Rose held up her hands in surrender, laughing. ‘Okay. I’m going.’
This time, she knew to smell the coffee then savour the round, smooth taste on her tongue. Then wait for the pleasure response. Matteo watched her then drank his, leaning back in his chair and slipping off his beach shoes.
‘When you go back home, you’ll miss this.’
‘I’ll miss a lot of things. Taking a siesta really is a very civilised thing to do.’
‘I think so. When I was in England I used to hate the way everyone would eat at their desks, without stopping work. I always try to take some kind of break at lunchtime, even if it is only for twenty minutes.’
‘How long were you in England for?’
‘I spent almost seven years there, as a child, but my sister and I always used to come and stay with our grandparents for the summer holidays. I studied in Rome and then went back to London after I finished medical school, and ended up staying three years. I stayed for a relationship, but...we went our separate ways in the end.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s hard when that happens, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. Not a choice I’d want to have to make again.’ He turned the corners of his mouth down.
‘But this is a wonderful place to come back to.’ He’d carried on the way that she had, and had made a good life for himself. Maybe she and Matteo had more in common than she’d imagined.
‘I like it. And my work’s here. It feels more like home than anywhere else.’ He turned his head lazily to look at her and she felt the connection that had been missing today. A feeling she couldn’t quite put a name to, until the pleasure response flared through her.
She didn’t want to talk about the bad things. It was too peaceful here, the breeze from the sea cooling the shaded patio. Rose reached into her bag and slid her phone across the table.
‘I was wondering... I’d be really interested to see what you see. If you don’t mind, that is.’ Suddenly that was important. Seeing the world through his eyes, maybe learning a little about what made Matteo tick.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN PEOPLE HELD things up, asking endlessly what colour this or that looked like to him, Matteo usually felt a surge of impatience. But this was different. Rose really wanted to understand, and it was strangely touching.
‘Of course I don’t mind.’ He picked up the phone, saving the colour profile that he’d set for William. Then he adjusted the colour settings, getting them as close as he could to his vision of the world.
‘Here.’ He felt a little thrill of anxious excitement as he handed her the phone.
She swung it around slowly, taking in everything around her, and Matteo watched. There was something very special about watching Rose when she was on one of her voyages of discovery, and the fact that she was discovering something about him made it all the more exquisite.
‘This is similar to William’s. Not quite the same, though.’
‘No, William has no green colour receptors in his eyes, so sees no green at all. I have some, not enough to actually be able to see the colour green but I see slightly different shades of colour from William.’
She nodded, swinging round and pointing the phone straight at him. This seemed suddenly very personal. He’d been told how he looked to other people and hadn’t taken a great deal of notice, but what Rose saw mattered.
‘What do you see?’
‘You look...much the same.’ Matteo smiled and she laughed. ‘You look exactly the same when you do that.’
‘Can you switch the view?’ Suddenly he wanted her to know how he saw her.
‘I think so...’ She fiddled for a moment and then held the phone to her chest, brushing her hair back with her hand and pressing her lips together, the way women did before having a photograph taken. That wasn’t going to make much difference. Her lips might look redder to most people, but one of the things about a green deficiency was that it affected many shades of red as well.
‘Here goes...’ She looked into the phone, and her eyes widened. ‘Oh. I look a bit pale, don’t I? Not very well.’
Matteo laughed. ‘You look fine to me.’
‘My eyes look...’ She seemed lost for words. Did she really see what he saw, a pale, ethereal beauty, with shining gold hair and startlingly blue eyes? Or was she filtering the information, and finding fault with her appearance.
‘Very blue. Gorgeously so.’ Matteo reckoned that it was all right to apply his own value judgement, since she was trying to see things through his eyes.
She gave a tremulous smile. ‘They stand out more. It’s almost as if all the other colours are faded down and they’re turned up.’