She called back on Skype. Even the picture on the tiny icon made her wistful; one of her and her grandfather, hand in hand on the sand.
The phone rang for a long time. Marisa realised she had almost forgotten her terrifying neighbour for a second, then quickly turned the volume down on the laptop.
‘PRONTO!’
Now, there was her grandmother’s face, looming terrifyingly over the full screen. Marisa flinched backwards in alarm. She also sounded incredibly loud. She nervously glanced to the side. At least the bedrooms didn’t share a dividing wall. That really would have been difficult. Mind you, why should she care? If anyone deserved to be disrupted by noise, it was him.
‘Nonna?’
Her grandmother’s voice boomed. ‘Marisa! There you are!’
‘Sit down, Nonna, you don’t need to be so close.’
Reluctantly the old woman moved back and was finally sitting in front of the sideboard, at the huge wooden table, which was also far too large for the house, on which Marisa had eaten so many meals she could remember the blush of the tomatoes; the clink of ice cubes in pastel-coloured plastic glasses; the shape of the netting skirts that covered the fruit bowl, that folded with a snap which she had been fascinated with as a child, until Nonna had smacked her hand away and told her not to touch them. Lucia, her own mother, wouldn’t have hit her in a million years; the child had gone wide-eyed and pale. But she had never touched them again.
‘Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.’
‘I can hear you fine. Turn up your volume.’
‘What is that?’
Painstakingly, Marisa described the right key to press, and was rewarded with her grandmother’s look of satisfaction. She could only imagine the volume she was booming out now. Mind you, they didn’t have neighbour problems. Their walls were about six foot thick. They barely exchanged a word with their neighbours anyway due to some contretemps, decades before, between their Little Carlo – then a child, now a grown man with a family of his own – and one of the smaller children in the playground over marbles which had ended up in a vowed blood feud. Marisa thought about that. She hoped it didn’t run in the family, this type of thing.
‘Well,’ said her grandmother eventually sitting back. ‘Look at me, on the computer.’
Marisa smiled shyly. She’d written to her grandmother, of course, and guessed Lucia spoke to her plenty, but she didn’t . . . they’d never quite had the relationship she’d had with her grandfather, and didn’t really know where to start.
‘How are you doing?’ she asked carefully. ‘Since Nonno . . .’
Her nonna sniffed. She was dressed all in black, her hair lightly pulled back with a great grey streak through it. She looked rather fine, in fact, Marisa noticed.
‘Well,’ said Nonna. ‘He is with God now.’
‘You miss him?’
‘I speak to him every day.’
She crossed herself briefly. Marisa felt herself sadden; she was hoping for a conversation with her grandmother, not platitudes.
‘Well, that’s good.’
Her grandmother’s lips twitched. ‘And sometimes, now, he listens!’
Marisa smiled at this.
‘And I did a computer class!’
‘I see that.’
‘Everyone else said, ah, you are old and behind the times, but Father Giacamo ran a class at the church and now PING! I am on the internet.’
‘You are on the internet.’
‘Everyone is very impressed with me,’ she said smugly. ‘Especially Father Giacomo. And I have more time now. Now that it is just me.’
Marisa thought about it. She had a lot of time in her day – but what had she used it for, but sitting inside and worrying about things? Even her grandmother, it appeared, had got it together enough to take a computer class, for goodness’ sake. That was amazing enough in itself. She looked at her grandmother carefully. It was almost like . . . well. She didn’t seem in the depths of despair quite as much as she, Marisa, felt herself to be.
‘You aren’t too sad?’ she tried tentatively. It had been, she realised, so long since she’d spoken Italian – to her mother’s alternate annoyance and sadness, she and Gino had started speaking rapid, West Country-inflected English the day they started school and used it as code, and there hadn’t been a lot of Italian spoken at home after that. And it had indeed been a while.
But it sounded so good in her mouth, soft and quick and musical on her tongue. She wondered, briefly, if the man next door found it difficult to speak English all day. His English wasn’t good at all. Maybe Russian to English was harder than Italian. Maybe it didn’t feel so good in the mouth. Italian had a rhythm all its own; the way every sentence rhymed, the way it had been designed, like so many Italian things, simply to be beautiful, because beauty was important in itself.
‘You look bad,’ countered her grandmother. ‘Stand up. What is wrong with you?’
‘I’m not going to stand up!’
‘Stand up!’
She did so, reluctantly.
‘Why are you not looking after yourself?’ her nonna demanded. ‘You look tired and bad, not beautiful as you are and should be. You are a young woman, or not a young woman in fact, you are not young, I suppose, but . . .’
‘Nonna, people here don’t get married at nineteen.’
‘And women don’t get married over thirty,’ shot back her grandmother. ‘Well, they do. But to absolute rubbish.’
Marisa remembered, not for the first time, quite how awkward talking to her grandmother could be. Now she could only see the top of her head. Which was good because her nonna wouldn’t see Marisa going pink, thinking about Mahmoud who, playing computer games in his tracksuit bottoms, normally with one hand inserted down them for some unknown reason while she made him dinner, would have undoubtedly passed her grandmother’s threshold for ‘absolute rubbish’. On the plus side, she didn’t have to add ‘missing my wonderful amazing boyfriend’ to everything else going wrong in her life, she thought darkly.
‘I can’t see your face, Nonna.’
‘My face doesn’t matter. My face has been married. Only your face matters. And your face is looking—’
‘Nonna. Please don’t.’
Suddenly, Marisa found herself speaking the truth from the depths of her being.
‘Since Nonno died . . . I have been so very, very, very sad.’
Chapter Fifteen
Her nonna still didn’t get her hairline into the camera, so it was like talking to the top of a hill, but the words that came from her mouth were kind.
‘Of course you miss him. Of course you do. We all do. Of course you are sad. Your mother, she cries every day.’
It was with a stab of guilt Marisa heard this.
She had thought Lucia was more or less fine about it; she certainly hadn’t stopped her normal life of seeing her friends, going to bridge club, going swimming, hanging out in the open air. Her mother’s frantic social life had barely slowed down in the last few years, regardless of what was going on in the world. It had always irritated her introvert daughter, that constant rush to be surrounded by people, to be everywhere.