Page 132 - The Midnight Library

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For instance, her grandfather on her mother’s side was called Lorenzo

Conte. He had le Puglia – the handsome heel in the boot of Italy – to come
to Swinging London in the 1960s.
Like other men in the desolate port town of Brindisi, he’d emigrated to
Britain, exchanging life on the Adriatic for a job at the London Brick

Company. Lorenzo, in his naivety, had imagined having a wonderful life –
making bricks all day, and then of an evening he would rub shoulders with
e Beatles and walk arm-in-arm down Carnaby Street with Jean Shrimpton
or Marianne Faithful. e only problem was that, despite its name, the

London Brick Company wasn’t actually in London. It was based sixty miles
north in Bedford, which, for all its modest charms, turned out not as
swinging as Lorenzo would have liked. But he made a compromise with his
dreams and settled there. e work may not have been glamorous, but it

paid.
Lorenzo married a local English woman called Patricia Brown, who was
also getting used to life’s disappointments, having exchanged her dream of
being an actress for the mundane, daily theatre of the suburban housewife,

and whose culinar y skills were forever under the ghostly shadow of her dead
Puglian mother-in-law and her legendar y spaghetti dishes, which, in
Lorenzo’s eyes, could never be surpassed.
ey had a baby girl within a year of getting married – Nora’s mother –

and they called her Donna.
Donna grew up with her parents arguing almost continually, and had
consequently believed marriage was somet hing that was not only inevitable,
but also inevitably miserable. She became a secret ar y at a law firm, and then

a communications officer for Bedford council, but then she’d had an
experience which was never really discussed, at least not with Nora. She’d
experienced some kind of breakdown – the first of several – that caused her
to stay at home, and, although she recovered, she never went back to work.

ere was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and
Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so
many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.
Nora thought of this as the boat chugged through the Arctic waters and

gulls – black-legged kittiwakes, according to Ingrid – flew overhead.
On both sides of her family there had been an unspoken belief that life
was meant to fuck you over. Nora’s dad, Geoff, had certainly lived a life that