The Love of My Life (10 page)

I held out my own hands as you would if you were walking into a warm, still sea and were trailing your fingers in the water. I walked amongst the dead people; they walked beside me to my husband’s grave.

Luca was one of the dead. Luca was not alone.

The alarm, when it shrilled on my phone the next morning, was brutal. I leaned over the bed to turn it off and hurt my hand on the bedside table. There was a maggot of a migraine burrowing away in the optic nerve behind my right eye and I found it hard to open my eyes to locate the phone, which I’d knocked on to the floor.

I hurt my hand again when I picked it up. Squinting, I realized there were ugly gashes on the palm. It was the same on the other hand. The gash on my right hand was so deep and angry it probably should have been stitched.

There were blooms of blood on the pillows. There was blood on the sheets. At the side of the bed, my soaked, torn, muddied and bloodied clothes lay in a filthy pile on top of my wet boots. So the previous night hadn’t been a dream. I didn’t remember coming home, but I must have found my way back somehow. I must have climbed over that wall a second time. And in less than two hours I was supposed to be at Marinella’s to look after my nephews and nieces.

I lit the pilot light in the boiler and ran a bath while the kettle boiled. I took two ibuprofen tablets with a pint of water and bathed, cleaning up my hands as best I could and then sealing the wounds with antiseptic spray. My knees were a mess too but I could hide them beneath a long pink and white gypsy skirt. I put on a washed-out old T-shirt under a cotton shirt with sleeves so long they dangled over my hands, and a pale blue cardigan on top of the shirt.

I dried my hair and used straighteners to tidy it up a bit. I covered the little scratches on my face with foundation, brushed on a healthy pink, artificial complexion, concealed the dark shadows around my eyes, used eyedrops to brighten the whites, curled my lashes, polished my lips and teeth, freshened my breath, scented my wrists and neck, and put on a pair of silver earrings threaded with tiny glass beads and a boho necklace. In the mirror I looked less like the crazy woman of last night, more like Olivia Felicone used to look. I promised myself there and then that I would never let anything like that happen again. Luca was with the dead and I had to leave him be.

Before I left I swallowed a diazepam to stop the trembling and the incipient feeling of panic.

I listened to a broadcast of an Easter service at some cathedral or other while I drove to Portiston. The steering wheel hurt my hands, so I drove mainly with my fingers, changing gear with my fingertips, sometimes forgetting and grabbing the stick, which sent shooting pains from my palms right to the middle of my brain. I practised speaking in a normal tone of voice.

‘Please would you pass me the butter, Maurizio? When is it you’re going skiing, Carlo? Let me give you a hand with that, Angela.’

On the seat beside me was a bunch of rather sad-looking lilies which I’d bought the day before and forgotten to put in water, and a Happy Easter card for Angela and Maurizio in a yellow envelope. I hadn’t signed the card because I couldn’t bear not to write
With love from Luca and Olivia
, which is what I always wrote on cards. So I just wrote
Hope you have a lovely day
and three Xs.

At Marinella’s, fortunately, everyone was so stressed preparing for the influx of lunchtime visitors while simultaneously coping with an abnormally high number of morning guests that very little attention was paid to me. An Easter Sunday magical mystery tour bus commissioned by a branch of the Watersford WI had turned up unexpectedly. The tour organizer had not thought to call ahead to check that Marinella’s could provide refreshments for fifty-four tourists at the drop of a hat but because it was a bank holiday, and because Angela and Maurizio hated turning people away, they had welcomed the visitors with open arms.

Marc was taking an order from a table of twelve as I went through the door into the restaurant, a napkin dashingly flung over his shoulder as he scribbled on his little pad. My stomach gave a little lurch of desire, which took me by surprise. I recalled the hundreds of times I had come to work at Marinella’s as a teenager, and seen both Marc and Luca waiting on tables, just like this. Marc was heavier now, stockier and hairier; he had the profile of a man, not a boy, thicker wrists and a bulge above the hipbone and his hair was receding slightly, but he was still Marc, twin of Luca. He was somebody I had known for such a long time. He caught my eye as I walked past, and I tried to give him a smile, but am not sure if I succeeded.

I went through the bar into the back rooms, smiling hello to Maurizio and Fabio in the kitchen, and up the stairs to the flat. I tapped on the door and it was opened by Stefano and Bridget’s daughter, Emilia, who was six.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Hello, Auntie Liv,’ said Emilia, reaching up to kiss me. ‘What have you done to your hands?’

I gave a self-deprecatory little laugh. I had been practising for this question. ‘I slipped and fell down the steps at the entrance to my flat,’ I said. ‘What an idiot!’

‘Poor you!’ said Emilia. ‘Were you drunk?’

‘Emmie!’ said Nathalie, coming out of the living room, her face flushed and tight. She had lost a little weight. Well, that wouldn’t hurt, I thought.

‘But Aunt Nat, you said . . .’

‘Enough!’ Then to me: ‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’

‘Of course,’ I said, smiling and shrugging off my jacket.

‘If anything happens . . .’

‘You’re only downstairs,’ I said in a reasonable voice.

Nathalie narrowed her eyes. ‘I’m only tolerating you being here for Maurizio’s sake,’ she said. ‘Don’t think for one minute this means anything more than that.’

I sighed and stroked Emilia’s hair.

‘If you don’t want me in your home, Nathalie, I’ll just go.’

‘I certainly don’t want you here,’ she said in a voice that was almost a hiss. ‘Nobody else does either. Did you know that? Even Maurizio doesn’t like you, he just tolerates you out of pity.’

I bit my lower lip hard and gave a little shrug which I hoped conveyed the fact that I didn’t much care. It occurred to me how satisfying it would be to let the miserable cow know that I was sleeping with her husband, but I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.

Nathalie turned away from me and straightened her hair in front of the mirror before crouching down in front of her niece.

‘Emilia, if anything goes wrong, you come and fetch me straight away.’

Emilia nodded solemnly.

At the door Nathalie turned to me again for one parting shot.

‘Just for the record, Liv, Marc can’t stand you either. He thinks you’re a mess. He despises you.’

‘That’s what he says, is it?’ I asked sweetly.

‘Yes,’ said Nathalie. ‘That’s what he says.’

I closed the door behind her and resisted the urge to make swearing gestures at it. This was fortunate, because when I turned to Emilia she was looking up at me anxiously as if she was worried I might do something erratic.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Come on, Em, let’s find your cousins.’

For a pleasant few hours, I sat on the carpet in the living room of Nathalie and Marc’s flat, playing Headache with the children while Ben toddled about being cute and funny and trying to join in the games. I began to feel quite relaxed. The diazepam had kicked in nicely and I thought that maybe the day would turn out OK after all.

We ate reheated pasta for lunch and the baby slept for a while in the afternoon while the children and I watched
Shrek
on TV. From time to time, one or other member of the Felicone family put their head around the door, presumably to make sure I wasn’t drinking or murdering the children. At dusk Nathalie came back up to the flat, looking frazzled, her hair wisped out of its bun, her apron soiled and her hands sticky, and headed straight into the bathroom to wash and clean up in preparation for the family meal. Behind her was Marc, who swooped into the living room growling at the delighted children before kneeling down in front of me, turning over both my hands to inspect the damage. (Nathalie must have been telling tales.) He looked into my eyes and I gave a little shrug.

‘Don’t ask,’ I whispered.

I would have done anything for some time alone with this man.

Marc’s eyes held mine for for ever. Then they glanced sideways, to the four children, who were all gathered round, watching.

‘Pooh! What’s that awful smell?’ said Marc, a master of distraction, his gaze sweeping around the assembled children. ‘Is it you, Kirsty?’ he sniffed in her direction. ‘Noooo . . . Is it you, Billy? . . . Uh uh. It must be Emmie? . . . No, it’s not Emmie! Then who is it? It’s not Olivia, is it?’

‘It’s Ben!’ shouted the children, jumping up and down, beside themselves with laughter. Ben, delighted to be the centre of attention, squealed and bounced on the soles of his feet.

Marc picked Ben up, turned him upside-down and sniffed his bottom.

‘Pwoar!’ he cried, making exaggerated wafting gestures with this hands. ‘This is not going to be pretty, Liv. Why don’t you go down and get yourself a drink and we’ll see you in a minute.’

‘All right,’ I said. As I left the flat the children were gathered round him inspecting the malodorous contents of Ben’s nappy.

fourteen

Banned from the buses (and our parents weren’t above searching our pockets, bedrooms and secret hiding places for cash to make sure we couldn’t get into Watersford), Anneli and I were forced to be bored and broke in Portiston. We did once try to hitch a lift into the city, but the first vehicle that stopped contained a large woman with a florid face in a flowery dress with dark sweat stains under the arms who asked us if we realized what we were doing was very dangerous and we might be picked up by a stranger in a white van who would do unspeakable things to us. The second vehicle was a white van driven by an exceptionally leery man with a large, slavering dog and a pornographic magazine in the footwell. So we gave up on that idea.

We had no money, so we spent a couple of weeks on the beach. There were days when it was warm enough to sunbathe, and then we would take off our T-shirts and jeans (the cut-offs had been confiscated, along with our bikinis and other offensive items of clothing) and stretch out on towels in our embarrassing regulation black school swimming costumes, trying to sophisticate the look with pink heart-shaped sunglasses we’d got free with a teen magazine. We rubbed Ambre Solaire into each other’s backs and legs. I recall that lovely, cosmopolitan, elegant smell, the delicious oiliness of our hands and the warmth of Anneli’s skin beneath my fingers. And then we’d lie, side by side, the only people on the beach, chewing Wrigley’s Spearmint and listening to Anneli’s portable radio, which brought the world to Portiston beach, and made us realize how much we were missing.

After a couple of weeks of this, we were so bored we thought we would die. We needed money and the only way to get money was to find a job. There were two places in Portiston that offered work to teenagers. One was the newsagent’s, which occasionally had vacancies for newspaper-delivery boys and girls. The other was Marinella’s. This being literally a stone’s throw from the beach, we got dressed and went in. After all, we reasoned, approximately half of Portiston’s teenage boys were resident there, even if they were so boring we wouldn’t deign to speak to them if they were the last boys on Earth.

Angela was a formidable woman. She had her standards and they were high standards and they never slipped. So when two gum-chewing, slightly grubby teenage girls in wedged espadrilles, jeans and cotton shirts tied above their belly buttons teetered in asking for work, she gave us the most scathing of looks and said, ‘Sorry.’

‘But there’s a postcard in the newsagent’s saying you want waitresses,’ said Anneli, pushing her heart sunglasses back on to her head.

‘And I do. But this is an upmarket establishment with well-presented staff.’

The implication was not lost on either of us.

‘We don’t always look like this,’ I said. ‘We’ve just come off the beach.’

‘Yes, Olivia, I can see that,’ said Angela.

We were crazy that summer, but not stupid. We went back to my house, knowing it would be empty, and took turns to bathe and wash our hair. Most of my clothes were either on my bedroom floor or scrunched up at the bottom of the wardrobe. It was impossible to work out what was clean and what was dirty. Fortunately for us both, Lynnette’s room was a completely different matter. She had a choice of long, formal-ish skirts and clean blouses, all neatly ironed and ranged on hangers. Anneli and I tried them all on. The clothes we didn’t like, or that didn’t fit, we simply threw on to Lynnette’s bed.

Very soon I was wearing a white cotton shirt with a collar and cuffs and a black skirt patterned with tiny daisies. Anneli was wearing a beige shirt with a ruff down the front and a shorter, pencil skirt. We were both wearing new, unsnagged tights from a packet we’d found in Lynnette’s underwear drawer, and Anneli, whose feet were the same size as Lynnette’s, had purloined a pair of flat, soft-leather pumps. We dried each other’s hair with Lynnette’s hairdrier and combed it straight and shiny. We put on a modest but effective amount of make-up. We pinned our hair off our faces with Lynnette’s kirby grips.

‘Now we look like waitresses,’ said Anneli as we stood, hand in hand, admiring ourselves in Lynnette’s mirror. Behind us was a scene from a war film: clothes strewn everywhere, drawers upturned, towels and cosmetics scattered about the place. But Anneli and I looked the business. We went back to Marinella’s and we got the jobs.

fifteen

Downstairs, the staff had closed the shop, pulled down the blinds and prepared the room for a party.

The tables had been pushed together to make one long table, which was decorated with white linen cloths, fresh flowers, yellow napkins and candles in glasses. Bottles of wine were distributed at intervals along the length of the table which was set for seventeen people, counting the baby. It looked less symmetrical than normal. That was because, without Luca, we were an uneven number.