Mediterranean Rebel's Bride

by Lucy Gordon

  With sudden resolution, as though he’d been given a reviving draught of life, he started the car and swung out of the airport.

  Well, what did you think was going to happen? Polly thought scathingly. That he was going to forget her and see you? Get real!

  On the way home she said, ‘Have you been sensible while I was away?’

  ‘No riding. I swear it.’

  ‘Short of that.’

  ‘I dropped in at work for an hour, but I behaved very feebly, and came home early. You’d have been proud of me.’

  ‘How about the pills?’

  ‘Just a couple at night. I’m on the mend.’

  When they reached the villa Primo and Olympia were there. Apart from Carlo and Della, away on their honeymoon, they were the only Rinuccis who lived in Naples, so their arrival represented the rest of the family.

  At first Polly stayed where Matthew could always see her, lest he grow alarmed. But he was easy in company—a natural charmer, who relished the attention.

  Everyone was delighted when Ruggiero dropped down on one knee to look his son in the eye, and received a steady stare in return.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ Ruggiero said politely.

  ‘Bon—bon—’ he tried to repeat.

  Ruggiero repeated the word and the tot responded by yelling, ‘Bon, bon, bon!’ in tones of delight.

  Everyone laughed and clapped.

  ‘His first Italian word,’ Hope cried. ‘Why don’t you sit down and hold him?’

  He sat on the sofa, and she helped little Matthew to get up beside him. He peered closely at this new giant, and finally became curious enough to try to climb onto his lap.

  ‘Better not,’ Ruggiero said quickly. ‘I’m still a bit sore, and I’d be afraid of dropping him.’

  It was an entirely reasonable excuse. Surely Polly only imagined that he’d seized the first chance to back off?

  He behaved impeccably, regarding the child with apparent interest, smiling in the right places, watching as he was bathed and dressed in the sleepsuit that Polly had brought with her, then put to bed. It was agreed, for the moment, that he should sleep in Polly’s room, in a crib that one of the maids had rescued from the attic.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to say that was mine?’ Ruggiero asked with resigned good humour.

  ‘No, this was Carlo’s,’ Hope declared triumphantly. ‘You managed to set fire to yours.’

  Everyone laughed, including Ruggiero, but it seemed to Polly that he was doing everything from a distance, trying not to reveal that this first meeting with his son meant nothing to him.

  When Matthew had fallen asleep, Ruggiero said unexpectedly, ‘Could you all give us a moment, please?’

  Everyone smiled at this sign of fatherly interest, but when the door had closed behind them he said urgently to Polly, ‘The photos? Can I have them now?’

  ‘Of course. I unpacked them ready for you.’

  She took the two albums from a drawer and handed them to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said briefly, and departed without a look at the sleeping child.

  That night Polly stayed up late in her room, telling herself that she was watching over the little boy, but secretly knowing that she was watching over his father. Opening her window and looking out, she could see the glow from his window next door. There was to be no rest for him tonight.

  She imagined him turning the pages, seeing ‘Sapphire’s’ face over and over, feeling fresh pain with every new vision.

  Why had she let herself be taken by surprise? Deny it how he would, Sapphire had been the woman he’d loved so passionately that a few days ago the briefest imagined glimpse of her had driven him to madness, almost claiming his life. Perhaps he would have preferred that, now she was dead. He was, in effect, a widower, but denied a widower’s freedom to mourn openly—denied even the memories of a shared love that might have made his loss bearable.

  Suddenly she remembered that Freda’s wedding pictures were in the second album. In the hurry and agitation it had slipped her mind, but now she wished she’d remembered and removed them. It was too late, but she might have spared him that.

  A quick glance showed that Matthew was still sleeping. She went out into the corridor and knocked softly at Ruggiero’s door.

  ‘Come in.’ The words came softly.

  He was sitting on the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, the wedding pictures open beside him.

  ‘I just came to see if you were all right.’

  ‘I’m fine—fine.’

  She sat on the bed beside him.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve been watching you all evening, and you’re like a man stretched on a wheel. Your nerves are at breaking point—even your voice sounds different.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Tense. Hard. Every five minutes you ask yourself if you can survive the next five minutes, and then the next. You smile at people and try to say the right things, but it’s taking everything out of you.’

  ‘Am I really as transparent as that?’ he asked, with a brief wry smile.

  ‘No, I don’t think anyone else has noticed.’

  ‘Just Nurse Bossy-Boots, keeping an eagle eye on the patient?’

  Or a woman with a man whose every word and gesture means something, she thought, and longed to be able to say it aloud.

  He sighed and squeezed her hand. ‘No, it’s not just your being a nurse. You see things that nobody else does. Where do you get it from?’

  She resisted the impulse to squeeze back, and said, ‘In a way it is part of being a nurse. You watch people so much that you starting noticing odd details. I don’t just mean medical things, but about their lives.’ She gave a little chuckle.

  ‘What? Tell me.’

  ‘I got so that when a man brought his wife into the ward I could tell at once how things were between them. I knew which husbands were going to be faithful while their wives were in hospital, and which ones were going to live it up.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Something in the voice. If he called her “darling” every second word I knew he’d be on the phone to a girlfriend before he left the building. The ones who were going to go home and worry didn’t say very much, just looked.’

  ‘You’ve got us all ticketed, then?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said, trying to ease the mood by making a joke of it. ‘No man can spring a surprise on me. You’re all boringly predictable.’

  There was one man she hadn’t told Ruggiero about—a soldier, who’d brought his wife to the ward and had seemed to think he was on parade, talking at the top of his voice and bullying everyone. But afterwards she’d found him sitting in the corridor, staring into space.

  ‘Boringly predictable’ had been a joke, and far from her real thoughts. It was that desperate soldier who’d given her the clue to Ruggiero.

  He interrupted her thoughts by saying suddenly, ‘Does Brian know how you think?’

  ‘Well, I don’t talk to him that way. A woman should keep her secrets.’

  ‘From the man she loves?’

  ‘Especially from the man she loves,’ she said firmly.

  ‘And he doesn’t suspect?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Keep the poor fool in blissful ignorance, eh? I guess that runs in the family.’

  He said the last words so quietly that she didn’t need to respond to them, but their bitterness wasn’t lost on her.

  ‘What kind of man is Brian?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Does he tend to be faithful, or go the other way?’

  ‘I’ve hardly had time to judge.’

  ‘But with you being so preoccupied this last year—you weren’t afraid that he’d stray?’

  ‘I haven’t been putting his fidelity to the test,’ she said, with perfect truth.

  ‘Is that because you’re afraid to try, or because he doesn’t have enough spirit to be unfaithful?’

  ‘You make infidelity sound like a virtue?’ she said,
half laughing.

  ‘Not exactly. But to be as sure of him as you are—he sounds like a suet pudding.’

  ‘I promise you he’s not a suet pudding. Brian’s lively enough, but he spends long, exhausting days looking after people who need him.’

  ‘And when you get together you talk about test tubes. That must be thrilling.’

  She hadn’t wanted this discussion, but it was useful. Being close to Ruggiero like this affected her so strongly that she was terrified he would sense it, and Brian was a useful shield. So she played along.

  ‘Anything can be thrilling if you share the same interests,’ she mused.

  ‘And that’s what you talked about when you saw him yesterday?’

  She chuckled. ‘I don’t think we talked much.’

  ‘But didn’t he try to persuade you to stay with him—in between doing whatever you were doing?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Of course not? Does he love you or not?’

  ‘He does, but he knew I had to come back for as long as I’m needed here. He understands about putting duty first.’

  ‘Another thing you share?’

  ‘Another thing we share.’

  ‘You told him that you’re crazy about him but you had to return to this grumpy so-and-so who’ll collapse without you? That and test tubes? How did you tear yourself away from such passion?’

  ‘Nurse Bossy-Boots never lets down a patient,’ she said primly. ‘And passion can be found in the oddest places.’

  She found she was enjoying this conversation too much for safety, and hurried to say, ‘But I don’t think I ought to discuss him any more. He wouldn’t like it.’

  Ruggiero threw her a grim look. His nerves were stretched from the two tense days he’d spent waiting for her, wondering if he would ever see her again.

  He was a man with no gift for self-analysis. He could dismantle an engine both actually and in his head. He even had some faint understanding of others. But to himself he was an almost total mystery.

  In the last two days he’d been miserable, thinking of the pictures that Polly might or might not remember to bring back. He’d focused on that because he understood it, but somewhere along the line it had blurred with the fear that she might not return at all.

  Arguments had raged in his head. His strong, reliable Nurse Bossy-Boots was a woman of her word. She wouldn’t let him down because that wasn’t her way. But the ties holding her back were immense—including the man she loved, who might be fed up with waiting and demand to come first in her life.

  Perhaps she’d give the pictures to Hope and leave, confident that she’d done her duty?

  But she wouldn’t have done it, he told himself firmly. She was the one person he could talk to, and she had no right to desert him.

  Hope had called him that morning to say they were returning together. He’d breathed again, but even so he’d been shocked by the explosion of relief that had attacked him when she’d appeared at Naples Airport. It had the perverse effect of making him abrupt, even angry with her. And this, too, he did not understand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HIS EYES WERE on the photographs. Sapphire. Briefly she’d faded, but now she flamed back into his consciousness, as sharp and poignant as ever. He drew in a sharp breath at the sight of her radiant beauty on the day she’d married another man.

  ‘They’re lovely pictures, aren’t they?’ Polly said.

  She began to turn the pages. Freda had been at her best on that day: her extravagant beauty flaunted in a glamorous satin creation, George’s wedding gift of diamonds on her head, holding in place a veil that stretched to the floor.

  There she was with her new husband, looking adoringly into his face because she wanted to be convincing in her role. George had been good for several more diamonds yet.

  There she was with her chief bridesmaid, poor cousin Polly, looking horribly out of place in a frilly pink satin dress, her dullness cruelly contrasted with the bride’s lustrous looks.

  One picture was a close-up of Freda alone, with a soft, sweet smile and a tender expression that had seldom been there in real life. She’d been an accomplished actress, and for this shot she’d managed to banish the gleam of greedy triumph from her eyes. The woman in that picture was enchanting: soft, generous, giving, yielding; everything that she had not been.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I shouldn’t have brought the wedding pictures.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked sharply. ‘Do you think I’m afraid of them?’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to be. What difference can it make now?’

  ‘Don’t say that. I can’t rid myself of her just because she’s dead. In some ways I feel I’ve only just met her, and I need to know everything.’

  She shook her head, but she didn’t say aloud what she was thinking—that ‘everything’ was precisely what he couldn’t endure knowing. Instead she begged, ‘Let the past be. It’s the future that matters—your future and Matthew’s.’

  ‘But the future grows out of the past. What do I do if the past is a blank? I need to find out as much as I can, then maybe—I don’t know. Maybe things will be different. If I could see the places where she lived, get some picture of her life in my mind—you could take me back there.’

  ‘Ruggiero, no.’

  ‘But you could. We could go to England tomorrow. We don’t have to be away for long—just long enough for me to see where she lived and go around the places she knew—’

  She seized his good shoulder, giving him a little shake.

  ‘It won’t bring her back,’ she said fiercely. ‘Stop this!’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said in agony.

  Looking at him closely, she saw that he was in the grip of a powerful force that was devouring him. His eyes were full of a terrifying obsession. His hot breath brushing her face might have come from the fires of hell.

  ‘Stop it!’ she said. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘How?’ he asked bleakly. ‘Help me, Polly. You’re the only friend who can. Nobody else knows—I can’t tell anyone—how could I?’

  It was true. Hope knew roughly what had happened, but not how deep his pain went. Because he loved his mother he would conceal the worst from her, but it left him with nobody to turn to except Polly.

  ‘All the time you were away,’ he went on, ‘I kept hoping for a miracle. Somehow I’d get things into perspective and see her clearly—that’s what I thought. And when you brought the baby back, I know I was supposed to take one look at him and be overcome with fatherly love.’

  ‘No, that’s only in sentimental films,’ she said. ‘I think what really happened is that you looked at him and thought, Oh, my God!’

  ‘O, mio dio!’ he agreed. ‘Call me a monster if you like, but I feel nothing for my son. Nothing.’

  ‘You’re not a monster at all. When you look at him I dare say you don’t actually see him, because there’s a brick wall built between you, and you can’t get past it.’

  ‘Except that she’s there too—both of her.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘The beautiful girl who loved me and transformed my life, and the manipulator who took what she wanted and left me in a desert, without a backward glance. I don’t know which one of them is real, and until I know more nothing is ever going to be real.’

  ‘Maybe the reality is a bit of both,’ she said, trying to soften it for him.

  ‘Or maybe I’m simply telling myself pretty fairy tales—seeing only what I want to see, blocking my ears to anything that doesn’t fit in with my picture: a weak, foolish man who can’t bear to face unpleasant facts?’

  ‘Stop being so hard on yourself,’ she said fiercely. ‘You haven’t recovered from the shock yet.’

  ‘I thought I might find some sort of answer in the child’s face, but it seems to change all the time. Sometimes her, sometimes me—’

  ‘And sometimes he’s just himself, which is how it should be. That poor little boy, carrying the burden of so many expectatio
ns.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that? They’re all looking at him to see if he’s a true Rinucci—just as they’re watching me to see if I’m feeling the right things. So I do what I have to—kneel down, speak to him—so that they don’t think how heartless I am. Nobody must guess the truth except you. Without you to hold onto I think I’d go mad.’

  She should be sensible and run away now. She’d already had a warning of the perilous path she was treading. But she didn’t want to be sensible. She wanted to take the burden from him, even if it led her further down that path and cost her dear.

  Polly put her arms around him, letting her forehead rest against his.

  ‘And you can hold onto me. I’ll help all I can, but not by creating a dream world for you.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ he said softly. ‘I want to know what she was like in the real world, and only you can tell me.’

  ‘And will telling you help?’ she asked. ‘Maybe talking about her will only make it worse?’

  His eyes burned with his obsession, warning her of the dangerous direction his mind was taking.

  ‘But it might keep her with me,’ he whispered feverishly. ‘I’m not ready to let go yet.’

  ‘Even of her ghost?’

  ‘If that’s all I can have.’

  ‘Haven’t you had enough of ghosts?’ she asked passionately. ‘She’s haunted you for over two years, and she nearly killed you. Don’t you realise that?’

  ‘Or you did,’ he said wryly.

  ‘No, it wasn’t me who sent you spinning off the track into what might have been your grave.’

  Something in her brain seemed to snap, and for a moment she went mad, her mind following his down the road to destruction.

  ‘That was her,’ she said passionately. ‘Because she’s jealous and possessive and she can’t bear to let you go, even though she doesn’t want you. That’s how she was. If she couldn’t have something, she hated anyone else to have it. Her life was taken, so now she—’

  Appalled, she checked herself.

  ‘What am I saying?’ she choked. ‘I’m talking about her as though—almost as if—’

  ‘That’s what she’s doing to my head, too,’ he told her. ‘Now do you understand that there’s no escape?’