Chapter Twenty-Two 25 July 2011 #2
“We’ll take the boat out into the gulf and watch the sun rise,” she said.
She didn’t seem quite herself, her eyes glassy in a way that should have given me pause, although I dismissed it as a trick of the moonlight.
“I can’t believe we’ve never done it before.
My father would sometimes take me and James out on the loch at night.
It was the only time we really spent with him. It’s magical out there.”
What I really wanted to do was go back to sleep.
I will forever wonder what would have happened if I did.
But until the end, I followed her. If she was the only one dancing at a reception, I would join her.
If she gamely ate the goat testicles floating in stew during a trip to Mongolia, I picked up a spoon.
If she wanted to take a boat into unfamiliar waters on a near moonless night, it took very little convincing for me to agree.
My eighteenth birthday loomed. Soon I would be travelling the world, and then I would be at St. Andrews, and she would be unmoored from the last ties to her old life.
“Do you even know how to drive that boat?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” she said and pulled back my blankets.
It was chillier than I expected on the dock, but Mum strode confidently ahead of me. Davide, who had been leaning against a pole, stood straight when he saw us.
“Bellezza,” he said. He had the gravelly voice of a pack-a-day smoker. “What are you doing up so late?”
“Davide, we’re going to take the boat out so we can watch the sun rise. We’ll be back at six-thirty at the latest.”
He looked between us. “I’ll come, yes?”
“No, darling,” she said kindly. “It’s a mother–daughter outing. But don’t worry. You’ll be able to see us the whole time. We won’t go far.”
Again, he hesitated. “Bellezza, I must be with the boy and the girl, that’s what the Englishmen said.”
She gripped his arm and leaned in as if they had a secret. “They’re so strict, aren’t they? Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I spent my whole childhood sailing, I know what I’m doing.”
Finally, he relented and helped us onto the boat.
It was a motor yacht that was small enough for me to assume the owner rarely did anything but anchor it in the Tigullio Gulf to day-drink.
There were two tiny cabins below deck. At the stern was a flat lounging area in white leather, with a diving board attached so you could jump straight from the yacht into the sparkling sea.
As Davide untied the boat and tossed us the ropes, Mum pressed buttons, inserted the key and used the gear stick to lower the motors into the water.
As she moved confidently around the cockpit, I started to relax.
“Have you driven this boat before?” I asked.
“Last summer,” she said. “I was here for about a week, and I got a quick lesson, although they’re all pretty much the same. This one’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
The smell of boat fuel rose up, and the engines shuddered to life.
Then Davide was waving to us from the dock as we pulled into the night.
I sat on the narrow couch in the cockpit and wrapped myself in one of the blankets Mum had brought with us.
She stood at the helm, looking out at the water, and I lay down on the white leather.
I don’t think I really slept. I just dozed as the boat churned across the glossy surface of the Ligurian Sea.
By the time Mum killed the engine, I was unsure how much time had passed.
I sat up and looked starboard and saw the lights of the Italian Riviera blinking like distant stars.
“Are we kind of far out?” I asked.
She turned to me, surprised. “Oh, you’re awake. No, not that far. See that lighthouse over there? That’s the very tip of Portofino. As long as we don’t go past that point, we’re still in the gulf.”
I squinted into the dark and saw a pulse of silvery light. Mum dug through the tote bag she’d brought with us and pulled out a bottle of champagne.
“I just thought, why not? You’re practically eighteen and this is our last summer together,” she said, pulling off the foil from its neck.
We moved to the leather lounging area and lay down, huddled under the blanket.
I was groggy with sleep and didn’t much feel like champagne, but I took a sip every time she passed me the bottle.
It was cosy lying together under the stars.
The water sloshed gently against the boat’s hull, and I pulled the blanket tightly around myself.
“Are you alright, Mum?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I’m going to watch the sunrise with my girl. What more could I want?”
I hesitated. The lighthouse flickered faintly again in the distance. “I know, but… are you okay?”
She was quiet. Then she took a long draw of the champagne bottle and passed it to me. “I worry about your brother. I worry about you, too. But it’s your brother who worries me the most.”
“He was just in a bad mood tonight,” I said. “He didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not talking about tonight.” She was lying beside me on the lounge, our feet tangled together, looking so young with her bare face and her unkempt hair that she could have passed for my sister. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t.”
She smiled. “Dearest, do you really think I don’t know about Louis and Kris?”
I froze, trying to recall a time when they might have given themselves away in her presence. Once Mum and Papa had separated, Louis and I didn’t burden her so much with our own problems, but I wondered now what she had quietly observed.
“Did Louis say something?” I asked.
“No.”
“How do you know then?”
“Because I’m his mother. I’ve always known.”
I lay back and looked up at the cold stars scattered over our heads, thinking of my brother.
I sometimes worried that as we got older I was losing him to Papa and Granny.
They were three people bound by fate, and an invisible curtain separated them from the rest of us.
Louis was disappearing behind it more and more as he grew up, even though it meant whole parts of himself had to remain concealed.
But they were the parts that Mum and I loved, the parts that made him Louis.
“He and Kris really love each other,” I said.
“I’m glad.”
I rolled over. “I’m sorry I kept it a secret from you.”
She smiled again. “I understand the honour code between twins. I haven’t brought it up with him because I know he’s not ready to talk about it, but I’m glad he has you. You two must always be brother and sister first, you know. You must always take care of him.”
“I know,” I paused. “Why are you worried about me?”
Her eyes were roaming my face with so much love, it clenched my heart.
“Because,” she said, “you never want anyone to worry about you.”
I was surprised that tears pricked my eyes. I thought again of my brother vanishing behind the curtain, leaving me alone in this world, even though we had arrived here together.
“Sometimes I wonder,” I whispered, “what’s the point of me?”
“Oh, dearest,” she cried softly and brushed my wet cheeks with her fingers. She took my face in her hands. “You are my brilliant, kind, funny girl. You are here for no other reason than to be yourself. I don’t want you to ever make the same mistake I did.”
“What was your mistake?”
She sighed and wiped her eyes.
“I wasn’t much older than you when I met your father,” she said. “We were both… desperate for something. He was heartbroken over her. I just wanted a family—any family, really. And I think we believed that we could offer each other a semblance of what we were missing.”
I had never heard her talk this way. She always discussed the catastrophic breakdown of their marriage as a betrayal.
Papa was the arch villain disguised as a handsome prince.
She was the innocent maiden who had entered the castle seeking love, only to find herself trapped by writhing dragons and swooping condors.
“Do you think he loved you?” I asked, but I really meant us.
“In his way.” She sighed. “I don’t know. He loved me for giving him Louis—and you. I just didn’t think the love would drain away quite so soon. I never expected to be thirty-nine and out on my own again.”
She took the champagne bottle from me and brought it to her lips. She drank for a long time.
“My mistake was believing that the only reason I was put on this Earth was to give birth to a king,” she said. “So after I had you and Louis, and your father was done with me, I found myself thinking, What’s the point of me now?”
She put the bottle down so she could find my hands.
“You were born to your position, and that is a privilege. But that is not all you are. Never forget that.”
She pulled me into her warm arms and held me for a long time. The stars flickered above us and we swayed on a placid wave. I fought to keep my eyes open.
“I might fall asleep.”
I felt her lips against the crown of my head. “Why don’t you go down to the berth and sleep where it’s warm? It’s alright, I’ll wake you when the sun’s coming up.”
I took the narrow steps below deck and collapsed onto the first bed I found. The pillows were flat and musty, but it was as dark as a tomb down there. I listened to the thump of the water on the hull, and let my champagne-fuzzed head and the gentle rocking of the boat lull me to sleep.
I’m not sure why I snapped awake when I did.
No sound roused me. The boat undulated on a rippling tide.
Nothing seemed amiss. But when I sat up in bed and listened for something I couldn’t name, all I heard was the creaking and settling of the hull.
I climbed the stairs to the deck and found it was still night, with the crescent moon now high overhead.
I walked past the cockpit towards the stern, expecting to find Mum asleep on the lounge.
But no one was there, only the blanket twisted in a heap where she had been.
“Mum?” I said.