Salvatore, coming to find her, found her standing before Antonio’s picture, so lost in it that she didn’t hear him. From this angle he could just make out the fond look on her face, the tenderness of her smile. As he watched she raised her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss. She might, or might not, have given a little sigh. He couldn’t be sure.
Helena seemed to become aware of him.
‘Look at his eyes,’ she said, indicating the picture. ‘He was a real devil, wasn’t he?’
‘He was in his youth. What about when you knew him?’
‘We-ell,’ she mused, remembering Antonio’s frailty, and thinking that a man didn’t have to be physically capable to be a devil. There were other ways, charming ways that ended in laughter. Remembering those times, she smiled, her eyes fixed on the distance.
Salvatore, watching intently, saw what he’d expected. She had seduced Antonio into action, driving him beyond his strength until he reached the inevitable end. Suddenly he was angry with himself for forgetting so easily that she was an experienced temptress. Her smile, with its hint of a secret history, told him everything he needed to know.
It was a useful reminder not to forget again.
She passed on and he stood for a moment, considering the soft seductiveness of her walk, the way one part of her body moved against another, which could drive a man to distraction.
Or to death, he thought.
He caught up with her as she paused before a wedding picture.
‘My parents,’ he said.
It was the bride who held Helena’s attention; young, beautiful, glowing with joy and love, she couldn’t tear her gaze from her groom. The man was clearly Salvatore’s father, yet there was something missing. His features were similar, but he lacked the driven intensity of his son, an intensity that would always make Salvatore stand out in the world.
Near-by was a picture that showed more of the family. There was Salvatore, seemingly in his early teens, surrounded by older people, presumably aunts and uncles.
‘And there’s Antonio,’ she said, peering. ‘Who’s the woman sitting beside him?’
‘That’s my mother.’
‘What? But she-?’
Astounded, Helena stared, trying to believe that this middle-aged woman was the same person as the glorious bride of the earlier picture. She was too thin, her whole aspect was tense and strained, and Helena had the feeling that she was putting on a brave, defiant face for the world. She stood just behind the young Salvatore, her glance turned slightly towards him, her hand possessively on his shoulder, as though he was all she had.
She looked back and forth between the two pictures, horrified.
‘How did it happen?’ she asked. ‘She’s so changed.’
‘People do change with the passing of time,’ he observed.
‘But it can’t have been many years after the wedding, and she looks as though some dreadful tragedy had happened to her.’
‘My mother took her duties very seriously, not only in the home but also in the many charities she supported.’
He spoke in a distant voice that made Helena feel he was warning her off the subject. She was dissatisfied. There was more here than simply passing years. Yet she supposed she had no right to ask further. She took one last look at the picture.
‘Poor woman,’ she sighed. ‘How sad she seems!’
Salvatore didn’t answer, and she guessed he was offended by her continued interest. But when she glanced at his face she saw it strangely softened.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘She was. Shall we go back?’
It was almost a surprise to discover that there was still food on the table from their abandoned meal. So much had happened since, not outwardly but inwardly. They had confronted each other from behind carefully erected barriers of mistrust and dislike, but neither had allowed for the random chance of physical attraction.
It defied belief. It was unexpected, unwanted, but undeniable. As malign and frisky as a jester, it danced between them, laughing at them both, caught in its trap.
Helena had no doubt that he was as trapped as herself. She knew it, not through vanity, but through her senses, fiercely alive as they hadn’t been for years, not since-She shut the thought off there.
Her mind swung obediently into action. Stay cool. Stay in charge.
She sat down, aiming a smile at him like a missile.
‘Now I must finish this cake. It’s delicious.’
‘Some coffee?’
‘How delightful!’
They were back behind their defences, looking out, keeping watch, big guns primed, ready for anything.
‘So,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to make me wait for the factory?’
‘At the very least. At the most you won’t get it at all.’
‘You’re not seriously planning to keep it?’ he demanded in a tone of incredulity that riled her.
‘Isn’t that what I’ve been saying all this time? Or weren’t you listening?’
‘I didn’t take it seriously. You were annoyed with me, perhaps rightly so, but you’ve had your fun and now it’s time to get real.’
‘You’re right. So listen to me. I really don’t intend to sell. Why should I?’
‘Because you know nothing about it,’ he said, exasperated. ‘No woman genuinely understands business.’
‘I don’t believe I heard that. Come into the twenty-first century.’
‘If you’re planning to run that place, be my guest. You’ll be bankrupt in no time and fall into my hands.’
‘Of course I’m not going to run it personally. Antonio told me that the manager is excellent. Don’t count on forcing me to sell. You can’t.’
‘I think you’ll find I can. I have a number of aces up my sleeve.’
‘I’m sure of it, but I have a few myself.’
Unexpectedly he smiled, raising his glass in salute.
‘Here’s to our confrontation,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope we both enjoy it equally.’
‘Oh, I mean to,’ she said, toasting him.
He began to laugh, surprising her with a tone that sounded genuinely warm, even charming. But that was just another of his tricks, she reminded herself quickly.
‘We’ve travelled a long, winding journey tonight,’ he said. ‘Have two people ever learned so much about each other in such a short time, yet still known nothing at all?’
‘Nothing at all,’ she echoed. ‘Yes, we’d both be wise to remember that, wouldn’t we?’
‘If it’s possible, but the danger with illusions is that they seem so much like reality-at least, that’s true of the best of them, the most desirable.’
She nodded. ‘Then we enter a conspiracy against ourselves,’ she murmured, ‘believing what we wish to believe, persuading ourselves that illusion is reality and reality illusion. And how do we ever know?’
‘That’s easy,’ he said wryly. ‘We know when it’s too late.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘That’s true.’
Salvatore was about to reply but something he saw in her eyes held him silent. She was looking into the distance and he had the feeling that she no longer saw him, or even knew that he was there.
‘What is it?’ he said urgently. ‘Helena, speak to me.’
But she was silent, lost in a world he couldn’t enter.
CHAPTER FOUR
HELENA was in another place, one in which the air sang with a hundred new impressions. The most disconcerting was the way she and Salvatore were talking, as though there was an instinctive connection between their thoughts. It was surely impossible, yet he knew what she was thinking, in a way that had only ever been true with Antonio.
It wouldn’t last. They were still enemies, but for a shocking moment she could see ahead to another world where enemies clung together in uneasy alliance.
Then the mist cleared and the world settled back into its right place.