The next day Stella climbed the dusty path to the top of the colliery where her mother was working on their allotment. It was a luminous September day. The sun was high and heavy in a cloudless sky. To Stella, the honeyed days of autumn were the loveliest of the year. Such days were finite and were therefore tinted with a wistful, melancholic hue. Winter was approaching, with its cruel, stark and colourless beauty. Each golden Autumn day should be cherished, savoured, remembered. Stella breathed deeply as she walked. She could smell the richness of black, loamy soil, the tartness of sun-warmed blackberries and the freshness of the sea air. Today, she would tell her mother about John. She stood still for a moment to enjoy the sweetness of the moment. She felt weightless. Buoyantly free, like a child’s balloon drifting, unanchored. Somewhere on the allotments a garden fire was burning, and the taste of wood smoke in the soft Autumn air was so delicious Stella felt she might cry with the beauty of it all. She wanted to hug this moment, this day, to her chest, tightly, protectively as if it was a favourite book. She wanted never to forget. Never to forget it could be possible to be so full of hope.
Lucia was harvesting potatoes when Stella arrived, crouching next to billowing waves of green. Next to her feet, a basket was already laden with creamy tubers speckled with mud. Even at the allotment, Lucia was unmistakable. Her dress was a deep French blue printed with dazzling crimson poppies. The colours flickered through the gently swaying greenery like a tropical bird fluttering through a rainforest. Stella felt overwhelmed by the surging swell of love she felt for her mother.
‘Mamma!’ she shouted and waved.
Her mother stood up, arching her back and rolling her shoulders to ease away the stiffness of her endeavour.
‘How is the harvest?’
Her mother smiled. ‘Wonderful . . . if you like brown food. We have potatoes, parsnips and onions. The only things that grow well in this place are the things that are snug under the ground. What does that tell you?’
Lucia was forever endeavouring to grow Italian fruits and vegetables. Family members from Italy would send seeds: peppers, courgettes, aubergines, pumpkins. Every year, Lucia would tenderly plant and nurture them. She tried them in well cultivated beds and in terracotta pots of all shapes and sizes. She even covered them with a make-shift cold-frame fashioned from wood and the reclaimed rear window of an Austin Cambridge. Nothing seemed to work. The wind from the sea was too harsh, too cold. Everything withered and died. Only the hardy native plants survived.
‘What are you doing here, Stella? I thought you were in the shop.’
‘It’s quiet. I wanted to enjoy this lovely day so I thought I’d come and see you. Why don’t you take a break, Mamma?’
They sat on the steps of the ramshackle shed Tony had built with sheets of corrugated iron and timber from the beach. Lucia poured cups of milky coffee from an olive-green flask. She closed her eyes and lifted her face to the sun like a flower. At that moment, Stella wanted to give her mother something, to offer her something, something benevolent and tender.
‘You look so beautiful in that dress, Mamma,’ she said.
Lucia opened her eyes and looked at her daughter. She felt a momentary wariness, as delicate and ephemeral as the heartbeat of a bird. Stella was leaning against the flaking door of the shed watching her mother with a transparent intensity. She seemed to glow in the softness of the September light. She has something to say, Lucia thought.
‘This dress? Oh, this dress is old, look at this,’ she showed Stella the fraying cuffs and patched skirt.
Lucia looked across the slate roofs of the colliery houses to the sea which was as flat and grey as molten pewter.
‘Even on a lovely day like this, the sea looks dull and dirty.’ Lucia said flatly.
‘It’s so still today though. It’s usually churning, full of frothy white horses,’ Stella replied. John was at work. He could be out there now, underneath the strangely somnolent sea. She should speak now. She should tell her mother about John, but suddenly her stomach was as fluttery as an attic full of bats. She closed her eyes, so as not see her mother’s unarticulated disapproval.
‘Mamma. I have something to tell you. I’ve met someone. A boy. A man, really.’
Lucia felt all breath leave her body and a trickle of sticky hot sweat inch down her back. She had suspected as much, of course. A mother notices everything, observes everything, tallies everything. All those afternoons and evenings when her daughter rushed out of the door, she’d seemed a little too excited and woozy just to be meeting girlfriends. A little too artfully dressed and made up, as she floated through the flat in a fug of Max Factor powder and Yardley perfume. And when she returned, she’d seemed flushed and giddy, dreamily vague about where she’d been and what she’d done. Lucia was silent.
‘He’s called John. He’s a joiner at the pit. He just lives a few streets away. You’ve probably seen him in the shop, he does pop in every now and then. The thing is Mamma, I love him and I want you and Papa to meet him because, well, it’s serious.’
‘In what way serious, Stella?’ Lucia asked with a manufactured composure that unsettled her daughter.
‘Well, just that we love each other and we want to be together. Forever. I mean, we’ve not spoken of marriage or anything yet, but . . .’ her voice dwindled. Suddenly her sentences and her thoughts had become disconnected and she knew she would never find the words to explain to her mother what she simply knew to be true.
‘Love is hard,’ her mother said simply.
Stella didn’t know how to counter that. For her, love was not hard at all. What was hard was the blurry nothingness of her existence before John. She smiled to herself as she remembered the night she had met him. The electrical charge that had surged through her body at the sight of him in his sombre black overcoat, studying the shop’s menu. The moment was so heady, so visceral even the memory of it could make her stomach seesaw wildly. But buried within the delicious pleasure of that memory, a dark thought loomed and grew malignantly. It was the picture of sad little Edie Waters, scurrying out of the ice cream parlour behind Frank like an abused puppy. How weak,Stella had thought at the time. How sad to think that he is all you deserve. She breathed deeply. John was not like Frank. She was not like Edie. So why did the barbed memory of that moment play over and over in her mind like a stuck record?
Lucia sighed and stood up. She looked at her daughter’s face, which a second earlier had glowed with certainty and optimism. Now it looked anxious and strained. I have failed her, she thought. I have failed her in many ways. To be a parent is to fail over and over again. She must choose her words carefully. She must try to understand.
‘I am sure John is a wonderful young man, Stella. He must be to have earned your love and respect. Tell me, what do you think your future will be?’
Stella paused. She was at a crossroads. There were the answers her mother wanted to hear, that she wanted to go to college and continue her education. That she wanted to travel and move away from the smallness of the colliery. That she would not settle down and have children until she had seen something of the world and had learnt all about it and herself. She looked at her mother, she was looking down at her with such a bare intensity, she knew she had to speak her truth.
‘I want to work in the ice cream parlour. I want to open the shop on winter’s mornings and hear the bell on the back of the door jangle, and the lights flicker and buzz. I want to make knickerbocker glories and weigh out bags of liquorice and barley sugar and listen to customers’ crazy stories about greyhounds and varicose veins, like Papa does. I want to marry John and have our children running about in the shop stuffing themselves with Papa’s tutti frutti ice cream. Mamma. I was so happy as a child there. I loved the ice cream parlour. I still do. I want to live in the colliery because I know everyone’s name and it feels safe, it feels like home. I want to be with you every day. I want you to see your grandchildren every day. I want a simple life. I want a life like you and Papa have.’
Lucia sat back on down on the cold concrete step. She put her arm around her daughter and rested her head on Stella’s shoulder.
‘Is that enough for you? It’s such a small life.’
‘I don’t think it sounds small at all. I think it sounds full magical. Is your life small, Mamma?’
Lucia sighed and sat up straight. She ran her hands through a pot of silver stemmed lavender on the step and deeply inhaled the waves of medicinal blue scent.
‘Beautiful,’ she sighed, ‘I was fourteen when I left school. I was sixteen when I met your father. By eighteen, I was a wife and mother.’
‘What were your dreams, Mamma?’
‘I used to dream I made and sold my own clothes in my own little shop. When I was young, I would go and stare through the window of Signora Ricci’s dress shop. Signor Ricci was the most chic lady in the neighbourhood. She always had a tape measure round her neck. Her shop was filled with the most beautiful fabrics and ribbons and buttons. I wanted to be just like her.’
Stella was silent. All her life she would remember the grace, the intimacy of that moment: sitting with her mother in soft September air scented with wood-smoke and lavender. When she looked back, the moment became as profound and meaningful to Stella as a final goodbye. Which in a way it was. That lush, golden day was the last day of Stella’s childhood. That was something they both understood.
‘Can I ask you a question, Mamma?’ Stella asked.
‘Go on, my darling.’
‘If you had the chance to go back. To have your own shop like Signora Ricci. Would you do it? Would you swap all this? All you have here?’ Stella gestured to the sprawling colliery streets, the wild grassy headlands, the smooth silver sea.
Lucia looked at her daughter with an extraordinary clarity.
‘Yes. I would swap all of this. The colliery. Our life here. The shop. That I would swap in a heartbeat, if I could go back. But I would never swap you, or your Papa. Never. You are worth more than all the silk dresses and ribbons and shell buttons in the world.’
She stood up briskly and picked up the basket of potatoes and held out her hand to Stella.
‘Come on. Let’s go. I want to talk about what we will cook for John when he comes for a meal. I am thinking we’ll do something traditional, from Napoli, yes?’
Stella stood up obediently and nodded her head. She found she could not speak. She was silenced by an overwhelming tenderness and compassion for her mother.
‘I love you. I love you. I love you,’ she repeated in her head as they made their way down the hill to the warren of narrow colliery streets.
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