English Rose for the Sicilian Doc

‘What did he say?’ Rose tried to keep the tremor from her voice, for William’s sake.

‘In his opinion, your son is colour-blind. It’s an inherited condition, and there’s no cure or medication for it. It’s just the way he perceives the world...’ Matteo broke off as a tear rolled down Rose’s cheek and she swiped it away. Why couldn’t he just have pretended he hadn’t noticed?

‘Your son is healthy.’ His dark eyes searched her face, as if looking for some clue as to the source of the tear.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ She turned to Dr Garfagnini, ‘Grazie.’

She had to pull herself together. It was unforgivable to react like this in front of William and the doctors who had been so kind. She could do the guilt and the soul-searching later, in private. Rose straightened her shoulders, blinking back any further tears that might be thinking about betraying her.

An exchange in Italian, and Matteo nodded, turning to Rose. ‘Dr Garfagnini has an evening appointment and needs to leave soon, but he’s suggested that I might be able to give you some practical insights, if you have some time to stay and talk.’

‘But...what kind of doctor are you?’ Maybe Matteo’s speciality had something to do with her son’s condition.

Matteo gave her that relaxed, seductive smile that seemed to burn through everything else. ‘I’m an interventional radiologist. And red-green colour-blind, like your son.’

CHAPTER TWO

MATTEO KNEW THAT any parent, given the news that their child wasn’t perfect, was likely to react. But most people’s reaction to his own colour-blindness was to ask how he managed to match his clothes in the morning and leave it at that. There was more to it, but Rose couldn’t have looked any more horrified if he’d told her that the end of the world was expected some time during the next ten minutes.

She’d regained her composure quickly, though, thanking both him and Dr Garfagnini and giving them both a polite smile. But that unguarded moment had piqued Matteo’s curiosity. Dr Garfagnini had seen it too, and it had prompted him to ask Matteo to talk to her now.

‘You’ll have to forgive me.’ She was strolling next to him through the hospital and down to his office. ‘I don’t exactly know what an interventional radiologist does.’

‘It’s all about image-guided diagnosis and treatment. It’s not as invasive as conventional surgery, and we use radiological techniques to target our treatments very precisely.’

‘Sounds fascinating.’ She was obviously weighing up the idea in her head, and Matteo smiled. Most people thought it sounded a bit dry. ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how does your colour blindness affect what you do? It’s not all black-and-white images, is it?’

‘No. Doppler imaging involves colour, to indicate tissue velocities. But it’s colour coding, and so switching the colours to the parts of the spectrum that I can see is always an option.’

‘Yes, I see. I suppose that most problems have a solution.’

That was exactly what he wanted her to understand. That William’s colour blindness was a set of solutions and not a set of problems.

‘Did you know that the man who pioneered diagnostic radiology was colour-blind?’

‘No, I didn’t. Did you hear that, William?’ She looked down at her son, who was busy engaging with the people who passed them in the corridor, pulling at her hand as he turned this way and that, taking in his new surroundings.

‘I don’t think he’s much interested in the history of diagnostic radiology.’ Matteo chuckled. He hadn’t been either when he’d been William’s age.

‘Well, he could be if he wanted to, later on.’ Rose seemed as open to new possibilities as her son, and it made her initial reaction to Dr Garfagnini’s diagnosis all the more puzzling.

He led her through the outer office, stopping to ask his secretary why she hadn’t gone home yet, and ushered Rose into his own office. She put her bag down on the floor, sitting down in the chair that he pulled up for her, and William reached into her bag.

‘William! That doesn’t belong to us...’ William had obviously slipped one of the cars from the toy box into Rose’s bag.

He wondered if the boy was just as entranced by Rose’s look of firm reproof as he was. Matteo turned away, putting his desk between them. He was a doctor first and a man second right now, and thoughts about just how stern Rose might be enticed into getting with him weren’t even vaguely appropriate.

‘No matter. I’ll take it back when he’s finished with it.’ Matteo was sure that the clinic upstairs could spare one rather battered blue car, but Rose was obviously making a point with her son.

‘Thank you.’ She turned back to William. ‘You can play with it while I talk to Dr Di Salvo, but when we go, we’re going to give it back to him.’

William nodded, running to the corner of the office with the car and sitting down on the floor. He looked at his mother and then Matteo, and then started to play with the car, running it up and down the carpet in front of him.

‘Sorry about that.’ She pulled an embarrassed face. ‘He’s an only child and...well, we’ve been exploring the concept of giving things back recently.’

‘He seems to interact with people very well.’ Rose’s eyes had taken on that look of suppressed panic again, and Matteo’s first instinct was to reassure her.

‘I do my best to give him as much time as possible playing with other children. It’s not always easy...’ She bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry if I overreacted over the colour-blindness. I didn’t mean to imply that it’s...well, it’s not a terrible thing. I hope I didn’t offend you.’

Her words jolted him into the unwelcome recognition that she had offended him. That her reaction had somehow told him that he wasn’t good enough and that it was a hard thing to take from a woman as beautiful as she was.

‘Not at all. It’s not an easy thing for people to understand at first.’

‘It’s kind of you to make excuses for me. I’m a scientist so I should be able to understand these things.’ She clasped her hands together tightly on her lap. ‘It’s...something he inherited from me?’

The question seemed to matter to her. ‘Blue-green colour-blindness is carried on the X chromosome so...yes, almost certainly. Is there anyone in your family who’s colour-blind?’

‘Not that I know of. My mother was adopted at birth, though, and she was never interested in finding her biological parents. I suppose she could have passed it to me, and then...’ She broke off. ‘I hope you don’t mind all these questions.’

‘Questions are what I’m here for. I can’t give you a proper clinical judgement, that’s Dr Garfagnini’s speciality, but I can tell you about my own personal experience.’

Even if his personal experience was making this more difficult than he’d expected. The line between doctor and patient—or patient’s mother in this case—had suddenly become a little more fuzzy than usual, and Matteo felt his own heart bleeding into the mix. But Rose had the one thing that pressed all his alarm buttons, telling him to back off now and stop thinking about how much he liked being in her company, and how intrigued he was to find out more about her. She had a child.

* * *

Alec, her ex-husband, would have known this all along. If there was something the matter with anything, then he would have taken it for granted that it was Rose’s fault. Even after more than four years of separation, it still grated to find that he would have been right and that this was one more way in which she’d failed William.

But for William’s sake, if not her own, she should calm down. Attaching a value judgement to something like this would only make him feel not good enough. She couldn’t do anything about her genes, but not good enough was something she could choose not to pass on to him.

She owed Matteo an explanation, though. He’d been more than kind, and she wanted to give him an explanation, which was strange, because usually she’d move heaven and earth rather than talk about this.

‘My marriage broke up before William was born, and I worry that...’ She shrugged miserably. ‘I can’t help worrying that somehow all the stress might have affected him. And I really should have noticed this before.’

He nodded, as if somehow he understood completely. It was a giddy feeling, and Rose reminded herself that he probably nodded in that exact way with all his patients.

‘You’re a scientist, you know that stress can’t change genetic make-up. But I suppose that any amount of good sense can’t stop a mother from worrying about her child.’

She couldn’t help smiling at him. ‘No. That’s right.’

‘And my colour-blindness wasn’t confirmed until I was William’s age. Even though my parents knew it was a possibility because two of my mother’s brothers are colour-blind.’

Rose nodded. ‘Thank you. I hear what you’re saying.’

‘But you don’t accept it?’

‘Give me time. I’m not sure that I can excuse myself so easily just yet.’

Matteo smiled, leaning back in his chair. ‘Fair enough. This is all very new. It may take a while before you can understand exactly which colours William can and can’t see. He’s probably already developed a lot of coping strategies, which may mask his inability to distinguish one colour from another.’

‘What kind of coping strategy?’

‘Well, for instance I talk about red and green traffic lights, but what I really mean is the one at the top and the one at the bottom. I know they’re red and green because people have told me, and so I refer to them in a way they’ll understand.’

‘How did you know about William? I mean, if you couldn’t see the colour of the cars...’

Matteo laughed. ‘I cheated. The receptionist told me.’

‘Do you see things as textures?’ He looked surprised at the question and Rose explained. ‘I had a student who was colour-blind a couple of years ago. He had a real knack with the data from ground-penetrating radar, and I got him involved in an ultrasound survey that the university was doing of some caves in the area. He really excelled with it, and he told me that it was because he saw things in terms of texture.’

‘We all see texture. But I use shape and texture a lot more in defining objects, because that’s what’s available to me. I can’t tell the difference between pink and purple on histological slides, so I got through that module at medical school by learning different cell shapes. The coloured stain is intended to highlight what’s there, but just looking at that can sometimes obscure other things.’

‘Which is why you’re a radiologist?’ Rose imagined that he was very good at what he did. He had that quiet assurance about him.

‘Partly, perhaps. Although actually it fascinates me.’

She laughed. ‘My mistake again. William’s options aren’t defined by his colour blindness.’

When she looked into the dark brown of his gaze, almost anything seemed possible. But if William’s future was all about options, hers wasn’t. It was about staying on course, looking after her son, and trying to make some contribution through the work that she loved. Matteo was a kind man, and he was gorgeous, but he wasn’t an option.

* * *

They’d talked for half an hour, and when William had tired of his game and come to squeeze himself onto Rose’s chair, she’d explained what colour-blindness was in response to his questions. Despite her initial reaction, Rose had been so positive about it all, telling her son that he was special, that his next questions seemed almost inevitable.

‘We’ve got super powers, then?’

‘Not yet.’ She flashed Matteo a smile, bending towards William with a stage-whisper. ‘Maybe when you grow up.’

William turned to Matteo, then back to his mother. ‘He’s got super powers?’ Matteo tried not to smile, since the observation had been behind his hand and clearly intended for his mother’s ears only.

‘Maybe. You never know. Best not to mention it, it might be a secret.’

William nodded sagely, and Rose looked at her watch.

‘We should go. We’ve taken too much of your time already, and I really appreciate it.’

And he should let her go. Right now, before the lines became any more blurred. He got to his feet, and William walked over to him and placed the blue car in his hand, whispering loudly that he wouldn’t tell anyone about the super powers.

Rose shot him a smile and picked up her bag, looking inside to make sure that William hadn’t deposited anything from his office in there. He almost wished that the boy had, because Rose would undoubtedly make a point of returning it, even if it did mean a trip all the way back to the hospital.

‘Would you like to see our lab? On the way out?’ She’d mentioned how most university archaeology departments would give their eye teeth for some of the imaging technology that the hospital boasted, and he suddenly felt like showing off a little.

‘Yes, I’d love to.’ She grinned. ‘Although you’d better check my handbag on the way out.’

‘That’s okay. You’ll never get a CT scanner in there.’

‘I suppose not. Anyway, you need it a lot more than I do.’

He led her down the corridor, quiet now that most of the department was on their way home. The night shift would be using one of the labs, but the other would be empty.

As he opened the door, she bent and took hold of William’s hand. She took a couple of steps into the room, looking around carefully.

‘Very impressive.’ Her gaze lit on the two large screens over the operating table. ‘So these screens tell you everything that’s going on?’

Matteo nodded. ‘Yes. We do a very wide range of procedures here. We can treat fibroids, unblock clogged arteries, perform angioplasty. There are some cancers that we can treat, and that list is growing. We often work with clinicians and surgeons from other disciplines.’

She looked up at him. ‘So maybe one day no one will need to be cut open by a surgeon.’

‘That’s more science fiction than medical fact at the moment. Although we do have help from robotic technology.’ He grinned, gesturing towards the robotic arm that duplicated his own precise movements on a much smaller scale.

‘But you make the decisions. If I were on that table, I think I’d feel a lot more confident if it wasn’t a robot in charge.’

She seemed to make everything so human, so personal. Or perhaps he was the one that was making everything personal, and if that was the case then he should stop it.

‘I’m definitely the one in charge.’

She smiled, turning for the door. ‘Thank you for showing me. It’s fascinating.’

Matteo closed the lab, and decided that it was only polite to walk her to the lift. When the lift came, it seemed only natural to walk her to the main entrance. If he wasn’t going to follow her all the way home, he was going to have to say goodbye at some point.

‘Whereabouts are you digging?’ If she couldn’t answer in the next thirty seconds then he’d never know, because they were already outside and halfway to the car park.

‘Up in the hills, about five miles to the south of Palermo. There was a dig up there a couple of years ago that uncovered evidence of a small settlement.’

‘I know it. You’ve found something else?’

‘Yes, we’re excavating a Roman villa. It’s an important find.’ In the sunshine she seemed even more golden.

‘That’s interesting. My grandfather used to tell me stories of encampments in those hills. More recently than that, though.’

‘We’ve found a lot to indicate that the site’s been inhabited for many years. We’re always very interested in any local stories about the sites we dig.’ She paused for a moment as if thinking something over. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to come and see the site, would you? I’d be very pleased to give you a tour, show you what we’re doing.’

The site sounded interesting. Matteo tried to think of a reason why he shouldn’t and found that the word no had just mysteriously disappeared from his vocabulary. ‘I’d really like that. If you have time.’

She gave him a look of mild reproof and opened her handbag, taking out her purse and extracting a card. ‘My mobile number’s on here. Give me a call and we’ll arrange a time.’

‘Thanks. I will.’ Matteo held out his hand, wondering how he should bid her goodbye. Somehow they seemed to be hovering insubstantially between Dr Di Salvo and Ms Palmer, and Matteo and Rose. Neither seemed to quite fit the bill.

‘Goodbye, then.’

She took his hand, giving it a brisk shake. ‘Goodbye.’ Clearly she wasn’t quite sure what to call him either.

He watched as she put William into the back seat of the car and got in, reversing out of her parking space, the card with her number on it seeming to burn a hole in his hand.

* * *

The early evening traffic in Palermo was a great deal less challenging than feeling that Matteo’s eyes were on her, watching her drive out of the car park. Rose relaxed a little as she rounded the corner, out of his view.

‘Mum.’ William’s voice sounded from the back of the car.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you going to ask him to be your boyfriend?’ William had been exploring the concept on and off for the last few months. His radar was just as perceptive as the delicate diagnostic equipment in Matteo’s lab.

‘No, sweetie.’ Rose injected as much certainty into her reply as she could, and started to count. Generally it took William about fifteen seconds to follow up one mortifyingly embarrassing question with another, even more embarrassing. At least he’d waited until they were in the car.

‘Wouldn’t he be a good boyfriend?’ It had taken William up to a count of twelve to formulate the thought.

‘I’m sure he’d make a very good boyfriend.’ Stupendous, actually. But in William’s mind the word was reserved for cars and superheroes. ‘Only I don’t want one.’

‘Why not?’

Why not indeed. Telling William that his father had been the only serious relationship she’d ever had, and that she’d made a complete and utter mess of it, probably wasn’t a good idea. Neither was telling him that she would never allow herself to get into a situation where she could make all those mistakes again.

‘Because I’ve got you. And Grandma and Grandad, and my job. And you. I don’t need anything else.’

‘Good. Because he’s my friend.’

‘Yes. I think superheroes ought to stick together.’

CHAPTER THREE

MATTEO DROVE ALONG the dusty, snaking road. He’d told himself that however interested he was in seeing the site, he wouldn’t go, but all the same he’d asked his grandfather to recount the old stories about the area when he’d visited him at the weekend. And once he’d transcribed them into English, it seemed only right that he should give them to Rose.

He sent her a text and she replied almost immediately. If he’d like to come to the site on Friday evening, she’d show him around.

He could see signs of activity up ahead of him, people taking advantage of the cool of the evening to work. Matteo turned off the road and parked his car next to the others that were lined up along the perimeter of the site.

She walked towards him as he got out of his car. Fair hair tied up in a messy ponytail at the back of her head, her arms bare, a thin white top with blue embroidery over a faded pair of denim shorts. Like the rest of the people working here, her feet were protected from the rocky terrain by battered work boots.

‘Hello. You made it, then.’

There had never been any real question about that. And now she was standing beside him he realised that he would have driven over to the other side of the island just for this one glimpse of her. Matteo wondered briefly whether her choice to wear blue was for his benefit, and decided that he had no right to hope that it was.

‘Yes, I made it.’

They stood for a moment smiling at each other and then Rose turned suddenly. ‘Come and see what we’ve been doing.’

She led the way over to a group of prefabricated buildings. Inside, long trestles held boxes of material, waiting to be sorted and cleaned.

‘I brought some notes from my grandfather.’ He felt suddenly unsure of himself. ‘I’m not sure they’ll be any use to you. They’re just old stories and some of them are pretty far-fetched.’

‘That’s just the kind of thing we’re interested in. Old stories are often embellished as they’re handed down but they usually contain a kernel of truth.’

‘I’m not sure about these...’ Matteo reached into his pocket, producing the written sheets and handing them over to her, and Rose scanned them.

‘Bandits...’ She nodded. ‘We’ve heard that one. But we haven’t heard this... A sorceress?’

‘Yeah. I doubt that one’s got any basis of truth in it.’ Matteo shifted uncomfortably. The stories meant a lot to his grandfather, but he liked to think that his feet were more firmly planted in the modern world.

‘You never know. It’s good to keep an open mind. May I put these into our site archive?’ She put the paper down on the worktop and walked over to a cabinet, consulting the labels on the plastic boxes stacked inside.

‘Of course. If they’re of any interest.’

She turned, grinning. ‘Everything’s of interest. We just have to find out how it all fits together. About what date would the bandits be?’

Matteo chuckled. ‘A long time ago, and they’re all long gone. My grandfather’s nearly eighty, and it was when his father was a boy.’

‘So...’ She turned. ‘Somewhere around nineteen ten. Twenty...?’

‘About that.’

‘Will you write that down, please, on the paper?’ She turned back to the boxes, running her finger along the rows, and found the one she wanted, pulling it out.

Matteo did as she asked, wondering what this was all about. Then she opened the box. ‘We reckon that this probably dates from around that time.’

In a plastic bag lay a bullet. Matteo stared at it open-mouthed. ‘You’re kidding...’

She grinned. ‘No, we found it in one of the test pits. We often find things which are more modern when we dig down to get to the older strata. You’d be surprised how many old plastic bags get turned up.’

Matteo picked up the bullet, looking at it carefully, the sudden thrill of discovery throbbing through his veins. ‘It could be from a hunting rifle...’

‘Could be. We’ve sent photos off to a forensic ballistics expert, and we should know a bit more soon. I’d have thought it would be more likely to be buckshot if it was for hunting, though. There were no human or animal remains there, so maybe target practice?’

‘You’re hoping target practice.’ The idea of anything else made Matteo shiver.

‘Yes, hoping.’ She smiled, leaning towards him, obviously catching his mood. ‘Careful. We’ll have you hooked if you don’t watch out.’

‘You might have warned me sooner. I’m already hooked.’ In more ways than one, when he thought about it.

‘Ah. Well, since the damage is already done, it can’t do any harm to show you a bit more.’ Rose gave him a bright smile, her obvious enthusiasm for her work bubbling deliciously. Putting the bullet away and picking up the sheets of paper, she led him away from the finds to a large computer screen in the corner of the room.

‘I thought this might be of interest to you. Where your skills and mine meet.’

The thought of her off-duty skills meeting his, and testing them to their limit, sent a cool shiver down his spine. Matteo reminded himself that he needed to get a grip. That clearly wasn’t what she was talking about.

She opened directories, finding the file she wanted, and an image came up on the screen. ‘This is the geophysical survey.’

Matteo sat down next to her, leaning forward to study it carefully. ‘This is ground-penetrating radar?’

‘Yes, that’s right. We’re using a combination of GPR and electromagnetic survey techniques.’ She leaned back in her seat. ‘This is a pretty easy one. What do you reckon?’

‘I’d say...well, that line looks like an external wall of some sort, and those are internal walls?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Most people don’t see it straight away.’