A Darkness Descending (14 page)

‘Oh,’ said Rosselli, frowning fiercely. ‘We – she doesn’t have a mobile phone.’

For a moment Sandro was stumped. Everyone had a mobile. Even he could hardly remember a time when he hadn’t had one, and he wasn’t exactly a technophile.

Rosselli took off the glasses: his eyes, Sandro saw, were red-rimmed, small and weak without the magnifying effect. ‘I mean, we have one, between us,’ he said, in that same shy, urgent voice. ‘For emergencies, that kind of thing. If we’re out in the car. My mother made us get it. To tell the truth, I don’t even know where it is.’ Still Sandro was lost for words. One between them? For emergencies? Only ones that occurred when they were together, clearly. Were they never apart?

‘But you’ve called it?’ Rosselli just stared. His own phone still in his hand, Sandro said, ‘What’s the number?’

‘You think she might have taken it with her?’ the man asked wonderingly.

‘The number?’ Sandro tried to restrain his impatience.

‘It’s – it’s—’ Casting about, from his back pocket Rosselli pulled a small, battered, leather-bound book, stuffed with scraps of paper and held together with a rubber band. He leafed through to the back and peered down, replaced his glasses. Sandro dialled as Rosselli read out the number, tracing each digit with a thin finger.

‘But it won’t be switched on,’ the other man said.

Both of them listened, Sandro with his phone held to his ear, one finger held upright to silence Rosselli. And there it was, the message.
This number cannot be reached, please try later.
Sandro breathed out hard, defeated, and pressed End Call.

So Flavia probably hadn’t taken it with her. After all, she didn’t want to be reached, did she? Or to reach anyone else. Sandro tried to imagine her setting off alone at dawn, cutting loose from the world. Only a handbag? Against hope he thought, there might have been a change of clothes in there.

Or she might have been meeting someone who would take care of everything.

It was the first time Sandro had seriously looked at that possibility: it might have occurred to Luisa before. Had it been hovering at the back of his mind for a while? But this set-up, these two serious, politically committed people – an affair seemed remote. Pleasure, self-indulgence, didn’t live here. An affair would be better, wouldn’t it? Than the other.

At least she took the handbag. Was that a woman’s reflex, even if all she was planning to do was lie down on the train tracks somewhere? Or was it the one bridge not burned, containing the credit card that would get her to her new life, among the handful of possessions she’d take with her in an emergency. But no phone? Lipstick, a diary, a book, a photograph? A purse. She’d left her baby behind.

And then Niccolò Rosselli’s landline rang, a loud, clattering, old-fashioned ring from an ugly telephone on the desk next to the computer, resounding in the apartment that at this instant, like its two occupants, seemed to Sandro to be holding its breath. And all that happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. Sandro watched, hypnotized, from the brown corduroy sofa as Niccolò Rosselli pronounced his own name carefully into the receiver and then grappled, as though blinded, for the chair behind him when finally he understood what it was his interlocutor was trying to tell him.

‘Where?’ Sandro heard him say, sounding breathless, disbelieving, doomed. ‘She’s where?’

Chapter Nine

E
NZO
’
S WORRIED FACE UNDER
its helmet ofhair appearing at the smoked-glass doors, his finger tapping insistently while she fumbled for the admission code, aroused complicated feelings in Giuli. He pushed in, eyes fixed on her, heedless of where he was or who else might be there. The reception area of the Women’s Centre was mercifully quiet, just one thin middle-aged woman whose daughter had not wanted her to accompany her inside the doctor’s room, who was waiting patiently, head down.

‘I can’t go yet,’ Giuli said to Enzo, desperate. ‘She hasn’t arrived.’ It was five-past one. Giuli was supposed to work till one, when bad-tempered Valerie would turn up to take over. Valerie was English and always late, especially when it mattered.

‘I can’t stay more than half an hour,’ Enzo said. He was working in some big office on the northern boulevard, the Via dei Mille, the other side of town. An insurance company. ‘What did Sandro say?’

‘Maybe you’d be better spending the time at the Frazione,’ Giuli said, her mind racing. ‘I mean, God. What’s it going to do to Niccolò? It’ll destroy him.’

Enzo stared at her, white-faced, and Giuli could see, her heart softening so she thought she might actually cry, for the first time in about a hundred years, that he was wondering what he’d do. If it were him. ‘What did Sandro say?’

And then the middle-aged Englishwoman was there, thumping in the entry code, square-shaped and furious. She was bad-tempered because she’d married a chauvinist pig of a man from Campania, and she’d left it too late now to jump ship and head back to England. ‘Christ,’ she said apropos of nothing as she barrelled through the glass doors. Giuli grabbed her bag and her jacket.

‘Let’s go,’ she said.

Out in the Piazza Tasso she took a deep breath, of September mist and car exhaust, and it smelled wonderful after the inside of the clinic. She’d have to go back in and break it to Clelia eventually. She fished in her bag for a cigarette. Enzo frowned.

‘I’ll give up,’ she said. ‘I am giving up. Just not today.’ They sat on a bench. She lit the cigarette and took the smoke into her lungs, held it there a long moment before exhaling.

She leaned forward on her knees, the cigarette in her hand. ‘They found her in a hotel in Viareggio; she took pills and cut her wrists and got in the bath. No note, not yet anyway, but they’re in no doubt it was suicide. The chambermaid, a Bosnian girl, found her. A handbag had Flavia’s address and phone number, and the local police called Niccolò while Sandro was right there with him.’

Enzo eyed the cigarette; following his glance, Giuli saw it was down to the filter and about to burn her fingers. She flicked it into the grass and stubbed it out with the toe of her boot.

‘He’ll need to identify – ah, the body.’ Enzo was looking down at his hands as he said it. He sat stiffly, looking anguished. Tentatively Giuli slipped an arm through his and pressed herself against his side, and he stayed stiff. She could smell the smoke on her own breath, on her clothes. I’m not good enough for him, she thought.

‘I suppose he will,’ she said. ‘Awful.’ It seemed quite unbearable, impossible in fact. She thought of Niccolò Rosselli’s thick glasses, his uprightness, of him bending awkwardly to look down in some police mortuary. ‘Maybe his mother will go with him.’ She stopped. The mother: cold comfort there. She could hardly voice the thought that came next into her head. This was no longer their business. The mother had commissioned Sandro to find Flavia, and Flavia had been found, even if not by him. End of story, or end of their involvement in it anyway.

Suicide. Giuli shouldn’t have been shocked for she’d known plenty of suicides. Any number of addicts, including her own mother, slowly killing themselves, and during the year she’d spent in prison three had done it the quicker way. One of whom had still taken four days to die, from a paracetamol overdose leading to liver failure: unwitting relatives had supplied the stuff for supposed back pain, and the woman – mother of five, four of whom had been removed from her care – had stockpiled it for three months, biding her time.

It wasn’t a pretty way to go, and Giuli knew what was required to get to that point: the knowledge that life held nothing for them. Guilt and pain and self-hatred and that meltdown in your head, neural pathways dying, capillaries collapsing or whatever, what might be called your soul being destroyed, assuming you believed in a soul, so that anyway you no longer knew where happiness came from. So dead looked good: it looked like sleep, like peace.

Yeah. Giuli knew: it was why she’d never done it, because luckily for her, even though it hadn’t felt like it at the time, some little pathway in her head had stayed open. She could just see down it back to the world, back to life. Standing at the end of it there’d been Luisa and Sandro, and now there was Enzo, and she wasn’t looking down a tunnel at it all any more, she was back in the world. She knew where happiness came from. Giuli shivered suddenly, and reflexively Enzo’s hand came out and rubbed her arm.

‘I just can’t – I can’t believe it,’ she heard herself murmuring. ‘I didn’t think – I never thought she would be someone—’ Impulsively she took Enzo’s hand, warm in her cold one. ‘You knew Flavia properly,’ she said, staring into his worried face. ‘She had so much in her life. Believing in – in things. In Niccolò, in the politics, in ideas, all those things. Do people like that kill themselves?’ Looking into his face, she saw it was too difficult a question for him to answer.

‘Roman philosophers were always doing it,’ he said, frowning furiously, trying not to put his face in his hands and cry, thought Giuli, not daring to hold him tighter, or to kiss him, for fear he would pull away. ‘Taking poison. People of ideas.’ He shook his head stiffly.

She spoke up tentatively. ‘Not Flavia, though, not once the baby was there, surely?’

He didn’t look at her. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Where I come from – no one I know would do that.’

Where Enzo came from: a hardworking peasant family was what he meant, rather than the Casentino. You worked, you pushed on, you provided for your own. Giuli saw the gulf open up between them. Where she came from, it happened all the time.

‘And where was Flavia from?’ she murmured, to herself.

‘Pigneto,’ said Enzo promptly, literal as ever. ‘Rome. Not a nice bit of Rome, especially not then.’

Giuli, who had hardly left Florence her whole life, was none the wiser. She looked at Enzo.

‘I asked her about her childhood once,’ he said slowly. ‘She said, it wasn’t a place you’d want to go back to. Not Pigneto and not the upbringing either, was the impression I got. She moved here when her mother died, straight to university,
Scienze Politiche.’

How old had Flavia been when her mother died? What had happened to the father? There were plenty of unanswered questions: Giuli sensed the dark contours of a story like her own. A childhood you didn’t much want to revisit.

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Enzo. He looked desperate, and Giuli didn’t know if it was for her, or for Rosselli, or for the Frazione. ‘Will you be OK?’ he said, on his feet and hands jammed in his pockets.

‘Oh,’ she said vaguely, wondering if this sudden feeling she had, that Enzo was taking a step back, meant anything. There was nothing she could do about it if so. She looked down at her boots, the cigarette stub in the grass. ‘I’ll be all right.’

She watched him go, watched him half turn, lift a hand. She stayed on the bench. Sooner or later she’d have to go inside the Centre and tell them that Flavia was dead.

*

‘Another half-hour,’ said Luisa, not bothering to plead with the idiotic Giusy, not even registering the whine in her voice. She hung up.

What did she need half an hour for? The old woman was gone, at last, thank Christ she was gone, out through the door with Luisa having to restrain herself from shoving her through and slamming it behind her. And once the door was closed the place seemed to expand, to breathe again, as though the oxygen Maria Rosselli had seemed to suck from the air while she was in the room had rushed back.

How would the child survive? Luisa thought of the baby, struggling to get a fix with those weak newborn’s eyes on the hard old face turned away from him, as his round pink cheeks turned red with frustration and the crying turned desperate.

‘I’ll get his bottle,’ Maria Rosselli had said, leaving him to strain against his wrappings on the sofa. No sooner was she out of the room than Luisa had the child up and against her shoulder, the left shoulder, what she thought of as the empty side, but the child didn’t seem to mind that there was no breast there. And then she was walking with him, jiggling, shushing, patting, feeling the hiccuping distress under her anxious hand. What on earth did she think she was doing? She knew nothing about babies. And then the phone rang, so when the old woman returned, bottle in hand, Luisa had the receiver jammed between one shoulder and her ear and the baby howling in the other.

The look Maria Rosselli gave her was rich in contempt, and lasted a full half-minute before she stiffly extended her arms for her grandson.

‘Hold on,’ Luisa had said into the receiver, keeping her grip on the child. ‘What?’

‘They’ve found Flavia Matteo,’ Sandro had said into a temporary lull in the howling, and it was a long time since she’d heard him sound so flat and low. A long time. ‘She’s dead.’ Luisa had felt Maria Rosselli hauling on the baby; his small face had looked up at Luisa in panic. ‘I need to talk to the old woman.’

‘It’s my husband,’ she’d said into Maria Rosselli’s face, setting the receiver flat against her shoulder. ‘It’s you he wants to talk to.’ She had experienced a fleeting spasm of triumph as the old woman relaxed her hold on the child and instead thrust the bottle into Luisa’s hand in disgust.

‘What?’ Maria Rosselli had snapped into the phone.

Don’t talk to my husband like that, Luisa had thought, turning away to disguise her sudden loathing. The bottle of milk had been ice-cold: the baby had made small, desperate, panting sounds at the smell of it. She’d gone into the kitchen, trying to unscrew the bottle as she went, well aware of Maria Rosselli wagging a finger at her. ‘He’ll take it cold,’ the old woman had hissed after her.

The hell he will, Luisa had thought, turning her back resolutely. He has no mother. The hell he will.

She walked into the empty kitchen now, and it was as though the air still resonated with the child’s crying. Luisa rubbed her eyes. He’d struggled and hiccuped and choked in his desperation to get at the teat, and Luisa had murmured to him, words she didn’t know she knew.
All right, darling. Little one.
And at last he’d taken a great shuddering breath and settled to it.