He heard the words before he awoke. They echoed in the darkness behind his eyes, screaming around his head like curses.
Then his eyes were open and he was sitting up in bed, trying to understand the world around him. He didn’t know where he was. Surely this was his home back in London, but where was she? Why not in bed with him?
Then the haze cleared, the walls fell into place. He was back at his parents’ home, the Villa Rinucci in southern Italy, a place where he hadn’t lived for years.
Now he was using it as a refuge until he could clear his head. Nothing had been straight in his mind since the day Celia had thrown him out. Somehow he’d organised himself, agreed to return to Naples to set up the Italian branch of his firm, and left England. There had been one brief meeting with Celia when he’d collected his things, but they had spoken to each other like strangers, and he hadn’t seen her again. She was behind him. Finished. Over and done with.
Except that her cry of
Francesco got out of bed and went to the window, seeing the dawn beginning to break over the Bay of Naples. As he sat there, unwilling to return to bed and risk a repetition of the nightmare, he heard a soft footstep in the corridor outside and knew that it was Hope, refusing to accept that a man in his late-thirties didn’t need to be hovered over protectively by his mother.
He heard her stop outside his door and waited with dread for the knock. He loved his mother, but he shrank from the questions he couldn’t answer because he didn’t want to face them.
After a while she went away, leaving him alone with the brightening dawn that had no power over the darkness inside him.
‘Are you looking at those again?’ Toni Rinucci asked his wife warmly.
Hope smiled, looking up from the book of wedding photographs she was studying.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said. ‘They are so beautiful.’
‘But Ruggiero has been married for three months now,’ he said, naming one of their twin sons.
‘The pictures are still beautiful after three months,’ Hope said. ‘Look at little Matti.’
Ruggiero’s toddler son stood just in front of his father and Polly, his new stepmother. Although only two years old, he’d already managed to steal the limelight.
‘He looks like a little angel in that pageboy suit,’ Hope said sentimentally.
‘Yes-you’d never know that he’d covered it with mud ten minutes later,’ Toni observed with grandfatherly cynicism.
‘He’s real boy,’ Hope declared happily. ‘Oh, look!’
She’d reached the picture showing all six of her sons.
‘It’s so good to see them all together.’ She sighed. ‘Francesco has been away so much-first America, then England-but this time he was here. Oh, it’s so good to have him finally back where he belongs.’
Toni was silent as they went down the stairs together, and Hope, who could read his silences, glanced at him.
‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.
‘I’m not sure he’s home to stay. He’s not a boy any more.’
‘But of course he won’t stay with us for ever,’ Hope conceded. ‘He’ll find his own place and move out. But we’ll still see him far more often than when he was living abroad.’
Hope made some coffee for the two of them, and took it out onto the terrace with its view over the bay. They both loved these moments when they had the house to themselves and could indulge in gossip about everyday matters-their household, their sons, their growing army of grandchildren, their upcoming thirty-fifth wedding anniversary-or just about nothing in particular.
‘That isn’t really what I meant,’ said Toni as she set his coffee before him, just as he liked it. ‘I sense something strange about his coming home now.’
‘He came home for the wedding,’ Hope pointed out.
‘Yes, but we thought he’d be here a few days, and bring Celia with him. Instead, he came without her, and stayed. Why did he suddenly leave England? He had a good career there, in a successful firm. He owns shares in it and was making a fortune.’
‘But he’ll do even better by setting up here,’ Hope pointed out. ‘It made sense for them to send him to his own country.’
‘I don’t like things that are too sensible,’ her husband complained. ‘There’s something else behind it.’
Hope nodded. ‘I think so, too,’ she conceded. ‘I just hope it isn’t-’
‘What?’ Toni asked, laying his hand over hers.
‘He used to tell us so much about Celia. Every phone call, every letter was all about her. I was surprised when he said she was blind, because he’s not a man who-Well-’
‘Yes, I can’t imagine him living with a woman he has to care for all the time,’ Toni agreed. ‘But I thought we were wrong. I was proud of him. He even sent us photographs of her, and called her his English rose. I’d never known him to be so committed to a woman before.’
‘Then suddenly it’s all over,’ Hope said, ‘and he comes home without her. He’s been back for three months now, and he never speaks of her. Why?’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘That he left her because his love wasn’t great enough for him to cope. I should be sorry to think that was true of any son of mine.’
‘But you didn’t like him living with her at the start,’ Toni pointed out. ‘You said her blindness would hold him back.’
She made a face.
‘All right, I admit I’m not consistent,’ she conceded. ‘Is anyone?’
‘Never, in all the years I’ve known you, have you been consistent,’ her husband said fondly.
‘I wanted him to be sensible.’ she said, ‘But I suppose I don’t like him to be too sensible. I wanted to believe that my son is better than myself, kinder and more generous.’
‘Nobody is more generous than you,’ Toni protested. ‘But for the generosity of your love my life would be nothing.’
‘You praise me too much,’ she said with a little smile. ‘It isn’t generous to love a man who gives you everything you want.’
He returned the smile, and she kissed him, but they both knew that it wasn’t really true. Despite his love, he didn’t give her everything she wanted. Only one man could have done that, and Toni was not that man. It would have been too much to say that he knew it, but he’d always had a suspicion, which he proved by determinedly refusing to ask questions.
Thirty-five years ago he had met Hope, an Englishwoman visiting Italy, a divorcee with three sons: Luke, adopted; Francesco, born during her marriage, but not by her husband; and Primo, the stepson she’d come to love. Toni had loved her from the first moment, and had been overjoyed when she’d agreed to marry him. Only his own children could increase his happiness, and that had come about the following year, with the birth of twin sons, Carlo and Ruggiero.
Since then he had sometimes wondered if Francesco was her secret favourite, but her adoration of each one of her sons was so all-encompassing that it was hard for Toni to be sure of his suspicions. Nor did he ever allow himself to brood about them.
Hope had missed Francesco badly since he’d left home to work in America, later moving to England, but she would have missed any of them who vanished for years, making only brief visits home.
But suddenly, three months ago, he’d returned to Naples from England, ostensibly for his brother’s wedding, and full of plans for setting up a branch of his firm and increasing his already healthy fortune. While he looked for somewhere to live he’d moved back into the Villa Rinucci, in the room that had always been kept for him, even when it had seemed he would never occupy it again.
But he had come without the woman he’d once seemed to love, and he would never speak of her.
‘You’re afraid he just dumped her because she was a burden, aren’t you?’ Toni asked his wife gently. ‘But I don’t believe that. Not our Francesco.’
