No one took the slightest notice of us in the hotel. I went along the empty passage in my dressing-gown and knocked on her door, and she opened it in hers to let me in. I locked it behind me.
‘If my sister could see us,’ she said smiling, ‘she’d have a fit.’
‘I’ll go away... if you like.’
‘Could you?’ She put her arms round my neck.
‘Very difficult.’
‘I don’t ask it.’
I kissed her. ‘It would be impossible to go now,’ I said.
She sighed happily. ‘I absolutely agree. We will just have to make the best of it.’
We did.
We went back to Milan in the morning sitting side by side in the railway carriage and holding hands surreptitiously under her coat, as if by this tiny area of skin contact we could keep alive the total union of the night. I had never wanted to hold hands with anyone before: never realised that it could feel like being plugged into a small electric current, warm, comforting, and vibrant, all at the same time.
Apart from being together, it was a depressing day. No one had seen Simon.
‘He couldn’t just vanish,’ I said in exasperation, standing late in the afternoon in a chilly wind outside the last of the hospitals. We had drawn a blank there as everywhere else, though they had gone to some trouble to make sure for us. No man of his description had been admitted for any illness or treated for any accident during the past ten days.
‘Where else can we look?’ she said, the tiredness showing in her voice and in the droop of her rounded body. She had been splendid all day, asking questions unendingly from me and translating the replies, calm and business-like and effective. It wasn’t her fault the answers had all been negative. Police, government departments, undertakers, we had tried them all. We had rung up every hotel in Milan and asked for him: he had stayed in none.
‘I suppose we could ask the taxi drivers at the airport...’ I said finally.
‘There are so many... and who would remember one passenger after so long?’
‘He had no luggage,’ I said as I’d said a dozen times before. ‘He didn’t know he was coming here until fifteen minutes before he took off. He couldn’t have made any plans. He doesn’t speak Italian. He hadn’t any Italian money. Where did he go? What did he do?’
She shook her head dispiritedly. There was no answer. We took a tram back to the station and with half an hour to wait made a few last enquiries from the station staff. They didn’t remember him. It was hopeless.
Over dinner at midnight in the same café as the night before we gradually forgot the day’s frustration; but the fruitless grind, though it hadn’t dug up a trace of Simon, had planted foundations beneath Gabriella and me.
She drooped against me going back to the hotel, and I saw with remorse how exhausted she was. ‘I’ve tired you too much.’
She smiled at the anxiety in my voice. ‘You don’t realise how much energy you have.’
‘Energy?’ I repeated in surprise.
‘Yes. It must be that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t look energetic. You’re quiet, and you move like machinery, oiled and smooth. No effort. No jerks. No awkwardness. And inside somewhere is a dynamo. It doesn’t run down. I can feel its power. All day I’ve felt it.’
I laughed. ‘You’re too fanciful.’
‘No. I’m right.’
I shook my head. There were no dynamos ticking away inside me. I was a perfectly ordinary and not too successful man, and the smoothness she saw was only tidiness.
She was already in bed and half asleep when I went along to her room. I locked the door and climbed in beside her, and she made a great effort to wake up for my sake.
‘Go to sleep,’ I said, kissing her lightly. ‘There is always the morning.’
She smiled contentedly and snuggled into my arms, and I lay there cradling her sweet soft body, her head on my chest and her hair against my mouth, and felt almost choked by the intensity with which I wanted to protect her and share with her everything I had: Henry Grey, I thought in surprise in the dark, was suddenly more than half way down the untried track to honest-to-goodness love.
Sunday morning we strolled aimlessly round the city, talking and looking at the mountains of leather work in the shops in the arcades; Sunday afternoon we went improbably to a football match, an unexpected passion of Gabriella’s; and Sunday night we went to bed early because, as she said with her innocent giggle, we would have to be up at six to get her back to start work in the shop on time. But there was something desperate in the way she clung to me during that night, as if it were our last for ever instead of only a week or two, and when I kissed her there were tears on her cheeks.
‘Why are you crying?’ I said, wiping them away with my fingers. ‘Don’t cry.’
‘I don’t know why.’ She sniffed, half laughing. ‘The world is a sad place. Beauty bursts you. An explosion inside. It can only come out as tears.’
I was impossibly moved. I didn’t deserve her tears. I kissed them away in humility and understood why people said love was painful, why Cupid was invented with arrows. Love did pierce the heart, truly.
It wasn’t until we were on the early train to Milan the next morning that she said anything about money, and from her hesitation in beginning I saw that she didn’t want to offend me.
‘I will repay you what you lent me for my bill,’ she said matter of factly, but a bit breathlessly. I had pushed the notes into her hand on the way downstairs, as she hadn’t wanted me to pay for her publicly, and she hadn’t enough with her to do it herself.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘It was a much more expensive place than I’d thought of...’
‘Big hotels ignore you better.’
She laughed. ‘All the same...’
‘No.’
‘But you don’t earn much. You can’t possibly afford it all. The hotel and the train fares, and the dinners.’
‘I earned some money winning a race.’
‘Enough?’
‘I’ll win another race... then it will be enough.’
‘Giulio doesn’t like it that you work with horses.’ She laughed. ‘He says that if you were good enough to be a jockey you’d do it all the time instead of being a groom.’
‘What does Giulio do?’
‘He works for the government in the taxation office.’
‘Ah,’ I said, smiling. ‘Would it help if you told him my father has left me some money? Enough to come to see you, anyway, when I get it.’
‘I’m not sure I’ll tell him. He judges people too much by how much money they’ve got.’
‘Do you want to marry a rich man?’
‘Not to please Giulio.’
‘To please yourself?’
‘Not rich necessarily. But not too poor. I don’t want to worry about how to afford shoes for the children.’
I smoothed her fingers with my own.
‘I think I will have to learn Italian,’ I said.
She gave me the flashing smile. ‘Is English very difficult?’
‘You can practise on me.’
‘If you come back often enough. If your father’s money should not be saved for the future.’
‘I think,’ I said slowly, smiling into her dark eyes, ‘that there will be enough left. Enough to buy the children’s shoes.’
I went to New York with the horses the following day in the teeth of furious opposition from the family. Several relatives were still staying in the house, including my three sharp tongued eldest sisters, none of whom showed much reserve in airing their views. I sat through a depressing lunch, condemned from all sides. The general opinion was, it seemed, that my unexplained absence over the week-end was disgraceful enough, but that continuing with my job was scandalous. Mother cried hysterical tears and Alice was bitterly reproving.