The Silent Wife(16)

‘Your turn, amore.’

I wanted to leap up and call a halt to this macabre theatre. I was desperate to tell Francesca she didn’t have to participate. She needed to be able to accept her feelings, take comfort in her memories without the rest of the bloody family assessing her ability to perform. But she looked at the table, then got to her feet as though what she was about to share had more of a purpose than voicing a random recollection.

Briefly, her face softened, taking on the rounder, more relaxed features of a child rather than the prickly teenager she’d become. Then glaring at Nico, her eyes red-rimmed, her features pinched and hard, she said, ‘The thing I remember most about Mum is that she was there for me one hundred per cent. No one was more important to her than me. And I miss that.’ Her voice tapered away, crumbling into misery.

Nico flinched. He stretched out his hand to her. ‘I’m here for you, Cessie. I hope you know that.’

He tried to pull her round for a cuddle but she shook him off. ‘I have to share you with Maggie now.’

Nico sagged into his chair. Despite being just forty, five years younger than Massimo, he could easily be mistaken for the eldest son, with his air of the worn and weary, the flecks of grey in his dark hair, the sense that something vital had seeped out, sucked away in battles with Francesca, wars he could never win.

I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him; I related so completely to that feeling of never quite getting it right, however hard you tried. I’d thought parenthood would be such a breeze, especially with Massimo by my side. His enthusiasm for starting a family had silenced my reservations about putting my fledgling career in accountancy on hold for motherhood, conscious that his first marriage had failed because Dawn hadn’t wanted children. And there’d never seemed a ‘right’ time to go back to work since. At least not in Massimo’s eyes and certainly not in Anna’s, who’d been horrified I might leave Sandro in nursery with ‘silly young girls who’ve never even had babies of their own!’

I pushed away the stab of sorrow at how optimistically I’d embraced motherhood and the grind it had become.

Right on cue, Sandro whispered he didn’t feel very well, that his stomach hurt. I didn’t want to get into a discussion at the table about which end he thought might be the trouble – the Farinellis for all their scorn for other people’s weaknesses were ridiculously prudish when it came to bodily functions. So I got up to take Sandro out, but Massimo put his hand over mine.

‘He can wait for a minute. Don’t miss out on sharing your memory of Caitlin. It’s important for you, Francesca, isn’t it, to hear how much your mum meant to us all?’

Francesca had captured – and perfected – Caitlin’s ability to look at her audience as though they were honoured to be in her company, as though she pitied the trees that produced the oxygen wasted on my words.

I sat down, muttering to Sandro to go to the loo, that I’d pop out in a minute. But he shook his head and tugged at my hand. My shoulders tensed, my mind racing. I needed to nip this in the bud right now before it escalated, before we set off down that well-trodden path of Massimo versus Sandro, with me dancing between them like a demented puppet. The dull weight of inevitability competed with my sense of urgency.

Massimo patted Sandro’s shoulder. Only I could see the hard fingers of the other hand digging into his arm, prising him off me. ‘Come on, son. Let Mummy talk about Auntie Caitlin.’ His tone was light but Sandro’s practised ear would be able to discern the thin thread of threat.

Sandro leaned into me, holding his breath, his stomach puffing out in a concave circle. I prayed that we weren’t about to see a splatter painting of soup.

I tapped Massimo’s arm. ‘I don’t think he feels very well. Could you take him out then?’

Massimo’s nostrils flared with impatience but his words played to the gallery. ‘Where does it hurt, son? Come here and let me have a look.’

I didn’t need to see Anna to know she’d have that expression, that face semaphoring to the world that ‘Poor Lara does her best, but Massimo has to step in so often. That boy’s so sickly, I don’t think she can be feeding him right.’

Sandro squiggled away from Massimo, leaning towards me, his back rigid, his bony shoulders digging into my ribs. I sat on my hands to stop myself scooping him up, lifting him onto my knee, rubbing his stomach and cuddling all his knots of angst away.

I could have leapt up and kissed Beryl when she came bustling in with a Cornetto – ‘Sandro – come into the kitchen and have this while the grown-ups do their talking.’