To Marry a Tiger

by Isobel Chace

  “You don’t have to tell me, you have my old room!” Mary-Anne said gaily, running lightly up the stairs.

  “D-do you mind?” Ruth answered, embarrassed. “I can easily move. I can use the room Pearl had—”

  “Mario would be furious if you did!” Mary-Anne answered frankly. “No, my dear, any room will do for me tonight. I’ll fix it up with Giulia if you don’t mind, when we go downstairs again. I’m not sure that I want to live in this house anyway. I think I’ll have a house of my own close by.”

  Ruth looked concerned. “I don’t think Mario would like—” she began.

  “I don’t suppose he will,” his mother agreed. “All Sicilians take their family responsibilities very seriously indeed. Still, I think if he sees that it’s what I really want, he’ll let me have it. He always does!”

  Ruth had no confidence that Mario would prove so obliging about anything.

  “It—it isn’t because of me, is it?” she asked.

  Mary-Anne looked at her with warm affection. “Not entirely. It’s mostly because although I was married to a Sicilian, I still have American ideas about privacy and so on. I don’t want to have people on top of me all day long, and I don’t want to be on top of them either!”

  “I’d love to have you here!” Ruth burst out.

  Mary-Anne gave her a curious look. “To please Mario? Ruth honey, are you afraid of Mario in any way?”

  Ruth shook her head. “Of course not!” she denied.

  Mary-Anne was far from being convinced. “You can tell me, you know,” she said, “because I shan’t tell Mario—”

  “I wouldn’t care if you did!” Ruth assured her defiantly.

  Mary-Anne giggled. “I expect it’s your courage that made Mario want to marry you in the first place! Nothing appeals to him more!”

  Ruth allowed her mother-in-law to precede her into her bedroom. Her defences had been sadly undermined by Mary-Anne’s charming interest in her and she was in two minds as to whether she wouldn’t be wise to tell her the whole story.

  “It was a matter of honour,” she said obscurely.

  Mary-Anne looked at her with expectant interest. “I thought it might be when Lucia told me that it was a dark secret why you had got married. She seemed to think she had had quite a lot to do with bringing the two of you together.”

  “Only because she never came when she said she would!” Ruth remembered with a deep feeling of injury.

  “Leaving you alone with Mario?”

  Ruth nodded. “Only he wasn’t here either—not really!”

  Mary-Anne gave her a sympathetic look. “But I don’t see what you were doing here?” she said gently.

  Ruth blushed. “I came instead of Pearl—”

  “Oh, I see!” Mary-Anne exclaimed.

  “Do you?” Ruth said dubiously.

  Mary-Anne pursed up her lips, her eyes laughing. “Of course! If Mario walked in and found you when he was expecting to find your sister, of course he wasn’t going to let you go!”

  Ruth was completely shaken by such an idea. She gave her mother-in-law a look of mute appeal and stuttered out something about it not having been quite like that!

  Happily for Ruth’s peace of mind, Lucia came upstairs carrying one of Mary-Anne’s suitcases. “Which room shall I put it in?” she asked.

  Mary-Anne looked at Ruth with perfect dignity. “Did you say I could have the one your sister had?”

  “Yes—no—but—” Ruth gave the two older women a helpless look. “I th-think you should have the best room!” she managed finally to get out.

  “Yes,” Lucia agreed with a bounce that betrayed her sheer good spirits. “The one next to ours! I shall put your suitcase in there.”

  “And I’ll tell Giulia to make up the bed,” Ruth added quickly, taking her cue from them. It gave her a very good excuse to make her escape from the questioning eyes of Mary-Anne before she was forced to admit a great deal more than she wanted to.

  “Shall' I help you?” she offered, when she had given Giulia the necessary information. “I’m afraid there is rather a lot for you to do with so many people here.”

  If Giulia was surprised at this new air of command in Ruth, she took pains to hide it. With care, she corrected Ruth’s Italian and made her repeat what she had to say several times over until she was word-perfect.

  “If you permit, I shall get my sister to come in and help me until the Signor and Signora Roberto go back to Tunis,” she suggested at some length. “She is accustomed to the ways of the house.”

  Ruth agreed that this would be an admirable arrangement, and then, having nothing else to delay her, she braced herself to go into the salotta to join the others. She could hear Mario and his mother laughing about something and wondered what it was. It was difficult not to feel excluded in a way by her presence, though she knew she was being ridiculous. Mary-Anne was the last person to be possessive over her son. But then it wasn’t Mary-Anne’s possessiveness that was the trouble, Ruth told herself wryly, it was her own!

  “I have been telling Mario about my plan to have my own house,” Mary-Anne told Ruth as she entered the room.

  Ruth gave Mario a nervous look and dropped her eyes again. “If it were very near—” she began vaguely.

  “Nonsense!” Mario exploded. “And you’re not to encourage her, Ruth,” he added angrily. “My mother will live in my house for as long as She stays in Sicily!”

  “Then I shall go back to New York,” Mary-Anne sighed.

  “But how can you be any less lonely in a house by yourself?” Mario shot at her. “Ruth would make you very welcome here.”

  His mother gave him an unblinking look. “She already has,” she said.

  Ruth had a sudden inspiration. “Why don’t you turn one wing of the house into a place of your own?” she suggested with a spurt of enthusiasm. “Then you wouldn’t be far away, but you could be quite private whenever you liked!”

  “There!” said Mary-Anne. “I told Mario you’d think of something!”

  Mario looked at his wife and smiled. “You have found yourself an ally!” he observed dryly. “My mother thinks I am unkind to you—”

  “Not unkind,” Mary-Anne protested anxiously. “Just that you ask too much!”

  “Do I?” Mario asked Ruth directly. She made a flustered movement, quite unable to answer.

  “You know you do!” Mary-Anne rushed to Ruth’s defence. “You haven’t been at all gentle! Why, you’ve scared the girl half to death!”

  Mario’s eyes flashed with amusement. “Rubbish, Mamma! Ruth knows very well what I am about. She finds our customs a little strange at first, but then so did you when you first married my father!”

  Mary-Anne looked severe. “But then I was in love with your father!” she pointed out delicately.

  Mario smiled straight into his mother’s startled eyes. “As Ruth is with me!” he said with complete certainty. “If you don’t believe me, ask her!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MARY-ANNE was tactful enough not to ask anything of the sort. She cleared her throat as if she was trying not to laugh and patted the sofa beside her, inviting Ruth to share it with her.

  “I thought I’d be quite exhausted after all my travels,” she said brightly, “but I’m not in the least bit tired. How would it be if we made up a party and went to the marionette theatre?” She looked meaningly at Roberto and Lucia. “When did-we last go anywhere together?”

  “That’s true,” Lucia agreed. “When you left to go to New York, you were still in mourning.” She looked at her sister-in-law with the faintest disapproval in her eyes. “Have you left off wearing black completely?”

  “Why not?” Mary-Anne said affably.

  Lucia sighed. “It is hardly more than a year—”

  “I don’t need black to remind me of that!” Mary-Anne said with decision. “That is one of the few things that I refuse to be Sicilian about! Why, what with friends and relations dying more and more often as one gets older, one
would never get out of black at all!”

  “It seems like that sometimes,” Lucia agreed. “I am in black now, so perhaps I shouldn’t go and see the marionettes?” She cast an anxious look of inquiry at Roberto. “I do so want to go!” she added.

  “Then go we shall,” Roberto agreed heavily. He was still confused by the events of the day and more than a little afraid that someone was going to ask him why he had been helping Ruth to leave Sicily without Mario’s knowledge or consent. “The three of us will go!” he added.

  Ruth licked her dry lips. “But—but I’d like to so too!”

  “We’ll go tomorrow!” Mario promised her. “If you still want to go.”

  “Why shouldn’t I want to?” Ruth asked him sulkily.

  His laughing eyes met hers. “I’ll tell you the answer to that later!” he said.

  There was some argument amongst the three elder members of the party as to what they wanted to see. Mary-Anne preferred the violence of the battle to any opera and, finally the other two gave way in the face of her determination.

  “They are fantastic!” she told Ruth with enthusiasm. “Sicilian puppets are the best in the world! They make them so well! They’re about two feet high, but they can do everything! I just love to see them lowering their visors and crashing into battle. They do the sound effects so realistically as well, with all the operators stamping about behind the scenes. Before I saw them, I used to think that I didn’t like puppets, but these are as good, or better, than any live theatre. You must make Mario take you—” She broke off, a trifle embarrassed. “Some other time, of course,” she went on quickly. “Oh, my dear, it is awkward for you having so many people about—” As this was so much worse than what she had been going to say in the first place, she subsided into an uncomfortable silence.

  “When we go to Tunis tomorrow, I am sure Ruth will miss us very much!” Lucia put in, unable to believe that anyone could not want to have their whole family about them every minute of the day.

  Ruth smiled. “So I will!” she assured her.

  “Who else will take you to Luigi’s for your hair and explain things to you?” Lucia asked innocently. ‘Of course you will miss me!”

  “You will always be welcome to visit us in Tunis,” Roberto added kindly.

  Ruth was warmed by the genuineness of their affection for her. “I’d like that,” she said.

  “We’ll both come,” Mario agreed. “The very first holiday we take!”

  The evening was a success, there was no doubt about that! Roberto, Lucia, and Mary-Anne had changed into full evening dress for their visit to the puppet theatre and they looked truly magnificent as they gathered round the table for the evening meal. Ruth had tried to persuade Mary-Anne to take her seat opposite Mario, but her mother-in-law would not.

  “I know,” she had said, “that on the Continent a married couple will often sit side by side at the table, but the Verdecchios have never done so. You must sit at the top of your table, my dear. It’s only proper.”

  And so Ruth had sat down opposite Mario, so placed that she had only to raise her eyes to see him whenever she would. It was tempting, she found, to watch him all the time; to follow the expressions as they flitted across his face, and to admire the hauteur that his large, broken nose gave him in repose. She herself could eat practically nothing. In the most ridiculous way, although she managed to look quite calm on the surface, she was suffering from butterflies in her stomach. It was something in the way Mario looked at her from time to time and, even more, the knowledge that once the others had gone out, he was bound to insist that the time had come for them to come to some sort of an understanding. The very thought of the land of understanding he might insist on gave her a nervous feeling that nothing would quell.

  She made a gallant effort at light conversation all through the first course. It was strange, she thought, how one was able to divide one’s mind in two, keeping the surface for polite chatter, while the underneath was frozen into immobility by sheer fright and worry.

  “P-Pearl doesn’t like travelling much on her own,” she said in answer to a polite remark of Roberto’s. “She doesn’t know any language except English and, if people don’t speak that, she feels cut off.”

  “And what languages do you speak?” Mary-Anne asked .her languidly.

  Ruth coloured a little in case she should be thought to be boasting. “I can speak French quite well,” she said. “I spent last winter learning Italian at evening classes, but I—but—”

  “Ah!” Mario teased her gently. “So that’s why you insist on referring to me in the third person! I shall have to teach you the proper way to address your husband!”

  Ruth blushed violently, but she had perfect control over her voice as she answered: “We were told we wouldn’t have the need to be anything other than formal.”

  “I knew the moment I set eyes on you that you had led a sheltered life!” Mario riposted.

  “So you repeatedly said!” she told him bitterly.

  He looked at her with warm amusement. “I wonder why you should resent it?” he questioned lightly.

  She felt a strong desire to laugh. “It was the beginning of all my troubles, you may remember!” she said.

  His eyes held hers, although she would have preferred not to be so open to him. “So that’s what you think,” he said.

  But at last the meal came to an end and Roberto went to get the car while the women prettied themselves and fetched their wraps against the cool of the evening.

  “We shall be very late,” Mary-Anne told her son. “Don’t wait up for us,” she added meaningly.

  He grinned at her and went out with them to help them into the car and to say goodnight to his uncle. Left to herself, Ruth would have liked to have taken refuge in the kitchen with Giulia, but Giulia scorned her help with the washing up. It was obvious that she didn’t really like having anyone else in her kitchen, a point of view that Ruth was bound to respect, and so she wandered back into the salotto, with Saro following close at her heels.

  She was fidgeting with the flowers when Mario came back. He stood in the doorway, watching her for a few minutes in silence. She saw him finally and the colour flooded into her cheeks, although she gave no other sign that she had noticed him.

  “That is a very matronly occupation!” he said with a smile.

  “Matronly!” she repeated. “Oh, Mario, how could you?” She gurgled with laughter. “You are the most uncomplimentary beast I’ve ever met!”

  “I knew we should get back to your sheltered life sooner or later,” he said in resigned tones.

  She lifted her chin. “It wasn’t as sheltered as all that! I’m not saying that most of the men we knew didn’t prefer Pearl, but I did have some boy-friends of my own!”

  “And the pleasant knowledge that they were the ones who could see further than their own noses!” he suggested.

  She was shocked. “How can you say such a thing?” she demanded of him. “And that’s something that I want to talk to you about! I think you owe Pearl an apology for the way you’ve treated her!”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Indeed?” he said haughtily.

  “Yes, indeed!”

  “I can’t see that she has any cause for complaining. I think I’ve been very nice to her—”

  “But you shouldn’t have been!” Ruth told him hotly.

  “I can’t think why not!”

  She could think of several reasons, but none of them were ones that she felt able to discuss with him.

  “She’s more vulnerable than you think!” she said desperately.

  “And rather less so than you think,” he answered.

  Ruth cast him a wary look and very nearly ruined the whole flower arrangement by snapping off one of the blooms right at the top of the stem. Mario reached out a hand and took the remaining flowers out of harm’s way. In doing so, he somehow managed to capture both her hands in his and drew her gently across to the sofa, sitting her down beside him.

&n
bsp; “Suppose you tell me what sent you rushing off to England,” he suggested.

  “I can’t!” she said baldly.

  His hand tightened on hers. “Am I supposed to guess?” His voice was charming, but inflexible.

  “It’s all so silly!” she exclaimed. “I can’t imagine how I allowed myself to be put in such a ridiculous position!” She gave him a petulant look and was immediately sure that he would make her regret it. “You must see that the only way you can get rid of me is to let me go home!”

  “I must be very obtuse,” he said gently, “but I can’t remember that I ever said I wanted to be rid of you.”

  “You didn’t,” she acknowledged.

  “Then it was something I did that gave you this unfortunate idea?”

  “No, of course not! But nobody wants to be married to someone he doesn’t know—D-does he?”

  “Perhaps not,” he agreed.

  Ruth bit her lip, completely miserable. “So there you are! You don’t have to be!”

  He leaned back, looking at her out of lazily smiling eyes. “But I had the oddest feeling that I knew you very well from the first moment I saw you,” he said in mild, conversational tones.

  She was much shaken. “In—in Naples?”

  He looked surprised. “No, not in Naples! In Naples, I am sorry to say, I hardly noticed you at all. You stood in the hotel foyer and glared at me in the most shrewish manner. If I felt anything at all, I felt rather sorry for Pearl having to face you every time she came in from a date!”

  “Oh?” Ruth said coldly.

  He smiled. “I didn’t know then that far from swooning if a man were to kiss you, you would kiss him right back!”

  “Oh, I didn’t!” she denied with considerable indignation.

  He put his hand under her chin and forced her to look at him. “How can you tell such lies?” he mocked her.

  Very easily, she assured him mentally. “Well, if I did, it was only because you took me by surprise,” she said grudgingly.