But even as she thought it, she realised that she was British; that there was too much about her home country she would always miss, from chocolate digestives to Fleabag that she wouldn’t have a hope of explaining here; that she missed her friends so, so much and was going to rectify that as soon as she got home; that she genuinely wanted to go dancing, to go to a party to eat food that wasn’t Italian, to laugh until she was sick. Italy was wonderful, but England was home.
And if she could have the best of both worlds; if she could find her freedom within herself, and only herself – well. That was the most healing thing she could think of, she thought, under the bright starry sky of an Italian summer.
A faint noise pulled at the edges of her consciousness and she frowned. Somebody must be playing the piano near here. How funny. It must follow her everywhere. She frowned and tried to figure out where it was coming from.
That was odd; it sounded like it was coming from inside the house.
Slightly nervously, she turned round again. What on earth was it?
Inside the little kitchen it was louder still; a great crashing epic of a piece, loud and bold, played on a piano . . . Had she left the television on?
Immediately she realised, and felt like a complete idiot. Of course. They’d been out the previous night, but of course – it was coming from the laptop, that was still connected to the flat.
She sat in front of it, even though there was nothing to see in the dark Cornish room. She could hear, though, the great swells of the playing. It sounded absurdly close; close enough to touch. So she simply sat, closed her eyes, opened her mind and listened. She hadn’t really listened before, being too irritated, or sad, or both. But now, here, far away, she let the music take her; music that felt like the rolling of a boat, like a great heavy-masted ship crashing through stormy seas, ploughing up and down through the waves. By the end of it, she felt like clapping, and did so. To her surprise she heard lots of other people too, through the walls, and a resumption of noisy chatter and laughter. Oh my God, he was having a party!
‘Alexei,’ she whispered through the computer. Of course he couldn’t hear her. Experimentally she tried a little louder. ‘ALEXEI?’
But nobody could hear her. She was torn between being insulted at him having a party and not inviting her, admiration for his consideration to wait for her to be gone – and an unexpected desire to be there too.
Chapter Sixty-eight
Marisa had seen lonely deaths in her job. Deaths from people in flats not discovered for months; deaths reported by social workers because there were no family members to love them enough to do it. She had made out death certificates for young drug deaths, and old solitary deaths, and she knew exactly what she was not going to do for her own family.
Nonna was not alone for a second. There was always someone by her side, encouraging her to eat just a little zuppa del minestrone, the cure for all ills, or reading to her from the old illustrated Bible on the mantelpiece, or playing her favourite music; changing and washing her, briskly and without sentiment; or simply holding her hand or combing her hair.
For such a voluble woman who had talked and talked and talked, she didn’t insist, not any more, on having something to say, even in the few moments she was lucid and could talk. As if she’d told them all she wanted to say – and they repeated, sometimes in hushed tones, her many pointed lectures on the subjects of their fashion choices, their partner choices and their life choices, but in every way with affection.
‘Oh my goodness, the trouble I got when I went to England with Stefano,’ said Lucia.
‘Well, she was right about Stefano,’ said Ann Angela, earning herself a very Nonna look from her sister.
‘Nonna only ever got a telephone so she could ring me internationally and tell me I’d made every single decision wrong in every conceivable way.’
Lucia smiled.
‘It must have cost her a fortune! All those international calls!’
Everyone laughed.
‘No wonder she never bought a new dress.’
Nonna slept a lot, nearly all the time, and the doctor came in morning and night to make sure she was never in pain or distressed, but the Rossis were all over it, and not beyond letting her have a sip of her beloved grappa at bedtime, which was quite as it should be.
On the fourth day her breathing started to labour a little and they looked at each other as she became slightly more alert, aware of the breath tight in her body and on her chest, and tugging on the sleeve of everyone who came in and out, and they sat down carefully as she turned to them, one by one, and croaked out.
‘Ti . . . ti voglio bene.’
And of course everyone said, ‘I know you do. And we love you too. And everything is well.’
And the doctor came for the last time and agreed that it wouldn’t be long, but that nothing hurt, and time took on an odd feeling of being extremely elongated – minutes drawing out, punctuated by the sense that every breath was taking longer to come than the previous one, that it might be the last, and they milled, and cooked because they were going to need a lot of food for the funeral, after all, so they might as well put it in the freezer, and neighbours popped in and out quietly in the hush. The priest came and Marisa and Ann Angela got the worst fit of giggles, in the way you do at the most inappropriate moments, when in the middle of all the solemnity he turned out to be both radiantly handsome and quite magnificently camp, and Nonna held on to his robe as strongly as she’d held on to anyone else’s, and intoned, with a somewhat theatrical flair, the ancient words of the ritual.
‘Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.’
And they gathered round as the day turned to night, and Marisa texted Alexei for the first time – she didn’t even have his number; she found it on an advert for piano lessons – and said hello, and that they could hear him and would he mind terribly playing something?
And he said of course, and she had almost certainly left her balcony door open again so would she like him to climb in and grab the laptop so it was closer? She had told him not to be so daft, he would fall if he attempted to scale their balconies, but he took this as a challenge, vanished and reappeared thirty seconds later, clutching her laptop triumphantly.
It was lovely to see him; she couldn’t stop grinning, had forgotten her crossness.
‘Are you comink home?’ he said anxiously. ‘Or have you gone for ever to land of Puccini? Is good land.’
‘I am coming home,’ she promised.
‘Well, that is good,’ he said. ‘That is very good. You want me to play? Are you sure?’
She had been trying to be subtle but it was impossible with nonna’s old laptop right bang in the middle of the kitchen, the volume turned up to a level an eighty-year-old could communicate in.
‘Ooh, is that him?’ said Lucia. ‘Let’s have a look then.’
‘Shut up!’ hissed Marisa.
‘Is he better-looking than the priest?’ wondered Ann Angela aloud. She looked at the screen. ‘Oh. No.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Buona sera, Italian family of Marisa,’ said Alexei gravely, blinking, which produced much excitement among them, and some giggling among the younger cousins. ‘What music did your grandmother like?’