Lucy Gordon - Married Under the Italian Sun

‘Where are we?’

‘This is Italy, and we’re going to a lovely house, and-’

‘I want to go home. Who are you? Why are you making me go with you?’ His voice rose higher. ‘Let me go.’

He began to struggle with the car door, growing more upset by the moment.

‘Sam, please-’

‘This is dangerous, we’ve got to stop,’ Vittorio said, pulling over onto the hard shoulder, and watching his mirror to see that the other car had stopped behind them. ‘Get one of those lads, quick.’

Roy was already running towards them, pulling open Sam’s door, taking the old man into his arms.

‘Help me,’ Sam wept.

‘Let me take him with us,’ Roy said to Angel. ‘He’ll calm down.’

‘Yes, do what he wants,’ she said raggedly.

‘Come and sit beside me,’ Vittorio urged her, patting the front passenger seat.

‘No, thanks, I’ll stay back here,’ she said bleakly. ‘It’s not far.’

She wouldn’t budge on this, and he was forced to drive the rest of the way trying to imagine what was happening in the back seat. Was she all right? Was she badly upset? He strained his ears but he could hear nothing.

After a while she said in a normal voice, ‘I should have known better than to separate him from the lads. Of course he’s confused, after not seeing me for a while, and then the journey-I expected too much. That’s all it is. Everything’s going to be fine.’

Her determined cheerfulness was more painful to him than tears would have been, but there was no comfort he could offer, and he could only say, ‘Of course it is.’

After that she didn’t speak again for the rest of the journey.

VITTORIO ate in the kitchen that evening, waiting until the house was quiet. He would have given a great deal to know what was happening, but although he could hear the others moving about it was impossible to guess details.

Berta, who served their meal, was cheerful because Sam seemed to have a hearty appetite. ‘He’s gone to bed,’ she told Vittorio when she’d collected the coffee cups. ‘One of the nurses has gone too, and the other one is talking to the padrona. I think she’s upset.’

Later she took them more coffee and returned with the information that the other nurse had retired for the night. Vittorio lingered awhile, then strolled out into the garden, where he could see Sam’s darkened windows.

As he’d half hoped, Angel was there, sitting on the sloping lawn that led down from the terrace, looking up at the rising moon, and the stars that were just beginning to appear in the softly darkening sky.

‘So that’s Sam?’ he observed, dropping down beside her.

‘Yes, that’s my darling Sam.’

‘Did it get any better after he arrived?’

‘Not really,’ she said despondently. ‘He’s all right when he’s with the boys, but he doesn’t know me.’

‘How long has he been this way?’

‘About nine years, maybe a little more. He’s not always like today. Like I said, I handled it badly.’

That was probably true, yet it hurt him to hear her finding reasons to blame herself. He risked saying gently, ‘Is he ever very much better than today?’

‘Oh, yes, he often knows who I am.’

‘And he often doesn’t,’ Vittorio said shrewdly. ‘That must be hard for you.’

‘Yes,’ she said a little huskily. ‘But I know he’s all right with Roy and Frank.’

‘It must cost you a fortune to pay their salaries, and I expect there are other expenses.’

‘Yes, the extras add up. But I don’t want Sam to go without anything he needs. He never let me go without.’

‘Is this where Joe came into the equation?’

Angel nodded. ‘I told you I married him for his money. It was a fair bargain. I got what I wanted for Sam, Joe got a trophy wife to flaunt. I did all I promised him, jumped through every hoop he wanted, acted sexy, gazed at him adoringly. It was quite an act but, if I say it myself, I put on a good show, because I keep my word.’

‘For pity’s sake, you don’t have to justify yourself to me.’

She looked at him quizzically and he had the grace to blush.

‘I supposed I deserved that,’ he grunted.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You didn’t have to. From the first day I acted as though you owed me explanations. I judged you in ignorance, and-’

‘Hey, that’s enough,’ she said, reaching over and taking his hand. ‘We’ve put all that behind us.’

‘So I thought, but I keep learning new things about you, and discovering again how wrong I was.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, squeezing his hand tightly. ‘Friends.’

Angel thought Vittorio hesitated a long time before agreeing, ‘Friends.’

They were both silent for a while, their hands tightly clasped.

At last he said awkwardly, ‘Go on telling me about Sam.’

‘He brought me up after my parents died, and he was always lovely to me. He had such plans for my future. You wouldn’t think it to look at him now, but he was quite a slave-driver. He decided that I was going to college, and that was that.’

‘You didn’t get a say?’

‘Oh, yes, I was allowed to choose what I wanted to study, but even then he had to take control. I said I’d like to do the history of art, and Sam said, “In that case you’ll need to learn Italian”. So I did.’

‘You tamely did as you were told? You?’

‘Well, I actually liked the idea a lot. I loved art, and I pick up languages easily, but I hadn’t thought about college because we weren’t an academic kind of family. Sam knew better. He simply took over, making me do my homework, and no nonsense. Then he declared war on junk food and insisted that I eat plenty of fruit.

‘He also started doing a second job so that he could save money for me. He shouldn’t have done that, it tired him out, but he was determined that I should have a nest-egg.’

She fell silent, looking into the distance.

‘What happened?’ Vittorio asked quietly.

‘I took my exams, did well, won a place at a good college. And then-then Sam had a stroke. It wasn’t very severe, and he recovered, but something had changed. He’d been getting absent-minded for some time, but only in little ways that we could joke about. Suddenly it was serious. He was forgetful about everything. I put off college, said I’d go next year, but I think I knew in my heart that it wouldn’t happen.

‘I got a job to support us, but I soon had to give that up. He kept leaving things on the stove. When he set fire to the house for the second time I left the job and stayed at home with him. We lived on his savings for a while.’

‘The nest-egg for your college career?’

‘That’s right. When it ran out we had to rely on state benefits.’

‘When did Ghastly Gavin enter the picture?’

Angel gave a choke of laughter. ‘How do you know he was ghastly? You never met him.’

‘I met him in the pages of that damned magazine, and he’s ghastly all right.’

‘Not to me, then. At nineteen all you see is looks, and his looks were gorgeous. I had sentimental fantasies of marriage, a happy home, with Sam making a third.

‘Then I entered a television quiz show and won some money. I paid a few bills and bought Sam some new clothes. Gavin hit the roof. He wanted to splash out on a holiday. We had a row, he said it was time I had Sam “put away”, so I kicked him right out of my life.’

‘Good for you. But how does Joe Clannan come into this?’

‘He had shares in the production company that made the programme. He was there during the recording, and he asked me out. I was still mad at Gavin and Joe seemed like a nice guy. We dated for a while, and when he proposed I accepted on the condition that Sam must live with us and have the best of care. Joe promised, and as long as he kept his word I was prepared to put on the performance he wanted.

‘Even at the worst times I never quite gave up hope that one day I’d find my way back to my true path. You don’t look at me and see an academic, do you? But that’s how I’ve always felt inside, even when I was flaunting myself in the most vulgar fashion, plunging necklines, skirts slit up the thigh, perfectly timed wiggle. I practised that wiggle, you know, in front of the mirror, and, oh, boy, you should have seen me doing my stuff for the cameras!’

‘I have,’ Vittorio said, and could have bitten his tongue out straight afterwards.

‘You mean some of those programmes have been shown over here? By satellite?’

‘No, I got a video tape-when the sale had gone through…’ he said awkwardly.

‘What did you see?’ she asked in a voice that gave him no clue as to how she was taking this.

‘Star On My Team.’

‘You mean-the one where I had to choose between Michelangelo and Maisie Mouse?’ she asked unsteadily.

‘That’s the one.’

It was too much for her. Angel gave a choke, then exploded into laughter, leaning back against the slope of the lawn, gasping helplessly. Vittorio watched her, wryly remembering his violent reaction at the time.

‘Come on, see the funny side,’ she chided him when she could speak.

‘I can. It’s just that at the time I-well, let’s just say it wasn’t one of my better moments.’

‘Don’t tell me, let me guess. You got a little figure of an angel and stuck pins into it.’ Seeing his embarrassment, she crowed, ‘You did! Admit it!’

‘I didn’t, I swear-’ Then he groaned. ‘But only because I couldn’t find an angel.’

She collapsed against him, chuckling helplessly, and he held her, finally able to laugh with her.

‘You are the most forgiving woman,’ he said unsteadily. ‘And you shouldn’t forgive me. I don’t deserve it. If you only knew…’

‘But I do know,’ she said, her arms about his neck. ‘You never bothered to hide it, even when you demanded the job. I’m not surprised you made a mess of it. It was a toss-up whether you loved this place more than you hated me.’