‘You haven’t reached the best bit yet.’
‘Oh?’ I sipped my Cointreau, silently thanking God for summer nights and moonlight and orange liqueur.
‘You’ll see.’
I was more than a little drunk. ‘Excuse me for asking,’ I said, ‘but how long did it take you to stop missing your wife? After she’d left?’
The professor cupped his glass. ‘Grief is an illness. Different people respond to it in different ways. And they find different ways of treating the symptoms.’
I picked a sprig of lavender and crushed it beneath my fingers. It scented the warm air.
‘It’s like a virus,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘Once it’s in your blood you can’t fight it and there is no cure. You just have to travel with it and see where it takes you.’
‘So how long have you been on your own?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Ten years? And you’re still not cured?’
The professor sat down on a curved stone bench and held his glass between his knees and watched the beads of water from the fountain tumble and dance as they fell. A smile turned up the edges of his lips.
‘I sound a bit self-indulgent, don’t I?’
‘Just a bit.’
‘I should get over myself, shouldn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I appreciate your honesty, Olivia.’
‘Any time, professor, any time.’
It was all OK, it was a nice evening and on Monday, when I went to work, everything was exactly as it always was, as it should be.
fifty-four
Eventually Luca and I made it to London and we started off our life together in a bedsit on the second floor of an old terrace in Woolwich. It was filthy-romantic, with damp blooms of mould on the ceiling, peeling wallpaper and an infested mattress on the floor. The window-glass vibrated to the tune of the trains that passed below our window. There was a schizophrenic poet and an old lady with a little Jack Russell dog called Minette in the rooms on the ground floor and some shy refugees on the floor below us. There was a shared bathroom. Luca used to pee in the sink. I loved him so much that I liked the fruity, farmyard smell of the drain when I brushed my teeth in the morning. We had sex all the time, everywhere. We smoked a lot of dope. We were on a permanent high. We were thin and good-looking. We went to a lot of parties. We loved London.
Mum had disowned me; Lynnette was quietly sympathetic. She and Sean took us out for meals and watched with the pleasure of parents as we ate like gannets, finishing off their leftovers, eating the sugar out of the bowl. Lynnette and I grew very close. We made plans to track down our missing father. Lynnette brought round food in Tupperware containers. She told us to heat it up but we were always so hungry that we ate it with our fingers straight out of the tub as soon as she was gone. Pasta bake, risotto, curry.
It was more difficult for Luca. Stefano, not yet with Bridget but living in London, came to see us. He was supposed to be angry but his heart softened the moment he saw Luca’s sorry, dark-lashed eyes. He hugged his brother and they both wept. I stood in the corner, my sleeves pulled down over my hands, and fidgeted. Luca missed his whole family terribly. He particularly missed Marc. Sometimes he would creep away to the phone box on the corner. He would return with sore eyes and lie down on the mattress, his face to the wall, one arm curled protectively over his head. I left him alone at those times. He wrote letters to Marc and gave them to Stefano. Stefano told us that Marc, left to clear up the mess that we had left behind us, tried to hate his selfish brother, but couldn’t. Still, it took months before the first bridge was built between them.
On sunny days and rainy evenings, we would walk the streets of London, hand in hand and starry-eyed, too broke for even a McDonald’s but generally too happy to care. We stole quite a lot. Just the essentials – food, toiletries, condoms, cigarettes, records, make-up. It can’t have been easy, but we managed.
Luca soon found a job in a restaurant and Lynnette called in a favour from a friend and found me work as a receptionist in a fairly swanky PR agency.
A year after we had left, Luca and I went back to Portiston for the first time. By then, unable to cope with yet another scandal, my mother had sold the house and left Portiston. I knew from Lynnette that Mr Hensley had arranged for her to stay with an associate of his who was chair of the governors at a church school in Hull. Angela, Maurizio, Fabio and Marc and Nathalie were still running Marinella’s. Angela and Maurizio had, however, bought a house in Watersford and had given the flat over the restaurant to Marc. Marc was already engaged to Nathalie.
I wasn’t allowed into Marinella’s.
Angela had told Luca over the phone that I wouldn’t be welcome, but he thought that when we got there she would change her mind. She didn’t. I stayed in my overheated but comfortable room in the bed-and-breakfast that had, at one time, been Andrew Bird’s house, while Luca visited his family. I lay on the bed and read a battered old paperback copy of Valley of the Dolls for hours and ate Minstrels. When that became too tedious, and there was still no word from Luca, I walked along the beach, picking up pebbles and throwing them into the sea, which was spraying and tossing playful little waves. The wind whipped my hair across my cheeks and my scalp was itchy beneath my woollen hat. At the ferry ramp I stopped, for old times’ sake, and wrapped my arms around myself and kicked the shingle around with the toe of my boot and smiled at the memory of Georgie. Then I turned round and wandered back up into town.
I didn’t look at Marinella’s, but I had to walk past its façade. The day was bright and blustery, a silvery-grey December day, yet the light behind the glass in the restaurant was golden and warm. I didn’t look, but I was aware of people moving behind the glass, the shadows of the family I had loved and who I’d wanted to love me.
It wasn’t as cold as it had been the year before, but it was still just a few days before Christmas and my breath veiled my face as I walked. I went along the High Street, past the windows of the little shops with their festive decorations and blinking lights. Thankfully the chip shop was open, its windows steamed from top to bottom, and a billow of fishy warmth cushioned me as I opened the door and stepped inside.
I recognized the girl behind the counter; she’d been in the year above me at school. She was pregnant beneath her white apron, her cheeks were rosy and her forearms were spattered with little burn marks.
‘Yes?’ she smiled at me, a stub of a pencil between her fingers to write my order on the wrapping paper.
‘Just a bag of chips, please.’
She grabbed the scoop and plunged it into the cooker, piling golden chips on to the paper. I was so hungry my stomach gave a lurch of pleasure.
‘It’s Olivia, isn’t it?’ asked the girl, salting the chips.
I nodded.
‘You and that Felicone lad caused a bit of a fuss last Christmas.’
‘Sorry. ’
‘Oh, you’re all right.’ The girl smiled and folded the paper. ‘I thought it was very romantic myself. His family didn’t take it too well, though, did they?’
I handed her some money. ‘Luca’s over there now trying to sort things out.’
‘It’ll be all right soon enough,’ said the girl, giving me my change. ‘These things blow over. It’ll all be forgotten.’
I thanked her, and took my lunch back out into the chill air. I ate it in the shelter near the ferry terminal. It smelled of pee and motor oil. An empty beer can rolled mournfully in the gap beneath my feet. The chips were delicious, fat and salty and so hot they burned my tongue and then sat heavy and comforting in my stomach.
Afterwards, I went back to the bed-and-breakfast and fell asleep on the bed. Luca came back red-eyed and dejected. He said Angela had invited him to stay for Christmas, but not me. He said Nathalie had refused to meet his eye and Maurizio looked old and disappointed. Only Marc had asked after me. He had sent me some cake, wrapped in tin foil. I ate it in the passenger seat of Luca’s car as we headed out of Portis
ton back to the lonely route south, picking off the lemon icing and letting it melt on my tongue.
fifty-five
September 1 was the date of Luca and Marc’s birthday. I did not know how I was going to get through the day. Yet it was a beautiful morning and when I looked in the mirror as I looped my hair into a ponytail, I saw my own face, and I knew it was a face which Luca had loved, and that made me feel almost happy.
It was going to be a long day. First, there was the professor’s landmark lecture about the life and loves of Marian Rutherford in the Watersford City Museum. After that, I had promised myself an hour or two alone with Luca. Then I didn’t know what I would do. I decided to go where the day took me.
In the café, Chris had put a posy of sweet william in a vase in the centre of my table. The intense, peppery scent mingled with the smell of espresso. He had the tiny coffee cup on the table for me almost before I had sat down, and with it was a glass of iced water.
‘Nothing but the best for you, madam,’ said Chris, shaking out a napkin for me.
He brought me frittata – a new recipe, he said, eggs soft and yellow and mixed with sweet vegetables. I hadn’t been hungry, but I cleared the plate he set before me and then bit into a vanilla pastry sprinkled with almonds and sugar, and swallowed a second espresso. By now the blood was dancing in my veins and my eyes were wide open. The day no longer felt like an ordeal to be endured, but just a day, like any other only with more memories.
‘You must stop feeding me like this, Chris,’ I said. ‘I’ll end up the size of a house.’
I licked my fingertip and picked up the pastry crumbs from my plate.
He sat down opposite me, as was his custom, to smoke a cigarette.
‘No real man likes a skinny woman.’
‘That’s what Luca used to say.’
‘He sounds like a top man, your husband.’
‘He was,’ I said.
‘What was he like?’
He was lovely. He was perfect. He was my world. I couldn’t find the words.
‘Don’t you want to talk about him?’
‘It’s just … It would have been his birthday today.’
Chris slapped his forehead with his hand. ‘Why don’t you stop me before I keep saying inappropriate things?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it’s really nice to talk about Luca with somebody who doesn’t go all tragically sympathetic on me.’
Chris smiled. ‘Actually I am quite sympathetic, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘I just find it hard to show it.’
I shook my head. For some stupid reason my eyes were growing dangerously hot.
‘It’s the testosterone. Us alpha males are hormonally incapable of … Oh Christ, are you crying? Oh God, I’m sorry!’
I wiped my eyes with my wrist and shook my head but I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Chris pulled his chair closer and put his arms around me and although at first I stiffened in his embrace, I soon relaxed and let him be my friend.
fifty-six
Eighteen months after we left Portiston Marc married Nathalie. Luca was invited to the wedding, but I wasn’t. I told him to go, I begged him to go. We argued about it. I said he owed it to Marc to be there – not to prove anything, or to show that he wasn’t ashamed or anything, just for Marc’s sake.
‘Not unless you’re there beside me,’ said Luca.
‘I don’t mind not being there,’ I said for the millionth time.
‘Well I do mind, very much,’ said Luca. And he kissed me full on the mouth and I think even though I was still so young I realized how wonderful it was to be loved by a man who minded about me so very, very much.
In the end, neither of us went to the wedding, but Luca wrote Marc a long letter full of love and Marc sent one back. There were snapshots in the envelope. Luca pored over the family groupings, picking out uncles and aunts who had travelled from Italy, and identifying grown children.
I noticed that Nathalie was wearing a different dress, not the one she’d picked out for marrying Luca. It wasn’t quite such a pretty dress, it was a little more adult. She looked better in it, less like a pantomime dame and more like a woman trying to make the most of herself. Nathalie was smiling in the posed pictures, but in her off-guard moments I thought she looked a little pinched. Marc was handsome as ever, gorgeous in his dark suit and purple cravat.
‘He looks like a waiter,’ said Luca.
I glanced at him covertly to see if he was jealous, but he had already turned away. He should have been there, I thought. I was angry with Angela. She was trying to drive a wedge between Luca and me by making him choose between me and his family. All she was succeeding in doing was hurting her son.
‘Bitch,’ I muttered to her heart-shaped face in the photograph. Beneath her charming little blue hat, Angela smiled out at me as if her heart was muscle and blood and not stone.
Luca was working hard; he was a good cook, and the punters loved him. He had inherited Maurizio’s showing-off genes and knew how to put on a performance in a restaurant.
If he was in a good mood, he would sing in the kitchen, and the diners would say that there was music in his food. It was good, honest, Italian food. His reputation went before him and Luca was never out of work. Soon, given the plethora of good Italian restaurants in London, he was able to pick and choose.
The people at the PR agency seemed to like me, and I was good at being a receptionist. I liked meeting people and chatting to them and putting them at their ease. There was talk of training and promotion. I went into Miss Selfridge and bought myself some new clothes. I had my hair cut at a salon in Chelsea. I met Lynnette for lunch and we sipped minestrone piled high with Parmesan and she told me I looked lovely. I swear there was a tear in her eye. We still talked about finding our father, but we both knew we wouldn’t. By this time, Mum was completely immersed in her good works and was living a life of almost monastic austerity in Hull, complete with the big-eared Mr Hensley. I’m certain their relationship was entirely platonic. I didn’t miss her much. For family, I had Lynnette and Luca, and they were the ones I loved. They were all the family I needed.
Marc and Nathalie’s first baby came along in due course. Luca was invited to the christening. I wasn’t. Marc telephoned to find out why Luca hadn’t come. I answered.
‘Liv,’ he said, his voice so hesitant that I knew he had toyed with the idea of putting the phone down rather than speaking to me. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and then, anxious to let Marc know that it wasn’t me keeping Luca from him, ‘I keep telling Luca to go and see you, I tell him, Marc, it doesn’t matter about me but he …’
Marc sighed. ‘Marry Luca, Liv. Get married and then she won’t have any reason to stop you coming. You’ll be part of the family then.’
I didn’t know if by ‘she’ Marc meant Angela or Nathalie. Either way, I waited up for Luca that evening and when he came home from work I was ready with a beer that had cooled in the freezer and a proposal.
‘Fuck a duck,’ said Luca, kissing me full on the mouth. His lips were wet and cold. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’
So Luca and I were married at Croydon Register Office. It was a low-key affair. Luca wore washed-out jeans, a baggy T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, and I wore a white summer dress from Top Shop, bangles and espadrilles. Representing our respective families were Stefano and Bridget and Lynnette and Sean. In the photographs that Lynnette took with her little Kodak camera, Luca and I look like brother and sister. Our hair is long, dark and wavy. We are both smiling widely, showing a lot of teeth. In the picture where Lynnette posed us beside a fountain to make us look romantic, Luca is making rabbit ears above my head with two fingers. After the ceremony we went to Dino’s, just near the Tate Gallery, which was where Luca was working at the time, and ate pasta and drank Chianti. Luca’s colleagues had made an amazing cake which they presented to us in a flurry of sparklers and petals. It was the best wedding ever.
And Marc was right. Now that we were married, I was invited to Felicone family gatherings as Luca’s wife. Angela and Nathalie never made me feel welcome, but at least Luca was back with his family and that made him happy, and really that was all that mattered to me.
fifty-seven
The professor was giving his lecture and I was assisting. I was responsible for the slideshow that illustrated his talk. He stood on the stage in the lecture hall, looking like the handsome academic he was, with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and the top button on his shirt undone. It was awfully hot in the room. An impressive number of students had turned up to listen to him talk about the life and loves of Marian Rutherford. There was also a small group of professors at the back of the theatre, and even a couple of arts-magazine journalists, friends of his whom he’d invited.
It was no secret that the professor was going to drop a literary bombshell during the course of this lecture. I felt deliciously proud to be the only person in the room, beside the professor, who knew the nature of this revelation. I had transcribed it myself just a few days earlier.
For one so quiet, the professor was a surprisingly good presenter. I was sitting on the steps in the middle of two blocks of seats, and the audience was enthralled. The professor and I had practised what he called ‘the show’ several times and our timing was down to a fine art. I stretched my legs out in front of me; they were going brown now, and my feet were bare inside a pair of sandals. I’d painted my toenails bronze to match the straps of the sandals. I clicked on the mouse and a picture of Marian Rutherford standing outside her little house appeared on the screen.
She was buttoned into a high-necked jacket and only the toes of her boots protruded from beneath her heavy skirt. Her hair was pulled rather severely back from her face, but she had a tilt to her chin which implied good humour. As was the fashion in late-Victorian photographs, she was not smiling, yet there was a definite glint in her eye and in the neat little arches of her eyebrows. Her eyes were very dark and there was a slightly foppish curve in the wrist of her left hand which was balanced on an ivory umbrella handle, carved in the shape of a swan’s head.
The Love of My Life Page 22