She shook her head.
‘Why?’
She shrugged her shoulders again. ‘I think perhaps the flowers want a drink, too.’
‘It was drugged, wasn’t it?’
‘Drugged?’ She laughed. ‘Now you are being melodramatic. And they say the English—’
‘I’m not being melodramatic,’ I cut in. ‘About three-thirty in the morning someone came to my room. If I’d had that drink — I don’t think I should be standing here now. You saved my life.’
‘Oh, come now, you are being ridiculous. It was all a joke.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘I will be honest. I thought you very attractive. I wanted to make you think me mysterious. That is all.’
‘Someone tried to murder me.’ My voice sounded obstinate.
‘Why should any one wish to do that?’ She turned and put her glass down on the tray. ‘I think I was right when I say you must have a holiday. Either you pull my leg, or if you really think such nonsense, then the fact that you have been overworking has made you imagine things.’ She pulled the wrap closer round her shoulders. ‘Come now. You invited me to dinner. But please, no more silly jokes about people trying to murder you.’
We went out to the car and then drove to a restaurant high up on the Vomero where we had dinner looking through tall glass windows out across the Bay. I don’t remember what we talked about. I only know that I didn’t refer again to what had happened in Milan and soon I had forgotten all about it in the pleasure of her company. The moonlight and the warmth seemed to fill all the dark corners of my mind, so that Milan and Pilsen were forgotten and I was free of the past, alone with her on a cloud where yesterday and tomorrow were nothing and only to-day mattered. We danced a little, talked a lot, and in a moment, it seemed, the evening was over. ‘I must go now,’ she said. ‘At midnight my husband will telephone me from Rome.’