The Decision

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘No. But do you know which box?’

  ‘Yes, Tim’s scrawled it on my ticket. Look. Come on, let’s go in. We can talk over dinner.’ They opened the door of the box to a second surge of huge applause as the curtains swung down. Jeremy smiled. ‘Is that for us?’ he said, then, ‘Mariella, Giovanni, can you ever forgive me?’ He bowed over Mariella’s hand and kissed it. ‘I am so, so sorry. I got lost in the fog. And then of course I couldn’t come in, until now.’

  Giovanni stood up, shook his hand. ‘Welcome, dear friend,’ he said, ‘we and Milan should not have subjected you to the fog. It is we who should ask for forgiveness. Let me give you a glass of champagne.’

  Ice bucket, champagne and flutes had appeared from apparently nowhere.

  ‘Thank you. How kind. Mariella, how very beautiful you look.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘how kind you are. Come, sit by me.’

  Which he did, and as he did so, brushed her hand, momentarily; and she looked down at their hands, and then at him, her brilliant eyes somehow embracing him; and then bent her lovely head over the programme discussing with him what he had and had not missed, occasionally glancing over at Giovanni and, when she saw that he was engrossed in conversation with the Fordyces, addressed the full force of her beauty and its sexual power in another direction altogether.

  A love affair was indeed born that night in the Crespi box at La Scala, taking the most extraordinary hold as the music surged and surrounded them and the tragic story told on the stage below found a most haunting and unpredictable echo. And the fog, holding them all captive in the city, disallowing escape, enforcing intimacy, played no small part in the drama that was to come.

  Returning to an empty house, with nothing to eat, Matt suddenly felt lonely. He should never have let Eliza go, or at least insisted on a two-day visit instead of four.

  He wondered what she was doing; having dinner with the Crespis no doubt, laughing and joking, drawn out of her depression, while he, stuck here without her, went into one.

  Suddenly he wanted to speak to her; and why not, he thought, there was a telephone for God’s sake; he would ring, calling overseas wasn’t very difficult these days. They could have a chat and he would feel better.

  He went into his study, sat down at his desk, dialled the operator and asked for the Crespi number. There was a slight delay, it seemed, about half an hour, some problem with the line, but then he should get through. He pulled some papers out of his briefcase and tried to concentrate.

  Milan was by now completely fog-bound, with no chance of leaving; Eliza was close to panic. She was away from Emmie, whom she had left with comparative strangers, one of whom had already managed to lose her in Milan, and she quailed from the thought of Matt’s reaction to the whole story.

  ‘Can’t we even try to get back?’ she said to Giovanni, close to tears. ‘I really want to—’

  ‘Eliza, you do not know our fog. It is very, very bad. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will be gone, but tonight we must stay here. Try not to worry,’ he said, smiling his sweet smile, ‘all will be well.’

  Mariella was dismissive of her anxieties.

  ‘Emmie will be fine. You can speak to her, you can speak to Bruno, you can speak to Anna-Maria.’

  ‘But she’s only very little, she might be frightened—’

  ‘Did she sound frightened? When you called earlier? She seemed to be having a wonderful time.’ She was growing bored with the whole Emmie situation. ‘Eliza, there is nothing we can do. If we try to get home, we will probably be killed. Please try to accept it.’

  ‘Mariella,’ said Eliza, determined to be firm. ‘She’s only five years old. She’s in a strange place with strange people. Of course your staff are good, I don’t doubt it. I’m just worried about her if she wakes up in the night or—’

  Janey Fordyce, who had been listening, put her hand on Eliza’s arm.

  ‘It’s very dangerous, the fog, Eliza. It really is. Now the thing is, where will you all stay? Mariella, you and Giovanni are very welcome to stay with us, in our apartment, but I don’t think we can find room for Eliza too—’

  ‘No, no, we can use the room at the Grande,’ said Mariella, ‘and Eliza can stay with you. There. That is settled. Now – shall we go to dinner?’

  ‘We will,’ said Giovanni, ‘but first Eliza and I will go and make a telephone call, so that she can reassure herself about her daughter. It is very worrying for her, Mariella, and I do not like to see people worried.’

  ‘But—’ began Mariella and then stopped, put on her sweetest smile and said, ‘of course.’

  It was the first time Eliza had seen the true balance of power in that relationship and it intrigued her. The conversations with both Bruno, who said he and Emmie had played cards after dinner and she had then told him a story, and Anna-Maria, who was sitting by her small bed as she slept, were reassuring; Eliza relaxed a little.

  ‘And now,’ said Giovanni, ‘would you like to try to speak to your husband? To reassure him that you are quite safe?’

  ‘Oh – no, thank you,’ said Eliza with a shudder. ‘He won’t for an instant be worried about me, he doesn’t know there’s a fog after all and there’s no way he’ll try to call. No, the best thing is to leave him in blissful ignorance, Giovanni. I’ll call him tomorrow when I’m back at the villa.’

  ‘Bene. Then let us go and enjoy our dinner.’

  It took forty minutes to get to the restaurant from La Scala, limousine crawling after limousine in the thick fog.

  ‘We’d have done better to walk,’ said Timothy.

  The restaurant, Lisander, was so beautiful that Eliza felt she must have strayed back onto the set of La Traviata, with rows of tables, each with their own little white-shaded lamps, and filled with flowers. ‘You should see it in the summer,’ Janey Fordyce said to her, ‘somehow they bring the garden inside, wisteria trailing everywhere, you would love it. A million romances must have begun here.’

  ‘Only a million!’ said Mariella, laughing. ‘I do not think so.’

  And then she organised them all very efficiently, placing herself next to Giovanni on one side and Jeremy on the other. And flirted with both of them quite outrageously. It was a bit like, Eliza thought, looking in on a ménage à trois.

  ‘Hello! Hello! Is that the Villa Crespi?’

  ‘Si signor, si, Villa Crespi is here.’

  ‘Can I speak to Signor Crespi, please?’

  ‘Signor Crespi not here, sir.’

  ‘OK. Signora Crespi then.’

  ‘The signora is also not here.’

  ‘Oh. Oh I see. Well, is my wife there? Mrs Shaw? Surely she must be there, it’s—’

  ‘One moment, signor, please.’

  What the fuck was going on? Where were they all? Pretty bloody rude leaving Eliza on her own. And she was obviously there, she wouldn’t have left Emmie at night surely, it was eleven thirty Italian-time … bloody wops.

  ‘Signor. Good evening. Is Sebastiano here, butler to the Crespis. Can I help you?’

  ‘Well, I hope so,’ said Matt, ‘I’m calling from England, I want to speak to my wife, Mrs Shaw …’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry, signor. They are all away, in Milan.’

  ‘Away? What do you mean?’

  ‘At the opera, signor. At La Scala.’

  ‘Oh – right.’ He did remember hearing something about La Scala and how worried Eliza was about what she would wear. ‘Will you ask my wife to call as soon as they get back?’

  ‘They will not be back tonight, signor. I am sorry.’

  ‘Not back? Why the hell not?’

  ‘Well, sir, because of the fog. There is a very bad fog here tonight, signor. They will not be able to come back. It happens often here, the fog at this time of year. It is very, very dangerous to try to drive, to travel.’

  ‘Well – well …’ Matt felt himself held in a fog of his own, a dangerous, bewildering, angry fog. ‘Well – is my daughter with them? Because if she is—’
/>   ‘No, signor, your daughter is quite safe with us. We are all taking great care of her, you must not worry, she is asleep, Anna-Maria is with her all the time, and she is very, very happy. What a dear little girl she is, so beautiful, so talented, so intelligent—’

  Sebastiano’s musings upon Emmie’s virtues and beauty were interrupted.

  ‘Well, she’d better be bloody well safe,’ said Matt, ‘and the moment, the moment my wife gets back, you get her to ring me, all right? When will that be?’

  ‘Signor, it is impossible to say, I am sorry, the fog sometimes lasts for a day, sometimes two. But I will get a message to Signor Crespi first thing in the morning—’

  ‘You bloody well get a message to him tonight,’ said Matt, ‘I want to know my wife is safe and when she’ll be back with my daughter, is that clear?’

  ‘Si, signor.’

  Sebastiano put the phone down disdainfully, feeling it had assumed the persona of the ill-mannered foreigner who had been berating him and after a few minutes’ thought, dialled the number of the Hotel Grande and asked to be put through to Signor Crespi.

  On hearing he was not there, but out at dinner, Sebastiano decided there was no more he could do. Nothing made his master angrier than being pursued in his leisure hours unless it was to do with his beloved wife. He left a message at the Hotel Grande, asking Giovanni to call him when he came back if it was convenient, as Mr Shaw had been asking for his wife, and left it at that. The whole thing was rather ridiculous and nothing that could not be resolved in the morning.

  The Fordyce apartment was grander than Eliza had expected, decorated alla Milanese, with endless gilt mirrors, heavy draped curtains, lavish flower arrangements, and every spare inch of wall covered in paintings – landscapes, miniatures, portraits, still lifes, many of them quite crude.

  ‘It’s a company apartment,’ said Janey. ‘I wanted to anglicise it, but we’re not really supposed to. I’ve got used to it now and we’re going back to London in six months, so—’

  ‘Will you be pleased?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so. It’s wonderful here, but it’s a bit – intense. And we’re neither fish nor fowl, not visitors, not Milanese, and there’s no place like England, is there?’

  Eliza agreed that there was not. She lay awake for a long time in her four-poster bed, complete with gilt cherubs, worrying about Emmie and thinking about Jeremy, how extraordinarily nice he was, how extremely attractive still and how much easier her life would have been if she had married him.

  When Giovanni got back to the hotel, and was told there was a message from Sebastiano, and that Matt had been asking for Eliza, he decided that at one in the morning, he had no stomach for trying to make complex phone calls. It had been a wonderful evening and there was a little anxiety like the mildest dyspepsia somewhere within him, he knew not why, and he wanted to be alone with his Mariella and try to sleep. The morning would take care of itself.

  Chapter 41

  ‘Matt? Is that you? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes. How about with you?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely fine, yes. Everything’s great. Emmie’s having a lovely time and so am I and we’re both looking forward to—’

  ‘To what? What are you both looking forward to? A reunion?’

  ‘What, with you? Yes, that’s what I was going to say, we—’

  ‘So you’re together are you?’

  ‘Well – not this minute, no. I’m in Milan. But we’re on our way back, just leaving in a few minutes.’

  ‘Which is where exactly, if I might ask?’

  ‘Well – in an apartment. Belonging to friends of Mariella and Giovanni—’

  ‘And why are you there?’

  His tone was quite easy, he sounded almost cheerful. Careful Eliza, steady; it might be all right yet.

  ‘Well, you see – last night—’

  ‘Ah, last night. And where were you last night? Exactly? Without Emmie?’

  So he knew. He’d found out somehow.

  ‘The thing is, Matt, we were in Milan, at the opera. You know I told you about that. And we got completely cut off by the fog. We just couldn’t get back. It was impossible, dangerous. I’m staying like I said, with – with friends of Mariella and—’

  ‘You were staying with people you don’t know. And leaving Emmie with people she didn’t know. It all sounds rather messy.’

  ‘She did know them, Matt, of course she did. Anna-Maria has looked after her before and she’s spent lots of time with Bruno – that’s Giovanni’s valet—’

  ‘You left Emmie alone with a man. A strange man, a bloody foreigner—’

  ‘Matt, don’t be ridiculous. He’s not a stranger and she loves him, he always plays with her when we’re here and—’

  Janey appeared at her bedroom door; she looked flustered.

  ‘Eliza – Mariella’s—’

  ‘Sorry, Janey, can you just give me a minute. Matt, the thing is—’

  ‘I don’t want to hear what the fucking thing is,’ said Matt, ‘I want you home, both of you, tonight, is that clear? So you just get out of that apartment with your smart friends and back to Emmie and then straight on to the airport. And I don’t want to hear about any fucking fog holding you up. I’m sure Giovanni can find a way out of it. In his private plane perhaps. I remember him talking about that rather a lot at dinner. I’m going to the office now and I’ll want to hear from you pretty bloody soon about your arrangements.’

  ‘Matt—’

  The phone went dead; Eliza sat staring at it, a crawling fear invading her stomach.

  ‘Eliza.’ Mariella pushed past Janey into the room. ‘Eliza, it seems Matt phoned the villa last night. Sebastiano called to tell us. For some reason the messages did not reach us.’

  ‘Really?’ This seemed unlikely.

  ‘Yes, really.’ Mariella’s eyes were wide with innocence. ‘I am so sorry—’

  ‘Well, it’s unfortunate,’ Eliza said, driven past courtesy. ‘Matt is absolutely furious with me, especially of course leaving Emmie behind—’

  ‘Cara—’

  ‘No, let me finish. And he’s ordered us both back tonight. So maybe you can help me find a flight – otherwise he’ll divorce me, I should think.’

  ‘Of course he won’t,’ said Mariella, her voice a soothing purr, ‘he is just annoyed that you are enjoying yourself and he is not—’

  ‘Mariella, he’s really angry and I’m scared—’

  ‘You should not be scared of your husband,’ said Mariella airily, ‘that is not good for you.’

  ‘Well, I am! I’ve got to get back. So—’

  ‘Cara, there are no planes. Not today. Not tomorrow I think, either.’

  ‘No planes! But—’

  ‘Eliza, look out of the window. No plane can fly in this. We must stay, it is the only safe thing to do.’

  ‘No, no, I must get back to Emmie at least. She’s only five, I know she was all right last night, but she needs me. Please, Mariella, can we try at least?’

  ‘I will call Giovanni, see what he says.’

  Giovanni said they might be able to leave at lunchtime, that the fog was clearing a very little. ‘But he also says no plane will leave Milan today, or even tomorrow. I am sorry, cara, it is just one of those things. Matt will understand, I am sure. Perhaps Giovanni could speak to him.’

  ‘I’d rather he didn’t,’ said Eliza and burst into tears. Mariella left in a huff to return to the Hotel Grande and Janey was left trying to comfort Eliza.

  ‘I’ll ask Tim, see if he thinks it would be possible to get back to the villa.’

  Tim was reluctant; he knew the dangers too well and he didn’t know the road.

  Eliza spoke to Emmie who sounded happy, but distinctly less cool, and told her she wanted her to come back.

  ‘Darling, the minute I can I will. Is it foggy there?’

  ‘Terribly,’ said Emmie. ‘We can’t see the garden even.’

  Shaking, Eliza rang Matt at midda
y; mercifully he was out at a site meeting. Mandy, Jenny’s replacement, sweet and helpful, asked if she could give him a message.

  ‘Tell him I rang and I’ll ring later. When is he back, do you think?’

  ‘I would think about four hours, Mrs Shaw.’

  So she had four hours. To get back to the villa. She began literally to pace the floor.

  Shortly after one, the phone rang; she heard Janey answer it.

  ‘Oh hello, Jeremy. Yes, she’s here. Hold on.’

  ‘Eliza! Hello, darling. I hear you’re in a bit of a pickle. Look the fog’s thinning out a bit, and I’ve asked Giovanni to call the villa, see how it is out there. If it’s really better, Tim and I are prepared to get a car from the company’s fleet, man with local knowledge, and see what we can do.’

  ‘Oh, Jeremy,’ said Eliza, bursting into tears. ‘You are marvellous!’

  ‘Not really. I like a challenge. Especially when there’s a lady in distress involved. Now then, you sit tight and I’ll call you the minute I’ve got some news.’

  Why hadn’t she married him? Why, why, why?

  But she knew. As she had at La Scala. It would have been wonderful, easy, luxurious, and fun. And – emotionally dull.

  However hateful Matt was, however critical and bad-tempered and difficult, he still brought her alive: in every possible way. Jeremy had never, ever, been able to do that.

  Which was a terrible shame, but …

  At two he rang again.

  ‘It’s now or never. Once it’s dark, we’ll really be up the river without a canoe. Ready?’

  ‘Of course!’

  She rang Matt again, knowing he would still be out, but she wanted to show she was trying.

  ‘Tell him I rang again, will you, Mandy, and that I’m on my way back to the villa.’

  They reached the villa at six; it was a long and hazardous journey; twice they skidded and once nearly hit a tree, but the driver was skilful and knew the road, and the fog was less dense the nearer they got to Como, with a breeze coming in from the lake. By the time they arrived, they could actually see the lights of the house from the gates. Eliza, who had been sitting in the back, silent and tense, next to Jeremy, reached for his hand and squeezed it and then leaned forward and kissed the back of Tim Fordyce’s rather thick neck.