Heron & Moss

Claire outside the Settembrini school, Via del Lavatore, Rome, April 2026 — almost forty years after she taught there.

We were staying at the Trevi Palace in Rome, not far from the Trevi Fountain, and one afternoon had gone out for a stroll through the streets around the hotel with no particular destination in mind. We were simply wandering, enjoying that lovely freedom you have in a city when there is nowhere you need to be and no reason to hurry, when Claire suddenly stopped and looked across the street.

“This is the school I taught in.”

I had always known, of course, that Claire had lived and worked in Rome. It was part of the story of her life before I knew her, those years in the late 1980s when she left Ireland, lived in Italy and taught English. I knew the facts of it and had heard many of the stories over the years, but standing there that afternoon, looking at the building behind her, made it real in a way those stories never quite had.

Here was the door she had once pushed open in the mornings, the windows she had looked out from, the stretch of Roman street that had once been as familiar to her as any road at home. Standing there, I found myself trying to picture her in those years, stepping out into the noise and warmth of the city, the smell of coffee drifting from bars, scooters passing too close, voices carrying from doorways, the great old buildings throwing shade across the narrow streets. Somewhere among all of that was Claire in her twenties, going to work, buying groceries, meeting friends, learning her way around and gradually becoming at home in a city that, until then, had existed for me only in the stories she told. For the first time, I wasn’t just hearing about that young woman. I could almost see her.

We hadn’t gone looking for the school. Claire hadn’t even realised we were anywhere near it. We had been turning down whatever street took our fancy when suddenly a building she had probably passed hundreds of times as a young woman was there in front of her again. Almost forty years had gone by, yet somehow our wandering had brought her back to the same doorway without either of us knowing we were heading towards it.

We were in Rome that April to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday, which gave the moment an added poignancy. Three generations of one family had travelled back to a city Claire had first known when she herself was barely into adulthood, and now, quite by chance, she was standing outside the place where she had once gone to work. For a few minutes the years seemed to fold in on one another, and the Rome we were visiting became, very briefly, the Rome she remembered.

I lifted my phone and took a photograph of her standing there. Claire was , smiling broadly, and I wondered what was passing through her mind, what faces had suddenly returned, what names, what conversations, what small pieces of a life she hadn’t thought about in years. There was something wonderfully unguarded in that smile, the kind that arrives before you have time to arrange it for a photograph.

I found myself looking at her differently too. I know Claire so well that it is easy to imagine I have always known her, yet the young woman who had walked through that doorway every morning belonged to a time before me. She had friends I never met, conversations I never heard, favourite streets I never walked with her, whole days about which I know absolutely nothing. And there she was in the Roman sunshine, while somewhere behind the woman I knew so well I could suddenly glimpse the girl who had once lived there.

Eventually, of course, Claire left Italy and came home, and somewhere among the belongings that returned with her was a handwritten recipe book.

We still have it.

Claire’s handwritten tiramisu recipe in an aged recipe book, written in blue ink and ending with the words “Grazie Davy”, styled with linen, moss and flowers.

It has lived in our kitchen for so long that I had almost stopped seeing it. Claire certainly never treated it as something to be preserved. It was a working book, opened with wet hands, left beside mixing bowls, splashed, scribbled on and returned to whenever something was worth making again. The pages have taken on that soft yellow colour that comes only with age, and the corners of the more familiar ones have been turned so often they no longer lie quite flat.

Her handwriting changes as you move through it. Blue biro here, green somewhere else, a quantity crossed out, another squeezed into the margin, a reminder added later when something needed changing. Some pages remain remarkably clean. Others tell you immediately what was popular.

I was looking through it again after we came home from Rome when one page stopped me.

At the top, in Claire’s handwriting, was Tiramisu.

It is a wonderfully economical recipe, although that probably has less to do with the person who gave it to her than with Claire herself. She is one of those people who can taste something and begin identifying what is in it almost immediately. She cooks by instinct, and whoever entrusted her with this recipe clearly didn’t feel the need to burden her with too much detail.

The coffee, for instance, is simply coffee. There is no quantity given. The same is true of the brandy, although anyone who knows Claire will understand that this is unlikely to result in a timid tiramisu. She has always had a generous hand when it comes to alcohol in cooking, and I suspect any carefully measured tablespoon would be regarded as little more than an opening suggestion.

The boudoir fingers are dipped into the coffee and brandy and layered with the mascarpone mixture, with much of what happens in between left to judgement. How strong the coffee should be, how wet the fingers, how generous the brandy — none of it required writing down. Claire would know.

There is one thing, however, about which the recipe is surprisingly firm. Once everything is assembled, it must be put in the fridge and left there for at least twenty-four hours.

The page bears the evidence of how often that instruction has been followed. There are splashes across the paper, the corners are worn and the blue biro has softened with age. Claire has added a note beside the mascarpone and squeezed in other little reminders along the way, writing entirely for herself with no thought that anybody else might one day be trying to decipher it.

Over the years, the result has become a firm favourite on both sides of our family. Whenever Claire’s tiramisu appears after a family dinner, the familiar refrain is never very far behind.

“No one makes tiramisu like Claire.”

And they don’t.

Perhaps it is the coffee. More likely it is the distinctly liberal interpretation of brandy. Whatever the reason, I had long since come to think of it simply as Claire’s tiramisu. It had been made so many times and for so many of us that I had never given much thought to where it began.

Then, looking properly at that old page, I noticed two words written beneath the final instruction.

Grazie Davy.

“Who’s Davy?”

There was a pause.

Not a particularly long pause, but long enough.

Claire said she couldn’t remember.

Perhaps she genuinely can’t. Almost forty years is a long time.

Then again, I know my wife.

So I left it there.

Grazie, Davy.