The Love of My Life (28 page)

Later, when he came up to see me on the ward, gasping for breath, propped up on pillows with oxygen being fed into my nostrils, he told me it was the best meal of his life.

‘There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be,’ he said. ‘You do talk a load of rubbish,’ I gasped out. He was right though. It was an inauspicious beginning to a truly beautiful relationship.

fifty-three

I took a bus to Watersford city centre to buy a dress for the faculty dinner. It wasn’t difficult at all; I couldn’t imagine why I’d found public transport so frightening just months earlier.

I browsed in Top Shop and River Island and Zara, but I knew where I wanted to go, and when I’d failed to find anything that was both decorous and sexy along the High Street, I went into Wasbrook’s.

It was laid out exactly as it had been when I used to work there. The point-of-sale displays were much more sophisticated than they used to be, and the carpet had been replaced by wood-effect flooring, but the assistants still wore the same uniform, and all the departments were in their traditional places.

I took the escalator up two floors to the wedding department. Two mannequins, which I swear were the originals from fifteen years earlier, posed on the podium, one in a shepherdess-type dress of the kind favoured by Nathalie, the other in a slim, ivory sheath. There was a young girl in a blue skirt and a white blouse standing behind the desk, sorting the jewellery. I smiled at her.

‘I used to work here when I was about your age,’ I said.

‘That’s amazing!’ she said. I gave her a £5 tip out of nostalgia. She thanked me nicely.

I travelled down a floor to womenswear, and wandered round looking at all the clothes. It had been such a long time since I’d bought anything that I didn’t know what suited me any longer. In the end I bought a demure, long-sleeved, navy-blue dress, and a pair of strappy, heeled shoes which weren’t so demure to go with it. I didn’t think the professor would like me to stand out from the crowd, so I took the ‘less is more’ approach.

That evening, I bathed and washed my hair, and listened to the Sugababes while I dressed. I’d bought some new make-up: foundation and mascara and a pinky-brown eyeshadow. For the first time since Luca’s death, I plucked my eyebrows and waxed my legs. I glued on some false nails. I stood on the bed to look at myself in the mirror. I looked OK.

The professor had sent a taxi to pick me up and take me to the hotel. In the lobby, I panicked. There were hundreds of people milling about and I didn’t know any of them. Most of the men were of an age where their hair was either receding or had totally disappeared. The women wore sleeveless dresses and shawls, and the flesh on their arms wobbled. I scanned the crowd for a face I recognized. Then Jenny appeared from nowhere, gorgeous in Karen Millen, with Yusuf on her arm, and they led me to the professor who was in a crowded lounge, deep in discussion with a Polish man with a long beard and a bald head.

‘Olivia, how lovely to see you,’ said the professor with polite enthusiasm. He didn’t kiss me, but placed a gentle, proprietorial hand on my hip and introduced me the Polish historian.

During the meal, I didn’t say much. We were sitting at a round table, and the conversation was predominantly about literature and history and everyone seemed to be showing off, in the nicest possible way, so I ate my fish in parsley sauce very slowly and cut my new potatoes up small so as not to finish before everyone else, and made sure I drank more water than wine, so as not to embarrass myself or the professor, and I successfully deflected intellectual questions. All in all, I think the evening was a success.

There were a lot of tedious, self-congratulatory speeches after the meal, when the temptation to drink did get the better of me, and I finished off a bottle of red all on my own. I was still sober enough to know that as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t fall over, I would be OK.

When the speeches were finally over, the professor invited me into the hotel garden for a nightcap before the taxi came to take us home.

At the back of the hotel was a long, stone terrace. Night-scented plants exuded the most delicious fragrances over the terrace, where some of the younger couples were canoodling in an intellectual kind of way. The women had kicked off their shoes and the men were smoking cigars. The professor led me down some steps in the centre of the terrace into a sunken garden, where an illuminated fountain played on a fishpond and moths had gathered in search of the moon.

‘You’ve nearly finished the Rutherford manuscript,’ said the professor. ‘You’re the first person who’s managed to stay the course.’

‘I’ve enjoyed it,’ I said. ‘It’s so interesting. It’s going to be a great book.’

‘You haven’t reached the best bit yet.’

‘Oh?’ I sipped my Cointreau, silently thanking God for summer nights and moonlight and orange liqueur.

‘You’ll see.’

I was more than a little drunk. ‘Excuse me for asking,’ I said, ‘but how long did it take you to stop missing your wife? After she’d left?’

The professor cupped his glass. ‘Grief is an illness. Different people respond to it in different ways. And they find different ways of treating the symptoms.’

I picked a sprig of lavender and crushed it beneath my fingers. It scented the warm air.

‘It’s like a virus,’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘Once it’s in your blood you can’t fight it and there is no cure. You just have to travel with it and see where it takes you.’

‘So how long have you been on your own?’

‘Ten years.’

‘Ten years? And you’re still not cured?’

The professor sat down on a curved stone bench and held his glass between his knees and watched the beads of water from the fountain tumble and dance as they fell. A smile turned up the edges of his lips.

‘I sound a bit self-indulgent, don’t I?’

‘Just a bit.’

‘I should get over myself, shouldn’t I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I appreciate your honesty, Olivia.’

‘Any time, professor, any time.’

It was all OK, it was a nice evening and on Monday, when I went to work, everything was exactly as it always was, as it should be.

fifty-four

Eventually Luca and I made it to London and we started off our life together in a bedsit on the second floor of an old terrace in Woolwich. It was filthy-romantic, with damp blooms of mould on the ceiling, peeling wallpaper and an infested mattress on the floor. The window-glass vibrated to the tune of the trains that passed below our window. There was a schizophrenic poet and an old lady with a little Jack Russell dog called Minette in the rooms on the ground floor and some shy refugees on the floor below us. There was a shared bathroom. Luca used to pee in the sink. I loved him so much that I liked the fruity, farmyard smell of the drain when I brushed my teeth in the morning. We had sex all the time, everywhere. We smoked a lot of dope. We were on a permanent high. We were thin and good-looking. We went to a lot of parties. We loved London.

Mum had disowned me; Lynnette was quietly sympathetic. She and Sean took us out for meals and watched with the pleasure of parents as we ate like gannets, finishing off their leftovers, eating the sugar out of the bowl. Lynnette and I grew very close. We made plans to track down our missing father. Lynnette brought round food in Tupperware containers. She told us to heat it up but we were always so hungry that we ate it with our fingers straight out of the tub as soon as she was gone. Pasta bake, risotto, curry.

It was more difficult for Luca. Stefano, not yet with Bridget but living in London, came to see us. He was supposed to be angry but his heart softened the moment he saw Luca’s sorry, dark-lashed eyes. He hugged his brother and they both wept. I stood in the corner, my sleeves pulled down over my hands, and fidgeted. Luca missed his whole family terribly. He particularly missed Marc. Sometimes he would creep away to the phone box on the corner. He would return with sore eyes and lie down on the mattress, his face to the wall, one arm curled protectively over his head. I left him alone at those times. He wrote letters to Marc and gave them to Stefano. Stefano told us that Marc, left to clear up the mess that we had left behind us, tried to hate his selfish brother, but couldn’t. Still, it took months before the first bridge was built between them.

On sunny days and rainy evenings, we would walk the streets of London, hand in hand and starry-eyed, too broke for even a McDonald’s but generally too happy to care. We stole quite a lot. Just the essentials – food, toiletries, condoms, cigarettes, records, make-up. It can’t have been easy, but we managed.

Luca soon found a job in a restaurant and Lynnette called in a favour from a friend and found me work as a receptionist in a fairly swanky PR agency.

A year after we had left, Luca and I went back to Portiston for the first time. By then, unable to cope with yet another scandal, my mother had sold the house and left Portiston. I knew from Lynnette that Mr Hensley had arranged for her to stay with an associate of his who was chair of the governors at a church school in Hull. Angela, Maurizio, Fabio and Marc and Nathalie were still running Marinella’s. Angela and Maurizio had, however, bought a house in Watersford and had given the flat over the restaurant to Marc. Marc was already engaged to Nathalie.

I wasn’t allowed into Marinella’s.

Angela had told Luca over the phone that I wouldn’t be welcome, but he thought that when we got there she would change her mind. She didn’t. I stayed in my overheated but comfortable room in the bed-and-breakfast that had, at one time, been Andrew Bird’s house, while Luca visited his family. I lay on the bed and read a battered old paperback copy of
Valley of the Dolls
for hours and ate Minstrels. When that became too tedious, and there was still no word from Luca, I walked along the beach, picking up pebbles and throwing them into the sea, which was spraying and tossing playful little waves. The wind whipped my hair across my cheeks and my scalp was itchy beneath my woollen hat. At the ferry ramp I stopped, for old times’ sake, and wrapped my arms around myself and kicked the shingle around with the toe of my boot and smiled at the memory of Georgie. Then I turned round and wandered back up into town.

I didn’t look at Marinella’s, but I had to walk past its façade. The day was bright and blustery, a silvery-grey December day, yet the light behind the glass in the restaurant was golden and warm. I didn’t look, but I was aware of people moving behind the glass, the shadows of the family I had loved and who I’d wanted to love me.

It wasn’t as cold as it had been the year before, but it was still just a few days before Christmas and my breath veiled my face as I walked. I went along the High Street, past the windows of the little shops with their festive decorations and blinking lights. Thankfully the chip shop was open, its windows steamed from top to bottom, and a billow of fishy warmth cushioned me as I opened the door and stepped inside.

I recognized the girl behind the counter; she’d been in the year above me at school. She was pregnant beneath her white apron, her cheeks were rosy and her forearms were spattered with little burn marks.

‘Yes?’ she smiled at me, a stub of a pencil between her fingers to write my order on the wrapping paper.

‘Just a bag of chips, please.’

She grabbed the scoop and plunged it into the cooker, piling golden chips on to the paper. I was so hungry my stomach gave a lurch of pleasure.

‘It’s Olivia, isn’t it?’ asked the girl, salting the chips.

I nodded.

‘You and that Felicone lad caused a bit of a fuss last Christmas.’

‘Sorry. ’

‘Oh, you’re all right.’ The girl smiled and folded the paper. ‘I thought it was very romantic myself. His family didn’t take it too well, though, did they?’

I handed her some money. ‘Luca’s over there now trying to sort things out.’

‘It’ll be all right soon enough,’ said the girl, giving me my change. ‘These things blow over. It’ll all be forgotten.’

I thanked her, and took my lunch back out into the chill air. I ate it in the shelter near the ferry terminal. It smelled of pee and motor oil. An empty beer can rolled mournfully in the gap beneath my feet. The chips were delicious, fat and salty and so hot they burned my tongue and then sat heavy and comforting in my stomach.

Afterwards, I went back to the bed-and-breakfast and fell asleep on the bed. Luca came back red-eyed and dejected. He said Angela had invited him to stay for Christmas, but not me. He said Nathalie had refused to meet his eye and Maurizio looked old and disappointed. Only Marc had asked after me. He had sent me some cake, wrapped in tin foil. I ate it in the passenger seat of Luca’s car as we headed out of Portiston back to the lonely route south, picking off the lemon icing and letting it melt on my tongue.

fifty-five

September 1 was the date of Luca and Marc’s birthday. I did not know how I was going to get through the day. Yet it was a beautiful morning and when I looked in the mirror as I looped my hair into a ponytail, I saw my own face, and I knew it was a face which Luca had loved, and that made me feel almost happy.

It was going to be a long day. First, there was the professor’s landmark lecture about the life and loves of Marian Rutherford in the Watersford City Museum. After that, I had promised myself an hour or two alone with Luca. Then I didn’t know what I would do. I decided to go where the day took me.

In the café, Chris had put a posy of sweet william in a vase in the centre of my table. The intense, peppery scent mingled with the smell of espresso. He had the tiny coffee cup on the table for me almost before I had sat down, and with it was a glass of iced water.

‘Nothing but the best for you, madam,’ said Chris, shaking out a napkin for me.

He brought me frittata – a new recipe, he said, eggs soft and yellow and mixed with sweet vegetables. I hadn’t been hungry, but I cleared the plate he set before me and then bit into a vanilla pastry sprinkled with almonds and sugar, and swallowed a second espresso. By now the blood was dancing in my veins and my eyes were wide open. The day no longer felt like an ordeal to be endured, but just a day, like any other only with more memories.