‘But you’ve never taken her advice long enough to find out if she’s right,’ Della chuckled.
He grinned. ‘You really do sound just like her. Besides, I know now that she was right. Today you’re going to do all the talking, and I won’t say a single word.’
‘Hmm!’ she said sceptically.
He looked alarmed. ‘You understand me too well.’
‘In that case we have nothing left to say to each other.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, isn’t that every man’s nightmare? A woman who understands him?’
‘I’m getting more scared of you every minute.’
‘Then you’d better steer well clear of me. If I call the airport now there’s bound to be a plane back to London today.’
At once his hand closed over hers, imprisoning it gently but firmly.
‘I never run away from danger,’ he said lightly. ‘How about you?’
There was a moment’s hesitation, because something told her that never in her life had she met a danger like this. Then, ‘Me neither,’ she said.
‘Good. In that case…’ He paused significantly.
‘In that case—?’
‘In that case I suggest we hurry up and finish our breakfast.’
She choked into her coffee. She had always been a sucker for a man who could make her laugh.
At Pompeii, his team was waiting for him in the canteen. A brief time in his company had made her more sharply aware of things she had overlooked before, and now she saw at once how the young women in the group brightened as soon as he appeared, and flashed him their best smiles.
She couldn’t blame them. There was a life-enhancing quality to him that brought the sun out, and made it natural to smile.
Della lingered only a short while as he talked to them in Italian, which she couldn’t understand, then wandered away to the museum.
Here she found what she was looking for—the plaster casts of the bodies that had lain trapped in their last positions for nearly two thousand years. There was a man who’d fallen on the stairs and never risen again, and another man who’d known the end was coming and curled up in resignation, waiting for the ash to engulf him. Further on, a mother tried vainly to shelter her children.
But it was the lovers who held her the longest. After so many centuries it was still heartbreaking to see the man and woman, stretching out in a vain attempt to reach each other before death swamped them.
‘There’s such a little distance between their hands,’ she murmured.
‘Yes, they nearly managed it,’ said Carlo beside her.
She didn’t know how long he’d been there, and wondered if he’d been watching as she wandered among the ‘bodies’.
‘And now they’ll never reach each other,’ she said. ‘Trapped for ever with a might-have-been.’
‘There’s nothing sadder than what might have been,’ he agreed. ‘That’s why I prefer these.’
He led her to another glass case where there were two forms, a man and a woman, nestled against each other.
‘They knew death was coming,’ Carlo said, ‘but as long as they could meet it in each other’s arms they weren’t afraid.’
‘Maybe,’ she said slowly.
‘You don’t believe that?’
‘I wonder if you’re stretching imagination too far. You can’t really know that they weren’t afraid.’
‘Can’t I? Look at them.’
Della drew nearer and studied the two figures. Their faces were blurred, but she could see that all their attention was for each other, not the oncoming lava. And their bodies were mysteriously relaxed, almost contented.
‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘While they had each other there was nothing to fear—not even death.’
How would it feel to be like that? she wondered. Two marriages had left her ignorant of that all-or-nothing feeling. What she had known of men had left her cautious, and suddenly it occurred to her that she was deprived.
‘Are you ready to go?’ he asked.
He drove back to the little fishing village where they had eaten the day before. Now the tide was in, the boats were out, and the atmosphere was completely different. This was another world from that sleepy somnolence, as he proved by taking her to the market, where the stalls were brightly coloured and mostly sold an array of fresh meat and vegetables.
The ones that didn’t offered a dazzling variety of handmade silk.
‘The area is known for it,’ Carlo explained. ‘And it’s better than anything you’ll find in the fashionable shops in Milan.’
As he spoke he was holding up scarves and blouses against her.
‘Not these,’ he said, tossing a couple aside. ‘Not your colour.’
‘Isn’t it?’ she asked, slightly nettled. She had liked both of them.
‘No, this is better.’ He held up a blouse with a dark blue mottled pattern and considered it against her. ‘This one,’ he told the woman running the stall.
‘Hey, let me check the size,’ Della protested.
‘No need,’ the woman chuckled. ‘He always gets the size right.’
‘Thank you,’ Carlo said hastily, handing over cash and hurrying her away.
‘You’ve got a nerve, buying me clothes without so much as a by-your-leave,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to thank me.’
‘I wasn’t. I was saying you’re as cheeky as a load of monkeys.’
‘Slander. All slander.’
To Della’s mischievous delight he had definitely reddened.
‘So you always get the size right, just by looking?’ she mused. ‘I mean, always as in always?’
‘Let’s have something to eat,’ he said hastily, taking her arm and steering her into a side street where they found a small café.
There he settled her with coffee and a glass of prosecco, the white sparkling wine, so light as to be almost a cordial, that Italians loved to drink.
‘So now,’ he said, ‘do what I wouldn’t let you do yesterday, and tell me all about yourself. I know you’ve been married—’
‘I married when I was sixteen—and pregnant. Neither of us was old enough to know what we were doing, and when he fled in the first few months I guess I couldn’t blame him.’
‘I blame him,’ he said at once. ‘If you do something, you take responsibility for it.’
‘Oh, you sound so very old and wise, but how “responsible” were you at seventeen?’
‘Perhaps we’d better not go into that,’ he said, grinning. ‘But he shouldn’t have simply have walked out and left you with a baby.’
‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I wasn’t abandoned in a one-room hovel without a penny. We were living with my parents, so I had a comfortable home and someone to take care of me. In fact, I don’t think my parents were sorry to see the back of him.’
‘Did they give him a nudge?
‘He says they did. I’ll never really know, but I’m sure it would