Chapter Eight #2
‘I don’t suppose,’ Gabriel said with an indolent shrug, ‘that this is any kind of state secret.’ Their eyes met, and she raised her eyebrows.
‘Okay, I admit it’s not something I shout from the rooftops but…
when I look back, it was a youthful escapade that was understandable at the time.
’ He paused, caught the eye of a passing waiter and ordered two glasses of cold, citrusy soda, which was a speciality of the café, and a plate of fresh fruit, along with cornettos con crema for them both.
‘My mother made a point of not talking about my dad at all. Their relationship ended, and it was buried underneath silence.’ He thought about his past for a few seconds, unfamiliar with the feeling of recounting it verbally.
‘I was too young to remember the details, but there were none of the usual arguments or shouting or raised voices.’
‘Your mother’s not the shouty sort.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but her silence when my father vanished did leave a void, and when I got older, I filled that void with all sorts of childish speculation. By the time I was thirteen, I’d come to the conclusion that my father was out there somewhere, possibly banned from seeing me.
But if not, then certainly desperate to make up for lost time with his only son.
It was easy to romanticise someone who was never talked about and a situation that was never discussed. ’
He sat back as their order was brought to their table. Then they were facing one another as they made inroads into the delicacies in front of them.
‘I can’t believe I’m eating all this after a gelato,’ Jennifer groaned. ‘I’m going to get back to England the size of a beached whale.’
Gabriel laughed. If he hadn’t wanted to continue with the conversation, her interruption would have provided a natural break, and he knew instinctively that she would have let whatever curiosity she had go. He realised that he wanted to continue.
‘I found out where he was living. For an amateur sleuth, it was pretty easy, because my mother had no locked filing cabinets, and the information was there in all the divorce paperwork packed up in neat little folders. If I’d taken the time to actually read through any of it, I might have found out what became apparent when I showed up on his doorstep two days later. ’
‘What did you find?’
‘He’d had a second family whilst he’d been married to my mother.
He was open about that. He also had no interest in me whatsoever.
He wasn’t curious about me, my life or anything I’d done.
He couldn’t give a damn about the things a parent should give a damn about.
He’d walked off, and he’d never looked back.
Later, much later, when I was an adult, I discovered the true extent of what he’d done, and it went beyond a second family.
He’d fleeced my mother of as much as he possibly could, left the family finances in a precarious position and had done it all without conscience.
She’d married him for love. He’d married her for money. ’
‘I’m sorry, Gabriel. That must have been devastating for you to discover.’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘I managed to get the finances back on track as soon as I was old enough to take over the reins, when I found out the true extent of the unholy mess with the divorce settlement and the way he’d trampled over my mother to squeeze as much as he could out of her.’
Jennifer looked at him in silence. His expression was impassive even though he was talking about an event that would have been heartrending.
She hadn’t had a clue.
Of course, she would have been too young to have even grasped the situation all those years ago, but afterward…
not a word had been spoken. Her mother and his knew each other well, and yet nothing had filtered down to reach her over the years.
He certainly had never breathed a word about that single devastating event in his life.
He’d wiped it from his consciousness and had only revived it now as a way of demonstrating just how immune he was to the concept of love and marriage and what lay at the end of that rainbow.
He might have played truant with work for a few days, and he might have actually allowed her to fall asleep in his bed instead of insisting she return to her bedroom, but had he wanted to impress on her how little both meant in the great scheme of things?
‘Did your mum ever talk about how she felt? About your dad? The divorce? What he did?’
‘Those would have been conversations best left untouched,’ Gabriel said dryly.
‘Really? I’m not sure I agree with that, actually.’
‘Yes, but you’re coming from the perspective of someone who uses cunning psychological tactics to squeeze information from your unsuspecting victims.’ He grinned, and Jennifer grinned back at him.
‘Don’t be mean. You should walk a mile in a teacher’s shoes.
Sometimes it’s the only way.’ She looked at him thoughtfully.
‘I guess,’ she mused pensively, ‘that at first your mother wanted to protect you. Then later, maybe too much time had passed. If you never asked any questions, she shied away from volunteering hurtful information. Parents do that. They protect their children. I never knew how ill my father was until he just couldn’t hide it any longer. ’
‘Have you noticed that on a fine, sunny day in one of the most beautiful towns in Italy, we’re wasting time having a deep, meaningful conversation about a past that neither of us can change?’
‘I suppose that’s your way of saying you’d like a change of topic?’
‘As I’ve said so many times before, how well you know me. What do you think of the pastries, by the way? They’re quite famous in this part of the world.’
So that insight was now gone, never again to be explored, Jennifer thought, idly lapsing into comfortable conversation and then eventually resuming her lazy people watching in easy silence next to him.
Yet he had fired up a train of thought in her head that was already picking up speed.
Beneath that remote expression, what did he really feel? Did he think about that past that couldn’t be changed and feel the pain of that child who was turned away?
Did he think that his mother remained bitter about what had happened?
Was that why he had become so wary of love?
Because he’d felt the sting of betrayal on behalf of his mother, whom he dearly loved?
With an example set of the worst love could be, had he retreated into the safety of a place sealed off from all emotion, incapable of wanting to find out the very best love could be?
Mostly it was dawning on her just why he remained so aloof in his private life, so determined never to give his heart to anyone.
It wasn’t because he could never love anyone. He loved his mother. His heart could hold love. What it couldn’t hold was trust. He’d been left without that, and without trust, how could love ever flourish?
He’d made a point of making sure to warn her off getting any ideas into her head that fiction might turn into reality. As much as he could care about anyone outside of his mother, he cared about her. They were friends more than lovers, and he didn’t want to see her hurt.
He probably warned all the women he slept with, but he probably didn’t care all that much if they chose to ignore his warnings.
Somewhere deep inside her, something felt vaguely broken at the realisation that he really would never commit to anyone, not in any meaningful way.
Had she somehow thought that he’d been exaggerating when he’d said that? Kidding herself? And anyway, did it matter?
She slid her eyes across to him. She could remember him as a teenager, lanky without the muscle mass of the adult, but already with those haughty, chiselled features that made all the girls in the village turn round and stare.
Now he was so much more, and she felt that she could carry on staring at him and thinking about him forever, which made her shift and frown with discomfort.
He was getting too enigmatic for his own good, she thought briskly. She made immediate plans to curb her curiosity. Yet again.
‘I suppose we should think about getting back?’ she said, standing up and waiting while he took his time to follow suit.
He looked at his watch, something beyond a mere run-of-the-mill Rolex. She’d once complimented him on it, but all she could remember about it was the fact that you had to put your name on some kind of exclusive waiting list to even be considered as a potential buyer.
‘You must be exhausted after sharing so much with me, Gabriel. You probably need a lie-down.’
He stuck on his shades and flashed her a dazzling smile.
‘Only if you’re in the bed next to me, and I can’t guarantee that the only thing we’ll be doing is lying down.’
And just like that, they were back in the moment. As they made their way to the vineyards in the four-wheel drive car Gabriel had rented while they were there, the details of what he’d said seemed to fade away.
They chatted about their day, and he impressed her by knowing more about the area than she would have given him credit for.
‘You underestimate me,’ he said in the sort of tone that implied there was no way he thought that she might actually believe that he wasn’t a genius about the details of a small town in Tuscany. ‘I know everything.’ He slanted her a wicked smile.
‘You don’t know who’s going to be at this party Roberto and Luisa are having for us this evening.’
‘No need to know, and why would I care?’ He took his hand off the wheel just for a second so that he could slide it over her thigh. ‘Probably some local vineyard owners who want to have a little more business chat with me before we leave the day after tomorrow.’
Jennifer shivered. Things would be different in En-gland. They would no longer be in the sun-drenched romantic surroundings of Tuscany, where Gabriel had put work on hold so that they could both forget about the real world for a little while.