The Italian Wife (11 page)

Rosa made herself meet his eyes and blink in a childish stupid way. He had to believe her and leave her alone.

‘Were you not educated? Didn’t you go to school?’

‘My mother taught me to read and write.’

‘What did she live on?’

Rosa lowered her eyes, her lashes fluttered with nerves. ‘She used to go out in the evening. Sometimes.’ Her mouth grew dry.

‘To do what?’

‘Whoring.’

She heard his intake of breath. Felt the nun’s disgust slither across the floor. ‘
Whoring
’ was a dirty word. Rosa was ashamed to say it, even though her mother had made her promise to use it if she was interrogated. She flicked her tongue over her lips to clean them.

‘Some nights,’ she added, staring at the policeman’s long brown shoes under the desk, ‘she came back smelling of beer and cigarettes.’ She felt a flush rise to her cheeks.

‘Why did she keep moving from place to place?’ the policeman demanded.

‘I don’t know. She never explained. I think it was because…’ She paused and recalled the exact words her mother had made her learn. ‘Because she was running away.’

Colonnello Sepe leaned forward, elbows on the desk, eyes sharp with expectation. Rosa could see that he wanted to grab her by the scruff and shake the words out of her, but he was good at control, this man. Almost as good as she was.

‘What was she running away from?’ He squeezed out half a smile.

‘From herself. That’s what she told me.’

‘And you believed her?’

‘Yes.’ Rosa looked at him with wide innocent eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

9

It was dark and Isabella wasn’t good in the dark. At night her thoughts bumped into one another and elbowed each other out of shape and that was why she didn’t see it coming, this soft, quiet realisation:
I should have made more fuss
.

She lay in bed and stared relentlessly at the black space that was the ceiling, listening to the rain. It drummed on the shutters so hard that she could picture it churning the oily black water in the drainage canals into a hissing frenzy that could threaten the safety of the town.

The water levels were rising. Six days and nights of unrelenting rain, so that the pumping stations were forced to work overtime to prevent flooding. She was acutely aware that the Agro Pontino fields needed no encouragement, none whatsoever, to transform into a quagmire that would seize any chance to reclaim its land from the controlling fist of Fascism. Isabella lay there wide-eyed among her mangled sheets, certain that she could hear the sucking, squelching, indecent sound of the parched earth drawing in the water, and she was convinced that she felt the house lurch. Actually lurch. Its foundations settling deeper into the mud with a sigh of satisfaction.

But not even the rain could drown out the noise of the slap. The sound of the bloodless hand of the nun making contact with young defenceless skin. It did something bad inside her. The girl’s dark eyes reacted with shock, as though the religious hand had reached in and stolen her soul.

Isabella knew she was the one who could have stood her ground in that stiflingly hot room and demanded that the hard-eyed Reverend Mother account for her action. She could have stormed into Chairman Grassi’s office at the base of her tower or shouted in the face of Colonnello Sepe and insisted that the girl be removed from the Suore di Santa Teresa convent. As a last resort she could even have begged for help from Father Benedict and his gilded altar. She could have called down the Wrath of God to smite that woman’s shaven head.

Suffer little children to come unto me
.

That’s what the Bible says, isn’t it?
Little children
. Rosa was a little child. So Isabella lay on her bed listening to the rain and convincing herself that what she did was right. If she had stormed and shouted, Rosa would have suffered. All of them – Mother Domenica, Chairman Grassi, Colonnello Sepe and even the taciturn Father Benedict – would have taken their anger out on the child. Isabella was sure of that. Rosa would be the one who was chastised, punished in some way that Isabella couldn’t imagine, or even removed from the convent completely to somewhere where Isabella couldn’t reach her.

And she couldn’t risk that.

For Rosa’s sake. And if she was honest with herself, for her own sake too. She had to keep Rosa here. Because the child must know things that she wasn’t saying, things that Isabella needed to hear. What was the connection between Luigi and Allegra Bianchi? What made the woman say what she said, as Isabella sat minding her own business in the town square?

Yet the voice in her head just wouldn’t shut up, the thin whispery one that said over and over till she dragged a pillow over her face,
You should have made more fuss
.

‘Isabella, no one is talking.’

Francesca had drawn Isabella into the back area of the bakery where the big oven was belching out heat. The air smelled of herbs and freshly baked dough.

‘Who isn’t talking exactly?’

‘The nuns.’ Francesca twitched her hairnet with irritation. ‘I took a delivery of bread out to the convent and as usual they were happy to stop and chat. They always love to hear what’s going on in town, but they were saying nothing. And then when I started to tell the gossips in the wine bars about the abandoned child and her mother, they clammed up.’

‘Is that unusual?’

‘Very.’

‘So you think they’re uneasy about discussing Allegra Bianchi and Rosa?’

Francesca nodded. Her dark eyes regarded Isabella with concern, but also there was something guarded behind the concern. She looked away and prodded at a tray of warm rolls, breaking one apart and inhaling the scent of rosemary that rose from it.

‘What is it, Francesca? What else?’

Her friend hesitated, sighed and turned back to her. ‘I think you are playing with fire, Bella.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘The nuns were nervous. Someone is making them bite their tongues.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you did glean something, didn’t you?’

Reluctantly the baker nodded her head. ‘Yes.’

‘Tell me.’

‘One young novice nun, Sister Bernadetta, who doesn’t know the meaning of the word discreet, told me something when she helped me carry the trays back to my van.’

‘What was it?’

‘That Allegra Bianchi had been in prison.’ She pulled an uncomfortable face. ‘That she was again on the run from the police when she came to Bellina.’ She frowned at Isabella. ‘It doesn’t sound good, Bella.’

‘No, it doesn’t. But it would explain why she was so nervous and anxious.’

Isabella tried to imagine what it must have been like to be hunted by the police when you have a child at your side.

‘Thank you, Francesca.’ She picked at the broken roll. It tasted wonderful. ‘One more favour. An easier one this time.’

Francesca looked relieved to change the subject. ‘What is it?’

‘There is a professional photographer in town. Chestnut hair and broad shoulders. I am interested to know more.’

Francesca grinned at her. ‘That’s more like it!’

‘Papa?’

Her father was standing in the living room in his second-best suit, and even though it was not yet seven o’clock on a Sunday morning he was dusting his collection of records, sliding them in and out of their tawny paper sleeves. He liked to handle them almost as much as he liked to listen to them.

‘What is it, Isabella?’

His head remained bent over one of the records and he was smiling at it fondly. Probably Beniamino Gigli as Rodolfo in
La Bohème
. He was humming contentedly to himself.

‘Do you think I will lose my job?’ she asked bluntly.

The humming ceased. He lifted his head and gave an eloquent shrug of his shoulders. ‘We’re all working here under sufferance, you must realise that, my dear Isabella. If what we do doesn’t please the likes of men such as Chairman Grassi in his marble tower at Party headquarters, then he sends in his Blackshirts in Mussolini’s name and…’ He stopped abruptly and raised his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of defeat. ‘And none of us knows quite what happens then, but men vanish and names are not mentioned again. It happened to my colleague, Dr Pavese. To this day I don’t know what he did to enrage them but he walked down the hospital front steps one day and never came back. We were just informed that someone else would be filling his position.’

‘Do you have any reason to think Dottore Martino, as head of architecture here, doesn’t want me working for him?’

‘No.’

Ah, but you betray yourself, Papa
.

His eyes sought out the photograph on the heavy oak sideboard as if seeking forgiveness for the lie. They both looked at it and smiled. She was so beautiful, the woman in the photograph – Isabella’s mother. Her dark hair was piled on top of her head in a double knot and her bright eyes lit up the room in a way that still had the power to make her daughter sit down in front of her to ask her advice. Isabella had inherited her mother’s strong straight nose and high cheekbones, and sometimes when the light was dim she would look in the mirror and see her mamma there. But Isabella had acquired her blue eyes from her father. For the last twenty-one years since her mother’s death, he had not even looked at another woman and every week he lovingly polished the heavy oak furniture that his wife had picked out with such care when they were first married. They rarely talked about her but for both of them she remained forever young and fragrant.

Isabella walked over to the window and inspected the sodden courtyard in the gloom, runnels of water zigzagging across it like silver snail-tracks. ‘Papa, have you heard anything more about the girl, Rosa Bianchi?’

She felt his mood change. He tucked the records back in their box and flipped the catches shut with a crisp snap.

‘No, I’ve heard nothing. Now do as I say and forget about her.’

‘How can I? For the past week I’ve been going over to the convent every day but they refuse to let me in to see her or Sister Consolata. And I can’t get in to see Chairman Grassi either. It’s driving me mad. They’re hiding something, I’m —’

‘Isabella!’

She turned from the rivulets on the window to find he was standing close behind her.

‘Do you,’ he asked sternly, ‘want to lose the job you worked so hard to get?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then forget this girl. She is a troublemaker in this town, just like her mother was.’

‘She is all alone, Papa. Her mother died in front of my eyes by leaping off
my
tower. Yet we know nothing about her. I feel a responsibility for the child. I have to talk to Rosa and find out if I can help her.’

His silence was a solid wall between them.

‘Listen to me, Papa.’ She needed to be honest with her father. ‘I know you think it’s risky but her mother told me something before she ran off to my tower, something that means I
have
to speak to Rosa. She mentioned Luigi.’

Her father’s heavy brow creased in the way that used to frighten her when she was a child. ‘Oh, Isabella! That just makes it worse. I’m telling you to forget about that girl. She will bring you nothing but trouble.’

‘What I don’t understand, Papa, is why they don’t just remove her from Bellina to an orphanage in Rome or Turin, if they don’t want me speaking to her.’

‘Perhaps they already have.’

His words hit her flat in the chest. She hadn’t considered that possibility.

‘I have to leave now.’ He scooped up his medical case, and in the tiled hallway he snatched his hat and scarf from the hat stand.

‘Why so early, Papa?’

‘Three more workers were caught in an accident yesterday.’ His fingers reached for the doorknob. ‘That makes six this week.’ She saw the muscles of his jaw tighten. ‘Two died. These houses that you and Mussolini are building are killing people.’ He buttoned up his jacket. ‘And I’ve heard that Sister Consolata is being transferred to another convent.’

‘Why? Where is she going?’

‘I have no idea.’

He walked out into the dismal morning and his daughter closed the door against whatever it was that was happening out there in this town she loved so fiercely.

Isabella stood naked in front of the mirror.

Don
’
t do this
.

The air hung chill in the bathroom and her skin felt tight, as if it had suddenly grown two sizes too small for her. The staccato beat of her heart betrayed her nerves.

Don
’
t do this
.

But she refused to let herself listen to that soft-tongued voice inside her head. For years it had been lulling her into a false state of calm, whispering in her ear, deceiving her. It told her that if she acted normally, spoke normal words and thought normal thoughts, then she would
be
normal. It had been lying to her.

She stared at the person in the mirror and asked herself when that other person had become her. There were similarities, she would admit that. But nothing more. The same shaped face, but this one had unfamiliar shadows wrapped around her eyes and hollows in places where there shouldn’t be hollows. The bones of her cheeks were hard, shiny and brittle.

When had she become so thin? Her hair was unbrushed. Lips open as though ready to cry
Stop this
. She didn’t let herself look at her pale, tight-skinned body because she knew what she would see – one hip higher than the other, one leg thinner than the other because it was lazy and didn’t do its share of the work.

Her mouth was dry. Sadness was seeping up her throat until she could barely swallow. She didn’t want to set eyes on herself and her hand reached out for her dressing gown but she turned away before her fingers could grasp its protective folds.

It was three years since she’d stood bare-skinned like this in front of a mirror and dared to turn around to inspect her back. She had become expert at hiding from herself but now she snapped her head round before she could change her mind and made herself look long and hard at her rear view in the mirror.