The phone rang and I moved past him to the hall to answer it. ‘Jen, what are you and Antonio doing for lunch. The weather is so foul that I thought you might like to come here instead of battling into town. Anyway, I have food all ready if it’s any help, darling.’
‘Thanks, Mum. I’ll hand you over to Antonio. I’m not sure when he has to leave,’ I said pointedly.
Antonio took the phone from me. ‘Bea? It is most kind. I would love to have lunch with you and James before I leave. Thank you. We will come now.’
He put the phone back and I avoided his eyes.
‘You go ahead,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll follow. I need to change. I look like a tramp.’
‘No. You look intensely desirable.’ Antonio smiled at me, his heavy-lidded and beautiful eyes amused. ‘I do not wish to argue with you. Please forgive me for upsetting you. I see you in a few minutes, yes?’
I nodded and fled to the bedroom. As I changed I still felt indignant. How dare he question my motives for not wishing to travel to the ends of the earth with him? Suddenly, I had the most amazing idea. It was so blindingly obvious I didn’t know why it had not occurred to me immediately. I pulled on a skirt and sweater, ran out of the house to my car and drove excitedly to my parents’ house.
As I walked into the sitting room James, Bea and Antonio all turned and greeted me a little too brightly as if I had been the subject of their conversation.
I said quickly, smiling at them all triumphantly, ‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea. Antonio wants me to travel with him to Singapore in the summer. Adam could come with us. It’s perfect! I could introduce him to his grandparents. It would be a wonderful opportunity for them to meet him at last, wouldn’t it? You would have no objection to him coming with us, Antonio, would you?’
They all looked at me in absolute silence. Then James said, ‘Jen, when and how Adam meets his grandparents is up to Jack and Ann Holland and Ruth, not you. How on earth do you think Ruth would feel if it were you who took Adam to meet them?’
‘I’d have to talk to her, of course, but I think she would be relieved the holidays are covered. She only has two weeks in the summer. I’m sure she would see the sense in him coming. Adam is their grandchild and they’re not getting any younger.’ I began to falter under Bea and James’s incredulous gaze. Why couldn’t they see the opportunity this presented for Adam? He did not have any grandparents. I walked away and looked out at the bay below me.
Bea got up and came over to me. ‘Jenny, stop for a minute and think. Don’t you think that if the Hollands are to meet Adam, Ruth is the one who should be with him? Adam’s name is Freidman, not Holland. You can’t take Adam over and make him into another little Holland, and that is how it will seem to Ruth.’
I spun round. I wanted to cry out but he is a Holland, whether you like it or not. He is all Holland. I shook as I stared at their faces full of concern. It was as if I had suggested something completely outrageous.
I turned and ran out of the house and back to my car, and drove home in the blinding rain. I parked awkwardly and dashed indoors. I picked up the phone and dialled with trembling fingers. I expected Flo to answer but it was Ruth and the relief made me almost incapable of speech. ‘Ruth, it’s Jenny.’
‘You sound breathless.’
Get the words out.
‘Antonio is here. He wants me to go on a business trip to the Far East in the summer.’
‘How marvellous! Of course you must go. Look, don’t worry about Adam. I’ll sort something out.’
‘No, no, that’s why I’m ringing. You don’t have to. I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity if Adam came too, to meet his grandparents in Singapore. We can plan it round your trip to Tel Aviv…if you agree, of course.’
I heard her intake of breath. ‘No way!’ she burst out. ‘No way! Absolutely not. I can’t believe you’re asking me. Adam is staying here. If his grandparents want to meet him they can write to me, they can come to London. No way are you taking him to Singapore to fill his head with more of Tom’s life and childhood.’ Her voice began to rise. ‘It’s never enough, Jenny, is it? You’re going to go on and on eating him up until you’ve swallowed him whole. My God, you’re unbelievable.’
I dropped the phone and ran back out into the rain. I ran along the foreshore, over the quay and on to the deserted beach. A north wind blew icy rain on to my hot cheeks. The sea crashed in great vicious waves, hissing and spraying, curling and swelling, the tips of the waves torn off in a sideways spray. My feet sank awkwardly into the wet sand. I felt frantic. Why, why was it that what seemed perfectly logical to me seemed unacceptable to everyone else?
I did not hear anyone behind me until Antonio was nearly on top of me. He reached out to grab me as he struggled in James’s heavy old Barbour. ’Jenny!’ he shouted, ‘stop running away.’ He held on to my sleeve.
‘Go away!’ I screamed against the wind. ‘Go away and leave me alone.’
I was soaked to the skin, my hair flattened by the rain that streamed down my face like tears. Antonio held me and pulled me firmly and with strength towards the shelter of the sand dunes. ‘How can you English live in this appalling weather?’ he shouted angrily.
Once up on the soft sand I could hardly stay upright and Antonio dragged me out of the wind, his breath coming in heavy bursts. When we were over the top and in some shelter from the rain and wind we stood panting, glaring at each other.
‘Will you let go of me, Antonio!’
‘Not until you promise to stop running and hear what I have to say.’
‘I’m not interested in what you have to say. I don’t want to hear it.’ I pulled at my arm, furious and mortified.
He jerked me nearer as if his patience were at an end. ‘Well, I am going to tell you anyway. I admired you. I did not think you are the coward who runs from the realities of her life, from the facts.’
‘I’m not running…’
‘Listen to me, Jenny. Listen.’ He gave me a little shake. ’Adam is not your husband Tom and he never can be. Adam is Adam. You must not make him into a little husband for yourself.’
‘Damn you.’ I tore myself free and he let me go.
‘Go then, run away into the rain. Ruin your life and Adam’s and Ruth’s. Break Bea and James’s hearts. What do you care, cara? As long as you can build your little walls to keep the real world out. Shut yourself up with a little mirror of your Tom. Your substitute child-man to replace…’
I lifted my hand and slapped him to stop his insidious flow of words.
He glared back at me. I lashed out again and clipped his jaw hard. He grabbed my hands and as I struggled he threw me on to the wet sand and held my hands down near my head. For a second I wanted to laugh hysterically at the ridiculousness of it, but Antonio was now as angry as I was. ‘Let your husband go,’ he shouted. ‘Bury the man. Do not reincarnate him in Ruth’s child. Love Adam, but do not try to possess him. He is not yours. It is only an accident that he is your husband’s. You are playing games with people’s lives.’
‘That’s not what I’m doing!’ I screamed. ‘I have let Tom go. I’ve let both Tom and Rosie go. You don’t understand.’
‘I do understand, Jenny. You think you have let Tom go, but you are resurrecting him in Adam. Do you not see this danger?’ His voice was soft but cruel.
I turned my face away. His words stung and made me cry. Antonio pulled me abruptly upright, enfolding me tightly, talking to me softly in Italian as if I were a highly strung horse. He tried to shield me from the rain. He laid his head on mine and rocked me gently, one hand stroking my hair.
I pushed him away. ‘How dare you say those things to me?’ But my anger had dissipated. I was shaking with cold.
He blocked the sky with his bulk. ‘I dare say them, darling, because no one else will dare. You are adored little Jenny. So loved; so spoilt. Everyone wants to spare your feelings. Well, I do not.’
He bent suddenly and kissed me hard on the mouth. He held me to him with
both hands cupped round my face. Then he bent to my neck, pulled the collar of my jacket away and pressed his warm lips to my cold, cold skin.
I stifled the moan that rose up in my throat. I stopped struggling. Aroused, I felt myself responding. It felt like a dam bursting inside me. Antonio and I kissed frantically until we could no longer breathe. I wanted him. I wanted him to take me here in the wet sand with the sea pounding and the rain slanting sideways. I wanted him to take me now while I did not care and nothing mattered and I could not think. I spread my legs under him and lifted my arms up by my head in invitation. I said urgently, ‘Now. Here.’ I lifted my hips.
He shook his head and whispered, ‘You mad English girl.’ He took off Dad’s mac and we lay on it. The warm feel of him made me want to weep and for a second we were absolutely still, just holding each other in a strange, heightened moment of closeness. Then he thrust into me and the pleasure was exquisite. I had almost forgotten the joy and power of sex. I cried out as I came and listened to the crashing waves and smiled as Antonio climaxed. It felt so good.
We held each other until the cold bit into our limbs. Then we straightened ourselves.
Antonio touched my nose. He looked rumpled and sexy. ‘At the moment you need only my body for comfort. One day I hope you will want the man I am, Jenny.’
SEVENTY-SIX
Antonio and I flew through Milan and Rome, and I saw both cities with new eyes. It was one thing to visit as a tourist, quite another to travel with an Italian. We were here to do business but it did not feel like it. I had almost forgotten the hospitality and vitality of a country devoted to fashion and innately conscious of it from the cradle.
Antonio whirled me around during the day to meetings, wholesalers and outlets. He took me to two fashion shows and these I found the most difficult because I knew so many of the designers and the usual crowd. I managed the air kissing and concentrated on the clothes. It was a bit like returning to another planet, but one I recognised and found I could, after all, slot into again without really engaging.
After lunch we would have a siesta and then in the cool we set forth and Antonio showed me Rome. We wandered down the via Condotti, which offered the most expensive shopping in Europe: Bulgari, Gucci, Valentino, Ferragamo…
We met his colleagues, drank wonderful wine sitting at marble-topped tables outside on the pavements and watched the people go by, guessing their nationalities by their clothes.
I stood breathless on the Spanish Steps and took photographs. We wandered round Keats’s house through rooms which had been preserved just as they were when Keats died, full of the echo and shadows of Byron, Shelley, Severn and Leigh Hunt. Antonio, mortifyingly, knew more about them than I did.
We walked together, through the Piazza di Spagna, hand in hand, and stood like tourists round the boat-shaped Barcaccia Fountain. Then Antonio took me with pride to the Basilica of St Peter. We lit candles together and kept our prayers secret in front of Michelangelo’s La Pieta.
On our last morning in Rome I stood in early sunlight by the Trevi Fountain and I felt alive, my whole body given to the wonder of a city I had only visited briefly for work. I turned, laughing, to Antonio. ‘Can this really be a business trip?’
‘Certainly it is a business trip. We are doing very important survey work into what the people of Rome and their visiting American friends are wearing this year. Now, darling, you wanted to see the Sistine Chapel and then it is time to leave, I am afraid.’
I sighed. I would have liked to have seen Florence through Antonio’s expert eyes. I had been with Tom for two days and it had not been enough.
Antonio threw his arm lightly across my shoulder and pressed his nose into my hair. ‘Next time, cara. It is not a city to hurry, but to relish slowly.’
I turned to smile at him. We had stayed in a small tourist hotel round the corner from the Trevi Fountain and we’d slept and made love to the sounds of the city, afternoon after afternoon; night after night. The days were fast, yet dreamlike, not quite real, as if I might all of a sudden wake up and find myself at home.
I had rung Tom’s parents to tell them about my proposed trip to Singapore, but they were about to leave for a two-month holiday with Tom’s brother who lived in Australia. It was such a long way to go to miss each other and we were all so disappointed that Antonio said, ‘We will go another year, Jenny. It does not make sense for you to travel all that way when they are not there.’
Instead, we were going to fly to Spain and study the Moroccan architecture and the vivid hot African colours. Antonio wanted this influence and feel to his collection. He wanted me to feel and taste and absorb it into me as I did the Cornish landscape.
From Rome we flew to Antonio’s villa for two days, to rest and wash our clothes and repack. I lay beside Antonio’s pool and slept, exhausted with sightseeing, meetings and nights of sex.
I thought of Adam at Tredrea with James and Bea, and I suddenly longed to hear his voice. I had seen Ruth briefly in the London house before I left for Milan. I apologised to her for being insensitive, for not thinking it through, for just assuming something I should not have done. I didn’t want anything to change. I wanted to go back to Adam.
‘Let’s have a talk when you get back, Jenny, and clear the air, so we both know where we stand. Adam’s settled with you and I’m grateful for that. I’m not about to upset him or you.’
We had looked at one another, strained and awkward. She did not want to upset her own life and a job she loved either. It was not a worthy thought and I wondered if it was ever going to be possible to be friends again.
I lay on the bed in Antonio’s cool room with its Tuscan colours and rugs, and as the phone rang a long way away at Tredrea this Italian/Spanish sojourn, in the slim guise of work, again seemed trance-like, as if I had become quiescent and was being carried along like a sleepwalker in a bright scented landscape.
Bea answered the phone on another coastline, another world, and I was pulled back to my real life. Everything was fine. James had persuaded Flo to come to Cornwall to have her hip operation at the end of the month. He knew an excellent surgeon who had a space on his list. It was great news, we could all help her convalesce afterwards.
Adam was bursting to tell me what he’d been doing. He had spent the weekend on Dartmoor practising for the Ten Tors run. He was going on a school trip to Plymouth to see Macbeth. He and James were taking the boat out near Godrevy tomorrow because the dolphins were back in the bay…
It was sweet music to hear him happy. It made me smile; like a light going on. As I replaced the phone I saw that Antonio had come into the room and was watching me. He smiled and held out his hand. I moved towards him warily. He was unable to understand my closeness to Adam. He had apologised for his words, but they still hovered somewhere between us. He said something low in Italian. It sounded like a love poem.
‘What did you say?’
‘That I will run you a bath.’
But I knew that wasn’t what he’d said.
Spain was stimulating in a quite different way. There was nothing subtle here. Colour upon colour mixed and matched; clashing and gaudy; bright and surreal against a backdrop of Moroccan architecture; arches and palaces, churches and mountains; villages and an overcrowded coastline.
Antonio drove me into an inland Spain I never knew existed; as yet unspoilt and utterly beautiful.
I took photographs of tiny villages down deserted tracks and of geraniums cascading out of windows and pouring down ancient buildings. Of children playing in scrubland in bright dresses, flashing gold jewellery and white smiles.
I studied the tiles and the decor and the filigree work on the top of doors and windows, and I sketched ideas until I could not hold a pencil. I fingered muslin and silk and heavy cotton material, weighed it in my fingers and knew the soft gold belts and light floating summer clothes I would design for next year.
It was the first time I had thought next year. It had been a long time since I felt the abs
olute joy in what I do, the promise and excitement of my own collection.
Antonio was right. It was not just necessary for a designer, or anyone, to travel, it was vital to draw inspiration from many sources and many places; to see and feel the heat and colour and people. To rub shoulders with them, to eat and breathe in a culture.
Tom and I had flown off to places whenever we could, even for a few days, but I had stopped travelling and I knew as I whirled around, sticky in hot cars, that without it inspiration and originality died. Without it you repeated yourself. Without it you grew stale. Cornwall had invigorated me, but now I had contrast and I knew the ideas that gathered in my head like a kaleidoscope would also work at home.
Antonio watched me with a constant smile on his face. On the way home I was going to stop off in Milan with him to see his new workplace and to leave some of my sketches and material samples with instructions and ideas for how they should be made up. I was impressed with his little ’English Enterprise’. The converted warehouse was spacious and cool, the women friendly and enthusiastic.
On our last night together in Milan we swam by candlelight, listening to Mozart in a huge tiled indoor swimming pool. We went back to his modern bachelor flat, full of green plants and polished furniture, and fell into bed in a heap, full of wine.
Antonio whispered soft caressing words into my neck in Italian. They were the same ones he had whispered to me in his villa in Amalfi.
I smiled. ‘You are not running me a bath this time, so what are you saying to me, Antonio?’
He held me away and looked into my eyes. ‘I said, I would like to give you another child.’
The blood rushed to my face and Antonio tickled me to diffuse the moment. That night I was careful to take my pill. Sex with Antonio was like a drug. It heightened everything. It was compulsive, it was part of all that I felt and had created in the long, hot, sensuous days with him. I felt as if my body breathed and moved and glowed with life again.
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