Chapter Twenty
I met Giancarlo when I was twenty-four. Leaving university without any definite idea of what I was going to do, my parents had suggested everything from teaching – my mother – to joining the army – Dad – and eek!
The latter forced me quickly to come to the conclusion that the only thing I wanted to do was cook.
I duly did some training, started off at the bottom of the catering trade but had moved up the scale to my first decent job as second chef in a country restaurant in the Midlands by the time Giancarlo entered my life.
It was one of those restaurants where the kitchen is on show – a total pain, actually, when you’re dripping with sweat and not looking at all at your best. However, it does impose a check on those head chefs who still feel it essential to their image to fall in with what they consider to be tradition by constantly screaming obscenities at you.
Giancarlo came in for lunch one early spring day with a group of businessmen.
He’d been attending some trade exhibition in Birmingham. He’s in the fashion industry.
I noticed him, of course. I say ‘of course’ because Giancarlo is one of those men every woman notices, being tall, dark and handsome – seriously, I’m not joking.
He really is. But I didn’t think too much about him.
Until I got outside after my shift had finished and found him waiting for me in the car park.
He asked me to have dinner with him and that was how we began.
‘Did you get on well together?’ Luc asked at this point.
‘Very well. It wasn’t just a flash in the pan either,’ I enlarged, ‘we actually liked each other. And although from very different backgrounds, we seemed to have a lot in common.’
I went back to the story. About a month after we met, I found out I was pregnant. To this day I don’t know how, discounting the obvious, because we’d been careful, extremely careful. But there it was, and I considered a termination.
‘Did you really?’ said Luc.
‘For about five seconds.’ As we bowled along the motorway, in the warm, womb-like interior of the old Citroen, I gave a sudden shudder. ‘But even though it was a very brief thought, to have had that thought at all makes me feel physically sick now when I look at Carl.’
‘Yes, doesn’t it just?’ Luc said with feeling.
He glanced sideways at me. ‘Esther had exactly the same idea when she found out she was expecting Emma. Esther was very young; she’d only just graduated and there was so much she wanted to do, so much she was going to do.
But this was Emma we were thinking of aborting!
God! It revolts me now to think of the world without Emma. ’
‘I know, it’s shocking. But do you know, I once read somewhere that Thomas Hardy’s mother considered getting rid of him? I mean, can you imagine the world without Thomas Hardy?’
Luc snorted. ‘Actually, I can imagine that quite well.’
‘Oh, don’t you like him?’
‘Not really, but that’s purely on account of being obliged to study Jude the Obscure in the sixth form at school. It still haunts me.’
‘It is a bit depressing.’
‘Depressing? It’s slit-your-throat stuff.’
‘I don’t think Hardy was a very happy man.’
‘Neither was I once I’d read Jude the Obscure.’
I laughed.
‘But go on,’ prompted Luc. ‘What happened next with you and Giancarlo?’
‘Once we’d decided to keep the baby, I moved in with him a month or so later. He owns a flat in London for when he’s on business there, so I gave up my job and moved in there with him.’
‘Were you planning on getting married?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not quite sure.
There’s stuff I can’t remember clearly from that time.
I know I wasn’t that bothered about getting married, but I also know I fully expected that we’d stay together.
I remember that, just as I remember how it all began and how it all finished. I’ll remember how it finished forever.’
It was an evening in late February, a bitterly cold, miserable evening, the sort of evening when everything seems so dark and dreary you feel like going to bed at six o’clock.
I was into my eighth month of pregnancy by then and tired all the time.
For some days, the baby seemed to have been lying awkwardly, which meant I could not get comfortable at night.
Giancarlo was away on business. He was away on business a good deal, every week shuttling between Milan and London as well as on stopover trips to places like Manchester or Bristol.
Exhausted and feeling a bit sorry for myself, I had decided to turn in early, fixing my mind on the next day when he would be home. And that’s when the entry phone buzzed.
At first I thought the woman standing on our doorstep was mad – a madwoman.
Then I saw that, not much older than me, she simply looked tired and depressed as well.
And she looked something else; she looked heavily pregnant – like me.
She started to tell me something, but it was difficult to understand what she was saying.
She was Italian, I realised straightaway, and her English was not good.
Quite quickly, however, I did understand.
She was telling me she was carrying Giancarlo’s child. She was telling me she was his wife.
‘Oh my Christ,’ murmured Luc at this point.
‘Yeah,’ I breathed and paused for a long moment. ‘Well, that was it,’ I said at length. ‘End of.’
‘What did he say when you taxed him with it?’
‘He tried to explain, to mitigate it. He said he had never loved his wife, that his marriage had been a mistake from the outset, that he hadn’t wanted her to get pregnant.
He said he loved me.’ I shrugged. ‘And in a way I believed him. But, you see, it wasn’t that. It sounds odd but it wasn’t that.’
‘It was the fact that he hadn’t told you.’
‘Yes.’
We drove on through the dark for a while without speaking. Then Luc broke the silence.
‘He can’t have known you very well.’
‘No, he can’t have, can he? Even though we’d been together for nearly nine months.
And that was the whole point. Oh, I know they say if a man can lie to his wife he can lie to you, his lover, and yes, he’d lied to me all along or lied by omission, I suppose I should say.
But what ultimately destroyed us was not that.
It was his inability to know me, to know in any sense how I would feel about his…
his not telling me. I can’t explain it very well, but ultimately that was what finished us.
I knew I’d never feel the same way about Giancarlo again.
I couldn’t stay with him after that. It was all over – without any hint of a fat lady singing. ’
‘What did you do?’
‘Went home to Mum and Dad. I’d given up my flat, my job, I was on the point of having a baby. It was the only thing I could do.’
‘Thank God you had them.’
‘Absolutely.’ I expelled a little sigh. ‘Three weeks after I moved back home, Carl was born.’
For the next couple of hours we didn’t talk much, but it wasn’t an uneasy silence; rather, it was relaxed, companionable, as if we were old friends accustomed to each other’s company and used to our lapses in conversation.
Above all, I felt Luc had understood what I had imperfectly tried to explain.
He understood where I was coming from, why I couldn’t have stayed with Giancarlo.
Not many people did at the time, not even my mother, particularly when Giancarlo offered – and I believe he meant it sincerely – to divorce his wife and marry me.
My father, of course, went completely apeshit as only fathers of daughters can, threatening to hunt down Giancarlo and punch his lights out.
And although it might sound weird given he was a professional soldier, my father abhors violence.
Fortunately, it never came to fisticuffs, but the threat of them gave me a few more sleepless nights.
Then, in the aftermath, the one thing absolutely nobody could understand was why, once Carl had arrived, I still chose to name him after his father.
‘Carl’ is a shortening of ‘Giancarlo’. But you see, when I found out I was expecting a boy, and all the days and weeks and months when he was inside me, that was what Giancarlo and I had called him.
To me, he became Carl, he was Carl, long before he was born.
I couldn’t change that simply because the two supposedly sane and sensible adults who were his parents had made an almighty cock-up of everything.
In the same way, despite lots of well-meaning people telling me I should, I adamantly refused to forbid Giancarlo from seeing his son.
No matter how bitter I felt, no matter the pain, I did not have the right to deny Carl his father. I still don’t, and I never will have.
Although I didn’t tell Luc about any of this, I somehow knew that he would have understood it all as well.
Just over the border with France, we stopped to get petrol and a quick cup of coffee from a machine.
‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to say how much I’m enjoying your book,’ I said as we stamped around the car park stretching our legs in the freezing air. ‘In fact, I agree with what Emma said; it reads like a good novel.’
In the smoky blue gloom from the neon lights, Luc gave the ghost of a smile. ‘You know, most historians wouldn’t take that as a compliment. They’d assume you weren’t taking them seriously.’
‘Oh, dear, would they? I’m sorry.’
‘No, don’t apologise! I’m not most historians, so I’m suitably flattered, but then I don’t take myself very seriously at all. Or rather, I keep trying very hard not to.’
‘Are you succeeding?’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t know. You’d best keep an eye out and let me know.’
Back in the car, he said, ‘We’ve made good time. We should be home in an hour or so.’
‘Do you think you should phone Nicole? She wouldn’t be expecting us back, and I don’t want to give her a fright.’
He smiled at me. ‘You’re fond of her, aren’t you?’