Only in the Night (2 page)

‘Tea would be a treat. I would like to stay for it but Vittorio cannot come back for me for at least half an hour,’ she told her hostess.

‘That’s no problem, do please stay,’ was Amanda’s gracious reply.

She watched Eliza caress Vittorio’s hand and listened to her thank him for arranging the introduction, telling him she would be ready to leave on his return. The love they had for each other, the care and respect, was as evident as their passion which could be read in their every gesture, seen in their eyes. Theirs was a true love story.

Vittorio gone, there was an awkward moment between the two women. It was broken by Maria who gestured with her hand that tea was to be served. ‘Would you prefer to have it on the terrace or in the library? It’s easily arranged,’ asked Amanda, and received a knowing look from Maria.

‘In here will do nicely. I like kitchens, always have done. And your table … how charming it looks. Afternoon tea doesn’t happen very often for me any more.’

There was very little that embarrassed Amanda but she did find exchanging pleasantries with Eliza somewhat awkward. She didn’t quite know whether to
speak to her as an Englishwoman or a struggling Italian farmer’s girlfriend. It was unreasonable but she nevertheless felt just a little angry with the woman for settling for a man such as Vittorio when she could clearly do much better.

The two women sat at the table talking about the herbaceous border while Amanda served the tea. But her mind kept drifting off into her own thoughts: wondering why Eliza had chosen to marry Vittorio. Sex! That could be the only reason for her stepping down to such a marriage. Amanda, having felt obliged to make an excuse for Eliza, was somehow relieved that it was something as simple as sex. She could understand that. Hadn’t Vittorio always exuded a kind of rough and exciting sexuality that had made her, years ago, dub him ‘our Tuscan Heathcliff’?

She was slicing into the lemon tart when she asked Eliza, ‘Do you live close by?’

‘We live about ten miles away, towards the sea.’

Amanda was curious about Eliza Flemming; there were so many questions she would have liked to ask her but could not. She had a sense that here was a woman who cherished her privacy, who did not gladly suffer intrusions into her life, most especially from the English colony settled in these Tuscan hills. Amanda had never heard Eliza’s name mentioned, and she and her lover Vittorio would have been rich pickings for the gossips.

After a slow start conversation came easily. It was an amusing half hour, Eliza exuding simple charm and an intelligence that was winning without her trying to be so. The moment she heard Vittorio’s lorry rattling up to the house, however, she rose from her seat.

‘Vittorio’s back,’ she told Amanda, and a special light came into her eyes.

‘It was very nice meeting you,’ her hostess told her as she clasped Eliza’s hand.

She smiled. ‘Yes.’ That was all she said before she went to Maria and thanked her, complimented her on the tart, and was gone.

‘Well, that was some surprise,’ commented Amanda to Maria, who was now clearing the tea table. The housekeeper said nothing but seemed quite pleased with herself.

‘You’ve never met her before?’ queried Amanda.

‘No, but I have seen her many times in the village. I even saw her once in her robes.’

‘Her robes?’

‘She’s a magistrate for this district, a good person to know. She almost single-handedly reorganised the hospitals in this district when she was attached to the Health Ministry. They say if she ran for Senator, she would win. But she’ll never do that, she’s not a woman for politics – she’s a woman in love with her man and her freedom. And she has the Villa Montecatini.’

That bit of news was enough to take Amanda off her feet. She sat down, exclaiming, ‘Then she’s a woman of considerable substance! That explains a great deal.’ Gigolo, sex, an older woman, were the thoughts running through Amanda’s mind.

‘No.’

‘No what, Maria?’ she asked.

‘Not wealthy, not poor. Her salary, his salary … what the farm yields. They struggle like most farmers.’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘It’s common knowledge.’

‘But the Villa Montecatini is supposed to be filled with marvellous things! And its gardens, its farm … it’s a place I have heard about, a legend. And that’s hers? Are you sure? How did she come by it?’

‘She’s a Montecatini on her mother’s side of the family.’

‘But she’s English.’

‘There are English Montecatinis and Tuscan Montecatinis. She’s an English one.’ And with a shrug of her shoulders, Maria was quite finished talking about Eliza Flemming.

Amanda could not let it rest and approached her as she was washing the tea cups. ‘You liked her, have respect for her. Why?’

‘Because she has everything
and
a generous heart. You can see it when she is with Vittorio, or when at harvest time she has all the workers to the house for a feast. And the way she rides her white stallion.’

Only then did Amanda realise that Eliza Flemming was the pale rider.

Vittorio drove most all of the way home with one hand on the steering wheel, Eliza leaning against his chest, his arm around her shoulders. He asked so many questions. Was it a nice tea? Did she enjoy herself? Did she find Signora Dix agreeable? And then, finally, did she miss not having friends like Signora Dix in her life any more? Eliza did not miss the tremor of anxiety in his voice nor did she miss the sigh of relief and the smile that crossed his face when she told him she missed nothing in her life with him.

His stubble was rough against her cheek when she
grazed it with her own, and licked one of the deep furrows in his face with the tip of her tongue to emphasise to him she meant what she had said.

He was damp with perspiration and smelled of new-mown grass and the sun. All day she had been missing him, had wanted to be with him. She would have been quite content to have spent the day sitting in the shade and watching him cut the Dix-Markham meadow. Now that they were together again and intended to be so for the remainder of their lives, she missed him every minute of every hour they were apart. It was sometimes difficult for her to remember their age, that they were not the lovers they had been twenty-five years before. Today she felt exactly the same about Vittorio as she had back then. It was as if the intervening years and the tragedies had never happened.

After the conversation they drove in silence, Eliza caressing the inside of his thigh, occasionally lowering her head to kiss the bulge in his jeans, and admiring the hills and a sky still bright with light. Vittorio was concentrating on keeping the old and dilapidated lorry on the road and getting them home as fast as possible. Eliza thought only briefly of Amanda Dix and how attractive she was with that studied and very elegant casual chic. How stylish everything was about her; her kitchen, and most probably her life.

Eliza almost never thought of her first husband, John, but she did now: how very different her life might have been with him had she been more like Amanda Dix. How he would have loved a wife just like her, a woman trapped in being upwardly mobile, money and culture-oriented; jockeying always for a
better place in the infrastructure of the 1990s quest for money and success. Briefly she remembered herself in those years she had been Eliza Hope-Quintin, and her struggle against who and what she was to make her marriage work. Eliza trying to be an Amanda for the love of her husband and children. A sense of overwhelming failure sent a shiver down her spine.

But mercifully it snuffed itself out as fast as it had flared up and she effortlessly let the past slip away from her. In her present life she was as happy as she had been as a child and young adult, before she had deserted Vittorio to learn about the cruelty man can inflict upon woman in the name of love; the disappointments that can twist and turn a life, make a stranger of one’s self to one’s self; and what profound loneliness and isolation can do to a psyche.

They pulled off the road on to the turning that led for several hundred yards up an incline to the gates. Eliza reluctantly abandoned the warmth of Vittorio’s body to jump down from the cab of the lorry and push open the rusting gates, closing them after he had driven through. How sweet he was. Normally Vittorio would have used one of the side drives that would bring them to the farm buildings where he would deposit the lorry, but he had wanted to end her visit with Amanda Dix by bringing her home in style, through the main gate to the house they now shared. He loved her so very much.

The long drive twisted and turned through the avenue of cypresses bordering the helter-skelter of flowering shrubs and trees long since grown wild. More than a hundred years before they must have been well kept and impressive. A very English drive in a Tuscan landscape to remind the family of their
other roots. The house, like the drive, had seen better days and more care but was nevertheless impressive, once a grande dame among the Tuscan houses and retaining an air of home, family and love.

Vittorio stopped directly in front of the entrance and cut the motor. For several minutes they sat there, listening. The heat of the day now on the wane, the birds were singing again, a symphony of several different songs. They watched the singers still on the wing coming home from their day’s hunt for food as they swooped and pirouetted on the warm currents of air, then settled among branches heavy with bright green leaves. They looked plump and satisfied as they preened their feathers and made ready for night.

Vittorio slid from behind the wheel and, still holding Eliza’s hand, pulled her along the seat and down from the cab with him. Their feet crunched the gravel underfoot as they walked across the courtyard, past the large white umbrella, chairs and table where Giacomo, the eighty-year-old retainer, who had been at the Villa Montecatini all his life, had left a jug of fresh peach juice with a tea cloth over it and two glasses.

The front doors, though closed, were unlocked. They pushed them open and the coolness of the house enveloped them as, together, Eliza and Vittorio climbed the grand staircase, two steps at a time, laughing. They made directly for their bathroom, a marble affair installed in the 1920s by Eliza’s grandmother. Like so many other rooms in the house, it spanned centuries of design and house-proud ancestors. The whole villa reeked of a time when the family had had great taste, a passion for collecting all things Italian, most particularly antiquities and more money.

Eliza knew and loved every room, every object; it had always been her fairytale castle. Ancestors had lived in luxury; her nearer family more like gypsies than English and Italian aristocrats because for the last seventy years the family’s history had been one of little money, more of a happy-go-lucky existence, living to the manner born in genteel poverty. For as long as anyone could remember the working farm had sustained the house just enough for it to remain intact. The pride of the Montecatinis had always been that they had a heritage, the house, their name, and had never sold one square foot of land or the smallest item from their villa. They had lived, as Eliza did now, in the splendour and sometimes squalor of the Villa Montecatini.

She bent over the black marble bath and turned the sterling silver Art Deco taps full on. Vittorio was bending over her, kissing the back of her head, the nape of her neck, and struggling with her dress. She fumbled with the buttons, anxious to help him. The sound of the water splashing into the tub was the only sound in the room except for Vittorio’s heavy breathing. There was an urgency in the sound, a need, a desire, that matched her own. They wanted to bathe away the day’s sweat but the pungent odour of earth and grass, the natural scent of a body in lust, was too raunchy. It demanded immediate sex, glorious base fucking.

There were whispers of love in her ear as Vittorio balanced her in exactly the right position over the marble rim of the bath to take her from behind, penetrating her deeply. She came on his first thrust and he moved in and out of her with a slow powerful
determination that she should, they both should, enjoy every nuance of the sexual act. His hands on her naked waist for leverage, he screwed her down to her very soul with his sex.

There was something about sex with Vittorio that triggered multiple orgasms for Eliza, dissolving any sexual control she might have. She came and came again. She lost herself in her orgasms and was unable to stop coming. She became a living, vibrant, sexual vessel for Vittorio, and in that state knew sex as she had never known it with any other man. It was so easy to give herself up to lust with Vittorio, so exciting, so rewarding. Now, as always, he was in total command and the moment he sensed that she had submitted to her own lust, his only desire was to give her more pleasure. Several more thrusts and they came together. He pulled her upright and against him, and whispered love to her. Without even withdrawing he pulled her down to the floor and took her in another position. Lying over her body, his semi-erect penis in her mouth, his face now between her legs, he licked away their mutual lust for each other and nibbled like a gentle cannibal at her vaginal lips. Then once more they changed positions.

It was not very long before Vittorio and Eliza came together again and this time he had the pleasure of seeing her face as she came: a face filled with love and passion, lust for him. Their hearts pounding against each other for several minutes before he moved, Vittorio did what he always had to do to ease Eliza back from lust unbound. He kissed her lips, her eyes and chin, and spoke to her. ‘Eliza, close your eyes. Sleep, my darling, for a few minutes.’ And he rubbed their lust across her lips with his
fingertips and she licked them and opened her eyes and sighed.

‘Happy?’ she asked him.

‘More than any man deserves to be. And you?’

‘I think you know how happy you make me.’ With that he scooped her up and carried her to the bath, now filled to the brim with water. He stepped into it, easing them slowly into the water to lie together in each other’s arms. It caressed their bodies in ripples as sensuous as satin, as seductive as soft, warm, liquifying sex. They never talked at times like this. They merely lay there, bathing each other, caressing. It was usually possible, and was now, for Vittorio to take Eliza one more time.