‘What anger? Dad will be thrilled,’ she predicted blithely. ‘He loves babies.’
It was true. Like many bullies Frank Solway had a streak of sentimentality. He cooed over babies and the world said what a delightful man he was.
‘Honestly, darling,’ Becky said, ‘this will make everything all right.’
How stupid could you be?
Her father was almost out of his mind with rage.
‘You got yourself knocked up by that…?’ He finished on a stream of profanity.
‘Dad, I didn’t get “knocked up”. I got pregnant by a man I love. Please don’t try to make it sound like something dirty.’
‘It is dirty. How dare he lay a finger on you?’
‘Because I wanted him to. To put it plainly, I dragged him into bed, not the other way around.’
‘Don’t ever let me hear you say that again,’ he shouted.
‘It’s true! I love Luca and I’m going to marry him.’
‘You think I’m going to allow that? You think my daughter is going to marry that low-life? The sooner this is fixed the better.’
‘I’m going to have my baby.’
‘The hell you are!’
She ran away that night. Frank followed her to Luca’s house and tried to buy her back. But the mention of money only made Luca roar with laughter. Later Becky was to realise what her father heard in that laughter. It was the roar of the young lion telling the old lion that he no longer ruled. Perhaps her father’s real hatred dated from that moment.
He tried to enlist the help of the locals, but he was thwarted. Frank Solway was powerful but Luca was one of them, and nobody was ready to raise their hand against him.
But Becky knew he wouldn’t give up, and in the end it was she who suggested they leave.
‘Just for a while, darling. Dad’ll feel better about it when he’s a grandfather.’
He sighed. ‘I hate running away, but all this quarrelling is bad for you and the baby. We’ll go for the sake of some peace.’
They fled south to stay with his friends in Naples. After two weeks he bought an old car, repaired it himself, and they set off again, heading south to Calabria. Two weeks there, then north again.
They talked about marriage but never stayed anywhere long enough to complete the formalities, just in case Frank’s tentacles reached them. Wherever they went his skilled hands found him work. It was a good life.
Becky had not known that such happiness was possible. She was over the first sickness of pregnancy, feeling well and strong, spending her life with the man she adored. Their love was the unquestioning, uncomplicated kind that inspired songs and stories, with a happy-ever-after always promised at the end. She loved him, he loved her, and their baby would arrive soon. What more was there?
The thought of Frank was always there in the background, but as week followed week with no sign of him he faded and became unreal, a ‘maybe’ rather than a genuine threat.
She began to understand Luca better, and herself. It was Luca who revealed her body to her, its fierce responses, its eagerness for physical love. But it was also through him, and the life they lived, that she was able to stand outside herself, and look with critical eyes. What she saw did not please her.
‘I was horrid,’ she said to him once. ‘A real spoilt brat, taking everything for granted, letting Dad indulge me and never wondering where the money came from. But it actually came from men like the ones who stopped me that day. He practically stole from them. You can’t really blame them, can you?’
‘You can’t blame yourself, either,’ he insisted. ‘You were so young, how could it occur to you to ask questions about your father’s methods? But when your eyes were opened you didn’t try to look away. My Becky is too brave for that.’
There was always a special note in his voice when he said ‘my Becky’, as though all the best in her was a personal gift to himself, to be treasured. It made her feel like the most important person in the world. And in the world they made together, that was true.
She gradually came to understand that Luca was one person to her, and a different man to everyone else. The attackers who had fled him, filled with fear, had seen the side of him that others saw.
He was a potentially frightening man who carried with him an aura of being always on the edge of ruthlessness, even violence. It took time for Becky to understand this, because he never showed that side of himself to her.
They had their arguments, even outright rows, but he fought fair, never turning his ferocity on her, and always bringing the spat to a speedy end, often by simply giving in. It hurt him to be at odds with her.
In their daily life he was tender, loving and gentle, setting her on a pedestal and asserting, by his actions, that she was different from all other human beings on earth.
His love for her carried a hint of worship that awed and delighted her, even while it sometimes made him over-protective to the point of being dictatorial. It was he who decided, in her sixth month, that their lovemaking must cease until after the baby was born, and she had fully recovered.
Torn by desire, she wept and pleaded. ‘It’s too soon. The doctor says we’ve time yet.’
‘The doctor is not the father of your baby. I am, and I have decided that it is time to stop,’ he declared in the most arrogant statement she had yet heard from him.
‘But what will you do? It’s months and months, and you’ll—well, you know.’
‘What are you saying? That you don’t trust me to be faithful to you?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ she cried.
There was a flash of temper on his face, for he had never given her a moment’s cause for anxiety. But anger was gone in a instant, dissolved in laughter.
‘Oh, stop that,’ she said, thumping him in frustration.
But he roared aloud with laughter, holding her carefully against him.
‘Amor mia, I promise to be home at the proper time every evening, and you may put a collar and lead about my neck,’ he said with a grin.
‘And every man in the place will say you’re living under my thumb, and laugh at you.’
‘But I don’t care what they think, only what you think,’ he said, serious again. ‘You and our child are everything in life to me.’
He stuck to his resolve, keeping an iron control over himself, and spending all his spare time at home. Becky, talking to other expectant mothers in doctors’ waiting rooms, knew just how lucky she was.
For most of the time she could push serious matters aside to enjoy their life. Everything was fun. Being poor, learning how to shop so that she got the best out of his wages, living in old jeans and letting them out as she put on weight—all this was fun.
It was Luca who finally decided that they should settle in one spot. She was now more than six months gone, and he said, ‘I want you under the care of the same doctor from now on.’
They had reached Carenna, a small town near Florence, where he had found work with a local builder. It was a pleasant place to put down roots. He located a good doctor, found some birth classes, and attended them with her, mastering all the exercises, to her tender amusement. At home they practised together until they collapsed with laughter.
Perhaps so much happiness could never last. Sometimes it seemed as though she’d used up her life-time’s allowance in those few glorious months.
Philip