One Night in Italy (6 page)

Chapter Four

Il segreto
– The secret

Catherine didn’t have a clue where she was going as she accelerated away from the house, tears pouring down her cheeks. She just had to get away, far from her husband, and . . .
her
. That woman. How could Mike have done such a thing? In
their bed
!

She couldn’t concentrate on the road, barely saw the junctions and bends as she hurtled along, adrenalin roaring. The woman’s face kept slamming into her mind, the casual way she’d said ‘Oops,’ like she thought the situation was funny. To think she’d had the nerve to look Catherine in the eye and smirk, actually smirk, while she was lying on Catherine’s Marks and Spencer sheets with Catherine’s husband sticking his traitorous cock in her.

How had it happened? She didn’t understand. What about the paperwork Mike was meant to be doing? Had it all been a lie? Had he thought,
Great, the wife and kids are out of the house all day, I’ll shag someone else
?

No. Not Mike. No way.

She was already starting to doubt her own eyes, her own brain. She must have made a mistake somewhere during that bizarre two minutes up in their bedroom. Mike always did say she was about as observant as Stevie Wonder. He was right. What was more, he was not the sort of man who had sex with strange women in broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon. He just wasn’t. ‘You muppet,’ she imagined him saying when she came back. ‘Did you seriously think I’d do the dirty on you? Even for you, that’s ridiculous.’

Maybe it was some weird hallucination. Some terrible feverish brain strain, brought on by the stress of the children going. But . . .

She gulped loudly and snottily. Wise up, Catherine. Deep down, she knew there had been no hallucination, no mistake. She had seen them, however much she wanted to pretend otherwise. Mike and the blonde woman. The blonde, nubile, pert-boobed, definitely younger, definitely sexier woman. Naked. On their marital bed, the goose-feather duvet kicked off onto the carpet. She had seen them.

Overcome with shock and grief, she pulled into a layby and sat with her head on the steering wheel, hazard lights flashing, and burst into tears.

Nearly nineteen years earlier, Catherine had marched into hospital fully braced to say, ‘I don’t want it.’ She planned to book herself in for an abortion as soon as possible to get rid of the interloper in her womb – the mistake – and that would be the end of it. Well, she was only twenty, wasn’t she? Two years into her degree and accidentally pregnant from a holiday fling – it wasn’t like she could possibly go
through
with it.

She lay there on the hard paper-towel-covered bed, waiting as the sonographer rubbed the cold blue jelly on her tummy then started moving the transducer around. ‘Don’t even look,’ her friend Zoe had advised. ‘It’s only a blob, not a baby.’ But then the sonographer announced ‘Twins!’ in an excited sort of way, and Catherine found herself unexpectedly transfixed by the monitor, showing the two bulbous heads and bodies. Twins! Not blobs of cells but two actual babies growing inside her. Tiny little people. Whoa.

Their heads were close together as if they were having a private conversation in the shared dark intimacy. In fact . . . ‘They’re holding hands,’ she whispered, eyes wide in shocked delight.

‘It does look like it, doesn’t it,’ the sonographer said. ‘Sweet.’

It
was
sweet. It was the sweetest thing Catherine had ever seen. And in the next moment, a force had taken over her, something primitive and rushing and fierce, and she knew, just like that, that an abortion was out of the question. ‘Thank you,’ she said faintly as the sonographer wiped the goo off her belly with professional briskness.

After a sleepless night, she got on a train to Sheffield the next day, carrying herself with a new sense of wonder, still shocked by her own momentous decision. The evening before, she’d sat in the science section of the university library, poring over everything she could find on the subject of babies and childbirth. Her body felt like a ticking clock, a precious vessel, rich with mystery.

Clutching the bit of paper with Mike’s address, she knocked tremulously on his door and waited there in her parka and fingerless gloves, the grainy scan photos tucked carefully in her pocket.

Mike’s mum Shirley answered, a pewter-haired woman in a grey wool dress, a small silver cross around her neck. ‘Yes, dear?’ she asked.

‘Is Mike there? Mike Evans?’

The woman looked at her with curiosity. ‘No, dear, he’s at university down in Nottingham. Won’t be back for another few weeks.’ She hesitated. Clearly something in Catherine’s face signified that this wasn’t a casual popping-round visit. ‘Can I give him a message?’

Catherine’s hands stole instinctively to her belly. She had recently felt the babies moving inside her for the first time and the strange fluttering sensation had returned. ‘I . . .’

Shirley noted the positioning of the girl’s hands, the pinched look on her face, the urgency with which she’d asked after Mike. She was a practical woman who could recognize disaster when it appeared on her doorstep. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

It was nearly six o’clock in the evening now and Catherine had been sitting in the layby for hours. The sun had slipped behind the hills without her even noticing; the other cars had their headlights on as they zoomed through the thickening darkness. She didn’t know what to do. Her brain wouldn’t function properly. What if she went home and that woman was still there? What if she walked in and Mike and that woman were still having sex, both laughing at her?

Oops
, the woman might say again cattily.
She’s back, Mike. Take a hint, can’t you, love?

Feeling cold, she put her arms around herself, tucking her hands in her armpits for warmth. She still couldn’t believe it. The whole thing felt like a bad dream, a joke. If only she hadn’t hurried home so quickly! If the twins hadn’t been so keen to see the back of her and the motorway traffic hadn’t been so light, she might never have interrupted Mike and
her.
Who was she, anyway? And how long had she been stripping off and having sex with Catherine’s husband?

Oh God. It was so awful, like something from a soap opera. The mistress in the bedroom while the wife was out of the house. Talk about tacky. And talk about out of character. Was Mike ill? Having a breakdown? Maybe he was in some kind of fugue state where you didn’t know what you were doing. She’d seen it once on TV. There must be some explanation because he loved her, didn’t he? She was his wife!

Unless . . . A cold fear pierced her. Unless he wasn’t ill. Unless he knew exactly what he was doing. Unless he didn’t love her at all.

Her phone was ringing, she realized after a while. It was past seven o’clock now and becoming darker by the minute. Another whole hour had slid silently by without her even noticing. Maybe
she
was having a breakdown?

Her fingers were numb with cold as she reached into her handbag to retrieve the phone. ‘Hello?’ she said hoarsely, her throat aching from crying.

‘Catherine,’ said Mike. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m . . .’ She blinked and stared out of the window. She could see nothing. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

Pathetic. She knew that was what he was thinking. Pathetic. How could anyone drive somewhere and not know where they were? Sometimes he spoke to her with such scorn it made her want to shrink out of sight.

‘Don’t make a scene, Catherine,’ he said eventually. ‘Just come home and we’ll talk.’

Then her phone must have lost connection because all of a sudden the dial tone buzzed in her ear.

She leaned back against the moulded head rest and heaved a long, juddering sigh. He wanted to talk. He’d said, ‘Come home.’ Those were good things, weren’t they? Practically an apology. He must be feeling terrible about this.

Yes. She would go home and he would explain that it had been a stupid mistake, never to happen again. A moment of madness, he would tell her. Then she would forgive him, cry a bit probably, and pop one of her sleeping pills to blot the whole thing out. Tomorrow, they would carry on as before. They never need mention it again.

Other couples managed to survive infidelity, didn’t they? She and Mike could too. They had to. Because without him, she was nothing.

When she walked into the house, the first thing she saw was his suitcase in the hall, black and ominous. A suit-carrier hung from the coatrack and she looked at it, then back at the bulging suitcase. No, she thought, panicking. No.

She went through to the living room as if in a dream. Mike was sitting on the sofa, his knee joggling impatiently. He stood up when he saw her.

‘I’m sorry you had to find out this way,’ he said. The line sounded well rehearsed. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time.’

Wait a minute. The moment of madness had been going on for ‘some time’?

‘We both know we shouldn’t have married each other in the first place,’ he went on. ‘I’ve made it work for the sake of the kids, but now they’re no longer here I . . .’

Whoa. Shouldn’t have married each other in the first place?

‘I want to move out. I’ve met someone else.’

‘The blonde woman,’ she said stupidly. Derrr. Ten out of ten, Catherine. Well spotted.

‘Yes. Rebecca.’

There was a deafening silence. Blood pounded in her ears. She thought for a moment she might faint. ‘Is this really . . .’ She swallowed. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Well, I’m hardly going to joke about it, am I?’ The sharpness of his tone cut her to the quick.

‘I . . .’ She was gaping like a halfwit. ‘I don’t understand.’

He got to his feet. ‘I don’t love you,’ he said, slowly and deliberately. ‘Do you understand that? You trapped me, getting pregnant. I never wanted any of this.’

Tears dribbled from her eyes. She sank into the armchair, her legs suddenly weak. ‘But . . .’

‘Look,’ he said, exasperated. ‘We reached the end of the road years ago. We both know it. This is the best thing for both of us – there’s no point struggling on, being unhappy together for the rest of our lives.’

Unhappy? Did he really think that? Every marriage had its ups and downs. That was life. Wasn’t it?

‘I’ll be back in a few days to get some more of my stuff,’ he said. ‘Bye, Catherine.’

Chapter Five

L’investigatrice
– The detective

Anna hadn’t got very far in her quest to track down her mysterious Italian father. Annoyingly, it turned out that Pete was right, and Gino was an extremely popular first name in Italy; there were tens of thousands of them. She would need a lot more information if she was ever going to narrow the field.

Her grandmother hadn’t been much help, other than the initial slip of the tongue that had started all of this. Anna had returned to the care home several times since, hoping to jog her memory with different techniques, but nothing had come of the venture other than to thoroughly confuse her. Despite the dementia, there was clearly some lockdown in Nora’s head which meant that she would go on loyally protecting her secrets the best she could till the end.

Anna had spoken twice more to her mum on the phone, but each time she had bottled out of asking her outright for information. Still, Anna was a journalist, wasn’t she? She could uncover a story better than most people. There had to be a way around it.

‘Colin,’ she said to the most senior writer on the paper one November morning. ‘If you were looking for a person and only had a first name to go on, what would you do about it?’

‘Give up,’ he replied, deadpan. Colin, who’d had a long career as an investigative journalist for the BBC up in Edinburgh, as well as a stint as a crime correspondent for the
Telegraph
, was one for telling it straight.

‘Oh. Right. But if you did decide to pursue it, I mean, what would you do to track them down? Where would you start?’

‘If all I had to go on was a first name? I wouldn’t bother starting at all. It would be impossible.’ His white, bushy eyebrows twitched with the beginnings of a frown. He could be something of a curmudgeon, Colin, especially if you bothered him before his lunchtime pint.

‘Who are you looking for, Anna?’ asked Joe, one of the sports writers, ambling through the office with a coffee just then. ‘Don’t tell me someone’s done the dirty on you.’

Anna, who had returned dispiritedly to writing copy on the big Christmas light switch-on due next week, looked up and gave a wan smile. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘It’s my dad.’

She hadn’t meant to be so transparent but there was something about amiable, friendly Joe that always disarmed her. He was all long limbs and cheekbones, and half the girls in the office fancied him with his chiselled face and black hair cut in a cool mod crop. ‘Oh,’ he said, halting and looking awkward. ‘Sorry – I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. She was aware that several other pairs of ears had pricked up around the office; there was suddenly an intense, alert silence. Every journalist was a nosey parker, it was part of the job description. ‘I’ve never known him – I don’t know anything about him. But I’ve recently discovered he’s called Gino, and he’s Italian. Well, he was, anyway. He might have snuffed it by now, of course.’