A Darkness Descending (17 page)

That fear was irrational, she knew. But Luisa had to admit, it was one of the things that frightened her.

The curtain opened again. ‘There,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

The woman was still too thin, but the smaller size made the most of her. Luisa appraised her robustly, the woman’s eyes never leaving her face to actually confirm what Luisa was saying by looking in the mirror, timidly trustful. Perhaps she has no mother to tell her, thought Luisa. Doesn’t her husband say anything nice to her?

Not that her own did so much, but there was a way he looked at her that was enough.

I’ll get the reconstruction, thought Luisa suddenly, out of nowhere.

‘Your husband will be very pleased, I should think,’ she said, but when she turned to look at the woman she didn’t seem to be listening, was in that reverie that fell over insecure customers at the moment of purchase.

‘Poor cow,’ said Giusy ruminatively as the door swung shut behind her. ‘There is such a thing as too skinny. It just looks unhappy, don’t you think? At a certain age. Or ill.’

Luisa, ready to disagree on principle with Giusy, said, surprising herself, ‘Um, hmm, well. Yes.’

‘You’re getting it done then,’ Giusy went on cheerfully. ‘The breast thing? Reconstruction?’

Luisa stared. Could it be that this late in her self-absorbed life, Giusy had taken to empathizing to the point of being able to read her colleague’s thoughts? Giusy licked a finger and turned a page of her magazine. ‘I saw you looking it up on the computer. I’ve heard it’s a piece of cake these days. Our surgeons, they’re the best. Good on you, I say. Life’s too short to shrivel up and hide.’ They were both still turned in the direction of the door through which the skinny woman had left.

‘Yes,’ said Luisa.

She thought she might not tell Sandro straight away.

Chapter Eleven

T
HE EXIT FROM THE
city seemed interminable. Who were all these people, changing lanes at random on the superstrada? The superstrada itself was a joke, too; thirty years on, the Firenze-Pisa-Livorno road still seemed only half built and was potholed to extinction: Sandro felt himself boil up with useless anger. Crawling around temporary barriers and traffic cones through the Isolotto, still crawling on the overpass through Scandicci, the multiplex cinemas and shopping centres crowding in. The grey prison to the left, built like a concrete stadium. Sandro hated Scandicci.

At his side in the battered little car Niccolò Rosselli blinked through his glasses at the road leading away to the west. If you looked far enough ahead, the castles and cypresses came into focus, San Miniato and Vinci, and then umbrella pines and forested hillside. Perhaps that was the trick – and sure enough, as Sandro refocused his gaze, the traffic around him seemed to ease and shift and they were moving again.

He’d found Rosselli more or less where he’d left him, standing in the shuttered gloom of his sitting room, as bewildered as though he’d forgotten who either of them were. It seemed to Sandro that the room was dimmer, as if dust had already settled over it all, dulling the photographs on the pinboard. Had his woman been all that had been animating Rosselli? It fitted with Sandra’s ideas on women, though he was uncomfortably aware that they were old-fashioned views, and Rosselli and Flavia would no doubt have dismissed them.

Although Rosselli had responded to Sandro’s name so far as to buzz him up, he’d stood silent once his visitor arrived. Waiting for the man to say something, Sandro had stepped around him and rested a hand on the chair at the desk. Not quite casually, he had looked again at the photographs pinned behind the computer’s silent screen, the pale, sensual face of the woman being the one that stood out.

You never could make sense of partnerships, was the thought that had come to him. A beautiful woman might not need to be told she was beautiful, or she might crave it. A plain woman might be fearless.

He didn’t wonder much about men; Sandro thought of them as simple creatures, motivated by sex – or call it love – or money, or power. Niccolò Rosselli didn’t seem to fit the rule, though.

A meeting of minds: Sandro supposed that was – had been – the key to Rosselli’s relationship; intellectual companionship, was that it? He found himself covertly considering his own marriage: his and Luisa’s minds met these days, more than they used to, knowing what each other was thinking, but that was a matter of growing into each other, like plants twining together until their separate beginnings are no longer visible. It was more a physical thing, in a way he could not explain, than an intellectual one: a matter of simple proximity, of feeling one’s way in the dark. Even in his short exposure to the partnership of Rosselli and Flavia Matteo, this was not how their relationship seemed to him. There were distances in this apartment, there were shadows.

There was a photograph of Rosselli, frowning intently behind his glasses, under an umbrella pine on a beach with hills behind, looking like he didn’t belong. There was a photograph of Flavia Matteo with a woman with short dyed blonde hair, both smiling broadly. Another of Flavia Matteo in a woollen hat pulled down hard and unflatteringly over the red hair, under a
loggia
he vaguely recognized from the city, a red slice of the Duomo’s cupola visible behind.

The baby was still absent, Sandro had registered. It had come to him then with painful suddenness that if he and Luisa had had a child that lived, if Luisa had died and left him with a newborn, he would have held on to it every minute he could. And as Sandro had the thought, Rosselli had suddenly taken off his glasses and polished them as he spoke, head bowed. ‘I found it,’ he’d said.

‘You found it?’ Sandro hadn’t known what he was talking about.

‘I found the mobile phone. Our mobile phone.’ He’d spoken flatly.

‘Right,’ Sandro had said slowly. Rosselli had made no move to produce it. Would the police want to look at the phone? Was it anything to do with Sandro, any more?

‘Could I see it?’

He’d not been able to help himself, had he? This isn’t your business, you aren’t being paid, the woman’s been found, he told himself. But he’d had to see. And like Luisa said, if it’s not our business, why does it still feel like it is?

Rosselli had replaced his glasses and scrutinized Sandro as though he were a new species. Then he had crossed to the desk, pulled open a drawer and taken out the phone. Sandro had been able to tell by the way he handled it that he had no interest in the thing, that it was not, as it was to almost everyone else these days, a talisman and lifeline and fetish. He had handed it to Sandro.

It had been an ancient model, but in good condition; the first thing that had been surprising about it was that it was fully charged. Even if it had been kept turned off, this had seemed improbable for an elderly mobile phone that was almost never used. Sandro had wiped a thumb across the small screen reflexively. Giuli would be the one to look at it and find out its secrets: all Sandro knew how to do was to scroll quickly through the phone book: doctor, lawyer, dentist, mother-in-law, a few miscellaneous names, all women.
Wanda, Maria, Anna K.
Flavia did use it, then, to keep in touch? So she had friends, old schoolmates, perhaps the teachers she worked with at the school?

Sandro had been halfway through thinking he’d send Giuli to the school, to the Agnesi to find out who might have been her friends, when he’d had to tell himself again, None of your business – not any more. But he’d kept the phone in his hand, had felt it warming from his touch in secret communication.

‘We’d better go,’ Niccolò Rosselli had said, half turning towards the door. ‘Yes, right,’ Sandro had said, and without thinking, or at least without thinking much, without the appearance of thinking, had slipped the mobile phone easily into his pocket.

As they’d wound their way through the clogged backstreets of Santo Spirito, Rosselli had gazed out of the window with a kind of fervour, a kind of longing, or so it had seemed to Sandro as he’d snatched a sidelong glance. They had passed a greengrocer’s Sandro knew to be the best in the city, a shabby little shop, an old woman picking through a tray of figs on the pavement. A huddle of streetsleepers of all varieties, with the knotted and dreadlocked hair of the young revolutionaries, with the bound and battered feet of the seasoned traveller, with the trolleyful of bizarrely assorted possessions of the mentally ill – all queuing outside the side door of a church. Christian charity still existed, then.

‘How long have you been going?’ he’d said to Rosselli. ‘The Frazione?’ He’d asked more by way of distracting them both than with any clear intention of gathering information, but as he’d spoken it had struck him again as weird to find himself in close proximity to this man, this hero. All those followers, all those acolytes, but no one he could trust to come with him to identify his wife’s body.

It had to be her, didn’t it? It did. Rosselli had seemed to be sure, which Sandro supposed was a blessing. Not a man given to denial or self-delusion.

With reluctance Rosselli had shifted his gaze to Sandro from his contemplation of a pair on the corner of the Via dei Serragli and the Via Mazzetta, outside a bar, a man in a hat and shabby camel coat giving some folded notes to a drunk: more charity.

‘They’re good people, round here,’ he’d said. ‘It functions. We can function, at the level of the street, of the village, we can function informally, we can be generous, we can care for each other.’

‘We?’

The ghost of a smile had appeared on Rosselli’s face, mirrored on Sandra’s. ‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ Rosselli had said. ‘The people of Santo Spirito? Of San Frediano, the Oltramo? We Florentines, we Italians, we members of the human race. You have to work outwards, from your own doorstep.’

Like when children wrote an address. Third floor, Via dei Macci, Florence, Italy, Europe, the World, the Universe.

‘It’s the same everywhere, isn’t it?’ Sandro had said. ‘Charity begins at home. Close to home, anyway.’

Rosselli had shifted his position, turned towards Sandro, and it was as if a spark had kindled inside him.

‘Yes, but you have to work outwards,’ he’d said, and his voice had been different, stronger, more certain. ‘We start with the roads. We start with people’s homes and livelihoods and the environment in which they bring up their children, we stand up against those who want to push the ordinary people aside in the pursuit of big business.’ He’d taken a breath, a practised speaker. ‘First home, then the
quartiere
, then the
comune.’

‘Then parliament?’ Sandro had understood from the webpage that the Frazione’s primary intention was to have Rosselli in the
comune
, the city hall. To have him appointed as an
assessore
– a councillor – with responsibility for roads. It seemed a solid, unglamorous, honourable ambition, but in this country was anything straightforward? He’d thought then of their prime minister’s broad, jovial smile. No.

Rosselli had frowned. ‘I don’t look that far ahead,’ he’d said, and had shifted again, turned his head back to look out of the window. ‘In answer to your question, the Frazione was formed – officially formed – two years ago. Carlo Bastone and I decided it was necessary.’ Sandro had stolen a look at the man’s quarter-profile, the jaw set. ‘Of course, like all things, it becomes more complicated the bigger it gets. More people, more opinions, more debate. It’s healthy. It’s democracy.’

‘Right,’ Sandro had said, registering the grim note in the other man’s voice. ‘Did you think it would get so – big?’

‘No,’ Rosselli had said shortly, and Sandro had understood that the man had no personal ambition at all. Which left him vulnerable, in Sandro’s book, because all that went with it, pride and greed and worldly understanding – well, Sandro had thought uncomfortably, they weren’t pretty, but they were essential, weren’t they? He’d fallen silent then and Rosselli had volunteered no more, staring out of the window instead.

It took an hour and a half to get to the floral roundabouts that marked the outskirts of Viareggio: all the way Sandro had held his peace, not wanting to intrude on the other man’s silence, and all the way the questions built in his mind. If he were investigating this … There was something curious, though, about Rosselli’s silence; Sandro felt it not as an absence but as something that grew and multiplied, containing possibilities. He had the feeling that the man wanted to say something, but could not. Wanted to ask, but could not: strange for a man with a reputation for oratory, for persuasive speaking, for articulacy. Yet perhaps not strange at all. It was one thing to talk about world peace and roadbuilding and health-care facilities; quite another to talk about one’s grief with a stranger.

Strangers, though, were sometimes the only ones who’d do. As they negotiated the first roundabout, Rosselli asked the question Sandro had been asking himself.

‘Why here?’ he said with painful bafflement, looking at the first of the prim, stuccoed villas, the Art Deco apartment blocks, the shady avenues. ‘Why did she come here?’

Sandro cleared his throat. Interesting that the man hadn’t asked,
Why
?, full stop. ‘You don’t have any idea?’ he asked cautiously. ‘Not a place where you came on holiday?’ He thought of the odd beach photograph he’d seen on the pinboard: not Viareggio. There had been a rocky hillside in the backdrop, and Viareggio was as flat as a pancake.

Niccolò Rosselli shook his head. ‘My mother had a place on Elba,’ he said. ‘We went there, if we went anywhere. But—’ He frowned. ‘We’re not really holiday people.’ And realizing he’d used the present tense, let out the awful sound of one unused to emotion, a kind of muted groan. ‘Weren’t.’

‘Nor us,’ said Sandro hastily, because until this year it had been true. Not wanting, suddenly, to have anything in common with Rosselli, he willed the memory of Castiglioncello into his mind. Life is to be enjoyed, he told himself, surprised to find he believed it.

‘Anyway, my mother decided to sell it this summer,’ Rosselli said with weary bafflement. ‘She said we’d need the money for the child.’ He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘I told her we had enough money.’