Page 17 of Sunrise By the Sea

‘It’s in Italy,’ she added.

‘Very good,’ said Anita. ‘Do you still have family there you could talk to?’

Marisa had a lot of family there, absolutely loads. But could she talk to them?

‘Is your grandmother still alive?’

Marisa thought of her scary grandmother, always shooing them out of her kitchen and telling them off for dragging sand through the house. Such a contrast to her kind, loving grandfather who was infinitely patient and pleased to see them.

Of course, as an adult she could see that was because he didn’t have to do anything in the house; hernonnawas fully in charge. But as a child it hadn’t seemed that way. Her grandfather was for fun and cuddles. Hernonnawas to be avoided at all costs.

‘It will be so hard to do this alone,’ warned Anita. ‘After all, how’s it working out so far?’

Marisa looked round her lovely bedroom and thought to herself, actually, not that bad.

Then she heard a new noise from next door; the sound of someone having a loud, extremely sad telephone call. Every word, she thought. Didn’t he realise she could hear every single word, even if it was in Russian? It was completely and utterly infuriating.

‘Okay, I have to—’ Anita started, and a small hand crept in and slammed shut her laptop for her.

Chapter Fourteen

Lucia, Marisa’s mother, had set up hernonna’s Skype when they’d been over for the funeral, with great fanfare, even though it was very obvious that her grandmother felt that she’d got through eighty years without using anything so ridiculous, so why did she have to change now?

Nonetheless, looking at it, Marisa felt ashamed, suddenly. Sheshouldhave contacted her grandmother. The fact that she wasn’t speaking to anyone was absolutely no excuse. That was the thing about grief and anxiety: it made you so selfish, so stooped in, only thinking about yourself. Marisa was heartsick of herself.

And she didn’t have to go outside. Well. Not yet. If she did this one thing first, that would be a tick in her workbook, and that would be her hard thing for the week. Yes. No rush.

She pulled up the computer screen before she got the chance to change her mind, and pressed dial. Listening to it ring, she felt nervous but tried her best to hang on. It was only Skype. She owed hernonnaa call. She could do this. She could. She could.

The first thing she saw when the button was clicked on the other side made her catch her breath.

A wall as familiar to herself as her own hands. Painted a rough blue, with a huge sunburst clock in the middle of it, over a sideboard – far too big for the little room in the small house, part of it blocked a window- but it had been handed down through the family and therefore had to stay.

Inside it, she knew, were screeds of china – far more than could ever possibly be used – gathered from wedding gifts from long ago, great-aunts and uncles whose dusty pictures hung on the wall, but whose names Marisa had long forgotten, if she’d ever known them.

Her grandfather had four brothers and two sisters, her grandmother two of each. Marisa, who was fond of her brother Gino; he lived in Switzerland now so she hadn’t seen him for months – could only imagine the world she remembered from visits as a child; a world where everyone you knew was related to you, where everyone you knew was a cousin, and of course you got on because . . . you were cousins and that’s just what you did. She looked at the scene for a long moment, wondering who had answered the computer.

Then she heard the voice.

‘Pronto!’ came a tiny querulous voice. ‘Pronto.’

Marisa realised that, without the neighbours around who had helped at the funeral, hernonnaprobably didn’t know how to use a computer. She didn’t realise where the camera was, and was looking at the wrong side of the laptop.

Nonna was always in the kitchen, cooking, and came from the generation that seemed perfectly content to do that – she and her grandfather had got married at nineteen, although children hadn’t come along until much later.

She ran a tight ship, was always chasing children out of the kitchen, spoke no English and made rigid demands about everything the children, particularly the girls, ought to be doing and how they should be dressed.

Her grandfather, who would take Marisa down to the pebbly beaches of Imperia and let her pick up pieces of blue glass and put them in his pocket; who would buy her soft ice creams, two flavours swirled together, an indulgence her own mother found rather shocking – had been so easy to love. Nonna was slightly terrifying.

And she had never had any truck with anything more modern than a television so she could watchUn posto al sole, which she did, religiously. She also did religion religiously. There was no skipping mass at Nonna’s. Marisa still remembered the enormous excitement of the grandparents visiting England – which they did not pretend to understand – for her first communion.

It had been a lovely spring day. All the other girls were wearing light white shifts and simple dresses. She had had the full works: hooped skirt, embroidered cape, white muff, full veil that covered her face, coronet, lace gloves, shoes, a white handbag that contained a Bible blessed in the Vatican, new rosary. Her entire family had cooed and taken photographs of her as she left for the church, waving like a queen. Inside the church the other girls had giggled and made side-eyes at her extraordinary garb, a way of behaving slightly at odds with what the priest kept insisting was their Innocent State of Grace.

‘They’re jealous,’ her mother had whispered. And perhaps they were. Marisa couldn’t bear to look at the photographs now, though, which Nonna and Nonno displayed so prominently of all their grandchildren. She looked like she should be sitting on top of a loo roll.

‘Pronto!’

‘Nonna?’ she called out softly in Italian. ‘It’s Marisa! Go round the other side of your laptop. Of your computer. Your computer. Turn it round.’

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