After the Storm (All I've Ever Needed)(21)

His mother had closed the restaurant for the celebration and it had turned out well. She had flitted around the room encouraging her son’s colleagues to try each of the dishes she had prepared specially for the occasion. She was a petite, expressive woman who entwined English and Italian words in a totally delightful way. It seemed impossible to Natalie that she had lived in the UK for almost thirty years and she’d understood why Stephano’s casual conservations were also heavily punctuated with Italian, especially the endearments—his mother used them at the end of almost every sentence.

Natalie had found disconcerting and oddly appealing to see Stephano’s features mirrored in his mother’s more delicate bone structure. Bizarrely she’d thought that he would look like his father. Santo, his father, wasn’t much taller than his mother and his slightly rotund body showed the effects of her exquisite cooking. Later that evening Antoinette had cupped her son’s face and kissed him on the lips and announced that he was the spitting image of her “Papà”. Natalie had smiled as his mother had hugged him—he had been seated at the time and his mother had been standing and there had been much different in their heights.

His mother had paid Natalie special attention that evening, but she had felt that it was only natural for the woman to gravitate toward the only other female. But treating a dinner guest well was not the same as having that person date your beloved son.

“That doesn’t mean that your mother would be okay with us seeing each other.”

“My mother is a romantic.” Stephano took his left hand off the steering wheel and reached for Natalie’s. “She gave up a life of luxury to run away to Britain with my father. He was a laborer with the construction company my grandfather had hired to build an extension on his mansion. They were both eighteen. They fell in love and when my grandfather had my father fired and sent back to his village, my mother packed a bag and ran behind him. My grandfather’s a powerful man in Italy and my father said that even sending my mother return home wouldn’t have guaranteed his safety. They had to leave the country.”

“Aw, that’s such a sweet story.” Natalie was a sucker for stories of couple surviving against the odds.

“It wasn’t sweet when they arrived here with nothing and my mother already pregnant with me!”

“They obviously made it work.”

Antoinette’s was cozy, with six tables each seating a maximum four people. His mother had said that she was always fully booked, but she didn’t want to larger premises because she like cooking or personally overseeing all the meals herself. She’d said that she also liked being able to have the time to mingle with the diners and ensure that they were all happy with their meals. On Sundays she entertained her special group of regulars, some of whom had been patrons of hers for almost twenty-five years.

“It took them almost five years to get on their feet. My father had to keep a low profile, so they had to avoid the Italian community over here. They didn’t even have enough to pay the large deposits the landlords demanded because my father had just arrived and didn’t have a job yet.” They had a arrived at the Thai restaurant but Stephano parked the car and continued, seeing Natalie’s look of rapt attention. “My mother says if they hadn’t met Shirley Jones she didn’t know how she would have survived. She and my father had been house hunting all day, carrying their belongings with them. She said that she suddenly felt tired and cold and hungry and started to cry. Shirley was coming from the shops with her daughters, Cheryl and Faye, and one of them said, ‘Mummy, that lady’s crying!’. Shirley invited them in for a cup of tea and when they explained their predicament, she told them that they could stay the night.

“It was only a two-storey house with two bedrooms and two large receptions downstairs, but when Ivan, Shirley’s husband came home and she told him the kind of rent landlord were asking for a single room, he decided to move the living room furniture to the dining room and convert the room into a bedroom for my Mum and Dad to rent.

“It helped my parents save a lot of money and helped the Joneses with their mortgage payments. Shirley had another daughter, Eva, just before my mother had me. They bought double bunk beds for the girls’ room when we were old enough and the older girls had the top bunks and Eva and I had the bottom, but most nights we used to sleep in one or the other. When mother first opened the restaurant, she had to serve breakfast, lunch and dinner to make it profitable and Shirley looked after me for her. People used to call Eva and me the ‘the black and white twins’ when she took us to the shops or to play in the park.” Stephano laughed at the memory as he released the car’s central locking mechanism. It hadn’t been as easy when he and Eva were teenagers—their friendship had incited racial comments and abuse from both races.