His Sicilian Cinderella

by Carol Marinelli

  ‘Do you think she might have been scared to show him she loved you?’

  ‘Perhaps at first but then she became as cruel as him. I remember when I was about five and I sat there at the dinner table and, as always, she served him first. Then she served Dino, he would have been about three, then she served herself. I remember watching her. I was hungry, but then he said he wanted more sauce on his pasta and so she gave him more. Then Dino. Always. I knew the routine and only after they had had seconds would she serve me. But that time she didn’t. She served more for herself and I got not only the scraps, I got the message—I came nowhere.’

  Bella could remember her own mother and how she would tell her she had already eaten, how she’d done everything she could to make sure that Bella didn’t go hungry.

  To think that a mother would do that deliberately.

  ‘I would go to Luka’s. I didn’t like it much there either but there was always food. I was home less and less but then Luka went to boarding school so I had no choice but to go back. We had a row when I was fifteen and I haven’t spent a night there since.’

  ‘Was that when she told you she hated you?’

  ‘Yep,’ Matteo said. ‘Or rather, I asked her why she hated me and she said that I reminded her of my father. I didn’t really know much about him so I said, “What, did he treat you badly?” She said no, he had treated her well and that was why she could not stand to look at me. I was too painful a reminder of good times.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Malvolio said I could stay in one of the fisherman’s cottages on the beach. I told him I couldn’t pay rent and he said that was no problem. He would find some jobs for me.’ Behind his glasses Matteo rolled his eyes. ‘And of course he did. I used to resent Luka. He went and studied in London and I wanted to ask if I could go and join him but I was too proud. I made out that I loved the place... When he came back to end things with Sophie, I knew he was cutting all ties. We were going to meet up for a drink at the airport. I was going to ask him then to help me get out but, like you, he never showed. He had an excuse, though, given he’d been arrested...’

  She didn’t take the opening.

  ‘What’s your excuse, Bella? Were you never intending to show, or did Maria talk you out of it?’

  Still she did not answer him.

  ‘Tell me another truth, then,’ Matteo said, and he did not turn his head to hers. ‘This morning wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you plan to throw the water?’

  ‘Do you really want the truth?’ Bella checked, and now their faces turned and Matteo removed his glasses and their eyes met. ‘I hoped you might be alone.’

  ‘To talk?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Bella said. ‘I find talking to you the hardest part...’ She thought back to last night and the little note she had written him. There had been this tiny kernel, a tiny dream that with Sophie and Luka together, even temporarily, Matteo might have been hoping to see her too.

  ‘So what would have happened if I had been alone?’ Matteo asked.

  If you could be unfaithful with just your eyes, he was then.

  And if you could be the other woman with just a look, then that was who she was.

  They did not touch, their eyes did not assess each other’s bodies but, Bella knew, if he was hers and he shared this look with another woman, she would die.

  He looked down at her mouth and there was such tension in her lips as they fought from meeting his and then he moved back to her gaze.

  They made love.

  Past love, perhaps, but together they watched the memory. He bathed her, washed her, tasted her, made love to her and they both lay, five years later, locked in recall.

  It was such a dangerous game they played with their eyes.

  ‘We were so good,’ she murmured.

  ‘We were.’

  And if they moved, even a fraction, they could not justify to anyone that they were mere friends.

  ‘But you have a nice life now...’ Bella tried to break the spell. ‘I see you in some of the magazines.’

  ‘They make a lot of stuff up.’

  ‘And they tell some truths,’ she said. ‘They found out about your scar. You never told me you were stabbed.’

  ‘I said to you that I was in a fight.’

  ‘And it was interesting to read that Shandy got suspended from school when she was sixteen for drinking.’

  Matteo swallowed. His throat was suddenly dry; he knew what was coming.

  ‘They pay a lot of attention to your past, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then it is just as well that we’re not together because they would have a field day with mine,’ she said. ‘I remember that you said, you would hate my past to bring you down.’

  ‘Bella—’

  ‘But aside from your embarrassment about me and my past and perhaps my mother, I could not stand to be discussed like that by the press, Matteo.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I would not want the scrutiny.’

  Bella stood up then. It was easier to walk and keep her distance, to remind herself why she could never belong by his side.

  They walked and then sat on the Spanish Steps, still not touching, back safe behind dark glasses, even though she knew the questions were going to come.

  ‘You said to your manager that you had worked at the hotel for five years...’ There was a slight huskiness to Matteo’s voice, a rare nervous edge as they approached the most difficult of subjects. ‘That would mean you came to Rome soon after...’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘Nearly three months after...’ Bella said, not completing it either—they both knew they were discussing that night and the plans that had been made that morning. ‘My mother had a stroke that morning. I came home and found her on the floor. She died three months later.’ Bella could see the shock in his expression. After all, Maria had only been thirty-four when she’d died. ‘Did you never think to find out why I wasn’t there?’

  ‘I gave you money to leave...’ Matteo said, and then let out a tense breath as he looked back on the time. ‘I spoke with Dino a few weeks after I left. He never mentioned that your mother was sick. He said you were enjoying working in the bar, that he was enjoying...’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. Even now the thought of Dino with Bella made him feel ill.

  ‘Your brother is a liar,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you worked that out yet? I never set foot in the bar after that night with you. On the night before my mother’s funeral, just after Paulo’s sentencing, I ran away to Rome and because of that she lies in a pauper’s grave.’

  ‘Bella—’

  ‘I got to Rome. Sophie had found a flat and...’ She hesitated. As honest as she had been, she chose not to tell him that Sophie had been working at the hotel when she had arrived. That was for Sophie to share with Luka if ever she chose to. ‘I got a job as a chambermaid at Hotel Fiscella and I’ve been there ever since.’

  ‘So you haven’t...’ He didn’t quite know how to voice it and Bella got up then and walked away briskly. He came up behind her but she just kept right on walking till they stood at the Trevi Fountain. Tourists were jostling for position, throwing in coins in the hope they might one day return.

  ‘Sometimes I think of the baths back home,’ Bella said. ‘You know they say that a young girl led Roman soldiers to a source of pure water...’ She looked at the magnificent structure and still, magnificent as it was, the most famous fountain in the world, it wasn’t home.

  She went into her bag and took out a coin and kissed it but then, instead of throwing it in the fountain, she handed it to him and closed his fingers around it.

  ‘Please put it in your pocket so that you don’t come back, Matteo. Let’s get through this wedd
ing but, please, don’t come back because if you do, if you buy the hotel, I’ll leave and I will have to start my life over again when I’m tired of starting over.’

  ‘Bella?’

  She could not avoid it, there could be no more changing the subject. It was here that she must face her past because Matteo was turning her to look at him as he addressed the painful topic of her other line of work. ‘Are you telling me that you never...’ It was still a sentence he could not finish. The thought of her with Dino had made him vomit in the past, the thought of her being used still made him feel ill and so, when words failed, he took her hand, but that just angered her.

  ‘Oh, I pass your test now, do I? I’m suddenly respectable because you were my only client?’ She was bitter, she was angry, but more than that she was so, so ashamed of the very hand that he had tried holding that it actually burnt as she took it back. ‘Well, before you get your hopes up, know that I don’t pass your test, Matteo. Sometimes you do what you have to to survive. It’s not always pretty.’

  ‘Bella...’

  She didn’t want to hear it, she didn’t want to try and justify things.

  She was here.

  With her shame perhaps.

  But she was here and alive.

  Even if it had cost any chance for them.

  Bella did a terribly cruel thing then.

  To herself.

  She reached up and took off his glasses and even if Matteo did his best to mask it, he didn’t quite and she saw not just the disappointment there but something else.

  Bella took it to be his disgust.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BELLA LEFT HIM THEN.

  She didn’t want his attempts at a normal conversation after her revelation. She just wanted to be alone and so, without a further word, she tossed his glasses back at him and then pushed her way through the crowd and headed for home.

  And Matteo let her go.

  For Bella, the rest of the day was long and spent trying not to think of him so she chose to escape from her thoughts the best way she knew how.

  She still couldn’t quite take in the news that Sophie and Luka were to marry this Sunday.

  She knew she would hear it first-hand soon but if it was true, if they really were about to wed, then there was one thing she could do other than pace their tiny apartment, trying not to dwell on a night that had taken place five years ago.

  She went through to the small kitchen, knelt under the table and pulled out two bricks and then put her hand in.

  Oh, she had done her best not to touch the money she had saved for her mother’s stone but sometimes it was a matter of taking care of the living and Bella wanted to help her friend in the best way she knew how.

  Bella headed to the market and to her favourite stall, where she spoke at length with the owner as she examined the bundles of fabric and the little boxes of beads.

  ‘This is beautiful,’ Bella said, running her hand over a length of ivory tulle that was affordable but they both knew she was trying to convince herself for her eyes kept going to the back of the stall and a roll of fabric that was close to four times the price of the one she was looking at. ‘Let me see that one again,’ she said.

  It was chiffon, the texture similar to that of the engagement dress she had once made for Sophie, though that had been a cotton chiffon and this was in silk. And that had been coral. This, though, was a parchment white.

  ‘It would be very difficult to work with,’ Bella said, still trying to dissuade herself from spending so much, ‘and I don’t have much time.’

  There would be no time for beading, Bella thought, but then again her best work had been the most simple cuts. And the challenge of working with such an exquisite fabric, to create for a relatively small price a dress that might cost thousands, even tens of thousands in a bridal store, had her heart beating with excitement.

  The thought of making, with love, a wedding dress for her friend fulfilled a long-ago promise. Oh, Bella had thought she would be rich by then, a famous seamstress who people flocked to. She laughed for a moment, remembering sitting at their secret cove at home, looking out across the water. Bella would be rich and famous and Sophie was going to sail the seas, working on the cruise liners.

  Life had seemed a lot simpler then.

  She would do this for her friend, Bella decided. Even if the wedding was a fake one, Bella knew that Sophie’s heart resided with Luka.

  And, Bella knew, as the stallholder cut out the required length, this might be her one and only truly luxurious creation—she was snared in the poverty trap, sewing together other’s cast-offs, whereas this would the first piece of clothing that she had made from scratch in years.

  Bella bought oil for her small sewing machine and silk thread as well as needles and tissue paper and then raced home.

  She set to work in the bedroom, cutting out the pattern from memory. Sophie was curvy, a little more full in the bust and hips than she had been at eighteen, but Bella allowed for that.

  She ached to cut into the fabric but she forced herself to be patient. Measure twice, cut once wasn’t going to work here, but at the very least she could get started on the skirt. Finally, that night, the first cut was made, her scissors slicing through the sheer fabric until the beginning of a dress was born—the fabric, like huge tulip petals, was still pinned to paper but its beauty was starting to emerge when she heard the rattle of the security gate and Sophie’s voice.

  ‘Sophie...’

  Bella came out of the bedroom and hugged her teary friend as soon as she stumbled into the apartment.

  ‘Luka says that he wished he’d never loved me,’ Sophie sobbed, and she told Bella far more than Matteo had. ‘He’s going to jilt me.’

  And though Bella would have loved to linger on her own problems, there were times when a friend, no matter how badly your own heart was bleeding, needed you to help with the gaping wound in theirs. Her own problems could wait for now, she decided.

  Sophie was leaving tomorrow for Bordo Del Cielo to be jilted in front of the town, and to add to things her father was dying.

  Yes, Bella put her own problems aside.

  ‘I had an argument with my father,’ Sophie wept. ‘He wants me to wear my mother’s wedding dress and I said no. I don’t want a marriage like theirs.’

  Never had Bella been happier to spend her savings for the smile she gave her friend then. ‘I’m already making your wedding dress.’ She told her that she would be working on it through the night. ‘I’m going to be there with you, Sophie.’

  ‘No.’ Sophie shook her head. ‘You have to work, and anyway...’

  ‘Anyway?’

  ‘Matteo will be there and...’

  ‘I know that he has a woman,’ Bella said. ‘And I know that she is stunning. I’d love to come and be your bridesmaid, Sophie. And don’t worry about work—as of this morning I am suspended.’

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘I got in a lot of trouble,’ she explained with a slightly mischievous smile. ‘I spilt an ice bucket on a guest’s lap when I was delivering the breakfasts to the room.’

  ‘An ice bucket?’

  ‘It was mainly cold water. I tripped but his girlfriend kicked up a fuss and called for the manager. It was a simple accident. The room was dark. I didn’t see him—or rather they didn’t hear me come in with breakfast. They were otherwise engaged.’

  Sophie looked up at the sound of venom and mischief in Bella’s voice and her mouth actually gaped for a moment before she spoke.

  ‘You threw a bucket of iced water over Matteo?’

  ‘I did.’ Bella grinned. ‘So, you see, now I am free to be at your wedding and I’m going to work on your wedding dress tonight. Sophie, you’re going to be the most beautiful bride.’

  She would be.
<
br />   Bella took a lot of measurements as they chatted. Paulo’s house had been part of Malvolio’s estate and was now owned by Luka. ‘He’s given it back to my father,’ Sophie said. ‘Well, at least that is what he has said to him. Who knows what will happen when my father is dead? For now, though, it is good that he thinks he has a home.’

  ‘I want to see my old home,’ Bella said. ‘I’m sure it has people living there now but I might knock and ask if they will let me come in, or at least take some cuttings from the garden. She loved her flowers so much.’

  It was good to have her friend back in the apartment but a strained Sophie, now she had relaxed a little and confided in her friend, could barely keep her eyes open.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Bella said.

  ‘We fly at seven,’ Sophie said. ‘On his luxury jet.’

  ‘So we will return to Bordo Del Cielo in style.’ Bella smiled. ‘You just try and rest for now, we don’t want the bride to have bags under her eyes and ruin my dress.’

  Sophie smiled but then it changed into a yawn. ‘Are you nervous to see Matteo?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Bella lied. ‘We have already spoken. He took me to some fancy restaurant for breakfast this morning.’ Bella gave a tight smile. ‘He still thinks I’m a whore.’

  ‘I hope you put him right!’

  Bella shook her head.

  ‘Bella?’

  ‘It was fine.’ She squeezed her friend’s hand. ‘Don’t worry about me right now. We’ll get through the next few days, we’ve been through worse.’

  ‘But you and Matteo...’

  ‘Matteo and I can never be,’ Bella said.

  She hadn’t even told her friend the full truth.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Get some sleep,’ Bella interrupted. ‘I don’t want to talk about Matteo now.’

  She didn’t want to think about him either.

  She didn’t want to look back at that time.

  Neither did Matteo.

  As Bella sat sewing, not far away Matteo was speaking to his assistant, who had adjusted his itinerary. The company jet was being used by Luka so he had had his assistant book his trips. Tomorrow mid-morning he was taking a helicopter to Bordo Del Cielo and it would bring him back to Rome at seven on the Sunday night and then he would fly to Dubai on Monday morning.