Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Fifty-nine

Nonna had a busy night. She had given herself a nasty bang on the head and they were doing MRIs and looking for brain damage and other difficulties.

Marisa too had not paused. Finally, at two a.m. she had accepted that nobody was going to be able to know any more that night and had tried to get to sleep but anxiety and Champagne were churning round her gut and she didn’t have a hope of dropping off. She stared into the starry night, praying to her grandmother’s God that he would spare her even though she couldn’t help thinking that her grandmother’s God would probably want to call her home as much as she did.

At five-thirty dawn started creeping in over the sea to the left of her window, and the stars started to fade and disappear. As if somehow tacitly giving her body permission, now that night was over, insomnia loosened its grip and she fell into a deep sleep, not waking till well after ten, less thick in the head than she thought she would have been and extraordinarily grateful to Alexei for postponing his lessons that morning; even more grateful when she went to the balcony to open the window, to see placed on the table and chair outside a croissant and a glass of orange juice.

‘Thank you,’ she shouted out, but got no reply. The croissant was hard; he must have fetched it from Polly’s hours ago.

Nonetheless, she gnawed on it and made herself a coffee, glancing at the empty room, now bathed in sunlight, and calling her mother, who was, understandably, perpetually engaged.

Lucia was packing, and Gino was heading down from Switzerland.

‘She won’t need you,’ Lucia was saying, trying to sound positive, but coming over as brisk and making assumptions about Marisa that made her bristle. ‘She might not even recognise us.’

Her mother sounded nervous, of all things.

‘Are you . . . ? I mean . . . Are you better?’

Marisa was surprised. That her mother would even acknowledge her illness.

‘I . . . I am definitely getting better,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to come,’ said Lucia. ‘If it’s too hard. It’s not like you’re close.’

‘We are quite close actually,’ said Marisa. ‘We’ve been talking on Skype.’

‘Your grandmother on Skype?’ said Lucia. ‘Darling, are you absolutely sure? She thinks women priests are sent by the devil. God knows what she’d make of Skype.’

‘Mum, that’s how we found her, remember?’

‘I thought she’d just got startled by the ringing noise of her big square telephone.’

‘Well no, that’s not what happened.’

Her mother sighed. ‘Well, I’m flying out of Bristol today to Genoa,’ she said. ‘If you can make that flight? It’s in two hours.’

‘You didn’t even ask me,’ said Marisa.

‘Darling, she’s a grandmother you haven’t seen for ages, never particularly got along with and barely mention, and you, as you keep telling me, have a serious disease which means you can’t leave the house or be with your family! You can hardly blame me for this one!’

‘No,’ said Marisa. ‘You’re right, I can’t. Have a safe trip. Call me as soon as you’re there.’

She hung up and looked at the computer thoughtfully.

Even the airport website made her feel terribly anxious. The thought of all those people . . . the queues, the anxiety you could always taste in the air at airports, of panic and mislaid documents and screaming children and worry and . . .

She felt her breathing speed up. What if she got there and Nonna was dead? What if she didn’t leave now and was too late? But if she went now, what if she had a panic attack on the plane and they had to land it halfway over or not take off and everyone would be so furious and scream at her and she wouldn’t get there anyway, she’d have such a meltdown it would be impossible to continue . . .

She found it hard to breathe and went back out onto the balcony again, trying to take in big gulps of air, trying to think of her happy place. But then her happy place was on the other end of a plane and that was blocking everything else out.

She put her head between her knees like Anita had told her; concentrated on her breaths, in through the nose, hold, out through the mouth, on taking her brain somewhere else, but she couldn’t get a grip, could feel her throat tighten and gulp, her leg jerk pointlessly outwards, because this wasn’t a step, it wasn’t a step that had taken her outside, and down the hill, and into the village and into a job. Getting on a plane by herself to go to another country was a crazy idea, a huge enormous leap, an impossible concept.

As she did so, the door next door opened and closed and she could tell by the pacing across the floor that it was young Edin and, suddenly, scales were ringing out, solid and identical, up and down the keyboard, rigid and unchanging, in a tight clear rhythm, and as they went – doh ray me fah so lah te doh, she remembered that much from The Sound of Music – and back again, she felt herself starting to breathe in time with the notes, an in-breath on doh ray me fah so, then holding it, then the same as it came down again.

Slowly, gradually, following the music tightly, she found herself bringing it back and calming down. He started to play something light and quiet, as if all of his fingers were dancing of their own accord, with a sweet joy. It sounded so incredibly easy, and yet it could not be: the idea that ten separate fingers were doing ten separate things made her head explode.

She could even hear Alexei humming along almost despite himself, in a gentle rhythm that mirrored the beating of her own heart as it gradually slowed and refound its natural equilibrium, and if she had been able to think further she would wonder if Alexei had asked Edin to play exactly this piece for exactly this reason, and she would have been right, for Alexei believed in the sacred power of Bach in the way that her grandmother believed in the sacred power of the Virgin Mary.