Married Under the Italian Sun

‘Wuff!’ Luca repeated, his eyes fixed on the distance.

Then Vittorio understood. Walking towards them was Angel, wearing a colourful silk top and snowy white trousers.

‘Stay!’ Vittorio ordered hastily.

He was too late. Luca was already bounding away towards her. Vittorio scrambled down the ladder and began to run, but Luca was too fast for him, hurling himself at her, leaving dirty paw marks over the white trousers and clawing the silk blouse until it tore. Vittorio arrived just in time to witness the demolition job.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, almost choking on the words.

‘Oh, forget it,’ she said. ‘He’s only being friendly.’

Astonished, he realised that she was laughing. Nor had she made any attempt to fend off her new friend, but had dropped down beside him, wrapping her arms about him.

‘That’s very generous of you,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But have you seen the state he’s left you in?’

She looked down at her clothes and sighed.

‘Well, it’s a pity, but he didn’t mean to. Did you, pet?’

She caressed him again and he nuzzled her, sure of his forgiveness. She stood up, brushing herself down, but with little effect, then wandered over to a fallen tree trunk and used it as a seat.

‘Naturally, I shall pay for the damage,’ Vittorio said stiffly, although he was wondering how he could afford to replace garments that, for all their apparent simplicity, shrieked expense.

She gave a cheerful shrug. ‘I shouldn’t bother. He’ll only do it again next time.’

‘There won’t be a next time. I shall keep him away from you in future.’

‘Oh, no, don’t do that. I love dogs.’

He strolled over and also sat on the tree trunk, taking care to keep a distance from her.

‘Yet you don’t have one of your own,’ he observed.

She made a face which disconcerted him, it made her look so much like a small child.

‘I always wanted to have one, but my husband didn’t like them.’

Irony overcame Vittorio’s manners. ‘But surely your husband showered you with every luxury?’

Angel regarded him satirically. ‘You’ve been reading those shallow celebrity magazines. You shouldn’t do it. It’s a bad habit, and they never tell the truth.’

A point to her, Vittorio thought, annoyed with himself. But he couldn’t stay angry. Luca had reared up on his hind legs, draping himself all over Angel again, and she was crowing with delight, tilting her head back so that she seemed to be laughing straight up to the sun. Sunlight poured over her, making her a part of the bright day, giving him a strange, unsettled feeling, as though he was excluded from something wonderful.

‘So,’ he said lightly, ‘he didn’t shower you with every luxury?’

‘Oh, yes. Every luxury. If I wanted diamonds, I had only to ask, but when I set my heart on a nice, big slobbery dog to have fun with, he vetoed it. The mere idea of my expensively elegant person being pawed at made him shudder.’

The satirical way she spoke of ‘my expensively elegant person’ took Vittorio aback. To hear her making fun of her own reputation was the last thing he’d expected. He wished she wouldn’t confuse him.

All he could think of to say was, ‘Hmm!’ which was a compromise, indicating that his prejudices wouldn’t be that easily abandoned.

‘Nobody really knows what Joe’s like,’ she said, interpreting his tone without trouble. ‘He wants what he wants and he’ll pay for it. But when you cease to please, that’s it. The shutters come down and he simply moves on to the next thing. He can be pretty nasty.’

‘Is that why you left him?’

‘I didn’t leave him. He left me. For a younger woman.’

That Vittorio simply didn’t believe. His glance at her slender figure and lovely face was full of involuntary admiration that he would have suppressed if he could, but it was beyond his power.

‘Younger woman,’ he growled. ‘What are you? Twenty-two? Three?’

‘You underestimate the power of the beauty salon,’ Angel said, with a hint of teasing. ‘If you’ve really been reading those magazines you’ll know that I’m an artificial construct who owes everything to a silent army, working night and day to conceal the fact that I’m falling to bits. Twenty-two, my foot! I’m a crumbling hag of twenty-eight. Every day pieces of me fall off and have to be fixed back on with safety pins.’

‘All right,’ he said in a harassed tone. ‘I get the idea.’

‘I’ll bet you don’t, not really,’ she said, enjoying the joke too much to let it go. ‘When I get undressed for bed I take off my wig, remove my nails, and count my fingers to see if any have gone missing. Whatever is left collapses.’

He felt a surge of anger against her. She meant to tease him with that picture of decrepitude, but what had really hit him like a blow in the stomach was ‘get undressed for bed’.

Was she mad to talk like that to a man with all his senses about him? Could she really be so unaware of her own power as to risk putting such thoughts into his head? Or didn’t it matter, because she saw him only as a servant, and therefore a kind of eunuch?

Whatever the answer, the thought of her stripping off her clothes was one he knew he couldn’t afford to indulge for more than a moment. The idea of her in bed was forbidden even for that little moment.

To silence her, Vittorio said coldly, ‘Have you finished?’

‘Quite finished. I just wanted you to understand that I’m last year’s model, so Joe swapped me for one of twenty.’

Angel hadn’t mean to confide so much of her personal history, but the sight of Vittorio uneasily trying to decide what to believe was giving her a lot of pleasure. That would teach him to jump to conclusions.

‘But-he bought this place for you,’ Vittorio said at last. ‘All the time I was showing him around he kept saying, “My lady will love this”, as though he really cared.’

‘But I wasn’t his lady by then. She was. He didn’t buy this for me, but for her. Only she didn’t want it. Not grand enough. So he decided that it would “do” for me. He was determined to divorce me as cheaply as possible, and the battle was wearing me out, so I accepted, just to get rid of him.’

If he’d had any doubts about her, they were dispelled by her last words that so closely echoed his own experience with Joe Clannan.

‘So you didn’t really want to come here?’ he asked slowly.

‘I was happy enough. I love Italy. I even learned the language once.’

‘That surprises me,’ he admitted. ‘I thought-well-’

‘You don’t have to say it.’ She’d been speaking Italian, but now she added in English, ‘You were expecting a miserable old trout.’

‘Trout? Excuse me-my English-surely a trout is a fish?’

‘Yes, but in England it’s also a term of abuse, especially for a woman. I think you had some very bad ideas about me.’

He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I never thought you a-a trout,’ he assured her. Then, to get off the awkward subject, he reverted to Italian and asked, ‘Do you still want a dog?’

‘If you can find me one like him,’ she said, indicating Luca, who was shoving his nose against her.

‘You’ve made a bad choice,’ Vittorio grunted. ‘He’s a villain.’

‘I can tell. That’s why I like him so much.’

‘I’ll get you one of his offspring. It won’t be hard. He populates the district with them. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve taken too much time away from the work you’re paying me to do.’

Angel would have laughed and passed it off, but the words were clearly meant to put an end to the brief moment of warmth. She had no choice but to accept her dismissal, and walk away.

For three days Vittorio didn’t mention the dog, and Angel thought he had forgotten about it. But on the fourth day he turned up with an animal that looked about four months old and had a marked resemblance to Luca, being brown, untidy, and with mischief in his eyes.

‘His name’s Toni,’ Vittorio said. ‘I found a home for him two months ago, but his owner was glad to give him back. Apparently he’s noisy, disobedient, uncontrollable, and generally possessed by the devil.’

Angel opened her arms. ‘Just what I wanted!’ she said eagerly.

He gave a faint grin. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’