His disappointment gave her a flash of pleasure. Not that she needed any proof that she could turn heads. The real test was whether she could turn the right heads.
Carla took out the silk sleep mask from her soft brown leather handbag. Adjusting her seat into the reclining mode, she closed her eyes. Just as she was starting to relax, there was a lurch followed by a ping and an announcement. ‘This is the captain speaking. We are entering a period of turbulence and I would advise you to return to your seats and fasten your seat belts.’
Silently, Carla began to recite her Ave Marias. Then, in a further bid to distract herself, she allowed her mind to slip back over the years. To the time when she had first flown in a plane. When she had been a scared, uncertain child. Not like the new Carla whom she had worked so hard to become.
She’d only just recovered from her appendix operation when it happened. Gossip travelled fast. After the discovery by her school friend’s mother that Mamma came from her husband’s birthplace, people in the valley and the mountains began to talk about Nonno’s daughter, who was not a successful London career woman as he had claimed, or a ‘widow’ as Francesca had maintained, but a struggling single mother, working in a shop. Prompted by Nonna, who had, it turned out, been behind those silent phone calls (‘I traced you through directory enquiries, but every time I got too scared and put down the receiver’), Nonno had summoned them ‘home’. And because Mamma could no longer pay the rent, they had had no choice.
From the minute they arrived, both she and Mamma found themselves firmly under Nonno’s thumb. Her grandfather would not allow Mamma to work. She must stay at home and look after Nonna – Carla’s grandmother – who had ‘aches in her bones’.
‘How I miss Larry,’ Mamma would tell Carla when they were alone in the bedroom they had to share.
‘But he was a bad man,’ she would reply.
‘He loved me.’
Instead, Mamma blamed Lily. Lily had forced him to stay away. Lily and her interfering ways.
Try as she might, Carla could not make Mamma see sense – Larry was as much to blame as Lily. Her mother’s hair grew lank. It lost its bounce and its sheen. Strands of grey crept in. Slowly at first. And then fast. She became thin. The bloom on her skin was no longer there. And she kept going over and over that last night in the flat. ‘I should have called the doctor earlier for you,’ Mamma kept saying. ‘You might have died.’
‘No, Mamma,’ Carla had reassured her. ‘You were sad.’
Mamma had nodded. ‘Perhaps you are right. If Lily had not threatened Larry, none of this would have happened.’
Was that true? Carla wondered. After all, she had planned to get rid of Larry. But when Lily had done it for her, she realized it hadn’t been such a good idea after all.
Already their lives were regulated by Nonno. She was never allowed out late, even when she became a teenager. She was banned from parties that her friends were invited to. ‘Do you want to end up like your mother?’ he always demanded.
‘Shh,’ Nonna would say.
But Carla already knew the truth. One of the neighbours had let the cat out of the bag, as the English would say, soon after they had moved in. ‘Your poor mamma.’ She said the ‘poor’ bit with a sneer, as though she wasn’t to be pitied at all. ‘To have been betrayed by that man. To think he was already married with a child of his own.’
‘How do you know about Larry?’ she had demanded.
The old woman’s face had frowned. ‘Your papa’s name is Giovanni. He used to live in Sicily, but I heard he has now gone to Rome.’
So her father was not dead at all? Carla felt she should be shocked. Yet something inside her had suspected this all along. After all, it wouldn’t have been the first lie Mamma had told her. Giovanni must be the man with the funny hat under Mamma’s bed. The neighbour’s remark prompted Carla to take another look at the box, which, now they were back in Italy, Mamma had hidden at the back of the wardrobe behind her clothes. Sure enough, tucked inside an old envelope, was her birth certificate. There was a blank space in the section for the father’s name.
Despite this, Carla knew that she must not ask Mamma anything or she would be even more upset than she was already. So she talked to Nonna instead. ‘Do you have his address so I can write to him?’ she asked. ‘If he knew I was here, he might want to see me.’
‘Hush, child.’ Nonna put her arms around her. ‘I am afraid he wants nothing to do with us. You must let the past be the past.’
Carla reluctantly did as she was told. What choice did she have? No one would even tell her what her father’s real surname was. Cavoletti was of course her mother’s maiden name, something she’d never thought of when they sent those postcards to Nonno and Nonna.
‘I should have said nothing,’ added the neighbour. ‘And don’t press your mother or grandmother. They have been through enough.’
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t plan for the future. ‘Don’t worry,’ she would say, holding her mother in her arms when she wept every night. ‘We will be all right in the end.’
‘But how?’ her mother had sobbed.
Her fists clenched. ‘I will think of something.’
Before long, Carla showed the natural aptitude at school that she had just started to discover back in England, before it all went wrong. Nonno began to boast about his granddaughter who got such excellent grades. He even began to listen to the teachers who said she should consider a career in the ‘professions’. How about becoming an avvocata? Carla showed great skill during school debates.
And that’s when the idea began to form. She would go to university to study law. It was a five-year course – a commitment – but it would be worth it. You can do it, her teachers had assured her. (Indeed her grades were so good that she’d been put up a year at school.) But the real reason that Carla wanted to take the course was because Lily had proved that law gave you power. A right to decide other people’s future. The Lily she’d seen in the corridor that last night was full of it. It might also make her rich enough to rescue Mamma from the stultifying atmosphere in Nonno’s home.
With the hindsight of time, Carla realized that Mamma had not behaved as well as she might have done in England. Perhaps she should have called that doctor sooner. Maybe she should not have had an affair with a married man. But she had been a vulnerable single mother. Now it was up to her, Carla, to protect her.
It was during her final year at university in Rome that one night, when researching a particularly dull case, she had suddenly felt a burning need to see what would happen if she put Ed and Lily’s name into Google.
So! Lily was a partner now. It was not fair that she was doing so well while Mamma was almost a prisoner in Nonno’s home as a result of Lily’s actions. The headshot on the firm’s website showed that she had cut her hair into a bob. Lily looked almost glamorous. Nothing like the Lily she once knew.
As for Ed, she could find very little about him apart from the odd small exhibition here and there. But then a picture jumped out at her from an obscure arts site. Her heart started pounding. The picture was of a little girl with black curls and a smile playing on her lips which somehow managed to look both innocent and knowing at the same time. The colours were dramatic – a crimson-red dress against a sky-blue background – but it was the way the child looked out of the frame that really got you. It was as if she was there in the same room.
Which of course she had been. Because the child had been her. The dress had in fact been black. But an artist, Ed had said at the time, was ‘entitled to change things’.
‘Artist sells acrylic painting to anonymous art collector for a five-figure sum,’ announced the text below.
A five-figure sum?