Authors: Katherine Webb
‘Well, I can’t wait to see it. Can’t you even say what it’s about?’ says Clare.
‘Oh, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, do we, Pip?’ Marcie aims a flash of her bright smile at Pip, and he smiles, closed-lipped, and shifts his feet.
‘That’s right. It’s supposed to be a surprise,’ he says. Clare gazes at him for a moment, because the expression on his face is one she hasn’t seen before.
The next day is one of heavy cloud and brooding humidity; stillness so complete that not a single leaf nods on the fig tree, not a single blade of the dry grass twists or bends. Clare goes for a walk after lunch and fancies she can feel the air parting to let her through, and closing gummily in her wake. She meets Ettore in the broken-down ruins of a
trullo
, its roof open to the blank sky. They make love first, and talk afterwards, like always. There’s little room to think of anything until their initial physical need is sated, and after a day, two days, sometimes three days, that need builds and snaps like a static charge. Clare is left with a graze on her spine from the rough stone wall, which stings, and an overwhelming sense of safety, surety.
‘You’re only twenty-four, Marcie told me,’ she says. Ettore nods. They sit side by side on the stone ledge outside the door of the
trullo
, and Clare thinks of all the people who have sat there before them, down the centuries: men smoking, thinking, watching; women resting, talking, hulling beans. Other lovers, perhaps, who’ve needed a hiding place and a hard stone bed on which to lie.
‘And you?’ he says.
‘Twenty-nine,’ says Clare, ashamed of her fresh face, and that she has no scars, by how untouched she is, how unmarked by the world.
‘You have never been hungry,’ he says.
‘No. No, I have never been hungry.’ Clare takes his hand and winds her pale fingers through his dark ones.
‘I can’t imagine that,’ he says, giving her a wondering look, with no rancour.
‘I can’t imagine your life. Your world,’ she says sadly.
‘Don’t try. Be happy you don’t need to.’ Ettore frowns.
‘But I want to. I want to know … to understand.’
‘Why? How can you? What good would it do you?’
‘Because it’s
you
. It’s who
you
are. So I want to understand,’ says Clare. Ettore looks up into the heavy sky and doesn’t reply.
‘It will rain soon,’ he says.
‘You don’t think I can, do you? You don’t think I can understand,’ says Clare. It’s a sad statement rather than a question, and Ettore turns to look at her, smiling slightly. His eyes, glowing with colour, are the brightest things she can see.
‘Nobody from outside could. It’s not your fault.’
‘I want … I want to make you happy.’
‘You’ll only make yourself unhappy.’ He shakes his head. ‘We should stop this.’
‘I don’t want to stop it.’
‘But we should. Sooner or later somebody will guess, and then your husband will know. We should stop,’ he says, and Clare holds her breath until she’s sure he doesn’t mean now – doesn’t mean
right now
. He brushes his thumb over her cheek, and kisses her.
When the first heavy drops of rain start to fall Ettore pushes Clare up and propels her away towards the
masseria
. She starts to walk but the sound of an engine sends her running back to the cover of the
trullo
, as the red car rolls past in the distance, also heading for the farm.
‘I didn’t know the road was so close!’ she says. Ettore hasn’t moved a muscle. ‘Do you think he saw us?’
‘He might not have if you hadn’t bolted like a rabbit,’ he says, and smiles briefly. ‘Nothing looks more guilty.’
‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it. I hope it was the servant driving on some errand, not Pip, or Leandro.’
‘If it was Pip there would have been more swerving, more noise and dust,’ says Ettore, and Clare smiles. ‘Rabbit. My uncle called you that, a while back, but he was wrong … you might be frightened but you don’t let it stop you. That’s courage, in fact.’
‘He called me a rabbit?’ says Clare. The insult hurts unexpectedly. ‘And Marcie called me mouse, once. That’s what they think of me – a weakling. A coward.’
‘What does it matter what they think?’ He smiles lopsidedly at her. ‘We know better.’
‘I’m so tired of …’ Clare shakes her head. She can’t put her finger on it. ‘I’m so tired of doing what I’m told to. Of being expected to follow where I’m led.’ Ettore frowns at her.
‘Yes. It gets under your skin, doesn’t it?’ he says softly. ‘When you are shown no respect; given no control over your own life.’
Clare lowers her eyes, ashamed.
‘I’m sorry. I have no cause for complaint, I know. I must sound so spoilt to you … It’s my own fault, anyway. People lead me because I’ve always let them,’ she says. Ettore lights a cigarette and blows the smoke high above his head, and says nothing. Clare is crouching with her face close to the ancient
tufo
stone wall, her fingers braced against it. She stands up and goes to sit next to Ettore. There are ants crawling around her ankles and she bends to brush them away; their bites are spiteful little pinpricks. In the distance, the last dust thrown up by the car resettles. ‘Even if it was that servant driving, we should be careful. He seems quite friendly with Marcie. Federico, that’s his name. Perhaps he’d say something to her, if he knew about us.’
‘He’s scum,’ Ettore snaps. ‘If Marcie knew what was going on, if she opened her eyes and looked, for once, she wouldn’t have him near her. Not for a second.’
‘Why, though? What’s going on? Your uncle told me there was a … crisis, a war,’ says Clare. Ettore pauses, thinking before he answers. He always does, and Clare loves the way he only speaks once he’s found exactly what he wants to say.
‘It is a war, Chiara. We’ve been fighting it for decades; it ebbs and flows, as these things will. Now we’re coming to the final act.’ He takes a long pull on his cigarette and shakes his head. ‘There’ll be more bloodshed before this summer is out. You saw a man beaten in Gioia, you told me. Attacked by a blackshirt squad.’
‘Yes. Yes, I saw it. His name was Francesco Molino.’ Clare recoils from the memory.
‘Federico Manzo leads one of those squads. He is one of them; a fascist. There is a great deal of violence in him, I’ve seen it. The same that’s in his father Ludo Manzo – violence that doesn’t need a cause, only an excuse.’
Clare stares at him. His words have turned her cold. She thinks of the posy of pale blue flowers Federico offered her, and the sweetness of his smile not quite matching the knowing look in his eyes. She thinks of him mending the bicycle puncture for Pip, and the gramophone for Marcie. She thinks of a man’s broken and bloody spectacles falling to the flagstones in Gioia, and yet again she’s assailed by the impossibility of all these things being true at once, by the unreality of this place, these events.
‘He tried to give me flowers,’ she murmurs, in English.
‘
Che cos’ hai detto
?’ says Ettore.
What did you say?
Clare gives a small shake of her head.
‘Does your uncle know about this?’
‘Yes, he knows.’
‘Then …’ Clare swallows. ‘Leandro is one of them, too? He’s a fascist?’
‘That is something I’m trying hard to find out,’ says Ettore grimly. ‘Nearly all of the other proprietors are, of course. They hire the squads, feed them, arm them, shelter them. They’re mounting an army to wipe out the likes of me, and my family. But Leandro is also my family.’ He shrugs one shoulder. ‘Or he was. Many landlords would not even negotiate with the peasant leagues. Did you know that? Not until they were forced to – and some not even then. They said that farm animals belonged in the fields, not at their tables. They said we had no right to speak. That’s how they see us – as animals,’ he says. Clare stares, shocked.
‘But … your uncle can’t think like that. He
can’t
. I saw how he was treated in Gioia, by the other rich men. He was … snubbed. Scorned. He can’t possibly think like they do.’
‘What my uncle thinks is a mystery to me these days. He wants to be accepted by them. I don’t know how far he would go to be accepted.’
‘But … to fight against these squads … Can that be the way? People will die … you could be hurt. There
must
be another way.’
‘Chiara,’ says Ettore. He tips his head back against the wall to look at her, as if suddenly exhausted. ‘The question is, what should we do when they leave us no other way?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says meekly. ‘But I can’t stand to think of you in danger. Is there no … political solution?’
‘We are
all
in danger.’ He drops the stub of his cigarette into the dust and grinds it with a chunk of stone. ‘And politics? Let me tell you about politics. In 1908 we had an election in Gioia. If we elected the socialist candidate we could start to make our voices heard, but Nicola De Bellis won by a unanimous vote. De Bellis, who believed he was king, and we were all his serfs. A
unanimous
vote, Chiara. Anyone who might have voted against him was beaten, killed, arrested, or barricaded inside. And, just in case, De Bellis made sure he owned the vote counters too.
That
is how politics works here in Gioia. So if you can think of another way, please tell me.’ He turns his head to look at her; his face is tense, eyes narrowed, but her defeated silence seems to calm him, and he relents. ‘You should go, before the rain really starts. I’ll follow a different way,’ he says, and Clare nods. Without having seemed to move, the white clouds have turned to grey, low and solid; fat raindrops explode in the dust and leave dark, uneven craters. Clare wants to say to him,
I love you
, but somehow she knows she shouldn’t; she knows he wouldn’t want to hear it, and also that he knows it already.
It’s pouring by the time Clare arrives back at the front gates, and the young guard, Carlo, lets her in with an amiable grin and water drizzling from the brim of his hat. This is the warm, wetting rain she’d hoped for before; no thunder or hail, just a steady downpour connecting heaven and earth, which plasters her hair to her shoulders and runs down her calves into her shoes. The dogs crouch beneath their meagre shelters, looking out with mournful eyes. They hardly bother to bark at Clare any more, they’ve got so used to her scent. As she walks past the raised hump of the cistern in the
aia
she can hear the water thudding into it below ground level. She walks a slow loop around the
masseria
, listening to the sluice of water in the gutter, the music it makes as it rushes along stone gullies, unseen, beneath her feet. She pauses in the vegetable garden to hear it battering the almond tree leaves, and pattering on the broken love seat. When she looks up she sees some of the guards on the roof standing out in it as she is, letting it soak them. In England people would run out of this rain, not into it, but here it’s a rarity like snow at home – something almost miraculous. But it isn’t enough to make a stream run between the fields, even for a little while. After half an hour the rain stops, like a tap turned off with a single twist, and minutes later a bloated sun emerges from the clouds and everything starts to steam.
Federico is in the courtyard, drying the red car with a leather rag. At the sight of him Clare is even more affected than before – physically repelled, like there’s a hand on her chest, shoving her away. She takes an involuntary step backwards and keeps her eyes lowered after taking one look at his face beginning to smile. But there’s no way to go inside without passing him, so she folds her arms, looks at her feet and marches by. As she does she hears a noise – a hissing, low and rhythmic, full of startling menace. She glances up and it’s Federico, hissing at her through the gap in his twisted front teeth, and his smile has turned sour and leering, and his eyes are mocking, and she knows then, absolutely, that he saw. That he knows about her and Ettore. He doesn’t stop hissing now that she’s looking at him. He wants her to see. Clare turns away and hurries inside, revolted; humiliated at the same time.
She goes into the long sitting room on the ground floor and finds it empty. She climbs the stairs and goes out onto the terrace but there’s no sign of Marcie, or Pip. She checks the bat room; the door is open, the room bright and empty. Crossing to the window with the soft sound of her footsteps echoing, Clare looks down into the courtyard. She watches Federico polishing the car, his brows furrowed against the sunlight, his arm working in rhythmic circles. He’s rolled up his shirtsleeves and the muscles of his forearms are taut ridges, and she thinks of Francesco Molino – the way he curled against their kicks and blows, after his glasses flew off, the wrong shape of his collapsed eye socket. There’s acid at the back of her throat, hot and sour. She can’t believe Federico has this normal life, that he looks like a normal man, not like a monster; it seems an outrageous dissembling. She’s appalled to have been near him when he had such a secret, and she’s frightened of him now, not just uneasy; she wants to tell somebody, to denounce him somehow. But Ettore said that Leandro already knows, and she can’t think of anyone else to tell.
Clare feels unsettled and restless, and doesn’t want to be alone. She goes to Pip’s room but that, too, is empty. The room has been made up by one of the maids – sheets stretched tight, the carafe of water on the nightstand refilled and covered, his copy of
Bleak House
and the photograph of Emma neatly arranged. A soft wash of air nudges in through the window, fresh and warm after the rain, and Clare goes to stand at it, looking out through the back wall of the
masseria
. She sees Pip on the far side of the overseer’s
trullo
, standing with Ludo and Leandro. He is slighter than either of them, but almost as tall. He stands with his shoulders pulled back, in discussion about something and pointing to a lone olive tree not far away. Clare watches, curious, even though she doesn’t like seeing him in their company, until she sees that they are holding guns – Pip included. She catches her breath, turns at once and goes back to the stairs. She doesn’t want to recross the courtyard but there’s no other way, so she walks fast and doesn’t look at Federico. He stays silent this time; he keeps working, but she can feel his eyes following her.