Chapter 24
CHAPTER 24
CASALTA, 27 APRIL 1985
LUCREZIA
My chest was rising and falling, and everything was silent: I could hear no thunderclap, no raindrops on the roof – it was like being underwater, deaf and mute and rooted to the spot by an unbearable weight.
Another hallucination. Or was I seeing a ghost?
A ghost soaked with rain, in a little puddle of water gathering around her feet.
‘Mum!’ Bianca called in a strangled voice: she could see her too!
Our mother was alive. In that moment, I knew I had seen her twelve years ago, I had seen her in Paris, I was seeing her now. I hadn’t been traumatised by grief, or ill and hallucinating. She’d been somewhere all along, away from us.
She had abandoned us.
We were all frozen. Slowly, I came out of my hushed trance, and thunder and rain began to rise and fall again in my ears. The lights came back, flashed once, then returned for good.
My eyes met my mother’s gaze, pleading but proud at the same time; I couldn’t speak. It was almost physical, the way I felt the wall around my heart rise up again, the wall that had protected me all those years in exile and that my sisters and Vanni had been chipping away at since I’d returned.
Our mother’s gaze untied itself from mine and went on to Bianca, whose mouth was agape, to Nora, who looked away, and finally to Mia, whose face was wet – maybe rain, maybe tears.
It was Mia, the sister who’d known our mother for the shortest time, who threw herself in her arms, her head on Mum’s shoulder, with the abandon of a loving child.
Mum spoke for the first time.
‘Oh, my girls ! I missed you so!’
The next few minutes were strange, almost blurred, like a distant memory happening in real time. I stood at a safe distance, apart from everyone else. I stared at my mother, who was sitting at the fireplace with Mia’s hands in hers. I studied every little detail, taking her in. She was as I remembered her, hardly changed at all: the long skirt, the dangling earrings, her beautiful hair, now dripping, in a side plait. Night had fallen suddenly, darkness pressing on the windows and the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the still open shutters.
Yes, a memory come to life, unfolding right in front of me.
So many times I’d seen her sitting right there, with the fire on during the winter and snowy hills behind her, or in a summer dress, sunrays setting her hair on fire. Holding one of my baby sisters, reading Bianca a book, thumbing through a sketchbook…
I wanted to shout at her, to throw her out. I wanted to hold her close and never let her out of my sight again. But I was paralysed. I was frozen in shock, like in one of those nightmares where you try desperately to move, but you can’t. The tears behind my eyes, the screams in my throat – everything was stuck inside me, beyond the wall in my heart. I was shaking like a leaf.
All around me, people were springing into action – it seemed that the only one still rooted to the spot was me. How could everyone be so pragmatic? Mia murmured something about making tea and something to eat to warm our mother up, and Bianca disappeared upstairs to get Mum a change of clothes. She almost ran face first into Gabriella.
‘Oh, girls, what a fright with the lightning! I ran upstairs to get changed; I was soaked through…’
And then she saw her.
Gabriella recognised my mother at once: not only had she seen her pictures, but it would have been easy to figure out that the red-haired woman was Emmeline, the long-lost mistress of Casalta. She looked like an older carbon copy of us – and not that much older: it seemed to me that our mother was somewhere in between a child and a crone, as if her age played by different rules. Gabriella froze, all blood drained from her face. She looked like she was about to faint.
Time seemed to stand still, to contract and expand simultaneously, so that it seemed an age for us to be standing around her, stunned – but the next moment Bianca peeped from the stairs, holding a dress. ‘Mum?’ she called, and she seemed to almost have to toil to say that word.
The rain kept drumming on the windows, the wind howling and hissing while our mother followed Bianca upstairs. Panic filled me for a moment – if I let her out of my sight, she might disappear again…
‘I need to go check on the horses,’ Nora whispered and turned towards the door – I took her hand to hold her back, and she stopped. Her fingers were cold.
‘Not now.’
‘I can’t, Lulu, I can’t…’
‘You’re not alone,’ I whispered and squeezed her hand.
We sat in stunned silence until they came back downstairs. Mia had arranged a teapot and cups on the side table. Mum was now dry, wearing a dress of Bianca’s with minuscule lavender flowers, a cup of tea in her hands and a blanket over her shoulders. A sodden rucksack lay by her feet. She looked around and took us all in. Only then I noticed that Gabriella had discreetly slipped away.
‘My girls…’ Mum said.
We all stared back.
‘Are you joking?’ Nora broke the silence.
‘I know I owe you an explanation, Nora…’ she began.
‘To say the least !’
‘You were in the garden, that night, weren’t you?’ I said. For a moment, I was sure I was about to faint. I took a breath. ‘When I saw you.’
She nodded. Guilt flooded her face.
‘ I went through a window trying to reach you . Did you see that too?’
‘Yes. And it broke my heart. But I wasn’t allowed to stay. I always watched over you.’ In spite of the guilt painted on her face, in spite of her wet hair and the blanket over her shoulders and her hands red with cold, she looked composed, and calm. Dignified. There was a strength about her, a self-confidence that, at that moment, infuriated me. She should have been ashamed. How could she even show her face?
‘You watched over me ? Father sent me to a mental hospital for children, do you understand? I spent a year in that place; I thought I was mad! I doubted myself for years! How did you ever watch over me, over us?’
A sob escaped my lips. Sorrow and disappointment were choking me.
‘I had to do it from afar. If I had come too close, I don’t know what he would have done…’
‘You could have taken me with you! All of us!’
‘I had nothing to offer. I had nobody to go back to in Scotland, no home, nothing to my name. It took me years to get back on my feet. I was barely older than you are now; I knew nothing about the world outside.’
I didn’t want to hear. I wanted to put my hands over my ears and block it all out.
‘I thought Father killed you!’ Bianca said in a low voice. ‘He told me he did.’
‘You what?’ Nora exclaimed. ‘How could you have thought that? Of course he didn’t! And here’s the proof. You thought our father was a murderer?’
‘He might as well have killed me, Nora,’ my mother said. ‘Because he forced me away from you… But I must tell you all that happened, everything, then you’ll know why I disappeared. Everything I say now sounds like an excuse.’
‘Because it is an excuse,’ Nora retorted.
Mia drew closer to her. ‘It must have been horrible for you, Mum…’ Her words came back to me: I was sure that you’d come back. I’m not sure she will . Did Mia know she was alive? Did she suspect?
Nora dried her tears of rage. ‘For her? Dad was never himself again. We lost Lulu. Bianca was left to carry everything on her shoulders. And everyone worshipped your memory, as if you’d been a heroine, the victim of a cruel fate. But you weren’t. You just left.’
I’d never heard Nora utter so many words before. My heart went out to her, to her soft self behind the rough exterior. How little I’d understood her…
‘I don’t know if I can ever forgive you,’ I said. The old sorrow, the loneliness I’d felt as a child when I wasn’t allowed to go home, overwhelmed me again. I was a child, being told that her mother was dead, that she’d fallen on the hills, that she would never come back.
My mother blinked many times, quickly, as if I’d thrown a rock at her. I sensed her confidence wavering. ‘You of all people know what Fosco was capable of. I wish you had some compassion for me like you want compassion for yourself.’
‘I don’t want your compassion. I don’t want anything from you!’ I cried.
And yet, in spite of all our rage, neither Nora nor I left the room. We expressed our rejection, but didn’t act on it. I would have liked to. I would have liked to storm out and forget she’d ever come back – but I couldn’t. In fact, right at that moment I envisioned myself falling asleep with my head on her lap.
It didn’t make sense, and the more confused I was, the more I came undone. I felt Bianca’s hand on my back, and we drew closer together.
Mum lifted her hands to the back of her neck and undid a golden chain she wore.
‘Look. I always carried it with me. Always.’ It was a locket; she opened it and handed it to me. On the left was the tiny photograph of two red-haired toddlers – Bianca and me – and on the right, a toddler and a baby – Nora and Mia. I passed it on to Bianca, and my sisters looked at it. Nobody seemed particularly touched.
‘Should we be moved because you carried a photograph of us with you?’ I said mercilessly.
‘There are things you don’t know, but I’ll tell you everything…’
‘Nothing can change what you’ve done,’ Nora said. ‘While she’s in this house, I won’t be.’ She got up, followed by a worried Bianca.
‘You can’t spend the night at the stables; it’s pouring…’ I heard Bianca argue, and then the slamming of a door. It didn’t look like Nora was concerned about the cold.
Our mother was pale, but she sat with her back straight. ‘I’ll go…’ she began.
‘No!’ and ‘Fine,’ Mia and I cried out at the same time.
‘Mum is staying,’ Bianca said, and her tone was final.
We made Mum’s bed in the guest room. Who knew if she slept – I certainly didn’t.
I went into Bianca in the darkness, and sat on her bed.
‘Come,’ she whispered, and lifted the blankets. I slipped in beside her like I used to do as a child, curled up together like two halves of the same person. Laying my head on the same pillow as my twin, at last, melted some of the soreness I held in my heart.
‘Why did he lie? Why did he tell me he killed her?’ Bianca murmured.
‘To intimidate you. It was the perfect way to terrorise you.’
‘He hated us, didn’t he?’
I thought of what Pera had told me.
‘I think that mostly, he hated himself,’ I answered.
‘I love you, Lulu.’
‘I love you, Bianca.’
We held each other tightly, and fell asleep together.