Love of Grace and Angels Read online

Love of Grace and Angels

  Barbara Jaques

  Editor: Moz Walls

  Cover: Ed Knox

  Copy Editor: Lydia Davis

  Formatting: Elizabeth Freeman

  The story and characters in this e-book are fictitious;

  any resemblance to real situations and persons

  living or dead is coincidental.

  Second edition published March 2016

  Copyright © 2016 Barbara Jaques

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One: Nights and mornings

  Chapter 1: Beginning with Ricardo Mancini

  Chapter 2: Moira

  Chapter 3: Art

  Chapter 4: Grace

  Chapter 5: Art's wife

  Chapter 6: The many boxes of Mancini

  Chapter 7: Grace

  Chapter 8: Ric

  Chapter 9: Art's wife

  Chapter 10: Here lies Moira, Friday morning

  Chapter 11: Sunday morning Grace

  Chapter 12: Ric's Sunday breakfast

  Chapter 13: Grace

  Chapter 14: Ric

  Part Two: One year on

  Chapter 1: Art

  Chapter 2: Ric

  Chapter 3: Grace's birthday

  Chapter 4: Art's wife

  Chapter 5: Friday evening Grace

  Chapter 6: Art

  Chapter 7: Ric

  Chapter 8: Art's wife

  Chapter 9: Ric's disquiet

  Chapter 10: Grace's quiet hours

  Chapter 11: Ric's warm bodies

  Chapter 12: Art

  Chapter 13: Grace

  Chapter 14: Ric

  Chapter 15: Art

  Chapter 16: Grace

  Epilogue

  About the author

  Special thanks

  Prologue

  WE START WHERE NO ONE COULD

  ‘I did. No one listened, as usual.’

  ‘You can’t have said it very loud.’

  ‘I did!’

  ‘You’re a liar. You always tell lies. You’re lying because you don’t like it that I saw something and you didn’t.’

  ‘I’m not!’ insisted the little girl, who might have flown at him for such a remark, but instead remained calm. ‘I saw her and I said everyone should look, but no one listened to me. No one listens. Not ever.’

  ‘Because you tell too many lies.’

  ‘No, because everyone thinks I am too little to know anything.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I know as much as you.’

  ‘You should have said it louder.’

  ‘So why didn’t you say something?’ she asked, ‘If you’re so clever.’

  The boy paused. It wasn’t clear to him why he hadn’t. Why he’d watched the whole event unfold but not revealed anything of it. Not a word. Only the small gasp, the strange involuntary whisper that had come from nowhere and faded before it was heard.

  ‘It’s too late now,’ his sister said. ‘They’ll want to know why you didn’t say. You’ll get into trouble.’

  ‘And you won’t?’

  ‘Thought you said I was lying?’

  ‘You are.’

  His sister frowned.

  ‘Prove it then,’ offered the boy.

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Fine. Then don’t. That means I saw it and you didn’t.’

  Thwarted by her brother’s logic, the girl began, ‘I saw her when we stopped for the phone …’

  ‘I saw her before that, while we were still parked,’ the boy interrupted, unable to resist the taste of triumph.

  ‘I saw her before that,’ countered his sister.

  ‘But you just said …’

  She smiled, ‘I was tricking you. I saw her before you did. Definitely.’

  He sighed. She was five. She probably hadn’t seen anything. ‘How could you see, anyway? You were in your car seat.’

  ‘So were you.’

  ‘Mine’s a booster seat.’

  The two were silent for a moment. The house was also quiet, the rest of the family outside in the garden, mother weeding, baby brother watching from a bouncy seat. Dad was working again, but it wasn’t the weekend for him anyway.

  ‘We could tell,’ said the sister, performing a mental u-turn. ‘You could tell Mumma what you saw.’ She was stretched out tummy-down on the floor, face turned towards the round, golden hamster sitting patiently next to her. She offered it a piece of green Lego.

  ‘Don’t give him that,’ said the boy, crossed legged beside her.

  ‘He likes it.’

  The boy took it, and threw it out of reach. Ordinarily his sister would have wailed angrily at this, but this was no ordinary day.

  ‘And why should I tell, and not you?’ he asked.

  ‘You saw her first.’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘That was a trick too.’

  The little girl rolled over onto her back. ‘You know when we stopped for Mumma to answer her phone?’ she asked, looking earnestly at her brother.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I really did see her then. Did you really see her before?’

  The boy sighed. It was true. He had seen her while they were still parked, delayed because Mumma was lecturing on the importance of quietening down, so she could drive safely. They had just got into the car after dragging around the shops for sports shoes, because his were falling apart, when Mumma had made them laugh. But then the noise grew too wild, and she had snapped. She had snapped, she said, because they had ignored her when she’d asked nicely. Speaking for himself, the boy hadn’t heard her ask nicely at all.

  ‘Could you really see what happened? Properly?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding.

  ‘Was it horrible?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Do you think she is dead?’ asked his sister, matter-of-factly, eyes now locked sideways on the busily grooming hamster.

  The boy shrugged. He hadn’t thought of that.

  Part One: Nights and Mornings

  Chapter 1

  BEGINNING WITH RICARDO MANCINI

  At eighteen years of age, Ricardo Mancini had attained average height alongside average academic achievement. By twenty-five it appeared to all that he would maintain his slim success and his slim build. Now, approaching thirty-two, he was little changed, with sandy brown hair and broad pale freckles that firmly concealed his origins in the way they always had.

  He was charming, with a pleasant voice and many, especially his mother, considered him good-looking. And he was. But in a way so unremarkable that a hopeful girlfriend might think she had spotted him walking across the street, or driving a passing car, when in fact it was someone else she had seen. A stranger. In reality, his was a plain sort of face, an inoffensive blank canvas, and the marginal thickening of his neck did not make it any less so. Where most men blossom as passing years sketch character and confidence over their broadening form, most of Ricardo’s appeal lay in his boyishness, in his absolute youth. Not only this, but his smile revealed enamel of perfect colour and proportion, and the idle flash of these classically beautiful teeth dissolved most women into useless puddles, and one or two men besides. But they didn’t know what sort of man he was, the dissolute nature he felt he must accept. Only he knew, and one other.

  He looked nothing like his only sibling or either of his parents, who carried the brooding complexion of their Tuscan heritage as proudly as any badge of honour. In another family, a more secure unit, there would have been an open running joke that Ric belonged to the postman or the milkman or Great Uncle Ricardo, who also bore the colouring of more northern origins, in addition to sharing Ric’s name. But this family chose not to comment, at least,
not openly. On the upside, no one could categorically refute his parentage, for Ric’s one redeeming feature was the brownness of his eyes. Great Uncle Ricardo, on the other hand, was undeniably the spawn of an illicit liaison and the enticing twinkle of bright blue, inherited from his father, went a long way towards ensuring the easy continuation of a very pleasurable pastime. Family tradition handed from father to son without either word or instruction. How many mini-Great-Uncle-Ricardos wandered the streets of Bath, no one could say for certain.

  Born in the local city hospital twelve days late, Ric had been long and fat with hair as black as the night that greeted him. When the soft fine threads of new baby eventually transformed into silky blonde curls, the family had ruffled the little boy’s head in puzzlement. In later years, when it darkened to a mute shade of brown, straight and unexceptional, the elderly in the family proclaimed with confidence that it would soon be as dark as theirs had been, before age had ruthlessly sucked out the colour, the peculiarity of his earlier hue no more than the will of God. But the fairness of his pale golden skin and propensity for freckles foretold the future, and Ric remained different. There was an even more difficult truth, however, for the apparent genetic discrepancy ran deeper than just the boy’s appearance. If anyone suspected this, beyond the few peers too young to fathom what it all meant, then no one came to his aid.

  Ric’s outward appearance mattered to the family. Even Great Uncle Ricardo’s humorous yet wise words couldn’t find a way to soften the difference. Better his family had teased and played about with disparity than have it sat amongst them like a tumour, for adulthood witnessed the fruits of a childhood tormented by whispers. Difference became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as blindly they stood by while Ric ripened into something not quite as it should be; as a gall on an oak where the oak itself, given a choice, would have preferred the acorn. With a growing sense that he and his family were not the same, Ric’s nature adapted accordingly. So as time went on, outward difference joined forces with the unsettling inner, guaranteeing trouble.

  When eventually Ric flew free of the nest, he rarely chose to visit his parents, who, for reasons known only to themselves, soon moved away from the core of the aging family they’d always been near. But it was not the fact his parents no longer inhabited his childhood home that kept Ric away, only a dislike for the feelings roused when visiting this new place. In a corner of his mind where family life had been accepted as normal – and therefore by its very nature, reassuring – an idea was growing. This notion was not new; instead it was long repressed and becoming plain to see against the fresh background of their new home. It seemed in uprooting the staid and old, his parents had inadvertently cut loose Ric’s objectivity, and it had begun running amuck. The sense that he had never been treated fairly, as a son should be, would no longer be quieted. It seemed that without the supporting embrace of recognisable smells, familiar light and space, to prompt conversation, Ric had absolutely nothing to say to the two people who had raised him. Soon the time came when his parents – like so many – could no longer claim to know their child beyond the obvious. Ric knew that they had never known him at all.

  Falling into a pattern of isolation that he came to enjoy, emotional shelter arrived in the form of even greater secrecy, an easy companion when living alone. If an individual person could actually be two, walking side by side, then Ric was that person, each self knowing precisely when to step into the shadow of the other. He saw few people, and only occasionally did he meet with his beloved sibling, Moira. In contrast to his parents, this was a reason for regret. Despite Moira’s prickly ways, it enabled Ric to find a comforting glimpse of himself, of the brother he had always wanted to be. Sometimes a knock would come at the door, and he knew it was Moira checking up on him. Mostly the knock never came, so more often than not he spent time alone, smoking roll ups and watching the world go by, perched on the sill of an open window.

  It was a day for watching that found Ric sitting in a busy café, hungrily awaiting the arrival of Moira, knowing already in his heart that yet again he would be eating alone. So often, Moira passed him over for something better or forgot their meeting entirely. Not for the first time that morning, Ric picked up the menu and absently scanned ludicrous descriptions of wilted this and crushed that. The waitress had come and gone without an order, a hungry baby cried and a family left, a group of youths filled the room with laughter. All the while, his eyes wandered over faces and forms or roamed the solid pages without decision or interest, despite the call of his stomach.

  When the heavy glass door eased open for what he calculated must have been the tenth time since he had been sitting there, Ric’s gaze shifted only fleetingly, as if drawn by the intrusive roar of the city, rather than the movement itself. Outside he could see the streets were in chaos and he was glad to be safely inside. It was probably the rugby crowd, but without any interest in the sport he had no idea what teams were playing, with no care for what it all meant to those involved, and only suspected as much as he did because the waitress told him, making it less of a suspicion, of course, and more of a fact. But what did interest him enormously – despite how it would have appeared to anyone happening to notice the half-hearted glance at the door – was the person who walked in.

  *

  One of Ric’s most guarded secrets was a predisposition to a particular form of obsession, and it was his current passion that had allowed the blast of outside noise to infiltrate the café for those few, long, seconds. He knew she was coming, of course. She was the real reason he was waiting. He had arranged the overdue brunch with Moira, who rarely turned up for anything yet had an obvious need to feel included, only to kill two birds with one stone.

  With husband in tow, the obsession made for the booth behind Ric, and as she passed, so he concealed his face in the menu, thumping heart trying to beat a path through the dry hollow of his mouth. When she had safely gone by, he smiled and raised his eyes so he could observe the curve of her body in the mirror that ran the length of a long wall; an opportune feature, he thought. Quickly, Ric lost himself in the flow of red hair dropping and folding like silk across her back as she slowly manoeuvred into her seat, his head spinning at the tempting round buttocks that only seconds before had brushed within inches of his shoulder. The richness of her perfume was gloriously intoxicating and filled his throat with a gluttonous urgency, yet in contrast he consumed the underlying fragrance of washing powder slowly and steadily, comforted by the suggestion of home. He inhaled deeply. Despite being delightfully powerful, both scents were blighted by the insistence of her husband’s even stronger aftershave. They were a couple that smelled, he decided. They were people that left their scent on others, marking territory without thought. But the artificiality of it didn’t matter to Ric, because underneath it all he could smell her skin and taste her nakedness.

  To have her so near was almost too much to bear after the long months of adoration, mostly from a distance although sometimes not; and to hear her exchange greetings with those already seated, showering them with her pretty tinkling laugh as she apologised for their late arrival, made him almost weep with pleasure. Ric ordered a cup of coffee and some toast, stressing – with a playful wink and flashy smile that thrilled the young waitress – that it should be neither crushed nor wilted. He then sat back to enjoy what he hoped would be satisfying amusement in the form of innocent and harmless snooping.

  Ric soon understood that the other people were her parents, and before long they were laughing and joking. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for. They were teasing in a way Ric would never be able to understand. It was the type of discussion his family would not have sanctioned, for they never would have thought it appropriate – even within the shady realms of clandestine childish banter – to talk about those parts of the body. In fact, they never would have thought of it in the first place, for what did they know of waxing and bikini lines, of topless beaches and youthful folly? Hadn’t his parents always been ancient and old-fashion
ed? To Ric the topic was lewd and base, and at first he ignored what he considered crude, unsettling humour, choosing to regard it as sympathetically as he could. He wanted to feel it was nothing more than earthy honesty, candid sentiment stripped of affectation, raw and without pretention: the uncluttered perspective of an Angel. For to him that is what she was, that is what all his obsessions were: women with the hearts of Angels trapped in a world of sin. He knew all about sin. Sin meant loneliness.

  A different waitress brought him his order, smiled as if he should know her, and left looking slighted. He was too caught up in their words to see, and as he listened, he revelled in the chemistry of close proximity. Surely she could feel the buzz, he thought, the electricity sparking between him and her? She must feel it if he could. He forgave his treasure for her misguided and coarse ways, for he was certain no one could be perfect without help. Even an innocent child will squash bugs until her mother tells her not.

  Ric stirred from his stupor to take a sip of coffee and a bite of toast. It was a lucid moment, rejoining everyone else around him, with the secure pleasure of eavesdropping momentarily set to one side. The pause was brief, for his delusional viewpoint was in fact preparing to further twist perspective. Judgment distorted, he tumbled back into fantasy: out went the solid fact that he had known to be in the café through means entirely of his own device, and in came the suspicion, if not the absolute certainty, that the Angel herself had planned it that way. It was a revelation. She wanted him very badly.

  Ric was not an unhappy man. Revelations were common, so he regularly enjoyed the explosive highs others might feel blessed to experience just once in a lifetime. Of course, before rising up Ric necessarily must be down, and to rise many times involved repeated crashing. Whether this rollercoaster of emotion was worth it was irrelevant. It was beyond control. It just was. Repeated resurrection.

  Head casually resting against the padded leather seat, Ric chewed slowly and carefully so as not to miss anything, listening as the family wandered through happy exchanges. Initially, his face glowed with the slight smugness that comes from feeling that no living person has more inside knowledge than oneself. But somehow, despite all he believed he and the Angel had been through, what he heard fell short. High expectations had not been reached, and this was increasingly a problem with certain revelations. Often it marked the peak of his affection. The summit was a tiny place, too narrow to stand steady for long.