The Italian Wife (15 page)

‘Worse? Worse? How could this possibly be worse?’

‘They are coming back tomorrow to witness Gabriele ploughing, with or without an injured leg. That means he has twenty-four hours to learn to handle those cows convincingly.’

‘That’s impossible.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘So how could it be worse?’

‘They could have hauled him into the yard right then and beaten him to death in front of his children.’

‘Don’t, Roberto. Don’t joke. They’d never do such a thing as that. Italy isn’t barbaric.’

But she looked at his face, at the bruise on his throat, at the hard set of his mouth and the anger in his eyes. And she knew he wasn’t joking.

‘Isabella,’ he said gently, his thumb brushing the strings of blood from her fingers, ‘that’s what Blackshirts do. They make sure Mussolini’s rules are written in blood.’

‘No.’

‘You, of all people, should know.’

His meaning shimmered just beneath the quiet surface of his words.

12

‘Come, Isabella, and eat my fish with me.’

‘No. Thank you, but I’m not hungry.’

At least she spoke. Roberto regarded that as progress. She had been silent in the car as he drove them through the fading light back to town. Too silent. He had seen her shaken by shudders that caught her unawares and made her toss her head like a mare with colic, a pain deep in her gut. Her long hair, which she usually wore tied severely back from her face with a black ribbon, had escaped during the clean-up of the mess at the farmstead and hung loose in a cascade of dark curls around her face and shoulders. It meant she had somewhere to hide. Her cheeks were flushed and she kept her eyes away from him.

Fingers of white mist were dragging themselves across the fields and crawling up on to the road, where they entwined together to create sinkholes that would swallow the car. They were both tired. Isabella and the girls had worked hard all afternoon to remove signs of the attack and to mend what furniture they could, while Roberto had taken Gabriele and Alessandro out in the fields to practise handling the animals. The boy learned fast, thank goodness, but poor Gabriele had no hope of overcoming by tomorrow either his leg-wound or his ingrained fear of any animal larger than a dog.

‘Roberto.’

He flicked a glance at Isabella in the passenger seat. He liked the fine high nose of her profile, but there was something about the way she said his name just then that made him certain that whatever was coming was not going to be good.

‘Roberto, I want to explain something to you.’

He waited. An owl drifted through his headlights on silent ghostly wings.

‘I want to explain,’ she continued, ‘that when I meet someone new, I have to try hard not to hate them.’

Roberto was stunned into silence, but when she didn’t speak again for another half-kilometre he asked, ‘Why is that, Isabella?’

‘The first reason’ – she was staring straight ahead, though he sensed she was seeing nothing – ‘is that I have to try not to hate people for being alive. When my Luigi is dead.’

A dull ache set up behind his eyes. As he changed gear in the car he let the back of his hand brush against her skirt where it hung over the seat, aware that her words sounded like a form of goodbye. He didn’t wish to say goodbye.

‘And the second reason?’

She took a long breath. ‘I was crippled once, Roberto. When my husband was shot. I don’t want to be crippled again. So I stop people coming too close.’

Roberto applied the brake and halted the car, its headlights pooling on a rat that scuttled across the road.

‘Oh, Isabella, I won’t cripple you. I promise you that.’

She lifted a hand and lowered her face into it. But made no sound. It took him a full minute to realise she was crying and that she was embarrassed to be doing so in front of him. The wind stirred the dust in the world outside and here in the car Isabella felt more fragile to him as the light seeped away. Her hair hung in a veil between them but he rested his fingers lightly on her shoulder and left them there, wanting the promise he’d made to flow through the cotton of her jacket and into her skin.

‘I am afraid, Roberto. Afraid of getting scarred again. The way Gabriele is scarred by the loss of his Caterina. What will happen to him now?’

‘He’ll be all right. I’ll make sure of that.’

She nodded, trusting him. ‘You are a generous man, Roberto.’ But her face was still hidden. ‘It’s taken me ten years, but I have made another life. I have my architecture and I am building a new town. I walk and I talk and I eat and drink like any other normal human being. No one can see the scars. Just my limp is a reminder.’

Her voice dropped as she removed her hand from her face and placed it in her lap. ‘No one knows, Roberto. I have said these things to no one before. Not even to my father.’

Roberto curled his hand tightly around hers and could feel the tension strung out in its delicate bones. He leaned back in his seat, giving her room to breathe, space to recover some of the certainty of who she was and what kind of place it was that she lived in. The truncheons had robbed her of that today. He had brushed shoulders with the Blackshirts before and knew how effectively they could destroy a person. He’d seen them tear a man’s belief in himself right out of his heart with a few viciously aimed blows and he couldn’t bear it to happen to her, but he made himself crush the anger that was growling in his gut.

‘I will keep your secret safe, Isabella.’

For the first time she turned her head and looked at him directly, a trace of a smile lifting the shadows from her face. ‘
Grazie
, Roberto.’

‘Now, will you come and eat my fish with me?’

She looked down at his large knuckles wrapped around her hand and he felt a pulse of heat under his palm.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

She picked at her food as daintily as a cat. He had grilled the red snappers and dished them up with beefy sliced tomatoes drenched in olive oil and with chunks of rough bread to mop it up. He liked looking at her. She had small hands that moved with unconscious grace and she licked the oil that glistened on her full lips with quick flashes of her tongue. Roberto wanted her to sit there and let him take her picture, but he didn’t ask. He wanted to capture the thoughtful way she studied his photographs that were pinned to the walls, but she was still too tense, so he was happy to sit and talk with her and watch the colour return to her cheeks as she sipped her wine.

He was asking her about the design of the new fountain being constructed in the Piazza della Libertà when Isabella said abruptly, ‘Why do you help them?’

‘The Fascists?’

‘No, the Caldarone family.’

He couldn’t tell her the truth. But he could tell her part of the truth.

‘Because, as you saw today, the Caldarones are in a bad state right now and need help.’ He smiled. ‘And to annoy Chairman Grassi, of course.’

Isabella tilted her head back and laughed, setting her hair into a dance as she swung it off her face. Roberto caught a trace of its fragrance, the warm scent of jasmine, and wondered what one of its rich dark curls would feel like between his fingers. He liked the way she laughed. As if she meant it. Really meant it. Too many women laughed politely.

‘So, tell me, Isabella.’ He leaned forward, elbows on the table, closer to her. ‘Why are you hell-bent on helping Rosa?’

The pupils of her dark eyes grew huge for a heartbeat and then she matched him elbow for elbow on the table and leaned forward till her face was only a hand’s breadth from his and he could see the creamy perfection of her skin.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘Rosa is in a bad state right now and needs help.’ Her eyes were solemn but her mouth took on a quick teasing curve. ‘And to annoy Chairman Grassi, of course.’

‘Why take such a risk?’

She looked away. ‘I am already involved with the girl, Roberto, whether I want to be or not. I saw her mother jump to her death from a tower that I created.’ Her gaze settled on one of his photographs, the one of a boy about ten years old with bony elbows and spiky hair carrying a hod piled with bricks up a scaffolding ladder. Five storeys off the ground. A cigarette in his mouth. ‘Allegra Bianchi gave her daughter into my care. I don’t know why, but I intend to find out. For Rosa’s sake… and for mine.’

‘Take care, Isabella. Don’t underestimate the danger of breaking the rules here. You saw what happened today.’

She seemed in no hurry to abandon the black and white image with its world of construction and hard labour, but he saw a frown tighten the corners of her eyes.

‘I’m not the one taking risks with Gabriele,’ she pointed out. ‘Roberto, you can’t fool the ONC agents.’

‘I know.’

Abruptly she jumped to her feet and limped over to the photograph. She inspected it closely. She pushed her nose so tight to it that it struck him she was trying to climb inside the picture. He liked that about her.

‘How do you do it?’ she asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Make it so real.’

‘I went up there. Climbed the scaffolding.’

‘What? With that great big heavy camera?’

He laughed. ‘No, the Graflex is for high quality pictures that are more posed. A cumbersome but superb beast. This one I took with my small Leica using a fifty millimetre lens. It makes me anonymous. People don’t notice it. And I’ve painted its shiny parts black to make it even less noticeable.’

She nodded and glanced around the walls at the other photographs. ‘They’re beautiful. So natural. So intimate.’

‘That’s because I prowl the streets all day, ready to pounce. Stick a big camera in front of people and they freeze, but the Leica lets me sneak up on them.’ He shrugged and waved a hand at one of a man trying to pull a folded newspaper from his dog’s mouth outside the library. ‘I like to trap a moment of life.’

She turned her head, her eyes suddenly darker as if she’d seen or heard something that alarmed her. ‘Is that what you’re doing now?’ she asked. ‘With me? Trapping a moment that you will add to a fine collection? To show someone else later, perhaps.’

He had no idea where it came from, this sudden ferocity, as unexpected as summer lightning, but he could feel the heat of it. He pushed back his chair and moved over to the door that led to the stairs down to the street. He opened it and stood back from it, uncertain whether she would stay or run.

‘See, Isabella, you are not trapped.’

He could hear her breathing.

The electric lamp on the bookshelf cast shadows in the room but not enough to hide the flush of colour that swept up Isabella’s neck and on to the fine bones of her cheeks. She shook her head.

‘I’d better leave,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Coffee first?’

She found something that resembled a smile. It hung crookedly on her face. ‘Another time, thank you.’

‘I’ll drive you home.’

‘There’s no need. I can walk.’

‘Yes, there is. It’s dark out there.’

She shook her head again but suddenly seemed too fatigued to argue. He helped her into the jacket she had abandoned on a chair but he was careful not to touch her, aware of the nervous energy coming off her skin and of her acute desire to be away from him. Once outside, a car swept past, throwing its headlights in her face, and he found himself alert to every flicker of her eyelids and every plume of breath from her lips. Though it was only October there was a touch of winter in the air this evening.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly.

‘No need to apologise.’ He turned up his collar against the wind and against his cold dismay at losing her so soon. ‘Today was hard, Isabella. I’m not surprised you feel that the sooner you’re out of the hair of this crazy photographer the better. I feel the same myself sometimes.’ He added an easy chuckle to convince her that there was no harm done.

‘It’s not that.’

‘What then?’

She lifted a hand, a faint shift of pale skin in the darkness of the street, and she touched his cheek with her fingertips. That was all.

The night sky was clear and thick with stars, but the mist still slunk along the ground. Roberto drove Isabella home through the quiet streets. He parked his car on the roadside and walked her into the elegant courtyard of her apartment block, conscious that her limp was noticeably worse. He could see she had no strength left to fight against the pain and he didn’t like to imagine what kind of effort that must take each day.

‘
Buonanotte, signora
,’ he said to her. ‘Sleep well.’

But again her pale hand crept out of the darkness of the doorway and reached for him. This time it attached itself to the lapel of his jacket and didn’t let go.

‘Roberto, forget about the convent. I’ve changed my mind. Don’t go there. Stay away from it completely. No photographs.’

‘But how else will you know whether Rosa is still there?’

‘That’s my problem. Forget I ever asked you. Please, just don’t go near Mother Domenica and her prison-school.’

‘Why?’

‘I should never have got you involved.’

‘Ah, Isabella, don’t you realise it’s too late for that? I am already involved.
We
are already involved.’

He heard her breath catch in her throat and felt her fingers tighten on his lapel. ‘No photographs,’ she repeated, scrutinising his face fiercely. ‘It might be dangerous.’

‘Don’t imagine,’ he told her, rubbing the bruise on his neck, ‘that all Blackshirts are like those brutal men today. To be a Blackshirt doesn’t mean you have to have a black heart.’

She made an odd sound under her breath and stiffly unlaced her fingers from his lapel. The mist in the courtyard seemed to possess form and weight, like a person standing between them, and Roberto didn’t care to put a name to whom that person might be. Instead he stepped back and headed for the car.

‘
Grazie
for the fish,’ he called out, and raised a hand in farewell.

Only when he was out of sight did he check the weight of the gun in his pocket.

‘Are you ready?’

‘We’re ready,’ Gabriele answered, propped against the doorpost for support.