Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Fourteen

Lucia, Marisa’s mother, had set up her nonna’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. She should have 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 her nonna a 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, her nonna probably 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 watch Un 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.’

There was a short pause, then the picture jumped and went blank.

Marisa waited. And waited again. Nothing. Had she dreamed it?

She called back on Skype. Even the picture on the tiny icon made her wistful; one of her and her grandfather, hand in hand on the sand.

The phone rang for a long time. Marisa realised she had almost forgotten her terrifying neighbour for a second, then quickly turned the volume down on the laptop.

‘PRONTO!’

Now, there was her grandmother’s face, looming terrifyingly over the full screen. Marisa flinched backwards in alarm. She also sounded incredibly loud. She nervously glanced to the side. At least the bedrooms didn’t share a dividing wall. That really would have been difficult. Mind you, why should she care? If anyone deserved to be disrupted by noise, it was him.

‘Nonna?’

Her grandmother’s voice boomed. ‘Marisa! There you are!’

‘Sit down, Nonna, you don’t need to be so close.’

Reluctantly the old woman moved back and was finally sitting in front of the sideboard, at the huge wooden table, which was also far too large for the house, on which Marisa had eaten so many meals she could remember the blush of the tomatoes; the clink of ice cubes in pastel-coloured plastic glasses; the shape of the netting skirts that covered the fruit bowl, that folded with a snap which she had been fascinated with as a child, until Nonna had smacked her hand away and told her not to touch them. Lucia, her own mother, wouldn’t have hit her in a million years; the child had gone wide-eyed and pale. But she had never touched them again.

‘Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.’

‘I can hear you fine. Turn up your volume.’

‘What is that?’

Painstakingly, Marisa described the right key to press, and was rewarded with her grandmother’s look of satisfaction. She could only imagine the volume she was booming out now. Mind you, they didn’t have neighbour problems. Their walls were about six foot thick. They barely exchanged a word with their neighbours anyway due to some contretemps, decades before, between their Little Carlo – then a child, now a grown man with a family of his own – and one of the smaller children in the playground over marbles which had ended up in a vowed blood feud. Marisa thought about that. She hoped it didn’t run in the family, this type of thing.

‘Well,’ said her grandmother eventually sitting back. ‘Look at me, on the computer.’

Marisa smiled shyly. She’d written to her grandmother, of course, and guessed Lucia spoke to her plenty, but she didn’t . . . they’d never quite had the relationship she’d had with her grandfather, and didn’t really know where to start.

‘How are you doing?’ she asked carefully. ‘Since Nonno . . .’

Her nonna sniffed. She was dressed all in black, her hair lightly pulled back with a great grey streak through it. She looked rather fine, in fact, Marisa noticed.

‘Well,’ said Nonna. ‘He is with God now.’

‘You miss him?’

‘I speak to him every day.’

She crossed herself briefly. Marisa felt herself sadden; she was hoping for a conversation with her grandmother, not platitudes.

‘Well, that’s good.’

Her grandmother’s lips twitched. ‘And sometimes, now, he listens!’

Marisa smiled at this.

‘And I did a computer class!’

‘I see that.’

‘Everyone else said, ah, you are old and behind the times, but Father Giacamo ran a class at the church and now PING! I am on the internet.’

‘You are on the internet.’

‘Everyone is very impressed with me,’ she said smugly. ‘Especially Father Giacomo. And I have more time now. Now that it is just me.’

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?’ her nonna demanded. ‘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 her nonna wouldn’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.’