He returned home triumphantly one evening, with his first wage packet.
‘I haven’t even opened it,’ he told her virtuously.
‘Good,’ she said, whipping it out of his hand. ‘I had a phone call today from the bank behind your credit card. Your payments are overdue. This will come in very handy.’
‘But can’t you-?’
‘No,’ she said remorselessly. ‘I can’t.’
Caution born of self-preservation kept him silent, and sent him back to work hard enough to make her reconsider. She relented up to a point, and when the New Year began he returned to college to ‘make a new start’.
Della didn’t allow herself to hope for too much, but she felt a mild sense of triumph. Sol was treating her with a cautious respect that was new, and for that she knew she had Carlo to thank.
She sent him a silent message of gratitude, wondering where he was and what he was doing. Did he ever think of her. And, if so, how?
Evie’s twins had been born in late November. Carlo had entered the villa to find his mother on the phone, his father dancing a little jig of joy, and Ruggiero grinning.
He’d mouthed, ‘Boy and a girl,’ to Carlo.
‘I’m so relieved,’ Hope said, hanging up. ‘The birth was a few days late and I was getting worried. And poor Justin was tearing his hair out.’
‘Justin?’ everyone cried sceptically.
Justin Dane, Hope’s first son, parted from her at birth, had reappeared in their lives three years ago. In time he’d grown close to his family, but it had been hard at first, for he’d been marked by the harsh way life had treated him. He was a grim, taciturn man, who’d developed a protective shell designed to fend off human contact.
Evie’s love had warmed him, so that these days he was more relaxed, and had learned how to be happy. Even so, the thought of him revealing strong emotion made the three men hoot with laughter.
‘Tearing his hair out?’ Ruggiero teased.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Hope said. ‘He says little, but I can tell.’
She and Toni departed early next morning, stayed away three days, and returned with a hundred photographs.
‘Evie looks happy,’ Ruggiero observed, studying the pictures.
He’d had a soft spot for Evie ever since her first visit. She was mad about motorbikes, and he’d been just about to buy a share in a bike factory, and they’d each recognised a kindred spirit in the other.
‘When do we get to meet them?’ Carlo asked, studying the pictures.
‘They’re coming for Christmas,’ Hope said.
Christmas was the time the Rinuccis gathered in force. Primo and Luke returned with their wives, Francesco came over from America, Ruggiero produced a new girlfriend. And Justin and Evie came over from England with their baby twins, accompanied by Justin’s fifteen-year-old-son Mark, from his first marriage.
It was he who’d brought Evie and Justin together, when she’d been a temporary language teacher at his school and he’d been her star pupil, with a propensity for playing truant. He was fascinated by languages, especially Italian, which he’d learned from her, and he loved his visits to Italy, seizing the chance to brush up not only his Italian but also on the Neapolitan dialect.
Carlo found him one day, deep in a newspaper article about Pompeii.
‘Can you understand it?’ Carlo asked, grinning.
‘Enough to know it’s about you,’ Mark said.
But Carlo shook his head. ‘No, it’s about the site. I added a few opinions, but a good archaeologist never lets himself become the story.’
‘Aren’t you going to do a whole series?’
‘No, that fell through,’ Carlo said hastily.
‘But Evie said-’
‘What do you think about Pompeii?’ Carlo interrupted him with a touch of desperation. ‘Would you like to come and see it? I’m making my final visit tomorrow.’
Next day they drove out to Pompeii together. Mark was an ideal pupil, wide-eyed, eager, drinking everything in, responding intelligently. Carlo began in much the same way as he’d done with the schoolchildren, the day he’d met Della, and Mark enjoyed the performance. But then he said, ‘But it’s much more than that, isn’t it?’
‘Much more,’ Carlo said, recognising a kindred spirit with pleasure.
He showed the boy around the whole place, talking to him as to a fellow academic, and introducing him to the team, who were finally packing up to depart. Mark was enthralled by the museum, especially the plaster figures. He lingered over the mother sheltering her children.
‘How do you get on with Evie?’ Carlo asked curiously.
‘She’s great,’ Mark said at once. ‘Dad’s ever so much nicer now he’s got her.’ He giggled suddenly. ‘The night we were waiting in the hospital he said he wanted us to have a talk, “man to man”.’
‘Heaven help us!’ Carlo said with feeling.
‘Yes, I thought it would be awful, but he just wanted to talk about Evie. He said when my turn came I shouldn’t be in a hurry, because a man had to wait for the right person, even if he waited for years and years.’
‘Justin said a thing like that?’ Carlo queried, trying to imagine this from his taciturn half brother.
‘Well, the twins were being born,’ Mark said, as though this was a complete explanation. And Carlo thought perhaps it was.
He left Mark talking to Antonio, one of his team, and moved quietly away, brooding on the unexpected words that he’d just heard.
Even Justin had found the secret that had eluded himself.
He walked, without looking where he was going, and came inevitably to the place where the lovers still clung together-as they had done on that far-off day when he and Della had seen them for the first time; as they had still been when they were together here for the last time, when everything had seemed most perfect between them.
Nothing had changed. The lovers lay as they had done for nearly two thousand years, dead to the world but alive to each other for all eternity.
For all eternity. That was what he’d wanted, what he’d been so sure of. And he’d been wrong. He hadn’t understood her for a moment.
How do I love thee…?
He could never have answered that. There were no words for how he had loved her.
Let me count the ways.
For him the ways were too many to count. For her they were too few to bother with. They had run out, leaving nothingness behind.
‘I’ll be going now,’ said a voice nearby.
‘What?’ He came back to himself with a start.
‘I’m on my way,’ Antonio said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine-fine.’ ‘The job’s done. There’s nothing to stay for.’ ‘No, there’s nothing to stay for.’
CHAPTER TEN
IT WAS Hope who suggested to Evie that they might invite Carlo to accompany them back to England.
‘He’s a good influence on Mark,’ she said. ‘That boy’s getting really interested in all sorts of serious things.’
‘Yes, he’s a budding intellectual,’ Evie said, smiling. ‘We’d love to have Carlo.’
If Carlo was suspicious of his mother’s motives he kept his thoughts to himself, and agreed to the visit with every sign of pleasure. Evie afterwards said that she didn’t know how she would have managed without him, as she was poorly on the flight home, and it was Carlo who took charge of the twins. This had a knock-on effect on Mark, who decided that, since his hero was happy looking after babies, it obviously wasn’t unmanly after all.
