AllFreeNovel
Share Us
JUSTINA WAS OUT in the garden when the doorbell rang. She’d been writing a song in the autumn sunshine and she glanced at Nico, sleeping peacefully in his pram, before going into the house to see who was there. Maybe Dante had forgotten his key. She hoped so. He wasn’t due home for another couple of hours, but perhaps he’d managed to cut his meeting short. He was getting much better at doing that, she thought. They could take the baby for a walk to the nearby park—maybe stop off at that new coffee shop on the way home and sit at one of the tables outside.
But the figure standing on the doorstep of the Spitalfields house was completely unexpected, and Justina stood stock-still as all kinds of conflicting emotions flooded over her. She felt resignation and slight irritation—but, interestingly, the thing she felt most of all was love as she looked at her mother.
As usual, Elaine Perry was dressed in a style which was slightly too young for her years. Her admittedly very good figure was squeezed into a pair of jeans, and she was wearing a soft leather jacket which matched her caramel-
coloured boots. From her narrow wrists clanged a symphony of narrow silver bands, and the enormous handbag she carried was one which was regularly toted by supermodels and celebrities.
‘Hello, Jus,’ she said.
Justina screwed up her nose. ‘Well, this is a surprise,’ she said drily. ‘Where’s Jacques?’
‘It’s Jean, actually, and he’s...’ The older woman gave a helpless kind of shrug. ‘He’s history.’
‘Right.’ Justina digested this. ‘So, are you coming in? Or are you just passing?’
There was a moment of hesitation while Elaine Perry delved around in her bag before holding up a package. It was wrapped in shiny paper and covered with images of dancing blue teddy bears. ‘I’d like to come in, if I may. I’ve brought a present for the baby.’ She looked almost sheepish as she met Justina’s eyes. ‘For...Nico.’
Justina swallowed. There was so much she could have said in response to that. The old Justina might have commented that she’d thought her mother was too young to be a grandmother, but she had learned to think before she spoke. She had learned so much. People changed, Dante had said—and he was right. People did. She remembered what he’d said about forgiveness, too. That people couldn’t be free to move on into the future if they stayed shackled to the resentments of the past. She recognised that this wasn’t so much a toy that her mother was holding out towards her as an olive branch.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘Because I know he’d just love to meet you.’
‘Would he?’
And for the first time in her life Justina saw her mother through adult eyes. She saw the vulnerability in her face and the thick make-up which failed to cover up the deepening wrinkles. And her heart turned over.
‘Of course he would, Mum,’ she said softly. ‘It’s true he’s not quite nine months old, but on some subliminal level he’s bound to recognise you because you’re family.’
Her mother was still there when Dante came home a couple of hours later, to be greeted by the rather amazing sight of two women sitting close together in the garden, the older one cradling his son.
He wondered what was going on, and then Justina looked up at him. ‘Oh, you’re home,’ she said simply.
He smiled into her eyes and all his questions were forgotten. How could he possibly think straight when she was looking at him like that? ‘Si, tesoro. I’m home.’
Elaine Perry stayed for dinner. She told them—falteringly at first—that she was tired. Tired of being the mistress of some rich man who didn’t value her. She told them how hard it was to keep up the perpetual fight to look younger than her years. It was only when she got on to the subject of leg-waxing that Justina quietly changed the subject and gave her mother another hug—though she couldn’t help but worry about what the future held for someone who had only ever been reliant on the largesse of men.
It was several weeks later, when Justina and Dante were lying in bed, that she turned to him, running her fingers through his thick dark hair the way she loved to do.
‘Dante?’ she murmured.
‘Mmm?
‘You know my flat in Clerkenwell?’
‘I certainly do.’ He drifted a finger over her belly and felt her wriggle. ‘Are you going to tell me that you’re planning to sign it over to your mother?’
‘You’re a mind-reader!’
He smiled. ‘It makes sense. She needs somewhere to live which doesn’t come with the price-tag of a man—and we’ll never live there as a family, will we?’
She shook her head, but his words thrilled her indescribably. As a family. ‘No,’ she said, then hesitated. ‘And while we’re on the subject of property...’
‘You don’t like this house?’
‘I do. It’s just...’
‘Mmm?’
‘It’s not really where I would have chosen to live. And we didn’t choose it together, did we? In fact, it was chosen when we were going through that horrible phase which I’d rather forget. I mean, if you—’
