‘I lied,’ she said calmly. ‘You wanted to be kept out of sight, so that’s what I would have done-but you would have been in our home, where the world couldn’t see you, but I could see you every day. Whether you were yourself, or whether your mind had gone, you would have been my husband and I would have loved you until the last moment of my life.’
Suddenly, shockingly, she found her temper rising. Why should she have to explain all this to him?
‘So now you know,’ she said. ‘I lied to you. I wanted to marry you so much, I’d have said and done anything. I made that promise without the most distant intention of keeping it, because I loved you with all of my heart and all of my life-but you just couldn’t realise, could you?
‘Can you see it now? Or are you just too proud and arrogant-and too stupid-to understand? You think love is a matter of making bargains, and you can’t get it into your head that love has to be unconditional. If it isn’t unconditional, it isn’t love.’
She waited to see if he would say anything, but he seemed too stunned to speak. Was she being foolish? she wondered. Was she risking their marriage for the satisfaction of getting this off her chest?
But she had no choice. If they were to stand a chance, the air must be clear between them.
‘So now you know the worst about me,’ she said. ‘I tricked you into marriage by deceit. I’m a shameless, dishonest woman who’ll do anything to get her own way.’
When at last Dante spoke, he said only two words, and they were the last words Ferne expected to hear.
‘Thank goodness!’
‘What was that?’
‘Thank goodness you’re a liar, my darling! Thank goodness you had the courage to be shameless and deceitful. When I think of the disaster that could have befallen me if you’d been truthful, I tremble inside.’
‘What-what are you talking about?’ she said, half-laughing, half-afraid to believe her ears.
‘I never felt I had the right to marry you, knowing what I might be leading you into. It was my way of setting you free. If you’d refused to promise, I’d have forced myself to refuse the marriage, although to be your husband was what I wanted with all my heart. In life, in death, or in that half-life I dreaded so much, I want you, and only you, to be there with me.
‘But that felt like selfishness. I demanded that promise because I believed I had no right to trap you and blight your life.’
‘But you could never blight my life,’ she protested. ‘You are my life. Haven’t you understood that?’
‘I guess I’m just starting to. It seemed too much to hope that you should love me as much as I love you. I still can’t quite take it in, but I know this: my life belongs to you. Not only because we married, but because the life I have now is the life you gave me.
‘Take it, and use it as you will. It was you who drove the clouds away, and you who brings the sunlight. And, as long as you are with me, that will always be true.’
Two weeks later Dante was discharged from hospital, and he and Ferne went to spend a few weeks at the Villa Rinucci. Even when they returned to their apartment they lived quietly, the only excitement being the delayed wedding-breakfast, celebrated when the whole Rinucci family was present.
After that everyone held their breath for the birth of the newest family member. Portia Rinucci was born the next spring, a combination of her mother’s looks and her father’s spirit. At her christening, it was observed by everyone that it was her father who held her possessively, his face blazing with love and pride, while her mother looked on with fond tolerance, perfectly happy with the unusual arrangement.
If sometimes Ferne’s eyes darkened, it was only because she could never quite forget the cloud that had retreated but not completely vanished. As her daughter grew, it might yet darken their lives again-but she would face it, strengthened by a triumphant love and a happiness that few women knew.
Lucy Gordon
