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could read his character in it; a strong will, humour, even, oddly, a
certain detachment. He was not a man to treat lightly; he was a lot less
obvious than she had thought, and, perhaps, far more likeable but if
he kissed her she would hit him.
He didn't. He dropped his arms and stood back, watching her through
his lashes. Vicky was surprised and it showed. She saw a quiver of
amusement run through his face. Furious, she turned and walked off
along the gallery. Ricco kept pace with her wary steps, halting at an
arched door in the wall. He produced a key and unlocked the door.
'This is the only way through to the empty wing, so this would be
your private front door,' he told her with a sideways smile of derision.
'So you could be sure of privacy.'
She made no comment, following him along a narrow whitewashed
corridor off which opened a row of doors. Ricco opened them one
after the other so that Vicky could see the rooms. They were just as he
had described them square, whitewashed, empty.
The final one was a bathroom, apparently from the Victorian era, with
a vast white enamelled bath and a lavatory of the same period
enclosed in polished mahogany.
'My grandfather had the bathroom installed,' he told her, turning on
the taps in the bath. The water came out reluctantly and was rather
rusty, but after it had run for a while it cleared.it's a museum piece,
but it works,' he added, turning the taps off. 'I'm afraid there's no
heating in these rooms, but I can get an electrician in to put some
points in strategic places.'
'What about cooking?'
'I could have a simple kitchen installed within a week an electric
stove, a sink, a few cupboards.'
Her forehead creased. 'All this would be very expensive, surely?'
'I've been meaning to have something done with this wing for a long
time. When you leave, I could let this place to someone else.'
'You said something about furniture,' she reminded him.
'Come and choose what you like.' He took her round the closed rooms
of his villa, opening shutters to let the sunlight into dark, stuffy
bedrooms often crammed with furniture from a strange mixture of
periods. Vicky knew very little about antiques, but she could see that
some of the pieces must be very valuable, whereas others were
merely old.
It was rather fun, like shopping with a blank cheque, able to pick
whatever you fancied without worrying about the cost. She didn't like
to risk choosing anything that she suspected might be worth a lot of
money, so she largely concentrated on Victorian and Edwardian
pieces a brass bed and a wardrobe and a tiny kidney-shaped
dressing-table of polished oak for her bedroom, a pink-velvet-
covered chaise-longue, and two matching chairs for the sitting-room.
Ricco persuaded her to add a stained glass Tiffany lamp with a solid
brass base, a nest of tables in black oak, a small bookcase and a few
other items.
It was obvious that a large part of the villa hadn't been kept dusted and
cleaned in the way that the rest of the house had been. Ricco showed
her most of the rooms, some of them revealing signs of damp. The
upper rooms had crumbling plasterwork, and their ceilings were
cracked and dirty. The air in them was musty.
'It seems a shame to let these rooms decay like this,' she said to Ricco,
who nodded agreement soberly.
'When I can afford it, I'll have the whole place modernised, but my
company profits go back into the business at the moment.'
Some of the older pieces had been homes for mice; she saw stuffing
leaking out of chairs, horsehair littered under a sofa. When she ran
her hand over a sideboard her finger came away coated with pale
dust. Yet she gained an impression of spacious elegance at times, a
glimpse of an age long vanished, chandeliers glittering from stuccoed
ceilings, deep-piled carpets and brocade and silk. Paintings hung on
the walls she had no idea if they were valuable or not, but some of
them were of men and women with Ricco's features: high, arrogant
noses, black hair, eyes that stared with his cool assurance, mouths
shaped like his and jawlines full of Ricco's determination and
insistence.
'My grandfather,' he told her when she stood and stared at one of
them, a portrait of a typical Victorian, she decided upright, dressed
in sober dark clothes, a white shirt with a stiff collar rising against his
throat. He had all the family characteristics except that his direct eyes
were black, not blue, but she felt that his mouth was a little cruel, a
thin upper lip and a lower one which combined sensuality with a
certain fierceness, and gave his high-boned nose the look of a beak,
the beak of a bird of prey.
'He looks rather daunting,' she observed.
'He was an old devil. My father was petrified of him when he was in a
temper. He ran his household with a rod of iron, but then in those days
I suppose men did.' He gave her a sideways glance, gleaming with
mockery. 'The good old days!'
'Which you regret, of course!'
'The days when women knew their place and men ruled the world?
Doesn't everyone?' He was laughing, but she frowned.
'I wish I thought it as funny as you do, but I get a little tired of
masculine jokes about women's place being in the home and men
being superior. In a way, I think I preferred it when it wasn't said as a
joke, when men meant it seriously at least that was honest. Now
they make jokes about it to your face and secretly mean it, and that's
worse.'
'You prefer honest tyranny to a secret hankering after it?'
'At least you know where you are with it when it's out in the open.
You can fight it then.'
'Hasn't anyone told you the fight was over long ago, the war's
ended.'
'Then what was all that stuff about the good old days?'
'You have no sense of humour,' Ricco told her, and Vicky eyed him
scornfully.
'I don't like black jokes, I admit, or sick ones. My sense of humour is
limited to what's really funny.' She looked back at his grandfather.
'What was your grandmother like?'
'Small, frail, beautiful even when she was eighty, which is when I
remember her best. She was only four foot ten, but she had more
spirit than a wild horse. I don't think my grandfather frightened her. In
fact, my mother always told me it was the other way round he was
scared stiff of her.'
'Good!' Vicky said ferociously, and Ricco took her arm and steered
her out of the room on to the wide loggia on the upper storey of the
house. She had long ago lost count of the number of rooms there were
or the number of staircases she had been up and down. The house was
built in the most rambling, ramshackle way imaginable; Ricco said
that there had been additions to it from time Uxtime over the
centuries. At one period it had been occupied not only by his family
but by a dozen servants, with their wives and children. Now Ricco
had two people working for him a woman who did the housework
and a man who looked after the gardens.
The loggia was just a wide terrace with a low wall topped with
smooth plastered columns facing outwards. On the terracotta tiles
stood pots of geraniums in flower, red and pink and white. The sun
made patterns on the floor and whitewashed walls. There were half a
dozen wicker chairs arranged along the loggia. They were a golden
colour in the sunlight, their cushions a pale green weave. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]