Cones in hand, we wandered in the vague direction of the Duomo. I hadn’t seen it close up yet, but you seemed to be able to spot it poking out above the rooftops wherever you were in the city. I breathed in the scent of Florence, which was warm and sweet with a punch of something floral. I wanted to stay here for ever, wafting around its narrow streets like a modern-day Lucy Honeychurch.
‘Shall we take a slow walk back to the hotel?’ I suggested.
Daisy looked less than enthusiastic. ‘If you want.’
I took a huge mouthful of my gelato, wanting to finish it before we got back. Somehow eating a messy ice cream in the street in the middle of the day seemed like something Rosamund would disapprove of.
‘Oh my God,’ I groaned. ‘This is literally the most amazing thing I’ve ever tasted.’
Daisy tutted. ‘Do you have to be so loud about it?’ she said, strutting off ahead.
I’d said the wrong thing again. Or had just been uncool, which came as no surprise to me. As I watched Daisy walk about two metres ahead of me, bubbling away inside of me were doubts about how I was going to navigate the next five days.
Although I’d had time to change into a floral sun dress, flat sandals and my favourite oversized cardigan, I was desperate to get back to the hotel so I could trawl through the contents of my suitcase and work out what the hell I was going to wear for dinner that night. It was my chance to make a better impression. To show Nick’s family that I wasn’t just some shabby girl he had picked up in a bar, but a professional, confident, relatively successful woman. Then again, how was I supposed to compete with the likes of Sophia, who I suspected would look good in an actual plastic bin bag? Not that she would be seen dead in anything that hadn’t cost a small fortune, I imagined. I betshedidn’t have a wardrobe full of H&M sale items and Topshop pieces from – no word of a lie – about fifteen years ago.
I followed Daisy up an achingly pretty street which I thought would take us in the general direction of the hotel – if I wasn’t trying to keep up with her, I would have stopped to look at the market to my left. A particularly enticing stall had fake designer handbags on display.
‘Hold on, Daisy!’ I called after her. ‘Don’t walk too far ahead.’
She scowled at me over her shoulder and slowed her pace a miniscule amount. I was about to run to catch her up when my phone rang. I picked up without thinking.
‘Maddie! Good, you answered. I thought I might have to email you.’
Fuck. If I’d clocked it was Tim calling, I’d have let it go to voicemail. What did he want?
‘How’s Florence?’ he asked faux-casually.
‘I’ve only just got here,’ I said, keen to remind him that I was officially on annual leave and that being my boss didn’t give him the right to contact me whenever he felt like it.
Just because I worked in TV and because, according to Tim, ‘thousands of people’ would kill for my job (doubtful), it didn’t mean I had to be on call twenty-four/seven. Yes, I often had to work late, or do long hours if I was away on a shoot. I got it, and that was fine. But we worked on a low-budget travel channel, it wasn’t like we were making cutting-edge documentaries here. If I wanted a few days off, I should be able to take them.
‘I wanted to remind you to pick up some generic Florence footage,’ said Tim, in the breezy tone he adopted whenever he was asking me to do something that deep down he knew was completely unreasonable. ‘It saves us doing a separate trip and we can use it to teaseCity Break Week.’
Was he seriously expecting me to work while I was on holiday? For free? Perhaps I should threaten to call HR (although both Tim and I knew I would never do any such thing).
‘I’m not sure I’ll have time,’ I told him. ‘Nick’s family have put together quite a full itinerary. And this is, as you know, my annual leave …’
‘I’m sure you can negotiate an hour here and there to do some filming, Maddie. Going above and beyond is part of this job, I’m afraid. I haven’t had a proper holiday for years,’ he said.
Which was a blatant lie.
‘New York didn’t count then?’ I asked.
I didn’t usually answer back because, well, you know – I needed my job. But, seriously, did he have selective memory syndrome?
‘That was a … family emergency,’ replied Tim.
It wasn’t. I’d seen pictures of him on a rowing boat in Central Park having a whale of a time.
I checked that Daisy was still in sight and was pleased to note she had stopped to take a photo of a pretty church. This was promising – perhaps she was taking a bit of interest in Florence after all. We could bond over being first-time visitors to the city.
‘Look, I’ll see what I can do,’ I said, trying to fob him off.
‘You do that. Keep me posted, yeah?’
I ended the call and threw my phone into the depths of my bag so that I wouldn’t hear it ring even if he did call back. I wanted Tim out of sight and out of mind, which was surely the point of taking a holiday from work. And if Tim had been nicer, if I felt like the company appreciated all my hard work, I might have been more inclined to be amenable. After all, the thought of spending an hour or two on my own shooting pretty footage of the Arno was actually quite appealing. But I was dispensable as far as Holiday Shop were concerned, I knew I was. I’d been stuck in the same assistant producer position for a while now and had been overlooked for promotion more times than I could mention. I thought that maybe it was because I didn’t big myself up enough, like some of the other assistant producers, and because I was never the loudest in the room. People didn’t seem to notice the good work I was doing. And that had been OK for a while, flying under the radar, so to speak, which had basically been my technique for getting through adolescence. My time had been split between my mum, who was preoccupied with her new twin babies (my now-teenaged half-sisters), and my dad, who had been so under the thumb of his new wife/ex-mistress, Sharon, that my visits there had felt increasingly awkward as time went on. But deep down,I had this desperate desire to succeed. To be noticed. To be excellent at something and applauded for it. I wanted to be revered for my work, my creativity, my passion, not for my ‘hilarious’ banter in office meetings or for my excellent sucking-up skills.
‘Right,’ I said to Daisy, who was tentatively licking her gelato as though it was going to poison her. Honestly, how had she managed to make it last this long? I’d wolfed mine down in about two minutes flat. ‘Hotel’s just up there on the left.’