CHAPTER 1
Home Base
'I am not going.'
'Oh yes, you are, young man, or there is going to be serious trouble.'
'Emotional blackmail won't work on me,' replied a defiant Emmanuel over the breakfast table.
'Emmanuel, please! Your father will be terribly upset.'
'Really?' was the rather haughty reply. 'You do realise that I received a telephone call this morning from my mother, who has also been invited to the wedding.'
'Well, seeing that it has been an afterthought, I should be very surprised if Angela is interested.;
'One is as bad as the other,' said Kerry, putting her cup down and heading for the toaster. 'Would you like another slice?'
'No, thank you. Angela, and I are out to lunch. I don't want to ruin my appetite.'
'Charming! My mother is a very poor influence on you.'
'Not at all! Angela and I just happen to get along famously.'
'That is exactly what I mean,' replied Kerry, as Emmanuel stood up and gave her a kiss.
'See you later. I'm off with Angela to check out a fabulous pair of French chairs.'
'I can just imagine!' said Kerry, settling back into her chair and being very aware that she was applying twice the amount of butter to her toast than was necessary. It had always been like this, she thought. Emmanuel and Angela against the world, and the thing Kerry found most annoying was they always won. Angela was very much the matriarch of this family. She had come from a wealthy background and followed the usual social rules to marry a man of suitable means. They had been given this enormous double-storeyed Victorian mansion as a wedding gift from his parents and it also came with two large Victorian double-fronted houses with huge bay windows that sat side by side. One of them, the furthest away, No. 10, was where Emmanuel headed, two doors down to his grandmother's mansion. Kerry had been very dubious about accepting this house when she married, feeling that an overbearing mother so close was perhaps not such a good idea. The other house next door and beside the mansion was No. 8 and that was now the property of her only sister, Mary, but she was rarely resident as she had a large country property.
Kerry looked at her lukewarm tea and sighed. It had been almost thirty years ago that she and Salvatore had married and despite a few moments it had been an extremely happy marriage. Kerry had gone to a school ball and there she had met a young man who also attended a good Catholic school. He invited her out and so a slight relationship formed, but on being invited to lunch at his family's home in a suburb the other side of the city, in a zone one could not call chic, but honest, Kerry met and fell in love at the first introduction, to Salvatore, the brother of the gentleman who had invited her to lunch. Her mother, Angela, thought the whole thing just too silly to think about, but for Kerry and Salvatore this was it.
Angela's husband had died many years before when his daughters were in their early teens and Angela had inherited everything. She immediately took all in hand and the companies that were her husband's she merged with her own, never selling anything, just expanding ruthlessly. She never lost a night's sleep from forcing somebody's company into bankruptcy. She was only concerned about profit, so when Kerry had put her foot down about marrying Salvatore, who obviously had a very limited financial background, Angela being Angela took over. Salvatore had worked in a family business of stone masons and Angela simply did her homework and found a large stonemason's business in financial trouble, bought it out at a low price and installed Salvatore as manager. On the agreement that the figures were met each month, eventually the business would be handed over to him. So 'Lampedusa Stonemasons', a large gilded sign, heralded one's entrance into what was now one of the largest of the businesses in Melbourne, and was seen as the right place to get exactly what one wanted. The marriage also went with No. 8 Ashfield Avenue, which was put in Kerry's name, not Salvatore's, something that he never managed to come to grips with. Although he had been handed the opportunity of his life with the stonemason's complex, he always lived in his wife's house, not his.
He and Kerry had had two children, both boys and as diff erent as daylight is to night. Vincenzo, who went by the name of Vince, was quiet, hard-working and at school a very high achiever. At the age of eighteen he entered Melbourne University, completed in record time a degree in theology and entered a seminary, much to Angela's surprise, as well as of the rest of the family. 'Oh well,' was her reply on hearing the news and offering Vince a glass of champagne, 'your uncle is a Monsignore so I guess it runs in the family blood,' and gave him a kiss. Salvatore was not so excited about the situation. He had automatically assumed that Vince would take over the enterprise that he had worked on for more than thirty years and so their relationship became much more formal.
But Vince had a brother, eight years his junior, Emmanuel. Needless to say, Salvatore was adamant that he choose the name of his sons and Kerry allowed him this right in a world where her mother controlled all, financially and socially. Chalk and cheese is an expression used to describe extreme opposites and Vince and Emmanuel were just that. The only thing they had in common was their extreme good looks. Vince was taller than Emmanuel and with a shock of short cropped black hair and dark brown eyes, very similar to his father. He was also blessed with an olive skin. His handsome features made him a great loss to the social scene when he accepted his vocation. But if Vince was extremely handsome Emmanuel was a show-stopper, tall, black bushy hair cut into a mane, olive skin, an inheritance from his father's Italian background, a very fine face with a determined forehead and jawline and a strong nose. But the impact of Emmanuel was the eyes, a blue shade that defied identification. In the harsh sun they turned to a strong cobalt; in the evening light they seemed a little lighter, but the combination of all the features was, as Angela said, 'just marvellous'.
It cannot be said that Emmanuel studied very hard at school. Both he and Vince went to the most expensive Catholic boys' school in Melbourne, not so far from where they lived in Hawthorn and, needless to say, Ashfield Avenue was the smartest address in this suburb. Whereas Vince applied himself, Emmanuel did not. At a very early age he spent a good deal of time with his grandmother. She adored him and he her, so this relationship from his teens on developed into a very sophisticated friendship. Angela forbad Emmanuel to address her as 'grandmother' and so Angela and Emmanuel were always seen at smart restaurants, the theatre, the races, anywhere where it was the place to be and have fun. Th ere they were, together, laughing and joking, generally at someone else's expense. Salvatore disliked this take-over of his son and in the confines of his home was not short on expressing his feelings. He and Emmanuel had a poor relationship but both made a little effort for the sake of Kerry.
At an early age, when Salvatore at the dining table one evening reprimanded him, he simply stood up, ramming his chair in sharply against the table and informed his father he could be contacted at Angela's and despite threats he stalked out of the house, slamming the front door. He walked down two doors, entered the large double gates and...
