I’d looked to her for reassurance. I remembered sitting there, trying to hold in my despair that everyone thought I should be so overjoyed at having a baby. The shame that I sometimes looked into the squalling, angry mass in the Moses basket and thought longingly of Sunday morning lie-ins, dinners in posh restaurants, dinners anywhere when I could pick up a fork without being braced for the wail that would signal another couple of hours of pacing and patting. I’d looked to Caitlin, the only recent mother I knew, in my quest for advice on how to break the pattern of feed, cry, snooze before the whole madness-inducing cycle started again.
Caitlin simply furrowed her brow and said, ‘Francesca slept through the night at eight weeks. I don’t recall it being a problem. Perhaps your milk isn’t satisfying him. Maybe better to get him on a bottle.’
There was no such thing as a difficult baby, just a useless mother. Both Caitlin and Anna wrinkled their noses in disgust when I produced a dummy, scouring off another layer of self-belief, leaving me raw, exposed and vulnerable.
Just the thought of Caitlin’s hypocrisy made me want to slam down my cutlery and stomp out of the restaurant.
‘But why did it carry on for five years? I’d been okay for a while by the time Sandro went to school. I hadn’t been on antidepressants for several years.’
Massimo scraped his fork in the remains of the sauce on his plate.
‘Caitlin was ill. She needed me. It wasn’t really an affair; we just supported each other.’
I wanted to stand on my chair and shout, ‘Anything that took you away from me when I needed you was a bloody affair!’ But I had to hear him out. Whatever he said would be better than the thoughts that kept crowding into my mind.
Massimo pleated and unpleated his napkin. ‘Nico couldn’t cope with her illness. You know what he’s like. He doesn’t communicate well at the best of times. Caitlin was terrified of dying but trying to protect Nico and Francesca. She found it easier to talk to me. I was slightly detached.’
I tried to be generous. She must have looked down the barrel of the future with fear in her heart. God knows what it felt like to look at your child and wonder whether you’d be there, for the big events, yes, school, marriage, babies, but also the little ones – not getting invited to the party, the bouts of tonsillitis, the ‘no one loves me’ days. But she was only ill for one year of a five-year-affair.
I surprised myself. ‘I don’t know whether I can forgive you.’
Massimo leaned back in his chair. ‘I was so lonely. I missed you so much. It’s not an excuse, but you’d cut yourself off from me. I know you don’t believe me, but Caitlin and I didn’t have sex. Yes, we held each other and comforted each other, but it wasn’t physical. I needed someone to talk to, she needed someone to talk to, and we found each other.’ He paused. ‘Do you think Maggie will tell Nico?’ His brow furrowed as he computed the probabilities and possibilities of disaster.
My desire to let him stew was outweighed by my respect for Maggie, bearing the burden of the knowledge, of Francesca’s outrage, of the injustice of their finger-pointing, without wavering. ‘I’m sure she won’t, and even if she did, she doesn’t know it was you Caitlin was having an affair with. If she was going to say something, she’d have done it by now. Even though they’re both blaming her for throwing away Caitlin’s stuff, Maggie’s so decent she’s still protecting them from what Caitlin did.’ I let the ‘And you’ hang silently, a cloud of accusation as dense as a mountain fog.
We got up to leave. Massimo paused outside the restaurant. ‘I’ve behaved terribly, let you down. I’ll make it up to you for the rest of my life. But don’t destroy my family.’
I caught a glimpse of my expression reflected in the shop window next door: serious and determined rather than meek and passive. The woman I used to be.
I hoped I could hold onto her.
39
MAGGIE
Since we’d come back from Italy, Lara was like a woman possessed. I no longer had to chase her to come out driving, wondering whether she wanted to learn or whether she was doing it as a favour to me, too polite to say no. We’d fallen into a routine of driving to visit her dad two or three times a week. I’d pop in for a few minutes, he’d shake my hand and introduce himself, so solemnly and delightfully – ‘I’m Robert Dalton. But Margaret, you may call me Bob.’
‘And you, Bob, may call me Maggie.’
Once, just to make conversation, I made the mistake of telling him I was teaching Lara to drive.
He stood up, shaking his head. ‘No. No driving. No cars,’ becoming more and more agitated, slapping at me with his newspaper until the nurse had to come and settle him down.
Lara was very kind about it. ‘Maggie, at least you come and talk to him. That’s more than can be said for anyone else in the family.’
He didn’t seem to hold it against me though and still greeted me the next time with a handshake and gorgeous old-fashioned gentlemanly introduction. I liked to let Lara have a bit of privacy with him, so usually I’d slip off to do some sewing in the lounge. Her dad would wave me off cheerily, saying, ‘Who was that?’ to Lara. She often tried to jog his memory with photos – sometimes I’d glance back at them, crouched over pictures of Lara as a child with her mother, Shirley. I’d see his old face soften as he peered into the photo and wonder what fog was parting in the memories in his mind. He’d start looking round: ‘When’s Shirley coming?’
And I’d see Lara’s face tighten, her expression caught between a forced smile and suppressed pain. She’d try and distract him with photos of Sandro. ‘Look, he likes building things, clever with his hands like you.’
And then sometimes I’d see him stab at a photo. ‘Him. I hate him.’
Lara would look puzzled. ‘That’s Massimo, Dad. My husband. He’s a good man.’ And then she’d get caught in explaining that yes, she had got married. Yes, he had been invited to the wedding.
Poor Massimo. Robert was so gentle in so many ways, it was weird that he had a downer on the one bloke who coughed up for him to live in a decent nursing home where he stood half a chance of getting his own pants back from the laundry.
As we walked out to the car, Lara always turned to wave at her dad as he stood watching her leave through the big bay window in the residents’ lounge. She gave him a big grin, waving furiously as he pressed his hands against the glass. Then always crumpled into little sobs as we reached the car.
‘I feel so guilty leaving him. I can’t wait to pass my test so I can come whenever I want.’ She paused. ‘Not that you haven’t been really generous bringing me here. I’ve been more times in the last few months than in the whole of the previous couple of years.’
‘Why don’t you take him to yours one day so he can see Sandro? Mum would come and help with any nursing stuff. He’s not really infirm, is he? You’d just need to keep a careful eye on him.’
Her face clouded over. ‘I keep thinking about it, but I’m worried Massimo wouldn’t be very keen. Dad can be quite difficult, though I’d love Sandro to spend some time with him. I can’t really bring Sandro here because it would give him nightmares. I mean, it’s all right, but there is something of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest about it.’