The satirical way she spoke of ‘my expensively elegant person’ took Vittorio aback. To hear her making fun of her own reputation was the last thing he’d expected. He wished she wouldn’t confuse him.

All he could think of to say was, ‘Hmm!’ which was a compromise, indicating that his prejudices wouldn’t be that easily abandoned.

‘Nobody really knows what Joe’s like,’ she said, interpreting his tone without trouble. ‘He wants what he wants and he’ll pay for it. But when you cease to please, that’s it. The shutters come down and he simply moves on to the next thing. He can be pretty nasty.’

‘Is that why you left him?’

‘I didn’t leave him. He left me. For a younger woman.’

That Vittorio simply didn’t believe. His glance at her slender figure and lovely face was full of involuntary admiration that he would have suppressed if he could, but it was beyond his power.

‘Younger woman,’ he growled. ‘What are you? Twenty-two? Three?’

‘You underestimate the power of the beauty salon,’ Angel said, with a hint of teasing. ‘If you’ve really been reading those magazines you’ll know that I’m an artificial construct who owes everything to a silent army, working night and day to conceal the fact that I’m falling to bits. Twenty-two, my foot! I’m a crumbling hag of twenty-eight. Every day pieces of me fall off and have to be fixed back on with safety pins.’

‘All right,’ he said in a harassed tone. ‘I get the idea.’

‘I’ll bet you don’t, not really,’ she said, enjoying the joke too much to let it go. ‘When I get undressed for bed I take off my wig, remove my nails, and count my fingers to see if any have gone missing. Whatever is left collapses.’

He felt a surge of anger against her. She meant to tease him with that picture of decrepitude, but what had really hit him like a blow in the stomach was ‘get undressed for bed’.

Was she mad to talk like that to a man with all his senses about him? Could she really be so unaware of her own power as to risk putting such thoughts into his head? Or didn’t it matter, because she saw him only as a servant, and therefore a kind of eunuch?

Whatever the answer, the thought of her stripping off her clothes was one he knew he couldn’t afford to indulge for more than a moment. The idea of her in bed was forbidden even for that little moment.

To silence her, Vittorio said coldly, ‘Have you finished?’

‘Quite finished. I just wanted you to understand that I’m last year’s model, so Joe swapped me for one of twenty.’

Angel hadn’t mean to confide so much of her personal history, but the sight of Vittorio uneasily trying to decide what to believe was giving her a lot of pleasure. That would teach him to jump to conclusions.

‘But-he bought this place for you,’ Vittorio said at last. ‘All the time I was showing him around he kept saying, “My lady will love this”, as though he really cared.’

‘But I wasn’t his lady by then. She was. He didn’t buy this for me, but for her. Only she didn’t want it. Not grand enough. So he decided that it would “do” for me. He was determined to divorce me as cheaply as possible, and the battle was wearing me out, so I accepted, just to get rid of him.’

If he’d had any doubts about her, they were dispelled by her last words that so closely echoed his own experience with Joe Clannan.

‘So you didn’t really want to come here?’ he asked slowly.

‘I was happy enough. I love Italy. I even learned the language once.’

‘That surprises me,’ he admitted. ‘I thought-well-’

‘You don’t have to say it.’ She’d been speaking Italian, but now she added in English, ‘You were expecting a miserable old trout.’

‘Trout? Excuse me-my English-surely a trout is a fish?’

‘Yes, but in England it’s also a term of abuse, especially for a woman. I think you had some very bad ideas about me.’

He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I never thought you a-a trout,’ he assured her. Then, to get off the awkward subject, he reverted to Italian and asked, ‘Do you still want a dog?’

‘If you can find me one like him,’ she said, indicating Luca, who was shoving his nose against her.

‘You’ve made a bad choice,’ Vittorio grunted. ‘He’s a villain.’

‘I can tell. That’s why I like him so much.’

‘I’ll get you one of his offspring. It won’t be hard. He populates the district with them. Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’ve taken too much time away from the work you’re paying me to do.’

Angel would have laughed and passed it off, but the words were clearly meant to put an end to the brief moment of warmth. She had no choice but to accept her dismissal, and walk away.

For three days Vittorio didn’t mention the dog, and Angel thought he had forgotten about it. But on the fourth day he turned up with an animal that looked about four months old and had a marked resemblance to Luca, being brown, untidy, and with mischief in his eyes.

‘His name’s Toni,’ Vittorio said. ‘I found a home for him two months ago, but his owner was glad to give him back. Apparently he’s noisy, disobedient, uncontrollable, and generally possessed by the devil.’

Angel opened her arms. ‘Just what I wanted!’ she said eagerly.

He gave a faint grin. ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

Watching them nuzzle each other, Vittorio could see that it was love at first sight, on both sides.

Angel immediately got him to drive her into Amalfi to buy the cheapest possible jeans and cotton tops and after that she wore nothing else when Toni was around, which was all the time.

She also abandoned make-up, since there was little point in putting it on when Toni would immediately shove his wet nose against her face. She knew she should reprove him and fend him off, but somehow she never got around to it.

Her truce with Vittorio held, with the ‘armed’ element becoming less obvious. Angel was wryly aware that she was beginning to win his approval, and even more wryly aware that his approval was worth having.

She practised her Italian on him, as she did with Berta, and was soon talking easily. Then, to tease him, she insisted on having their conversations in English. Vittorio spoke her language well enough to get by, but no more than that, and she told him firmly that it was time he improved. His cynical expression showed that he wasn’t fooled, but he let her instruct him, and didn’t seem to mind her teasing.

He began to teach her the finer points of lemon growing. She learned that the estate produced the type known as Lisbon, that the right compost was crucial and great care should be exercised with watering.

‘Flood them at the start, let them almost dry out, then flood them again,’ Vittorio explained. ‘And you need patience. It can take years from seed to harvest, so your-the orchards here contain trees at several different stages. Some will be ready to harvest this year, some next, some the year after.’

She didn’t miss the way he had begun to say ‘your orchards’ and hastily changed it to ‘the orchards’. Now that she was no longer angry with him, Angel found herself alert to his every nuance, and she thought how painful it must be for him to do this. His love for the place seemed overwhelming, making this a sacrifice that must hurt him to the heart, yet which he endured.

She was beginning to realise that a good harvest was vital. The lump sum Joe had paid her, and which had seemed comfortable at the time, was vanishing fast under the demands she was forced to make on it. Her wage bill alone was alarming. She knew she couldn’t do without a car, but she put it off, and finally bought herself only a modest vehicle.

The time was coming when she would be forced to make money somehow, and it made her uneasy because none of the ways open to her were appealing. She’d already had an offer to sell the story of her life with Joe, complete with juicy details, but to do that was to return to the old life and the old values, the very ones she was trying to escape.

Angel pushed the thought aside, telling herself that there would be time enough to worry later. Just now, she wanted to concentrate on Sam, and getting his new home ready for him.

Every morning and evening she called him, seizing on any sign that he was a little more alert, and concealing her disappointment when he didn’t know her. Afterwards she would talk to Roy or Frank, his nurses, and they would be reassuring.

‘He’s been a little better today-truly-we talk of you, and he seems to understand. He just doesn’t recognise your voice on the phone, but it’ll be different when he sees you.’

‘Of course it will,’ Angel would say, trying to convince herself. ‘Give him my love. Tell him we’ll soon be together again.’

Then she would put the phone down and weep.

CHAPTER FOUR

VITTORIO usually ended a trip to town by collecting his mail. It eased the confusion caused by the fact that he no longer lived in the big house.

‘I’ve got some for you today,’ the post mistress said with a smile. ‘And also some for her.’

She said ‘her’ in the significant tone many of the locals used to signify that they were on his side. This time it troubled him.

‘It’s not her fault she’s the new owner,’ he said mildly. ‘Perhaps we should ease off.’

A guffaw behind him made him turn to see a young man whom, now he thought of it, he’d never much liked. His name was Mario, a ne’er-do-well who drank too much and lived by doing odd jobs, not very well. Vittorio had hired him as a temporary hand at harvest time, and fired him for laziness.

‘I guess she’s been working her wiles on you,’ Mario said now, sounding not quite sober.

‘What do you mean?’ Vittorio asked in a cold voice that should have warned him.

‘Well, we all know what kind of a woman she is. It’s in the papers.’

Moving with deliberate care, Vittorio took Mario’s ear between his finger and thumb, squeezing it painfully, and eliciting a squeal.

‘I’ll tell you just once,’ he said, almost gently. ‘Shut-up! Understood?’

A strangulated gasp signified agreement, and Vittorio released him, turning his back at once.

‘I’ll take my mail now,’ he said. Then he walked out of the shop without a glance at Mario, who was still rubbing his ear and regarding him with malevolence.

Sitting in the car afterwards, he took some deep breaths, clenching his hands on the wheel. To calm himself down he checked over the mail. Among the items for Angel was a large brown envelope that had come from England and was falling apart. He laid everything on the seat and started up.

At the villa he walked straight in, going to the room at the back where there was a desk, from which he had once run the estate. As he laid the brown envelope down it suddenly gave up the ghost and split right open, depositing its contents over the floor, and revealing them to be a collection of English magazines. As he picked them up Angel’s face blazed out at him.

She was there on the cover of a publication with a ridiculous name, designed to make every man who read it feel like a daredevil. And her pose reinforced the impression, eyes wide, as though meeting a man’s gaze, lips touched by a provocative smile. It was practically an invitation to bed.

Then he saw the words beneath.

How Angel Broke My Heart-by the lover she dumped.

Vittorio made a sound of distaste, flinging the magazine down and heading for the door. But something made him stop, turn back and, hating himself, retrieve it.

Inside, there were more pictures from Angel’s heyday, but there were also amateur snapshots showing her several years back, looking unfinished and barely recognisable as her present self. With her was a handsome young man, presumably her boyfriend.

The headline claimed that this was ‘The True Story Of What Really Happened’, told by Angel’s broken-hearted fiancé.

What followed was a tragic tale of a young man’s love spurned by a rapacious woman, who callously threw him over for a rich man. Reading it, Vittorio discovered that his English had improved more than he had realised.

I loved her, and I thought she loved me, but she threw me over for the sake of wealth. How could I compete with Joe Clannan’s millions? I bear her no ill-will, but, now that she too has been dumped, I hope she has learned the value of a loving heart.

He grimaced with disgust. Then he took a closer look at the man’s face. Like a god, he thought. Probably an empty-headed god, but exactly what a young girl would fall for. But she’d dumped him for Joe Clannan, and Vittorio reckoned he didn’t have to be clairvoyant to guess why.

He felt suddenly sad.

Angel, coming into the room a few minutes later, found him sitting, staring into space. She stiffened when she saw the magazine.