The Silent Wife(14)
Nico flinched. He stretched out his hand to her. ‘I’m here for you, Cessie. I hope you know that.’
He tried to pull her round for a cuddle but she shook him off. ‘I have to share you with Maggie now.’
Nico sagged into his chair. Despite being just forty, five years younger than Massimo, he could easily be mistaken for the eldest son, with his air of the worn and weary, the flecks of grey in his dark hair, the sense that something vital had seeped out, sucked away in battles with Francesca, wars he could never win.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him; I related so completely to that feeling of never quite getting it right, however hard you tried. I’d thought parenthood would be such a breeze, especially with Massimo by my side. His enthusiasm for starting a family had silenced my reservations about putting my fledgling career in accountancy on hold for motherhood, conscious that his first marriage had failed because Dawn hadn’t wanted children. And there’d never seemed a ‘right’ time to go back to work since. At least not in Massimo’s eyes and certainly not in Anna’s, who’d been horrified I might leave Sandro in nursery with ‘silly young girls who’ve never even had babies of their own!’
I pushed away the stab of sorrow at how optimistically I’d embraced motherhood and the grind it had become.
Right on cue, Sandro whispered he didn’t feel very well, that his stomach hurt. I didn’t want to get into a discussion at the table about which end he thought might be the trouble – the Farinellis for all their scorn for other people’s weaknesses were ridiculously prudish when it came to bodily functions. So I got up to take Sandro out, but Massimo put his hand over mine.
‘He can wait for a minute. Don’t miss out on sharing your memory of Caitlin. It’s important for you, Francesca, isn’t it, to hear how much your mum meant to us all?’
Francesca had captured – and perfected – Caitlin’s ability to look at her audience as though they were honoured to be in her company, as though she pitied the trees that produced the oxygen wasted on my words.
I sat down, muttering to Sandro to go to the loo, that I’d pop out in a minute. But he shook his head and tugged at my hand. My shoulders tensed, my mind racing. I needed to nip this in the bud right now before it escalated, before we set off down that well-trodden path of Massimo versus Sandro, with me dancing between them like a demented puppet. The dull weight of inevitability competed with my sense of urgency.
Massimo patted Sandro’s shoulder. Only I could see the hard fingers of the other hand digging into his arm, prising him off me. ‘Come on, son. Let Mummy talk about Auntie Caitlin.’ His tone was light but Sandro’s practised ear would be able to discern the thin thread of threat.
Sandro leaned into me, holding his breath, his stomach puffing out in a concave circle. I prayed that we weren’t about to see a splatter painting of soup.
I tapped Massimo’s arm. ‘I don’t think he feels very well. Could you take him out then?’
Massimo’s nostrils flared with impatience but his words played to the gallery. ‘Where does it hurt, son? Come here and let me have a look.’
I didn’t need to see Anna to know she’d have that expression, that face semaphoring to the world that ‘Poor Lara does her best, but Massimo has to step in so often. That boy’s so sickly, I don’t think she can be feeding him right.’
Sandro squiggled away from Massimo, leaning towards me, his back rigid, his bony shoulders digging into my ribs. I sat on my hands to stop myself scooping him up, lifting him onto my knee, rubbing his stomach and cuddling all his knots of angst away.
I could have leapt up and kissed Beryl when she came bustling in with a Cornetto – ‘Sandro – come into the kitchen and have this while the grown-ups do their talking.’
She’d swept him out before Massimo could react, before he could insist on Sandro standing in front of him to be prodded and poked, before the inevitable announcement: ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’
The surge of apprehension loosened inside me as Sandro ran off holding Beryl’s hand, snuggled in close to her ample hips as if leaning into a windbreak in a storm, safe for the moment.
Irritation flashed across Massimo’s face but he settled back into his chair, arms folded, expectation chiselled onto his features. ‘The floor’s yours then, Lara. I know how much you miss Caitlin.’
I groped around for something, anything other than the thought that was burning in my head, blotting out everything else. The scar on the back of my hand from an old dog bite tightened and itched as it always did when I was nervous. I glanced around wildly, feeling Massimo shift beside me. I spotted the little vase of snowdrops on the side. ‘Gardening,’ I said, as though I’d just come out with the answer for a million-pound prize. ‘She was brilliant at gardening.’ I prepared myself to start naming spring bulbs, gearing up for a eulogy about her daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses.
Anything to stop myself saying, ‘The thing I remember most about Caitlin is how much I hated her and her perfect life.’
7
MAGGIE
Now I wasn’t spending the mornings in my shop working out how many dresses I needed to alter to pay for new football boots for Sam, my old love for sewing returned. And by mid-March, when Francesca had ramped up her hostilities – flouncing out of the room whenever I walked in, barging me out of the way to sit next to Nico on the couch, encouraging Sam to be cheeky to me – it had also become my haven. I loved opening the door into my own private space where I wasn’t constantly on the back foot, feeling as though I had to make excuses for still sucking in air. At work I knew the answers. People looked to me for help and didn’t go all out to contradict me once I’d found a solution. In the long hours I spent bent over buttons, hems and hooks, the nagging feeling of not being good enough subsided only to claw its way to the forefront again as I drew closer to the place I still didn’t think of as home.