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One said, ‘My mother got me to take her to the opening of the new children’s hospice. It turns out to be his wife’s brainchild.’
‘I suppose even a lady who lunches needs something to put on her CV.’
‘That’s what I thought, but it turns out she’s really hands-on. Literally actually,’ he recalled with a reminiscent smile. ‘She was down on her hands and knees rolling around on the grass barefoot with some of the kids.’
‘She doesn’t sound like a Gianfranco Bruni girlfriend.’
‘She’s not—she’s his wife. Maybe that’s the difference. You’re not wrong, though. She really isn’t his usual type.’
‘Presumably not hard on the eye, though?’
‘She’s pretty,’ the speaker agreed. ‘A redhead, green eyes, freckles.’ He gave a reminiscent smile. ‘Really great, sexy laugh.’
‘Sounds like Ricardo was smitten,’ someone said slyly, and there was laughter as the middle-aged man in question flushed but didn’t deny the charge.
‘I’ve never even seen a photo of her.’
Another result of his sudden marriage had been that Gianfranco, who had once supplied the gossip columns with acres of copy, had pretty much slipped off the photo-opportunity map and retreated behind the sort of security that people who were as rich as he was could.
‘Not exactly a party girl, then, the redhead?’
‘She is English, though?’ The person who asked the question glanced at the closed door before he spoke. Being caught gossiping about the boss would do his promotion prospects no good at all.
‘I’m not sure. Her name doesn’t sound English … Der something …?’
‘Dervla.’ It was the sole female who supplied the bride’s name.
‘Wasn’t she a model?’
‘Doubt it. She’s not tall enough,’ one person who had met her said.
‘Well, from what I’ve heard …’
The men leaned forward to catch the woman’s words as her voice dropped to a confidential hiss. ‘I don’t know how true it is, you understand, but my friend’s cousin—he works at the hospital in London where she was apparently working when they met.’
‘She’s a doctor?’
‘No, a nurse … she looked after his son when they were caught up in that terrorist thing.’
There were murmurs as the people present recalled the horrific incident she spoke of.
‘I think it’s so romantic,’ she added dreamily.
One of the men, the youngest there, who had been struggling to defend a business decision earlier to his critical boss, laughed and said scornfully, ‘Gianfranco Bruni doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body. A couple of years’ time and he’ll probably trade her in for a new model.’
When Gianfranco had reached for his phone and not seen Dervla’s name he had needed to dig deep into his seriously depleted reserves of self-control to maintain a semblance of composure.
At least until he was out of the room.
In the corridor he gritted his teeth and ground one clenched fist into the other. It had been forty-eight hours and not a word—not one word!
For all he knew she could be lying unconscious in a hospital bed. Fighting against the swell of crushing anxiety in his chest, he pushed his fingers deep into the ebony hair that sprang from his temples and inhaled deeply, forcing the air into his lungs before expelling it in a gusty sigh.
Get a grip, man, he counselled himself as he smoothed back the tousled hair from his brow and adjusted his tie.
Damn the woman!
‘Gianfranco!’
Gianfranco turned his head at the sound of the familiar voice and forced his lips into a semblance of a smile. Normally he would have been genuinely pleased to see Angelo Martinos, who had been his closest friend since the days when they both shared the distinction of being the only ‘foreigners’ at the English prep school they had been sent to at the ages of nine and ten respectively.
‘Angelo, what brings you here?’ he asked without enthusiasm.
‘Called on the off chance. They told me you were in a meeting.’ He raised an interrogative brow as he scanned his friend’s face. ‘Not a good one, apparently …?’
Now this was one of the reasons why Angelo was the last person to see right now. It wasn’t easy to pull the wool over his eyes, and he thought being his best friend gave him the right to pry.
‘You know how it is,’ he returned, doubting that his happily married friend knew the first thing about being put through an emotional meat-grinder by his wife.
Angelo’s wife apparently thought that his every word was a pearl of wisdom, whereas Gianfranco’s own bride never lost an opportunity to challenge him.
‘Feel like a coffee?’ Angelo wondered, his glance lingering briefly on the razor cut on Gianfranco’s angular jaw. When a moment later he noticed the mismatched socks his eyebrows hit his hairline—impeccable and effortless elegance were descriptions frequently ascribed to his friend.
Gathering his straying attention and wishing his friend would take the hint and go, Gianfranco shook his head and said, ‘Not really,’ in a discouraging way that would have made ninety-nine people out of a hundred back off, but not Angelo.
‘I’m at a loose end. Kate and her mum are baby shopping. I was getting in the way.’
‘Sorry, I’m pretty snowed under today. I just ducked out to take a call from Alberto. I should ring back.’
‘I hardly recognised Alberto when I saw him. Thirteen and he must be nearly six feet. At this rate you’ll be looking up at him before long.’
‘Maybe,’ said Gianfranco, who at six five rarely had to look up at anyone.
‘I don’t envy him puberty. It was hell.’
Gianfranco choked off a bitter laugh. ‘For you? I don’t think so, unless adolescent hell involved every girl you wanted and—’
‘I only got them because you knocked them back, Gianfranco,’ Angelo, ever the pragmatist, cut in. ‘Your problem, my friend, was you put women on a pedestal.’
Gianfranco had been approaching his twentieth birthday when he thought he had found one who belonged on that pedestal. By the time he realised that beyond the perfect face the innocent-eyed woman he had woven his romantic fantasies around—a barmaid who worked in the local hotel—had actually been not so innocent and rather more interested in his sexual stamina than his philosophical reflections and pathetic poetry, it had been too late.
She had been pregnant and to his family’s horror he had married her and become a father at twenty.
‘I was intense.’ Gianfranco cringed now to think of the boy he had been. ‘And an idiot.’
‘You were a romantic,’ Angelo retorted indulgently. ‘And I was shallow, but now we are both older and wiser, not to mention happily married, men. It was a great weekend, which is what brings me here. We’d love to return your hospitality. Kate wants to know if you’re both free on the eighteenth, always supposing nothing has happened on the baby front …?’
‘Eighteenth … I probably, yes … no … I’m not sure.’
Angelo’s scrutiny sharpened as he stared at his friend. In the twenty-five years he had known him, Gianfranco had never to his knowledge been not sure about anything.
‘Well, when you are just get Dervla to give Kate a ring. And how is Dervla?’ Angelo asked casually.
Gianfranco met his friend’s eyes and lied unblinkingly. ‘She’s fine.’
Well, it wasn’t actually a lie. She might well be fine. She might be totally fine after walking out on her husband. Gianfranco’s sense of outrage and the throbbing in his temple swelled in unison as an image of her standing at the front door of their home flashed into his head.
‘You’re being ridiculous, Dervla.’
She stuck out her chin and glared at him through tear-misted eyes, emerald eyes, so intensely green when they’d first met he had assumed she was wearing contact lenses, shimmering.
‘There’s no need to work yourself up, Gianfranco. After all, it doesn’t really matter what I do.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, I’m not important. I’m just a temporary someone who’s passing through, someone who isn’t good enough to take responsibility for your son … and don’t give me that guff about our ready-made family because you shut me out totally. Bottom line is I’m good enough to have sex with but not good enough to be the mother of your child!’
‘That’s totally ludicrous. There’s nothing temporary about our marriage.’
Eyes narrowed, she lifted her chin in challenge. ‘So you want a baby?’
He ground his teeth and reminded her, ‘You were the one that said that you didn’t need children to have a fulfilling life.’
She glared at him with withering scorn. ‘That, you stupid man, was when I thought I couldn’t have any!’
‘You knew when we married that I did not want children. I haven’t changed.’
‘That’s the problem!’
‘Don’t play cryptic word games with me, Dervla.’
‘I’m not playing anything any more. I’m leaving.’
He could see her slim back shaking as she fumbled opening the big oak-banded door. He focused on his anger to stop himself taking her in his arms to wipe away the tears he knew were pouring down her cheeks. He walked up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.
‘I admit you have a flare for drama, but this is enough, Dervla.’
She didn’t turn around, just whispered, ‘Goodbye, Gianfranco.’ And walked through the door.
And he stood there watching, never quite believing that she would go … expecting her to run back through the door at any moment admitting that she had been totally in the wrong.
But there had been no running and no Dervla.
She had left him and their home. The home she had put her indelible mark on. Gianfranco pushed aside the disturbing thought that the mark she had put on him was much more indelible.
Having learnt the hard way that romantic love was a sham, a form of self-hypnosis, Gianfranco had never expected to marry again.
The fact was he had married because the woman he’d wanted would not accept less.
And you tried so hard to persuade her otherwise …?
Gianfranco’s eyebrows twitched into an irritated frown at the mental interruption. His decision to marry had not been based on anything as unreliable as emotions. Like all the decisions he made, he had weighed the pros and cons and come to the conclusion that marriage was something he could live with.
And Dervla was something he did not wish to live without—at least for the moment—though he did not doubt that the overwhelming compulsion he had to bind her to him would fade.
The intensity of it had shaken him, but he did not read any magical significance into it. Feelings of that sort of intensity were not durable; they did not signify a meeting of soul mates. The problems began when you started to believe they did.
He had not changed his opinion of marriage. He still pitied the fools entering into it with a lot of unrealistic phoney, sentimental expectations.
The trouble was people forgot that basically marriage was a legal contract. He had every intention of fulfilling his end of that contract, a contract that could be dissolved if the balance of those pros and cons shifted.
Marriage was like Christmas—people expected too much and were inevitably disappointed.
His expectation had been more realistic the second time around—but he didn’t think it was realistic to expect your wife to change the rules a year in. It wasn’t as if they had not discussed the subject—he had never even imagined she felt that way.
Not strictly true, said the voice in his head as an incident he had mentally filed as insignificant popped unbidden into his head. He had been giving her the grand tour of her new home at this time.
‘This was my nursery … I thought you could use it as a study. The view is really magnificent.’
He pretended not to see the pain and hopeless longing in her face as she touched the carved wood of the antique crib in the corner. Guilt gnawed at him, he hadn’t wanted to see it.
‘A study would be nice,’ she agreed quietly.
‘Of course, you can redecorate just as you please. I’ve got the names of some very good interior designers.’
‘What would I want with an interior designer?’ she asked, shaking back her tawny curls.
Gianfranco was relieved to see no trace of the previous sadness in her eyes as she looked up at him with that half-quizzical teasing look of hers.
‘An interior designer isn’t going to live here, silly, we are. A home should evolve …’ she explained earnestly. ‘Be filled with memories.’
Gianfranco was pretty sure that by memories she had meant some of the curious and totally valueless objects she took pleasure in discovering and producing for his admiration, and not the memories that were causing him torture of an unbearable kind.
At the time making love to his wife in every room of their large and many-roomed home had seemed an excellent idea, but now that good idea had come back to haunt him. Quite literally! He couldn’t walk into a room without being assaulted by sweet erotic recollections.
‘We thought she seemed a little … quiet …?’
Gianfranco shook his head to free himself from the images playing in it. He dragged his eyes up from the floor, where presumably he had been staring like some catatonic moron, until his friend’s face came into frame.
He gave a careless shrug and ignored the question in his friend’s eyes.
If he had been going to confide in anyone it would have been Angelo, but it was not his way to offload his problems on others.
‘She was a little tired.’
Angelo grinned. ‘Nine months ago Kate had some similar symptoms.’
Gianfranco’s jaw clenched. ‘Dervla is not pregnant.’
