Clara dabs at her mouth with a napkin. ‘It’s a funny story,’ she says.
And it is. She tells them about the square, about the drawing. About her boyfriend and the year that followed, and the awkward audition that followed that. She doesn’t spare any details, which Enzo approves of. She gesticulates like an Italian, too, which gets her extra points. How did his son end up with someone so talkative? Seb is barely blinking, so fixated is he on her. His laugh, which is usually deployed sparingly, is out in full force where Clara is concerned.
‘More importantly,’ Clara says, glass of wine in hand, fixingEnzo and Helen with eyes as blue as the sea back home, ‘how did you two meet?’
Clara had seemed nervous when she’d first arrived, holding out a ludicrously large bunch of flowers, tripping over her words on her way up the stairs. We don’t shake hands here, Enzo had said, with a hug crushing enough to flatten the flowers. Enzo is a host. He’s also a storyteller. He flashes a mouthful of metal fillings, now, and begins. He remembers the years before Helen like a faded stack of postcards, hours spent lounging in the back corners of coffee bars and on the backs of Vespas in every fishing village from Pisciotta to Palinuro, long lunches with wine and mozzarella di bufala, wine and parmigiana di melanzane, wine and fritti misti fresh from the azure sea, and wine, wine, always more wine, wine-soaked trysts on the decks of patched-up boats and on the sunbeds of bleached-white lidos. He’d been grabbing a bite to eat with a friend in Paestum when he’d spotted a tall young history student from England, standing at the entrance of the ruins with a Leica camera dangling from her slender neck. He’d left the table mid-meal, crossed the road without looking and hailed the tourist. Her chestnut hair. Her almond eyes.
‘I’m a tour guide,’ he’d told her, flashing a smile with fewer fillings.
‘No, you’re not,’ Helen had said, returning her eyes to her map.
She’d be a tough nut to crack. ‘I could be.’
He’d stood under ancient columns and made things up, and Helen had been kind enough to humour him. They’d even posed for a picture, obligingly taken by a passer-by. That samepicture, now pinned to their fridge with a gaudy magnet made to look like Amalfi lemons. He plucks it from beneath the magnet, passes it to Clara. Clara’s eyes travel over the other photos, Italian family gatherings at which Seb makes silly faces with his cousin’s kids. She can’t help but smile.
‘Wasn’t I handsome?’ Enzo says, proudly.
‘Humble, too,’ Helen says.
‘I see the resemblance,’ Clara says.
‘Very handsome, then,’ Seb says, seriously.
‘Seb is too self-conscious to show off that much chest hair,’ Helen says. ‘Enzo likes to flaunt it, even if he hasn’t got it any more.’
Clara strokes Seb’s forearm, then takes his hand. It’s clear that she loves him, that she loves hearing his parents’ stories about him, tales taller than the platters of aperitivi piled up in front of them. She nods and she nods, fiddles anxiously with her cutlery. She cares what they think of her. Enzo can’t tell her that there’s no need to be nervous, that it’s clear from Seb’s face that she’ll always have a place at this table. And he won’t tell her that life isn’t always a postcard, because everyone knows it, and no one needs to hear it. Salerno might have been the sunnier option, but Helen’s burgeoning career, her friends and her family, they were all here. Enzo was just happy to follow her. Leicester had seemed grey at first, and her parents hadn’t exactly rolled out the red carpet. He’d struggled to find work as a foreigner with a flimsy grasp of the language, and Helen’s teaching position at the local comp could only stretch so far. But they’d managed. They’d built a life.
‘Where’s this?’ Clara says, to Seb.
She’s holding another polaroid. A teenage Seb standing at a stainless-steel sink, looking as serious as ever.
‘Downstairs,’ Seb says, with a grimace.
‘You used to work downstairs?’
‘If you could call it work,’ Enzo says. ‘He and Nimesh were as bad as each other.’
They say that there’s a person from every country in the world on Narborough Road. That was definitely Enzo’s experience of his adopted hometown, where an Italian could start a restaurant next door to a Sri Lankan and find a best friend in the process. Enzo and Viraj have always shared a love of feeding people, and Enzo has always loved feeding them here, under the very same roof as his restaurant below. When he’d first started circling the idea of opening his own place, Enzo had made it clear that it wouldn’t be what everyone expected: plastic tubs of Parmesan and comically oversized pepper mills, Enzo in a chef’s hat and pomodoro-spattered apron.Che schifo. His new friends had all raised their eyebrows when he’d decided on a fish-and-chip shop instead. But the place was still going strong, even after all these years, even after all Seb and Nimesh’s best attempts to ruin it through sheer gormlessness. Viraj wouldn’t employ his own son, even as a waiter, but Enzo was soft. Besides, those few years in which the three of them worked side by side in that kitchen might have been the best of his life. Seb heaving enormous sacks of potatoes into the industrial chipper, Nimesh forgetting to water down the acetic acid in their industrial-strength vinegar and almost causing a city-wide chemical burns epidemic. All three of them, pausing during the afternoon lull to shovel down battered sausages and chips, mushy peas andcurry sauce, this uniquely beige English slop that Enzo has never been able to get enough of.
Enzo wonders what Clara must think of this place, a family home above a fish shop with walls the colour of batter and a carpet that smells like reheated chips. Enzo wonders if his son ever wished for more.
‘What about your family?’ Enzo asks, his hand making circles in the air around her. ‘I imagine this is all very different to where you’re from.’
‘Don’t interrogate her,’ Seb says.
‘Let the lady speak,’ Enzo says.
‘The lady,’ Seb says, rubbing his forehead. ‘Christ.’
‘It’s fine,’ Clara says, squeezing Seb’s hand. ‘There’s not much to say,’ she says. ‘They definitely don’t cook as well as this.’
‘Don’t flatter him too much,’ Helen says. ‘He’ll never let you leave.’
‘Has Giuseppe cooked for you?’ Enzo says.
There’s a pause. Clara looks like she isn’t in on the joke. ‘Who’s Giuseppe?’
Seb isn’t one for blushing, but he looks like he could right now. He raises one hand. ‘That’s me.’
