My Husband's Wife(66)

‘Both.’ Carla took a large sip. The wine was not as good as that in Nonno’s cellars, but it helped her relax. ‘I have just finished my law degree in Italy and now I am going to do a conversion course in London. But I also intend to look up some old friends.’

‘Really?’ The man’s eyebrows rose. They were sandy-coloured, stirring distant memories of Ed’s head tilted over his sketchpad. ‘I’m in the pharmaceutical business myself.’

Carla could see where this was going. She’d already said too much, partly out of nervousness. It had encouraged him. If she didn’t take steps now, he would drone on for the rest of the journey. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, draining her glass. ‘But I have a headache. I think I must sleep.’

His disappointment gave her a flash of pleasure. Not that she needed any proof that she could turn heads. The real test was whether she could turn the right heads.

Carla took out the silk sleep mask from her soft brown leather handbag. Adjusting her seat into the reclining mode, she closed her eyes. Just as she was starting to relax, there was a lurch followed by a ping and an announcement. ‘This is the captain speaking. We are entering a period of turbulence and I would advise you to return to your seats and fasten your seat belts.’

Silently, Carla began to recite her Ave Marias. Then, in a further bid to distract herself, she allowed her mind to slip back over the years. To the time when she had first flown in a plane. When she had been a scared, uncertain child. Not like the new Carla whom she had worked so hard to become.

She’d only just recovered from her appendix operation when it happened. Gossip travelled fast. After the discovery by her school friend’s mother that Mamma came from her husband’s birthplace, people in the valley and the mountains began to talk about Nonno’s daughter, who was not a successful London career woman as he had claimed, or a ‘widow’ as Francesca had maintained, but a struggling single mother, working in a shop. Prompted by Nonna, who had, it turned out, been behind those silent phone calls (‘I traced you through directory enquiries, but every time I got too scared and put down the receiver’), Nonno had summoned them ‘home’. And because Mamma could no longer pay the rent, they had had no choice.

From the minute they arrived, both she and Mamma found themselves firmly under Nonno’s thumb. Her grandfather would not allow Mamma to work. She must stay at home and look after Nonna – Carla’s grandmother – who had ‘aches in her bones’.

‘How I miss Larry,’ Mamma would tell Carla when they were alone in the bedroom they had to share.

‘But he was a bad man,’ she would reply.

‘He loved me.’

Instead, Mamma blamed Lily. Lily had forced him to stay away. Lily and her interfering ways.

Try as she might, Carla could not make Mamma see sense – Larry was as much to blame as Lily. Her mother’s hair grew lank. It lost its bounce and its sheen. Strands of grey crept in. Slowly at first. And then fast. She became thin. The bloom on her skin was no longer there. And she kept going over and over that last night in the flat. ‘I should have called the doctor earlier for you,’ Mamma kept saying. ‘You might have died.’

‘No, Mamma,’ Carla had reassured her. ‘You were sad.’

Mamma had nodded. ‘Perhaps you are right. If Lily had not threatened Larry, none of this would have happened.’

Was that true? Carla wondered. After all, she had planned to get rid of Larry. But when Lily had done it for her, she realized it hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

Already their lives were regulated by Nonno. She was never allowed out late, even when she became a teenager. She was banned from parties that her friends were invited to. ‘Do you want to end up like your mother?’ he always demanded.

‘Shh,’ Nonna would say.

But Carla already knew the truth. One of the neighbours had let the cat out of the bag, as the English would say, soon after they had moved in. ‘Your poor mamma.’ She said the ‘poor’ bit with a sneer, as though she wasn’t to be pitied at all. ‘To have been betrayed by that man. To think he was already married with a child of his own.’

‘How do you know about Larry?’ she had demanded.

The old woman’s face had frowned. ‘Your papa’s name is Giovanni. He used to live in Sicily, but I heard he has now gone to Rome.’

So her father was not dead at all? Carla felt she should be shocked. Yet something inside her had suspected this all along. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first lie Mamma had told her. Giovanni must be the man with the funny hat under Mamma’s bed. The neighbour’s remark prompted Carla to take another look at the box, which, now they were back in Italy, Mamma had hidden at the back of the wardrobe behind her clothes. Sure enough, tucked inside an old envelope, was her birth certificate. There was a blank space in the section for the father’s name.

Despite this, Carla knew that she must not ask Mamma anything or she would be even more upset than she was already. So she talked to Nonna instead. ‘Do you have his address so I can write to him?’ she asked. ‘If he knew I was here, he might want to see me.’

‘Hush, child.’ Nonna put her arms around her. ‘I am afraid he wants nothing to do with us. You must let the past be the past.’

Carla reluctantly did as she was told. What choice did she have? No one would even tell her what her father’s real surname was. Cavoletti was of course her mother’s maiden name, something she’d never thought of when they sent those postcards to Nonno and Nonna.