by Liz Fielding
‘Eight months isn’t very long, and you’re still grieving-’
‘Are you still grieving for Bruno Vanelli?’
She thought for a moment before saying, ‘Only for the person I thought he was. Remember how we talked about this once before? You were right. The happiness I knew with him is something I’ll never know again. But that happiness is dead, just as the man I believed in is dead.’
‘Fool’s paradise,’ he said sombrely. ‘How long it lasts is the luck of the draw.’
‘I suppose it can only be fleeting,’ she said with a little sigh.
‘No, it can last for years.’
‘Did yours last for years?’ she asked.
For a moment she thought she’d gone too far, trespassing on his private feelings. But instead of being annoyed he nodded silently.
‘So you want to know more about my wife?’
‘I need to know the things Liza knows-like, how did you meet?’ she asked bravely.
‘She was over here on holiday, being taken on a conducted tour of the law courts. She came into the court where I was prosecuting a case, and as soon as I saw her it was all up with me. I fumbled, made a fool of myself, lost the case.
‘Afterwards I caught up with her before she left the courthouse. She laughed at me. I was dazzled. That very night I determined to marry her. I was in love in the way the songs describe. We were married the following month. Liza was born a few months later, and I thought I was the happiest man in creation.’
‘You never wanted more children?’
‘Yes, but it didn’t happen. She miscarried the next baby, and suffered so much that I never asked her to try again. Besides, we had Liza.’
His voice softened and he smiled as though he couldn’t help himself. There it was, she thought; the thing she’d been looking for, the overwhelming love of a father for his child.
‘I’ll bet she was a gorgeous baby,’ she encouraged him.
His answer was a grin, open and unselfconscious.
‘She was the best,’ he said simply. ‘No other baby was like her. She did everything before other children, she walked, she talked, she smiled at everyone because she wanted the whole world to be her friend. But she smiled at me before anyone else, even her mother. If only you could have seen how she looked then-’
‘But I have,’ Holly told him. ‘There’s a book of photographs that Liza showed me, with some lovely pictures of the three of you. You seemed such a happy family.’
‘We were,’ he murmured softly.
‘I even felt envious because I never knew my father. I’d have loved to have pictures like that, with his arms about me, looking at me with such love and pride. It would have been something to keep, even when he wasn’t there any more. When you have a memory like that, it’s like being blessed forever.’
He didn’t answer. He seemed lost in a dream.
‘Don’t you ever look at those pictures?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said flatly.
‘Perhaps you should-to remind yourself-’
‘And if I don’t want to remember?’ he asked quietly.
‘What can I say? I have no right to give you any advice.’
He managed a bleak smile. ‘That never stopped any woman yet. Besides, I’ve made you part of it, so go ahead. Let me hear your advice.’
‘You both loved Carol, and you’re both grieving for her. But do it together. Talk about how wonderful she was.’
‘Wonderful-’
‘Well, wasn’t she? You said she was dazzling when you first met, but wasn’t it more than that, all the years you were together? Isn’t that why you’re grieving for her, because she was wonderful? Maybe you don’t want to dwell on that part, but I don’t think you can get through it without remembering, and sharing it with Liza. You’re the only person who can do that for her.’
‘I know I am,’ he said heavily. ‘That’s the devil of it. But you don’t know what you’re asking. If I could talk to anyone it would be you. I’m like Liza in that. We both lean on you. It’s the effect you have. But even with you…’
His voice faded and the hand that was holding hers clenched convulsively.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right.’
She wasn’t sure that he’d heard, but the grip on her hand remained tight. After a while he looked up, meeting her eyes, his own full of an unmistakable message. Every nerve told her that she should draw back, be cautious, but that message mesmerised her.
She leaned forward as he reached up to touch her face, drawing his fingertips down her cheek, tracing the outline of her lips. It was the lightest touch, yet the effect was electric, shuddering through her with a brilliant excitement.
‘Holly,’ he whispered. ‘Holly-Holly-’
It was like a lightning flash. Once before a voice had spoken her name on that caressing note, and it had all been a performance. Now another man was luring her into the same trap for his own ends, and she had nearly fallen for it.
This time she’d even known what he was doing, yet the spell had worked. She’d recovered from Bruno, but to fall in love with Matteo would finish her.
‘Take me home,’ she said in a hard voice.
He stared. ‘Holly-’
‘I said, take me home.’
They let themselves quietly into the house.
‘Goodnight,’ she said, turning towards the stairs.
‘Holly, don’t.’ Matteo took her arm. ‘You’ve been silent all the way home and now you’re trying to run away from me. I didn’t mean to offend you. One moment I thought we understood each other, but then you backed off as though I were the devil. What happened?’
‘It got out of hand, didn’t it?’ she asked wildly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The clever game you’re playing. “Taking care of the problems”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Have you forgotten your own words so soon? I heard you talking to Signora Lionello after the party. She said I was out to get a rich husband, and you said you’d take care of the problems. I guess this is your way of doing it.’
He swore under his breath.
‘Forget that,’ he begged. ‘It meant nothing.’
‘I know exactly what it meant. You’re trying to “attach me”, but only just so far, so that I’m there when needed. Just so that you have the use of me for Liza. After that I can go hang. A bit like Bruno really, except that he only wanted money. You want far more.’
‘Don’t dare liken me to him.’
‘Why not? You’re playing a cynical power game, just like him.’
‘A game? You think this is a game?’
His move was too fast for her to see, and the next moment she was in his arms, feeling his lips on hers. If his fingertips had excited her, his kiss drove her wild. She tried to control the fierce feelings that threatened to overwhelm her body, but he seemed set on making her acknowledge them, moving his mouth over hers with seductive power.
‘Stop this,’ she managed to say.
‘No,’ he said fiercely against her lips. ‘Not until you see sense.’
He called this seeing sense? she thought wildly as he silenced her again. There was no sense in this, no logic, no calculation, no ability even to think. There was only sensation so violent that it left her trembling, and anger at the way he thought he could set her objections aside, as though they counted for nothing.
But the real treachery was the way rage became confused with desire. It was as though she had turned against herself, betraying her own resolve with the need to kiss him back, press herself against him, demand that he explore her further.
Her mouth opened against his in what should have been a protest but emerged as a sigh, encouraging him to thrust his advantage home. The feel of him caressing her with skill and purpose almost sent her wild.
She knew she must free herself from his hold, but it was hard when all her senses were betraying her. They wanted to cling to him, inviting
him on to the next step, and the next, wherever the path might lead. But she would fight them, though it broke her heart.
Holly could feel him moving, drawing her back into the shadows under the stairs, but she knew that if she yielded she was lost. This time she was going to be no man’s pawn.
She tried to pull herself away from him, but succeeded only in freeing her mouth.
‘Let me go, right now,’ she gasped. ‘I’m warning you-I’m dangerous-’
She had the feeling that he was almost in a trance, but this seemed to get through to him, and his hands fell away from her so suddenly that she had to clutch the wall.
‘Yes, you are,’ he murmured. ‘I shouldn’t have forgotten that.’
She backed away until she reached a door, then turned and went through it without bothering where it led. She found herself in the dining room with its great window doors that led into the garden, and pulled them open, running outside, taking deep breaths, struggling to calm down.
Holly had promised herself that this wouldn’t happen. Maybe she’d been warning herself about it from the moment she met Matteo, knowing even then that he was a man who threw Bruno into the shade. And every warning had been useless.
She walked anywhere as long as it was away from the house, away from him. As she did so, she talked to herself.
‘Leave this place. Get as far away as you can. Get away from him.’
All useless. There was a time when she might have left this place, but it was long past.
She wandered for an hour, until at last her feet seemed to find their own way to Carol’s monument. She wasn’t sure why, unless she had subconsciously known that she would find him there. He was sitting on the edge of the fountain, dipping his hands into the water, throwing it over his face.
He’d discarded his jacket, and the thin material of his shirt was soaked, showing her the outline of his body beneath.
She didn’t want to look at him. The passion of desire he’d roused in her could only become a greater torment with that incitement.
He looked up at her, gasping.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean anything to happen the way it has.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘You were partly right. It started as you said. I wanted to make sure of you, but then-things changed.’ When she didn’t answer he said almost angrily, ‘You know they did.’
‘I don’t know what I know, except this-I don’t want to be in the arms of a man who’s dreaming of another woman.’
‘What?’
‘You’re still in love with her. You don’t want me, except in one way, and you’re secretly ashamed of that. That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You couldn’t wait to beg her forgiveness for touching me.’
He stared at her. In the silvery light she could only half see his face, glinting with droplets of water, but she could sense that he was totally thunderstruck.
Suddenly he slid down from the fountain until he was sitting on the ground below and, to her astonishment, he began to laugh. Leaning back against the marble, he shook with bitter, silent mirth.
‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘Oh, dear, sweet heaven!’
He put his hands up to his head, covering his face, rocking back and forth, almost moaning. Her anger couldn’t survive that desperate sound, like that of an animal in pain, and she went down on her knees beside him, trying to take hold of him.
‘Matteo, whatever is the matter?’
He dropped his hands and looked at her. He was still making choking sounds that might have been laughter.
‘What’s so horribly funny?’ she asked.
‘Everything. Every damned thing, including your ideas about me. The grieving husband, dreaming of the woman he lost. I’ll tell you the truth. The only time I dream of Carol is in my nightmares.’
‘But-this thing…’ She indicated the monument.
‘This overblown monstrosity? I built it to hide my feelings, not reveal them. I could hardly tell the world how I really regard my wife’s memory.’
‘How you really…?’
The tension seemed to drain out of him.
‘I hated her,’ he said tiredly. ‘I hated her with every fibre of my being for the vicious deception she’d practised on me for years. I hated her for not telling me the truth, and I hated her even more for finally telling it to me.’
He closed his eyes and seemed to address some dreadful inner vision.
‘All those years I loved her, she filled my world. I’d have lain down my life in her service. I told you I’m not a demonstrative man, but with her I was. I held nothing back. Whatever I had or was or would ever be was hers, and she knew it. She’d known it for years, and all that time…’
He opened his eyes again and turned in her direction, so that his head lay directly against the words ‘Beloved wife’ carved into the marble.
‘I made the foolish mistake of thinking I had everything,’ he continued after a while. ‘I should have understood that the man who believes that has nothing at all, that when he imagines he’s walking a firm road he’s actually staggering across a tightrope hung over an abyss. The abyss was always there, but I never saw it.’
‘You mean she stopped loving you?’
His smile was terrible, desperate, wolfish, half-mad.
‘I mean that she never did love me. Not for one second. She married me for money. She liked money a lot, and the man she really loved-an Englishman called Alec Martin-didn’t have a penny. I think she decided on me when she saw the house, these grounds.
‘I learned all this in the last few days before she left me. She told me-boasted of it-that she’d gone on sleeping with her lover until the night before our wedding. That’s why Liza was born so quickly.’
‘You mean-?’
‘Yes. My little girl isn’t mine at all. She’d been another man’s child all the time.’
Holly drew a long breath, calling herself all kinds of a fool. This had been staring her in the face if she’d had the wit to see it.
‘He went away after we married,’ Matteo continued, ‘and stayed away for a few years, making some money of his own, I gather. So when he came back she decided to leave me for him. I said I couldn’t stop her leaving, but she wasn’t taking my daughter. That’s when she told me that Liza wasn’t mine, but Martin’s.
‘A few hours after they left I got a call from the hospital. The train had crashed, Carol was dead and Liza was seriously injured. I learned later that Martin had been killed too, but nobody else knew that he had any connection with us. The world only knows that my wife and child were taking a journey and their train crashed. All the rest-’ he paused for a moment before resuming with difficulty ‘-is known only to me.’
‘And Liza,’ she said, horrified, ‘all those years-it’s incredible-but perhaps it isn’t true. Maybe Carol only said that to hurt you-’
She stopped because he’d held up a hand, shaking his head.
‘I thought of that,’ he said. ‘When she was in the hospital I had a test done anonymously. What my wife told me was true. Liza is not my daughter. I have to accept that.’
He was silent for a while, and Holly could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t have sounded inadequate. The silence hung heavy between them.
‘When her condition improved,’ he resumed after a while, ‘I brought her home. I didn’t know what else to do.’
‘Does Liza have any idea?’
‘None. I was afraid that Carol might have told her, but it’s obvious that she still thinks I’m her father.’
‘As you are in every sense that matters,’ Holly said urgently. ‘Hate your wife if you must but that little girl has done nothing wrong.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ he asked tiredly. ‘None of it’s her fault but-’
‘There are no buts,’ Holly insisted. ‘She’s the same person that she always was, a child who loves you, and who’s done nothing to forfeit your love.’
He regarded her with desp
air.
‘You’re saying all the things I’ve said to myself a thousand times over. My head knows they’re true, but that doesn’t help. Logic doesn’t work. Don’t think I’m proud of myself, because I’m not. I do everything in my power to prevent her suspecting any difference, but I can’t help it if the feeling isn’t there.’
‘Oh, goodness,’ she murmured.
Matteo looked up at the sky, where the oblivious stars wheeled coldly overhead.
‘She was my child,’ he said. ‘And then she wasn’t. When I look into her face I see the face of the woman I hate, and I can’t bear it.’
‘Can’t you try to forgive Carol?’ Holly asked, realising how useless the words were even as she spoke them. It was no surprise when Matteo turned on her with real fury.
‘Forgive her? Are you mad? For years she mocked me, accepting my love, luring me on to love her more, taking and taking-and all the time it was nothing but a cruel deceit while she dreamed of another man. She took and took and took, and gave nothing in return. Even my child isn’t mine.
‘If she’d ever been a true wife to me in her heart I might have forgiven a moment of madness-but years of cynical, cold-blooded, calculated-’
He broke off, shuddering.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, reaching out to him.
But he flinched away from her.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he raged. ‘You, with your stupid English reasonableness-’
‘It’s got nothing to do with-’
‘You’re all the same. Let’s tie up the loose ends and be sensible. We don’t want to make a fuss, do we? She used to say that. It was her gift-diffusing a fuss, calming everyone down. I used to admire her for it, until now, when I realise it was a clever tactic to fool me.
‘The only time she dropped it was when we made love. Then she was shrewd enough to abandon reason and drive me so wild that I couldn’t think straight. That way I never became suspicious, by night or by day. Oh, she covered every angle, leaving me not one single pure and honest memory. And now you want me to forgive. Never! I thought you’d learned enough to understand about vendetta, but you don’t know anything.’
‘So you’re going to teach me, are you?’ she demanded, angry in her turn. ‘You’re going to pass on to me all the lessons you’ve learned about cruelty and bitterness, about being self-centred and brooding on nothing but your own wrongs to the exclusion of all else. And when I’ve learned that, who will look after that innocent child?’