Читать книгу A Woman In The Shadows - Maria Pia Oelker - Страница 6

Chapter 4

Travelling again towards the south over the Padova plain, I found a completely different climate from the one I had encountered going towards Austria. The suffocating heat and the cloak of stagnant humidity had broken with the August rains and now the sky was clearer, the temperature pleasant.

The days of travel were long and exhausting, but Leopold seemed to be fully recovered and did not give any signs of particular tiredness, unlike me who often felt awful.

Travelling with Leopold was a unique experience. He usually did not talk much, but he had his way of explaining things, observing the countryside that we were crossing through, which was fascinating for its acuteness, concreteness and at the same time for his capacity to give to his knowledge a logical and amazingly rational substrate. I listened to him interested and fascinated, but I realised more every day my cultural inadequacy compared with him. He seemed happy to have me next to him and our nights together were proving to be ever more pleasant and exciting. He had not returned to that distressing argument addressed in his letter; I expected it to be him to talk to me about it spontaneously, he was perhaps hoping that I had forgotten and was content with what life now offered me.

Furthermore, could a woman desire more than what I had?

Honestly, no.

And yet my heart, insatiable and perhaps deep down rather jealous, wanted, or would have wanted, something different from that albeit beautiful friendship, which was really growing between us, from those marital relations in which there was a lot of passion, but perhaps little love.

One day, we had just left and we were heading towards Bologna on a road made rather difficult by some recent storms, when suddenly, for no good reason, my husband whispered in my ear:- “I can’t wait to arrive tonight to come into your bed -”