Painstakingly, Cesare kept a limping conversation going, talking about her pregnancy, asking questions she could scarcely answer.
When the meal was over they repaired for coffee to the terrace, underneath a shady parasol, catching the lightly cooling breeze. Out in the beautiful walled garden the sun sparkled off the water in the pool.
‘How much exercise can you take?’ Cesare asked.
‘As much as I like, really. Swimming is the best—especially as I get closer to my due date,’ she answered.
Her eyes went to the pool. So did Cesare’s.
Is he remembering too? Remembering how we swam stark naked beneath the stars?
Emotion gripped her, like a knife sliding between her ribs.
Without thinking, Carla reached for the silver coffee jug, pouring black coffee for Cesare as she had done a hundred times before, handing him the delicate porcelain cup and saucer with its silver crested coffee spoon. He sketched a constrained smile of thanks and took it, sitting back in his chair, crossing one long leg over the other.
Absently, he stirred his coffee. Then, abruptly, he looked across at her as she poured hot milk into her own coffee.
‘We can make this work, you know, Carla. We just have to...to set our minds to it.’ There was resolution in his voice, determination in his expression.
She lifted her cup to her lips, took a sip, then lowered it. She looked across at him. Her eyes were bleak. Negating his resolve.
‘How can we?’ she said. ‘You’d be marrying your mistress. How can that ever work?’ Her voice was tight—so tight it must surely snap, like wire under unbearable tension.
‘You were never my “mistress”!’ The words came from him like bullets. Automatic, instinctive. ‘Do not paint yourself as such! We had an affair, Carla—a relationship. It was simply that—’ He broke off.
She shut her eyes. Took a ragged breath. She would finish for him. Tell the truth that had always been there, right from the start—the truth that was not her fault, nor his, but that had always set the terms of their relationship.
‘It was simply that marriage to me was never on the cards for you—and it still doesn’t have to be, Cesare! I’m perfectly prepared to stay stashed away in Spain with my mother. I’ll never show my face in Rome again! If you want to pay towards the child’s upkeep, you’re welcome—but I don’t need your money. I’ll sign any document you like never to make a claim on your estate, or your heirs.’
She fell silent. Breathless. Inside her there seemed to be a knot—a tight, hard knot that was getting tighter and harder every second. She kept her eyes on Cesare. Fixed. Resolute.
I have to say this—I have to do this. He must hear from me that I do not want this marriage.
She felt a crying out in her heart.
Not a marriage like this! Oh, not a marriage like this!
Across her heart a jagged knife seemed to be dragging its serrated blade. Had she ever had such insanely impossible hopes that he might be falling in love with her? That last evening of their affair, when he’d been so different, she’d thought—dear God, she’d really, truly thought—it might be because he was recognising what she had come to mean to him!
The jagged knife drew her heart’s blood from her. But now all she was to him was a burden. An obligation. A duty he must fulfil.
For a moment—an instant—she thought she saw emotion flash darkly across his face. Then it was shuttered.
‘That is out of the question,’ he said.
He drank his coffee, jerkily lifting the cup to his lips, precisely setting it back down, as if every muscle were under tight control.
He looked across at her. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘it might have been acceptable to have a...a second family, an informal arrangement.’
Into his head flashed that Caradino portrait of Count Alessandro’s mistress, the mother of his illegitimate children, her swollen belly. He thrust the image from his head.
‘But that is out of the question these days!’ His voice was a snap—a lock to shut out any other possibility.
It did not silence Carla. Her violet eyes flared with emotion. ‘It’s just the opposite!’ she retorted. ‘There is no longer any social opprobrium in having children outside marriage. We don’t have to go through a marriage ceremony just for appearance’s sake! Not like—’
She broke off. A crushing sense of fatalism paralysed her. Words, unsaid, scars inside her head, played themselves silently.
Not like my parents had to...