Marcus shifts beneath his covers on the bottom bunk, while Mia mutters quietly in the bed above. Ollie, who’s on a camp bed at the far end of the room, doesn’t even stir.
‘I can’t sleep.’ Freddie sniffs into the sleeve of his PJ top.
‘I’ll lie with you for a little while,’ Rob whispers. ‘Move up a bit. But we’ve got to be very quiet, okay?’
‘Yeah. I had a really scary nightmare, Dad.’
‘What about?’ Rob is now in bed with his son, stroking his hair. It’s been so long since he’s lain close to one of his children, it causes an ache in his heart.
‘Bad cheese,’ Freddie mutters.
‘What?’
‘Cheese with germs in.’
‘Oh, love.’ Curling an arm around Freddie, Rob pulls him close. ‘That was just Nadine. There are certain things you shouldn’t eat when you’re having a baby but you needn’t worry about that.’
‘Yeah, only ladies have babies.’
‘That’s right. Now hush, try to go to sleep.’
‘It comes out their vagina, Mummy said.’
‘Um, yes.’ Christ, how about we wake everyone up and have a little where-babies-come-from talk right now?
‘Can you see germs?’ Freddie whispers.
‘What germs?’
‘The cheese ones.’
‘No, not just by looking with your normal eyes. You’d need a microscope …’
‘It is germy then!’ Freddie exclaims.
‘Shhhh!’ Rob sighs, feeling suddenly, achingly tired, as if his bones could crumble like the thin, salty crackers his father likes. ‘Well, there are good and bad germs.’
‘I wanna see the germs in Nanny’s cheese.’
‘Freddie, please go to sleep …’
‘Can I have a microscope?’
‘Shush!’ It’s gone 2 a.m., and Mary will be rousing everyone at eight thirty for her customary Sunday breakfast: eggs, salamis, a great mound of pastries and amazing coffee he’s never managed to replicate at home, despite investing in various hideously expensive gadgets. Picturing his mum’s breakfasts, coupled with the steady rhythm of Freddie’s breathing, gives Rob a warm feeling inside. As he finally drifts off, the day’s worries start to float away and he’s a proper dad again, before the split – before Shorling, even – when they all lived together in Bethnal Green in a rather gloomy little house, but happy as anything.
Rob is properly asleep now, back with Kerry at home, and his old mate Simon in the editor’s chair. In his dreams, Rob is carefully crafting a lengthy feature about vineyard tours in Umbria, and all is right with the world.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Mary Tambini loves nothing better than having her boys here, her beautiful Roberto and Domenico and all the children, who bring this big old house to life. She’s worried, though, which is probably why, at 2.47 a.m., she decides there’s no point in tossing and turning in bed, and pads lightly downstairs to the kitchen instead. Here, waiting for the kettle to boil, she mulls over the day’s events. Rob’s bedroom light was on, she noticed as she passed his door on the landing, resisting the urge to check he was okay. He’s a forty-year-old man, she reminded herself, not a little boy anymore. He can stay up as late as he wants.
Now, as she sits at the kitchen table, her hands cupped around her mug of tea, what happened today seems even stranger and more impossible to figure out. Yes, she’s had a few months to get over the shock of Roberto leaving Kerry and taking up with that girl – that Nay-dine – yet it still seems … ridiculous. There’d been no warning whatsoever. He’d just blurted it all out on the phone, leaving her and Eugene shocked to the core. When Mary had called Kerry she, too, had sounded stunned, but also strong and determined, and had tactfully avoiding saying anything bad about Roberto. Not that Mary would have blamed her. God, she could wring his neck sometimes, the silly, silly boy …
She’s not angry now, though – more concerned, because she has never seen him looking so stressed, not even when that new editor arrived and all his old friends were thrown off the magazine. And he’s started smoking again. He might be able to fool the children with his minty gum and mouthwash but she detected it straight away.
Is he still awake, she wonders? Would it be completely wrong of her to go up and try to talk to him? She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t. After all, the family will still be here tomorrow so she’s unlikely to have the chance of a private chat. The central heating pipes judder ominously as Mary gets up from her chair and treads softly upstairs.
His light is still on, and she taps the door gently. ‘Roberto?’ she whispers. No reply. Another tap. ‘Roberto? Are you awake?’ Still nothing. She hesitates before pushing the door open, then reassures herself that he must have fallen sleep – while reading, probably – with the light on. But when she steps into the room, Roberto’s not there. The covers have been thrown back, as if in haste, and his laptop is sitting open on his bed.
Mary is a modern woman; she shops online and is on Facebook, mainly to keep in touch with Eugene’s side of the family in Verona. Roberto has been working on a document, she notices, and his laptop is running on battery power. Should she save the document and shut it down for him, or is he planning to come back and work on it? It’ll probably save automatically if it runs out of power, but she wouldn’t want to risk him losing anything important. Mary gets up and checks the bathroom – no one there – then peeps around the door of the biggest bedroom where all four of her grandchildren are sleeping soundly. Ah, there’s Roberto, fast asleep with Freddie in his arms. The image of the two of them snuggled together causes a lump to form in her throat. This is what it’s about, she thinks, her vision blurring. This is family. Mary wishes Nadine could see this. Maybe then she’d be less keen to dump her baby with a stranger and have an almighty strop about cheese …
Mary pads quietly back to Rob’s room and perches on the edge of his bed, turning the laptop towards her. She’s about to press save, but can’t resist a little peek at what he’s been working on. Such a talented writer, Roberto – although he’s recently stopped sending his father copies of Mr Jones, she’s noticed. ‘It’s taken a different direction,’ he explained. ‘Not sure it’d be your kind of thing anymore.’
Mary’s eyes flick across the screen. So many men give my breasts a cursory tweak before moving onto the main event. She squints at the text, as if she might have misread it. My super-sensitive nipples, she reads on, are not radio knobs … kiss and lick my lovely sumptuous … At that, Mary stops. Why is he writing as if he were a woman – the kind of woman who refers to her breasts as ‘pleasure centres’? The phrase ‘fun pillows’ leaps out at her. Mary shivers in her apricot Marks & Spencer’s nightie. Is this what he’s lowered himself to now – writing pornography? Is he desperate for money these days?
She stares at the screen, seeing just a haze of type now as her mind races. Perhaps this isn’t a magazine feature after all, but a fantasy. Maybe Rob is one of those men
