The First Year

by Genevieve Gannon

  ‘Of course, Mrs Colbrook,’ Saskia said, using one hand to help herself to more dill potatoes with the long-stemmed serving spoons, like she’d been practising.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let her win,’ Andy had said when they got to his place. He took off his jacket and hung it in the wardrobe.

  Saskia took Andy’s hands. ‘She didn’t win. She wanted to cause a fuss.’

  ‘But you’re signing away—’

  ‘What?’ She spread her hands out before him. ‘Nothing I don’t already have. It will make your mother happy. Think of all the trouble it will avoid. When she gets over losing her chance to cause a rift, it might even melt some of the hatred she has for me.’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you.’

  Saskia gave Andy her best Oh-come-now face.

  ‘We shouldn’t let her interfere.’

  Saskia wrapped her arms around his waist and stretched her neck so she could plant a kiss on his chin. ‘It’s not just about your assets. I’ve got three boxes of old fashion magazines I need to protect.’

  *

  ‘You see, Carla,’ Alberto said, thrusting forth his fist, which was clamped around a fresh glass of Scotch, as Saskia finished telling the pre-nup story.

  ‘It’s so disrespectful,’ Carla hissed at Alberto.

  ‘Look, it’s something between you two,’ said Andy in his most diplomatic tone. ‘Every couple has to do what’s right for them.’

  There was a loud groaning noise as Carla pushed her chair back. ‘Please excuse me, I’m not feeling very well,’ she said.

  ‘Carla.’ Alberto’s smile dropped. ‘We have guests from Australia. How can you be so rude?’

  ‘Forgive me, Andrew and Saskia,’ she said, touching her hand to her forehead. ‘I think I was too long in the sun today.’

  ‘Carla.’ Alberto got to his feet. His voice held a warning. ‘Carla!’

  She ignored him and walked towards the door.

  ‘Carla!’ he lunged after her and grabbed her wrist. He spoke to her in rapid Italian, finishing with something about being rude.

  Unruffled, Carla released herself from his grip. She spoke calmly and slowly. ‘I am not one of the great Marianos, Alberto,’ she said. ‘I am merely a commoner. You will have to excuse my lack of breeding.’

  Alberto stood facing away from the room for a minute. Then he collected himself, and turned around.

  He laughed a little and shook his head. ‘Please forgive Carla,’ he said. ‘She gets upset.’ He picked up a crystal carafe. ‘More wine?’

  *

  ‘Poor Carla,’ Saskia said when they were alone in their hotel room.

  ‘That is precisely the reason I made sure I was never reliant on family money,’ Andy said.

  He walked into the bathroom where his iPhone was hidden among the folded towels. He ran the tap and opened his email account, rapping his fingers on the marble countertop while he waited for it to connect. There it was in his Inbox. All staff meeting. Mandatory. And above it, an email from Hugh Delahunty. Re: The meeting. Urgent. Call as soon as you can.

  He peered out through the crack in the folding wooden doors to where his wife was straightening the bed after their raucous afternoon siesta. It looked like the quilt and the sheets had fought to the death. He felt the weight of his phone in his hand.

  ‘Andy,’ she called. ‘Bed time.’

  He turned off his phone, and shoved it back under the towels.

  Day 11, Wednesday, October 22

  ‘Let’s never go home.’ Saskia leaned into the warmth of Andy’s body. Pale clouds had been spraying Vatican City with light showers on and off since morning, and the wind at the top of St Peter’s Basilica was whipping Saskia’s skirt around her legs and sending her hair flying. As it started to drizzle again, Andy peeled Saskia’s hair off her cheek, where it stuck in damp straps.

  All of Rome was spread out before them, an orange ocean of terracotta roof tiles. The sky was dark for the middle of the day. Saskia shivered, burrowed under Andy’s arm. ‘It makes you feel very small, doesn’t it?’

  He sucked a huge breath of air into his lungs. ‘It makes me think of history, and the future. Our future.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave, ever,’ Saskia said. ‘I don’t want to think about taking lunch orders, or wiping down the front of the cake display fridge.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to take conference calls.’

  ‘I don’t want to scour the coffee machine.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back down those stairs.’

  The stone staircase they had climbed to reach to Basilica roof was narrow and its low sloping roof had forced Andy to crouch. He’d felt claustrophobic.

  ‘It would be nice not to have to go back to that office.’ The thought stirred his memory of the all-staff meeting email alert. A pang of alarm darted through him. He quashed it by wrapping his arms around his wife and breathing in the scent of her skin, lightly perfumed with oranges. ‘I hate to think of you working in that cafe. Serving people.’

  ‘Don’t be so bourgeois,’ she teased. A favourite accusation.

  ‘I’m not being bourgeois. It’s a waste of your time and your talent.’ His tone had become pragmatic. Saskia recognised it as the voice he used when taking a work call.

  ‘Sas,’ he said, readying himself for his proposal. He had been thinking about this since he saw her drawing the fountain on their first day in Rome. He’d watched her from afar, bent over the sketch, her expression inscrutable and focused, and an idea had planted itself in his mind. He knew he needed to be delicate when he raised it. He didn’t want to open a new battle front. The back of her head rested against his chest. He hated the thought of her saying ‘Yes, Jill,’ as she bussed stacks of plates while the remnants of someone’s lunch leaked onto her arm. ‘About the cafe . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you consider not going back to it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Saskia pulled away from him and turned to meet his eye.

  ‘I mean . . . quitting.’

  ‘Just, not having a job anymore?’

  ‘You could become a full-time jewellery designer.’

  ‘I work in the cafe because jewellery designing doesn’t cover my living expenses.’ She smiled patiently, as if he had suggested that maybe she might like to consider a career as the King of Spain.

  ‘I know that, but I can take care of our living expenses. I don’t want you wasting time making coffee and bringing people plates of that awful dry factory cake when you could be building your business.’

  It was no accident that the cafe she worked in was located in a gallery nestled among the hatted restaurants and couture boutiques of Flinders Lane. She could have taken a clerical job that paid better or a position at a real restaurant with the opportunity of progressing. But neither of these options put her in the path of the men and women from New York and Tokyo and Copenhagen who sauntered into the gallery, dripping in hand-cast silver jewellery, to talk with its director. Saskia fantasised that one day one of them would stop for a coffee. As they reached out a hand to receive their espresso they’d catch a glimpse of her earrings, or pendant, as she served them. They’d offer a casual complement and she’d say, ‘Thanks, I made them myself.’ They’d pause a moment and say, ‘I never do this’, before giving her a business card. They’d mention they knew heads of design at major fashion houses who just happened to be looking for someone to take their accessory line in bold new directions.

  She furrowed her brow and spoke carefully: ‘It’s a very generous offer, but I don’t want you to have to support me. I don’t want to be a kept woman.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be a kept woman. You’d be working very hard.’

  She imagined what it would be like to be able to devote every waking moment to her business. All those hours she spent day-dreaming about designing, she could actually be designing. But then she pushed that thought aside.

  ‘Thank you. Really, it’s a wonderful thing to offer. But I can’
t, I just, I don’t feel comfortable.’

  Andy laughed, ‘Sas, you’re being silly. You can’t keep working in that cafe.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. You don’t understand.’

  ‘I do understand. You don’t want to be supported by me but we’re married now. We’re a partnership.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ She pulled away. ‘I like it there.’

  This was partly true. She took pleasure in dressing the plates with squiggles of sauce and evenly arranged dollops of cream. She loved hearing customers say, ‘Now isn’t this just a little piece of heaven,’ after Saskia had managed to disguise the dense mass-produced cake with edible embellishments. Most customers left the cake after a few bites once they’d eaten off the sauce and cream and discovered what remained wasn’t very good.

  She liked Joe, the old security guard, who retired from his job as an art conservator only to find he missed being around paintings and so took a job at the gallery. He drank a pot of camomile tea each morning before his shift and discussed the latest exhibit with Saskia.

  She liked the regulars, and seeing grandmothers come in with their granddaughters, and in particular she liked watching the children on school excursions. There were always one or two students who would trail behind the pack, their little mouths agape, in awe of the paintings, and Saskia would think, ‘I know. Isn’t it amazing?’

  Most of all she loved being able to wander through the exhibits after her shift.

  ‘Five hundred cups of coffee a day, and constant burns from the pie heater? You don’t like it that much. What about that obnoxious manager of yours, wouldn’t it be great not to have to take orders from her?’

  ‘It’s good for me to be near such great art.’

  ‘If you quit, you can visit two, even three times a week.’

  Saskia frowned. Andy pulled open her satchel and rummaged inside until he’d retrieved her sketchbook.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said, turning the pages. ‘Look at all of these ideas you’ve had since we’ve been here. Look at these designs.’

  Page after page was filled with drawings of scenes and places. In the margins were rings and pendants inspired by Borromini ceilings. She’d been particularly taken by the Baroque era. Fragments of sketches of Bernini sculptures and his papal art peppered notes about a Roman collection she was planning.

  She was pouting now, eyeing the drawings and longing to be able to take this blind leap. She had fantasies about a well-lit, clean studio space. But she’d never allowed herself to dwell on it too long.

  ‘Don’t you want to get started? Aren’t you hungry to put all your energy into the designs?’

  ‘Yes, but—’ Saskia took the book from his hand.

  ‘But what?’

  She shrugged. ‘Very few people actually do this for real. Jewellery designing. It’s a side project. You can’t live off it. Not really.’

  ‘If you did it full-time you could.’

  ‘To be able to survive, I’d have to produce vast volumes of work. The materials alone would cost thousands. I’d need software, insurance and a distribution chain . . .’

  ‘So you start out small and it grows from there.’ He folded his arms around her.

  ‘And what if it doesn’t grow?’

  ‘Think about it this way. If I came to you and said, “Sas, what I want more than anything else in the world is to start my own legal practice. It’s a long term goal and I think it’s important for our future, but I need you to support me”, would you do it?’

  She twisted away from him. ‘Is that what you want, to start your own law firm?’

  ‘Well.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe. Eventually. I mean, I don’t want to work for a big firm forever.’

  ‘Won’t supporting me prevent that?’

  ‘No, I’m not ready yet. And that’s beside the point. If you knew I had a dream, a goal, that I had always worked towards but I needed your support to make it a reality, would you support me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then this is no different.’

  ‘There’s no risk of me needing to support you anytime soon.’

  ‘But you would, if it came to that. Just think about it.’

  Again she was silent. She frowned, grappling with the thought of not having her own income, of being reliant on someone.

  ‘Are you scared of not having a safety net. Your own money?’

  Saskia gave a sharp intake of breath. She thought of that first morning after Seth had gone — the morning he’d not come home after a gig at the Exford. He wasn’t answering his phone and nobody knew where he was. She’d started tidying the flat, desperate to keep busy but unable to leave. She’d been on her hands and knees scrubbing the grout in the bathroom when she’d heard his key in the door. He gave a feeble excuse about passing out on the couch of a mate. But who, he couldn’t say. It was past noon and he knew she would have called the usual suspects. He wouldn’t look at her, and Saskia knew her fiancé had been with another woman. He’d showered but her cheap perfume had somehow clung to his T-shirt. Or was that the fruity, feminine shower gel he’d used to try and wash away her scent?

  ‘Sas, we’re married,’ Andy said. ‘What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.’

  She smiled. ‘You definitely got the raw end of that deal.’

  Seth, a musician, hadn’t had much money either. There had been times when her cafe income had gone to paying his bills and supporting his ambitions. After they’d split, she’d found herself quite far behind where she’d planned to be. The nest egg she’d been building to invest in her business was nowhere near as substantial as she had expected.

  ‘Andy, please don’t push this. The jewellery business . . . it’s, well, it’s a business. It has to be viable on its own. And if that means I have to work in a cafe to prop it up then I’m willing to do that. Silver sheet, rods and casting grain is expensive. It all adds up. That’s why I’m always at the cafe.’

  ‘The business is never going to succeed if you don’t devote yourself to it one hundred per cent.’

  She was silent, knowing this to be true.

  ‘When we get back to Melbourne I’ll set up a joint bank account. I’ve been meaning to for months. Then you can tell Jill you won’t be working at the cafe anymore.’

  Andy’s offer was so tempting, but something inside Saskia wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t bear the thought of relying on him, of accepting money he earned to pay for her business, like it was some hobby for a bored housewife. She didn’t have the courage to put herself into his hands like that, to relinquish her independence. She had only just starting to feel comfortable in his flat. If she wasn’t contributing, all that would be undone.

  She also dreaded what Millie would think if she found out. It would confirm everything she had intimated she expected of Saskia.

  ‘It’s none of my mother’s business,’ Andy said, reading her mind.

  Saskia sighed heavily. He was clasping her hand now, urging her to say yes and in doing so, show that she trusted him. The memory of her willingly signing the pre-nup entered his mind. She had almost jumped at the opportunity to retain the division of their lives.

  She looked up at him, pensive. ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘Of course.’ He kissed her brow. ‘Take as long as you need.’

  He smiled reassuringly but felt strangely unsettled. He had been prepared for an initial, knee-jerk objection. It hadn’t occurred to him that she would say no.

  Day 13, Friday, October 24

  Andy shuffled into the middle seat of the cab so that he was squeezed tightly next to Saskia. The centre spot was not designed for a grown man, but he had to avoid a wet-looking stain the shape of Africa on the left-side seat. Next to him, Saskia was gazing out the window trying to keep her eyes open.

  He usually kept his toothbrush in his carry-on bag but he had forgotten to rearrange his wet kit before they left Rome and now his mouth felt gluey. It had been raining and the roads were wet as they sped
past concrete warehouses and empty grass fields, the cab’s tyres hissing on the bitumen.

  A cardboard pine tree swung from the rear-view mirror, suffusing the air with the sort of canned aroma only found in mundane, everyday life. The tree, an unnatural green, was precisely the type of thing Saskia couldn’t imagine people buying in Italy. Vanilla pods, but not air freshener.

  The air was cool and the freeway lights cast a sulphur yellow hue over the early morning traffic. A truck roared past, trailing a sooty cloud of exhaust. Andy frowned at the giant Sexyland sign that greeted all incoming traffic from Tullamarine airport.

  ‘What a wonderful message for international visitors,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘Welcome to Melbourne. We like dildos.’

  Saskia laughed, then squeezed his arm. ‘I take it you’re not happy to be home?’

  He rubbed her knee. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go into work.’

  He’d explained about the email while they were in line at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport.

  Saskia placed her hand over his. ‘Are you worried about the meeting?’

  ‘Not really.’ He was slow to answer. ‘I just wish I knew a little more about it.’

  ‘You have been away for almost two weeks. It’s highly likely the whole firm has collapsed.’

  When he didn’t laugh, she said, ‘Sorry, joke.’

  He cupped his right fist with his left hand and cracked his knuckles. ‘I know we just landed, but do you mind if I check my email?’

  Saskia furrowed her brow. They had been back from their honeymoon less than an hour and already Andy was preoccupied with his job. But she shrugged and said, ‘We are back, I guess.’

  He fished his phone from his carry-on bag and started clacking the keys the moment it came to life.

  Since Andy was absorbed in his screen, Saskia pulled out her own phone and turned it on. It seized and buzzed as twelve days’ worth of text messages registered on its screen. Most were from friends wishing them well on their trip or reporting they’d had a wonderful time at the wedding.

  Her heart contracted when she saw a message from someone who wasn’t a contact. The sender registered as a long list of numbers, mostly threes and fives. But the digits were as familiar as any friend’s name. She knew she should ignore it but was unable to resist clicking.