Black Cake(79)

Marble looks at Byron and Benny. My brother and sister, she thinks. She calls on all her professional skills now, trying to convey curiosity and friendliness and none of this undercurrent of agitation that she is feeling. She talks around the elephant in the room. She talks about her mum and dad, she talks about her late husband and her son’s schooling, she talks about her plans to go back to the UK full time.

One thing Marble doesn’t say is how hard it will be to leave Italy, to leave the everyday memories of her husband behind, even after more than fifteen years. Even after the occasional lover. Even after a man like Coffee Man. She suspects he would fly to England to see her, if it came to that. And it will have to come to that. She knows it’s time to make the move. She’s been feeling this for a while now, ever since she sent her son back to the UK for prep school.

How to begin again? Marble has clothes in the closets, food in the pantry, plants to think of. She has Bobby the dog. The thought of putting poor Bobby in a crate and carting him over to London, the thought of emptying out her husband’s home, is weighing on her. But this is too personal, this isn’t any of Byron and Benny’s business.

Looking at Byron and Benny, now, Marble is aware that she is feeling resentful. She knows these two have nothing to do with Marble being abandoned as a baby, but the fact is, Byron and Benny are the ones who grew up with Eleanor Bennett, while Marble is the one who was left behind. Byron and Benny might not have been born yet but their mother, in effect, chose them over Marble.

Marble knows that she should ask herself, what would a woman have to go through to make the kind of choice that Eleanor Bennett had? It was fifty years ago. A woman like Marble, a person with financial and social resources, cannot presume to judge a woman who came of age in another time, or under different circumstances.

And yet.

Marble will find out more tomorrow how all of this happened. Her birth mother’s lawyer says Eleanor Bennett left a letter and recording for her before she died. Maybe she should have gone to the lawyer’s office first, but the thought of it had made her throat unbearably dry. Ease into it, she’d thought, but now the questions are driving her mad. What will Eleanor Bennett have to say? Will it be enough to cancel out what Marble is thinking?

She didn’t want me enough.

All this thinking about her birth mother makes Marble miss her son terribly. Her Giovanni, her boy Giò. She wants to tell Byron and Benny that she, Marble, never had any doubts about wanting to be his mother, not even when she found herself widowed and pregnant at a young age and without warning, with all her visions of the future dashed. She wants someone to ask her, right now, What is he like? so that she can take out her mobile phone and show them the photos of her son.

Marble wants to say that she would trade being here with Byron and Benny, trade the chance to learn anything about her biological mother, for knowing that her son would be back in his own room when she returned home, and not tucked away in a boarding school. Giò is her real family, not these two people sitting at this table with her.

Byron is a funny sort. The man looks like a movie star but he is gaping at Marble as though she’s stolen his favorite teddy bear. She doesn’t think he likes her very much. Benny is sweet, but a bit needy. Marble notices that Benny is shifting her seat closer to her. Inching, inching. Marble is not sure what to make of this.

“About your son,” Benny says.

Marble takes a breath.

“So, he goes to school in England?”

Marble nods.

“But you live in Italy.”

“I go back and forth. I started Giò in the Italian schools but then I wanted him to get exposure to the UK system. After this, he’ll be able to live and work wherever he wishes.”

“So your son won’t really be Italian and he won’t really be British?”

“He’ll be both, I suppose. Like many people, he isn’t any one thing.” Though right now, Marble is feeling that she is indeed one thing, more than any other. She is Giovanni’s mum, and she has been letting her son grow up out of her sight. What in the world was she thinking?

Five years have passed and Marble has mourned every single month that her son has lived away from her, gone to school with kids she doesn’t know, rested his head at night in a room under a different roof, come back home for the holidays looking and sounding different from the child she sent away. She doesn’t understand how so many other parents like her have done the same thing, generation after generation, sent their eleven-year-olds away to school because they could afford to do it, because they’d convinced themselves that this was the way to guarantee their children the best future possible.

At one point, Marble thought of taking her son out of the boarding school, but he seemed to have adjusted so well. Now it’s too late. Exams to finish, university to plan for. What Marble doesn’t understand is how all this time, not a single boarding school mum has ever taken her aside at a dinner, at the supermarket, in a doctor’s office, to say I hate this, I want my child back home. Surely she is not the only one who feels this way.

“Do you have pictures?” Benny asks. Marble feels her neck relax. She picks up her mobile phone and swipes through to the photo gallery and hands the phone to Benny.

“Oh, look at him, he’s gorgeous!”

Marble nods.

“And he’s doing well in school?”