Irresistible You (29 page)

‘It’s you who’s getting me worked up about things! Now tell this poor girl where Mark is!’

There were a few moments in which Elena looked from Barney to Linda and back again, not quite sure who was going to win and feeling very sure that she was never actually going to find out where Mark was.

‘He’s-’ Linda started.

‘- in the bedroom,’ Barney finished.

‘You can go through if you like - have some privacy,’ Linda said.

Elena gulped. She was right: Mark had been there all along. Had he been listening to them? Had he told Barney to tell her that he wasn’t there?

‘It’s through there on the left. Don’t trip over anything. It’s Barney’s land-of-the-lost-guitars room.’

Elena walked out of the room, hearing Linda yelling at Barney and making no attempt not to be heard by Elena. She really did have a voice, that woman, Elena thought, and now she came to think about it, she remembered Mark telling her that she sang in Barney’s band.

Barney’s music hideout was at the back of the flat and, as Elena approached, she could hear strumming from behind the closed door. She felt herself smiling. She’d never heard Mark play a guitar. He was really quite good. She stood outside the door for a moment, acutely aware that he was so close and that it was just a matter of her opening the door. But what a huge task that was Their relationship was in tatters: she’d ruined it! Single-handedly, she’d wrecked what they’d built so carefully together.

She closed her eyes. Where had all her strength gone? In the taxi from her flat, she’d felt so confident and strong but, somewhere, all her strength had ebbed away. She wasn’t even sure if she could reach out and open the door into the room where Mark was.

Then why did you come all this way?
a voice asked her. She couldn’t tell if it was Rosanna chiding her, Stefano remonstrating with her, or her own conscience. Whoever or whatever it was, it worked because her hand closed on the handle of the door and she was in the room before anything else could change her mind.

‘Hey, Barney!
These strings are a bit knackered, aren’t they?’ Mark said without looking around.

‘It’s not Barney, Mark,’ she said.

Mark’s fingers stopped strumming and he turned from his position on an old chair by the window but he didn’t smile. Had she been expecting him to smile? She wasn’t sure. But the absence of such a greeting made Elena feel like turning and running away again.

‘What are you doing here, Elena?’

‘I’ve come to see you.’ It was a silly thing to say but his question was a profoundly silly one too. What did he expect her to say? That she’d come to audition for Barney’s band?

‘I need to talk to you,’ she said.

‘I’ve already heard all you have to say to me,’ Mark said and, to Elena’s horror, his fingers began strumming once more.

‘You haven’t,’ she interrupted, trying not to be deterred by his indifference. ‘You haven’t heard everything I have to say because I’ve been lying to you.’

To her great satisfaction, he stopped strumming and looked up. ‘I know. I met him, remember?’

‘I’m not talking about Reuben.’

‘No? Don’t tell me, you’ve had another fiancé hidden away somewhere?’

Elena winced at his accuracy but didn’t rise to his bait. ‘Sarcasm really doesn’t become you, Mark.’

‘Oh, really?’ he said in a tone which could have eaten sarcasm for breakfast. He began strumming again.

Elena swallowed. Her throat felt horribly dry - like her first day of teaching. She didn’t know what to do. There was no training for this; no manual to tell her how to handle this sort of situation.

‘MARK!’ she suddenly shouted. ‘Will you please put that bloody guitar down?’

He did. He then turned dark and angry eyes on Elena. ‘What is it you want, Elena? I’ve already given everything up for you: my time, my sanity, even my job.’

‘I never asked you to do that.’

‘But it’s done all the same.’

‘Then undo it.’

‘What?’

‘Tell Tomi you want your job back. You know he’s desperate. He’ll give it back to you sooner than spending on advertising for somebody else.’

‘Thanks. That makes me feel so much better.’

Elena sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. You know you’ll be missed. The students will miss you. Even Tomi will.’

There was a pause when both of them knew exactly what should be said.

‘And I’ll miss you,’ she said at last, filling the silence with exactly the right words.

‘You don’t even know I’m around half the time,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve been your shadow for months now but you only notice now that the sun has gone in.’

For a moment, Elena wanted to make a joke of his poetic turn of phrase but she felt too sad to say anything at all.

‘You have every right to say that,’ Elena said. ‘If I was you, I’d be saying exactly the same things right now. But I think you should listen to what I have to say.’

Mark made a noise that was mid-way between a sigh and a groan. ‘What?’

‘Can I sit down?’ she asked, looking around the shabby room. There was one other chair opposite the one Mark was occupying but it was covered with newspapers and sheets of music. Elena crossed the room and swept the mess up in one armful, placing it on the floor in a small mountain.

‘I was hoping you’d be waiting for me at the hotel when I got back to Venice,’ she told him. He didn’t say anything. ‘No, that’s a lie.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’

‘I was hoping you’d follow me and stop me after I broke up with you - tell me to stop being stupid.’ She shrugged. ‘But you didn’t. And you were right not to because you’ve been doing that all along, haven’t you? You followed me out to Venice and tried to tell me, so many times, that I was being a fool and that I couldn’t be happy with anyone other than you. But I didn’t want to hear you.’

She paused. He was watching her with an intensity that made her feel nervous. She felt like she was auditioning for her life.

‘I guess I didn’t want anyone getting as close as you were. It scared me. Do you want to know why? Do you want to know what this is all about?’

Mark frowned. ‘Rosanna said there was something I should-’

‘I’ve never told anyone before. I’ve locked it away. But I’ve leant that no matter where you run, no matter how you cocoon yourself in your new life and your new self, you can never truly escape your past. It’s only ever a blink away. No matter how brash and bold I am, no matter which mask I choose to wear, I’m still the sixteen year-old girl standing in the bend of the road, looking down the cliff face at a billowing cloud of dust.’

Tears swam in her eyes as the words left her mouth.

‘Lucio and I had spent the whole summer together. We’d just left school and were celebrating - doing all the crazy stuff you do when you’re sixteen. I’d never met anyone like him before but I guess every sixteen year old girl feels like that when she falls in love, and I really believed I was in love. I thought I was going to spend my whole life with Lucio. We didn’t talk about that, of course; we were too busy messing about to be serious but I could see my whole future clear ahead - as bright as the summer sunshine. We spent hours doing absolutely nothing but our favourite thing - messing about on his moped. He loved that moped. It was like an extension of him, really, and he insisted on it being an extension of me too! We did some really stupid things - every day - but none as stupid as the day I’ve tried so hard to forget.’

Elena stopped for a moment but she didn’t look at Mark. She was miles away - somewhere in the Italian countryside - somewhere in her past.

‘We’d taken the coast road and had stopped for a picnic that I’d made up that morning. And then …’ she paused. ‘It was all so unreal. Lucio got on his bike and was fooling around. One moment, we were laughing, and making fun of each other, and then there was the roar of his bike as he took up my dare. He was always a bit of a show-off and I loved him for it.

‘I hadn’t really believed it had happened because it had seemed more like a scene from a film than anything else. I kept expecting him to appear again - with a huge smile on his face as he laughed at having tricked me. But he never did appear.’

‘What happened?’

‘His bike had skidded, right on the edge of a cliff. He didn’t have time to stop. I couldn’t even see him - the land just disappeared into air and then sea. There was nothing there.’

‘God, Elena-’

‘You see?’ she cried. ‘Do you see now? I had to get away from that person. I hated myself. I was a murderer.’

‘No, Elena -’

‘But he died! Because of a stupid, stupid dare! I wanted him to prove himself to me. I was nothing but a vain, self-centred, foolish teenager.’

‘It was an accident,’ Mark said.

‘And I caused it!’

They were both silent for a moment.

‘I never want to go through that again,’ Elena said at last.

Mark frowned at her. ‘But you had two fiancés. Surely that meant doubling the chance of it happening?’

Elena gave a tiny shrug.

‘I don’t understand you,’ Mark said. ‘I really don’t. If you’d been so scared of losing those close to you, why get engaged at all? That doesn’t make any sense. Unless, you weren’t ever going to take things further than that. Was that it?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said in a half-whisper. ’Why are you asking me all these questions? I don’t have the answers!’

‘I’m asking them because you’re
here!
Why are you here telling me all this stuff now? How do you expect me to respond?’

Elena looked at him, her eyes dark and full of sadness. ‘I just thought I owed you an explanation. That’s all. I wanted to say I was sorry. And that I love you.’

There was another pause and Elena’s words hung heavy in the air between them.

‘What do you want from me, Elena?’ Mark asked. ‘You want me to promise you I’m not going to die? I can’t do that! I wish I could. I wish I could stand here and tell you that everything’s going to be just fine between us but I can’t. Nobody can guarantee that sort of thing. I can’t - you can’t -
nobody!
’

Elena let the tears spill from her face. ‘I know that!’

Mark bit his lip and sighed. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said.

Elena looked up at him. ‘Then tell me you love me!’ she said, her voice loud - demanding attention.

It took Mark completely by surprise and made him laugh which made Elena laugh too. The room was suddenly filled with laughter and, before they knew it, they were hugging and kissing.

‘God!
Elena! You’ll never ever fail to knock the wind right out of me!’ He wrapped his arms around her tightly as if he never meant to let go.

Elena hugged him back. ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t want me! I’m horrible. I’ve
lied to you, deceived you-’

‘And I still love you! I must be completely mad!’

‘Let’s be mad together, Mark. Please? Will you give me another chance? I know I don’t deserve it. I know I’ve been impossible and that I should leave you in peace to find somebody nice but I can’t do that.’

He smiled at her and pushed her dark hair away from her eyes. ‘And I wouldn’t let you.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.
I love you, Elena. You infuriate me. You make me want to tear my hair out and stuff it in my mouth until I choke myself. But I love you!’

Elena’s eyes filled with fresh tears. ‘Then you’ll marry me?’

Mark took a deep breath. ‘As long as you promise I’m the only fiancé you’re going to marry.’

She nodded. ‘I promise.’

Elena and Mark got married in the middle of August and the reception was held in the grounds of a small hotel in the Thames valley overlooking the river, just as Mark had imagined it. Barney Malone was there with the newly resurrected
No
Name
. He’d jacked in his office job after three weeks and was actually now making a killing playing at weddings.

‘It isn’t exactly
Top of the Pops
, but it pays the rent and keeps me out of a suit,’ he said.

Linda was there too - back in fine singing fettle after giving birth to baby Cher.

Rosanna and Reuben had flown over from Venice to be there and Mark had even shaken Reuben’s hand and received a slap on the back in return.

Even Tomi, the skint Finn made an appearance, offering Mark his old job back with a small pay rise as a wedding present.

It was the perfect day. The sky was the colour of forget-me-nots and a gentle breeze from the river was just enough to prevent Elena from overheating in her full-length rose-coloured gown.

‘You look gorgeous,’ Mark whispered to her when they finally managed to escape the wedding party and sneak down to the river.

‘And you look so handsome,’ she said. She’d never seen Mark in a suit before and he looked very dashing in his wine-coloured cravat. Very Mr Darcy, she thought.

‘We’ll have to have a honeymoon, you know,’ he said. ‘Now I’ve got my job back.’

‘I know,’ she agreed.

‘Anywhere you fancy?’

Elena looked thoughtful. ‘Not Venice,’ she said. ‘Anywhere but Venice.’

He laughed.
‘Agreed.’

Elena felt as if she never wanted to go back to Venice, yet, at the same time, she couldn’t shake the place from her mind. She felt as if its labyrinthine streets had found a way into her very soul. Sometimes, she even dreamed about them: walking over endless bridges and staring into its
canals, and each journey would end at Viviana’s.

‘Where have you been?’ Stefano would say. ‘I’ve been worried about you.’

‘I’m fine, Stefano! Please don’t worry about me. Everything’s fine. Absolutely fine!’

And, on waking, she really did feel fine. Perhaps it was because she’d come to terms with the fact that the past was the past. She couldn’t erase it but she had to move forward into her future, and that future now contained Mark. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so happy before. So they hadn’t been able to afford the flat they wanted, so they were still working for appalling wages, but they had each other. Mark was right about not being able to guarantee her the future she wanted but, with Mark beside her, she’d quickly realised that the present was a pretty good place to be.

And the mask?

The mask remains in its box, safely cushioned in its tissue-paper bedding on a shelf in Elena’s wardrobe. When she first brought it home, she couldn’t stop getting it out and holding it, checking to see if the gold was less gold in the English light. It wasn’t, of course. It glimmered and glowed as if alive but not once did she try it on. She didn’t need to. The mask had done its job and it deserved a happy retirement but, even though she didn’t think she’d ever need to wear it again, she wouldn’t part with it for the world. Perhaps it was a comfort thing - just having it there.

No, Elena really doesn’t think she’ll ever need to wear it again. But you never know, do you?