Chapter Ten
‘A PINT OF FERRYMAN’S, a rum and Coke and a couple of packets of cheese and onion crisps, please, love. Can you put it on my tab? The name’s Anderson.’
‘Of course.’
Smiling, Dulcie selected a pint glass and angled it at forty-five degrees directly under the tap, straightening the glass as she poured.
This was her second shift at the Crown and Gown, and she was still checking off the steps of pint-pouring as she went. But there was something calming in the process, and she felt a small uptick of satisfaction as the beer separated to form a creamy head.
Right now, she would take her wins where she could.
It had taken almost six hours to get back to England from Paris. Somehow, she’d managed to flag down a taxi to take her to the airport, but even the thought of walking into Charles de Gaulle had made her want to burst into tears and she’d made the driver turn around and return to the city.
She must have looked pretty unhinged, clutching her passport like an amulet because the driver had suggested she take a train instead, and he had dropped her at Gare du Nord.
There were no tickets for the first train leaving so she had to wait for the next one and that hour seemed like the longest of her life, and she couldn’t relax or even sit down until she was safely on the train and the sprawl of Paris was replaced by countryside.
It was too late to get a train back to Cambridge.
Instead she booked into a hotel near St Pancras.
She was so strung out and emotional she thought she would never sleep but when she curled up on the bed, her eyes shut and she woke up nine hours later, still fully clothed with the familiar, pale London light flooding the room.
She stayed there for two more nights, buying food and eating it in the room, watching the city wake and then return to darkness. She slept a lot, mainly because sleep anaesthetised the pain. But each time she woke, Ettore was the first thing she thought about.
And it hurt. Everything ached and she understood then why Oscar drank and took drugs. But it was thinking about Oscar that pulled her back from the cliff-edge. Because he needed her, and she needed him.
She needed Ettore too, and she missed him like an amputated limb.
Missed him so much that it was easier just to stay another night.
But when dawn rose again, she checked out.
In that liminal space between Puglia and Cambridge, she could slow time, pretend to herself that she was travelling but never actually reaching her destination, like Sofia or Holly Golightly.
Because then she would have to admit that it was over with Ettore.
But they were done. She knew that now.
And she had done enough pretending.
It was time to start living for real. To make some changes, because she wasn’t the same woman now.
She glanced around the pub. Most people were enjoying their drinks and the sunshine in the garden that stretched back to the Cam, the river that meandered through the city and had given it its name. The pub itself was cool and quiet, in contrast to the inside of her head.
But some of that noise was starting, finally, to fade a little.
And with each tiny, baby step she took back into the world, it faded incrementally.
The first step was putting the house on the market. If she was going to put the past in her rear-view mirror once and for all, she needed to pay Ettore back. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be beholden to him.
There couldn’t be that connection between them even if it was just a three-digit amount next to the word ‘monthly’ and Ettore’s name.
It was his name that was the problem. Seeing it written down, saying it inside her head, was enough to make her spiral.
To make her yearn.
To make her hope.
In short, to do what she’d done in the hotel off St Pancras.
She needed to move forward.
Before the agents had put up the For Sale sign, the house was under offer. The buyers had no chain and were desperate for the house, the agent said. More importantly, they were cash buyers.
So, this morning she had gone to the bank and asked for a bridging loan to tide her over until the sale went through. The bank had agreed, and twenty minutes ago she’d sent the balance of what she owed to Ettore and closed her standing order.
And now she had done it, she felt so many differing and conflicted emotions.
Relief. Pride. Astonishment. And sadness, because selling the house hadn’t just broken the connection with Ettore.
It was her last link with her dad. He had given her the deposit for her original flat in London before he’d severed all ties with her.
Strangely, splitting up with Ettore had given her closure with her father.
For so long, she had feared him, then she had hated him.
But now she knew that he must have acted how he had because he was damaged.
She would never know what or more likely who had inflicted the harm, but it made it easier to forgive him.
As for her mum, she had forgiven her a long time ago.
The house was still hers but she had decided to move out so she was renting a room from one of the professors at the college.
She would sort out something more permanent in a couple of weeks.
But for now, she liked the smallness of her situation.
She felt like a snail, carrying everything she needed on her back.
She had just one bill to pay, one bedroom and a bathroom to keep clean and tidy. It meant she had less to think about.
More time to think about the big picture. And the big picture was taking shape. Incredibly, she had come up with a business plan for working with country estates to bio-diversify their lands. She had even come up with a name: The Green Canvas Collective.
It would start small but if she had even a tenth of her dad’s brain for business and her mum’s energy, it would work.
That was part of the bigger picture too: remembering her mother from before she became ill.
They were snapshots. But she knew they were true because they chimed with the way Oscar was now.
He was still in the clinic. But she could see the progress he was making in the photos he sent and hear it in his voice when they spoke. There were setbacks, but he was inching towards that calmness and certainty she had longed for in Paris.
Paris.
Ettore.
It was only a sliver of time since she’d last seen his face or touched his skin or felt her body soften beneath his steady gold gaze, and yet it felt like a lifetime.
It felt like yesterday. Would the pain ever disappear completely? She was shocked by how much it hurt. More so even than the first time because a part of her had never quite let go of him then. Now, though, she knew they were over.
She had left him high and dry.
Not quite. Despite what she’d said in Paris, she hadn’t told her solicitor to get in touch with Carlo Biondi for the very good reason that she didn’t have one.
Whether Ettore was her husband or not, he was the best man to run the estate. To oversee the vineyard and the charitable trusts.
She pictured him on the floor at the casa-famiglia playing that game with the teenager in the hoodie. In another life, in another country, that boy was Oscar. What would happen to him if Ettore was forced to step down and hand the reins over to Checco?
It would be a disaster. Everything would fall apart. The money would evaporate, and people would get hurt, damaged children like Oscar.
But married was still married even if you were separated. And she would stay married until Ettore inherited the estate.
And then she would divorce him, or he could divorce her. Her ego could survive either. Her pride demanded that she prioritise the lives of people who had done nothing to deserve the consequences of her and Ettore’s actions above her personal pain and the need for absolute closure.
She pressed her hand against her chest.
The pain changed on an hourly basis. Sometimes it was sharp like now when she was stupid enough to think about Ettore.
But even when she was busy or distracted, the pain remained.
A constant, dull ache, and with it a longing, a yearning for him that was so persistent and ridiculous that sometimes she would start laughing.
Only then she wasn’t laughing, she was crying.
But he was gone. Just like those hailstones in Paris. Her dreams of love had melted away, but she would not let it define her life or her brother’s.
If she told herself that often enough, surely it would come true. Wouldn’t it?
As the car pulled slowly to a halt, Ettore stared up at the familiar crenellated outline of the Castiglione Fiana. He had half considered staying on in Paris indefinitely. But he couldn’t keep hiding from the truth for ever. Couldn’t hide the truth from his family for ever either.
And now he was here, he felt something like relief.
But then, things had changed. He had changed.
Dulcie had changed him. Throughout his childhood, his parents’ open favouritism for his siblings had left him feeling rootless and superfluous in his own family. He had made himself useful, leaning into his natural affinity for order amid chaos.
But it had stifled him. His life had narrowed in ways he didn’t want but felt powerless to change. Because his value, his only value to his family, lay in what he could do for them, not in who he was or wanted to be.
And then there was Dulcie with her blue, dancing eyes and her sweet smiles and her courage and he’d been forced to face their past. To see that he had put conditions on their love in the same way his family made their love conditional.
Acknowledging that had given him the courage to change his life.
To put down the survivors’ guilt that he’d carried since his brother’s death.
To grieve for Edo and know that his grief wasn’t tainted somehow.
Dulcie’s words had been a restorative balm to his mother’s angry outburst. She had been like a nurse plant brought in to care for the vines.