A Darkness Descending (29 page)

She comforted herself with the thought that she would escape this life, this awful present: he would not.

The Pizzeria Venere came into view on the far side of the road, a low, ugly and garish building with tables set outside on the broad pavement in the sun. A sunburned northern European couple were already seated: there were place-settings and tall glasses of beer in front of them. When did their holiday season end, these people? Sooner or later, they’d have to go home.

She stopped in the last of the shade and looked around, unobserved, and tried to remember what she’d heard, on Monday morning, standing on the landing above the foyer. Calzaghe had spoken to Flavia Matteo in that insinuating voice of his, the one he didn’t waste on married lady guests in the presence of their husbands. Perhaps he thought he was sounding charming, kindly: to Vesna he’d sounded slimy.
Viscido
, slimy like a snail trail, that was the Italian word for a creep like Calzaghe. Had he thought he had a chance with a woman like Flavia Matteo? The thought turned Vesna’s stomach.

What had Flavia been doing here, alone? The question tormented Vesna, who’d learned how to protect herself. Flavia Matteo had been an Italian woman and she should have known better, but she had no such protection. She had been, from the moment she stepped into their lives with no luggage save for a battered handbag, as irresistibly thin-skinned and vulnerable as a worm was to birds.

On one side of the Pizzeria Venere there was an expensive wine shop, with a tasting bar just visible through the open door, a vast empty champagne bottle with a pink foil top leaning across the window display. On the other side an electrical goods shop, a window full of travel irons and hairdryers, a dusty microwave. The kind of thing people on holiday or furnishing a second home would need to buy, last minute. What would a woman contemplating taking her own life go in search of – champagne, or an electric carving knife?

Perhaps she hadn’t been contemplating suicide then: perhaps there’d still have been time to stop her. Vesna shivered and rubbed her upper arms briskly in the wind off the sea. A man appeared in the doorway of the wine shop and she stepped off the pavement and walked towards him in the sun.

*

Luisa was eating her lunch at Giacosa. Filled this lunch hour and every other with mature
vendeuses
like herself, wealthy Russian women, old-school Florentine matriarchs with lacquered hair and knuckledustered with diamonds … the old-fashioned bar was guaranteed to restore Luisa’s equilibrium under any circumstances, to set her squarely back among her sisterhood.

Any circumstances, it seemed, but today’s. She could hardly taste the food – which was always good – and she hardly registered the cheerful respect of the handsome barmen, or the new egg-sized sapphire on the owner’s wife’s hand. Luisa hadn’t spoken to Sandro since last night and she didn’t like it. Things were falling apart: babies left motherless, daughters not talking to their parents. And then she realized, setting her empty dish back on the counter, that the man she’d been vaguely focusing on through the side window of Giacosa, standing in a doorway on the Via della Spada and talking to another man, was Pietro.

He wasn’t in his uniform, but wearing jeans: Pietro never wore jeans. And a polo shirt. There was something weirdly unrecognizable about him that explained why she hadn’t seen it was him straight away. The other man – younger, perhaps thirty-five, good-looking from his profile at least and also rather oddly dressed, to Luisa’s eye, in an unseasonable hooded raincoat – was moving restlessly from foot to foot, as if warming up to run somewhere.

As she watched, she distinctly saw Pietro put something in the man’s hand and then, looking quickly around as if – exactly as if – to make sure he hadn’t been seen, his eyes rested on Luisa, through the glass. Immediately he raised his hand and patted the man he’d been talking to sharply, twice on the upper arm, in what might under other circumstances have been a kind of hearty greeting but in this case seemed to Luisa like a signal. Because the man turned away instantly – as he moved the sleeve of his raincoat rode up fractionally and she saw the shadow of something revealed, at the wrist – and then he was off down the street without a backward glance or a goodbye. The whole exchange was so unmistakably clandestine Luisa just stared, trying to make it mean something else and failing.

Opposite her Pietro held her gaze a moment from the doorway, and then he stepped off the pavement and was inside, bringing the cool breath of the street in with him and as instantly out of place among the jewelled women, it seemed to her, as a Nigerian street vendor with a trayful of lighters. He took her by the arm, and they moved into a corner, leaning against a small high table.

‘What are you up to?’ she said, bluntly. Then as something occurred to her: ‘It’s not about Chiara? You’re not – he’s not—’ Pietro was staring at her, and she stopped speaking. He’d lost weight. The reliably pouchy, contented face she’d seen grow older for the preceding twenty years, had a sunken look. There were bags under his eyes.

‘You’re wearing jeans,’ she said, changing tack. ‘Who was that man?’

Pietro opened his mouth, closed it again, then signalled to the muscled barman for a coffee.

‘It was work,’ he said abruptly, nodding into the street to indicate the transaction she’d just witnessed. He obviously wanted to talk about Chiara even less than he wanted to discuss giving money – or something else – to some dubious character in the street.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Luisa. ‘If you say so.’ It felt strange, standing in a bar talking to Pietro: that was Sandro’s job. Well, obviously not his real job, not any more. Pietro was looking at her with an odd, tense expression.

‘How long is it,’ she said, as it occurred to her that it had been a while, really quite a while, ‘since you and Sandro last got together?’

‘It’s been hectic,’ said Pietro, half turning away from her. ‘There’s a lot on.’

A lot he wasn’t going to tell her about.

‘He misses you,’ she tried: Sandro would sooner be garrotted than admit to such a thing, but it would be true all the same. ‘You know – he doesn’t want to make things difficult for you, using you. Putting you in a difficult position. He knows how things are.’

‘It’s appreciated.’ Pietro spoke gruffly, still not looking at her. ‘I don’t know if he does know how things are, though. There really is a lot on.’ He set the cup back down carefully.

‘It’s not – Chiara then?’ Pietro flinched – so subtly Luisa felt it rather than saw it – but he said nothing. She went on. ‘You know, you could talk to him about that. That’s not business, is it? If you’re getting some dodgy contact to go after her and not Sandro, who’s a private investigator – well. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you, you know that.’

‘I told you,’ said Pietro fiercely, jerking his head towards the street and the doorway where she’d spotted him. ‘That back there, that was work, a – a covert operation.’ He shot a glance at her from under a deep frown, gauging to see if she believed him. ‘I can do my own investigating of my own daughter.’

His knuckles were white against the edge of the high table. Luisa, who had known him twenty years, had never seen Pietro like this, ever: no trouble at work had made him so much as raise his voice to a woman. He was the gentlest and most reasonable man she’d ever known: gentler than her own husband, and an awful lot more reasonable.

‘I saw her, you know.’ The words sprang to Luisa’s lips before she knew where they’d lead her. Pietro’s head jerked up.

‘You saw her?’ His voice cracked, and looking into his face she saw the tears in his eyes.

‘Outside the shop,’ she said, wishing she’d kept quiet. ‘Yesterday evening. She looked so pretty. She was wearing a dress.’

‘Chiara, wearing a dress?’ He tried to laugh but it came out strangled.

‘She looked fine, honestly.’

Had she, though? Luisa recalled the soft shade of the summery dress and the pale shoes, but also that the face itself – Chiara’s strong, familiar features – had seemed blurred, as though with late nights, or tears.

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘I – I tried.’ Should she say, Chiara took one look at me and bolted? Should she tell Pietro about Giancarlo? She could picture Pietro seizing the boy by the shoulders and trying to shake information out of him. Fathers, Luisa knew only too well, should not do their own investigating: it was a cardinal rule and breaking it had cost Sandro his job.

But no one was going to murder Chiara. In the warm fug of the Giacosa, Luisa felt a sweat break on her upper lip.

‘I’d better get back to work,’ she said.

It was as though a shutter came down in Pietro’s face.

‘Right,’ he said stiffly.

There was a silence, but she didn’t move, and then as if her staying put one second longer had given him licence, the floodgates opened.

‘What you mean is, you’re not going to tell me. You talked to her and you’re going to tell me nothing? How long have you known me, and you’re treating me like this? Everyone’s pussyfooting around me.’ Pietro raised his hands to his temples in frustration, and as his arms came up she saw how much weight he’d lost, the torso no longer stocky, the jeans loose. Was Gloria worried?

‘What do you all think I’m going to do, murder the man? He hasn’t got the decency to climb the stairs and shake my hand, he waits in the car. He knows I’d see through him, that’s why. Or maybe she’s told him I’m some kind of Nazi.’ Pietro snorted in disbelief. ‘If only she knew. Why don’t they trust us to be the good guys? I’m her father.’ And, rising, his voice cracked again.

Luisa remembered what Giancarlo had said about Chiara’s new man: an authority figure. A father figure? It made her uncomfortable: this was one piece of information she would not be able to pass on to Chiara’s parents. She resisted the temptation to put out her hand to Pietro: he’d probably shove her on to the floor if she tried. People weren’t looking at them yet, and Luisa didn’t want them to start.

‘I didn’t talk to her,’ she said quietly, and he stared at her with that policeman’s look, searching for a lie. Not finding one, his shoulders dropped. She went on. ‘I came out of the shop, and she disappeared. Perhaps she saw me: perhaps she knew I’d react – just like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Worried.’

He was grey-faced: ‘worried’ didn’t begin to cover it.

Luisa went on. ‘Of course you want to look the man in the eye, get the measure of him. Of course you do. Have your permission asked even, why not? It’s not being a Nazi. But kids – well.’ She took a breath. ‘There are times when they don’t see us as we are,’ she moved on before he could say ‘
Us
?’ to remind her she didn’t have kids of her own. ‘She needs to know you can be reasonable, I suppose. You need to show her that.’

‘You mean I need to shut up and leave her to it,’ he said, and began shaking his head, and then she dared put a hand out and stay his arm.

‘You’re the most reasonable, level-headed man I know,’ Luisa said. ‘It’s not me you need to convince. You need to show her you can leave it.’

Pietro looked over his shoulder, along the bright, busy street, one way and then the other, like a hunted man. Along the front of the bar the usual row of tiny round marble tables, the elegant smokers gossiping: what danger could they represent? And in the Via della Spada a handsome, ambling elderly couple, arm in arm. For an instant Luisa glimpsed the possibility that the stress had unhinged Pietro: she saw him pacing the city’s cool, narrow streets after dark, looking for his daughter.

‘I can’t leave it,’ he said, and the anger in his voice gave way to sorrow. ‘She needs me. She still needs her father.’

*

‘She walked here every day?’

The gravel path was steep, winding through the dark, grey-green trees with the view all behind them, and Giuli was beginning to feel puffed out. She’d have to ease up on the cigarettes: she hadn’t had one yet today but she could feel last night’s in her lungs.

Wanda nodded, drawing on her own cigarette. Short-legged, she had a particular walking style that seemed compatible with chainsmoking. She marched doggedly: there was nothing leisurely about it. ‘All year round,’ she said. ‘It’d have to be pouring with rain to stop Flavia – although sometimes they close the park, in high winds and that kind of thing. Then she’d go along the river.’ She shoved her hands in her pockets and raised her head, squared her shoulders, imitating a taller, more romantic figure. ‘Like this, face front, into the wind.’

‘On her own.’

Wanda nodded. ‘Mostly. She’d ask me to come, like I told you, now and again, but she knew I wasn’t a walker.’ She made a face. ‘Hate it. I’ll walk through the city as much as you like, on my way here or there, but walking for its own sake?’ She shook her head. ‘And besides, I think she preferred to be on her own, thinking her thoughts, in her own world.’

What world would that be? thought Giuli. Daydreaming? Flavia Matteo was the last person you’d imagine it of, but everyone dreamed, didn’t they? Of a different life, of how things might have been, or might still become. Wanda had fallen silent and Giuli wondered if her mind were running along the same lines.

‘But when you did come along with her, that was when you and she – talked?’

There were footsteps approaching, coming around the winding path and down the hill towards them on the gravel: Giuli glanced up, then back at her own feet. The tall man kept on without breaking his long stride, past them and down the hill, although his head turned to watch them as he went.

‘I suppose,’ said Wanda. ‘At school we talked, in the breaks, about this and that, mostly school work. But it’s hard to say anything that means anything much in a place like that. The kids, the staff, the constant racket.’

‘Flavia liked it, though?’

‘She did.’ Wanda frowned. ‘The noise didn’t bother her. The kids loved her. She was so serious with them, and so beautiful, they quietened down, just to see her.’ She sounded surprised: Giuli looked at her and saw not a trace of resentment in her square, plain face. What was beauty? Giuli thought of Farmiga then, good-looking but a bitch, all the way through. She took a breath.