The Silent Wife(53)
I flinched at Anna’s insinuation Sandro was ‘so problematic’ as to be a full-time job for Massimo, whereas clearly my contribution to parenthood was almost a hindrance. I stood, bread roll in hand, waiting to see which blow would land next. Beryl probably had a bit more practice at slanging matches with people who didn’t have to overcome their natural middle classness, prefacing everything with ‘I don’t mean to be rude’ and ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but…’ though I had absolutely no doubt Anna would be nastier.
Beryl slammed down her knife with a clatter, wiped her hands on her jumper and wobbled her way up to Anna, who was doing an excellent impression of a poplar tree.
‘Look, I get it that Nico and Massimo have responsibilities to their own kids, no one’s saying otherwise. But I won’t have my Sam talked about like he’s just an old shoe to be chucked in a cupboard until he’s eighteen and they can get rid of him. You’re all the same, you posh people. It ain’t a limited pot of love and kindness, you know. If you’re nice to Sam, it doesn’t mean that there won’t be nothing left over for the others.’
Anna took a step back as though Beryl was a pesky baby rhino butting her with a horn. But she didn’t get to reply because Massimo and Maggie came in the door.
Maggie clocked the stand-off immediately. ‘Mum? Everything okay?’
I loved Beryl’s fearlessness. She put her hands on her hips and stared directly at Anna and said, ‘Anna seems to think that Lara and Massimo shouldn’t make so much effort because Sam is not really part of the family. I was just helping her out with my opinion.’
Maggie’s face dropped, but Massimo stepped in before she could speak. ‘Whoaaa, ladies, ladies. We’re all on the same side here.’ He put his arm round Beryl. ‘You’re my favourite mother-in-law by proxy. And we do consider Sam – and Maggie – family. I think Mum is just worried about Lara, because she gets so stressed about everything. Her concern comes from a place of love, doesn’t it, Mum?’
Anna looked like a cobra geared up to strike but which, at the last minute, decided to coil up in the sun instead. ‘Of course. Perhaps Beryl misunderstood my concern. Perhaps now dear Caitlin has gone and everyone has moved on, I feel someone has to remember what she would have wanted.’
I watched Massimo closely. I hadn’t dared even mention Caitlin in case I blurted out – or confirmed – my suspicions.
He moved away from Beryl and took his mother’s arm. ‘I know you miss her, Mum, but no one has forgotten about her. She was very special, but so is Maggie. And Beryl.’
I couldn’t read him, this man of many faces. Was he saying ‘special’ as in ‘I loved her and am bereft without her,’ or was he making the point that she was a big part of the family?
Anna burst into noisy tears, falling against Massimo’s chest, sobbing in between gasps of grief, ‘I still can’t believe she’s gone, a lovely wife and mother like her, it’s just so unfair.’
I’d only ever seen Anna cry in a queenly manner, delicate tears dabbed away on a dainty handkerchief. I glanced at Maggie and Beryl.
Beryl was muttering, ‘Christ, I only came here to butter a few buns. Didn’t realise I was coming to a bloody performance of the Wailings of Winifred.’
Maggie’s lips twitched but she still managed to hiss at Beryl to shut up.
Massimo steered Anna out into the garden and then we all looked at each other in silence for a minute until Beryl, wonderful, disrespectful, say it how you see it Beryl, blurted out, ‘That’s such a lot of bollocks. Anna didn’t even like Caitlin. It was your lovely Massimo who sat with her most of the time when she was ill. Now he’s a man who understands family. Proper gent he is.’
The knife went loose in my hand. Either I was mad, suspicious and interpreted everything Massimo did wrongly or he was so clever no one else could see the truth.
After all these years, I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.
26
MAGGIE
By the time Nico arrived, twenty minutes into the party, I was frazzled. Being anywhere around the Farinellis en masse, especially when Mum was there with her own special brand of problem-solving, did my bloody head in. And Anna doggedly clinging to the sainted deceased cliché about Caitlin made me want to sit her down, pull the pin on what I’d found in the attic and pop that particular grenade under her skinny little arse.
Even if I did give into temptation one day, with a herd of kids marauding about sticking up the proverbial two fingers at my ‘three at a time’ rule on the trampoline, today was definitely not the right moment.
Every time I turned my back the springs were groaning under a bunch of lively frogs somersaulting away, which made the idea of a neck brace look like a ‘when’ not ‘if’ scenario. That was if the whole bloody tarpaulin didn’t suddenly shear down the middle and dump them in a bone-busting heap. Another group were driving footballs into the shed door with relentless regularity, while one kid had fallen into the dustbin full of water, tipping it over and turning the lawn into a mudslide, much to the boys’ delight. A couple of the girls who’d ignored the ‘come dressed in old clothes’ on the invitation were now in tears by the privet hedge, having slipped over in the sludge. Sandro hovered close to them, looking as though he wished he was sitting in the local library with a book about fossils.