by Zoë Folbigg
The showdown came on the yellow and blue tiled floor of the kitchen in the lofty apartment on Via Tiziano. Maria sat at her kitchen table, the Necchi sewing machine surrounded by lemons she had picked in the garden, and she looked her husband’s lover in the eye.
‘You have the baby, and I will nurture it,’ she said, her eyes black and steely. Nancy wasn’t sure if it was a suggestion or a command, and her hackles rose under the guilty sheen of her peachy skin. But the humiliation rendered her speechless. ‘You want to be a working woman? Well, I want more than anything to be a mother, to hear laughter and noise in this lonely place.’ Maria shot Alessandro a look to let him know her loneliness was his fault.
Nancy shook her head, unsure of what she had just heard, while Alessandro stood at the window, looking at the view of Milan beyond the balcony, oblivious to the tooting and the traffic below, his hands in his pockets and his dark brow furrowed. He couldn’t believe Maria wasn’t wailing.
‘Maria, with respect,’ Nancy trod carefully, ‘I’m just not sure it would work.’
‘Why not?’
And Nancy couldn’t think of a single reason. It would certainly save her going back to her parents – she remembered their disapproval when abortion was legalised in her teens. She didn’t want to go back to Edinburgh when she had made such a vibrant life for herself in Milan. And her inquisitive, intrepid mind was intrigued to know what a half-Scottish, half-Sicilian child would look like. Her biggest worry had been losing her job; perhaps this way, she wouldn’t have to.
‘I will not let you lose my husband’s child,’ Maria added.
She knew this was her one shot to be a mother.
And Nancy had been told.
*
Nancy, Alessandro and Maria agreed that Nancy would have the baby and they would live together in the spacious apartment on Tiziano while Nancy was convalescing. Then the baby would live with Maria and Alessandro during the week, and its birth mother at weekends. Maria, a seamstress, who could take as much or as little work as she wanted, would look after the baby during the days and long nights of Nancy’s working week at the Pirelli Tower; growing into homework, ballet, swimming and horse-riding as their child got older. Nancy would have her baby at the weekends, some holiday time to visit her parents in Scotland. But there was a condition. The affair had to stop.
‘I’m a proud woman,’ Maria said, playing with an empty bobbin between her forefinger and thumb. ‘A gift has come from this embarrassment. Don’t make me go through it ever again.’
Nancy agreed. She was fond of Alessandro, but she didn’t love him the way she would hope to love a man: wholeheartedly, without limits, terms and conditions.
Olivia was born in July 1975 and so the arrangement began. Maria was a tender and caring doula to Nancy while the battle cries of birth tore her apart. Alessandro sat in Bar Basso nursing a negroni and bought each woman a Bulgari diamond pendant for their travails. Maria might have looked rustic with her large bust and wild curly black hair, but her expensive clothes, cinched-in waist and subtle gems discreetly told the world she was an executive’s wife.
Nancy recovered in the top-floor apartment while Maria got the nursery tip-top and Olivia gurgled in her crib. Alessandro had a Silver Cross pram with swirling, ostentatious wheels, shipped out from England, much to the amusement of his Pirelli colleagues, who said the tyres looked Stone Age, but there was nothing Olivia would want for. Two mammas. One doting father. A phoenix rising from the ashes of a marriage on the brink, bringing joy and normality to these otherwise unusual of circumstances.
Once Nancy was back at work, Olivia would kick and gurgle in her baby basket atop Maria’s sewing table, the hum of the machine sending her off to sleep. At weekends Nancy would take her daughter to Parco Sempione, where old women would marvel at the little girl with olive skin and deep red hair, as if she were a firefly darting between the verbena bushes.
‘Che belleza!’
‘Che magica!’
‘Affascinante!’
At school plays and musical recitals, Mamma Una and Mamma Due would clap proudly, and Alessandro would turn up if he could, beaming at his daughter; bestowing her with a Gucci watch or a Damiani ribbon-tied bag. It was a happy childhood for the adored girl, who felt extremely comfortable being the centre of three people’s universes, until her teenage years brought rebellion and turmoil at the International School.
*
The man with the pink face returned from a second visit to the toilet and propped himself up at a fruit machine nearby, but Daniel didn’t notice, he was too lost in Olivia’s story.
‘One of my mothers is an atelier.’
Daniel didn’t know what that meant, but nodded because it sounded very impressive and he was too embarrassed to ask.
‘She worked for the big houses before I was born: Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Ferré… She was so good, so precise, so fast, they didn’t want to let her go, so they let her work from home, with me in my basket on the sewing table. It was the early days for some of those houses.’
‘What, she made all those expensive dresses from home?’
‘Well, when she was at home and not in the studio she’d make the toiles. The prototypes.’
Prototypes. Models. Precision. They were words both Alessandro and Maria used in their very different sectors; motoring and fashion, two pillars of Milan’s booming economy.
‘She had a little sewing machine in the kitchen, and a bigger one, her favourite Necchi, was in the studio room.’
Olivia thought of the sewing machine under the window that looked out onto the fig trees of the manicured communal garden below. The room was light and bright with long windows and high ceilings; white fabric cut-outs of suits, skirts and dresses, some pinned with paper adornments where patterns, sequins and feathers might be added. All worn by faceless mannequins. Notes and dimensions, fabric codes and swatches, chalk and pencil markings, all pinned to great boards on the walls, designating which fashion house the item was for, which season, which collection. Secrets Maria kept for each designer, final incarnations of which she only saw in the Corriere della Sera or Vogue Italia after Milan Fashion Week had blazed through town. The seamstresses were never invited to the shows.
Olivia told Daniel how she would have tea parties with the mannequins: silent, impeccably dressed playmates and he smiled, picturing what a cute child Olivia might have looked like.
‘I loved that studio room as a kid. I suppose it was meant to be another bedroom, but it was the best playroom ever. And there weren’t any more children coming along – at least that’s what we hoped…’ Olivia rolled her eyes at Daniel.
Alessandro wasn’t allowed to smoke in the toile room, lest the patterns turn yellow or pick up the scent of Kentucky tobacco, but he stopped in the 1980s anyway, after his first heart attack.
Daniel finished his pint and gestured to Olivia.
‘Want another? I’ll get you a double this time.’
She looked to the man at the fruit machine.
‘Yes! But let’s go somewhere else.’
‘Cool. We should probably eat too,’ Daniel said sagely.
*
In a similar, smaller sports bar, further down Princes Street, Daniel and Olivia sat opposite each other, each eating a burger. Double Jack Daniel’s and Coke next to each plate. Daniel was definitely getting a second wind.
‘So what did you grow up thinking – about your… situation?’ Daniel asked, while he put down his vast burger for a pause. Olivia stopped short of taking a bite, put her burger down, and tied her hair in a bun on top of her head, ready to go into battle. The mac’n’cheese burger they both ordered was no mean feat. A towering cheeseburger with bacon, lettuce, tomatoes and gherkins, then a square of macaroni cheese plonked on top of it, and sealed in by a burger bun.
‘I thought it was normal. It was all I knew.’
‘Wow.’
‘I suppose when I got to elementare, maybe I wondered why my friends’ families we
re more… nucleare. I suppose I started asking questions. Maybe I assumed all dads had these “blips”. Or maybe because it happened before I was born made me not put any significance on it. As if nothing exists before you exist.’
Daniel looked at Olivia swiping mustard from the corner of her mouth and forgot that life existed before tonight.
‘Maybe I assumed other dads had also… what’s the word… squeered other children.’
‘Squired?’
‘Yes that’s it. And that it was perfectly normal.’
Daniel picked up his burger again.
‘It was perfectly normal, until I went to International School and realised it wasn’t a very nice way to treat either of my mothers. But I made friends with people whose lives were a lot crazier than mine. And we all have our cross to wear…’
Daniel didn’t correct her as he thought about his. He didn’t really have any. His mum and dad were pretty nuclear. He and his older brother Matt always fitted neatly into life, into bunk beds, into cars and family tickets to theme parks. They still lived in the neat semi Daniel and Matt grew up in. The only family heartache they had known was the death of Daniel’s beloved grandad in the spring.
‘Anyway,’ she said casually as she looked at her watch again and tutted. ‘Enough about this, I don’t really want to talk about my dad.’
Daniel got the impression Olivia always wanted to move on; that she liked to talk and then suddenly didn’t.
‘What about you? Tell me your life story.’
Daniel lifted his burger but paused at his lips and looked a bit nervous. He was much happier talking about other people. Asking the questions.
‘Me? Well I’ve just graduated. In journalism. Undergraduate and then post-grad. At Surrey.’
Olivia looked blank. ‘Sorry?’
‘Surrey. It’s basically London.’
‘Ah, OK.’
‘I’m travelling for the summer before I start a job on my local newspaper. Again, basically London, just the other side of it. To the north. It’s the paper in the town I grew up in.’
Daniel suddenly thought of Elmworth and Kelly and realised he didn’t give a fuck where she was in the world. Whether she’d got a job in a bar or in telesales in Sydney. Whether she and Ian were going great guns or whether her foibles – the way she twisted her ponytail or pulled at the skin around her fingernails – bothered him more than they’d bothered Daniel, which wasn’t much.
‘Cool,’ Olivia said, sounding more American now, as if it was quaint. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Cambridge. Have you heard of Cambridge?’
‘For sure. Some of my friends went there.’
‘Oh yes. Well, I live in a little town near there. Elmworth, it’s called, you won’t have heard of it.’
He didn’t mention that he would be living back at home with his mum, dad and brother. That Matt would go off to work at the local Safeway supermarket while Daniel went to the newspaper office, his mum to school and his dad to the bank. His nuclear family. It didn’t sound nearly as cool as a flat in Soho paid for by a Pirelli tycoon.
‘What sort of thing will you write about?’
‘Oh, I’m not sure.’ Daniel dabbed ketchup off the corner of his mouth onto his red check shirt, a little more demurely than Olivia had with her mustard. ‘I imagine cats stuck up trees, potholes, refuse collection. Although I guess I’ll be making the tea to start with…’ Daniel winced as he realised he was selling himself short and not making his best impression. ‘But I hope to move into sports writing one day. I specialised in sports journalism. You have to work your way up.’
‘Sounds cool.’
‘Maybe one day I’ll work for that pink paper you guys have. The sports one?’
‘La Gazzetta dello Sport?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘All the life is rosy.’
‘Hmm, it really isn’t,’ shrugged Daniel, not getting the joke. Then a brief panic passed over him while he was chastising himself about underselling himself: what if he hadn’t actually got the job; what if it wasn’t secure?
He’d been offered the role of junior news reporter by Viv Hart, the paper’s editor, the day before he went travelling, and he hadn’t heard from her since. No email follow-up. No contract had come in the post. There would be nothing rosy about getting home from travelling and returning to live with his parents and being jobless.
He made a mental note to call home tomorrow – when Olivia had gone – and ask his mum if a contract had come through. He hoped the job was still there, and that he could work his way up to being a sports reporter on a national paper during the time Olivia was doing her course in London. Then he could really impress her.
A karaoke DJ started setting up his equipment and Pulp’s ‘Disco 2000’ came over the speakers.
‘How old are you Olivia?’ Daniel asked, changing the subject, embarrassed by how formal he sounded.
‘Twenty. You?’
‘Twenty-two.’
‘Well, I’m only 20 for a few hours more.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’ll be 21 tomorrow.’
Daniel cleared his throat.
‘What? Actually, tomorrow?’ He looked at his Casio. ‘In less than four hours’ time?’
‘Yes!’ Olivia said through a mouthful of burger.
‘Happy birthday!’
‘Thanks. It’s not yet though. It’s bad luck to say it beforehand.’
‘Oh sorry.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘So you’re travelling all day on your twenty-first birthday? That sucks.’
‘No, I’m pretty sure I get this birthday twice, International Date Line you see. That’s why I’m going home. My mammas have organised a party.’
It was a party Daniel wished he could go to, but he wondered why her father hadn’t had a hand in organising it: did he always leave the hard labour to the women?
‘Then we should do something momentous! To celebrate tonight. What do you want to do?’
‘It’s bad luck to celebrate before your actual birthday!’ Olivia protested.
‘You look like a rule breaker to me,’ Daniel said, surprising himself by how flirty he sounded.
‘We-lll…’ Olivia said, in a long and thoughtful way, as she leaned across the table, put her hand on Daniel’s face, and wiped the final residue of ketchup from the corner of his mouth with her thumb.
He was taken aback.
‘I want to do karaoke. For sure,’ she said, nodding to the DJ. ‘And then I might want to kiss you.’
*
‘Right,’ said the DJ with a mullet and a shiny suit, into a handheld microphone as he looked at his clipboard. ‘We’ve got Livvi and Danielle – they’re up next singing “Islands in the Stream”. Livvi and Danielle? Come on girls, you’re up!’ The DJ looked around the bar, his mullet shaking in the breeze of his small and rickety wind machine.
‘Ooh, that’s us!’ said Olivia, as she widened her eyes and unleashed her bun.
‘What?’
Despite the steady flow of lager, whisky, and now sambuca, Daniel still wasn’t willing to sing karaoke. He’d never done it before.
‘Nahhh, sorry, I’ll sit this out – you go. I’ll cheer the loudest I promise!’
Olivia took off her jumper and flung it on her cloth bag, not caring that her passport was inside it. The bar was warm and she looked like a Proper Backpacker again, in her vest and multicoloured trousers.
‘Andiamo,’ she ordered, hands on her narrow hips.
‘No!’ Daniel protested.
‘Yes!’ she barked. ‘Look!’ She gestured wildly to the watch on her wrist without taking her eyes off Daniel. ‘In two hours it will be my twenty-first birthday – and you—’ she pointed accusingly and almost stumbled ‘—you, are the last friend of my trip.’
Daniel felt a stab of jealousy, for all the other friends she had made. What if she had actually kissed them? He bet she kissed the man at the lighthouse without any shoe
s. ‘You have no choice, you have to sing karaoke with me or you ruin my whole birthday.’
‘I thought it was bad luck to celebrate before…?’
Olivia rose on the balls of her feet like a peahen, almost level with Daniel she was so tall. She gave him a disarming look he knew then he would never forget.
Daniel put up his palms in defeat.
‘Really, I’m not a singer.’
Olivia studied Daniel’s face through drunken eyes. She wasn’t sure if his fear was genuine or not. She’d never met anyone like him before – the boys at school were never so modest. But they were the sons of Milan’s finest. The bankers. The fashion elite. The motoring heirs. The sons of footballing legends. None of them would talk themselves down as Daniel did. The boys Olivia knew all had an air of entitlement about them that meant they would never consider themselves the tea boy, or be too embarrassed to sing to a half-empty sports bar.
‘Livvi and Danielle? Come on girls! Make me happy!’ said the DJ in clipped Kiwi vowels.
Olivia held out her hand.
‘Please…?’
‘Can’t I just watch?’
She burned into his khaki eyes. Daniel stood up and took her hand.
‘Allora,’ Olivia said commandingly. ‘You’re Kenny, I’m Dolly, although in that check shirt it should be you who is Dolly.’
What?!
Daniel laughed at the ridiculousness of it.
‘I can’t sing!’
‘Nor can I!’ Olivia howled. ‘That’s the beautiful of karaoke.’
They approached the DJ and his PA system to a limp applause from the bar. The DJ looked at the pair of them.
‘Danielle?’ he asked Olivia.
‘Daniel – she’s Livvi, I’m Daniel.’
‘OK Livvi and Daniel, Dolly and Kenny – whoever you are – take it away!’
Daniel’s warm palms turned cold and clammy as a cheesy backing track struck up and Olivia started to sway confidently as the first chords started. Daniel ruffled his hair, missed his cue and started to panic, as Olivia watched words change from white to blue on a small monitor. As Daniel’s mouth went dry and a ball bounced over the words, Olivia came in and rescued him.
