Happy Mother's Day! (13 page)

‘So you come back later today?’ asked the Italian girl quietly.

‘Well, I’ll probably stay overnight because I expect the meeting will run on into dinner.’ Aisling saw Gianluca come out of his study, carrying a sheath of papers which looked suspiciously like a contract, and raise his eyebrows at her in question. ‘I’ll catch a flight back first thing.’ She stared at her husband, looking so handsome and yet so impossibly forbidding. ‘If that’s okay?’

‘I think we might just be able to cope without you.’ He shot her a mocking black glance. ‘Tell me,
cara,
haven’t I seen that suit somewhere before?’

Aisling blushed. It was the one she had been trying on. The one.

She had managed to squeeze into it and had expressed enough breast milk for Claudio to be given in her absence, along with a long list of instructions for Carmela about what to do if he wouldn’t settle—and for her or Gianluca to ring her immediately if anything went wrong.

But there was no phone call—and while she was pleased that they hadn’t
had
to call her, she found herself feeling strangely disappointed, too. Was she so expendable, then? Didn’t Gianluca think that she might like to hear an account of the baby’s day while she was in a different country—or didn’t he care? Silly Aisling. Of course he didn’t.

She arrived to a chilly Paris and found it hard to settle during her meetings. Worse, she had little appetite for the delicious restaurant lunch she was taken to in the
arts et
metiers
district. In fact, all she wanted to do was to whip out little photos of Claudio and show them round.

Was he missing her? she wondered. Was he doing that little thing he did when he’d just been fed—of lying on his back and kicking his darling little feet in the air? Gianluca always said one day he would become a striker for one of the top Italian clubs—while she had argued that he would be much better playing for an English side. Until they’d both decided that maybe football was a risky career for such a talented child.

But thinking like that didn’t help matters. It made her imagine an unimaginable future and ache with an odd kind of emptiness.

Stupidly, she found herself wishing she were back in her beautiful house with her beautiful baby—watching her beautiful man. Suddenly, she remembered how gentle
Il Tigre
could be. A strong man who could cradle a baby with infinite tenderness. Her heart turned over.

What wouldn’t she give for Gianluca to be missing her, too?

By mid-afternoon, she still hadn’t heard from them and she rang the house, but there was no answer. She tried Gianluca’s phone, but it just went straight through to voicemail and she left several messages asking him to call.

By late afternoon, she was frantic. Frantic enough to cut short her meeting and to cancel dinner and her hotel room and catch an early flight back to Perugia.

An empty stomach and self-doubt made her imagination work overtime. Claudio was sick. Gianluca had taken this opportunity to have the locks changed so she couldn’t get in! Gianluca had gone off with another woman! She had
neglected her child by zooming off to the French capital and he would make her pay. And even though the rational side of her brain told her that these were crazy thoughts without foundation—that didn’t make them seem any less real.

She had to switch her phone off during the flight, but by the time they landed and she switched it back on again a text had come through from Gianluca saying, rather cryptically: ‘We’re fine—what’s the panic?’

But by then Aisling was being fuelled by adrenaline and at the airport she leapt into a taxi with her nerves in shreds, knowing she couldn’t go on like this. That she was living her life the wrong way and sooner or later it would drive her insane.

Yet even as these thoughts were racing through her head she was aware that she was plotting like a master-criminal, knowing that she wanted to arrive at the house early and unannounced. To surprise Gianluca. To find him doing …
what?

The taxi crunched its way up the hillside and Aisling had it stop outside the main entrance. Thrusting a note into the driver’s hand, she slipped in through a side gate and went running inside, throwing open the door with a shaking hand, but there was nobody to be seen in the vast hallway.

‘Hello?’ she called, and then again as she closed the door behind her, only this time louder. ‘Hel
-lo!’

There was nothing but the ominous sound of silence and a cold, sick feeling clamped round her stomach until she heard the distant sound of a sonorous voice coming from upstairs—and she took the stairs two at a time, heading for the direction of the voice, which seemed to be coming from the nursery bathroom.

She burst into the room with all the urgency of a firefighter
and then halted in her tracks to see the vision which greeted her.

Gianluca was on the floor with the sleeves of his shirt all rolled up, tickling the tummy of a newly bathed Claudio, who was lying on a big, fluffy dry towel beside him. He’d dressed the baby in a new Babygro festooned with blue bunnies, which Aisling had bought in Rome only last week, and Claudio was gurgling with delight at the attention. They both turned their heads at the sound of the door and Aisling stood there, blinking back stupid tears of shame and remorse.

How
could
she have thought that Gianluca might have been up to no good—when he was all splashed with water and laughing at his son and looking like a leading contender for a Father of the Year award?

‘Gianluca,’ she said, her voice shaking with emotion as he sat back on his heels, his black eyes narrowing with an expression she couldn’t quite work out.

This, he thought, was Aisling as he had rarely seen her. Her hair was falling out untidily all over her shoulders, her tights had a run in them and her face was pink and shiny, as if she’d been sprinting. But the difference was about more than her dishevelled physical appearance. He could see her face working, like someone who was trying very hard not to cry. Aisling
crying?
Surely not. ‘You’re early,’ he observed.

‘Where
were
you?’

His eyes hardened. ‘Do I have to give an account of my movements every time you’re away?’

‘I couldn’t get through all day and I was
worried!’
‘About what?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Presumably not
about leaving your son with his father or with the nanny whom
you
helped vet? So what’s to be worried about, Aisling? Maybe you just couldn’t bear the thought of losing control—of the world functioning perfectly well without you always being in the driving seat. Isn’t that closer to the truth?’

She stared at him. She had been tightly gripping onto her handbag, but now it slid unnoticed from her fingers as she registered his caustic tone. What sort of monster was he describing? ‘What are you saying?’ she whispered.

He shook his head. ‘Not now, Aisling,’ he said harshly. ‘And not in front of the baby. If there has to be some kind of showdown, then let’s do it by upsetting as few people as possible.’

Showdown?

Aisling felt dizzy as he picked up Claudio and carried him into the nursery. ‘Where’s Carmela?’ she questioned breathlessly as she followed him.

‘I gave her the evening off.’ He turned his head and she could see the mirthless line of his mouth. ‘Or maybe should I have run that past you first?’

Aisling stared at him and a slow, steady thump of fear began to work her heart into a different beat. She had been planning to tell him that she thought things needed to change, but now it looked as if Gianluca had come to a similar sort of conclusion himself and suddenly she was scared.

‘Can I put him to bed? I haven’t seen him all day.’

‘Of course.’ He kissed Claudio’s head and handed him over—barely meeting her eyes.

‘I’d better feed him, too.’

He was going to say that Claudio had taken most of the
bottle she’d left behind, but by then she was already lifting her shirt with trembling fingers and latching the baby to her. Was she doing that to emphasise the fact that the baby needed a mother in the way that it never could need its father? He heard Claudio’s little sound of contentment and then the glugging of him feeding and saw Aisling briefly close her eyes with relief.

And, God forgive him, but at that moment he felt excluded. An outsider. Hadn’t he seen articles about fathers sometimes feeling jealous of their babies and hadn’t he despised them? Yet now here he was, feeling something very close to envy. He turned his back on her with a gesture of finality. ‘I’ll be waiting for you downstairs,’ he said.

Had he meant that to sound like a threat? Aisling forced herself to relax while Claudio fed, but it felt as if a soft dark cloud of dread were waiting to descend on her shoulders. It should have been a glorious homecoming—her baby safe and happy—with a sense of achievement that she’d managed to do a day’s work. Except that she hadn’t, had she—not really?

The whole day had been a disaster from start to finish. She hadn’t been able to concentrate on her work properly and yet she hadn’t been there for Claudio either, and now Gianluca was waiting for her downstairs with a strange and sombre look on his face and she was terrified of what that might mean.

That life was better when she wasn’t around—and now that Claudio was entrenched in this rural paradise she would have the devil’s job ever prising him away from it.

She spent longer than she needed to cuddling her little boy and then putting him down in the cot. As if she was
trying to hold onto these last few moments of innocence before her world was shattered in a way which instinct told her it was about to be.

Flicking the mobile which hung over the crib with her fingertip, Aisling watched the tiger spinning round and round, its distinctive gold and black colouring blurring into something unrecognisable and indistinct—just as her life seemed to have done since meeting Gianluca.

Was it over? she wondered as she switched on the nightlight and slowly made her way downstairs.

Probably. And maybe it would be better like that—with all this need for pretence gone. She used to think she had everything mapped out, rigidly put in its place. She had thought that if you hid how you were really feeling, then you wouldn’t get hurt. But she had been wrong—because she had opened up the way for the kind of hurt which was a million times worse than anything else she’d ever experienced before.

She had grown up under a canopy of fear—and that had carried on into her adult life. But fear didn’t make a situation better—it made it worse. Fear that Gianluca might one day leave her or slowly edge her from his life was spoiling what time they had together now.

He was waiting for her in the smallest of the reception rooms with only a couple of low-lamps on and a fire which had been lit against the newly chilly evenings. Flames danced shadows over the walls and ceiling, and she could hear the crackle and spit of the logs.

He’d opened wine, too—she could see that it was a bottle from his own estate with its distinctive Palladio label—and he had poured two glasses. Viewed from here,
it looked like a picture-perfect family scene. The husband and the wife who had just put their adorable baby to bed. The glow of the room and the pleasurable anticipation of the evening ahead. Suddenly, Aisling felt weak. She wanted to freeze-frame it and keep it, but it wasn’t real, and yet the pain in her heart had become so very real.

Gianluca saw her face whiten and his eyes narrowed. ‘What’s happened?’ he demanded. ‘Is something wrong?’

She hesitated. What would she usually say?
No, I’m fine—just a little tired, that’s all.
She wouldn’t want him to think she was less than perfect—because Gianluca wanted and expected perfection. But she wasn’t—and her elaborately constructed act wasn’t working anyway.

‘Yes, something is wrong,’ she said, slumping into the nearest chair and beginning to cry. ‘Something is very wrong. You know it is!’

Gianlucawatched her. Usually, he mistrusted awoman’s tears—for they were often used as tools of manipulation—but these were sliding down her pale cheeks and her mouth was twisting in pain. And this was
Aisling,
he reminded himself. She always hid her emotions and she was not amanipulator. She never cried.

His cool expression did not change as he sipped his drink. ‘A hitch at work, perhaps?’

Aisling flinched as if he had struck her—but then, in a way, hadn’t he done just that? Because a crushing emotional blow could wound just as savagely. ‘Is that how you see me, then?’ she questioned, her voice shaking. ‘As so driven and focussed that nothing but ambition can touch me?’

‘I thought that was how you saw yourself.’

‘If you knew how I saw myself—you’d run a million
miles away, Gianluca.’ She lowered her voice, daring to voice her deepest fear—bringing it out from the dark cupboard of her imagination. ‘But perhaps you’re intending to do that anyway.’

The cord of tension which had been stretching tight within him suddenly snapped as he saw this cold wasteland of a life spread out before him with this clever, closed woman.
‘Sì,
maybe I am,’ he ground out. ‘Because I think I would find anything tolerable to living with a damned mannequin!’

The awful confirmation that he was thinking of leaving her was momentarily eclipsed by his accusation. ‘Amannequin?’ she echoed in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I am talking about a woman who might as well be made of wax—for all that she lives and breathes. For that is you!’ he declared. ‘A cool, controlled woman who never shows her feelings—except in bed! You think that I wish to be married to a block of ice?’

She clapped her hand over her heart, it was beating so hard. ‘But th-that’s what you wanted!’

His eyes narrowed. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You told me that’s what you found so attractive about me—that you never knew what was going on in my head. That Iwas an enigma and that men liked awoman to be mysterious—especially a man like you, who had spent all their lives being pursued by women who were like open books!’

He slammed his glass down so hard that some of the wine slopped onto the mantelpiece. ‘Yes, that was what initially intrigued me—but certainly not all. Are you crazy—thinking that I would tie my life to a woman simply because she played hard to get? You do not think that I was
attracted to your mind as well as your initial reserve?’ he questioned hotly, shaking his dark head.