A Darkness Descending (16 page)

‘I was there when he got the call,’ said Sandro. ‘You know how it works. They fix on you, if you’re there when the news comes in. It binds you. Like that imprinting thing.’ It was true, though it had only come to him as he said it. Pietro’s silence seemed warmer now: Sandro hesitated, then took the risk. ‘Look, how about a drink when I get back? Or even something to eat? Or – or we could just sit in the patrol car and talk.’

Sandro could hear himself, like a discarded lover, begging for a chance. He ground his teeth, turning on the spot in the big sunny piazza, taking in the happy crowds around him. Couples arm-in-arm under the great green statue of Neptune in its fountain, bathed in the clear blue September light, a tall man sauntering through them with not a care in the world. There was something familiar about the man, but it took a while for Pietro to recognize him: journalist? No, soldier. Out of uniform.

‘Maybe,’ said Pietro, sounding distant. ‘I don’t know. I’ve got – things to do.’

‘I’ll call you,’ Sandro said, trying to sound concerned but not panicked. ‘Look, it’ll be a phase, it’ll be a brief rebellion, she’ll come back. You’ll have your five years. You’re good parents. The best.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ said Pietro abruptly. ‘Good luck this afternoon.’ And then he hung up.

It wasn’t on his way to where the car was parked but Sandro made the detour, past Frollini’s big plate-glass windows, full of padded jackets and fur-lined boots when it was twenty-five degrees in the shade and winter seemed a long way off: the craziness of fashion. The mysterious side of his Luisa: that she took it seriously, even now she was long-since an adult woman and sensible with it. He remembered coming here to call in on her when they were newlyweds, and how she would look so delighted by the sight of him in his uniform. Sandro slowed to look in and there she was. She still stood like a young woman, with her shoulders back, proud even when serving, and he saw her bend to get something out of a cabinet and then straighten gracefully. Setting down some knitwear on the glass counter, her hand went quickly to adjust her own sweater.

As he turned to go, she was alerted by the movement, raised her head and looked at him. They didn’t need to wave, or smile: he moved off, and she turned back to her customer.

Ask her later, he told himself.

*

‘I don’t understand,’ Guili said to Sandro when he called as she sat there on the bench alone in the Piazza Tasso. She was watching a tiny child wedged into a swing and being pushed by a woman who was not its mother, a Filipina. Did nannies bring children down here? Would Rosselli get a nanny for his now-motherless child? ‘I thought it was all over.’

He sighed. She’d understood from the sound quality that he was in the car, his voice muffled from holding the phone under his chin.

‘It is and it isn’t,’ he said. He was going with Rosselli to identify the body apparently. I knew that, had been Giuli’s first thought on hearing him say it. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Is he with you now?’

‘I’m going over to get him,’ said Sandro, and she heard him shift the phone. ‘Did you talk to them about her? At the Centre? I don’t know what to say to him.’

‘No,’ said Giuli, thinking of Sandro and Niccolò Rosselli squeezed together into his scruffy little car, the fact of Flavia’s death hanging between them. Thinking too of Clelia Schmidt. ‘I did talk to one of the midwives earlier.’ But then she hesitated: what had she learned, exactly, from that conversation? ‘Flavia wasn’t a happy bunny, by the sound of things – but the woman was pretty shocked all the same to hear she’d disappeared. Clelia, the midwife, I mean. And now I’ve got to go back in and tell them she’s dead.’

‘Ah.’ Sandro’s voice changed and she could tell he was acknowledging that burden: they’d feel guilty, that little team of overworked medical professionals. We should all feel guilty, thought Giuli out of nowhere, when someone kills themself. ‘She was depressed?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Giuli slowly, turning her conversation with the midwife over in her head. Something had been missing, something had been withheld. ‘Not exactly. Maybe the professional discretion thing. I don’t know, I just had the impression I didn’t get the whole story.’ She sighed. ‘I guess it’ll come out at the inquest. I guess they’ll talk to people – about all that.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Sandro, and thinking of the inquest they both fell silent. Then he spoke again. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘I don’t know that you don’t have a better chance than a coroner’s investigator of finding out – well, the whole story. More of the whole story.’

‘Right,’ said Giuli warily, watching the Filipina nanny haul the child out of the swing and clasp it against her with rough tenderness. Was that enough, paid-for love? Having had considerably less herself and survived, she thought, maybe it was.

Sandro cleared his throat. ‘And finding it out quicker.’

‘Do you think there’s more to this?’ she asked.

‘Don’t jump the gun,’ he said. ‘We’re not being paid. Call it
pro bono
for the moment, but if you care about that Frazione of yours – it’s as well to know the extent of the damage. To learn the whole story.’

‘Not always,’ she said before she could think. ‘It must be worst of all for him, don’t you think? For Rosselli. Because if the midwives are feeling guilty – if we’re feeling guilty, for God’s sake – then how must he be feeling? Living with her, sleeping next to her …’

‘All right,’ said Sandro, interrupting. ‘All right. You leave him to me.’ She heard a change in the background sounds and understood that he had come to a stop. ‘I’ve got to go.’

Hanging up, Giuli sat there a long moment, watching the empty swing move with the memory of the child’s weight in the pale smoky air. The trees were still green, the big mediaeval wall glowed pinkish-grey. She looked at the handsome building that housed the Centre and thought, do I have to? And as if in answer, the tinted-glass door swung outwards and there was Clelia Schmidt in sensible shoes, broad in the hip, fair and frowning, handbag clasped against her chest. Giuli got to her feet and Clelia stopped. There was something in the midwife’s face that said she knew what was coming.

Giuli waited until they were both sitting down side by side on the bench.

‘I was going for my lunch,’ said Clelia vaguely. ‘But I’m not hungry today.’ Giuli took her hand.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ said Clelia, and let out a long, ragged sigh. ‘Poor girl.’

Girl. ‘Forty-two,’ said Giuli. ‘Same age as me.’ Clelia’s eyes widened and Giuli could tell she’d thought Giuli older. ‘And me,’ she said wonderingly.

‘Some of us age quicker,’ said Giuli wryly. They both looked down at their hands entwined.

‘It’s so hard to tell, with educated, intelligent women,’ said Clelia, as if picking up a conversation halfway through. ‘They feel the need to hide more. They require more privacy. They can see what the questionnaire is trying to discover, and they can evade answering.’ She faltered. ‘But there was absolutely no sign in her answers to the questionnaire or to my questions that Flavia was depressed. How was I to know?’

‘But you now believe she was?’

Clelia frowned, looking up directly into Giuli’s face with her blue eyes. Giuli felt as though she herself – her thinning skin, her dry lips – were being examined by those clear eyes. ‘I believe – perhaps with hindsight – I do believe she was very unhappy,’ she said finally. ‘Is that the same thing? Don’t we have a right to our unhappiness without some professional diagnosing it as depression?’

‘I see,’ said Giuli, although she wasn’t sure she did. ‘Unhappiness – well.’ She thought hard. ‘I think of that as – as something with a specific reason, a clear source, and as a temporary state. If you’re lucky.’

‘Exactly,’ said Clelia, suddenly energized. ‘I think that was what worried me. That if Flavia’s feelings were diagnosed as depression she might think it would last for ever—’ And her voice broke off. Her face fell. ‘Or that was my excuse. That was why I didn’t push it with her. I was wrong.’

A specific reason.
Giuli remembered something.
A clear source.
‘You said – back there – you said you weren’t the only professional she was seeing. There was another midwife?’

Clelia didn’t speak for a moment, and when she did, it was hesitantly. ‘Well, I didn’t deliver her,’ she said, and Giuli heard caution in her voice. ‘The child was born in an ambulance, on the way to the hospital. Flavia stayed at home too long, sometimes women do – the child was delivered by the paramedics, in the ambulance bay as a matter of fact.’ She breathed out. ‘But it was all fine. Textbook delivery. Flavia did very well—’ And again she broke off.

An old man shuffled towards them on the gravel of the little square, eyed the space on the end of the bench, looked at the two women and shuffled on past. Thinking better of it.

Giuli waited till he was out of earshot: this seemed suddenly the most delicate ground imaginable. Although the woman was dead, Giuli didn’t want to invade her privacy more than she could help. She frowned. ‘So the other caregivers – you didn’t mean the paramedics?’ Clelia said nothing, not daring even to look Giuli in the eye. ‘Was she – was she seeing anyone else at the Centre? In the other clinics?’

Birth control. Addictions. Sexually transmitted diseases. Jesus God, thought Giuli, catching her breath, thinking of Niccolò Rosselli. Then thinking of the Frazione.

‘I – I don’t know,’ said Clelia, desperately casting around. ‘I can’t say.’

‘The coroner’s officials will come and ask you,’ said Giuli, taking Clelia’s hands again. ‘You know that, don’t you? And you’ll have to answer them.’

‘Will I?’ She looked terrified.

‘Well,’ Giuli said, ‘people have been known to lie to officials of the state. Even in Germany. But I don’t know how advisable it is.’ Clelia pulled her hands away and buried her face in them. ‘I want to help her,’ said Giuli urgently, not realizing until she said it that it was true. ‘She’s dead, I know that, but – if there’s anything I can do to help Flavia, now, then I want to do it. Do you understand that? The coroner’s office has no interest in that. In helping her.’

‘They just want the truth,’ said Clelia Schmidt dully. ‘Poor Flavia. Poor Flavia.’

The truth, thought Giuli with sudden dislike of the whole concept. What good did the truth ever do? She saw the old man on the next bench, fishing for something in a battered shopping bag. A newspaper, a plastic tub, a fork. She saw his anxious old face soften into an expression of contentment as he peeled the lid from the tub and began to eat, eyes half closed in the soft late-summer air.

‘You need food,’ she said suddenly. ‘We both do.’ She nodded across the square to the small old-fashioned restaurant tucked into the corner. ‘Let’s go and sit down and eat, and you don’t need to talk if you don’t want to.’

The two women stood and made their way through the swings to the far side of the square. The old man paused in his enjoyment of whatever the plastic tub contained, and watched them go.

*

At least, thought Luisa as she stood patiently, hands behind her back and waited for her customer to emerge from the changing cubicle, she had not thought about her check-up and her damned breast for a good five hours. On the negative side, she was sure the boiling rage she felt at the memory of almost everything about Maria Rosselli could not be good for her. It was a bit like having the menopause back: poor Sandro, those had been bad years. It was a surprise to her sometimes, even now, that he had stuck it out.

Of course, the years of declining communication preceding it following the death of their only child hadn’t helped. Perhaps it was because they were still of the generation that stuck it out, that didn’t ask for happiness but only stability. She had never thought of leaving Sandro: she had thought of death more often than that. She was pretty sure he’d never thought of leaving her, either.

‘All right, madam?’ she asked brightly into the curtain. ‘Another size?’

The woman was one who was in denial about her measurements: common enough. This one, middle-aged and too thin, thought she was two sizes bigger than she was in reality: most often it was the other way. The answer through the curtain was muffled and non-committal.

Luisa smiled, not thinking of the customer but of Sandro, but when the woman emerged she caught the smile and tentatively returned it.

‘Oh, madam,’ said Luisa in involuntary despair at the gaping neckline that revealed the bones of the woman’s chest, and the customer’s face fell. ‘Please,’ said Luisa, reaching behind her for the smaller size she’d kept ready. ‘For me, try this one.’

How old was this woman? Luisa had known her ten years, off and on, a rare but regular customer, not one to treat herself. She came in when her husband gave her some cash and told her to make more of an effort; Luisa tried to picture the husband, and failed. The woman was probably only forty-five but looked older: almost anorexic. It didn’t seem right to Luisa that women of forty-five could still have the insecurities and eating disorders of an adolescent. They should feel strong. When Luisa had been a child those women of middle years had held all the power; even she, Luisa, with her silent marriage and lost child, had not been as cowed as this woman seemed. What had changed?

Mutely, the woman took the dress and retreated back into the cubicle. Luisa closed her eyes briefly at the memory of the visible ribs where a cleavage should have been.

She’d looked on the internet during a lull. They had a computer in the shop now – had done for five years – with a program showing the stock levels, and a website for customers to look at catwalk shows and the like. Luisa still marvelled at the way you could type in something like, say, ‘breast reconstruction’ and get pages and pages. Pictures and everything, detailed explanations of what they called the gold-standard procedure, which involved moving skin from your back and took months. She marvelled at the women they photographed, brave enough to stand there in front of the camera for the before and after, some of them ageing like her, their flesh softened and pale. Some of them young,
young
, and even lovely. Truth to tell, made lovely again, in some pictures, brave enough, too, to get themselves rebuilt without fear of the cancer coming back, should they have the boldness to allow a new breast to appear where the disease had been.