Love, Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  Tess contemplated the idea. ‘I wonder what she meant? What was she before him?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ The two women were thoughtful for a moment.

  ‘She was an elderly primigravida too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what they call me, in my hospital notes. Pregnant for the first time at thirty-five.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘But neither of them had been married before?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘I wonder … do you know how they met?’

  Donna thought for a moment, a nostalgic smile breaking across her face. ‘On the bus, commuting to work.’

  ‘Really? Are you serious?’

  ‘Yep. I think so. Yes. I remember.’

  ‘So you do know this stuff. How come?’

  ‘I did have a life with her before you came along, you know.’ But her voice was kind, not sarcastic.

  ‘The bus!’

  ‘Different times, I suppose.’

  ‘I wish I knew what happened to her wedding dress. It was so beautiful …’

  Donna laughed her throaty laugh, but it died in her mouth. ‘I can help you there.’

  ‘Really?’

  She looked at her mother, saw her mouth contort a little, trying to control itself. Donna brought her hand up to cover it and inhaled sharply.

  ‘Mum? What?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘She kept it. I mean really looked after it. Acid-free tissue paper, a sealed box – all of that – on top of the wardrobe. All my childhood. I remember begging her to get it out sometimes, when I was little. It was a palaver – getting the box down, unpacking it all, putting it away again – but I don’t remember her ever saying no to me. I loved it.’

  ‘It was stunning. All that tulle.’

  ‘It was. I always used to say I was going to wear it to my wedding …’

  ‘You didn’t though, did you?’

  ‘No. It was 1981 when I married your father. The fashion was completely different: that dress was classic late-fifties. The eighties were something different. It was all Lady Di. Crumpled silk and taffeta and lace. Not that I was into that either, particularly. Looked like it needed a good iron.’ Tess smiled. She’d heard Iris say exactly that about Diana’s crumpled Emanuel dress. Donna sounded just like her.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to wear it. It just wasn’t what I wanted. Even if it had fitted.’ That last was an aside almost to herself.

  ‘That waist.’

  ‘Indeed. I was built more like my dad’s side, I think. Never had a waist like that.’

  ‘Was she upset?’

  ‘She was amazing. She said I shouldn’t wear it, if I didn’t want to. That she understood completely. But she offered to take it apart, let me have the silk from underneath. It was really good-quality stuff. We took it to the dressmaker’s, they took it apart, lost the froth from all the tulle petticoats underneath, and just used the silk. There were metres of it – her dress had a big circle skirt, you know, just gathered on to a waistband. Completely preserved for all those years in that acid-free tissue paper. So it was like new. Made my whole dress.’

  ‘Wow. I can’t believe I didn’t know that.’

  Donna smiled. ‘It pleased her, I remember. That I was wearing it, albeit reincarnated into something that looked completely different. She liked the fact some of it walked down the aisle on me, she said. Not that there was an actual aisle. But figuratively.’

  ‘What happened to it? Have you still got it?’

  ‘That’s the rotten bit. I threw it away, when your dad left. Couldn’t bear to look at it.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I didn’t even tell her.’

  ‘Did she know?’

  ‘She never asked.’

  ‘You were upset. She’d have understood.’

  ‘That’s no excuse. It was mean. I always felt lousy about it. One of many things …’

  ‘You’ve never really talked about when you and my dad broke up. About why.’ Tess waited for Donna to stiffen, give her the brush-off. But she didn’t. She looked down at her legs and picked imaginary bits of fluff off her trousers.

  ‘You were so young.’

  ‘I’m not now. Got my own epic break-up story now, and everything. If you wanted to tell me yours?’ They hadn’t talked much about her and Sean. Like Holly, Donna seemed to understand, without being told, that she didn’t want to talk about it. She knew Holly understood her. It surprised her that Donna did too.

  Donna smiled. ‘Hey, what’s this? Filling in the blanks before I get like my mum? I’m not losing my marbles yet, you know.’

  ‘I know. But I’d … I’d like to know.’

  ‘Going to need a glass of wine, if we’re going there.’

  ‘Make mine a peppermint tea, will you!’

  Donna stood up and went to the kitchen. Tess lay her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes, her hands across her belly. When Donna came back, with a large glass of red and a mug of tea, she sat cross-legged on the floor opposite Tess.

  ‘Okay. I’m going to tell you. Iris is the only other person who knows this story, and she obviously never told you. Sometimes I wondered if she would – you two were so close.’

  ‘She never said anything at all.’ Donna raised her eyebrow.

  ‘I was only twenty-one when I met your dad. We were both at someone’s birthday party, in the back room of a pub. I can’t remember whose. He was a friend of a friend, I think … anyway, we got together that night. Started going out a couple of times a week. He was the first proper boyfriend I’d had. I mean, there’d been fellas, but nothing that had lasted very long. This was different, right from the start. He was a couple of years older. Had a job, so that ticked my dad’s box. Was polite to Iris, when he came for Sunday lunch, all of that.

  ‘Everyone assumed we’d get married. I think I did too. It was what you did. It was not so much that he asked me, just that we were sort of on that path and we all knew it.

  ‘I think, when I look back, it’s one of the reasons I didn’t build much of a career, before you were born. I hadn’t set the academic world alight, as you no doubt remember, but I think I’d been more ambitious for myself before I met Harry. That part sort of fizzled away afterwards. It sounds mad now, but, then, it was like I was waiting for marriage, babies … all of that. Harry earned enough to get a mortgage. I was just messing about at working, really. Nannying. I liked the kids, it paid well –’

  ‘I never knew that about you.’

  ‘No. Well, I wasn’t your classic Mary Poppins type. I was always a bit scatty. I think I was just being a big kid myself – it was good fun, and not too onerous. I worked for this family – the Rossis. He was Italian, she was English. They had these four gorgeous kids. Three boys and a girl. All big brown eyes and curly hair, they were. Almost totally feral. I think that’s why they liked me.

  ‘So, anyway … I’d been working for them for a few months. Then Giovanni, the father of the family I worked for, lost his father unexpectedly. His family owned a vineyard in Umbria. Nothing massive, but a family business, you know. His brothers had stayed there, but only one of them knew the business … Giovanni worked in the wine trade in London. But he had to spend some time at home, after his dad died. Sort his mother out. Help his family with the business. It was the beginning of the summer holidays, so they were all going to go … they asked me to go with them. I said no, at first. Harry definitely didn’t want me to go. But they begged. And they offered me a fortune – or at least it seemed like a fortune at the time.’

  ‘So you went?’

  Donna nodded. ‘For six weeks.’

  She got up and went over to the desk in the corner of the sitting room. It was one of those that had a lid that closed and locked. Opening it down, she bent over and rustled around in some shelves at the very back. After a few moments, she stood up, exclaiming, ‘Ah, I knew it was here.’

  She handed Tess a small photograph with a
white border. It was unmistakably her mother, as a much younger woman. Slimmer, and slighter somehow, but with the same familiar stance, and the same smile. She was standing against a mellow-coloured brick wall, behind which an astonishing valley stretched out to the horizon in every direction.

  ‘It’s a place called Gualdo Cattaneo. It’s a medieval hill town about forty-five minutes from Perugia. That’s where the vineyard was. Still is.’

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. We flew to Rome. I’d only been as far as France, really – my parents liked a gite holiday. Warm milk from cows. All that.’

  Tess nodded enthusiastically. ‘Iris is mad about milk warm from cows.’

  ‘I know. She always was. She grew up on a farm. I suppose that’s how she remembered it. Disgusting.’ They laughed.

  ‘Rome … Rome was something different. We hired a car at the airport, and they drove us through the centre, so I could see the Coliseum and the Pantheon. It was amazing. I loved it. Then out into the country. Higher and higher … and eventually, a couple of hours later, we got to this town.’

  ‘And that’s where you stayed?’

  ‘We stayed at the vineyard with Giovanni’s family, a bit outside. You could walk there, uphill, slow ’cos it was so hot, and have a gelato in the square.’

  Tess nodded.

  ‘And that square is where I met the person I thought was the love of my life.’ Donna was lost in a reverie now. Not so much telling Tess a story as reminding herself of something long buried away. Tess daren’t interrupt, just waited for her mother to start speaking again.

  ‘He was Italian. He was my age. He worked locally, on a farm, where he’d grown up. He was a big noise in the town. You know the type – easy laugh, broad smile, twinkle in his eye, gorgeous. Everyone loved him. He was always in the centre of it all. Well, I fell hard. I didn’t expect him to be in the slightest bit interested in me. Why would he? I’m not exaggerating, honestly, when I say he could have had any of the girls in the village. I didn’t even speak Italian – just some I’d picked up working for the family – really basic stuff. The kids had to translate for us when he started talking to me.

  ‘He was learning English. He said he was glad I’d come – he could practise on me. That’s how it started. Conversational English. I’d take the kids up to the square in the late afternoon, when he’d finished work. We’d buy them ice cream. As much as they wanted. As much as they could eat. And we’d try to talk.

  ‘I can’t explain it. But for me, he was it. People talk about the thunderbolt, all that … and it sort of was … d’you know?’

  Tess didn’t. There hadn’t been a thunderbolt with Sean. Or with anyone. There’d been love, she knew. But no thunderbolt.

  ‘There is no way to explain it without sounding hokey. Thunderbolt. Whatever. Like you’ve met before, or like you’ve always known you were going to – like you sort of recognize something in each other …’ She shrugged. ‘Hard to explain. You sort of have to feel it. Then you know the difference between that and everything else.’

  ‘For him too?’ Tess was suddenly afraid she knew how this was going to end.

  ‘For him too. He was the first one to say the L word. The A word.’

  ‘Amore.’

  ‘Amore. I expect it all sounds very Mills and Boon to you. Very holiday romance –’

  Tess put her hand up to protest.

  ‘I know it does. I can’t explain it. It was instantaneous. I know people say love at first sight is a myth, but I know it isn’t. They say it’s lust, but it wasn’t. He was from a good old-fashioned Catholic family. He was completely respectful. Far too bloody respectful, for my liking, but I couldn’t persuade him to be otherwise. I just loved him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You happened.’

  ‘What!’ The shock on Tess’s face broke Donna’s nostalgic spell.

  ‘No. No. That’s come out wrong –’

  ‘Is Harry not my father?’ She was sitting bolt upright now.

  Donna raised her hands and shook her head. ‘Yes. Yes. Of course Harry is your father. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I loved Marco. As far as I was concerned, that was it. I wanted to give up everything I’d left behind at home. Not just Harry – everything. It seemed very clear to me, all of a sudden, that what I felt for Harry wasn’t real love. It was affection, but it was … well, it was nothing compared with this. You can’t be in love with one person and fall in love with another one. That, I do not believe to be possible. I knew I would hurt him. I felt sad about that. But I also felt – it’s hard to explain – like I couldn’t help it. I saw my life lived in Umbria, with Marco. A home of our own. Kids of our own. There was something simple and easy about it. I was so, so sure.’

  ‘And that’s what he wanted too?’

  Donna nodded. ‘He’d asked me to stay.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Tess’s heart was beating fast.

  ‘I found out I was pregnant already. I’d never slept with Marco. It was too fast, anyway. I must have been pregnant when I left England. I was a couple of weeks late, I suppose, but I wasn’t all that regular anyway. I didn’t think about it. Then weeks went by … nothing. It took me a stupidly long time to get it. I wasn’t really thinking about anything except how happy I was. I didn’t have symptoms or anything. I just realized one day, when another girl was talking about getting her period and not wanting to go swimming. I’d been swimming every day. Wham. It was like being hit by a truck. I don’t know how it was for you …’

  ‘Definitely like being hit by a truck. I was on the pill.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But we’d been careful. I thought so anyway.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘What could I do? I was trapped. I thought about not having the baby’ – she looked at Tess – ‘you … but it didn’t feel like an option for me. I would have had to tell so many lies. And I’m many things, a lot of them not great, but I’m not a liar.’ Tess realized the remark would have stung her a great deal more a few months earlier. The new empathy between them was almost startling to her.

  ‘So you came home.’

  ‘We were coming home anyway, by then. The summer was over.’

  ‘What did you tell Marco?’

  Donna rubbed her hand across her face.

  ‘There’s a thing they call a festa, a big hooley – the whole town gets together night after night for a week right at the end of the summer. There are games, and races, and it’s all a big competition. Lots of drumming. Tables all over the town, everyone eating together. Fireworks. They do this extraordinary run from the valley floor to the town square. It’s the grand finale, sort of. They train all summer – all the young men. And they won. Marco’s team. He was ecstatic. Bragging rights for a whole year, you know.’

  Tess nodded.

  ‘Then it was the fireworks, and he was so happy, and proud. We were leaving the next morning.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’

  ‘No.’ Donna’s voice was very quiet. ‘I couldn’t find a way, and I couldn’t find a moment to tell him.’

  ‘So you just left.’

  ‘It broke my heart. I mean, almost like it literally did. It physically hurt.’

  ‘And then?’

  She shrugged. ‘I came home. Gave up work. Married Harry. Had you.’

  ‘Without telling anyone.’

  ‘Just Iris. She could see I was unhappy. She more or less guessed.’

  ‘You told her about me?’

  Donna shook her head. ‘No, not at first. I told her about Marco.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said I should go back. Be with him. I’ve never forgotten. She said love should be the simplest thing in the world, and that it was always the most precious thing. She was amazingly adamant about it.’

  ‘But you didn’t?’

  Donna shook her hea
d. ‘I did the right thing. Harry proposed very quickly after I got back, as soon as I told him I was pregnant. We were married before I was really showing.’

  ‘Did she understand, then, when she found out?’

  ‘She knew I was pregnant by the time we got married. I sometimes think that’s why she gave me her wedding dress.’

  ‘And that was that? You never talked about it.’

  ‘We were never all that good at talking about things. You see that now.’

  ‘Do you think she thought you were doing the right thing?’ Tess asked.

  ‘I think she was utterly certain I was doing the wrong thing. It was between us then, and it was probably always between us after that. But I did the right thing,’ she said again, emphatically. Then, just a whisper, ‘I just always blamed Harry.’

  ‘And me?’

  Donna put her hand on Tess’s cheek and rested her forehead against hers. ‘Sometimes. I’m sorry.’

  Tess thought it was the most searingly honest thing her mother had ever said to her. She didn’t feel angry or hurt. She felt the weight of a decades-old sorrow, and she felt pity. And something else – a chink of understanding.

  ‘It was never going to work, starting that way. Poor man. We were very, very unhappy. I’m amazed it lasted as long as it even did, to be honest. I think it was pride that kept him with me. I was awful.’

  ‘What about Marco?’

  Tess saw tears in her mother’s eyes. ‘Oh, there’s no fool like a lovesick fool.’ Donna laughed bitterly. ‘I went back to look for him. When Harry and I had split. Before Martin.’

  ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’d never left. He was married. He’d married a local girl a few years younger than himself. I hadn’t known her. They had a baby. An olive-skinned dark-eyed chubby baby who looked just like him. He was nice to me, you know. But there was nothing there, not for him. Maybe he hadn’t felt it in the first place. Maybe I’d hurt him so badly I’d really killed it off. Maybe time had just passed. He was so patently completely in love with his wife, with his beautiful baby. I was just a nice memory. And, for me, he’d been this … this huge love of my life. He introduced me to her. She knew all about me. I wasn’t even a dark secret for him. He’d been the cause and the reason for so much of who I was and what had happened to me. And I was his summer romance. I felt so bloody ridiculous.’