Stella and John married on the one-year anniversary of the day they met. It was a perfect April morning, the kind of morning that holds within its light and breath the promise of summer approaching. From her seat in the front pew, Lucia watched the trees behind the broad alter window. They cast flickering shadows across the whitewashed walls as their new leaves trembled in the shimmering morning. Tiny particles of dust which floated and turned in the hushed air were illuminated in this opalescence, making them twinkle like jewels. That was a fitting metaphor for marriage, Lucia thought, reaching to take her husband’s hand, marriage is a form of alchemy, transforming dust into diamonds, the lowly into the magical, the lost into the found. She took her handkerchief out of her bag and handed it to Tony. This was marriage too, sitting next to a man you have known for longer than half your life and knowing without looking at his face that he is silently weeping. Tony took the handkerchief and smiled bashfully at Lucia.
‘It’s just too beautiful,’ he said.
The following year, Caterina and Silvia were born. Stella and John and the twin girls moved into the flat above the ice cream parlour. Lucia and Tony moved to a little house a few streets away and walked every day to work in the shop. Cichella’s deep tap root that anchored it into the colliery grew and extended like the snaking pit tunnels that lengthened under the sea. While the girls were at school, Stella worked in the shop, as she had always wanted to do. After school, the girls would sit at the counter and drink their milkshakes, chattering wildly about their day: whose knee got grazed in PE, what the latest chapters of The Faraway Tree had revealed and whether they’d been lucky enough to have PINK custard with their chocolate sponge for lunch.
John continued to work at the pit, but more and more people were asking him to do carpentry jobs at the weekend. He began to wonder if he could start his own business. He found working for others a source of constant irritation. Like a recalcitrant child, he would constantly challenge and defy his bosses. He’d had several warnings: his hair was too long or he was repeatedly five minutes late for his shift. He never bothered to turn up for work meetings. When Stella chided him gently about these things, reminding him of his family commitments, he shrugged.
‘I tell you what, petal, five minutes in to one of those meetings I’d be guaranteed to be fired. My job’s safer this way, trust me.’
The night classes he took all those years ago had not led to university. That was a source of unarticulated disappointment. When they’d moved to the flat above the shop, he’d packed all his books and folders away in a battered suitcase and buried it in the loft behind the Christmas decorations. There wasn’t much room in the flat anyway, but more than that, the sight of the books deeply disturbed him. Their coloured spines, tatty and corrugated with wear, seemed to torment him with their dry superiority and their remembrance of discarded dreams. Still, John was not unhappy with his life. How could he be? He had so much. After work, he would walk up the street from the pit and sometimes he would ache for the moment he pushed the glass door of Cichella’s open and saw his family waiting for him. Stella would be behind the counter, an apron tried round her waist. The girls would be at the counter, dishevelled from school, socks askew, cardigans buttoned incorrectly, their faces sticky with pink milkshake moustaches.
For Stella, life was anything but small. Her year was orchestrated around the rhythm of family life and the ice cream parlour. September ushered in the school year with new Clarks shoes and handfuls of freshly sharpened pencils for the girls. At Christmas time, the shop glowed with tinsel and multi-coloured string lights, warding off the deepening darkness of the Northern midwinter. In Spring and Summer, Cichella’s hummed with happy industry. On a warm day, Stella would prop open the front door and the joyful sounds of prattling children, the steamy hiss of the coffee machine and the chimes of spoons in sundae glasses would froth out into the street. It was the small things in life that brought the most joy, Stella thought: the changing of the seasons, butter melting on toast, a bed made with clean, crisp sheets, a walk by the sea. Life was built with layer upon layer of small pleasures like these, the way a pearl is formed from a simple grain of sand.
Every Thursday afternoon, Stella would leave her parents in the shop and visit the colliery library. At first, she restricted herself to the shelves of children’s stories or cookery books. One afternoon though, she found herself drawn to the small art section. She remembered the Renaissance painting she’d loved from school: Giotto’s The Lamentation of Christ. She had never forgotten it. She started searching the titles to see if there was a book about Italian art or about Giotto himself. She lifted a book called The History of Art from the shelf. Like all the books in the art section, it was big and heavy, as if weighted with the gravity of the works held within.
Stella was transfixed, flicking through the coloured plates in the book when Miss Partridge, the elderly librarian, scuttled over. She was dressed in assorted shades of brown, from her serviceable beige twin-set and drab tweed skirt to her wrinkled American Tan tights.
‘Can I help you find anything, Mrs Coxon?’ she asked. As she peered eagerly over her spectacles with her startling conker hued eyes, she reminded Stella of a round bustling owl, kindly and wise.
‘Oh, Miss Partridge, I was looking for something on Italian art or the Renaissance. Giotto, perhaps. I don’t suppose you have anything?’ Stella felt herself flushing, as if she might be asked to leave the library for making such a grandiose and ridiculous request. Miss Partridge though, seemed utterly delighted with the inquiry. She puffed up her chest and sailed across the room like a stately galleon.
‘Come to the desk, Mrs Coxon. We’ll talk. I think I’ll be able to find you what you need.’
After that, every Thursday, Stella visited the library to see the books that Miss Partridge had tracked down for her. It was one of the highlights of her week, an occasion to be savoured because it was hers and hers alone. In the flat, she hid the books under the cushions of the sofa and in precious moments alone, she would pour over them, her fingers lightly brushing the glossy illustrated plates. She could not have explained why she kept the books secret from her family. Only that the books to her were hypnotically alluring, beautiful: and ever so slightly dangerous.
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