Formalities completed, the man called a boy who took her suitcase and led her up some stairs, along a corridor and finally to her room. He opened the door and then stepped aside to let her enter first. It was a beautiful space, again decorated mainly in white with pops of blue and pink in the cushions and bedspread, and a tall glass vase containing a single woody stem of purple bougainvillea. The window did indeed look out across the sparkling Ionian Sea.
Cecily dug in her purse for a tip for the boy, but he did not wait for one and simply let himself out, closing the door quietly behind him.
What would happen next? she wondered.
She had been summoned. She was here. And now she would just have to wait.
6
ENGLAND
Lily scrolled through the online university website. You could do free courses in so many different subjects. Consumer Behaviour and Psychology. An Introduction to Cryptography. Digital Wellness. What even was that? An Introduction to HR. Maybe she should take that and then she would be able to impress Felicity with her newly discovered knowledge. Actually, what was the point? She probably wouldn’t understand it and she definitely wouldn’t be able to pick up from a free course what Felicity had learned from nearly fifteen years in the job.
Perhaps she should try something that neither of her sisters knew anything about. Her eyes settled on a course entitled ‘The Importance of Play in Everyday Life’. Well, Felicity definitely didn’t know much about that, Lily thought wryly, and then reprimanded herself. Her sister had many other strengths. Lily clicked on the link. An image of a middle-aged woman waving her arms in the air and grinning as if she had just been given the answer to the secret of life filled the screen. Lily ran her eyes down the programme and saw that most of it was what she considered to be common sense, and yet the course would take three hours a week for seven weeks to complete. What could there possibly be to talk about for all that time? There was so much about life that Lily didn’t know.
‘You should stop worrying about it,’ her husband Marco had said once in one of their very many conversations about what Lily considered to be her inadequacies. ‘You don’t have to go to university to understand life. Look at me! I’m a success, no?’
Lily had to agree. Marco had come to England from a village outside Ancona to work in his uncle’s pizzeria when he was just sixteen, and now he ran a small chain of his own restaurants.
‘You are a success,’ she said. ‘Of course you are, but no one in your family expected you to do anything else. I am the only one in my family not to go to university. It’s different for me.’
Marco had shaken his head. ‘What you have, it’s more important. We made children and you care for them. This is the most important job in the whole world. Felicity has only Hugo and she gives him to someone else to look after and Julia has no one. Tell me, what would you rather have, our babies or a boring job in an office?’
When he put it like that Lily knew he was right, even though she winced a little when he criticised her sisters. What upset her, though, was not that she hadn’t gone to university, but more that she couldn’t have gone. She didn’t have the grades. She just wasn’t smart enough.
In many ways she was lucky to be alive at all. Lily had forced her way into the world, uninvited, at thirty-one weeks, born just a scrap of a thing at two and a half pounds in weight. She had been rushed to an incubator where she had been ventilated and fed through a tube and it had been touch and go, her mother told her. More than once they had thought that they would lose her but Lily had fought on, and little by little she had grown stronger until she was able to breathe on her own. But this premature start to life had meant that she had reached the various developmental stages later than was expected, and some she just hadn’t reached at all.
And where was Julia, her twin, whilst all this was going on? Julia was still safe and warm in their mother’s womb. Through what many had termed divine intervention, her mother’s body had relaxed after it had expelled Lily, her muscles no longer contracting. By the time Julia finally emerged, pink and healthy and able to breathe unaided, Lily had already been on the planet for seventy-one days.
The press had loved the story. Miracle twins born nine weeks apart. Their proud parents had posed for a photo with both of their girls, Lily waif-like next to her younger but stronger twin, and a feature had appeared in the newspaper. The history of their births had been a talking point ever since. Twins who didn’t share a birthday. What a thing.
Their mother said it was wonderful that they each had their own special birthday and didn’t have to share, but Lily had never felt like that. As far as she was concerned, she should have been born on the same day as Julia and hated that she had to celebrate alone, as if she wasn’t worthy of the ‘real’ day. Julia had always been happy for Lily to share her birthday and Lily knew that she was expected to feel special for having two birthdays, like the Queen, but nothing about it had ever felt special to her.
When the twins had gone to school, one in age five uniform and the other in the smallest sized everything that still had to be taken in, it had quickly become apparent that having their real birthday wasn’t the only advantage that Julia had over Lily. Lily had been late to read and write, struggled with her times tables and never really got the hang of maths. So when Julia went to university to read medicine, Lily had done a qualification in childcare and become a nursery nurse. Not that this was something Lily regretted. She’d made a far better nursery nurse than Julia would ever be. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a little cheated out of the life that she might have had if she had only managed to stay in place for a couple of months longer.
So, instead of following a career like her sisters, Lily had chosen a different path, and had babies. Lots of babies. And the success of Marco’s business meant that she was in the luxurious position of being able to stay at home and bring them up herself. As it turned out, neither of her sisters seemed to be particularly good at breeding and Lily knew that both Felicity and Julia envied her her simple choices. Couldn’t life be ironic sometimes?
Lily closed down the computer and checked the time. The baby would be up from his nap in twenty minutes and then they would wander along to collect the boys from school and playgroup. There was just time to ring her mother first. Lily liked to talk to her mother most days. She was different from Fliss and Jules there, too. Apparently, Felicity only rang to make arrangements for Hugo, and Julia almost never rang. Lily got as far as finding her mobile and retrieving the number on speed dial when she remembered. Her mother wasn’t there. She was in Greece.
Lily’s shoulders slumped. Her mother didn’t use a mobile phone, having refused to embrace the one they had bought for her.
‘If I’m in then I’ll answer the phone,’ she’d said, ‘and if I’m out you can leave a message on the answerphone and I’ll ring you back. It’s worked perfectly well like that for thirty years. I see no reason to change things now.’ And she hadn’t. But now she was going to be gone for almost a week and Lily had no way of getting in touch. The thought of their separation stabbed at her chest. She didn’t even have a number for where her mother was staying, although her father probably did.
So Lily dialled her parents’ house and waited for the phone to be answered. Her father would probably be at home but as the ringing went on, seven, eight, nine times, Lily’s heart sank. The answerphone clicked on after ten rings. Then, just as she was about to give up, her father lifted the receiver.