Chapter Two
I consulted the map the hotel had given me, wondering which of the city’s attractions was generating the slow-moving queue Daisy and I were deciding whether or not to join.
‘I think it’s the Galleria dell’Accademia,’ I said, squinting up at the white building in front of us and then back at the map. ‘And if it is, it’s got Michelangelo’s David inside, which explains the crowds.’
Daisy pushed her sunglasses onto her head, looking up at it, too. ‘What, that’s what they’re all waiting for? To look at some ancient piece of marble?’
I laughed, softly. ‘Aren’t you into sculpture?’
Daisy shrugged. ‘Not really.’
The queue moved forward. I wondered whether seeing David was worth the hype.
‘I thought your dad said you were doing GCSE art?’ I said.
He’d said she was really in to it. A ‘total creative’ was how he’d described her.
I’d thought that maybe it could be something for us to bond over.
I’d loved art at school, too, although I’d never been good enough to take it any further.
The reality of the work I produced had never been as good as it had seemed in my head, which was something I’d noticed about my life in general.
Daisy nodded. ‘I am. But I prefer painting.’
‘Me too, I think,’ I said, looking up at the perfect, bright blue sky and slipping off my cardigan so that I could feel the late-afternoon sun on my arms. Somewhere in the distance, a street performer was playing something rousing and romantic on the violin.
When I breathed in, I could smell burnt sugar.
‘He’s gutted that I’m not into something more useful,’ Daisy remarked. ‘Like maths or chemistry, or something.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ I replied. Nick had never given me the impression he cared what Daisy was or wasn’t studying.
Sophia seemed to be the one in charge of all the school-related stuff.
Daisy was at one of the North London private schools, of course.
I was pretty sure she’d do well whatever she chose to study for GCSE.
‘He said he’s going to book us both a guided tour of the Uffizi Gallery. He thinks you’d be really into it.’
‘Do we have to?’ complained Daisy. ‘I like painting myself, not looking at other people’s in a stuffy old gallery.’
I sighed inwardly. ‘You’d better talk to him about it.’
I gave up on the idea of going into the Galleria, not prepared to queue for hours to see the statue if Daisy wasn’t that enthusiastic about it. Perhaps we’d find something else to do and I’d come back on my own.
‘Fancy a gelato?’ I asked, determined to find some common ground. I’d have to use a different tactic, and food seemed as good a place as any to start. I was going to be her stepmother after all (a mortifying thought, if I was honest). And everyone loved ice cream, didn’t they?
‘I suppose,’ huffed Daisy. ‘How many calories does it have, though?’
I looked at Daisy with her long, slim limbs and her minute waist and felt quite sad about the fact she clearly wasn’t confident about the way she looked.
She reminded me of my half-sisters, who were just as obsessed with their weight.
Nick reckoned Daisy’s constant worrying about food was just a phase, and that her hormones were ‘going haywire’, as he’d put it.
Mind you, I didn’t think Nick could deal with emotional outbursts of any kind.
On the odd occasion I’d lost it and had had a meltdown in front of him, I’d caught him looking at me with a mixture of utter contempt and blind panic.
‘You’re on holiday, Daisy. Treat yourself. Plus you look great – you don’t need to worry about putting on weight.’
I bought us both a gelato – Daisy had spent absolutely ages looking at the menu and I’d watched her mind ticking over, as if she was trying to work out which flavour was the least calorific.
She went for black cherry in the end and I had pistachio, a decision that for me had taken, oh, about five seconds to make.
Cones in hand, we wandered in the vague direction of the Duomo.
I hadn’t seen it close up yet, but you seemed to be able to spot it poking out above the rooftops wherever you were in the city.
I breathed in the scent of Florence, which was warm and sweet with a punch of something floral.
I wanted to stay here for ever, wafting around its narrow streets like a modern-day Lucy Honeychurch.
‘Shall we take a slow walk back to the hotel?’ I suggested.
Daisy looked less than enthusiastic. ‘If you want.’
I took a huge mouthful of my gelato, wanting to finish it before we got back. Somehow eating a messy ice cream in the street in the middle of the day seemed like something Rosamund would disapprove of.
‘Oh my God,’ I groaned. ‘This is literally the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted.’
Daisy tutted. ‘Do you have to be so loud about it?’ she said, strutting off ahead.
I’d said the wrong thing again. Or had just been uncool, which came as no surprise to me. As I watched Daisy walk about two metres ahead of me, bubbling away inside of me were doubts about how I was going to navigate the next five days.
Although I’d had time to change into a floral sun dress, flat sandals and my favourite oversized cardigan, I was desperate to get back to the hotel so I could trawl through the contents of my suitcase and work out what the hell I was going to wear for dinner that night.
It was my chance to make a better impression.
To show Nick’s family that I wasn’t just some shabby girl he had picked up in a bar, but a professional, confident, relatively successful woman.
Then again, how was I supposed to compete with the likes of Sophia, who I suspected would look good in an actual plastic bin bag?
Not that she would be seen dead in anything that hadn’t cost a small fortune, I imagined.
I bet she didn’t have a wardrobe full of H&M sale items and Topshop pieces from – no word of a lie – about fifteen years ago.
I followed Daisy up an achingly pretty street which I thought would take us in the general direction of the hotel – if I wasn’t trying to keep up with her, I would have stopped to look at the market to my left. A particularly enticing stall had fake designer handbags on display.
‘Hold on, Daisy!’ I called after her. ‘Don’t walk too far ahead.’
She scowled at me over her shoulder and slowed her pace a miniscule amount. I was about to run to catch her up when my phone rang. I picked up without thinking.
‘Maddie! Good, you answered. I thought I might have to email you.’
Fuck. If I’d clocked it was Tim calling, I’d have let it go to voicemail. What did he want?
‘How’s Florence?’ he asked faux-casually.
‘I’ve only just got here,’ I said, keen to remind him that I was officially on annual leave and that being my boss didn’t give him the right to contact me whenever he felt like it.
Just because I worked in TV and because, according to Tim, ‘thousands of people’ would kill for my job (doubtful), it didn’t mean I had to be on call twenty-four/seven.
Yes, I often had to work late, or do long hours if I was away on a shoot.
I got it, and that was fine. But we worked on a low-budget travel channel, it wasn’t like we were making cutting-edge documentaries here.
If I wanted a few days off, I should be able to take them.
‘I wanted to remind you to pick up some generic Florence footage,’ said Tim, in the breezy tone he adopted whenever he was asking me to do something that deep down he knew was completely unreasonable. ‘It saves us doing a separate trip and we can use it to tease City Break Week.’
Was he seriously expecting me to work while I was on holiday? For free? Perhaps I should threaten to call HR (although both Tim and I knew I would never do any such thing).
‘I’m not sure I’ll have time,’ I told him. ‘Nick’s family have put together quite a full itinerary. And this is, as you know, my annual leave …’
‘I’m sure you can negotiate an hour here and there to do some filming, Maddie. Going above and beyond is part of this job, I’m afraid. I haven’t had a proper holiday for years,’ he said.
Which was a blatant lie.
‘New York didn’t count then?’ I asked.
I didn’t usually answer back because, well, you know – I needed my job. But, seriously, did he have selective memory syndrome?
‘That was a … family emergency,’ replied Tim.
It wasn’t. I’d seen pictures of him on a rowing boat in Central Park having a whale of a time.
I checked that Daisy was still in sight and was pleased to note she had stopped to take a photo of a pretty church. This was promising – perhaps she was taking a bit of interest in Florence after all. We could bond over being first-time visitors to the city.
‘Look, I’ll see what I can do,’ I said, trying to fob him off.
‘You do that. Keep me posted, yeah?’