A Postcard from Italy: The perfect summer beach read

by Alex Brown

  ‘Yes. Good thinking, Grace, you’re always full of good ideas.’ Larry put the jewellery box back on the dressing table and walked over to where she was standing by the paintings. He lifted one out to take a look. ‘Now I’m no art dealer but this looks pretty impressive to me. None of your mass-produced printed stuff here! You know, the kind of thing that you find in IKEA. No … this is a proper oil painting. And thankfully we have the correct climate control in all the units, even the older ones such as this, as I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for such a wonderful work of art getting ruined with mould or mildew. It’d be a travesty.’

  He carefully touched the corner of the canvas with a look of relief on his face. An exquisite scene of Venice’s famous Grand Canal was displayed before them, with tall, creamy-caramel-coloured buildings flanking either side of the water’s edge. Gondolas on glittering blue water under an atmospheric cloud-streaked sky led up to two marble domes with delicately intricate detailing. ‘And a skilled artist by the looks of it … see how he or she has captured the detail of the cornicing on the domes right there?’ Larry paused to point at a beautifully impressive building in the top right corner of the painting. ‘The famous Salute. It’s a church. And built as a thank you when the plague ended in 1630, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Gosh, that must have taken the builders years to create. It’s incredible.’ Grace studied the picture; it reminded her of the 1950s film, Summertime, starring Katherine Hepburn. She’d only watched it again a few months back and had been swept away in the gorgeous, romantic scenery of Venice’s magnificent waterways.

  ‘It’s breathtaking up close,’ Larry said, carefully placing the painting on the chaise longue.

  ‘Have you actually seen it in real life then?’

  ‘Oh yes, I took Betty there on a mini-break back in the day. We were young and carefree, and this was long before the nippers came along and you could just up and do all that spur-of-the-moment stuff.’ He smiled wistfully, as if remembering the lovely time he’d had with Betty in Venice. ‘And we hadn’t been married long, so it’s a wonder we saw anything much at all outside of our hotel room,’ he added, doing an exaggerated wink. Grace put a hand over mouth to stifle a giggle as she really couldn’t imagine Larry and Betty cavorting in bed all day and night long. ‘Ah, those were the days.’ He pondered quietly for a moment before rubbing his palms together. ‘Anyway, enough of the melancholy – shall we make a start in snapping some pics then?’

  Grace lifted her phone up and took several pictures of the Venice Grand Canal painting, wondering if she should put some filters on to enhance the scene, but thought better of it as Ellis would most likely need to see the original work in all its naked glory. She repeated the process with all the paintings, and there were a dozen at least, many in the same style. They couldn’t make out the marking in the bottom right corner; it wasn’t even a proper signature and gave them no clues as to whether Connie herself was the artist. The thought had crossed Grace’s mind, though, after reading her diaries – the imaginative style of her writing showed that she clearly had a creative talent. Perhaps painting was in her repertoire, too, and that’s why she went to Italy … to capture its beauty on canvas.

  Twenty minutes later, and Grace had photos of every painting.

  ‘I’ll email them to you,’ she told Larry as he stowed the last painting back in its place.

  ‘Thank you, Grace. I’m so pleased we have you here with all the good ideas,’ he said kindly.

  ‘Really?’ she said without thinking, unused to impromptu praise.

  ‘Of course,’ he nodded. ‘And don’t be worrying about being late now and again, I know it’s hard for you at home.’ A silence hung in the air between them as Grace studied a fingernail. ‘The important thing is that we have you here.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she managed quietly, fearful now that Larry being nice might make her emotional.

  As if sensing this, he jovially added, ‘So how about we have a lovely cup of tea?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she breathed, grateful to be talking about something else. ‘And Larry …’ She hesitated, wondering if he would agree to another idea.

  ‘Go on,’ he prompted.

  ‘Well, I was wondering if I could take some pictures of Connie’s diaries and letters too? I know I can’t take the originals home, but I could read through them when I’m up in the nigh—’ She stopped talking. ‘Um, if I get time,’ she added. Larry looked at her, momentarily hesitating, as if he wanted to say something more but wasn’t sure if he should.

  ‘Grace, you can read through them here tomorrow,’ he settled for a few seconds later. ‘There’s really no need to take on more work, I’m sure you have enough to be getting on with at home as it is …’

  ‘But I’m not sure I can wait until then. Please Larry, it will give me something interesting to do …’ She looked away, disliking how desperate she sounded. But it was the truth. The thought of delving into Connie’s life gave her a sense of purpose, and it would be a break too from the monotony of her usual night-time routine of waiting for her mother to fall asleep … just so she could do something for herself, if only for a short while, uninterrupted, and without fear of being bellowed at and then chastised for not coming to her aid fast enough.

  ‘Well, in that case, I’ll get the jewellery box into the safe while you get cracking on reading more of that diary to see if you can spot some clues.’

  A little while later, Larry returned with two mugs of tea.

  ‘Betty made it just how you like it,’ he said, handing a mug to her. ‘And said to give you this too.’ He pulled a bundle wrapped in kitchen towel from his pocket. Inside was another generous slice of Betty’s delicious babka. ‘She also said I was to give you a hand with going through Mrs Donato’s things and she’ll take care of the invoice letters.’

  ‘Oh, that’s kind of her. And thank you, Larry.’ Her eyes lit up as she took the cake. She hadn’t had time again to eat a proper lunch, just half a homemade ham sandwich on the bus back to work. But at least Cora had agreed to serving herself a cheese ploughman’s with a big buttered baguette and tomato soup from a flask while Grace had Googled local engineers in the hope that one could come and take a look at the washing machine that was now playing up. She devoured the cake and took a slurp of tea while Larry lifted the first suitcase from the pile and flipped open the lid.

  ‘Well I never! There must be dozens of diaries, letters and papers in here,’ he said, placing his hands on his hips in preparation for the mammoth task ahead. ‘Right, let’s make a start. I’ll open and place each one on the chaise longue while you snap a pic, and then I’ll put it all back in the suitcase afterwards. If we get a system going then we might be done by home time …’

  My truelove is never coming home! I swear my heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces as my knees buckled and I grasped the back of an armchair on hearing the news. Mother and Father travelled all the way here on the train to Tindledale especially to tell me themselves. Killed in a training exercise is what Father explained, with his head bowed and black fedora hat pressed to his chest as he imparted the terribly sad news in the middle of Aunt Maud’s sitting room. Mother put a steadying hand on my arm as she passed her best embroidered hanky towards me. I managed to control my emotions, though, and didn’t cry until I was alone upstairs in the bedroom.

  Hitler has a lot to answer for!

  This world is so cruel.

  Poor Jimmy will never see the baby that is kicking its tiny feet as it grows within me, and this darling soul will never feel the love of the marvellous father that I know Jimmy would have been. The father that poor Jimmy could and should have had the chance to be if he hadn’t gone off to learn how to fight in Hitler’s phoney war! Not even a proper war.

  Mother says adoption is the only option now, especially as I’m unmarried and will not be in any fit state to deal with the grief as well as look after a new baby all on my own. Because that is what I shall be: alone! An unw
ed mother. Not even my best friend, Kitty, knows of my predicament. There was no time for me to even get a message to her before I was sent away, and Mother says she saw her at the station going off to join the Land Army in Oxfordshire, so I can’t burden her with my troubles when she needs to concentrate on doing her bit for the war effort. Mother also says it won’t be long now until baby arrives. But how can I bear to be parted from Jimmy’s child when it is all I have left in the world? And this poor mite doesn’t deserve to be abandoned to strangers who never even knew Jimmy. How will they ever be able to tell our child what a marvellous man he was?

  In the lounge below her mother’s bedroom, with her laptop on her knees, having transferred the pictures of Connie’s paperwork from her mobile, Grace felt a solitary tear trickle down the side of her nose as she wished she could reach into poor Connie’s diary and sweep her up into an enormous hug. Although Jimmy had died a lifetime ago, Grace knew the sense of loss for a life you thought you were going to have never really goes away, and she wondered if Connie still felt it after all these years … if it turned out that she was still alive. And Grace was even more hopeful now that her instinct was wrong and Connie was still here.

  She would love to meet her, to see a glimpse of the young woman she was reading about back in … she paused to click through her photo stream to find the date of the diary she was reading from … ah, January 1940. During the Second World War. So Jimmy served his country and courageously gave his young life so that others could live on in peace. But not for poor Connie; Grace imagined her life was shattered on losing her love, and therefore so very far from peaceful.

  Grace made a note in the pad on the coffee table in front of her. ‘Jimmy died – 1940. Connie’s baby born 1940.’ So the baby would be in her seventies if she were still alive today, thought Grace, assuming the child was a girl on remembering the delicate pink hand-knitted matinee jacket and bootees. She vowed to read on and see if she could find the name of Connie’s daughter, as that would probably be the easiest and quickest way to find her mother, Constance di Donato, now that she knew the truelove mentioned in the later diary extract in Italy clearly wasn’t Jimmy. ‘Another man’ … Grace wrote on the pad, followed by, ‘Italian? Connie’s husband? Mr di Donato.’ And then she made a list of questions she would look for answers to in amongst Connie’s paperwork inside the unit.

  1. Who is he?

  2. Where did they meet?

  3. Where is he now?

  4. Was Connie’s baby (a girl?) adopted?

  5. If not adopted, did the baby take Mr Donato’s surname?

  6. Ask Betty to ask Maggie for advice on how we can look up the name ‘Donato’ on the ancestry websites that she uses to make her family trees.

  7. Or, better still, how do we go about looking on the electoral roll?

  Donato is an unusual name; there can’t be that many people with it, surely, and if Connie’s daughter did take her stepfather’s name and then never married, or even if she did, she may have kept her name in any case, so we could find her that way. Grace’s head was spinning as she went through all the possible options.

  She placed her laptop and pen on the sofa beside her and sat back, still and numb for a while, letting the silent tears flow for Jimmy and the heartbroken, lonely young woman from the past who had been left behind with Jimmy’s unborn baby. Loneliness was a terrible thing, Grace knew; she had endured it when Matthew first left and before she’d conceded and had given up the flat, unwillingly moving back in with her controlling mother. And, from the sounds of it, Connie had a controlling, unfeeling mother too! Who tells their grieving young daughter that giving their unborn baby away is the only option? Grace knew things had been different for unmarried mothers back in those days when Connie was a young woman, but still, it felt so heartless, and why was she far away in the countryside and not with her parents when she most likely needed them the most?

  Grace wiped her tears. Determined to find something or some way of helping Connie, she picked her laptop up and read on. The next few pages were blank as she tapped through on the mouse pad, but then something familiar caught her eye. After tapping back a page, she took a proper look.

  If only I had kept my passion and love for Jimmy intact a little longer, certainly until my eighteenth birthday on 20 June, and then we could have married and …

  Grace sat bolt upright. The twentieth of June. That was her birthday too. Her pulse quickened. What were the chances of that? It had to be a sign. She liked signs, and wasn’t sure why exactly, other than that they tended to feel comforting, reassuring somehow. As the similarity sank in, drawing her and Connie together over the decades, a fresh batch of tears came as she picked up her pen and pad and tried to write.

  8. 20 June. Mine and Connie’s birthdays!!!

  Grace let all the feelings flood through her until, moments later, she became aware of a colourful flash at the window. A Hawaiian shirt in petrol blue with vibrant green parrots all over it was jigging up and down. Jamie from next door was tapping on the front-room window and waving exuberantly with his other hand. Grace quickly swiped at the tears with the sleeve of her top and leapt up, motioning to him that she was coming to the front door. After taking a brief moment to gather herself, she let him in.

  ‘How are you, Grace? A million miles away you were then. Everything OK?’ he asked, folding his tattoo-covered forearms and staring at her intently. ‘You looked like you were crying. Not that I was spying on you or anything – I had barely glimpsed in before I tapped on the window. Promise.’ And he enveloped her in an enormous embrace, the waft of his coconut hair gel engulfing her. Grace let herself lean into his gym-honed chest, grateful for the moment of comfort. ‘Ah, that’s it, love, you let it all out,’ he added, when she couldn’t help her shoulders from heaving up and down. The last few months had been so exhausting, what with caring for Cora and then on reading and absorbing Connie’s pain … well, it all felt so overwhelming right now and Grace realised she was crying again. An ugly cry with the tears sprinkling all over the shoulder part of Jamie’s cheery parrot shirt.

  ‘Is that you, Jamie?’ Cora’s voice bellowed, breaking in to Grace’s moment of comfort from her friend. Jamie lifted his chin from where it had been resting gently on top of Grace’s head and responded.

  ‘Yes it is, Cora. I’ll be up to see you after I’ve spent some time with Grace, OK?’ he called out, firmly, never one to take any nonsense from her mother.

  ‘Of course, love. No rush, I know how busy you are at the hospital … get Grace to make you a cup of tea, I’m sure you could do with one.’ And her voice faded as she turned the volume of the TV up even higher.

  ‘Can you turn that down, please, Cora? It’s very loud,’ Jamie added, giving Grace a look as he let out a sigh and rolled his eyes.

  ‘Oh, yes, sorry. I didn’t realise,’ Cora acquiesced sweetly, and the TV volume instantly lowered.

  ‘How do you do that?’ Grace whispered, shaking her head as she went to pull away. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry,’ she added, on seeing the state of his parrot-print shirt. But he gave her another squeeze before taking her hand in his and leading her into the lounge.

  ‘Oh don’t worry about a few tears, they will all come out in the wash,’ he said, gently.

  ‘There you go.’ He steered her to the sofa. ‘Now sit down and I’ll make you a nice mug of tea and you can tell me all about it. Better out than in.’ He squeezed her hands in his before turning on his heel and heading towards the kitchen.

  Half an hour later, and Grace had told Jamie all about unit 28 and Constance di Donato’s diaries and beautiful belongings.

  ‘Blimey! How intriguing,’ Jamie exclaimed through a mouthful of strawberry jam on extremely buttery toast – he had made several rounds to go with their tea, declaring this a very justified moment for some good comfort food. ‘But desperately sad too. Do we know what happened to the baby yet? Was she adopted?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know. Maybe Connie will tell us soon.
There are lots more diary pages and scraps of paper to look at, but it’s slow going trying to piece a proper timeline together as they don’t seem to be in a logical order.’ Grace took another mouthful of tea as she nodded towards her laptop.

  ‘But you already have clues to investigate,’ Jamie suggested.

  ‘Such as?’ Grace put down the mug and lifted her pad and pen, poised to note any ideas that Jamie might have.

  ‘Well, her address in London for starters.’

  ‘What do you mean? The post from there was all returned with “Not known at this address”, so we know that she doesn’t live there any more.’

  ‘Fair enough. But a neighbour might know where she moved to, or how about the person who does live there now? Somebody wrote on the envelopes and put them back in the post. Somebody kind. Somebody who cares. I couldn’t be bothered with all that.’ He let out a long sigh before cramming a jammy crust into his mouth.

  ‘Really?’ Grace quizzed as she turned to study her best friend. She was surprised by his attitude, as she thought Jamie was the kindest and most caring person she knew, alongside Larry and Betty of course. ‘So what would you do then if post arrived for someone who used to live at your house?’

  ‘That’s highly unlikely – you know we’ve lived next door for as long as I can remember. But I guess I’d chuck it in the bin,’ he said and shrugged.

  ‘That’s terrible.’ She batted his arm. ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? Of course you can. Unless it had a credit card inside or something like that … then I’d open it and pocket the card ready for some seriously fraudulent online spending. Card and address details right there. Bingo!’ He rubbed his hands together in glee.

  Silence followed.

  ‘You idiot!’ Grace proclaimed, when the penny dropped that he was messing around and teasing her.

  ‘What?’ He pretended to cower as she batted him with her pad. ‘Oh Grace, as if I would do a thing like that! You are so gullible. Always have been.’