Dead Season (6 page)

‘You don’t know how much it is,’ she’d said.

Galeotti had raised his head again. ‘I think you’ll find my client—’ and he had broken off, nodding to Luisa, ‘our client, should I say, is open to offers. The apartment does need, ah – some attention.’

And Sandro had sighed, giving in. Then Galeotti had fished from his briefcase a great circular bunch of keys – eight or nine different sets, each tagged – extracted one and they had gone in.

Some attention: well, that had certainly been true. The roof had collapsed in places, and the speckled tile of the floor was heaped with rubble. The window frames were rotten and the shutter-slats half broken; the tiny bathroom blotched with rust and mildew, the kitchen no more than an ancient cooker and a stained sink in one corner of the main living space. But the room was wide and light and spacious and beautiful, with chestnut beams; one set of long French doors let in a rectangle of green hillside, and another a slice of the view, between rooftops, of the smoke-blue layers of the Casentino hills.

‘Perhaps you could leave us for ten minutes, to have a look around?’ Luisa had said politely to Galeotti, who had appeared unsettled by the request.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he’d said, chinking the big hoop of keys against his thigh.

‘Please,’ Luisa had said, and there was something about her tone – Sandro knew it all too well – of precision and firmness and certainty, which demanded compliance.

‘I’ll be downstairs,’ the estate agent had said shortly. Ten minutes.’

‘I don’t like him,’ Sandro had said, listening to the man’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘I think he can tell,’ Luisa had said, smiling. The pale soft skin around her dark eyes had crinkled and Sandro had found himself wondering why anyone would want to erase such lines. ‘I could never work out how you managed to be such a good policeman,’ she’d said, hands on hips. ‘You’re so bad at pretending.’ He had laughed abruptly: wasn’t that just like Luisa? Hide a compliment in an insult. Or vice versa.

‘Yes,’ he’d agreed. ‘Do you like him, then?’

And she’d laughed out loud.

A little trace of a breeze had set up, drifting through the long window nearest to them that gave on to the hillside, and it brought with it the smell of hot, dry earth and pine needles. It hadn’t rained in five months.

‘You love it, don’t you?’ Luisa had said, and Sandro had nodded, just barely.

‘Why did you bring me here, Luisa?’ he’d said with a sigh, turning slowly on the spot, taking in the scratched floor tiles, the long streak of reddish-brown stain down one corner, the lovely windows one after another. ‘We can’t afford it.’

‘Come here,’ she’d said, and dutifully Sandro had followed his wife. Ahead of him her wide shoulders – finer than they’d been before the chemo, her collarbones pronounced now, but still strong – made him think of Anna Niescu’s tiny frame, struggling with its burden. Had her fiancé brought her to a place like this and said,
Imagine, darling? This is where we’ll put the nursery
.

‘We’re too old,’ he’d begun, but Luisa’s sharp backwards glance had silenced him. She had then taken him into the only other real room in the apartment, the one bedroom. It was big, too, twice the size of anything you’d find in a modernized place. A square, handsome room, with two windows looking down into the nested houses, ornamented with window boxes and washing hung out to dry, that clustered around the old wall.

By now the sun had disappeared behind the dark hump of hillside to the west, but the sky had remained livid blue, and clear. Luisa had been leaning on the windowsill, silhouetted as she gazed out. The hot wind had blown in past her, carrying her scent inside with its load of humidity. She’d turned.

‘Do you think I want this for me?’ she’d said softly. ‘Just for me? Do you think I don’t hear you, lying awake, grinding your teeth every time someone smashes a bottle in the street? Pacing the flat at night as if you’re in a cage?’

Sandro, suddenly overwhelmed by his own stupidity, had said nothing.

‘Too old? No,’ Luisa had said. ‘Life is too short. You need to make changes, now and again. Not too often, but Sandro,
caro
, once or twice in a lifetime? Is that too often?’

He’d nodded, mute with shame. ‘I thought you loved Santa Croce,’ he’d mumbled.

‘I made the best of things,’ she’d said, shrugging. ‘We both did. But we don’t necessarily have to do that forever.’ She’d sighed. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think it was a bad place. But I like this one much more.’

There was a sound from below, of someone slipping on the crumbling steps, and a muffled curse. And then the agent was with them in the bedroom, examining the dust on his shoes with disgust. ‘Seen enough?’ he asked brightly, key in hand. ‘Ready to go? Sorry to rush you, but there’s another viewing in ten minutes.’

‘Another viewing?’ Luisa said with dismay, and the man shrugged.

‘It’s a good area,’ he said. ‘Places like this don’t hang around.’

One of the windows hung at a crazy angle, and Galeotti, trying to open it, had pulled a rusting hinge out of the wall. ‘Needs some attention,’ Sandro had said drily and the man had looked back at him with a trace of sullenness before putting the professional smile back on his face and leaving the rotten window to dangle against the wall.

Now settled in at Nello for a late dinner, they talked around in circles. Could they afford it, how much would they get for the place in Santa Croce, who might they get to do the work? Pietro knew a mason, and there was a good place in Santo Spirito for the windows. Every time Sandro felt excitement bubble up inside him he fought to suppress it – partly because it was his nature, partly because it was only sensible, wasn’t it? Because nothing was certain. So dangerous, to make plans: disappointment was the default position in life. But Sandro found himself agreeing to go into the bank, to talk about a loan. He pushed away his plate, the breaded cutlet on it not quite finished. This heat, it had taken away his appetite, too.

‘There was a girl came in today,’ he said slowly. Talking of plans.

And he was suddenly overcome by the desire for a cigarette, after twenty years without one. But now smoking was banned more or less anywhere but most particularly in the place where it would have been most perfectly enjoyable, in a convivial restaurant after a good meal. Since when, he asked himself, did we become so intolerant? Since when did we start refusing to take even the tiniest risk for another’s pleasure? Of course, smoking terraces had sprung up all over the city since the new law, most of them so fully enclosed that effectively people were still smoking inside. But that was the Italian way: keep your head down under authority’s demands and then carry on as before.

Fleetingly he wondered: perhaps taking up smoking again would be a change too far even for Luisa.

‘A girl?’ said Luisa, her curiosity caught by whatever it was he had allowed to slip into his voice. Reluctance, regret.

And for the second time that day Sandro laid out Anna Niescu’s story, but the version of it he found himself telling Luisa was different in several particulars, some of it new even to Sandro himself. He talked of the sweetness of the girl’s nature, of her conviction that the man needed only to be brought back to her for a happy ending to ensue, her faith. And he even found himself telling Luisa, wonderingly, what he would not have dared describe to her even five years ago: of the moment when he and Anna Niescu had both looked down at the child moving inside her, immanent; untainted perfection waiting to be born.

‘It seems like waiting for someone to die,’ he said, without even thinking if what he was saying made sense. ‘Waiting for a child to be born. You can’t – anticipate. You can’t know what it’s going to be like, until it’s there.’

Too late, he heard what he had said. They had waited for their child to die. But Luisa closed her hand over his. ‘You’ll have to find him, then,’ she said. ‘The father. If anyone can, you can.’

It had never failed her, not through all the chemo and the surgery, the bruising cannulae, the drips and the hospital wards and the vomiting in the dark. And not for the first time Sandro wondered where Luisa got it from, all that certainty.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Wednesday

T
HE SKY HAD CHANGED
overnight; the breath of wind had dropped and, while they slept, it had closed over them like a lid, white-hot. As Roxana climbed off her
motorino
by the river and removed her helmet, it seemed to her that the city was nothing more than a cauldron, and they were boiling in it like the damned.

As soon as he got back from the seaside, she would talk to the boss.
Prioritize
, Maria Grazia had said on the phone last night. Make a list of how you need your life to change, and take it one step at a time.

Leaning over the parapet for a moment, Roxana could still feel the helmet’s pressure on the back of her neck and her temples, where it had made her sweat; she knew sweat was designed to lower the body temperature, but it didn’t seem to be working.

In the centre of the river, a bleached stick emerged from the clogged green, a crested bird perched on it, head cocked to look down into the water. Roxana thought that surely there could be nothing living in there; like every Florentine with any choice in the matter, the fish would have moved along to cooler, faster waters.

There was time for a coffee this morning; Roxana had left a good half-hour earlier than usual. Leaving Mamma in the kitchen on her knees in housecoat and rubber gloves, cleaning out cupboards and muttering angrily. Better the fierce, furious, energetic mother she’d always known growing up, than the fearful, gentle, clinging one who increasingly seemed to be taking her over? Roxana thought so.

Last night, for the first time in eight years, Roxana had smoked a cigarette, and not just one, either. When Violetta had finally shuffled upstairs to bed, with a small glass of warm milk, Roxana had gone into the
salotto
, where neither she nor her mother ever went except to put another coat of polish on the huge Biedermeier dining table. As if sleepwalking herself, Roxana had gone straight for the inlaid box where Dad kept American cigarettes for visitors, had taken a handful, dry and light as dead leaves, felt the cool weight of her father’s old Zippo in her hand and then she’d stopped. The smell of lavender wax and stale air, the solid pieces of heavy, old-fashioned furniture around her – the sideboard from her grandmother’s house, the upholstered chairs, the glass-fronted display cabinet – familiar in every detail even in the dark, the ugly roll-down shutters: it had all suddenly borne down on Roxana like a landslip, and she felt as though she was about to lose her balance. So she backed out, as far as the front door and beyond, out on to the porch, leaning against the dusty plaster and looking into the street. Quiet as the grave.

Lighting up, she’d taken one drag of the stale cigarette, practically coughed up her lungs, and had walked in the hot night down the road to the machine outside the tobacconist’s to buy a half-pack of MS. On the way back home, as she’d listened to the trickle of the river – a tributary of the Arno – that ran through the suburb unseen, through bamboo thickets and culverts, the heat if anything had seemed to be intensifying.

She’d stood in the garden and smoked among the feathery branches of a big unwieldy shrub her father had loved. There was bougainvillea too, growing up the back of the house, a moth-eaten banana palm, and a fig tree whose fruit was just ripening. She’d heard a whine and slapped fast and hard at her calf; the river drew the mosquitoes. She’d put out the cigarette then and gone inside to get a moon tiger, the coiled incense burner whose smoke was supposed to keep them away. Listening in the hall she’d heard Ma snoring at last, a soft, regular sound through the door. She’d been exhausted, poor old thing.

Sitting at the table in front of their empty bowls, Roxana had interrogated her mother as gently as she could.

‘Was it – one of those people trying to sell you something, Mamma?’

What had been starting to worry Roxana was not the stupid phone call, but Ma’s reaction to it, standing there in the gloomy hall in her slippers, about to burst into tears. The forgetfulness, the panic, the disproportionate anxiety over the whole business.

‘You know,’ Roxana had said, trying not to sound impatient. ‘Mobile phone, or internet or something?’

‘Oh, no,’ Ma had said then, and her face had seemed to clear. ‘Oh, no, nothing like that. She was – a friend of yours maybe? She called you by your name—’

‘Oh, Ma,’ Roxana had said, in despair, ‘they all do that. It’s a kind of trick. A selling tool.’

‘A trick?’ Her poor face falling all over again. ‘I don’t think so. She was upset. She was really upset.’

And now, twelve hours later, Roxana was as far from being ready for work as she’d ever been, her mouth sour from the cigarettes and lack of sleep. She stood outside the only bar near work that was open – the Bar dell’Orafo, an exhausted little tourist dive tucked into a subterranean archway behind the bank – and she considered. Considered how few friends she actually had, friends who would call her if they were upset. Maria Grazia was about it – and she’d spoken to Maria Grazia. Eventually.

Across the street, a garbage truck squealed and hissed into position beside two big dumpsters, the noise alone enough to drown out Roxana’s thoughts. The Bar dell’Orafo seemed pretty quiet, and looking through the window Roxana relented: it wasn’t such a bad little place. Who didn’t serve tourists, in this city? The pastries would be no good – only a handful of
pasticcere
worked through August, just as very few bakers did, and the very thought of those ovens blazing brought Roxana out into another sweat – but the coffee would be fine.

She went inside, ordered a glass of water and a cappuccino, no chocolate on top. Orlando, the wizened, moustachioed barman, made it with ridiculous care, pouring the milk to make an oakleaf shape in the foam. Either oakleaf or heart; if she’d been a different sort of woman she’d have got a heart, maybe, but Roxana liked the leaf better, anyway. Orlando was the middle of seven children, he’d once told her; not much elbow room in his life; perhaps that was why he was working through August, too.