One Summer in Italy…

telling you all this? What does this have to do with-?’

‘Just answer my questions,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m beginning to get the picture. It must have been a very restricted existence. Did you go out, have boyfriends?’

‘Not really. Boyfriends didn’t want to know about Mom.’

‘How did you come to be visiting Portsmouth?’

‘I had a friend who lived there. I met her when I was on my course. She used to invite me every year and Mom was determined I should have a holiday, so she insisted on going into respite care to let me have a break.’

‘And how long did that last?’

‘Until last year, when she died.’

Her voice shook on the last words and she fell silent. He was silent too, not offering sympathy, which could hardly be genuine, and which she would have found it hard to cope with, but letting her take her time.

‘And then?’ he asked at last in a voice that was quiet, and almost gentle.

‘I took a refresher course so that I could start teaching and that’s when I met-’

‘Bruno Vanelli.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you fell for him because you’d never learned to be worldly-wise. I didn’t understand that until I spoke to Liza, and discovered that your life had given you little experience of the world, and of men. But why didn’t you tell me yourself?’

‘Didn’t we agree that the less I told you the better?’

‘True.’

She gave a brief, mirthless laugh. ‘Anyway, there isn’t much to tell. He sought me out. He was good-looking and I was flattered. And it seemed so romantic that he was Italian. That’s how stupid I was.’

‘Ah, yes, we have that image,’ he murmured ironically.

‘If I’d been a bit sharper I’d have known that the truth is different-nothing to do with amore.’

‘And what do you think the truth is?’

‘It’s a stiletto,’ she said bitterly, ‘a slim dagger, small enough to be concealed until the last moment. And then it slides in so smoothly, so easily, so cruelly. And the victim never sees it coming until it’s too late.’

Matteo gave a crack of laughter that, had she been in the mood to notice, matched her own in bitterness.

‘That may sometimes be true, signorina, but not always. It can be the poor, crazy Italian who is deluded, and the English enemy who deceives and tortures. The blow is so unexpected that it seems to come out of the sunshine, but afterwards there is only darkness. Where we use a stiletto, you use a bludgeon, but the destruction is just as final.’

Holly stared at him as it dawned on her that this was no idle speculation. He was speaking out of a savage misery as deep as her own.

‘Do you have an English enemy?’ she asked.

She saw him stop, tense and control himself before saying, ‘Go on telling me about Bruno Vanelli.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-’

‘I said go on.’ His voice was harsh.

Something had happened. She wasn’t sure what, but the air was jagged with anguish.

‘Go on,’ he said again, more calmly. ‘I need to hear the rest.’

She turned away, trying to escape the force of his presence. Now the hardest part of the story confronted her, and she could feel her courage ebbing away. It had been painful enough to live it. To relive it was more than she could bear.

‘Tell me everything,’ he commanded.

‘No,’ she choked, ‘not everything.’

‘Every last detail that you remember,’ he said remorselessly.

When she did not speak he came up behind her and seized her arms, trying to turn her towards him, but she resisted.

‘I can’t help you through the pain,’ he said. ‘I can only tell you to endure and not yield to it. It’s the only way to survive.’

Something in his voice made her relax, even against her will. He pulled her around to face him and she stood there, too distraught to move. He was watching her carefully, his dark eyes seeming to hold her even more firmly than his hands.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘The only way.’

‘So now tell me,’ he repeated. ‘Everything.’

CHAPTER FIVE

AT LAST Holly nodded and he led her to a chair, urging her down gently, then retreating to stand by the wall a short distance away. After a moment she began to speak.

It was hard to talk about her happiness, now that it was gone for good. She tried to function as a machine, but she was remembering the sweetest time of her life.

‘He took me out to dinner, we were together all the time. He seemed to want nothing except to be with me.’

She fell silent as memories assailed her.

When I’m with you, love of my life, I seem to come alive. You’re there in my dreams. I think of nobody else.

‘He said such things,’ she whispered. ‘They sounded wonderful-’

‘And yet words mean so little,’ came his voice from just behind her. ‘We all know that in our hearts but we won’t let ourselves believe it, because when we do-there is nothing.’

‘Well, maybe “nothing” isn’t so terrible,’ she said, almost angrily. ‘Maybe it’s best.’

‘That depends on what you had before, or what you think you had before.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ she said heavily. ‘I know now that he chose me because I’m good at copying other people’s work. He showed me a photograph of a miniature that he said belonged to his family and asked me to imitate it. He said the original was kept in a bank, because it was so valuable.

‘Then he invited me to come to Italy with him, to meet his family in a little town near Rome, called Roccasecca. I’d never heard of it before but when I got there I loved it. It was just like every romantic picture I’d ever seen of a small Italian town. I should have realised it was too perfect to be true.

‘When we got there, the family seemed to disappear. There was always some reason why the meeting had to be postponed, although he took the picture to them and told me they loved it.

‘I suppose I began to be suspicious then, but I tried to ignore it. It had been a lovely dream and I couldn’t face the fact that it was over-no, it wasn’t over. It had never started. It had been false from the beginning. He’d played me for a sucker, and boy, was I ever a sucker!’

She gave a hard laugh, looking into the distance, remembering.

‘I was the love of his life, his angel,’ her lips twisted in irony aimed at herself, ‘his beloved. Imagine that! Oh, I believed it. I ached to believe it. All the tired old cliches, amore, mia bella per l’eternita. And all the time his brain was calculating like a cash register.’

Holly stopped again, but held out a hand to ward him off, lest he dared insult her with sympathy. But he didn’t, only watched her with wary eyes.

‘I must have seen it then,’ she said at last, ‘but I blinded myself to the truth a little longer. After all, there was nothing specific, just vague suspicions. Then he told me to go home, and he’d join me later.

‘My flight left from Rome, so I had to get the train from Roccasecca. Bruno dropped me off at the railway station but he didn’t stay, even though there was a two-hour wait for the train. I guess he was anxious to get away from me. While I waited I remembered something I thought I’d left behind in my room. I checked my luggage, and that was when I found it.’

‘The original of the miniature?’