“I don’t know,” she replied. As she stood up, she grabbed her cigarette packet and lighter from the bedside table and threw them at him. “Light me one, will you?” Then she sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unfurled the scroll of paper.
Rupert didn’t smoke. In fact, he loathed cigarettes, but not wanting to appear gauche, he did as she asked, throwing himself onto the bed beside her and running an appreciative hand down her back. She stiffened. Without looking at him she said, “I’ve enjoyed you, Rupert. But now I want to be alone.”
“What is it?” he asked, astounded that she could suddenly turn so cold.
“I said, I want to be alone.” For a moment he was unsure how to react. No woman had ever treated him like that. He felt humiliated. When he saw that she wasn’t going to change her mind, he reluctantly began to dress, clutching at the intimacy they had shared only moments before.
“Will I see you again?” He was aware that he sounded desperate.
She shook her head, irritated. “Just go!”
He did up his shoelaces. She still hadn’t looked at him. Her attention was entirely captivated by the scroll. It was as if he had already gone.
“Well, I’ll just let myself out then,” he mumbled.
She lifted her eyes to the glass doors that gave on to the upper deck and stared at the pink evening sky, now dissolving into night. She did not hear the door slam or Rupert’s heavy footsteps as he trod gloomily up the gangplank, only the whisper of a voice she thought she had forgotten.
“Oh dear! Someone doesn’t look very happy,” commented Fitz as Rupert made his way to Chelsea Embankment and disappeared beneath the street lamps. His comment suspended their game of bridge for a moment. Sprout cocked his ears and raised his drooping eyes before closing them again with a sigh.
“Well, she does get through them, darling,” said Viv, curling a stray wisp of blond hair behind her ear. “She’s like a black widow.”
“I thought they ate their mates,” said Wilfrid. Fitz contemplated that delicious thought before placing a card on the table with a snap.
“Who are we talking about?” asked Georgia, crinkling her nose at Wilfrid.
“Viv’s neighbor,” he replied.
“She’s a tart,” added Viv caustically, winning the trick and swiping it over to her side of the table.
“I thought you were friends.”
“We are, Fitzroy. I love her in spite of her faults. After all, we all have them, don’t we?” She grinned and flicked ash into a fluorescent green dish.
“Not you, Viv. You’re perfect.”
“Thank you, Fitzroy,” she replied, then turned to Georgia and added with a wink, “I pay him to say that.”
Fitz glanced out of the little round window. The deck of the Valentina was still and quiet. He imagined the beautiful Alba lying naked on her bed, flushed and smiling, with curves and mounds in all the right places, and was momentarily distracted from the game.
“Wake up, Fitz!” said Wilfrid, snapping his fingers. “What planet are you on?”
Viv placed her cards on the table and sat back. She took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled with a loud puff. Gazing upon him with eyes made heavy from drink and the excesses of life, she said, “Oh, the same sad planet as so many other foolish men!”
Alba stared at the portrait sketched in pastels on the scroll of brown paper and felt a rush of emotion. It was as if she were looking into a mirror, but one that increased the loveliness of her image. The face was oval, like hers, with fine cheekbones and a strong, determined jaw, but the eyes weren’t hers at all. They were almond-shaped, mossy brown in color, a mixture of laughter and a deep, unfathomable sadness. They held her attention, stared right back at her and through her and, when she moved, they followed her. She gazed into them for a long while, swallowed up in hopes and dreams that never bore fruit. Although the mouth only hinted at a smile, the whole face seemed to open with happiness like a sunflower. Alba’s stomach twisted with longing. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she was staring into the face of her mother. At the bottom of the picture, written in Latin, were the words Valentina 1943, dum spiro, ti amo. It was signed in ink Thomas Arbuckle. Alba reread those words a dozen times until they blurred with her tears. “While I breathe, I love you.”
Alba had learned Italian as a child. In an unusual moment of charity her stepmother, the Buffalo, had suggested she take lessons in order to maintain some contact with her Mediterranean roots, roots that in every other way the woman had tried to eradicate. After all, Alba’s mother had been the love of her father’s life. And what a great love it had been. Her stepmother was all too aware of the shadow Valentina cast over her marriage. Unable to erase so powerful a memory, all she could do was attempt to smother it. So Valentina’s name was simply never mentioned. They had never traveled to Italy. Alba knew none of her mother’s relatives, and her father avoided her questions, so she had long since given up asking. As a child she had shrunk into an isolated world of patchwork facts that she had managed to sew together by devious means. She would retreat into that world and derive comfort from the invented images of her beautiful mother on the shores of the sleepy Italian town where she had met and fallen in love with her father during the war.