I forced a big smile. ‘A complete surprise! I didn’t even know you wanted a dog.’
‘I bought it for Sandro. It will do him good. And he’ll be a brilliant guard dog for you when I’m away.’
It was a measure of how bonkers my life had become that I was prepared to put up with a dog that frightened me rather than risk my husband’s wrath at my ingratitude.
11
MAGGIE
Even if Francesca saw me only as a source of sanitary towels she didn’t have to ask her dad to buy, her attitude towards me had definitely softened during the last fortnight.
As a result, I dithered over broaching the attic clearing with her, torn between needing a proper workspace and the fear of smashing the delicate truce that had sprung from such an unlikely source. However, with the middle of April, my deadline for moving out of the shop, fast approaching, Nico was adamant. ‘You need a place to work and we need the house to be a home, not a shrine.’
Contrarily, as soon as he showed any signs of being able to sweep Caitlin into a corner, I took it not as a sign he loved me so deeply he was now able to move on, but as an indication that he didn’t let himself get too attached to anyone. I hoped if I dropped dead tomorrow, I wouldn’t be brushed out of his life into a few bin bags and a couple of wicker baskets and carted off to Oxfam.
I sat downstairs in the kitchen while Nico discussed it with Francesca, bracing myself for raised voices. But when Francesca came down, she leant shyly against the doorjamb.
‘When you’ve got your sewing room finished, I was wondering if you could make me a dress for the end of year party? If you want, that is.’
I wanted to leap off my chair and promise to make fifty-five dresses, each in a different colour. The opportunity to do something we could discuss together, that wasn’t Nico manufacturing a ‘And now you will get to know Maggie’ occasion, filled me with hope for the future that I couldn’t have predicted even two weeks ago.
When Saturday rolled around, Massimo and Sandro invited Sam to the park with them. He’d settled in very well to having an extended family. In fact, for two pins, he’d probably move into Massimo’s house, with the double lure of football and Lupo. I wasn’t sure how keen he’d be on living with Lara though. She was what my mum would call ‘dour’, endlessly looking like she was waiting for rain to come bucketing down despite a cloudless sky. Massimo seemed to adore her though, always putting his arm round her and saying, ‘I do love you’ if she even brought him a cup of tea.
As I watched Sandro scuffing along behind, trailing his hand along the top of walls, stopping to pick up a feather, I had a sneaking suspicion Massimo was enjoying having my football-mad Sam to indulge. Every time I saw them together, they were discussing players in the Premier League I’d never heard of. Nico wasn’t very blokey in that way, far more interested in Gardeners’ World than Sky Sports, so it was brilliant Massimo was genuinely interested, rather than just pretending like me. I tried not to think about how much Sam had missed out on by having Dean as a father who, apart from the occasional postcard, had never troubled us with his presence. To be fair though, Dean had never made any pretence about who he was: a jack of all trades, working on building sites just long enough to make enough money to take off to a straw hut on some exotic island for months at a time. He was always telling me, ‘Mags, you’re too serious. Live for today. As long as I’ve got a beer and a bit of sunshine, I’m king of the world.’ But it had still hurt when he’d walked out.
I consoled myself that although I’d picked a dud for his father, at least I’d found a great stepdad for Sam in the end.
And today – the day we’d set aside for ‘sorting the attic’ – Nico astonished me again with his kindness, less worried about how traumatic he’d find it and more concerned about how difficult it might be for me picking through his dead wife’s things. I hugged him. ‘We’ll get through it.’
For my part, I was more nervous about how Francesca would react. I hovered awkwardly on the landing when he went to fetch her from her bedroom. But any embarrassment dissipated as I struggled to hook the ladder down, an exercise akin to fishing for a plastic duckling at the fairground, only twice as frustrating. I hoped I’d get the knack of it, otherwise getting to work every day was going to be a pain in the arse. I was grateful, however, that we’d found something to laugh about and solve together before we delved into the real task of the day.
I loved the attic. I felt a buzz of excitement as I imagined a sewing table under the window, shelves in the alcove to hold all my cottons, pins and paraphernalia. And unlike Mum’s meter cupboard in the flat, where I was too scared to move anything in case a rat was dislodged from an ancient football boot, there was nothing ‘glory hole’ about this space, with its bright lighting and array of boxes, neatly lined up and marked in red pen: ‘Jodhpurs/riding hats’, ‘Small weights/resistance bands’, ‘Cassettes – A-J’. I felt a bit queasy seeing Caitlin’s writing there, big and bold. The confident form captain writing I associated with someone who’d been goal attack in netball and centre in the hockey team. I wondered if these boxes were already up here or whether she’d started packing up things when she knew she was dying, tidying up to save everyone else the trouble.
I hoped if my days were on countdown, I’d find more pressing things to do than put my CDs in alphabetical order. Or maybe when she had so little control over her health, ensuring Abba was next to Aerosmith provided a grain of comfort, of certainty, in the face of the great unknown.
I couldn’t imagine knowing I had a finite time to live. But if I did, would I want to spend my last months parachuting out of planes, walking the Great Wall of China and diving on the Great Barrier Reef, when those activities had never appealed to me while I thought I had another fifty years? Depressingly, I had a sneaking suspicion I’d spend my last few weeks getting rid of manky old T-shirts, greying underwear and holey socks so I didn’t go down in history as the woman with the baggy knickers and saggy bras.
Plus I’d definitely have to prune through my photo albums and weed out any dodgy photos that might change the way people saw me when I wasn’t there to defend myself and explain that it really wasn’t ‘as bad as it looks’. Sam probably didn’t need to stumble across posthumous pictures of me slumped over a tequila bottle with the worm balanced on my cheek, dancing with a life-sized inflatable penis or snogging one of the long line of ne’er-do-wells, any one of whom would probably have done a better job than his lesser-spotted father.
Nico stood with his hands on hips while Francesca looked to him for guidance. I hung back by the attic hatch, afraid to encroach on the emotions swooping between the boxes.