Authors: Katherine Webb
‘In due course,’ says Leandro, and his tone brooks no argument. ‘I want to talk to her first. But take that one.’ He points at Boyd. The
carabinieri
exchange a look. ‘Yes, yes – take him! He shot my nephew, Ettore Tarano, in cold blood, for a vendetta. We all saw him. He must be kept in custody, and sent to Bari for trial.’
‘Yes, Mr Cardetta.’
‘Please – you must at least send someone to fetch Paola’s child to her. He can’t be left all alone, he’s too little,’ says Clare.
‘Perhaps she should have thought of that before she came here to
rob
me!’ Leandro’s sudden bellow is shocking, but there’s a treacherous sparkle in his eyes. He glares at Clare but she isn’t cowed. Ettore is dead; she has nothing else to fear. Leandro relents. ‘All right. Have someone go to Vico Iovia; the Taranos have an apartment there, in the courtyard. Fetch her baby and bring him here.’ The
carabinieri
nod. ‘Anything you want to say to your husband before they take him?’ he says to Clare.
The two officers pull Boyd to his feet and he looks across at Clare. His face is shiny and flaccid, he’s as colourless as whey, his long body is limp. When he looks at her his eyes are quite empty.
‘You were perfect,’ he says. She can’t make out his tone of voice – it’s heavier than neutral; past calm, into somewhere else. ‘You were perfect. No man had touched you until … until you let that …
peasant
…’ He swallows convulsively, as though the very thought nauseates him. That’s what’s in his voice, she realises. Disgust; even revulsion. ‘No man had ever touched you. You were pure.’ Boyd shakes his head, and Clare understands what he means. Before, she’d wondered if they’d ever made love at all, given the barrier that was always between them. Now she knows they had not, and that this had been his intention – to keep her pure.
That bitch
, he called little Christina Havers, after their affair.
That whore
.
‘You dare to look disgusted with me?’ she says softly. ‘Ettore was twice the man you are. A hundred times the man!’ Her voice is rising; she wants her words to scar him. ‘I loved him more than I
ever
loved you! And I loved making love to him!’
‘Shut up! Shut up, you
whore
!’ Boyd roars.
‘Enough! Take him,’ says Leandro. In silence, the
carabinieri
march out with Boyd stumbling between them. Clare realises that she has referred to Ettore in the past tense, twice; a strange, raw keening starts up in her throat, and for a while she can’t stop it. She puts her hands over her mouth but the sound leaks out through her fingers, and she can smell blood on her skin – she has Ettore’s blood all over her hands.
The sun rises on Masseria dell’Arco as though the new day is the same as any that went before, and Clare wakes with every muscle aching, to the sound of splashing and sweeping. The servants are scrubbing blood from the courtyard stones with long-handled brooms and buckets of water. She looks in on Pip, still sound asleep, then wanders out onto the terrace, barefoot and dressed in her slip, to watch the clean-up. She’s still not able to absorb everything she’s seen and heard and learnt. That Marcie seduced Pip, and he thought himself in love with her. That Marcie was in love with Ettore. That Boyd had Emma killed, when she wasn’t as perfect as he wanted her to be. That Boyd killed Ettore, and that he aimed the gun at Clare, and pulled the trigger. She feels nothing whatsoever about the fact that the chamber was empty when he did. She can’t decide if it was good luck or bad, and she doesn’t care. Ettore is dead. None of these events, none of these things she’s learnt, will settle into a sensible order in her mind; an order she can read, and understand. It’s all a dark jumble and every time she feels some small satisfaction that she need never see Boyd again, that she is safe from him, it’s followed closely by the raw pain of remembering that Ettore is also gone. It’s exhausting. Trying to think it through is exhausting.
She goes back to Pip’s room and watches him sleep for a while. The room is full of the soft smell of him – skin and hair and breath. He’s sleeping off his shock, his double heartbreak; the trauma of losing his father, of having to rewrite his own history; the strain of sifting the truth from all the lies. To Clare it seems as though he’s cocooned himself in sleep – that this stupor hides a metamorphosis of some kind, and she can only wait to see what form he will take when he emerges from it. When she thinks how Marcie used him it kindles a slow-burning anger; she tries not to dwell on it. Marcie hasn’t yet come down from the high room she shares with Leandro, to which she retreated at some point in the night, and more than anything, now, Clare wants to be gone, and see none of them again. She wants to take Pip and leave. She thinks of all those hours he spent with Marcie in the bat room, listening to music or supposedly rehearsing a play that will never be staged. She thinks of the dusty old couch they dragged in there, initially for Clare to sit on and watch them. Perhaps it was all a play to Marcie, but Pip thought it was real.
I was protecting you
, he said, after he shot at Ettore,
like I promised I would
. She pictures Marcie playing the helpless, frightened woman, making Pip feel like a man. It’s all too easy to imagine. And she knows how word of the raid got to Leandro in time for him to prepare its defence. From Marcie, who heard it from Pip, who had sworn to Clare that he would tell no one. But she has no blame for Pip, only for herself. She abandoned him to be with Ettore; she left him to be lonely and uncertain – left an open wound for Marcie to heal.
Clare can’t eat. Not even when her hands start to shake with hunger and black flecks jig around the edges of her vision when she moves too quickly. Carlo is back on duty at the front door as though nothing has happened. His nose is swollen and bruised, split open across the bridge, and his eyes are bloody. When Clare apologises to him he turns his face away and doesn’t answer. He tries for a stony expression but he’s too young and too sweet; he looks like he might cry instead. Clare asks him where Paola Tarano is and Carlo jerks his thumb at the stairs behind him, still refusing to look at her, and she goes up in silence.
Paola is in a small room high up in the front wing of the
masseria
. There’s a little window overlooking the courtyard but Paola has her back to it, curled on her side on the narrow bed with Iacopo asleep against her stomach. These are servants’ quarters, and the room doesn’t look like it’s been used in a while. The nightstand is thick with dust, as is a rickety chair against one wall – the only other furniture. Someone has taken up a jug of water and a plate of bread and cheese, but they’re untouched. Paola moves nothing but her eyes when Clare knocks softly and goes in. For a second Clare hardly recognises her because Paola’s hair is loose, released from its usual knot and scarf. It reaches down past her elbows, black, and wavy from braiding. She looks younger, prettier, but her eyes are ancient with grief. For a while Clare simply stands there and says nothing, and their shared pain hovers between them. There’s some other resonance as well, something else they both feel – it takes Clare a moment to put her finger on it. She can feel her own guilt over Ettore’s death seething inside her, and she’d expected Paola to blame her, and be furious. But Paola is sodden with guilt as well; Paola blames herself.
Gently, to not stir the baby, Clare sits down on the edge of the mattress. She takes Paola’s hand, and though the girl’s black eyes fill with unease, even suspicion, she doesn’t pull away. They stay like that for a while. There’s nothing Clare can say to explain, nothing she can say to make things better, even if she could make this hard-faced girl understand her Italian. In the end she lifts Paola’s hand and presses it to her middle, low down, beneath the waistband of her skirt. Paola gazes at her, confused.
‘Ettore,’ says Clare. Paola still stares, so Clare points to Iacopo, then taps the girl’s hand on her abdomen. ‘Ettore’s baby.
Bambino
,’ she says, and sees comprehension dawn, and as it does Clare’s eyes flood with tears, and she can’t seem to stop them. She hangs her head and lets them run. ‘I never got to tell him,’ she says. ‘He’ll never know.’ Paola keeps hold of her hand but says nothing.
Clare stays for an hour or more, unwilling to leave because she’s sure that this will be the last time she sees Paola. The girl’s kinship to Ettore is a precious commodity now; the tantalising hint of him she has about her is a grain of comfort. When she gets up to leave she stoops and kisses Paola’s forehead, before the girl can jerk away, and Paola watches after her with an odd mix of anger and vulnerability. Clare can see how she hates to be cared for; how she doesn’t want sympathy, and mistrusts affection. She has a strength in her that Clare can’t hope to emulate, but then she thinks that if Paola won’t bend she must break, eventually.
Restless, searching, Clare paces the rooms and corridors of the
masseria
like a ghost. She would go out into the landscape but she can’t stand the thought of seeing the places where she met Ettore; can’t stand the thought of having to return to the
masseria
once she’s left it. Perhaps she wouldn’t return – perhaps she’d just keep walking, and she needs to be there when Pip emerges. She can’t go without him, but there’s a kernel of terror inside her that somehow, when he’s reborn, the bond between them will have vanished. That Marcie and Ettore will have somehow erased their affinity, that invisible tie they had, which is not motherhood, and could dissolve without trace. He would be justified in blaming her, after all – for all of it. Even for his father being taken away. He might refuse to leave while Boyd is still in Italy; he might want to stay with him. Clare’s walk drifts to a halt. Could that happen? Could she be forced to choose between Pip and staying for ever in a place that has begun to feel like a vast prison? It could happen. The idea makes it seem like the air itself is crushing her.
When she walks past the door to what was Ettore’s room Clare shrinks back, and doesn’t stop. From a high window she sees Leandro on the roof, in the same place he stood two days earlier, staring out in just the same way. For a second her thoughts scatter into wild imaginings of it really being two days earlier – of how she would do things differently if she was given the chance, if she really had walked back through time. How she would force Leandro to let her out, so she could warn Ettore about the extra guards at the farm. How she would rush down the stairs as soon as she saw Pip and Marcie waiting at the foot of them, and snatch the revolver from his hand. How she would take it from him after he’d shot Ettore in the shoulder, instead of leaving it to Boyd to disarm him. How she would refuse to help the raiders by opening the door, so that perhaps they would call it off. She tortures herself with what might have happened if she had not done the things she did, in the order in which she did them; pouring salt into her wounds until she can’t take any more. Then she goes up to the roof and stands beside Leandro.
He turns to look at her briefly, his expression unchanging. He looks older, and tired; he stares off into the far distance as if he can see the future there, so Clare follows his gaze and tries to do the same. The landscape hasn’t changed, and that seems unreal because it feels as though great seismic shifts have shaken everything to pieces. She expects to see ruins, giant fissures in the earth. But she sees the flat, long land with its brown grass, its burnt stubble fields; she sees the same gnarled olive trees that have witnessed generations of human lives flickering out at the end of their time like the stars at dawn. She sees the dry stone walls and the dusty road; the madly bored
aia
dogs and the
trullo
by the gates where Ettore first kissed her, and they first made love. The breeze rolls softly from the north. It moans over the stone parapets of the complex and the low field walls; it runs through Clare’s hair and flutters her shirt against her ribs, filling her ears with quiet noise. It’s impossible that all this should still exist when Ettore does not; Clare wonders whether perhaps she doesn’t exist either. She feels like thistledown; she’s the same weight as the air – she could blow away at any moment, and drift, disperse, vanish.
Leandro’s voice, when he speaks, is sombre.
‘You want to leave. You must do. Do you want to see Boyd before you go? It could be arranged.’
‘No,’ says Clare. ‘No. Never again. But … Pip might.’ She must sound afraid because Leandro turns with a speculative look.
‘You can’t think he’ll want to stay here, with his father?’
‘I don’t know. He … he was very angry with me. About Ettore.’
‘Jealous of your attention, only.’ Leandro shrugs. ‘He’ll want to be with you. He doesn’t love his father like he loves you. I saw that from the start. And now he knows how his mother died …’
‘I hope you’re right.’ Clare pauses. ‘There … there was something you wanted to find out from Boyd before you would let us go home. Ettore told me. Was that it? Was it whether or not he might harm me?’
‘That was it.’ Leandro nods. ‘Killing that girl changed me. Killing Emma Kingsley. It may be hard for you to believe, but she was the only woman I ever harmed and, by Christ, she haunted me afterwards. And I changed; I went into business. I’m not saying I was a model citizen ever after, but … but I was never as low and dirty again as I was that night. The night I shot her and her lover. I wanted to see if Boyd had changed as well.’
‘But couldn’t you tell straight away that he was just the same?’
‘Not for sure, and even when I suspected it I wasn’t sure what to do about it. How to change things. He … it was cowardly, you see. It was cowardly to have her killed, rather than to confront her, or just let her go. It was cowardly not to kill her himself, if that was what he wanted. But why kill her at all, when she had a child that needed her? There was no need. But he’s unbalanced; he doesn’t think the way I think, that much is obvious.’
‘No, he does not. I was a thing to him – an idea, not a person. I think I’ve always felt it, though I couldn’t quite define it. And when you say he’s a hypocrite you don’t know how right you are. He has been unfaithful to me – with one woman that I know about, and perhaps others that I don’t. And yes, he is a coward. I thought he was grieving, but it was guilt. I thought he was afraid to let me know how deeply he’d cared for Emma, but he was only afraid of me finding out what he’d done – of anyone finding out. I thought he was vulnerable, and ultimately kind. But his vulnerability was just … weakness, and his kindness was a fraud. I tried to love him but I … I never could.’