‘Can’t wait to see that,’ Emily said.
Lou ran back downstairs to the bathroom to see how Toni was doing.
As she hurried, she thought that perhaps this was what her flight to Sicily was all about – it wasn’t about finding Angelo: it was about seeing her life from a distance.
With distance, she could see what was wrong and what part she’d played in that. Blaming other people – her mother, Ned, Oszkar and Bettina – was too easy. People treated you how you allowed them to treat you.
In the bathroom, Lou found that Toni had graduated to sitting on the lid of the toilet and was clearly now contemplating the rehydration salts. Toni held up her phone.
‘Bingo. The Angelo M painter is none other than Mr Mulraney. He emailed right back. He sent an address. He can see us tomorrow at noon, if we can make it.’
Lou gazed at her sister, who got to her feet shakily.
‘That is, he can see us ifIcan make it.’
Lou wondered ifshewould be able to make it. This was it: why they’d come to Sicily. Now that the meeting was set, she felt as shaky as her sister looked. But she said none of this. The new, no-nonsense Lou had to be courageous.
‘You’ll be fine, Toni,’ she said, fixing the pillows so that Toni was a little bit propped up. ‘I’ll take care of you. But don’t be stroppy or it’s all off.’
‘Get you,’ said Toni weakly.
‘Yeah, this is the new me,’ Lou joked. ‘Tough cookie extraordinaire.’
‘You’re too lovely to be tough,’ said Toni sinking into the embrace of the bed as if it was a lover.
‘Watch me,’ said her sister. ‘Just watch me.’
Chapter Nineteen
Lou woke, heart pounding, from a nightmare. Beside her, Toni slept the sound sleep of the exhausted food poisoning victim. Sweating and breathing fast, Lou pushed off their light duvet.
In her dream she’d been in her parents’ house, Valclusa, in Whitehaven: the house the way it had been before her mother had built the studio. Then Lillian used to sculpt in a big shed around the back. Dad had been there too. He was old in the nightmare: old, frail, with a drip stand alongside him as if he was still getting chemotherapy for the cancer that had killed him.
In dreamworld, Lillian was bright, vibrant and much younger than she was now, her lips glistening with that Moscow Red lipstick she liked.
‘Angelo won’t like you, you know,’ she’d been saying, her voice the taunting of the brattiest child in the school playground. ‘He won’t like you. Nobody likes you.’
You didn’t need a degree in psychotherapy to work out what it meant.
Lou went quietly downstairs in the moonlight and began to boil the kettle in the tiny kitchen. Camomile tea might help. Lou took her tea into the big main room. It was nearly dawn. She didn’t think she’d sleep again. The Barking Dog had been missing for the last few days on the island, but now she could feel it in the back of her head rising up again.
She could hear her mother’s voice from the nightmare:He won’t like you. Nobody likes you.
What if he didn’t ... ?
She had no idea if Angelo knew he’d fathered a child with Lillian, if he’d known that Lillian had been pregnant.
But, Lou thought with new clarity, if he had known, why had he not come looking for her?
Outside, the sky was lightening even though dawn must be some time off. She went into the little kitchen and made coffee.
Toni had said she was in love with the octagonal Moka coffee pot.
‘Much better than our huge machine,’ she said wryly.
Oliver had bought a giant steel coffee shop beast of a thing that needed regular servicing and possibly several baristas to run it.
Toni said she liked the coffee from the stove-top pot much better.
