Authors: Katherine Webb
‘In the sense that the shape of the blocks and of the cone allows for the entire structure to be stabilised without the need for mortar or separate roof supports? Yes, very similar,’ he says.
‘Well, sure.’ Marcie smiles, flustered. ‘That’s exactly what I meant.’
‘There’s a proper chimney,’ says Pip, his voice echoing. Clare peers in; he has his head in the hearth.
‘They’re hovels,’ says Leandro, with a dismissive grunt. ‘Let’s carry on. Much more to see.’
As they walk, Clare finds curiosity overcoming her distrust of Leandro. He is so relaxed, so benign, she can hardly credit her own memory of the way he spoke to her in Gioia.
‘How is farming here, then, Mr Cardetta? You said the men who come back from America try to farm but mostly fail,’ she says.
‘I’m a novelty, Mrs Kingsley, in that I live on the land I own, and run it myself. Most of Puglia is
latifundia
– huge estates owned by rich, ancient families, some of whom haven’t actually been here in decades. They let the farms out on short leases to tenants who often aren’t even farmers, and have no experience of it at all. They’re speculators, with no incentive to make improvements to the land whatsoever. They make what profit they can and then they leave.’ He shrugs. ‘They use antique ways of farming that exhaust the soil. There’s no irrigation, no effective fertilisation, no proper crop rotation. We’re on the edge of failure, every year. So a drought like last year? Total disaster. Men starving to death in the streets, in some places. The tenants are working with tiny margins – there’s no room for error. They’re on the brink of ruin themselves a lot of the time, and the only thing they can control is how much or little they pay the workers. I hope to break this cycle. This is my land, and I want to see it fruitful and stable. I want to pass it down to my sons thriving.’ He sweeps his arm across the wide view of dry, rocky ground. ‘In whatever limited way it can thrive,’ he amends. Marcie loops her arm through his and squeezes it.
‘My visionary husband,’ she says.
‘Most Puglian landlords hate the place and can’t wait to leave, but not me. The government posts disgraced officials down here as a
punishment
,’ he says proudly. ‘But I can take whatever Puglia throws at me.’
They have come around in a large loop, and are approaching the
masseria
buildings from the back. As they get nearer they see two or three men standing around a tethered mule, one of them working bellows into a portable furnace, sweat running down his face. The mule’s mouth has been wedged open with wooden blocks secured with ropes around its head; its top lip is clamped viciously between the metal bars of a device that looks like a giant nutcracker. Each time the animal attempts to move, a hard-faced man gives a jerk of the clamp, and the animal holds still, rolling its eyes, its ears laid flat back against its head.
‘What are they doing to that poor mule?’ says Pip, as they draw nearer.
‘The animals here get a thing called lampas,’ says Leandro. ‘The roof of the mouth swells up and hardens, right behind the front teeth. It’s because of the rough food they get – straw and coarse stuff like that. It can get to the point where the beast can’t eat properly. The twitch, that device Ludo has hold of – that’s my overseer, Ludo Manzo – isn’t as bad as it looks. It actually helps the animal to relax.’
‘It looks evil,’ says Boyd. The man who had the bellows has taken a long, ridged iron tool from the coals, glowing red hot at its tip.
‘Let’s not watch,’ says Marcie. ‘Come on, Pip, Clare. Let’s go inside.’ The keen way she says it makes Clare only too happy to follow her, but Pip lags behind, turning his head to see.
Leandro and Boyd turn and start to follow the women, and then the mule starts to scream. There’s a smell of burning flesh, and Pip goes pale.
‘Make them stop it,’ he says, in a stunned voice.
‘Come away, Pip,’ says Clare, when she finds her voice. But Pip is frozen in horror and can’t seem to look away.
‘Cardetta – isn’t that dreadfully cruel?’ says Boyd. He too looks shocked; his face has paled. ‘There must be a better way to treat the poor creature.’
‘This is how it’s done.’ Leandro shrugs.
‘Pip, come
on
,’ says Clare. The mule’s screams are making her wince; she has the urge to put her hands over her ears, to run from it.
‘It’s horrible!’ Pip cries. There are tears in his eyes and he looks panicked. Swallowing hard Clare puts her arm around his shoulders and turns him forcibly. Leandro glances over with an inscrutable expression.
‘It is horrible, Pip, but it’s also necessary. Like a lot of things in life. It does no good to look the other way. That changes nothing.’
‘Really, Cardetta, he’s just a boy. And this
isn’t
how things are in our life – he’s not used to such things, and he needn’t become so,’ says Boyd frostily. Leandro smiles slightly at Boyd, and for some reason it chills Clare – or perhaps it’s the way Boyd recoils from it.
‘Really? In my experience there’s ugliness and violence in every life. It’s only a question of how well concealed they are,’ he says neutrally. ‘Down here, we don’t draw a veil over them.’ Clare looks at Boyd but he says nothing more. He turns his back on Leandro and marches towards the farm buildings with his head down, frowning. Pip shrugs Clare’s arm off gently and wipes at the tears on his cheeks.
‘I’m really fine, Clare,’ he says.
‘Made of sterner stuff, aren’t you, boy?’ says Leandro, catching up with them and clapping Pip on the shoulder. Pip manages to nod, though his face is still slack with horror.
For a while they can still hear the mule screaming from inside the
masseria
, and Clare’s head starts to throb with faint, imagined echoes of its torture. Pip has gone silent and morose, she suspects partly from shame at his own reaction to the scene, and she wants to tell him that he was right to be horrified, that he was right to cry. It’s the nature of boys to want to be like the men around them, but she never wants him to be as callously habituated to such things as Leandro is. She wishes Boyd would go to him and share his disgust, but Boyd has gone just as quiet as his son; he withdraws to a private room, muttering about the need to work. Clare wants to hug Pip and talk to him about it like she would at home, but things have changed subtly here, and with Marcie and Leandro watching she daren’t. When he pushed her encircling arm away, as they walked away from the mule, it was the first time he had ever rejected her touch.
In their room after dinner she’s unresponsive when Boyd hugs her. The anger, which lay still while they were in company, now rises again. They undress gradually and hang up their clothes, and the lamp conjures deep shadows in every corner. Clare finds lines of dirt under the straps of her bra, just as Marcie said she would. In his vest, shorts and socks, Boyd peers into the foxed mirror on the wardrobe door and combs his pale hair, frowning at it as if displeased. It looks just the same after he’s combed it – soft, wispy thin, close to his skull. Like a baby’s hair. Satisfied with it he comes across to her and kisses her, and she allows him to for just a moment before she drops her chin and turns her face away. He gives her a quizzical look, and when she doesn’t smile he moves away and pulls off his socks with a cautious air. He clears his throat.
‘Are you all right, Clare?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, truthfully enough.
‘Is it … what you saw in Gioia? Is it still troubling you?’
‘What I saw in Gioia will trouble me for the rest of my life.’ She watches him, and keeps her eyes on him, and he skits about in front of her as if he can’t bear her gaze – from the nightstand to the cupboard to the window and back.
‘Yes, of course.’ He steps into his pyjama trousers, buttons up the jacket, sits down on the edge of the mattress. ‘Will you come to bed? I’ve missed you so much these past few days.’ He looks down at his feet as he says this. His toes are long, bony and white, like the rest of him; his stomach is a soft rise behind the jacket, more noticeable than usual. Leandro has been feeding him well these past few weeks.
‘I feel wide awake,’ she says, and goes over to the window. Their room looks east; nothing to see but a swathe of dark ground, and in the distance the paler shade of a field of wheat stubble, lit by the moon.
‘Is it … is it something I’ve done, Clare? You’re being very cold,’ he says, sounding miserable. At once she feels the familiar guilt, and at the same time the new anger, all of it together, but she refuses to be paralysed by it. She won’t be gagged any more.
‘I want to know who Leandro Cardetta is. I want to know why we must do everything he says.’
‘Clare—’
‘Please … show me the respect I deserve as your wife, and as someone who has been with you through several … crises,’ she says, turning to him on the word ‘crises’, so that he knows exactly what she means. She means Christina Havers. The wife of a London client; the woman Boyd bedded for a time. He flinches and drops his gaze. She has such power to hurt him, power she doesn’t want. ‘Please tell me truthfully. Who is he?’ For a long time Boyd doesn’t answer. He swallows, and laces his fingers together, but she won’t let him off; she waits.
‘Leandro Cardetta,’ Boyd says eventually. He pauses, flutters one hand across his eyes. ‘Leandro Cardetta is a very dangerous man.’
A shiver runs over Clare’s skin; the hairs stand up along her arms. Boyd shoots her a wretched little glance, and she blinks.
‘In what way is he dangerous?’ she says.
‘In every way you can think of, Clare,’ he whispers, as though afraid of being overheard. From somewhere else in the house comes the sudden, distant peal of Marcie’s laughter, and Clare has a powerful feeling of unreality again, when she knows that this is all too real.
‘Is he … is he a criminal?’
‘He … yes. He was, when I first knew him. Now … I’m not sure. I don’t think so. He seems to want to be … respectable. He seems to want the farm to work.’
‘My God, Boyd … my God, what kind of criminal?’ Clare whispers.
‘What kind?’ Boyd echoes, as if bewildered by the question. ‘I suppose … I suppose you’d call him a mobster.’
‘A mobster? What do you mean?’
‘Organised crime … In New York. I … I don’t know. Theft … extortion … I’m not sure. It’s a world I don’t know, but it’s a dark world, and a violent one. I can’t say what he’s done, or what he hasn’t.’ As Boyd says this he pinches his eyes shut with the forefinger and thumb of one hand, curls his other arm around his middle. Hiding. Clare stares and thinks and can’t speak. ‘I’m sorry, Clare. I’m sorry that … you’re under the same roof as him …’
‘Is he a killer?’ she says. The question appals her.
‘I don’t know. He could be.’
‘Does Marcie know?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘How … how ever did you come to know him?’
‘I … he …’ Boyd murmurs these two words and then goes silent. He shakes his head, and there are tears in his eyes.
Clare doesn’t know how to feel, but he looks so dejected that she goes to sit beside him, and leans her face against his shoulder.
‘These people … once they’ve got your name, you see … once they know who you are, and how they can make use of you, then they’ll use any means to do so. They threaten what’s dear to you …’
‘He’s threatened you?’ she says, and Boyd nods. ‘That’s why when he wanted Pip and me to come out, for Marcie, you agreed?’
‘Yes. I did everything I could to dissuade him, and I said several times that I wouldn’t take the commission. I didn’t want anything more to do with him, but … he insisted.’ Boyd shakes his head, perplexed. ‘He insisted, and I’m a coward, Clare. He swears that this will be the last time, and I … I’ve seen what he can do. He knows where I work, so he could find out where we live, I’m sure of it. I just couldn’t risk alienating him. I’m so sorry. You must believe how sorry I am.’
‘Jesus Christ, Boyd!’ For a moment Clare almost laughs at the absurdity of it – avuncular Leandro, with his skittish, ebullient wife. ‘She can’t know – Marcie
can’t
know. I can’t believe it.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. She doesn’t seem … the type.’
‘So then, perhaps he
has
left it all behind him?’ Clare suggests. ‘Now that he has Marcie, and now that he’s come home to Gioia … Perhaps whatever he did in New York made him rich enough.’
‘I never met a rich man who didn’t want to be richer still,’ says Boyd, and shakes his head. ‘Please,
please
do nothing to test him, Clare. Promise me!’ He takes her hand and squeezes it hard, and she winces.
‘I promise.’ She takes a deep breath in and smells that sharp, sour scent, and realises now that it’s the smell of her husband’s fear. ‘But how does he even know you, Boyd? Why would he want
you
, of all people, to come to Italy and design his wretched new façade?’
‘I think …’ Boyd shakes his head and looks across at her with his eyes still swimming. ‘Christ, Clare, I think he just really liked the building I designed in New York.’
They look at one another and then laugh, just for a second. An incredulous laugh, brought on by nerves and adrenalin. It soon passes, and Boyd shakes his head again. ‘It’s really not funny at all, is it?’ he says.
‘Not one bit,’ Clare agrees.
‘What should I have done differently? Tell me. What would you have done?’ he says. Clare stands up, feeling light, alert, ready for violence. The feeling is alien to her, and it’s troubling but electric too; she feels very alive. She goes over to the window and looks out at the flat ground, silver in the moonlight, and feels so far from everything she knows that she could be on Mars. Just days ago she would have reassured him, even if the words had felt like cotton wool in her mouth. Now, that urge is gone.
‘What would I have done?’ She folds her arms, running her fingers over the rough gooseflesh of them. ‘I’ve have told him to hang from his damned façade,’ she says. ‘I would. But you didn’t say that. And here we are, you and I and Pip, stuck in a place where some kind of civil war is breaking out, in the house of a mobster and a show girl, and entirely at their disposal. What could possibly be wrong?’ She says it lightly but there’s no more laughter, no more smiles.