The Night Falling (20 page)

‘It’s really not necessary.’

‘I’m not sure you’re best placed to say if it is or it isn’t,’ he says.

‘I’d far rather walk alone.’

‘Then stay within the bounds of this farm. Please, Mrs Kingsley.’ He holds her hand in his two as he speaks, and squeezes it, and Clare catches her breath. His hands are large and there’s no give in them, like they’re made of wood.

‘Very well,’ she says.

But it’s hard to know where Cardetta’s land ends and the next farm begins. There are only fields, caught between stone walls, one after the other, on and on and on. Here and there are stunted orchards; here and there isolated
trulli
, some in ruins, some with smoke curling up from squat chimney stacks. Clare avoids them. She changes direction when she sees men working up ahead, ashamed to spy on their labours. Once she stumbles across a group of mounted men, their horses in a loose circle, their eyes down. There’s movement on the ground, at the horses’ feet, and Clare glimpses the shocking, incongruous flash of pale bare flesh. She stares. A man is on his hands and knees, pulling at the short stubble of wheat stalks with his teeth. He’s naked, and has lash marks on his back; he’s not young, he could be forty or fifty years old; his ribs have dark shadows between each bone. Shocked, Clare recognises Ludo Manzo, the overseer, as one of the mounted men; he has a long whip in his hand, hanging down like a snake. When they notice her they all look up – the mounted men, Ludo, the naked man on the ground. Clare expects them to stop, to scatter, to be ashamed and try to explain or apologise somehow, but Ludo only grins. He points to the man on the ground and says something Clare can’t understand, which makes the other guards chuckle. She looks down at their victim, and his expression of anger and humiliation is a mask over bare bones of despair. There’s a churned slick of dust and drool around his mouth, down over his chin. Clare can’t stand his gaze, she’s almost relieved when Ludo flicks the whip and the man resumes his slow grazing. Then she hurries away, sickened by them and by herself, and tells nobody of the scene. She has no words to describe it.

Returning from one walk as the sun is setting, Clare finds Federico in the courtyard; he’s rubbing the red car with a rag, and where he’s taken off the dust the sunlight roars on the paintwork. When he sees her he grins, and again she notices the way his mouth flattens itself out of its unusual shape when he does. The divide in his top lip is still there, his front teeth are twisted, but the smile is foremost. Clare smiles politely in reply and makes to walk past him but he reaches out and stops her with the tips of his fingers on her arm.

‘
Signora, prego
,’ he says. Clare looks down at something he’s holding out to her. Flowers – a small posy of spiked thistle flowers, pretty and pale blue amidst their thorns. She stares at them. ‘For you,’ he says, in heavily accented English. He makes her a small bow, still smiling, and Clare’s hand rises even as she feels a rush of unease. That look of his, the one he gives her. She still can’t decide if her aversion to him is wise or unfair. She lets her hand fall again.

‘Thank you,’ she says, in Italian. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t take them. I’m a married woman.’ At this he grins even wider.

‘I won’t tell him,’ he says. She looks closely at him, trying to read him. Then she shakes her head.

‘Thank you, but find a different girl to give them to.’ She turns away and goes inside, and doesn’t look back even when she thinks she hears him chuckle.

Before Boyd leaves for Gioia again he hugs Clare tight, and presses kisses onto her forehead.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ he says, sounding hopeful rather than sure. Just then his lost look, his uncertainty, pricks at her. She thinks of Francesco Molino, dragged out and beaten in public, and reaches up to touch Boyd’s face. The hard, vulnerable ridge of his eye socket.

‘Get those designs finished so we can go home. And be careful, Boyd,’ she says quietly. ‘Do be careful.’

‘I will,’ he says.

‘I mean it.’

‘So do I – and the same goes for you. Why not let the servant walk with you? He can walk behind if you don’t want to talk to him.’

‘No, no. It would feel like being stalked. There’s no danger here – how can there be when I almost never see a living soul?’ Clare waits with Pip and Marcie as the two men climb into the back of the car and Federico drives them away. And she’s relieved – in one way or another, she is relieved to see the back of all three of them. When they’re gone and before the doors close behind them, Clare runs her eyes around the
aia
. She returns to the courtyard, looks up at the upstairs windows, the terrace. There has been no sign of Ettore Tarano that day.

‘He might come out of hiding now Leandro’s gone,’ says Marcie. Clare stops looking, glances questioningly at Marcie. ‘Our Ettore, I mean. I think he was just trying to make a point by keeping away. Men! Their pride is their own worst enemy, don’t you think?’

‘Pride is better than some other things I could think of,’ says Clare. Marcie gives her a quizzical look, but doesn’t ask.

Before dinner Clare goes and lies down in the still and quiet of the bedroom. She leaves the windows open, though flies buzz in incessantly. She stares at the shadowed ceiling and wonders how long she will be able to stand it – being trapped, being lost, being so awake, and having the maddening presence of Ettore nearby. Outside the dogs bark a few times, like a scattered reflex reaction rather than a real alarm. A door closes sharply; not long afterwards she hears footsteps rushing towards her room.

‘Clare!’ Marcie shouts, her voice muffled by the door. Clare sits bolt upright, heart racing. ‘Clare!’ Marcie calls again, rapping on the bedroom door even as she opens it. ‘Oh, do come, Clare! It’s Pip!’

‘What is it? What’s happened?’ says Clare, grabbing at Marcie’s fluttering hands. The blonde woman’s eyes are frantic and there is a smear of blood on the front of her shirt. They rush out together. ‘What’s happened, Marcie?’

‘That damned dog! I should never have let him go near it,’ says Marcie, and Clare’s stomach clenches.

‘Has Bobby – has the dog attacked him?’

‘It was bound to happen – bound to! I should have put a stop to it! I’m so sorry, Clare!’ Clare can’t speak any more. She runs into Pip’s room with dread clutching at her chest, to find him sitting up on the bed watching the kitchen maid, Anna, bathe his hand in a basin of water. The hand is shaking visibly, even though his arm is resting on a pillow. There are two deep puncture wounds in the heel of it, dark and constantly welling blood.

‘Oh, Pip!’ says Clare, and rushes over to him. ‘Darling – are you all right? Oh, your hand!’ she cries.

‘I’m all right, Clare – really. It wasn’t Bobby’s fault …’ Clare sits down alongside him, and feels the way he’s shaking, just like she herself shook after the beating in Gioia. His face is sickly white.

‘Pip—’

‘I took him some crusts and jam – just like you suggested – and he loved them! He came to take them right from my hand. But then one of the other dogs barked suddenly, and he got scared …’

‘Oh,
Filippo
! You’re being altogether too brave – look at your poor hand!’ says Marcie. ‘Ought I call the doctor, Clare? Should they be stitched?’

‘I’m not sure.’ Clare watches as Anna dribbles water into the two deep holes. The water in the bowl is a merry red, berry bright. The sight makes her dizzy – that it’s Pip’s blood, and there’s so much of it. ‘I don’t think so. I think … just a tight bandage.’ She swallows, fights to keep her voice even. She holds Pip’s head close to her, and kisses his hair.

‘Clare, I’m really all right,’ he says, embarrassed, but there’s a catch in his voice. He might cry from the shock, if it weren’t for Anna and Marcie watching. It’s only pride that stops him, this new need to be manly.

‘You have to stay away from the dogs, Pip,’ she says.

‘But it wasn’t Bobby’s fault, Clare, it was—’

‘No, Pip, I’m sorry. He bit you – whatever the reason was! You must keep away. Promise me,’ she says. She pictures the heavy dog – the muscles beneath the shaggy fur, the mad, bewildered look in its eyes. If it got a proper hold of Pip it could tear him like paper.

‘But, Clare—’

‘
No
, Pip! Just do as I say!’ Pip turns away from her, glowers at his hand. At the foot of the bed Marcie hovers and wrings her hands. She can’t look at the wound.

‘Well, thank God you’re all right, Pip, that’s all I can say. How about a brandy to soothe your nerves, hm?’ She smiles anxiously at him, and turns to go, and Clare hasn’t the heart to object even though Pip is far too young for spirits. When Marcie brings the drink he sips it in a dignified manner, and staunchly refuses to cough when his throat objects.

Clare stays until Pip is asleep, with his fat, bandaged hand resting on his chest. She turns the knob on the gas lamp until it stops hissing and darkness rolls into the light’s wake. The floor is warm beneath her bare feet; she crushes a mosquito against her forearm, and rolls it through the tiny hairs there. She can still smell Pip’s blood. Anna has taken the gory water away but its metal tang lingers at the back of her throat. There’s a red spot on Pip’s bandage, and as she watches it gets bigger by tiny increments. She thinks of the naked man, being forced to graze like an animal; remembers the raw look in his eyes when he glanced up at her. She has such a sudden strong sense of the violence all around, the possible and the actual, that she has to grind her teeth together. It’s like an electric charge in the air; the hum before a lightning strike. She feels that everything is breakable, and will break; that anything could happen, and will. She wants more than anything to be somewhere else,
anywhere
else.

With steady, silent steps, Clare goes across the courtyard, from shadow to shadow between the pooling light of the lamps. From the kitchens, where the house staff are eating, come voices in the dialect, loud and mocking. She has to insist before the guard will unlock the front door for her, and in the
aia
the nearest dog growls with gut-deep menace. The
aia
is in darkness, a deep black for the dogs to hide in. Clare pictures teeth sinking into Pip’s flesh, cutting easily through the soft, elastic skin and the delicate red underneath. She thinks of Boyd leaving her naked in the library in Gioia, as shame washed out her arousal, and how now when they touch she can’t feel a single thread of a bond between them. Not since she saw Francesco Molino beaten near to death; not since she saw Ettore Tarano.

She’s running now, along the front of the
masseria
because she doesn’t dare cross the
aia
past the dogs. Her feet are almost silent without shoes. She feels the dust flying up between her toes, the prickle of stalks and stones. For a wild instant she thinks she could run away altogether – disappear into the night and never see her husband or Leandro Cardetta again. Back to Gioia and onto a train, to Bari, Naples, Rome, home. She turns blindly to begin this escape, taking the first few steps away from the
masseria
, but at once she’s surrounded by darkness so profound she can’t even be sure there’s ground at her feet. Everything vanishes. When she looks up there are no stars, and no moon. The light coming from the building behind her can’t penetrate it; the night is like a wall. She stops. A few paces – that’s what her flight has amounted to. A few paces, and she’s given up already. She hangs her head, defeated, and every nerve in her body feels as sharp as glass shards, so that when she hears movement in front of her, she gasps. Even as she asks who it is she realises that she knows, and there’s a subtle change in the way she feels – a change in the tension, which neither lessens nor increases but takes on a different tone: reaching out rather than coiling inward. She strains her eyes to see him but he’s merely a wraith until he’s standing right in front of her, with the weak light from the walls describing shoulders, hair, drawn-down brows. Ettore’s eyes look clouded and sore. Clare wants to tell him everything, and in the next moment finds she’s got nothing to tell.

Only when it seems like he will walk away can she speak and ask him how he is, ask about his sister’s baby, about his English. She sounds like a fool to her own ears, but she wants him to stay there in the vegetable garden so that she can work out what she’s feeling, and what it means. Why her eyes seek him everywhere, why the impossible vibrancy of everything she sees and smells and tastes is causing her to panic. She tells him that she hates it there, and that she wants to run away. The words are out before she can stop them, and though they’re honest she regrets them. She can’t find the right word and he provides it for her.

‘Escape.’ He says it in a low voice, and for a second she thinks he will ask her to explain, that he wants to know more. But then he tells her to go back inside, and he sounds impatient, and Clare is dismayed. She sees herself through his eyes then, truly, and sees that she’s ridiculous. She’s nothing, and could never understand him. It’s torture, and it gets worse when he leaves her there, limping past her on his crutch. He smells faintly of sweat, and of clean linen. She holds her breath to hear every last sound he makes, further and further away, until all she can hear are crickets in the foliage, faint sounds from within the
masseria
, and her own pulse, loud in her ears. She does not do as he tells her; she stays outside for a long time, in the dark, trying to know her own thoughts.

Ettore comes to breakfast the next morning; he’s already at the table, waiting, when Clare and Pip come down. His eyes look bruised, the whites all bloodshot, and Clare, who has not slept, recognises the fatigue in the slow drag of his gaze. Marcie beams when she sees him.

‘Well, good morning, Ettore. Dear boy, you look shattered! What on earth have you been up to? Are you ill?’

‘He’s working as a guard now – I think he was on the night shift,’ says Clare, remembering something he said the night before. The urge to look at him is so strong that she’s careful not to give in to it. She’s worried she might not be able to look away again. The skin of her cheeks is tingling, and threatening to colour.