The Love of My Life (6 page)

If we (or more usually I) had been naughty, we would be excluded from the weekly trip to Marinella’s. It was dreadful to be locked in my bedroom knowing that I was missing all the fun. If we were particularly good, or if my mother had one of her migraines and wanted to bribe us into silence, extra visits would be dangled in front of us as treats.

Portiston is a small town with just one primary school, so it was inevitable that Lynnette and I would grow up with the Felicone boys. Stefano had already moved up to grammar school by the time I started at the primary. Carlo was in the same year as Lynnette. Luca and Marc were two years above me. The year I started school, there were just twenty children aged between four and eleven attending Portiston Primary and we shared the same classroom.

It was a friendly school, still housed in purpose-built Victorian premises with separate doors marked Girls and Boys for when even the infants used to be segregated. I can’t remember the name of our teacher, but she was young and had dark frizzy hair and glasses and she smiled a lot and used to put her hand on our heads if we were becoming overexcited – it had the effect of calming us down.

Our classroom was bright and airy, with pictures tacked up on the walls, and it was alive with the bird-cage chatter of the infants. I remember sitting in between Luca and Marc, colouring in a picture of a dragon with fat, wax crayons. I was good at colouring, and so was Marc, but Luca found it tedious and scribbled all over the black lines that were supposed to contain the colour. He was quite a naughty child. He used to spend more time out in the corridor, excluded from class for misbehaviour, than any of the rest of us. Even these minor separations made Marc uncomfortable. While Luca was excluded, Marc would be constantly wandering over to the door and standing on tiptoe to peep through the glass window and make sure his brother was in sight and all right.

Both boys had very skinny legs with bony knees. Their shoes looked far too big for their feet. They wore black lace-up shoes whilst I had brown sandals. When I was little, I preferred Marc to Luca, because he was patient and obliging. If I told him to do something, he generally did it. Luca refused to co-operate with anything I suggested. Even at the age of six, he liked to be the one in control. Marc and I were usually happy to be his foot-soldiers.

The three of us built a den in the wooded area behind the school, which was officially out of bounds. We thought we were being very daring. There was a brick-lined hole in the ground already, which must originally have been part of some earlier building, or perhaps an old bomb shelter. We covered the roof of this hole with sticks, and then covered the sticks with grass and leaves. We had to leave a space to climb in, but when we were inside we filled in the gap so that we were completely hidden.

The hole was tiny. There was just room for the three of us to squeeze in with our chins on our knees and our arms folded round our legs. It smelled of wet leaves, mud and fungus and once we had hidden ourselves inside it was dark and green, like being underwater. I worried about spiders dropping into my hair. We used to pretend we were hiding from the enemy. I didn’t know who the enemy was. This was the twins’ game; I didn’t have any say in its content or its outcome. Sometimes they made me be captured by the enemy, which meant I had to hide in the playground until they came and rescued me. They didn’t always bother.

Sometimes Lynnette let me play with her, and I had a girlfriend of my own age, Anneli Rose. I preferred playing with the twins though.

As we progressed through primary school, I spent more and more time with Luca and Marc. We were a gang of three.

Out of school, we had a pretty idyllic childhood. By the time I was about eight, Mum used to spend most afternoons lying on her bed with the heavy brown curtains drawn. She said it was migraine, and Lynnette and I were forbidden from disturbing her. The only way to avoid this was to go out. As a result, although Mum endeavoured to keep her daughters on a very short chain, when she was lying down with migraine we had limitless freedom. Lynnette was happy reading or drawing on the beach. I would seek out the Felicone twins. The three of us were forever up on the cliffs spying on people (a favourite pastime) or bobbing about in the harbour in Maurizio’s boat. It was anchored and we were forbidden to touch the rope that held the anchor, but we pretended we were out at sea and we caught fish and, occasionally, swam, although the water was so cold it took my breath. When we were hungry, which was often, we went back to Marinella’s. I would sit at a table on the terrace at the front, swinging my bare brown legs, peeling my sunburn and making ersatz grown-up conversation with the tourists while the twins begged whatever food they could off Maurizio. He would make a big show of bringing a tray of cakes and fizzy drinks out to us.

‘For you,
signorita
, the chocolate fudge cake,’ he would say, squeezing my cheek, and I would be so pleased that my face ached with smiling.

Occasionally Fabio tagged along with us, but by then we all knew that he wasn’t quite like other children. He was silent. He didn’t join in with anything. He would come with us if Angela told him he must, but it was as if he didn’t care if he was there or not. We liked him well enough, but he was never one of us.

It’s difficult for me to tell different summers apart now. One runs into another in my mind. I recall one summer when Luca and I made a small fortune telling Japanese tourists on the literary trail that we were direct relatives of Portiston’s very own famous writer, Marian Rutherford. For 50p we would pose for photographs beneath the blue plaque on the wall of the house where she used to live, now the Rutherford Museum. The tourists were too polite to question our authenticity, but word got back to Angela, who immediately put an end to our entrepreneurial enterprise and told us we must give all the money we had made to charity. My mother told me she was bitterly ashamed of me and due punishment was inflicted. Marc had refused to join in the scam. I can’t remember his objections, whether they were moral or if he just didn’t want to get into trouble.

Those summers seemed to last for ever, and when there was a sniff of autumn in the air it would be time to go back to school, me in one of Lynnette’s hand-me-down pinafores, Luca and Marc in new trousers and shirts two sizes too big, so that they had to fold back the cuffs. We all thought our childhoods would never end.

Then, the September after my ninth birthday, I went to school as normal to find the twins weren’t there. They’d both gone up to Watersford Boys’ Grammar School in the city. By the time the summer holidays came round, the boys had no interest in me at all, having discovered more interesting pastimes like football and Army Cadets. We had nothing much to do with each other again until we were teenagers, and very soon after that I found out that my place in the triangle had been taken by somebody else. That somebody was Nathalie Santo.

nine

I decided to take the bull by the horns and call in to Marinella’s. Angela would be wondering what had happened to me, and I wanted to see Marc again. I had a new ache and it was centred on him.

Early in April I coaxed the Clio, now covered in birdshit, back into life and followed the road back to Portiston. I parked the car in the seafront car park. In summer there’s a warden because a good many literary tourists end up in this remote little seaside town. In April, however, the inclement weather keeps most of the tourists away.

Beyond the seafront is the town’s main street with its single line of pastel-painted bars, restaurants and shops facing out to the sea. Marinella’s is the biggest and grandest of these establishments. It was founded in 1890 as part of a chain belonging to a
gelato
entrepreneur, a chain that stretched throughout Scotland and the north of England. In summer they sold ice cream, in winter their speciality was hot peas and vinegar. They were remarkably successful. In 1901 there were twenty-one ice-cream shops in Watersford and two years later the number had risen to 115. I know this because the history of the UK ice-cream industry is written on the inside of the menu in Marinella’s, and over the years I’ve learned it off by heart.

I stood outside for a moment, my arms wrapped round myself against the wind. A solitary seagull stood on one of the posts that support the railing that demarcates Marinella’s terrace from the pavement, and mewled at me. Taking a deep breath, I walked up the steps and pushed open the door.

It was both a relief and a disappointment not to see anybody I knew inside. Only two of the tables were occupied, one by a couple of elderly ladies taking time over tea and sandwiches and the other by a young touristy-looking couple holding hands but not saying anything to one another. Probably honeymooners. A young waiter I didn’t recognize was wiping crockery behind the counter, and another young woman was tidying up at the end of the bar, where the cakes were stored on doilies behind glass. Both were wearing the Marinella’s uniform: black trousers, immaculate white shirt, long white apron. The girl’s blonde hair was held back with a black velvet Alice band. I used to have one exactly the same.

The young man smiled at me. ‘Please sit down. I’ll bring you a menu.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘But I’m looking for Mrs Felicone. Angela. Is she here?’

‘Is she expecting you?’

‘No. But I’m family.’ There. I had said it. I had given myself the status Angela never bestowed on me.

‘I’ll see if she’s available.’

‘Tell her it’s Olivia.’

‘Oh.’ The young man stopped in his tracks and the girl paused, silver cake knife in hand. They clearly recognized my name. ‘I’m so sorry . . .’ the boy said.

I gave my widow’s smile, a brave little smile of reassurance accompanied by a dismissive ‘Don’t worry about it’ wave of my fingers, picked up the menu and pretended to study it while he trotted off to find Angela.

She came through from the offices at the back almost immediately, her glasses in one hand, the other extended in welcome. She was smiling too, but hers was a forced smile.

‘Olivia, what a surprise!’ She embraced me politely, a rush of Dior, pink lipstick, heels and hairspray. As always she looked immaculate in a navy skirt and white blouse, with a pale blue cardigan hooked over her shoulders. A string of pearls dangled round her neck.

‘How have you been?’ she asked, holding me by the shoulders at arm’s length so that she could look at me properly.

‘Fine,’ I said.

Angela steered me towards a table, away from the door that led to the office and the flat which was now Marc and Nathalie’s home. I sat down in the chair she indicated.

‘We’ll have coffee, please, Gavin,’ she said to the young man. ‘And please bring us a slice each of the orange and rosemary cake. Fabio made it, Olivia, it’s delicious. Let’s sit here, by the radiator.’

In the face of Angela’s exquisite neatness, I felt somewhat unkempt. I’d simply fastened my hair back with an elastic band that morning. I was wearing jeans and old brown boots, and a long woolly coat which had seen better days over one of Luca’s fleece jumpers. As I hadn’t washed anything of Luca’s because there were still vestigial traces of his scent in the folds of the clothes, it is a fair assumption that my outfit was grubby. I wished I’d thought to make an effort and put on something special – or at least something clean.

‘Well,’ Angela said, tapping her spectacles on the table.

I smiled at her, nervously. I realized I should not have come. Angela didn’t really care where I was or what I was doing, she just wanted me to stay away from her family.

‘So I assume this visit means you’re back up in Waters-ford?’ she asked after a painful pause.

‘Yes. Yes I am.’

‘Oh.’

‘I just wanted to let you know, that’s why I . . .’

‘Yes of course.’

Thankfully the young man came over to the table. Like all Marinella’s staff he had been expertly trained. He laid out linen napkins, silver cake forks, coasters, three different kinds of sugar and porcelain jars of cream and milk on the table. Then he placed tiny cups of coffee in front of us. He returned a minute later with the cake, the slices lying helpfully on their sides in the centre of the fine white plates.

‘This looks lovely,’ I said.

‘Do eat,’ said Angela, pouring cream into my coffee, just the way I liked it.

‘So how is everyone?’ I asked, my mouth dry and sticky with cake.

‘Well, you know,’ said Angela. ‘No, you wouldn’t know. But it’s not easy. Maurizio’s not been good. Not good at all. Nathalie’s been marvellous, of course. She and Marc have taken him out to look at patio heaters. Nathalie says it’ll be good for Maurizio to go through some of the familiar motions.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s nice.’

‘That girl has been an angel,’ said Angela.

‘And Marc?’ I asked, moving a piece of cake around my plate with my fork. ‘How is he?’

Angela glanced at me. She didn’t want to give me anything. Not a crumb of the truth.

‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’s coping very well really.’

I was shrinking beneath her gaze, becoming less of a person, taking up less space. If Luca had been with me, I would have been all right. Without him, I felt I might disappear altogether. Sensing her advantage, Angela continued along the same lines.

‘Nathalie’s been an absolute rock to us all,’ she said. ‘I really don’t know how any of us would have managed without her.’

I nodded and spooned crystallized sugar into my coffee.

‘She’s the best thing that could have happened to this family,’ Angela said, just in case I hadn’t got the point.

I was trying to be strong, but I knew I couldn’t hold out much longer. The effort of holding back the humiliation was already exhausting me.

‘So tell me,’ said Angela. ‘When are you planning on going back to London?’

I stirred my coffee. ‘I haven’t any plans at the moment.’

Angela opened her mouth to respond but fortunately was interrupted by a commotion behind us, and a cold draught. Maurizio, Marc, Nathalie and their three little children, their cheeks and noses pink with cold, came into Marinella’s.