Chapter Thirty-Nine
Legs still trembling, Caroline walked inside. The hallway of the suite was as large as the room she shared with Louise, the lounge beyond so gigantic that the furniture arrangements looked dwarfed in the enormous space. Her heels skidded a little on the elaborately inlaid marble floor. As she got her balance, she noticed that Santino did not turn back to help her, as he had always done on the island if she tripped in her flip-flops.
He was heading for the terrace: the sliding glass doors were standing open, and she remembered his often-expressed, vehement views about how Italians considered air-conditioning terrible for the health. If she had been feeling on stronger ground, she would have joked at the contradiction of the soft, humid, warm air around them, so much better for the lungs, and the fumes he was about to inhale; he was picking up a cigarette packet from the rattan table on the terrace.
But she couldn’t. She was too nervous to joke about anything.
There was a bottle of red wine on the table. Without asking, Santino poured Caroline a glass of wine and handed it to her, and that made her even more nervous, because it was as if he knew she was going to need it.
‘Sit,’ he said, gesturing at the white-cushioned armchair. As she did so, he tapped a cigarette out of the packet, lighting it with a Zippo he pulled from his pocket.
‘I want to tell you a story,’ he said. ‘Listen, please, for it is very important.’
There was no need for him to tell her that; she couldn’t have spoken a word. Her throat had closed up. She couldn’t even manage a sip of wine; she set the glass down on the table so that he would not see her hand shaking with nerves.
‘So six years ago, I am on holiday in Barbados, with Ilaria and Giova,’ he began.
Ilaria, Caroline knew, of course, was his dead wife. Instantly, Caroline assumed, at the mention of her name, that Santino was going to say that he needed time; that the passion on the island had been wonderful, crazy, but that now they were in the real world and he was back with his kids, he had realized that he needed to slow things right down. It dovetailed exactly with what she had been telling herself, the story she had created to explain his behaviour. Of course she would follow his lead, not introduce herself to the kids until he was ready, stay in the shadows if that was what he wanted, do anything not to lose him, not to be humiliated by the gleeful media coverage of her romantic downfall . . .
‘And one night at dinner at the hotel,’ Santino was continuing, ‘we feed Giova some of our food. Ilaria and I are very Italian, we believe that children should not eat different food from the adults, they must learn to have good palates. We teach that to all our boys.’
He was leaning against the terrace rail, not looking at Caroline as he talked and drew on his cigarette, but off into the night, over her shoulder.
‘But one bite that we give him – I will never forget, it is some mashed potato, and it has little bits of hazelnut in it – cazzo, a stupid thing, why would they do that? Ma lascia stare – so yes, there is hazelnut. And it turns out that Giova is allergic to nuts. He gets red, a rash, itchy, he starts to scratch his face. He’s only two and a half, he’s frightened, we are frightened. Ilaria starts to cry. I hold Giova’s hands to stop him scratching, but he cries and fights me and the rash is growing – it happens so fast, so fast – and Ilaria is calling for a doctor. We are screaming now, both of us, screaming for help – we don’t want to leave Giova but we need a doctor, we are desperate, we don’t know what to do –’
The terror of those moments could clearly be heard in Santino’s voice. Caroline had no idea where this was going; she knew Giovanni had survived, of course, but she was still on tenterhooks because she didn’t understand why it was so important for Santino to tell her this story now, of all times.
‘And then,’ Santino continued, ‘another hotel guest runs over to us, holding a pill for Giova to take. But she says the dose is too big, so she gets a steak knife and she cuts it up and gets some Coca-Cola so that he will want to swallow it and gives it to him. We are hysterical, sobbing. He is our only son, so young, and we are in panic, and she does everything. Everything.’
He drew a long breath, remembering the fear and panic of that evening, shaking his head in disbelief at how fast it had happened.
‘A doctor comes at last, but by that time Giova is breathing better and he doesn’t want to scratch his face so much any more. He tells us that the lady has saved Giova’s life by giving him an antihistamine. There is an injection the doctor can give, but Giova is still small, the injection is for adults, not children, and maybe it would have been too late, because with this allergy, the throat closes up very fast and Giova maybe chokes to death.’
Santino’s free hand clenched into a fist as he said these last words. He took another long breath, then slowly opened his fingers again, running his hand through his black silky hair. Only a few days ago, Caroline had been able to do that herself, twist her fingers into his thick mane, the sense of privilege so delicious it was almost overpowering. Now she would not have dared to touch him; there was a cold aura around him, a force field repelling contact, and that hurt like a bandage wrapped tightly around her torso, a pressure squeezing her lungs.
‘So, this woman, this hotel guest we do not know, she has saved our son’s life,’ he finished softly, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘I wonder if you can guess who this lady is, this angel from heaven who Ilaria and I will never be able to thank enough?’
Caroline actually jerked as if she had been punched in the ribcage, realization dawning on her.
‘Yes, I see you have guessed,’ Santino said. ‘She is called Lexy O’Brien. And a month ago, she rings me and she says she is trying to pull strings to get you on this show, and she asks me, if she manages it, will I do her a big favour? And before she tells me what it is, I say, Anything. I will do anything for the angel who saved my Giova’s life.’
He looked at Caroline directly for the first time since he had opened the door to her. There was compassion on his face now, and that was worse than anything. Much worse, say, than anger or contempt.
‘In Italy, the family is the most important thing,’ he said. ‘La mamma è sempre la mamma. I would have done this for Lexy in any case, but when she tells me that you have tried to come between her and Frank, parents of two children, I am horrified. How could you do that? You do not seem like a bad person, Carolina. But you have done this. You tried to take a husband away from a wife. And that is what I will say when they ask me in the interviews why I don’t want to see you any more. That I did not know, I did not understand, what you had done. But now I do.’
Lexy had thought of everything, including the simple and devastating explanation for Santino’s rejection of Caroline. She couldn’t even deny the truth of what he had just said. She dropped her eyes to the table to avoid his gaze, but what she was seeing was the television footage of Lexy trying to get into her own house, surrounded by paparazzi, entering the gate code over and over again before realizing that Frank, at Caroline’s very delicate but effective prompting, had changed it to bar his wife. Caroline remembered vividly the moment that it had dawned on Lexy what was happening, the sag of her shoulders, the paling of her cheeks, the long pause before she eventually turned back to her waiting car.
Without Caroline whispering in his ear, Frank would never have locked his wife out. They would almost certainly have reconciled that day. But Lexy, clearly, had spent the time since then not just drying out, giving up smoking and taking care of her own children, but analyzing her downfall and plotting to undermine Caroline just as Caroline had undermined her.
Caroline had been so flattered to be invited on Celebrity Island Survivor! She had thought it meant that she was becoming famous enough for people to know her name! But no, not at all. Even that had been taken away from her. She hadn’t got the show on her own merits, but through Lexy’s clever manoeuvrings.
‘Was any of it real?’ she heard herself ask the table in a tiny thread of a voice.
He was reflected in the glass top; she saw his shoulders rise and fall in one of the exaggerated Italian shrugs with which she was achingly familiar.
‘You are an attractive woman,’ he said. ‘It was not difficult to make love to you.’
‘Well,’ Caroline managed, still looking at the table. ‘That’s something, I suppose.’
She must have sat there for a whole minute before she realized that the conversation was over. Santino had nothing left to say, and nor did she. It took a little more time for her to gain the strength to push back her chair and stand up, and even then she used the edge of the table for support, her sweaty fingers leaving marks on the glass top.
‘Addio, Carolina,’ Santino said, stubbing out his second cigarette, watching her go with the same mortifying look of compassion in his black eyes.
He did not see her out. He left her to cross the sprawling expanse of living room on her own, the sound of her heels small, lonely clicks in the huge space, as if underlining her single status. From a door on the far side of the room Ilaria’s sister emerged, slim and tanned in an orange linen dress, her black hair pulled into a bun, her arms stacked with gold bracelets. Behind her were the two younger boys in pyjamas, clutching soft toys, clearly getting ready for bed. Giving Caroline the most cursory of glances, they bounded across the room in the direction of the terrace, calling:
‘Papa! Papa! Dove sei?’
The sister-in-law remained where she was, looking at Caroline, her silence indicating that she was waiting for Caroline to leave. As she resumed the long walk to the door, behind her she heard a happy family, the giggles and chatter of the small boys, Santino’s deeper voice laughing with them, his sister-in-law speaking in quick, beautifully articulated Italian, sounding indulgent but reproving: clearly, she was trying to get the children to bed, while they wanted to stay up and play with the father they hadn’t seen for weeks.
It sounded joyous, cosy, warm. With every step Caroline took, she felt more and more alone. She had been trying, she realized, first with Frank and then with Santino, to enter an already established family, to have the benefits without having done the work, to walk in and warm her hands at a fire someone else had built.
It was very cold, leaving that fire behind. Very cold indeed.
Her hotel room was empty. Louise was still partying happily downstairs, soaking up as much free food and booze as she could cram in. The air conditioner was running, the chilly room a perfect metaphor for Caroline’s current mental state. The door closed behind her, and she stood there in the dark, her key card in her hand, not reaching out to slide it into the slot that would activate the lights.
For a long time, she didn’t move at all. She just stood there, silently, in the darkened room, slowly, painfully, absorbing the full extent of the revenge which Lexy had inflicted upon her.