Maria Rosselli looked at Luisa as if she did not believe for a moment that she would be capable of producing a decent cup of coffee. ‘Water,’ she pronounced. ‘Just a glass of water.’
‘It’s a long time since we spoke properly,’ said Luisa, when she returned from the kitchen. As if they ever had spoken properly, she and old Signora Rosselli, nothing but guarded niceties concealing a standoff, but the elderly had to be given their due. She set the glass down warily in front of her guest, on a coaster on top of a hand-crocheted snow-white doily, everything she might want in deference to her status. But the old woman made a sudden, explosive sound of frustration; beside her on the deep sofa the baby started briefly.
‘I don’t see why I had to leave them alone,’ she said angrily, ignoring the overture, leaning forward over hands that were clasped in her lap and thrusting her strong chin at Luisa instead. ‘I’m Niccolò’s mother. There are no secrets between us. I know more about that – that relationship than anyone.’
I’m sure you do
, thought Luisa, and she nodded seriously. ‘But still,’ she said easily. ‘It’s not that we – that Sandro thinks there might be secrets, not at all. At least, not between you and your son. But, professionally, it’s simply easier for him.’ She smiled gently. ‘He’s not a young police officer any more, after all. He needs all the help he can get, concentrating. One person at a time, you see?’ And silently apologized to him for the slander.
Maria Rosselli, who obviously prided herself on faculties undimmed by the passing of time, leaned back into the sofa, mouth pursed in satisfaction.
‘How’s the baby, then?’ Luisa said, knowing she’d have to keep the woman here as long as possible. ‘You’re managing?’
‘Managing?’ said Maria Rosselli, and snorted. ‘It’s hardly work, is it? Hardly a complicated business. One small baby. Only interested in the next feed. And six weeks – well, in some ways it’s the ideal age. None of that separation anxiety nonsense, more or less anyone will do. I mean – if she never comes back …’ She broke off, shrugged coolly, and Luisa stared in frank disbelief.
‘But you want Sandro to find her?’ she said, before she could think about it.
Maria Rosselli’s eyes were like grey stones. She looked at Luisa for a long moment before eventually she spoke. ‘Don’t think it’s for myself,’ she said. ‘I can deal with the raising of this child. Niccolò – well, God knows why, but he’s beside himself. It’s his intelligence, you see. Not having any explanation for it.’ And at last she seemed to falter, her expression showing incomprehension, frustration, doubt. ‘He seems to feel the need to know why. To understand. Personally I don’t believe such a person is worthy of understanding.’
Lifting the glass of water to her lips defiantly, she took no more than a sip. ‘And the child’s clearly thriving on this formula. Sentimental nonsense, all that nature-knows-best rubbish.’
‘She – Flavia – was breastfeeding?’ Luisa said. She cleared her throat. When her own baby had died, of course they had told her the milk would come in, but that if she were lucky it wouldn’t last more than a day or two, and it had not. She tried to amplify the terrible sensation that had dogged her for those thirty-odd hours – of something having been lost, left behind, gone missing, and even in her sleep she must search for it – and apply it to a woman leaving this warm, rosy living child for not hours but days. Days that might stretch to weeks. Or for ever. She stole a glance at him down there between them on the sofa, and strained, against the sudden fury that rose in her against the absent mother, aligning herself with Maria Rosselli, heaven forbid. Strained to understand.
‘What do
you
think?’ she said, giving up. ‘Why do you think Flavia’s gone?’
And the big pale stone-eyes rested on Luisa as Maria Rosselli leaned forward again over her large bony hands, white-knuckled now, and Luisa could see all the fury wound tight in her big, spare frame.
‘She’s weak,’ she said, and Luisa found the level calm of her voice more unsettling than rage, hissing, or spitting or shouting. She made Luisa think of a beast of prey, lean and strong and evolved into preternatural control, like a cobra or a hawk. Maria Rosselli straightened herself. ‘She’s a weak, silly woman, I knew she would fail him and she has. I told him. Long ago, I told him. Weak but stubborn.’ She looked down. ‘Like a baby: like this baby, strong-willed when he’s after something.’
‘After something?’
‘She wanted the child.’
Like a baby wants his feed: an imperative. Luisa waited, and Maria Rosselli, steely calm now, went on. ‘She wanted to secure Niccolò, she kept on at him, on and on, and never mind his ideals. She had to prove that she was more important than the party. The personal relationship was more important than his work.’
‘The personal relationship,’ said Luisa. ‘You mean love.’ She was surprised at herself; she didn’t like the word. But something about Maria Rosselli made her contrary. And sometimes love was the right word.
‘If you like,’ said Maria Rosselli stiffly.
‘Come on,’ Luisa said. ‘Of course personal relationships are important. They’re what make the world go round.’
‘He never wanted a child.’
‘But once he was born—’
‘All right, all right,’ said Maria Rosselli, and Luisa saw the force of her jealous rage.
‘They loved each other. They were happy about the child.’
Maria Rosselli’s mouth set in a stubborn line. ‘Yes,’ she said tersely. Blood from a stone. ‘Fools, both of them. There are more important things.’
Luisa hadn’t consciously been intending to mine the old woman for information, but as Maria Rosselli’s mouth clamped shut she knew she’d had all she was going to get. Beside them the child stirred and struggled in his swaddling; raised his small, strong chin, tipped his head back, opened his mouth and wailed.
His grandmother didn’t even seem to notice.
*
Niccolò Rosselli looked terrible. Ill-shaven, gaunt, shambling as he moved ahead of Sandro further into the apartment – his and Flavia Matteo’s apartment on the Piazza Santo Spirito – and Sandro walked with his hands instinctively held out as though he might need to catch the poor man if he fell.
Worth a euro or two, Sandro couldn’t help thinking as he looked around himself furtively, even on the modest side of the square.
The apartment was not large, but comfortable. On the second floor, running from front to back of the building, which was more unusual than it might sound for a city where the old stone palaces, regular enough in their symmetrical front elevations, turned into twisting, turning labyrinths inside. Divided and subdivided and added to like termite mounds, some of them. This was not a palace, though: Sandro understood quickly that these people would never live in a grand or noble building, not even a dilapidated one. Against their principles.
Niccolò Rosselli was standing now as if uncertain of what to do next. Waiting, Sandro glanced around himself.
They were in a
salotto
at the front of the apartment with all the walls but one covered with bookshelves, more books than Sandro had ever seen in his life outside a library. A desk stood between the windows with a battered computer on it and a pinboard behind. The furniture consisted of a low, brown corduroy-covered set of two armchairs and a sofa, shiny with age. An Indian-looking embroidered cloth lay over the
divano
, another was hung on the back of the door, and a beaded string of brightly coloured cloth birds and bells chinked against the door jamb.
Finally Niccolò Rosselli gestured at the brown sofa and Sandro sat down. Rosselli sat in one of the matching chairs and thrust his hands under him, as if to keep them out of harm’s way, thin arms taut, shoulders hunched. He looked hamstrung, as if he might at any moment begin rocking like the straitjacketed inmate of an asylum. No wonder the mother was worried: no wonder Giuli and the rest of the Frazione Verde were too, if this man was their new bright hope.
‘You know why I’m here?’ said Sandro, and slowly Rosselli focused on him. His dark eyes were magnified by the thick, old-fashioned glasses he wore; a boy who’d ruined his eyes through over-studying, that would be the old-school diagnosis. Tentatively Sandro persisted. ‘Your mother—’ And Rosselli sighed.
‘My mother wants to help,’ he said. He spoke hurriedly as if everything was urgent, running the words together: Sandro imagined it might be rather effective in front of an audience, but in this confined space it seemed like a kind of shyness, awkwardness. ‘Do you need help?’ he asked gently.
Rosselli frowned. ‘My – my – Flavia’s gone,’ he said. ‘My partner. The mother of our child.’ How many words to describe it, thought Sandro: it would be easier if you’d married. My wife. He opened his mouth.
‘Yes,’ Sandro said. ‘Your mother said she – you haven’t seen her since Sunday. Or heard from her, I suppose. That must be hard.’
He glanced around, only now remembering the child. Asleep? Or out with the grandmother? Yes, of course: he shied from the thought of Luisa entertaining them on his behalf.
There was a silence which Sandro interpreted as agreement. Uneasily he shifted on the brown corduroy, levering himself up out of its yielding depths. It was not the way he would have chosen to sit, asking questions like these. ‘She went before you woke? That’s what your mother said. In the night?
Then Rosselli raised his head and frowned, as if at last Sandro had asked something new.
‘Early in the morning,’ he said. ‘She was there during the night itself.’
‘Right,’ said Sandro, waiting.
‘I don’t sleep well,’ said Niccolò Rosselli wearily. ‘I often don’t get to sleep until two, three in the morning – I mean, I go to bed, but I don’t sleep. I – Flavia says, I think too much. I sleep deeply only between three, perhaps four and seven or eight in the morning. That night she was still there beside me when I got to sleep, and she was gone when I woke up. I always said to Flavia I should do the night feed as I was awake anyway. She said I could when she stopped breastfeeding.’
It felt like a long speech, somehow. If Sandro and Luisa had had a child, would he have got up in the night to feed it? He couldn’t imagine so.
‘So when you woke that morning … Sunday morning?’
‘It was eight, just before eight. Flavia had fed him in the night but still it was a long time for him to sleep. He was crying, and I woke. I don’t know how long he’d been crying.’ Niccol Rosselli stared unfocused at some point beyond Sandro. His hands came out from under his thighs and briefly went to his face. Finding them there, he pushed them under the glasses and rubbed his eyes hard.
‘It’s usually Flavia, you see. I wasn’t conditioned to respond. To the crying.’
Conditioned to respond. ‘What’s his name?’ Sandro found himself asking. ‘Your son’s name?’ It had just been ‘him’ so far.
Rosselli frowned as if unable to make sense of the question, or to remember the child’s name perhaps. ‘Luca,’ he said eventually. ‘I – we only decided recently.’ Sandro fought against what he knew to be prejudice: this man was odd; this set-up was odd. So clever, and so helpless, and so weirdly cold –
conditioned to respond? –
was this man or his partner even capable of looking after this child? Yet there were soft touches too; there were the brightly coloured cloths, and the bells and birds, and the photographs and postcards on the pinboard. All hers, thought Sandro.
‘Did she take anything? A – a bag, clothes? Money? Passport?’
Again Rosselli sighed. ‘My mother asked that,’ he said. He seemed to sigh, Sandro observed, whenever he said anything about his mother. ‘She – I let her look, my mother looked. In the wardrobe, the drawers. The suitcase is still there, pretty much all Flavia’s clothes. She doesn’t have a passport. It expired: we don’t travel much. We were going to – we did talk about a holiday. After he was born. We were going to renew her passport – and mine for that matter. We got them together, they had both expired. When we got one for him, we would—’ And here he seemed to run out of steam, stopping abruptly.
The
suitcase – a family with only one suitcase between them. Modest in all things. Luisa, thought Sandro, would probably approve.
‘She took her handbag,’ offered Rosselli, ‘so she would have had her
carta d’identità.
And I suppose money.’ He passed a hand over his forehead. ‘Should I have thought of these things? Her purse … but she never carried much money. There’s a bank card for taking money out, and a credit card, but we don’t use it.’
‘She has her own bank account?’
‘A joint account,’ said Rosselli. ‘We don’t have much, and we don’t spend much. We’re – the same, really, there’s no question of not trusting – I mean, we have the same feelings about money, it’s not important to us.’
Easy to say, thought Sandro. When there is money to be had. Furtively he looked around him again; nothing expensive, it was true. The furniture shabby, but everything clean, ordered. The photographs on the pinboard behind the computer drew him. There was a picture of a woman’s face: she had the dark red hair and freckled white skin common in the Abruzzo. She was looking away, to the side, no makeup at all. She seemed very beautiful to Sandro.
‘She worked?’ He realized he’d used the past tense and scrambled to catch himself up. ‘I mean, before the baby?’
‘She’s a teacher,’ Rosselli said, and looked down at his hands. He had heard the past tense, for sure. ‘Before the baby she taught mathematics at the Agnesi.’
‘You’ve looked to see if any money’s been withdrawn?’ Sandro asked. ‘I assume you can see online? Has the credit card been used?’
Rosselli looked blank. Had he done anything at all? Had he just sat and waited?
‘You’ve tried calling her?’ Sandro asked: because of course Rosselli would have done that. But, of course, he was wrong.
‘Calling her?’ The man looked bizarrely confused. ‘But I don’t know where she is.’
‘On her mobile? The
telefonino
?’ Sandro pulled his own out by way of demonstration – that new magic phone he’d finally been talked into getting – and when he touched it, the screen brightened. Missed call, it said. Pietro. How long had it been since he’d spoken to his old friend? A while.