‘You are tired,’ observed Rafaello’s aunt, in a manner that was more a statement than a question.
Magda nodded in docile agreement, not meeting her eyes, feeding Benji a soft roll. Everyone was still very far away—especially Rafaello. He seemed to be light years away from her.
But he was watching her, she could see. His face was unreadable, and there was something shuttered about his eyes. Presumably, she thought, with that same remote, distant feeling that seemed to be pervading her whole brain, he is thinking how low and common I look, polluting his ancestral home. Wishing he could just dump me out with the trash.
Why did it hurt so much that Rafaello di Viscenti, a complete stranger to her in every meaningful definition of the word, should have deliberately and calculatedly used her to insult his father? Why did it hurt so much that he wanted her to be the lowest of the low, that he wanted to throw her in his father’s teeth precisely because she was plain and common, a feckless single mother from the slums of London who cleaned toilets for a living?
She knew, with her head, that none of his litany of accusations was her fault, that she had nothing, nothing to be ashamed of. Someone had to clean toilets—and everything else. Someone had to keep the rich and pampered clean and comfortable. Those who did it were not shameful. To look down on someone because they were poor—that was shameful.
But she could tell herself that all she liked—somewhere, deep inside it just hurt that Rafaello di Viscenti had looked her over and catalogued every fact and factor about her that might disgrace his rich, well-bred, cultured, respectable family…and relished finding them so he could throw them in his father’s face.
A scraping of chairs roused her from her painful reverie. Signora Calvi was speaking to her—Magda forced herself to listen.
‘My dear, let Benji come with me for a while. Maria tells me one of her great-nieces has brought along some playthings her own children have outgrown. I believe there is a tricycle, and some toys that I am sure your little boy will adore. No, do not disturb yourself—he will come with me very happily, I have no doubt.’
She lifted Benji off Magda’s lap and stood him on the terrace.
‘Vene.’ She smiled down at the infant. ‘Come and see some new toys.’
‘Toys’ was a word Benji was pretty clued up on, and he toddled off happily, Signora Calvi holding one tiny hand, her husband the other. Magda watched the little procession make its way along the terrace and disappear around the corner of the house. She still felt dull, and numbed, and very far away inside.
Rafaello watched her watching them. She seemed very small, very young sitting there, far too young to have responsibility for a child.
Far too young to have to bear the cruel accusations his father had thrown at her.
His hands clenched on his thighs. Dio, she was hurt; it was obvious. There was a bleak, wounded look in her eyes which made him feel terrible. She’d withdrawn inside herself, shut herself away—and he couldn’t blame her for that.
The feeling of discomfort he’d come to be familiar with around her sharpened acutely. Sharpened into guilt. He found himself wishing, with all his might, that he could undo the ugly scene that had played out in front of her bedroom door, that he could have stopped his father throwing those harsh, unpalatable insults in her face.
But Rafaello blamed himself, too. He had deliberately presented her to his father that first afternoon with a furious, sarcastic flourish, delineating every single unappealing, unflattering, unsavoury aspect of the woman he’d just married in order to ram home the message to his machinating father: You force my hand, force me to marry—well, look—look at the bride I’ve brought back with me.
Oh, he’d never intended the girl to find out—she wouldn’t have understood what he’d shouted at his father—and yet, all the same, he had used her quite deliberately, used her wretched appearance and circumstances for his own ends.
Guilt flushed through him. A rare, unpleasant feeling.
And something more than guilt. Something that had started to spark in him all though that painful breakfast as he had sat there, watching her, watching her closed face, the wounded look in her eyes.
Anger.
An emotion very familiar to him over these last months as his father had sought to reel him in, tighter and tighter, into Lucia’s grasping clutches. He’d lived with anger, day in, day out, until it had soaked all the way through him, obliterating everything else except his absolute, total determination not to let his father play with his life as if it were a toy. Yes, anger was a familiar feeling.