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‘Stop it,’ she heard James telling her warningly. Then he said, ‘It’s me you’re married to, Poppy, not Chris. My child you’re carrying—mine!’
‘Don’t you think I know that?’ she returned bitterly. Her dress suddenly felt uncomfortably tight round her waist, her head ached and she felt hot and tired.
‘I hate all this hypocrisy,’ she told James angrily. ‘All this pretence.’
‘Really? You didn’t seem to mind the pretence the night you convinced yourself you were in bed with Chris and not with me,’ James reminded her bluntly.
Shocked by the unexpectedness of his attack, coming so soon after his convincing act of love in church, Poppy could only stare at him in silence until she was rescued by the welcome sound of her mother’s voice exclaiming, ‘Darling, are you all right? You look rather pale. Come and sit down. Everyone’s here now and the caterers are ready to serve lunch.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘IT WON’T be long now.’
Poppy had balked at the idea of a honeymoon but James had insisted, pointing out that it would look odd if they didn’t go away, and in the end she had had to give in, although she had wished she hadn’t when he had told her where they were going.
‘Italy!’ she had protested. ‘No, I can’t, not Italy; it will remind me of your Japanese friend—the one you spent the night with at the hotel,’ she had begun, childishly driven into the panicky reaction by her own misery.
But James had stopped her, telling her firmly, ‘The only person I spent the night with at the hotel was you.’
‘One night you didn’t come back to the room,’ Poppy had accused him challengingly.
‘Yes, but not because I was with someone else. If you must know, I stayed up all night working.’
Poppy hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to look at him. ‘I still don’t want to go back to Italy.’
‘We don’t have much choice,’ James had told her coolly. ‘My mother is insisting on giving us the villa as a wedding gift and it would look churlish to refuse.’
Poppy had knowm he was right. James’s mother had not used the villa since James’s father’s death, preferring, she said, to keep her happy memories of the holidays they had spent there intact.
Now she had told James and Poppy it was time that other members of the family enjoyed it, and since James had always been far more in touch with his Italian heritage than Chris she had decided that James and Poppy should have it.
Poppy had been there once with her parents, as a child, and she remembered how awed she had been by the Tuscan countryside, by the richness of its colours and the warm vibrancy of its people and its life.
One unexpected side effect of her pregnancy had been that her body temperature seemed to have risen by several degrees, and the air-conditioning in the car that James had hired for them was a welcome antidote to the heat of the Italian summer, beneath which the Tuscan countryside drowsed.
Whenever Poppy thought of the area she always thought of it in terms of its colours—amber, saffron, warm browns and rich terracotta—the colours of the earth, colours which, for her, echoed its richness and warmth, its bounty, their depth leavened and lightened by the cerulean sky.
The villa—their villa now—was small and relatively isolated and had originally been a wedding gift from James’s father to his mother.
‘James was conceived there,’ she had told Poppy several days ago, ‘and I’ve often wondered if that is why he is so much more in tune with his Italian heritage than Chris.
‘You do love him, don’t you, Poppy?’ she had asked quietly. ‘Because I know how much he loves you, how much he has always loved you.’ And Poppy had bowed her head.
She had no idea why, when James could so obviously and easily lie to his mother, she seemed unable to do the same, but perhaps her aunt had taken the tears in her eyes as a sign of her love for James rather than the reverse, Poppy decided, because she had not pressed the matter, simply touching Poppy’s bent head gently.
The small town several miles away from the villa was just as Poppy remembered it. A couple of dark-eyed children watched them from an open doorway as they drove past and Poppy’s heart turned over, seized by the quick, melting surge of emotions she had become familiar with in these last weeks.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ James asked her, but she did not feel able to tell him, to explain. died all women feel like this when they knew they were carrying a child? she wondered. Did they all experience this—this emotional awareness of the vulnerability of all young things, this need to protect and cherish? The strength of her love for a child she had never intended to conceive, the bond she felt with it already, constantly amazed her. She might not love James or he her, but she would—she did even now—love their child.
And so did James, she acknowledged, moving her head to look at him as he turned off the main road and onto the narrow dirt track that led to the villa.
Time and the hot Tuscan sun had turned the original. deep terracotta of the building into a soft, faded colour somewhere between pink and brown. The shutters, closed now against the afternoon sun, were painted white. The local farmer whom James’s mother paid to maintain the property for her had obviously repainted them recently, Poppy decided as she noted their dazzling brilliance.
James stopped the car and got out. Uncertainly Poppy went to join him.
‘Paolo should have been down with some supplies for us,’ he told her, referring to the farmer. ‘If not, I’ll leave you to get settled in and drive back to the village to get some. Is there anything in particular that you would like?’
‘Only water,’ Poppy told him, grimacing a little. Her mouth, like her body, felt dry and dusty from the journey. The heat, coupled with her own inner tension, had also made her feel slightly light-headed. As she blinked dizzily in the sun, she saw that James was frowning.
‘You’d better get inside out of the heat,’ he told her.
‘I’m pregnant, James, that’s all,’ she responded irritably. ‘There’s no need to fuss. Not that you are fussing—fussing on my account,’ she added bitterly. ‘You don’t give a damn what happens to me.’
‘Would you want me to?’
Poppy stiffened as she heard the challenge in his voice.
‘We both know what’s really bugging you, Poppy,’ James added grimly, ‘and it isn’t my so-called “fussing”, is it? For God’s sake!’ he exclaimed, ‘I know I’m not Chris but just when the hell are you going to grow up and realise—?’ He stopped, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand and frowning as he narrowed his eyes against the sun.
‘Let’s get inside,’ he told her, turning towards the front door to the villa.
Silently Poppy followed him, deliberately keeping her distance as he unlocked the weathered wooden door. Inside the villa it felt blissfully cool. Whilst James opened the shutters Poppy made her way to the kitchen. Paolo had obviously been, because there was a box of groceries on the kitchen table. As she looked through it Poppy sniffed appreciatively at the locally cured ham and the freshly picked tomatoes, suddenly feeling unexpectedly hungry.
‘Aha, you like that, do you?’ she teased the baby, speaking her thoughts out loud as her mouth watered at the sight and smell of the fresh, locally baked bread.
‘You’re going to be like your papà, are you, and favour your Italian heritage?’ she laughed as her tiredness melted away, her body relaxing now that it was released from the tension of James’s constant presence. It was something new that she had only started very recently, this verbal communication with her child.
‘Well, don’t expect me to be a doting Italian mamma and spoil you,’ she warned with very obvious untruth. Then spinning round, her face flushing, she realised that James was standing in the doorway. How long had he been there? Long enough to overhear her silliness, she guessed, and quickly defended herself.
‘All the books say that it’s important to communicate with the baby even before it’s born, to let it know tha
t you’re there, that you care, that you love it.’
‘And do you love it...him or her?’
‘He or she is my child... How could I not do?’ Poppy demanded huskily.
‘Your child is also mine,’ James reminded her. ‘Mine, Poppy,’ he reiterated. ‘And, let me warn you now, if you ever, ever attempt to pretend that my child has my brother for its father, in the same way you pretended that he was your lover—’
