Sunrise By the Sea by Jenny Colgan

Chapter Sixty-eight

Marisa had seen lonely deaths in her job. Deaths from people in flats not discovered for months; deaths reported by social workers because there were no family members to love them enough to do it. She had made out death certificates for young drug deaths, and old solitary deaths, and she knew exactly what she was not going to do for her own family.

Nonna was not alone for a second. There was always someone by her side, encouraging her to eat just a little zuppa del minestrone, the cure for all ills, or reading to her from the old illustrated Bible on the mantelpiece, or playing her favourite music; changing and washing her, briskly and without sentiment; or simply holding her hand or combing her hair.

For such a voluble woman who had talked and talked and talked, she didn’t insist, not any more, on having something to say, even in the few moments she was lucid and could talk. As if she’d told them all she wanted to say – and they repeated, sometimes in hushed tones, her many pointed lectures on the subjects of their fashion choices, their partner choices and their life choices, but in every way with affection.

‘Oh my goodness, the trouble I got when I went to England with Stefano,’ said Lucia.

‘Well, she was right about Stefano,’ said Ann Angela, earning herself a very Nonna look from her sister.

‘Nonna only ever got a telephone so she could ring me internationally and tell me I’d made every single decision wrong in every conceivable way.’

Lucia smiled.

‘It must have cost her a fortune! All those international calls!’

Everyone laughed.

‘No wonder she never bought a new dress.’

Nonna slept a lot, nearly all the time, and the doctor came in morning and night to make sure she was never in pain or distressed, but the Rossis were all over it, and not beyond letting her have a sip of her beloved grappa at bedtime, which was quite as it should be.

On the fourth day her breathing started to labour a little and they looked at each other as she became slightly more alert, aware of the breath tight in her body and on her chest, and tugging on the sleeve of everyone who came in and out, and they sat down carefully as she turned to them, one by one, and croaked out.

‘Ti . . . ti voglio bene.’

And of course everyone said, ‘I know you do. And we love you too. And everything is well.’

And the doctor came for the last time and agreed that it wouldn’t be long, but that nothing hurt, and time took on an odd feeling of being extremely elongated – minutes drawing out, punctuated by the sense that every breath was taking longer to come than the previous one, that it might be the last, and they milled, and cooked because they were going to need a lot of food for the funeral, after all, so they might as well put it in the freezer, and neighbours popped in and out quietly in the hush. The priest came and Marisa and Ann Angela got the worst fit of giggles, in the way you do at the most inappropriate moments, when in the middle of all the solemnity he turned out to be both radiantly handsome and quite magnificently camp, and Nonna held on to his robe as strongly as she’d held on to anyone else’s, and intoned, with a somewhat theatrical flair, the ancient words of the ritual.

‘Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.’

And they gathered round as the day turned to night, and Marisa texted Alexei for the first time – she didn’t even have his number; she found it on an advert for piano lessons – and said hello, and that they could hear him and would he mind terribly playing something?

And he said of course, and she had almost certainly left her balcony door open again so would she like him to climb in and grab the laptop so it was closer? She had told him not to be so daft, he would fall if he attempted to scale their balconies, but he took this as a challenge, vanished and reappeared thirty seconds later, clutching her laptop triumphantly.

It was lovely to see him; she couldn’t stop grinning, had forgotten her crossness.

‘Are you comink home?’ he said anxiously. ‘Or have you gone for ever to land of Puccini? Is good land.’

‘I am coming home,’ she promised.

‘Well, that is good,’ he said. ‘That is very good. You want me to play? Are you sure?’

She had been trying to be subtle but it was impossible with nonna’s old laptop right bang in the middle of the kitchen, the volume turned up to a level an eighty-year-old could communicate in.

‘Ooh, is that him?’ said Lucia. ‘Let’s have a look then.’

‘Shut up!’ hissed Marisa.

‘Is he better-looking than the priest?’ wondered Ann Angela aloud. She looked at the screen. ‘Oh. No.’

‘Shut up!’

‘Buona sera, Italian family of Marisa,’ said Alexei gravely, blinking, which produced much excitement among them, and some giggling among the younger cousins. ‘What music did your grandmother like?’

Marisa translated, and there was lots of shouting, particularly of popular Italian songs and hymns he simply didn’t know, but they finally settled on a gentle programme of Verdi and Rossini.

Marisa took the laptop into the bedroom, where the breaths were still faltering and far apart. One of the younger cousins immediately got up and Marisa slipped into their place.

‘Hey, Nonna,’ she said. ‘Here he is, he’s going to play for you.’

There it was, almost impossible to feel – the tiniest grasp on her sleeve.

‘Buona sera, Babushka of Marisa,’ said Alexei, and beamed cheerfully, then turned to his piano and started with a merry waltz, as other family members crammed into the bedroom to hear.

To Marisa’s astonishment, her nonna’s eyes opened for the first time in two days. She couldn’t quite focus, but Marisa held up the laptop.

‘That’s him?’ she said in a papery whisper. Alexei, oblivious, was concentrating intently on the music, those huge ungainly hands of his now flying as if they were in their natural habitat; a seal in water.

‘Si, Nonna.’

‘I like him,’ she said.

Marisa kissed her nonna as she closed her eyes and settled back to sleep as the music played on and everyone discussed Alexei ad infinitum and Marisa found that she missed him. And much later, at four o’clock in the morning when the world was truly still and all the Rossis were asleep, with her beloved eldest daughter Lucia holding her hand, curled up fast asleep next to her on the bed, Ismarilda Madolina Marisa Rossi woke, bolt awake, eyes wide open, and said, quite distinctly, ‘Carlo’, Marisa’s grandfather’s name, and then the breathing stopped and Marisa herself in the next room woke with a start and wondered what she could hear.

It took her a little while to realise it was something she could not hear.