said, showing it to him. He picked it up and checked the details on it. ‘But I wish to pay cash for tonight. If I decide to stay longer, and you have a room available, I may use my credit card for any larger amounts. Is that a problem?’
He looked puzzled but shook his head, gave her back her credit card and the usual card every guest had to fill in, asked to see her passport and looked even more startled as she gave him the Italian one.
‘You are Italian?’ That told her that her accent wasn’t quite as good as she had thought it was.
Quietly she explained, ‘I was born here, but I live in Britain. My father was British, my mother Italian, so I have dual nationality.’
He handed her back the passport, a smile finally crossing his face. ‘Then I do not need to keep this.’ He picked up her money and handed her a key. ‘I hope you have a very pleasant stay with us, signorina. Would you like help with your luggage?’
‘Please,’ she said, handing him the key of her car. ‘Just the smaller tan leather case, please.’
She went to the room and immediately plunged her sweating face into cool, clear water. What she wanted was a bath, but that could wait until her luggage arrived and she could unpack clean clothes to change into.
The porter brought her case; she tipped him generously, got a broad grin and asked him to book her in for dinner for the evening.
When she was alone again she stripped and had a long, relaxing bath, put on a white cambric dress, the bodice stiff with broderie anglaise, and lay down on the bed, her muscles weak and her ears singing with hypertension.
She couldn’t remember ever having been this tired before! She wanted to go to sleep, but first she had to ring Paolo.
It was surely many months since she had last spoken to him. They were neither of them great letter writers, and anyway theirs was a very intermittent friendship; it was often several years before they got in touch, but the minute they did it was as if they had never been apart.
She had always been able to tell Paolo everything. At least she would be able to talk to him about what was tearing her apart, be open about why she could not go through with her marriage, knowing that he would understand. He was the one person in the world whom she had ever told about the past.
Paolo had lived next door to her when she was a child. He was four years older than she and had been a short, dark, silent boy, always painting and drawing and making clay figures. They had been thrown together because their mothers had been friends and neither of them had found it easy to get on with their own classmates.
Gabriella, shy and nervous, had found Paolo’s silences reassuring; he was sensitive and intelligent, and very different from the other boys in his class at school. They had mostly been bigger, cheerfully down-to-earth, and had made fun of his passion for art, despised him because he didn’t love football and fighting, and bullied him a little too. Paolo had kept away from them whenever he could; he had already had a sure sense of what he wanted and had known that it would take him away from Brindisi.
When Gabriella’s mother died, her grieving father had taken his daughter back to England so that he could be near his only living relative, his mother. Jack Drayton was himself a man in poor health; he had only survived his wife by three years and had usually been too ill to see much of his only child.
Gabriella had been sent away to boarding-school, although she’d spent her summers with her father’s brother Ben and his family. They had given her a couple of very happy years until it had all crashed down again. Sometimes she’d thought that every time she began to be really happy fate intervened—something always happened to wreck it.
Her uncle Ben had died suddenly the summer that she was fourteen. Afterwards his wife had sold their home, taken her children and gone back to Scotland, to the village where she had been born. After that, Gabriella had stayed with her grandmother, her father’s mother, in the summer.
During all those years, Gabriella had written to Paolo and got back scratchy little notes from him, but she hadn’t actually seen him again until he had come to England on holiday five years ago. She had still been at school, and was spending the holidays with her grandmother in Maidenhead on the River Thames—and she had been thrilled to see Paolo again.
He had stayed in London for a fortnight. Gabriella had shown him around, taken him to Windsor and Hampton Court, Kew Gardens and as far afield as Stratford-on-Avon, so that he could visit the theatre and see Shakespeare’s birthplace and Anne Hathaway’s cottage.
Paolo had just left art school in Milan and was going to be taking up a career in TV, set-designing. At twenty-one, he had been far more sophisticated and worldly-wise than the seventeen-year-old Gabriella, yet somehow they had picked up their brother-sister relationship where it had left off six years earlier without any difficulty.
When he’d gone back to Milan he’d rarely written. Neither had, but she’d known that when she saw him again they would still talk the same language—indeed, understand each other without words.
Smiling, she picked up the phone and dialled his number. The ringing went on for quite a while before his voice came on the line.
‘Sì?’ He sounded impatient; perhaps he was very busy.
‘Paolo?’ she whispered uncertainly, and heard his intake of breath.
‘Where are you?’
His swift reply told her a lot. ‘You know?’
Paolo didn’t bother to ask what she meant. His voice dry, he said, ‘He rang me last night. Even over the phone he was quite frightening. I don’t know what he does to you, but he turned my blood to ice. I got the distinct impression that if he found out I’d lied to him he would tear my head off my body and then dance on the rest of me.’
She half laughed, half sobbed. ‘How did he get your number?’
‘I think he was trying everyone you ever mentioned to him. No stone unturned, Gabi.’
She had known what he would do. Wearily she said, ‘I barely mentioned you to him.’
‘Mia cara, I was on your guest list!’
‘Yes, you were, but how did he find you so quickly? I gave him your address in Rome.’
‘Unfortunately, he—or one of his staff—knew I worked for TV in Rome, and tried them. Of course, they knew where to find me; I’d left my summer address with them.’
She sighed, closing her eyes. ‘Thank God I didn’t ring you before I left—at least you really weren’t lying when you told him you didn’t know where I was. Do you think he believed you?’
‘I think he must have realised that I was surprised. Yes, I think he believed I didn’t know where you were, but I may have spoilt the effect later—I lost my temper, I’m afraid.’
Anxiously she asked, ‘What did you say to him?’
‘I told him I wouldn’t tell him even if I did know where you were, but I hadn’t heard a word from you so I didn’t have to lie and I said that if you did get in touch I certainly wouldn’t tell him so he could shove off.’ Paolo sounded triumphant. ‘He didn’t like that, I’m glad to say. I did not take to him, mia cara—in
