The Love of My Life (29 page)

‘You must stop feeding me like this, Chris,’ I said. ‘I’ll end up the size of a house.’

I licked my fingertip and picked up the pastry crumbs from my plate.

He sat down opposite me, as was his custom, to smoke a cigarette.

‘No real man likes a skinny woman.’

‘That’s what Luca used to say.’

‘He sounds like a top man, your husband.’

‘He was,’ I said.

‘What was he like?’

He was lovely. He was perfect. He was my world. I couldn’t find the words.

‘Don’t you want to talk about him?’

‘It’s just . . . It would have been his birthday today.’

Chris slapped his forehead with his hand. ‘Why don’t you stop me before I keep saying inappropriate things?’

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it’s really nice to talk about Luca with somebody who doesn’t go all tragically sympathetic on me.’

Chris smiled. ‘Actually I am quite sympathetic, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘I just find it hard to show it.’

I shook my head. For some stupid reason my eyes were growing dangerously hot.

‘It’s the testosterone. Us alpha males are hormonally incapable of . . . Oh Christ, are you crying? Oh God, I’m sorry!’

I wiped my eyes with my wrist and shook my head but I couldn’t trust myself to speak. Chris pulled his chair closer and put his arms around me and although at first I stiffened in his embrace, I soon relaxed and let him be my friend.

fifty-six

Eighteen months after we left Portiston Marc married Nathalie. Luca was invited to the wedding, but I wasn’t. I told him to go, I begged him to go. We argued about it. I said he owed it to Marc to be there – not to prove anything, or to show that he wasn’t ashamed or anything, just for Marc’s sake.

‘Not unless you’re there beside me,’ said Luca.

‘I don’t mind not being there,’ I said for the millionth time.

‘Well I do mind, very much,’ said Luca. And he kissed me full on the mouth and I think even though I was still so young I realized how wonderful it was to be loved by a man who minded about me so very, very much.

In the end, neither of us went to the wedding, but Luca wrote Marc a long letter full of love and Marc sent one back. There were snapshots in the envelope. Luca pored over the family groupings, picking out uncles and aunts who had travelled from Italy, and identifying grown children.

I noticed that Nathalie was wearing a different dress, not the one she’d picked out for marrying Luca. It wasn’t quite such a pretty dress, it was a little more adult. She looked better in it, less like a pantomime dame and more like a woman trying to make the most of herself. Nathalie was smiling in the posed pictures, but in her off-guard moments I thought she looked a little pinched. Marc was handsome as ever, gorgeous in his dark suit and purple cravat.

‘He looks like a waiter,’ said Luca.

I glanced at him covertly to see if he was jealous, but he had already turned away. He should have been there, I thought. I was angry with Angela. She was trying to drive a wedge between Luca and me by making him choose between me and his family. All she was succeeding in doing was hurting her son.

‘Bitch,’ I muttered to her heart-shaped face in the photograph. Beneath her charming little blue hat, Angela smiled out at me as if her heart was muscle and blood and not stone.

Luca was working hard; he was a good cook, and the punters loved him. He had inherited Maurizio’s showing-off genes and knew how to put on a performance in a restaurant.

If he was in a good mood, he would sing in the kitchen, and the diners would say that there was music in his food. It was good, honest, Italian food. His reputation went before him and Luca was never out of work. Soon, given the plethora of good Italian restaurants in London, he was able to pick and choose.

The people at the PR agency seemed to like me, and I was good at being a receptionist. I liked meeting people and chatting to them and putting them at their ease. There was talk of training and promotion. I went into Miss Selfridge and bought myself some new clothes. I had my hair cut at a salon in Chelsea. I met Lynnette for lunch and we sipped minestrone piled high with Parmesan and she told me I looked lovely. I swear there was a tear in her eye. We still talked about finding our father, but we both knew we wouldn’t. By this time, Mum was completely immersed in her good works and was living a life of almost monastic austerity in Hull, complete with the big-eared Mr Hensley. I’m certain their relationship was entirely platonic. I didn’t miss her much. For family, I had Lynnette and Luca, and they were the ones I loved. They were all the family I needed.

Marc and Nathalie’s first baby came along in due course. Luca was invited to the christening. I wasn’t. Marc telephoned to find out why Luca hadn’t come. I answered.

‘Liv,’ he said, his voice so hesitant that I knew he had toyed with the idea of putting the phone down rather than speaking to me. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, and then, anxious to let Marc know that it wasn’t me keeping Luca from him, ‘I keep telling Luca to go and see you, I tell him, Marc, it doesn’t matter about me but he . . .’

Marc sighed. ‘Marry Luca, Liv. Get married and then she won’t have any reason to stop you coming. You’ll be part of the family then.’

I didn’t know if by ‘she’ Marc meant Angela or Nathalie. Either way, I waited up for Luca that evening and when he came home from work I was ready with a beer that had cooled in the freezer and a proposal.

‘Fuck a duck,’ said Luca, kissing me full on the mouth. His lips were wet and cold. ‘That’s not a bad idea.’

So Luca and I were married at Croydon Register Office. It was a low-key affair. Luca wore washed-out jeans, a baggy T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, and I wore a white summer dress from Top Shop, bangles and espadrilles. Representing our respective families were Stefano and Bridget and Lynnette and Sean. In the photographs that Lynnette took with her little Kodak camera, Luca and I look like brother and sister. Our hair is long, dark and wavy. We are both smiling widely, showing a lot of teeth. In the picture where Lynnette posed us beside a fountain to make us look romantic, Luca is making rabbit ears above my head with two fingers. After the ceremony we went to Dino’s, just near the Tate Gallery, which was where Luca was working at the time, and ate pasta and drank Chianti. Luca’s colleagues had made an amazing cake which they presented to us in a flurry of sparklers and petals. It was the best wedding ever.

And Marc was right. Now that we were married, I was invited to Felicone family gatherings as Luca’s wife. Angela and Nathalie never made me feel welcome, but at least Luca was back with his family and that made him happy, and really that was all that mattered to me.

fifty-seven

The professor was giving his lecture and I was assisting. I was responsible for the slideshow that illustrated his talk. He stood on the stage in the lecture hall, looking like the handsome academic he was, with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and the top button on his shirt undone. It was awfully hot in the room. An impressive number of students had turned up to listen to him talk about the life and loves of Marian Rutherford. There was also a small group of professors at the back of the theatre, and even a couple of arts-magazine journalists, friends of his whom he’d invited.

It was no secret that the professor was going to drop a literary bombshell during the course of this lecture. I felt deliciously proud to be the only person in the room, beside the professor, who knew the nature of this revelation. I had transcribed it myself just a few days earlier.

For one so quiet, the professor was a surprisingly good presenter. I was sitting on the steps in the middle of two blocks of seats, and the audience was enthralled. The professor and I had practised what he called ‘the show’ several times and our timing was down to a fine art. I stretched my legs out in front of me; they were going brown now, and my feet were bare inside a pair of sandals. I’d painted my toe-nails bronze to match the straps of the sandals. I clicked on the mouse and a picture of Marian Rutherford standing outside her little house appeared on the screen.

She was buttoned into a high-necked jacket and only the toes of her boots protruded from beneath her heavy skirt. Her hair was pulled rather severely back from her face, but she had a tilt to her chin which implied good humour. As was the fashion in late-Victorian photographs, she was not smiling, yet there was a definite glint in her eye and in the neat little arches of her eyebrows. Her eyes were very dark and there was a slightly foppish curve in the wrist of her left hand which was balanced on an ivory umbrella handle, carved in the shape of a swan’s head.

‘Marian was a favourite of the great and the good of Watersford,’ said the professor as I clicked again, and there was a picture of the writer posing beside one of the city’s former mayors – a huge ball of a man complete with whiskers, medals and ermine.

‘She became a society darling, and a mainstay of the literary and social circuit. In her time, she was a huge celebrity, the equivalent, perhaps, of David Beckham today. However, she always professed to be happiest strolling along the seafront, or on the cliffs at Portiston, and enjoying the simpler pleasures of the seaside town.’

Cue a picturesque shot of the town taken during our earlier visit. On the large screen it was possible to make out the frontage of Marinella’s in the centre of the picture. My heart gave a little lurch.

There was no time for nostalgia.

‘Marian never married,’ said the professor, ‘and it certainly wasn’t for lack of opportunity or admirers.’

Cue several slides of Marian’s beaux, all of them literary, and extremely hairy men with a predilection for felt fedoras and pipes.

‘There were rumours,’ said the professor, ‘that she was romantically involved with a much younger man, the son of the vicar, no less. It was rumoured that one of the sexiest fictional characters in nineteenth-century literature, Dan du Bruin, was based on the man in question, yet the fictional hero bears little physical resemblance to any of these real-life possibilities.’

I curled my toes with anticipation. I knew what was coming. I glanced to my right, where the journalists were sitting. One of them, a very tall, bony man, was leaning forwards, balancing one elbow on the knee of his crossed legs, his chin in his hands, his spine making a perfect C. He was wearing Jesus sandals and I could see the curly hairs on his toes and their big yellow nails. The other was older, suited, with grey hair combed over a large, pink head. Neither of them was making notes. The professor made a little nod towards them, as if to tip them off that what came next was the important part.

I returned to the job in hand. There was a flurry of slides as the professor described how Miss Rutherford never returned to America and never left her pretty little rented house. She lived to the grand old age of eighty-six, eventually dying in her sleep in her bedroom.

‘It was,’ said the professor, ‘according to Marian’s longtime friend and companion Daniella Urbin, a most peaceful and serene death.’

He cleared his throat, and his eyes darted around the lecture hall. Nobody had made the connection yet.

‘Not much is known about Daniella. I came across a picture of her in the course of my research, and the letter from which I just quoted was actually framed on the wall of a bed-and-breakfast establishment in Portiston, so it’s quite incredible that nobody picked up on it before. Anyway, this is Daniella . . .’

I clicked and on the screen appeared a young woman. She was attractive in a rather rakish and decidedly unconventional way but the first thing anybody would notice about this young woman was the fact that she was wearing an eye patch.

The audience weren’t stupid. They’d read their Rutherford. They all knew that Daniel du Bruin had lost his left eye in a duel and ever after had to wear a patch. It didn’t take anyone long to solve the obvious wordplay.

There was uproar in the lecture hall. There was applause and cheers and the professors, many of them women with an interest in lesbian influences on Victorian literature, crowded around my professor. There was talk of changing the nature of the Portiston Literary Festival next year. The professor was going to be a hero. He didn’t know it then, but within the month he would have been interviewed by the national newspapers. He would be invited to appear on TV arts discussion programmes and his face and voice would become well known and respected internationally. That was the professor’s future, but for now I, his assistant, had a promise to keep in the cemetery.

The professor knew I had to go. I caught his eye and he held up his hand to wave goodbye. He smiled and mouthed, ‘Thanks,’ and I mouthed back, ‘My pleasure.’ I put the slide of Daniella Urbin in the zip-up pocket of my handbag, where it would be safe, and left the rest to be tidied up by Jenny. Then I trotted out of the room, blinking, into the summer sunlight.

fifty-eight

I was almost looking forward to visiting the cemetery on Luca’s birthday. I wanted it to be a special occasion. So after the lecture I went back to the flat and blew a kiss in Luca’s direction through the window, and then had a bath and washed my hair. It was so warm, I didn’t bother with the drier, but combed it out over my shoulders and walked round the flat in my towel tidying up bits and pieces. I poured myself a small glass of cold orange juice and fingered a couple of black olives out of a jar in the fridge. I played Irene Grandi, being in the mood for Italian love songs.

There weren’t many summer clothes in my wardrobe. I hadn’t brought much from London, and I hadn’t had occasion to buy clothes except for work, but I wanted to dress up for Luca. Humming to myself, I went through the wardrobe, dropping unsatisfactory and rejected items on the floor. I ended up in a very old pair of Luca’s jeans which I held up with his leather belt pulled tight so that the waist bunched, and a white
broderie anglaise
top. I remembered Luca standing behind me and kissing the balls of my shoulders one day last summer when I was wearing that top. Possibly there were still some of Luca’s cells in the fabric. I liked the thought of his DNA being so close to my skin.