Page 19 of Sunrise By the Sea

Marisa thought about it. She had a lot of time in her day – but what had she used it for, but sitting inside and worrying about things? Even her grandmother, it appeared, had got it together enough to take a computer class, for goodness’ sake. That was amazing enough in itself. She looked at her grandmother carefully. It was almost like . . . well. She didn’t seem in the depths of despair quite as much as she, Marisa, felt herself to be.

‘You aren’t too sad?’ she tried tentatively. It had been, she realised, so long since she’d spoken Italian – to her mother’s alternate annoyance and sadness, she and Gino had started speaking rapid, West Country-inflected English the day they started school and used it as code, and there hadn’t been a lot of Italian spoken at home after that. And it had indeed been a while.

But it sounded so good in her mouth, soft and quick and musical on her tongue. She wondered, briefly, if the man next door found it difficult to speak English all day. His English wasn’t good at all. Maybe Russian to English was harder than Italian. Maybe it didn’t feel so good in the mouth. Italian had a rhythm all its own; the way every sentence rhymed, the way it had been designed, like so many Italian things, simply to be beautiful, because beauty was important in itself.

‘You look bad,’ countered her grandmother. ‘Stand up. What is wrong with you?’

‘I’m not going to stand up!’

‘Stand up!’

She did so, reluctantly.

‘Why are you not looking after yourself?’ hernonnademanded. ‘You look tired and bad, not beautiful as you are and should be. You are a young woman, or not a young woman in fact, you are not young, I suppose, but . . .’

‘Nonna, people here don’t get married at nineteen.’

‘And women don’t get married over thirty,’ shot back her grandmother. ‘Well, they do. But to absolute rubbish.’

Marisa remembered, not for the first time, quite how awkward talking to her grandmother could be. Now she could only see the top of her head. Which was good because hernonnawouldn’t see Marisa going pink, thinking about Mahmoud who, playing computer games in his tracksuit bottoms, normally with one hand inserted down them for some unknown reason while she made him dinner, would have undoubtedly passed her grandmother’s threshold for ‘absolute rubbish’. On the plus side, she didn’t have to add ‘missing my wonderful amazing boyfriend’ to everything else going wrong in her life, she thought darkly.

‘I can’t see your face, Nonna.’

‘My face doesn’t matter. My face has been married. Only your face matters. And your face is looking—’

‘Nonna. Please don’t.’

Suddenly, Marisa found herself speaking the truth from the depths of her being.

‘Since Nonno died . . . I have been so very, very, very sad.’

Chapter Fifteen

Hernonnastill didn’t get her hairline into the camera, so it was like talking to the top of a hill, but the words that came from her mouth were kind.

‘Of course you miss him. Of course you do. We all do. Of course you are sad. Your mother, she cries every day.’

It was with a stab of guilt Marisa heard this.

She had thought Lucia was more or less fine about it; she certainly hadn’t stopped her normal life of seeing her friends, going to bridge club, going swimming, hanging out in the open air. Her mother’s frantic social life had barely slowed down in the last few years, regardless of what was going on in the world. It had always irritated her introvert daughter, that constant rush to be surrounded by people, to be everywhere.

‘She needs to be busy. She thinks it makes it better,’ said hernonna. ‘Maybe it does.’

‘Maybe,’ said Marisa.

‘Do not be so sad. He was old and he had a very happy life because he was married to me. So there.’

Marisa smiled.

‘And he loved you and all his children and grandchildren and he sat in the sun and talked to his friends and drank good wine, so there is nothing to be so sad about. You know, some lives are very sad when they finish. You know I had a sister. I was small and I don’t remember. But she got measles. She died. I don’t even remember it, but it made my mother unhappy for the rest of her life.Thatwas sad.’

Marisa had known a little about that; her mother often said, if Marisa was looking particularly gloomy, that she reminded her of her own grandmother, who had died long before. Marisa had known even at a young age that this wasn’t a compliment; that her mother might rather have preferred an outgoing, charming child she could have taken to her bridge group and shown off, who would have been a popular member of the church community, not a terrified little mouse who hid behind her mother’s skirts and didn’t say a word unless directly addressed. Even when she’d opened up as she’d got older – you could hardly perform wedding ceremonies and be a total introvert – and found nice friends, her mother still saw her as that mouse, she felt, which had the tendency to make her clam up in her presence, and that of her mother’s noisy, carefree friends, who were legion.

‘So!’ Hernonna’s face brightened. ‘Your hair is terrible, but let me know what has been happening in your life.’

‘Not very much,’ confessed Marisa. ‘But I do have a noisy neighbour.’

‘I have a solution,’ said her grandmother when she’d finished. ‘You take your broom handle. And just – BOOM! Hit the side of the wall. Every time he does it.’

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