envelope immediately. For Vittorio. The words had faded, the final o almost invisible, but they were underlined with two vivid dark slashes, which Lisa instinctively felt turned them into an instruction.
She frowned and toyed with the envelope, feeling the weight of it in her hand. The name ‘Vittorio’ conjured up confusing elusive memories that danced away whenever she tried to catch them.
Why did Nan have it? Vittorio, her father – not that he deserved that title – had upped and left a few years before her mother had died. Was this envelope a deathbed request? Lisa didn’t remember much about her mother, except that she’d been ill a lot. At the age of seven it was probably kinder not to explain the life-sucking treatments that left her mother wan and listless in a fight against cancer.
Sometimes she remembered, or maybe misremembered, things about her father. Being carried on his shoulders, pushed high on a swing, riding a carousel pony and him running alongside the merry-go-round, waving all the way, but they didn’t tally with what Nan had to say about him. She winced, her back teeth protesting at the sudden tensing of her jaw. What sort of father abandoned a daughter and didn’t come back for her even after her mother had died? Well, that was his loss. Thank goodness she’d had Nan.
As she turned the envelope in her hand, the moral question of what right she had to open it became moot as the old gum on the seal yawned open. Two photographs slipped out, or perhaps she’d helped them with an illicit shake. A handsome man in sunglasses laughed up at her, his arm around Lisa’s mother, who was heavily pregnant. Lisa studied the picture, a sudden lump blocking her throat. She had so few photos of her mother, because many of them had been lost when the bathroom in Nan’s house flooded and the ceiling collapsed in the lounge. Few of the photos had been salvageable and Nan being Nan had chucked them all out. She didn’t do sentiment.
And Lisa had no photos of her father at all. She turned it over, looking for confirmation. There it was, Me and Vittorio, Rome. She studied the picture, but it wasn’t a great shot and with the sunglasses and his face in shadow it was difficult to get much of a feel for what he looked like. Her lip curled. She knew what he was like. Irresponsible. Selfish. Heartless.
In the second picture, blurred and out of focus, the same man was pictured on his own outside a building, which she guessed was somewhere in Italy. She turned it over.
Vittorio & the family home. 32 Via del Mattonato, Rome, 001
‘What have you got there?’
Lisa started and almost shoved the envelope behind her back.
‘I found this and the envelope.’
Nan peered at the picture.
‘Is this …’ Lisa stopped. Nan had always refused to talk about him, but maybe this time she would.
She huffed. ‘Yes, that’s your father. Buggered off and left your poor mum holding the baby. Not that he was missed. We did just fine without him.’
Lisa stared curiously at the picture. It was the first time she’d seen her father. She didn’t want to be curious about him. She wanted to be indifferent, the way that he’d been indifferent to her, throughout those years when her six-year-old, eight-year-old, eleven-year-old self secretly believed that one day he would turn up and be her daddy.
‘Loved the ladies, that one. A roaming Roman.’ Nan sniffed.
‘He was from Rome?’
‘Of course he was from Rome. He was Roman.’
‘And he’s much taller than I thought he’d be.’ She deliberately kept her voice cool.
‘Not all jockeys are midgets. He was very skinny, like your mother. A pair of matchsticks they were.’
Lisa’s mother had worked at a local racing stables for the owner, Sir Robert Harding, managing all the admin in the office relating to entering the horses in races, charging the owners stable fees and paying the jockeys, which was where she’d met Vittorio Vettese, one of the stable’s full-time jockeys.
Going up to the stables had been a rare treat that Lisa had loved, although she wasn’t allowed to very often. Sir Robert’s wife had had an accident that had left her in a wheelchair and unable to have children. Lisa’s visits tended to be timed for when Lady Mary was away.
‘That’s where you get those knobbly knees from.’ Nan gave another one of her characteristic disdainful sniffs. She had them down to a fine art, conveying a mix of taciturn disapproval and regal superiority.
Lisa glanced down at her legs with a smile at Nan’s typical bluntness.
‘What’s this, then?’ Lisa pulled out a small jewellery box and Nan’s mouth pursed mollusc-tight, her lips pressed together in a vacuum-like seal.
The black box sat in her palm with all the allure of Pandora’s and gave Lisa a misty sense of premonition. Once opened, there was no going back.
Lisa looked at Nan, her thin, stooped frame radiating tension, but she didn’t say anything.
As her fingers brushed the lid of the box, out of the corner of her eye she saw her grandmother flinch, but it didn’t stop her from prising the lid upwards. It reached that point of no return and popped open.
‘Oh!’
The folds of skin on Nan’s throat quivered.
With the tip of her finger Lisa touched the ring of tiny pearls, interspersed with equally small rubies encircling a pea-sized diamond, well petit pois, perhaps, but still significant.
‘Wow, that’s pretty.’ And valuable, in her humble and not very informed opinion. At the very least, old. The rich navy velvet inside the box had faded around the edges and the elegant script on the inside satin of the lid spoke of a bygone age.
Nan sniffed again. ‘Hmm, belonged to his grandmother, apparently.’
‘What, my father’s?’
‘Yes. He gave it to your mother.’ She spat the words out with the unwillingness of a miser parting with pennies. ‘When they got engaged.’
‘So it was …’ Confused, Lisa tried to gauge her Nan’s expression, but the gimlet eyes were giving nothing away, ‘Mum’s engagement ring.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Oh.’ Betrayal and hurt splintered at the same time, making her vision a touch blurry. She had no idea what to say. Why hadn’t her grandmother given her the ring? Hadn’t her mother wanted her to have it?
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ snapped Nan. ‘She wanted it to go back to Vittorio. Said it was a family heirloom and should be returned. She didn’t feel right keeping it.’
Ah, so that explained Nan’s strange reticence. ‘Why didn’t you do it, then?’
Nan shrugged. ‘Never got round to it.’
Lisa couldn’t hide the spark of surprise or the quick instinctive censure she felt at Nan’s admission.
‘Don’t look at me like that, Missy. It wasn’t like I had time on my
