discovered for days. No way. He’ll stay with me.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of troubling you,’ Luke said at once.
‘It’s no trouble,’ she snapped.
‘Then why did you say earlier that you wouldn’t take him at any price?’ Netta demanded.
In the icy silence that followed, Luke looked from one to the other.
‘Did you say that?’ he asked, sounding only mildly interested.
‘I-may have said something like it, but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want your fate on my conscience, so you’re coming to stay with me.’
‘Don’t I get a say?’
‘No. And that’s final.’
‘You say “final” very often,’ Netta mused. ‘Only then things turn out not to be final at all.’
‘Netta, I’m warning you-’ She checked herself and drew a long, slow breath. ‘Please be kind enough to collect Luke’s things.’
‘Suppose I say no,’ Luke said. ‘Perhaps I don’t want to.’
She turned on him, breathing fire. ‘Did I ask what you want? You are coming to stay with me, and that’s the end of it. No more argument.’
‘You’d better do what she says,’ Netta told him. ‘When she’s made up her mind, she never changes it. Never,
Then, perceiving that she had pushed her beloved daughter-in-law as far as was safe, she fell silent.
‘Then I guess I’ll just have to agree,’ Luke said with an air of meekness that did nothing to improve Minnie’s temper.
She glanced at the other woman, expecting to see her relish her triumph. But Netta had left the field of battle while she was winning.
The whole family helped him move the short distance to Minnie’s flat, where Netta got to work on his bed.
‘Come and see if it’s all right,’ she commanded Luke, guiding him, not to the spare room, but the large bedroom with the double bed.
‘I’m taking the spare room,’ Minnie told him. ‘Netta says you toss and turn a lot, so you’ll be more comfortable with the extra space.’
‘I can’t take your room.’
‘It’s all arranged,’ she said. ‘So quit arguing.’
He didn’t want to argue. He didn’t want to do anything except collapse on the double bed, which looked wonderfully inviting. Minnie, reading his face, shooed everyone out so that he could have some peace. The last one to leave was Netta, and Minnie went with her to the door.
‘You’re disgraceful,’ Minnie told her amiably. ‘There was no need to hurry it tonight.’
‘Best if neither of you had time to change your mind.’
‘It won’t work, Netta. Luke and I just aren’t on that wavelength.’
‘Hmph! Much you know! Goodnight,
Minnie laughed and kissed her. ‘Goodnight.’
She closed the door and went back to the bedroom where she had left Luke. But he was already sprawled across the bed, fast asleep.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LUKE settled into a peaceful routine in which he slept a lot, had his dressings changed by the visiting nurse, and entertained visitors.
Teresa came every day with Tiberius. If Luke had been her hero before, he was doubly so now that he had received injuries that would otherwise have descended on herself and possibly the cat.
‘The dear old girl has somehow persuaded herself that it was all a plot against Tiberius’s life,’ he told Minnie one evening, ‘and that I charged in at the last moment, seized him up and put myself between him and the blast.’
‘What was Tiberius doing taking a shower?’
‘He’s a cat of many talents, according to Teresa.’
‘And nobody will ever make her understand the truth,’ Minnie said ruefully. ‘That, but for pure chance, you’d have been the villain and I’d have been suing you, on Teresa’s behalf, for every penny you have.’
He grinned. ‘Better luck next time.’
They had fallen easily into this way of talking, still opponents, but teasing each other almost like brother and sister. In the mornings she would rise first and bring him coffee. When she’d left he’d embark on the awkward business of washing himself with only his left hand, and the nurse would help him finish dressing.
After that there would be a procession of Pepinos and various other neighbours, bearing food and entertainment. The afternoons became a card school, with Luke insisting on small stakes and being careful to lose.
Minnie would return when the evening was half over, looking tired and with a briefcase full of files. Once he tried to prepare a meal for her and made such a clumsy mess of it that she asked pointedly if he were trying to destroy her home as well as his own.
It was Netta who did the real cooking, sweeping in every evening with an elaborate meal that she swore she’d ‘just thrown together’, then sweeping out and not returning until the next morning, which surprised him. Such restraint was unlike Netta.
After supper Minnie would settle down to work while he watched television. He’d offered to turn it off but she assured him this wasn’t necessary, as her concentration was deep enough to blot out distractions. And it was true, he realised, regarding her bright head bent over the papers. Her private world was always there, the door open invitingly.
He only wished he knew who was waiting for her in there. It hadn’t escaped his attention that she’d removed Gianni’s picture from his sight.
One evening Minnie put her books away, then yawned and stretched. From behind the half-open bedroom door she could hear Luke talking into his phone, and heard him say, ‘Mamma.’
As he hung up she pushed the door right open. ‘Cocoa?’
‘Lovely.’
He came out and settled on the sofa until she returned with two mugs.
‘Have you told your mother what happened to you?’ she asked.
‘Not yet. I’ll tell her when I’m human again.’
‘Tell me some more about your family. How many are there?’
‘Eight, including our parents.’
‘Six brothers and sisters?’
‘Just brothers. Hope, my adoptive mother, had a son when she was fifteen and obviously unmarried. Her parents gave him up for adoption and told her he was dead.’
‘Swine,’ Minnie said succinctly.
‘I agree. None of us knew anything about him for years. Hope married Jack Cayman, a widower with a son called Primo, because his mother had been Italian. And they adopted me. I don’t think it was ever a very happy marriage, and it collapsed when Franco, Primo’s uncle, came visiting from Italy, and he and my mother fell in love and had a son.
‘After the divorce she got custody of me, and Primo stayed with his father, but Jack died a couple of years later and the Rinuccis took Primo to Italy. Hope went to look for him, and that was how she met Toni, Franco’s brother, and married him.’
‘What about Franco? If she had his baby, didn’t she go to him after the divorce?’
‘No, he already was married with two children, and he felt he couldn’t leave his wife.’
‘Doesn’t that make family reunions a little tense?’
‘They don’t happen often. Franco lives in Milan, which is a safe distance.’
