Faith - Lesley Pearse [178]
Janet met her at the airport. She was a dumpy, middle-aged woman with a sweet face and greying hair, and she had a similar down-to-earth manner to Lena. As they drove round the Bay of Naples to Sorrento, she explained that the job was simple enough, cleaning rooms, changing beds and helping Carlo in the kitchen when needed.
Vincenzo’s in the Via Santo Paolo was a very old building dating back to the sixteenth century. It was a small, comfortable hotel with only twelve bedrooms, and the guests ate their breakfast down in the restaurant on the ground floor. Laura had a tiny, simply furnished room on the third floor and from the window she could just glimpse the sea over rooftops. Janet told her to go off and explore after she’d unpacked her suitcase.
Laura felt she had to go out, but she didn’t want to. It was very hot and the tall old buildings either side of the narrow cobbled streets around the hotel seemed almost to press in on her. She didn’t like the foreign kind of smells wafting around, or that she couldn’t understand what people were saying, and the hordes of tourists, who all seemed to be going the opposite way to her, kept pushing and elbowing her.
But she forced herself to keep going, keeping her head down and not meeting anyone’s eye. Then suddenly she stepped out of the shadow of the buildings to find herself at the top of a very steep lane, and unexpectedly, there below her was the sea and a pretty little harbour. She smiled involuntarily, and the cloud of greyness which had enveloped her for so long seemed to lift a little.
The work at the hotel was quite arduous. She was up serving breakfast at seven, and then cleaned the guests’ bedrooms and the bathrooms. They were messy, untidy people who left their clothes on the floor, covered every surface with toiletries and dumped wet towels on their beds. But she found satisfaction in making the rooms look nice again, and she could tell that Janet was impressed by her work. She had the whole afternoon off until six, and she spent that exploring, each day walking a different way until the pretty little town became as familiar as Edinburgh.
Her favourite place was the harbour. The beach to the right of it wasn’t very special, just a manmade one beneath the rocky cliffs, always crammed with sunbathers and noisy children, and she avoided that for fear of seeing boys who would remind her of Barney. But she could sit on a bench in the sunshine, well away from the beach, and watch the boats bobbing in the water, or the ferry coming back from the Isle of Capri.
But by the second or third week she found herself wanting to get away from people and craving silence. She found that just a couple of hours of complete peace in the afternoon seemed to make her calmer. One of her favourite walks was right along the Via Califano, a road going out of the town along the clifftop where there were no shops, only the odd hotel and a few sleepy little bars with terraces overlooking the sea where she could linger over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and enjoy the view.
It was in one of those places that she came to grips with what she was doing the day Barney died.
For a whole year she had never allowed herself to think about that. Barney came into her mind all the time in vivid flashes. It was as though she had a slide show in her head, but the pictures were not in chronological order. A glimpse of him in his first school uniform would be followed by one of him sitting in his high chair, or waving his arms and legs as she changed his nappy. Then suddenly she’d see him as he was just before he was snatched from her, a tall, gangly eleven-year-old, kicking a ball around the park. His trousers were always sliding down his slim hips, his shoelaces invariably untied, and when he smiled his nose wrinkled up and his front teeth were slightly crooked, something she’d intended to get put right.
Sometimes she cursed these pictures for bringing on a fresh wave of grief; sometimes they comforted her. But she blocked out the