‘I am very sorry to hear that, Santo,’ Vito responded very gently. ‘For your sudden dislike of Naples rather spoils the surprise your mamma and I had planned for you.’
‘What surprise?’ the boy quizzed warily.
Surprise? Catherine was repeating to herself, her head twisting to look at Vito with a question in her eyes, wondering just where he was attempting to lead Santo with this.
‘I’m not going to live with you in Naples!’ Santo suddenly shouted as his busy mind drew its own conclusions. ‘I won’t live anywhere where Marietta is going to live!’ he stated forcefully.
Vito frowned. ‘Marietta does not live in my house,’ he pointed out.
‘But she will when you marry her! I hate Marietta!’
In response, Vito turned to Catherine with a look meant to turn her to stone. He still thought it was she who had been feeding his son all this poison against his precious Marietta!
I’ll make you pay for this! those eyes were promising. And as Catherine’s emotions began the see-sawing tilt from pain to bitterness, her green eyes fired back a spitting volley of challenges, all of which were telling him to go ahead and try it—then go to hell for all she cared!
He even understood that. ‘Then hell it is,’ he hissed in a soft undertone that stopped the threat from reaching their son’s ears.
Then he was turning back to Santo, all smooth-faced and impressive puzzlement. ‘But how can I marry Marietta when I am married to your mamma?’ he posed, and watched the small boy’s scowl alter to an uncertain frown—then delivered with a silken accuracy the dart aimed to pierce dead centre of his son’s vulnerability. ‘And your mamma and I want to stay married, Santino. We love each other just as much as we love you. We are even going to live in the same house together.’
It was the ultimate coup de grâce, delivered with the perfect timing of a master of the art.
And through the burning red mists that flooded her brain cells Catherine watched Vito’s head turn so he could send her the kind of smile that turned men into devils. Deny it, if you dare, that smile challenged.
She couldn’t. And he knew she couldn’t, because already their son’s face was lighting up as if someone had just switched his life back on. So she had to squat there, seething but silent, as Vito then pressed a clinging kiss to her frozen lips as still he continued to build relentlessly on the little boy’s new store of ‘togetherness’ images.
Then all she could do was watch, rendered surplus to requirements by his machiavellian intellect, as he turned his attention back to their little witness and proceeded to add the finishing touches with an expertise that was positively lethal.
‘Will you come too, Santo?’ he murmured invitingly. ‘Help us to be a proper family?’
A proper family, Catherine repeated silently. The magic words to any child from a broken home.
‘You mean live in the same house—you, me and mummy?’ Already Santo’s voice was shaky with enchantment.
Vito nodded. ‘And Nonna,’ he added. ‘Because it has to be Naples,’ he warned solemnly. ‘For it is where I work. I have to live there, you understand?’
Understand? The little boy was more than ready to understand anything so long as Vito kept this dream scenario flowing. ‘Mummy likes Naples,’ he said eagerly. ‘I know she does because she likes to listen to all the places we’ve visited and all the things that we do there.’
‘Well, from now on we can do those things together, as a family.’ His papà smoothly placed yet another perfect image into his son’s mental picture book.
At which point Catherine resisted the power of the arm restraining her and got up, deciding that she was most definitely surplus to requirements since the whole situation was out of her control now.
‘I’m going to get dressed,’ she said. They didn’t seem to hear her. And as she stepped around Santo he was already moving towards his darling papà. Arms up, eyes shining, he landed in Vito’s lap with all the enthusiasm of a well-loved puppy...
* * *
‘If you still possess a healthy respect for your health, then I advise you to keep your distance,’ Catherine warned as Vito’s tall, lean figure appeared on the periphery of her vision.
She was in her small but sunny back garden hanging out washing, in the vague hopes that the humdrum chore would help ease some the angst that had built up in her system after having a great morning playing happy families.
Together, they had eaten a delightful breakfast where the plans had flown thick and fast on what to do in Naples during a long hot summer. And she’d smiled and she’d enthused and she’d made suggestions of her own to keep it all absolutely super. Then Santo had taken Vito off to show him his bedroom with all the excitement of a boy who felt as if he was living in seventh heaven.
Now Santo was at his best friend’s house, several doors away, where he was excitedly relaying all his wonderful news to a captivated audience, who would no doubt be seeing Santo’s change in fortune in the same guise as the child equivalent to winning the lottery.
Which clearly left Vito free to come in search of her, which was, in Catherine’s view, him just begging for trouble.
He knew she was angry. He knew she was barely managing to contain the mass of burning emotion which was busily choking up her system at the cavalier way he had decided her life for her.
‘Don’t you have an electric dryer for those?’ he questioned frowningly.