A Clash With Cannavaro by Elizabeth Power Page A

memory led her to wonder whether he had been.
    On the eve of their siblings’ wedding he had given her scant insight into why he hadn’t been Angelo’s best man. His brother and he had moved on. Made their own lives, he’d said simply, which had seemed to explain why the role had fallen to the bridegroom’s closest friend. Yet there had been strained feeling, Lauren had detected, between the two brothers, noticeable in the way Angelo had praised Emiliano with a kind of cynical self-mockery, as though he was jealous and resentful of his older brother in some way, and not the other way around. There had been a strained politeness too, she had sensed, between Emiliano and Claudette Cannavaro, the middle-aged, amazingly glamorous French ex-model who had been introduced to Lauren as the brothers’ stepmother. Lauren remembered her as a rather distant, rock-hard beauty who hadn’t projected much warmth.
    ‘So what about you, Lauren? Did you have a happy childhood?’
    Her smile was warm and wistful. ‘Very.’
    ‘In the house where you are living now?’
    She nodded, having already told him how she had moved from London, where she’d lived for little more than a year, back to the farmhouse when she had taken on caring for Danny. It was then that she’d let out the stables and taken on the unmarried, intrepid Fiona to run them.
    ‘And did you have any dreams or desires before you were forced into the role of guardian, beyond working on the checkout at your local garden centre, or typing house particulars in an estate agent’s office?’
    She remembered mentioning the estate agent’s job on the night they had met, but not the reason for her being in London in the first place—not how hard she had been studying during her evenings and at weekends.
    ‘Yes, I did,’ she answered and, deciding to wipe out that glimmer of mockery in his devastating eyes, along with any more preconceived ideas he might have about her, added, ‘I wanted to be a vet.’
    He looked surprised, just as she’d thought he would.
    ‘So why didn’t you?’ he enquired, frowning.
    ‘My parents died during my first term at uni.’ She gave a little shrug. ‘So I left.’
    ‘Mamma mia! I’d no idea!’
    ‘That my parents were dead?’ She couldn’t believe he could have forgotten a thing like that. She couldn’t imagine him ever forgetting anything.
    ‘No, of course not.’ Now it was his turn to sound slightly affronted. ‘Only that you had lost them in such recent years. For some reason I imagined it was when you were a child...’
    ‘I thought Angelo might have mentioned it,’ she said. ‘Vikki must have told him.’ Or perhaps she hadn’t, Lauren thought wildly, remembering with an aching regret how her sister had always seemed ashamed of her parents and her lowly origin.
    ‘If she did, he didn’t say anything to me. My brother and I communicated very little,’ Emiliano said, ‘and, when we did, it was seldom on a social footing. I am afraid that Angelo and I rarely saw eye to eye.’
    There it was. Clarified. Everything she had suspected and speculated over.
    ‘What did your parents do?’ he enquired before she could ask him why.
    ‘Mum wrote horoscopes. You know, star signs? For an astrology magazine. She believed every word of it.’ Her mouth curved fondly as she thought about her gentle, often distracted mother, who had the ability to let every worldly care wash over her. ‘She was unconventional in her ideas. Her views. In the way she dressed...’ So much so, Lauren remembered, that she and her sister had often been the butt of some unkind teasing at school, although she had never minded quite as much as Vikki had.
    ‘And your father?’
    ‘He was a teacher. Well, a retired professor, really. Mum was a dropout student from the college where he taught. That’s how they met. At some sort of reunion or other.’
    ‘And what did he profess?’
    ‘Natural sciences.’ She grinned. ‘And the whackiest ideas no one