The Love of My Life

by Louise Douglas

  Then, to top things off, I had a letter from Georgie, who told me he was sorry but he wouldn’t be coming back to Portiston to work the ferry any more. He had been offered the role of bass guitarist with a promising new rock band. He wrote that he loved me and that he would never forget me and that one day he would write a song called ‘Ferry Girl’ in memory of the times we shared. I went down to the seafront and watched the ferry lights as it cut its course through the waves to the island and drank a bottle of sherry. Then I was sick on the pebbles with their tarry, seaweedy smell. I wondered why Georgie hadn’t asked me to join him; that would have solved all my problems. (It turned out that he was courting the band’s punky girl singer. They later married and lived happily ever after, which was nice for them but not so good for me at the time, given my situation.)

  Some good things happened. I had a postcard from Lynnette which simply said: Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.

  Anneli refused to bow to pressure from anyone to renounce me as a friend. I heard her hissing in the ear of one girl who had curled her lip at me, ‘You’re just jealous because no man will ever look at you.’ Anneli’s parents were nice too. Her dad gave me a (very paternal) hug and said, ‘Chin up, Liv, in a couple of weeks they’ll have somebody else to talk about. You’re just experiencing one of the downsides of living in a small, boring town.’

  For some reason their forgiving kindness was harder to shoulder than other people’s cruelty.

  In due course Mum received a letter from school. She and Mr Hensley made an appointment to see the head-teacher. I was spared the ordeal of being present at the interview, but had to wait on a seat in the corridor outside the head’s office. The head’s secretary was kind to me. She brought me out a glass of water and asked if I’d rather sit in her office than in the public corridor, beneath the smug boards listing the names of successful scholarship students. Lynnette’s name was on the boards in gilt letters twice, once for being Head Girl and once for winning a music prize. My name too had made it on to a school wall, only the wall was the lavatory wall and my name was written in permanent marker.

  I declined the secretary’s offer. I thought it would be worse to be in her office, with her feeling sorry for me, than out in the corridor. The secretary’s eyes were so full of pity that I knew something serious was going to happen.

  Little girls, eleven-and twelve-year-olds, filed past me in a navy-blue rush of giggles and whispers and scabby knees and sticky fingers and I tried to smile at them in a patronizing manner, like I was about to go in to the head’s office and get an award or something.

  Eventually I was summoned. The office was huge. The mullioned window gave on to a rosebed outside and the smell of pig shit which the gardener had laid around the base of the plants hit me first. Light was streaming through the windows in oblongs and the air was cloudy with dust motes.

  Mum had been crying. Her eyes and the rims of her nostrils were red. She was dabbing at her nose with a screwed-up handkerchief. Mr Hensley sat beside her, his face set like concrete, his stupid hairy ears sticking out of his stupid shiny head. On the other side of a great, old, wooden desk was the head. I’d hardly had any dealings with her close up, never having either excelled at anything or been particularly badly behaved in my time at Watersford Girls’ Grammar School. She was probably only in her fifties although, at the time, I regarded her as an old woman. The skin on her face and neck was soft and jowly. Her silver hair was set solid, like the hair of a woman in an oil painting. It moved as a unit, not as thousands of individuals. I can’t remember a word she said, but the long and short of it was that I was being expelled. Mr Parker, apparently, was close friends with the chairman of the governors. He had given a generous donation towards the construction of the new science block. My indiscretion was public knowledge and couldn’t be ignored, blah blah blah. Mum sniffed and swallowed bravely, Mr Hensley stared, the head asked me if I was ashamed of myself and I nodded.

  I was only two terms away from the A levels that might have opened up some doors for me. The headmistress had indicated, kindly, that there might be a possibility of taking the exams as an external candidate if we could organize some private tuition, but I think we all knew that was not going to happen. My education was over.

  On the drive back, while I sat hunched and tearful in the back of Mr Hensley’s beige Morris Minor (the scene of so much humiliation), Mum told me about Dad. She told me how his lasciviousness had destroyed her once and now I was following in his footsteps.

  ‘You mean my dad is still alive?’ I asked, shocked and incredulous.

  ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘And no wish to find out.’

  ‘You had no right to tell us he was dead!’

  Mr Hensley turned round and said, ‘Don’t you speak to your mother in that tone of voice.’

  Mum stared straight ahead. ‘I knew you were going to turn out bad right from the beginning,’ she said. ‘You were such a difficult baby, such a fractious child.’

  I wasn’t listening any more. I leaned my head against the window and watched the leaves of the bushes go by and I swallowed all the questions that were bubbling up from my stomach and decided that I would go and live with Dad. There was absolutely no reason for me to stay in Portiston any longer. There was nothing to keep me.

  I never heard from or saw any of the Parkers again. Somebody told me they went to live in Edinburgh.

  thirty-three

  I went to the café to wait for my taxi.

  ‘Going anywhere nice?’ asked the bodybuilder chef. I only had a small bag with me but I kept checking my handbag for the ticket receipt and my passport.

  ‘I’m going to Ireland for the weekend.’

  He put my coffee down on the table and scratched behind his ear with his pencil.

  ‘A dirty weekend?’

  I smiled. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘But you’re going with the brother-in-law?’

  I looked up at him. There was nothing judgemental in his expression, no malice. He was just asking what he thought was an obvious question. I looked away and stirred my coffee. It smelled divine.

  ‘None of my business,’ he said. ‘Just that you’re not the sort of woman who deserves to be waiting for a taxi on her own.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

  ‘It always is.’

  I concentrated on the consuming task of sugaring my coffee, and a few moments later the chef returned with a little slice of perfect treacle tart. He set it in front of me like a gift, together with a pastry fork and a napkin. I felt at home.

  ‘Can I sit down for a moment?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  He retrieved his roll-up from behind his ear and struggled to light it, his hands cupped round it, striking the flint of the disposable lighter again and again. When it caught, he inhaled gratefully and I inhaled the scent of the tobacco, as familiar to me as the smell of my own shampoo.

  ‘My husband used to smoke roll-ups,’ I said.

  The chef raised an eyebrow. ‘Filthy bloody habit,’ he said.

  ‘He died,’ I said.

  ‘Of smoking?’

  ‘No, no. It was a motorway crash.’

  ‘Shit. I’m sorry. Life’s a bastard, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘So whereabouts in Ireland are you going?’

  ‘Shannon.’

  ‘It’s beautiful. You’ll like it. They know how to enjoy themselves in Ireland. They’re not dour like the miserable buggers over here.’

  I sipped coffee froth from the spoon.

  ‘My husband was a chef too,’ I said.

  ‘All the most alpha males are.’

  ‘He was going to open his own restaurant in London.’

  ‘What sort of place?’

  ‘Well, like this really. Only more Italian. He wasn’t going to do cooked breakfasts.’

  ‘Try the tar
t.’

  I forked off the tiniest sliver of the tart and tasted it. It was heavenly, butter and caramelized breadcumbs with the sweetest toffee aftertaste.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  ‘Good. It’s nice to …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ He stabbed out the centimetre of cigarette he had left between his yellowed fingertips on the glass ashtray.

  ‘I was going to say it was nice to see you smile and then I thought that sounded like some kind of sad-act chat-up line.’

  I couldn’t help myself. I smiled again and took another, larger mouthful of the tart. The chef stood up and wiped his hands on his apron.

  ‘Make sure he takes you to the Cliffs of Moher. If you’re staying in County Clare, that is. They’re amazing. You’d like them.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you for the tart, and, you know, everything.’

  He shrugged. ‘No worries.’

  And then the taxi arrived and I went to the airport for the secret assignation that would launch my first and only weekend with my beloved brother-in-law, Marc.

  thirty-four

  It was early summer. I had just turned eighteen. It should have been the best time of my life, only unfortunately no new scandal had broken and I was still the town pariah. I went to Marinella’s to see if Angela would give me a job, naïvely assuming that, because I’d done a good job for the Felicones in the past, she might be prepared to overlook my indiscretion. The bell tinged as I opened the door, and the first person I saw was Luca, who was standing behind the bar wiping glasses.

  He was twenty years old, still lanky, with big hands and shoulders and a slender throat, and a shadow of acne around his jawline. His hair was shoulder-length, black and silky, and his smile, oh God, was a smile a girl would die for.

  ‘Liv!’ he cried, and my heart flipped and then danced because he was so clearly pleased to see me. I had entered the restaurant hopefully, but still with the downcast air of the penitent which I assumed was appropriate for somebody in my position. Now I perked up a bit.

  Luca vaulted the bar – if Angela had seen him she’d have been furious – and in two strides I was in his arms and my feet had left the floor.

  ‘Boy, you have been one naughty girl!’ he said, paraphrasing one of our favourite Beatles songs.

  I was so relieved by his reaction, and it was so good to see a genuinely friendly face, that I hung on to Luca’s neck and put my face on his shoulder, breathing in his hot young-man smell, and stayed there for as long as I could, which was only about a second because Nathalie came into the restaurant and coughed pointedly.

  I let go of Luca and he let go of me, but he was still grinning slightly wolfishly.

  ‘It’s our local celebrity,’ he said to Nathalie, somewhat unnecessarily. Nathalie looked at me. There was no kindness in her eyes. They were cold and her face was expressionless.

  ‘What can we get you?’ she asked, producing a notepad and a pencil. I glanced to Luca for help. He bit a little piece of his lower lip between two canine teeth.

  ‘Um, actually, I came in to see Angela,’ I said. ‘I wanted to ask about my job.’

  Nathalie’s expression didn’t soften. ‘We don’t have any vacancies at present,’ she said.

  I tried to adopt a friendly but humble expression. I still wanted to be an actress and had practised.

  ‘I don’t mind what I do, Nathalie. I’d be willing to—’

  ‘There are no vacancies,’ she said.

  ‘Oh come on, Nat,’ said Luca, ‘there must be something we can give Liv. She’s an old friend of the family. She’s worked here lots of summers.’

  Nathalie gave Luca one of her looks. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Well, we should at least ask Pop if he needs a hand with anything.’

  Nathalie rolled her eyes, very quickly, so that you couldn’t be sure if she’d done it or not, but I didn’t like her patronizing Luca in this way, and little hackles of anger began to strain at my shoulderblades.

  ‘Don’t worry, Luca,’ I said sweetly. ‘I wouldn’t want to put Nathalie to any trouble.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, I’ll go and ask him myself,’ said Luca, and he disappeared into the back of the restaurant.

  Being alone with Nathalie was uncomfortable. She had a way of imparting her mood to the whole room, and the atmosphere was so chilly I was practically shivering.

  ‘So, how are things with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Very good,’ replied Nathalie, straightening the cutlery in the trays by the counter. ‘You know that Luca has asked me to marry him?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ I swallowed. I felt dizzy. ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have you set a date yet?’

  Nathalie smoothed her skirt. ‘Christmas,’ she said. ‘It won’t interfere with the business, and we’ll have snow on the hills for the photographs.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Just perfect.’

  Nathalie looked at me without smiling. As always, she was neatly turned out, but in a suit that probably came from Country Casuals. Her hair was cut in a bob which didn’t flatter her heavy jaw. Her skirt stopped just below the knee. She was wearing tan tights and flat shoes.

  There was a hole in my black tights, and I hitched down my skirt to try to cover it. My T-shirt was dark green, with a black Blondie print on the front. I could see the outline of my nipples through the fabric. Standing this close to Nathalie, I felt naked. I sat down at one of the little circular two-person tables by the window, crossed my legs and rested my chin on my hands. I swung my foot and gazed at the door, waiting for Luca to come back.

  It only took a couple of minutes, and he emerged from the office with Maurizio in tow. Nathalie melted away, a satisfied, Cheshire-cat smile on face. She knew what was going to happen because she and Angela had already guessed that I would come looking for a job, and had prepared themselves for this eventuality.

  ‘Olivia, carina, you’re looking as beautiful as ever.’ Maurizio came over to me, put his hands on my arms, just below my shoulders, and leaned down to kiss me on both cheeks in a waft of garlic and wine. ‘But I have bad news,’ he continued, pulling a comic-tragic face and holding his hands to his heart. ‘There is no work here; we have too many sons to do the jobs that need doing, we don’t need any extra help.’

  Luca said, ‘Pop, you’re always saying we’re understaffed at weekends …’

  Maurizio held up his hand. ‘But your mother interviewed this week for the position.’

  Luca opened his mouth but before he could say anything I stood up and pulled down my skirt. ‘Well, thanks for letting me know, Maurizio. I assume you won’t be needing me in the summer either.’

  Maurizio did his Italian, palms-open gesture of helplessness.

  Luca was doing an exaggerated, open-mouthed mime of incredulity. ‘Liv is one of us, Pop. You can’t do this!’

  ‘It’s OK, Luca,’ I said. ‘I completely understand.’

  My pride was in tatters. I turned and went out of Marinella’s, wondering if I would ever go back. I was halfway along the seafront, seagulls keening above me, waves commiserating at my feet, wiping my nose with my forearm, when Luca caught up with me.

  thirty-five

  The bed was wide and low with a pale green candlewick spread and the room smelled of air freshener. There was no TV or kettle but the landlord brought us a tray of tea and biscuits. We sat on opposite sides of the bed, our feet on the practical carpet, and drank our tea like strangers thrown together by circumstance.

  We had driven out of Shannon Airport in a hired Ford Focus and I had watched the countryside of Ireland go by while Marc drove. We’d stopped at several bed-and-breakfast establishments, but all had been full until this one, a large, modern bungalow, painted what Marc had dubbed ‘Clare yellow’ because so many of the buildings favoured this particular colour. The bungalow was so ne
w that there were still piles of bricks and other construction detritus stacked up on the tarmacked drive, which had space for several cars.

  The landlord was a young man with a nice face and a kind manner who practically tripped over himself trying to make us feel welcome. I wondered if we were his first customers. Later, we heard a baby crying in the bowels of the bungalow, and then the sound of singing as its parents tried to quiet it, obviously anxious it didn’t disturb us. I wanted to go and tell them to let the baby cry, we didn’t mind, but Marc said that would only draw attention to the fact that we had heard it. So I stayed by the mirror, applying my make-up, warm with anticipation because Marc and I were going out for a meal together and I hadn’t been out for a meal since Luca died, and I loved the whole drama of going out to eat.

  Marc was in the shower, and warm steam heavy with the apple fragrance of my shampoo billowed into the bedroom through the open door. I opened my eyes wide to comb mascara on to my lashes, and smiled at the result. So many times lately I’d looked in the mirror, or caught sight of myself in shop windows, and I hadn’t recognized myself. But that evening, I looked like Olivia Felicone, green-eyed, brown-haired, wide-mouthed Olivia, wife of Luca Felicone, top chef and self-confessed sex god; he who never tired of telling me how lucky I was to have him. So when Marc came out of the bathroom, naked, rubbing his hair with a blue towel, I said, ‘Luca, you’re right, I am lucky,’ and didn’t even notice that the man I was with was not my husband.

  He came over to me and kissed my neck.

  ‘It’s me,’ he whispered, ‘Marc. Sorry.’

  I swallowed.

  ‘Oh Marc, I’m sorry. I just forgot …’

  ‘What did you forget?’

  ‘That I wasn’t happy.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the same as actually being happy.’