Dead Season (35 page)

‘Ma,’ had been all she said, before she’d stopped.

‘Well, I went to the doctor’s first,’ Ma had said, shushing Roxana out through the
salotto
– had it been dusted? There was a smell of polish – on to the veranda at the back. ‘This morning.’

She’d wanted to clear a few things up, she had said. Do it on her own: there was no point in just sitting at home fretting over whether she was losing her grip, was there? There were tests.

They’d both sat down. ‘And?’ Roxana had still been holding her helmet, she had realized. Gently she had set it down beside her, and pulled off her jacket.

‘Well, it takes time,’ Ma had said, smoothing the cloth on the little table. Refocusing, Roxana had seen that there was a Martini glass with an olive in it, and a small empty beer bottle.

‘I had to offer him something,’ Ma had said, seeing where she was looking. ‘Coming out here, in August. Nice man. The handyman.’

‘Right,’ Roxana had said, trying to remember when she’d last seen Ma drink a Martini. Dad had made them once in a while, for special occasions. The bottles must have been gathering dust for a decade. But alcohol didn’t spoil, did it? ‘The doctor?’ she had said. ‘The tests?’

‘Well,’ Ma had said comfortably. ‘Like I said, it takes time. They do tests, then do them again, to measure deterioration.’

Roxana had stared at her. So had it taken that day Ma had spent hiding, frightened, in the hall, for her to gather her wits and see what the truth of the matter was? She had imagined Ma getting dressed so carefully, for the visit, and felt a sudden burning shame, mingled with respect. ‘So?’ she had managed.

‘He says, he can’t say.’ Violetta Delfino’s eyes had been bright. ‘But right now, it seems I have the appropriate level of – cognition, or something – for a person my age. No evidence of progressive disease – although, of course, he will do the tests again to monitor that. He says, his belief is that I have been depressed.’ Pressing her lips together in an expression familiar to Roxana. ‘I told him, nonsense.’

‘Right, Ma,’ Roxana had said, expressionless. She hadn’t known whether to cry or to hug her mother. Neither response, she had guessed, would be greeted with anything but impatience.

‘They say the weather’s going to break,’ Ma had said then, getting to her feet. ‘I had a Martini.’ A week, a day ago, the non sequitur would have panicked Roxana. ‘Would you like one?’

There had been no scent of dinner from the kitchen; things, it seemed, had changed today. ‘Fine,’ Roxana had found herself saying.

The alcohol had been warm and oily but had tasted surprisingly clean. Roxana had let it burn her throat and as it did so, she’d felt her shoulders drop. Ma hadn’t had another: at least Roxana didn’t have to worry about her turning to drink. The beer bottle had gone.

Ma had settled herself into her chair, smoothing her dress. She had looked perhaps ten years younger; why, the doctor had asked, hadn’t they done this test months ago? Roxana had supposed it would have always had to be Ma who requested any such test.

‘So what did the handyman say?’ Roxana had sat up straight, suddenly flustered and reaching around her for her handbag, ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. How did you pay him?’

‘He’s sending his bill,’ Ma had said. ‘He said he’d bring it round in a day or so, actually. A nice young man.’

Roxana had subsided, waiting.

Ma had set her hands on the table. ‘He said, we should talk to the police because it was criminal damage, not wear and tear. He said, it looked like someone had been – almost camped out there. Recently.’

She had spoken complacently, without the terror that Roxana would have expected, that Ma had herself experienced looking at the damage. It had come to Roxana that she felt justified, happier in some way that the whole affair of the mysterious caller at the house had been a real threat rather than an imagined one.

‘Fancied himself as something of a detective, if you ask me,’ Ma had said confidentially. ‘Talking about footprints, showing me, “Look, there’s this set here, lots of those, then someone else, here.”’

Roxana had shifted uneasily in her chair. ‘Two sets of footprints?’ She had tried not to sound alarmed: did she want Ma too scared to leave the house all over again? No. She had got to her feet, and leaned on the balustrade, looking out into the garden. ‘I should have got back sooner,’ she had said.

But Ma had gone on blithely, ‘He put on a very good strong bolt, and a new lock, he pieced in some wood where it had been pulled away. Safe as houses now, he said. He was concerned, that was all. Thorough. Quite insistent, about the police, doing things properly.’

Roxana had tried to remember the man’s voice on the phone. Had he sounded young? He had sounded, to her, like a man such as her father, or perhaps she’d merely imposed that on him, poor guy, just as she’d done to Sandro Cellini.

It had come to her that Ma would like Sandro Cellini.

‘Well then, perhaps we should,’ she had ventured. ‘Contact the police. Or someone.’

‘Yes,’ Ma had said. A silence. ‘Tomorrow.’ Her face had looked completely serene in the soft light falling through the door. ‘He said we should talk to old Carlotta next door. She might have seen something, he said.’

Still leaning on the balustrade, Roxana had turned her head and found herself listening for the grey Persian, nodding absently. The police. Two sets of footprints.

‘I thought we might have a bite out, tonight,’ Ma had said, standing to brush down her shirtwaister fastidiously as if she hadn’t spent the last two years barely even bothering to look in a mirror. ‘When you’ve finished your drink? The place on the corner’s open.’

‘Leave the lights on,’ Roxana had said as they left. Ma had looked at her, enquiring. ‘So we’re not fumbling about when we get back.’ And it’ll look like there’s someone home. ‘We’ll only be out an hour.’

It had been a bit more than that, in the end: it had been close to eleven. The trattoria – a decent place, if basic – had been very busy as there were so few places open this time of year; the clientele a mixture of campsite tourists and locals, and no air-conditioning, a waitress with a sheen of sweat hurrying between tables. So it wasn’t till eleven that she had started to look for her mobile, to phone Sandro Cellini.

She should have realized earlier; what was wrong with her? The overheated trattoria, its doors open to the steamy dark and the sound of frogs in the trickling river, fireflies on the far bank, a good meal of the old-fashioned kind they used to go out for, when Dad was alive, when Luca was home. The thought of a handyman she’d picked at random out of the Yellow Pages who could be bothered to worry about Ma, and a glass or two of wine on top of the Martini; that was what had been wrong with her. Lulled into thinking,
Life isn’t so bad. Things will get back to normal
.

The phone hadn’t been in her bag. Fumbling at the restaurant, she hadn’t been able to find it, had told herself she’d check when she got home because she was beginning to attract attention as she flung the bag’s contents around: Cellini’s business card, then her keys landing on the table with a clatter that caused heads to turn.

Must have left it at home. Though she had known she hadn’t taken it out. Knew. And when it hadn’t been there – the house otherwise just as they’d left it, though in her rush to get back through the door Roxana had barely had time even to worry about footprints and all of that – and Ma had been standing over her in the hall and beginning to look anxious at last, Roxana had made herself stop. She was worse than Ma, panicking over nothing.

‘It’s only a phone,’ she had said, with forced breeziness. ‘Must have left it at Marisa’s.’

Ma’s mouth had pursed. Just as Roxana had been thinking she doesn’t like Marisa any more than Maria Grazia, Ma had said, ‘Oh!’ Startled, pleased with herself. ‘Maria Grazia phoned.’

‘My Maria Grazia?’ Like an idiot. ‘Phoned here?’

‘Yes,’ Ma had said with exaggerated patience. ‘Here. At about six. Because you weren’t answering your mobile. She was worried about you. She was on a train.’

I’m
worried about me, Roxana had thought, feeling the stupid panic rise, pushing it down. What will I do without my mobile?
It’s not safe
. She had taken a deep breath, stop it. Twenty, thirty years ago, nobody had had mobiles. We coped. Not safe? Don’t be stupid. She had put her hands to her temples.

‘Six.’ She’d been on the pavement outside the bank at six, if Maria Grazia had called, she’d have heard it ring – oh. Oh. And she’d exhaled. ‘It’s all right,’ she had said. ‘I know where it is.’

Standing now, the morning after, at the window in her bare feet, Roxana pulled up the roller shutters with a rattle and looked out over the thick vegetation of the garden to the fence at the back, the path that led along behind the houses; had she always known you could see it from here? She left her shutters closed, as a rule, to keep the room cool. And most mornings she was at work, not gazing out of her bedroom window.

Ma had been right about the weather breaking. The sky was low and grey and the light glared, flat and scalding, turning the green foliage dull and lifeless. It was always the worst before the storm came, and it could take days to break. The air was so dense with humidity that Roxana could hardly breathe, and the light hurt her eyes. And when she remembered where the phone was, she felt a dull throb of dread. It was plugged in, in the bank’s little kitchen, tucked behind the toaster, and charging at the bank’s expense.

Stupid to feel dread: this was the place where she’d gone to work for the past two, three years. Was it suddenly a hellhole? But standing here, she suddenly felt the most tremendous unwillingness to go back in there, ever. She felt the weight of all those mornings, pulling on her helmet, parking up by the river, letting herself in, booting up the computer screen and settling at her workstation, and realized, she understood that she hated every minute of it. Every minute of it.

At the window, Roxana exhaled, wow. Where did that come from? Her face, she noticed putting a hand to it, was filmed with sweat. Stop it, she told herself. Stop it. Everyone has bad days, no one loves their job all of the time.

Somewhere far off under the low sky, somewhere to the south there was a rumble. Below Roxana and to the right, Carlotta came slowly out on to her rear balcony, which was identical to Violetta Delfino’s, and began to pull laundry off a wire rack. In her nightgown, with bare old arms, with that look of clammy exhaustion from too many sleepless nights in the heat.

Seen from above like this, they were so close, so similar, the lives of Ma and old Carlotta, that it was almost comical that they barely exchanged a word from one end of the year to the next. Roxana thought of the imagined slights and hostilities that might stem from a sidelong glance or an overheard word, from the behaviour of the cat, some piece of untamed vegetation or the hanging out of inappropriate garments in full view.

Carlotta looked up.

Roxana waved.

Carlotta hurried back into the house as if scalded, and Roxana had to laugh at the expression of sheer affront on the old lady’s face. She pulled the shutters back down, went inside and got in the shower.

As the water ran, lukewarm because it never got properly cold once the summer was here, the heat settling everywhere, even into the stone-cold earth, Roxana pondered. She had already spent longer on the phone to Sandro Cellini than was strictly necessary, she knew that, but he hadn’t seemed to mind. Actually – and Roxana felt a little pulse of satisfaction as she remembered it – it seemed as though she had actually made a difference.

So all it had needed was the sound of Sandro Cellini’s voice – weary, attentive, kind – as he answered his phone late last night, and she had ended up telling him everything. Rambling on, Ma would have called it, and does he really need to know what you think about this man, this Josef? Does he really need to know that, in fact, you liked him, you’d been suspicious at first because he was a foreigner, and poor, but seeing him once a week, registering his patience and unassuming respectfulness, you had got a feeling about him? Just a sense that he was, in some central part of himself, a decent man, even though you barely exchanged a word. Roxana had told Cellini about her visit to the Carnevale, too.

‘They’ve boarded it up,’ she had said. ‘I think they’re starting work next week, properly, it’s been a long time in the pipeline, apparently. He said they’re getting dogs – the man who was putting up the boards. Said it was horrible inside.’

‘Horrible.’ She heard him turn the word over. ‘And no sign of him? The builders, or whoever this man was, had seen no sign of Josef, or anybody?’

‘Well, I did ask,’ Roxana had said. ‘That was why I went there, I had a feeling, about Josef.’

She’d sat down then, feeling in the dark for the uncomfortable little upholstered chair that sat by the phone table. Uneasy, because she had known it was going to sound mad.

‘I thought there was a connection, you see, I don’t know why. When – when Claudio died, and Josef hadn’t come in the day before, when he always came in. Stupid, I know.’

There’d been a silence, then Cellini had cleared his throat. ‘Not stupid, as it turns out,’ he had said. ‘Given that Josef was calling himself by Claudio Brunello’s name.’ He had paused, and he had heard women’s voices, soft, in the background. ‘So you asked?’

‘He said the place was empty.’ And she had frowned, trying to remember. There’d been something, though. ‘He said, it wasn’t pretty, or something like that. There was some kind of mess, left behind.’

‘Right.’ Cellini had sounded thoughtful. ‘When does the work start? Did you say, they were putting dogs in there?’

‘That’s what he said. Well, he was putting a sign up, too, warning, guard dogs.’

The sound Cellini made had been sceptical. ‘Might get down there, anyway,’ he had said. ‘Have a look around.’

‘Will you tell the police?’

‘I used to be a police officer,’ he had said, distant for a moment, and, in Roxana’s opinion, not answering the question at all. Then he had said, ‘I will tell them, yes. Of course. It’s just that I’d like a look myself first. It’s my client, you see. I have to think of her. I have to – act in her interests. The police barging in and digging things up and drawing their own conclusions – well, that might not be in her interest.’