Something caught in her throat, half-laughter, half tears.
‘So the two of you had a nice little talk?’ she asked.
‘He did most of the talking. He wants to know how you are.’
‘I’m just fine.’
‘Was it a good flight? He knows you don’t like flying, and he’s worried about that.’
‘Tell him it was a nice smooth flight.’
His voice became muffled as he turned away to say, ‘She says it was a nice smooth flight.’
Matti answered, ‘Aaaah!’
‘He says he’s very pleased,’ Ruggiero passed on.
‘Give him my love.’
‘Why don’t you tell him yourself? Here, Matti. Put it to your ear-like that.’
‘Aaaah!’ he said.
‘Is that you, darling?’ she asked.
‘Si, si, si, si, si.’
‘You’ve learned another word. How clever you are.’
‘Aaaah!’
‘He says he loves you,’ came Ruggiero’s voice. ‘He wants you to say it too. Here, Matti.’
‘I love you,’ she said softly. ‘Matti?’
‘He slid off my lap and went to Mamma,’ Ruggiero said.
‘It’s time he was in bed.’
‘She’s just about to take him.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ll be there, too.’
‘Good. I must go now. Goodnight.’
‘Ciao!’
‘Ciao!’
She put down the phone and sat quietly in the dusk, until there was no light left.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THERE’S a letter for you,’ Hope said, putting it in Ruggiero’s hand. ‘From England.’
Conscious of his parent’s eyes fixed eagerly on him, he pulled open the envelope. Inside was a letter and a photograph, showing a small headstone in a graveyard. Beneath it was the name of the church and the village.
I found this when I got home. One day Matti might like to have it. Talk to him about her. Remember what I told you-that she was a good mother and she loved him with all her heart, until the last moment of her life. Think of her like that, and try to forgive her the rest.
It was signed, ‘Your affectionate Bossy-Boots.’
‘She talks as though she wasn’t coming back,’ Hope observed.
‘I don’t think she is,’ Ruggiero said heavily.
‘And you’re just going to accept that?’ Hope demanded, outraged. ‘Why didn’t you ask her to marry you?’
‘Have you forgotten that she’s engaged?’
‘Poof! Don’t tell me you’re going to let yourself be put off by a trifle like that?’
‘Mamma,’ he said with a faint grin, ‘sometimes I think you’re completely immoral.’
‘I can remember when, if you wanted a woman, you’d have elbowed a whole army of fiances out of your way.’
‘Well, perhaps it’s time I stopped doing such things. Other people have rights.’ He gave a grunt. ‘I guess I finally learned that.’
‘Not from me. I tried but I failed there.’
‘No-from her. It’s odd,’ he said softly, ‘but when I think of all the things I learned from her it really makes her seem like Nurse Bossy-Boots. And yet…’ He paused and smiled faintly, as though he barely realised he was doing so. ‘She wasn’t a bit like that.’
‘What was she like?’ Hope asked, her gaze fixed fondly on him.
He shook his head. ‘I can’t tell. Even to me she’s-I don’t know.’
‘But what does she say on the phone? You call her every night.’
‘Matti calls her every night,’ he corrected fondly. ‘They talk and I put in the odd word. I’m not sure she’d talk to me as easily. Now she’s with her fiance again…’ Ruggiero sighed. ‘Heaven knows what kind of man he is, but she seems very set on him.’
‘She told you that?’
‘No, she gave me only bare details. If I ventured onto that territory I got ordered off.’
‘Hmm!’
‘Mamma, you can put more meaning into that one little sound than anyone I know.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that this man may not exist? That he may be simply a device she has found useful?’
He nodded. ‘At the start I wanted her to keep Matti, but I had to give up when she mentioned the fiance, and it did cross my mind that she’d invented him to silence me. But when she returned from England with you he called her.’
‘She said so?’ Hope demanded sceptically.
‘No, but I heard her say something about a hospital. And since he works in one-’
‘That could have meant anything. Her friends had to return Matti early because their daughter had been rushed to hospital. Perhaps she was talking to them?’
‘But you told me she went out to see him while you were there.’
‘I said she went out for a couple of hours. I don’t know who she saw.’
‘But he was there when I called her the other night.’
Hope turned, thoroughly startled now. ‘She actually told you that?’
‘No, but I heard him in the background, asking where she kept the glasses.’
She breathed again.
‘And it didn’t occur to you that if he were her fiance he’d have known that without asking?’
‘You think-? No, there could be many things to account for it.’
‘You won’t know unless you go to find out.’
Unwittingly, she’d touched a nerve. Suddenly he was back in London, searching uselessly for someone who wasn’t there, turning corner after corner, always hoping that he would find his dream around the next one. An icy dread went through him at the thought of doing it again.
He didn’t call her that night, hoping she would call him. But the phone was silent. And when the next night came he found that he couldn’t force himself to call. The silence of the evening before held him in a grip of dread. The next night he admitted to himself that he was afraid, and the admission was a kind of release, so that he snatched up the receiver and dialled her home number.
The phone was dead.
There was still her cellphone, but that had been switched off. He called it repeatedly over the next twenty-four hours, but it was always off.
She had vanished into thin air.
Hope had given Ruggiero the address. All he had to do was take a taxi from London Airport to the building where her tiny apartment was situated. He arrived in the late afternoon. As he got out he looked up at the window on the second floor, which Hope had said was hers. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw the curtain twitch.
Seeing someone come out of the front door, he took the chance to slip inside, and began to climb the stairs. There was only one door on the second floor and he knocked at it.
It was opened by the most handsome young man Ruggiero had ever seen.
