The House by the Sea. Louise Douglas

who knocked my arm as he reached for his seat belt.

      ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘so sorry.’ His jumper slid off his lap and landed on my feet. It was unpleasantly warm. Surreptitiously, I kicked it back towards him. ‘I’m all fingers and thumbs,’ he said. ‘I don’t like take-offs and landings. Always make me nervous.’ He laughed uneasily.

      I moved closer to the window, turning my body away from his. I didn’t like flying either. Last time, I’d sworn ‘never again’ and yet here I was, on a journey I hadn’t planned, going to a place I didn’t want to visit, brittle with nerves, resenting the time and energy I was expending, dreading what was to come, and all because of her, Anna DeLuca, and her stupid, manipulative will.

      The intercom pinged and the pilot informed us that we’d be landing in fifteen minutes. She said the weather in Sicily was a fine and sunny twenty-five degrees. Good, I thought. It would be nice to have some sunshine. The British weather had been dull in the weeks since Anna’s death and I’d been out of sorts. Nothing had gone terribly wrong, but nothing had been right either. I’d felt as if I had a persistent hangover, or jet lag; some affliction that dulled my mind and slowed me down. It was knowing that this trip was coming; knowing I had to use my precious holiday allocation to come to Sicily to meet Anna’s lawyer; knowing I’d have to burn energy dealing with whatever mess Anna had left for me and Joe to clear up.

      My paperback was on my lap and I’d been using a photograph of Daniel as a bookmark. There he was, my beautiful boy, sitting astride the skateboard that Anna had bought him for his fifth birthday. He’d been asking for a skateboard for months, begging for one, and Joe and I kept saying ‘No,’ because we didn’t think he was big enough and back then we lived in a tiny flat on the second storey of an old house in North London. There was no way I could manage the creaky stairs with a child, a shopping bag and a skateboard in tow. But Anna being Anna, that didn’t stop her. She presented the gift to Daniel on his birthday; his eyes were wide with delight as he tore the paper from the present, its shape and weight giving away what was inside. It was a fabulous board, the exact one he’d wanted. He kept saying: ‘This is the best day of my whole life!’ Anna told him the skateboard had to stay at her house, close to the park. She also – pre-empting objections from us – gave him a protective helmet and pads and told him that using the board was conditional on him wearing the safety gear. I could still recall the sinking feeling as I watched Daniel hugging his present, the half-hearted smile I dredged up, Anna’s eyes flicking from Daniel to me, delighted at his joy, desperate for my approval, and Joe saying: ‘Wow, that’s great, Anna!’ (he never called her Mum) and then reaching across to take hold of my hand to let me know he knew how annoyed I was.

      I lay Daniel’s picture back in the book, closed it carefully and tucked it into my bag. The closer I came to seeing Joe again, the more anxious I felt. Funny how it was always the relationships that once were closest that caused the most trouble when they were over.

      We were lower now, so low that details of the landscape were revealing themselves: a water park, a motorway junction, a shopping mall. I saw the shadow of our plane swoop beneath me, a ballet partner mirroring the arc of the real thing. I thought of Joe, waiting for me, and had a rush of nerves. Here I was – a jolt as the landing gear mechanism lowered the wheels – here we were – a groaning of the air brakes – the two of us about to be reunited because of the machinations of his mother, and it was too late to do anything about it now; too late to do anything but comply.

      The man beside me was breathing heavily. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered, ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’

      The roofs of the apartment blocks rushed closer and closer, a forest of aerials and chimneys and water tanks. We skimmed the power lines and the tops of the trees, the airport terminal came into view to our right and there was the bump as the plane touched down, a brace against the forward thrust as it braked, a spasm of relief.

      ‘Hurrah!’ the man beside me muttered. He grabbed hold of my wrist. ‘We did it!’ he cried. ‘We’re safe!’

      He was the lucky one. For him, the anxiety was over. For me, it was just beginning.

      3

      We disembarked and I experienced my first blast of Sicily: hot and dry, streaky with the smell of aircraft fuel. We were shepherded across the tarmac, buffeted by gusts of displaced air. I managed to position myself behind a family I’d noticed at the departure gate back in London. The boy was about ten, older than Daniel had been when he died, but younger than Daniel would have been if he had still been alive. He was holding his little sister’s hand, pointing things out to her.

      Halfway between the plane and the terminal, the girl dropped her toy rabbit and none of the family noticed. I picked it up and quickened my pace to catch up. I tapped the mother’s arm and when she turned, I gave the rabbit to her. She smiled her thanks. I wanted to say something about her son’s gentleness and thoughtfulness, about how he reminded me of Daniel, but it might have come across as a bit weird. Sometimes when I tried to praise the children of strangers, I went over the top and everyone got embarrassed and it didn’t end well. I was glad for that mother that she had such lovely children and it wasn’t that I wanted them for myself, only that I wished Daniel was with me. I would have traded the rest of my life if I could have had him back for a single hour, a minute, a heartbeat. It was a hopeless wish though. All the time in the world wouldn’t be enough to compensate for the time that had already been lost.

      We reached the terminal building and walked through sliding doors into the quiet, sanitised chill of a hallway. We shuffled across a marble floor towards the immigration desks. I stood a little apart from everyone else, keeping myself to myself and switched on my phone. Amongst the welcomes from various Italian service providers that lined up over the screensaver of Daniel’s face, was a text from Joe.

      I’m at arrivals.

      Okay. Fine. Don’t say ‘hello’ or ‘hope you had a good flight’ or ‘looking forward to seeing you again.’ The coldness and brusqueness of the message put me on edge. But what had I expected?

      Up until Anna’s death, all I’d heard about my ex-husband were bits and pieces of information that Martha passed on from Cece. For a year or two after I left Joe, Martha kept trying to tell me about his mental health issues and so on, but I wouldn’t listen. In fact, I used to get quite angry with her. ‘Why are you even telling me these things?’ I’d say. ‘I don’t care about Joe. Really, I don’t!’

      I knew he was running his own gardening business in North Wales and as far as Martha was aware he didn’t have a new partner: like me, he’d never come anywhere close to marrying again. I assumed he was better now – he’d sounded quite coherent in the emails he’d sent in the past few weeks. Still, this whole situation was ridiculous. It was a stipulation of Anna’s will that Joe and I meet the lawyer together, but we had flown in separately and we should have arranged to make our way separately to the lawyer’s office in the city of Ragusa. It had been a stupid idea to meet at the airport. It had been a stupid plan to share a car. What on earth would we talk about? How could we bear to be together?

      I typed a reply.

      You go on ahead, I’ll follow in a taxi.

      My finger hovered over the ‘send’ button. I didn’t actually know how much a taxi would cost or if Sicilian taxi drivers had the facility to accept card payments and I didn’t speak Italian so I wouldn’t be able to ask. I wouldn’t know if I was being charged a fair price for the journey, I didn’t even know where Ragusa was in relation to the airport. What if it was 200 miles away? Why hadn’t I looked it up beforehand? Why hadn’t I thought this through? Did they even have Ubers in Sicily?

      I deleted the text without sending it. My heart was thumping. My breathing was ragged. I heard Fitz’s voice in my head: One foot in front of the other, dear heart. One step at a time.

      I was desperate for a delay to give me time to collect my thoughts but was through immigration