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‘You didn’t! Oh, please God, tell me you didn’t proposition him.’
She shrugged, sitting at a table, picking up a cloth in one hand, a glass dolphin in the other, absently rubbing its head. ‘Turning fifty is no joy, Valentina, you mark my words. Nobody wants you. Nobody sees you. You might just as well be invisible when it comes to men.’
‘There’s nothing flattering about being asked to be someone’s mistress, Lily!’
‘But of course there is. He’s a very good-looking man.’ And then she stopped rubbing and stared into the middle distance as if she was building an entire story around the possibilities. ‘Just think, if you play your cards right, he might even marry you...’
‘I told him I wouldn’t do it.’
Her mother looked at her, and Tina saw an entire fantasy crashing down in her eyes. ‘Oh.’
‘And that’s when he told me about Dad, and agreeing to put up the farm. Is that why you were on the phone to him, Lily? Looking for a Plan B in case I couldn’t save you? Begging for favours from a man you abandoned with a baby more than twenty-five years ago? A man who by rights should hate your guts.’
‘He doesn’t, though. I think Mitchell was the only man who ever really loved me.’
‘Well, you sure made a mess of that.’
‘I still don’t understand what your problem is. People would kill to sleep with Luca Barbarigo.’
And the desire to shock her mother just for once, instead of being the one who was always shocked, was too great. ‘That’s just it. I have slept with him.’
‘You sly girl,’ she said, swapping the dolphin for another, this one with a baby swimming alongside. ‘And you never let on? So why make such a big deal out of it now?’
And that simple question told her more about her mother than she ever wanted to know. ‘It ended badly.’
‘Because he didn’t express his undying love for you? Oh God, Valentina, you’re so naive sometimes.’
Her mother’s words stung, deep inside where she’d promised she’d never hurt again. And maybe that was why she said it. Because she didn’t want to be the only one hurting here. ‘He said I was a chip off the old block. That, like you, I did my best work on my back!’
Her mother paused, forgetting momentarily about the delicate glass dolphin in her lap that she’d been lovingly dusting till then. And then she laughed, absolutely delighted. ‘He said that? And you didn’t take it as a compliment?’ She took one look at her daughter’s stricken face. ‘You didn’t, did you?’ She shrugged and started polishing again, before she gave it a final check in the light and replaced it with another ornament. Rub rub rub. Polish polish polish. And the more she polished, the more Tina’s nerves screamed.
‘Would you please stop doing that?’
‘Doing what?’
‘Dusting those wretched ornaments of yours.’
‘Valentina,’ her mother said, incensed, rubbing on, ‘they’re Murano glass, they deserve to be shown to best advantage. Of course I have to dust them.’
‘I was pregnant, you know!’
Lily looked up at her, and this time she put the ornament right back on the side table where it had come from. Finally, Tina thought. Finally she managed to look aghast. ‘You were pregnant? To Luca Barbarigo?’
Tina nodded, a sudden tightness in her throat, a sudden and unbidden urge to cry stinging her eyes as she released a secret she had been holding inside for too long. Finally her mother might understand.
Finally.
Lily just sat there and shook her head. ‘So why didn’t you make him marry you?’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you know how rich he is? His family were once Doges of Venice. He’s Venetian nobility and you didn’t marry him?’
‘Lily, we had a one-night stand. One night. A baby wasn’t part of the deal. Anyway, I lost the baby. And thank you so much for asking about the fate of your grandchild!’
‘But if you’d married him,’ her mother continued, unabashed, ‘then we wouldn’t be in this mess now.’
Tina’s world reeled and spun. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I lost the baby. At twenty weeks. Do you have any idea what that’s like, giving birth to a child that is destined to die?’
Lily flicked away the argument as if it were no more than a speck of dust on one of her ornaments. ‘You didn’t really want a child, did you? Besides, you could have been married by then. You would have been, if you’d told me at the time. I would have arranged your marriage within a week.’
