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‘Do you think this is just about ego?’ Roxanne asked with another frown. ‘Most men are proud of the fact they can cut the mustard, or whatever the saying is.’
Scarlett couldn’t help smiling, but it faded as she answered, ‘I don’t really know. I’ve met plenty of men who were adamant they didn’t want children. I’ve met women just as strident about avoiding motherhood. As I said earlier, Alessandro and I never really got around to discussing the marriage-and-babies thing. I wanted to, many times, but you know how it is with a new relationship—you tread so carefully in case you scare them off.’
‘But weren’t you on the Pill?’ Roxanne asked.
Scarlett shifted her gaze from the probe of her friend’s. ‘Yes and no.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It basically means no.’
Roxanne rolled her eyes. ‘Yeah, that’s what I figured.’
‘I was young and naïve,’ Scarlett said in her own defence. ‘I didn’t for a moment expect to become involved in a full-on relationship while I was overseas.’
‘Yes, well, someone should have warned you about men like Alessandro,’ Roxanne said with a wry look.
Scarlett turned to look at the screen saver and sighed again. ‘He’s missed out on so much… Maybe I should have sent him some photos right from the start. I wanted to many times, but then I thought of the way he threw me out on the street that night and I changed my mind.’
Roxanne placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not your fault, Scarlett. You did your best and he refused to listen. Maybe it had to happen this way.’
Scarlett gave another deep sigh. ‘How am I going to tell Matthew his father is alive?’
Roxanne gave her shoulder a little squeeze. ‘You’ll think of a way.’
‘How was crèche today, darling?’ Scarlett asked as she lifted Matthew into his evening bath.
Matthew’s bottom lip came forward slightly as he settled amongst the bubbles. ‘Robert taked my car off me, one of my favourite ones.’
‘Robert took your car off you,’ she corrected automatically. ‘That’s terrible, darling. Did Mrs Bennett or Miss Fielding get it back for you?’
He shook his head and his little shoulders went down. ‘No.’
‘I’ll have a word to them about it tomorrow,’ she promised. ‘Maybe Robert doesn’t have many toys and really enjoyed playing with yours.’
‘I don’t want to go there any more,’ he said, big tears forming in his hazel eyes as he looked up at her. ‘I want to come to work wif you.’
‘Darling, you know that’s impossible. We’ve talked about this before, lots of times.’
Another little sigh puffed out of his mouth. ‘I know…’
She took a break to prepare herself. ‘Matthew, remember I told you that you didn’t have a daddy, like your cousins Angie and Sam and Michaela have?’
He nodded solemnly.
‘Well…’ She moistened her mouth and picked up a handful of bubbles, watching as they lay suspended there in the palm of her hand. ‘Well, the thing is…’
The sound of the doorbell ringing stalled the rest of her sentence. She tossed the bubbles aside and quickly pulled the plug out of the bath and, scooping Matthew up in his towel, called out, ‘Just a second.’
‘Who is it, Mummy?’ Matthew asked as Scarlett did her best to dry him as she walked to the front door of her flat. ‘Are we having pizza again?’
‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s not the pizza-delivery man. It’s…it’s…’
‘A surprise?’ he asked, with excitement building in his eyes. ‘What sort of surprise?’
‘Er…I’m not sure…it could be Mrs West. She might have run out of milk again.’
Scarlett opened the door, already knowing who it was, for she had felt it in every single cell of her body at the first sound of that bell.
Alessandro stood there, his eyes going immediately to the child wriggling in her arms. Such a rush of pain, panic and guilt passed through his body he felt as if he was not going to be able to keep upright. He tried to speak, but for some reason his throat refused to work. He swallowed half a dozen times but still nothing came out.
‘Who is it, Mummy?’ Matthew asked in a small-toddler sibilant whisper.
Scarlett looked at Alessandro with a direct and somewhat challenging look. ‘This is your father, Matthew.’
Matthew wrinkled his brow and looked at her again. ‘He’s not dead, like Mrs West’s cat Tinkles?’
‘No, darling, he’s not dead. He’s very much alive.’
A silence measured the erratic pace of Alessandro’s heartbeat before the little boy whispered up against his mother’s ear, ‘Can he speak?’
Scarlett smiled in spite of the tension of the moment, and when she looked at Alessandro his mouth, too, had tilted a fraction.
‘Hello, Matthew,’ Alessandro said, not knowing whether to offer his hand or bend down and kiss the child.
What did one do these days with small children?
He didn’t know.
Over the years he’d actively avoided children of any age, knowing how much worse it made him feel about the decision he’d been forced to make.
‘Hello…’ the child said with a shy but totally engaging smile. ‘Do you like cars?’
Alessandro felt a sharp pain begin in his abdomen and travel right through to his backbone, like a savage drill. ‘Yes…yes, I love cars. I have several.’
The boy’s eyes lit up, and Alessandro couldn’t help noticing they were exactly the same colour as his, fringed with thick, sooty lashes.
‘I’ve got twenteen,’ Matthew announced proudly.
‘Twenteen?’ Alessandro glanced at Scarlett with a quizzical look on his face.
‘Twenty, darling,’ she said, addressing the child. ‘Remember how it goes after ten? Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen—’
‘Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty!’ Matthew crowed.
‘That is indeed a lot of cars,’ Alessandro said, still struggling to hold himself together.
‘Umm…perhaps you should come inside,’ Scarlett said when she noticed a neighbour she didn’t particularly like hovering in the stairwell.
‘Thank you,’ Alessandro said, stepped inside and closed the door.
Scarlett brushed a strand of her hair back with her one free hand. ‘Umm…would you excuse us while I get Matthew into his pyjamas? He was in the bath when you rang the bell.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking uncharacteristically uncomfortable. ‘Perhaps I should have phoned first.’
Scarlett wondered why he hadn’t. But then, looking at him now, she realised he had probably needed time to gather himself. The news would no doubt have shocked him. He had clearly not expected to be proved wrong.
She felt for him, even as she felt angry that she had suffered alone for so long. It was a bewildering mix of emotions: resentment, regret, hate, love…
No she didn’t love him any more, she decided. How could she? She had suffered too much as a result of his lack of trust. She wasn’t going to allow herself to get caught out a second time.
‘Can I wear my racing-car jammies?’ Matthew asked as she carried him out of the small living-room.
‘Sure you can,’ she said. ‘I washed them yesterday.’
‘You won’t tell Daddy I still sometimes wet the bed, will you Mummy?’ he asked in another whisper, but his little voice carried regardless.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not if you don’t want me to.’
Alessandro turned to look around the room, knowing it was pointless feeling shut out and angry. It was his fault for being so arrogantly confident. He should have at least given her the benefit of the doubt. He could have repeated the tests. He could even have checked the statistics on the internet like any other layman, for God’s sake. He’d done it after he’d left the doctor’s surgery, ashamed that he hadn’t thought of it earlier.
It was all there. He’d even read of two pregnancies occurring five years after surgery.
He wondered how those two men had treated their partners. Had they cut them from their lives, accusing them of being unfaithful. Or had they stayed close, supporting them, and guiding them through what to all intents and purposes was an unplanned pregnancy.
It shocked him to the core that he hadn’t once considered Scarlett’s feelings about being pregnant at twenty-three. That was considered young these days, when most women got their career established before they thought about settling down. She had not only been young, but only just qualified as an interior designer. And he had thrown her out on the street, late at night in a foreign country, pregnant and alone.
No wonder she still hated him.
His eyes went to a photograph sitting on a side table and he picked it up and looked at it, emotion beginning to tighten his chest. It had obviously been taken the day she left hospital after the birth of Matthew. He could see the run-down outer-suburbs hospital building in the background.
Scarlett was holding him, a tiny bundle of blue in her arms, her still-swollen stomach visible, her breasts fuller than normal, and her gaze full of love as she looked down at the infant. But there was sadness in her smile. He could sense it.
You should have been there, the voice of accusation thundered in his brain. You missed the birth of your child out of arrogance, ignorance and prejudice.
Three whole years had passed.
He had not been there for a moment of his son’s life. Not a single moment. He hadn’t felt the first fluttery kicks in Scarlett’s womb with his hand pressed against her abdomen. He hadn’t been there for the first ultrasonic image of his son. He hadn’t witnessed the moment of birth, heard that first mewing cry, had never been woken in the night by the howls of hunger that only an infant could perform with such fervour. He had missed everything, but he had no one to blame but himself.
Scarlett had faced it all alone, and how in the world he was going to make it up to her, or even to Matthew, was anyone’s guess.
But he wanted to.
Oh, dear God, he wanted to—but there were several hurdles in the way.
The first one was to find out if Matthew was healthy. He certainly looked it; his limbs were strong and rounded with the plumpness of early childhood, his hair was glossy black, and his eyes clear and bright.
But Marco’s had been too, until their world had been turned upside down…
CHAPTER TEN
SCARLETT tucked her son’s night nappy out of sight under the elastic waist of his pyjamas and led him by the hand back out to the small living-room.
Alessandro was standing with his back to them, a photograph in his hands, and as he heard their footsteps he placed it back on the side table and faced them.
‘Matthew would like to say goodnight,’ Scarlett said, with a look he couldn’t quite decipher.
He looked down at the child, the ache in his chest so unbearable he felt like he was going to cry, like he had done so uncontrollably at Marco’s funeral.
‘Can I call you Daddy?’ Matthew asked, blinking up at him.
‘Of course,’ Alessandro said, squatting before him. ‘But in Italy where I come from children call their father Papa. Can you say that?’
‘Papa,’ Matthew said with a dimpled grin. ‘Is that right?’
Alessandro reached out and touched his child for the first time. He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, but then, wanting more skin-on-skin contact, he placed his hand on the curve of his tiny cheek. ‘That is perfect, my son,’ he said, his voice breaking slightly over the words.
‘Will you tuck me into bed and read me a story?’ the little boy asked—and then, glancing briefly at his mother as if to ask her permission, added as he turned back, ‘Mummy won’t mind. She’s always tired after work and she even skips a few pages. She thinks I don’t notice, but I do.’
Alessandro smiled even though it hurt. Marco had been the same. He’d only had to hear a story once to have it memorised word for word. ‘Sure, I would like to do that, very much,’ he said. ‘That is, if your mother does not mind.’
Scarlett met his gaze. ‘No,’ she said, trying but not quite managing to smile. ‘I don’t mind at all.’
A few minutes later Alessandro read a story about a wombat and an echidna, and how they managed to have a workable friendship in spite of their many differences.
He looked down after he had finished the second-last page, and saw the fan-like lashes of his son’s eyes flutter a couple of times then close over his eyes, a soft sigh of total relaxation deflating his tiny chest, covered by a thin cotton sheet. In his hand was a tiny matchbox car, a black Maserati, the sight of which had affected Alessandro almost more than anything else so far.
He looked at that tiny chest moving up and down, and wondered if Scarlett had any idea of what could be lurking inside there, waiting like a time bomb to leap out in the future and cast a dark shadow over all of their lives.
When he came back out Scarlett was sitting with a magazine in her hands, her reading glasses perched on her nose, giving her that studious, intellectual look he had always found so incredibly sexy.
She looked up and removed her glasses. ‘Is he asleep?’
‘Yes,’ he said, taking the sofa-chair opposite, a particularly uncomfortable one, he noticed. A spring of some sort was protruding into his left buttock, and he had to move a few times to avoid its insistent prong.
A silence threatened to halt all communication, but Alessandro had things to say and didn’t want to let any more time pass. ‘Is he well?’ he asked somewhat abruptly.
She blinked a couple of times. ‘Yes…mostly.’
He found himself leaning forward on the sofa, which activated the prodding spring once more. It made him realise how hard she had struggled to provide for their son. The irony of it was particularly heart-wrenching—she decorated penthouses worth millions, and yet she lived in a tiny cramped flat with furniture that looked like it had come out of a charity shop.
He cleared his throat, as if by doing so he could clear away his guilt, but it was pointless. It rose like a debris-ridden tide inside him, making his voice sound husky. ‘What do you mean by “mostly”?’ he asked.
‘Alessandro, he’s three years old.’ Her tone was matter-of-fact. ‘He’s had numerous colds and stomach bugs. He’s a little kid—they get sick all the time.’
‘How sick?’
She frowned at the intensity of his gaze. ‘Not enough to be hospitalised, although he came close once.’
