‘She’ll be in soon,’ said Cora loyally.
‘She’d better be.’ Bianca might look like a cool blonde angel, but she wasn’t up for being taken for a mug, not now, not ever. She’d been adopted into a fierce immigrant family, and had absorbed their ways; she wouldn’t take any shit. And it mattered so much to her that this went right. So much.
She was special and she knew it. Bella was always telling her so.
‘We chose you out of all the little girls we could have brought home from the orphanage,’ Bella would say.
Bianca had no memory of the orphanage. All she did remember was a blonde woman, smiling. One of the nuns or matrons or whatever they were called, no doubt. And Tito, cuddling her in the family kitchen, saying she was his little sister, his precious one – with Vittore looking on, uninterested, and Fabio looking furious. Oh – and a bead of blood, dripping from a blade of grass. Weird. She must have fallen over when she was small, cut herself perhaps. Something like that.
‘Speak of the devil!’ said Claire, as Tanya came in the door, looking washed out.
‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘What the fuck time d’you call this?’ asked Bianca.
Tanya looked truculently up at the clock on the wall, brand new and still without its batteries, both hands stuck at the vertical.
‘Twelve,’ she said.
There was a brief, freezing silence.
‘Don’t even think about being bloody funny,’ said Bianca. ‘Carpet fitters are coming in today, and they’re late too, so get on the sodding phone and hurry them up, capisce? And you keep an eye on them when they get here, I don’t want to see any joins in awkward places, I want this to look the business.’
‘And what will you be doing?’ asked Tanya. It wasn’t her job to balls around looking at carpets. She was supposed to be in charge of the waiting staff, wasn’t she?
Bianca looked at her. ‘You got a hangover?’
‘A bit.’
‘Then I’ll make allowances. Not that it’s anything to do with you, but I’ll be interviewing doormen, if that’s all right with you, Tanya?’
Tanya shrugged. Sure.
‘OK, get on with it then, the lot of you. I’ll be up in the office.’
Bianca went upstairs. Cora and Claire looked at Tanya.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘You don’t half push your luck,’ said Claire. ‘She ain’t in the mood for fun and games.’
‘She never flaming is,’ said Cora.
‘She’s on edge with all the decorating and stuff going on. She wants the place to look right. Tito’s trusted her with it, and she wants to impress him.’ They all knew how Bianca worshipped her eldest brother, Tito. Claire took a long pull at her cigarette, then stubbed it out in a black ashtray on the bar. ‘Let’s get on then, shall we…?’
