Her Italian Boss’s Agenda

Luke seemed unperturbed.

Once, while she was there, the phone rang. Hope answered it, saying, ‘Ciao, caro,’ and it soon became clear that she was talking to Primo. Olympia listened to the flood of Italian which was too rapid for her to follow in detail, but she could tell that there was no mention of him returning home soon.

Hope hung up with a sigh. ‘I like to have them around me,’ she said. ‘I am unreasonable, since they are all grown men, but there! Mothers are unreasonable. And perhaps it’s better for Primo and Luke to be apart just now.’

There was a slight buzzing in Olympia’s ears. ‘Why just now?’ she asked, trying not to sound too curious.

‘It’s hard to say. All their lives they have been fighting. If it’s not about this, it’s about that. The last thing was a man they both wanted to employ, but Primo snatched him from under Luke’s nose. “Stole him” according to Luke. But that’s not important. There’s something else, something that causes really bad blood between them.’

It gave Olympia a shock to realise that Hope still didn’t know what had been between herself and Primo. She thought they had met for the first time at the party.

‘Was that Primo?’ Luke asked from the doorway.

‘Yes, he is well and he sends his love to everyone.’

‘Including me?’ Luke asked in disbelief.

‘Including you,’ Hope said firmly.

‘Perhaps I’d better test it for poison first.’

‘Stop that,’ Hope ordered him, suddenly stern. ‘Whatever it is that has come between you, he is still your brother.’

‘Sorry, Mamma,’ Luke said sheepishly. He put his arms about her and kissed her. ‘It’s nothing,’ he told her tenderly. ‘You know that he and I have always been at odds about one thing or another.’

‘But this time it’s serious, I know it is. Why won’t you tell me?’

‘Because it’s nothing. Come on, you know what we’re like. If we’re not scrapping we’re not happy.’

After that he exerted himself to make her laugh and the matter was allowed to pass.

Primo wasn’t mentioned again, but he stayed in Olympia’s thoughts and perhaps Luke’s too, because he suddenly began talking about him as they drove home that night.

‘He’s a contradictory man in many ways,’ he mused. ‘He can feel something with all his being, while doing things that go completely in the other direction.’

‘Surely most people can do that?’

‘Yes, but he takes it to extremes. Maybe it’s the result of not really knowing whether he’s Italian or English. You only have to look at how he behaved over our brother Justin.’

‘Exactly who is Justin?’ she asked curiously. ‘I keep hearing odd bits of information but never very much. He’s almost like a ghost.’

‘For years he was a completely taboo subject. We all knew that Mamma had another son, but nobody knew what had happened to him. She was only fifteen when she became pregnant. She wasn’t married, of course, and in those days it was a great stigma. What her parents did was unforgivable, but they must have been desperate.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Snatched her baby, handed it over for adoption and told her he’d been born dead.’

‘Dear God!’ Olympia exclaimed, shocked to the core.

‘She never got over the loss of her baby. She married Jack Cayman and became Primo’s stepmother. Primo couldn’t remember his real mother and he adored Hope from the start. When they adopted me he wasn’t best pleased. I was competition for her attention, you see. We’ve always fought and bickered.

‘But I think the thing that really got to him, almost as much as it did Hope, was when she discovered that her baby hadn’t died after all. She went crazy trying to find him, but it was too late. He’d been adopted. She’d lost him.

‘Her marriage didn’t last. When it ended she took me with her, but Primo was Jack’s son and she couldn’t claim custody. But when Jack died Primo’s Italian family brought him here and she contacted him again. Since she married Toni we’ve all been one big family.

‘But Mamma never forgot her first son. She couldn’t trace him, but when he turned eighteen she began hoping that he would try to trace her. No luck though.

‘In the end it was Primo who found him. He contacted every private eye in England that he could find, putting down markers, saying he was to be notified if anyone likely turned up. And in the end it happened.

‘But here’s the strange thing. Primo was always jealous of Justin for displacing him as Mamma’s eldest son. Yet he did it for her, because he knew what it meant to her. It took him fifteen years, and, when he got the first hint, he went over to England to meet him, check him out, then bring him back here.’

‘What a wonderful thing for him to do,’ Olympia said, touched.

‘Yes, it was. My brother drives me nuts sometimes. He’s pig-headed, too sure of himself, blinkered, obstinate- but then he’ll do something that makes you stare, and wonder if you could be as generous as that. And I don’t think most people could.’

His words brought back a memory-Primo talking on the phone to an agitated Cedric, calming him with kindness, promising to be there for him, no matter the inconvenience.

And that was the real Primo, the one who could empathise with someone else, even when it was against his own interests.

‘Fifteen years,’ she murmured. ‘He would have been so young when he started.’

‘True. Fifteen years of patient watching and waiting. That’s very Primo. He knows how to take his time. Incredibly, he’s still jealous. Mamma’s thrilled about what he did for her. She calls him her hero. But he minds about Justin because he feels displaced.’

His words gave Olympia a strange feeling because they cast a new light on Primo’s behaviour in England: watching and waiting, moving slowly towards his goal, keeping in the shadows while she tricked and teased another man-even though that man was himself.

She thought of the quiet, self-effacing generosity of someone who would spend years seeking a person he didn’t really want to find, to please the mother he loved.

How she wished she could have known him under other circumstances! How different things might have been!

Life with Luke was contented. She found him easy to talk to and he soon knew all about her, including the story of her elderly parents. After an initial hesitation she told him about the Valentine cards and how she’d fooled Primo.

‘So he was living with you?’ Luke asked when he’d finished laughing.

‘No, he just stayed one night.’

‘Ah, I see.’

‘No, you don’t see,’ she said, aiming a swipe at him. ‘It was because he had a bump on the head.’

‘Which you gave him?’

‘In a manner of speaking. We had a little altercation on the way home and he crashed his car into mine.’

He eyed her askance. ‘None of the men in my family are safe from you in a car, are they?’

‘Anyway, Valentine’s was next day and you should have seen his face when the cards arrived. And the red roses that my parents always send me.’

‘Have they ever been to Naples?’ he asked.

‘Never. I took them to Paris once as a treat, but apart from that they’ve never been abroad.’

‘I’m going to be away for a few days. Why not invite them to stay here?’

‘You really mean that?’

‘Why not? Give them a real vacation. They’ll enjoy the Maggio dei Monumenti.’

‘Whatever’s that?’

‘Literally it means May of the Monuments, although it starts in the last week in April. For a few weeks many museums and monuments open for free, and because they attract such crowds other things have started up at the same time-fairs, dance spectacles, that sort of thing.’

‘Wait, I saw a puppet show in the street yesterday,’ she remembered.

‘That’s right, it’s just started, and now there’ll be processions and concerts of Neapolitan songs. Spring is coming and it’s a great way to celebrate. Call your parents and get them down for the fun.’