‘I think Leonie’s right,’ Mum says later, over breakfast. ‘I think we should go. To L’Angelo.’
The Angel. Dad’s hotel is called The Angel.
My stomach curls at the thought of walking in there without Dad. Of not hearing his stories – he told some of the same stories every single year. One about walking into a room where a woman was just walking out of the shower, naked. ‘I don’t know which of us screamed louder.’ One about smashing a tray full of glasses on the marble floor and having to stay an extra shift to get it all cleared up. One about a famous actor’s wedding where he and the bride stayed in a much fancier hotel, but he put all his family up at L’Angelo.
‘I do too,’ Elyse says, and I have to pull myself back from my memories. ‘I keep thinking about what Leonie said – that we might not all come back again, together. I want to drink to Dad. At his hotel.’
Mum nods, her cheeks pink and her eyes shining. ‘It’ll be hard,’ she says. ‘I know. But I think we should do it anyway.’
I don’t. I don’t think I can. I swallow, trying to make the words come out of my mouth, but then Leonie says, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Milly.’
I shake my head. I do. If they’re going, I have to go. I know that.
‘No, it’s okay,’ I say, eventually. ‘I’ll come.’
L’Angelo’s entrance is just a door between two shops on a narrow pedestrianised street. But it’s an incredibly glamorous door: all white marble and gold trimmings and monogrammed tile on the floor. Once, when Leonie was a toddler, she refused to go inside. She stood with her back pressed to the window of the jeweller’s opposite with her eyes wide and her thumb in her mouth, shaking her head. Dad had to carry her in in the end. I feel like doing the same now. I don’t want to go inside – and Mum and my sisters are just standing in front of the door, staring. I half hope they’ve changed their minds too and we can just go back to San Georgio and try again next year. Maybe.
‘Come on,’ Mum says, eventually, her voice sounding strained.
As soon as we’re inside, the hotel’s distinctive scent hits me. For years, I’d never smelled it anywhere else, but then someone at work bought Mum an amber candle for Christmas and it immediately made our house smell like L’Angelo. It smells warm and sort of dreamy. I love it.
There’s an enormous mirror down one side of the narrow corridor and I drop my head so I’m not tempted to look at my reflection. And then the corridor opens out into the wide foyer with its yellow-and-white striped wallpaper and glass-encased staircase.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ Leonie mumbles. ‘I’d forgotten.’
The woman on the reception desk – she’s young and I don’t recognise her – smiles brightly and asks if she can help, but Mum tells her we’re just here for a drink and we head over to the bar on the far left. The bar is part of the foyer, but is darker and low-lit. The yellow striped wallpaper is replaced with dark wood panelling and the floor is carpeted in a deep red. We sink into the brown leather chairs and I let myself breathe, as if the hardest part is over.
Mum reaches for the drinks menu in the middle of the low coffee table and I can see that her hands are shaking. I realise I’m digging my fingers into the leather arms of the chair and so I pull my hands away and tuck them under my thighs.
‘What do you girls want to drink?’ Mum asks, passing the menu to Elyse, who glances at it and passes it to me.
When we first came, we used to get chocolate milk and it always tasted so much better than chocolate milk at home. But for a few years now, Mum and Dad let us have what Dad always called ‘a proper grown-up drink’ and we’d each try something different every year.
I stare at the list of drinks: Aperol Spritz, Bloody Mary – which is what Mum always has; she says the L’Angelo Bloody Mary is the best she’s ever had – Bellini, Campari, Martini. I kind of want a chocolate milk.
‘What are you having?’ Elyse asks Mum as I pass the menu to Leonie.
‘I’m going to get a negroni,’ Mum says. Her voice sounds wrong. Like she had to concentrate to get the words out. Dad always got a negroni.
‘Me too,’ Elyse says.
‘And me,’ Leonie says, putting the menu back on the table.
I can’t speak, so I just nod.
The waiter comes over – again, a young man I’ve never seen before – and takes our order and we’re still sitting in silence when he brings the drinks: four tumblers of the bright orange liquid over ice, a curl of orange peel decorating each rim, plus little bowls of crisps and pistachios. Dad always hogged the pistachios.
Mum leans forward and picks up her drink and so Elyse, Leonie and I do too. We clink our glasses without speaking. I take a sip, wincing at the bitterness and Leonie says, ‘Should we say something? I feel like we should say something.’
‘The first time we came here,’ Mum says. ‘When we weren’t sure if we’d work – he was here, I had another year at university and then med school and neither of us really thought long distance …’ She shakes her head and sips her drink. ‘And I hadn’t been sure that he was right to come to Rome. I thought maybe he should have stayed at uni. Stayed with me. And then we came here and he was just … He was so comfortable. He made everyone laugh. Everyone loved him. He was so happy here. And I knew that he was right. He was really good at doing things that made him happy. I always loved that about him.’ Her voice cracks and she looks down at her drink.
‘My best memory is the time he came and took me out of school,’ Elyse says. ‘When I was about thirteen? I’d had breakfast with him that morning and I was really dreading school – you remember when I had that fight with Rachel and she wasn’t talking to me? I got to school and I was in DT and Mr Mahoney came in and said I had to go to the office. And all the way there I was expecting it to be Rachel’s mum. But when I got there it was Dad. And we walked out of school and got in the car and we went to the Sheraton near Heathrow. The bar’s got a swimming pool and Dad had brought my costume and we swam – you can swim up to the bar, which blew my mind at the time – and then we just hung out all day. Until it was time to go home.’
‘I can’t believe you never told us that!’ Leonie says.
‘I didn’t even know about that,’ Mum says, smiling. ‘That’s lovely.’
‘Mine was after we got Mr Berry,’ Leonie says.
Mr Berry was a rabbit we got for Christmas. He was in a box under the tree in the morning and we could see it moving and white fluff poking out through the holes in the sides.
‘Not when we first got him – even though that was amazing – but after, I don’t know when. It might even have been that first night. I woke up in the night and went downstairs cos I wanted to see if he was okay. Well, I wanted to cuddle him really, but you said I wasn’t allowed.’
Mum nods. ‘You were quite an aggressive cuddler.’
‘I got the step-stool to open the back door. And I was already thinking it had been a bad idea, but I wanted to be brave and do it anyway. And then Dad came out. And I started crying cos I knew I shouldn’t have been there and also cos I really, really wanted to see Mr Berry. And Dad opened the door and brought Mr Berry in and we sat in the lounge and we cuddle him together. It was great.’ She smiles at us all. ‘What about you, Mil?’
‘You know about mine,’ I say. ‘The mixtape.’ Dad bought me a Walkman one Christmas, calling it a ‘retro classic’ and he made me a mixtape of all his favourite songs to go with it.
‘Yeah, we already know about that one,’ Elyse says. ‘You’ll have to think of something else. Something we don’t know.’
I swirl my drink around, the chunks of ice clinking together, but I can’t think of anything. I know there’s more – I know there are lots – but my mind feels foggy.
‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I’ll think about –’
I’m interrupted by a cry of ‘Bella!’ and I look up and see Mimo heading towards us. Mimo worked here with Dad, but left a couple of years ago. Mum starts to stand up, but he gently pushes her back into her seat and tuts at her, before picking up her hand and kissing the back of it.
‘Look at you!’ he says, beaming. ‘All so beau-ti-ful! And how you have grown!’ He smiles from Elyse to Leonie to me. ‘I’m contentissimo you are here!’
‘Are you working here again, Mimo?’ Mum asks, smiling up at him.
He pouts, shaking his head. ‘No. Very sadly, no. My job went poof!’ He mimes an explosion. ‘And you? Do you stay here?’ He looks around. ‘And where is Dominic?’
I curl forwards in my seat, as if I’ve been punched.
‘Oh,’ I hear Mum say. ‘Oh.’
I stare down at the red carpet, at my feet in my flip-flops; the pink varnish on my toenails has started to chip. I think about Leonie’s black varnish and her plan to write on her nails with chalk.
‘Mimo,’ I hear Mum say and I can tell she’s crying.
‘Oh, no,’ Mimo says. ‘Oh, no, no.’
In the taxi back to San Georgio, Mum sits in the front, crying quietly. Leonie’s face is red and blotchy, Elyse is staring down at her phone, texting frantically, but I can see her hands are shaking.
Mimo had pulled a chair over and sat down with us, holding Mum’s hand in both of his while she told him how Dad had gone to sleep one night and just not woken up the next morning. How it was a heart attack, no warning, he probably hadn’t known anything about it. Mimo had cried and ordered himself a whiskey and downed it in one and then said over and over how sorry he was. How sorry that Dad had died, how sorry he hadn’t known, how sorry he’d upset us all.
He and Mum eventually exchanged numbers and he called us a cab and we left.
Leonie rests her head on my shoulder. ‘This is my fault,’ she says quietly against my neck.
I shake my head, but I can’t speak. My throat feels tight and my heart is actually hurting; I’m holding my hand against my chest. People keep saying it will get easier. But how? How is it ever going to get easier? Dad’s heart killed him and broke all of ours.