Picnic basket in hand, I crossed the sun-drenched slope of lawn and followed the directions I’d been given. I found him stripped to the waist and wielding an axe. He was fully immersed in the task of chopping down a tree, and taking advantage of his absorption, I observed him for a few moments, shamelessly enjoying the sight of the muscles in his back and shoulders rippling in the dappled sunlight.
Some distance from Matteo, two lumberjills were tackling a felled tree with a cross-cut saw. It was one of the girls who saw me first.
‘I’m guessing you haven’t come here to help?’ she said, weighing up the smart summer frock I had deliberated over first thing that morning. It contrasted forcibly with the uniform the two girls were both dressed in – sturdy dungarees with a beige short-sleeved shirt, and a green beret. The girl’s tone was teasing, but not unfriendly. Her fellow member of the Women’s Timber Corps turned to look, followed by Matteo, who promptly dropped the axe he was holding. He could not have looked more startled if the sky had parted and Moses had been standing before him, stone tablet at the ready.
‘Why did you not tell me you were coming?’ he asked, after the two lumberjills had given him permission to take a break, and not without a good deal of mischievous asides. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ one of them called out to us as we walked away.
‘I wanted to surprise you,’ I said.
‘You certainly did that,’ he remarked, a shy smile covering his face. He had now smoothed back his dark hair and put on his shirt. I had to admit privately that I experienced a flicker of disappointment as he did up the buttons and snapped his braces into place over his shoulders. It also did not pass my notice that he was all fingers and thumbs and the buttons of his collarless shirt weren’t correctly aligned.
‘Is it a good surprise?’ I asked, suddenly anxious that he might be annoyed I had caught him in a state of partial undress. POW or not, he was Italian and Italian men were the vainest I had ever come across.
He stopped walking and turned to face me. ‘Seeing you again is . . . is like the sun bursting through the clouds after many weeks of rain.’
‘What a lovely thing to say,’ I said.
He smiled and took the picnic basket from me. As we walked on, he slipped his free hand through mine and a spontaneous spark of electricity ran through me. It felt so real, I half expected my hair to stand on end.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To my favourite place. It is where I go when I want to think of you.’
‘Do you think of me a lot?’
‘More than I should say.’
‘What if I said that ever since I left here, I haven’t been able to get you out of my thoughts?’
‘I would then have the courage to say that you are the first thing I think of when I wake in the morning, and the last when I go to sleep. And if I am lucky, I dream of you.’
Hand in hand, we walked on without another word, the air fragrant with haymaking, the hedgerows filled with the fluttering of birds and their sweet song. Overhead a lark swooped and dived in the crystalline sky; its distinctive call adding to the perfection of the day.
Our destination proved to be a secluded spot on the riverbank. Unfolding a tablecloth from the basket, I laid it on the bone-dry grass. ‘I’m afraid it’s not much,’ I said, revealing the meagre picnic I had thrown together, ‘it was the best I could manage in the circumstances.’
‘For some reason I am not hungry,’ he said, his soft dark brown eyes settling on mine. I held fast to his gaze and as the moment – potent with a pulsating energy – stretched between us for the longest time, I smiled.
‘But it would be a shame for it to go to waste,’ I said finally, passing him a precious bottle of champagne to open. ‘And if you’re going to be felling more trees, you’ll need your strength.’
Having said he wasn’t hungry, and doubting my own appetite being this close to him, we made short work of the half loaf of bread I’d brought, along with the lump of cheddar, the small jar of Mrs Partridge’s homemade apple chutney, a clutch of pea pods, and the tomatoes I’d picked from the greenhouse. For dessert I produced the remains of an apple pie, again care of Mrs P.
As we ate and drank our fill, I thanked him for his letters, saying how much I had looked forward to reading them.
‘I could not say all that I wanted to,’ he said, lying on his side, his head propped up so he could look at me.
‘Why not? Were you worried about our letters being censored?’
‘No. I was afraid if I said too much . . . if I declared my feelings for you, it would ruin our friendship.’
‘Is that what we have, a friendship?’
He traced his forefinger along the chequered pattern of the gingham tablecloth beneath us. ‘I do not know what we have, Romily, only that it feels wonderful and I never want it to end.’
His hand moved towards mine so that our fingertips were touching. Once more that spark of electricity fizzed through me causing my heart to race and my mouth to turn as dry as the champagne we were drinking. My gaze locked with his, and with my body zinging with the kind of desire I hadn’t felt since being with Jack, I didn’t know how much longer I could continue in this virtuous manner. I tilted my head, just the slightest of movements, and it appeared to be all the signal he needed.
When our lips met, the passion between us ignited spontaneously, putting us both in danger of self-combusting. Our hands, no longer tentatively touching, explored each other’s bodies with an urgency that matched the fervour of our kissing. But when he entered me, he did so with a more measured tenderness. Impatient for that soaring moment of euphoric release that I knew I was seconds away from, I urged him on.
‘Slowly,’ he whispered, cupping my face in his hands, ‘I want to remember this always.’
At the mercy of his self-control, he kept me teetering on the brink until finally in an explosion of mutual climax, we clung to each other as one complete body. Then with tears in our eyes, we stared at each other as though we couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.
‘Ti amo,’ he murmured. ‘I love you.’
I never thought to hear those words again, or utter them myself, but I wiped the tears from his eyes, and mine, and told him I loved him. ‘Ti amo, Matteo.’
We lay for some minutes in the warm sunshine, basking in the exquisite bliss of what we had just done. ‘I can’t believe you’re really here in my arms’ he said. ‘I shall wake up in a minute and find it was just a beautiful dream.’
Thinking it would be wonderful to lie here for ever, I sighed like the most contented of cats who had got more than her share of cream.
‘I’m so happy I could sing!’ I suddenly exclaimed.