by Penny Feeny
They ate for a few minutes in silence. Carlotta, pausing to break off a chunk of bread, noticed a woman with two children enter the restaurant. Shabby and careworn, she spoke in an agitated way to a group of men seated at a table in the corner. They all shook their heads.
Eva followed her gaze. ‘I bet,’ she whispered, ‘she wants to find her husband and they know where he is but they won’t tell her.’
Carlotta wasn’t interested in the errant husband. She was captivated by the children: a curly-haired baby in a buggy and an older girl, clinging onto the handles, her eyes roving the room, a sweet patient expression on her face. It was the combination of their ages, Carlotta supposed, that attracted her: the baby, a little under a year, like her own, not quite walking. And the girl, Lily’s age, with something of Lily’s innocent demeanour.
Eva was embroidering her story. ‘So the husband has a mistress and these guys have promised to cover for him. Younger than the wife, maybe still in her teens and easy to impress. They’re probably only around the corner, bouncing on the bed in a room above the tabacchaio. She’s defying her father because the silly man insists she comes home every night by nine and this is her revenge.’ She giggled. ‘What does he know?’
Voices rose and subsided, as the men protested their ignorance. In exasperation, the woman wheeled the buggy around and out of the door, the girl tagging behind. The men went back to their beers.
‘It’s a year and a half,’ said Carlotta, pushing her plate away. ‘Since I saw her.’
Eva sighed. ‘Carli, I’m sorry, really, but, as you say, it was a while ago and you can’t even be certain…’
‘Yes, I can. I am absolutely certain.’
‘But there’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘I did try.’ She struck a match and watched the flame flare and die, leaving an acrid trace of sulphur. ‘I wrote to them afterwards. I begged them to let me see her.’
Eva had been Carlotta’s confidante for some time; her tone was soothing. ‘I know.’
‘They didn’t even reply,’ she said bitterly – though she’d no way of knowing if her letter had arrived, if she’d used the correct address. ‘I’m not asking for much. Of course it would be wrong to break up the family and she is close to her brother, who is also very cute. But… I can’t get her out of my mind… I want her to know that I’m thinking about her, that I haven’t forgotten her.’ She took the postcard from her handbag and turned the image of the fountain between her fingers.
‘How many so far?’ demanded Eva.
‘Not many, only three or four.’
‘You must not do this to yourself.’ In a sudden swift movement, like a bird darting to a berry, she plucked the card from Carlotta’s grasp and tore it in half.
‘What’s the point of that?’ said Carlotta. ‘I’ve got other cards I can send.’
‘You’re wasting your time,’ said Eva. ‘You can’t go on tossing words into a void. If you are really serious, if you absolutely refuse to give up this fixation of yours, then there is only one thing you can do, no? You should go to England.’
15
Lily was lying humped under the bedclothes, holding her breath, counting to two hundred. Surely a person who’d once been trapped underground for two whole days should be able to manage without air for a bit. She had heard that if you could count beyond two hundred, if you held your breath for long enough, your body would start to close down and you would faint. And that scared people. Teachers and bullies alike. They’d think they’d done something awful, life-threatening, they might even call an ambulance. They would realise they had gone too far.
‘You have to stand up to bullies,’ Alex said airily as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Lily was pretty certain he’d never actually been bothered by them. She’d tried to hint, when she’d started secondary school, that things weren’t great. But when she mentioned, as casually as she could, how much she’d enjoyed her happy period of home-teaching, her parents didn’t register the connection. In any case Jess was lecturing part-time at her old art college so she could access the design equipment. There was no space for a studio at home now that Lily and Harry had their own bedrooms. Lily couldn’t expect Jess to give up paid work just because she was having a hard time getting used to the terrifying impersonal warehouse that was her new school, where she never seemed to be able to do anything right.
Things had improved in the summer term when Andrea had started to show interest in her. Andrea preferred to be called Andi, which she wrote with a circle rather than a dot over the i. She was tall and sporty and disruptive and even the teachers were a little wary of her. At the time Lily was flattered to be chosen as her friend; she hadn’t realised that Andi was the kind of girl who dropped people, for no good reason, after she had winkled out all their secrets. Or that she would use this information to taunt a person once they were in the wilderness again.
Andi had new soulmates now, who picked on Lily because she was an Eyetie and everyone knew Eyeties were cowards. The girls liked to devise little tests to see if Lily could prove otherwise. Which made her current situation in Year 8 even worse than it had been in Year 7. Which was why she was teaching herself how to faint. Fainting wasn’t feeble like sniffling or whimpering; it was silent and powerful.
Jess came into the room and drew the curtains. She addressed the hump. ‘Better get a move on, darling, or you’ll be late.’
Lily didn’t answer. She’d reached 129, counting too quickly for it to be a valid exercise.
Jess said, ‘Are you feeling all right?’
She should grab this lifeline. ‘I’ve got dreadful cramps. And a migraine.’
‘Oh, sweetheart, not again!’
Lily’s periods had started not long after her twelfth birthday. The frequency and severity of them took everyone by surprise. Jess had been much older when hers began, nearly sixteen, but she agreed it was a horrible penance to have to go through every month. She’d been sympathetic, but Lily was aware she couldn’t over-egg things. She had to keep her suffering at a plausible level.
‘You’ve missed so much school already this term.’
‘We don’t learn anything anyway.’
‘Take some paracetamol,’ coaxed Jess. ‘And I’ll make you a chocolate milkshake for breakfast.’
‘Harry will want one too.’
‘Then you shall both have one! Right away.’
Another thing Alex always said was: ‘Pick your battles.’ Lily, sliding her feet from the bed to the floor, abandoned the argument. Maybe this would turn out to be an okay day. The gang wasn’t predictable. They didn’t always lie in wait, tripping her up to see if she’d cry or getting her blamed for misbehaviour in class. Sometimes they simply ignored her. Besides, Andi often bunked off. She might even have forgotten about the money.
The term before, when Lily thought they were friends, Andi had lent her a belt to help keep her skirt up when the zip broke after PE. It was a leather belt, but quite old and scruffy, and Andi said she could keep it. Now, however, she wanted it back and Lily couldn’t find it, couldn’t remember what she’d done with it. Suddenly it had become precious and expensive and Andi was nagging her. ‘Pay me back, yeah?’ she’d said. ‘Or I’ll tell Miss Wright you stole it.’
Lily could have explained all this to Jess, of course, but Jess still assumed Andi was her friend so it wouldn’t solve anything – more likely make things worse. As she struggled into her uniform, she decided to save up the period cramps for another day, but she’d see if she could filch a bit of cash to take as insurance.
In the kitchen Jess was pouring thick brown gloop from the liquidiser into two tumblers. Harry was eating Rice Krispies. Jess’s bag was open on the dresser. Neither noticed Lily slide her fingers into the wallet, tweezer them around a pound note and withdraw it. Silently, behind her back, she folded the note up very small and stuffed it into her pocket.
Jess spun around so fast Lily was startled, but she was beaming with the frothy suc
cess of the milkshakes. Alex loped into the kitchen, beating his chest with his fists and pulling gorilla faces to make Harry laugh; Harry was always serious in the mornings. After breakfast, he would walk him to school because Harry was still at the juniors. This was in the opposite direction to Lily’s comprehensive, which was a pity because if they could all walk along together she wouldn’t get that awful growling pain in her stomach, which had no known cause, but wouldn’t go away.
Toast popped from the toaster. The kettle whistled. Alex made himself some coffee. Lily and Harry drank their milkshakes. The long hand of the big wall clock jerked through the minutes. Jess said, ‘Shouldn’t you get going, darling?’
Lily scraped back her chair, swung her satchel over her shoulder, shot Harry a look of lingering envy. As she grabbed her coat from its hook in the hall she heard Alex say, ‘You haven’t any spare cash, have you, Jess? Just till I get to the bank. I’ll pay you back.’
‘A few quid, I think, if you want to take a look.’
‘I won’t clean you out.’ His footsteps were crossing the tiled kitchen floor towards the dresser.
Lily fled.
*
Jess could see that Lily was unhappy but she hadn’t been able to work out why. She tried to remember her own adolescence, the shock of boarding school. But the loneliness had passed soon enough and anyhow Lily wasn’t at boarding school. She was with her loving family and neither Jess nor Alex had put any pressure on her. Alex, in particular, had a healthy disrespect for authority. None of the teachers at last term’s parents’ evening seemed to have any complaints or concerns (though she did wonder if they’d noticed Lily at all).
She opened her wallet and counted the money again. Alex had taken a fiver. He’d fluttered it at her as he’d escorted Harry through the door and into the street. He’d left her a pound note, but she was certain there’d been another one as well. Jess wasn’t good at confrontation. She didn’t like to think of her children stealing from her; she couldn’t bring herself to accuse them.
This wasn’t one of her teaching days so she didn’t have to keep to a timetable – but she did need to get to work. There was the chance of a commission from Liberty’s and she was anxious to impress. ‘The bastion of bourgeois imperialism!’ Alex had mocked, while Jess had fantasised about the thrill of mounting the broad central staircase and seeing rolls of her own fabric displayed in the gallery. But instead of getting ready to leave here she was, in Lily’s room, eyes raking the bookshelves, the knick-knacks, the shoebox of pens and crayons, the posters of Abba, John Travolta and the Fonz.
Could Lily be squirrelling money away somewhere? Saving up for something? Could Jess bring herself to look? Well, she could check under the bed – something she’d do automatically when hoovering, so as not to clog the nozzle with dirty socks. She straightened the duvet and lifted the corner of the valance. She knelt down and peered. Nothing. She straightened a pile of books on the desk. She opened the top drawer. Then the phone rang and, guiltily, she jumped.
She answered it in the sitting room, perched on the end of the sofa, twisting the curly plastic wire through her fingers.
‘Jess?’
‘Dinah? Is something the matter?’
Her sister’s voice was sombre. ‘Daddy’s had a stroke.’
‘Oh, no! When?’
‘He toppled over in the garden yesterday. The dogs found him.’
Jess toppled too, from the sofa’s arm to its cushions, her mouth too dry at first for speech. She had a vision of two golden retrievers sniffing at a body on the lawn. ‘How bad is it?’
‘He’s in hospital and they’re running some tests, so we don’t know yet.’
‘Do you want me to come? How’s Mother taken it?’
Dinah said, ‘There’s no rush, but I think she could do with some company. She doesn’t like being alone in the house and she’ll need driving to the hospital every day.’ A long drawn-out sigh. ‘I’m used to everything falling on my shoulders and I do what I can, but I have commitments of my own. Rosalind, as always, is too far away to be any use. So, yes, I’d appreciate a helping hand.’
‘I’ll have to look at my schedule,’ said Jess. ‘Rearrange some classes. Check what the children are doing.’
‘Isn’t Alex there?’
‘Yes, but… Dinah, I can’t just drop everything.’
‘You’d have to,’ said Dinah, ‘if I wasn’t holding it all together.’
Jess bridled. Her sister, thirteen years older, had never had to earn a living, or even look after her own children. Her existence rolled along the same measured tracks as their parents’, under a comfort blanket of tradition. She was loyal and steadfast, but completely unable to see any perspective but her own.
‘I’m not making excuses,’ Jess said. ‘Obviously I’m worried about Dad and I’ll come as soon as I can. When I mentioned the children, it was because… well, I think Lily may be having problems at school and I wanted to check—’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Dinah. ‘I don’t know how anyone can bring up children properly in London. I’ve said before now that you’d be better off moving down here, closer to family. Everyone knows how frightful those comprehensive schools are.’
‘Do they?’
‘There’s that television programme, what’s it called, Grange Hill?’
‘You watch Grange Hill?’ said Jess, astonished.
‘No, of course I don’t watch it. But I’ve read about it in the paper. I know what goes on. I’m surprised you don’t. I suppose your problem, Jessamy, is that you’re far too trusting.’
Jess thought of the missing pound note. She’d have to find some way of dealing with it, of teasing out Lily’s troubles, which were probably much greater in her eyes than anyone else’s. She tried to sound firm. ‘Can I get back to you? And will you let me know the results of the tests as soon as you hear them?’
‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ said Dinah.
Jess hung up, not much reassured. Dinah’s information was sketchy, so there was no way of knowing how disabled her father would become or how her mother would cope, whether her own time would be eaten up by frequent train journeys to Wiltshire, helping to care for them.
She rose from the sofa and was putting on her coat when she remembered she’d left open the drawer in Lily’s room. She went back, intending to close it, but the first thing she saw was a diary with a basket of puppies on the cover. There was no lock on it, no fierce message saying ‘Private Keep Out’, but looking under the bed was one thing; snooping was absolutely against the rules – the McKenzies all agreed on that. Jess’s fingers moved faster than her conscience and opened a page at random. It was blank. She flicked through the earlier months. They were blank too; Lily wasn’t keeping a diary or confessing her secrets in code. There was nothing in this room to give cause for alarm and Jess was relieved. She didn’t plan to ferret any further.
When she tried to shut the drawer, it caught on something stiff. She tugged to release it and found herself holding a postcard, a photograph of the Bocca della Verità. Jess had only seen the Mouth of Truth in the film, Roman Holiday, but she regarded the disc of marble with its holes and fissures as creepy and disturbing; sinister even. She could have sworn she’d thrown the card out, along with the others. When Carlotta’s first letter had arrived, two years ago now, she and Alex had taken the decision to ignore it. It was harmless enough, an apology, a plea for understanding, typed carefully in stilted English, but it troubled them that she knew where they lived.
‘However did she get our address?’
‘Fucking Gerald,’ Alex had said. ‘He’s the only person who could have given it to her.’
‘Oh, God. What are we going to do? Accept the apology?’
‘Risks being an invitation, don’t you think? Better to do nothing. That way she won’t know whether we’ve got it, whether we even live here…’
Jess hadn’t reminded him that it would have been better to have done nothing in the first pla
ce. But after their experience in Roccamare, the instinct to pull up the drawbridge was only natural. They reckoned if they didn’t reply they would be safe: one-way communication couldn’t go on forever. They ignored the second letter too and then, at irregular intervals, came the occasional postcard. The messages on these were brief – tanti cari saluti – because, apparently, they were cheaper to mail. More than five words and the cost of the stamps would go up. It had been a while since the last one and she’d hoped that meant Carlotta was finally defeated.
She had no way of knowing whether Lily had come across this postcard by accident – perhaps she’d needed a bookmark and chose the picture because it reminded her of Italy? Jess hoped she hadn’t recognised the signature, but, in any case, she wasn’t going to leave it in the drawer. Or in the flat. She banged the front door behind her and shredded it into the litter bin in the street.
16
Carlotta sat on a stool in front of the wardrobe mirror with a towel around her shoulders. Eva stood behind her with the scissors, slicing tresses to the floor. They had discussed going to a hairdresser, but it would have been an extra cost on a tight budget. It had taken months to save enough money to make this trip. Eva, who claimed the idea as her own, had masterminded the details. She’d pointed out that if they went to England in August while the shop was closed, the McKenzies might be on holiday too. So they’d waited until October, until Iacopo could find a temporary assistant to take Carlotta’s place, and Eva could get a good deal on a room in a budget hotel in Victoria, owned by a cousin of her father’s.