The Silent Wife(19)
‘He’s gorgeous, Sandro, look how friendly he is,’ I said, pressing myself against the hall wall as Lupo strained towards me, his big tongue flapping in my direction. I could feel the fear circulating at the back of my knees, making my legs tremble.
I summoned up the voice I’d heard dog owners using, with the little endearments that always ended in a ‘y’.
‘There’s a lovely doggy.’
‘These dogs are native to Africa, Sandro. I drove all the way to Whitstable to fetch him,’ Massimo said, impatience gathering in his voice.
But among all the other rubbish traits Sandro had inherited from me – an overlong second toe, a wonky canine tooth, a tendency to chapped lips – a paralysing fear of dogs was on the list. I couldn’t let Massimo notice Sandro was reversing up the stairs rather than motoring down. I clapped my hands with delight like a nursery teacher about to burst into a rendition of ‘Wheels on the Bus’.
‘Come on, let’s see if he likes our garden. He might want to do a wee if he’s had a long journey, and we don’t want him making a mess in the house.’ I beckoned him down the stairs.
Massimo put down the dog on the hallway floor, where it started to jump up and scrabble at my thighs. I wanted to burst into tears.
Massimo eyed me closely. ‘So what do you think of your present?’
I forced a big smile. ‘A complete surprise! I didn’t even know you wanted a dog.’
‘I bought it for Sandro. It will do him good. And he’ll be a brilliant guard dog for you when I’m away.’
It was a measure of how bonkers my life had become that I was prepared to put up with a dog that frightened me rather than risk my husband’s wrath at my ingratitude.
11
MAGGIE
Even if Francesca saw me only as a source of sanitary towels she didn’t have to ask her dad to buy, her attitude towards me had definitely softened during the last fortnight.
As a result, I dithered over broaching the attic clearing with her, torn between needing a proper workspace and the fear of smashing the delicate truce that had sprung from such an unlikely source. However, with the middle of April, my deadline for moving out of the shop, fast approaching, Nico was adamant. ‘You need a place to work and we need the house to be a home, not a shrine.’
Contrarily, as soon as he showed any signs of being able to sweep Caitlin into a corner, I took it not as a sign he loved me so deeply he was now able to move on, but as an indication that he didn’t let himself get too attached to anyone. I hoped if I dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn’t be brushed out of his life into a few bin bags and a couple of wicker baskets and carted off to Oxfam.
I sat downstairs in the kitchen while Nico discussed it with Francesca, bracing myself for raised voices. But when Francesca came down, she leant shyly against the doorjamb.
‘When you’ve got your sewing room finished, I was wondering if you could make me a dress for the end of year party? If you want, that is.’
I wanted to leap off my chair and promise to make fifty-five dresses, each in a different colour. The opportunity to do something we could discuss together, that wasn’t Nico manufacturing a ‘And now you will get to know Maggie’ occasion, filled me with hope for the future that I couldn’t have predicted even two weeks ago.
When Saturday rolled around, Massimo and Sandro invited Sam to the park with them. He’d settled in very well to having an extended family. In fact, for two pins, he’d probably move into Massimo’s house, with the double lure of football and Lupo. I wasn’t sure how keen he’d be on living with Lara though. She was what my mum would call ‘dour’, endlessly looking like she was waiting for rain to come bucketing down despite a cloudless sky. Massimo seemed to adore her though, always putting his arm round her and saying, ‘I do love you’ if she even brought him a cup of tea.
As I watched Sandro scuffing along behind, trailing his hand along the top of walls, stopping to pick up a feather, I had a sneaking suspicion Massimo was enjoying having my football-mad Sam to indulge. Every time I saw them together, they were discussing players in the Premier League I’d never heard of. Nico wasn’t very blokey in that way, far more interested in Gardeners’ World than Sky Sports, so it was brilliant Massimo was genuinely interested, rather than just pretending like me. I tried not to think about how much Sam had missed out on by having Dean as a father who, apart from the occasional postcard, had never troubled us with his presence. To be fair though, Dean had never made any pretence about who he was: a jack of all trades, working on building sites just long enough to make enough money to take off to a straw hut on some exotic island for months at a time. He was always telling me, ‘Mags, you’re too serious. Live for today. As long as I’ve got a beer and a bit of sunshine, I’m king of the world.’ But it had still hurt when he’d walked out.
I consoled myself that although I’d picked a dud for his father, at least I’d found a great stepdad for Sam in the end.
And today – the day we’d set aside for ‘sorting the attic’ – Nico astonished me again with his kindness, less worried about how traumatic he’d find it and more concerned about how difficult it might be for me picking through his dead wife’s things. I hugged him. ‘We’ll get through it.’