‘I know. It’s a bachelor’s fate at a wedding.’ He assumed a twittery voice of the kind he’d heard so often that day. ‘“He’ll be next. Just wait and see.”’
‘Was that why you didn’t bring a date?’ she asked, chuckling.
‘One reason. My mother complains about the girls I bring home, and when I don’t bring one she complains even more.’
‘I gather they’re real eye-openers?’
He made a wry face, and she became serious to say, ‘I guess you’re a long way from finding what Carlo has.’
‘I think there are very few men who find what Carlo has. Or what you and Justin have.’
She was silent, watching him sympathetically.
After a while he added, ‘And thank you for not saying, Don’t worry, your turn will come.’’
‘Don’t you think it will?’ she asked, struck by the sudden quiet heaviness in his voice.
‘Maybe. Or maybe it came and went.’
Evie was silent, astonished. She had always sensed that there was more to her brother-in-law than the rough, hard-living man he was on the surface, but this was the first time he’d offered so much as a hint of a more reflective inner self.
Cautiously, so not to scare him off, she said, ‘Can you be sure that it’s gone finally?’
‘Quite sure. Since I know hardly anything about her. She was English, her name was Sapphire, and we had two weeks together. That’s all.’
But it wasn’t all, she could tell. During those weeks something had happened to him that had been like an earthquake.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked.
‘I met her in London about two-and-a-half years ago. I was visiting friends, but they suddenly had a family crisis, so I left them to it and explored London on my own. We met in the bar of my hotel. She was there to meet a friend who didn’t show up, we got talking and—that was it.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Like something from another world. So insubstantial that I was almost afraid to touch her. I knew her for two weeks, and then she vanished.’
‘Vanished? Where?’
‘I’ve no idea. I never saw her again. Perhaps she was nothing but a mad hallucination?’
Evie was astonished. Who would have thought the hardheaded Ruggiero could talk in this way? She wondered if he even realised what he’d revealed. He was looking into the distance, his eyes fixed on some inner world. She held her breath, willing him to go on.
But instead he made a sound that was part-grunt, part-nervous laugh, seeming to draw himself back from the brink.
‘Hey, what the hell?’ he said edgily. ‘These things happen. Easy come, easy go.’
‘But I don’t think it was easy,’ Evie urged. ‘I think she meant more to you than that.’
He shrugged. ‘It was a holiday romance. How much do they ever mean?’
‘Ruggiero—’
‘Do you want to come with me tomorrow or not?’
‘Yes, of course. But—’
‘Fine. Be ready to leave early in the morning.’
He bid her goodnight and hurried to his room, despising himself for making a cowardly escape, but unable to help it. Much more of that conversation and he would have gone mad.
He stripped off his clothes and got under the shower, hoping to wash away the day. But nothing could banish the thoughts that had troubled him from the moment he’d arrived at the church with Carlo.
Carlo, the twin barely an hour younger than himself, who’d shared with him all the riotous pleasures of youth, now transformed into a man lit by a powerful inner joy. And the sight had thrown him off balance because it had called up a voice he’d thought he’d silenced long ago.
‘Forget the rest of the world—there’s only our world—what more do we need?’
Memories started to crowd in. She was as he’d first seen her, in a glittering tight red dress, low enough in front to show her exquisite bosom, high enough on the thigh to show off her endless legs. It was the attire of a woman who could attract men without trouble, who enjoyed attracting them and had no scruples about doing so as often as she pleased.
Within a few hours of their meeting he’d held her, naked, in his arms. Everything about her had been breathtaking—her body, the whisper of her voice, her laughter.
Other pictures crowded in: a day out together at the funfair, doing childish things. They’d sat together in a photo booth, arms entwined, heads leaning against each other, while the machine’s lights flashed. A moment later two pictures had appeared in the dish, and they had taken one each.
‘Sapphire,’ he murmured.
It was the only name she had ever told him. She’d kept her last name a secret, and even that had been part of her magic.
Magic. He’d resisted the idea, considering himself a prosaic man and proud of it. But Sapphire had burned with erotic power, dazzling him and luring him into a furnace from which he’d emerged reborn.
She’d been an adventurous lover, who hadn’t tamely waited for him in the bed but had come after him eagerly, appearing in the shower and sliding her arms around him as water laved them. How many times had he seen her shadow outside the frosted glass, then felt her beside him?
The last memory was one from which he still shied away. They’d made love in the afternoon and she’d left him in the evening, promising to return in the morning. He’d lain awake that night, vowing to bring things to a head the next day.
But the next day there had been no sign of her.
He’d waited and waited, but she hadn’t appeared. One day had become two, then three.
He had never seen her again.
Now he stood in the shower, his eyes closed, keeping out the world. But at last he opened them and switched off the water.
Then he tensed.
She was there, just outside the shower, her shadow outlined on the glass. She was waiting for him.
He moved fast, hurling himself against the glass so hard that he nearly broke it, reaching out, trying to find her.
But his hands touched only air. There was nobody there. She had been an illusion as, perhaps, she had always been. He stood there alone, shaking with the ferocity of his memories.
He dried himself mechanically, trying to force himself to be calm. It shamed him to be out of control.
That was the mantra he’d lived by since the day she’d vanished into thin air. Control. Never let anyone suspect the turmoil of joy and misery that had destroyed and remade him.
He’d returned to Italy, apparently the same man as before. If his rambunctious hard living had been a little forced, his manner more emphatic, nobody had seemed to notice. He had kept his memories a secret, sharing them with nobody in the world—until tonight.
With Evie he’d come closer to confiding than with anyone else, ever. But he wasn’t a man who easily discussed feelings, or even knew what his own feelings were much of the time. So he’d gone just so far before retreating into silence.
Today, at his brother’s wedding, he’d sensed that Carlo had found a secret door and gone through it, closing it behind him.
For him the door had stood half-open, but then it had brutally slammed shut in