The realization flowed through me like a splintered shot of electricity.
“I fear if I praise your father too much,” he continued, “Santina will serve me porridge for the rest of the week in protest.”
Everyone laughed at that. Paolino looked over at me.
“Paolino darling,” Martha interjected, “he says you’re a match for Santina!”
I pretended not to read more into his diagonal smirk. Martha filled in the lulls in conversation with sublime ease, which I could see did not go unnoticed by the major. Paolino then paraded his deck, pointing out his joinery, his varnish, the way he had restored the old masts with years of care. The major did a fine impersonation of interest, looking over to me between regaled details of such and such workmanship, his eyes dancing.
Why was he here? At first I thought it had been Elizabeth’s insistence, but as I watched him enjoying the youngsters dance around one another in the water, I realized he was here for the very same reason I was: Maddalena.
We took in her every move. Every flirtatious smile to Salvatore, every time she elicited hearty laughter from Elizabeth. We observed her long limbs, the ease with which she swam, her natural habitat it seemed, as if life on land was something learned, adjusted to. But most captivating was her élan, unfettered, unselfconscious; we had gifted her the freedom we lacked. She ducked in and out of the water oblivious to the two adults reliving their ill-timed flicker of love, their meander through their shadow selves. And there, before us, the miraculous reminder of what we shared and sacrificed.
We did a fine job of disguising our stares.
When the sun eased past the most ferocious part of the day, and Paolino set a pot of coffee to simmer upon the stove, everyone settled into their own thoughts. The major looked up from his book for a moment. His eyes found mine; we were still at sea.
The sunset streaked across the deck, stretching out, lengthening mast shadows across the water before us. Paolino raised the anchor and the boat cut through the deep, to our left, the jagged gray cliffs. The salty breeze caressed my face, but despite the charge of the yacht, I felt as if the sea carried me without direction. From out there the pink plaster of the house was visible amongst the villas perched higher on the hill. It looked at once like a stranger’s home, somewhere I visited in a memory. Every element of my life was tossed in the air, droplets of seawater mid-flight, and I was unsure as to where they would land.
Martha sunbathed at the bow, a sleeping Elizabeth beside her. Maddalena stood beside Salvatore, his wandering arm slinking around her waist when he thought no one was looking. The major was sat in front of them, reading. Paolino sat beside me.
“All this can be yours, Santina,” he murmured.
He was hapless, relentless, adorable.
“How easy it could be for you to just be happy, Paolino? You’re always chasing. Or running away. Is middle age really so terrifying? I feel like I’ve just woken up. I think middle age is my great escape from the traps of youth. The unanswered questions. The doubts. The desperate search for roots. I think we’re old enough to not care. Aren’t we?”
“Talk poetry if you want, Santina. I want to follow my heart, not just talk about it.”
I looked at him then, his fuller cheeks no longer the golden perfection of the young lover. In his eyes the sparkle of our youth was replaced with a quiet desperation. Maddalena let out a hearty laugh, Salvatore wrapped around her, assisting her command of the helm. She wore Paolino’s skipper’s hat.
“I know she’s yours, Santina.”
I snapped round to face him. At first I thought I’d misunderstood.
“And I know she’s not mine.”
I felt my blood drizzle down toward my ankles.
“I’m not so stupid after all, am I?” he continued, with a half smile that told me he thought the bait was hooked. “You disappeared for those months. Stories flew around. I haven’t told a soul. I wouldn’t do that to you. I’m telling you now not as a threat. But so you know my love isn’t blind. That’s how you know it’s real.”
I didn’t want to defend myself. It would only provoke him further.
“You think the major feels this way? All these years in the house and did he ever make you happy in the way you deserve? You were never his lover. Always the help. But you stay because you think what you feel is love. Loyalty. Duty. Friendship. But it’s not. It’s guilt. We all have it. You and I have lived in two shadows cast by the same unforgiving sun.”
I couldn’t ignore the thorn of truth stabbed between his words. It smarted.
“Guilt is your cross to bear, Paolino, not mine.”
“Not anymore.”
I stared at him.
“The tides have turned, Santina. Your runaway brother owns Positano now. I heeded his advice all those years ago, a debt he’s more than happy to reciprocate.”
“What are you talking about?”
A grin creased over his lips. “Your baby brother made good, Santina. Quite the man now. There’s no dagger over my head anymore. Your Marco ran away from those forcing him to prepare to murder me. He cowered in the shadows long enough till he was ready to ruin them. Who do you think runs things now? And that makes me a free man; time to let the truth shine at last.”
My heart galloped in my chest.
“You think that Englishman loves you like you do him? I hope he does.”
He left me then, and took over the helm, steering us back to our bay—a different place to the one we left that morning. I felt naked. We stepped onto the jetty, paid our thanks, exchanged polite kisses. Paolino beamed—after twenty years we’d finally had the most frank conversation of our lives; a warped victory was his at last.
The girls walked ahead of us. The major fell into step with me. Tourists wove around us. I knew the cacophony of early evening would not be pleasurable to him. As we climbed the curving, stepped alleys, I realized that I was, as always, focused on his state of mind before my own. Paolino’s words echoed in my mind.
“Are you alright, Santina?” the major asked. “Would you like to pause a while? I think we’ve had too much sun for one day.”
“No. I’m fine.”
“You’re a dreadful liar. And I love you for it.”
He grinned.
An American tourist walked between us, arms loaded with paper bags from the boutiques; the sharp corner of one scuffed my elbow.
“I want to be home,” I said.
And in that moment I knew home had never been and would never be the villa. Home had been anywhere the major was. Home had been anywhere he took me, through the history books, the poetry, the garden.
It was time I found home for myself.
I pretended not to register his expression, nor the way I could intuit he had sensed my thoughts. We walked on in silence, restaurants tinkling with holiday makers sipping their aperitifs, diving into plates of antipasti like maniacal last suppers, an endless hedonistic chase for pleasure and escape. I filed the pictures like snapshots, a memorized album of one of my final nights in Positano, squares of photographic paper curling in on themselves in the dying light.
Maddalena was in no hurry to leave. She and Elizabeth took a bottle of chilled wine and put the world to rights out in the garden beneath the lemon groves as the sun streaked the sky purple pinks and fire orange.
I laid the table with a light dinner, charred zucchini from the garden, a salad of fennel and orange, a large wedge of fresh ricotta, and a basket of small rolls I had baked that morning. The major called to the girls, who wound their way up to us, sandals in hand, feet browned with the dusty earth, and not a care in their worlds. It was hard to believe Elizabeth had lost her mother only a few days ago.
They took their seats. I turned toward the kitchen.
“Please eat with us, Santina,” I heard Elizabeth call out.
I turned back.
“I think that’s in order, don’t you?” the major added.
I walked back to the table. He pulled out a c
hair beside him. I sat down.
“To Mummy,” Elizabeth said, lifting her glass. We clinked and remembered Adeline. Maddalena caught my eye. Her father’s death must have felt recent to her still too.
“To absent friends,” Maddalena added, “isn’t that what we’re supposed to say?”
“Always do what you’re supposed to, Maddie, yes?” Elizabeth asked.
I noticed the start of a frown on the major’s face, which melted into a sun-kissed smile. The deep pink of his wind-kissed cheeks was edging toward brown.
The doorbell cut through the silence.
I answered it. A tall young man with long hair stood before me. He wore a backpack stretching the length of his back, sandals out of which I spied filthy toenails, a worn rusty-colored shirt, and baggy linen trousers that begged a wash. Before I could ask who he was, Elizabeth dashed across the terrace, stepped before me and wrapped herself around the young man.
The major stood up.
“Daddy!” she gushed, leading the worn-out boy into the terrace by the hand, his eyes wide with surprise, as if he’d never seen so many lemon trees in one place. “This is Eddie. My fiancé.”
Chapter 30
“Are you completely out of your mind, Elizabeth?”
The major’s voice cut through the silence of the downstairs rooms. I was sure Elizabeth’s fiancé could hear him, though he was showering in Adeline’s bathroom at the top of the house.
“Did you expect him to ask for permission? What year are you living in?” Elizabeth replied. The thunder began to rumble in her voice.
“I guess I’d better get going,” Maddalena said, following me into the kitchen with the bread basket.
“I’m sure Elizabeth would prefer you to stay, but maybe yes, it’s probably best.”
She set the basket down. I felt her looking at me.
“My mom has told me so much about you.”
“First person I met when I came back from London.”
“I like her face when she talks about you. Kinda sparkly maybe? That sound crazy to you?”
I smiled. She mirrored me. Our lips were the same shape, though hers were fuller, and had the knack of creasing into an oblique smile like the major’s.
“It’s nice to hear that,” I said.
“You’re pretty quiet, like she said. She calls herself the foghorn. I remember at parent-teacher conferences I was always so embarrassed, you know? She’d yell across the room. Half in Neapolitan, half in English. Not so cool.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
I watched her fold the dishcloth around the rolls to keep them fresh for the next day.
“It’s like I already know you. Weird, right?”
I took her hand in mine. Her fingers were committed to memory and uncharted maps. “That makes me happier than you’ll ever know.”
Then she stepped forward and kissed me on the cheek, following her impulse without a moment’s doubt. “Thank you for the heavenly dinner, Santina. This entire day may have been the best of my life. Does that make me sound like a kid?”
“It makes you sound like a happy woman.”
She danced out of the kitchen. Then her head popped back through the doorway. “I’ll be back. Think up some embarrassing stories about Mamma—I know there’s a lot she won’t tell me, right?”
I smiled. I could hear her light footsteps across the tiles, then the heavy creak of the door and its weighted close. The quiet was no longer comforting. It seemed like the calm before the storm already whirring in the next room. I opened the kitchen door that led to the lobby. It wasn’t difficult to hear the major and Elizabeth.
“I just don’t understand the rush. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Why are you promising yourself to someone you barely know? It’s insane.”
“Insanity is sending a child away at four, Daddy. Falling in love is what people do. You keep telling me how much you loved Mummy. Why can’t I love Eddie that way?”
“Of course you can. But why promise your life to someone who you can’t have been in love with for longer than a year at most?”
That’s when she swung the door open, almost banging it against the wall inside. She brushed past me and out onto the terrace. He followed.
“Why do we have to argue, Elizabeth?”
“Can’t you just be happy for me? For once in your life just say, well done, Elizabeth, you’re marvelous, just as you are. You are enough. But I’ll never be enough, will I? And you command me back here every summer and I have to suffer the same old shit. I’m so bloody tired of it.”
The major ran a hand through his hair. “Why didn’t you even mention he was coming? Don’t you think Santina would have appreciated that? What are we? A hotel? She doesn’t have to run after someone else just because you decide. Why didn’t you tell me at least?”
“Because we would have had this argument already, that’s why. Just be happy for me!”
He let out a terse sigh. “I will not stand here and be lectured to by someone who doesn’t know what it means to be in love! To really love someone so that you know what their thoughts are even before they say them, or think them. What do you know of that? Of meeting a person who makes you the very best version of yourself, forces you to grow, to be better, to listen better, to them, to yourself? What do you know of that?”
“Is it so hard for you to think that Eddie has fallen in love with me? Am I really so ghastly?”
He softened. I willed him to use his Adeline voice, the one that would always ease her back into the room when her mind had taken flight to frightening places. Yet in that moment I felt the painful realization that he was as terrified of Elizabeth falling in love as he was himself.
“So just enjoy each other,” he soothed. “Get to know one another. Why do you have to plan on marriage? It’s too fast. It’s unnecessary.”
“I want it! He wants it! That’s the end of it.”
The major stiffened. He took a long breath.
“That is not the end of it. You are inviting someone into our family. Someone I don’t know. Someone who shuffles in with sandals and his house on his back, gawking. I don’t like it. Not one bit.”
“So?”
“You marry that man, Elizabeth, and you forfeit your own plans. Put yourself first. You’ve worked hard all these years. You’re a bright, inquisitive, argumentative woman. You could put your mind to anything.”
“And being in love means I sacrifice myself?”
“Yes!”
“No—you did that. You gave everything away because of Mummy. I’m not going to make those same awful mistakes. You put your whole life on hold. You locked yourself away, and me for that matter, and now you think that’s what it means to be in love. It’s pathetic!”
I watched them from the other kitchen doors, swung open onto the terrace. Elizabeth brushed by him and stomped upstairs.
* * *
The evening slid into night. Elizabeth and Eddie shuffled downstairs to raid the fridge. I was sat on the terrace reading. I heard them dismantling my careful order. When I went inside, there was lettuce torn in strips upon one of my chopping boards and several jars opened at the same time; sundried tomatoes, pickled zucchini, olives. Eddie’s face lit up.
“This is phenomenal. Thank you so much!”
“Santina is like my real mother. She’s the lady I’ve told you all about,” Elizabeth purred, her face flushed.
He reached out a hand. I shook it, feeling some olive oil clinging to his fingers, from where he’d scooped them into one of the jars no doubt.
“Daddy’s being ghastly. Our bags are packed. We’ll head out tomorrow.”
“Elizabeth, give him a little time. Give yourself a little time. A lot has happened the last few days.”
“I’m so sorry,” Eddie interjected, wrapping some bread around a heap of cheese and zucchini. “I wanted to be here. My friends and I got held back in Naples. Crazy place. Missed our connection.”
He kissed Elizabeth on he
r cheek.
“I’ll write to you, Santina,” she said, at once hollow.
“Things will be different in the morning,” I urged.
Eddie looked at her. I could tell what he preferred to do, but she shook her head.
“We’ll head to the beach, tesoro. That’s where I need to be,” she concluded.
And she stood, planted two kisses on my cheeks, and left, her puppy close behind. I looked down at the debris upon the table and counters.
* * *
The major had long since retired upstairs when they left. He didn’t come down to say good night.
I returned the kitchen to its original state, then headed upstairs. I looked toward my room, then along the corridor to the bathroom, noting the wet towels Eddie had left strewn along the floor. I headed upstairs to Adeline’s instead. I hadn’t said my own goodbye yet, and with the major most likely asleep, I could steal a private moment of reflection before we stripped her room. I owed myself that.
I stepped into the dark and opened the windows and doors onto the terrace. It was a beautiful night, the sea a sheet of glass reflecting the stars, the horizon wrapping around the far distance beyond Capri. Overhead, her paintings fluttered on the careless whisper of breeze, ferocious scrawls of color now black and white silhouettes in the dark, as if they had lost their light along with her. They crinkled above me, exhaling her spectrum and all the fury that accompanied it. I allowed my own breath to release. I followed the moonlight onto the terrace, steeped in a chrome glow, shafts of onyx shadows of the surrounding trees and trailing bougainvillea cast across the blanched plaster.
“She won’t be told. Just like her mother.”
I turned toward the major’s voice. He was leaning on the balustrade at the opposite end of the terrace that ran the length of the villa. His silhouette’s outline was a nimble sketch of silver, his face a shadow but for the glint of his blue eyes in the metallic light.
“Or her father,” I replied, deciding not to shy away from the truth.
“It’s such an awful feeling, Santina. To know you’ve failed someone so deeply. She despises me.”
Four Hundred and Forty Steps to the Sea Page 35
