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‘I never run away from danger,’ he said lightly. ‘How about you?’
There was a moment’s hesitation, because something told her that never in her life had she met a danger like this. Then, ‘Me neither,’ she said.
‘Good. In that case…’ He paused significantly.
‘In that case—?’
‘In that case I suggest we hurry up and finish our breakfast.’
She choked into her coffee. She had always been a sucker for a man who could make her laugh.
At Pompeii, his team was waiting for him in the canteen. A brief time in his company had made her more sharply aware of things she had overlooked before, and now she saw at once how the young women in the group brightened as soon as he appeared, and flashed him their best smiles.
She couldn’t blame them. There was a life-enhancing quality to him that brought the sun out, and made it natural to smile.
Della lingered only a short while as he talked to them in Italian, which she couldn’t understand, then wandered away to the museum.
Here she found what she was looking for—the plaster casts of the bodies that had lain trapped in their last positions for nearly two thousand years. There was a man who’d fallen on the stairs and never risen again, and another man who’d known the end was coming and curled up in resignation, waiting for the ash to engulf him. Further on, a mother tried vainly to shelter her children.
But it was the lovers who held her the longest. After so many centuries it was still heartbreaking to see the man and woman, stretching out in a vain attempt to reach each other before death swamped them.
‘There’s such a little distance between their hands,’ she murmured.
‘Yes, they nearly managed it,’ said Carlo beside her.
She didn’t know how long he’d been there, and wondered if he’d been watching as she wandered among the ‘bodies’.
‘And now they’ll never reach each other,’ she said. ‘Trapped for ever with a might-have-been.’
‘There’s nothing sadder than what might have been,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why I prefer these.’
He led her to another glass case where there were two forms, a man and a woman, nestled against each other.
‘They knew death was coming,’ Carlo said, ‘but as long as they could meet it in each other’s arms they weren’t afraid.’
‘Maybe,’ she said slowly.
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘I wonder if you’re stretching imagination too far. You can’t really know that they weren’t afraid.’
‘Can’t I? Look at them.’
Della drew nearer and studied the two figures. Their faces were blurred, but she could see that all their attention was for each other, not the oncoming lava. And their bodies were mysteriously relaxed, almost contented.
‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘While they had each other there was nothing to fear—not even death.’
How would it feel to be like that? she wondered. Two marriages had left her ignorant of that all-or-nothing feeling. What she had known of men had left her cautious, and suddenly it occurred to her that she was deprived.
‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked.
He drove back to the little fishing village where they had eaten the day before. Now the tide was in, the boats were out, and the atmosphere was completely different. This was another world from that sleepy somnolence, as he proved by taking her to the market, where the stalls were brightly coloured and mostly sold an array of fresh meat and vegetables.
The ones that didn’t offered a dazzling variety of handmade silk.
‘The area is known for it,’ Carlo explained. ‘And it’s better than anything you’ll find in the fashionable shops in Milan.’
As he spoke he was holding up scarves and blouses against her.
‘Not these,’ he said, tossing a couple aside. ‘Not your colour.’
‘Isn’t it?’ she asked, slightly nettled. She had liked both of them.
‘No, this is better.’ He held up a blouse with a dark blue mottled pattern and considered it against her. ‘This one,’ he told the woman running the stall.
‘Hey, let me check the size,’ Della protested.
‘No need,’ the woman chuckled. ‘He always gets the size right.’
‘Thank you,’ Carlo said hastily, handing over cash and hurrying her away.
‘You’ve got a nerve, buying me clothes without so much as a by-your-leave,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to thank me.’
‘I wasn’t. I was saying you’re as cheeky as a load of monkeys.’
‘Slander. All slander.’
To Della’s mischievous delight he had definitely reddened.
‘So you always get the size right, just by looking?’ she mused. ‘I mean, always as in always?’
‘Let’s have something to eat,’ he said hastily, taking her arm and steering her into a side street where they found a small café.
There he settled her with coffee and a glass of prosecco, the white sparkling wine, so light as to be almost a cordial, that Italians loved to drink.
‘So now,’ he said, ‘do what I wouldn’t let you do yesterday, and tell me all about yourself. I know you’ve been married—’
‘I married when I was sixteen—and pregnant. Neither of us was old enough to know what we were doing, and when he fled in the first few months I guess I couldn’t blame him.’
‘I blame him,’ he said at once. ‘If you do something, you take responsibility for it.’
‘Oh, you sound so very old and wise, but how “responsible” were you at seventeen?’
‘Perhaps we’d better not go into that,’ he said, grinning. ‘But he shouldn’t have simply have walked out and left you with a baby.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I wasn’t abandoned in a one-room hovel without a penny. We were living with my parents, so I had a comfortable home and someone to take care of me. In fact, I don’t think my parents were sorry to see the back of him.’
‘Did they give him a nudge?
‘He says they did. I’ll never really know, but I’m sure it would have happened anyway. It’s all for the best. I wouldn’t want to be married to the man he is now.’
‘Still irresponsible?’
‘Worse. Dull.’
‘Heaven help us! So you’re still in touch?’
‘He lives in Scotland. Sol—that’s Solomon, our son—visits him. He’s there now.’
Light dawned.
‘Was Sol the one you were talking to on the phone last night?’
‘That’s right.’
So there was no other man in her life, he thought, making urgent calculations: her son might be twelve, if she’d been so young at his birth. He was almost dizzy with relief.
‘What made you go into television?’ he asked, when he’d inwardly calmed down.
‘Through my second husband and his brother.’
‘Second—? You’re married?’ he demanded, descending into turmoil again.
‘No, it didn’t work out, and there was another divorce. I guess I’m just a rotten picker. Gerry ran off leaving a lot of debts, which I had to work to pay. The one good thing he did for me was to introduce me to his brother, Brian, who was a television producer. Brian offered me a job as his secretary, taught me everything he knew, and I loved it—the people I met, the things it was possible to do, the buzz of ideas going on all the time. Brian loaned me some money to start up for myself, and he recommended me everywhere.’
‘So now you’re a big-shot,’ he said lightly. ‘Dominating the schedules, winning all the awards—’
‘Shut up,’ she said, punching his arm playfully.
‘You’re not going to tell me you’ve never won an award, are you?’
His eyes warned her that he knew more than he was letting on.
‘The odd little gong here and there,’ she said vaguely.
‘You’re not the only one who knows how to use the internet, you know. You won the Golden World prize for the best documentary of the year—’
‘You’ve really been doing your detective work, haven’t you?’
‘Sure—and, to show you how clever I am, I know how to use a telephone as well.’
‘No kidding?’
‘I made a few calls last night and spoke to someone who knows your work and admires it.’
He didn’t add that his friend had known nothing about her personal life. It had been a frustrating call.
‘He mentioned a big new project you were gearing up for, but he didn’t know any details. He just said glumly, “I suppose the rest of us can give up for the next year, while she walks off with everything in sight.”‘
‘You’ve been checking up on me with a vengeance,’ she said, laughing at him with her head on one side.
‘Which makes us quits, since you came to look me over.’
‘You were recommended to me so strongly and by so many people that I started to get a bit cross with you. I must admit that I half hoped to find that you were useless. But you were quite the reverse, and that made me even more annoyed.’
‘So you’ve reluctantly decided to offer me a job? How about I make it easy for you and refuse?’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions before you know everything. I’m doing eight hour-long episodes, each one concentrating on a place where a notable event happened. I don’t just need a frontman, but someone who’s an archaeologist and a historian in his own right, who will have some authority.’
‘You mean they’re all going to be things like Pompeii?’
‘One of them will be underwater.’
‘Don’t tell me—let me guess. Titanic.’
‘No, the Titanic has been done to death. But she had two sister ships, and one of them, the Britannic, also sank. It was used as a hospital ship in the First World War, but it went down after only three months—probably because it hit a mine. The odd thing was that after Titanic went down Britannic was partly redesigned, to make her safer, yet she sank even faster. She’s in the Aegean Sea, and there’s still a lot to be learned about her fate.’
To her surprise he grew pale.
‘And you want me to go down there and—?’ he asked in a faint voice. ‘Sorry, but that’s not my area of expertise.’
‘Of course not. I’ll have professional divers—although you could make a trip down if you wanted to.’
‘No, thank you,’ he said at once.
‘Not even out of curiosity?’
‘Nope.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I’m chicken,’ he said frankly. ‘I’ll climb any height you want, descend into any cave, but when it comes to diving in deep water—not a hope. It’s my nightmare.’
‘That’s quite an admission,’ she said, enchanted by this frankness.
He smiled, looking slightly red.
‘It’s better for me to admit it than wait for you to find out. So, that’s that. You’ll have to get somebody else.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’ll do the frontman stuff from dry land.’
‘Is that a promise? Because otherwise I’m out of here.’ He edged a few inches away.
‘Will you stop?’ she asked, laughing.
‘I just don’t want misunderstandings,’ he said, giving up the performance and coming closer again. ‘I’m a dyed-in-the-wool coward, and don’t you forget it.’
