Irresistible You (2 page)

There were a pile of unmarked essays on Prof’s desk, there were five mugs of unfinished tea in varying states of decomposition around the room, and the answerphone had three messages which all needed responding to, yet all he could do was to sit and think of Elena. It seemed an age since he’d last seen her yet she had only been there last week, he thought, tapping his silver pen against his jaw.

He switched his lamp on as he endeavoured to make a start on the essays. His eyes weren’t as good as they’d once been. He had to wear glasses now which, his last girlfriend told him, made him look like Indiana Jones before he set out to become a hero. He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. Wouldn’t one rather be a hero than an academic - when it comes to looks, anyway? Still, he supposed it was better than being told he looked like Woody Allen.

Elena actually loved the glasses. She’d said they made him look distinguished and he supposed his grey hair was also being referred to when she made that remark. It used to be a rich brown but now it was threaded through with silver as if he’d walked through a city of spiders’ webs. He wouldn’t have cared so much but the grey had begun its sabotage long before his thirty-third birthday.

‘I like older men,’ Elena had told him, her warm kiss convincing him completely. So, there were some advantages to ageing, Prof
thought.

Ah, Elena! Every time she was there, she filled the room with joy. It was the only time the place felt alive. Normally, it had that musty library-crossed-with-a-morgue smell that came from being stuffed with old books. Prof could tell that that’s what Elena had been thinking when she’d first walked through his door. She’d had him summed up with a blink of her brown eyes. And yet, she’d stayed.

Of course, Prof knew it was wrong. How many times had he been warned about the perils of passion with pupils? It was irresponsible, irrational and idiotic. But it was also pure bliss. She made his heart leap within his chest. She made his head spin when she kissed him. She turned his walk into a waltz and his sleep into a heavenly haven. And his brain had been alliteratively addled. He felt as if he’d swallowed
The Golden Treasury of English Verse
as he kept thinking and talking in similes and metaphors. He’d be brushing his teeth and suddenly think,
she’s like a rainbow
, or he’d be under the shower and remember a line of poetry which perfectly described her and run, dripping through the house to find it.

She was a true heroine. She could have walked straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. She was Eustacia Vye and Bathsheba Everdene rolled into one and he was sure Thomas Hardy would have fallen head over heels in love with her had he met her, and then punished her to within an inch of her life in one of his novels.

Prof would never forget the time Elena had first asked him his name. She’d made an appointment to see him about her essay on the Byronic hero but, instead of listening to his words of advice, she’d insisted on cross-questioning him.

‘Professor Mortimer is such a stuffy name, don’t you think?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ he’d peered at her over his glasses, feeling exceptionally stuffy.

‘What’s your first name?’ she asked, crossing her legs and leaning across the table most alluringly.

He cleared his throat. ‘Sigmund,’ he said.

‘
Sig
mund! As in Freud?’ Elena laughed. But it wasn’t a mocking laugh, rather a perplexed one, as if she had trouble believing he’d told her the truth. ‘What were your parents thinking of?’

‘It’s a family name,’ he said, picking up her essay again, ready to point out her lack of relevant quotations.

‘It’s terrible!’ she went on. ‘What do you think of me calling you Siggy?’

He frowned at her across the desk and shook his head. ‘About this essay - I really think there’s room for-’

‘Have you got a second name?’

His frown was set in by this stage but he was obviously not going to win her concentration until he’d answered all her questions in a satisfactory manner.

‘Algernon.’

Elena’s eyes suddenly became very round and her mouth dropped open. ‘Algernon,’ she repeated, as if it were the punch line to a joke that wasn’t particularly funny.
‘Algie?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Can I call you Algie?’

‘I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ he said. ‘Now, getting back to Byron-’

‘What do most people call you, then?’

‘Professor.’

‘Well, I can’t call you that!’ she said, and that’s when the name ‘Prof’ materialized.

Prof had always been an old-fashioned sort of man. He opened doors for women, he liked to pay for dinner and he never really believed in women chasing after the man of their choice. However, that was exactly what Elena had done. He really didn’t get any say in the matter and, strangely, he’d found it a rather refreshing experience. He’d pretend to be outraged by her up-front behaviour but he knew she saw right through him from the start.

‘Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this, Prof,’ she said as, many dinner dates later, which he most certainly insisted on paying for, she began undressing behind his filing cabinet. ‘I know you’re not really reading that Tennyson, so put it down and start paying
me
some attention.’

He slammed the book shut. ‘He would have written about you, Elena,’ he told her, crossing the room and loosening his bow tie.

‘What about Shakespeare?’

‘Sonnet after sonnet.
He would have run out of ink writing about your beauty.’

She smiled at this and her fingers found the buttons of his shirt. ‘Will you write about me?’ she asked.

‘Making love to you will be my poetry.’

She pouted prettily. ‘Can’t I have both sex and poetry?’

‘Not at the same time,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ she said after some careful thinking.
‘Sex now; sonnet later.’

Prof had never fallen for somebody so quickly or so wholeheartedly. He had always loved rationally which was a bit of a contradiction, he knew. Love should be spontaneous and unhindered by thought. Wasn’t that what years of being consumed by poetry should have taught him? Still, it wasn’t in his nature to abandon himself quite so completely - until he’d met Elena. It was as if she’d unlocked him and set him free.

He gave her his grandmother’s antique amethyst ring. He didn’t think it was worth very much, but its mellow beauty had always struck him, and he’d so desperately wanted Elena to wear it. Sure enough, it looked stunning against her olive skin. The only thing they had to arrange now was a date. Mother couldn’t have been happier.

‘It’s about time you found somebody to take care of you,’ she said, still believing that he couldn’t possibly survive in the world on his own, despite him being forty-nine and having been independent for the last thirty-one years.

‘You need somebody to love. And somebody who loves you,’ she said. And, he believed he had found her.

Rosanna had said a prayer for her sister earlier that day. She’d said, ‘Please, Mary, mother of Jesus, help to guide my sister. Give her the wisdom to know herself.’ And then she began to wonder if she really should be praying to Mary. Was there a suitable saint to help incurable flirts? Should she pray to Saint Christopher as Elena journeyed through so many love affairs, or to Saint Anthony as she lost her heart to yet another man? They never taught you the really useful saints at school: who to pray to if you’d run up a huge debt or who to pray to if you were failing miserably in your private life. And then Rosanna remembered Saint Rita, the patron saint of desperate causes.

‘Please, Santa Rita, help my sister out of her desperate situation as you yourself were helped.’

She sighed. She’d done her best, and only hoped that it would do the trick because she would be spending the next couple of weeks with Elena and she wasn’t as prepared to put up with her amorous antics as she had been when they were teenagers.

It was always Rosanna who had to pick up the pieces and nurse the broken hearts of Elena’s dumped suitors. She remembered Marco, the sweet nineteen-year old student who fell in love with Elena when they were staying outside Rome one summer. Unfortunately, it was nothing more than a
Roman Holiday
for Elena who, Rosanna believed, loved Marco’s Vespa more than him. It was the feel of the wind through Elena’s hair as they’d sped by The Coliseum that turned her on, and not the feel of his kiss. Then there was Massimo - Mama’s best-friend’s son. The mamas had always hoped that the two of them would get married but Massimo’s mama didn’t appreciate Elena three-timing her boy.

There’d been so many of Elena’s suitors over the years that the names of the others had blurred in Rosanna’s memory. Anyway, comforting the broken-hearted wasn’t a role she relished and she was not prepared to play it in their adult lives. That was why she was a little reluctant to her staying. A fortnight was a long time when you were a female Casanova in Venice and Rosanna dreaded to think what Elena would be up to. She also had the feeling that Elena was running away from something and that could only be a relationship, or three, that wasn’t working out quite how
she’d anticipated.

It wasn’t as if Rosanna had nothing better to do than sort out her sister’s problems. She had problems enough of her own. She’d been sitting an artist’s studio in Cannareggio. It was a quiet residential area of Venice and Rosanna loved strolling next to the lagoon, looking out across the water to San Michele - the
island of the dead
- where Venetians from forgotten times lay in peace behind the apricot walls and dark cypress trees. Mama had once told her that a great-great uncle of theirs was buried there and so, one day, she’d taken the boat across the short stretch of water, her black-ribboned chrysanthemums in her hand, and spent two hours walking up and down the rows of graves, peering into the ornate tombs and squinting at old photographs on the stones. She had found several Montellas but had never found her great-great uncle so had laid her flowers on the grave of Lucia Montella 1892 - 1938, saying a prayer for the woman who might well have been a long-lost relative.

There was definitely something about having Venetian relatives. It was as though they had the very water of the lagoon running through their veins. As soon as Rosanna had returned, she’d felt the connection immediately and knew that she had found her home even if she was staying in somebody else’s in the meantime. She felt as if she could never go back to a land where cars tore up the roads with deafening speed; she needed to be surrounded by the water - to feel its peace and absorb its reflections.

So, she’d been absolutely delighted when she was asked to house-sit the studio of the well-respected artist, Sandro Constantini, who had set his sight on world domination no less. But, no matter how much he adored being in demand, he hated leaving his home and his cat, which Rosanna secretly called
cat-child
.

‘
Bimba
!’ Sandro would coo in an excruciatingly embarrassing manner, cradling it in his arms and pouting his lips as if he meant to kiss it. Rosanna didn’t care for cats herself and had taken to leaving cat-child’s food and drink bowl in the enormous sunken bathroom at the far end of the house. That way, they didn’t have to pretend to tolerate each other.

‘You will look after her, won’t you?’ he’d asked for the hundredth time before leaving for the States.

‘As if she’s my own baby,’ she’d lied, smiling convincingly. Rosanna would have done anything to get that apartment for the summer. Her own horrible rented one on the mainland was a nightmare when it was hot. It heated up like a sauna and, if she’d dared to open a window, it would fill with a thick fog of fumes from the road below. Sandro’s apartment was a dream in comparison. She felt like a princess floating around the enormous studio, her feet cool on the stone floors, draping herself on the cream-coloured sofas. It was heaven and, if heaven came complete with the cat-child, then she’d have to put up with it. Besides, this was a job; she was actually getting paid to stay there. It was probably the easiest money she’d ever earn. She didn’t have to do much more than take care of the house, feed cat-child, field telephone calls and deliver a couple of canvasses. Other than that, she could attend her own sittings.

To be honest, it was a welcome relief to be free to choose her own work again although she had to be selective because Sandro could be quite a jealous artist. He liked to monopolise his models.

‘I don’t want to see my women in other people’s paintings,’ he would tell her, his dark eyes stern and serious. ‘It’s artistic adultery!’

Just as well he paid her enough not to need to work but her clients were safe bets whilst Sandro was abroad and this was her chance to put some money away for a deposit on her very own apartment.

She was really very proud of making her own way in the world and one would have thought she’d be respected for earning her own money and not being reliant on a man but respect was a word that the man in her life had obviously never heard of. Corrado Taccani may have been tall, dark, and handsome but he was also a male chauvinist pig. Rosanna hadn’t known that, of course, when she’d first met him. He’d kept it well hidden, along with a few other unpleasant surprises. Like his mother.

Irma Taccani was the sort of mother-in-law you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. Bridges shook and canal waters quivered when she was in the vicinity, and shop blinds would be pulled down all of a sudden in an attempt to escape a possible unwelcome tirade.

Rosanna remembered when she’d found out that Corrado still lived with his mother.

‘Who can afford their own place in Venice?’ he’d shrugged, and it didn’t really bother her too much until she met the mother in question.

She soon came to realise that it wasn’t only Corrado’s inability to fend for himself in Venice on a labourer’s salary that was holding him back, but that Irma Taccani had him held in a boa constrictor grip.

So, where did that leave Rosanna? Did she really want Corrado enough to fight for him? There were days when she could think of nothing but Corrado - when she couldn’t imagine her future without him even though he didn’t want the same things as he did. He longed to move away from Venice to set up a little small-holding somewhere in Umbria where he could grow his own food and have his wife cook it for him and his seven children. Yes, Corrado wanted to turn her into a big fat Italian mama and that didn’t really fit into Rosanna’s scheme of things. She didn’t want to live in the middle of a field and tread her own wine - she wanted to be able to book a table at the best restaurants and choose from a wine list.

She knew that procrastinating was just making matters worse, and what made her feel worse still was the fact that Elena would feel the same way. As she tidied round the apartment, Rosanna realised that she was dreading her sister’s arrival because it would, inevitably, lead to talking about relationships, and what was she going to tell her? She knew Elena would force her into making some sort of decision about her future and she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that.