A Darkness Descending (9 page)

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing.’ The small fold-out table was laid for the two of them, mats, glasses, napkins. ‘Sandro,’ she said. ‘What did he say when he called?’

Carefully Enzo turned off the gas under the chicken, and stirred something in a big saucepan. ‘He said had Flavia – Niccolò’s, um, wife – did you know where she’d been seen during the pregnancy, and after? Her doctor, for example, the hospital. He said he’d call you back in the morning.’ Enzo looked serious.

Giuli sighed, turning away to look back out into the trees again. She’d told Enzo the bare bones of it. It had shocked and upset him, she could tell.
How could it happen
? his anxious face had said to her.

‘Flavia and Niccolò have been together for ever,’ he’d actually said, faltering. ‘And the Frazione – could it really destroy the whole thing? A – a misunderstanding. It must be a misunderstanding.’ He’d gone round and round in circles, trying to make sense of it.

Behind her she could hear him dishing up the food. As it happened, Giuli did know where Rosselli’s wife had received her ante-natal care, because she had been seen at the Women’s Centre. About as far as you could imagine from the expensive private care most public figures’ wives would expect: a public clinic whose remit was to treat anyone who walked in off the streets, which was where most of them did come from. Sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies outnumbered happy families by about twenty to one.

‘A tavola,’
said Enzo, just an edge of anxiety to his cheerful voice: he could sense her holding back.
Hungry
, Giuli told herself, you’re hungry. Forcing herself to smell the thyme and lemon again, to look around the kitchen, at the set of coffee cups hanging on their little stand, the kitchen towel on its roller, the brushes and folded cloths on the sink. But instead of the reassurance she usually got from checking off these things, Giuli felt a little pulse of panic. Is this me? she thought. Do I belong here? She sat down.

‘Wow,’ she said, after the first forkful. It was good. She made herself taste it properly, she pushed the panic away. ‘You’re a genius, Enzo. How d’you do that?’

Giuli saw him relax, just fractionally, but she stayed tense. She wanted to ask him about Flavia and Niccolò Rosselli, together for ever. Had he seen any cracks? Together since they were at school, surely there must have been stress points? But she couldn’t ask him, not now he’d wound down.

‘So he thinks it’s something to do with the baby,’ said Enzo, frowning down at his plate as he diligently dissected his
scaloppine.

‘Flavia was treated at the Women’s Centre, as a matter of fact,’ Giuli said as lightly as she could. ‘I’ll see if I can find out who did the post-natal care tomorrow, maybe. It could be she’s stressed out, you know? It’s so common, women often run home to their mothers when a baby’s born. Rows about who bathes the baby, who gets up at night, all those hormones.’

Giuli heard the soothing note in her own voice, the
there’s nothing to worry about
note that was particularly important when there was, in fact, something to worry about.

Head still bowed over his food, Enzo nodded. He wasn’t stupid. ‘She doesn’t have a mother,’ he said. ‘Flavia doesn’t.’ He looked up, chewing methodically, his homely, thoughtful face completely absorbed in the problem. ‘Nor a father either, long dead, cancer. Niccolò’s all she’s got.’

He knows a lot about them, Giuli registered. ‘How did you first meet them?’ she said, surprised that she hadn’t asked before.

‘Oh, I was twenty-five or so.’ Enzo applied himself to another forkful, still worrying diligently at the problem. ‘They led a sit-in. The first Gulf War, ninety-whatever. We got a group visit to the army barracks in Piazza San Marco when they opened it to the public and then refused to leave.’

The first Gulf War. Giuli had hardly been aware of it, as she’d been out of her head from the late-eighties on. Only realized the first war had happened when the second one came along. She felt an uncharacteristic flush of shame: Giuli was not given to regretting her past; it only led to relapses. But the truth was, sometimes you did have to wish things had been different. She might have met Enzo then. They might have had – time. Stop, she thought. You don’t know. You can’t change it.

So Flavia had no parents? Giuli should have known that, somehow. The woman used to come on her own to her Centre visits, scans and all. Not that that was anything unusual for the Centre, whereas in those private clinics or in the big modern hospitals there’d be four or five family members to most mothers-to-be, hovering over the technician, cadging extra scan photos. Giuli could just see her now, waiting patiently on the hard plastic chairs among the chaos and the other women and their badly behaved toddlers – the bad-tempered, resentful, unhappy, desperate women. Why hadn’t Niccolò come? It seemed obvious; he wasn’t a man for sentiment, she wouldn’t have wanted to seem needy.

If it were me. If I were pregnant
– the thought sprang, unwelcome, into Giuli’s head because after the life she’d had, the age she’d reached, it just wasn’t going to happen –
if I were pregnant I’d want Enzo there.
Enzo would be there come hell or high water. And he wasn’t a man for sentiment, either. Having allowed that observation in, as it was relevant, as it seemed significant, Guili shoved the whole scenario out of her mind.
I’m not going to be pregnant.

‘Delicious,’ she said, cutting up the food on her plate into smaller and smaller pieces. It might as well have been cardboard, now, as she put it in her mouth. Enzo put the salad on the table, looking at her from under a worried frown. Beside it he set the cruet with oil and vinegar and salt and pepper. Throughout her childhood Giuli had only ever seen such a thing through the window of a restaurant. The surfaces of her mother’s
angolo cottura
in the two-room walk-up off the Via Senese had been strewn with things that did not belong in a kitchen, and almost nothing that did.

No mother to run to for Flavia, just like Giuli. So where would she go? And at the memory of that patient figure sitting alone in the corridor waiting for her appointment, Giuli felt something, a chill, a darkness, move more assertively into the bright little room with them. It was something that sat in corners just out of sight and waited for her to turn and look at it.

But Giuli didn’t turn: she finished her chicken, she finished her salad. She cleaned her plate.

‘How long has she been gone?’ Enzo asked, setting his knife and fork side by side. They faced each other over the empty plates. ‘Flavia? When did she – disappear?’

‘The mother – Rosselli’s mother – said three days ago. Sunday morning he got up when he heard the baby crying, at seven … seven-thirty and she was gone. No note. Nothing.’

‘Nothing,’ Enzo repeated, looking around the room as if to reassure himself of something, that everything was still in place. The place in the bed would have been empty when Niccolò Rosselli had woken up. He would have assumed his wife was in the bathroom, the kitchen. He would have walked around the apartment holding the crying baby. And then what?

Where would Flavia go, if there were no mother to take her in? But when Giuli opened her mouth that wasn’t what she said.

‘Flavia will turn up,’ she said to Enzo, wanting it to be all right. And when he looked back at her at last, reaching for her cleaned plate, she knew that he knew, that they both knew, that it would not be all right at all.

*

In his sitting room as it grew dark and the only light came from the flickering television, showing the late news, Pietro Cavallaro leaned forwards on the sofa with the remote control clenched in his hand. He wasn’t moving, nor was he really taking in what was happening on the screen. A demonstration in Naples gave way to scenes from a suburban development on the edge of Rome, a brothel where government ministers had been secretly filmed. His grip tightened on the remote.

In the kitchen Gloria was hovering, pacing anxiously from stove to sink to refrigerator, unable to think about what she was doing. Making coffee: the little machine on the stove began to bubble and the familiar, comforting smell filled the room. Mechanically she took down the cups, the sugar, the coffee spoons.

It wasn’t that Chiara would be there every evening drinking coffee with them in front of the weather report anyway. More often than not there would only be two cups on the little tray; she’d be out having ice cream with her friends, maybe at a club or a bar at weekends, maybe – lately – a university gathering, a political meeting. The details volunteered had become hazier. Gloria set the tray down, glanced at Pietro then at the lamps, decided not to switch on the light. She didn’t want to see the fear and anger and confusion on his face: it was enough to see as much of the set of his pale features as the light of the television allowed her.

Had it been down to work, to distraction? Had Pietro been too busy with whatever his latest investigation was, taking him out of the house two evenings a week, to talk to their daughter?

He’d got home from work halfway through Chiara’s packing: she’d been coming out of her bedroom with a holdall, in the middle of asking Gloria, too politely, if she could borrow it. There’d been a stand-off, Chiara falling silent mid-sentence, Pietro staring with mute, pointless rage from the bag in her hand to the bed behind her, piled with CDs and clothes and stuff from the dressing table they’d bought for her fifth birthday. Nobody told me, Gloria had wanted to cry, this is what you get when you only have one child. Half an hour’s packing and your house is suddenly empty. And Luisa trying to take back what she’d said,
They have to leave sometime.

But did it have to be like this?

‘You won’t tell us where you’re going?’ Pietro had said, as Chiara had turned back and silently begun to fill the bag from the heap on the bed.

‘Babbo,’ she had muttered, and Gloria had heard the anguish in her voice. ‘Of course I’ll tell you. Just – look, I need to get settled in, to be sure it’s going to work. I don’t want you turning up and shouting.’ Crushing things heedlessly into the holdall, when she used to be such a careful child. Folding and wrapping and ordering, every time they went on holiday, socks rolled up in pairs, larger garments in tissue paper. Zipping it up and stepping around her father in the doorway, setting the bag next to her wheeled suitcase by the front door.

‘You’re not – you’re staying in the city?’ Pietro had muttered, humbling himself. ‘You’re not going far?’

‘Dad,’ she said again, impatient – but affectionate too, Gloria told herself, surely affectionate too? ‘I’m enrolled at the university, remember? I’m not going far. I’ll – I’ll be in touch. I will.’

Had there been something evasive in the way she’d said that? They’d both heard it. And the way she’d slid out through the door, leaving them staring at it as it closed, Gloria trying not to cry, Pietro with both fists clenched in frustrated fury, listening to her footsteps on the stairs.

They hadn’t even asked, until it was too late, how are you getting there? Wherever
there
was. Just stood unable to talk to each other until suddenly Pietro had said, ‘Did she go on the bus, or what? How did she come? She’ll never get that stuff on the
motorino.’

They’d bought her the scooter for her eighteenth, because she’d begged. And because they could trust her, she was a careful girl. Risk-averse, they’d trained her that way, sensible, orderly, intelligent – until now. But she couldn’t have got the suitcase on the
motorino.
Pietro had started away from Gloria then, in the hall, ran in awkward haste through into the sitting room and flung open the long windows that opened on to the busy street over a small stone balcony. They never opened those windows, for some reason, though the view was nice. Incongruously, following in Pietro’s angry wake, Gloria found herself noticing as the warm air came in, smelling of some flower, that it was a lovely evening. He hurled himself at the balcony and for a moment she was seized with terror of what he might do. But he was only looking down into the street.

‘He must have brought her,’ Pietro muttered, raging over the low parapet. ‘Damn it. He was probably outside all along. When I came in the front door, he was probably waiting. Bastard, bastard! What kind of man doesn’t make himself known to a girl’s father? What kind of world—’ He looked down then, at Gloria’s restraining hand on his arm, and reared his head away in a kind of agony, she could tell, at women, women who didn’t understand, and why did one have to explain everything to them?

He’d never been like this before. Throughout all their marriage, Pietro had been kind and mild and thoughtful and patient. Old-fashioned? Gloria knew this was what Chiara had come to think, she had read it in her daughter’s face.
Silly old dad, who doesn’t know.
But old-fashioned seemed to Gloria now only to mean experienced, sensible, cautious, all they had wanted to pass on to Chiara, the qualities she had seemed to possess in admirable abundance – until now.

Timidly Gloria pushed the coffee towards Pietro in the darkened room. Were they simply over-reacting? She wished it to be true. Why didn’t the man come up, whoever he was? Why could he not come up, so they’d know at least what he looked like, they could judge him? Would they have always found him wanting, irrespective of his intelligence, good family, anything? Was that what Chiara felt? Was that why she didn’t allow him up for inspection? It was what she’d said. Over-reacting? Deep down, what Gloria thought was the same as Pietro. A decent man would have insisted he meet the girl’s parents.

‘You told Sandro.’ The words were spoken flatly, without hope.

‘I told Luisa,’ said Gloria. ‘I knew she’d talk to him about it. Yes.’

And Pietro put his hands up to his face, the remote control still held tight in his fist and crushed against one ear. ‘My little girl,’ he said.

They sat there a long time without talking. Outside it grew dark.

Chapter Seven

T
HE SHARP, CLEAN EARLY
sun slanted through the great circular window on the Stella Maris’s first-floor landing, casting a golden disc on the door of number five. It was early to be doing the rooms – eight-thirty – but the hotel had only four guests remaining and three of them had been in the dining room by seven o’clock sharp.