The Italian Wife (16 page)

‘Take only what you can carry,’ Roberto told him.

The moon had risen, turning the road across the flat plain into a river of polished steel that flowed through the darkness, but still the mist stalked the fields and ditches like smoke in great white drifts that came and went at will, obscuring stretches of the road. It was the mist that would be their friend tonight.

Four old cardboard suitcases tied up with string stood outside the house and beside them lay four bundles wrapped up in tablecloths, looped in a knot to fasten on someone’s back. One for each of the younger children to carry. The baby was wrapped up warm in Alessandro’s arms and he was pacing back and forth across the yard.

‘The animals are in the barn, all fed and watered for the night,’ the boy said as soon as Roberto stepped out of the car.

‘You’ve done well,’ Roberto told him. ‘We’ll get you all up into the mountains before the rain comes. It will wash away any tracks.’

‘I don’t want to leave here.’ The boy looked lost in his cap and threadbare coat, both too big for him. He gazed out across the black expanse of fields that seemed to exhale their night-breath into the mist. ‘I liked working with the cattle and the land. It was a fine new life for us.’

‘No good looking back, Alessandro.’ Roberto placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He could hear the fear smothered in his young voice. ‘You have to look to the future now.’

‘Roberto is right, son.’ Gabriele limped over to them. ‘This bloody town is no good to us. It’s a place where you can find yourself behind bars or with a cracked skull just for looking at the Fascist flag the wrong way.’ He spat viciously on the ground. ‘That’s what I think of Il Duce.’ He clapped a hand hard on his son’s back. ‘We’ll do better down south, won’t we?’

‘No,’ the boy said stubbornly.

A thin wail rose from near the house. Roberto glanced over to where the sisters were lined up against the wall, thin shadows that scarcely registered in the darkness except that one of the twins was crying. He walked over and crouched down. She was shivering.

‘No need to cry, little one. You’ll soon be warm and safe again.’ He pulled the blanket that was draped over her small shoulders more firmly around her. ‘Make no sound now.’

‘Why can’t we take Columbine with us?’

Her twin patted her sister’s cheek for comfort. ‘Columbine is our pig,’ she whispered to Roberto.

‘No animals, I’m afraid,’ he explained gently. ‘They all belong to the ONC, so they have to remain here.’ He scooped up both children, one on each arm, and carried them to the car. ‘In you get. The sooner we leave the better.’

It was a crush, cramming everyone in, small bodies piled on larger ones and cases strapped to the roof, but Roberto worked fast. He had to get the Caldarones out of here quickly. He kept a sharp watch on the veiled landscape, alert for the slightest movement or the flicker of a torch, but all the time there was a harsh pulse of anger at his throat. Finally he checked the sacking covers taped over the headlights to keep them to no more than a dim glow, but before he slid into the driver’s seat of the overloaded Fiat, Gabriele hobbled up to him and clasped him to his chest. Tears were streaming down the man’s gaunt face and his lips were quivering behind his whiskers.

‘
Grazie
, my good friend,
mille grazie
. I was a fool to come to this hell-hole.’ He kissed Roberto ferociously on both cheeks. ‘You were sent from God to save me and my family. You will always be in my prayers.’

‘Thank you, Gabriele.’

Roberto took one final look at the farmstead. A hell-hole? The pulse quickened in his throat. Right now the whole of Italy was one damned hell-hole.

‘
Andiamo
!’ he said, and started the car.

13

Rosa did not believe that God was in the convent chapel. It was much too plain for Him. It had no marble statues of the saints with sad faces, no gilded crosses. And it smelled of empty stomachs.

Why would He bother to come here?

All it could offer Him was one measly Madonna of painted plaster. The whitewashed walls were as bare as a shroud and the heavy wooden altar looked no better than someone’s dining table. God wouldn’t like it here any more than she did. He would be in Rome, only an hour away by train. Right now, if Rosa had to guess, he was probably in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Matiri in Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica listening to the huge pipe organ. That’s where Rosa would be. If she had any choice.

So that’s why she didn’t think it was a sin to release the mouse in the chapel. God wouldn’t even notice. She slid the lid off the small bonbon tin she had stolen from behind the refectory curtain where Sister Agatha kept her secret stash of peppermints. Rosa had hidden it under the bib of her grey pinafore dress, aware all through Father Benedict’s sermon of the scratching of tiny claws against the metal. She felt sorry for the poor mouse, imprisoned in a dark place. But it wouldn’t be for long. She’d caught it yesterday in the outside lavatory with the help of her friend Carmela who, Rosa discovered with surprise, was immensely brave when it came to mice.

She placed the tiny animal on the top of the backrest of the pew in front of her, watching as its black eyes bulged with shock at its sudden freedom and its naked pink feet set off at full speed towards the far end.

Rosa screamed. Jumped to her feet and shouted, ‘Mouse!’

Screams are catching. Panic is like fire, it leaps from one head to another, its flames igniting fear even when the person doesn’t know what they are afraid of. She had seen it before, how easy it is to stampede a herd of empty-headed girls. The pupils bolted out of the pews into the aisles in a jumble of squeals and shrieks, and it could easily have been an accident that Rosa bumped against the wooden box on an iron stand by the wall. It could have been an accident that her elbow nudged open the lid as it fell.

It could have been.

Sister Agatha and Sister Pietra came flapping their black wings down the aisles, voices raised even in the house of God as they ordered the girls back into their seats. But by then Rosa was picking up all the small votive candles that had fallen on to the flagstone floor and was replacing them in the box.

A hand slapped her ear. ‘Hurry up, girl. Get to your seat.’

She hurried. It was only after she’d taken her place on the pew once more, heart thumping hard, that she looked up towards the altar and saw the priest’s gaze fixed on her. She didn’t look away. She sat there and stared back. But the four slender candles tucked behind her pinafore bib were burning a hole in her chest.

‘Don’t, Rosa.’

‘I have to.’

‘You’ll get caught.’

‘No, I won’t.’

But Carmela didn’t look convinced. They were whispering at the far end of the dormitory, crouched down under the casement window in the dark. There were metal bars over the panes of glass, too close together to squeeze between, and the door was locked on the outside, so all sixteen girls inside were secured until morning. But several times a night the door would swing open and a torch beam in the hand of whichever nun was on night duty would swoop on to each bed.

Rosa wrapped an arm around Carmela and drew her closer. Partly to bring her ear nearer so that the other girls wouldn’t wake, but mainly because Carmela may be brave with mice but she was terrified that Mother Domenica would cut her hair. It had been threatened. To shave off her long auburn curls. She kept them covered in a white scarf for much of the time to lessen the provocation they caused. She was shivering and Rosa rubbed her long back vigorously. Her friend was absurdly tall for a nine-year-old and the nuns found her white-skinned face and fiery hair an irresistible magnet for their slaps and smacks.

‘Go to bed, Carmela. I can do it on my own.’

‘No, I’ll stay.’

Rosa kissed her cheek. ‘The match?’

Carmela held up a single match that she had sneaked from the priest’s coat in the cloakroom while he was closeted in the Mother Superior’s office. Rosa had noticed several times that he drew matches from his pocket when he wanted to smoke his vile black cheroots.

‘Candle,’ she announced.

She drew a short thin candle from the thick knot of her hair at the back of her head and held it out to be lit. Carmela struck the match on the rough floorboards and it flared into life with a hiss. Both girls glanced nervously at the beds but could see no movement among the blankets. Rosa melted the bottom end of the candle first and stood it on a flat stone she had picked up in the yard, then Carmela lit the wick before the match burned out.

The darkness leapt backward. Wisps of yellow light flickered on their faces and scampered up the wall. The candle was the kind worshippers lit in church as a prayer for someone, so Rosa knew it wouldn’t last long, any more than people’s prayers did, so she stood quickly on bare feet and lifted the flame to the window. Slowly, carefully, she moved it from side to side.

‘Can you see anyone?’ Carmela whispered.

‘No.’

‘He may not come.’

‘He’ll come.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Or tomorrow night. Or some other night. But he’ll come.’

‘How can you be sure, Rosa?’

Rosa smiled softly as her eyes scoured the blackness in the convent garden beneath them. ‘I’m sure.’

‘But there’s a high wall down there.’

‘That won’t stop him. Nothing will stop him.’

‘Oh, Rosa.’

‘Go to sleep. I can do this.’

But Carmela curled up at Rosa’s feet, unwilling to leave her, and it took a whole hour for the candle to burn to nothing. Rosa was ice cold by the end, hearing her father’s deep voice in her ear and feeling his hand warm on her shoulder, until she no longer knew what was real and what wasn’t. The darkness outside seemed to drift closer, to rap on the glass, to seep into her mind and distort her thoughts, twisting them into knots that she couldn’t undo. She believed she saw the architect. Sitting on the window sill and offering her hand. But when Rosa reached for it hungrily, the architect vanished and all she clutched was cold brittle emptiness.

When the answering light flashed, she almost missed it. She blinked. She waited for it to come again out of the darkness but the garden remained stubbornly mute, no sound, no light. Did she imagine it? Had the night played a trick?

She waited another hour. No more lights flashed. The darkness and the cold swallowed everything out there and her chest hurt so bad that it squeezed tears from her eyes. She dashed them away and knelt down to wake Carmela who was still curled like a long-limbed cat at her feet. Gently she patted her shoulder and placed a hand over her mouth, so that she would make no noise.

That was when she heard the sound of a key in the lock and the yellow beam of a torch sprang into the room.

14

It was the silence that hit Roberto first, a silence so solid he could have stood his tripod on it. The high ceilings of the convent of Suore di Santa Teresa echoed with it. He strode down the corridor behind the black robe that billowed beneath the tall white headdress with its ice-hard triangular edges and he inhaled a smell. That’s what hit him second. The raw smell. Not the stink of paint and damp plaster and freshly oiled wood that permeated the new buildings throughout Bellina, he was used to that and expected no less. But over it and under it lay a different smell, one he had not expected to find in this house of God.

It was the smell of a bordello.

Not the cheap scent of a whore’s perfume, no, not that. The only perfume here was the smoky aroma of incense. No, what caught his nostrils was the unmistakable smell of sex. Musky and muted in the air around him, a femaleness that lingered, as if it were hidden away behind the bricks in the wall and tucked into the mortar that gripped the tiles under his feet. It made him wonder. What thoughts filled the heads of the nuns when they scourged their pale and untouched bodies at the end of each day, and what dreams stalked the nights of the older girls in their care as their young bodies ripened out of their control?

The squat fat figure in front suddenly halted and turned humourless eyes on him. He could see rage within her but he had no idea whether it was directed at him for being a man and a sinner or at the Mother Superior for being the one whose door she was obliged to tap on so meekly.

‘Thank you, Sister Agatha,’ he said.

But his tone had an edge. And she was sharp enough to pick it up.

‘Signor Falco, while under this roof I suggest you learn to practise a little humility.’

‘Thank you, I’ll make sure I bear that in mind.’

Her shoulder gave an annoyed little hitch before she tapped on the door and walked away, leaving him to it without a word. He opened the door and entered Mother Domenica’s inner sanctum. It was a beautiful room, though he could have done without the cardinal portraits. Tall arched windows along one wall allowed sunlight to drift through the fine muslin curtains that robbed it of its glare and gave the room an elegance that he did not associate with convents, but maybe that was because he’d never been inside one before. Certainly this chamber was furnished with a degree of luxury that came as a surprise to him.

‘Good morning, Signor Falco.’

So this was the Mother Superior who didn’t stint herself. Wasn’t there supposed to be something about a vow of poverty? He hid his frown and didn’t offer his hand, any more than she did.

‘Good morning, Reverend Mother. Thank you for seeing me so promptly.’

‘It’s my pleasure. We are proud to be part of this town and the recording of this historic achievement.’

‘I will cause as little disruption as possible. As I explained on the telephone, I will need to photograph the buildings and then the pupils in their class groups. With teachers, of course, to indicate the most valuable work that your convent does here in Bellina.’

‘Our most valuable work, as you put it, lies in our prayers, young man. Now, sit down, if you please.’

The order was given affably enough but there was that look at the back of her pale eyes; a look he’d seen before in the eyes of those within the church. A look of forgiveness. As if they could see your sins written in black slime on your skin, yet were willing to let you sit with them and drip your filthy stains on their pristine carpet.