Her mouth was dry as sand as she spoke again. ‘I’ve never seen him—my father—not since I was a baby. If he walked past me in the street I would not know him. He would be—is—a complete stranger to me. He refused all contact with me. Wrote me out of his life as though I did not exist. And, for him, I don’t exist. I was a girl, and he wasn’t interested.’
She gave a little shrug.
‘My mother let him go—in the end was glad he went, for it freed her to work as she wanted to. With the help of nannies and au pairs and boarding school she raised me in what spare time she had. Which wasn’t much.’
She shrugged again.
‘She’s always ensured I was well looked after—just not by her. And in her own way,’ she acknowledged with painful honesty, ‘she loves me, and I her, but it’s never been a...a close relationship.’
She got to her feet. Restless suddenly. She paced up and down, trying to find the words she needed to say now. Vito was not moving. Only his eyes traced her steps. She paused suddenly, looked at him, chin lifting, eyes focusing on him.
‘Because of my father, Vito—because of his absolute and utter lack of interest in my existence—when I discovered I was pregnant the first thing I thought of was him. I realised that there were terrible echoes in my situation to my parents’.’
He started, his expression changing. ‘I am nothing like your father!’
She threw up her hands, eyes widening. ‘Vito, as far as I knew you were marrying another woman—even before our child was born! That was the truth of what I was facing when I realised I was pregnant!’
Her words seemed only to incense him. His dark eyes flashed with anger.
‘Por Dio, do you really think I would have married Carla—would even have consented to the farce of our engagement—had I known you were pregnant? That—that is what appals me so much, Eloise. That because I didn’t know I might actually have married Carla! I might now be married to another woman! The thought of it freezes my blood!’
She reeled from his accusation, but she fought back. She had to fight back.
‘But I didn’t know that, Vito! To my face you told me you were engaged to Carla! How should I have known it for a lie?’
‘I tried to tell you.’ His voice was harsh. ‘You refused to let me.’
She blanched. Closed her eyes for a moment as if to acknowledge the justice of his accusation. Then she opened them again t
o acknowledge it.
‘Yes, I know—and I have had my punishment, have I not? Had I not fled Rome—’
She broke off. What use to go over that again? None. It was gone now. It was the future that counted—that she had to try and save.
‘But I did flee Rome. And I faced, here, a future without you. A future as a single mother—as my own mother is. Vito—what else could I have done? You were engaged to another woman—would be marrying her, I assumed. To have informed you that I was pregnant would have achieved nothing!’
She saw him move as if to speak again and stumbled on, desperate to make him understand why she had kept silent.
‘Vito, even if...even if you had not married Carla because I’d told you I was pregnant, and you’d married me instead—even setting aside all the dreadful complications of the Viscari shares—how could I possibly want a husband who’d had to marry me? Not married me out of choice! Not because he’d wanted to marry me! But simply to legitimise a child he’d never intended to conceive and never wanted in the first place! When all you’d wanted—all I knew you wanted, because of that nightmare scene in Rome, when Carla stormed in on us—was to marry her, not me! Just what kind of marriage would that have been, Vito? What kind of husband would you have been? What kind of father would you have made, forced into it unwillingly?’
Again she saw him try and interrupt her, but she would not let him. She ploughed on. She had to say this—say it all. Bitter and hard though it was.
‘I wrote you off, Vito. I had to. It was all I could do. I had to face the future on my own—just as my mother had to. Only when you tracked me down—and only when I realised just what you had been through with Carla, and the loss of half your heritage—did I know that I must re-evaluate my decision.’
She rubbed a weary hand across her brow.
‘And that is what I did, Vito. From the moment you said, “No pressure”, that is what I did. Hour by hour, day by day.’
She looked at him with infinite sorrow and sadness in her eyes, in her voice.
‘As you wooed me again, courting me again with every glance, every smile, everything started growing again between us. And I started to hope—oh, Vito, I started to hope! When you told me it was not the past you were seeking to recapture but our future together—then I knew that everything was changing for ever.’
Her expression changed, her face working.
‘But would it be enough, Vito? That is what I wanted to know! My parents were romantically in love—but their utterly opposing views on children severed them completely! What if we were the same? What if the child that I want so much—so rejoice in bearing, that’s so absolutely precious to me—what if that was the very, very last thing you wanted? What if, instead of uniting us, our child divided us?’
She shook her head, all the fears that had racked her open in her face. Her voice dropped.