A Gift for a Lion (3 page)

She was much in demand for the remainder of the evening, as the local men vied with each other for a chance to partner her. It was all very flattering and a little heady, and as Joanna glanced through the crowd towards the table, she saw that Paul and Mary had returned and were sitting with their heads together with Tony. Criticising her, no doubt, she thought rebelliously. Well, she'd give them something to be critical about.

At last Tony made his way through the crowd to her side. 'I think it's time we were going, Jo,' he said tautly.

'Oh, why?' she laughed up at him, buoyed up by the chorus of groans from the men around her.

'Because it's late.'

'It's not that late, and it was you who discovered this place anyway.' She knew she was being deliberately obstructive but told herself she didn't care. 'I'm enjoying myself, and I don't want to leave. You three go on back. I'm sure I can find someone to bring me back to the boat later on.'

Tony looked furious. 'No chance,' he said grimly. 'We'll wait until it's convenient for you to leave.'

Joanna watched him turn on his heel and walk away and sighed a little. She would have to leave, in spite of what she had said. She didn't want to give Paul and Mary any further ammunition for their complaints about her behaviour. And if she was truthful, she was tired herself.

So she followed Tony back to the table, apologised meekly but with a glint in her eye for having kept them all waiting, and allowed herself to be shepherded back to the
Luana
.

She had hoped that the wine and the dancing would have made Mary sleepy, but as they undressed awkwardly in a rather fraught silence in the tiny cramped cabin they shared, Joanna soon realised that Mary wanted to talk - and was merely biding her time. It was also obvious that she viewed herself quite erroneously in the role of peacemaker.

Mary was quite willing to acknowledge that Paul should not have said what he did, but neither, she pointed out, should Joanna always expect her own way.

'Tony's patience won't last for ever. After all, living with other people requires give and take,' she declared sententiously.

'Precisely,' Joanna agreed a little drily, allowing Mary's rather self-righteous remarks about making sacrifices for the person you loved and not always expecting to be the centre of attention to drift over her.

But after her cousin's voice had died away and been replaced by quiet, steady breathing, Joanna lay awake, thinking.

Mary had been right about one thing, she decided. There should be an element of give and take in a relationship. The main problem with her father and herself was that they both seemed to be takers, she realised a little wanly.

It was not a particularly comfortable thought and she switched her attention to her plans for tomorrow with a pleasurable feeling of excitement. On her way through the saloon she had appropriated one of the local guide books that were kept on the boat, and now she reached up to the shelf above her bunk for the small torch she kept there.

The book dealt mainly with the larger islands in the vicinity, like Corsica, Sardinia and Elba. Saracina, which lay to the north of Corsica, barely merited a paragraph, but that was probably as much as its size warranted, she thought. As if anyone would want to keep people away from a place that size!

But as she read the book, she soon discovered that people had once been kept away with a vengeance. One of the features of Saracina, which appeared to be mainly rocky with a small fertile hinterland, was the remains of some old fortifications built by the islanders of long ago to keep away marauders like the Saracen Turks and Barbary pirates who had been the scourge of the Mediterranean one time.

Joanna pursed her lips. In the ordinary way she would have enjoyed a visit to what was left of the fortifications. She liked scrambling around on historical sites and letting her imagination have full play. But this time, she felt she would stick to her original idea and find a quiet little beach to stay on, well away from Saracina town itself or any other centres of population that might exist. After all, on a beach she would be doing no harm to anyone, even hostile islanders who liked to emulate their ancestors by defending their privacy with guns.

She tossed the book aside and lay down, switching off her torch, her mind roving as it sometimes did before sleep claimed her.

'I won't be selfish any more,' she thought drowsily. 'I will gave Tony more consideration, and I'll make an effort to get on with Paul and not expect everyone to give way to me all the time.'

But such virtuous resolutions deserved one final fling, she convinced herself—her trip to Saracina, before she settled down and became a solid citizen.

She was almost asleep when the thought came to her, forcing her to sit up, fumbling once again for the guide book and the torch.

But though she searched right through the book, nowhere, to her relief, could she find any reference to lions, past or present, on Saracina.

Joanna never forgot her first view of Saracina. It rose out of the faint haze that hung over the sea, a black jagged shape against the unbroken blue of the sky and water. In spite of its rather forbidding aspect, she felt her pulses quicken, and that faint, strange excitement stirred in her stomach again.

It had all been worth it after all, she thought exultantly. Getting to the island had proved to be no easy task. The first part of her plan had worked like a charm —if she discounted the obvious hurt she had inflicted on Tony by preferring her own company to his. She had almost been tempted to tell him about her good resolutions for the future—almost, but not quite. Breakfast had been an uncomfortable meal with Tony sulky and reproachful and Paul and Mary exchanging glances, at once pitying and superior.

She had seen them safely on their way, then slipped into her black bikini which she topped with a simple white towelling shift with a cowl neckline. She piled her book, cosmetics and other belongings into a big straw beach bag, and went up on deck. It was a matter of moments, hailing a passing dinghy and persuading the owner to take her to the quay, but there her troubles began.

It seemed the fishermen in the bar last night had not been alone in their desire to boycott Saracina. Her tentative inquiries about hiring a boat to take her there and bring her back in the late afternoon were met with shrugs, evasions and sometimes downright refusals, accompanied by a spit on the floor.

Joanna began to feel thoroughly frustrated. She was afraid too that word might begin to spread through the little port that the English
signorina
with red hair was trying to get to Saracina and that Tony and the others might hear and arrive in time to prevent her. She had just begun to feel that she would have to abandon her quest , and return to
Luana
to spend the day after all, when someone mentioned the name Pietro. Immediately a ripple of laughter ran round the listening men, and Joanna, straining to follow the quick Italian, learned that Pietro was the one man who might be willing to risk a trip to Saracina in his boat, being, added her informant, tapping his head significantly, completely mad.

Joanna was taken aback. She hardly wished to embark in a small boat with a lunatic, but she soon gathered from the halting explanations in very broken English from some of the other men that Pietro's madness lay rather in foolhardiness than in any actual mental deficiency.

When the madman eventually appeared in a striped sleeveless vest and jeans covered in fish scales, Joanna thought with a hidden smile that he was the nearest thing to the answer to a maiden's prayer in every way that she had ever seen.

Pietro appeared equally impressed. He managed to convey with much gesturing and eye-rolling that he would be overjoyed to convey
la bella signorina
wherever she might wish to go, and was desolate that anything as sordid as money had to enter into the transaction.

But on this point, Joanna was firm. She did not want her trip with Pietro to be on anything but a strictly business footing. Judging by the speed with which he recovered from his broken heart and stowed the generous amount of money she gave him in some mysterious pocket in his vest, Joanna guessed he probably had a strong-minded wife and several children not too far in the background.

As they pulled away from the quayside, Joanna saw that some of the boatmen she had spoken to were standing watching them depart. But there was none of the calling, waving and handkissing which usually attended departures. The men's faces were unsmiling, and some were almost contemptuous, Joanna thought resentfully. She got the impression that while Pietro could be mad, and accepted as such with a shrug, she was regarded as a fool, and a fool who was also a woman, which condemned her utterly.

She was glad to turn her back on the harbour wall and the row of watching figures and lift her face to the open sea, revelling in the movement of the boat and the slap of the little waves against the bow. A day out of time, she thought exultantly. A day that belonged to her. It was a strangely exhilarating thought and she began to smile. Behind her at the tiller, Pietro started to hum a tune in a loud but not unmusical voice. It was one of the tunes that had been chosen most often on the jukebox the previous evening, she recognised, and after a moment or two she joined in with him.

In snatches of conversation between songs, she learned that he was from Genoa and had married a girl from Calista where he now worked for her father. Joanna guessed that a day trip to Saracina, however much risk was involved, was probably preferable to being at his father-in-law's beck and call all day.

'We all want freedom,' she thought, smiling to herself, but the smile faded as she suddenly realised what she had implied. But she was free—wasn't she? All her life she had come and gone pretty well as she pleased. She had started and later discarded a number of possible careers including her abortive art college courses without any real pressure being applied by her father. She could have got a flat of her own, if she had wanted, but it had always seemed less bother to live at home. Now for the first time she began to wonder if, in her restless flitting between jobs and courses, she had sacrificed her only real chance of independence. Perhaps it had suited her father quite well to have her living under his eye, without the demands of a career to distract her from acting as his hostess and running his home.

Much of her life, she realised, had centred so far on attending to her father's needs and considering his likes and dislikes. He invariably demanded that his home should be run like clockwork, but he always held aloof from any problems that arose, and Joanna had known from her early teens that he expected her to cope with staff and make all the everyday decisions that he preferred to avoid.

If she married Tony, would she merely be exchanging one housekeeping job for another? It was an unexpectedly dismal thought, and she noticed with a slight shiver that she had said 'if she married, and not 'when' as if there was still a basic doubt in her mind. And it was no use thinking she was going to escape from her father's sphere by her marriage. She knew it was his intention to turn part of his large London house into a flat for them, and she recalled with some surprise that Tony had raised no objection to the plan when it was first hinted at. The reservations had all been hers. She shook herself impatiently, trying to dispel her sombre mood, and grinned almost with relief when Pietro burst into a full-blooded rendering of 'O Sole Mio.'