The Love of My Life (4 page)

My mother and Angela were of a similar age. Both my mother’s parents hailed from Lancashire. Angela had been born in Glasgow, the only daughter of second-generation Italian immigrants who owned and ran a chain of fish-and-chip shops. Both women had been encouraged to learn a useful skill and had left school at sixteen to take secretarial classes which equipped them for office work. At the age of twenty, both had started courting and at the age of twenty-two both were married. The difference was that Angela’s marriage was successful.

When my mother arrived in Portiston with her two small daughters, she was on the run from a small-town scandal that was nipping at her heels. Up until then our little family had been living in an upmarket suburb of Wigan in what appeared to be complete propriety. This image was shattered when it transpired that my father, an electrician, was romantically involved with the teenage girl who kept the books at the shop he owned. My mother, with her secretarial certificates, could have kept the books herself, but she didn’t believe it was ‘done’ to be a mother and to work.

This is obviously conjecture, but knowing my mother as I do, I imagine the neighbours would have been outwardly sympathetic, but inwardly just a little pleased at this turn of events. My mother was, and most likely still is, a snob, and there would have been those who thought she got what was coming to her.

Mum’s overriding concern was to avoid being the subject of gossip. She craved respectability and the admiration of her friends and neighbours above everything else. She cared profoundly about what other people thought of her, and their pity would have been as wounding to her as their
Schadenfreude
. The situation was intolerable.

Fortunately, as well as her pride, Mum also had access to a small inheritance which she’d wisely squirrelled away from her husband. She had the keys to the house of a spinster aunt who had lived, and died, in Portiston. Nobody had bothered to sell the house; it was fully furnished, and available. So we upped sticks and decamped to Portiston, where nobody knew us and our history. Mum allowed people to believe that she had been widowed. Lynnette was somewhat confused but everyone else, including me when I was old enough to understand, accepted the lie. For the first seventeen years of my life, I really believed that my father was dead.

Angela, on the other hand, had married Maurizio, a gentle, hard-working Glaswegian whose family originally hailed from Naples. Maurizio’s catering skills complemented Angela’s administrative abilities: they made a good team. Angela’s wealthy parents gave the young couple Marinella’s as a wedding present. They worked hard to establish the restaurant, living in the large flat above it and expanding their family in line with their profits.

My mother looked down her nose at Angela, despite the fact that she had money in her pocket and a good-looking, cheerful husband who adored her. She thought it wasn’t right for a pregnant woman to be working behind the counter of what she termed a ‘jumped-up ice-cream shop’. She thought that only lower-class people worked in the catering industry and only bad mothers worked at all. She also thought it wasn’t right for a pregnant woman to be wearing high heels and make-up and looking for all the world like somebody out of a fashion plate.

So in the early months of our time in Portiston it was my mother who enjoyed a relative life of leisure, while Angela worked every moment that she wasn’t asleep. My poor, thick-ankled, lonely mother passed her days polishing the furniture and scrubbing the floors in the dark, draughty house in which we lived. She only had my sister and me for company. God knows she must have felt isolated, so it’s little wonder she turned to religion. On nicer days, she would sometimes take us out for fresh air to play on the pebbled beach, waving the seagulls away from the fish-paste sandwiches she had prepared for our lunch. She would sit and knit and watch the ferry travelling to and from Seal Island while Lynnette and I made mermaids out of seaweed. Luca’s mother, meanwhile, was managing a home, a pregnancy, four sons, a business, a loving but unpredictable husband and the two local girls who worked as waitresses in the restaurant.

The two women never became friends, but they soon became courteous acquaintances. As well as my mother’s carefully rationed visits to Marinella’s for coffee and cake, she and Angela met at school functions and, inevitably, given Portiston’s size and lack of amenities, in the shops, the doctor’s surgery, the post office, the bank and the church.

Angela’s fifth child was another boy. Maurizio was ‘
fam al settimo cielo
’ – over the moon – Angela less so. She told my mother that she’d ordered some pink fabric to make smocks, and knitted pink matinée jackets, so convinced was she that this baby would be a little girl. She sat down at our table and stroked Lynnette’s dark hair and sighed for the plaits she would never have to twist and the ribbons she would never have to tie. The baby, Fabio, a bonny, happy, wide-eyed boy without an ounce of malice in him, sat in his pushchair opposite mine and blew bubbles at me from his little pink lips while I sneakily kicked him with my own fat little legs, hoping to make him cry.

seven

I moved into my flat on the top floor of a tall, terraced Georgian house at number 12 Fore Street, Watersford, on 17 March, St Patrick’s Day. The pub windows were full of Guinness promotions, there was a shamrock on every street corner and the inhabitants of Watersford, still suffering the tail-end of a long winter, cold even by the standards of this north-easterly ridge of the country, were in the mood for drinking – especially as it was a Friday. It felt like a party the day I moved into my flat. I had equipped myself with wine and diazepam so that I could join in.

The flat was in good order and newly painted. The landlords had had the place professionally cleaned so there was a strong smell of disinfectant, with an underlying odour of drying carpet, about it. I had paid a stupid price for a man with a van to transport three hundred miles the bed Luca and I used to share, the settee, the TV, several potted plants whose chances of survival had diminished exponentially over the last few weeks, boxes of books and CDs, and various other bits and pieces that either smelled of Luca or were stained with wine he had spilled or burned with cigarettes he had dropped, or that he had chosen, or repaired, or broken.

The flat was clean, but it was cold. I turned the central heating up as high as I could, and scorched my calves in front of the old-fashioned three-bar electric fire in the fireplace in the living room. Because the flat was in the eaves of the house, the ceilings sloped and once it was warm the double glazing kept the heat in. There was no need for curtains, because nothing overlooked the flat, but I tacked nets up over the front windows anyway, leaving the back-bedroom window clear. It had comforting views to the dark space on the hill beyond which was the cemetery.

I had broken my promise to tell Angela when I arrived in Watersford. I had no inclination to speak to her.

I made up the bed, and aired it with the electric blanket and a hot-water bottle. The bed had got used to our bodies over the years. Now I would have to get used to sleeping on Luca’s side, my hips in the slight indentation where his hips used to be, my face turned towards the place where my face used to be. In this position I could see out of the window and fall asleep as close to my husband as circumstances permitted.

That weekend I explored my new neighbourhood. I found it difficult to go out by myself. It was like being in another country where I didn’t speak the language or understand the culture. Several times I walked into a shop and then felt panicked because I didn’t know where to find the item I needed. My accent didn’t fit any more, I’d been too long in London and had lost my northern lilt. Once I attempted to catch a bus into the city centre but as I stood at the bus stop I realized I didn’t know which number bus I needed, or how much the ticket would cost. I abandoned the plan and ran back to the flat. Inside, I leaned on the door, shutting out the world. My hands were shaking. I wondered, not for the first time, if I was going mad.

Fortunately, there was a small supermarket tucked into the ground floor of a student house at the end of the road. It was stocked with enough basic provisions to keep me going for the foreseeable future, and the off-licence was the same distance in the opposite direction, so there was no practical need to wander far.

I didn’t need a job – Luca had been earning good money and his life insurance had been up to date. I had also spoken to an agent about letting our London house out to tenants and he had assured me that this could be done quickly and easily. Sooner or later I would have to find work, for the sake of my own sanity, but I could deal with that later, when I felt stronger. For the time being, everything I needed was within walking distance of the flat.

By Monday it was all beginning to feel familiar. I was used to the way the doors opened and closed, I knew which ring on the gas cooker didn’t work, I knew how to set the mixer tap on the bath so that the water was at the perfect temperature. I had stocked the tiny kitchen cupboards with tins of soup, crispbreads and cereal, food that didn’t require thought or preparation. The television was tuned in and working. I had seen to all my practical requirements. It was time to visit Luca.

March was as cold as January had been. If anything the trees and shrubs of Arcadia Vale looked bleaker and blacker than they had at the funeral; the headstones hunched their shoulders against the wind and the inscrutable angels were sadder than ever, their poor bare ankles and shoulders exposed to the biting air.

I walked up the hill to Luca’s grave. Despite the gloominess of the surroundings, I had an irrational sense of pleasurable anticipation at being physically close to him again.

The cemetery was full of primroses. Prettier and more subtle than all the shop-bought flowers and plastic ornaments on the graves, they grew wild and promiscuous in every available slope and crevice. God, they were sweet, their pale yellow flowers like glimmers of sunshine amongst the greyness. Primroses lined the path up to Luca’s grave, and I felt almost like a bride treading the marital aisle as I climbed that path, a wrap of thin, unnaturally yellow forced daffodils in my hand.

At the grave I stopped.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know . . .’

Marc was there. He was squatting on his heels, his chin resting on his fists, staring at the head of the grave. His eyes were red and swollen. It might have been the cold but I doubted it.

‘Hey.’ He turned and smiled, jumped up, wiped his face with the back of his hand. ‘Liv, what are you doing here?’

‘I couldn’t stay away any longer,’ I said.

‘Me neither.’

We stood for a moment, each of us not looking into the other’s eyes.

‘Is it the first time you’ve been back here? To the cemetery?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve come a few times. It doesn’t seem to help much.’

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say to him.

‘How’ve you been?’

‘Oh, good,’ I said. ‘Fine. Yourself?’

Marc shrugged. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘OK.’

I jiggled my heels. ‘It’s so cold.’

We both glanced down to the grave. Poor Luca was down there with that cold weight of earth above him. Down there with the frost. A sorry little sigh slipped between my lips like an exhaled breath. The black dog on my shoulders grew heavier.

‘Shall I fetch you some water for the flowers?’ asked Marc. ‘Give you some time . . .’

I nodded. ‘Yes, thank you. That would be nice.’

Marc took the flowers and left me alone with the grave, which hadn’t yet been colonized by primroses. The carcasses of other shop-bought, rootless flowers, blackened by repeated frosts, littered the grave. Somebody had planted something, but it was too small to know what it was yet. There was a sheet of paper on the grave, weighed down with a pebble, a letter or poem, too water-damaged to read, and a damp little blue teddy bear from one of Luca’s nephews. I knelt down at the head of the grave and tidied the soil, as if it were Luca’s hair.

‘Darling, I’m back,’ I whispered. ‘I’m just down the hill there.’

I closed my eyes and tried to summon up my husband, but I couldn’t reach him.

I was calm, but there was a thought inside my head. I imagined scraping away at the soil with my hands, digging down to Luca, opening the coffin, climbing in beside him and just lying there, watching the sky change colour. Looking out into the universe like a tiny dot at the eyeglass end of a huge telescope.

Around me were thousands upon thousands of headstones, every one commissioned by somebody who had been left behind. The grief of all these abandoned husbands and wives, parents and children lapped at my ankles. It was a lake, a sea. And beyond Arcadia Vale was a whole ocean of death and loss and grief. It was unbearable. How could a world have evolved where such sadness was the inevitable result of love? There was a spasm in my heart, and I thought: Yes, I will bring tablets and gin, and I’ll dig down to Luca, and I’ll lie there and watch the sky and that’s how they’ll find me.

The thought was so comforting that it filled my cold eyes with hot tears. The black dog lay down beside me and put its chin on my lap. I stroked its head.

‘Liv? Are you all right?’

Marc’s nose and cheeks were red but his eyes less so. He was proffering an old pickled-onion jar half full of water and my poor forced daffodils with their unnaturally orange trumpets.

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I said.

‘No worries,’ said Marc. He was wearing boots, jeans and an old leather jacket over a baggy old jumper, with a woollen hat pulled down over his ears. He had a stud in both ears and there were shadows of tiredness on his face. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m off now, I’ll give you two some privacy.’

‘Marc,’ I said. ‘Please don’t go.’

When we were children it was always the three of us, Luca, Marc and I. None of us was ever excluded. We were a perfect triangle. I didn’t see why it should be any different now.