said Gianfranco, who at six five rarely had to look up at anyone.
‘I don’t envy him puberty. It was hell.’
Gianfranco choked off a bitter laugh. ‘For you? I don’t think so, unless adolescent hell involved every girl you wanted and—’
‘I only got them because you knocked them back, Gianfranco,’ Angelo, ever the pragmatist, cut in. ‘Your problem, my friend, was you put women on a pedestal.’
Gianfranco had been approaching his twentieth birthday when he thought he had found one who belonged on that pedestal. By the time he realised that beyond the perfect face the innocent-eyed woman he had woven his romantic fantasies around—a barmaid who worked in the local hotel—had actually been not so innocent and rather more interested in his sexual stamina than his philosophical reflections and pathetic poetry, it had been too late.
She had been pregnant and to his family’s horror he had married her and become a father at twenty.
‘I was intense.’ Gianfranco cringed now to think of the boy he had been. ‘And an idiot.’
‘You were a romantic,’ Angelo retorted indulgently. ‘And I was shallow, but now we are both older and wiser, not to mention happily married, men. It was a great weekend, which is what brings me here. We’d love to return your hospitality. Kate wants to know if you’re both free on the eighteenth, always supposing nothing has happened on the baby front …?’
‘Eighteenth … I probably, yes … no … I’m not sure.’
Angelo’s scrutiny sharpened as he stared at his friend. In the twenty-five years he had known him, Gianfranco had never to his knowledge been not sure about anything.
‘Well, when you are just get Dervla to give Kate a ring. And how is Dervla?’ Angelo asked casually.
Gianfranco met his friend’s eyes and lied unblinkingly. ‘She’s fine.’
Well, it wasn’t actually a lie. She might well be fine. She might be totally fine after walking out on her husband. Gianfranco’s sense of outrage and the throbbing in his temple swelled in unison as an image of her standing at the front door of their home flashed into his head.
‘You’re being ridiculous, Dervla.’
She stuck out her chin and glared at him through tear-misted eyes, emerald eyes, so intensely green when they’d first met he had assumed she was wearing contact lenses, shimmering.
‘There’s no need to work yourself up, Gianfranco. After all, it doesn’t really matter what I do.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, I’m not important. I’m just a temporary someone who’s passing through, someone who isn’t good enough to take responsibility for your son … and don’t give me that guff about our ready-made family because you shut me out totally. Bottom line is I’m good enough to have sex with but not good enough to be the mother of your child!’
‘That’s totally ludicrous. There’s nothing temporary about our marriage.’
Eyes narrowed, she lifted her chin in challenge. ‘So you want a baby?’
He ground his teeth and reminded her, ‘You were the one that said that you didn’t need children to have a fulfilling life.’
She glared at him with withering scorn. ‘That, you stupid man, was when I thought I couldn’t have any!’
‘You knew when we married that I did not want children. I haven’t changed.’
‘That’s the problem!’
‘Don’t play cryptic word games with me, Dervla.’
‘I’m not playing anything any more. I’m leaving.’
He could see her slim back shaking as she fumbled opening the big oak-banded door. He focused on his anger to stop himself taking her in his arms to wipe away the tears he knew were pouring down her cheeks. He walked up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.
‘I admit you have a flare for drama, but this is enough, Dervla.’
She didn’t turn around, just whispered, ‘Goodbye, Gianfranco.’ And walked through the door.
And he stood there watching, never quite believing that she would go … expecting her to run back through the door at any moment admitting that she had been totally in the wrong.
But there had been no running and no Dervla.
She had left him and their home. The home she had put her indelible mark on. Gianfranco pushed aside the disturbing thought that the mark she had put on him was much more indelible.
Having learnt the hard way that romantic love was a sham, a form of self-hypnosis, Gianfranco had never expected to marry again.
The fact was he had married because the woman he’d wanted would not accept less.
And you tried so hard to persuade her otherwise …?
Gianfranco’s eyebrows twitched into an irritated frown at the mental interruption. His decision to marry had not been based on anything as unreliable as emotions. Like all the decisions he made, he had weighed the pros and cons and come to the conclusion that marriage was something he could live with.
And Dervla was something he did not wish to live without—at least for the moment—though he did not doubt that the overwhelming compulsion he had to bind her to him would fade.
The intensity of it had shaken him, but he did not read any magical significance into it. Feelings of that sort of intensity were not durable; they did not signify a meeting of soul mates. The problems began when you started to believe they did.
He had not changed his opinion of marriage. He still pitied the fools entering into it with a lot of unrealistic phoney, sentimental expectations.
The trouble was people forgot that basically marriage was a legal contract. He had every intention of fulfilling his end of that contract, a contract that could be dissolved if the balance of those pros and cons shifted.
Marriage was like Christmas—people expected too much and were inevitably disappointed.
His expectation had been more realistic the second time around—but he didn’t think it was realistic to expect your wife to change the rules a year in. It wasn’t as if they had not discussed the subject—he had never even imagined she felt that way.
Not strictly true, said the voice in his head as an incident he had mentally filed as insignificant popped unbidden into his head. He had been giving her the grand tour of her new home at this time.
‘This was my nursery … I thought you could use it as a study. The view is really magnificent.’
He pretended not to see the pain and hopeless longing in her face as she touched the carved wood of the antique crib in the corner. Guilt gnawed at him, he hadn’t wanted to see it.
‘A study would be nice,’ she agreed quietly.
