‘It’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever seen,’ I reply. And I feel gutted, as gutted as the ruined church and its tower, destroyed by bombers in the Second World War, except part of it still stands (the beauty remains) and I have nothing still standing, just my memories of the past and the pain of the present and how much I hate myself for not being someone else, anyone else, who might be loved.

CHAPTER 12

Summer 1975

My mother left us when I was five and Angela was three. Dad was two years into his architecture degree. He told us, at first, that she’d gone away for a while on a ‘little holiday’.

‘And when will she come back from her holiday?’ Angela had asked. Dad had picked us up from school and nursery – which was a surprise – and we’d had a snack of digestive biscuits and a Nesquik chocolate milk, and we were clinging on to Dad’s legs once he’d told us about Mum’s Holiday – like street urchins – while I patted Angela on the back with a consolatory hand. I’d overheard Dad on the phone to Nonna about an hour and a half before and had caught the words ‘flighty’ and ‘hated to be tied down’ and ‘struggled with everything’, amongst many more in Italian. I knew they were talking about Mum. Hadn’t she told us herself how she’d run away from home three times as a child – with a cheese sandwich, an apple and a clean hankie in a tin lunchbox, each time – and once from school, one Thursday lunchtime, to go and watch The Beatles’ rooftop concert at Savile Row?

‘I really don’t know,’ Dad said, and that was that, for a while, but later I began to see my mother as a character in a series of vignettes – or as one of those cardboard dolls you cut out from a book and put paper outfits on by folding tabs around them – because every time she came back to us, she was a slightly different version of herself.