Page 55 of Days You Were Mine

I get a little lost in my description.

‘Well, he’s tall and thin, with long dark hair and a romantic kind of face, angelic, a bit like a Botticelli painting.’

Rick is tittering, though the woman manages to keep a straight face.

‘He’s a musician, a singer and songwriter. He’s artistic. He wears shirts with bell sleeves and velvet suits and lots of scarves and jewellery.’

‘He might like a unisex fragrance?’

‘Nothing too feminine,’ I say.

‘But frankly nothing too masculine either,’ adds Rick, and this time the woman joins in with our laughter.

‘How about something Italian?’ she asks, and Rick and I, in unison, cry, ‘Perfect!’

‘He’s obsessed with Italy. We both are. We spent the summer outside Florence.’

She produces a beautiful turquoise bottle with a cobalt-blue lid.

‘This is Acqua di Parma, a cologne. Very fashionable in Italy and worn by women just as much as men.’

Rick and I inhale deeply.

‘Wonderful, smells like ferns,’ Rick says, ‘and lemons and cedar trees.’

‘It’s exactly right for him,’ I say, opening my purse to find the right amount of cash.

We wake up late on Christmas morning (no church, another luxury) and Jake insists on bringing me breakfast in bed: cappuccinos in polystyrene cups and fat slices of panettone from Bar Italia, which stays open every day of the year.

‘On the house with Luigi’s love,’ he says, getting in beside me.

He lifts the blankets and inches down to kiss my stomach.

‘Happy Christmas to you, baby,’ he says.

He counts up the months on his fingers.

‘Next Christmas you’ll be six months old. Imagine that. I wonder if we’ll still be here in this flat.’

‘We’ll never leave Soho, surely?’

‘Never. I can promise you that. Unless we move to Italy.’

It is a perfect day, just the two of us. While a chicken is roasting, we listen to classical music, Brahms first, his violin concerto, and then Vivaldi’sGloria. It reminds me of my father for a moment – anything choral and churchy always does – but I push away the image of my parents sitting down to a turkey alone. My father hogging an expensive bottle of wine, my mother cowering as he pours his third, fourth, fifth glass and the spectre of incandescence rears its head.

‘What were your Christmases like as a kid?’ I ask, without thinking, and beside me Jake goes still.

‘Well, that depends on where I was. Sometimes it was just me and my mum on our own and that was fine. But usually we were at my grandparents’ farm and quite often my mum left me there alone. She liked to get the sun at Christmas if she could afford it; she went to Spain, Morocco, the Canary Islands.’

I can sense the change in his breathing, and my own heart begins to pulse in return. I reach for his hand.

‘I’m never going to ask you to talk about things you don’t want to talk about.’

‘I know that.’

‘But sometimes I think it might help you to exorcise the past. And I would listen. I love you. And I want to help.’

‘All right,’ he says, and he gets up and walks over to our tree with its twinkling, flashing lights and its baubles the colours of Quality Street. He picks out a package, flat, square and wrapped in shiny red paper.

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