Several children came and went, all indistinguishable to my eyes. Seven of them, there should be, I remembered. Four boys, three girls, Patrick had said. Although it was nearly midnight, none of them seemed to have gone to bed. They had all been waiting to see Patrick and tumbled about him like puppies.
When Lisabetta had poured the coffee and one of the children had handed it round Giulio asked Patrick a question, looking at me.
‘He wants to know what your job is,’ Patrick said.
‘Tell him I look after the horses.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
Giulio was unimpressed. He asked another question.
Smiling faintly, Patrick said, ‘He wants to know how much you earn?’
‘My pay for a single trip to Milan is about one fifth of yours.’
‘He won’t like that.’
‘Nor do I.’
He laughed. When he translated Giulio scowled.
Patrick and I slept in a room which normally belonged to two of the boys, now doubling with the other two. Gabriella shared a third bedroom with the two elder girls, while the smallest was in with her parents. There were toys all over the place in our room, and small shoes kicked off and clothes dumped in heaps, and the unchanged sheets on the boys’ beds were wrinkled like elephant skins from their restless little bodies. Patrick had from long globe trotting habit come equipped with pyjamas, slippers, washing things, and a clean shirt for the morning. I eyed this splendour with some envy, and slept in my underpants.
‘Why,’ said Patrick in the dark, ‘won’t you tell them you have a title?’
‘It isn’t important.’
‘It would be to Giulio.’
‘That’s the best reason for not telling him.’
‘I don’t see why you’re so keen to keep it a secret.’
‘Well, you try telling everyone you’re an earl’s son, and see what happens.’
‘I’d love it. Everyone would be bowing and scraping in all directions. Priorities galore. Instant service. A welcome on every mat.’
‘And you’d never be sure if anyone liked you for yourself.’
‘Of course you would.’
‘How many head grooms have you brought here before?’ I asked mildly.
He drew in a breath audibly and didn’t answer.
‘Would you have offered me this bed if Timmie had kept his big mouth shut?’
He was silent.
I said, ‘Remind me to kick your teeth in in the morning.’
But the morning, I found, was a long way off. I simply couldn’t sleep. Gabriella’s bed was a foot away from me on the far side of the wall, and I lay and sweated for her with a desire I hadn’t dreamed possible. My body literally ached. Cold controlled Henry Grey, I thought helplessly. Grey by name and grey by nature. Cold controlled Henry Grey lying in a child’s bed in a foreign city biting his arm to stop himself crying out. You could laugh at such hunger: ridicule it away. I tried that, but it didn’t work. It stayed with me hour after wretched hour, all the way to the dawn, and I would have been much happier if I’d been able to go to sleep and dream about her instead.
She had kissed me good night in the passage outside her door, lightly, gaily, with Patrick and Lisabetta and about six children approvingly looking on. And she had stopped and retreated right there because it was the same as in the street outside the restaurant; even the lightest touch could start an earthquake. There just wasn’t room for an earthquake in that crowded flat.
Patrick lent me his razor without a word, when we got up.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘You were quite right. I would not have offered to take you with me if the Welshman hadn’t said...’
‘I know.’ I put on my shirt and buttoned the cuffs.
‘All the same I still wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought you looked all right.’
I turned towards him, surprised.
‘What you need, Henry, is a bit more self-confidence. Why ever shouldn’t people like you for yourself? Gabriella obviously does. So do I.’
‘People often don’t.’ I pulled on my socks.
‘You probably don’t give them half a chance.’ With which devastatingly accurate shot he went out of the door, shrugging his arms into his authoritative Captain’s uniform.
Subdued by the raw steely morning, the three of us went back to the airport. Gabriella had dark shadows under her eyes and wouldn’t look at me, though I could think of nothing I had done to offend her. She spoke only to Patrick, and in Italian, and he, smiling briefly, answered her in the same language. When we arrived at the airport, she asked me, hurriedly, not to come and talk to her at the gift counter, and almost ran away from me without saying good-bye. I didn’t try to stop her. It would be hours before we got the horses loaded, and regardless of what she asked, I intended to see her again before I left.
I hung around the airport all the morning with Conker and Timmie, and about twelve Patrick came and found me and with a wide grin said I was in luck, traffic at Gatwick was restricted because of deep snow, and unessential freight flights were suspended for another day.
‘You’d better telephone the studs again, and tell them we are taking the mares to England tomorrow at eight,’ he said. ‘Weather permitting.’
Gabriella received the news with such a flash of delight that my spirits rose to the ionosphere. I hesitated over the next question, but she made it easy for me.
‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked gravely, studying my face.
‘I didn’t sleep at all.’
She sighed, almost blushing. ‘Nor did I.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said tentatively, ‘if we spent the evening together, we could sleep tonight.’
‘Henry!’ She was laughing. ‘Where?’
Where proved more difficult than I had imagined, as she would not consider a hotel, as we must not sleep there, but go back to her sister’s before midnight. One must not be shameless, she said. She could not stay out all night. We ended up, of all unlikely places, inside the D.C.4, lying in a cosy nest hollowed in a heap of blankets stacked in the luggage bay alongside the galley.
There, where no one would ever find us, and with a good deal of the laughter of total happiness, we spent the whole of the evening in the age-old way: and were pleased and perhaps relieved to find that we suited each other perfectly.
Lying quietly cradled in my arms, she told me hesitantly that she had had a lover before, which I knew anyway by then, but that it was odd making love anywhere except in bed. She felt the flutter in my chest and lifted her head up to peer at my face in the dim reflected moonlight.
‘Why are you laughing?’ she said.
‘It so happens that I have never made love in bed.’
‘Where then?’
‘In the grass.’
‘Henry! Is that the custom in England?’
‘Only at the end of parties in the summer.’
She smiled and put her head down contentedly again, and I stroked her hair and thought how wholesome she was, and how dreadful in comparison seemed the half-drunk nymphs taken casually down the deb-dance garden path. I would never do that again, I thought. Never again.
‘I was ashamed, this morning,’ she said, ‘of wanting this so much. Ashamed of what I had been thinking all night.’
‘There is no shame in it.’
‘Lust is one of the seven deadly sins.’
‘Love is a virtue.’