It was the first proper restaurant Charlie had been into since she had come to Italy. The clientele was mostly over fifty, and she could feel their eyes on her, which made her self-consciously twiddle her fingers under the table until Riccardo raised his eyebrows.
To further disconcert her, he ordered wine, shooting her a quelling look just in case she interrupted.
This, he had discovered, was one of the more boring aspects of being a so-called wanderer. He was supposed to be penniless. Or at least conserving all his money for some mysterious sensible future that lurked around the fictitious corner. Despite his relief that he didn’t have to be on his guard with her, there was still a part of him that would have liked to spend money on her. After all, it wasn’t as though he didn’t have an endless reserve of the stuff. He supposed it all came down to a pretty human desire to quite simply show off. Strange.
‘You’ll regret this,’ Charlie said, stifling her awkwardness by very quickly downing a glass of cold, white Italian wine. ‘When you’re backpacking your way through some bit of Europe and you haven’t got enough cash to get the train…’
‘That will never be the case,’ Riccardo said truthfully. Persuaded by him, she had stopped wearing a bra, and his eyes drifted to her ample breasts pushing against her tee-shirt.
He prided himself on his sophistication, but there was nothing sophisticated about what his body was doing right now. He hurriedly focused his attention on her face. Safer.
‘Because?’
‘Because I will…make sure I always have sufficient to get by.’
‘That’s fine to say, but you don’t know what’s around the corner.’ Her friend Pete’s dad had, quite suddenly, been made redundant at the age of sixty-two. They had been forced to sell the family home and move into a tiny terraced house. Life never quite worked out the way you thought it was going to.
‘No, but you can hazard a pretty good guess. God, as they say, helps those who help themselves.’ He lazed back in his chair and looked at her with hooded eyes. Without turning, he snapped his fingers and a waiter came charging over. Charlie marvelled at his air of command. Where on earth did he get that from?
‘And where would you like God to help you get?’ she asked, smiling, relaxed, blossoming under his languorous gaze.
‘Oh, all the usual places. To a sprawling house with the sprawling lawns and the fleet of fast cars…’
‘You don’t really mean that, do you?’
‘Why not?’ Riccardo shrugged. ‘When you strip away all the nuts and bolts, isn’t that what everyone wants, whether they care to admit it or not?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’re telling me that you wouldn’t want all the things that money can buy?’
‘You don’t need money to enjoy life.’ Charlie thought that she had never been happier than she had been over the past few weeks and money hadn’t been involved. Since when had money been able to buy the beauty of the Tuscan hills with a man you loved right there by your side?
‘But it enables one to eat…like this.’ On cue, their starters were brought for them, a bowl of massive tiger prawns smothered in butter and garlic.
‘You talk like someone who has oodles of it, Riccardo,’ Charlie laughed.
‘And you, cara, talk like an idealistic young kid who’s never sampled the reality of life.’
Which abruptly reminded her that he was probably right. She needed to edit her opinions just a fraction, because really, as a woman in her mid-twenties about to strike out in a brand-new career, she would be looking towards a future that involved making money, as much as she could, so that she could enjoy all the things money could buy. Nice house with a cosy mortgage, a small house but with a bigger one on the horizon just as soon as she had settled into her imaginary job and started climbing the imaginary ladder. She nearly grimaced at the dreary prospect of it all.