The Love of My Life (14 page)

On the cliff path we stopped and kissed and the universe righted itself. Marc smiled at me.

‘When it’s just us,’ he said, ‘you and me, then everything is bearable. I feel there is a point in carrying on.’

‘I know.’

‘Away from you, all I have is missing Luca.’

‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that what we do for each other is fill the space where Luca should be.’

‘I think,’ said Marc, ‘that it’s more complicated than that.’

We walked down the steps cut in the cliff to the beach. Somebody else had been there. There were the remains of a fire on the shingle at the entrance to the cave, and discarded Stella cans inside. We made love with the utmost gentleness. On the island, the lugubrious, sad-eyed seals gazed towards the mainland where we sat holding hands, two human beings who didn’t matter very much at that moment in time, except to one another.

twenty-one

The third and last summer that Anneli and I went to work at Marinella’s, we found out that Luca and Nathalie were officially a couple. They went out on dates. They had performed a passable foxtrot at the annual Portiston and District Trading Association dinner and dance. I couldn’t believe that Luca knew how to foxtrot. The thought made me queasy. After we were married, I could never get him to talk about what happened on these dates, but you can bet that the relationship progressed very, very slowly.

I don’t know for sure. We didn’t talk about it because it was a part of his life Luca preferred to forget, but I’m certain Angela was pulling Luca’s strings. She can’t have forced him to go out with Nathalie, but she probably brainwashed him into thinking it was a good idea. Nathalie had a good business brain and Luca was showing signs of being a talented chef. The two of them had the potential to forge a partnership as successful and strong as Angela and Maurizio’s. If Luca married Nathalie, then all the promises Angela had made to her cousin would be fulfilled. Her favourite son and heir apparent to Marinella’s would be forging a matrimonial and commercial partnership with her almost-daughter. It was perfect. Luca never liked confrontation and Angela never backed down. If his mother told him that he should take Nathalie out, it would have been impossible for him to refuse without upsetting the whole household. And perhaps he liked Nathalie. Perhaps, for a while, Luca thought Nathalie was what he wanted. Going out with an older woman certainly raised his status in the teenage male pecking order another couple of notches, though his ego didn’t really need boosting and heaven knows he can’t have been getting much action.

Angela was very protective of Nathalie. Because Nathalie wasn’t like the other girls in Portiston, she decided it was the other girls who were at fault. She judged us by Nathalie’s high moral standards and found us lacking. Fairly early on in the summer that last year, Anneli and I were called into Angela’s office and given a dressing-down. She had been watching us. She didn’t approve of the way we conducted ourselves outside work and scolded us for walking provocatively along the seafront, our arms entwined, each of us enjoying the stares we attracted although we scowled at anyone who looked at us. She told us that unless we shaped up, she wouldn’t tolerate us working in Marinella’s. She said we reflected badly on the business.

Anneli and I had long since abandoned our original plan of marrying one twin each. What was the point of dreaming when Luca was spoken for? I suspected that Anneli was still sweet on Marc. She pretended that she wasn’t but I was forever catching her looking at him through her lashes, and once, after we’d been drinking cider on the front, she wrote his name in pebbles on the terrace outside Marinella’s. I’d been hanging around with a nineteen-year-old called Georgie, with whom I was a little bit in love. Georgie was a drama student at Manchester University and he had a holiday job working the Seal Island ferry, which belonged to his uncle.

We worked harder than ever that last summer. We were rushed off our feet serving
gelati
, toasted sandwiches (this was before anyone in the UK had heard of panini), iced drinks and pots of tea to people sitting inside and outside the restaurant. There were always long queues at the counter, where we were occasionally asked to deputize if neither Luca nor Marc was available to scoop one of twelve different flavours of ice cream into the deliciously crisp and sweet home-made cones.

As soon as one table emptied we had to clean it, dust away the scraps beneath it, wipe and prop up the menu, and show any waiting clientele to the vacant seats. We made a small fortune in tips. Even if the weather was bad, the restaurant was always busy. In rain, those who could came inside for tea and cake. Those who couldn’t fit inside huddled beneath the large green, red and white canopy over the terrace where they were sheltered from the worst of the weather. At the end of the working day our feet hurt, but we were generally happy.

On what Maurizio called ‘the last day of summer’ – the final Saturday before school restarted – there was a party for the family, staff and suppliers of Marinella’s.

The restaurant closed at 6 p.m., and we were sent home to change into our glad-rags.

I went back to Anneli’s house to prepare for the party. My mother was already in mourning for Lynnette’s imminent return to university and grey Mr Hensley would be with her, making things worse. I couldn’t bear the long looks of silent reproach we’d have to endure. It was easier, and more fun, at Anneli’s.

In her bedroom, a chaos of pink and yellow Flower Fairy wallpaper covered with posters of Duran Duran, we made each other up, and tried on every single item in Anneli’s wardrobe, aiming to find outfits that made us look the same, but different.

In the end Anneli wore a cute little pair of cut-off jeans with a tight black shirt and I went for a leather-look skirt worn with a black halterneck shirt and a very old, lacy cardigan. The effect was designed to be soft punk. We covered ourselves in perfume – I can’t remember the brand but it had a lovely sherbetty smell, like the taste of Love Hearts. We both looked and smelled pretty good.

‘Liv, can I tell you something?’ asked Anneli as she ironed my hair. I was in an uncomfortable position, my head on a towel on her pink carpet, the rest of me curled in a foetal position so that she could have the best access to my hair.

‘You
do
fancy Marc!’

‘Oh all right, I do.’

‘I knew you did, I knew it I knew it I knew it!’

‘Nobody likes a bighead, Liv.’

‘Yes, but I knew, didn’t I! It’s perfect, you two will be perfect together!’

‘So what should I do?’

‘You should tell him, of course.’

‘What, really?’

The iron was uncomfortably close to my ear as Anneli hovered above me to look at my face to see if I was serious.

‘I think he likes you too,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen him looking over when he didn’t think anyone was looking.’

‘Are you serious? Really? What, really looking at me?’

‘Anneli, you’re burning my cheek.’

‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me. I won’t know what to say.’

The room was beginning to smell of singed hair. Anneli smoothed her hand over her work. ‘Your hair looks lovely, Liv. It’s perfect.’

I looked at myself in the mirror above Anneli’s white and gold dressing table. My hair did look good. I gave my friend a quick hug and we swapped positions so that I could iron hers.

It was impossible to escape the house without saying goodbye to Anneli’s parents, who were watching
The Generation Game
on TV. Anneli’s mum gave us a half-hearted smile and told us to have a nice time and make sure we were back before midnight. Her dad looked at me and said, ‘Is that a skirt, Olivia, or a pelmet?’

‘Oh ha ha, Dad, you’re so funny,’ said Anneli, leaning over to kiss his cheek. She was positively glowing with anticipation. ‘See you later!’

The party was already in full swing at Marinella’s. Karaoke hadn’t yet arrived in Portiston, yet the spirit of karaoke was born there. Maurizio was on the ‘stage’ at the fireplace end of the restaurant with a microphone, singing along with Gene Pitney at the top of his voice and telling the story in hand gestures too. He waved when he saw us and we waved back as we headed for the bar.

The room was full. There were some young people, like us, who worked in Marinella’s or were family friends, but most of the guests were older. Whiskery brewery representatives rubbed shoulders with clean-shaven bank staff. The fish lady was dancing with the sanitary-ware man. Everyone was having a great time.

Luca and Nathalie were sitting together stiffly at one of the tables, like a couple posing for an old-fashioned photograph. Luca looked strangely tidy. I actually didn’t recognize him at first. He was wearing a pair of dark trousers and a pressed shirt that was open at the collar where his Adam’s apple bulged. His hair had been combed and flattened, somehow. He looked rather like his brother Carlo – a sort of Stepford son. Nathalie was, for once, wearing something feminine. It was far too old for her, a sort of floaty two-piece in green and black. On her feet were long black shoes with a pointed toe and a squat heel. They weren’t talking to one another. They just sat, and watched the party.

Marc was having fun. He was dancing with Fabio and a couple of children who belonged to the newsagent up the road, doing the same exaggerated actions as his father and miming along to the words.

Annoyingly, Angela was standing at the bar, dashing any hopes we had of being served anything alcoholic. Luckily Marc had planned for this contingency.

After he’d finished his dance he came over to us, out of breath and laughing, and we talked for a while about this and that and he topped up our glasses of fruit punch with something or other he’d stolen from the cellar, which made our heads buzz. And then Maurizio called all the males in the house to the centre of the dance floor, where he told them to take off their socks and shoes and roll up their trousers to the knees. Anneli and I were helpless with giggles as the businessmen of Portiston, as well as the Felicone boys, did exactly that. Then Maurizio told them there’d be a prize for the best surfer, and played ‘Surfing USA’. All the shopkeepers and suppliers, the accountant, the solicitor, even the vicar was there, their hairy, bony, white male legs bare beneath their trousers, swaying and balancing like they were real surfers. It was so funny we were nearly crying. I happened to glance over at Nathalie; she wasn’t even watching, but was deep in conversation with Angela.

When it was over Maurizio asked the assembled womenfolk who should win the prize and Anneli and I jumped up and down and shouted, ‘Marc! Marc!’

‘Hey, what about me?’ asked Luca, bounding up to us, his shirt all out of his trousers, his tie askew and his hair back to its normal dishevelled state.

‘Sorry,’ I said with a tiny sneer. ‘But your brother was better.’

Luca gave us an Italian double-raised-palm gesture of confusion and disbelief and hopped off back to Nathalie, shoes in hand. Marc showed us his prize, a bottle of Aloha sun cream.

‘Thanks for your support!’ he said, looking vaguely embarrassed.

Anneli looked at her feet and twisted a strand of hair round her finger.

I must have been a little drunk. ‘Why don’t you ask Anneli to dance?’ I said.

‘Liv!’

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘She’ll say yes.’

Marc blushed and shuffled his feet back into his shoes. But he did ask her and she did say yes and they went, hand in hand, to the dance floor. And that was how Anneli and Marc started going out with one another.

I looked across to Luca. He was sitting between Nathalie and Angela, drinking from the rim of a bottle of beer. I caught his eye but he looked away.

I was bored by the party. I found my coat and slipped away and met Georgie off the late ferry. We sat in the dark on the pebbles. He rolled a joint and held it to my lips and I breathed in and burned the back of my throat, and then he lay back and sang ‘Stairway to Heaven’ while I gave him a blow-job and marvelled at the twinkling of the lights in my inky black mind.

twenty-two

Every day I learned a little more about Marian Rutherford and nothing at all about the professor. I liked being in the large office with him, though. It was quiet but it was companionable. The only sound, generally, would be that of my fingers on the keyboard and him turning the pages of whatever document or book he was reading. We were comfortable with one another, like an old married couple who had run out of things to talk about years before. Some mornings he would come in to unlock the door and then go straight off to lectures or seminars with his students. Other days, if he didn’t have to see anybody, he would let me in and then disappear to work from home. He said it was easier to concentrate there. I imagined a big old house, semi-derelict, with wall-to-ceiling books, a couple of mangy cats sleeping on the windowledges, and the professor scribbling away at a desk like a character from Dickens.

Working gave my days a purpose, and because picking apart the professor’s writing was so difficult, I had to concentrate and that meant there was no room in my mind for other thoughts. I approached my job rather as I would have approached evening classes in my previous life – as a welcome distraction from reality and as a means of relaxation. I am a fast typist but it was taking for ever to work through the notes. The professor never asked how I was progressing, or looked over my shoulder. I was certain he didn’t check the computer when I wasn’t there. I was glad that he trusted me.

When he wasn’t around, Jenny often came in to chat with me. She’d curl her knees beneath her on the leather settee and tell me about Yusuf and the noodle bar and her kleptomaniac flatmate. She was very entertaining and I enjoyed her company. Best of all, she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in me. If anyone had asked her, I doubt she’d have been able to tell them anything about me, except perhaps my Christian name.

There were dozens of different editions of Marian Rutherford’s books on the shelves in the office, but I didn’t dare touch them. Instead, I went to the Central Library and ordered them, one at a time, to read in the flat. I started with
Emily Campbell
, which I’d read at school (or not read most of it, if I’m honest) and then again some years back after I’d found a copy on the second-hand bookstall at the market near our London home. The story is set in Portiston, with no attempt to disguise the town or any of its landmarks. Its heroine, Emily Campbell, was a daughter of the town, a charming, headstrong and selfish girl torn between her longing to escape what she regarded as the suffocating constraints of her life, and the desire to live and die amongst the people she knew and loved. This conflict is epitomized in the characters of the two men who love her, the handsome, faithful but unambitious Jude McCallistair and the driven but slightly dangerous John Perriman.