The morning after the party, just swinging my legs out of bed when the alarm went off felt like I’d exhausted my energy reserves for the day. It was incredible that before I’d married Nico, I never worried a jot about how late I went to bed, more afraid of missing out on an extra laugh with my mates or an outrageous antic that would be recounted for weeks than feeling a bit knackered the next day. Now though, I’d fallen into Nico’s rhythm of going to bed by ten-thirty. But the night before, we’d snuggled up watching films until late to make sure Nico wasn’t concussed. It was hard to believe that a post-midnight bedtime had left me quite so done in. I could only put it down to the exertion of dealing with the Farinellis en masse, with all their outright trickiness, not to mention their hidden undercurrents.

So once I’d sent the kids off to school and tried and failed to persuade Nico to stay at home to rest, I was hoping to have a quiet morning in the attic to finish off the final garments before we left for holiday.

But Anna had other ideas. She let herself in, then stood shouting in the hallway, ‘Helloooo? Anyone home?’

I’d been tempted to pull up the hatch to the workshop and hide up there with the suit jacket I was struggling to get right but in the end, I made my way down the steps. I wished I hadn’t bothered. Anna launched into telling me off for ‘letting Nico go to work’.

‘But Anna, how am I going to stop a forty-year-old man driving off in his car if that’s what he decides to do? He probably should have had a day at home but you know what he’s like about work. He was a bit sore, but he did seem all right.’

She sniffed and pursed her lips. ‘Massimo was so worried about Nico. He had a sleepless night over it.’

I didn’t know whether Anna said stuff like that to wind me up, but when I’d seen Massimo saunter out to his car that morning, he was whistling as though he’d had a fat eight-hour sleep then woken up to fresh coffee and croissants. And apart from a ‘You stopped seeing double yet?’ text, he hadn’t exactly been rushing round with the grapes and chocolates. I had a sneaking suspicion that Massimo, alpha male and sporting superstar, thought Nico had made a right old drama over nothing.

I’d just managed to shoo Anna out of the door and got my needle out again, when the doorbell went. I considered ignoring it but I thought I’d better check it wasn’t Nico on his last legs, crawling up to the front door on his hands and knees. As I peered out of the upstairs window, I could just see a glimpse of Lara’s beige sundress.

I sighed. No doubt she wanted to see how Nico was. She was a worrier at the best of times: I couldn’t leave her fretting away so I ran downstairs and invited her in.

She sat down for a coffee, and although she looked tired, there was a vigour, a determined energy about her that I didn’t often see, a brisk ‘things to get on with’ manner.

First on her checklist was Nico. ‘Has he been all right? His colour didn’t look great yesterday evening. I kept getting up in the night and looking out of the window to see if both of your cars were there. I was so worried you’d have to take him to hospital.’ She paused. ‘Massimo wanted to pop round first thing, but he thought you’d be too busy getting everyone ready for school.’

Personally, I thought Massimo hadn’t covered himself in repentant glory but Lara’s concern made up for him. I told her about Anna’s disapproval that I hadn’t locked Nico in the bedroom to make her laugh.

Despite not working, Lara always seemed to have something urgent to do, things that would never make it onto my list such as trying to recreate some fancy dish Massimo had eaten on one of his trips away. So I fully expected her to dash off after fifteen minutes on some ridiculous chore such as hunting down wild Alaskan salmon, organic grass-fed beef or some other delicacy you couldn’t buy down the road at the supermarket. But instead she fished about in her handbag and pulled out a piece of paper.

She looked at the floor. ‘I wondered if you were still happy to teach me to drive? I know I haven’t seemed very enthusiastic.’ She paused, then waved the paper at me. ‘But I’ve booked my theory for next month and I’m hoping to be driving by October.’

‘Oh my god! That’s brilliant! We’d better get you behind the wheel straight away.’ Even if I had to sew every evening until holiday, I needed to get her in that car before she got cold feet.

Lara was grinning like a kid on Christmas Eve, as though it was something she’d been planning and plotting for ages, just when I’d decided she’d lost interest. She really was a woman of surprises. I’d always yearned to be like that, dark and mysterious, a woman who men tried to read, to get a handle on. Instead I was the straightforward backdrop to everyone else’s complex and cunning ways. Maybe I just wasn’t bright enough to pull off that ‘now you see me, now you don’t’, second-guess me stuff.

Whenever I told Nico my worries that he would find me boring once he’d heard all my stories, he just laughed and said, ‘I don’t want to play games, Maggie. I love the fact that what you see is what you get. Stop doubting yourself. And me.’ And I’d feel a big buzz of contentment and resolve to stop expecting everything to go tits up. That usually lasted for a glorious half an hour before Anna came bowling in with a mention of Caitlin’s brilliant intellect or Francesca rushed to play on her phone when I was trying to empathise, telling her a story about when I was a teenager myself.

So the idea of taking Lara on secret little sorties in the car gave me a ridiculous amount of satisfaction as though somehow I wasn’t quite the predictable ‘good egg’ they all thought I was.

And that was the start of our cunning plan. For the last two weeks of July, we got into a routine of Lara slipping out of her back gate every morning after school drop off. I’d pick her up from the corner of the alley and like two runaways on a road trip, we’d drive out into the countryside with the radio blaring. As soon as we reached a bit of quiet open space, we’d swap seats. And yet again, Lara surprised me. I’d expected her to be easily discouraged, to display her defeatist attitude of ‘I knew I’d be rubbish, I told you I wouldn’t be any good.’ But in fact, she was a powerhouse of determination. Even when she hit the wrong pedal and almost shot into a ditch while I did my best not to scream, she didn’t panic. She simply switched off the ignition and worked through every step in a logical manner before having another go. Other people’s beeping and rude gestures didn’t even worry her. She just laughed and sometimes said the odd ‘sod off’ herself. It was a revelation to me that she wasn’t as strait-laced as she seemed. Her occasional bad language opened the floodgates on my own swearing, which I would then sweat and fret about later on, wondering how many times I had stuck my middle finger up at the various people who tooted at us. Lara didn’t seem to mind though. There was something carefree about her, as though our joint secret liberated her from something I couldn’t quite pinpoint.

29

LARA

We were flying to Italy on the first day of August. I’d left it to the last afternoon to pack, sitting on the carpet, scratching at the pile, willing myself to open the door to our walk-in attic and find the suitcases. A single click of a buckle would release a cloud of memories from previous holidays, a rush of na?ve expectations transformed into toxic accusations.

What would definitely get the holiday off to a bad start would be Massimo coming home and discovering that I was nowhere near ready, leading to one of his ‘Have you any idea how hard I work to keep your lazy arse in luxury?’ rants. He’d already flung down Sandro’s passport and said, ‘Don’t get any ideas.’

But now, with my mind scattering like a pack of rabbits hearing gunfire, it was difficult not to. So hard not to wonder what life could be like without Massimo and his moods, as variable as an unreliable thermostat. Instead, just like hundreds of times before, I squashed that train of thought and focused on anticipating every holiday need. I knew any oversight, any forgotten sunblock, hat or adapter would simply be further evidence of my ‘inherent stupidity’.