The Night Falling (22 page)

‘Chiara,’ he says, and it seems fitting that he should give her this new name, since she is not
Clare
any more, not the person she thought she was at all. It sounds almost like a sigh as he says it:
kee-ahra.
She presses her cheek to his, just for the feel of its contours, the roughness where he hasn’t shaved, the hard bones beneath. ‘Will you come again?’ he says.

‘Yes. Soon.’ Clare’s hand is the last thing to leave the
trullo
, held in his, reaching out behind her. He only lets go in the last instant before his own hand might be seen.

Clare walks across ice towards the white walls of the
masseria
; it splinters under her feet. When she enters the sitting room Marcie leaps up to greet her.

‘Oh! Thank goodness! You found shelter? That was a real humdinger. But look at you – you’re soaked! And cut!’

‘I’m completely fine, Marcie, really – just this one nick where a hailstone caught me,’ says Clare, when really her body is a secret map of bruises and aches and tender places.

‘But how did you avoid being cut to ribbons? Where on earth were you hiding?’ says Marcie, and a sudden sparkle of warning makes Clare hesitate.

‘I … In a … what do you call it.’ She waves her hand, buying time. ‘In a
trullo
. One of the old, empty ones.’

‘Oh, good thinking – how lucky you were near one! I’ll get Anna to run you a bath.
Anna!
And then come and sit with us and have a cool drink to restore you – look! Look how we do it in Puglia!’ And Marcie laughs delightedly as she drops a smooth, round hailstone into her
amarena
.

Chapter Ten

Ettore

When Ettore’s shift ends he goes to watch the men shovelling the hailstones in the
neviera
, the snow cave; a stone-lined chamber sunk into the ground behind the
masseria
, where in wintertime snow is packed in thick layers, with straw in between, and will stay frozen for weeks, even months, to be used to keep meat and milk fresh as the weather warms. The hail won’t last anything like as long – it doesn’t pack down in the same way, and now, in the height of summer, the air is too warm – but for a few days Anna will be able to churn ice cream for Marcie and her guests.

At the thought of them, at the thought of Chiara, Ettore feels the watching eyes of the windows behind him. He feels everything watching him, from the evening sky, clearing now, to the low trees and the men, the dogs and the sparrows washing themselves with manic abandon in the puddles of meltwater. It’s like hands pressing down on him, and he knows that really it’s Livia he can feel watching; she’s the one scrutinising his guilty face and his every guilty move. And the thing that shames him is not that he made love to another woman, but that for a short while he surrendered to her completely; and for that short while he was happy. She was just as she had seemed she might be – a drink of water in a drought; a relief. A complete relief. And he had promised Livia that he would not rest until the man who had raped her to death was dead himself. His anger with himself grows until it includes Chiara as well, and when she doesn’t come to find him later that night, he is angrier still. Angry that she hasn’t come, and angry at how badly he wants her to.

Ettore can’t sleep during the day, even when he’s been awake all night, in the
trullo
by the gates. His shifts rotate with Carlo and one other man, so that one night shift is followed by two day shifts, and he can’t find a rhythm to it, so that by the end of a night shift he has been awake for twenty-four hours. He lies up on the roof, in the shade of the parapet, or else in his room with the sunlight streaming in through the curtains and the angry buzz of flies, and the slamming of doors and the footsteps and shouts of the household all making it impossible to think, or stop thinking. His anger simmers, and doesn’t cool, and his thoughts are sludgy with sleeplessness. He doesn’t eat with them again – he can’t stand the thought, the pretence. He only went at breakfast, that morning after his first night shift, to see her. To see Chiara Kingsley, and look at her more closely; and now he doesn’t think he could look at her without hitting her. Or kissing her again.

The second day afterwards he emerges from the
trullo
, crosses the
aia
and goes under the archway to find the
annaroli
milling about near the kitchen steps, pestering Anna and demanding food from the cook, Ilaria. He can hear Ilaria’s boisterous protests from within.

‘If one more of you deadbeats comes into my kitchen to ask me what is for lunch and when you will have it, you won’t have it at all! It’s that simple!’

‘What’s going on?’ Ettore asks one of the corporals, a man he doesn’t know, who has an apron of fat hanging over the front of his trousers. The man shrugs, then spits.

‘The shit-eating peasants are on strike again – they want some communist bastard or other let loose from jail. So we’ve nothing to do but cool our heels till it’s sorted out. Or till the starving starts.’ He has a
marina
accent – he’s not from Gioia – and he clearly has no idea who Ettore is. In an instant Ettore has him by the front of his shirt; his crutch clatters to the ground, and there’s laughter from the onlookers.

‘You’d do better to keep hold of that stick, boy, and use it to batter the man,’ says Ludo Manzo, standing up from a shady spot against the wall. He speaks without taking a thin cigarette out from between his teeth, and squints at Ettore. ‘You’ll have no luck trying to knock that fat pig down with only one leg on the ground.’ The fat man bridles but knows better than to say anything. Ettore releases his shirt, hops back and bends to pick up the crutch. ‘Watch your temper, Ettore Tarano. I don’t care if you’re the boss’s nephew; if you make trouble I’ll whip you myself, same as any other one of these men.’

‘Try it,’ says Ettore, through clenched teeth. ‘Go on and try it.’ Ludo grins at him and chuckles. He puts one hand on Ettore’s chest and shoves him, quick and hard. Ettore stumbles back, fighting for balance. But he doesn’t fall.

‘You see that, men? That’s the goddamned peasant urge to protest, and not to know they’re beaten. That’s what we’re up against here. But sooner or later they’ll learn. They’ll learn or they’ll die. One or the other.’ He keeps a steady, hard eye on Ettore, who doesn’t look away or move. ‘Change is coming, Mr Tarano, and that little shindig at the Girardi place last year was just the start. Soon if you and your friends want work you’ll know to be grateful for the work that’s offered, on whatever terms.’

‘You’re right about one thing,’ says Ettore. He stands straighter; the violence in him makes his jaw ache. ‘Change is coming. Maybe not the kind you’re hoping for, Manzo, but change, all the same.’ He spits and turns his back on them. There’s a chorus of whistles and curse words and jeering.

He’d expected Paola to come back to the
masseria
to collect money from him, or more food, and when she didn’t he’d assumed Valerio had found a wage from somewhere. Now he knows there’s a strike, most likely for the release of Capozzi, he worries more. There will be demonstrations in Gioia for the duration of the strike, rallying calls, a dangerous air of rebellion that could boil over into rioting as easily as a dropped match could start a grass fire, and Paola would be in the thick of it, like as not with Iacopo strapped to her back. Not knowing what’s going on is intolerable. Once he’s out of sight, up on the roof, Ettore puts his left foot down on the ground, gingerly. The ache is intense, the pulling feeling still there, but it’s bearable now. Keeping hold of the crutch but not using it, he takes a few small steps. If he shortens his stride to minimise the movement of muscles in that leg, he can manage it, and it gives him a flash of triumph.

‘Bravo, bravo!’ calls Carlo, from his watch place at the parapet. He grins good-naturedly at Ettore, and Ettore smiles back at him. ‘See how fast the body heals with rest and food in the belly?’

‘The sooner the better,’ says Ettore. ‘I have a home to go to.’ But before very long his calf muscle is trembling, and then cramp knifes through it and Ettore must stop and sit abruptly, screwing up his eyes at the pain. He rolls up his trouser leg and sees a string of red beads forming along the stitches of the wound. He smears them with his thumb but they grow again at once. His heart sinks.

‘Easy does it, though,’ says Carlo, and Ettore nods. If he tried to walk back to Gioia now he would ruin it. He wonders if he could manage fifteen kilometres with the crutch yet. He wonders if he could borrow a horse – Marcie would let him, Ludo would not. Of those two he knows who would win. Marcie would flap her hand in distress, and take Ludo’s word as law. He wonders about taking one without asking, but knows at once that if he was seen he would be shot first and questioned later. He wonders whether, if he left the
masseria
, he would be able to forget about Chiara Kingsley.

In the night Ettore skirts sleep, and his leg throbs with pain where he disturbed it. He watches the shadows the lamp casts on the ceiling; he leaves the shutters open so the dawn light will wake him, and moths come in to circle the light, hitting the glass, leaving little puffs of dust from their wings. Her knock is as soft as the sound the moths make; he isn’t sure he’s heard it until she sidles in through the door, closing it silently behind her. Her face is alive with some emotion, something pitched halfway between fear and happiness. When she sees that the shutters are open she gasps and turns, reaching for the doorknob again.

‘Wait!’ he says, louder than he should. He winces as he struggles up from the bed.

‘I can’t be seen here! Please close the shutters,’ she says, in rapid English that he can barely understand. She keeps her face turned to the door, as though with her back turned she might be mistaken for somebody else. Ettore almost smiles.

‘There’s nobody awake to see you,’ he says. The guards on the roof will all be facing outwards, not in through a courtyard window. But he limps across to close the shutters, barely touching the floor with the toe of his bad leg. Looking out, he thinks he actually does see movement in one of the other windows – a quick, furtive blur high up in an unlit room – but he can’t be sure, and though he stares at the spot there’s nothing more. He latches the shutters then pauses, realising that his heart is thudding far too fast. Fast enough to make his fingers shake. His own weakness infuriates him, and when he turns to Chiara he sees her flinch at his expression.

She takes one step away from the door and then hesitates, her face falling. She conceals nothing; her every thought marches openly across her face. Ettore doesn’t know how she can survive in this world, being so visible, so transparent. He wants to warn her.

‘Do you want me to go?’ she says uncertainly, remembering to speak in Italian now. He doesn’t go to her. He sits back down on the bed and he tries to remember his anger, but though he can recall the feeling, he can’t actually feel it. Not with her standing there. The twisted length of her fair hair hangs over one shoulder; she’s wearing a long white slip which must be her nightdress. He pictures her darting silently along dark corridors to his room, in fits and starts, just like a moth. He shakes his head. For a moment neither one of them moves, but then he raises his hand and holds it out to her, and she walks over to take it without hesitation.

‘Why did you not come sooner than this?’ he says. He can’t help asking even if the question shames him. A spark of the anger returns. He will not be her plaything, to pick up and put down.

‘I … I couldn’t. The guards will see me if I go to the
trullo
in the night, or in the day. The dogs will … cry … shout?’

‘Bark.’

‘Bark. They will bark. I came to your room before, but you weren’t here.’

‘The boy must not know? He would tell his father?’

‘Pip must
not
know! He must not,’ she says vehemently. ‘It would … He would not understand.’ She looks stricken as she says this, and Ettore nods. He understands her feeling of guilt, of being watched.

‘But you want me,’ he says.

‘Yes I do. I want you,’ she says.

‘Why?’

‘I …’ She has no answer right away, and suddenly what she says next is very important. He will not be a tool to shame her husband; he will not be a distraction, a cure for boredom. ‘I don’t know exactly. Only … nothing here seems real. Only you do. Nothing here seems …’ She searches for words. ‘When I saw you, I woke up. For the first time.’ She stares at him, to see if he understands. ‘There’s so much danger here, so much ugliness … I’ve felt afraid ever since I arrived. Except when I’m with you. Then I feel safe.’ A thread of tension in him snaps, and its loose ends unravel. He puts the back of his hand up to her cheek and she turns her face into it, and the sweetness of it is almost unbearable. He hardly dares to feel for her. ‘Your uncle said … Leandro said you lost somebody. Your sweetheart,’ she says, so quietly that he hardly hears. Ettore drops his hand and nods.

‘Livia,’ he says roughly.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She was killed. She was violated. She was taken from me,’ he says, and can’t look at Chiara. His sorrow settles onto him almost as strongly as when she first died; a wave of heat surges through him, the caustic taste of hate is in his mouth. He can hear Chiara breathing, fast and shallow. The rise and fall of her ribs behind the thin silk looks so vulnerable, so breakable. He knows too much of the ways women can be broken.

‘When?’

‘At the year’s head.’

‘And the one who did it?’

‘I will find him, and I will kill him.’ He sees her assimilate this, and not dismiss it as an idle threat, but she does not fear or despise him for it. She nods carefully.

‘I know I am not her. I know about … being second. I know I am not Livia, and I know you love her,’ she says, and because she knows it Ettore feels her take half the guilt from him, half the responsibility for what they will do, and he’s grateful to her.

As he lays her down he studies her, as he did not have time to do before. The whiteness of her skin is astonishing, and it’s flawless – no scars, no bruises, no blemishes. He has never seen anything like it, and such perfection brings the temptation to destroy – he’s torn between wanting to preserve her as she is and wanting to mark her in some way. Mark her as his. She’s thinner than he likes; her breasts are small, soft circles against her ribs; her hips curve only slightly more; her bush is the same golden blond as her eyebrows. Three small moles march diagonally across her stomach, in perfect alignment, like the constellation in the south-western sky. She smells clean, neutral, just like water, and he’s startled by how quickly he loses himself in her again; how healing and compulsive the feeling of being inside her is. He can’t be slow or gentle, however much he tries. When he makes the mistake of looking into her eyes he climaxes too soon, and uses his mouth and his hands on her instead, and she turns her face into the pillow to stay silent. Afterwards he falls asleep with her long hair in his face; it’s too hot and it tickles him but he doesn’t want to brush it away. He knows he shouldn’t like her too much; that he shouldn’t like lying in a bed, curled around her, with an ache in his balls that tells him he’ll want to make love to her again by morning. He knows it can’t last, this sudden feeling of safety and calm.

Ettore doesn’t wake when Chiara leaves, and in the morning when he sits up and puts his head in his hands, he can smell her on his own skin. He holds his head over the washstand basin and pours the whole contents of the jug over himself, gasping at the coldness of the water. He can’t pin his thoughts to any one thing, to any one need or wish or action. He feels stupid, vacant; hollowed out by her and frustrated with lust. He shaves messily, cutting himself, then dresses in trousers, shirt, waistcoat, and goes to find Marcie. He tries the sitting room first, and then goes to knock at the series of private rooms she shares with Leandro. After a pause she opens the door rather than calling him in, and he remembers something his mother once said, about never trusting a person who did that. About the multitude of things that could be hidden in the interim.