Wishful Thinking by Jemma Harvey Read Free Book Online Page B

working populace if anyone ever bothered to pay. Anyhow, Franco was dark and handsome, if not actually tall, with the caramel complexion of the Mediterranean, black hair, and a wicked green glint in his eyes. Georgie met him in Venice, where she had gone for the carnival. The setting was a palazzo, lantern-lit, candle-lit, fairy-lit; reflections shimmered in the canal below; somewhere above the stars were keeping their end up. Music fought a running battle with conversation. Georgie wore gold silk in the style of the seventeenth century; Franco was dressed as a pirate. Through the slits in his mask, she saw that green glint. It was fatal. She had never yet completely lost her head over a man, and somewhere at the back of her mind she felt it was long overdue. He fulfilled all the clichés: the looks of a film star, the credentials of a Latin lover, even the title. ‘It was so Mills and Boon,’ Georgie sighs, ‘that was the joke. I never could resist a good joke.’ But the joke was on her.
    As soon as she returned from Venice, she booked her next ticket out. By the third trip the ticket was one-way. She shacked up with him in an apartment in Rome and in due course they got married.
    I’ve seen the pictures. Georgie’s hair looks darker then, a more golden blonde, and long enough to put up, piled on her head and twined with white flowers and bits of silver leaf. She is wearing that reliable marital standby oyster silk, and a train. The pallor of the material sets off a perfect tan, and the sculpted bodice and skirt show her tiny waist and the slender curve of her hips. She looks unbelievably lovely in a totally different way from Lin, all assurance and warmth and sensuality. Beside her, the groom is wickedly handsome, glint and all, his tan deeper and greener than hers, with that olive tint that you get in southern Europe, his pointy smile and loose curls making him look slightly faun-like.
    â€˜Wasn’t he a Catholic?’ Lin asked.
    Georgie made a face. ‘Oh, yes. I was so besotted, I agreed to the whole package. It wasn’t as if I had any religion – nor had he. It was just what you did in Italy. He had the guilt, of course. Fornication was a sin and all that. I expect that’s what made him so good at it.’
    â€˜Do you regret it?’ I inquired.
    â€˜No. I don’t . . . really . . . think I regret anything. What’s the point? I was madly in love, I got married. Some of the time it was magic. Some of the time it was hell. That was all right with me. Living happily ever after would be very boring.’
    Georgie’s a lot more down-to-earth than Lin, but in those days she had her romantic streak. She had traded in her glamorous London lifestyle for what she hoped would be the dolce vita in Rome, but it took time to make friends and her determination to get a job unnerved her husband. She didn’t have the contacts for PR there, so she studied Italian and got work as a translator. She found herself drawn into a small community of ex-pat brides, women from colder climes who’d gone the Mills-and-Boon route, falling for heat, bougainvillaea, dark good looks, seductive accents, out-of-date titles. They would gather together and compare notes on their Italian stallions, on the dominant mothers-in-law, the masculine obsession with machismo and bella figura , the best ways of cooking pasta, their frustrated desire to repaint the salone blue, or green, or any colour except the standard creamy-white. They had secret feasts involving Marmite, Branston pickle, rice pudding and curry. Georgie, never at her best with too much female company, shocked both foreigners and natives by cultivating menfriends, not clandestine lovers but admirers and companions: a gay fashion designer, an artist who painted her, an American writer encountered in the course of work. When Franco objected she laughed at him. ‘Jealousy is good,’ she told him.