A man asked his wife, ‘What is she meant to be? Who is that inside it?’
‘She’s a bird, stupid!’ his wife retorted. ‘I think it’s Antonia. Is that you, Antonia? You look wonderful.’
She smiled, said thank you, and said the other woman looked gorgeous too, which was true.
‘Thanks,’ the woman said, complacently smoothing her brief, glittering gold lamé dress with one hand.
‘Is it a carnival costume?’ asked someone else, and she nodded.
‘It must be as light as a feather,’ someone else joked, and everyone groaned.
‘What an awful joke!’
All the time she kept moving, looking for Alex, wondering if Patrick was with him, if he had come in through the front door as if he had never been here earlier.
She eventually found them in the garden, with glasses of champagne in their hands, by the fountain, which was spraying glittering drops of water into the air.
Patrick was standing facing her; Alex was sitting on the edge of the fountain. They were talking to a man in a dark suit who had his back to her.
As she slowly drifted towards them, her long feather skirts floating around her, Alex caught sight of her and waved, his face lighting up in a smile. ‘There you are at last, Antonia! You look quite wonderful.’
She smiled back, glad of her mask, very conscious of Patrick’s dark, unsmiling glance, taken aback by the grimness of his expression. Why was he looking at her like that, as if he hated her?
Then the man in the dark suit turned, smiling, holding out his hands. ‘Hallo, darling! Surprise, surprise!’
It was Cy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SOMEHOW Antonia went on walking towards them, even more relieved to be wearing the mask of feathers, which could hide her expression, her feelings, what she was thinking. Shyly, she put her hands into Cy’s, and he bent and kissed her lightly on the cheek, laughing as he straightened.
‘Your feathers tickle!’ Cy said, laughing, and then moving back a step to contemplate her. ‘I remember you wore that at Patsy’s ball and it made a sensation. It suits you; there has always been something bird-like about you. You look enchanting in it.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Patrick’s face stiffen, his mouth a white, angry line.
Neither Cy nor Alex noticed his expression; they weren’t looking at him, either directly or secretly, like Antonia. Alex was smiling indulgently at her. Without even glancing at Patrick, Alex said, ‘Come on, Patrick, let’s go back inside and see how the party’s going on, and leave the love-birds to bill and coo out here alone.’
Antonia flinched at that and felt Patrick watching her, his face hostile, picking up the vibration of her reaction, his eyes coldly probing to work out what she felt.
‘See you later, Cy,’ Alex said, grinning at him. ‘Don’t expect to have the garden to yourself for much longer, though. I warn you, people always come out here to dance, so if you want to kiss the girl properly get on with it before you get interrupted! I’ll keep them inside for as long as I can, but I can’t promise anything!’
Patrick grimly strode away towards the house, his lean, dark figure tense as a drawn sword. She quivered as he passed her, her nerves jumping, but he didn’t look in her direction, and was gone a second later, followed at once by Alex.
She sank down nervelessly on the bench under the fig tree and Cy came and sat beside her, taking her hand, stroking her fingers gently.
‘Glad to see me, Antonia?’
She stared up at him, finding his face oddly unfamiliar, remote. He wasn’t far off forty, a tall, spare, austere man with dusty-coloured hair slipping back off his forehead, dark eyes and a thin, pale face. Work occupied most of his time; although he was wealthy he took even his pleasures seriously, but then Cy was a serious man with a strong sense of responsibility and duty. That was why Antonia had felt safe whenever she was with him.
She didn’t feel safe now. She felt as if she were walking a slippery edge over a cliff fall. She wished Cy had not come back to Venice now.
‘I’m always glad to see you, Cy,’ she lied, huskily, and he smiled at her.
‘I was very concerned after we talked last night, Tonia. Thinking over what you had said, I realised it was vital that we talked, face to face, so I moved heaven and earth to rearrange my appointments for today and tomorrow, flew down to New York from Boston, managed to get a seat on Concorde at the very last minute, arrived in London at midnight last night...’
‘You can’t have got there that soon! We only talked at around nine o’clock that evening.’
‘You’re forgetting the time difference.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘It was nine in the evening for you, but mid-afternoon for me. I booked into an airport hotel, and slept quite late, because I knew I’d have to wait until the afternoon for a seat on a plane to Venice. I flew in three hours ago.’
‘You must be exhausted! You shouldn’t have rushed all this way just to see me! If I’d known you were thinking of doing this I’d have told you not to!’
‘I suspected as much; that’s why I didn’t warn anyone I was coming.’
‘Not even Patsy? I wondered. I saw her this morning and she didn’t say a word about you coming.’
‘She had no idea. She was amazed when I arrived.’
‘So you have been to the palazzo? Pasty must have been overjoyed to see you.’
He smiled again, his eyes warm, as they always were when he talked about his aunt.
‘Yes, she was as welcoming as ever. I went to the palazzo straight from the airport, expecting to find you there, and Patsy told me you were having this party tonight and were helping your uncle and
