One Summer in Italy…

CHAPTER FOUR

DESPITE her troubles, Holly found it easy to settle into the life of the villa, which seemed to open its arms to welcome her. Everything was done for her comfort. The maid cleaned her room and made her bed, leaving her free to spend her time with Liza.

Nothing mattered but the little girl who had clung to her so desperately on the train, weeping as though her heart would break. As she had guessed, Liza’s spirits were volatile. She could be happy one minute and tearful the next. Even worse were the fits of screaming that would overtake her without warning.

‘I nursed her in hospital,’ Berta explained. ‘When she was ready to leave she still needed care at home, and they thought I’d be best because she was used to me. She’s a sweet child, but I can’t cope with her outbursts. They’re alarming because they seem to come out of nowhere.’

‘But really they come out of her tragedy,’ Holly suggested. ‘To lose her mother like that-the train crash, her injury…She must still be suffering a lot.’

‘To be sure. I understand it well enough,’ Berta agreed. ‘I just don’t seem to be any help to her. I put my arms round her and try to console her, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’m not the one she wants.’

‘It’s her mother that she wants, poor little soul,’ Holly sighed.

‘Yes, but, failing that, someone like her. Someone English, like her mamma. You.’

This seemed to be the answer. Only that morning Liza had become violently upset about some trivial matter that had arisen over breakfast. But then the mood had passed so quickly that Holly had barely understood what had brought it on. She’d asked no more questions, unwilling to prolong what was best forgotten.

Holly studied the child constantly to discern more about her needs, but almost equally useful were the talks she had with Berta and Anna during the afternoons, when Liza took her nap.

Since the judge often left early and came home late it was almost as though he wasn’t there at all, so they talked freely.

‘When he is here he shuts himself away,’ Anna observed one day in the kitchen as she poured coffee for the three of them. ‘He didn’t used to be like that, before his wife died. But now it’s like living with a ghost.’

‘What was she like?’ Holly asked.

‘Beautiful,’ Anna said enviously. ‘Like a model. It was easy to see why he was mad about her.’

‘Mad about her?’ Holly queried. Such a picture didn’t sort with the harsh, unyielding man she knew.

‘Mad, insane, crazy,’ Anna said firmly. ‘I know it’s hard to believe if you’ve only seen him now, but in those days he was all smiles, all happiness. I came to work here soon after they married and I tell you, you never saw a man so much in love. He would have died for her. Instead…’ she sighed.

‘I was on duty in the hospital the day of the accident,’ Berta recalled. ‘I saw him walk in, and he showed nothing. No emotion, nothing at all. His face was blank.’

‘Did he know his wife was already dead?’ Holly asked.

‘Yes. The first thing he said to the doctor was, “Even if she’s dead, I want to see her”, and the doctor didn’t like that because she looked very bad, all smashed up. He tried to make him wait a while, and I saw his face become even colder and harder as he said, “I want to see her, do you understand?”’

‘He can be scary when he’s enraged,’ Anna mused. ‘Did the doctor give way?’

‘Not at once. He said that the little girl was still alive and perhaps he’d like to see his daughter first. And Signor Fallucci said, ‘I demand to see my wife, and if you don’t get out of my way you’ll be sorry.’

‘So the doctor showed him into the room. The judge ordered everyone out so that he’d be alone with her, but when we were outside the doctor told me to stay close, and fetch him when Signor Fallucci came out, or if “anything happened” as he put it.’

‘So you went and listened at the door,’ Anna said wryly.

‘Well-yes, all right, I did.’

‘And what did you hear?’

‘Nothing. There wasn’t a sound from inside that room. I’ve seen people visiting the dead. They cry, or call out the person’s name, but all I heard was silence. When he came out-his face-I’ll never forget it. You’d have thought he was the dead one.’

‘Did he go to see Liza then?’ Holly asked curiously.

‘Yes, I took him in. She looked terrible, attached to all those machines. I was going to tell him not to touch her, but I didn’t have to. He never moved, just stood staring at her as though he didn’t know who she was. Then he turned and walked out.’

‘I don’t understand that,’ Anna said. ‘He’s always adored her, almost as much as his wife. I heard someone make a joke with him once, about how he’d feel differently when he had a son. And he said, “Who needs a son? No child could mean more to me than my Liza.” I’ll never forget the way he said that, or his face as he looked at her.’

‘Well, he wasn’t like that in the hospital,’ Berta said. ‘Mind you, men can’t cope with that sort of thing as we do. Even the strongest of them get scared and freeze up.’

It might be true, yet somehow Holly wasn’t satisfied with this facile explanation. There was a mystery here, the same mystery as the one that made Signor Matteo Fallucci, a judge with a career and a reputation at stake, harbour a suspicious character for the sake of a child he seldom saw.

On the one hand, there was the love so vast that it would take any risk. On the other hand, there was the frozen withdrawal. If she could understand that, then perhaps she would begin to understand him.

But she did not think he was a man who could be easily understood. She was even more sure of it a moment later when Anna said,

‘He never speaks of her. The only one who’s allowed to mention her name is Liza, and even then he steers her off the subject as soon as he can.’

‘But that’s terrible,’ Holly said, disturbed. ‘He’s the person who knew his wife best, and Liza needs to discuss her mother with him.’

‘I know,’ Anna said sympathetically. ‘But he can’t make himself do it. And he doesn’t even have the signora’s picture on his desk. He doesn’t act like a grieving widower at all, and yet he must be, because he built that fancy monument, and he keeps going to it, as though he couldn’t keep away.’

‘Night after night,’ Berta confirmed.

‘One night I was out there,’ Anna remembered, ‘and I saw him close enough to tell that he was talking to her. It was really scary.’

‘You’d better not let him know you spy on him,’ Berta said darkly. ‘That would be the end of you.’

‘I know. I dashed off before he spotted me.’

Berta was so delighted with Holly’s coming that she asked no awkward questions, almost as though she had a superstitious fear that to query her good luck would make it vanish.

She gladly showed Holly the mechanical part of caring for Liza. A physiotherapist attended twice a week, and from her Holly learned some simple exercises to be repeated every day. She mastered them without trouble, and Liza was more relaxed with her.

To show her preference she insisted on talking English with Holly, even when Berta was there.

‘That’s not very polite to Berta,’ Holly protested. ‘Her English isn’t too good.’

‘Non e importante,’ Berta said with a grin. ‘Tonight I see my Alfio, and we don’t talk English.’

Holly went regularly to the library to study the newspapers that were put there every day, to see if there was any mention of herself. But there was nothing.

Like every other room in the house this one was luxurious, furnished with ornate oak bookshelves that came from another age. The volumes were mostly history, philosophy and science. Some of them were very old, suggesting a family that had collected books for centuries.

She had the answer in a portrait of two ladies, dressed in the style of a hundred years ago, both of whose faces so strongly resembled the judge’s that it was clear he was their descendant. A small plaque at the bottom announced that this was the Contessa d’ Arelio, and her daughter, Isabella.

‘That’s his grandmother,’ Anna said, coming in with a duster. ‘The younger lady, I mean. She married Alfonso Fallucci. They say there was a terrible row because her family wanted her to marry a title.’

‘Alfonso wasn’t good enough for them?’ Holly asked.

‘They thought he was a nobody, but she insisted on marrying him. She was right, too, because he made a fortune in shipping.’

So that explained how he came to be living in this extravagant place, far beyond what most judges could afford. Much of it was shut off, the rooms surplus to such a small family, but what she could see was still sumptuous, both inside and out.

A small army of gardeners worked in the grounds. There was one whose first duty was to care for the memorial to Carol Fallucci, keeping the fountain clean and flowing freely, and the flower beds perfect. Taking a stroll that afternoon, Holly saw him busily weeding, and exchanged a smile and a wave.

Walking on further, she came to a sight that checked her. Here was a small swimming pool, surrounded by trees and invisible from the house. It would have been perfect for a summer afternoon, except that it was empty and neglected.

Empty and neglected. The words repeated themselves inside her head. In some mysterious way they seemed to apply to this place, despite the extensive staff keeping it in order. It was an emptiness of the soul, and nobody was more afflicted by it than the master of the house.

She wondered how she was so sure of this, since she barely knew him, but she had no doubt.

Liza’s most treasured possession was a book of photographs, containing everything, starting with the wedding of Matteo and Carol Fallucci. There were pictures of them with their newborn baby, their year-old baby, and so on.

It was his face that caught her attention. Carol would sometimes look at him, sometimes at her child, but most often she looked directly at the camera. The judge did this only once. His eyes were for the two women in his life, always with a look of blatant worship. In one he rested his cheek against Carol’s hair, as though here lay all joy and contentment.

Some of the pictures showed the family gathered around a swimming pool, all in bathing costumes. Carol was at her most glamorous, in a black bikini designed to show off her glorious figure, her fair hair tumbling over her shoulders. Sitting beside her was Liza, sturdy and cheerfully belligerent, her face so much like her mother’s that the effect was startling.

And there he was, Matteo, as Holly could never have imagined him, lean and lithe in swimming trunks. A stranger, seeing the breadth of his shoulders, his flat stomach and muscular arms and legs, would have put him down as an actor or a model. But not a judge, she thought wryly. Anything but a judge.

Neither did his face belong in a courtroom. This was a healthy, handsome man, with powerful enjoyment of life and a desire to savour every moment.

The picture that really transfixed her showed Liza and her father, gazing into each other’s eyes, both of them blissfully, adoringly happy, oblivious to the rest of the world.

That was what it must be like to have a father, she thought.

From Liza’s appearance the picture must have been taken the previous summer, yet Matteo looked years younger. His smile was that of a completely different man; one still young, blazing with hope and happiness. He had almost nothing in common with the man he was now.

Holly felt she began to understand him. His beloved wife had died, leaving him sunk in despair. He would find it hard to confide in anyone, and the exaggerated monument in the garden was his only way of showing his feelings.

Even Liza was somehow lost to him, as though his heart had frozen too much to let him respond to her needs. They might have consoled each other, but he was reduced to commandeering help from a stranger. He wasn’t an easy man to like, but she found that her heart mysteriously ached for him.

Then she looked again and realised why the pool seemed familiar. It was the one she’d seen in the grounds. So glitteringly joyous then, so desolate now. It seemed to sum up the change that had come over this house when the woman who was its heart had died, leaving her husband and child bereft, yet unable to communicate.

As she returned to the house Berta waylaid her.

‘The judge is home,’ she said. ‘He’s with Liza and he said not to disturb him.’ She looked around before asking in a conspiratorial voice, ‘That online catalogue you were looking at-did it have any wedding dresses at reasonable prices?’

‘It didn’t have anything at reasonable prices,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve never been so scared in my life. So, you’ve reached the stage of choosing a wedding dress?’

Berta needed no encouragement to talk about her fiancé. Holly smiled but this was a hard conversation for her. Only recently she too had been planning a wedding to a man who made her pulses race, a man she thought she would adore all her life-until he betrayed her in the most brutal, selfish manner.

He had never loved her, she knew that now. Instead he had laid a cynical trap for her, and she had fallen into it without the slightest caution.

Where was he now? What was he doing? Would she ever see him again?

Matteo was there at supper. Several times she caught him watching her curiously, and she began to feel that something had gone badly wrong. Her fears seemed to be confirmed when he rose from the table and spoke to her quietly.

‘When Liza is asleep, please come to my study, no matter how late it is.’

It was a couple of hours before she was ready to leave the child, but when Liza was breathing regularly she crept out of the room and downstairs to the study.

When there was no answer to her knock she pushed open the door gently. She couldn’t see him, but she decided to go in anyway.

The lights were low and she had to look around to be sure he wasn’t there. When there was no sign of him she looked around as much as she could, and that was how she noticed the newspaper on the desk.

It was lying open under the only bright light, the desk lamp. At first she saw it upside down and the only word that registered was Vanelli.

A name she knew, to her everlasting bitterness.

Moving as in a dream, she lifted the newspaper and fought to read through the words that danced before her eyes. Only the gist of it reached her.

Valuable miniature-worth millions-replaced by a cheap copy-duo of thieves, Sarah Conroy and BrunoVanelli-Vanelli arrested but escaped-no trace of the woman…

She sat down suddenly, feeling the breath knocked out of her body.

It had been bound to happen. She’d been living in a fool’s paradise, but it couldn’t last. The brutal truth had caught up with her. At best she would be thrown out. At worst she would be arrested. She must run. But where? There was nowhere to run to.

There was a photograph of Bruno in the paper. Not knowing why, she ran her fingers over the handsome, wilful face. It was just as she had first seen it, the charming quirk at the corner of the mouth, the roguish glint in the eye. How she had loved it when that glint had been turned on her. How her heart had thundered!

She touched the picture again, feeling the dead paper beneath her fingers, trying to conjure him up as he had first appeared to her. But that dream was dead. Tears stung her eyes and began to slide down her cheeks.

‘Is it a good likeness?’

The judge was standing there, watching her, as he must have been for the last few minutes. Hastily she brushed the tears away.

‘Yes, it’s a good likeness,’ she whispered. ‘You didn’t leave this here by accident, did you?’

‘Of course not. I had to know.’

‘Now that you know, what are you going to do?’

‘I’m not sure. There’s a lot I need to understand first.’

‘You mean, like-am I a crook? If I deny it, will you believe me?’

‘I might.’

‘And if you don’t-what then? What of Liza?’ she asked.

In the poor light she saw him flinch.

‘I’ve been talking to her,’ he said. ‘She has much to say about you, especially about your mother.’

‘My mother? What does she have to do with this?’

‘She could have a lot to do with it. I understand that she was ill, and you had to look after her.’

‘Yes. She had a wasting disease. I knew she’d never get better. For the last ten years of her life she needed constant attention, so I stayed at home to care for her.’

‘There was nobody else? Your father?’

‘I never knew him. My parents weren’t married, and when she became pregnant he just vanished. I never knew anyone from his side of the family. I didn’t know much of my mother’s family either. I think they were ashamed of her, and they never helped.

‘So for years it was just the two of us, and we were happy. When I showed a talent for drawing she arranged for me to have special lessons, although they were expensive. She took on two and sometimes three jobs to make the extra money. She dreamed of sending me to art college even more than I dreamed of it, but before I could go she was already showing signs of illness. So I did a teacher training course instead.

‘When I finished that, I got a job in a local school, but I was only there two terms before I had to leave to be with her.’

‘That must have been hard on you, having your life swallowed up.’

‘I never saw it like that. I loved her. I wanted to be there for her as she’d been there for me. But why am I telling you all this? What does this have to do with-?’

‘Just answer my questions,’ he said curtly. ‘I’m beginning to get the picture. It must have been a very restricted existence. Did you go out, have boyfriends?’

‘Not really. Boyfriends didn’t want to know about Mom.’

‘How did you come to be visiting Portsmouth?’

‘I had a friend who lived there. I met her when I was on my course. She used to invite me every year and Mom was determined I should have a holiday, so she insisted on going into respite care to let me have a break.’

‘And how long did that last?’

‘Until last year, when she died.’

Her voice shook on the last words and she fell silent. He was silent too, not offering sympathy, which could hardly be genuine, and which she would have found it hard to cope with, but letting her take her time.

‘And then?’ he asked at last in a voice that was quiet, and almost gentle.

‘I took a refresher course so that I could start teaching and that’s when I met-’

‘Bruno Vanelli.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you fell for him because you’d never learned to be worldly-wise. I didn’t understand that until I spoke to Liza, and discovered that your life had given you little experience of the world, and of men. But why didn’t you tell me yourself?’

‘Didn’t we agree that the less I told you the better?’

‘True.’

She gave a brief, mirthless laugh. ‘Anyway, there isn’t much to tell. He sought me out. He was good-looking and I was flattered. And it seemed so romantic that he was Italian. That’s how stupid I was.’

‘Ah, yes, we have that image,’ he murmured ironically.

‘If I’d been a bit sharper I’d have known that the truth is different-nothing to do with amore.’

‘And what do you think the truth is?’

‘It’s a stiletto,’ she said bitterly, ‘a slim dagger, small enough to be concealed until the last moment. And then it slides in so smoothly, so easily, so cruelly. And the victim never sees it coming until it’s too late.’

Matteo gave a crack of laughter that, had she been in the mood to notice, matched her own in bitterness.

‘That may sometimes be true, signorina, but not always. It can be the poor, crazy Italian who is deluded, and the English enemy who deceives and tortures. The blow is so unexpected that it seems to come out of the sunshine, but afterwards there is only darkness. Where we use a stiletto, you use a bludgeon, but the destruction is just as final.’

Holly stared at him as it dawned on her that this was no idle speculation. He was speaking out of a savage misery as deep as her own.

‘Do you have an English enemy?’ she asked.

She saw him stop, tense and control himself before saying, ‘Go on telling me about Bruno Vanelli.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-’

‘I said go on.’ His voice was harsh.

Something had happened. She wasn’t sure what, but the air was jagged with anguish.

‘Go on,’ he said again, more calmly. ‘I need to hear the rest.’

She turned away, trying to escape the force of his presence. Now the hardest part of the story confronted her, and she could feel her courage ebbing away. It had been painful enough to live it. To relive it was more than she could bear.

‘Tell me everything,’ he commanded.

‘No,’ she choked, ‘not everything.’

‘Every last detail that you remember,’ he said remorselessly.

When she did not speak he came up behind her and seized her arms, trying to turn her towards him, but she resisted.

‘I can’t help you through the pain,’ he said. ‘I can only tell you to endure and not yield to it. It’s the only way to survive.’

Something in his voice made her relax, even against her will. He pulled her around to face him and she stood there, too distraught to move. He was watching her carefully, his dark eyes seeming to hold her even more firmly than his hands.

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘The only way.’

‘So now tell me,’ he repeated. ‘Everything.’