The House by the Sea. Louise Douglas

      The waterfront, that had looked so appealing from the other side of the bay, was, close up, as scruffy and run down as the rest of the town. The street facing the harbour was lined with bars and the pizzeria, Vito’s, was at the far end. A teenage boy was sweeping the terrace outside. He was dark haired and slender with heavy eyebrows; obviously Valentina’s son. He concentrated on his work, pushing the head of the brush under the tables, making a pile of dust. His expression was serious, as if he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.

      ‘Ciao,’ said Joe as we drew near.

      The boy looked up. ‘Ciao,’ he replied.

      His eyes were dark and sensitive, wary, his arms wiry and tanned. He still had the narrow shoulders of a young boy, yet he worked with the diligence of a man.

      Joe walked on, but I stopped to watch the boy.

      He was only a little younger than Daniel would have been if he had lived. How wonderful it must be to have a teenage son; Valentina was lucky. If only I’d had the chance to see Daniel grow up! If only Anna hadn’t taken all that potential joy from me.

      A wave of grief took me by surprise and in its aftermath I wondered if anyone had ever posted a picture of Daniel on the memorial wall: Anna or her mother? I couldn’t bear the thought of that: Daniel’s picture, out here, in this hot, distant little town, so far from home.

      Valentina’s son was beside me, concern in his eyes. ‘Stai bene, signora?’

      ‘I’m fine. I’m sorry. Ignore me.’

      ‘American?’

      ‘English.’

      He looked at me, still worried.

      ‘Really, I’m okay,’ I said.

      ‘I could fetch you some water.’

      ‘No. I don’t want anything.’ I smiled reassurance. From some distance away, Joe looked back over his shoulder to see where I was. ‘Joe over there used to be friends with your mother. We’re going to come here for pizza one day,’ I told the boy.

      ‘It’s the best pizza in town.’

      ‘That’s what we heard! I’ll look forward to it. See you again…?’

      ‘Francesco.’

      ‘Francesco. See you soon.’

      I grabbed the rim of my hat and trotted after Joe, catching him up at the harbour wall. The water was green tinged, glassy, a slick of fuel making rainbows on its surface. Boats rocked at the ends of their ropes. Tiny pink jellyfish were floating around the weedy chains that anchored the buoys. The sun was warm on my skin.

      Joe pointed to the far headland, no more than a hundred yards away as the crow flies. I could see the wall that surrounded our villa, with trees behind it, thickly bunched together, the black tips of the cypresses. I couldn’t see much of the building, only one edge of the roof, but the location from this viewpoint was like something from a film; the wall, the trees, the sea almost enclosing it.

      ‘It looks mysterious,’ I whispered.

      ‘Mysterious?’

      ‘Don’t you think it does?’

      ‘The locals think it’s haunted,’ said Joe.

      ‘Really?’

      ‘The waiter told me this morning. He said, if you stand here, at night, sometimes you can see lights inside the walls.’

      I laughed uneasily.

      ‘People always make up stories about abandoned buildings,’ I said. It was an attempt to disguise my disquiet about what Joe had just said and at the same time convince myself that my sense of the villa being occupied was pure imagination.

      ‘He said he and a group of friends were fishing close to the villa one night and they saw a woman drifting through the gardens.’

      ‘Drifting?’ I struggled to keep my voice steady.

      ‘They were convinced it was a ghost. They said she almost looked human, but when she raised her head, she had no face.’

      The woman standing beside Anna in the picture on the memorial wall didn’t have a face either.

      I looked at Joe from beneath the rim of my hat. He was staring at the villa. I thought he might have been teasing, but he wasn’t smiling.

      Before Daniel’s death, neither Joe nor I believed in life after death or any other concept that Joe liked to term ‘superstitious nonsense.’ We weren’t unsympathetic, but used to feel something akin to pity towards those who did. Back then, of course, neither of us had experienced the shock and the ensuing black hole of grief that came with losing the person you loved most, the one you were supposed to protect, the one who gave meaning to your own life. After Joe and I separated, although I felt guilty about it and sometimes faintly ridiculous, I’d found myself drawn towards tarot cards and mediums, standing stones and old churchyards, anything that might bring me closer to Daniel. He had to be somewhere, I reasoned, at least his spirit did. A soul so vital, so loving and bright and energetic couldn’t just disappear. If I looked hard enough, for long enough, I would find him. I was convinced of it.

      ‘Did your grandparents ever mention anything about the villa being haunted?’ I asked.

      ‘No. But…’

      ‘What?’

      ‘When they’d had a drink or two, they used to talk to their ancestors as if they were still there. They said the DeLucas never really left the villa, even the ones who moved away.’

      ‘Even the ones who died?’

      He nodded.

      ‘There’s nothing strange about it,’ Joe said defensively, even though I hadn’t said anything at all to suggest there was. ‘It was a way of remembering, that’s all. Keeping memories alive.’

      ‘Sure,’ I said. I wondered if, privately, Joe had been harbouring hopes similar to mine, that some part of Daniel might still exist somewhere in the world.

      And then I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years: a conversation I’d had with Anna when Daniel was only a few months old. She’d told me that before she was born, her mother had delivered three stillborn children; one after the other. Anna’s three dead siblings hadn’t been baptised and couldn’t be buried in consecrated land, so her father had buried them in the villa’s gardens. Her mother had kept the baptismal gowns she’d hand sewn for each baby and a photograph of each of them hung in an alcove in her bedroom, where she knelt to pray several times a day.

      Anna had been drinking when she told me this story. When she wasn’t drinking, she was quiet and private. After a bottle of wine, she became more willing to talk about herself and her feelings. That day, she’d been trying to explain her relationship with her parents and how heavily the burden of their expectations had weighed upon her shoulders.

      I’d held my baby to my shoulder and