A Darkness Descending (7 page)

*

The shop, mercifully, remained quiet for the entire forty-five minutes Gloria stayed. A nice-looking pair of men in young middle age – a gay couple, Luisa thought with a professional reflex, from the Southern states of America – came in at one point, looking around them with smiling anticipation, but Beppe was there to usher them away before she could even open her mouth.

The younger man glanced back from the stairs as they went up with Beppe, a slightly puzzled look on his face at the scene on the shopfloor: Gloria, plump and pale and tearstained on the velvet stool, twisting a scrap of paper tissue between her hands, and Luisa back at her side protectively. She smiled at the man to reassure him, and the little group moved on upstairs. She heard the soft murmur of their voices start up and kneeled down again beside her friend.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Gloria, biting her lip. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate, Luisa. Check-up must be due around now, I know.’

Luisa frowned. ‘You know?’

Gloria shrugged. ‘We can count, you know,’ she said, bowing her head over the scrap of Kleenex. ‘Pietro remembered, actually.’

Three years ago, on a rainy weekend in November, Luisa and Sandro had waited for her appointment while he distracted himself with a girl gone missing. It was not exactly that Luisa did not worry about the cancer returning – certainly somewhere buried away in her brain it had registered as a possibility. She did not know how, but she had managed a trick of faith: faith in the doctors and the statistics that were on her side. They told her she was old enough for her body to have slowed down, young enough to tolerate the treatment, the cancer was sluggish and it had not migrated to any other part of her. Faith even in doctors was irrational, she had decided, but one could choose to be irrational in one’s favour; to be irrational in expecting the worst went against reason.

She had never explained this to anyone.

‘They’re only going to talk to me about the reconstruction,’ she said easily.

Although it was not true: of course there would be the usual body scan and blood tests too. Over the tissue held to her small, reddened nose, Gloria’s eyes widened, and Luisa saw her try not to look.

‘Chiara, then,’ she said gently. ‘You’re not saying it was totally out of the blue?’

Gloria shifted on the velvet stool and Luisa saw with unease that she’d lost weight recently. When had they last seen the Cavallaros? ‘Well,’ said Gloria, ‘I don’t know. She’s been different for a month or so. She didn’t want to come away with us to Elba last month.’ The curly, faded red head bobbed down again. ‘She’s never done that before, never, she’s got so many friends there, you know? The whole gang of them, every year since they were born practically, going to the beach together, out for pizza.’

She was almost crying again. ‘But, Gloria,’ Luisa tried lamely, ‘it does happen eventually, you know. Children leave, in the end.’ She felt uneasy, because it was something she’d consoled herself with, childless as she was; she might have had a child but by now the child would be long gone. She didn’t really want to trot it out for poor Gloria, as if they were both in the same boat.

But the expression on the face Gloria raised to hers was not what she’d expected. The tears were drying, the mouth set. ‘But moving in with a – with a boyfriend? At her age? She’s nineteen. She’s my baby. I don’t even know him.’

Luisa noticed her determination. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘I know. I suppose – I suppose I’d be worried too. But you’ll meet him?’

‘I don’t even know that,’ said Gloria, her mouth trembling. ‘She said she’d come and get some things this evening. She didn’t say he’d be coming with her.’

In the silence that followed Luisa could hear the hushed, happy voices of the men upstairs, exclaiming in their soft foreign accents over something nice Beppe had shown them. Was that why she stuck this job, enjoyed it even? The little pulse of pleasure observed, the satisfied customer, the sly smile when a woman or man was pleased with the way they looked? It didn’t seem much, sometimes. That with such things a life was kept stable, until you found a lump in your breast, or your only child upped and left.

‘You asked?’

Gloria sighed. ‘She got – angry. Said she wouldn’t bring him for inspection.’

Luisa could imagine Pietro, pacing the room with this – boyfriend in front of him, interrogating him, reading him the riot act. She wondered what the law said. If Chiara was nineteen – well, she was an adult. Although when Luisa had been a girl, she could have got married, had kids at nineteen, that had been how things were done then. In fact they’d lived with her parents for close to a year after they’d got married – that had been how things were done then, too. And like Gloria, she thought of Chiara as no more than a baby still, unformed.

She tried another tack. ‘What do her friends say?’

‘They came around in Elba, asking for her. They didn’t know anything about this – this boyfriend. Well, I didn’t either, not then. But they had just assumed she’d be there, like every year.’ Gloria got to her feet, distractedly. ‘I should go. You’re – you’re—’

‘I’m not busy, Gloria,’ said Luisa gently. ‘Sit down.’ But Gloria stayed standing.

‘You’ve talked to Pietro?’

Gloria looked down at her hands. ‘I tried his number, left a message.’ She fumbled in her pocket in a sudden panic and got out a battered little phone. Gloria had never been one for gadgets. ‘No signal in here. He might have—’

‘Calm down,’ said Luisa. ‘Half an hour won’t make any difference.’ She took Gloria’s hands in hers. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Go home, make the dinner, breathe deeply. When Chiara comes to pick up her things, be normal. Don’t panic, don’t get hysterical, give her a chance to prove to you, calmly, that she knows what she’s doing. She might see sense, you never know. If you give her the chance.’

Chiara had always been a sensible girl, that was the thing.

Gloria gazed at her as if hypnotized. ‘And Pietro?’

Luisa puffed out her cheeks. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Try and get him to see it the same way. Failing that, tranquillizer dart? Or just keep him out of the way.’ Was this the right advice? In the pit of her stomach Luisa felt unease stir. But what else could they do?

‘I’ll talk to Sandro,’ she said. Clinging to straws. ‘OK?’

Hesitant, Gloria clutched her bag. They stood, facing each other: it didn’t feel as though anything had been resolved. Just move forward, one step ahead: it was Luisa’s only strategy.

They crossed the shopfloor. ‘Will you do it?’ said Gloria, her hand on the door.

‘Do what?’

Pale-faced, Gloria nodded down at the careful folds of Luisa’s silk blouse. ‘The breast,’ she said. ‘Do you want it back?’

And Luisa opened her mouth, fully intending to say, robustly, ‘No, no, I’m fine as I am, all fine,’ but the way Gloria had phrased it meant she found she couldn’t say anything at all.

Chapter Six

O
N THE CROWDED TERRACE
of the restaurant Sandro prodded despondently at his salad.

Luisa had her mind on something else, too. ‘Why did you order it then?’ she said with distracted impatience. ‘You hate salad.’

Sandro forked it into his mouth.
Insalata Fantasia
was what they’d called it: it had lumps of rubbery cheese and maize kernels in it, and he chewed with stolid disgust. He had wanted
pici
with hare sauce and some beans in oil followed by a slice of cake, but had decided that he needed to look after his health. He put the fork down, pushed the big gaudy bowl away and stared into the soft warm dark of the Piazza del Carmine.

This square, the breadth of it, still as untidy and car-choked as it had been when he’d been a boy, the grand
palazzi
along one side with their ornate balconies, faded and crumbling, the big church with its jewel of a chapel: he loved it, if pushed to admit it. But the restaurant was a mistake. It had been a favourite once upon a time, an old-fashioned place with excellent food, but it had embarked on a half-baked programme of modernization that involved uncomfortable aluminium seating and neon and loud music. The menu was now too long, the quality of the food too patchy.

This was the problem with eating in restaurants, he thought gloomily as he forked a piece of cheese into his mouth – worrying about the cost. Their few weeks in Castiglioncello, it seemed to Sandro now, had only lulled them into a false sense of carefree security, persuaded them that they were the kind of couple who could do things spontaneously. Or perhaps it was just the day he’d had.

It had been Luisa’s idea: she’d called that afternoon and said perhaps they could go out to eat. He’d had the impression then that she had an agenda: his head full of Niccolò Rosselli and what his mother had said in that strange, dark untidy lawyer’s office, he’d thought, why not?

A distraction. The whole situation was a mess, all right: he didn’t hold out a whole lot of hope for the Frazione Verde, not since this afternoon and Maria Rosselli’s revelation.

Had he known what she was going to say? An inkling, just like Giuli said she’d had when Niccolò Rosselli had stopped talking and swayed on the stage. From the moment the door opened there’d been an unusual dynamic between the two people, the lawyer and the fierce old woman, that had made Sandro stop and observe and wonder. Giuli had looked at them, bewildered by the strange, crackling energy Maria Rosselli brought into the room with her. Of course, thought Sandro to begin with, the old woman’s known this lawyer since he was a kid, coming round to play with her son, of course there’s a lack of respect, of course she still sees him as the overweight, bumbling child struggling to keep up with her odd, sharp, determined Niccolò.

He didn’t even know where these thoughts came from. He could be quite wrong about all sorts of things, and Carlo Bastone might have been a skinny child. But there was something else, too, something else consuming the woman; he could see that right from the beginning, and it infected their host. Carlo Bastone had looked from his new visitor to Sandro in a pleading panic.

‘You know each other?’ he’d said as Sandro had got formally to his feet and, despite – or perhaps because of – Maria Rosselli’s hostility, had deliberately held out his hand.

‘My wife,’ he had repeated to her. ‘You know my wife.’

‘Luisa Venturelli.’ The old woman’s hard-set mouth had moved, using his wife’s maiden name quite deliberately, but did not soften in a smile. ‘Yes. Of course.’ Then she had turned to Bastone and had spoken as though Sandro was an irrelevance.

And now Luisa sat, staring into the darkness away from him, and whatever she might have wanted to say remained unsaid. Sandro wished he could put Niccolò Rosselli’s mother in a room with Luisa and see which of them came off worst: like getting blood from a stone, getting anything out of either of them.

He looked at his wife’s stubborn profile, still beautiful to him, as she stared away. She knew he was looking, he could tell from the set of her jaw.

‘Carlo Bastone,’ she said without turning. ‘Yes. Old family: old money. Plenty of fancy
palazzi
but no cash. I knew that mother too.’ Sandro shook his head.

‘It’s nobody’s business but his,’ was what Maria Rosselli had snapped at the lawyer as though they were alone in the room, but Sandro and Giuli had both at once moved forwards in their chairs, listening. The lawyer had immediately begun to fiddle anxiously with something, head down. Signora Rosselli leaned both big-knuckled hands on the table in front of him. ‘Why would it be? It’s nothing to do with his work.’ Bastone had darted a nervous look at Sandro, and the old woman had turned on the visitors.

‘What
are
you still doing here?’ she’d said.

‘I – they – we—’ Bastone had seemed quite helpless.

‘We had an appointment.’ Sandro had stared: Giuli had spoken with quiet courtesy. She had got to her feet and stood facing the terrifying old woman. ‘I am Giulietta Sarto,’ she’d said, her hands at her sides. ‘My fiancé Enzo works for the Frazione. We came to see if there was anything we could do to help.’

‘Giuli was great today,’ said Sandro, without thinking, and at last something in Luisa unbent and she turned towards him.

‘Yes?’

And he told her. As she sat and listened, nodding, she was still looking faraway, that same look he’d seen on Liliana’s face, and the old nun’s. Trying to fit the story into a bigger scheme: perhaps it was what women did.

‘It was Giuli’s thing, of course, her case. If it is a case. But she took the responsibility. She faced down Niccolò Rosselli’s mother.’

‘Well,’ said Luisa, ‘that takes some doing, too.’

Sandro nodded. ‘You’re telling me. And in that lawyer’s office? We could have gone on for days, trying to find out anything. She’s a tough nut, that old woman.’

‘Are you getting paid for this?’ Luisa said abruptly, leaning forward across the restaurant table. ‘This Rosselli investigation, whatever it turns out to be?’

Sandro grimaced. ‘Well, that’s the weirdest part of it,’ he said slowly. ‘You know what? We might even get paid.’

That had been strange: the old woman abruptly deciding to trust them had been startling enough, and then the offer of money. He’d have said she’d be the last person to offer hard cash to a private detective.

Not that he’d had the impression that Maria Rosselli had given in: she’d looked at Giuli, at Sandro, at the lawyer, and had made a calculation. Sandro imagined that it was hard for her to admit that she needed help, but she was too clever not to.

‘All right,’ was what Maria Rosselli had said, addressing Sandro directly as she treated the lawyer’s room as though it were her own, jaw still set hard as iron. ‘All right. She’s left him. That stupid girl has left him.
Beh!
Not even the excuse of being a girl … at her age, it’s ridiculous. I tell him, it makes no difference, we can manage without her. She hardly knew what she was doing with the child anyway.’

Giuli and Sandro had been openly staring at her at this point. Sandro had found himself wondering how this woman had earned a living, brought up her only child on her own. He imagined there wasn’t much that Maria Rosselli wouldn’t be capable of, if she wanted it badly enough. Her certainty was frightening.