‘What’s your speciality?’
‘I’m an osteologist.’
‘So our interests overlap.’ It was pleasing to find a point of connection with her.
She nodded. ‘I tend to deal with older bones that you would generally come across, although I have done some forensic osteology.’
‘That’s difficult work.’ Forensic osteologists worked with more recent history, war graves and crime scenes.
‘Yes. It can be.’ She took a breath, as if she was about to say more, but lapsed into silence. Matteo decided not to push it.
‘You must be very good at what you do.’ Sicily’s rich history, and the many archaeological sites on the island, meant that it was unusual for any particular expertise to be needed from elsewhere.
She smiled suddenly. A real smile, one that betrayed a bit of fire. ‘Yes. I am.’
‘And you teach mainly?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Your hands.’
She smiled again. This time a touch of sensuality, all the more heady since it seemed to be kept strictly under wraps most of the time.
‘You’re very observant. I wear gloves when I dig. And, yes, I also teach.’ William had been running back and forth as they talked, depositing toy cars in her lap, and she started to gather them up.
Matteo watched her as she walked to the toy box, stacking the cars carefully back in their proper place. He might not be responsible for William’s diagnosis but he’d already made a few observations that might be of assistance to Dr Garfagnini.
Admittedly, watching the way her skirt swirled around her legs, noting the smooth curve of the fabric around the bust and tracing his gaze along her bare arms wasn’t the kind of observation that was necessary for a diagnosis of anything other than his own appreciation of a beautiful woman. But thinking that she was beautiful was about as far as Matteo was prepared to go.
Her son was a patient at the hospital where he was a doctor. That might change, but it would make no difference. Matteo had loved a woman with children once before. There was no changing the damage he’d caused then and no woman, however beautiful, could change the way he felt about it now. If he wanted to be able to sleep at night, he wouldn’t lay one finger on Rose’s perfect, porcelain skin.
* * *
Dr Garfagnini was a small, middle-aged man with a kind face. He appeared in the entrance to the reception area, beckoning to Matteo, and Rose caught William’s hand, her heart beating a little faster. Maybe this was some long-standing issue that had somehow escaped her notice. That verdict on her failings as a mother would be a lot easier to take coming from the older man’s lips, and Rose almost wished she didn’t need Matteo to translate.
Introductions were made and they were seated in easy chairs set around a large, low table in Dr Garfagnini’s bright, airy consulting room. William was given crayons and paper, and Dr Garfagnini pushed an upholstered stool up next to the table for him. Coffee was brought in, and Matteo waved it away, prompting a laugh and a joking observation from Dr Garfagnini.
‘He says I’m a coffee snob. That takes some dedication on this island.’ Matteo seemed to be trying to put her at ease. ‘Now, I’m going to fill Dr Garfagnini in on what you’ve already said to me, and then I’m sure he’ll have some questions...’
There were many questions, and at times it seemed that Matteo’s translations of her answers were a little longer than the original. Rose battled against the rising anxiety, and finally she snapped.
‘Please. Will you tell me what you just said to him? I need to know what’s going on.’
‘Of course. I’m sorry. I was mentioning what happened in the waiting room.’
‘What did happen in the waiting room?’ Rose pressed her lips together, aware that William had looked up from the blue and brown smudges that he was drawing. It would be a little more to the point if Matteo directed his colleague’s attention to those.
‘We played with cars.’ William provided the answer, and Matteo nodded, grinning broadly at him. His relaxed attitude seemed to reassure William that all was well, and he went back to his drawing.
Matteo turned to Rose. ‘Dr Garfagnini would like to test him for colour-blindness.’
‘Colour-blindness?’ How could she not have noticed something like that? Rose reached for her coffee and realised she’d already finished it. The empty cup rattled in the saucer as she put it back onto the table. The game had been a test after all.
‘It’s not going to distress him in any way.’ Matteo’s brown eyes were melting with concern.
‘No. I’m sorry, please, go ahead.’ She wanted to grab William and hug him. Tell him she was sorry that she hadn’t thought of this. That she’d allowed him to be confused by the world around him, without it even occurring to her that he might not see it as she did.
She watched numbly as Dr Garfagnini produced a set of Ishihara plates. These were obviously made for children, the blotches forming squares, triangles and circles, rather than numbers. Matteo explained what he wanted William to do, making it all seem like a game to him. Rose watched in horror as her son failed to pick out the shapes in almost a third of the pictures.
Then there were more games, all centred around colour. Matteo was pretending to make mistakes, some of which William gleefully corrected, and others that he didn’t notice. Then an examination of William’s eyes, and finally Dr Garfagnini nodded and spoke to Matteo in Italian.
‘What did he say?’ Rose tried to keep the tremor from her voice, for William’s sake.
‘In his opinion, your son is colour-blind. It’s an inherited condition, and there’s no cure or medication for it. It’s just the way he perceives the world...’ Matteo broke off as a tear rolled down Rose’s cheek and she swiped it away. Why couldn’t he just have pretended he hadn’t noticed?
‘Your son is healthy.’ His dark eyes searched her face, as if looking for some clue as to the source of the tear.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ She turned to Dr Garfagnini, ‘Grazie.’
She had to pull herself together. It was unforgivable to react like this in front of William and the doctors who had been so kind. She could do the guilt and the soul-searching later, in private. Rose straightened her shoulders, blinking back any further tears that might be thinking about betraying her.
An exchange in Italian, and Matteo nodded, turning to Rose. ‘Dr Garfagnini has an evening appointment and needs to leave soon, but he’s suggested that I might be able to give you some practical insights, if you have some time to stay and talk.’
‘But...what kind of doctor are you?’ Maybe Matteo’s speciality had something to do with her son’s condition.
Matteo gave her that relaxed, seductive smile that seemed to burn through everything else. ‘I’m an interventional radiologist. And red-green colour-blind, like your son.’
CHAPTER TWO
MATTEO KNEW THAT any parent, given the news that their child wasn’t perfect, was likely to react. But most people’s reaction to his own colour-blindness was to ask how he managed to match his clothes in the morning and leave it at that. There was more to it, but Rose couldn’t have looked any more horrified if he’d told her that the end of the world was expected some time during the next ten minutes.
She’d regained her composure quickly, though, thanking both him and Dr Garfagnini and giving them both a polite smile. But that unguarded moment had piqued Matteo’s curiosity. Dr Garfagnini had seen it too, and it had prompted him to ask Matteo to talk to her now.
‘You’ll have to forgive me.’ She was strolling next to him through the hospital and down to his office. ‘I don’t exactly know what an interventional radiologist does.’
‘It’s all about image-guided diagnosis and treatment. It’s not as invasive as conventional surgery, and we use radiological techniques to
target our treatments very precisely.’
‘Sounds fascinating.’ She was obviously weighing up the idea in her head, and Matteo smiled. Most people thought it sounded a bit dry. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how does your colour blindness affect what you do? It’s not all black-and-white images, is it?’
‘No. Doppler imaging involves colour, to indicate tissue velocities. But it’s colour coding, and so switching the colours to the parts of the spectrum that I can see is always an option.’
‘Yes, I see. I suppose that most problems have a solution.’
That was exactly what he wanted her to understand. That William’s colour blindness was a set of solutions and not a set of problems.
‘Did you know that the man who pioneered diagnostic radiology was colour-blind?’
‘No, I didn’t. Did you hear that, William?’ She looked down at her son, who was busy engaging with the people who passed them in the corridor, pulling at her hand as he turned this way and that, taking in his new surroundings.
‘I don’t think he’s much interested in the history of diagnostic radiology.’ Matteo chuckled. He hadn’t been either when he’d been William’s age.
‘Well, he could be if he wanted to, later on.’ Rose seemed as open to new possibilities as her son, and it made her initial reaction to Dr Garfagnini’s diagnosis all the more puzzling.
He led her through the outer office, stopping to ask his secretary why she hadn’t gone home yet, and ushered Rose into his own office. She put her bag down on the floor, sitting down in the chair that he pulled up for her, and William reached into her bag.
‘William! That doesn’t belong to us...’ William had obviously slipped one of the cars from the toy box into Rose’s bag.
He wondered if the boy was just as entranced by Rose’s look of firm reproof as he was. Matteo turned away, putting his desk between them. He was a doctor first and a man second right now, and thoughts about just how stern Rose might be enticed into getting with him weren’t even vaguely appropriate.
‘No matter. I’ll take it back when he’s finished with it.’ Matteo was sure that the clinic upstairs could spare one rather battered blue car, but Rose was obviously making a point with her son.
‘Thank you.’ She turned back to William. ‘You can play with it while I talk to Dr Di Salvo, but when we go, we’re going to give it back to him.’
William nodded, running to the corner of the office with the car and sitting down on the floor. He looked at his mother and then Matteo, and then started to play with the car, running it up and down the carpet in front of him.
‘Sorry about that.’ She pulled an embarrassed face. ‘He’s an only child and...well, we’ve been exploring the concept of giving things back recently.’
‘He seems to interact with people very well.’ Rose’s eyes had taken on that look of suppressed panic again, and Matteo’s first instinct was to reassure her.
‘I do my best to give him as much time as possible playing with other children. It’s not always easy...’ She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry if I overreacted over the colour-blindness. I didn’t mean to imply that it’s...well, it’s not a terrible thing. I hope I didn’t offend you.’
Her words jolted him into the unwelcome recognition that she had offended him. That her reaction had somehow told him that he wasn’t good enough and that it was a hard thing to take from a woman as beautiful as she was.
‘Not at all. It’s not an easy thing for people to understand at first.’
‘It’s kind of you to make excuses for me. I’m a scientist so I should be able to understand these things.’ She clasped her hands together tightly on her lap. ‘It’s...something he inherited from me?’
The question seemed to matter to her. ‘Blue-green colour-blindness is carried on the X chromosome so...yes, almost certainly. Is there anyone in your family who’s colour-blind?’
‘Not that I know of. My mother was adopted at birth, though, and she was never interested in finding her biological parents. I suppose she could have passed it to me, and then...’ She broke off. ‘I hope you don’t mind all these questions.’
‘Questions are what I’m here for. I can’t give you a proper clinical judgement, that’s Dr Garfagnini’s speciality, but I can tell you about my own personal experience.’
Even if his personal experience was making this more difficult than he’d expected. The line between doctor and patient—or patient’s mother in this case—had suddenly become a little more fuzzy than usual, and Matteo felt his own heart bleeding into the mix. But Rose had the one thing that pressed all his alarm buttons, telling him to back off now and stop thinking about how much he liked being in her company, and how intrigued he was to find out more about her. She had a child.
* * *
Alec, her ex-husband, would have known this all along. If there was something the matter with anything, then he would have taken it for granted that it was Rose’s fault. Even after more than four years of separation, it still grated to find that he would have been right and that this was one more way in which she’d failed William.
But for William’s sake, if not her own, she should calm down. Attaching a value judgement to something like this would only make him feel not good enough. She couldn’t do anything about her genes, but not good enough was something she could choose not to pass on to him.
She owed Matteo an explanation, though. He’d been more than kind, and she wanted to give him an explanation, which was strange, because usually she’d move heaven and earth rather than talk about this.
‘My marriage broke up before William was born, and I worry that...’ She shrugged miserably. ‘I can’t help worrying that somehow all the stress might have affected him. And I really should have noticed this before.’
He nodded, as if somehow he understood completely. It was a giddy feeling, and Rose reminded herself that he probably nodded in that exact way with all his patients.
‘You’re a scientist, you know that stress can’t change genetic make-up. But I suppose that any amount of good sense can’t stop a mother from worrying about her child.’
She couldn’t help smiling at him. ‘No. That’s right.’
‘And my colour-blindness wasn’t confirmed until I was William’s age. Even though my parents knew it was a possibility because two of my mother’s brothers are colour-blind.’
Rose nodded. ‘Thank you. I hear what you’re saying.’
‘But you don’t accept it?’
‘Give me time. I’m not sure that I can excuse myself so easily just yet.’
Matteo smiled, leaning back in his chair. ‘Fair enough. This is all very new. It may take a while before you can understand exactly which colours William can and can’t see. He’s probably already developed a lot of coping strategies, which may mask his inability to distinguish one colour from another.’
‘What kind of coping strategy?’
‘Well, for instance I talk about red and green traffic lights, but what I really mean is the one at the top and the one at the bottom. I know they’re red and green because people have told me, and so I refer to them in a way they’ll understand.’
‘How did you know about William? I mean, if you couldn’t see the colour of the cars...’
Matteo laughed. ‘I cheated. The receptionist told me.’
‘Do you see things as textures?’ He looked surprised at the question and Rose explained. ‘I had a student who was colour-blind a couple of years ago. He had a real knack with the data from ground-penetrating radar, and I got him involved in an ultrasound survey that the university was doing of some caves in the area. He really excelled with it, and he told me that it was because he saw things in terms of texture.’
‘We all see texture. But I use shape and texture a lot more in defining objects, because that’s what’s available to me
. I can’t tell the difference between pink and purple on histological slides, so I got through that module at medical school by learning different cell shapes. The coloured stain is intended to highlight what’s there, but just looking at that can sometimes obscure other things.’
‘Which is why you’re a radiologist?’ Rose imagined that he was very good at what he did. He had that quiet assurance about him.
‘Partly, perhaps. Although actually it fascinates me.’
She laughed. ‘My mistake again. William’s options aren’t defined by his colour blindness.’
When she looked into the dark brown of his gaze, almost anything seemed possible. But if William’s future was all about options, hers wasn’t. It was about staying on course, looking after her son, and trying to make some contribution through the work that she loved. Matteo was a kind man, and he was gorgeous, but he wasn’t an option.
* * *
They’d talked for half an hour, and when William had tired of his game and come to squeeze himself onto Rose’s chair, she’d explained what colour-blindness was in response to his questions. Despite her initial reaction, Rose had been so positive about it all, telling her son that he was special, that his next questions seemed almost inevitable.
‘We’ve got super powers, then?’
‘Not yet.’ She flashed Matteo a smile, bending towards William with a stage-whisper. ‘Maybe when you grow up.’
William turned to Matteo, then back to his mother. ‘He’s got super powers?’ Matteo tried not to smile, since the observation had been behind his hand and clearly intended for his mother’s ears only.
‘Maybe. You never know. Best not to mention it, it might be a secret.’
William nodded sagely, and Rose looked at her watch.
‘We should go. We’ve taken too much of your time already, and I really appreciate it.’
And he should let her go. Right now, before the lines became any more blurred. He got to his feet, and William walked over to him and placed the blue car in his hand, whispering loudly that he wouldn’t tell anyone about the super powers.
English Rose for the Sicilian Doc Page 2