by Lucy Gordon
He helped Laura with the washing up, surprising her with his efficiency.
‘I thought Italian men were old-fashioned and macho,’ she said. ‘Working in the kitchen is for women, that kind of thing.’
‘You do us wrong, we’re very domesticated. When I was a little boy my mother taught me how to do these things, “just in case you ever have to”, was how she put it. She showed me how to wash a cup, and when I’d finished she said, “All right, now you know how to do it, go and play”.’
‘And that was it?’
‘That was my domestic education. But I must say this for myself-I wash a mean cup.’
They laughed together and finished putting things away.
She drove him into town in her little car, and they managed to get to see the bank manager after only a short wait.
‘It’ll take a few days for funds to arrive from your Italian account to your new one with us,’ the manager said. ‘But in the meantime there’ll be no problem if you overdraw a little.’
Gino’s first action was to pay Laura two weeks’ rent.
‘For this week and next,’ he said.
‘But this week’s almost over,’ she protested.
‘Business is business. Half a week counts as a full week.’
‘I’m the landlady. Shouldn’t I be the one saying that?’
‘You should, but you’re a terrible businesswoman, so I’m saying it for you.’ He looked at her kindly. ‘Someone needs to look out for you.’
It was so long since anyone had looked out for her that at first the words were almost startling.
‘I still feel guilty taking this,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll earn it. I’ll be the most troublesome tenant you’ve ever had.’
By way of demonstrating just how awkward he could be he came round the shops with her, carrying things and generally making himself useful, explaining that he was improving his English.
Sometimes he clowned, claiming not to know words that she was sure he did know. He would throw himself on her mercy with a piteous air that made her laugh.
Gradually she absorbed the message that he was sending out. She could relax. He was harmless. All he asked was to be left in peace to wrestle with whatever demons were driving him.
Laura was happy to give him the space he needed, but she was curious about him. Although he talked a lot, most of his words were the equivalent of blowing bubbles in the air. The amount of real information he disclosed about himself was almost nil.
She, on the other hand, found herself revealing more than she could remember ever doing.
‘I was born around here,’ she told him as they sat over tea and toast when they stopped for a break. ‘And I thought this was the dullest place on earth. I wanted London and the bright lights.’
‘Did you ever manage it?’
‘Yes, I enrolled in a London dance academy. I was in the chorus of a few shows. Then six of us got together and formed a little dance troupe. Jack was our agent.’
‘Sounds like a match made in heaven. Did he try to make you a star?’
She laughed ruefully. ‘No. I did hope about that for a while, but once we were married he wanted me to give it all up and be domestic.
‘We argued about it for a while, but then I found I was pregnant. And when Nikki came along I just wanted to be with her. Besides, I’d put on a few pounds that I’ve never managed to shift since.’
He surveyed her critically. ‘I can’t see them.’
‘They’re still there, and they’re just too much for me to be a dancer. Anyway, I’m too old now.’
‘Eighty?’ he hazarded. ‘Ninety?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘You’re kidding. You don’t look a day over fifty.’
She laughed, but there was a shadow in her manner, and he was immediately contrite.
‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t funny.’
‘No, I’m just being over-sensitive. It was a mistake for me to start talking about the past. It reminded me that I promised myself that by the time I was thirty my name would be in lights.’
‘Don’t you talk about the past normally?’
‘Who with? Not Nikki, it would be too painful for her. And why would the tenants be interested? They come and go.’
He had a sudden vivid picture of her isolation, the burdens she was carrying alone.
‘Did you come back to live here after you broke up with your husband?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I couldn’t have stayed in London. For one thing it was too expensive, and for another he-well, I suppose he bribed me to go away. He was becoming fairly well known in showbiz. He didn’t want to risk the “beautiful people” learning that he had a daughter who wasn’t perfect. He said it would hurt him professionally.
‘So he offered me a better settlement to get out, and I accepted it because that was best for Nikki anyway. I came back here and used the money to buy the house. It’s a living.’
‘Not much of one if you have to work in the evenings too. When do you sleep?’
‘Ah, but look on the bright side. I never have to pay for babysitting. There’s always someone at home with Nikki, and she likes them all.’
‘So none of them reacted hurtfully to her face?’
‘No, but I warned them all before they saw her. I never leave it to chance, if I can help it, and of course she guesses that. It’s people like you she values, the ones who had no warning.’
‘I just hope I don’t let her down.’
Laura frowned. ‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s the spell, you see. It’s cast over you too, and whatever you do, she’ll see it in the best way, in the light of that spell.’
‘You talk as though you believe in magic,’ he said curiously.
‘If someone is determined to think the best of you, no matter what you do, I think that a kind of magic spell.’
The words gave him a strange feeling, as if she’d looked into his mind. Only last night he’d known that he had to think the best of Alex, no matter what.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said heavily. ‘The strongest kind there is.’
They returned to the boarding house to find Bert and Fred pottering about in the kitchen.
Fred was the nightclub bouncer, a vast mountain of a man with a sleepy, contented manner. Little Bert was an amiable ferret.
Gino was instantly at ease with them, chiefly because he wanted to know all about English sport. Soon the three of them were friends for life.
Mrs Baxter returned from school, with Nikki, who gave her mother a brief greeting before claiming her new friend’s full attention.
‘Let the poor man have a cup of tea before you jump on him,’ Laura begged.
‘But Mummy I did a picture at school and Gino wants to see it. Don’t you?’
‘Absolutely,’ he responded at once. ‘I’m longing to see it.’
‘Just don’t let her be a pest?’ Laura said, smiling.
‘How can she be a pest?’ Gino demanded at once. ‘We are friends.’
For half an hour he sat listening, with every sign of interest, as Nikki showed him her picture and explained what it was about. Only when Laura wanted to lay the table did they move.
Sadie and Claudia came in from the factory and Gino immediately asked if there were any jobs available.
‘Only in the warehouse, lifting heavy boxes,’ Sadie said. ‘I expect you want something more exciting.’
‘I’ll take what I can get,’ Gino said. ‘I can lift things.’
‘In that case, report to the chief packer first thing tomorrow.’
He did so and secured a job that brought him enough to pay his rent and a little to spare. With that he tried to slip back into the life that had been his for the last few months, living from moment to moment.
But he found that refuge was now denied him. Nikki saw to that. She loved nothing better than to talk to him and would pounce, bombarding him with questions.
Sh
e was endlessly fascinated by his foreignness, especially his use of Italian words and expressions. The day she first heard ‘Assolutamente niente’ she was in seventh heaven.
‘It means “absolutely nothing”,’ she explained to Laura, for perhaps the tenth time.
‘Yes, darling, I know what it means.’
‘Doesn’t it sound lovely? Assolutamente niente. Assolutamente niente.’
‘If I hear that expression once more,’ she seethed to Gino, ‘I shall commit murder.’
‘Poor Nikki,’ he grinned.
‘Not her. You! This is all your fault.’
At school Nikki boasted of her Italian friend, to such good effect that the geography teacher enquired, via Mrs Baxter, whether Gino would give a talk one afternoon.
‘Me?’ he demanded hilariously. ‘A teacher?’
‘You don’t have to teach anything,’ Nikki hastened to reassure him. ‘Just talk about Italy, and how everything’s got music and colour, and there are lots of bandits-’
‘Bandits?’
‘Aren’t there bandits?’ she asked, crestfallen.
‘Assolutamente niente!’ he said firmly, and she giggled.
‘Not just one little bandit?’ she pleaded.
‘Not even half a bandit, you little devil.’
‘Oh, please.’
It ended, as it was bound to, with him giving his good-natured shrug and agreeing to do what she wanted. He got the afternoon off, and he turned up at the school soon after lunch. He had no idea what he was going to talk about, except that he drew the line at bandits.
Inspiration came when he discovered the pupils were studying Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. After that he talked about Verona, and the house that purported to be where the Capulets had lived, complete with a real balcony.
The pupils were impressed, especially the older girls who sighed over his good looks. Nikki, who could claim him as a real friend, became the heroine of the hour. It was her proudest moment.
CHAPTER THREE
A FTER that Gino began giving Nikki what he called ‘history lessons’, but which seemed to concentrate almost entirely on the most bloodthirsty aspects of Italy’s past.
‘Isn’t she a little young to be learning about Lucrezia Borgia?’ Laura asked.
‘Why? Lucrezia’s great fun.’
‘I don’t suppose her victims thought so. How many is she supposed to have poisoned?’
Gino grinned. ‘Between you and me, she probably never poisoned anyone. But don’t tell Nikki. She’d be very disappointed.’
Now that he was earning, Gino had increased the rent he paid Laura. She tried to protest, but he said, ‘Silenzio!’ with a tone that was unusually imperious for him, and refused to discuss the matter further.
He slipped easily into the life of the boarding house. He was a good listener, always ready to lend a sympathetic ear, and was soon in possession of all the details of the feud between Claudia and Bert. At the best they maintained an armed truce. At the worst they went long periods without speaking. Nikki, who got on famously with both combatants, was adept at taking messages between them.
‘Claudia, Bert says did you eat the last cup cake?’
‘Bert, Claudia says she was doing you a favour because your waistline-’
‘Claudia, Bert says-’
And so on. In time, Gino took his own share of messages. He said it made him feel part of the family.
He also set himself to be useful around the house, mending, changing fuses, sometimes cooking the supper.
Three nights a week Laura went out to work, leaving Nikki in the care of the sisters, or Mrs Baxter. Gino would usually spend these evenings doing a little modest carpentry. He’d discovered that Laura tried to economise by buying flat-packed, self-assembly furniture. The plan never worked because she had no gift for putting things together. Since Bert and Fred were equally useless with their hands the house was awash with incomplete items.
Gino went rapidly through three small chests of drawers, to be put in bedrooms, to the infinite gratitude of the occupants, one wardrobe and two bookshelves.
The bookshelves went in the living room where the ‘family’ congregated to watch television. Nikki was there, going through a photo album, but she looked up to admire.
‘You’ve got the shelves all the same space apart,’ she said, awed by this mark of genius.
‘It’s not that difficult.’
‘Well, Mummy can’t do it.’
Gino grinned. ‘I’d gathered that.’
He got to his feet, brushed himself down and came to look at what she was doing.
‘Hey, who’s that?’ he asked suddenly.
He was pointing at a picture of a young girl in jeans and shirt, with flowing fair hair swirling around her as she did a dance that was clearly energetic. She looked a bit wild, and bit mad, and totally happy.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ he asked incredulously.
‘That was Mummy,’ Nikki said, speaking, in the manner of children, as though her mother’s earlier self was somebody else, now deceased.
‘You mean it is Mummy,’ Gino suggested.
‘No, she doesn’t look like that. But she did then. That was before I knew her.’
‘Before time began,’ Gino said through twitching lips.
He studied the girl again. She was young; heart-breakingly so to anyone who knew how life had treated her later. She’d been perhaps seventeen, and she’d had no idea. She’d just known that life would go exactly as she wanted, the way you always knew that at seventeen.
The next set of pictures came from her dancing career. There she was in leotards, concentrating intensely on the steps she was practising. Then she was dressed up to perform in glittering costumes.
They turned her into almost another person, beautiful, sophisticated, at home in the spotlight. She had Wow! legs he noticed with interest, long and elegant as a dancer’s should be. Her waist and hips were also Wow!
Then there were the wedding pictures. She’d been a joyous bride, gazing at her new husband with radiant eyes as they joined hands on the cake.
He hadn’t been looking at her, Gino noted. He was facing the camera with a brilliant grin, as if inviting onlookers to admire his undoubted good looks.
‘Full of himself,’ Gino thought. Then honesty made him add, ‘A bit like I was.’
The recognition didn’t make him feel any kinder towards the man. That lovely, fresh, life-enhancing girl deserved better.
The pictures went on. There was Laura, sitting up in bed, holding baby Nikki, while her husband sat with his arm around both of them, bursting with pride.
‘That’s my daddy,’ Nikki said proudly.
She turned more pages and Gino saw her as a toddler, learning to walk, her hands held by her father. Picture after picture showed them together, and now he could see how she was growing to resemble him. She had his dark hair, his brown eyes, his wide mouth.
One picture showed them looking straight at each other, eyes meeting, sharing smiles of delight as though they recognised their shared looks and rejoiced in them.
After that there was just one more picture, and it said everything. Nikki was about four and now Gino could see the first sign that all was not well. Her forehead had grown, just a little, but an ominous portent of what was to come.
Now it was Laura who sat with her, while her husband kept in the background. His smile had gone, and his face bore a stunned look.
After that he didn’t appear in any more pictures.
Gino remembered Laura saying, ‘She adored him and he seemed to adore her-then he just upped and left.’
How could any man just switch off his love for a little girl? Unless his ‘love’ had been little more than vanity?
Gino tried to get into the mind of a man who could simply abandon a child like an unwanted puppy, at the very moment when she needed him most. But he couldn’t do it. All he could feel was helpless rage which he concealed behind a smile.
It was the child who turned the pages back to the last picture where the man could be seen.
‘That was Daddy,’ she said softly, touching the face.
‘Yes,’ Gino said, floundering for something to say. ‘He looks-he looks-quite a fellow.’
‘He taught me to swim. He said he’d teach me to draw one day, when I was older. Only he died.’
‘Died?’ Gino couldn’t keep the astonishment out of his voice.
‘Yes, he’s dead,’ Nikki said calmly. ‘My daddy’s dead.’
Gino drew a long breath, sensing that he was walking across eggshells.
‘He’d have been proud of that drawing you showed me,’ he said. ‘You’re very talented.’
She beamed. ‘Daddy was good at drawing. I want to be as good as Daddy.’
‘I’m sure you will be,’ he said lamely. It was the best he could manage while his mind was whirling. Nikki seemed satisfied.
But she had another bombshell for him. As she closed the album she whispered, ‘Don’t tell Mum what we talked about. She doesn’t know that I know, and I don’t want to worry her.’
He nodded, bereft of speech. He was aghast.
When Nikki had gone to bed he took a walk through the quiet streets. The last of the summer night was fading, and by the time he was ready to turn back it was completely dark.
Just ahead of him was a pub, with a sign proclaiming The Running Sheep, and he felt in need of a beer after this evening. Inside, it was a small, attractive place with a pleasant, old-fashioned atmosphere. The barman sold him a pint of bitter, and he went to sit at a table in the corner.
He was tired. What he’d heard tonight had disturbed him, but his walk had left him no clearer how to deal with it. It was pleasant to sit there, sipping and thinking about nothing very much.
He closed his eyes, and might have dozed off for a moment. When he opened them the barman had gone. In his place was a young woman with fair curly hair and a sweet smile. It took Gino a moment to realise that he was looking at Laura.
He was so used to regarding her as a landlady and Nikki’s mother that he’d unconsciously been perceiving her through those filters, and they had gotten in the way of the real woman. Now he realised that the dancer he had seen in the photographs was still alive somewhere. It was like seeing her for the first time.
