no matter what. It was the last strong connection with his mother’s Sicilian family and family was important to the DeLucas.
‘Yeah,’ he shrugged. ‘Well.’
‘I know how much the villa meant to you, all those fabulous childhood holidays you had there…’
‘I need the money.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yeah.’
I waited, but he said nothing more.
We drove on in silence. I resumed my original position: staring out of the window, my face turned from Joe, my shoulders aching with tension. We rattled along the slow lane of a dual carriageway, and were overtaken by a variety of ramshackle trucks, including a three wheeler towing a flatbed stacked with tractor tyres. The driver, a swarthy young man in overalls, grinned and saluted as he went past. Joe touched his forelock in response. I had a flashback to a holiday sixteen years previously, when Joe and I spent the summer driving around Ireland in a campervan; the windows open, my belly swelling with Daniel inside it, music playing on the radio and life feeling so good, so easy. I remembered the braids in my hair, the cotton pinafore I used to wear, the cheesecloth shirt, the sun in my eyes, Joe’s hand reaching across the hot leatherette of the bench seat, to take hold of mine; how happy we were.
The happiness was long gone. Daniel was gone and our love hadn’t been strong enough to survive the aftermath of his death. Now we were merely two people with nothing in common, save an inheritance that had been foisted on us in a clumsy attempt to make up for something that could not be compensated for; an inheritance I couldn’t wait to offload.
5
Back in Bristol, when I was planning for this trip, I’d borrowed a linen trouser suit from my colleague, Meg, to wear to the meeting with the Sicilian lawyer. The suit was a mistake. It was of good quality, but it wasn’t my style and it didn’t fit. Beneath the jacket was a sleeveless, polyester shirt with a bow at the neck. I had to hold the ribbons of the bow to stop the wind blowing them into my eyes. Sweat was pooling in the ridge of my back. Meg always looked well-dressed, she looked right in her clothes. I’d thought that if I borrowed them, I’d look right in them too, but I didn’t. I tucked the ribbons inside the shirt, sweated in the suit and watched the countryside pass by.
Soon, we left the flatlands behind and drove a winding road that led into lusher countryside. We passed a hobbled donkey and Joe’s fingers clenched on the steering wheel. I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in years. When we were eleven years old, Joe and I rescued a starling from a cat and put it in a box in the shed at the back of Joe’s family’s house in Muswell Hill. Joe looked after it, bringing it food and water, checking on it several times a day. The starling, which we named Stanley, was recovering and we had hopes of a successful return to nature, until Joe’s father, the psychiatrist Patrick Cadogan, discovered it.
Joe and I found Stanley’s body on the compost heap; we recognised him by the missing tail-feathers. Mr Cadogan told us he’d found the bird dead in the shed, but he was lying. Patrick Cadogan was a murderer; Joe knew it and so did I. When Anna saw the starling limp in Joe’s hands, I looked into her eyes and saw that she knew it too. That was one of the reasons Joe changed his surname from Cadogan to DeLuca as soon as he was old enough to legally do so. Patrick Cadogan was a cold, cruel man and Joe wanted nothing more to do with him.
To reach Ragusa city, we had to drive through a tunnel hewn through the mountain. After that, we crossed a ravine on an elevated section of road. The drop on either side terrified me, but Joe was oblivious to my discomfort. He had no idea about the dark places to which my imagination had a propensity to turn, but I read the headlines, clear as anything: Bridge failure – multiple deaths, rogue concrete blamed.
We crossed the ravine without anything terrible happening, travelled a winding road for a while and then at last the old city of Ragusa came into view, clinging to the side of a mountain, materialising like a dream. It was built so high that its apex was wreathed in cloud. It was a fairy tale city; growing out of the landscape like something organic and ancient, one of its faces lit by the sun, the opposite side in shadow. I stared at it, awestruck, trying to imprint the memory in my mind because I’d never seen a city like it.
‘Did you know it was like this?’ I asked Joe. ‘Did you know it was this beautiful?’
‘I’ve been here hundreds of times,’ he replied coldly.
Of course he had. No doubt this view was commonplace to him. I wished I’d kept my enthusiasm to myself.
We found a shady layby at the foot of the city where we could leave the car, before getting out, stretching and staring upwards. Anna would have known I would love this view, she would have known the effect it would have on me, but, even in death, I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. If she had imagined that bringing Joe and me here together would be the prompt we needed to start dismantling the wall we’d built between us, then she’d been wrong. Joe clearly had no interest in making friends with me and the feeling was entirely, one hundred per cent mutual.
Joe pulled a jacket from the back seat, shook it ineffectually to smooth out the creases and put it on. He leaned down to comb his hair with his fingers using the wing mirror as a reflector. To one side of us, the seductive city climbed the mountain. To the other, the land dropped away steeply into a shrubby ravine. Goats were grazing in sandy patches amongst the black shade of trees dripping with long, pale catkins.
Joe retucked the hem of his shirt into the waistband of his trousers. He had a small belly now that he’d never had before and I tried not to notice it.
‘I should have brought a tie,’ he said.
‘I’m sure it won’t matter.’
‘You don’t think it’ll look disrespectful?’ This was typical Joe, becoming anxious, craving reassurance, whenever he had any dealings with authority. It was a window back into the past, to the insecure young man who was never good enough for his father, who struggled to cope at the expensive and brutal boarding school Patrick had insisted on, who had, right up until Daniel’s death, used humour to deflect criticism. Neither of us was laughing now.
‘No,’ I told him, ‘you look fine.’
Joe said, ‘Hmm,’ unconvinced, and patted his pockets until he found a folded letter with the address we needed on the heading. He tapped the street name into the map app on his phone and we followed the directions, climbing steeply uphill through narrow, stepped alleyways.
Close up, the city was as lovely as it had looked from the road, unexpected views announcing themselves as we turned tight corners: a wall overlooking a ravine with a church clinging to its side; falls of bougainvillea, swallows feeding above a grand fountain, splashing water poured from the urn of a statue into a great, green bowl; patches of dark shadow, patches of bright light, dappled ground around the trees. Birds sang from their perches on flag-poles jutting over secret squares; restaurants were tucked behind houses that were stacked tightly against one another; twisting alleyways barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side; steps leading upwards, or downwards to arched doorways and tiny, vaulted bridges; the smell of good coffee; the smell of cooked cheese. Carnations and pelargoniums planted in old olive-oil tins spilled red flowers like spots of blood; caged songbirds trilled from balconies; and washing dried on wire racks hooked to windows above our heads. If it hadn’t been for the fact that it was Anna who had brought
