by Penny Feeny
The words fell like stones into a pond. Outside, birds were singing, spring flowers danced in pools of sunshine. Saturday, the date with Drew, seemed a long way off, like a mirage. Lily felt curiously detached. ‘Am I? She told us she lost her husband in the earthquake. She didn’t say anything about any children.’
Then she remembered: a baby must have a father, Carlotta had said when they were on Favignana, and she had taught Lily the lullaby she’d since forgotten. The simple melody now spun in her brain, along with the image of a mother singing to her new-born, rocking the infant to sleep at her warm milky bosom. Was that what Carlotta had done? Had she been trying to suggest a connection, which Lily had missed? How could she have been so stupid? Detachment gave way to rage. She yelled, ‘You’ve known this all along and you never said anything! Why didn’t you tell me before?’
Alex tried to keep his tone steady. ‘Because it might have been total fantasy. We’d no idea if it was true. We still don’t, although there are… indications that it’s likely. We wouldn’t have deprived you of contact if she’d gone about things the right way, but after she ran off with you both we simply couldn’t trust her. You said yourself that she lies. I couldn’t let her mess you around.’
‘So what’s changed?’
‘She didn’t give up. Somehow she got hold of our address in London. She wrote to us, though we didn’t reply. She also sent the odd postcard, which you may have seen.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lily vaguely. Postcards often arrived from family friends; she didn’t pay them much attention.
‘And then she came to find you.’
This was shocking. ‘When?’
‘A while ago. You remember that business with the girls and the garage?’
It was an episode Lily preferred to suppress. She shuddered. ‘That wasn’t her!’
‘She’d tried to disguise herself,’ said Alex.
Lily’s mental picture of the little foreign woman was hazy but it didn’t fit her knowledge of Carlotta. ‘What sort of disguise?’
‘She cut off all her hair and bleached it. Drastic to say the least.’ He added sharply, ‘She told me you hadn’t seen her.’
‘I don’t know who I saw,’ said Lily. ‘But I know I wished she hadn’t got involved. She made everything worse.’ Then a handful of words in a soft Italian accent swam through her memory. Please don’t cry. Don’t be upset. I will bring you help.
Alex switched on the tape recorder and the same low voice was saying, ‘… Try to imagine my feelings! My husband is dead, my baby is dead. My old life, it’s finished. Then I hear news of a little girl in the orphanage who is from Santa Margherita. They say no one has claimed her, but when I arrive from America she’s gone. Then I meet you and you tell me how you found the baby and gave her to the nuns, and they are the same nuns I went to see…’ There was the scrape of a match being struck, the tinny clatter of a teaspoon against china, a background buzz.
Lily whispered, ‘Did she really come all the way to London to look for me?’
‘She had a bee in her bonnet. What she didn’t have was any proof.’
Glamorous, slippery, duplicitous Carlotta. ‘My actual mother? My real mother?’
‘I’m your real mother,’ said Jess, cradling her. ‘I’m sorry, darling, this is a dreadful thing to have sprung on you. It should never have happened this way.’
Alex said, ‘It was a total shock to me when she turned up. Out of the fucking blue. She basically blackmailed me into having a meeting and I made the tape as a precaution. Jess hasn’t heard it before, that’s why I was playing it. To explain…’ He massaged his jaw, pulling his mouth downwards, etching deep grooves. ‘The last thing I wanted was for you to be hassled, so we struck a deal. I agreed to send Carlotta photographs if she agreed to keep out of the frame. I slipped up, I’m afraid. I was busy with other stuff, let a couple of months drift by. And she’s come down on me like a ton of bricks.’
Lily thought back to Alex’s new-found interest in photography, how he would sometimes sneak up on her, twisting his lens, making a joke of it. She had been duped. Disgustingly. Resentment burst out of her. ‘You make it sound like it’s nothing. But it isn’t, it’s horrible. D’you really think that because you were the person who saved me you have the right to treat me like this? Like I’m some kind of object! A bargaining chip!’
Jess said, ‘It’s always worse to find out stuff when you’re not properly prepared, but you have to remember, darling: you are the same person. We are the same people. Maybe when you’re older, when you’re an adult, which isn’t long to wait, you can go to Italy and make your own investigations. We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we, about seeing if you can trace any relatives in Santa Margherita? In the meantime, nothing needs to change.’
But everything had changed. Irrevocably. Her very identity, her whole life – from the babyhood that was a blank to their final holiday in Roccamare, from the scene in the garage she’d rather forget to this tense showdown – was thrown into turmoil. She longed to crawl under a pile of blankets and blot out the world until she could make sense of it again.
Over the top of Lily’s head, Jess said to Alex, ‘Look what you’ve done! There’s so much we’re going to have to get sorted. You can’t leave yet.’
Alex said, ‘I thought it was what you wanted.’
‘No, that’s not fair, it’s what you wanted. I just said that if you were so unhappy here, if you felt things weren’t working, I wasn’t going to stand in your way—’
Lily was adrift in a turbulent sea, tossed from one wave of emotion to another. Currently being buffeted on livid – why had she been kept in such ignorance? She sat up and snarled, ‘Are you kicking him out?’
‘I’m giving him space,’ said Jess. ‘If he wants to take it. A lot of things have gone wrong. There’s been a lack of trust and we need to take some time out and find a new approach…’
‘That is such crap,’ said Lily furiously. As if there could be any chance of replicating their old family conferences in these circumstances!
‘You’re not to blame Jess for anything, d’you hear?’ said Alex. ‘If you feel the urge to have a go at anyone, pick on me. I thought I was doing the right thing, but, hell, I cocked up. Misfired. Good intentions don’t always produce good results. I’m not making excuses, but I guess there comes a point in every kid’s life when they discover their father has feet of clay.’
Harry, wide-eyed and silent until this point, said with deliberate provocation, ‘Not yours though.’
Alex made a general swipe in his direction, which Harry easily dodged. ‘You little shit!’
‘Are you splitting up?’ Lily persisted. ‘Yes or no?’
‘Of course not,’ said Alex and Jess in unison.
She didn’t believe them. Carlotta wasn’t the only person who told lies. She sat, shivering in her fancy batwing top, unable to stop her teeth chattering. She wished her parents could scoop her up the way they used to when she was little, holding her tightly to the twin thump of their heartbeats, raining down kisses and telling her she was their precious miracle. But it was too late: no one could love an awkward disgruntled teenager who didn’t fit into her skin. The charmed existence the McKenzies had created for themselves was dissolving and Lily had no idea where she belonged any more.
Part Three
1988
24
Eva had such a knack with her window display that passers-by might think they had stumbled on a party. She’d clothed her mannequins in vivid cocktail dresses and satin boleros and manoeuvred them into realistic poses, champagne glasses cleverly balanced between their fingers. Sometimes she played her favourite jazz records too, notes from trumpet and saxophone snaking into the street. But if you looked closely, you’d see her incongruous figure bent over a sewing machine in the centre of the room: a little brown sparrow surrounded by birds of exotic plumage.
Carlotta rang the bell. Eva let her in, ribbons fluttering around her neck, a chalk penci
l behind her ear. ‘I always knew this day would come,’ she said, embracing her happily. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind?’
‘About Nicolo?’
‘No! The dress.’
Carlotta knew Eva was disappointed not to be making the peacock dress. In her imagination it was fully fledged. ‘I was planning to sew white feathers on your train and make a headpiece too, with sequins for extra sparkle!’
‘No,’ laughed Carlotta. ‘That’s too much for a civil ceremony.’ The wedding was to be a quiet affair, as it was the second for both of them. The date had been fixed a few weeks hence, at the beginning of August. No wild celebrations with hordes of stray relatives, but a meal in select company at a fine restaurant. Some dancing afterwards. ‘I want an outfit that’s elegant and classy. This is Rome, not Sicily.’
They spent a pleasant twenty minutes discussing the style and the fabric and settled on a lustrous silk in pale gold, which Eva described as the colour of sunrise. Then Carlotta undressed in a cubicle so Eva could check her measurements. ‘I might need to make adjustments later,’ she said. ‘Honestly, you’d be surprised how many brides lose weight before their wedding day.’
‘That’s because they want to look their best.’
‘It’s not always deliberate. Some of them get so wound up they don’t eat properly.’
‘I’m too old to be nervous,’ said Carlotta.
‘Age has nothing to do with it,’ said Eva. ‘But I am very content for you, Carli. I told you everything would work out if you’d only take my advice. I’m very glad you kept your promise and you ought to be too.’
‘I didn’t have any choice!’ It was a fact she had become used to: Lily was lost to her. There had been no more photographs. Five years ago, she’d received a cool note from Alex McKenzie saying he was no longer living with his family, so there was no point in her writing again.
‘I don’t know why it’s taken you and Nicolo so long to legalise everything,’ said Eva. ‘But it’s good to have the security, isn’t it? The final commitment.’ Carlotta nodded. Eva removed the tape measure from her waist and jotted in her notebook. ‘Right, I’ve got all the figures down. Do you want to come back in a fortnight for the first fitting? You can leave work early again?’
‘Now that I’m the manager,’ said Carlotta, ‘I can do what I like.’ She had overseen the move to larger premises near via del Corso and had two sales assistants beneath her.
‘Perfect! Just don’t do anything silly in the next few weeks.’
‘What, like lose too much weight?’
Eva’s lapels were stuffed with round-headed pins, which glittered as she tossed back her head. ‘You know what I mean, Carli. Things have been going well for you. Don’t spoil your luck.’
The Belice earthquake was twenty years past; her life had turned around. ‘Don’t you think, tesora, I know that better than most people?’
*
It was extraordinary how luck could change – from one extreme to the other and back again. It was a story she liked to tell at social gatherings, with Nicolo close by and Luca interjecting. Luca said it was his story really, because he was the one who’d found the peacock feathers. Also, because he was the one who’d been hit by the Alfa during its frantic swerve. Carlotta had rushed to catch his small body as it was flung skywards and she had broken his fall. As they’d tumbled together to the side of the road, she’d been transported back to Santa Margherita, to the ground cracking and jarring beneath her feet, to the crash of walls collapsing and roof tiles flying, to the infinity of lost consciousness.
The driver had leapt from his car, swearing angrily, justifying himself; the miscreant scooters had disappeared. Luca had lain in Carlotta’s arms, his face ghostly pale. The noise of squealing tyres had alerted his cousin, Paolo, and his friends who’d come pouring around the corner.
Carlotta was winded and bruised, but she didn’t think anything was broken; there didn’t seem to be any blood. She was more worried about Luca, who was lying, warm and solid but inert, across her lap. When he opened his eyes, the irises rolled around the whites, unfocussed, which scared her. Then they fixed on her own. She said gently, ‘How are you, Luca?’
‘I feel dizzy,’ he said. ‘Where’s my feather?’
She was immeasurably relieved to hear him speak. ‘Don’t worry about that now. Does your back hurt? Your legs? Can you move them?’
‘I think so.’
‘We need to get him to hospital,’ she said to Paolo.
The car driver said, ‘San Camillo’s the nearest. I’ll take you. You should be checked out also, signora.’
Paolo stuttered, ‘That’s where Luca’s father works.’
‘Right, you’d better come with us too.’
Carlotta’s first encounter with Nicolo Morandi had not been auspicious. She could still replay the fear on his face when she’d stumbled into the hospital emergency department with Luca and he’d heard the convoluted explanations of the driver. The afternoon had dragged into evening and when she’d been discharged she hadn’t expected to see either Morandi again. But the following weekend father and son had come to the shop. She hadn’t recognised Nicolo at first, in his casual clothes, but Luca she’d known instantly. All pallor gone, he had been bursting with good spirits. He had cocked his head on one side and beamed as he’d whisked a dazzling bouquet from behind his back.
‘He chose the flowers himself,’ Nicolo said. ‘To thank you.’
‘I didn’t really do anything.’
‘You were my cushion!’ said Luca and they all laughed.
‘He wants to take you out for lunch,’ said Nicolo. ‘If you are free.’
That was the beginning of the good luck. They had bereavement in common: Nicolo was a widower who’d relocated from Bologna to Rome so Luca could keep in contact with his mother’s family. Sometimes Carlotta would help out with the child-care too. She loved having Luca round to her flat, creating dens and playing hide-and-seek in its nooks and crannies. She taught him Sicilian card games and amassed a collection of Lego. When, after these visits, she came across stray plastic bricks, they seemed tiny symbols of hope and renewal.
Nicolo and Luca had been living in a rented apartment in need of a woman’s touch. Carlotta had hung pictures and arranged plants and sewn cushions and helped to make it homely. She’d bought toys and ironed shirts and spent much of her spare time there. Their relationship had blossomed by degrees – like Carlotta, Nicolo was chary of commitment. He hadn’t proposed until he’d saved enough for a deposit to buy their own place. She’d insisted on pooling their resources and the three of them had taken possession six months ago.
This apartment was in a newly built block not far from the hospital where Nicolo worked as an anaesthetist. (And she only a blacksmith’s daughter!) It had a balcony and a car parking space and airy spacious rooms. Carlotta liked to walk around in her bare feet, stroking the walls and the window sills and the modern kitchen appliances, holding her breath at the shine on the cooker hood and the chrome handles on the cupboard doors – afraid that if she let out too much air at once everything else, and not just her lungs, would deflate. Because her contribution had been less than his, they joked that the bathroom (with a full-size bath!) was the space she had bought. She stored all her beauty paraphernalia on its shelves and kept the tiles scrubbed white and spotless. Luca had a smart bedroom with a grand new desk for his homework. And she and Nicolo had an enormous bed, for which she’d chosen a set of sheets with English words scribbled over them: I love you I love you I love you.
After leaving Eva’s studio, Carlotta called into the butchers to buy veal escalopes for supper and the greengrocer’s for spinach and calabrese and a punnet of pink flushed apricots. She didn’t even hesitate over the cost of the veal. She was aware Eva hadn’t yet given her a precise quote for the dress, but lack of money was no longer a worry. She didn’t have to flirt or bargain to get what she wanted – and, oh, this was liberating! Arriving home, she shifted he
r shopping bag into the crook of her elbow, collected the post from their box in the lobby and let herself into the empty flat. This evening there was no Luca, diligently pretending to study. He’d gone straight from school, as he often did, to visit his nonna and nonno, Maria’s parents.
She didn’t look at the mail until she’d put the food away and opened the shutters to let in the light; the heat of the day was fading. She poured a glass of mineral water, ice cold from the fridge, and sat down to flick through it. The envelope that caught her eye had been forwarded from her old address and had an English stamp. She opened it in a mixture of trepidation and incredulity. Her heart somersaulted, her throat closed. It was not from Alex – why would it be? – but from Lily.
Carlotta shook her head in disbelief. After so long, could this really be happening? She’d once hoped Lily might make contact when she became eighteen, but that date had passed three years ago. She’d taken the silence as confirmation the McKenzies thought her a fantasist. Besides, she had fallen in love with Nicolo; the trajectory of her life was altered and she needed to concentrate on the future.
Lily expressed herself in a manner that was blunt and unadorned. (English was such a functional language, lacking the delicacy and grace of Italian.) She stated simply that she would soon be travelling through Italy. She was with a group researching classical Renaissance gardens because she was studying garden design. They would be visiting Villa d’Este and, as Tivoli was near Rome, she hoped they could meet. There were issues they might discuss.
Carlotta smoothed the piece of paper, tracing Lily’s signature with her forefinger. Then she noticed the date: the letter had been sent weeks earlier. It must have been sitting in the postbox in her old building, or in the sorting office itself, where nothing was done in haste. Lily would already have begun her trip. There was no way of contacting her. If she didn’t know Carlotta’s new address, she couldn’t call by. And Carlotta could hardly take a day off from the shop to go to Tivoli on the off-chance of finding her wandering through the gardens. This was crushing news – how could the timing be so horribly wrong? – but once she’d digested it, a second problem arose: what, if anything, should she say to Nicolo? Her brain turned to sludge; she couldn’t think properly. Lily’s words danced about on the page, taunting her.