman! Two! Not bad for a fishing village girl, no?’

I was back on my narrow streets, gossip climbing cobbles. I took a breath to speak without knowing what I wanted to say. He quashed my indecision before I could. ‘Listen, if it doesn’t work out with the Lords up there, you call me, si ? Wait – two men you say? Together in one house? Brothers?’

I shook my head. His eyebrows furrowed. I wasn’t convinced that he didn’t mutter something to the Virgin Mary and the saints.

‘I always have work for a paesan .’ I didn’t want to be a paesan . I wanted to be a Londoner. ‘This Soho,’ he continued, twiddling his fingers in the air like someone sprinkling Parmigiano, ‘this patch belongs to us Italiani. Out there we’re immigrants. But in Soho we help each other – capisce ?’

I nodded, but I didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to.

I tried to let go of the vague sense that his approach was more of an offensive than a welcome. Wisdom, and scrawled number on limp paper imparted, he turned and walked across the café, waving sing-song arms at an English couple who were sat at another Formica booth, dipping their rectangular strips of toast into soft-boiled eggs. I took a final sip and left, all remnants of homesickness hanging in the sweaty tea-smudged air of that café.

My attic room is etched in my memory. It was clean and simple. My routine was described to me in great detail and it didn’t take me long to adjust to the gentlemen’s habits, which, it would seem, never altered independent of the day. To her credit, Signora Cavaldi’s terse grip had stood me in fine stead for London life.

I hadn’t meant to, nor planned to, but on my sixth visit to the police station the first cracks appeared. Small but prominent fissures. I was the tenth in line to have my Certificate of Registration stamped. I held it in my hand, trying to not let my nerves crease it too much. At the top was my number: 096818. And below the words: ALIENS ORDER 1956. Every other visit, I had felt like it would only be a matter of time until I would no longer be alien; I would belong, click into the puzzle, be that final missing piece. But that day, as the drizzle left a damp trail on my hair like half-dried tears, I felt the sting of being the outsider. It was the first time I’d noticed the sideways glances of the people going about their regular days. Or perhaps they had always looked at us like that. I was used to being alone, I told myself. Life here was a world better than the one I’d left behind. I almost convinced myself.