‘You’re much too late for that, I’m afraid,’ said Rosamund, giving Nick a pointed stare.
‘Oh don’t give them a hard time, Ros,’ said the tan-trousered goddess, getting up and circumnavigating the table to give me an awkward, socially distanced embrace. It was like the hugging equivalent of an air kiss. Had I just coined the phrase ‘air hug’? ‘I’m Sophia,’ she announced dramatically, elongating her vowels to perfection. ‘Nick’s ex-wife.’
I swallowed hard, letting myself hope for a second that I’d misheard. Because why on earth would Nick’s ex-wife be here? And if I hadn’t imagined it and this stunning woman was in fact his ex, why hadn’t he warned me?
I smiled at Sophia as authentically as I could manage andthen glared at Nick, hoping to telepathically convey that this was not OK. This was not OKat all.
Nick was completely oblivious, of course, and continued his overenthusiastic greetings with aplomb, launching himself at Daisy, his fourteen-year-old daughter who I’d actually met once before. She’d been staying with Nick for a couple of weeks over the summer holidays last year and he’d thought that it would be a brilliant idea for us to meet, ensuing in a disastrous trip to the theatre where Daisy had barely said a word to me all night, had glowered through the entire performance (an admittedly very pretentious take onHamlet) and then had refused point-blank to let me sit in the front seat on the drive home.
‘Nice to see you again, Daisy,’ I said.
She grunted a hello and wiggled her fingers in my direction. I supposed that was a start. Now that Nick and I were engaged, it felt even more important that we got along. I had several missions for this weekend (making Rosamund like me suddenly seemed even more daunting than I’d built it up to be), and one of them was to get off on a better foot with Daisy. She resented me for marrying her dad, I got that – divorce was never easy on the kids, I knew that better than anyone. But I had to win her over and this trip could be the perfect time to start.
As I saw Sophia say something out of the side of her mouth to Rosamund, I began to feel the familiar prickle of self-doubt. Were they wondering what Nick was thinking, getting engaged to somebody who was clearly ‘not one of them’? Were they the sort of people who would deem me not properly English because I was of mixed heritage and my dad was from St Lucia? I started imagining all the ways in which they could think I wasn’t good enough for Nick and my stomach swirled with anxiety.
I twisted my engagement ring back and forth on my finger again, reminding myself that Nick thought I was good enough and that that was all that mattered. Not that he was my favourite person right now, by any means – he could have let me smarten myself up before bringing me to face this firing squad of family members, who were looking at me as though I was some kind of alien. And he didn’t want to get me started on the fact his ex was here!
‘Can I go out for a walk?’ Daisy asked her mum in the same whiny tone I remembered from the ill-fated theatre trip.
‘No, you can’t, because you don’t know Florence and, knowing you, you’ll get lost,’ snapped Sophia.
Daisy rolled her eyes. ‘Mum, I live in London. I’m sure I can find my way around a city that’s basically about a tenth of the size.’
‘Italian men are very sleazy, you know,’ piped up Peter, who didn’t seem to care that he was loudly spouting unfair cultural generalisations when there were potentially quite a lot of Italian men within earshot. ‘They’ll be fawning all over you the second you step outside the hotel doors.’
‘Don’t encourage her, Peter, she’d probably quite like that,’ said Sophia.
I felt for Daisy in that moment – no wonder she was always miserable if she had to put up with passive-aggressive comments like that twenty-four/seven. Sophia had custody of Daisy, but from what I could gather, they clashed constantly. Nick hadn’t told me much about his marriage to Sophia, except that it had lasted seven years and that he’d been unhappy for most of it and that it had been nasty for a while, at the end. I hadn’t pushed him further at the time, but now I wished I had. What had drawn him to me, I wondered, given that I was possibly the polar opposite ofthe elegant, blonde, immaculately groomed Sophia? Or was that precisely it – that he’d been so damaged by whatever had happened between the two of them that he’d actively gone out looking for someone who was nothing like her? Although judging by the fact she was here on the trip, she was clearly still very much a part of the family in a way that I was already beginning to worry I’d never be.
‘You haven’t been to Florence before either, have you, Maddie?’ piped up Rosamund, just as I was about to flag down a waiter and order myself a desperately needed large glass of wine. ‘Would it be too much to ask for you to take Daisy out for a little stroll? It’ll be a good chance for you both to get your bearings.’
I mean, since I’d just been travelling for twenty-four hours and hadn’t even seen my room yet, going for a stroll wasn’t exactly top of my agenda.
‘Oh good idea,’ said Nick, traitor that he was. ‘You can acclimatise to Florence, Mads. She’s never even been to Italy,’ he explained to the table, who all laughed. Loudly. As though the concept was hilarious.
‘That’s not true, actually. I’ve been to Rome and Naples,’ I protested.
‘Work trips don’t count,’ said Nick.
The whole table snickered in agreement.
I wanted to add that I may not have spent my summers in Italy like this lot, but I had been to Vietnam and Costa Rica, places they’d probably only read about in theSunday Timestravel supplement. Then again, if there wasn’t a private beach club or a golf course, they probably wouldn’t be interested.
‘I should probably unpack first,’ I said, eyeballing Nick.
‘You can do that when you get back, darling,’ he replied, settling in next to Rosamund and pouring himself a glass of very attractive-looking alcohol.
‘Well, then,’ announced Rosamund, patting Nick’s knee, ‘let’s get some champagne in to celebrate your arrival.’
‘And your anniversary,’ crooned Nick.
Stalling for time, I pounced on the chance to engage Rosamund in conversation. That way, hopefully they’d forget about this ‘stroll’ altogether, or at least I might have time to down a glass of wine before I set off. ‘I hear you’ve been married for forty-five years,’ I said, a stab of jealousy pricking my stomach quite unexpectedly.
I felt that, sometimes, and it was irrational because, for all I knew, it could have been forty-five massively unhappy years. But it still hurt that my parents had only given it eight years before acrimoniously calling it a day. I wondered, often, what would have happened if they’d tried a bit harder to make it work. Whether they’d considered, even for a moment, staying together for my sake.
‘Congratulations!’ I said, hoping Rosamund hadn’t noticed that my expression had slipped, just for a second or two. ‘What an achievement!’
Rosamund nodded, the trace of a smile on her alabaster face. For some reason, I was fascinated by her hair, which was swept starkly back from the hairline, reminding me of paintings I’d seen of Mary Queen of Scots.