It irritated Rico. Did he have to spell everything out in excruciatingly vulgar detail? Evidently so. His mouth tightened. He took a controlled breath, and prepared to speak again.
But before he could say anything she got to her feet.
It was a jerky movement, like an automaton. Her eyes were pinned on his. There was something in them that took him aback. Then she spoke. Her voice was strange.
‘You do not seriously think I am going to let you part me from Ben, do you?’
She was trembling like a wire strung out to breaking point.
Emotion poured through her, terror and fury storming together.
They spilled over into a torrent of words.
‘Do you really think I would ever, ever allow Ben to be taken from me? Do you? How can you even imagine that for a moment? I’m his mother—the only mother he’s ever known.’
A burning, punishing breath seared through her lungs. ‘Listen to me and listen well. Because I will say this over and over again until I get you to understand it. I am Ben’s mother—his guardian. And that means I guard him—I guard him from anything and everything that threatens him, threatens his happiness, his emotional and physical well-being, his long-term stability…everything. I love him more than my own life—I could not love him more if he were my birth child. He is all I have left of my sister, and I made a vow to her that I would keep her child safe, that I would be the mother to him that she was not allowed to be. He is my son and I am his mother. It would devastate him to be taken from me—how could you even think of doing so? Nothing will come between us. I will never let him be taken from me. Never.’
Her face was contorted, but she could not stop. She had to make him listen—had to make him hear.
‘You must be completely insane to think of taking him from me. How do you even begin to think I would consent to it? Consent to Ben losing the only mother he’s known. Are you mad, or just evil, even to think of separating us? No one takes a child from its mother. No one.’ She shut her eyes. Her throat was burning, her breath choking. ‘Oh, God, how could this nightmare ever have happened. How?’
Her anguished question rang into silence, complete silence. She stood there, shaking like a leaf.
Then, slowly, a voice spoke. Deep and resonant.
‘No one will take Ben from you. You have my word.’
Rico was in his bedroom. The phone was against his ear. He stood with one arm extended, resting his hand on the folded wooden shutters that framed the sash windows. From where he stood he could see the gardens. Ben and his aunt were on the lawn, in the last of the early-evening sunshine, playing football. Two goals were roughly marked out with sticks. Ben kicked, and scored, and ran around gleefully in imitation of professional footballers. His aunt threw up her hands in exaggerated defeat, and took a goal kick. It was a very bad one, and Ben returned it instantly, scoring yet another goal. He crowed with triumph.
At the other end of the phone line, Rico’s brother was speaking.
‘What do you mean, she won’t give him up? She’s nothing more than his aunt—what claim can she have?’
‘A watertight legal one,’ replied Rico dryly.
There was a pause. Then Luca spoke.
‘She wants more money, I take it?’ His voice was sharp.
‘She wants her son.’ Rico realised his voice was equally sharp.
‘The boy is only her nephew,’ riposted his brother.
‘She’s raised him as her son, and he regards her as his mother. Which, legally, she is. She adopted him at birth. So, if she does not want to part with him, we have to accept that.’
There was a pause again.
‘How much did you offer her?’ Luca asked.
‘Luca—this is not about money. She’s not prepared to consider it, OK?’ He paused, then spoke again. ‘And neither am I any longer. The attachment between them is definitely that of mother and child. I’ve been with them all day—so far as Paolo’s son is concerned, the woman is his mother. There’s nothing we can do about that. We may not like it, but that’s the way it is. Our only way forward is for her to live in San Lucenzo with the boy. I have to persuade her of that, and I will do my best to do so. But—’he took a sharp breath ‘—I gave her my word we would not try and take the child from her.’
There was another pause. Outside in the garden Ben was still playing football. Rico felt a sudden urge to go and join in.
Luca was speaking again. ‘Rico, do and say nothing for the moment. I’ll report this back to our father. He won’t like it but…’ Rico could almost hear Luca shrug. ‘Look, I’ll phone you back.’
The line went dead. Rico’s gaze dropped again to the figure playing on the lawn below with Ben. She was wearing some kind of grey tracksuit, baggy and shapeless, and her frizzy hair was tied back in an unflattering bunch. She looked overweight and lumpy. She really was extraordinarily unappealing. Yet what did her appearance matter to Ben? Even as he watched, he saw Ben trip as he ran to intercept the ball, and fall sprawlingly on the grass. She was there in an instant, hugging him, inspecting his grass-stained knee, then dropping a kiss on it before resuming play again. An ordinary maternal gesture. Memory shafted through him. Or rather, lack of it. Who had picked him up when he’d gone sprawling like that? A nanny? Whichever of the nursery floor staff was looking after him at the time? Not his mother. He’d only ever seen his mother at five in the afternoon, when she had taken tea and interviewed both himself and Luca as to their progress in lessons that day.
A frown creased his brow. Paolo had been the only one of them ever to sit beside his mother on the exquisite silk-upholstered sofa in her sitting room. The only one of them he could remember her embracing.