From a Distance (5 page)

Tom hadn’t even wanted an ice cream, he had actually stopped to let his puppy out in a gateway he’d noticed on this unfamiliar stretch of road. He’d just bought her, Flicka, a lurcher soft as smoke, from a gypsy set-up near Lowestoft, and was on his way home. He always reckoned that the puppy had brought his guard down, so when he saw Luisa, her face framed in the ice-cream van’s window, cloaked in pink fur and caught in a panel of gilded sunset reflected off the pond’s glassy surface, love hit him like a boxer’s fist. It happened there and then at his first glimpse of her on the roadside in the most ridiculous vehicle he’d seen outside a
Flintstones
cartoon. She looked like an off-duty film star combined with a Renaissance painting. He didn’t say any of this to Luisa. No indeed. No way. Not them.

Tom’s heart may have been hurtling up and down with the brio of a ragtime piano, but he gave nothing away. He sauntered slowly up to her window, taking in the gaudy pink of her van’s cab, the twin cones, like flambeaux on a chariot picked out not in gold, as he, an art historian, might have chosen, but in pistachio green and vivid raspberry. Tom squinted in at this girl, moving a jar of gummy bear chews to lean his elbow on the counter, settling his tall frame into an accustomed slouched stance, relaxed. Smouldering, he hoped, though it never seemed to work that way.

Luisa, in a split second of registering surprise that the guy with a mop of hair and narrow grey eyes was actually peering into her van, took in the long denim clad legs, and—

‘Hey! it was the eighties, denim was the image, nothing wrong with that!’ Tom always liked to interject at this point.

Luisa was tongue tied, excitement rising as he opened the conversation. What he said was, ‘How many ice creams do I need to buy to get you to shut this shop and come and help me take this bundle of puppy for a walk?’

Luisa knew she was blushing, and pressed the ice cream scoop to her cheek. ‘Ow, it’s freezing,’ she exclaimed.

He reached in, took it out of her hand and opened the door for her. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I like that foxy fur of yours.’

‘That’s sleazy,’ she said, and he nodded, looking at her sideways out of his sleepy eyes, then shut them together with a contented sigh.

‘Tod’ began as his name for the coat, ‘because Tod is an old country name for fox, stoopid,’ he’d told her, flicking her cheek gently when she asked. Flicka took to it as her bed. ‘It’s only fair, seeing as you’re in mine,’ said Tom, when they found her curled up in it on the floor on the first morning they woke up together.

A warm, wet sensation on her hand brought Luisa back to the present, Grayson, grandson of Flicka, was standing in front of her, eyes shining, tail thumping against the cupboard. Good, he was awake. ‘Have a bit of this, Gray, and I’ll take you out,’ she offered. ‘I know it’s not really your thing, but just pretend, can’t you?’

She cut into the blue pudding. The ice cream was beginning to melt at the edges, soft, yielding, unctuous. Grayson averted his gaze, he looked embarrassed. He wasn’t going to eat it.

Luisa looked across at him, ‘You’re usually the first to raid anything with eggs and cream in it. Is it because it’s blue?’ she demanded. ‘Oh well, s’ppose it’s up to me, isn’t it?’ She licked the spoon. Hot and cold, sweet with a kick, smooth, silky, more-ish. Was it the ice cream or the memory of the first date that suddenly flipped her stomach in a knot of desire for her young self? The tug of lust grabbed her when Tom hooked her out of her carefully guarded small-town life, the life of an émigré family, safe, tight knit, a little cloying, and took her into his world. He had been crazy about her. Luisa licked the meringue coating, her tongue exploring the ridge between brittle, chewy meringue and foam-light ice cream. That girl that she had been, Tod, in a pale blue T-shirt and her pink fox fur, flashed her smile at Tom and knew in a slow motion tungsten-bright moment that she would fall in love with him. She sighed, throwing the spoon in the sink. Memories seemed to exist in a different universe. No time had passed since she had opened the oven, and yet, in her mind she had travelled back  two decades to her first meeting with Tom. She glanced again at the three clock faces and was propelled to a month ago, and Tom being kind, thoughtful, busy with his mission.

He wore glasses now, small ovals framed in fine wire that caught the light and reflected it back to the dark centre of his eyes. She still loved his eyes. She had opened her mouth to say so, but Tom cut in, polishing his glasses on his handkerchief, a swell of satisfaction riding on a smile. ‘I was on the industrial estate, at the tyre place. Had a quick look in the factory shop while I was waiting for the car. This caught my eye. I’ll put it up for you.’

He dragged a chair over to hammer a nail into the wall above the kitchen door.

‘It’s a clock,’ he said finally.

Luisa laughed. ‘So it is,’ she agreed, deciding not to comment as a patch of plaster the size of a coin crumbled off the wall, falling like a ghostly pinch of salt on to the door mat.

‘That’s wonderful, thank you.’ She was puzzled. ‘Do I need three? How does that work? I’ll never be late again, will I?’

Tom wiped his hands on his trousers, ‘Oh it’s nothing really, just thought you could do with a way to stay in the loop with Ellie away and all that. This might do the trick.’ He opened the glass face of the third clock. ‘It’s meant for the stock markets, but I’ll alter the Tokyo time to India. That way you’ll be up to speed on the daily adventures in Kerala.’

He stepped down off the chair, kissed Luisa’s cheek, then stroked it and kissed her again. ‘You smell nice, Tod,’ he said, and wandered out of the room with the air of a man who had thought of everything and fixed it.

A Handel aria, from the opera
Julius Caesar
, ended, leaving delightful menace hanging in the air. It was followed by the song ‘Angel From Montgomery’. Luisa loved the deadpan gloom of the lyrics, ‘
How does someone go to work in the morning, come home every night and still have nothing to say?
’

Did she and Tom still have things to say to one another? She thought so, but he was so busy at school. Running a big secondary school’s history department, his dedication shown by the fact that he had shoehorned a qualification in history of art into his schedule because he believed it was civilising to his students. He was spreading himself thin, but he was happy. And he was home in the holidays, which meant they could do things together. The trip to St Ives with the children before Ellie left had been precious. All of them in the car, squabbling about what to listen to, playing the games of their childhood car journeys, remembering, bickering, laughing, sleeping. She had treasured those three cold, grey days in February.

Luisa arranged the meringues on the table. They were impressive, definitely impressive. Baked Alaska wasn’t a very good name for them, was it? It sounded cartoonlike, and macho, not sensuous enough for the voluptuous puddings before her. The recipe was perfect. It was exciting to be on the brink of success, she thought, although a shame that no one except the dog would notice. For a moment she wished Gina was not away, she would be proud of her. The Amorazzis, her mother’s family, had a series of
gelateria
scattered across the low-lying small towns in the Dolomites region and running down the shin of Italy. Uncles, cousins, grandfathers, a great trail of her mother’s forebears had worked in or owned ice-cream shops. As a child in her bedroom facing out onto the grey North Sea, Luisa had slept beneath a battered green metal sign, depicting a smudged blue cow drawn out of the letters of the name ‘Amorazzi’, the last relic of the family business her grandfather had not been able to sustain in Italy.

He came to Great Britain after the war with a hunch he could bring something to life. Working his trademark brightly painted ice-cream vans and carts, the new enterprise brought colour and excitement to the seaside towns in Norfolk and Suffolk. He gained a reputation Luisa cherished. Food was a life force, her life force. Antonio Trevi, Luisa’s father, had been a market gardener, a prisoner of war in Norfolk, who stayed on and set down roots, finding work at the canning factory in North Walsham. He met Gina ten years after the war. It was his day off and, as he liked to tell the story, he went to place a bet on the dogs at the Yarmouth greyhound track, and won the jackpot, his lovely wife Gina, who was waiting the tables in the restaurant, and had gone outside to sneak a cigarette when Antonio strolled by, his pockets full of cash and his heart singing.

Tom loved Luisa’s exotic origins. ‘If you’ve got to have in-laws, make them the Italian mafia,’ he always joked. ‘The food’s good, and an Italian mother-in-law will love all the men in her family, and that includes me!’ His enthusiasm made up for the lack of interest the children showed. All that Mediterranean fire diluted through the generations to just a pair of dark eyes and the curl of a cow’s lick in Luca’s hair. Luisa could never quite believe their indifference, and hid it from her mother. Their genes were different. Her tall, athletic eighteen-year-old son amazed her, his body shape was so un-Italian, miles of legs that meant when he stood next to his grandmother his elbows were level with her chin.

He reminded her of Tom. His light-hearted slant on life was the antithesis of her family. There were two kinds of Italian men, as she saw it, the Amorazzi, who were short, saturnine and swarthy, skittering and frenetic like little bulls, snorting, intensely engaged with life’s struggle. And then there were the Modigliani types, as Tom identified them. The photographs of her father’s family showed etiolated Trevis picking their way through the back streets of Turin, slight narrow-shouldered men, nimble, orderly and tidy like Antonio himself. Poverty had frayed their sleeves, drawn nervous lines across their faces and given them straight small mouths. The sweetness of disposition that made her father so dear was palpable through the grainy black and white. A hint of softness in his dark eyes, gentleness in a lowered head, hair flopping, a little too long, that essence was in Luca too.

The phone rang, imperiously, Luisa thought.

‘Hello?’ Splashing sounds and a gasp, ‘Oops, sorry, dropped the phone.’

It wasn’t imperious. It was Dora. ‘Lulu, it’s me, are you in the middle of something?’

‘Ice cream, why?’ Water gushed in the background. ‘It sounds like your phone’s leaking, what’re you doing?’

‘In the shower. I’m a bit late. It’s on speaker phone so it’s not getting wet.’

The gasps were slightly soft porn, Luisa thought. ‘It sounds as though you’re auditioning for
Readers’ Wives
with the shower head.’

‘Luisa! Don’t be disgusting! I’m just laying a paper trail. You know, making a call to a friend, making sure someone knows where I am. I’m off on a date.’

‘Ah, so it
is
an audition. Thought so. Who is it, anyway?’

‘Oh you know, the man from the North I told you about. The one from the Internet.’

‘But I thought you told him you wouldn’t go anywhere far?’

‘I’m not. That’s the amazing thing. He’s coming here, Lou, to Blythe.’

‘He can’t be. You said he lives in Newcastle. It’s miles away, how’s he getting here?’

The shower ceased, Dora’s voice loomed. ‘He’s called Bruce, he’s actually from Darlington, not Newcastle. He might be amazing.’

‘He might be crazy. Be careful, Dora. Was it his idea to come all the way here?’

Everything about this date was a bad idea in Luisa’s eyes, but what did she know?

Dora sighed. ‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘So that’s why I’m making the phone call. I chose a pub near here because I thought it was good to be visible. D’you think he’s a pervert?’

No point in trying to appeal to Dora’s common sense, she was cynical about a perfect partner these days, but that didn’t stop her from interviewing them. She loved male company. And men loved her right back. With the exception of Maddie’s father. Poor old Benji. He still looked gloomily bemused by Dora when he showed up for Maddie’s birthdays, even though their marriage had ended more than six years ago, leaving Dora alone with their one-year-old daughter. Dora was always happy to tell anyone who might enjoy her stories, which included her fascinated nieces, that she then began a more dedicated search for a soulmate. Meeting Aaron, as she had done a year later, was the proof that such a person existed. Aaron’s tragic death floored her. She had only recently begun to take an interest in meeting anyone again, but even so, there were more candidates than Luisa could keep up with.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘You can’t practise tantric sex with him, there won’t be time.’

Dora’s laugh was full of mischief, ‘Not necessarily, but I was wondering if you could pick up Maddie for me? That way if we go for a walk or something I won’t have to rush off. I’ll meet you in town. She said you and she had a plan to go out to tea this week anyway.’

Luisa smiled to herself, ‘I love Maddie,’ she said, ‘I told her we had to ask you before we planned it. She wants to go shopping with Mae. She’s such a darling, Dora, you’re so lucky to have someone small.’

‘Share her as much as you want to if you feel broody, Lou, in fact, I don’t suppose you’d like to share her today, would you? Keep her for tea?’

Luisa thought about her afternoon. Seven was the most enchanting age. She could never resist Maddie. Time with her trumped most everyday activities and Mae would like it too.