Unmasking Elena Montella (2 page)

She wouldn’t have felt quite so pressured with just Mark and Prof hounding her for an answer, she thought as she blow dried her hair upside down, but even Reuben had been getting in on the act.

‘
ELENA!
’ he’d shouted across the studio the other day, paintbrush poised in the most threatening manner. ‘You’re driving me crazy! I want to make an honest model out of you!’

Elena really did find it most off-putting to be told such a thing when naked on a chaise longue. She’d ignored him, as usual, because he was rather prone to these little outbursts. She thought it was all part of the artistic temperament. However, this caused him to become even more furious until, finally, he’d ripped his canvas with a palette knife and told her to go home without so much as a ravishment for her pains.

Elena had, on two separate occasions, walked out on Rueben and threatened not to come back. Sometimes, she felt that his ego was far greater than his talent and she wasn’t at all sure that she could put up with him for the rest of her life, but something kept on pulling her back to him.

Men!
They really were the most unpredictable of species, she mused, choosing a crisp white shirt and pair of black cotton trousers for the day ahead. She couldn’t believe that she’d managed to pick, perhaps, the only three men in the world who wanted to sprint up the nearest aisle. Didn’t anyone want to live in sin anymore? Her only explanation was that each of her paramours had come to the realisation that they might not be the only ones in her life, and that had brought their hunter-gatherer genes to the fore. She couldn’t really believe that they had found her out, though, as she kept each one of them very separate.

Mark was Elena’s work colleague at the foreign school she taught at in West London. She saw him four days a week when she was teaching, and kept Saturday morning’s free for him.

She saw Prof every Thursday evening for her literature class at evening school and occasionally dropped by the university during Friday lunchtimes when she knew he wasn’t tutoring.

Sundays were for Reuben and, because he had a whole posse of models, she didn’t think he minded only seeing her once a week. He certainly hadn’t questioned her about it. So, why the sudden urge for each one of them to get married? Whatever the reason for their Mrs Bennet behaviour, it spelt trouble for her. Hence her decision to make some life changes.

She was going away. Her bags were packed and she was just about ready to leave for the airport.

It was the Easter holidays and her flight to Venice was in three hours’ time and she was going to stay with her sister, Rosanna, who was sitting an artist’s apartment there and getting paid for the privilege.

She’d phoned Rosanna the week before but she hadn’t sounded too pleased to hear from her.

‘
What do you want, Elena?’ she’d asked.

‘
I want to come and see you,’ she said in her sweetest sister’s voice, but Rosanna wasn’t having any of it

‘
What for? Are you in trouble again?’

‘
Yes, I am,’ she said matter-of-factly.

‘
Dio Mio! I
knew
it.’

‘
I was joking!’ Elena said. ‘I just want to see you. What’s wrong with that?’

‘
Nothing,’ Rosanna relented.

‘
Good! I’ll book a ticket, then,’ she said, laughing at her little sister’s bossiness.

Elena had a distinct memory of Rosanna wagging her finger at her from her cradle, but maybe she was mistaken.

Sitting on a plane can be a very soporific experience for some people, and Elena happened to be sat next to such a person. No sooner had they taken off from Gatwick than the woman in tartan beside her was snoring sonorously. Her glasses had fallen half-way down her nose, and her mouth hung open like a dog’s on a hot day. Elena looked down at the lady’s left hand, and saw two gold rings: a stunning emerald surrounded by diamonds, and a thick gold wedding ring. She wondered who had placed them on her finger and if they’d known she snored as they’d done so.

Mark had seen Elena off at the airport. That was why she was wearing his ring - a classic diamond solitaire. It was a bit smaller than she’d hoped for but she knew he didn’t have much money. Her other rings were hidden in a red velvet pouch in one of her stockings. There was Reuben’s row of rubies, and Prof’s antique amethyst. All of the rings were so beautiful, and all so very different, just like the men who’d given them. So, how was a girl meant to choose just one?

She closed her eyes and tried to switch off her brain, which wasn’t easy with the hippo-snorter beside her but, gradually, she felt herself drifting into a dreamless sleep and was only woken up by the announcement that they were about to land and, less than an hour later, she was on a boat ploughing across the open waters of the lagoon, sitting up high in her seat in anticipation.

And there she was: La Serenissima. The Pearl of the Adriatic. Venice.

In the deep haze of sunshine, everything looked milky-blue. Sunlight danced happily on the water like notes from a Vivaldi concerto. There were bell towers, church domes, houses and bridges and, as the boat pulled in to its stop, Elena breathed a long, contented sigh.

It felt so good to be back in the country in whose language she dreamt.

There were a pile of unmarked essays on Prof’s desk, there were five mugs of unfinished tea in varying states of decomposition around the room, and the answerphone had three messages which all needed responding to, yet all he could do was to sit and think of Elena. It seemed an age since he’d last seen her yet she had only been there last week, he thought, tapping his silver pen against his jaw.

He switched his lamp on as he endeavoured to make a start on the essays. His eyes weren’t as good as they’d once been. He had to wear glasses now which, his last girlfriend told him, made him look like Indiana Jones before he set out to become a hero. He wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not. Wouldn’t one rather be a hero than an academic - when it comes to looks, anyway? Still, he supposed it was better than being told he looked like Woody Allen.

Elena actually loved the glasses. She’d said they made him look distinguished and he supposed his grey hair was also being referred to when she made that remark. It used to be a rich brown but now it was threaded through with silver as if he’d walked through a city of spiders’ webs. He wouldn’t have cared so much but the grey had begun its sabotage long before his thirty-third birthday.

‘
I like older men,’ Elena had told him, her warm kiss convincing him completely. So, there were some advantages to ageing, Prof thought.

Ah, Elena! Every time she was there, she filled the room with joy. It was the only time the place felt alive. Normally, it had that musty library-crossed-with-a-morgue smell that came from being stuffed with old books. Prof could tell that that’s what Elena had been thinking when she’d first walked through his door. She’d had him summed up with a blink of her brown eyes. And yet, she’d stayed.

Of course, Prof knew it was wrong. How many times had he been warned about the perils of passion with pupils? It was irresponsible, irrational and idiotic. But it was also pure bliss. She made his heart leap within his chest. She made his head spin when she kissed him. She turned his walk into a waltz and his sleep into a heavenly haven. And his brain had been alliteratively addled. He felt as if he’d swallowed
The Golden Treasury of English Verse
as he kept thinking and talking in similes and metaphors. He’d be brushing his teeth and suddenly think,
she’s like a rainbow
, or he’d be under the shower and remember a line of poetry which perfectly described her and run, dripping through the house to find it.

She was a true heroine. She could have walked straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. She was Eustacia Vye and Bathsheba Everdene rolled into one and he was sure Thomas Hardy would have fallen head over heels in love with her had he met her, and then punished her to within an inch of her life in one of his novels.

Prof would never forget the time Elena had first asked him his name. She’d made an appointment to see him about her essay on the Byronic hero but, instead of listening to his words of advice, she’d insisted on cross-questioning him.

‘
Professor Mortimer is such a stuffy name, don’t you think?’

‘
I beg your pardon?’ he’d peered at her over his glasses, feeling exceptionally stuffy.

‘
What’s your first name?’ she asked, crossing her legs and leaning across the table most alluringly.

He cleared his throat. ‘Sigmund,’ he said.

‘
Sig
mund! As in Freud?’ Elena laughed. But it wasn’t a mocking laugh, rather a perplexed one, as if she had trouble believing he’d told her the truth. ‘What were your parents thinking of?’

‘
It’s a family name,’ he said, picking up her essay again, ready to point out her lack of relevant quotations.

‘
It’s terrible!’ she went on. ‘What do you think of me calling you Siggy?’

He frowned at her across the desk and shook his head. ‘About this essay - I really think there’s room for-’

‘
Have you got a second name?’

His frown was set in by this stage but he was obviously not going to win her concentration until he’d answered all her questions in a satisfactory manner.

‘
Algernon.’

Elena’s eyes suddenly became very round and her mouth dropped open. ‘Algernon,’ she repeated, as if it were the punch line to a joke that wasn’t particularly funny. ‘Algie?’

‘
I beg your pardon?’

‘
Can I call you Algie?’

‘
I’m not sure that’s a very good idea,’ he said. ‘Now, getting back to Byron-’

‘
What do most people call you, then?’

‘
Professor.’

‘
Well, I can’t call you that!’ she said, and that’s when the name ‘Prof’ materialized.

Prof had always been an old-fashioned sort of man. He opened doors for women, he liked to pay for dinner and he never really believed in women chasing after the man of their choice. However, that was exactly what Elena had done. He really didn’t get any say in the matter and, strangely, he’d found it a rather refreshing experience. He’d pretend to be outraged by her up-front behaviour but he knew she saw right through him from the start.

‘
Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this, Prof,’ she said as, many dinner dates later, which he most certainly insisted on paying for, she began undressing behind his filing cabinet. ‘I know you’re not really reading that Tennyson, so put it down and start paying
me
some attention.’

He slammed the book shut. ‘He would have written about you, Elena,’ he told her, crossing the room and loosening his bow tie.

‘
What about Shakespeare?’

‘
Sonnet after sonnet. He would have run out of ink writing about your beauty.’

She smiled at this and her fingers found the buttons of his shirt. ‘Will you write about me?’ she asked.

‘
Making love to you will be my poetry.’

She pouted prettily. ‘Can’t I have both sex and poetry?’

‘
Not at the same time,’ he said.

‘
Okay,’ she said after some careful thinking. ‘Sex now; sonnet later.’

Prof had never fallen for somebody so quickly or so wholeheartedly. He had always loved rationally which was a bit of a contradiction, he knew. Love should be spontaneous and unhindered by thought. Wasn’t that what years of being consumed by poetry should have taught him? Still, it wasn’t in his nature to abandon himself quite so completely - until he’d met Elena. It was as if she’d unlocked him and set him free.

He gave her his grandmother’s antique amethyst ring. He didn’t think it was worth very much, but its mellow beauty had always struck him, and he’d so desperately wanted Elena to wear it. Sure enough, it looked stunning against her olive skin. The only thing they had to arrange now was a date. Mother couldn’t have been happier.

‘
It’s about time you found somebody to take care of you,’ she said, still believing that he couldn’t possibly survive in the world on his own, despite him being forty-nine and having been independent for the last thirty-one years.

‘
You need somebody to love. And somebody who loves you,’ she said. And, he believed he had found her.