Chapter Six #2
‘Yara, could you store Rosalie’s case behind the desk?
Thanks.’ Now Jade found herself speaking like an estate agent.
‘The upper four floors are all guestrooms, and, obviously, this is Reception. In here’s the breakfast room.
’ She took the necessary few steps into the stylish room that was re-laid as soon as breakfast was over, so anyone in Reception saw neatness and elegance rather than crumbs and crumpled napkins.
‘Nice,’ Erin said. Her glossy, highlighted hair shone like polished wood in the glow of the wall lights.
Rosalie agreed. Her long hair flipped over at the ends. People in north Italy were frequently fair, and presumably this had combined with her English genes to give her honey-brown hair and honey-brown eyes.
A door at the other end of the breakfast room allowed them into the stainless-steel catering kitchen where they could view utensils on racks and pans in stacks. A barista coffee machine gleamed from a surface by the window.
‘Who gets the job of keeping this so surgically clean?’ Erin sounded admiring. The air con was off and sweat shone on her forehead. Somehow, Jade was surprised, as if Erin was too groomed to perspire.
‘Whoever does the breakfasts. At the moment, usually me and either Carlotta or Vittoria.’ It had often been Jade and Gran in the past, of course. ‘With such a small staff, each of us does whatever needs to be done.’
‘I’ve worked in kitchens.’ Rosalie glanced around. ‘This is a goodie.’
Jade led the way back through the breakfast room and Reception. Vittoria had disappeared and Yara was working industriously at the computer as they bypassed the desk and entered the apartment.
Whatever was about to happen to Pensione Three Sisters, for now the apartment was Jade’s home, so she didn’t show Erin and Rosalie the bedrooms but headed straight to the kitchen, with its beams and scarred marble tops, where four plain wooden chairs surrounded the table, equally plain but for a few scratches and a scorch mark.
‘The apartment kitchen is a contrast to the commercial kitchen, as you can see.’ Jade gestured for Erin and Rosalie to help themselves to seats while she made drinks – tea for herself and Erin, while Rosalie chose water.
As Gran’s rocking chair stood in the corner, as if she were there, watching, Jade made tea in a pot, rather than with teabags.
When they were seated around the table, Jade took a deep breath and broached the elephant in the room. ‘It was a shock.’
‘Gran’s death?’ Erin propped her chin on her fist, her teacup steaming at her elbow.
Again, Jade fought with a whiff of possessiveness of Gran, as if Erin should refer to her as ‘our grandmother’ or even ‘Mairead Campbell’.
‘Poor Gran had been fading for a while. She said she’d had a good life and urged me not to mourn her when the time came.
’ Jade made every effort to keep the tremor from her voice, but was only semi-successful.
‘The shock was finding out about you and Rosalie,’ she said bluntly.
Erin’s brows knitted. ‘I get that. Mary Smith said you didn’t know about us. But Gran did and you lived with her.’ Polite and pleasant, she was neither friendly nor unfriendly, but, clearly, she found this information deserved to be tested.
Matching her tone, Jade replied, ‘I’m sure Mary explained that Gran kept you a secret at Joey’s insistence. Did you know you had two half-sisters?’
‘No.’ Erin shrugged one shoulder. ‘All I’ve ever known is that my father was called Giovanni Beretta, who went by the name of Joey.
He had a Scottish mother, an Italian father, was good-looking and irresponsible.
Apparently I saw him once when I was a wee one, but Mum’s fiercely independent and didn’t want him in our lives.
She told me she was blowing off steam when she had a thing with him.
’ Absently, she traced the rim of her tea mug with a finger.
Then she smiled faintly. ‘Probably Mum had allocated space on her timetable for “healthy sex to decompress” as part of a holistic approach to achieving. The pregnancy was an unintended consequence.’
Jade’s attention was caught. She’d known the bones of this story from Gran’s letter, but now Erin was adding flesh. ‘But she brought you up? Or were her family around to help?’
Erin pursed her lips. ‘She didn’t rate her parents and brother.
I’ve not met them. Apparently, they lived somewhere in Edinburgh by benefit-cheating and other crimes.
She said every time the police came to the door for her dad, or her brother brought home a dodgy friend, she promised herself she’d get out at the first opportunity.
And she did. She wanted to be better than her upbringing and aim higher than her roots. ’
Jade didn’t know whether to be impressed at Lisa Ferguson’s focus or shocked at Erin’s calm recitation of her family – or lack of family – situation. But Jade hadn’t wanted contact with Joey, a relative she didn’t approve of, so how could she judge Erin and her mother for doing the same?
‘What’s your mum’s name?’ Rosalie’s English accent sounded flat compared to Erin’s Scottish lilt.
‘Lisa Ferguson. She still lives in Dundee. She’s a high achiever and brought me up the same way.’ With a note of pride, Erin added, ‘School, uni, work . . . it’s always been about performance.’
Jade worked hard herself, but rather than a high achiever she thought she was more of a get-on-with-it person.
She worked long hours in summer but valued having part of most evenings to please herself, and periods in the winter when she could ease up considerably, seeing to maintenance around the pensione.
‘Do you have siblings? I mean . . . via your mum,’ she added awkwardly, in case it sounded as if she’d forgotten that Erin and Rosalie were her half-sisters.
They’d also be business partners as soon as the formalities were complete .
. . until she could buy them out, anyway.
Erin shook her head, making her hair dance. ‘No. Do you? Do you see your mother?’
‘No to both. Geneva, my mother, went off, like Joey.’ Jade wasn’t embarrassed.
As a child she had been, but adult Jade knew these facts didn’t reflect shortcomings on her part.
‘I wouldn’t know her if she walked into this room.
And possibly not Joey, though I’ve seen photos of him as a child and a teenager.
Gran and Nonno – our grandfather,’ she said, in case Erin and Rosalie didn’t know the Italian term, ‘they brought me up. Nonno died when I was fourteen. Since then, it’s been Gran and me.
Was, I mean.’ She faltered. For a second, she’d forgotten Gran was gone. Reality was a knee in the stomach.
Gathering herself, with an effort she turned to Rosalie, who was silently turning her glass of water on the tabletop. ‘You were brought up by Joey?’
Rosalie nodded. ‘Mainly. Mum was alive till I was four, but she had kidney disease. While she was alive, we lived in Devon, where she came from. Handsome, Devon was,’ she said, assuming a West Country accent.
‘Mum and Dad met when she was twenty. She was called Donna Anning.’ She looked wistful. ‘After Mum died, I lived with Dad.’
Jade couldn’t help flinch. Joey couldn’t have cared less about her or Erin, but had raised Rosalie. And Rosalie called him ‘Dad’. She glanced at Erin and saw her face was carefully expressionless. Politely, she said to Rosalie, ‘Sorry about your mum.’
‘Thanks.’ Rosalie shifted her gaze to the window that overlooked the tiny outdoor space behind the apartment, with the two garden chairs Jade hadn’t had much motivation to use without Gran beside her.
‘Dad was cut up. I was a kid. It was like . . . well, she’d always been ill and then suddenly she wasn’t there at all.
I clung to him. We began moving about. Dad would get work on a farm or a building site, or in a pub.
Any job that made him enough money to rent a house or a flat for us, and where he could find me a school.
When I got into Sheffield University, I was happy to have my living arrangements in my own hands so Dad could go back into nomad mode.
He deserved that.’ Then, perhaps reading non-comprehension on their faces, added, ‘Because he wasn’t really the single-dad type, but he made himself be one for fourteen years for my sake.
Anyway, I didn’t like uni, so I ditched it. ’
Rosalie’s recitation was so calm that Jade found it hard to sense how her upbringing had affected her. ‘What about your mum’s parents?’
‘Lost touch.’ Rosalie shrugged. ‘Grandma and Grandpa ran a village shop. I did go there once, before uni. There was a handwritten notice taped to the inside of the door. Back in a few minutes. Sorry. After I’d hung around for an hour, some woman came by and said it had been like that for a couple of years.
The Annings had left suddenly and people thought the shop must have gone bust.’
This seemed a full-stop to the grandparents angle and Jade’s heart softened, picturing a young Rosalie waiting hopefully outside the shop.
She must have wanted to find her grandparents if she’d made a special journey, but they weren’t Jade’s focus.
It was the man who’d ‘made’ himself into a single dad .
. . for the sake of one of his daughters.
‘So, what’s Joey like?’ She noticed one of Erin’s eyebrows quirk, as if she was surprised at Jade’s forthrightness, but Jade didn’t see why she shouldn’t ask.
Refusing contact with Joey didn’t mean she hadn’t wondered about him.
And here was Rosalie – the only one of his carelessly strewn offspring who’d lived with him until she was eighteen .
. . as Gran had lived with Joey until he was eighteen.