The Night Falling (32 page)

‘It’ll be fine,’ she says, because his news has made her happy enough to believe it. ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘You’re so brave, my darling. You’re an angel.’

Once Boyd and Leandro have returned to the house in Gioia, Clare waits as long as she can. It’s three days, but seems far longer; the hours drag their feet and feel like weeks. She watches from the terrace, from windows, from the roof, even though she knows she won’t see what she longs to – Ettore, coming back; the square shoulders from which the rest of his spare frame seems to hang; the economic way he moves, and the limp; his rough black hair and hard face; his astonishing eyes, full of ghosts. She knows she won’t see it at Masseria dell’Arco again, but still she watches because there isn’t much else she can do. At the end of the third day, when Marcie and Pip emerge from the bat room, she tells them that she’s feeling faint again and is going to bed early, and won’t have dinner. As firmly as she can without being rude, she refuses Marcie’s offer to check on her later, to send up a supper tray, to send for the doctor.

‘I think I just need to sleep,’ she says, smiling as she lies. There’s a specific time she must use, a specific window. It must be while they are both in their rooms, which look out through the back wall of the farm, getting ready for dinner. If she’s seen she will say that she changed her mind, and wanted a walk instead.

The key in the ancient lock to her and Boyd’s room hasn’t been turned in an age. It resists when she takes it out, and when she shuts the door and tries to lock it from the outside she has to use both hands, and strain at it until it bruises her hands. Eventually it turns with a grinding clunk. She puts the key in her pocket, where it swings and weighs her jacket down. She drapes Marcie’s loaned scarf over her hair and knots it at the back of her neck. Now when they check on her, as she knows they will, they’ll have to think she’s locked the door and gone to sleep. She doesn’t try to decide what she’ll say when they ask why she locked the door, or if the servants let on that they saw her go out, or if she’s seen in Gioia. Deliberately, she thinks only about her destination.

Carlo is on the front door and Clare’s relieved. He’s amiable and obliging; he unlocks the door with a smile and a
buona sera
, and Clare walks across the
aia
with her back rigid and the skin between her shoulder blades tight and tingling, waiting to be seen, waiting for a shout to call her back. The buildings themselves seem to watch her but the dogs don’t bark – the one she thinks is Bobby even gives an experimental wag of its tail. Her heart batters her ribs, though her excuses are ready. Somehow, she thinks they’ll know at once what she’s doing, and that she’s lying. She doesn’t know the man on the gates; he has a chiselled face, all eye sockets and angles, but since they’re used to her walking he lets her out without a word. She can feel his bullet eyes following her as she walks away along the road, but she is out. She is free.

When the road from the farm abuts another, joining it at a right angle, Clare turns in the direction with the most wheel marks in the dust, trusting them to mark the direction of town. She doesn’t know how far away Gioia is, but since Ettore’s friend carried him all the way to the
masseria
, she hopes it can’t be very far. She walks with the sinking sun on her left shoulder, the key to her bedroom bumping against her hip. She walks, and walks. The road is straight and featureless, flanked by low stone walls; there are no men in the empty fields. She walks for well over an hour, until the sun kisses the horizon, flooding the furrowed land with an orange light that glows on every rock, every thistle and weed, every feathered head of grass. Clare stops, hands on hips, thirsty and feeling the first nudge of unease. Night is coming quickly. If she has walked in the wrong direction, she will have to go back to the
masseria
and repeat the ruse again another day. Tears of frustration blur in her eyes. She’s sweating under her clothes, and has dust up to her knees. She walks on a bit further then stops again, standing in the middle of the road for some minutes, frozen in indecision. She decides she must have come the wrong way – she doesn’t think Ettore’s friend could have carried him such a distance, even though he was tall and well built. Clare hangs her head in defeat, turns around and sees a small cart approaching in a cloud of sunlit dust.

It might be one of the dell’Arco servants, sent out to find her. If it is, she will go back quietly and pretend she lost track of time; she will have little choice. Clare steps to the side of the road and when the fat woman driving the cart sees her there she yanks her mule to a halt. The woman’s breasts rest on the bulge of her stomach, but there are such hollows in her cheeks that Clare can only think she’s lost all her teeth. The scarf over her hair is black, like her eyes. She is no one Clare has seen before, and when she speaks Clare can’t understand a word of it. The woman talks at some length, and then laughs, and Clare smiles nervously.

‘Gioia dell Colle?’ she says, and the woman laughs again, patting the seat beside her.

‘
Sì, sì
,’ says the fat woman, and then something else Clare can’t follow. She climbs up beside the woman, who whistles the mule back into its shuffling trot. The back of the cart carries a sparse cargo of tomatoes, aubergines and peppers; the woman smells of earth and smoke, and Clare sits mute with relief as, only a short while later, the outskirts of Gioia appear up ahead.

She doesn’t know where Ettore will be – at home, or working, or wherever. She doesn’t know where he lives, but he once said he lived near the castle, in the tangled streets of the old centre, so she will go there and walk and ask, and avoid Via Garibaldi. The thought of not finding him is debilitating, but as if to make up for her long, anxious journey, a curvaceous young girl walking near the castle walls – only the third person Clare stops to ask – points into the mouth of a narrow alleyway opposite. The girl sketches a right angle in the air with one hand and points to the corner, all the while studying Clare with naked curiosity. There’s the same smell of sewage and rubbish as before, the same hush from the people all dressed in black, with their furtive eyes and famished faces, and the women’s hair covered with shawls in spite of the warmth of the evening. Dusty and tired as she is, Clare feels too fat, too clean, too pale. Too much of a stranger.

She hurries into the mouth of the alley, into the cover of its deep shade, and feels slightly better knowing she can’t possibly run into Boyd now, even if he happens to be out on the streets. When she was at the house on Via Garibaldi he stayed indoors, or in the garden behind. He never wanted to explore; he never wanted to see. Much like Marcie. A knot of barefooted children scurry past Clare, erupting from a doorway like ragged birds. Some of their heads have been shaved, the hair growing back in ugly tufts; they look wiry and feral, swamped by their clothing. They scare up a pair of hens, who shriek and flap and make Clare duck instinctively. There are doors but few windows; flights of stone steps scooped out with wear; iron tethering rings hammered into the stone, weeping streaks of rust.

After a hundred feet or so the alleyway narrows further and then turns a sharp right. At the point of this elbow a small courtyard sprouts off, away from the thoroughfare, and here Clare halts. Twilight has gathered in the corners of the tiny square, and there’s a steady silence that seems watchful. From behind a ramshackle wooden gate comes the rumbling bleat of a goat, and Clare jumps. There are two other doors, each at the top of a short flight of stairs. Clare has a sudden clear notion of the risk she’s taken, of the encroaching night and her clumsy intrusion into a life she can’t know; of her own idiocy. If she doesn’t find Ettore she’ll be alone in darkness, in a town full of desperate people. Even if she does find him, her disappearance from the
masseria
might have been discovered already – they could already be searching for her, and she might bring as much trouble down on him as on herself. She almost turns and leaves again, as surreptitiously as she arrived, but with the last of her resolve she walks up the nearest steps, to the door above the goat stall, and knocks.

After a pause the door cracks opens a fraction to reveal a face inside, a glimmer of eyes, and for a second of lurching hope Clare thinks it could be Ettore. But the eyes are dark. The door opens wider and she recognises his sister, Paola, who came with him to the
masseria
the first time. Clare smiles, though she’s uncertain of her welcome – in spite of it all, she has come to the right house – a rotting doorway in a cramped courtyard; a nook in the maze of old streets. She swallows, and is about to speak when Paola pulls the door open further and says something Clare can’t understand, though her incredulity is all too plain. Her eyes are striking in her spare face, set deep beneath black brows; a sensual mouth is the only concession to feminine softness. Clare had thought Paola to be about her own age, but since Ettore calls her little sister she must revise this guess. Paola can only be twenty-two or twenty-three, though there are lines around her eyes, and between her eyebrows, and brackets from her nose to her mouth. She wears a faded grey dress with a high neck and long sleeves rolled up to the elbow, with an undyed canvas apron over it; her feet are in shapeless leather slippers, hair hidden beneath the ubiquitous scarf. When she speaks again it’s abrupt, accusatory, and Clare can only shake her head.

‘Ettore? I was hoping to see Ettore,’ says Clare, in Italian. Paola glares at her, and now she’s mystified, and Clare understands that Ettore has said nothing to his sister about their affair. With a click of her tongue and an anxious glance around the empty courtyard, Paola ushers Clare inside and shuts the door.

It takes some time for Clare’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. She pulls up short and looks around, confused, because it’s just one room – a single room in which a few pieces of furniture are carefully arranged, and a squat stove is making it far too hot. A terracotta jar on the stove top steams slightly, and smells of vegetables. There’s one bed, pushed against the back wall, and a single oil lamp on a tiny table with three stools pulled in around it. Clothes hang from pegs around the walls, and there are alcoves here and there where tools and pots and folded cloths are kept. Clare stares around in dawning realisation – that this cramped space is where Ettore lives, with his whole family. The air is rank. Gazing into a shadowed recess in one wall she realises that the dark shape there is gazing back at her. She steps back, startled, and her eyes pick out the creased face of a man tucked into blankets, lying still, not blinking. The man is not Ettore; she doesn’t recognise him. Embarrassed, Clare turns back to Paola, who has her arms folded and appears to be waiting for her to speak.

‘Can … can you understand me when I speak Italian?’ says Clare, and Paola’s frown of displeasure is answer enough. She replies in the dialect, and the only words Clare can pick out are
Ettore
and
Gioia
. ‘Where is Ettore?’ Clare tries, spreading her hands hopefully. Paola takes in a sharp breath through her nostrils, taps her fingers against the bronze skin of her forearms, and Clare’s heart sinks. She’s suddenly sure she’ll leave again without seeing him; she’s not sure that Paola would tell her where he was even if they could understand one another.

There’s a long, uncomfortable silence. Paola is in front of the door and when Clare smiles apologetically and takes a step towards it, she doesn’t move. Clare has no idea what to do or say next, no idea what Paola is thinking, what she might do, and she can feel the man in the alcove staring, watching, making the hairs stand up along her arms and her throat go dry. Clare does not belong, and she is not welcome. Then there’s a high-pitched murmur behind her, followed by a soft, curious squeal, and Clare spins around, spotting Paola’s baby for the first time, wedged into a wooden box on the bed.

All that’s visible of him are his arms, his hands and splayed fingers, waving in the air above him. ‘Oh!’ Clare exclaims. At the sound of her voice the baby makes another gargled noise, an inquisitive sound, and Clare goes over to the box. The little boy peers up at her, and she can’t help smiling. He has huge eyes, dark as molasses, and a shine of spittle on a tiny red pout of a mouth. ‘Oh, he’s just perfect,’ she murmurs. ‘May I hold him?’ She glances at Paola, whose expression has softened, though she still says nothing. Clare wriggles her fingers beneath the baby’s soft weight, lifts him and puts him to her shoulder, surprised by the density of him, the incredible heat his small body gives off. She turns her face to rest against the side of his head, and feels him take a fistful of her hair and pull. Free of the confines of the box, he kicks his legs with arrhythmic enthusiasm. Clare swings him gently, side to side, patting his back. He smells of sleep and milk and the oiliness of his scalp, faintly sour and animal but not the least bit unpleasant. Holding him causes Clare a pang of yearning, hot and painful as a cramp. She looks back at Paola, still smiling. ‘He’s perfect,’ she says again, and perhaps Paola understands this word –
perfetto
– because she can’t help but smile too, hesitantly, as if she’s not used to doing it.

‘He is Iacopo,’ she says, in Italian. Softly, Clare hums a small tune, something she can’t name, something learnt from her nanny in her own infancy. She’s still rocking the child on her shoulder, still singing quietly and being watched with calm bemusement by his mother, when the door opens again and Ettore appears.

One of his eyes is half shut, swollen from his fight with Ludo, and there are other bruises too. He looks more incredulous than surprised, and a question, half begun, dies on his lips as he absorbs this strange scene. His lover, cradling his nephew while his father and sister watch in silence. For a moment he only watches too, and a strange expression crosses his face like a ripple in water, and Clare, seeing herself through his eyes, almost laughs. But then he shuts the door behind him and shakes his head sharply.