The Silent Wife(57)

She sniffed and pursed her lips. ‘Massimo was so worried about Nico. He had a sleepless night over it.’

I didn’t know whether Anna said stuff like that to wind me up, but when I’d seen Massimo saunter out to his car that morning, he was whistling as though he’d had a fat eight-hour sleep then woken up to fresh coffee and croissants. And apart from a ‘You stopped seeing double yet?’ text, he hadn’t exactly been rushing round with the grapes and chocolates. I had a sneaking suspicion that Massimo, alpha male and sporting superstar, thought Nico had made a right old drama over nothing.

I’d just managed to shoo Anna out of the door and got my needle out again, when the doorbell went. I considered ignoring it but I thought I’d better check it wasn’t Nico on his last legs, crawling up to the front door on his hands and knees. As I peered out of the upstairs window, I could just see a glimpse of Lara’s beige sundress.

I sighed. No doubt she wanted to see how Nico was. She was a worrier at the best of times: I couldn’t leave her fretting away so I ran downstairs and invited her in.

She sat down for a coffee, and although she looked tired, there was a vigour, a determined energy about her that I didn’t often see, a brisk ‘things to get on with’ manner.

First on her checklist was Nico. ‘Has he been all right? His colour didn’t look great yesterday evening. I kept getting up in the night and looking out of the window to see if both of your cars were there. I was so worried you’d have to take him to hospital.’ She paused. ‘Massimo wanted to pop round first thing, but he thought you’d be too busy getting everyone ready for school.’

Personally, I thought Massimo hadn’t covered himself in repentant glory but Lara’s concern made up for him. I told her about Anna’s disapproval that I hadn’t locked Nico in the bedroom to make her laugh.

Despite not working, Lara always seemed to have something urgent to do, things that would never make it onto my list such as trying to recreate some fancy dish Massimo had eaten on one of his trips away. So I fully expected her to dash off after fifteen minutes on some ridiculous chore such as hunting down wild Alaskan salmon, organic grass-fed beef or some other delicacy you couldn’t buy down the road at the supermarket. But instead she fished about in her handbag and pulled out a piece of paper.

She looked at the floor. ‘I wondered if you were still happy to teach me to drive? I know I haven’t seemed very enthusiastic.’ She paused, then waved the paper at me. ‘But I’ve booked my theory for next month and I’m hoping to be driving by October.’

‘Oh my god! That’s brilliant! We’d better get you behind the wheel straight away.’ Even if I had to sew every evening until holiday, I needed to get her in that car before she got cold feet.

Lara was grinning like a kid on Christmas Eve, as though it was something she’d been planning and plotting for ages, just when I’d decided she’d lost interest. She really was a woman of surprises. I’d always yearned to be like that, dark and mysterious, a woman who men tried to read, to get a handle on. Instead I was the straightforward backdrop to everyone else’s complex and cunning ways. Maybe I just wasn’t bright enough to pull off that ‘now you see me, now you don’t’, second-guess me stuff.

Whenever I told Nico my worries that he would find me boring once he’d heard all my stories, he just laughed and said, ‘I don’t want to play games, Maggie. I love the fact that what you see is what you get. Stop doubting yourself. And me.’ And I’d feel a big buzz of contentment and resolve to stop expecting everything to go tits up. That usually lasted for a glorious half an hour before Anna came bowling in with a mention of Caitlin’s brilliant intellect or Francesca rushed to play on her phone when I was trying to empathise, telling her a story about when I was a teenager myself.

So the idea of taking Lara on secret little sorties in the car gave me a ridiculous amount of satisfaction as though somehow I wasn’t quite the predictable ‘good egg’ they all thought I was.

And that was the start of our cunning plan. For the last two weeks of July, we got into a routine of Lara slipping out of her back gate every morning after school drop off. I’d pick her up from the corner of the alley and like two runaways on a road trip, we’d drive out into the countryside with the radio blaring. As soon as we reached a bit of quiet open space, we’d swap seats. And yet again, Lara surprised me. I’d expected her to be easily discouraged, to display her defeatist attitude of ‘I knew I’d be rubbish, I told you I wouldn’t be any good.’ But in fact, she was a powerhouse of determination. Even when she hit the wrong pedal and almost shot into a ditch while I did my best not to scream, she didn’t panic. She simply switched off the ignition and worked through every step in a logical manner before having another go. Other people’s beeping and rude gestures didn’t even worry her. She just laughed and sometimes said the odd ‘sod off’ herself. It was a revelation to me that she wasn’t as strait-laced as she seemed. Her occasional bad language opened the floodgates on my own swearing, which I would then sweat and fret about later on, wondering how many times I had stuck my middle finger up at the various people who tooted at us. Lara didn’t seem to mind though. There was something carefree about her, as though our joint secret liberated her from something I couldn’t quite pinpoint.