She looked away again, out of the window. ‘Alec never told me about that. It would have made it easier — to understand.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t want to make it easier for you to understand.’
‘Perhaps.’
An awkward silence fell between us. It grew so that I felt at any moment our nerves would snap and we’d cry or laugh out loud or something equally stupid.
‘What are you doing in Milan?’ I asked.
‘A holiday,’ she replied. ‘And you?’
‘Business,’ I answered.
Silence again. I think both of us knew that small talk was no good between us. ‘Will you be here long?’ I asked. ‘I mean — couldn’t we meet some—’
She stopped me with an angry movement of her hand. “Don’t make it more difficult, Dick,’ she said and I noticed a trembling in her voice.
Her words took us over the edge of small talk, back into tine past that we’d shared; a holiday in Wales, the Braemar Games where we’d first met, her fair hair blown by the wind on a yacht on the Broads. I could see her slim body cutting the water as she dived, see her face laughing up at me as we ay under the shade of an old oak in the woods above Solva. Memories flooded through me bringing with them the bitter thought of what might have been between us — a home, children, life. Then her hands were on the table, moving blindly among the tea things, and I knew she had not married.