Flirting in Italian (3 page)

“We could travel all around Italy!” Mum’s saying, waving her arms in great excitement. “Venice—Florence—Rome—Naples! Do a big trip!”

“The Grand Tour,” I mumble, thinking of Sir John Soane.

“What?”

“Mum …” I have to burst this bubble now. It’s not completely unexpected. I thought my mother might jump at the opportunity to spend the summer with me, abroad. There’s a phrase she uses constantly—

“Mother-and-daughter time!” she exclaims, clapping in sheer pleasure, her blond hair tumbling around her shoulders.

I start again, as gently as I can. “Mum, I don’t think I’ll manage to learn Italian if it’s you and me together, staying in nice hotels. Who are we going to talk to, waiters? I was thinking I should go and do a residential course in Italy for a couple of months. Immerse myself in the language, see lots of art, study a bit of history.…”

Her face falls, and my overbright voice trails off at the sight of the disappointment and sadness written so clearly on her beautiful face.

“Oh,” she says slowly. She looks around her, as if she’s forgotten the layout of our living room. She takes a couple of steps sideways, almost shuffling toward the armchair that matches the sofa, and she reaches out to its back, resting her hand on it for support.

I don’t know what to say. So I stay silent as she lowers herself into the armchair, sinking into it heavily, like an old lady.

“Oh,” she says again, even more quietly, looking down at her hands.

I feel absolutely terrible. Words rise to my lips: assurances that I love her more than anything, that I don’t want to hurt her, that I won’t go to Italy by myself if she doesn’t want me to, that I’ll spend the whole summer with her instead.

But the trouble is, I don’t want to say them. I really
do
want to go to Italy. By myself. Mum’s expectations for me are like a weight on my shoulders, and I find myself itching to shake it off.

I’ve been staring at the carpet, the weave and the pattern, so I don’t realize for a while that Mum has raised her head and is looking at me. It takes all the courage I have to meet her gaze, and when I do, my heart melts.

Because in her eyes I see nothing but love.

“Oh,
Mum
 …” I throw myself across the space between us, falling to my knees in front of her, wrapping my arms around her legs, burying my head in her lap. “I’m so sorry—I didn’t want to hurt you—I won’t go, I won’t do the course—”

“Don’t be silly,” she says, stroking my hair, her voice so gentle that it triggers the tears that have been building up. I start to cry into her jeans as she goes on:

“Of course you have to go off by yourself. What was I thinking? You’re nearly eighteen! If you weren’t taking a gap year, you’d be off to university in the autumn! I’m so lucky I get an extra year with you. I should be counting my blessings,
not trying to hang around your neck all summer when you want to be off with girls your own age.” She bends down to kiss my head. “Tell me about this course. I bet you’ve picked one out and know everything about it already, don’t you? You’re always so organized.”

I raise my head, my face smudged with tears, which Mum wipes away with the hem of her sweater.

“It’s in Chianti,” I say eagerly, “in the middle of Tuscany. Really close to Florence and Siena, in this lovely fourteenth-century villa with a swimming pool. This Italian lady runs it every year—she takes about four to six girls, so it’s nice and small, and you learn Italian, do art tours, go riding, learn watercolor painting and ballroom dancing, study Italian history—there’s even a flower arranging class and a course on the wine and food,” I add, thinking that this will appeal to Mum.

She doesn’t react the way I expect, however. Instead of looking pleased that I’m taking an interest in one of her hobbies, her eyes widen in surprise; she seems completely taken aback.

“Darling,” she says, “flower arranging—
ballroom dancing
? You know what this sounds like to me? Finishing school!” She frowns in confusion. “That’s the kind of thing my model girlfriends used to do, so they could learn to be rich men’s wives. They used to teach you how to climb in and out of Porsches with your knees politely together so no one could see up your skirt. It was for girls who weren’t that bright. Like me.” She grimaces. “But you’re so clever! Why do you want to go to some sort of
finishing school
?”

Because Villa Barbiano, where the course is based, is in the valley below the Castello di Vesperi. And the lady who runs it takes her students on a private guided tour around the castello, which is otherwise strictly closed to the public. It says so on the website
.

“It looks really pretty,” I say rather feebly. “And the art history part of the course seems very thorough. They have lots of guided tours to private art collections that you’d normally never get to see.”

“Well, you’d know all about that kind of thing,” Mum says dubiously. “But wouldn’t there be something a bit less—I don’t know—posh thick rich girl? Darling
—ballroom dancing
.”

“I really want to do this one!” I plead. “I can skip all the bits I don’t like. And it’s only for a couple of months. I can still come to Norway afterward. And by then, I’ll be rattling away in Italian!”

“Ciao, bella!”
Mum says, giggling. “That’s what all the boys say in Italy. You’ll see. I remember that from modeling in Milan.
Ciao, bella!
” she repeats, waving her hands around and smiling reminiscently. “They ride Vespas and offer you lifts on the back. Oh, darling.” She pulls me up to sit next to her on the arm of her chair. “You’re going to have a wonderful time.”

“I hope so,” I say, hugging her.

Words are trembling on my tongue. I want, very badly, to ask if there’s anything she wants to tell me. Anything that she might not have felt comfortable telling me before. Anything remotely to do with Italy. Or the fact that I look so different from my Norwegian relatives.

But she’s being so lovely, so supportive, that I simply can’t ask. I can’t pry into a possible secret that my mother may have chosen not to tell me.

“I’ll tell your father,” she says. “But I’m sure he’ll be fine. One thing I will say for him, he’s never stingy with his money.”

Dad left Mum over ten years ago, for an awful Danish woman with a name—Sif—that sounds like a brand of toilet cleaner. (Dad really does like Scandinavian women.) I hate her. It’s not that I blame her for stealing Dad away—I mean, I do blame her, but it was Dad’s fault much more than hers. She’s just a horrible cow who wants to pretend Dad didn’t have a life, or a wife and daughter, before she met him, and she does everything she can to stop me seeing him; she even got him to move halfway around the world, to head up an investment fund in Hong Kong.

But at least Mum and Dad didn’t have a messy divorce, like the parents of a lot of my friends. No custody battles over me, or making me tell the judge who I want to live with, or sending me to mandatory therapy, ugh, like poor Lily-Rose, who had to go to a counselor for two whole years. Mum said Dad was great in the whole settlement thing. She had savings of her own, from her modeling days, but he’s taken total care of us both, giving us enough money to buy this lovely flat in Kensington, ensuring we don’t want for anything. Mum isn’t remotely extravagant—we don’t live some sort of jet-set life. But if I want to do a two-month course in Italy, which costs, I must admit, what looks to me like an awful lot of money, I don’t need to worry for a moment that we can’t afford it.

And yes, I know how lucky I am. I really do.

“Maybe I could come to visit for a weekend?” Mum says in a small voice. “I could stay in Florence, rent a car, come and see where you’re staying … you could be my guide and take me round the galleries you’ve been to.…”

“Oh, Mum! Of course!” I hug her even tighter. “And I’ll email you the whole time—I’ll have my phone, you can ring me whenever you want to—”

“I won’t ring you every day,” she promises in an even smaller voice. “I promise. I won’t be one of those awful smother mothers. Honestly, I won’t.”

And though a little warning bell is ringing inside my head, she’s being so wonderful that I ignore it and tell myself that I believe her.

“Violet! My baby! Violet, darling …”

Mum is sobbing, full-out weeping, a river of tears pouring down her face, taking a lot of her mascara with it. That’s the real downside of her inability to pretend to emotions she doesn’t feel; it also means that she has no control over them. This has led to the occasional embarrassing incident when I’ve had tiny parts in school plays (tears of pride, overapplauding at my split-second curtain call as Peaseblossom or Second Lady). But nothing has ever been as remotely bad as this.

The worst part is that I’m frozen to the spot. I know I should be hugging her, reassuring her, but I’m so scared by the idea of getting sucked into the scene she’s making that I
just stand there by the departure gates, one hand on the pull handle of my carry-on bag, the other holding my passport and boarding pass. It’s the most awkward place for a scene that I can imagine. Anything more public would be hard to picture.

“Violet, darling … I tried to be brave, I really did!” Mum’s sobbing, her arms outstretched to me. “But it’s two months!
Two months!
I’m going to be so worried about you all the time—I don’t think I can bear it!”

“Madam, could I ask you to move a little to the side?” one of the security guards says, visibly uncomfortable. “We do have quite a press of travelers today—”

“My daughter’s going away!” Mum wails. “She’s leaving me! My daughter’s leaving me!” And to my horror, she grabs on to the arm of the poor woman, who looks as appalled as I feel.

“Madam—” she starts, looking around frantically for help.

For a few awful, shameful seconds, I seriously contemplate dashing through the gate and joining the line at Passport Control. It’s moving fairly quickly; in the minutes it will take Mum to recover any shreds of composure, I’ll be into Security, where if she tries to follow me, she’ll be detained by the guards.

I’m a bad daughter even to think that. A terrible daughter. Not only am I leaving my mother on her own for two whole months, I’m fantasizing about running away from her and possibly getting her arrested
.

Galvanized by guilt, I dash over to Mum’s side, peeling her hands off the security guard, apologizing profusely.

“I’ve never really gone away before,” I mumble. “She’s very upset … sorry.…”

Mum collapses on my shoulder, folding over me like a rag doll because she’s so much taller than I am. She looked so lovely today, I was so proud of her; in her slim gray trousers and white linen sweater, her blond hair pinned back from her face, a big silver necklace wrapped around her neck and cascading down the front of her sweater, she looks so young and smart. I could see men glancing sideways at her admiringly as we walked through Heathrow, and my heart swelled with happiness at how fantastic she looked, how great she was being, holding my hand, swinging it back and forth, talking about what a wonderful time I was going to have in Italy.

She’s been so brilliant, too, during my exams. For the last few months I’ve been revising nonstop, drilling myself in French conjugations, learning Shakespeare quotes, staring at Rembrandt self-portraits till I dream about his face every night, and Mum has been a star, making sure I have my favorite meals, dragging me out to get some fresh air now and then, reassuring me when I break down and panic that I’m going to have mental blocks in the exams and forget everything I’ve learned.

She looked after me, and now I have to look after her
, I tell myself as I pat her back and do my best to tell her I’ll be okay, that two months will go by really fast, that there’s nothing to get upset about.

But a nasty little voice inside my head points out that I threw my messy sobbing fits in private. Not at the departure gate at Heathrow airport.

I dart a glance around me to see if anyone’s staring. And I promptly see two girls standing by the currency exchange, whispering together, all-too-obviously staring in our direction. I notice them at once because they’re both carrying big white bed pillows wedged under their arms, something I’ve never seen before. They look older than me, with smooth hair pulled back elegantly from their faces, which are equally smooth and so well made up that if they were in uniform, rather than jeans and hoodies, I’d think they might be air hostesses. One’s white, curvy, with lots of blond hair, and one’s black and very slim; they make a striking pair, and from the way they carry themselves, it’s clear they know it.

The black girl meets my eyes for a moment, and smirks; she turns to say something to her blond friend, who laughs in response.

Cow
, I think angrily. Maybe it’s the fact that Mum and I are being openly sneered at that makes me take Mum’s shoulders, lift her off me, and say:

“Mum—I really have to go now. There might be lines at Security, it takes ages to go through.”

“Violet, darling, my precious little girl … why did I
ever
think this was a good idea?” Mum grabs a tissue from her bag. One thing mothers always seem to have, I notice, are tissues. She wipes her eyes, wincing at the amount of mascara that comes off in the process. “You can always come back, darling. Just one phone call—one text—and I’ll be on the next plane to come and get you. I promise. I know it’s a long way away—”