Learning by Heart (34 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Cooke

BOOK: Learning by Heart

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Cora put her hand, briefly, on Zeph’s, felt slight resistance and trailed her fingers away. In that same second’s flash, she thought of Pietro’s hand on hers, and pain flickered in her throat, her chest. ‘Your hair colour is the same,’ she said quietly. ‘Your eyes.’

‘Do I remind you of him?’ Zeph asked. Her voice was full of trepidation. ‘Did you think of him every time you saw me?’

‘Oh, no,’ Cora reassured her. ‘No, no.’ She tried to think how she could explain it. ‘I worried about it before you were born,’ she said. ‘I worried that Richard would be reminded. But in the end it didn’t matter. You were Richard’s baby, Richard’s child. He loved you to distraction. There was nothing he wouldn’t have done for you, and he wasn’t bitter. He was incapable of that.’

There were so many pictures in her mind: Richard carrying Zeph, newly born, on the day they left hospital, folding the satin-edged blanket carefully so that the baby would not be cold; Richard pacing the floor to soothe his daughter during the night; Richard wheeling her in a pushchair through town, his face alight with pride. He had been Zeph’s slave from the first.

Cora frowned a little, then glanced away. ‘We never mentioned Pietro,’ she said. She noticed Zeph’s surprise. ‘Although sometimes I thought of him,’ she admitted. ‘On special days. When you learned to ride. He would have been proud of that, because his family had horses, and I know that he rode as a boy. And when you learned to swim. You were just like him about the sea. Those things …’

‘You loved him.’ Zeph was watching Cora’s face.

Mother and daughter gazed at each other for several seconds.

‘Yes,’ Cora said. ‘And when I read about him later, when I saw what he had become, what talent he had, I was proud of him. But as for the book … for myself, for Richard, I wished it hadn’t been written.’

‘It was you,’ Zeph whispered. ‘So it was true. Your story.’

‘Yes,’ Cora admitted. She took a long, slow breath and looked away, down the slope of trees, past the farm, the distant thread of the lane to the hills on the far side of the valley, showing as the merest line of green. ‘But whatever Pietro wrote about us afterwards, you must understand one thing, darling. You must remember this above anything else. I loved your father more.’

They stood facing each other in the centre of Richard’s orchard, under the lines of naked trees, for some time. Then Zeph took her mother’s hand and squeezed it.

Together, without a word, they turned and walked up the hill in the direction Nick had taken, towards the woods.

Postscript

She came out of the house at first light and made her way to the sea. This morning, as every morning since she had got there a year ago, she took off her clothes, laying them in a small, neat pile on the smooth stones at the water’s edge.

Cora wouldn’t swim for long: even in the summer she would feel cold quickly. But she struck out in long, even strokes from the shore, then lay on her back, relishing the sun on her face. From the ocean, she could see the roof of the cottage, and the garden, now terraced after her labours in the winter, planted with fig trees, almonds and lemons. It would be years before they matured enough to bear a heavy crop, but she didn’t mind. Zeph and Nick would have the benefit of it and, after them, Joshua and his sister.

The baby had been born in the spring, and the family had come out to see her after Nick had finished his script, travelling by car and taking the ferry from Naples, as she and Richard had so many years ago. It was the first time that Zeph and Nick had seen the house; the first time that Zeph had been able to put a picture to Pietro’s country and his passions. The two women had gone alone together to Enna and stood hand in hand on Good Friday on the Via Roma, watching the processions and crossing the square together at midnight.

Nick had helped the last of the contractors to lay the stone paths alongside the terraces, grinning at the achievement when it was done. He was used to it. The orchards at the farm were far more work than this.

On the last day of their visit, Cora had planted another rose, a red one, in the shade at the opposite end of the house. A young rose, which raced in green haste towards the roof in the months afterwards. And they pruned the white, now more of a tree than a single rose, its thick stem twisted, and the roses themselves a mere scattering of petals in the branches.

Cora swam to the shallows now and looked back up the hill.

Sometimes, when the light was brightening, like this, she thought she saw him coming towards her. She thought she heard Pietro’s voice, his laughter.

She closed her eyes and heard him reading to her in those lost days, the only days that they had had to themselves.

‘Non vo’ che da tal nodo Amor mi scioligia,’ he had read to her.

Love will not loose this knot
.

As she got out of the water, she felt the sun on her back and stopped, luxuriating in the warmth.

He had given her this year: this year in the winter of her life, when the light burned brightest of all.

About the Author

Elizabeth Cooke lives in Dorset in southern England and is the author of fifteen novels, many of which she wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth McGregor, as well as a work of nonfiction,
The Damnation of John Donellan: A Mysterious Case of Death and Scandal in Georgian England
. Acclaimed for her vivid, emotionally powerful storytelling and rigorous historical accuracy, Cooke has developed an international reputation. She is best known for her novels
Rutherford Park
and
The Ice Child
. Her work has been translated into numerous languages.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-5040-0690-3

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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