child should have the shame of knowing her father killed her mother because he was on a drunken high after winning at cards.’
She thought how cold he sounded—and how ruthless. But that was his default position, wasn’t it—and wasn’t it somehow understandable in the circumstances? Wasn’t much of his behaviour explained by his dreadful legacy? ‘You still must have been devastated?’ she ventured.
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Do you want the truth? The real and shocking truth? My overriding emotion was one of relief that my father had won so big and that somehow the money got to me intact. It meant that I could pay the rent and clear the debts. It meant that I could send Michela away to school—at thirteen she was getting too much for me to handle. And it meant that I could live my own life. That I could capitalise on his win and make it even bigger. And that’s what I did. I bought my first property with that money and by the end of that first year, I had acquired three.’
Alannah nodded. It was funny how when you joined up the dots the bigger picture emerged. Suddenly, she realised why he’d always been so strict with his sister. She saw now that his own controlling nature must have developed as an antidote to his father’s recklessness. Financial insecurity had led him to go on and make himself a colossal fortune which nobody could ever bleed away. His wealth was protected, but in protecting it he had set himself in a world apart from other men.
‘And did this all happen at Christmas?’ she questioned suddenly. ‘Is that why you hate the holidays so much?’
‘No. That would have been neat, wouldn’t it?’ He gave a wry smile. ‘It’s just that Christmas came to symbolise the bleak epicentre of our family life. For me, it was always such an empty festival. My mother would spend vast amounts of money decking out the rooms of our apartment, but she was never there. Even on Christmas Eve she would be sitting like some passive fool on the sidelines while my father played cards. Supposedly bringing him luck, but in reality—checking out that some buxom hostess wasn’t coming onto him.’
She winced at the phrase, but suddenly she could understand some of his prejudice towards her, too. For him, buxom women in skimpy clothes were the ones who threatened his parents’ relationship. Yet in the end, his puritanical disapproval of her chosen career had done nothing to destroy his powerful lust for her, which must have confused him. And Niccolò didn’t do confusion. She’d always known that. Black and white, with nothing in between.
‘To me, Christmas always felt as if I’d walked onto a stage set,’ he said. ‘As if all the props were in place, but nobody knew which lines to say.’
And Alannah realised that she’d done exactly the same. She had tried to create the perfect Christmas. She’d bought the tree and hung the holly and the mistletoe—but what she had created had been no more real than the empty Christmases of his past.
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