Wounds of Passion

so now that he had seen her again. She was so fragile, with her light, fluttering hair and her sad eyes. He kept wanting to touch her; but that would be madness. This was not a girl you could risk touching, not any more. He sensed that the merest touch of a hand would make her terrified. She was like a wild bird in a cage, ready to dash itself to death against the bars if a hand reached out to it.
Carefully, keeping his voice casual, he asked, ‘Who do you take after—your father or your mother?’
‘Neither,’ Antonia said, but it wasn’t quite true. She was a mixture of them both. She inherited her colouring from her mother. Annette Cabot was a beautiful woman, blonde and classically elegant, blue-eyed, a little icy. Antonia inherited her artistic talent from her father, and her shyness.
She had been sent away to school at an early age, had spent her vacations in summer school or been sent on skiing holidays in winter, and then, when she was eighteen, had been sent to Italy to study art.
All Antonia’s friends had said she was lucky—Italy alone, with every chance of having fun! Wow, they had said, her parents were great, letting her go so far away. But they hadn’t understood. She had been far away all her life.
Her parents were never unkind; they were charming to her, generous, took care that she had what she wanted, but Antonia had known in her heart of hearts that they did not love her.
She was an interruption to their otherwise important lives, and although, for a short while after she came home from Italy two years ago, they had tried hard to bridge the gap between her and them, appalled and overwhelmed by what had happened to her, by then it had been too late. Antonia had not wanted them.
She had retreated into silence herself; small and pale and needing only to avoid being noticed, she had put up a barrier nobody could cross, and slowly her parents had given up, drifted back to their own lives, their own obsessions.
Antonia had been left alone with her claustrophobic dreams, her haunted days and nights. She had stopped eating; she was shrinking, slowly turned into a ghost of herself.
Then her mother’s brother, Uncle Alex, had come to visit, had taken one look at her and been horrified. ‘You can’t go on like this!’ he had said. ‘You’ve lost so much weight you look like a child of twelve! And that’s how you’re dressing, too. My God, can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? You’re trying to pretend it never happened; you’ve gone back into childhood to escape it. You’ve got arms and legs like little sticks; you’re anorexic. Now don’t lie about it! I’ve got eyes in my head; I can see it. If your parents weren’t so obsessed with themselves, they would see it, too. We’re going to have to do something about it. You must confront it, go back to Italy, face up to what happened.’
‘No, I can’t!’ she had said, white-faced, and gone on saying it for weeks, but Uncle Alex was dogged. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually he had talked her on to the plane, back to Florence, to pick up her studies again.
Her parents had approved, relieved to see her go. With her out of sight and far away they needn’t feel they should be worrying about her, doing something about her. They needn’t feel guilty any more.
That was one reason why she had come back to Italy, in fact—so that her parents need not look so uneasy when they saw her, so that they need not feel guilty. Her other reason was Uncle Alex’s distress at the sight of her. He made her feel he cared.
‘What are you thinking about to make you look like that?’ Patrick asked, and she started.
‘Nothing.’
He knew she lied, and watched her, his blue eyes narrowed. He wished he could see inside her head, but maybe he would hate what he saw. Something terrible must have happened to this girl to make her look the way she did.
‘So when did you come back to Italy?’ he asked, and she sighed.
‘Uncle Alex and Susan-Jane rented a flat in Florence for six months, and I shared it with them, and finished my art course. Then when their lease ran out they left and I stayed on, in a smaller flat somewhere else.’
They had made her go to classes, filled the flat with people, got her eating again—lots of pasta with cream and eggs—had stayed until they were certain that Antonia was going to be able to manage on her own. Nobody in Florence had known about what had happened to her; that had made it easier, and being away from her parents had helped too. Uncle Alex and Susan-Jane cared about her, and that had worked a sort of magic.
‘They’re great,’ she said. ‘I love Uncle Alex, and Susan-Jane is great fun, not like an aunt, more like a sister.’
Patrick remembered the cartoonist’s face in the villa that night as the police were hustling him past the open door into the huge lounge. If Alex Holtner could have got his hands on him at that moment he would have killed him, he thought. Yes, Alex Holtner loved his niece, no doubt about that.
‘Do they still live in Bordighera?’
‘No, they sold that villa; they bought a big three-bedroomed flat in Monte Carlo—that’s their home base now—but they’re born wanderers; they travel all the time, right around the world, because, of course, Uncle Alex can work anywhere. He’s been working here—he rented this house for the summer.’
Patrick gazed at the little strawberry-pink-painted house with its white ironwork balcony over which a white awning stretched, shading the windows on the upper floor of the house, and coveted it. He was living in a tiny flat high up in a shabby old house, in a back street of Cannaregio, a district