The House by the Sea. Louise Douglas

Daniel, I used to wash it for him sometimes. He liked me to massage his head, my fingers slippery with conditioner, and afterwards, if the hair washing hadn’t led to sex, which it sometimes did, I’d rinse his hair with the shower head and then blow dry it for him. I’d known Joe’s head intimately, every lump and bump of it. I knew his hair; its texture and its whorls. In all the time we were together, I’d never found a single white hair on Joe’s head.

      ‘Edie?’ Joe asked again, definite irritation in his voice now. ‘I asked if you’d been to Sicily before?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I mean, no. No, I haven’t.’

      We’d been planning to come to the island the year Daniel died; he was supposed to celebrate his sixth birthday here, in the villa where Joe used to spend his childhood holidays. Anna and Anna’s mother were going to be there and other relatives from the Italian side of the family who I’d never met. It was going to be a big celebration of a holiday. All kinds of treats and outings and parties had been planned: picnics and days on the beach and a visit to a nearby hilltop city to watch a festival. We never made it to Sicily that year, of course, and Joe’s grandmother had died soon after, and Joe and I divorced and all our plans had come to nothing.

      ‘What about Italy?’ Joe asked. ‘Have you ever been to Italy?’

      ‘Florence, once, with the school I work at.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘It was an art trip, Fitz – Miss Fitzpatrick – the friend I live with, she arranged it. We travelled by coach.’

      He didn’t respond.

      ‘We saw lots of statues.’

      Nothing.

      ‘And churches.’

      I’d been particularly taken by the tiny, hidden church of Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi where Dante met Beatrice. I’d gone there with a fifteen year old with a range of disorders who couldn’t cope with the organised tours the rest of the party were enjoying. I couldn’t cope with them either, excursions were far more pleasant when it was just the two of us. We’d discovered a basket beside Beatrice’s shrine filled with fascinating notes from people pleading for help with their love lives. Some were written in English: Oh, Beatrice, help me! He is my world but he doesn’t even notice me! … I know she prefers this other guy but he’s a dick, what shall I do? … We’d made up our own responses, matching broken heart to broken heart. Afterwards, we bought ice creams and sat on the wall beside the river. The girl, Keira, her name was, told me about how she wanted to do well in life to prove her mother wrong. ‘Wrong about what?’ I’d asked and she’d replied: ‘Me being too stupid to make anything of myself.’

      I considered telling the story to Joe but decided against it.

      We left the airport and joined a dual carriageway. Cars and mopeds zipped past us.

      ‘How far is it to the lawyer’s office?’ I asked.

      ‘About two hours,’ Joe replied.

       Oh God! What are we going to talk about for two hours?

      ‘We should use the time to discuss what we’re going to do with the villa,’ Joe said, so promptly that I wondered if I’d inadvertently voiced my thoughts out loud: how else could he have known to answer my question? It used to happen when we were married; one of us would pre-empt the other’s unspoken question with a response, but surely that telepathy born of intimacy must have withered while we were apart? ‘Do you have any thoughts,’ Joe asked, ‘about what you want to do with your share?’

      ‘Of the villa?’

      ‘Yes,’ Joe said, and I heard the word ‘obviously’ even though he hadn’t actually said it.

      ‘If it was down to me,’ I replied, ‘a quick sale would be best. Do you want to sell it too?’

      ‘I do, yes.’

      ‘Okay. Good.’

      Joe was still staring ahead and I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. I licked my lips; my mouth was dry as dust. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to sell,’ I said, my casual tone disguising how intensely relieved I was at his response. I’d been expecting a battle; I thought he’d be determined to hold onto the villa, 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