‘Black coffee, please,’ Emma said. She turned to Fleur. ‘And you?’
‘Pistachio ice cream. With extra nuts on the top. And a long spoon to eat it with. And I wouldn’t say no to a wafer biscuit if you have one. Please.’
‘Scusi?’ the woman said. She put her hands across her mouth. Then she pulled her hair from behind her ears before pushing it back again. ‘I no understand. Uno momento.’
The woman scurried across the room to the bar area and to the man who seemed to be doing his level best to ignore everyone, his back to them all.
‘Why did you do that?’ Emma scolded Fleur. ‘I think you knew the poor woman wouldn’t understand more than a basic request. You could have just said “ice cream” and pointed to it on the menu.’ Emma picked the menu up off the table. It was written in English and Italian as she’d guessed it would be. ‘It’s never nice to make people feel discomfited.’
‘I’ve gone right off it now anyway,’ Fleur said. ‘I’m not a child, you know, to be told off all the time.’
Oh, yes you are, if you warrant telling off.
The woman stood on tiptoe, and leaned her elbows on the bar. She began talking rapidly in her own language to the man who looked back at her over his shoulder but who continued to arrange the bottles on the shelves.
He shrugged. Then he left the arranging and leaned over to put his arms around the woman’s neck. He spoke more rapidly to her than she had to him if that were possible. Then he kissed her cheek. Emma heard him say, ‘Mama,’ drawing out the first ‘a’ in a sad sort of sigh.
The woman scurried off, and Emma was left with a lump in her throat that she had no man – father, husband or son – to put his arms around her any more, or kiss her cheek.
‘Paolo!’ the man yelled.
And almost before the last syllable had left his lips a young lad appeared in the doorway. His concerned expression turned into the widest of grins. He was staring straight at Fleur who – Emma couldn’t help but notice – was grinning just as widely back.
‘Just as I thought,’ Fleur whispered to Emma. ‘I saw the van parked in the side alley.’
Of course. Emma remembered now. She’d seen the ice cream delivery van at the hotel. It was there the day she’d arrived back by taxi after her disastrous meeting with Ruby. So that was who Fleur had been looking out for daily!
These two had already met. That was evident now. But this was the first time since that day, wasn’t it? And Emma knew now why Fleur had been so grumpy – she’d been expecting to see Paolo again, but hadn’t.
Paolo came to their table and with much flirting – Fleur – and flashing of chocolate button eyes – Paolo – their order for coffee and cake, and ice cream was given and delivered.
Paolo found a dozen reasons to return to their table and ask Fleur something; Did she like Torquay? Was the ice cream to her liking? Did she roller-skate? They were to, please, forgive his nonna for not understanding because she had much sadness. He even turned his charm on Emma and told her she looked too young to be Fleur’s mother, which threw Emma momentarily, but she smiled and thanked him for his compliment with good grace. Paolo seemed as upbeat and full of joy as his father and grandmother were of doom and gloom.
‘You scheming little madam,’ Emma said, wiping cake crumbs from the corners of her mouth, but she smiled as she said it.
How well she remembered walking in a certain direction in the hope that Seth would be walking that way, too, when she was just the age Fleur was now. And what bittersweet memories the encounter between Fleur and Paolo was conjuring up. What emotional hurdles was she going to have to jump over before she found peace in her own heart again? And just where is this friendship going, she wondered, as she saw Paolo slip Fleur a note as they left Cascarini’s?
Emma couldn’t put it off any longer. She had to see Ruby again. She’d resisted while she was so busy with the negotiations to rent Romer Lodge, but now it was all agreed and hers to move into in two days’ time. Although it was fully furnished there was still room for the few bits she had in storage with Pickfords: her writing desk, a favourite stool, her Victorian sewing box and, of course, all of Seth’s paintings. She’d agreed to keep the garden tidy and the internal and external paintwork to the same standard as it was now for a reduction in the rent. And while she’d waited for all the paperwork to be completed she’d hired a sewing machine from Rockhey’s, bought lengths of material – cotton and lawn, georgette and silk – and she’d made dresses for herself and Fleur. Sample dresses for future clients of her dressmaking business to see and admire – she hoped! From a junk shop on the corner of Avenue Road she’d bought a mannequin that only needed a good scrub to make it serviceable again. She’d been almost happy doing this. Almost. Ruby, and the state she’d been in when Emma had seen her a few weeks’ ago, was never far from her mind.
And now here she was, about to knock on Ruby’s door once more.
Taking a deep breath Emma picked up the knocker and let it drop just once against the wood. She crossed her fingers behind her back that Ruby was alone.
‘Ma! There’s someone at the door!’
A child’s voice, hard to tell if it was a boy or a girl. But at least Ruby wouldn’t be ‘entertaining’ a man in the bed that was hers and Tom’s if there was a child in the house.
No, make that three children as the door opened and three startled pairs of eyes looked up at her. And Emma was pleased to see that the children were all clean and tidily dressed.
‘Hello,’ Emma said. ‘You must be Alice, Sarah and Thomas. I’ve got your photograph in my valise.’
‘Why’s it in your valise?’ the younger girl, Sarah, said.
‘Because I haven’t got a home of my own just yet to put it on the mantelpiece. But I will soon.’
Emma looked over the tops of the children’s heads and saw Ruby coming down the stairs – stairs which she herself had walked down many times.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Ruby said, coming to stand behind her children. She placed her arms around them, resting her hands on Alice’s and Thomas’ shoulders in a protective gesture. ‘I wondered when you’d be back.’
‘Wonder no more,’ Emma said. ‘Can I come in?’
Ruby began to usher the children away from the door. ‘You lot,’ she said, ‘find your coats. You can go and play in the garden until I come and call you.’
‘Can we get dirty?’ Thomas asked. ‘Only you said we wasn’t to get dirty in case your busybody friend came back. I—’
‘Get your coats, and out!’ Ruby stopped him.
The children went, shouting excitedly to one another so loudly that even the sound of gulls screeching overhead was drowned out by their chatter.
Emma remained standing on the doorstep of Shingle Cottage, wondering if everyone saw her as a busybody, as it seemed Ruby so obviously did. It wasn’t a comfortable thought, sitting somewhere around her heart like indigestion.
‘You took your time comin’ back,’ Ruby said, when, at last, the children were out of earshot. ‘I thought, maybe, you’d seen enough and didn’t want to see me no more.’
‘Of course I want to see you,’ Emma said. How she longed to throw her arms around her old friend as she’d done often when they were girls, but now … well, now she’d wait for Ruby to make the first move.
‘As Master Big Mouth let on, I’ve been keepin’ ’em clean and tidy in case you did.’
Emma laughed. Children did have a habit of letting the cat out of the bag. And you’re a lot cleaner and tidier than when I last saw you, too. Ruby’s hair, Emma was pleased to see, looked freshly washed, and brushed. Her skin seemed less sallow, too. She was wearing a maroon wool skirt Emma remembered giving her back in 1913 just before she and Seth had left for Canada. It reached almost to Ruby’s ankles. How old-fashioned Ruby looked wearing it. Emma had long since shortened all her clothes to just below the knee. Perhaps, if they could rekindle their friendship, Ruby would accept Emma’s offer to shorten the skirt for her. Or
make her a new one.
‘So, Ruby, can this busybody come in?’
Ruby laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know where that young tyke ’eard that word from.’
‘Well,’ Emma said. ‘I’m prepared to forget he said it and to forget I heard it if I can come in. I’ve brought cakes. Not home-made I’m afraid because I expect the chef at the Grand Hotel would have taken a dim view of it if I’d asked to take over his kitchen.’
‘’E would an’ all,’ Ruby said. ‘Not that I doubt fer a minute you wouldn’t ’ave asked if you’d really wanted to make cakes.’
Emma dangled a cardboard box of chocolate éclairs, bought from May’s Bakery near the railway station, from its paper string.
‘The sun’s getting stronger by the second,’ Emma said. ‘The chocolate on them will melt.’
‘Won’t be up to your standard, chocolate or no chocolate,’ Ruby said. ‘But I’ll force meself.’
A smile played at the corners of Ruby’s lips and the sight of it made Emma’s heart flip with a frisson of hope and happiness that Ruby wasn’t beyond saving as she’d said at their last meeting.
Ruby opened wide the door and ushered Emma inside.
‘Ti amo,’ Paolo whispered.
He had one hand on the back of Fleur’s head and the other was edging up her side, getting closer and closer to her breast with each passing second.
The sign on the ice cream parlour door was turned to CLOSED. Paolo’s father was out the back, across a yard about twenty feet wide, churning a fresh batch of ice cream that had to be watched carefully and would take half an hour. And his grandmother was upstairs having a siesta. Paolo had let Fleur in through the back door, and they were pressed up against the wall in the tiny kitchen.
Ma would kill me if she knew I was here, Fleur thought. And somehow that thought – that her mother didn’t know where she was – brought an extra thrill to the moment.
So this was what the start of sex was like. A tingle. And not just up her spine, either. Fleur could feel a dampness in her drawers. Was she wetting herself? No, not that.
‘What—’
‘Sssh,’ Paolo took his hand from behind Fleur’s head and put two fingers to her lips.
‘I …’ Fleur began to mumble through his fingers. She poked her tongue through her lips and licked Paolo’s fingers. He made a strange sort of low growling sound that rumbled through his chest and into Fleur’s, almost.
Her first kiss was about to happen. She knew it. Her heart began to race and she felt the blood pumping past her ears.
‘I … I …’ she began again.
But Paolo stopped her flow of words by kissing her. He began to part her closed lips, gently, with his tongue. And then his tongue was in her mouth, moving slowly, sinuously. Oh my God! Thomas Hardy didn’t explain the half of it in his book, did he?
‘What does what you just said mean?’ Fleur mouthed, barely a whisper, when at last Paolo decided the kiss was finished. This particular kiss because Fleur knew there would be others.
‘It mean, I love you,’ Paolo mouthed back, over emphasising his mouth movements as though he were speaking to someone totally deaf.
His hand – which hadn’t quite reached her breast in the kissing, much to Fleur’s disappointment, and even though her nipples had gone hard and she’d thrust them at him almost – was thumped hard into his chest and he knocked himself off balance, teetering sideways towards a pile of tins that toppled over.
‘In here,’ Paolo said, balling his fist up and thumping his chest again. ‘I feel it. Like fire.’
But the words came out louder than he had probably intended them to. He hurriedly tried to right the tins.
Then they heard footsteps coming down the passage.
‘Paolo!’
And then a volley of Italian Fleur didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of understanding although she knew beyond doubt Paolo’s pa wasn’t saying ‘Ti amo,’ as he came rushing into the back kitchen.
She withered under the older man’s gaze. He was looking at her as though she were a lesser form of life. Just for kissing his son? Fleur bridled. And besides, if anyone was going to take the blame then Paolo was, for letting her in the kitchen in the first place. The plan had been for Paolo to turn the sign on the door to OPEN and then for Fleur to be seated at a table, the first customer for the afternoon, when Signor Cascarini came back from his ice cream making, and Paolo’s grandmother came down from her siesta. After the kissing.
But now the plan had backfired.
‘Where your mama?’ Signor Cascarini asked her.
‘Well, she’s not here, obviously,’ Fleur said.
No way was this man going to make her feel guilty for kissing his son. She wasn’t a child. The feelings she’d had weren’t a child’s feelings. She’d felt like a woman in Paolo’s arms. And he’d told her he loved her. She wasn’t some sort of good time girl, letting any man kiss her, was she?
‘You bad girl,’ Signor Cascarini said.
Well, that did it!
‘So, it’s all right for a man to kiss a girl in a kitchen in the middle of the afternoon but it’s far from all right for that girl to want to be kissed and to kiss back, is it?’ Fleur yelled at him.
Signor Cascarini shrugged. Because he thought all that, or because he didn’t understand? Fleur didn’t know which and she cared even less.
‘You not good Italian girl.’ Signor Cascarini seemed to have found his voice again.
‘You’re right about one thing – I’m not an Italian girl. Good or otherwise. Although I imagine Italian girls do get kissed in kitchens in the middle of the afternoon sometimes.’
‘Fleur,’ Paolo said. He put an arm around her shoulder and turned her towards the back door. ‘I take you back to hotel now. My papa and—’
But Paolo’s father grabbed Paolo roughly by the elbow and pulled him away.
Volumes and volumes of angry Italian filled the air. Paolo and his father seemed to get louder with every word. Fleur knew she could probably just leave and they’d never notice, but she was mesmerised by the passion in their voices, the musicality of the Italian language. She had to learn to speak it – she just had to.
All the noise must have woken Paolo’s grandmother because she came bustling into the kitchen in very worn carpet slippers, her bare big toe peeping through the right one.
The men stopped their arguing and the old woman’s eyes widened with surprise when she saw Fleur. She made a spitting sort of sound, although no spit came out, thank goodness.
‘I’ll say it before they do,’ Fleur said. ‘Paolo can translate, although I know his father understands English well enough. I was invited here by Paolo because we wanted to be alone. We have walked out together a few times now. Along the seafront. In Torre Abbey gardens. In public. We are friends, Paolo and I – very good friends. And we are going to stay friends, whatever other ideas you two might have.’ Fleur reached towards Paolo and grasped his left hand between both of hers. She raised it to her lips and kissed the backs of his fingers. ‘It would have been nicer had we had our first kiss in better circumstances but I don’t think I’m ever going to forget it. I don’t want to. Now, I’m going. I can find my way back to the hotel, Paolo.’
It was obvious Signor Cascarini had understood the bulk of what Fleur had said because he opened the back door for her.
‘No, not that way,’ Fleur said. ‘I made a mistake coming in that way. I’ll leave by the front door.’
‘And I come with you,’ Paolo said. ‘I am gentleman.’
He rushed forward to the front door and unlocked it. Fleur and Paolo left the ice cream parlour without looking back and without shutting the door behind them. A volley of Italian followed them, but Paolo didn’t answer whatever it was his father and grandmother were shouting at him.
‘What are they saying?’ Fleur asked.
‘Oh, that I am the big disappointment in the world to them. Papa is happy my mama dead not to see how I behave. Papa now
do the deliveries I not doing. My grandmother must speak English which she hates doing because Papa not there at opening time. And you—’
‘I’m a whore or whatever the Italian word is for it?’
‘Is puttana. But you not that. But you in big trouble,’ Paolo said. ‘And I think you can, how you say, fight yourself.’
‘Fight my corner,’ Fleur said. ‘Oh, yes, I can do that.’
Not that she was going to have to because Paolo had stood up to his father and grandmother and was seeing her home – like a gentleman should.
Paolo made a crook of his arm and Fleur slipped her hand through, held onto him.
‘Not just me by the sound of it.’ She laughed.
Paolo’s father’s voice was still within earshot, and he didn’t sound as though he’d calmed down one little bit.
‘Oh, it is expected an Italian man have many lovers before he marry. And after, too …’
‘Was that what I was about to become?’ Fleur asked, outraged at the thought. ‘Was I just minutes away from being another of the many lovers you expect to have before marriage?’
Fleur went to withdraw her arm from Paolo’s but he second-guessed her and grasped her hand so she couldn’t. He beamed down at her.
‘No,’ he said. ‘On the life of Mary and all the saints, you would have been the first.’
‘Will be the first,’ Fleur said. ‘One day. I expect …’
But her words were drowned out by the Cascarini delivery van being driven past them and at high speed.
And in the direction of the Grand Hotel.
‘Where’s Fleur?’ Ruby asked, pulling out a chair for Emma to sit at the kitchen table. She plonked a black teapot with bright blue forget-me-nots painted on it in the middle of the table. ‘I thought you might ’ave brought ’er to see me.’
‘I will, but not just yet.’
‘Ashamed of me?’ Ruby said. She let her gaze slide from Emma’s and began fussing with the crockery, letting the cups bang so heavily on the saucers that Emma feared they might break.
Emma and Her Daughter Page 4