Chapter 48
Violet
‘This is for you.’
Henry made no move to take what Luke was offering, and neither did I.
‘Both of you,’ he clarified, readjusting the package in his arms. ‘It doesn’t matter who opens it.’
I cleared my throat. ‘Can I, we, open it in a minute? I just need to put some clothes on.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure.’
Luke shook his fringe from his eyes, taking in our state of undress. I saw what looked to be the beginnings of a smile as he turned to go and glanced towards Henry.
‘Do you think he bought us a thirty-grand painting?’ he stage-whispered.
‘Not funny,’ I hissed back, though his humour had warmed me. ‘Go and get dressed. I’ll meet you on the landing.’
Instead of my usual shorts, I decided to put on the dress I’d left out for Antonio’s wake, which was black with a wrap front and fluted sleeves. One of the many garments I’d splurged on after Henry and I parted ways, each new purchase a small shot of serotonin that kept me going when it felt as if the world was caving in. I didn’t need the dress, just as I hadn’t needed an expensive new car, so-called ‘miracle’ face creams, and a bi-weekly appointment to have my nails done – but being able to have all those things had felt freeing. For the first time in my life, it was up to me where my money went, and on whom I spent it.
‘You look nice.’
Henry appraised me from the top of the stairs. He, too, had dressed for the wake, the tatty overalls he’d stripped out of replaced by the smarter outfit he’d laid out on the bed. As he raised a hand to sweep his hair back off his forehead, I saw a flash of gold and hope flared. But it was a cufflink I’d seen, not his wedding ring. I still wore mine; had never been able to bear the thought of taking it off.
‘So do you,’ I said.
He dipped his chin self-consciously, reminding me of the boy he’d been, that gangly eighteen year old who’d no idea how beautiful he was. If only we could’ve flicked a switch and gone back to that moment, the opportunity to get things right rolled out like fresh turf ahead of us. I would do it all so differently.
‘Ready?’ he asked, and I nodded, though I almost certainly was not.
Henry went first and I followed him, along the hallway and out through the open back door. A half-empty bottle of white wine had been left open on the patio table, foil scattered around it, and as we made our way down to join Luke and Eliza beside the lemon tree, I saw that four glasses had been lined up on the stone steps.
As they instinctively did whenever I ventured out into this space, my eyes began to roam over the beds, taking in lilac campanula petals veined in black, the tissue-thin poppies, and the gaps between the stone where determined cliffhanger flowers clung, earning their name through sheer tenacity. During our third summer here, I had planted several beds of Spanish love-in-the-mist as a gesture for Henry, and admired the spider-topped heads as I stepped past them. Memories hung in the air out here, as dense and all-consuming as the heat, and I had to make a concerted effort not be caught up in them, to focus, to be present in this, new, moment.
‘I thought we should drink a toast to Antonio,’ said Luke. ‘I was going to get brandy, but I figured nobody would want to drink that.’
‘You figured right,’ agreed Henry, as the four of us stood in a circle, and sipped in unison. I waited for Eliza to speak, as she usually did in the midst of an awkward silence, but this time she remained quiet. Luke was doing a good job of looking anywhere other than at me and Henry, his trainers disturbing the dust as he shuffled from one foot to the other.
‘Are you going to open it or what?’ he mumbled, gesturing to the parcel, which he’d propped up against the tree trunk. The fact that I was standing in the exact spot I’d first seen Henry felt significant, as if destiny itself had tied one of life’s many strings into a neat bow.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Henry, shall we?’
Lifting the large, flat rectangular box between us, we each took a corner of paper and, having counted to three, tore it open to reveal a wooden frame, inside which was an image I recognised.
‘Oh wow,’ I exclaimed, feeling the sting of tears. Luke had painted an image from the photo album I’d found while clearing out the dresser, the one of me and Henry in the doorway of La Casa Naranja, both of us beaming, his hand placed protectively on the swell of my pregnant belly. The boy that had once been inside that bump had not only captured us perfectly, but the joy of the moment, too, his use of colour, light, and layers of oil adding depth and movement. Henry’s eyes shone as he took it in, wonderment softening his features.
‘I don’t know what to say.’ He turned to look at Luke. ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Exquisite,’ I added. ‘Stunning. All the superlatives.’
Luke stared at the ground.
‘Seriously,’ went on Henry. ‘This is something else. Thank you.’
‘S’all right,’ he said, cheeks carnation red.
I pressed my thumb and forefinger into the soft trench below each eye to stem my tears. I knew my son, and this work of art he’d so painstakingly created was his way of pleasing us, making us proud, and demonstrating how important we were to him.
‘It’s a very special painting,’ I told him, leaning in to examine more of the details. ‘Shall we take it inside, out of the sun? We don’t want it getting damaged.’
‘I’ll do it.’ Eliza stepped forwards, but not before casting a meaningful look in Luke’s direction. I caught Henry’s eye, and saw that he, too, had clocked this exchange.
None of us said anything until Eliza had moved away. Then, as the back door closed behind her, we all spoke at once.
‘You go,’ I said to Luke, as he said the same thing.
Henry hesitated. ‘I was just going to ask why,’ he said.
Luke shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts. ‘Why what?’
‘Why that photo, of all the photos in that album?’
Luke fidgeted uncertainly. There had been a time when I would’ve provided a range of responses for him, a multiple-choice list from which he could choose, safe in the knowledge that nothing he said would be wrong. One of my therapists had described it as ‘overcompensating’; my mother referred to it as ‘suffocating’, and Henry merely told me to ‘let the boy think for himself’. What none of them seemed to understand was that I’d done it to protect Luke. And far from being a calculated act, it came wholly naturally. Nurturing was what I did; it was the only language I knew by which to parent. I’d had to work hard on quashing these responses when they arose, and even now, the urge to lay down verbal escape routes for my son was a strong one.
Luke, when he eventually replied, did so with his standard air of indifference.
‘Thought it was nice,’ he said, crunching dirt underfoot. ‘A photo of our family where you both look happy.’
‘There are loads of those,’ I exclaimed, withering at the look he gave me in reply.
‘You reckon?’
‘Yes. I’m sure there are. Hundreds. Aren’t there, Henry?’
He shrugged, screwed up his features.
‘There are,’ I insisted, wondering why Eliza hadn’t come back.
Luke glanced at Henry. ‘Sometimes people smile in photos, but their eyes don’t match what they’re trying to convey with their mouths.’
To illustrate his point, he drew back his lips into a wide, soulless grin.
‘I don’t do that, though,’ I said, more to convince myself than either of them. ‘Do I?’
‘Mum, come on, it’s practically your resting face at this point.’
I responded with a brittle laugh. ‘Gee, thanks.’
‘I don’t blame you for it,’ Luke went on. ‘I get why you do it, put on a brave face and all that. It’s not as if I’ve given you much choice in the matter.’
‘That’s not true—’ I began, but Henry was nodding.
‘When I saw that photo, I felt like I was seeing the real versions of you both for the first time,’ said Luke, pausing to swig some wine. He looked deeply uncomfortable yet dogged all the same, and again I had to fight the compulsion to offer him a way out. ‘You were happy then, before I came along and ruined it all.’
This time, both Henry and I leapt in with denials, but Luke dismissed both of us with a slow shake of his head. ‘You can say it all you want, but I know how difficult it’s been for you both, how awful I’ve been to live with. All the photos I’ve seen with me in them, you both look different. Like, sad and stuff.’
He’d said all this in a rush, determined to get his point across before either of us had a chance to interrupt him, but in doing so he’d allowed his composed mask to slip. Now, he looked edgy, his skin flushed, and fists clenched.
‘We were different,’ I agreed gently. ‘Having a baby changes you in a unique way, but it didn’t make either of us sad. On the contrary, the love I experienced the minute I held you in my arms was indescribable. It was as if life suddenly made sense, the purpose of it all, the reason I was here, on this planet, and had met your dad.’
‘She’s right.’ Henry was smiling at the memory. ‘It was the happiest day of my life.’
There was disbelief in Luke’s expression. He took another, bigger, gulp of his wine. ‘You don’t need to lie to me,’ he said. ‘Especially you, Mum.’
‘Me?’
‘What Dad said last week, you know, about being angry with me because of everything I’d put you through, because of me being so screwed up?’ He’d tapped the side of his head as he said it, and the gesture made me feel as if someone had taken a chisel to my heart. ‘At least he was being real,’ Luke continued. ‘Telling the truth.’
Henry had gone very still. ‘I shouldn’t have said any of that. It was— I was a mess. I didn’t mean it.’
Luke let out a rasp of frustration. ‘But you did, Dad – and that’s OK. I can take it. I know who I am, and what I’ve done, all the shitty things I’ve said to you. It makes more sense that you’d be angry with me than not.’
‘But I don’t blame you,’ Henry insisted. ‘I know none of it was your fault.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘I know you don’t blame me. Instead, you blame each other.’
Eliza chose that moment to come back, bringing the half-empty bottle of white wine with her. She’d changed into a black A-line dress, her pink locks pushed back by a gold hairband, and looked rather apprehensive.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked, glancing at each of us in turn. ‘You told them?’ she said, reaching for Luke’s hand. ‘I knew you’d understand,’ she added, with what sounded like palpable relief. ‘It came from a good place.’
Incomprehension nudged at me. ‘You mean the reason behind the painting?’
‘No.’ Eliza wrinkled her brow. ‘The money – the thirty thousand euros.’
Luke closed his eyes, his head tilted back until it was bathed white by the sun.
The smell of lemons was suddenly overpowering, reminding me of my mother’s kitchen, cream cleaner squirted across the draining board, the gusto with which she used to attack the limescale while I sat bouncing a baby Luke on my knees. ‘Got to get it gleaming,’ she’d say, though never explaining why. I realised now that I knew the answer, understood her need to control something – anything – and tackle a task that came with a satisfying result guaranteed. Watermarks were easier to remove than regrets, plants more straightforward to grow than relationships, and heads simpler to bury in the dirt than stick above the parapet. All the things I’d long accused my mother of doing, I also did, and as I’d observed and learned from her, so, too, had Luke from me.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, as the blood drained from a horrified Eliza’s cheeks. ‘We’d already worked it out.’
Henry cleared his throat. ‘If you’d needed something, you could’ve just asked,’ he said, sounding exhausted. ‘We would’ve sorted it for you.’
‘It wasn’t for me.’ Luke stared at his father. ‘It was for—’
‘Me.’ They all turned in my direction.
‘You took my purse, didn’t you?’ I said, recalling how conveniently it had turned up again the same day I’d misplaced it, sitting on the coffee table as if it had been there all along.
Luke took a deep breath. ‘Yeah.’
‘You knew I was struggling, money wise?’
Eliza squeezed his arm encouragingly.
‘I know you were earning barely nothing at the estate agent, and when I saw the new car, all the clothes, the furniture at Granny’s... I was worried,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d check, you know, to be sure. So, I borrowed your cards. I already knew the pin number to two of them, and the other one was saved in your phone.’
‘You should probably delete that,’ Eliza put in, with such earnest sincerity that I almost laughed.
‘When I saw how much— I mean, how bad things had got, I didn’t want to wait until my inheritance came through to sort it – that’s years away, and I was worried you’d get into trouble.’ He looked beseechingly from me to Henry. ‘I was planning to pay it back, all of it. I just thought that if the money thing was sorted then you two could stop arguing all the time about selling this place and, you know, make up and stuff.’
‘Oh, Luke.’ Henry put a hand on his shoulder.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, appalled at myself and what my stubborn foolhardiness had set in motion. ‘This is all my fault. The debt, it could have waited. I was going to sort it.’
There was pity in the eyes of both men as they stared back at me.
‘I really was,’ I reiterated. ‘I had a plan.’
Luke gave into a smile far more wicked than I’d seen him make before.
‘So did I,’ he said simply. ‘Mine was just way better than yours. I took the money to a Western Union place in town and transferred the lot to Granny, told her I’d got some cash from Antonio, and could she put in it my account, and then I diverted it to yours. It’s no big deal,’ he added, as I gawped at him. ‘Did most of it on my phone. And I know you’ll want it back, Dad,’ he went on, ‘and you can have it – as soon as I turn twenty-one.’
‘But that’s your money,’ I said faintly to which Luke made a tsking sound.
‘Mine,’ he agreed, the flash of confidence making him seem older somehow, for once at ease within the framework of his body. Despite my own shame, I felt pleasure in that moment. Pride for the man who was beginning to shed the petals of his youth. ‘And that means I get to decide what I use it for.’