I gathered all my resolve and ploughed on.
‘We saw the Galleria dell’Accademia, didn’t we, Daisy, but the queue was huge? We didn’t bother waiting.’ I thought if I kept talking, it would stop this desire I had to look over my shoulder.
‘Oh, you should have gone in!’ exclaimed Rosamund, tooloudly. She sounded quite put out. ‘If this is your first time in Florence, you absolutely must seeDavid. Mustn’t she, Peter?’
Peter poured himself a glass of wine – not his first, by the looks of it. ‘It’s overhyped if you ask me.’
‘I thought that might be the case,’ I agreed, picking up the wine list.
Rosamund made a clacking sound. ‘That’s easy for you to say when you’ve seen it three or four times. But poor Maddie has never even been to Italy.’
PoorMaddie?
‘She has been to Italy,’ said Daisy, making a gurgling sound with her straw as she foraged around for more liquid at the bottom of the glass ‘She said earlier.’
I glanced sideways at her. Was she sticking up for me?
‘Although it’s true, I do tend to travel further afield,’ I said, catching the waiter’s eye as he put a basket of bread on the table. ‘Could I please order a glass of, um …’
I should have looked at the wine menu beforehand. Now what the fuck was I going to order, since I couldn’t pronounce a single one of the pretentious-sounding wines on here? I scanned up and down the list, the words blurring in front of my eyes as I began to panic.
‘This one, please,’ I said, pointing at random. ‘Large glass.’
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Nick to the waiter. ‘I trust your judgement implicitly,’ he said, rubbing my knee under the table.
‘Which wine did you go for, Maddie?’ asked Sophia sweetly, leaning forward so that she could catch my eye.
I didn’t know if I was being paranoid, but it felt like she’d asked me on purpose because she knew that wine wasn’t my thing and she wanted to make me look stupid.
‘The, um …’ I said, desperately scrabbling around for thename of an Italian wine. Any Italian wine. ‘Montepulciano,’ I replied with conviction, even though there was very a good chance it had not been that at all.
‘Oh I didn’t see that on the menu,’ said Sophia, flinging it open.
Thankfully, Rosamund distracted her by asking her which treatment she was planning to book at the spa for the following afternoon.
I half-listened in and eagerly kept an eye out for my wine. After a bit, my mind began to wander again – could I risk a quick look over my shoulder? I could almost feel Aidan’s eyes on the back of my neck. He used to have this intense way of looking at me, as though he was trying to see right inside my head. We’d had this instant connection, the kind I’d never had with anyone else – from the moment we’d met, I’d felt as though I could tell him anything.Almostanything. I’d held some stuff back, of course I had, which I was glad about now, but I thought I’d probably showed him more of who I really was in the month we were together than I had revealed to Nick in two years. Sometimes, with Nick, I sort of edited myself, because I knew he wouldn’t get it and I couldn’t be bothered to explain. Aidan always got it.
‘So, Maddie,’ said Sophia from the other end of the table. ‘Tell us about yourself. What do you do?’
I cleared my throat, pushing all thoughts of Aidan from my mind. This was my chance to show them that I was an equal for their doted-on son/father/ex. Somebody to be respected, not the pathetic pushover I thought I was probably currently coming across as.
‘I’m in TV,’ I said, smiling brightly around the table. ‘An assistant producer on a travel show.’
There, that didn’t sound bad. Lots of people wanted to work in TV, didn’t they, as Tim was forever telling me?
‘Interesting,’ piped up Peter, who so far hadn’t said more than a few words to me and instead had seemed much more interested in the contents of his glass. I noticed that the ice bucket had conveniently been placed just behind his left shoulder. ‘What do you do then, write scripts?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, there’s a lot of that. Then there’s researching locations, coming up with interesting new ways to present them to the audience. Making sure they’ve got all the legal jargon right. And I get to travel a lot, which is nice.’
‘I hadn’t realised you had such an exciting job,’ said Rosamund. ‘Nick hadn’t mentioned it.’
Yes! Finally I was getting somewhere. She definitely seemed impressed.
‘I’ve told you several times, Mummy. Maddie works at Holiday Shop, remember?’
I kicked his ankle. Honestly, what had he gone and said that for? Had I really needed to spell it out to him that I wanted to make my job sound more high-profile and alluring than it actually was? These people clearly wouldn’t watch Holiday Shop if it was the last channel on earth.
‘Ah …’ said Rosamund, smirking. ‘I do remember now. That package holiday thing, isn’t it? On one of those funny cable channels?’