The Silent Wife(98)
But even with Maggie by my side, I still felt sick at the thought of Massimo’s vitriol. Maybe Anna’s as well. I couldn’t quite piece together how she’d suddenly become part of the showdown. Massimo was obviously still running to his mother to fix things for her favourite boy when the going got tough. But I didn’t know how he could bring her on board over his affair with Caitlin. Even Anna couldn’t airbrush that into one of his triumphs. Great waves of fear were pulsing through me. Massimo wasn’t a man who took to public humiliation well. He’d find a way to make it my fault. He was so clever, so slippery, I’d end up feeling I was in the wrong.
Just before we walked into the sitting room, Maggie squeezed my arm. ‘I’ve got this, I promise. You’re okay.’
I loved her faith when mine could have balanced quite happily on a pinhead.
Massimo was standing looking out of the French windows when we went in. Not defeated or apologetic but defiant. Anna was all peacocky indignant, hands on her hips.
‘What on earth has been going on here?’ she asked, fluttering her fingers at the array of decapitated ornaments. ‘Massimo’s being ridiculous. Says it’s nothing, just a misunderstanding. Doesn’t look like a misunderstanding to me. Have you had a fight with Massimo, Lara?’
I felt like the snitch in the playground, the person everyone would turn on later for not keeping their mouth shut. While I dithered, wondering where to start, Maggie took Anna by the arm, sweeping the glass in front of an armchair out of the way with her foot.
Massimo’s face was twitching, as though vicious and wounding sentences were distilling at the back of his throat. But Maggie stood there, solid as an oak on a windy day, not stumbling over her words or sucking in gasps of air as I would have been.
‘I’m sorry, Anna. There’ve been a few happenings in the family that you should know about. Have a seat for a moment.’
Anna shook her off, as though Maggie had no right to utter the word ‘family’. She frowned and said, ‘What is all this nonsense about? I’ve got my bridge partners coming over in three-quarters of an hour.’
Massimo piped up. ‘They’re all making a drama out of nothing, things that happened years ago. Maggie in particular keeps sticking her nose in where it’s not wanted.’
And that did it for me. Suddenly, the dread that had pumped round my body with every bit of me yearning for the unhappy but familiar status quo of before dissipated. I turned towards Anna. ‘Believe me, we are not making a drama out of nothing.’
She was still quivering with irritation, her nails tapping an impatient rhythm on her watch face, just in case we didn’t realise her time was immensely more valuable than ours.
As the details of what Massimo had done emerged, Anna shrank into the armchair. I’d expected to feel a bit smug at finally having the upper hand, at watching her forced to absorb a few blows after all the times she’d fanned the flames of Massimo’s dissatisfaction with me, with Sandro.
But as she said, ‘Nico, my poor boy,’ I recognised her need to make things right for her sons. A primeval urge to protect, to defend, to repair. But I couldn’t see how she was going to fix things for both of them when the problem was each other.
‘Massimo? Is what Lara is saying true?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ But he sounded subdued, none of the usual condescending conviction in his words.
Maggie moved to speak, but I put up my hand to stop her. Standing up for myself might become a habit. ‘You don’t need the gory details, Anna, but it was like that.’
Suddenly though, I didn’t want to launch in with how he’d bullied me, how Sandro lived in fear of getting things wrong, how every time we thought we’d done what he wanted he’d up the stakes with another demand. Not for Massimo’s sake, but because I couldn’t face telling a mother what a total bastard her son had turned out to be. No one looked down at a tiny newborn face and thought, ‘I’m going to teach you to ride roughshod over everyone you meet.’
But while I was standing there, hesitating about pulling out the drawer of truths and releasing them to descend like vultures on the corpse of happy families, Maggie frowned at me. She looked almost apologetic, as though she was embarrassed to speak.
‘There’s something else I need to tell you, Lara.’ She glanced at Massimo.
‘Sandro’s got a half-brother.’
48
Maggie
Anna was the first to react. ‘Not Caitlin’s son?’ she asked, her eyes pleading for a negative answer.
‘No. Dawn’s.’
Lara let out an exclamation somewhere been a shout and a scream. ‘Dawn’s?’
She spun round to look at Massimo. ‘You told me she didn’t want any children, that she was too self-centred. Have you told the truth about anything? Did you know about him? How old is he?’
Her distress was so acute, so painful to watch, that I wished I’d never met Dawn, that we’d all staggered on in blissful ignorance. It was like seeing the last stitch attaching a button to a coat finally fray and give up the ghost.
I tried to calm her. ‘Lara. Lara. I’m sorry. I thought you should know.’
But she was beside herself. ‘Did you carry on seeing Dawn and Caitlin behind my back?’ Her voice kept petering out, then raging up again as more scenarios and betrayals presented themselves.