'I wouldn't mind, but I didn't even want to go on holiday in the first place.' She smiles. 'I wasn't very adventurous in those days, you see. It was my ex-husband's idea. Our daughter had just finished her GCSEs, and he thought she deserved a treat. And as Jeremy's an airline pilot, he can get cheap flights. I was still a bit reluctant to go, but then he offered to pay for the whole thing, and so I thought - well, it'd be silly to turn down a free holiday, wouldn't it?'
A young-ish woman, thirty-something, is talking to an invisible someone, who is sitting just to the right of camera. Her hair is bleached stripy blonde, and she has pale, watery blue eyes. She is neither beautiful nor pretty, but attractive.
'Tessa Holroyd', it reads along the bottom of the screen, 'Musician'.
'But I only agreed to go for Sammy's sake,' she appeals.
'Sammy?' asks the off-screen voice.
Tessa's face floods warm. 'Samantha. My daughter.' Pause. She realizes she is supposed to say more. 'We hadn't been getting on that well, you see - I thought a holiday might help.'
'Mum was, like, really getting on my tits.' Oh. A young woman: 'Samantha Holroyd' apparently. 'Teenager'. Like it's her full-time job.
'She just couldn't accept that I wasn't a little girl any more.' Mum must be blind - girl on the screen with full set of bosoms, panda-kohled eyes and bumpy skin on nightclub pallor. She sighs, shakes her head. 'Didn't want me to grow up. Just, like, trying to arrest my development, in order to satisfy her own childhood limitations.' She shoots a look skywards. 'Mad.'
Blimey.
*
Gina hadn't wanted to go on holiday either. The boys had made her. Do her good, they said. Get her out of herself. Or was it take it out of herself? There were some parts of the English language she had never mastered. It was a lingua stupida sometimes, it made no sense. Italian was so much easier, so much more simple. Or was it simpler? Simplier?
Doesn't matter now. He's not around to correct her, not any more. But she still heard his voice in her head, of course. Sometimes she got angry with him. Told him to go away. But then she'd be sad when he did, because she'd want him back. She'd give anything to have him back. She was in charge of him now, you see, and she didn't like it. Didn't suit either of them. All wrong. He was the big boss, and she was the little boss, and that was the way it had always been.
As she washed her hands, Gina did her best not to look in the (dusty) mirror above the little guest basin. She'd been trying to keep out of her own way, hadn't looked at herself properly recently, hadn't wanted to. Or needed to, what was the point? There was no one to look nice for any more.
But she was going to be spending the next couple of weeks with other people, most of them strangers, so she had to keep up the appearances, Alfie would expect that. He'd be upset if she let the family down. Look at your flection, mamma, keep looking.
She was surprised by the woman staring back at her, she thought she'd have started to look her real age now. She felt so old nowadays, you see. And tired, all the time, so tired. Tired all day, awake all night. All wrong. But no, she could still pass for the late sixties. On the outside, anyway.
Papa's customers used to tell her that she looked just like Sophia Loren, but Gina always suspected that was the only Italian woman they knew. Or they thought she'd been named after La Lollo, who was only a couple of years older than Gina, but she never corrected them, of course not. She was still a good-looking woman, she knew that. She kept her hair brown because it made her feel younger, but it needed tinting again now; Fabio said there was a hair salon where they were staying, she'd get it done there.
And she'd kept her figure; since having her babies, she'd put on a bit of weight of course, everyone did in those days, but she hadn't let herself get fat. No, he wouldn't have liked that. Her strong bone structure and a tipicamente Roman nose had helped keep her foreign-looking, as Alfie says. Used to say. But he'd loved her eyes most of all, they were like she was on fire, made him passionate, he loved that. So had she, she'd enjoyed their love-making - sex, they call it now, a horrible word — it was a way of making even more love between them, you see, that's how she saw it. And they'd made their love right up until he couldn't any more …
But these weren't her eyes staring back at her from the mirror - the fire had gone, the spark had died with him, she'd fizzled out. Nothing in there now. This was the face of an empty woman whose heart had been stolen, taken away from her soul. A woman without love.
Gina folded her wet flannel into the handy Safeway’s polythene bag she'd saved for just this job, rustled it up, tucked it into a little space down the side of the suitcase, closed it up to shut. There. All done.
Now what?
She sat down on the edge of the bed, beside her suitcase. Save her legs. Long day ahead. She hadn't slept that well. Not used to sleeping in a single bed, you see. Wasn't going to get used to it, either. She'd keep that bed, their bed, no matter what. They won't take that away, I won't let them. That bed had been the centre of their world. They'd laughed, loved and cried together in there. She'd given birth in that bed. He'd died in it.
Anyway.
So much time now.
Too much time.
All quiet outside. Well, it was only half past six in the morning, too early for London to wake up, probably. London was more of a late night place. She looked around the bedroom. The nanny's room, normally. Nice room. Small. Should be easier to keep clean. She'd been hurt to see that nice china figurine of a shepherdess she'd given Felicity for Christmas a few years ago gathering dust on the little shelf above the fireplace, but the cheerful primrose of her porcelain skirts did brighten this basement room up a bit. And she must tell her daughter-in-law that those spittoon curtains didn't go up and down properly, the cord was broken, that would be helpful.
But at least this room was still quite comfortable. Not like the rest of the house, which was almost completely bare now. Gina had been shocked when she'd arrived last night. The last time she'd visited it had been a normal cosy home with nice fitted carpets and squashy sofas and all the usual family clutter. But it looked like the place had been gutted, everything had been stripped away; they hadn't even got a new carpet yet, they were still walking on bare floorboards (which as any proper housewife knows are impossible to keep clean, the dust keeps coming up through the cracks, you see); and the soft furnishings were now hard ones, in bright primary school colours, with not so much as a nice pattern or even a flower in sight. (And she'd thought she was saying the right thing, complimenting Spike on his painting over the fireplace; how was she to know it hadn't been done by her little grandson, but by one of these modern art people, she'd felt so foolish.) This 'new look' Felicity had gone for was so unwelcoming, so unfriendly. And she'd felt like she was just cluttering the place up when she'd arrived late last night, standing there in the hallway with her coat on for a full ten minutes before Cliff had finally offered to take it for her.
Though maybe she'd felt awkward because she always felt a bit - well, you know, 'in the road' when Felicity was around. Gina had really, really tried with this daughter-in-law, honestly she had. Alfie had liked her, always said his son's wives got better each time. But she just couldn't make herself.
It wasn't that Felicity was a wicked woman, not at all; it was just that Gina wanted more for 'Cliff’, as he liked to be called now. A man like this needed a nice woman, one who was happy and willing to look after him herself, not a woman who paid other people to do it for her. He even did the cooking most nights, can you imagine?! Or she telephoned for a takeitaway, like last night. That wasn't pizza, that was cotton wool on a cardboard circle. It wasn't right. These want-it-all women were just plain selfish, you see. And lazy. Though, of course, Gina would never say as much –
'Where's Rebecca?' demanded a small boy in Bob the Builder pyjamas and no slippers, poverino, who was standing in the open doorway, hanging on the handle, about to pull the door off its hinges. 'Who are you?'
Gina smiled at his stick-'em-up hair, as her boys used to call it. You remember me, don't you?' She held out her arms, for a hug. Please.
'No,' said the boy, scowling. Just like his dad used to. 'Where's Rebecca?'
Who's Rebecca?'
'My nanny.' And he wasn't budging till he found out. You're not her.'
'No, I'm your nonna.''
'What's a nonna?’
'A funny name for a Granny, that's what.' Felicity appeared in the doorway behind her son looking like an old man in big, baggy, crumpled, tartan pyjamas. Poor Cliff. Gina wanted to get the iron out. And the hairbrush. And the eye make-up remover. 'She's gone back to Australia, you know that.' She yawned, not even bothering to put her hand up in front of her mouth.
'No, I didn't know that! Why didn't you say? Why didn't she say bye bye to me?' He started to cry. 'I want Rebecca, I want my Becca!'
And that was how their holiday started. Spike was feeling distraught, Felicity was feeling exhausted, and Gina was doing her best to feel nothing at all.