His cousin
Lucrezia and Seb have known each other their whole lives. But when you haven’t seen each other in six years, family really can feel like strangers.
‘Piacere,’ she says, extending a hand to Clara. ‘Call me Rezia.’
Rezia and her family have crossed half a continent for Zio Enzo and Zia Helen’s fortieth wedding anniversary.
It would take such an occasion, to make them travel all the way to Leicester.
Last time Rezia saw Seb, he was already talking about this girl like he knew he’d spend the rest of his life with her.
Back then, his hair had still been floppy, and Rezia was still able to reconcile him with the skinny ragazzino who’d make visits out to Salerno back when they were kids.
Seb is easier to talk to since Clara. Less prone to moody silences, more likely to engage with a group conversation in settings like this.
Rezia remembers a night out in Naples as teenagers, Seb crying on her shoulder about Ellie.
He’d never spoken to her about that night, or his sister, ever again.
When Rezia had come to Leicester as a self-confident seventeen-year-old, she’d attended one of the band’s first gigs in this very pub, on the same street as Zio Enzo’s fish-and-chip shop.
Afterwards, she’d slept with Ryan, then spent several months fielding his tearful phone calls about wanting to fly out to Italy and ‘make things official’.
Time has a habit of surprising you. Now Seb is happy, and Ryan is happily married, and Nimesh can’t stop introducing everyone to his new girlfriend, or talking about his new girlfriend whenever he’s not talking to her.
‘Have you met my new girlfriend?’ Nimesh says, with a big and goofy smile.
‘I’m trying to meet Clara,’ Rezia says, impatiently.
‘I’ve met his girlfriend,’ Clara says, one sympathetic hand on Nimesh’s shoulder. ‘She’s my neighbour. I’m actually taking credit for that whole thing.’
Maisie comes over, and Nimesh wastes no time in introducing her, and they all take a seat and start chatting.
Rezia feels a nudge at her leg beneath the table.
She looks down to see Jasper resting his wispy grey chin in her lap, searching for a scrap of food that isn’t there.
The last time she saw him, he was almost a puppy.
Now there are three times as many years in his milky eyes, in his lumps and his bumps.
She gives him a stroke, tickles his chin.
Then she wipes her hands and steers Clara off towards the bar.
It’s not every day you get to chat with the girl for whom the whole Bonami family has fallen head over heels, and Rezia wants to make it count.
Clara may be small in person, but she casts a long shadow.
Zia Helen is always going on about their ‘boozy brunches’, about the matinee shows Clara takes her to when they come down and visit London.
Giuseppe’s girlfriend wins awards, Rezia’s mother says.
Che barba. Che noia. Did you know, Giuseppe’s girlfriend is going to be a star?
‘And what do you do?’
Rezia tells Clara that it’s not important.
What is important is that they get another drink.
The pair become comrades in tipsiness, chatting away while the boys disperse and make their rounds.
Nimesh is introducing Maisie to Seb’s parents.
And Seb? He’s by the kids’ table, telling some kind of tall tale.
They care about family, their people. Lots of cousins, lots of kids.
Rezia’s brothers are older than her, and they both have a brood.
Seb was always a natural with them, even as a teenager.
He never suited being an only child, which is why Nimesh has always been more like a brother to him.
Why he has his bandmates, his aunts and his uncles and his nieces and his nephews, his pride, his pack.
At any family gathering, you’ll find him over there, having his make-up done by the girls or swinging the boys around by their ankles.
Those who meet Seb now see him as serious, because they didn’t know him before Ellie.
It’s disarming, to see that light come back on, when he’s being ridden like a woolly mammoth or playing a game of hide-and-seek behind his beanie hat.
Rezia’s mother says that Seb’s acting gigs have dried up – che peccato!
– but Rezia suspects that acting was never an endpoint for him.
She can imagine him: two kids, camping trips in the school holidays, swimming lessons every Saturday, even if the tattoos and the distressed jeans don’t exactly fit the role of a fleece-wearing father.
Seb and Clara are of that age. And Rezia isn’t the only one thinking it, because all the aunts are watching him, and they’re all elbowing Clara, saying what a catch, what a doting dad he’ll be, what they’d do to have a husband like that.
Clara smiles, but Rezia senses something beneath the smile, something that makes her want to take Clara’s elbow again, to take her away from this room.
‘Excuse me,’ says Clara, doing so herself.
Rezia acts on instinct. Besides, she needs the toilet, too. So she follows, and she and Clara wash their hands next to one another under low lights. Two sinks, two mirrors. Two women who barely know each other.
‘My mother loves you,’ Rezia says, to make conversation ‘She doesn’t know you, but she thinks you’re very glamorous.’
‘Oh, wow,’ Clara says, suddenly quiet. ‘I don’t know about that. You’re much more glamorous than me.’
‘I am just Italian.’
‘Big family,’ Clara notes, making conversation of her own.
‘Family is everything,’ Rezia replies.
Rezia returns to washing her hands, Clara to reapplying her dark lipstick. The tremor in her hand betrays her first.
‘Oh my god,’ Rezia says. ‘Are you—?’
‘No, no,’ Clara says, waving her unsteady fingers, acting fast to catch the black trickle now escaping from beneath one eye. ‘It’s nothing.’ She blots her eyeliner with the bases of her thumbs, but she can’t stem the flow of the tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, when they come. ‘I’m being stupid.’
Then Clara looks at Rezia, and Rezia looks at Clara, and it’s because they don’t know each other that Clara starts to speak, in the manner that you’re sometimes only able to when you’re drunk and standing shoulder to shoulder with a stranger at a bathroom sink.
‘It’s just—’ Clara begins.
It’s just one thing. It’s just everything.
It’s just the thing that has been following her for years now, the thing she didn’t realise had been on her tail until it found her.
Seb was never bothered about marriage, and they’d never talked about kids.
She’d assumed one was like the other. When Clara was younger, her mother and her magazines made it clear that she’d only be allowed so many years before she was expected to give herself up.
Then she’d grown up, and she’d met Seb, and she’d allowed herself to be happy, and to believe she could forget.
Now those years have passed, and that younger Clara, the Clara who thought they might be different, who thought Seb might be different, is suddenly learning the truth.
No one is different. She sees him as he holds her sister’s child, sees the quiet ache behind his eyes.
She bristles when he tests the water, asks what names she likes, wonders if she’d ever raise kids in London.
Skirts around the actual question, the big question he doesn’t want to ask, because he doesn’t want to hear the answer.
She knows that Seb wants a girl. That he’d call her Eleanora, if he had one.
And she knows that she’s a monster, because she does not want the same thing.
When they had their first fight about it, Clara was angry because she could tell that Seb assumed she’d change her mind eventually.
They’ve fought about it again since. There are babies everywhere.
She’s drowning in babies. So how could there not be something wrong with her, some crucial part of her missing, when people say, you next, and all she wants to say is, not me, not ever.
How long? Not long now, right? She and Seb are learning to evade the question, to laugh it off, to grip each other’s hands and dig their nails in.
Right? Right? Right? Every time they’re asked, the sound of Seb’s yearning grows louder, and Clara struggles harder to be heard.
‘I understand, not now,’ Seb had said, during one of those fights. ‘But never?’
Seb has always been supportive of her career.
But sometimes she wants more than support.
She wants him to live it and to breathe it, like she does.
Failing that, she wants to be seen. She wants a sympathetic ear, or at least a functioning one, one that will hear what she’s saying, what she’s always been saying.
But he’d assumed the same as everyone else: that it was just Clara being dramatic.
She’s sorry, she says, now, in the bathroom, because she knows that she’s ranting, that she must sound like a madwoman.
‘I can’t believe I’m saying all this to a stranger. Although we’re not strangers, are we? And who else could I tell? The only person who ever really understood me is Seb.’
Clara is as desperately in love with him as she was when he spun her around and kissed her in Covent Garden seven years ago.
He loves her, too. He tells her this. He tells her, as if she wants to hear it, what a brilliant mum she would be.
She would do anything for Seb. So how can she deprive him of this?
She is a roiling sea of self-doubt. She wonders whether she should just roll over and let it happen.
She knows that she will lose him, if she never relents.
She knows that she will lose herself, if she does.
She pictures him staying, bending to her will, regretting it for the rest of his years.
The image breaks her heart. Perhaps loving someone means ruining your own life instead of theirs.
‘You don’t understand,’ Seb had said. ‘I’ll quit acting. You can direct while I look after the kids. You can have it all.’
But it was Seb who didn’t understand. Clara doesn’t want it all.
‘You should tell him all this,’ says Rezia, when Clara has run out of words, when the words she has used have been allowed to settle like dust after a bomb blast.
There’s a long pause, in which Clara stares into the mirror like someone in a daze, swaying slightly, white knuckles whiter from gripping the sides of the sink.
‘I will,’ she says, quietly. ‘Maybe I will.’