Zina accepted at once and there was nothing I could do about it. For a solid hour I had the two of them talking volcanic eruptions across me. Zina seemed remarkably well informed on the history of Pompeii so that I began to wonder if this Ruggiero fellow had been her lover at some period.
At last we were back at the boat. As we left Casamicciola Zina looked at me and said, ‘You do not like our American friend, no?’
‘It isn’t that,’ I said quickly, remembering how kind he had been to me in Milan. ‘It’s just that he will go on talking.’
She laughed. ‘Perhaps he does not get any opportunities to talk when he is at home.’ She sprawled back on the cushions with a little sigh. After a while she said, ‘Do you wish to hear Rossini’s Barbiere to-night? It is at the San Carlo. I have a box.’
So I went with her to the opera that night and that was the end of my idyll in Naples. Sitting in the box with the crystals of the chandeliers ablaze with lights and the orchestra tuning up, I looked down on a sea of faces, a constantly shifting mass of colour stretching from below the crimson red of the curtain right back to the dim recesses of the theatre. And in all that eddying mass, my gaze was caught and held by one pair of eyes staring up at me. It was Hilda Tucek. I saw her nudge her companion and then he, too, looked up and I saw she was with John Maxwell.
‘What is the matter?’ Zina’s hand touched my arm. ‘You are trembling, Dick. What has happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing at all. Just someone I know.’
‘Where?’ I didn’t answer and she said playfully, ‘A girl?’ I still didn’t say anything, but she must have seen the direction of my gaze, for she focused her opera glasses on the centre of the stalls. ‘An English girl — in a white frock?’
‘No — Czech,’ I corrected. ‘Why did you think she was English?’
‘She look so damn’ superior,’ she answered venomously. Then I heard her suck in her breath quickly. ‘What is the name of the man who is with her? I think I have met him before.’