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‘So you keep saying,’ he said with soft mockery, and watched her crossly flush at the double meaning, the sexual teasing.
‘I don’t think you’re funny!’
‘I know you don’t. Come on, Antonia, try it; I know you’re going to love it.’
He was right; it was delicious, as was the wine, and the music on the compact disc player. While they ate, Patrick talked about the great Venetian artist, Tintoretto, whose painting was a mixture of mystical fantasy and soft, subaqueous Venetian light. Antonia listened, watching the candle-flame smoke and twist in the night breeze from an open window.
When they cleared the table and washed up, Patrick began sketching her. Dreamily she sat in the candlelight, watched herself grow under his deft fingers: a slender creature with dishevelled light curls and drowsy, languorous eyes, a girl with her own familiar features, yet someone startlingly different, a new self, invented by Patrick.
He pushed the sketch over to her later. ‘Well, what do you think?’
She looked at the mouth of the girl in the sketch; parted and sensuous, it wasn’t hers. Nor were the glimmering, inviting eyes.
‘That isn’t me,’ she said huskily.
Patrick got up and unhooked a small Venetian mirror from the wall near by and propped it up in front of her, on the table. ‘Look at yourself,’ he said in a low, slurred voice, leaning over her shoulder, his face against hers. ‘It is you, Antonia, as you should be, not as you think you are.’
She looked, her senses drowning, and couldn’t deny it—the reflection exactly matched the sketch, the girl with her aching, parted mouth, the eyes full of sensual, erotic yearning.
‘The first time I saw you, you looked like that,’ Patrick said, and she gave him an angry, jealous look.
‘The first time you saw me, your engagement had just been broken off, and you were i
n no mood to find me sexy!’
He grimaced. ‘I was angry that night; I’d been angry for days,’ he admitted. ‘But I couldn’t take my eyes off you from the minute I saw you. When I heard, afterwards, what happened later that night, I felt as guilty as if I’d done it, because I knew I had wanted you myself.’
‘That wasn’t the impression I got!’
‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘I wish to God I had gone over to you, danced with you, even taken you to bed—if I had you wouldn’t have been on that beach alone, would you?’
Tears pricked her eyes. She got up, stumbled to the door, and ran upstairs without saying goodnight.
She was awake half the night imagining what might have happened two years ago if Patrick hadn’t slapped her down and walked off. If he had danced with her, as he’d said, taken her to bed.
Would I have gone? she asked her brooding triangular cat’s face in the mirror of her dressing-table, her elbows propped on the bed facing it.
Yes. Oh, yes. That night, that moment, like ripe fruit falling off a tree, she had fallen for Patrick. She hated to admit it, but she couldn’t deny the truth any longer. If he had reached out he could have taken her easily, because she had fallen in love with him at first sight; but he hadn’t reached out, he had walked away, and two years of her life had been blighted.
Sometimes I think I hate him, she thought, looking into her slanting, angry eyes in the mirror. I’d like to make him suffer the way he did me. I’d like to see him on his knees. If he gives me that mocking, sexy smile once more and tells me to ask for what I want, I’ll scream!
She turned over and buried her hot face in the cool pillow, but that only reminded her of his mouth, the feel of it under her own, the taste of it. Groaning, she turned on to her side again. It was a very long night, but by dawn she had finally fallen asleep. At least she didn’t have a nightmare that night.
Over breakfast, Patrick told her and Alex that he was going out across the lagoon to the island of Murano, where he was having glass-blowing lessons with a friend who had a workshop over there and was a famous glass-maker.
‘Why don’t you come, Antonia? You could take a lesson yourself; you might well find you have a flair for working with glass. You have strong wrists and a good eye.’
She knew it was a beautiful trip out across the misty reaches of the lagoon on a fine summer morning, but she found the prospect of making that journey with Patrick far too disturbing after last night.
‘Thanks, but I have other things to do,’ she said coolly.
Patrick gave her a dark, smouldering look, but in front of her uncle had to accept the answer.
She spent the rest of the day imagining what it would have been like to go with him, see the opalescent mists rise as the vaporetto sped over the water, and the sun came through, to stare up at the cemetery island of San Michele, the white walls, behind which were white Carrara marble monuments, the tall, dark flames of cypresses burning against the blue sky, the angels, flowers, and photographs of the dead on the graves. The whole island had a melancholy tranquillity, which she loved.
She knew, by now, that Patrick’s passion for such places matched her own. They had found out so much about each other from their hours of talking about painting, sculpture, music, perhaps even more from the silences that fell now and then when both of them sat watching the light on the falling spray of water from the fountain, the dark shadows of the fig tree shifting on the gravel, the sound of pigeons cooing on a warm afternoon.
She went for a walk along the riva for an hour that afternoon, and when she got back the front door was opened by Susan-Jane.
