A Darkness Descending (37 page)

Halfway through the search she paused, looked up. ‘You said she looked different? Coming out of the Miramar.’

‘She looked like an angel,’ he said. ‘She was shining.’

*

From the way he stared at her in dismay, Giuli knew this was going to be one of those aspects of the modern world Sandro would have trouble with. Around them the piazza was in chaos: half of it being dug up, the market stalls shifted into one corner. A carabiniere sitting in his car at the military police post in the corner.

‘She’d been having a what?’

There was the tall journalist, leaning against the wall of the house neighbouring Niccolò Rosselli’s, smoking. His eyes met Giuli’s and languidly he pushed himself off it and sauntered away, into the Via Mazzetta. It seemed an age ago, passing him in the doorway at the Frazione’s meeting. Before all this kicked off.

How to explain it to Sandro? In his time you’d have talked to a girl at a – God knows, a First Communion or something. A dance. Gone for a walk with her parents chaperoning. Times had changed: well, even Sandro had kept up, up to a point. He knew about the internet, he knew things had moved on and you didn’t have to communicate by pigeon these days.

The thing was, it had jumped too fast. One minute, even in Giuli’s childhood, not everyone had a telephone, and if you did have one, it would be on a table in the hall and everyone could hear what you were saying. Now – you could call someone from a lilo floating in the sea. You could send them a photograph from up a tree. You could send them a video. You could say the most secret things to someone you’d never met, and it had got dangerous.

‘It’s like any addiction,’ Barbara had explained to her in the bar. ‘Like cigarettes, like heroin. At least, that’s how I tackled it. I said to her, You can’t expect to stop wanting it. I mean, Jesus, I gave up alcohol fourteen years ago and I still want a drink.’

‘You did?’ Giuli had stared at her. ‘You do?’

Barbara had shrugged. ‘They say ex-addicts make the best counsellors. I don’t know about that. But I said, You’ll still want it, it’s just you get to the point when you know you’re not going to have it.’

‘But that means you’re never safe.’ Despite the warm fug of the bar, Giuli had felt cold.

‘Life’s not safe, is it?’ Barbara had said. ‘We’ve all got our private needs. Wants. And it’s why we’re not still living in caves, isn’t it? It’s wanting what we can’t have that drives us on.’ She’d smiled sadly. ‘I don’t say that to them, though. The addicts. Not to many of them.’

Their coffee cups empty, Giuli had stared through the glass and seen a long-legged woman climb out of a car on the corner of the Piazza Tasso. Good legs, black hair, too much make-up. Farmiga. Giuli had watched her lean down into the window to say something to the driver.

Barbara had sighed then. ‘I don’t know how patient I was,’ she’d said, and rubbed her eyes. ‘I’m used to dealing with it all at the other end, when it’s all gone to shit, when the – the – what they think was love turns into drug-abuse and booze and they’re on the streets, and they’re sick. They’re physically destroying themselves, that’s what you have to manage. Flavia was a woman of privilege, it seemed to me sometimes. She had the intelligence to deal with it, she had Niccolò, a home. I couldn’t understand how she got herself in so deep.’

‘She wasn’t born into that life, though,’ Giuli had said. ‘You know that? She left home at sixteen, came here to study. Her dad beat her once too often, her mother died.’

Barbara’s face had set. ‘I didn’t know that,’ she’d said. ‘She didn’t tell me that.’

The car that had dropped Farmiga off had slid past the plate glass of the window where they’d sat, and involuntarily Giuli had looked down as the driver looked up. He’d smiled at her: she’d turned away.

‘That’s her type, is it?’ she’d said. ‘I suppose that figures. A man in uniform. Good-looking, though.’

‘Him?’ Barbara had said. ‘He’s a creep.’

There’d been a brief silence then, and Barbara had slid off her stool. ‘I’d better get in,’ she’d said. ‘Especially if Farmiga’s in a temper.’

‘Did Flavia show you?’ Giuli had asked. ‘Did she show any of the messages to you?’

Barbara had shaken her head. ‘Told me about them – a bit. The kind of things he would say. I suppose she wanted to show me he wasn’t an ordinary guy, not the kind of man who’d pick a woman up on the street and give her a line.’ She’d shaken her head once more. ‘Don’t we always think that? I tried to tell her. I told her, You’re turning him into something he isn’t. It’s the problem when it’s only words, when a relationship’s just words. Just because he reads Tolstoy, just because he listens to Bach, doesn’t make him good, doesn’t make him – anything.’

At the door, weighed down by bag and coat and looking too small suddenly for the job she was heading off to do, Barbara had turned back to Giuli, still sitting there.

‘She’ll have written them down somewhere, though,’ she’d said. ‘She told me she was deleting them all, but she’ll have written them down. It’s a human instinct.’

Now, in the piazza a digger had roared into life and Sandro was shouting over it.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What is all this? How did you work it out? There was nothing on her phone. No messages.’

‘It was Wanda.’ The digger stopped, and Giuli’s voice was abruptly too loud. ‘The colleague. The maths teacher.’

Giuli glanced up at the window of Niccolò Rosselli’s apartment: the shutters were closed.

‘What she said about being out on a walk with her and Flavia’s phone bleeped, like she’d got a message. Flavia answered it straight away. Like a pro, Wanda said, but not like the Flavia she knew. Wanda showed me.’

Moving her thumbs, deft and quick, over the little keyboard.

‘She said she realized then she’d never heard Flavia’s phone make a sound before: had hardly been aware she had one.’

A text-message relationship: it sounded stupid, and tawdry. It sounded like something for teenage girls or losers.

‘And then Barbara – the addictions counsellor at the Centre – she confirmed it. Sounds like the guy, whoever he was, really did a job on Flavia. Wouldn’t let up. Like a full-on seduction, old-style. Only Barbara did say – she thought it was possible it never went further. It was just an intellectual thing.’

Giuli told Sandro what Barbara had said, trying to remember all the stuff about fantasy and reality, about why people need drugs. About adrenaline, and addictive relationships, and the chemicals produced by what you could call love, or sex.

Sandro was chewing the inside of his cheek, as he did when something was getting to him. ‘What kind of man would do it?’ he said. ‘Someone – inadequate? Someone – what’s the story, the guy with the nose? Cyrano? Does it all with words, seduces the woman who’d never look at him twice in the street?’

Giuli didn’t know what he was on about.

‘There was a movie – never mind,’ said Sandro. ‘That might explain – if it didn’t go any further.’

‘Have you got someone in mind?’

‘Bastone just told me he loved her,’ said Sandro shortly. ‘I went in there to grill him about the land deal, and—’ He looked defeated suddenly. ‘I ended up feeling sorry for the guy. He’s been in love with Flavia for years.’

‘Him?’ Giuli tried to fit Bastone into the frame, the scruffy, unshaven lawyer, with his anxious face, rumpled forehead. ‘It sounds like these messages were – well. Not all love poems and platonic stuff.’

‘He certainly had their mobile number,’ said Sandro slowly. ‘He used it to call us, in the middle of the night.’

‘You haven’t still got the phone, have you?’

Sandro shook his head, slowly. It couldn’t be Bastone. ‘Niccolò’s got it now.’ He tipped his head back and they both looked up at the window.

‘What are you going to tell him?’ said Giuli, feeling abruptly nauseous. ‘What are you going to say to Niccolò?’

‘I think I’ll have to tell him – something. Say there may have been some kind of a relationship he doesn’t know about. Connected with Flavia’s – state of mind.’ Sandro sighed. ‘He said all he wanted was the truth. It might even
be
true.’

They stared at each other and Giuli knew Sandro was thinking what she was thinking. They should never have started on this: Barbara had been right, Clelia Schmidt had been right. Who would gain by finding out that Flavia Matteo had been – if not unfaithful, then in love with someone else?

As she watched, Sandro took out his phone and looked at it. ‘Text messages,’ he said. ‘So that’s why—’

‘That’s why she left the mobile behind when she went to the seaside. When she checked into the hotel, to – to—’

‘To kill herself,’ said Sandro, frowning furiously. ‘She didn’t want to be tempted.’

‘She was – it was like flushing the drugs down the toilet, pouring the booze down the sink. But there’s always more booze, if you know where to look.’

‘And so Flavia went looking for another mobile.’

‘She didn’t go through with it, though. She didn’t buy the mobile, she didn’t send the message. Although I don’t know what it would have said, or what reply she’d have got. Would it have saved her? Or did she just want it to send her suicide note?’

Sandro made a curious movement with his shoulders as if trying to shake something off. ‘She tried to write something, they said. She sat down to write something. Maybe she just – couldn’t.’

‘It would be a tough thing to explain,’ said Giuli. ‘I’m leaving you alone, for this.’

‘But a woman like that?’ he said, agonized. ‘Educated? After the life she’d made for herself? It’s so – so – it’s like the way kids behave. Hysterical. She killed herself over that? You mean, she didn’t even – they didn’t even sleep together? It was just words?’

‘We don’t know what kind of woman she was,’ said Giuli. ‘I don’t know for sure if they slept together or not. The child was Niccolò’s, though.’

She sighed, suddenly weary of it, of being female, of men’s ideas – even Sandro, even her beloved and loving ersatz dad’s ideas – of what women should be, what women were good for or capable of. She tried again.

‘We know what she tried to turn herself into alongside Niccolò, her white knight, a man who was only good.’

They both looked up again and the shutters shifted as they did. It was Maria Rosselli who leaned out to push them open and instinctively both Sandro and Giuli stepped back, behind the trunk of one of the square’s elms. In the quiet Giuli became aware of an unfamiliar sound, somewhere not too far off to the west, the Piazza del Carmine perhaps. A low murmur that rose to chanting.

‘We don’t know what that relationship was like. What she didn’t get out of it, for example.’

Sandro looked tired suddenly. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I see. Yes.’

‘And we don’t know what he said to her, this man she couldn’t get away from. We don’t know if it was just words, either.’

And as if on cue Sandro’s phone, still held out in his hand in front of him like a talisman or a bomb, began to ring.

Chapter Twenty-Four

A
TTEN-THIRTY EXACTLY
G
LORIA
’
S
worried face appeared at the door of the Portakabin where the breast clinic had been ‘temporarily’ relocated two years ago, squeezed up against diabetes and renal disorders. Luisa lifted a hand: that twinge pulled at her under the arm, and she thought of the family she’d served – was it only thirty-six hours ago? – in the shop.

She’d thought about just lying to Sandro all the way, not going: after all, saying Gloria was going to come with her had been a lie at the time. She could cancel the appointment, she could head into the city, to the university perhaps, looking for Chiara’s friends.

What had stopped her was the knowledge that she’d really be cancelling the appointment because she was afraid. So she’d thought, right, I’ll call Gloria, she won’t be able to come, that’s my decision made for me. Only Gloria had said yes, immediately, and Luisa had heard it in her voice, all the anxiety of sitting at home fretting over husband and daughter. Gloria needs something to do, she’d thought.

But judging from the way she sat now, close but not too close, and from the calm and kindness with which she insisted on talking about it to her friend, counselling would come naturally to Gloria, nursing too.

‘It’s OK,’ said Luisa, adjusting to the sight of the others in the cramped space as Gloria talked on, soothing. This was the worst bit. Seeing the young frightened women, with small children. The elderly ladies, complacent and unflustered, a lump in the breast no worse to them than a bit of deafness or rheumatoid arthritis, all part of the deal. Luisa neither one nor the other, not a mother, not a grandmother. Not young, not old enough to be reconciled to the prospect of death. She had thought she was sanguine but it turned out she was not.

‘I’m only here to talk about the reconstruction,’ she said. ‘I’m not worried about the rest.’

Gloria gave her a look but said nothing. In the silence Luisa saw her face change, new thoughts creeping in to replace all that chatter about gold-standard breast reconstruction and annual check-ups and five-year prognosis.

‘Have you heard anything?’ Luisa said. ‘Has she called?’

Gloria shook her head slowly.

‘She used to text,’ she said. ‘Little messages …
Hello, Mummy … You’re the best mother in the world.
Nothing. There’s been nothing, since she left’

Luisa felt something tighten in her chest. ‘Chiara used to say that?’ she said. ‘Your tough cookie?’

Gloria looked at her shyly, a faint flush on her cheeks. ‘It was like a secret,’ she said. ‘Oh, you know. Some people act tough, but they’re soft inside, like my little Chiara. She could be like that – in a message. Kind of an alter ego, her soft side. She knew how it used to cheer me up. She was a thoughtful girl.’

The past tense hovered between them. ‘She is,’ said Luisa. That’s why—’

‘That’s why we can’t understand it,’ said Gloria, despairing.

The door opened: murmurs of complaint rippled around the packed space as bodies shifted to accommodate the new arrival.

‘How long’s it been going on, d’you think?’ asked Luisa. Something occurred to her then. ‘You don’t think it’s connected with – when she got interested in politics? The Frazione Verde stuff. Because—’ She hesitated. ‘Well, it seems to have changed Giuli’s life. Meeting a new group of people.’