She loved when he spoke to her in Italian. He was fluent because his grandmother had taught him.
‘The others didn’t want to learn but I’m a painter and every painter wants to go to Italy, right?’
At weekends, they’d sometimes spend a whole day in bed in the tiny cottage he was renting from one of the farmers outside the town. Gloria loved those times in bed, feeling Angelo’s hands on her skin. She felt beautiful in his arms, in a way she’d never felt before.
‘You make me feel loved, beautiful,’ she said one day, sitting on the bed with Angelo behind her, both of them naked, staring into the mirror, his arms around her caressing her naked shoulder and her naked breasts.
‘I would like to paint you like this,’ he said.
‘Angelo, I think my parents would have a heart attack.’
‘They must know what we are doing here,carissima,’ he said.
‘I think we’re operating on a don’t-know-don’t-tell basis,’ Gloria said wisely. ‘Both of my parents are pragmatists. They have to be after years of serving the town. But still, they would prefer to see me ...’ She stopped. She’d been about to saymarried.The revolution of the sixties and seventies had been slow to reach Whitehaven. Her parents would not acknowledge that their daughter was sleeping with a man she wasn’t married to.
But Angelo had never mentioned marriage or indeed anything long term. Gloria accepted this. She knew he wanted to travel the world and paint, and she thought that perhaps she might go with him. It was 1973. It was a different world. People did not have to get married to live together. People had children outside wedlock. All these things were possible.
Angelo, being an artist, was not bound by the constraints of the time that she thought about. He made sketches of her and Gloria loved the way he portrayed her body. She had never thought herself in any way beautiful. And yet, in Angelo’s eyes, with his fingers flying over the page, sketching her, she was.
Of course it could not last. She’d known.
Lillian had noticed. Lillian who had her own man and yet wanted everyone’s eyes on her, as if she could only exist when she was the brightest star in the firmament, the one everyone gazed at.
‘I see you spending a lot of time with Angelo,’ she said silkily one evening at the Coopers’ as they sat around the table for dinner. She and Mrs Cooper had been discussing bridesmaids’ dresses for Bob and Lillian’s forthcoming wedding. It was to be the end of August, a Saturday, and then they were going to travel to Paris for their honeymoon.
Lillian’s plans were for a wedding the like of which Whitehaven had never seen. Her own family, the Foyles, had been pushed into having the wedding in Whitehaven. Lillian had no desire to marry in the small country town in Kerry that she came from. She had no respect for her decent farming parents and preferred to get married from the doctor’s house in Whitehaven.
Lillian’s grand plans included an expensive and sleekly beautiful wedding gown for herself.
Gloria knew that the bridesmaids, of which she was one, were to be clad in pouffy dresses in giant florals so as not to take from the beauty of the bride.
‘Angelo’s a very interesting person,’ went on Lillian.
‘Yes, he is,’ said Gloria politely.
She had tried her best, but she found it hard to get on well with Lillian. No matter how many overtures of friendship she made, Lillian wasn’t interested in being nice to her future sister-in-law. It was as if Lillian was jealous of her, Gloria thought, and as to why that was, Gloria had no idea.
‘He’s very talented,’ said Lillian idly. ‘Lots of sex appeal.’
Dr Cooper looked over his spectacles at his future daughter-in-law as if to say, ‘We do not discuss such things at this dinner table,’ but Lillian, characteristically, didn’t appear to notice the froideur.
‘He has such a way with the ladies,’ she went on as if wildly amused at such a thought. ‘We had some tourists in the studio the other day. He was all over them. It’s the Italian thing. He’s half-Italian or something. They can’t help themselves. They’ll flirt with anyone.’
‘A quarter Italian,’ said Gloria and regretted it instantly.
‘Really? So you do know him well,’ Lillian said.
Gloria flushed, and under the table she clenched one fist so that her fingernails stuck into her palms. She would not respond. Lillian was taunting her.
The summer solstice was when it all went wrong. A group of people decided to hold a celebration out at Etain beach, a tiny curve of white sands named for the Celtic goddess of the summer solstice.
Quite a lot of people in Whitehaven were outraged at the idea.
‘All that pagan carrying on,’ raged the Coopers’ neighbour, Mrs O’Brien. ‘It’s not right. I don’t know why the bishops don’t put their foot down and ban it! Far from Celtic festivals that lot of young pups were reared.’
Since Mrs O’Brien disapproved of singing, disco dancing and the heathen carry on of horoscopes, her views meant nothing to the younger people.
There was going to be a big party with the bonfire to celebrate the solstice, with drinks and some traditional music and nobody managed to put a stop to it in time.
