She was endlessly fascinated by his foreignness, especially his use of Italian words and expressions. The day she first heard ‘Assolutamente niente’ she was in seventh heaven.
‘It means “absolutely nothing”,’ she explained to Laura, for perhaps the tenth time.
‘Yes, darling, I know what it means.’
‘Doesn’t it sound lovely? Assolutamente niente. Assolutamente niente.’
‘If I hear that expression once more,’ she seethed to Gino, ‘I shall commit murder.’
‘Poor Nikki,’ he grinned.
‘Not her. You! This is all your fault.’
At school Nikki boasted of her Italian friend, to such good effect that the geography teacher enquired, via Mrs Baxter, whether Gino would give a talk one afternoon.
‘Me?’ he demanded hilariously. ‘A teacher?’
‘You don’t have to teach anything,’ Nikki hastened to reassure him. ‘Just talk about Italy, and how everything’s got music and colour, and there are lots of bandits—’
‘Bandits?’
‘Aren’t there bandits?’ she asked, crestfallen.
‘Assolutamente niente!’ he said firmly, and she giggled.
‘Not just one little bandit?’ she pleaded.
‘Not even half a bandit, you little devil.’
‘Oh, please.’
It ended, as it was bound to, with him giving his good-natured shrug and agreeing to do what she wanted. He got the afternoon off, and he turned up at the school soon after lunch. He had no idea what he was going to talk about, except that he drew the line at bandits.
Inspiration came when he discovered the pupils were studying Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. After that he talked about Verona, and the house that purported to be where the Capulets had lived, complete with a real balcony.
The pupils were impressed, especially the older girls who sighed over his good looks. Nikki, who could claim him as a real friend, became the heroine of the hour. It was her proudest moment.
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER that Gino began giving Nikki what he called ‘history lessons’, but which seemed to concentrate almost entirely on the most bloodthirsty aspects of Italy’s past.
‘Isn’t she a little young to be learning about Lucrezia Borgia?’ Laura asked.
‘Why? Lucrezia’s great fun.’
‘I don’t suppose her victims thought so. How many is she supposed to have poisoned?’
Gino grinned. ‘Between you and me, she probably never poisoned anyone. But don’t tell Nikki. She’d be very disappointed.’
Now that he was earning, Gino had increased the rent he paid Laura. She tried to protest, but he said, ‘Silenzio!’ with a tone that was unusually imperious for him, and refused to discuss the matter further.
He slipped easily into the life of the boarding house. He was a good listener, always ready to lend a sympathetic ear, and was soon in possession of all the details of the feud between Claudia and Bert. At the best they maintained an armed truce. At the worst they went long periods without speaking. Nikki, who got on famously with both combatants, was adept at taking messages between them.
‘Claudia, Bert says did you eat the last cup cake?’
‘Bert, Claudia says she was doing you a favour because your waistline—’
‘Claudia, Bert says—’
And so on. In time, Gino took his own share of messages. He said it made him feel part of the family.
He also set himself to be useful around the house, mending, changing fuses, sometimes cooking the supper.
Three nights a week Laura went out to work, leaving Nikki in the care of the sisters, or Mrs Baxter. Gino would usually spend these evenings doing a little modest carpentry. He’d discovered that Laura tried to economise by buying flat-packed, self-assembly furniture. The plan never worked because she had no gift for putting things together. Since Bert and Fred were equally useless with their hands the house was awash with incomplete items.
Gino went rapidly through three small chests of drawers, to be put in bedrooms, to the infinite gratitude of the occupants, one wardrobe and two bookshelves.
The bookshelves went in the living room where the ‘family’ congregated to watch television. Nikki was there, going through a photo album, but she looked up to admire.
‘You’ve got the shelves all the same space apart,’ she said, awed by this mark of genius.
‘It’s not that difficult.’
‘Well, Mummy can’t do it.’
Gino grinned. ‘I’d gathered that.’
He got to his feet, brushed himself down and came to look at what she was doing.
‘Hey, who’s that?’ he asked suddenly.
He was pointing at a picture of a young girl in jeans and shirt, with flowing fair hair swirling around her as she did a dance that was clearly energetic. She looked a bit wild, and bit mad, and totally happy.
‘Is that who I think it is?’ he asked incredulously.
‘That was Mummy,’ Nikki said, speaking, in the manner of children, as though her mother’s earlier self was somebody else, now deceased.
‘You mean it is Mummy,’ Gino suggested.
‘No, she doesn’t look like that. But she did then. That was before I knew her.’
‘Before time began,’ Gino said through twitching lips.
He studied the girl again. She was young; heart-breakingly so to anyone who knew how life had treated her later. She’d been perhaps seventeen, and she’d had no idea. She’d just known that life would go exactly as she wanted, the way you always knew that at seventeen.
The next set of pictures came from her dancing career. There she was in leotards, concentrating intensely on the steps she was practising. Then she was dressed up to perform in glittering costumes.
They turned her into almost another person, beautiful, sophisticated, at home in the spotlight. She had Wow! legs he noticed with interest, long and elegant as a dancer’s should be. Her waist and hips were also Wow!
Then there were the wedding pictures. She’d been a joyous bride, gazing at her new husband with radiant eyes as they joined hands on the cake.
He hadn’t been looking at her, Gino noted. He was facing the camera with a brilliant grin, as if inviting onlookers to admire his undoubted good looks.
‘Full of himself,’ Gino thought. Then honesty made him add, ‘A bit like I was.’
The recognition didn’t make him feel any kinder towards the man. That lovely, fresh, life-enhancing girl deserved better.
The pictures went on. There was Laura, sitting up in bed, holding baby Nikki, while her husband sat with his arm around both of them, bursting with pride.
‘That’s my daddy,’ Nikki said proudly.
She turned more pages and Gino saw her as a toddler, learning to walk, her hands held by her father. Picture after picture showed them together, and now he could see how she was growing to resemble him. She had his dark hair, his brown eyes, his wide mouth.
One picture showed them looking straight at each other, eyes meeting, sharing smiles of delight