Laura groaned again.
‘It’s not a bad description,’ Gino said with a faint smile. ‘Yes, there’s a place where they’d have to let me in.’
‘Is it like this?’ Nikki wanted to know.
He laughed outright. ‘No, it’s a farm.’
‘Is it big?’
‘Too big. Too much work. I just ran away. Something smells good.’
‘It’s only a cup of tea,’ Laura pointed out. ‘I’ll pour you one.’
Laura did so, appreciating the neat way he’d slid away from the subject of his home. She wondered exactly what he was running from. Not hard work, as he’d implied. But he was escaping something. There had been an odd look on his face, that hinted at troubled currents beneath.
She wasn’t sure how much of this robbery story she believed. It might just be his way of saying that he wasn’t really a vagrant, no matter how things looked.
An instinctive clown, she thought, but one who clowned as a way of hiding himself.
If it came to that, she supposed it was true that she knew nothing about him. He might be all kinds of a weirdo.
But then she looked at him, and calculations fell away. This was a good man. All her instincts told her so.
‘I’ll get your room ready,’ she said.
He followed her up the stairs to the next floor where three of the rented rooms were located, the other two being on the floor above. She led him to the one at the far end of the corridor, with Nikki bringing up the rear.
As Laura had warned him, it was tiny. The bed was narrow and only just long enough for his tall figure. There was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a chair and a small washbasin attached to the wall.
Even so, he had space enough for his meagre possessions.
Laura fetched sheets and blankets and began making up the bed with Nikki’s help, so that Gino had to hop out of the way in that narrow space.
‘Can’t I do anything useful?’ he asked.
‘You could put the pillow in its case,’ Nikki told him kindly.
‘Thank you ma’am.’
As they worked Laura said, ‘I have five other guests. Sadie and Claudia are sisters, and they both work at making computers in a local factory. Bert is a night-watchman, Fred is a bouncer at a nightclub, and Mrs Baxter is a widow and retired teacher. She keeps an eye on Nikki when I have to work in the evening.’
‘You work, as well as running this place?’ he asked, startled.
‘I do a few hours as a barmaid. The pub’s not far away.’
When it was all finished they stood back and regarded the result.
‘I’m afraid it’s a bit bare,’ Laura said.
‘I know what we can do,’ Nikki said. She disappeared and returned a moment later, clutching something that she laid triumphantly on the little chest of drawers by the bed.
It was a small soft toy in the shape of a dog.
‘His name’s Simon,’ she said. ‘And he’ll keep you company.’
Gino sat down on the bed so that his eyes were on a level with hers.
‘Thank you,’ he said gravely. ‘That was very kind. Now I shall have a friend.’
‘Three friends,’ Nikki said at once. ‘’Cos you’ve got us too.’
He raised his eyes to Laura, signalling a question.
‘Yes, you’ve got three friends now,’ she agreed. ‘I’ve got to go and start the supper. Come along Nikki. If Gino slept on the ground last night he’s probably longing to get some sleep now.’
He smiled and didn’t deny it.
When they had left he threw himself back on the bed and lay looking at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come. After the uncomfortable night he’d had, it should happen easily.
But, as he’d feared, there was only restless wakefulness. By now he was drearily used to that happening. Once he’d been a man who slept easily, like a contented animal, living through his happy physical instincts.
But in the six months since he’d left Italy that had all changed. Now it seemed that he rested properly only one night out of two. The others were spent in chasing wretched dreams and visions, wrestling with regrets and ‘if onlys’.
The child’s mention of ‘home’ had caught him off guard, as so many things seemed to do these days.
‘A place where they have to let you in, even if they don’t like you.’
Home was Belluna, the great farm in Tuscany. If he knocked on the door, his brother and Alex, his brother’s wife—for so he must force himself to call her now—would let him in. They would have to, since he owned half the property.
They would smile and say how good it was to see him, how concerned they’d been while he was away, how they’d thought about him every day.
And it would all be true.
But there was something else, also true, that nobody would mention. They would worry, lest he rock the boat of their happy marriage with his bitterness and anger, his anguished, unrequited love. They would look at each other behind his back, and know that an alien had come among them. And they would long silently for him to leave.
‘I could never love you,’ Alex had said. ‘Not as you want, anyway.’
But even she had never understood how deeply in love with her he had fallen. Before that he’d loved as a very young man, plunging into infatuation and out again, like the giddy whirl of a carousel.
But when he met Alex the carousel had stopped, tossing him to the ground so that he rose into a new world, one where she existed. The one. The only one, for, like many young men who love lightly and carelessly, he had been struck by the real thing like a thunderbolt. After that no more carelessness was possible.
‘Not as you want,’ she had said.
He had wanted everything from her, love, tenderness, passion, a promise to last a lifetime.
And he’d thought he had them, until the night he returned to find her in his brother’s bed.
CHAPTER TWO
SOMETIMES the dreams were worse than the waking memories. If you were awake you could decide not to think about it, but dreams were remorseless.
In dreams he had no choice but to live again the moment at the Belluna harvest party where he’d told Alex of his love in front of all their neighbours.
Even
