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That evening, Sabrina joined Marielle in Big Moon for a glass of wine, some cheese and company.
‘We have a lovely farm shop nearby,’ Marielle explained, loading a water biscuit with some buttery, crumbly Wensleydale. ‘I always spend far too much in it. Teddy buys his cheese there too for the restaurant. He won’t use any cheap ingredients. He couldn’t cut a corner, that boy, if his life depended on it and I hope it’s not the undoing of him.’
‘It has a very happy air, the restaurant,’ said Sabrina. She’d picked up on that as soon as she’d walked in through the door. But something in her brain clicked in and began looking at it through an analytical eye and decided, though she could appreciate why it was a popular place, there was definite room for improvement.
‘Sal had Teddy working in the kitchen with him before he could talk and he loved it. Apart from a spell when he wanted to be the goalkeeper for SSC Napoli and a brain surgeon, he never wanted to do anything other than have his own restaurant.’ Marielle laughed at the memory of young Teddy with his toy doctor’s case and his makeshift hospital in his bedroom. ‘Teddy’s was always booked out; people travel for miles to eat there. Probably why those horrible people think there are rich pickings to be had. They make me sick.’ Marielle drained her glass and while she was thinking she’d better slow down, she was reaching for a top-up at the same time. She’d had nearly a full glass before she’d asked Sabrina to come through.
‘Flick seems to have her head screwed on.’
‘Doesn’t she just,’ replied Marielle. ‘We all love Flick. She’s wonderful, and so bright. She’s had a gap year to earn some money and in September she’ll be off to university doing business studies. We’ll miss her but it’s only right and proper that she go.’
‘You said she was your cousin’s daughter?’
‘Yes. My cousin Cilla.’
Marielle took a long drink. The wine and the chat were taking the edge off a not too great a day. How dare that despicable Stirling woman get the police involved.
‘Her mum was my mum’s sister. When my auntie died, Cilla would have had to go into care if my parents hadn’t taken her in. It would have happened sooner or later because if Janet hadn’t died of a drug overdose, she would have ended up in prison.’ Out of all her friends, only Sylvie knew that detail, and Marielle had no idea why she had just told it to a relative stranger rather than to those who were closest to her. ‘I was eleven, Cilla was four when she came to live with us. I was so excited about having a little sister in the beginning.’ She sighed then, in such a way that Sabrina could tell her idealistic expectations hadn’t quite turned out the way she thought they would.
‘She was like a blonde, blue-eyed Shirley Temple, butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth, like a china doll. My parents tried to make up for everything she’d lost and it felt to me as if their whole world revolved around her.’
‘That must have been hard on you, being an only child and then suddenly having to share,’ said Sabrina.
‘It was,’ said Marielle, then she realised she must be coming over as resentful and unkind. ‘Ignore me, Sabrina.’ The wine was loosening her tongue in a way she didn’t like.
‘No, please go on,’ urged Sabrina because it sounded like whatever was inside Marielle needed to come out.
‘I shouldn’t be saying these things,’ said Marielle, gulping back more wine. ‘Yes, it hurt. I wasn’t supposed to say anything because I was “the grown-up one who hadn’t known anything other than a nice bedroom and lots of toys”.’
‘Well you weren’t exactly grown up at eleven,’ said Sabrina. ‘I would have thought you needed more love at that time, not less.’
‘She used to lie. Oh god did she lie. They’d believe her before me and I’d be the one who got the slap. And I remember one Easter they bought her an egg bigger than mine. Isn’t that petty of me to have stored that in my head for fifty years?’
‘The fact you have stored it up for fifty years says it was important to you, Marielle. It’s the papercuts that hurt the most.’
Marielle hadn’t even told Sylvie all thissilly stuffthat she’d kept hidden because she didn’t want to be judged as an awful person. The fact that Sabrina seemed togetit made her feel vindicated in a way she didn’t think possible, and she was beyond grateful that her deeply buried pain was seen to have some validity.
A tear slid down Marielle’s cheek and she dashed it away too late to not be seen. There was so much more that could come out: how one year when her school prizegiving had clashed with Cilla’s play, her mother had gone to the latter. No one had been there to see her pick up her award for excellence and though her cup had pride of place in the sitting room, the shine had been taken away.
‘Did you keep in touch with your family when you went to live in Italy?’ asked Sabrina, ready to cut the questions because she could see Marielle was upset.
‘Yes, we kept in touch. And they came over occasionally to visit. They doted on Teddy of course and it was lovely to see but I wanted some of that for myself.’
Tears, thick as syrup, were trickling down Marielle’s cheeks now and she couldn’t wipe them away fast enough.They felt hot and sour, as if they’d been inside her too long and fermented.
‘When I came back to live here because my mother wasn’t well, she told me one day that she was sorry if I’d ever felt pushed out, that she’d done a lot of thinking over the years about why I’d taken off at just seventeen. We’re all a lot wiser in hindsight though, aren’t we? I never told her it was because I didn’t feel loved. I didn’t want to hurt her.’
Sabrina could well imagine that. Marielle had kept the weight on her own shoulders rather than offload it. She was one of life’s givers, that was clear.
‘Cilla had a very short-lived marriage. He took off long before Flick was born and then he died soon after, before they could even start the divorce, so she copped for the whole of his estate. Then when Flick arrived, Cilla said she couldn’t cope alone with her so rather than palm her off on child minders, we looked after her a lot of the time.’
‘Blimey, Marielle, did you ever have any time to yourself?’
Marielle shook her head. ‘Flick was such an easy baby, no hardship at all. Sal adored her. Sometimes she felt as much my own child as Teddy was, though I was always very careful to make sure he knew he was my number one.’
Marielle took another drink, then another.
‘Sal left me well provided for,’ she said after a thoughtful pause. ‘Our house was way too big for one so I bought this place and a holiday flat to rent out, even though Flick’s staying there at the moment because she didn’t want to live with her mother’s new boyfriend. Mum left half of everything to me and half to Cilla, no surprise there, but she still wasn’t satisfied. She took mum’s engagement and wedding rings, even though she denied it. Iknowshe has them. It was pure greed.Iwas her daughter. They were precious.’
